04.09.13
Posted in Google, Patents, Red Hat at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google, Red Hat et al. versus the old guard which is lawyers and ageing companies such as IBM
Following a much-publicised action against patent trolls a lot of awareness is spread about the issue and some “Ask FTC, DoJ To Do The Same” (i.e. take a stand). Being part of the corrupt system which harbuors the monopolies office, the USPTO, they are hardly doing anything, so the negatively-affected corporations are lobbying. The government did take a stand against some other patent practices as of late, why not trolls? There are a variety issues such as FRAND (see this battle which hits Android from numerous directions) that show not only trolls are a problem. Google focuses on the price of trolls because Microsoft uses trolls like MOSAID as proxies in this battle — an issue about which Google has already spoken. One article says that “Google — along with Blackberry and other tech companies — has asked the FTC to pay greater attention to patent trolls, who embroil companies in expensive litigation over bogus claims on the ownership of new technologies.” If trolls are stopped, the litigation-by-proxy strategy too is impeded.
The FTC has not been promising when it comes to justice, but Red Hat is at least helping raise awareness with that aforementioned complaint. The EFF is also involved in this. It wrote:
EFF filed comments today urging the Federal Trade Commission to take action against patent trolls. We have written often about the rise of the patent troll—entities that don’t create products themselves, but instead buy patents and make money from lawsuits—and the serious harm they are causing true innovators.
Here is some coverage from London:
Google, Red Hat, BlackBerry and ISP EarthLink have called on the US Federal Trade Commission and US Department of Justice to take action against patent assertion entities (PAEs), or as they are more commonly known, patent trolls. In a letter to the agencies, the companies point out that PAEs are now filing four times as many cases as they did in 2005 and claims cost US companies at least $29 billion in direct costs in 2011 and $80 billion when accounting for indirect costs. Although large companies face hundreds of PAE lawsuits, the vendors point out that small and medium-sized companies are the most frequent targets. According to the comments, 62% of all recently filed patent litigation is PAE lawsuits.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a one-sided battle in the press. The debate is rigged and there's more. Corporate media has some troll toll apologists with weird lines of logic, as shown in the case of Tim Worstall. Not too long ago the same site’s blogs amplified the arguments of Lundberg, one of the most vocal software patents proponents [1, 2]. There is also IBM which is appearing in a prominent pro-software patents site (run by patent lawyers).Manny Schecter (IBM’s patents chief) is again being borrowed by the patent maximalist, who is latching onto glorified lawyer Rader. Pamela Jones responded by writing: “Judge Rader is describing only one form of abuse, trolls. Companies can abuse the system too, as the smartphone patent wars have so ably demonstrated. Until someone addresses the issues of patentable subject matter, invalid but issued patents, and design patent misuse, none of the above will really help. Trolls are a problem, but they are not the only problem.”
In the midst of all this opposition to patent trolls we find that a very notorious troll is suing many companies again. To quote one report:
Remember Lodsys, the “inventions” firm that started issuing letters to iOS developers’ doors back in 2011, warning them that by using Apple’s in-app payment mechanism they were infringing on patents it owned? Well, as MacRumors notes, Lodsys has now risen from its slumber to take on the might of Disney, and others.
Another article about it says that 10 mobile game makers have been hit by these software patents. There is no lack of examples of the harms of software patents (a troll’s favorite weapon) and the latest nonsensical arguments and flawed analogy from Goetz [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] gets smashed by Jones, who wrote: “Aside from the ridiculousness, and inaccuracy, of his posited example, may I just point out that the Wright Brothers held back innovation in the US aviation industry for years? As Patent Plaques writes: “The Wright’s patent wars were not without consequences. Unfortunately, all of the time spent fighting to protect their patent was time the Wright’s were not spending on innovation and the development of new planes. Their planes became inferior to the planes being produced in Europe.” Neither were they the inventors of airplanes, despite the claims. Many others flew before or contemporaneously, we now know. Nor was the patent on airplanes; it was only on one aspect of it, a method of flight control, and France and Germany refused to grant them a patent there, which is why inventors there bypassed US aviation. The same thing will happen with software, by the way, if no one acts to stop the strangulation of innovation via software patents.”
That spin, unsurprising enough, came from a lawyers’ site, Patently-O. Here is one new column that slams the patent system. No text shows up in this page. It may seem as though software patents are being pushed back, but not enough software developers write about this issue. Lawyers specialising in patents are rigging the public debates, still. It for their own profit — profit at the expense of programmers. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Layoffs not needed when Microsoft can just sell away its staff, as it currently does
AMID layoffs and financial issues (Microsoft reported losses last year) there is a path of dead projects left behind. Sony-Ericsson, which already sues Android players [1, 2], is taking another part of Microsoft that Microsoft unloads:
Ericsson AB (ERICB) agreed to buy Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Mediaroom business, adding software used by phone companies to deliver television over the Internet.
Mediaroom, based in Mountain View, California, has more than 400 employees globally and will help Ericsson be the largest provider of IPTV technology, with a market share of over 25 percent, Ericsson said today in a statement. The value of the deal wasn’t disclosed.
So we don’t know how much cash Microsoft raised by unloading about half a thousand employees. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Patents at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As Supreme Leaders Steve 'thermonuclear' Jobs would have wanted…
Original photo by Matthew Yohe, modified
Summary: Apple, the imitator that the press likes to glorify, is suing Android leaders with yet another ridiculous patent
A good column from the British Linux press reminds readers that Apple’s patent battles are completely hypocritical because Apple copies many designs and technologies. It concludes as follows:
The instrument for Apple’s war has been the acquiescence of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the US courts, ownership of scores of debatable utility and design patents, and its claims against Samsung and others of ‘trade dress infringement’. The good news in recent months is that some of these entitlements, such as Apple’s patent entitled ‘Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics’ and ‘the rubber band patent’ have come up for review and been found wanting by the USPTO. The bad news is that Apple still has a vast portfolio of debatable patents to draw upon.
Patents are not a defence of the rights of the innovator, but a weapon against competition and invention and the rights of the user. Android is no more a ‘rip-off’ or ‘stolen product’ than the iPhone itself, or the music of Stravinsky or poetry of Eliot.
Meanwhile, says this other article, Apple uses a patent on text selection to sue Android:
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd infringed a key portion of an Apple Inc patent by including a text-selection feature in its smartphones and tablets, an International Trade Commission judge said in a preliminary decision.
“Lord,” wrote Pamela Jones, “Text selection. Nothing obvious there. No prior art that you and I might think of off the top of our heads. Sigh. Anyway, it’s just preliminary. Time for some prior art searching, though.”
Watch patents crippling Apple’s OS:
After losing a patent dispute, Apple has modified the VPN behaviour of iOS 6.1. In a support document published last week, the company announced that the “VPN On Demand” feature will no longer initiate a secure connection by default, even if it is set to “Always”. Instead, the iOS VPN will behave as if it were set to “Establish when needed”.
Does anyone still believe that patents promote faster innovation and benefit customers? How many lawsuits against Apple will it take for Apple to walk away from this strategy which comes from Steve Jobs’ megalomaniac complex? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Vista 8, Windows at 10:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With Vista 8, Microsoft finds itself unable to outsell Linux-based operating systems
Several years ago we showed — using hard evidence — how Microsoft created groups named “task forces” [1, 2, 3] (or whatever other euphemisms) to gun down the competition, notably GNU/Linux, wherever it appeared. Mr. Pogson alludes to this when he says:”It is well-documented that M$ spies on friends and foe in IT. Now the OEMs are taking counter-measures.”
The report he cites is from Taiwan and it says that:
Rumors have also spread that Microsoft is developing another operating system, which will serve as the next-generation Windows and will be released in October.
We wrote about this before. Well, this is another sign that Windows is in trouble. Android is the top operating system at the moment. █
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Posted in Patents at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More stories about the US patent system granting monopolies on too broad a range of ideas
The patent boosters say that Twitter, which promised not to sue with patents, claims to have ‘invented’ tweeting. Maybe it’s just not aware of syndication and SMS, which predate Twitter. To quote the patent boosters:
Now those of you who know me and have read my posts in the past, know that I am not a patent attorney myself (although I am married to one who is rather well known). Rather, I am a social media strategist — sometimes called The Social Media Diva™ — who uses Twitter and other social media platforms to assist my clients in their online marketing strategies. Quite frequently we will feature posts that analyze the technologies of an issued patent from the IP attorney perspective. We thought it would be fun for me to analyze this patent from a non-attorney standpoint as it pertains to social media platforms as a whole.
Rather than promising not to sue, as we said last year, Twitter could just refuse to patent. This is of no use against trolls anyway.
Rackspace, which is fighting patent trolls these days, is getting a hand from some lawyers who search for prior art along with geeks in Groklaw:
Rackspace is going after a troll, Parallel Iron and its “agent”, IP Navigation (or IPNav), bringing a declaratory judgment of noninfringement action against Parallel Iron, because it owns the patents and is asserting them against the Open Source Hadoop distributed file system ( Parallel’s patents being on storage-area-network and network-attached-storage equipment) and a breach of contract action against both. Since Rackspace says, as the H Online reports, one goal is “to highlight the tactics that IP Nav uses to divert hard-earned profits and precious capital from American businesses”, I thought we could pitch in and spread the word.
Why are those patents granted in the first place? Quite simply, the USPTO decided to give up on quality assessment and now it just grants almost everything. It’s the guilty until proven innocent mentality. Here is new analysis from Ars, citing a study of the backlog:
When David Kappos announced his resignation as head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) late last year, one of his most touted accomplishments was a significant reduction in the backlog of pending patent applications. Kappos’s fans have attributed this to the hiring of hundreds of additional patent examiners.
But a new study suggests another explanation for the declining backlog: the patent office may have lowered its standards, approving many patents that would have been (and in some cases, had been) rejected under the administration of George W. Bush. The authors—Chris Cotropia and Cecil Quillen of the University of Richmond and independent researcher Ogden Webster—used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain detailed data about the fate of patent applications considered by the USPTO since 1996.
Watch what the USPTO has been causing. As covered by Ars as well:
Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action.
The USPTO should be slammed for enabling extortion by granting a government-endorsed monopoly (privatisation) on scanning. Rather than slamming the trolls we should target the system which enables those trolls and call for its reform or complete demise. There is a coup going on against creativity, innovation, and freedom of thought. We need to defend ourselves from this corporate coup which passes fees from customers to some billionaires at the top (patent hoarders like Intellectual Ventures). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Virtualisation at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2009 and before:
Summary: Money from Microsoft helps influence a Linux banding of companies that need virtualisation
AS Red Hat recently hired from Microsoft for virtualisation leadership we needn’t be shocked that in a Linux Foundation article from Zemlin [1, 2], with help or a boost from New York Times blogs that label it “Corporate Style” (as if ethics can be neglected when you deal with a corporation), Red Hat et al. enter into bed with Microsoft. This is widely covered, naming both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft. “Is Microsoft influence already making itself felt at Red Hat?” This is what Will Hill thinks. It is about virtualisation:
Recently, I argued that while there’s been a lot of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) hype, it’s also real and will redefine corporate networking in the coming years. The Linux Foundation agrees and — in its OpenDaylight Project — has introduced a community-led and industry-supported open-source framework to accelerate SDN adoption, foster new innovation, and give it a more open and transparent approach.
[...]
Red Hat will be working on building and delivering an SDN solution that integrates with OpenStack and Linux’s built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
Microsoft hasn’t spelled out what it plans to contribute to the project yet.
For now, it provides funding and insists on making its virtualisation purely proprietary. Last year Microsoft indirectly (but more directly than before) paid the Linux Foundation as well. We has seen that before and it leads to self-censorship. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There are community managers for Linux distributions who spend their whole time spinning this or that and trying to influence opinion without dealing with the reality.
There are others in similar roles who spend all their time contradicting people on mailing lists and discussion forums and flinging mud at anybody who says the smallest thing negative about their distribution.
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Desktop
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Is Linux on the desktop worth a second look if Chrome gives an old PC a new lease of life?
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Server
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When HP Moonshot servers launched today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) was quick to note that the new Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) servers will leverage Atom processors — though HP does eventually plan to offer ARM-based support as well. It’s a significant near-term win for Intel, which hopes to defeat potential rivals like ARM in the emerging market for so-called “microservers.”
According to an Intel spokesperson, Atom is an ideal choice for the HP servers because the architecture can run excisting operating systems (Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.) with no porting requirements.
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Kernel Space
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Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm, mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates (gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people who want to wallow in the details..
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The Darktable team has announced the release of version 1.2 which brings some new features, supports for more cameras and bug fixes. Darktable is one of the most important free software apps (along with GIMP) which is must have for someone like me who shoots in RAW from his DSLR camera. This apps is the first stage of my post-processing and does a great job when compared with Adobe’s Lightroom.
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The latest release of the open source photo workflow package darktable adds de-noising profiles for camera sensors, support for using the same plugin multiple times on one photo and the ability to import workflow data from Adobe’s Lightroom. Additionally, darktable 1.2 includes a number of other improvements, bug fixes and an improved user manual.
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We are happy to announce the immediate release of Kdenlive 0.9.6.
This version fixes several bugs and crashes, including a very annoying bug that caused project files to seem corrupted. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
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A great amount of productivity comes from writing tasks, whether it be for school assignments, articles for your blog, or much more. While full-featured office applications tend to be the norm for such tasks, it may sometimes be a good idea to go in the opposite direction and use some simpler or specialized tools, depending on what you’re working on. Often, this can either help you focus more on the work that’s ahead, or simply improve your overall workflow to save some time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Thousands of aliens, giant spiders, mutant lizards, and more are on the attack – can you survive the onslaught? You will consistently unlock new and better perks that improve your ability to use a devastating arsenal. Crimsonland features 3 modes of play, online high scores, and endless hours of pressure packed fun.
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Shovel Knight has dug a tunnel to the Mac and Linux platforms, lined with Kickstarter money, in a tortured metaphor for which we apologize. The point is that Shovel Knight’s fundraiser has passed the stretch goal required to ensure ports to those two platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they’re not necessarily tuned for virtual servers.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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All in all Mint’s Debian branch offers a pleasant experience with a friendly graphical installer, useful tools and lots of software all in a convenient package. The one detractor Mint’s Debian Edition may have is, oddly enough, Mint’s own Main Edition. While the Debian branch of Mint is a fine distribution its technology base prevents users from having access to certain helpful features available in other Mint editions. For example Mint’s Debian Edition isn’t able to use Ubuntu PPAs, it is missing some third-party software packages built for Ubuntu, and One storage & store support is missing. It would also appear as though the kernel which ships with Mint’s Debian Edition doesn’t have all the hardware support available in the Main Edition. These features tend to be edge cases and many people will probably get along fine without them, but I still suspect the strongest competitors to Mint Debian Edition are Mint’s other flavours.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Beta 2 was also released today, April 5, along with all the others Linux distributions that are part of the Ubuntu family.
Ubuntu Kylin is a new flavor of Ubuntu Linux, and Raring Ringtail (version 13.04) will be its first ever stable release. Today’s final testing version fixes last minute bugs, such as an updated PM2.5 API in the China Weather Indicator, and saving note issue with the Chinese Calendar.
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Flavours and Variants
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My wife now has a new desktop computer. Her netbook computer (Acer Aspire One) works fine, but its Linux distro (Fedora 11) is getting positively antiquated. I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (Compaq Presario 2170CA), so it needs a Linux. And the “hand-me-down” process means I have upgrades for my other two PCs (audio processing and ham radio); they also need Linux upgrades. Ideally I’d like to put the same Linux on all five of them. Which Linux?
Although I like Debian on my desktop, I must admit that it is difficult for a novice to administer. (Hell, it’s difficult for me to administer.) And while I like the economy of LXDE, I confess that its tools are still a work in progress; it’s a bother to administer, too.
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Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu. The OS uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but takes design and usability cues from Ubuntu.
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In a post at Linux.com, Eric Brown, former editor of LinuxDevices.com, presents a slideshow of 10 new ARM-powered COMs. The current boom in ARM boards is, in part, fueled by the continuing growth of ARM-friendly Linux, and more recently Android, in the general embedded market, he suggests.
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Movea’s motion-processing software now supports TV set-top boxes (STBs) built with STMicroelectronics “Orly Platform” STB SOCs (system-on-chips). The “SmartMotion Server” software can add gesture-based user interface features to TV STBs running Linux and Android.
The SmartMotion Server motion-processing software is intended to ease the process of developing intuitive motion-based user interfaces for TV STBs and other connected home systems, according to Movea. The SmartMotion framework provides gesture-based interaction support for applications such as web browsing, video-on-demand catalogs, media center and social media navigation, and gaming.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung said that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier.
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Android
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Is the brand new Google Play Store coming? Timed for I/O summit?
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This past week at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a big one for third party publishers like Electronic Arts and Konami. It was also the place where supporters for the OUYA system got a first look at what they invested in. The company held a private event Thursday evening for a number of its KickStarter backers and other guests, providing plenty of food, drink and hands-on time with the system before it ships in June. We managed to go a few rounds with it to see what it was like.
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Facebook Home “is an idea that deserves to be copied,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “If your primary use for a smartphone is some activity, why not have it front and center of your Android experience rather than buried in an app or widget somewhere? Flipboard, Twitter, Edomondo, Max MP, Gameloft, Androidslide and other Android developers should explore this avenue.”
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Researchers at the University of NSW are preparing to launch a public beta of a new open source system that could drive a digital revolution in the field of archaeology.
the Federated Archaeological Information Management System (FAIMS) Project, led by UNSW’s Dr Shawn Ross, a senior lecturer at UNSW’s UNSW’s School of Humanities, received funding from the federal government’s the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.
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If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps. There are apps that will pretend to be games (like the Drop.dialer fiasco earlier this year) and steal your information and cost you a buck load of money you never knew you were spending, and then there are apps that other people can use to spy on you, using your own phone. Sure the Jelly Bean is slated to slash all security issues to pieces, but just because it’s coming out doesn’t mean your phone will be compatible with it – unless you can easily jump from one phone to another.
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Application development tool vendor Profound Logic has taken its user interface framework open source citing benefits such as increased capability for users to control their own software, improved integration between the IBM i and other platforms, no-cost opportunities for companies and developers to test the application modernization waters, and a route to development that avoids vendor lock-in. It’s Profound’s latest step in providing IBM midrange shops with an RPG tool that is more open and transparent.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 21 is now in Beta and it introduces a number of new features that will become generally available inside of the next 6 weeks.
At the top of the list is a new Health Reporting feature that Mozilla first publicly started talking about in September of 2012.
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Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.
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The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.
If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.
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That is, there were two key aspects to Mozilla’s previous work: hacking code, and hacking the system. Both will be important in the years to come. The following comment from Baker in her post shows how the two are intertwined:
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SaaS/Big Data
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The latest release of the OpenStack cloud orchestration software adds support for large scale clouds spread across multiple datacentres.
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CMS
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Mumbai, Maharashtra, India : LoudCloud Systems has taken an important step forward in brining next generation technology oriented teaching and learning in India. Mumbai based company has been selected as the Learning partner by Delhi based Modi Academic International Institute (MAII) for all of their education programs.
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Education
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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This year’s SugarCRM annual gathering starts today and like every year there are vendors lining up to announce the good things they are doing with SugarCRM either now, or in the coming year. First off the market this year is Colosa, which has just announced the release of ProcessMaker SugarCRM Edition.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.
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Challenge #5 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a CGI script that serves up HTML pages with embedded Scheme, a la PHP. It is the first challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.
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Openness/Sharing
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There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you everything you want to know about a residential building in New York City. StreetEasy can show you floorplans and amenities. The Department of Buildings can tell you how a place is zoned or what its roof is used for. The library can give you a detailed history. But there’s no resource that brings all these elements together. Enter, Condopedia, a wiki for condo and co-op buildings. Founded by real estate agent Laurence Putnam, the site provides all of the above, plus more, in the easy-to-use Wikipedia format that people are familiar with.
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Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012.
As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.
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Open Data
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Medicine’s evidence base — our hard drive — is corrupt, in all senses of that word.
She was 86 years old, frail, with limited income. Her aching and fever had started two days ago. Although she had gotten the flu shot like I had asked her to, this was still most likely the flu. Ads for Tamiflu came immediately to mind, but like Ben Goldacre, I knew that the published data on Tamiflu has been as cherry-picked as your weekend bounty from the farmers’ market. My patient asked me: “Should I be on Tamiflu?” Should she, indeed. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know because I don’t trust the hallowed literature. I don’t trust PubMed, or highly cited articles in prominent journals, or the glossy circulars in my mailbox. Sitting across from her, at that moment, I felt my desire to practice evidence-based medicine completely undercut by the systematic suppression of “unfavorable” studies. The corruption of the evidence by publication bias isn’t theoretical. It’s there every day in our clinics and bedsides, affecting every patient and every doctor, breeding cynicism and distrust.
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Who or what inspires you?
People who fight back.
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Trial charge for messages to people outside users’ social circle, from 71p for Robert Peston to £10.68 for Tom Daley
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Facebook was ridiculed for setting a $100 (£61) fee to contact founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has previously said he would like Facebook messaging to become an alternative to email. The network rolled out @facebook.com email addresses to all users last June.
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We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade
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So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.
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CNN has drawn unwanted attention on the internet after broadcasting a picture of Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.
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Science
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The Polynesians’ epic voyages of exploration and colonization across the Pacific are one of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments (even if the local bird life wasn’t likely to have enjoyed it). Having most probably started in Taiwan, the explorers reached and settled on islands across most of the Pacific, as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand. And recent evidence shows that they also stopped in South America, where they stayed long enough to pick up food crops that eventually wound up distributed across the Pacific as well.
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Health/Nutrition
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Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.
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Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.
The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”
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The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. As the New York Times (4/5/13) put it, Obama “will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Apparently the most important risk is to the one to him, and not to millions of people whose benefits will be cut.
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Security
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Someone claiming to be a “1337 hacker” has defaced programming projects hosted by SourceForge.net
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Iraq is executing more people than it has done for almost a decade. The country now has the third highest number of executions in the world, according to a report to be published this week.
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At the height of Emergency, fiery Socialist labour leader George Fernandes sought to get funding from the American Central Intelligence Agency and the French government while he was underground organising sabotage activities.
Mr. Fernandes, who liked to project himself as a sworn enemy of American imperialism and foreign capital, said in November 1975 that “he was even now prepared to accept money from the CIA,” according to a new set of U.S. diplomatic cables from the Henry Kissinger era obtained by WikiLeaks and accessed by The Hindu.
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A group of Iranians reported to be involved in a sophisticated operation involving a deal with Chinese intelligence and involvements of Huawei have been able to obtain information about the certificate authority infrastructure produced and operated by Equifax at first, then sold to GeoTrust, Verisign and finally Symantec.
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US media on Sunday repo rted that Pakistan’s ISI and CIA made a secret pact to facilitate drone strikes against selective terrorist targets. Citing excerpts of a soon-to-be released book, American media said Pakistan gave access to US drone strikes on condition they would not target nuclear facilities and terrorist camps where Kashmiri militants underwent training for attacks against India.
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Despite the CIA chief technology officer’s stunning claim last month that “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the agency does not submit a congressionally mandated report on data mining, The Huffington Post has learned.
That’s because under the CIA’s reading of the law, it doesn’t do any data mining at all. A legal loophole allows it to skip submitting the report even though other agencies, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, do.
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When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.
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This does raise the question that the US fight against terrorism is self-centred, and that its rhetoric against international terrorism is one-sided and need hardly be taken at face value (as many here tend to do). Evidently, the US agreed to Pakistan’s terms on drones in their self-interest. That is not surprising.
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Cablegate
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That strategy was, according to the cable, to be carried out via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).
The cable has received almost no media coverage. I wonder why.
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The whistleblower website this morning published more than 1.7 million American diplomatic records dating between 1973 and 1976.
According to Wikileaks, the cables include “significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.”
The documents also include many references to Ireland. In one document dated October 9th, 1973, the US embassy in Dublin assesses Ireland-US relations.
Describing them as “excellent”, the cable says “those in the power queue of both major parties are generally well-disposed toward the United States”.
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A 1974 diplomatic cable, released by Wikileaks Monday, points to the enormous respect and attention Margaret Thatcher drew both in and outside of her party and from the press, even before she became leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.
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Julian Assange – currently a fugitive from justice in the Ecuadorean embassy in London – has released a new batch of information on the internet. Published by ‘Wikileaks’ the data covers almost two million records from the USA relating to diplomatic information – some of it potentially embarrassing.
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WikiLeaks has published the ‘Kissinger Cables’: its largest public release of documents in nearly a year, totaling some 1.7 million classified files, including information on the US’s secret diplomatic history.
A variety of files have been collected and collated, including from congressional correspondence, intelligence reports, and cables.
Julian Assange, who heads the organization, told the Press Association that the documents were illustrative of the “vast range and scope” of global US influence. He is to present and mark the release of the documents on Monday in a mass-press conference.
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Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s.
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Not so long ago, WikiLeaks represented the world’s most radical group of investigative journalists. Lately, Julian Assange‘s organization has been acting more like radical librarians.
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GOUGH Whitlam was a proud, “even arrogant” leader who hoped to abolish the Senate and cool relations with the US, but lent a sympathetic ear to an ageing Mao Zedong who confided in the visiting prime minister that he had a looming “appointment with God”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don’t hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.
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Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they’ve been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.
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Finance
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Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, led MF Global, a futures broker and bond dealer that collapsed in 2011. MF Global investors lost as much as $2.1 billion. At the time MF ran into trouble, Corzine was eligible for as much as a $12.1 millon golden parachute. However, Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, told me this afternoon that Corzine didn’t take any compensation when he stepped down. He also said Corzine has been unemployed since then, spending time with his family and doing philanthropic work.
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Sorry about the silence — I spent yesterday being human (the High Line in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be!), and then had a hellishly busy day today. If I had more energy left I’d plunge into the next stage in the European crisis; the moving finger of instability has now reached Portugal, with the government, of course, proposing to cure matters with More Austerity. But it will have to hold until tomorrow.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Huh. Anything else U.S. officials want you to share with the public, absent even a shred of skepticism?
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Censorship
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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.
In February, 2013 PA House Bill 683 was proposed by nine Pennsylvania lawmakers – Reps. Gary Haluska [D-73rd], Carl Metzgar [R-69th], Stephen Barrar [R-160th], M. K. Keller [R-86th], Dick Hess [R-78th], Dan Moul [R-91st], Mike Fleck [R-81st], C. Adam Harris [R-82nd] and Tom Murt [R-152nd]. Steve Todd was among the first to report on it in his February 26 post, PA State House Judiciary Committee: NO on HB683. This bill would prohibit people from photographing oil and gas operations because they are occurring on agricultural lands. By fracking farmland, gas drillers would gain new impunity under a piece of anti-whitsle blower legislation, commonly known as an “Ag-gag.”
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On March 7, 2013, a large number of citizens tried to email members of the European Parliament to express their views on the ”Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report had attracted public attention on the internet and in media, since it called for ”a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.
One of the bloggers writing about this was the Pirate Party’s founder Rick Falkvinge, who asked citizens to email members of the European Parliament to let their views be heard, and set up a simple internet service to make it easy to find the addresses to the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).
Around noon on March 7, approximately 350 emails from concerned citizens had arrived, but then they suddenly stopped appearing.
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Decision follows campaign by Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up in memory of girl fatally attacked in 2007
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A Twitter account called @ExxonCares has been suspended after tweeting about Ninja Turtles and finding the men who built the Pegasus pipeline 65 years ago.
The parody account was created last week in response to the Arkansas pipeline rupture that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, a suburb 25 miles outside Little Rock.
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Privacy
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Phil Zimmerman has always been a privacy advocate, and while he developed PGP, others fortunately saw fit to follow and extend his work and developed an open source and compatible equivalent, called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG).
Today, GnuPG or GPG is the linch-pin for the vast majority of Linux Distributions (Distros) and provides a ‘keyring’ feature to ensure that software obtained from a Distro’s repository will be guaranteed to be safe from tampering (trojan horses, viral code insertions). So, too, GPG is compatible with PGP email and allows users to encrypt (envelope) their email correspondences to guarantee privacy.
Thus far, however, the implementation of low-cost or free, ‘easy-to-use’ email systems with standard encryption have been few, so there truly is a huge unmet need here–world-wide.
As more users embrace the Internet and become comfortable incorporating it into their daily lives, they have also come to understand the crucial importance of privacy. In fact, many feel that such privacy is their given right. I agree with that. The right to privacy is implicit and incorporated into our nation’s Bill of Rights. It’s no different than the paper mail envelope analogy I gave above.
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It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.
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Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar Tuesday dodged a query from a legislator who asked if US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials are in the state to probe casinos and their alleged links to terrorist activities.
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Civil Rights
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Online privacy is something I feel very strongly about, and when I heard about the current government’s plans to opt out of new EU social media laws, I decided enough was enough and it was time to take bigger stand. I won’t get into the depths of my views in this post but here is a brief idea of the situation.
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When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he’d been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn’t the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely — even though the website didn’t want to press the matter — the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to “exceed your authorization” on any online service.
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Today, EFF and a host of organizations across the political spectrum are launching a week-of-action imploring Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the expansive law used to prosecute the late activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.
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Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.
The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.
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Four men were convicted of inciting race hatred Monday from the Italian website of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. The four, aged 23 to 42 and from various towns across Italy, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 months to three years for “promoting and directing a group whose purpose was the instigation to ethnic, religious and racial discrimination and violence”. A Rome judge found the four guilty of targeting “Jews and immigrants, advocating the supremacy of the white race and instigating racism and Holocaust-denial”. The four, who were placed under house arrest Monday, were arrested November 16 after police shut down the website, which had regularly posted anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Corporations and lawmakers have put us on course for a world where consumers do not own the things they buy
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PIRATE PARTY FOUNDER Rick Falkvinge is a travelling evangelist for the political group and its ideals, and he says that Pirate Parties will spring up when and where they are needed and that they are becoming needed more and more often.
Falkvinge founded the Pirate Party when he realised that political change needed to come from the inside.
“I realised activism isn’t enough. Politicians won’t care about an issue if their job isn’t on the line over it; they’ll look at all the activists and remember their own time on the barricades nostalgically, then go back to serving corporate interests,” he said. “My key insight was that votes beat all the money in the world when it comes to getting politicians’ attention.”
The Pirate Party won its place in the European Parliament in 2009 after gaining success in the Swedish elections, and Falkvinge said that gave it credibility that previously it had been lacking. “Well, we certainly got credibility we didn’t have before,” he said. “Kicking the first politicians out of office forced them to take the threat to their power – us, not their incomprehension of the issues – seriously.”
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