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02.19.11

Microsoft Cancels Windows CardSpace 2.0 (Windows InfoCard) Plans

Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 7:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Vintage card

Summary: Another project falls off the agenda as Microsoft cuts back and shrinks a little further

The number of dead products from Microsoft keeps increasing and we may complete the list/close the gap pretty soon because we missed a couple of casualties as we no longer watch Microsoft closely enough. In the mean time, Glyn Moody points out that, according to this, Microsoft “will not be shipping Windows CardSpace 2.0.”

Today, Microsoft announced that it will not be shipping Windows CardSpace 2.0. Having made a significant personal investment in working to make CardSpace a success and the Information Card vision a reality, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a few personal reflections on the CardSpace journey and the lessons we might want to take away from it.

The Microsoft boosters divert attention to something called U-Prove.

For a while, had been wondering when Microsoft would ship CardSpace 2.0, the last, un-delivered piece of its Geneva set of security wares. The answer, it turns out, is never.

CardSpace, which got its start as “Windows InfoCard,” attempted to represent an individual’s digital identity that the user could use to communicate with a third party entity.

Can Microsoft find some real projects to replace all those which it gradually axes? Apple is worth about $100,000,000,000 more than Microsoft now and Google is worth almost as much as Microsoft. Everything changes so fast. █

Links 19/2/2011: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS is Out, Android/Linux is Beating Apple

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • IBM’s Watson Should Rejuvenate Open Source AI

    Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past week, you had to have caught the remarkable performance of IBM’s Watson intelligent computer, which has beaten the two best players in the history of the show Jeapordy, and caused people to herald “our new computer overlords.”

  • Fans

    What bothers me most is not that such attacks are personal so much as the lack of tolerance behind them. To my way of thinking, the refusal to tolerate criticism is crippling in any discussion. The right to question is basic, not just to civilized discourse, but to any improvement — as well, as Robin Miller impressed on me, to journalism, which can be an essential part of that process of improvement if it tries to describe fairly and raises inconvenient truths.

    In fact, you could say that questioning is central to FOSS. After all, what is the patch system of software development, except a series of criticisms and counter-criticisms? Sometimes, the criticism are wrong, or create more problems than they solve, but FOSS could not evolve without a constant critique of what is. In other words, I would argue that, by finding enemies in anyone who doesn’t show unwavering support, FOSS fans are acting against the basic tenets of the cause they claim to support.

  • Terracotta adds search to cached databases

    The latest company to merge analytics and transactions into a single operation, Terracotta has added search functionality into the latest version of its Ehcache Java cache software.

    The search feature, available in the newly released version 2.4 of the software, will allow organizations to perform analysis directly against their online data stores, which could simplify their architecture and cut the time it takes for analyzing data, when compared to performing analysis against disk-based databases or data warehouses, the company claims.

  • Web Browsers

    • Qualys Releases Report on Faulty Browser Plugins

      Qualys’s BrowserCheck tool, released last summer, reports on any security problems with your browser. A new report, released Wednesday, shows the most vulnerable plugins.

      BrowserCheck focuses on plugins that are out of date and hence vulnerable to attack. You can click a button for more details about each found problem; in most cases clicking another button will launch the needed update. The tool works with Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome running under Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

    • Chrome

      • Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings

        In the spirit of the lunar new year, we’re excited to kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel. Today’s new beta includes a dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.

      • Find out who has the most Klout on Twitter with this Chrome extension

        Klout (beta) is a Chrome Extension that was born in a recent Hackathon between bit.ly and Klout. It’s a Twitter rating system that once installed tells you what Klout scores Twitters users have in your Twitter stream. The higher their Klout score the greater their power influence in the Twitterverse.

      • Tech Support Folks Rejoice: All Chrome Settings Now Have a URL

        Google released the latest beta version of its browser, Google Chrome, today and at least one of the changes is likely to make a lot of phone tech support folks very happy.

        In addition to the standard fare updates of making things generally faster and better, the browser now opens all of its settings in a new browser tab, making them entirely searchable and reachable by URL.

      • Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff

        Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we’ve reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client SDK.

    • Mozilla

      • Moving forward with F1

        We’re releasing a new update to F1 with support for more services, more service specific features, and a brand new UI. Here’s a run down of what’s new.

      • Firefox 4 RC coming next Friday

        One year on since the first Alpha of Firefox 4 was made available for testing the worlds second most popular browser may finally have the finish line in sight.

      • Sandboxed add-ons to be disabled next week

        The new Developer Tools and review process were implemented on AMO and announced a little over a month ago. I also expanded the explanation about the new review process, so you should have a look if you haven’t already.

      • Announcing Search in Thunderbird

  • SaaS

    • Yahoo to open-source cloud-serving engine

      Yahoo is developing an internal cloud-serving engine to boost its own productivity, and intends to release the code as an open source this year.

      “We’re committed to open-sourcing all of our cloud infrastructure, for the simple reason that we don’t believe the cloud infrastructure is a competitive differentiator for us,” says Todd Papaioannou, Yahoo’s vice president of cloud architecture. “I have this question pop up from time to time, ‘Is Yahoo ever going to move into the cloud?’ And the answer is, ‘No. We are the cloud.’”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation
    • LibreOffice Raises 10000 Euros for Foundation in One Day

      The Document Foundation announced their intention of becoming a legal non-profit foundation to allow it to accept donations and financial assistance as well as pay employees and rent without having to suffer the tax liabilities levied upon businesses. Since startup capital is required, they began asking for donations to reach their goal. And so far, so good.

      The plan to form a legal foundation was mentioned a while back but not widely announced until February 16. By that time a donation mechanism was instituted and outlined on The Document Foundation Blog. Florian Effenberger, founding member of The Document Foundation, said they’ve decide to apply in Germany where €50,000 in startup funds are considered necessary. That’s where the community comes in. They need help raising that sum.

  • Funding

    • Slashdot owner reports loss again

      Geeknet, the owner of the American technology news accumulation site, Slashdot, has reported a net loss of $US4.4 million for the year 2010.

      In 2009, the company recorded a net loss of $US14 million.

  • Project Releases

    • Python for Qt version 1.0.0 release candidate 1 “The name doesn’t matter” released

      The PySide team is proud to announce the first release candidate of PySide: Python for Qt version 1.0.0. We consider PySide quality already high enough for the 1.0 release, and to ensure a high-quality 1.0 release, we are providing a release candidate to catch any last-minute regressions. Please pound this release hard to help us verify there are no serious outstanding issues!

    • Muon Suite 1.1.1 Released

      This is a few days late in coming (I have been busy with school), but I am glad to announce the release of the first bugfix update for Muon Suite 1.1. This release fixes several bugs that the public has found with the newer tools in the suite such as the Muon Software Center, Muon Update Manager, and Muon Update Notifier. All known bugs are now fixed with this release, and the Muon/QApt buglist is sitting right at zero, and it is recommended that anybody using Muon Suite 1.1.0 upgrade to Muon 1.1.1. Thanks to all the testers who filed bug reports, and thanks to Colin Watson for providing several bugfix patches. In addition, one month’s worth of translation updates from the rocking KDE l10n team are included.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Creative Commons 2010 Figures

      Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization and we happily provide all of our tools for free. As a result, we rely on our international community of users and advocates to give back to this vital public resource and support our work. With so many worthy causes in the world vying for peoples’, foundations’, and companies’ support, we are grateful so many have given whatever they are able to help keep CC afloat and going strong for the past 8 years. In the spirit of transparency and openness, below are some numbers to give you an idea of where our money comes from (You can also see real-time figures as they come in). We’d like to see these numbers continue to grow, just as CC license adoption and use of our tools has grown so steadily since 2002. Please donate today and join our international ranks of supporters to make 2011 our best year yet.

    • Open Data

      • The open-data battle continues with OC Transpo

        When OC Transpo started giving out live GPS data on its buses to app-developers who wanted to let people know when their next buses were likely to make it to particular stops, it was a breath of fresh air — very un-OC Transpo-like, to just give out info like that.

        So much so that when the transit company yanked the data, saying it was necessarily current or accurate enough to be used for REAL real-time predictions of bus arrivals, it seemed plausible. These people really wanted to get the thing right, it seemed. They did mention putting out an official OC Transpo-branded app with the data later, but that’s as far as they went.

      • City mulls making money off bus-tracking data

        The City of Ottawa’s decision to pull access to global positioning system data for OC Transpo buses appears to have been in part to capitalize on potential advertising revenue.

        OC Transpo had made the GPS data available as part of a pilot project, but suspended the project in January shortly after a developer had created a mobile application which gave real-time updates for people waiting at bus stops.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Standards What A Corrupted Term

      When Steve Jobs stands up and says h264 is an Open Standard are we bucking up against sociological, political and generational corruption of what he truly means? Is he saying that and Open Standard refers to the availability of the standard itself and has nothing to do with the implementation, restrictions or privileges defined by the standard and licenses applied to the standard? Is there a purposeful play on words here to describe a technology like h264 as an Open Standard thus playing to the popular “buzzword” term of the day ascribing Open Standard to be akin to Peren’s definition when in truth it is merely the publication of the h264 standard itself and nothing more?

    • W3C Confirms May 2011 for HTML5 Last Call, Targets 2014 for HTML5 Standard

      Today there are more than 50 organizations participating in the HTML Working Group, all committed to Royalty-Free licensing under the W3C Patent Policy. There are more than 400 individuals from all over the world in the group, including designers, content authors, accessibility experts, and representatives from browser vendors, authoring tool vendors, telecoms, equipment manufacturers, and other IT companies.

    • 15-day Public Review for OpenDocument Version 1.2

Leftovers

  • GM to offer Pandora Internet radio on Chevy cars

    General Motors Co will launch a new system to stream online radio from Pandora in upcoming Chevrolets starting with the Volt and Equinox.

  • Jon Stewart gawks at Silvio Berlusconi’s nerve

    Silvio Berlusconi will face a judge for allegedly paying for sex with a teenager. For a leader who has long avoided legal consequences of his sometimes salacious activities, this could go very poorly.

  • Review: Recompute Cardboard PC

    Shawn shows us the Recompute PC from Sustainable Computers. It’s a full blown workstation that you could use to start a camp fire. We don’t recommend the camp fire part though.

  • 2011: Year of the SSD?

    Disk manufacturers are putting a new spin on an old product: Solid State Drives. New technology, increased power costs, space limitation, and new business requirements are driving advances in storage. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are part of that new technological push toward more efficiency, increased agility, and higher demand.

  • Berlusconi has made Italy a laughingstock

    L’Espresso start publishing the secret Wikileaks cables

  • Twenty questions I ask myself every day
  • ‘Some EU governments’ consent helps rise of Islamophobia’

    Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg has said that as some EU governments take a tolerant stance regarding the arguments of the extremist right in Europe, xenophobia and Islamophobia gain strength, resulting in more border controls and restrictions on immigration.

  • 10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe

    10. The Robber Barons weren’t robbers — they were capitalist heroes.

  • Ask Ars: How should my organization approach the IPv6 transition?

    Whenever Ars runs an article about the increasing global scarcity of IPv4 addresses or an IPv6-related topic, we inevitably hear from some readers that they would like to see Ars available over IPv6. We thought we’d explain why we haven’t made that move yet.

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Doctors Embrace Facebook, Twitter

      Hospitals and healthcare facilities all over the U.S. are integrating Facebook, Twitter and even mobile apps into their work, in an effort to improve patient-doctor communication.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Friday
    • Pirates are not hackers and software piracy is also the Government’s fault

      In January 2011 Italian newspaper Repubblica published an article that is a nice example of how much confusion there still is, in mainstream press, about the nature of software and copyright, their relevance for all citizens and the responsibilities of Public Administrations in these fields. That article may have been written everywhere, there’s nothing specifically Italian in it, so I translated my objections to it because they too may be useful outside Italy (to stimulate discussion if nothing else).

    • Government and Security

      There’s a story running on CBC that several Canadian Government departments were penetrated from China over the network. It seems the intruders got control of some executive PCs and sent memos to underlings to reveal passwords etc… I guess it helped that the PCs were running that other OS but once the keys to the kingdom are turned over it matters little what OS was running where.

    • Why the Cabinet Office’s £27bn cyber crime cost estimate is meaningless

      Today the UK Cabinet Office released a report written by Detica. The report concluded that the annual cost of cyber crime in UK is £27bn. That’s less than $1 trillion, as AT&T’s Ed Amoroso testified before the US Congress in 2009. But it’s still a very large number, approximately 2% of UK GDP. If the total is accurate, then cyber crime is a very serious problem of utmost national importance.

      Unfortunately, much of the total cost is based on questionable calculations that are impossible for outsiders to verify. 60% of the total cost is ascribed to intellectual property theft (i.e., business secrets not copied music and films) and espionage. The report does describe a methodology for how it arrived at the figures. However, several key details are lacking. To calculate the IP and espionage losses, the authors first calculated measures of each sector’s value to the economy. Then they qualitatively assessed how lucrative and feasible these attacks would be in each sector.

    • NSA reveals its secret: No backdoor in encryption standard

      The National Security Agency made changes in the proposed design of the Data Encryption Standard before its adoption in 1976, but it did not add any backdoors or other surprises that have been speculated about for 35 years, the technical director of NSA’s information assurance directorate said Wednesday.

      “We’re actually pretty good guys,” said Dickie George. “We wanted to make sure we were as squeaky clean as possible.”

    • Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

      The attached document, which is in English, begins: “LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION).”

      It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one’s enemies with knives (try “the area directly above the genitals”), with ropes (“Choking… there is no other area besides the neck”), with blunt objects (“Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick.”), and with hands (“Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.”).

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Feb18 Bahrain Army Attack on peaceful protests
    • The Tweet and Revolution

      President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton rushed to contrast the repressive brutality of the Iranian authorities with what they now seek to present as the bloodless, US-managed triumph of pro-democracy forces in Egypt.

      By any measure this was brazen impudence, starting with the fact that across the past few weeks the 300 dead, slaughtered by security forces and government-hired thugs fell in Tahrir Square and the streets of Cairo, not in Teheran, with more dead piling up in Bahrein, home of the US Fifth Fleet.

      Good or bad, everything has to be made in America. The 9/11 conspiracists decry the notion that “men in caves” –could plan the destruction of the Twin Towers. They say it had to be non-cavemen Bush and Cheney, plus the commanders of NORAD and several thousand red-blooded American accomplices.

      Today, there’s a flourishing little internet industry claiming that the overthrow of Mubarak came courtesy of US Twitter-Facebook Command, overseen by Head of the Joint Chiefs of Twitter, in the unappetizing, self-promoting form of Jared Cohen, with flanking support by the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House.

    • Bahrain’s army deliberately kills peaceful protesters with live rounds ( automatic weapon )
    • Bahrain: anti-government protests continue despite brutal crackdown (big photo gallery)
    • Bahrain royal family orders army to turn on the people

      As protesters attempted to converge on Pearl Roundabout, a landmark in the capital Manama that has become the principal rallying point of the uprising, soldiers stationed in a nearby skyscraper opened fire.

      Since they took to the streets, Bahrain’s protesters have come to expect violence and even death at the hands of the kingdom’s security forces. At least five people were killed before yesterday’s protests.

    • Libyan protesters assert control

      Libyan officials said that the security forces had been withdrawn from al-Bayda city centre to avoid further loss of life, but were now laying siege to the town as an uprising turned into outright conflict.

      Demonstrators in contact through social media with Libyan exiles claimed they also controlled parts of Libya’s second city, Benghazi, and, in one unconfirmed report, had managed to prevent government planes bringing reinforcements landing at the airport.

      Other social media from the country, which is largely closed to western journalists, showed bodies lying in hospitals as security forces fought back.

    • WikiLeaks: US wanted ‘derogatory’ information on Bahrain king’s sons

      The office of Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wanted to know if Prince Nasir bin Hamad al Khalifa or Prince Khalid bin Hamad al Khalifa took drugs, drank alcohol or “caused problems” within the monarchy.

      Embassy staff in the Bahraini capital of Manama were also asked whether the princes had any friends among the country’s Shia Muslim majority, which is behind this week’s protests against the minority rule of the Sunni regime.

      Prince Nasir, 23, who is serving in the Bahrain Defence Force, and Prince Khalid, 21, are King Hamad’s sons by his second wife and there have been fears in the region that hardliners from neighbouring countries might try to influence them.

    • 08MANAMA194, NEW HEAD OF BAHRAIN NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

      1.(SBU) King Hamad on March 23 appointed Khalifa bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa as the new Head of the Bahrain National Security Agency, replacing Khalifa bin Ali Al-Khalifa. Khalifa bin Abdullah is currently Bahrain’s ambassador in London, and has been there only about a year. Prior to that, he served in a variety of positions at the Ministry of Information: Acting Director of Press and Foreign Media Relations (1997-1998), Director of Press and Foreign Media Relations (1998-2002), Assistant Undersecretary (2002-2007), and Acting CEO of Bahrain Television (BTV) and Radio Corporation (2006-2007).

      2.(C) During his time at the Ministry of Information, Khalifa bin Abdullah was a valued contact of the Embassy’s Public Affairs section. He worked closely with the PAS on a judicial forum in 2004 and the Forum for the Future in 2005. During his stint as acting CEO of BTV, he presided over a successful collaboration with the State Department’s Office of Broadcast Services in producing a documentary program about the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement.

    • 05PRAGUE337, C) RUSSIAN MISSILES FOR US NAVY COMING FROM

      1. (C) THIS IS AN ACTION REQUEST. SEE PARAGRAPH 4. The US Navy has for some time been planning an open commercial purchase of 23 KH-31 (or MA-31) Russian sea-skimming missiles from a Czech arms dealer. It has come to our attention that the missiles are coming from Belarus, via a series of complicated transactions. This arrangement is reportedly necessary because the Russians themselves refused to sell the missiles to the Czech arms dealer.

    • 04HELSINKI1603, FINNS FIND PUTIN “FRUSTRATED, ANXIOUS”

      1. (C) Finnish President Tarja Halonen’s most recent meeting with Vladimir Putin left the Finns with the clear impression that the Russian president is feeling frustrated and anxious. He complained at length to Halonen that Russia has been misunderstood and mistreated by the West, with an implicit accusation that the U.S. is fostering regime change in the near abroad with political cover from the EU. Former PM Paavo Lipponen, after discussing the meeting with Halonen, described to the Ambassador his own sense that the Russians feel under pressure on their perimeter, at least in the Baltic and Caucasus; Lipponen advises that the U.S. and EU stand firm on principle, as always, but “bear in mind that Putin feels very uncomfortable right now.”

    • Bahrain’s death toll grows and its Internet slows

      Bahrain’s dictatorship looked at what has happened in Tunis and Egypt and decided that bullets would serve its cause better than relenting to its people’s call for ballots and reform. This morning, mercenaries of Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf country, overran a camp of sleeping protesters killing at least four of them. At the same time, it appears that Bahrain has started strangling the country’s Internet connection to keep news from coming in or out of the country.

      Sources at Arbor Networks, a network security company, told me that “Bahrain has significantly increased its filtering of Internet traffic in response to growing political unrest.” While the Bahrain Internet has remained up, unlike Egypt’s Internet, it’s averaging a pronounced 10-20% reduction in traffic volumes.

    • Algeria Tries To Placate Unrest By Ending 19 Years Of Emergency Law

      Algeria is making a dangerous gambit in attempts to placate thousands of protesters.

      The petro-state will lift emergency laws that have been in place since 1992, according to Al Jazeera.

    • Algerian minister: Protests just a minority stunt
    • Adding insult to Lara Logan’s injury

      …used the attack to reinforce their anti-Muslim, anti-revolution arguments.

    • Egypt’s military rejects swift transfer of power and suspends constitution

      The Egyptian military has rejected the demands of pro-democracy protesters for a swift transfer of power to a civilian administration, saying it intends to rule by martial law until elections are held.

      The army’s announcement, which included the suspending of the constitution, was a further rebuff to some pro-democracy activists after troops were sent to clear demonstrators from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the centre of the protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak. “We do not want any protesters to sit in the square after today,” said the head of the military police, Mohamed Ibrahim Moustafa Ali. Many agreed to leave but a hardcore refused, saying they would remain until the army took a series of steps toward democratic reform including installing a civilian-led government and abolishing the repressive state of emergency.

    • Albanians hold new anti-government protest

      Tens of thousands of Albanian opposition supporters marched peacefully through the capital Friday to demand that the government resigns over corruption allegations, almost a month after four people died when a similar demonstration turned violent.

      Hundreds of police guarded the main government building in Tirana, where dozens of protesters and police were injured in the Jan 21 riot. But the protest ended peacefully.

      The opposition Socialists are demanding that conservative Prime Minister Sali Berisha hold early elections over allegations of corruption and vote rigging in the 2009 general election.

    • Egypt: prison guards killed scores in run-up to fall of Hosni Mubarak

      The full extent of the carnage at Al-Qata Prison outside Cairo as guards fought back is only now becoming clear.

      One prisoner, speaking from inside his cell, told The Daily Telegraph that inmates had drawn up a list of 153 men killed during a siege lasting a full two weeks. He described how as the men celebrated the fall of Mr Mubarak, a man standing next to him was hit by gunfire, an explosive bullet ripping into his head through the cell window.

      “We started to cheer and shout,” said the prisoner, whose name The Telegraph is witholding for his protection. “This man was standing here and was just shot through the eye. He died immediately.

    • U.S. veto thwarts UN resolution condemning settlements

      The other 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the draft resolution. But the U.S., as one of five permanent council members with the power to block any action by the Security Council, struck it down.

    • In dramatic turnaround, US to censure Israel in Security Council

      In a dramatic departure from longstanding policy, the United States intends to support a United Nations Security Council resolutions censuring Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory.

      The Obama administration told Arab governments Tuesday it will back a draft resolution saying the Security Council “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

    • Is the Apocalypse upon us? In dramatic turnaround, US to censure Israel in Security Council

      In a dramatic departure from longstanding policy, the United States intends to support a United Nations Security Council resolutions censuring Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory.

      The Obama administration told Arab governments Tuesday it will back a draft resolution saying[1] the Security Council “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” according to Foreign Policy[2] magazine.

    • Adventure playground

      What happier roost could there be for Mark and his mother? Margaret Thatcher found that permitting British companies to break the sanctions against the apartheid regime turned South Africa’s problems into our opportunities. When Mark was asked what he thought of his mother’s position, he replied: “My sympathy is with the struggling white community.”

    • Cop apologizes for ‘sluts’ remark at law school

      A police officer who suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like “sluts” has apologized, saying he is “embarrassed” by the remark and that assaulted women are “not victims by choice.”

      “I made a comment which was poorly thought out and did not reflect the commitment of the Toronto Police Service to the victims of sexual assaults,” Const. Michael Sanguinetti wrote on Thursday to Osgoode Hall Law School where he made the comment.

    • Don’t dress like a slut: Toronto cop

      Students and staff at Osgoode Hall Law School are demanding an apology and explanation from the Toronto Police Service after one of their officers suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like a “slut.”

      On Jan. 24, a campus safety information session was held at Osgoode Hall, where members from York security and two male officers from Toronto police 31 Division handed out safety tips to community
      members.

    • Wisconsin Dem Senator Posts ‘brb’ Message On Facebook

      The Democratic walkout was designed to deny Republicans the necessary number of lawmakers needed for a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial proposals that would strip most state government workers of their collective bargaining rights.

    • Wisconsin Democrats could stay away for weeks

      Democrats on the run in Wisconsin avoided state troopers Friday and threatened to stay in hiding for weeks, potentially paralyzing the state government in a standoff with majority Republicans over union rights for public employees.

      The dramatic flight from the state stalled a proposal that seeks to ease Wisconsin’s budget woes by cutting the pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights of many government workers. Democrats who stayed in Madison scored their own victory, forcing the state Assembly to adjourn until at least Tuesday without taking a vote.

    • Texas man wrongly put away for 18 years denied compensation after legal glitch

      A courtroom technicality has cost a wrongly convicted Texas man the compensation that would otherwise be due him for the 18 years he’d served in Texas prison–14 of which he spent on Death Row.

      Anthony Graves would have received $1.4 million in compensation if only the words “actual innocence” had been included in the judge’s order that secured Graves’s release from prison. The Comptroller’s office decided the omission means Graves gets zero dollars, writes Harvey Rice at the Houston Chronicle, even though the prosecutor, judge, and defense all agreed at trial he is innocent.

    • Fear of Teratocracy

      I’ve been thinking about the nature of democracy over the past few weeks, for both obvious (Egypt) and less-obvious (potential for social change under conditions of disruption) reasons. The definition of democracy that most people are familiar is something along the lines of “rule by the people through voting, where the recipient of a majority of the vote wins.” That’s a decent description of the mechanism of democracy, I suppose, but I don’t think it captures the important part.

      Democracy is defined by how you lose, not (just) how you win.

      The real test of whether a society that uses a plebiscite to determine leadership is really a democracy is whether the losing party accepts the loss and the legitimacy of their opponent’s victory. This is especially true for when the losing party previously held power. Do they give up power willingly, confident that they’ll have a chance to regain power again in the next election? Or do they take up arms against the winners, refuse to relinquish power, and/or do everything they can to undermine the legitimacy of the opposition’s rule?

    • Flamboyant Gaddafi feels ripples of change

      For most that time he also held a prominent position in the West’s international rogues’ gallery.

      He has maintained tight control by clamping down on dissidents but his oil-producing nation is now beginning to feel the wind of change that is blowing across the Arab world.

      Anti-Gaddafi protesters clashed with police and government supporters in the eastern city of Benghazi, and Human Rights Watch reported that at least 24 people had died in two days of unrest this week.

    • Gaddafi’s forces accused of using gunships against citizens

      Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime turned its helicopter gunships and snipers on protesters as rare anti-government protests were reported to have reached Tripoli, the capital.

      The dictator was the focus of a ”day of rage” in at least five cities, an unprecedented challenge to his ”Green Revolution”.

      Human Rights Solidarity, a campaign group, said snipers on the rooftops in al-Baida had killed 13 protesters and wounded dozens of others after police stations were set on fire and posters of Colonel Gaddafi burnt.

    • US targets Afghan laundering network

      The US government on Friday slapped sanctions on a high-profile Afghan money exchange house and its executives, accusing them of laundering cash for drug traffickers.

      The Kabul-based New Ansari Money Exchange as well as 15 related people and firms were accused of hiding “illicit narcotics proceeds” in billions of dollars they transferred in and out of Afghanistan between 2007 and 2010.

      The New Ansari Exchange was thought to be the biggest of Afghanistan’s “hawala” money-transfer firms, which play an even larger role in the war-torn nation’s economy than commercial banks.

    • The Arab Revolution Saudi Update

      Remember, in a former post, when I said that Saudis were captivated and shocked by what happened in Tunis and Egypt but hadn’t collectively made up their mind about it? Well it appears that they have. Everywhere I go and everything I read points to a revolution in our own country in the foreseeable future. However we are still on the ledge and haven’t jumped yet.

      I know that some analysts are worried particularly of Saudi Arabia being taken over by Al Qaeda or a Sunni version of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Calm down. Besides my gut feeling (which is rarely wrong), the overwhelming majority of people speaking out and calling out for a revolution are people who want democracy and civil rights and not more of our current Arab tradition based adaptation of Sharia. My theory of why that is, is that Al Qaeda has already exhausted its human resources here. The available muttawas, are career muttawas (fatwa sheikhs) and minor muttawas (PVPV) of convenience both paid by the government and do not want the current win-win deal between them and the government to sour. So it’s unlikely that they would actively seek change. Actually quite the opposite, they will resist and delay as much as they can. Fortunately the winds of change can’t be deterred by a PVPV cruiser.

    • protest in #Djibouti

      Dijibouti had protested earlier, on January 28, leading Ismaël Guedi Hared, President of Djibouti’s UAD opposition alliance, to call for a massive protest today. “According to UDDESC activists, this evening even international calls have been blocked in Djibouti in an attempt to restrict reporting from the events.”

    • Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs’ Plan to Break Labor’s Back

      As some 30,000 protesters overwhelmed the state capitol building in Wisconsin today, Democratic state senators hit the road, reportedly with State Police officers in pursuit. The Dems left the state in order to deprive Republicans the necessary quorum for taking a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to strip benefits and collective bargaining rights from state workers. Newsradio 620 WTMJ reported that the Democratic senators were holed up in a Rockford, Illinois, hotel, out of reach of Wisconsin state troopers. Now, it seems, Republican lawmakers are beginning to waver on their support for the union-busting bill.

    • Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people

      These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your “friends” are.

      But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my “friends” even real people?

      In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.

  • Cablegate

    • What caught the attention of US diplomats?
    • ‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech

      As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

    • [Old] Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern
    • WikiLeaks Precedes Ugandan Election to Reveal Meteroic Rise of Homophobia

      Wiki Leaks reveals U.S. embassy cable reports on ’s meteoric rise of homophobia in Uganda, reflecting on a UN-backed human rights meeting attended by now murdered Ugandan Gay activist David Kato, and author of the “Kill the Gays” Bill, David Bahati. The International community could not have better real time reports and so action and outcry must occur in as rampant a fashion.

    • Gay hate exposed in Uganda poll countdown

      The murdered gay rights activist David Kato had been mocked at a United Nations-backed debate on proposed Ugandan legislation on homosexuality, a US diplomat in Kampala said.

      The diplomat said in a leaked embassy cable that in the debate Mr Kato, who was bludgeoned to death near his home in the capital last month, had delivered a well-written speech against a bill that would impose the death penalty for the offence of ”aggravated homosexuality” and life imprisonment for consenting adults who have gay sex.

    • Five Reasons Why Georgia Lost The August War

      But a recently-released cables via Wikileaks has brought the issue back into focus again. The cables in question cite sources that cast serious doubt on the ability of the sprawling, but famously creaky, Russian conventional military as being of little threat to NATO.

    • WikiLeaks brings to light suspected baby trafficking from Egypt to Canada

      The RCMP and Canadian consular officials in Cairo have been investigating up to a dozen cases where couples are suspected of having trafficked babies from Egypt into Canada, according to leaked diplomatic cables.

    • US extradition claims revealed by Wikileaks site

      THE extradition of a former university academic accused of plotting to smuggle military equipment to Iran was delayed for political reasons, a leaked secret cable claims.

      A US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks suggests the UK Government put the extradition of Nosratollah Tajik on hold to protect sensitive nuclear talks with Iran.

      The claim appears at odds with ministerial statements given to the House of Commons four months after the cable was sent, saying the extradition was a judicial process and that the sole issue to be considered was whether it would breach Mr Tajik’s human rights.

    • A Wikileaks Primer on the Cozy US-Bahrain Relationship

      In December 2009, the then-US Ambassador to Bahrain, Adam Ereli, cabled to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton his great regard for the rulers of that country. The US-Bahrain relationship as seen through Wikileaks cables is quite cozy, and focused quite a bit on areas of mutual security.

      King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Ereli wrote, “is personable and engaging” and “rules as something of a ‘corporate king,’ giving direction and letting his top people manage the government.”

      King Hamad was given high marks for ushering in governmental reforms. Ereli sad King Hamad had “overseen the development of strong institutions with the restoration of parliament, the formation of a legal political opposition, and a dynamic press.” King Hamad, Ereli said, “is committed to fighting corruption and prefers doing business with American firms because they are transparent.” Ereli noted that King Hamad had awarded U.S. companies major contracts, including Gulf Air buying 24 Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

    • WikiLeaks panellists censure ‘virus’ of government secrecy

      GOVERNMENTS have become too secretive and politicians should be disqualified from Parliament if they lie, says Julian Burnside, QC.

      Advertisement: Story continues below

      Mr Burnside, who spoke in a panel discussion about WikiLeaks at the Capitol Theatre last night, said the number of classified documents in the US had grown by almost 10 times between 1996 and 2010. Secrecy hid incompetence and corruption and was only warranted when lives were at risk, he said. ”Of course governments have got to have secrets. But they have too many at the moment.”

    • Senate Bill Would Make Leaks a Felony

      Legislation introduced in the Senate this week would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information. The bill (S. 355) sponsored by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) would make it a felony for a government employee or contractor who has authorized access to classified information to disclose such information to an unauthorized person in violation of his or her nondisclosure agreement.

      Under existing law, criminal penalties apply only to the unauthorized disclosure of a handful of specified categories of classified information (in non-espionage cases). These categories include codes, cryptography, communications intelligence, identities of covert agents, and nuclear weapons design information. The new bill would amend the espionage statutes to extend such penalties to the unauthorized disclosure of any classified information.

    • What WikiLeaks has told us

      Since 2006, the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks has published a mass of information we would otherwise not have known. The leaks have exposed dubious procedures at Guantanamo Bay and detailed meticulously the Iraq War’s unprecedented civilian death-toll. They have highlighted the dumping of toxic waste in Africa as well as revealed America’s clandestine military actions in Yemen and Pakistan.

      The sheer scope and significance of the revelations is shocking. Among them are great abuses of power, corruption, lies and war crimes. Yet there are still some who insist WikiLeaks has “told us nothing new”. This collection, sourced from a range of publications across the web, illustrates nothing could be further from the truth. Here, if there is still a grain of doubt in your mind, is just some of what WikiLeaks has told us:

    • Wikileaks Scandal Hits paraguayan president Fernando Lugo

      Paraguay president Fernando Lugo, a center-left politician who was elected to office in April 2008, was seen as a potential ally to the U.S. by the U.S. embassy in Asuncion, so long as he had “more than just a little help from ’upstairs’ to govern as president” which Lugo was apparently willing to accept.

    • A Librarian reacts to “A Librarian Reacts to WikiLeaks”

      Thanks to Bill Sleeman for his Jan. 24 article on WikiLeaks. His parsing is thought-provoking, but incomplete.

      I’d like to add some context to Sleeman’s op-ed because I think he conflates and ignores several issues surrounding Wikileaks the organization and the leaked US State Department cables themselves.

      Sleeman ignores the information and focuses instead on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the actions of members of the American Library Association — Al Kagan’s American Libraries Magazine article as well as Larry Roman’s comment/response offer a good review of the ALA Midwinter conference WikiLeaks dustup. Sleeman repeatedly suggests that we have only one choice: “embrace” WikiLeaks or reject it. This is a false choice and misdirection. In doing this, Sleeman has adopted the strategy being used by those who wish to suppress the information by distracting us from it and focusing instead on the messenger.

    • Swedish justice questioned as Julian Assange awaits extradition ruling

      The Australian ambassador to Sweden has written to the country’s justice minister seeking assurances that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, would be treated justly under Swedish and international law, should he be extradited there.

      Assange, an Australian citizen, is currently fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden over allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual molestation made by two women in August last year, which he denies. He will learn within days whether his attempt to resist the European arrest warrant has been successful.

    • 06YEREVAN1019, A PROSTITUTE’S STORY: SEX AND TRAFFICKING IN

      Poverty and desperation are the largest factors contributing to trafficking in persons in Armenia, according to prostitutes, police and NGOs in Vanadzor, Armenia’s third-largest city. We met them during a July 14 trip to the city, where prostitutes gather after dusk in the traffic circle outside a central church to begin the day’s work. To each we posed the question, “What can be done to eradicate trafficking in persons in Armenia?” No one had an answer, but all agreed that lack of jobs drove women to sell themselves both in Armenia and overseas, where the money was better, but where they often didn’t actually get paid. They told us that girls as young as 11 and 12 have started walking the streets. A police officer told us that parents send their daughters to Turkey fully understanding the cost at which remittances will be sent home. We visited a decrepit shanty town, where prostitutes work for bread and rice, to see first-hand the conditions in which many of them live. We left Vanadzor convinced that, while stricter laws and harsher sentencing are needed in Armenia, prostitutes work in large part because they have to put food on the table, and they go to Turkey and the UAE because they believe the money is better there.

    • 08MOSCOW1124, MOSCOW TABLOID SHUT DOWN BY OWNER AFTER BREAKING

      The Moscow-based tabloid Moskovskiy Korrespondent suspended its operations on April 18 at the request of its owner after being the first Russian newspaper to report the rumor on April 11 that Putin had divorced in February and planned to marry 24-year old rhythmic gymnast and Duma member Alina Kabayeva. Korrespondent owner, Aleksandr Lebedev, told the Ambassador that no one had called him and he had not been forced to suspend the publication, as reported in the media. Korrespondent had ceased publication because kiosk owners had refused to carry it in the wake of the scandal. Putin denied there was any truth to the rumors during an April 18 joint press conference in Sardinia with Silvio Berlusconi, and the reporting which followed in the mainstream Russian press focused exclusively on his denial, pointedly failing to address the veracity of the rumors. Media sources we have spoken with indicate that it is not worth the risk of attracting Kremlin scorn to print any stories having a First Family angle.

    • Viewing cable 08MANAMA89, BAHRAIN’S CROWN PRINCE CONSOLIDATING HIS AUTHORITY

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Melting Arctic soil spewing carbon: study
    • GOP Lawmaker Mike Beard Claims God Will Provide Unlimited Natural Resources

      Mike Beard, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, recently argued that coal mining should resume in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, in part because he believes God has created an earth that will provide unlimited natural resources.

      “God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable,” Beard told MinnPost. “We are not going to run out of anything.”

    • Why Chevron’s lawyers must be among the busiest in the world

      Oil is the dirtiest industry in the world and Chevron, one the world’s largest companies, must be the oiliest. That’s saying something when you consider it has rivals including BP, Shell, Exxon and Oxy. Never mind the gross violations of the Ecuadoran environment for which it was punished this week with a $8bn (£5bn) fine. When it comes to aggressive legal tactics, vindictiveness, threats, pollution, intimidation, tax evasion and links with venal and repressive regimes, it is in a league of its own as its corporate lawyers bludgeon, bully and try to beat with the law any opposition it meets around the world.

  • Finance

    • Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – Closed Session – Ben Bernanke
    • How Goldman Killed A.I.G.

      The conventional wisdom has it that the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a low-budget flop, hopelessly riven by internal political disputes and dissension among the commission’s 10 members. As usual, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Actually, the report — and the online archive of testimony, interviews and documents that are now available — is a treasure trove of invaluable information about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.

    • Did Goldman Sachs Kill AIG ?

      The “dispute” between GS and AIG was over the timing and amount of the collateral call. I must emphasize that this was part of the contract between two very sophisticated financial firms — AIG was the world’s biggest insurer, and GS was one of the world’s biggest bankers.

      As Cohan states “On July 27, 2007, Goldman sent a $1.81 billion collateral call to A.I.G. Financial Products.” But Cohan’s mention that: “Goldman — pretty much alone at that point — thought represented the decline in the value of the securities.”

      But so what? That AIG gave GS the ability to demand increased collateral based on their own valuations is pretty astonishing — and dumb as hell. AIG ultimately negotiated down the $1.8B collateral call to “only” $450m; eventually, they ponied up an additional $1.55 billion in collateral. AIG also had to pay collateral to Merrill and Soc Gen.

    • A Few Words From Bernie

      No senator in Washington talks straighter about the truth than Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He is a staunch defender of ordinary Americans, and strongly opposes the Republican effort to balance the budget on the backs of these people while giving huge tax breaks to the rich. The following statements from Senator Sanders are from an interview with Judy Woodruff, where he discusses the budget plans of President Obama and the Republican Party. As usual, he’s right on target.

    • 05MINSK851, THE BANKING SECTOR, BELARUSIAN STYLE

      1. Summary: The banking system in Belarus is characterized by its underdevelopment, lack of foreign competition, and constant government interference. The Belarusian economy still relies primarily on cash as a settlement instrument. Cash outside the banking sector is the preferred method of payment because, what the GOB doesn’t see, it can’t confiscate or control. GOB intervention in the operational activities of both private enterprises and government- controlled banks is the cause of most of the problems in the banking sector. However, despite these systemic problems, public trust in the banking sector is growing.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sign the petition: Bev Oda must resign

      Falsifying documents? Misleading Parliament? Enough is enough.

    • Koch Industries Slashed WI Jobs, Helped Elect Scott Walker, Now Orchestrating Pro-Walker Protest

      Wisconsin’s newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker is facing a growing backlash over his attempt to cut pay and eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in his state. Although Walker is claiming his power grab is an attempt to close a budget gap, the budget “crisis” was engineered by Walker as soon as he got into office. As Brian Beutler reported, half of the budget shortfall comes from Walker’s own tax cuts for businesses and other business giveaways enacted in January.

    • Sarah Palin Answers Questions From Business Group In Front Of Mainstream Media
    • Targets of Chamber of Commerce fight back

      Three attorneys at Hunton & Williams, the international law firm that is implicated in a scheme to attack WikiLeaks and critics of the Chamber of Commerce, will be hit with bar complaints next week by anti-Chamber activists who were targeted in the scheme.

      “It’s a powerhouse law firm and if they’re allowed to deal in this kind of illegal activity, what do ethics in the law mean?” asks Kevin Zeese, attorney for the group StopTheChamber.com. “These guys are openly talking about potentially criminal activities — invading privacy, moving toward libel and slander and defamation of character — by creating forged documents, tricking us to putting them out, and accusing us of putting out disinformation.”

    • Why Ballmer wasn’t at the Obama tech dinner

  • Censorship

  • Civil Rights

    • TSA screeners stole over $200K from fliers’ baggage

      Two TSA screeners from New York’s Kennedy airport were busted for stealing over $200,000 in cash from fliers. They targetted people they thought were drug dealers, since they didn’t think their victims would complain.

    • Comment: Civil liberties campaigners dig their own grave

      The reason leftists always sense a rightward drift in British politics is simply because the pressure is there. The tabloid press seize on any instance of crime being dealt with leniently, or an MP who proposes liberalising drugs laws, or a theatre production in a prison. People are on their toes about getting done from the right, so they cater to its concerns. The most you get from the left is a concerned column in the Independent. There’s just not enough pressure.

      Which is why civil liberties activists’ current strategy – namely complacency – is so ruinous to the cause.

      It was evident when the coalition took power that civil liberties was a crucial middle ground for the two parties. The Tories were always dodgy on civil liberties but it fitted a freedom agenda which could be combined with their deregulation plans to imitate an ideologically coherent policy portfolio.

    • Defend Free Speech on the Internet

      Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would give phone and cable companies absolute power over the Internet.

    • FBI pushes for surveillance backdoors in Web 2.0 tools

      The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.

      FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.

    • Data retention should last one year: AG

      The talks, set for July this year, will lay the foundations to unify current data retention plans between the US, Europe and Australia.

      Governments have proposed that internet providers retain information on customers including websites visited, online searches and key data required to tie verified account identities to IP addresses. The ideas are being pushed as a means to assist law enforcement within and across national borders.

    • The Fourth Amendment is Going Dark

      In 1994 the FBI decided it needed a surveillance system built into the telephone network to enable it to listen to any conversation with the flip of a switch. Congress obliged by passing the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), forcing the telecoms to rebuild their networks to be “wiretap ready.” Seventeen years later, law enforcement is asking to expand CALEA to include the Internet, claiming that its investigative abilities are “going dark” because people are increasingly communicating online.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • EU to consider new plans to reduce roaming phone charges

      The European Commission will have to consider radical new measures to reduce the cost of mobile roaming charges after almost all respondents to its consultation said prices were unfair.

    • Rogers Responds To CRTC Net Neutrality Concerns: No Need for Disclosure Changes
    • Regulations committee drops advice to CRTC on false and misleading news

      Facing mounting public pressure, the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations, a committee of the House and Senate, agreed Thursday to withdraw advice to the CRTC to water down a regulation prohibiting the broadcast of false and misleading news.

      Some observers now expect the CRTC, which is against the proposal, to withdraw or abandon the regulatory change it put forward in a consultation on Jan. 10.

    • Who owns the tangible Internet?

      What is the Internet? It is not analogous to a house. But you folks want tangibles, so lets talk tangibles.

      A house occupies a finite amount of space. A house anywhere in our world is most likely to fall under the specific jurisdiction and laws of the nation in which it stands. Under the laws of the land, it is usually straightforward to determine who holds title to the house. In most cases only the owner has the rights to alter or amend the structure of the house.

      The Internet, on the other hand, spans the globe. This means that there are bits of infrastructure residing in many nations and under many different legal systems. And if Fred in Topeka sends an email to Mary in London, the email it is broken down into multiple packets which are sent independently — part of Fred’s email might go in a relatively straight line from sender to destination but part of it may be rerouted via Sri Lanka and another through Iceland.

  • DRM

    • Copyright Lobby Group Makes the Case for Flexible Digital Lock Rules

      This report is what Canadian officials have in mind when they talk about it being driven entirely by U.S. industry. There are many aspects worth noting in this year’s report – the criticism of countries like Vietnam and the Philippines for encouraging the use of open source software (the Vietnamese program was established to help reduce software piracy), the criticism of Bill C-32′s digital lock provision that allows cabinet to establish new exceptions (the IIPA would like any new exceptions to be both limited and for a limited time), and the near universal demand that countries spend millions of public dollars on increased policing, IP courts, and public education campaigns.

      Of particular note, however, is the fact that the IIPA report provides a fairly convincing case that there is considerable flexibility in implementing the WIPO Internet treaty anti-circumvention rules.

      The IIPA hopes to make the opposite case by claiming that country-after-country should amend their digital lock rules to make them more like the U.S. DMCA. Yet the picture that emerges is that dozens of countries around the world have rejected that DMCA approach in their effort to comply with digital lock requirements found in the WIPO Internet treaties.

    • Stipulation: Hotz to Turn Over Computers to Neutral Third Party – Updated

      This will make a lot of you feel better. The parties have come up with a stipulation in Sony Computer Entertainment American v. Hotz regarding what Hotz must do about handing over his computers. The new Preliminary Injunction [PDF] now says that he is to turn his materials over to a “neutral” third party, not to SCEA’s lawyers, and after the neutral party combs through them, it all is returned to Hotz. All but whatever they “segregate” out of them. He won’t get that back until the end of the litigation, should he prevail, which this court at least currently thinks is less likely than that Sony will. There will be a hearing on Hotz’s motion to dismiss on April 8, 2011.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Did Watson Succeed On Jeopardy By Infringing Copyrights?

      This is a really good point and (once again) highlights the ridiculousness of copyright in certain circumstances. Of course, your viewpoint on this may depend heavily on whether or not you believe Google’s book scanning infringed on copyright (I don’t). But, for those who do, do you believe that IBM’s scanning of books does infringe? Technically, it’s the same basic process. In fact, you could argue that with Watson it’s much more involved, because Watson then actually made use of the actual data to a much greater extent than Google did with Google books.

    • Photographer Who Took Family Portrait Of Girl Shot In Tucson Suing Media For Using The Photo

      What you might not know is that the professional photographer, who took this photo, apparently seems to think this is an “opportunity.” After Christina’s unfortunate murder, photographer Jon Wolf of Tucson decided to register the photo at the Copyright Office and then threaten and/or sue a bunch of media properties for showing the photo without licensing it (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending this over). It’s hard not to be sickened by someone who would so brazenly try to capitalize on such a tragedy.

    • Trademarks

      • Google Pushes To Keep Reams Of Documents Secret In Major Trademark Case

        Rosetta Stone v. Google, one of the most important trademark cases of the digital age, is pending in a Virginia federal appeals court, and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is fighting a remarkable battle to keep thousands of pages of documents secret. The documents could contain information that’s potentially damaging to Google about how frequently customers are confused by trademarked searches, which is a central question in the case.

        The company is trying to block an effort by the non-profit Public Citizen to unseal heaps of documents in the case. The battle over these sealed documents won’t affect what Rosetta Stone has access to, so it shouldn’t really affect the outcome of the case. But Google is fighting to keep sealed at least 800 pages of documents that could damage it from a PR perspective.

    • Copyrights

      • Creating creativity

        To give creative endeavor more shelter I proposed making fair dealing illustrative. But if we must remain locked into enumerated categories of fair dealing Professor Graham Reynolds convincingly argues that a further category be added: a protection for those who engage in transformative work. In his chapter, “Towards a Right to Engage in the Fair Transformative Use of Copyright-Protected Expression,” in From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright…” (free download available here) he indicates that Canada would not be the first country to take such a step, and, he stresses the importance of ensuring that the anti-circumvention provisions of Bill C-32 do not render such a right null and void.

      • Leaving Millions on the Table: Pandora and Canadian Music

        Pandora, the popular U.S. online music service filed for an initial public offering last week, provided new insight into hugely popular company that spends millions of dollars in copyright royalties. Pandora users listened to a billion hours of music in the last three months of 2010. Given U.S. laws, the Pandora prospectus notes that it paid for the privilege of having its users do so, with the company spending just over half of its revenue on copyright fees – $45 million in the first nine months of 2010.

      • RIAA Labels Spain and Canada As Piracy Havens

        Together with their partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the RIAA has submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Canada and Spain are listed as two piracy havens that require urgent attention from the US Government, even though the latter just adopted a US inspired anti-piracy law.

      • The RIAA attacks Canada

        The IIPA (International Intellectual Property Alliance) is touting another of its spurious ‘reports’ and, says the RIAA, quoting from the document, “the Canadian Government has inexplicably consumed yet another year without modernizing its copyright regime, leaving a legal structure in place that is not adequate to respond to present challenges.”

        Posted Michael Geist, “This [IIPA] report is what Canadian officials have in mind when they talk about it being driven entirely by U.S. industry.

        “There are many aspects worth noting in this year’s report — the criticism of countries like Vietnam and the Philippines for encouraging the use of open source software (the Vietnamese program was established to help reduce software piracy), the criticism of Bill C-32’s digital lock provision that allows cabinet to establish new exceptions (the IIPA would like any new exceptions to be both limited and for a limited time), and the near universal demand that countries spend millions of public dollars on increased policing, IP courts, and public education campaigns.”

      • Nothing New Under The Copyright-Eclipsed Sun

        The copyright industry has tried the same tricks and rhetoric for well over 500 years, and they are also keen on trying to rewrite history. But the tale of the history books differs sharply from what the copyright industry is trying to paint.

        When the printing press arrived in 1453, scribe-craft was a profession in high demand. The Black Death had taken a large toll from the monasteries, who were not yet repopulated, so copying books was expensive.

      • President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil

        This is an open letter to President Dilma Rousseff signed by international organizations, academics and activists in support of the work of the Brazilian society and government for the cultural commons

      • Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company

        Yesterday, I blogged about Artur Tchoukanov, who figured out how to make a 3D printed “impossible” Penrose triangle. Turned out I didn’t have the details quite right. The guy who came up with the 3D design in Thingiverse had made it after seeing someone else’s model for the same thing on Shapeways, and he’d made the triangle design to show that he’d figured out how the trick was done.

      • ACTA

        • Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: European Commission welcomes release of negotiation documents

          The negotiation parties of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) today published the documents of the 8th round of negotiations held in Wellington on 12-16 April. The European Commission welcomes the decision to make the draft available to the public. This text shows that the overall objective of ACTA is to address large-scale infringements of intellectual property rights which have a significant economic impact. ACTA will by no means lead to a limitation of civil liberties or to “harassment” of consumers.

        • Comments to USTR Submitted for ACTA: Thirty Professors Say It Requires Congressional Approval

          We write to call on the Obama administration to comply with the Constitution by submitting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to Congress for approval.

          The executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter international agreements on intellectual property without congressional consent. The regulation of intellectual property and of foreign commerce, which are at the heart of ACTA’s terms, are Article I Section 8 powers of Congress; the President lacks constitutional authority to enter international agreements in this area as sole executive agreements lacking congressional authorization or approval.

Clip of the Day

Using HLML5 as a wrapper around Flash, Is it a Possibility?


Credit: TinyOgg

IRC Proceedings: February 18th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 12:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

02.18.11

Links 18/2/2011: LSE’s GNU/Linux Doing Fine; Dell’s New Android Tablets Revealed

Posted in News Roundup at 2:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Stock Exchange denies Linux system glitch

      The London Stock Exchange has played down reports that its new Linux-based Millennium Exchange is failing to cope since it went live earlier this week.

      According to the Financial Times, a technical glitch disrupted some trading displays and caused confusion over prices.

      DIY-style execution-only brokers, such as Selftrade, warned that their websites were not showing correct prices. It is the latest glitch to affect the system, following problems during a partial roll-out last year.

      However, the LSE told PC Pro that the problems were down to individual trading companies, not the system itself.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Plumbers Conference looking for more track proposals

      We still need several more though to fill out the schedule. So if you have additional ideas for tracks, please don’t hesitate to submit them! Likewise if you know someone who ought to run a track this year, badger them and get them to submit a proposal.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland Is Now Playing Well With NVIDIA, ATI Drivers

        For those of you interested in running the Wayland Display Server on your NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards, without running it nestled inside an X Server, it should work if you use the newest Linux kernel code.

        There’s reports on the Wayland mailing list that for ATI users you can use the Linux 2.6.38 kernel (for the Radeon DRM page-flipping support) and for NVIDIA users if using the Nouveau kernel (the page-flipping isn’t yet merged into the mainline kernel, possibly for Linux 2.6.39) and use one external patch, Wayland should now work directly with both of these DRM drivers. This is coming after it’s long been a pleasant Wayland experience when using the Intel DRM.

  • Applications

    • Exaile 0.3.2.1 Released, Install Exaile in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid via PPA

      Exaile is a very good music player alternative for Linux. Exaile is nimble and can handle large music collections without any problems. Exaile 0.3.2.1 was released a day ago. Exaile 0.3.2.1 is a bugfix release for version 0.3.2.

    • Guayadeque 0.2.9 Supports iPod, USB Mass Storage Devices, Wavpack, Trueaudio, Integrates With The Ubuntu Sound Menu

      Guayadeque is starting to become a mature, reliable music player – the latest version 0.2.9, released today brings some very important features to Guayadeque like Ubuntu sound menu support, iPod support with covers and playlist, usb mass storage devices support, support for trueaudio files and wavpack, option to embed album cover to all album tracks, output audio device configuration option in preferences, Magnature and Jamendo support.

    • Chromify-OSD: NotifyOSD Notifications For Chrome

      Jorge Castro announced the release of a Chrome extension called Chromify-OSD that makes the build-in Chrome notifications use NotifyOSD. I’ll make this post short because for some reason the extension doesn’t work for me in either Google Chrome or Chromium.

    • Proprietary

      • First Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” Dev Snapshot Available For Download

        Earlier this week, the Opera Desktop Team announced Opera 11 “Barracuda” which they say it will bring “another popular Opera feature will be taken to the next level”.

        Well, the first Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” development snapshot was made available for download on the Opera Desktop Team blog today. For now, the mysterious new feature is not available but considering the fast development Opera has been undergoing lately, I’m sure we’ll see it soon enough.

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • webOS up and running on PC hardware

        PreCentral user cdowers looks to have successfully booted up webOS on a Dell C600 laptop. The trick, apparently, is to take the webOS image from the emulator (which is compatible with x86 processors) and put it on an IDE hard drive (not the more modern SATA standard). Essentially what’s happening here is that instead the webOS emulator running in a ‘virtual’ machine, it’s running on the real machine.

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Qt at MWC11 – Digia NFC ShopWizer demo
        • Intel says will find new MeeGo partners

          Intel Corp (INTC.O) said its partner Nokia dropped the MeeGo operating system after Microsoft offered “incredible” amounts of money for the phonemaker to switch to Windows but it would find new partners for MeeGo.

          Intel’s Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a meeting with analysts in London, accessed by Reuters via conference call, that Nokia’s (NOK1V.HE) choice of Microsoft (MSFT.O) over Google’s (GOOG.O) Android platform was a financial decision. [ID:nLDE71A0DG]

        • First MeeGo based netbook coming from Fujitsu

          Bangalore: Japanese computer hardware and IT services company Fujitsu has unveiled world’s first MeeGo-based netbook called the LifeBook MH330. The netbook is available in Asian markets for a price of $380.

        • Google CEO feels sorry for Nokia’s Microsoft alliance

          Nokia should have chosen the Android operating system for its upcoming handsets instead of going with Microsoft, Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday.

          “We would have loved if they had chosen Android. They chose the other guys, that other competitor, Microsoft. I think we are pretty straightforward,” Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, adding that Google was open to Nokia switching to Android in the future.

        • Google Sky Map Turns Your Android Phone into a Digital Telescope

          Whether you’re an astronomy buff or just somebody looking for a perfect “look how sweet my smartphone is!’ application, Google’s Sky Map application for Android phones is a must have app.

          If all the application did was show you detailed views of the night sky it would be pretty awesome based on that alone. Where Sky Map dazzles, however, is in linking together the GPS and tilt-sensors on your phone to turn your phone into a sky-watching window. Whatever you point the phone at, the screen displays.

      • Android

        • Setting up the standard Andriod marketplace on the Archos 10.1

          I was not a very pleased user of the Archos 10.1 ever since I got it last December. The issue centered on the Archos supplied “AppsLib” which was not all that efficient nor useful. It would startup slowly sometimes, crash at other times, and a lot of apps that I’ve got in my Nexus One was not even available (like ConnectBot for example). Apart from these inconveniences, the tablet is really a nice device, quite responsive and despite it’s plasticky feel, it is robust and quite well built.

        • Secret codes for your Android phone

          Kind of like the hidden menu at In-N-Out (if you don’t know what that is, I’m sorry you’re so deprived), there are some nifty hidden codes that can be used to accomplish certain tasks on your Android phone. Some of them do fairly basic, practical things, while others can be used to perform complete alterations, such as factory resets. You should be careful when using some of these codes, because once you do (again, factory reset), they can not be undone.

        • Official Google Reader app gets updated, now comes with widgets
        • Honeycomb features such as action bar, app switcher and hologram design will come to our phones in Ice Cream

          Like Andrew mentioned in his report about Eric Schmidt’s MWC keynote, Google’s next version of Android will combine Gingerbread and Honeycomb, so there will not be separate versions for phones and tablets. I think that’s good news, and now a few more details have emerged about which Honeycomb features we’re going to see on our phones.

        • Entrance of Android tablet PCs will weaken dominance of iPad, says Acer chairman

          In addition to the four ARM-based tablet PCs that Acer introduced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2011, Acer is also set to launch a MeeGo-based tablet PC in 2011.

        • QuickOffice will edit Office docs, sync with Dropbox & more on Honeycomb tablets
        • Mobile World Congress 2011 Wrap-Up: Android Takeover

          Today was the last day of Mobile World Congress 2011 and the majority of exhibitors and press folks are on their way home. In fact, organizers are gently nudging us out of the press room right now. I just completed one final sweep of the conference and wanted to do a quick recap of what were my favorite things about Mobile World Congress. Below is my list of the best things that I spotted at MWC 2011.

        • Midmarket: Acer Tablets, Smartphones Run Android, Play HD Video

          Not to be left out of the burgeoning tablet market, computer maker Acer showcased a number of portable computing devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress, including three tablets—two running the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, “Honeycomb,” which was designed specifically to run on tablet devices. Debuting under the company’s Iconia nameplate, the A100 and its larger cousin, the A500, boast front- and rear-facing cameras and sport Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core processor.

        • Dell roadmaps show 4 Honeycomb tablets and 2 Ice Cream phones

          A leaked Dell device roadmap is showing that a Honeycomb future isn’t too far off.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Choosing Java sides

      With all the drama going on with Nokia this month, it was easy to miss other goings on. But one thing of note to the open source community was the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM), where FOSS developers from around the planet congregated in Belgium Feb. 5-6 to groove on all things FOSS.

      One of the FOSDEM sessions that caught my eye was “IcedRobot: The GNUlization of Android,” which announced a new project that hopes to take Android and change it so it has a clean-room OpenJDK-based Java VM and will be based on what they refer to as a more standard Linux kernel.

      The idea here is to get this Android fork to run on something like a Linux desktop, hence the need to have IcedRobot on a more vanilla Linux kernel. The swapping out of the Dalvik VM for something from OpenJDK is a clear move to get this project out from the litigious crosshairs of Oracle, which is currently suing Google for trademark infringement over Oracle code that’s allegedly in Dalvik and shouldn’t be.

  • ECM/CMS

    • Alfresco 3 Business Solutions: Types of E-mail Integration

      In this article by Martin Bergljung, author of Alfresco 3 Business Solutions, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages between three different e-mail integration solutions and also learn how to use Alfresco’s built in IMAP solution to:

      * Enable dragging-and-dropping of e-mails into the Alfresco repository
      * Enable e-mail attachment extraction
      * Enable viewing of document metadata from the e-mail client
      * Set up different folder mount points
      * Enable e-mail management in an Alfresco Share site

    • What Makes Diaspora Special?[Video]

      You all must be already aware of open source Facebook alternative called Diaspora. I have been using it for a month now and I am really starting to like it. Now a lot of people ask me what’s so special about Diaspora, what makes it different. For that, you need to watch this “introduction to Diaspora” video by the inventors of the idea themselves.

    • Open Source Obama

      Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS).

  • Funding

    • Open business funding: New ideas for a new economy

      Starting a business is always a bit of a gamble. But investing in a start-up is practically a guessing game.

      “A lot of venture capitalists will tell you that for early stage investment they don’t have any real way of knowing which businesses will succeed,” said Marc Dangeard, head of Entrepreneur Commons. “They might invest in thirty businesses of the same type for the one that will thrive.”

      Faced with the difficulties of venture capitalism and start-up funding, Dangeard decided it was time to “take the ego out” of venture capital. “With traditional venture capital you have a lot of egos involved: the venture capitalist who decides if a business plan is good or bad, the entrepreneur who thinks his idea is great,” he explained.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview: Eben Moglen – Freedom vs. The Cloud Log

      Glyn Moody: So what’s the threat you are trying to deal with?

      Eben Moglen: We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage – machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody’s equal.

      In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web – that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.

      The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.

    • FOSS maven says $29 ‘Freedom Box’ will kill Facebook

      Concerned about Facebook, Google, and other companies that make billions brokering sensitive information, free-software champion Eben Moglen has unveiled a plan to populate the internet with tiny, low-cost boxes that are designed to preserve individuals’ personal privacy.

  • Government

    • Open Source at the State Department: Loud, timely, not your parents’ State Department

      Last Friday, I was in Washington, D.C., for Tech@State’s Open Source Conference . Tech@State is an inspiring step by the State Department, connecting technologists to targeted goals of the U.S. diplomacy and development agenda via networking events as part of Secretary Clinton’s 21 st Century Statecraft initiative . Tech@State connects leaders, innovators, government personnel, and others to work together on technology solutions to improve the education, health, and welfare of the world’s population. To date they have held events on Haiti, Mobile Money, and Civil Society 2.0.

  • Licensing

    • Free Speech Online UnderAttack

      Yesterday, Republicans in Congress introduced a “resolution” in both chambers that would give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over Internet speech.

      Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and John Ensign (R-Nevada) introduced the “resolution of disapproval” on Wednesday. It already has 39 Republican cosponsors. On the House side, Reps. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) and Greg Walden (R-Oregon) are pushing similar measure.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Court Says Metadata Should Be Released Under Freedom Of Information Act Request

        Copycense points us to the fascinating news that a federal judge has ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reveal the metadata on a document as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. ICE had responded to the FOIA request (apparently “after significant delay,”) but provided the content requested in an unsearchable PDF. The original requestor for the content, the National Day Laborer Organization, complained that this was unfair, and the information had to be supplied with metadata — and the court agreed.

      • National Audit Office: Open data the key to ‘big society’

        In a report titled “Information and Communications Technology in Government, Landscape Review”, the watchdog says that a duty will be placed on all levels of government to publish data.

        As a result, new demands will be placed on existing ICT systems across government. These systems will be required to provide access to data at low cost using common data standards; a system of identity assurance that can be used by government’s partners; information security where necessary; assurance about data quality; and the timely release of data.

    • Open Hardware

Leftovers

  • On rape culture & the importance of staying angry
  • Wisconsin Crowds Swell to 30,000; Key GOP Legislators Waver

    “I have never been prouder of our movement than I am at this moment,” shouted Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt, as he surveyed the crowds of union members and their supporters that surged around the state Capitol and into the streets of Madison Wednesday, literally closing the downtown as tens of thousands of Wisconsinites protested their Republican governor’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.

  • Live Reporting from the Massive Protests in Wisconsin — Over 30,000 Assemble at the Capitol

    Tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents are flooding the State Capitol in Madison in protest of Governor Walker’s proposed budget “repair” bill that would end 50 years of collective bargaining for Wisconsin workers. CMD reporters will be out providing live coverage of these historic events.

  • Long Time Academic, Regular Op-Ed Writer, Claims He Had No Idea He Was Supposed To Attribute Text He Plagiarized

    This one is just bizarre. Romenesko points us to the news that the director of the University of Utah’s Middle East Center, Dr. Bahman Baktiari, who regularly writes op-ed pieces for various newspapers, has been accused of plagiarism. His defense? He claims he had no idea he was supposed to attribute the content he copied.

  • U. probes claim of possible plagiarism by scholar

    Several political commentaries published by the director of the University of Utah’s Middle East Center (MEC) appear to borrow heavily from unattributed sources, prompting an inquiry by university officials.

    One of the pieces is an op-ed about the Egypt turmoil by Bahman Baktiari that was published in The Salt Lake Tribune on Feb. 5. According to an analysis by MEC faculty and students, given to top U. administrators and The Tribune on Tuesday, the piece replicates material from at least four sources, including The New York Times and The Economist.

    In an interview Thursday, Baktiari said he was unaware that he needed to attribute material written by others in opinion pieces he wrote for newspapers.

  • Influence vs Obeisance at the Independent

    There was an educational article in the Undiependent yersterday, in a sort of “OmiGod” way. It was about the UK “Top 100 Twitterers”, and was ostensibly based on the PeerIndex algorithm. Now those of you who know about measuring influence on Twitter will know we are in Iteration 4 of Influence Monitoring.

  • As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret

    As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life?

    The answer determines how much spending the government should require to prevent a single death.

  • The trick to defeating tamper-indicating seals
  • Full apology and fluffed Labour response saves Caroline Spelman

    Caroline Spelman walked into the Commons chamber at lunchtime today with a shaky grip on her cabinet post. The environment secretary left the chamber an hour later with far greater prospects for the future.

    How did the mild-mannered Spelman, who had been the butt of jokes among senior members of the cabinet over her forest sell off plan, change her fortunes? Here are three reasons.

  • Science

    • Radio jammed by massive solar flare

      The cloud of supercharged particles emitted by a series of three solar flares is, as feared, disturbing radio communications.

      The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) reports that shortwave communications have been disrupted by the flares, of which the third, on Tuesday, was the biggest in over four years. With flares categorised as C Class, M Class and X Class, it’s well into the X Class range.

      And while there’s some debate about how much disruption the flare will cause, a similar coronal mass ejection (CME) cut the power to millions of people in Canada in 1973.

    • Print the Impossible

      This is an awesome print of an awesome object that does the very awesome trick of looking like it can’t possibly be real, even though it totally is. I think in person you might have to close one eye or be far away for it to work.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Firefighter refused call to Tucson shooting spree scene

      A veteran city firefighter’s refusal to respond to the Jan. 8 shooting spree, citing “political bantering,” may have slowed his Tucson Fire Department unit’s response to the incident that left six dead and 13 wounded, city memos show.

    • Judge Throws Out Ex-Detainee’s Suit Alleging Torture

      A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by Jose Padilla, who alleged that he was tortured at a Navy brig while being held on terrorism charges.

      U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled Thursday that Padilla has no right to sue for constitutional violations and that the defendants, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, enjoy qualified immunity.

    • Bahrain joins the freedom campaign

      Now the former rulers of Bahrain are experiencing what can happen when ordinary people decide they’re in charge of their own destinies.

    • Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law

      This week has seen massive, broad based protests in Wisconsin over Tea Party governor Scott Walker’s new labor bill, which outlaws collective bargaining, slashes real wages in the public sector (by increasing workers’ share of pension contributions and other payments), and allows the executive to fire state employees without substantial due process. Walker brought down his bill with enormous bluster, promising to mobilize the national guard against the state’s workers if they had the temerity to demonstrate against this gutting of their hard-fought rights. Thousands and thousands of protestors have surrounded the state capital, and Walker has had to retreat to a nearby corporate boardroom in order to give his budget address. Protestors are camping out around the clock, braving the Wisconsin February to stand up for their rights — a little bit of Midwestern Tahrir Square right there in America.

    • Overview of Middle East crackdowns and the (varying) U.S. responses

      As protests — and crackdowns — have been rippling through the Middle East, the U.S. response has varied by country.

      For instance, while the Obama administration has been vocal about events in Iran, it has been relatively quiet about violence by pro-government forces in Yemen. Here’s a brief look at what’s happening in some key countries — and the U.S.’s response in each.

    • Bahrain protests: live

      Troops and tanks lock down the capital of Manama after uprooting a protest camp in a central square, beating demonstrators and blasting them with sprays of birdshot and tear gas. Medical officials say four people are killed. The military bans all gatherings.

      The protesters want the ruling Sunni Muslim monarchy, a key U.S. ally in the Gulf, to give up its control over top government posts and all critical decisions. Shiite Muslims make up 70 percent of Bahrain’s 500,000 citizens but say they face systematic discrimination and poverty and are effectively blocked from key roles in public service and the military.

  • Cablegate

    • Secretary Clinton Unveils New Funding for Activism Technology, Rhetorical Refresh in Internet Freedom Speech

      Earlier today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a speech about Internet freedom titled, “Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges In A Networked World.” In her remarks, Clinton built on prior statements about the U.S. Government’s commitment to a free and open Internet, responding in part to the uprisings in the Middle East and Cablegate — major, ongoing international developments adding to the swell of debate about the parameters of Internet freedom.

      Notably, Secretary Clinton announced that the State Department plans to award $25 million in grants to technology, tools, and training projects that support Internet freedom. Moreover, the State Department appears to be committed to diversity in the projects it awards, with Secretary Clinton stating, “We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are at the ready.” We hope to see that commitment to diversity translate into real improvement for the best tools for online anonymity, circumvention of censorship, and the technologies that help protect lives and move ideas throughout the world.

    • Why Our Government Would Fear Wikiarguments More than WikiLeaks

      Wikiarguments is an Internet-based (wiki) system that would force congressional accountability and make government deception much more difficult.

    • Will the Rise of Wikileaks Competitors Make Whistleblowing Resistant to Censorship?

      As these sites multiply, they will still need to deal with the challenges that Wikileaks and Cryptome have faced. They will need to find ways to effectively protect the identities of their sources, provide an adequate media platform, earn the trust of whistleblowers, weed out fabricated leaks, and avoid the wrath of corporations and governments. However, one thing is clear: the strong demand by readers and the media will make anonymous whistleblowing websites a permanent fixture in the future of investigative journalism. Cutting off services to one popular whistleblowing website will never be enough to keep truthful political information off the Internet.

    • Arabs believe world is better off, thanks to Wikileaks

      Most Arabs support Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, and demand greater transparency, a survey conducted in 17 Arab countries indicates.

      According to the Doha Debate poll that surveyed the views of more than 1,000 Arabs in the first week of February, six out of ten Arabs believe that the world has become a better place with Wikileaks.

    • Jemima Khan on Wikileaks

      Jemima Goldsmith explains why she is supporting Wikileaks & Julian Assange’s fight against extradition to Sweden.

    • Jemima Khan – Defending Wikileaks Stop The War Coalition 7.02.11
    • Anonymous Surpasses Wikileaks

      The exploits of Anonymous to hack the systems of firms providing spying services to governments and corporations suggest that the WikiLeaks mini-era has been surpassed.

      Much of WikiLeaks promise to protect sources is useless if the sources are not whistleblowers needing a forum for publication. Instead publishers of secret information grab it directly for posting to Torrent for anybody to access without mediation and mark-up by self-esteemed peddlers of protection, interpretation and authentication, including media cum scholars.

      The wit and brevity of Anonymous taunts are exemplary — min-talk max-action — compared to the overblown gravitas of WL aping MSM in valuing its mission over short-shrifted “sources.”

    • Special report: China flexed its muscles using U.S. Treasuries

      Confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Hong Kong lay bare China’s growing influence as America’s largest creditor.

      As the U.S. Federal Reserve grappled with the aftershocks of financial crisis, the Chinese, like many others, suffered huge losses from their investments in American financial firms — from Lehman Brothers to the Primary Reserve Fund, the money market fund that broke the buck.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • State: Reality TV miners didn’t have to shoot bear to protect themselves

      In one of the first episodes of “Gold Rush: Alaska,” the new Discovery Channel series about six men transplanted from Oregon to Southeast Alaska in hopes of striking gold, a brown bear wanders into camp.

    • Tell Chevron’s CEO: Clean Up Ecuador Now!
    • Japan suspends whale hunt after chase by protesters

      Japan has suspended its annual whale hunt in the Antarctic for now after a hardline anti-whaling group gave chase to its mother ship and it may call the fleet back home, a government official said.

      Regular attempts by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to interrupt hunts have caused irritation in Japan, one of only three countries that now hunt whales and where the government says it is an important cultural tradition.

    • Forests sell-off abandoned as Cameron orders U-turn

      David Cameron has ordered ministers to carry out the government’s biggest U-turn since the general election by abandoning plans to change the ownership of 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland.

      Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, will announce on Friday that a consultation on the sale of forests will be ended after a furious backlash that united Tory supporters with environmentalists and the Socialist Workers party.

    • Armenia: Animal Rights Activists Plan Suit Againist New Yerevan Dolphinarium

      A group of Armenian non-governmental organizations is planning to file a lawsuit against a recently opened Yerevan dolphinarium, asserting that the center’s seven marine mammals are subject to abuse. The dolphinarium’s management, which promotes the facility as a “world of water miracles,” denies abuse accusations.

      “This is a prison for animals, an exploitative circus, and we will not give up our fight,” asserted Silva Adamian, the chairperson of the Ecological Alliance, a group comprising 50 environmental, human rights non-governmental organizations, and the opposition Heritage Party. The alliance opposes the Nemo dolphinarium’s operations. Efforts to review the Ukrainian-built center’s license to import dolphins into Armenia, or the license to construct the building, have so far been unsuccessful, she said. “We are going to bring a lawsuit soon and we will go to international courts,” she said.

    • Ebay Classifieds: Stop Selling Live Animals

      EBay claims that they have safeguards in place to protect the animals. But unless eBay is inspecting all of the operations listing pets for sale (because the USDA is not), and unless they’re doing home visits on all of the people buying, how could they possibly protect the animals?

      The answer: They can’t. Because of a loophole in the laws, as long as animals are being sold online, the breeders don’t even fall under USDA regulation. Ebay has given puppy mills a huge, unregulated platform to peddle cruelty. And it seems that they’re hoping animal advocates won’t notice.

    • Interview with legislator who introduced bill to declare global warming “natural” and “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”

      Climate policy, he believes, is essentially an attempt to steer money and control into the federal government, which has been dictating the direction of climate science research for decades. He rejects the counsel of scientists like the University of Montana’s Dr. Steve Running, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists whose research on global warming finds that the “only solution that adds up on a global scale is reduced emissions.”

      “The purpose of this whole issue of carbon credits and pushing the agenda of global warming,” Read told the Wonk Room, “is about directing levies and fees for carbon credits so the federal government gets an income source.”

      Faced with the prospect of regulation, the fossil fuel industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last thirty years to cast doubt on long-established scientific conclusions.

  • Finance

    • Obama, GOP freshmen win in jet engine budget fight

      Determined to reduce deficits, impatient House Republican freshmen made common cause with President Barack Obama on Wednesday, scoring their biggest victory to date in a vote to cancel $450 million for an alternative engine for the Pentagon’s next-generation warplane.

    • Trust Over Pension Pots Prompts Hungarians to Send Money Abroad

      Hungary’s fiscal policies are encouraging Peter Barta to hoard his money abroad.

      The 35-year-old businessman started sending cash out of the country after Premier Viktor Orban diverted 3 trillion forint ($15 billion) of private pension assets to plug the budget.

    • Borders Is Bankrupt. Use Your Gift Cards Now!

      As expected, second-tier book chain Borders filed for bankruptcy today, after a last-ditch effort at a lifesaving loan failed. The company now says it will be closing 30% of its stores—nearly 200 locations—over the next several weeks. But…but what about my gift card?

    • Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

      “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

    • In an Amish village, the SEC alleges a Madoff-like fraud

      The personal assets of Monroe L. Beachy, a 77-year-old Amish man, included a horse, buggy and harness. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, his skills included financial fraud.

      Beachy spent a quarter-century raising $33 million from more than 2,600 investors, the overwhelming majority of them fellow members of the Amish community, which often shuns modern conveniences such as automobiles.

      But Beachy’s investment approach allegedly had more in common with the timeless methods of Charles Ponzi and Bernard Madoff than with the sheltered village of Sugarcreek, Ohio, where he lived. When the SEC charged him with fraud on Tuesday, it said he had lost nearly half of his investors’ money.

    • Comparing the GDP of China’s Provinces to Countries

      I happened to come across a Chinese report that compiled 2010 growth rates and GDP figures for individual Chinese provinces. (This exercise may also be a partial and limited answer to my fellow guest blogger Edward Goldstick’s dispatch on China’s 12th five-year plan, a topic on which I’ve written extensively in my day job.) So using World Bank GDP numbers for various countries, which were only up to 2009 unfortunately, I did a quick comparison (confession: I did not tally up the GDPs to see if they totaled $5.8 trillion).

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Week 81 – No freedom of speech for Cardiff University

      Several weeks ago, I was emailed an invitation to speak alongside Noam Chomsky in Cardiff, in March. The organisers also asked if I would give a talk at Cardiff University the following day; I happily agreed to both proposals.

      Yesterday, I got call from Ghaith Jayousi, who had invited me to Cardiff, to inform me that his University had refused to host the event, due to “security concerns coming from higher channels”.

  • Civil Rights

    • About That Constitution

      The GOP shows that for all their recent rhetoric about the sacredness of the Constitution, the document is really little more than a political prop.

    • Ron Wyden Speaks Out Against COICA: We Shouldn’t Toss Out The First Amendment Just To Go After A Few Bad Actors

      Senator Ron Wyden (who just joined Twitter) was kind enough to send over the remarks he made to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning COICA. It’s an excellent read that highlights many of the points we’ve been making.

    • The COICA Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill
    • ICE Seizures Raising New Speech Concerns

      We’re still getting a handle on the details, but it appears that the government took down all sites associated with a dynamic DNS service called afraid.org, in particular subdomains beneath mooo.com. One or more of the subdomains may have been hosting child porn, but instead of seizing that subdomain alone, the takedown targeted mooo.com. What is worse, it also appears that the perfectly legal sites were temporarily plastered with a notice suggesting they trafficked in child porn.

    • US Senate votes to extend Patriot Act measures

      The US Senate has voted to extend controversial surveillance powers granted by the Patriot Act law, put in place after the 9/11 attacks.

      By a vote of 86-12, the Senate approved a 90-day extension of wiretaps, access to business records and surveillance of terror suspects.

      The move came one day after the House of Representatives voted to extend the provisions until 8 December.

    • MPs call for EVERYONE to be added to the national DNA database

      Erm, perhaps Mr Horwood would like to explain how the creation of a vast, central database of the intricate biological data of every British citizen can be squared with any conception of civil liberties?

    • ‘Internet Freedom’ in the Age of Assange

      Describing the Internet as the “public space of the 21st century,” she called the debate about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or oppression “beside the point.” Whether this digital public space is used well or used badly, she noted, is the responsibility of each and every one of the world’s 2 billion-plus Internet users — alongside all governments who seek to regulate it and companies that build Internet technologies and platforms.

    • China warns US over Clinton’s web freedom call

      China has warned the US not to use calls for internet freedom as an excuse to meddle in other countries’ affairs.

      The foreign ministry comments came after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced an initiative to help dissidents around the world get past government internet controls.

      Since Mrs Clinton’s speech, comments about it have been removed from China’s popular Twitter-like microblog sites.

    • European Commission and Europol refuse to supply data on the implementation of the EU-US TFPT (SWIFT) agreement as it is “Top Secret”

      The German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, and member of the Joint Supervisory Body of Europol, asked the German Interior Ministry numerous questions about the EU-US TFTP Agreement as they are empowered to do. The TFTP (“SWIFT”) Agreement covers the transfer of personal records on financial transactions in the EU concerning terrorism and terrorist financing.

      The questions could only be answered by the European Commission or by Europol. The Europol Management Board decided that questions regarding the implementation of the Agreement should be answered by the Commission (13-14 October 2010). Under Article 4 of the Agreement Europol has to clear all US requests for detailed personal financial data.

    • FBI To Announce Significant New Wiretap Push Backdoors Galore In Everything From Skype To BitTorrent

      Despite the fact the phone companies now act as part time FBI surveillance analysts with a fleeting regard to law, and dump U.S. citizen data and voice traffic wholesale through NSA listening posts, Uncle Sam still apparently isn’t happy with its wiretap authority. The FBI has been making their intentions clear in recent months that they not only want to start pushing hard again for ISP retention data, but the DOJ and FBI are also launching a new push for laws that would allow the easier access to a wider variety of information transmitted via new Internet communications platforms.

    • Newly Released Documents Detail FBI’s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws

      EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI’s “Going Dark” program, an initiative to increase the FBI’s authority in response to problems the FBI says it’s having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies. The documents detail a fully-formed and well-coordinated plan to expand existing surveillance laws and develop new ones. And although they represent only a small fraction of the documents we expect to receive in response to this and a more recent FOIA request, they were released just in time to provide important background information for the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing tomorrow on the Going Dark program.

    • Debate Over Internet Backdoors Heats Up in Congress and in Court

      Two hearings tomorrow—one in court and one in Congress—will highlight the brewing debate over whether Congress should expand federal surveillance laws to force Internet communications service providers like Facebook, Google and Skype to build technical backdoors into their systems to enable government wiretapping.

    • FBI: We’re not demanding encryption back doors

      The FBI said today that it’s not calling for restrictions on encryption without back doors for law enforcement.

      FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told a congressional committee that the bureau’s push for expanded Internet wiretapping authority doesn’t mean giving law enforcement a master key to encrypted communications, an apparent retreat from her position last fall.

    • Hillary Clinton Talks Freedom as Protester Ray McGovern Is Bloodied

      But that’s what our current Secretary of State did when peace activist, veteran Army officer and onetime C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern protested silently while she lectured the rest of the world about freedom this week at George Washington University.

      [...]

      McGovern had been standing silently facing the back of the auditorium where all the news cameras were. His supposed crime? “Disorderly conduct” – i.e. wearing a shirt that blocked the view of guests and the media, and therefore “disrupted” the speech by the Secretary of State.

      McGovern discussed his protest and subsequent arrest at Secretary Clinton’s “Freedom Speech” in an interview with blogger Rob Kall.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Students: Show Your Support for Net Neutrality!

      Thank you for participating in the Internet Strikes Back! Please read the letter below and fill out the fields at the bottom of the page in order to add your signature. We’ll deliver this letter to Congress with all of the student signatures attached at the end of February. Want to do more to show your support for net neutrality? Click here to visit the Internet Strikes Back homepage. Want to learn more about net neutrality? Click here for more information.

    • The Internet Is Mine

      The Internet does belong to *me* — and all the other self styled Citizens of the Net.

      Corporations may own bits of wire and pieces of equipment, but that isn’t The Internet.
      Any more than a handful of soil scooped up from the nearest garden is your country.

      That pile of dirt may be a fractional portion of your country, and those bits of technology may be segments of Internet infrastructure, but they are neither the sum of your country nor the entity we call The Internet.

      Please note: there is but one Internet, which is the sum of a whole mess of interconnection.
      Networks. Computers. Cell phones.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • New leaks of TPPA text show U.S. is playing hardball

      The text confirms that the Americans are taking an extremely aggressive position on intellectual property that contrasts starkly with the New Zealand proposal, said Professor Jane Kelsey, who is in Santiago as a registered “stakeholder” at the negotiations.

    • Copyrights

      • Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web
      • History of Copyright, part 6: Hijacked By Record Industry

        Copyright in the 20th century was not characterized by books, but by music. The 1930s saw two major developments that affected musicians: the Great Depression, which caused many musicians to lose their jobs, and movies with sound, which caused most of the rest of musicians to lose their jobs.

        In this environment, two initatives were taken in parallel. Musician’s unions tried to guarantee income and sustenance to the people who were now jobless, made redundant as we say today in executivespeak. Unions all over the West were concerned about the spread of “mechanized music”: any music that isn’t performed live and therefore didn’t need performing musicians. They wanted some power over the speaker technology, and the question was raised through the International Labour Organization (a predecessor to the UN agency with the same name).

      • History of Copyright, part 7: Hijacked by Pfizer

        The president of Pfizer, Edmund Pratt, had a furious op-ed piece in a New York Times on July 9, 1982 titled “Stealing from the Mind”. It fumed about how third world countries were stealing from them. (By this, he referred to making medicine from their own raw materials with their own factories using their own knowledge in their own time for their own people, who were frequently dying from horrible but curable third-world conditions.) Major policymakers saw a glimpse of an answer in Pfizer’s and Pratt’s thinking, and turned to Pratt’s involvement in another committee directly under the President. This committee was the magic ACTN: Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations.

        What the ACTN recommended, following Pfizer’s lead, was so daring and provocative that nobody was really sure whether to try it out: the US would try linking its trade negotiations and foreign policy. Any country who didn’t sign lopsided “free trade” deals that heavily redefined value would be branded in a myriad of bad ways, the most notable being the “Special 301 watchlist”. This list is supposed to be a list of nations not respecting copyright enough. A majority of the world’s population is on it, among them Canada.

        So the solution to not producing anything of value in international trade was to redefine “producing”, “anything”, and “value” in an international political context, and to do so by bullying. It worked. The ACTN blueprints were set in motion by US Trade Representatives, using unilateral bullying to push foreign governments into enacting legislation that favored American industry interestes, bilateral “free trade” agreements that did the same, and multilateral agreements that raised the bar worldwide in protection of American interests.

      • BitTorrent is to stealing movies what “bolt-cutters are to stealing bicycles”

        Today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was all about COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The bill would give the government legal tools to blacklist a “rogue” website from the Internet’s Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid US-based online ad networks from working with the site. It even directs the government to keep a list of suspect sites, even though no evidence has been presented against them in court.

        Everyone loves the idea. Democrats love the idea (well, except for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who said it was “like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile”). Republicans love the idea. And rightsholders really love the idea.

      • The Economic Consequences of Piracy

        But this laudable attempt at rigour is completely undermined by the fact that nowhere in the report is there any recognition that all this “lost” money does *not* disappear, but is simply channelled elsewhere in the Australian economy, where it might actually create more jobs than it would if spent on films (because of revenue outflows to the US, and the fact that local money would be spent on more labour-intensive industries like retailing or catering.) Similarly, it *does* produce tax revenue for the Australian government, just from different sources.

        It would be far more conducive to producing an honest debate about the *real* effects of unauthorised copies on national economies if these key facts were included for a change; by continuing to ignore them, these misleading and one-sided reports amount to little more than industry propaganda.

      • File-Sharers Start Handing Over $1,000 Each in Bizarre Amnesty Program

        Ten individuals have freely and bizarrely handed over $1,000 each to movie studio Liberty Media in piracy settlements, despite the company having absolutely no idea who they are or if they did anything wrong. Now Liberty have a new amnesty and are offering BitTorrent users the chance to hand themselves in or risk being involved in 36,000 upcoming lawsuits.

        After running rampant in Germany and the UK, the United States is now suffering under an onslaught of Speculative Invoicing – mass file-sharing lawsuits designed to scare people into paying cash settlements on the basis that by doing so they avoid a much more costly trial later.

      • CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry [Ed: just recording industry, not music]
      • Can Senator Patrick Leahy Actually Provide The Proof That The COICA Censorship Law Is Needed?

        “Are reported?” By whom? Not the US government, who a year ago noted that all of the studies making those sorts of claims were bogus, and the various studies discussing these claims of “losses” to both jobs and the American economy have been thoroughly debunked. The only people still claiming that such things are factual are lobbyists and legacy industry insiders, who clearly stand to benefit from such laws that can be used to stifle innovation.

        If Leahy is going to insist that these numbers are factual, shouldn’t he at least have to say where he got those numbers from — and also avoid relying on numbers from the very industries this law is designed to help?

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

Clip of the Day

WikiRebels: The Documentary on Wikileaks (Part 2 of 6) HD


Credit: TinyOgg

FSF Explains Why Software Patents Are Bad While OIN Grows Stronger

Posted in Australia, FSF, OIN, Patents at 1:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

City lights
Melbourne at night

Summary: Churchill Club Great Debate on software patents ends; Rackspace joins the OIN; Australian reviews patentable subject matter and New Zealand wrestles with the “embedded” software loophole

As expected, a public debate took place to discuss the patentability of software and the FSF was there. No matter where we check [1, 2, 3], a video of this debate is not published yet. Paul Krill of InfoWorld has a new report about it, which he summarised as follows:

Free Software Foundation argues that software patents infringe on individual expression and present a roadblock to innovation

Meanwhile, the OIN keeps growing (Rackspace has just joined), so there is at least some reassurance that patent attacks on GNU/Linux will have a deterrent.

Further down, in the southern hemisphere, there is also some interesting progress regarding patents. There is an Australian “Review of Patentable Subject Matter” and “sadly,” explains Glyn Moody, this “doesn’t do anything about software patents, gene patents.” Recently, gene patents were questioned in Australia. There is also this from New Zealand:

The NZ Open Source Society has given what it calls “qualified support” to the draft IPONZ guideline on the patentability of inventions containing embedded computer programs.

“There is a fog of misinformation around software patents and the IPONZ guideline,” says Don Christie, NZOSS government liaison officer, in a statement.

The vast majority of the patents in New Zealand (also alleged software patents in New Zealand) are not owned by companies from New Zealand but by large companies mostly from the United States. So clearly the benefit of this type of patent system is not New Zealand’s benefit. There is this new article that quotes different statistics from the United States:

You hear it all the time from our political and economic leaders – small business is the engine of the U.S. economy. Of the nation’s 26.8 million businesses, some 99.9 percent of them have fewer than 500 employees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In addition to driving the economy, small business is the source of a big share of the nation’s innovation. For example, 98 percent of telecommunications patents and 97 percent of software patents are issued to companies of 500 or fewer companies, according to a U.S. Small Business Administration study.

The innovation cannot be measured and enumerated in terms of patents, but the point the author is trying to make is that small businesses need government protection. As we know too well, patents are beneficial to large companies that can always counter-sue small companies (bar patent trolls); the same can apply to nations by saying that only large countries with a ton of patents (and some filed overseas) would likely benefit from the collective, worldwide patent system, which is a system of exclusion and protectionism (protecting those already in power, under the umbrella of WIPO and WTO). The US Chamber Of Commerce — like the ICC (lobby for large multinationals) — has released a 2011 IP Policy Agenda just now (amid huge scandals that are covered widely, such as spying on family members of Chamber Of Commerce critics so as to scare and silence them). The fight against patents excess is often a fight against sheer greed, as demonstrated even in the days of Edison — a now-glorified businessman who bullied people using patents he did not deserve. █

Microsoft Bans Mono

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OSI at 1:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”

–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist

Summary: Vista Phony 7 forbids the use of Mono, based on what the terms simply say; in fact, Vista Phony 7 bans Microsoft’s own OSI-approved licences

THERE IS some laugh-worth news in Mono land. While Novell keeps increasing its influence inside the Linux Foundation it is also increasing Microsoft’s influence inside GNU/Linux with projects like Mono and Moonlight, which are partly Microsoft releases because of the code they contain and the manager of the project, a Microsoft MVP who raves about them [1, 2] even though they receive little attention. As we explained last year, Moonlight had lost a lot of momentum and so had Mono, to a lesser degree. The problem with both is that owing to the FSF sort of denouncing them, more people do realise they are the patent burden a lot of other people claim them to be. It is not just a patent issue but also an API issue and a copyright issue because Microsoft owns part of Mono (and Moonlight, which depends on Mono and uses codecs from Microsoft). There is MS-PL-licensed code right inside Mono and since Microsoft bans free code from Vista Phony 7, there too Mono may not be allowed. “Microsoft Bans Open Source From Windows Phone Marketplace” says this new article:

Jan Wildeboer points at clause ‘e’ which states, “The Application must not include software, documentation, or other materials that, in whole or in part, are governed by or subject to an Excluded License, or that would otherwise cause the Application to be subject to the terms of an Excluded License. ”

It is beyond comprehension how this clause will help Microsoft in getting more developers or great applications. What I can understand is Microsoft is trying to discourage developers from using open source model for application development. Is it a well calculated move by Microsoft to attack the free and open source community or yet another immitation of Apple’s App Store?

“Microsoft bans open source from the Marketplace” says also the British press:

Jan Wildeboer, open source evangelist and Red Hat employee, was one of the first to spot the restrictions in Microsoft’s licence this week. “One thing is extremely obvious,” Wildeboer claims in a post to his personal blog. “Microsoft wants to keep its platform clear of Free Software. Period.”

As evidence, Wildeboer points to Article 5 of the Application Requirements section of the Microsoft Application Provider Agreement, which states: “The Application must not include software, documentation, or other materials that, in whole or in part, are governed by or subject to an Excluded License, or that would otherwise cause the Application to be subject to the terms of an Excluded License.”

The reference to ‘Excluded License’ refers to an earlier section which explicitly names the GNU General Public License version 3 and its Lesser derivative – two of the most common open source licences around – along with ‘any equivalents.’

Our member gnufreex wrote a detailed analysis of it, which says:

First of all, application delivery mechanism for WP7 (or call it “App Store”) is completely incompatible with Free Software. User has no means of getting the source code, nor installing modified software. That makes all software received through this mechanism non-free, regardless whether previous license was BSD, GPL or any other FSF or OSI certified license. In case of copyleft license, this would be a violation, but that is besides the point. Acquired software is not Free in practical sense, in a way that user can’t help himself by examining the code, which one of basic Freedoms that Free Software gives.

[...]

Clause (ii) is more of the same, but clause (iii) I think might be FUD. No Free Software license requires redistributing at no charge, and license that would require that would never pass FSF and OSI certification process. So it is possible that this clause is there only so that Microsoft advocates can spray FUD on GPL, something they love to do. It is bad for Microsoft if people talk about clause(i), that Microsoft banned every copyleft license, but it is good for Microsoft if people talk about clause (iii) and misinterpret GPL as anti-capitalist license (which is not). If that makes one coder stay away from GPL, then that is good for MSFT.

[...]

WP7 would be nice chance for Microsoft to make a statement that they are never ever planing to force Mono underground with software patents. They could do that by allowing and encouraging GPLv3 apps in their app store. After all, only .NET developers can get those patent grants, since noting else runs on WP7. But sadly, Microsoft is doing just the opposite. Their double-ban of GPLv3 sends message to their devotees in Mono movement: they need to use permissive license without patent protection if they plan to have proprietary port to WP7. This shows that Microsoft wants to reserve right to sue against Mono ecosystem, as we already know by now. Will Mono app developers prefer GPL or Microsoft walled garden? Well, considering that Mono leader is “psyched” about developing for WP7 phones, my guess is that Mono devs will want to follow the leader and port their stuff to WP7. Profile of people who are endorsing Mono is such that they will probably do whatever Microsoft and De Icaza asks them to.

But wider FLOSS community needs to continue shunning Mono because Microsoft obviously didn’t change it’s mind. They are still making sure they don’t give patent grant to Mono users, and are not shy to double-ban licenses which would give them needed guarantees.

Simon Phipps says that “Microsoft Bans Its Own License” and this includes Mono ramifications:

But his critics aren’t accurate either. Most of the criticism I’ve seen tries to turn this into the old GPL vs BSD wars, claiming “it’s just Microsoft continuing to ban the GPL and who could blame them”. But Microsoft’s prohibition goes further than the GPL licenses it’s using as an example; it says “Excluded Licenses include, but are not limited to the GPLv3 Licenses”. So this makes it impossible to use, for example, the Eclipse Public License – ruling out anything from the whole, large Eclipse ecosystem – or the Mozilla Public License or any other “weak copyleft” license.

That includes, remarkably, Microsoft’s own OSI-approved Microsoft Reciprocal License and possibly even the Microsoft Public License, according to one legal expert. As a consequence, use of open source libraries under these licenses – which not even Apple’s byzantine regulations object to – is apparently prohibited.

That might plausibly include Mono, based on Microsoft’s own .NET but partly licensed under MS-PL. It also means that Microsoft’s new partner Nokia could have trouble using it’s Qt graphics environment on the platform as it’s under the GPL. Some legally-qualified commentators are even suggesting that, if the first use of “the software” in the definition of “Excluded License” means the open source software and not the application being submitted, then all open source licenses are barred. I hope that’s just bad drafting.

“Ooh, ooh,” wrote Phipps some hours ago, “Miguel still hates me”. Microsoft MVP de Icaza and his minions are currently attacking all the messengers by belittling their intelligence. It’s rather pathetic really, but that’s just the mentality of Mono bullies, who seem to inherit their aggression from ‘mother ship’ Microsoft.

Here is The H saying that “Microsoft bans free software from Windows Phone Marketplace” (we are quoting just headlines by the way, as they are quite consistent and pass the fact-checking phase).

The prohibition of free software licences appears to be Microsoft’s own response to the issues raised by the appearance and later removal of GPL applications such as VLC from the Apple iPhone App Store. Commercial application stores like Apple’s and Microsoft’s do not have mechanisms to make source code for applications directly available. They also have some form of DRM lock which prevents the binary being passed on to another user, on all applications, even ones available for no charge in the market. It is these restrictions that make the stores incompatible with licences such as the GPL.

In other words, Microsoft hardly tries to make Vista Phony 7 succeed.

In Wayne’s latest part of “Microsoft Death Watch” he looks at Microsoft’s own reports sceptically and reaches the conclusion that Microsoft loses a lot of money in phones (known fact for years, Microsoft hid it by merging divisions/operations).

1) Microsoft’s sales of Windows Phone 7 haven’t been all that good. It appears that WP7 is costing Microsoft more than it’s making in sales. Charlie over at Semi-Accurate has reported that Microsoft is giving WP7 away. If what Charlie says is true, it’s also likely to put downward pressure on the price of Windows for personal computers.

2) Check row 15. Microsoft Business, which includes Office, is Microsoft’s best profit center. The problem is that Microsoft Office only works on the personal computer version of Windows. Anything which impacts on the number of personal computer Windows licenses that are sold will hurt Office sales. There aren’t versions of Office for tablets or phones, which are the fastest growing segments of the personal computer market.

3) HP is planning to use WebOS in phones, tablets, and personal computers. WebOS is a Linux based operating system, somewhat similar to Android, another Linux based operating system, and Apple’s IOS, a BSD based operating system. Windows Mobile, the predecessor of WP7, which was supposed to take this market never did sell well.

So here we have a dying phone platform which even the NoWin deal [1, 2, 3, 4] cannot rescue. Microsoft is banning itself. Hilarious way to end the week. █

IRC Proceedings: February 17th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 12:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

02.17.11

Links 17/2/2011: Linux 2.6.38 RC5, SplashTop Makes MeeGo-based Platform

Posted in News Roundup at 5:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Nigeria Uses GNU/Linux to Manage Elections

    120K PCs in a huge network manage the database.

  • Linux Based Cameleon XR1.5 For Indian Telecom Industry

    Donjin Communication Technology, a player in global multimedia communication platform technology and Contarra Systems, a worldwide telecommunica­tions software company specialized in multi-purpose communications solutions, have introduced Cameleon XR 1.5 a service delivery platform based on Linux Operating System for the Indian telecommunications industry.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung aims for iPod touch with WiFi-only Galaxy S variants

      At Mobile World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona, Samsung was showing off two new WiFi-only Android devices based on the popular Galaxy S smartphone. Coming in both 4″ and 5″ display sizes, the models would serve as non-phone companions to Samsung’s Galaxy S line, similar in many respects to the iPod touch.

      Both new devices feature 1GHz Hummingbird processors, front-facing VGA video cameras, microSD slots, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and they run Android 2.2 (Froyo). A smaller device which looks almost identical to current Galaxy S smartphones features a 4″ LCD touchscreen, a 3.2MP rear camera, and a 1200mAh battery. The larger version has an 800×480 pixel 5″ touchscreen, a 5MP rear camera with flash, and a 2500mAh battery. Both devices are compatible with 32GB microSD cards, but it’s not clear how much, if any, flash storage is built in.

    • LG Optimus 3D video hands-on

      The recently announced LG Optimus 3D (read specs) provides glasses-free 3D vision by sending separate signals to the right and left eyes. The technique creates an image that tricks the eyes into seeing the foreground of videos, games, and the user interface at a closer angle. My only problem with this that angles must be tight. When moving the phone a small degree to the left or right, the desired effect is gone and a distorted image appears in its place. While it’s a neat trick to be able to view 3D video without having to wear glasses, the experience is rather limited.

    • LG Optimus 3D is the new king of the hill when it comes to hardware performance thanks to its TI OMAP 4 chip

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Organizing conf.kde.in Conference In India

        The Indian KDE team is organising conf.kde.in, a conference for the KDE community and users. The conference is creating a platform for Qt and KDE contributors and enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn and play.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3: Getting better by the day

        It’s easy to focus on the big new features, but there has been a huge amount of polishing work going on also. Marina has been refining the behaviour of the messaging tray, Owen has been making sure that icons are clearly rendered, and lots of bug fixing has been happening.

        This isn’t everything that’s been happening to GNOME 3 in recent weeks (system settings have been getting a lot of attention, as have many of our applications) but I hope the update’s useful.

      • Gnome Shell is Almost Ready to Rock Your Desktop

        When Gnome Shell was first becoming available over a year ago, we took a look at it to see what the foundation was like, and to see what direction the Gnome desktop was likely to go. At the time, we liked it, though it was clearly a “rough draft” of what it could eventually become. Since then, time has gone by, and while Ubuntu may have decided to go with Unity instead, others have taken Gnome Shell up to the next level. Fedora, among others, will be putting it front and center in future releases. Today we’re going to take a look at one of the most recent builds available to see what this slick desktop environment has got to offer.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Blog Now Included on the Censored Planet

          My blog is now included on Fedora’s “Planet Edited” – mind you various people won’t like me for calling it censored. Originally, I thought the censored version of planet was going to filter out the ‘I had this-and-that for breakfast’ type of blog posts, which, usually anyway, have nothing to do with Fedora at all. However, after some clarification from Andrea Veri, it seems a relation between the posts content and Fedora isn’t sufficient – the blog post must be specifically about Fedora.

        • Stop blaming Italians for Berlusconi

          The Italian media do not allow public opinion to be formed in an objective and impartial way. We could blame Italians for their leader only if the delicate mechanisms that govern Italian democracy were not distorted by a biased, irresponsible media. Rather, we should blame its “mediocracy”; that is, the dangerous entanglement of power and media that has been afflicting the country for decades.

          The mammoth media power that Berlusconi has built his empire on is unimaginable in any other western democracy. If we overlook his immense and unchallenged power over public opinion, his articulate propaganda machine, we won’t be able to explain why Italians have fallen asleep instead of reacting to the regime.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Linux finally released

        In a recent article Brockmeier argued that Debian was still crucially important to the Linux world for two key reasons.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The top 5 desktops from our Facebook competition

          We got over 500 submissions throughout the week, and it was certainly a tough decision to pick only 5 winners out of so many.

        • A Long Overdue Introduction: ecryptfs-migrate-home

          One of my most popular (by number hits) posts on eCryptfs is the one on Migrating to An Encrypted Home Directory. This post contains a lengthy set of instructions when, if followed correctly, allows you to migrate to an encrypted home directory.

        • Live Ubuntu Video Q+A: Every Wednesday
        • Bug search no longer does substring matching of source package names
        • Canonical Re-licenses Ubuntu Wiki to CC BY-SA

          Elizabeth Krumbach on behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council announced in an email to various mailing lists, and posted on the Ubuntu Fridge that the licensing for the Ubuntu wiki will be CC-BY-SA and barring a “substantial number of objections” this change should take place in approximately one month.

        • Thunderbird in the Usability Lab!

          This time, I had the pleasure of working with Andreas Nilsson, who came to London to observe the sessions. It was very useful to get his feedback and to work collaboratively with him on the analysis and implications of the findings. In addition to these benefits of our work together, there is an added one: since he observed participants struggling with certain aspects of the interface, he will no doubt be a very effective user experience advocate with his team.

        • Ubuntu Unity 2D

          Some random musing about Ubuntu ARM Netbook Edition.

          Last month Canonical held its Ubuntu Platform Team rally in Dallas TX. During this rally the Unity 2D launcher was added to the public archive for use with the Ubuntu ARM Netbook edition. We had hoped it would be fairly simply to replace the existing EFL (Enlightenment Foundations Library) launcher with the QT based Unity launcher.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Noki-Soft Windfall – who wins most when Micro-Kia hand away lucrative smartphone empire bigger than Blackberry, bigger than iPhone

          Even more than being an 11x bestselling author of mobile telecoms and a consultant and ex-Nokia executive, I am more than anything else, an industry analyst for the mobile industry and one of its leading statisticians and forecasters. I am known for deep and insightful statistical analysis articles of the industry and its market such as this final review of all the stats and major players in the year 2010 in smartphones. So I have done a thorough analysis of all rivals who stand to gain from the loss of market share, that Nokia’s sudden Microsoft partnership announcement will create.

        • Analyst: Nokia-MS alliance bodes ill for phone giant

          “With the Microsoft deal unlikely to yield any products for nearly one year, Nokia will have no choice except to remain awkwardly reliant on the Symbian and MeeGo platforms in 2011. This will have a further negative impact on the Nokia’s already eroding position in smart phones,” it said.

        • SplashTop Releases Its MeeGo-based OS

          While Nokia has effectively abandoned the MeeGo Linux operating system, Intel is still supporting MeeGo along with AMD and other vendors, including SplashTop. SplashTop has today announced the release of their MeeGo-based operating system.

        • Fujitsu starts selling the first MeeGo netbook

          Fujitsu has just put MeeGo on their existing LifeBook MH330 netbook (originally launched with Windows onboard) making it the first MeeGo netbook shipping commercially. The MH330 (launched in mid 2010) has an Intel Atom N455 @ 1.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM, a 250 GB hard disk and 10.1″ 1024×600 display. The netbook is available now on Asian markets for about € 300.

        • Meego and Qt after Microsoft & Nokia: a summary of “facts”

          # MEEGO@NOKIA: #info Elop: Nokia would continue to develop the MeeGo operating system in collaboration with Intel
          So, definetly this work will continue.

          [...]

          So Meego will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Qt will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Symbian will die. Qt will not be ported to QP7. KDE will survive.

        • Collabortage

          I coined the term during an IRC conversation after a friend expressed dark suspicions that the MeeGo alliance between Intel and Nokia might have been a ploy by Intel to screw up Nokia’s ARM-centered product strategy in order to favor Intel’s Atom processors. I do not endorse this theory, but it started me thinking of various historical examples, such as Microsoft’s browser-technology collaboration with Spyglass, for which there is in fact strong reason to suspect deliberate collabortage.

        • Doomed By The Desire For Control?

          By attempting to seize control, Nokia and Microsoft are actually likely to lose influence.

        • Nokia shareholders and unions fight back against Microkia

          First, will be a battle with the Finnish trade union Pro which is demanding €100,000 (in addition to severance payments) for every Nokia employee that loses their job under Elop’s new strategy — money the unions says will be used for reeducation.

        • Otellini: Nokia News Made Me Swear Like Yahoo’s CEO

          When Intel CEO Paul Otellini received a call from Nokia chief Stephen Elop about Nokia’s move to Microsoft, he used a word that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz “has often used.”

        • Nokiasoft: Who are the Open Source Winners and Losers?

          The clearest loser in the deal is Symbian: it is as dead as the proverbial Monty Python parrot.

          [...]

          Surprisingly, perhaps, I don’t think Qt will be joining Symbian and MeeGo as a Dead Parrot; indeed, continuing the Monty Python theme, I’d say it’s more a question of “I’m not dead yet.” For Qt is, of course, a key element of KDE, which is doing very nicely thank you, and certainly doesn’t depend on the commitment or otherwise of Nokia (luckily). People will continue to hack on Qt because by doing so they can make KDE better – which is what they are passionate about.

          Indeed, you could argue that Qt might benefit from Nokia leaving it alone: it will allow Qt development to concentrate on improving those things that matter to KDE, rather than Nokia’s corporate priorities. And if the eventual owner of Qt (whoever that might be, assuming Nokia eventually sells it, as I think likely) starts messing about – hello Oracle – then there’s always the option of a fork, which in the wake of LibreOffice has become a much more respectable option.

        • Hands on with Intel’s MeeGo tablet UI: good ideas, rough edges

          Although Nokia is gutting its commitment to MeeGo, the platform still has support from a number of other prominent hardware vendors. Intel, which originally cofounded MeeGo with Nokia last year, has released an experimental “pre-alpha” build of its MeeGo tablet environment.

          The software was unveiled at Mobile World Congress this week and is being demonstrated on the Atom-based ExpoPC tablet. It is built with Nokia’s Qt development toolkit and uses the powerful Qt Quick framework for much of the user interface. It appears to be at a relatively early stage of development and is still lacking a lot of basic capabilities, but many of the underlying concepts are promising.

        • Intel Shows Off MeeGo Tablet UI Experience[Screenshots and Video]

          MeeGo is in the news again, this time for all the right reasons. Few days ago, Nokia announced that they are going to partner with Microsoft and use Windows Phone 7 as its primary OS instead of MeeGo. Intel on the other hand is all set to go ahead with MeeGo platform without Nokia. Intel has reiterated its commitment towards MeeGo open source mobile OS project by showing off MeeGo’s latest UI experience at Mobile World Congress currently being held at Barcelona, Spain.

        • Community SSU features to look forward to

          Most of these patches try to improve the user experience and look and feel of the Maemo 5 UI, but tastes differ, so you can choose which one to enable:

          * Blurless desaturation: With this feature enabled, the background of dialogs, menus, the launcher and the switcher won’t get all blurry – instead, they keep their sharpness, but are darkened and desaturated. (thread with screenshots)
          * Bigger task switcher: I think this is one of my earliest patches, now cleaned up to be configurable with different settings. You can choose between the Maemo 5 default layout, the single-column “big” task switcher and the two-column task switcher. I’ve left the horizontal task switcher out of this, as it wasn’t working that well in some situations. (thread with screenshots)
          * Rotation around the Z axis: This one makes the screen rotation look much more natural, just like on the MeeGo Handset UX. Instead of rotating around the X and Y axis, this makes the transitions from/to portrait mode rotate around the Z axis. (demo video)
          * Forced auto-rotation for all apps: By default, hildon-desktop obeys the preferences of application windows and whether or not they support portrait mode. With this option enabled, hildon-desktop ignores those preferences and instead assumes every application can be auto-rotated. There’s no support for the home screen, launcher or switcher, as these things are more complicated to support in portrait mode. (demo video)

        • Intel Giving Away Lots of Cash, Trip to Antarctica, Jet Flight & More for MeeGo Developers

          Intel is currently offering several incentives for developers to create MeeGo apps. The prizes look very interesting. How does a trip to South Pole sound? How about flying former military jets at supersonic speeds? If you’re not into that, you can opt for cash. The first 100 submitted quality apps also get $500 and the best 10 of those apps get $1000.

      • Android

        • Google: Android activations up to 350,000 a day
        • VMware put an Android in your Android, so you can VM while you VM

          So apparently VMware heard you like virtualization (or at least, that corporations do), so it made an Android virtual machine that can run inside Android’s own Dalvik VM.

        • ZTE taking the high road with new Android devices

          One of the more interesting announcements at this year’s MWC has come from ZTE, a Chinese telcom which has held a solid portion of the Chinese market by offering a number of low-end Android phones. Last year, ZTE shipped 2 million Android phones, and this year is looking to increase that number to 10 million, but also aim a little higher with these. ZTE has announced a number of devices ranging from 1 GHz smartphones to 1.2 GHz dual-core devices. The standouts from ZTE’s announcement were the ZTE Skate, the Light 2, the Light 10, and a mysterious “Internet box”.

        • Social discovery app “Tagged” comes to Android this week

          Just about every one loves a little social networking in their lives, right? Well, if you are tired of Facebook and Twitter and hopefully have also moved on from MySpace, then maybe the network Tagged is what you are looking for. Tagged is self-dubbed “the world’s leader in social discovery” and because of that are brought their popular iPhone app to Android this week.

        • Android increases lead over iOS in ad impressions. Let’s break down the numbers.

          As of October and November of last year, Millennial Media reported that Android and iOS were tied in ad impression share at about 38% each. By December, Android had pulled ahead with 46% to iOS’s 32%. Now, Millennial Media is reporting that in Januray iOS had an ad impression share of 28%, compared to Android’s 54%.

        • Huawei announces low-end IDEOS X3 smartphone and X7 tablet

          Huawei is certainly not going for the big money crowd like many of the other Android manufacturers seem to be doing. Huawei has just announced an entry-level phone, the IDEOS X3, and what looks to be an entry level tablet as well, the IDEOS X7.

        • CyanogenMod 7 release candidates now available for a number of devices

          Version 7 of the Android world’s most popular custom ROM, CyanogenMod, has now received its first proper release candidates. This means that a final release of CM7 should be pretty close now. The new builds are feature-complete and have been pretty thoroughly tested, although they might have to do some further tweaking. Nonetheless, these release candidates of CyanogenMod 7 should definitely be stable enough for everyday use.

        • The System & The System: Overlaying GNU on Android on the Beagle Board

          And so it is with Contraption, my project to overlay a GNU environment on top of the otherwise very un-GNU-like Android on the Beagle Board. Like the citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma, the GNU and Android environments co-exist in close proximity, within the same geographic file system and random access memory, yet kept separate through the auspices of the Breach-like Linux kernel. You can interact with Android from one one screen while running GNU-based software from a bash shell inside an ssh session from another. For the most part the two systems simply unsee one another by virtue of using different PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variables and by being dynamically linked to different shared objects. The Linux kernel and the dynamic loader keep it all separate.

        • MapQuest Launches Android App with OpenStreetMap and Turn-By-Turn Navigation

          One of the superior apps on the Android phone has long been Google Maps, with its turn-by-turn and voice-guided navigation missing from the iPhone version. So on the surface, MapQuest has a difficult sell to Android users with the launch of its free app today.

          The MapQuest app also offers the turn-by-turn capabilities and takes advantage of Android’s speech capabilities to offer a voice guide as well. The benefits of MapQuest over Google Maps comes from the former’s use of OpenStreetMap (OSM), making the mapping app usable outside the U.S. and adding to it some user-submitted data.

        • Android pwns Mobile World Congress with unique display [Video]

          Android is taking over according to all the stat reports and user surveys released these days. But what happens when the green robot commands a large space of one of the major mobile phone events in the world?

          In Hall 8 of Mobile World Congress, Google has an Android zone that takes up a big chunk of space. There are product demos of Google and third-party apps, massive statues, giveaways, and even a smoothie bar serving up treats with an Android theme (Cupcake, Donut, Gingerbread, and Honeycomb). It’s one of the most popular and crowded destinations at MWC.

        • Google Unveils Android Subscriptions

          Google on Wednesday debuted an Android subscription model, which lets publishers “set their own prices and terms for their digital content.” As Fast Company notes, “It’s a fast counter blow aimed squarely at Apple’s new subscription system.” Indeed, “Google’s been careful to frame its system as a direct competitor to Apple’s App Store subscription service–one that’s far friendlier to publishers–without really mentioning Apple at all.”

        • Android Market on pace to outgrow iTunes 3-1

          According to a recent report by Lookout’s App Genome Project, the number of Android Marketplace apps increased by over 125% since August, putting it on pace to outgrow iTunes apps three to one. Apple still commands a sizeable lead in the total number of apps it offers through iTunes versus AM, the gap is narrowing quickly.

        • Android Ice Cream 2.4 = Gingerbread + Honeycomb

          Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed to an audience at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the upcoming version 2.4 of its Android operating system will combine both Gingerbread 2.3 and the tablet-centric Honeycomb 3.0.

        • TeamViewer6 Stable For Android, Released [Remote Desktop Application]
        • IcedRobot Will Take Android Beyond Smartphones: Exclusive Interview

          A group of developers has announced a project called IcedRobot which will make it possible to run Android apps on non-Android platforms. Something similar to what Alien Dalvik is trying to do. However, there is a significant difference between the two projects, what is it? How is IcedRobot going to affect the Oracle-Google court battle? How is it going to make life easier for developers? How is it going to make life easier for users? We got in touch with one of the founders of the IcedRobot to understand more about the project. Here is an exclusive interview with one of the founding members of the IcedRobot project, Mario Torre.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4, Socorro at AOL, PyCon 2011, Join Mozilla and more…

        * Firefox 4 playing well on major websites
        * Laura Thomson talks Socorro at AOL
        * Mozillians Take PyCon 2011
        * Now serving weekly updates on Join Mozilla
        * Meet the Developer Engagement Team
        * Thoughts on community from metrics guru
        * Mozilla and IPv6 day
        * Can IE9 be considered a modern browser?
        * Improvements to Firefox 4′s spell checker
        * More on MozMill at FOSDEM
        * What will Add-on updates look like in the future?
        * Software updates
        * Upcoming events
        * Developer calendar
        * About about:mozilla

      • Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/02/15

  • SaaS

    • Is the open source cloud computing dream evaporating?

      It’s hard to avoid cloud computing these days, with vendors lining up to support this latest incarnation of an idea that goes all the way back to terminals hanging off a mainframe. In many ways, that’s unfortunate, since the idea of computing ‘in the cloud’ poses particular problems for free software.

  • Databases

    • Database Technology for Large Scale Data

      It is similar to the MapReduce programming model, which has been frequently used as of late. Both Greenplum and Aster Data provide a feature of combining SQL and MapReduce. The following is a description of the SQL used by Greenplum and the manner in which it is processed.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Linux 6 available

      With a simple email to an in-house mailing list, last Friday Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 6. There is, as yet, no press release on the release, which is unusual as the company and its CEO usually tend to aim for maximum publicity.

      The new generation Oracle Linux is largely a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL), which was released last November. New features listed in the release email and release notes are, therefore, already familiar from the original, for instance the use of Ext4 as the default file system, the support of XFS and the ftrace and perf tracing tools. One section in the release notes lists all the packages Oracle has modified to adjust the distribution’s “look and feel” and remove Red Hat trademarks.

    • [tdf-announce] LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation

      LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation

    • Webcast recap: General Hugh Shelton
    • Now Hudson moves to GitHub

      The dispute between Oracle and the Hudson community over the continuous integration software Hudson, which led to the creation of Jenkins, a renamed version, has taken an ironic turn.The arguments started over where Hudson’s code and other developer resources would be hosted.

      Oracle had insisted, having ownership of the Hudson trademark, on the code being on its project Kenai-based Java.net service. But after problems with a mishandled migration of the project, much of the community backed a plan that would have moved it to the GitHub repository. Oracle objected to this and the community’s response to Oracle was a vote to rename Hudson as Jenkins to avoid the trademark issue and taking control of Jenkins hosting.

    • Google Files Motion for Leave to File Motion for Summary Judgment on Oracle’s Copyright Claim

      Google has sent a letter [PDF] to Judge William Alsup, asking leave to file a motion for summary judgment on Count VIII of Oracle’s Amended Complaint in Oracle v. Google.

      Count VIII is the one about copyright infringement. So regardless of how the judge rules, we get to see Google’s position, which if I translate into non-legalese would be: “What we did isn’t actionable, being covered by fair use or the files are so few their use is de minimis or they are not copyrightable.” I have done the letter as text for you.

    • New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300m100) available

      Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m100 is available for download.

      DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.

    • LibreOffice Starts 50,000 Euro Challenge Foundation Set-Up

      Oracle’s Sun buyout has taught a very important lesson to the Free and Open Source Community: its better and safer to be independent than be controlled by a corporate entity. There are many projects driven by corporates with good intentions, but the risk of buyout remains.

      OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice is one of the role models of community-governed project. To meet the financial requirements without compromising on what the community or users want, the LibreOffice community is calling for monetary contributions.

    • LibreOffice Colorful Icons Land In The US @ SCALE

      LibreOffice is the free office productivity suite developed by the TDF developer community, and is going to be included as the default choice in all Linux desktop distributions announced from March 2011 onwards. The software features a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation manager (Impress), a charting and graphics program (Draw), and a database front end (Base). The suite supports the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) for personal documents, and is compatible with most of the legacy proprietary formats – including several flavors of Microsoft Office, WordPerfect and Microsoft Works – and with the OOXML ISO standard (in the current non-standard Microsoft implementation).

  • Healthcare

    • Parliament Approves European Directive Against Falsified Medicines

      The European Parliament today approved a new law aimed at preventing falsified medicines from entering the legal supply chain, according to a Parliament press release. The law needs to be formally approved by the Council of Ministers.

      The new law will cover internet sales and introduces new safety and traceability measures. According to the release, a “huge growth” in falsified medicines has been witnessed since 2005, with an estimated one percent of products sold in to the European public through the legal supply chain being falsified, according to the release. The law is expected to be posted soon to a link provided in the press release.

  • Funding

    • AdBlock Plus: Open source for fun (not funds)

      It is this last thing that strikes me as offering the most vital reason for the significant contributions to VLC, and it also comes through in Palant’s decision to invest so much time in Adblock Plus. He told me: “I have the feeling that this work is important. I can help many people and in the long term the web might actually become a better place.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Stress test FSFE’s new donation options!

      FSFE’s work depends on your donations. Without we would not be able to work on software freedom, follow the policy process in European countries, the European Union, and the United Nations, nor would we be able to run campaigns like pdfreaders.org or Document Freedom Day.

    • Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

      On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

    • The FreedomBox Foundation
    • Debian and the FreedomBox

  • Project Releases

    • GNU Guile 2.0.0 released

      We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.0.0, the first of a new stable series and the result of almost 3 years of work. It provides many new noteworthy features, most notably the addition of a compiler and virtual machine.

  • Government

    • EE: Ministry saves millions by using open source office

      Using the open source costed the ministry no more than 64.000 Euro over the past ten years, being simply the annual budget for training users. Had it continued to use a proprietary office suite, the costs for purchasing or renting proprietary software licences and user training would have ranged between 1.4 and 2.8 million Euro, Merilo showed in a presentation at the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), a trade organisation, on 18 January in Latvia’s capital Riga.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • User-led innovation can’t create breakthroughs. Really?

      2) Getting user feedback ≠ taking user feedback.

      Jens and Rasmus jump to a conclusion that I probably wouldn’t reach myself. They argue that it is actually harmful to listen to users and that innovative brands don’t care about what their users want. They make four key points 1) Users insights can’t predict future demand 2) User-centered processes stifle creativity 3) User focus makes companies miss out on disruptive innovations 4) User-led design leads to sameness.

    • The Lebanese Creative Commons community gains momentum

      In the past three years, the Lebanese CC Community has started to structurally gain momentum and actively co-create together on local, regional and multi-national levels. The community that we have is vibrant and diverse consisting of visual artists, photographers, musicians, NGOs, and publishers—each with his own story and journey with CC.

    • Open Data

      • The State of Open Data in Canada: The Year of the License

        Open Data now an established fact in a growing list of Canadian cities. Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa have established portals, Montreal, Calgary, Hamilton and some other cities are looking into launching their own and a few provinces are rumored to be exploring open data portals as well.

        This is great news and a significant accomplishment. While at the national level Canadian is falling further behind leaders such as England, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, at the local and potentially provincial/state level, Canada could position itself as an international leader.

      • How Open Data Initiatives Can Improve City Life

        Major city governments across North America are looking for ways to share civic data — which normally resides behind secure firewalls — with private developers who can leverage it to serve city residents via web and mobile apps. Cities can spend on average between $20,000 and $50,000 — even as much as $100,000 — to cover the costs of opening data, but that’s a small price to pay when you consider how much is needed to develop a custom application that might not be nearly as useful.

    • Open Hardware

      • Texas Instruments OMAP 5 may offer the best quad-core chip [Processor fights]

        All cores are not created equal. That was the key message that I took away from a recent meeting with the folks from Texas Instruments. While the trend among mobile phones and tablets is to trumpet how many cores one chipset has, and how many gigahertz can be crammed into a tiny piece of hardware, that doesn’t tell the whole story of how a device will perform.

        Texas Instruments recently announced that its TI OMAP 5 would be a quad-core processor that greatly advances the computing power of smartphones, tablets, and other devices. OMAP 5 features twin ARM Cortex-A15 cores that can each reach 2 GHz of power, and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores that are used to deliver optimal battery with less power requirements. So while NVIDIA trumpets its four Cortex A9 cores, TI plans to counter with what it claims will be a stronger and smarter quartet.

  • Programming

    • Is Eclipse Open-By-Rule?
    • Open Source COBOL-IT Tools to be Distributed by Speedware

      IBM i shops that develop in COBOL may be interested in learning about COBOL-IT, a compiler and collection of modernization tools that is developed in France under an open source license. Last week, the Canadian application modernization company Speedware announced that it’s now distributing COBOL-IT to North American customers.

      According to the Paris-based company, the COBOL-IT Compiler Suite is an ANS85-compliant version of the popular procedural language. The compiler installs on Windows, Unix, and Linux machines, including Linux for z/OS, thereby providing organizations with hosting options besides the IBM mainframe, where a lot of legacy COBOL resides.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C: HTML5 will be finished in 2014

      Those curious about the final release date for the hotly debated HTML5 need wonder no more: The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) plans to finalize the standard by July 2014, the organization announced Monday.

      “This is the first time we’ve been able to answer people’s questions of when it will be done,” said Ian Jacobs, head of W3C marketing and communications. “More and more people from more and more industries are asking when it will be done. They require stability in the standard and very high levels of interoperability.”

    • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) Authorized Translations Now in Six Languages
    • ODF Mime Type Icons Redesign

      Overall, this design decision enables us to make ODF file distinction to be supported via luminance and form/contour contrasts. Which is a significant improvement compared to the current ODF icons, without violating any ODF marketing constraints.

    • ODFDOM 0.8.7 – The new Release of the OpenDocument Java Library

      The new version of ODFDOM – our Apache 2 licensed ODF library in Java has been released!

    • Scramble to set mobile pay standard

      In the business world, the pursuit of profits sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. And in the race to be first in the local mobile payment market, credit card firms, telecommunications companies and mobile phone makers are forging unlikely alliances.

      With the country’s “cashless” payment culture and the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones creating a whole new way to pay for goods and services – via mobile devices – companies in some industries are looking to set the standards for the new business and get in on the first train.

    • Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet

      They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment would ever require, far more, in fact, than he could ever imagine needing. And so he was comfortable rejecting the even larger number of addresses that some on his team had argued for.

Leftovers

  • [Old] Hunton & Williams Sued for $150 Million in Contract-Interference Case

    Hunton & Williams has been hit with a $150 million lawsuit in Wisconsin claiming that the law firm maliciously squeezed a broker out of a contract and should pay up for the company’s losses.

    The lawsuit alleges that Hunton & Williams and client Insight Equity Holdings LLC ousted plaintiff Minerals Development & Supply Co. from a supply chain agreement in which Minerals Development was the middleman. Filed in Monroe County, Wis., Circuit Court, on July 30, the lawsuit seeks punitive damages for what Minerals Development asserts was the law firm’s intentional and malicious conduct.

  • Why You Should Use Emoticons In Your Emails

    Language is a means of communication, buts its only as effective as the person using it. Without inflection and emotion, language loses a lot, making text communication one of the poorest forms. While emoticons can be informal, they may actually be the best way of bringing additional meaning to your emails.

  • Guilting parents out of child care

    In the crass world of Canadian right-wing politics, there is a surefire way to diffuse voters’ earnest desire for affordable, high quality child care and early learning options: play the guilt card.

    Human Resources Minister Diane Finley did it just last week in response to a federal Liberal promise to revive the national child-care program Paul Martin said he would implement before losing grip of his fledgling minority government five years ago.

  • No courting in public, Hindu group warns Delhi

    “We won’t allow our culture to be hijacked by foreign multinationals who have introduced concepts like Valentine’s Day just to sell cards,” said its spokesman, Sunil Tyagi. The group plans to equip its members with cameras to film couples in action. “When we upload such footage on YouTube, the couples will learn their mistake.”

  • Police issue arrest warrant for rabbi that supported book which justifies killing non-Jews
  • Stop the global land grab

    “NGOs don’t mobilise people, desperation mobilises people,” said a Cambodian land activist as he related the experience of Boeung Kak villagers who were driven off their land by their own government to make way for corporate profiteering.

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • ARM Marches Onward

      Obviously ARM is doing very well in embedded stuff and smart thingies but nVidia’s newest Tegra chip is mind-blowing. They tout it for mobile but demonstrate it doing video and games on huge monitors. Does that not spell desktop/notebook/gaming console? Yep! There’s a rumour that this will power the next iPad.

    • 3TB Drives are Here

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Aims to Own Our Food, While Profiteering Off of Toxins and Pesticides

      In its latest of many articles on the increasing threat of Monsanto to world agricultural production, Truthout once again points out that the multinational corporation is in the process of privatizing much of our food supply through the patenting and aggressive marketing of genetically engineered (GE) seeds and crops.

    • Doctors Sue Federal Government for Deceptive Language on Meat, Dairy in New Dietary Guidelines

      A nonprofit physicians organization is suing the federal government over the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, accusing officials of using deliberately obscure language regarding foods consumers should avoid. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) cites the government’s conflicts of interest and arbitrary and capricious behavior in developing nutrition advice that was supposed to help Americans fight record obesity levels.

      In a lawsuit filed this week against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, PCRM says the Dietary Guidelines are clear about what to eat more of—vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, for example—but deliberately hide the foods Americans should eat less of. The Guidelines use biochemical terms, such as “saturated fat” and “cholesterol” instead of specific food terms “meat” and “cheese.” This deliberate omission can be traced to the USDA’s close ties to the meat and dairy industries, including fast-food companies such as McDonald’s.

  • Security

    • Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
    • Wednesday’s security updates
    • Legal Defenses For Anonymous In The Excited States – IANAL

      This is actually a multi-layered defense. The FBI appears (from some statements) to be trying to claim that having a copy of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon is illegal. The Low Orbit Ion Cannon is a network testing application. Network testing applications aren’t illegal, however they possibly could be used for illegal uses. I can see a defense lawyer claiming that the LOIC application is the cyber equivalent of a rifle, and possession is covered under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

      The use of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks against Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, etc. is being regarded by the FBI as illegal. However the use of a gun in self defense isn’t illegal in many places. Expect to see arguments that use of the LOIC software is equivalent to using a gun for self defense.

      Also expect to see arguments that the social engineering attack on Rootkit.com was also self defense, assuming that the FBI can locate whoever actually did it. This would also cover any of the actions by anyone against HBGary Federal.

    • Anonymous victim HBGary goes to ground

      The computer security company hacked by members of activist group Anonymous has gone to ground as further revelations about its activites leak online.

      HBGary has cancelled its appearances at public events, saying that members of staff had been threatened.

      It follows the release of internal documents which appear to show the firm offered to smear Wikileaks’ supporters.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • [Old] Police arrest four at Toronto homes

      Toronto police are arresting many of the key organizers behind anti-G20 protests, several of them during pre-dawn raids on houses across Toronto that resulted in four people being charged with conspiracy to commit mischief.

    • CBS News’ Logan recovering after ‘brutal’ attack
    • Yemen protests turn violent

      Yemen protests started in mid January with a self immolation and the arrest and release of Yemeni activist Tawakel Karman, and they have not really stopped since. A Day of Rage was organized for February 3 but tens of thousands were in the streets on January 27 as well as many smaller protests, throughout the time period. The last five days have seen a huge increase in the numbers in the streets, as well as the violence directed at them. According to Human Rights Watch, president Ali Abdallah Saleh’s security forces have attacked demonstrators, activists, lawyers, and journalists in Yemen capital city Sanaa without justification. An estimated 3000 people protested from Sana’a University, clashing with police and pro-Saleh demonstators using batons, rocks, and occasionally knives. Today in Taiz, over 2500 people are refusing to leave and are forming committees and buying tents to continue occupying their protests grounds.

    • ‘Best lead’ before 7/7 not followed

      Police failed to chase up their “best lead” after a suspected armed robbery, which may have led them to one of the July 7 bombers weeks before the atrocity, an inquest has heard.

      Inquiries were “left outstanding” after Jermaine Lindsay was linked to an alleged gun crime in May 2005. Though police were able to identify the 19-year-old as the owner of a red Fiat Brava spotted leaving the scene, this information was never fully followed up.

      Officers launched an investigation named Operation Bugle after a man dialled 999 to say there was a gunman in his flat on May 27, 2005 – five weeks before the terror attacks on London.

      Three women and a child were later seen fleeing from the property “in fear” while three men – wearing balaclavas and gloves – were spotted getting into the Fiat Brava.

      When armed officers arrived later that evening, neither the owner of the Luton flat nor the gunman were there. Attempts to identify the gang of men – two black and one Asian – or the group of women seen leaving the area in a taxi were unsuccessful.

    • Somali pirate gets more than 33 years in prison

      A Somali pirate who kidnapped and brutalized the captain of a U.S.-flagged merchant ship off the coast of Africa in 2009 was sentenced to more than 33 years in prison Wednesday by an emotional judge who told him he deserved a stiff punishment for leading a crew of armed bandits bent on committing “depraved acts.”

      U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska choked up as she read at length from letters written by Capt. Richard Phillips and traumatized sailors who were aboard the cargo vessel commandeered by Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse.

    • Vaughan Smith’s new film ‘Blood and Dust’ broadcasting on Al Jazeera

      Above is a preview of Vaughan Smith’s dramatic new film BLOOD AND DUST recording life and death with an American helicopter medevac unit in Southern Afghanistan.

      ‘These Medivac teams, US military air ambulances, are amoungst the only soldiers that go to war to save lives and they are very good at it.’

    • Two TSA agents arrested at JFK Airport for stealing $39K from passenger’s bag

      Under questioning, the pair also admitted swiping up to $160,000 from other unsuspecting passengers.

      Rogue agents Davon Webb, 30, and Persad Coumar, 36, were busted after a sharp-eyed colleague blew the whistle.

    • Libya cracks down on protesters after violent clashes in Benghazi

      Hundreds of anti-government protesters clashed with police and government supporters in Libya’s second city yesterday as unrest spread across the Arab world.

    • Mubarak ordered Tiananmen-style massacre of demonstrators, Army refused

      Buried in this Robert Fisk report for The Independent is a startling account of the Egyptian army refusing to move with tanks against the Tahrir Square protesters on January 30. If this is true, it must be the defining moment in the history of the movement that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign.

      [...]

      Last night [Feb 10], a military officer guarding the tens of thousands celebrating in Cairo threw down his rifle and joined the demonstrators, yet another sign of the ordinary Egyptian soldier’s growing sympathy for the democracy demonstrators. We had witnessed many similar sentiments from the army over the past two weeks. But the critical moment came on the evening of 30 January when, it is now clear, Mubarak ordered the Egyptian Third Army to crush the demonstrators in Tahrir Square with their tanks after flying F-16 fighter bombers at low level over the protesters.

      Many of the senior tank commanders could be seen tearing off their headsets – over which they had received the fatal orders – to use their mobile phones. They were, it now transpires, calling their own military families for advice. Fathers who had spent their lives serving the Egyptian army told their sons to disobey, that they must never kill their own people.

    • Baghdad wants U.S. to pay $1 billion for damage to city

      Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

    • Iraqi lied about weapons of mass destruction

      An Iraqi defector has admitted for the first time he fabricated claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday.

      In an interview with the newspaper, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi said he made up a story told to German intelligence officials throughout 2000 about mobile biological weapons and clandestine factories. His motive was to overthrow the Iraqi government, he said.

    • Bahrain: 2011-2-16

      In the last hour police raided the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. The protestors were camped when teargas, buckshot and rubber bullets were fired into the square from the bridge overlooking the circle. When the crowd stampeded away from the bridge another barrage from the opposite direction scattered them. The circle has been locked down with no one allowed in or out. Many were wounded and some deaths have occurred. Men, women and children were injured. This attack came after the king promised to investigate the previous deaths from buckshot.

    • Bahrain: 2011-2-17

      It looks like the regime will not roll over as in Tunisia and Egypt. I expect tomorrow will be a very interesting day in Bahrain. Friday is the holy day when many passionate speeches will be made in the mosques.

    • Bahrain Police Refuse Ambulances Access To Wounded Protesters
    • Domino Theory 50 Years Later
    • Tsunami in Egypt

      UNTIL THE very last moment, the Israeli leadership tried to keep Hosni Mubarak in power.

    • Tea Party declares war on military spending

      In his speech to the conference on Friday, Paul the elder was the only speaker to address the current crisis in Egypt and criticised successive US administrations for “propping up a puppet dictator”, citing 30 years of uncritical support for Hosni Mubarak. Traditionally, Ron Paul’s supporters (and the libertarian philosophy they espouse) have been dismissed as merely boisterous gadflies fluttering around the real heavyweight horsetrading for political power within the Republican party. The issues they champion range from the practical (passing a balanced budget amendment), to the fanciful (abolishing the Federal Reserve and reintroducing the gold standard); thus they have never been taken seriously by the Republican establishment.

  • Cablegate

    • The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG For Tuesday, Day 80

      Six in 10 say WikiLeaks played role in Tunisia revolt, which sparked so much else, and other demos. “More than 60 percent believe that Wikileaks will change the way governments behave. 55 percent of Arabs revealed in the poll that they believe little to nothing of what their governments tell them.”

    • WikiLeaks, free speech and Twitter come together in Va. court case

      In the courtroom, John Keker, a lawyer representing one of the Twitter clients, said the users’ data would give the government a map of people tied to WikiLeaks and essentially halt free speech online.

    • Notes From a Father of the Open Internet, 15 Years On

      As a revolution that was in many ways organized on Facebook continued in Egypt, John Perry Barlow said Wednesday that the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace that he wrote 15 years ago Tuesday is still as relevant now as it was when he penned it.

    • The Australian’s double standard on Julian Assange

      The Australian’s love-hate relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — possibly a little more co-dependent on The Oz’s side — continues apace. Like much of News Limited, its right-wing columnists turned their guns on him early, before The Oz began a desperate attempt to acquire some of the “cablegate” cables after Philip Dorling began publishing reports of them in Fairfax (which disgraced itself as the only news partner unwilling to actually publish the cables in question).

      [...]

      The implicit accusation is absurd and simply wrong.

    • EFF Argues for Privacy in Hearing Over Twitter Records

      These secret government requests for information only came to light because Twitter took steps to ensure their customers were notified and had the opportunity to respond. In fact, EFF was only able to speak publicly about the hearing and the motions we filed on behalf of our client, Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir, after petitioning the court to lift the seal on the legal proceedings. We also asked the court Tuesday to go further with its unsealing, and make more documents public. The issues at hand — WikiLeaks, privacy, free speech, and social networking — are all important matters of public interest, and the orders and motions before the judge should be available to inform public debate.

    • Obama Admin Touts Internet Freedom While Targeting Twitter, WikiLeaks

      The Obama administration has unveiled a new policy it says will help protesters worldwide evade curbs to internet freedom. Drawing on the key role of online organizing in the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. will help bloggers and activists evade state censorship.

    • Hillary Clinton Talks The Talk On Internet Freedom; Will The Administration Walk The Walk?

      A year ago, Hillary Clinton gave a speech about the importance of “internet freedom” that many of us later pointed out appeared to be in stark contrast with the federal government’s (including Secretary of State Clinton’s) reaction to the publishing of various State Department cables. So a lot of folks were interested in what Clinton had planned for her followup speech on internet freedoms, which she gave yesterday. I’ve embedded the full speech below, but you can also read a summary of the speech at Wired.

    • Friend of Suspected WikiLeaks Source Alleges Torture

      A friend of the alleged whistleblower, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, says the U.S. government’s treatment of Manning amounts to torture.

    • WikiLeaks: Egypt’s new man at the top ‘was against reform’

      The military leader charged with transforming Egypt opposed political reform because he believed that it “eroded central government power”, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.

    • Hillary Clinton champions Internet freedom, but cautions on WikiLeaks

      The 50-minute speech was also an opportunity for the US to weigh in on a event that has been a thorn in the discussion over freedom of speech since it began, namely the WikiLeaks document release, says Depauw University communications professor Kevin Howley.

      He noted the “surprisingly small” amount of mainstream attention given to the fact that WikiLeaks was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize two weeks ago.

    • Clinton: We Love Net Freedom, Unless It Involves WikiLeaks
    • Government challenged on Twitter records access

      Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament, is the most high-profile of the three defendants.

    • Interview of Daniel Ellsberg on Bradley Manning [MP3]
    • 06YEREVAN1019, A PROSTITUTE’S STORY: SEX AND TRAFFICKING IN

      Poverty and desperation are the largest factors contributing to trafficking in persons in Armenia, according to prostitutes, police and NGOs in Vanadzor, Armenia’s third-largest city. We met them during a July 14 trip to the city, where prostitutes gather after dusk in the traffic circle outside a central church to begin the day’s work. To each we posed the question, “What can be done to eradicate trafficking in persons in Armenia?” No one had an answer, but all agreed that lack of jobs drove women to sell themselves both in Armenia and overseas, where the money was better, but where they often didn’t actually get paid. They told us that girls as young as 11 and 12 have started walking the streets. A police officer told us that parents send their daughters to Turkey fully understanding the cost at which remittances will be sent home. We visited a decrepit shanty town, where prostitutes work for bread and rice, to see first-hand the conditions in which many of them live. We left Vanadzor convinced that, while stricter laws and harsher sentencing are needed in Armenia, prostitutes work in large part because they have to put food on the table, and they go to Turkey and the UAE because they believe the money is better there.

    • Lawmaker reintroduces WikiLeaks prosecution bill

      New legislation in the U.S. Congress targets WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage prosecution.

      Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, introduced the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination, or SHIELD, Act on Tuesday. The bill would clarify U.S. law by saying that it is an act of espionage to publish the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the U.S military or intelligence community.

      King introduced similar legislation in 2010. Senators John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, introduced similar legislation in the Senate last week.

    • Julian Assange Has NEVER Done ANYTHING That Would Give The U.S. Jurisdiction! Alan Dershowitz
    • Cables illuminate U.S. relations with Bahrain, potential for unrest

      The United States and Bahrain are close allies. In fact, according to an April 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable, one of several released by WikiLeaks this week, the two countries have “about as good a bilateral relationship as anywhere.” The cables recount a number of interesting details, particularly in light of ongoing unrest there this week, about the government’s leadership, U.S. interests in Bahrain and the region, and about the backstory of sectarian tensions between a ruling Sunni government and a large underclass Shiite majority.

      U.S. interests in Bahrain, according to the cables, center around two issue: Iran and Iraq. And the two are related. The April 2008 cables notes that Bahrain’s “number-one security concern is Iran. They support [the U.S.] tough stand toward Tehran.” The cables claim that Bahrain worked with the U.S. government to monitor financial transactions from Iran. And perhaps even more importantly, Manama expressed interest in creating a broader alliance of countries in the Gulf and the region to resist Iran, the cables claim. And here’s where Iraq comes in, according to a 2008 cable: “Our point that reintegrating Iraq into the Arab fold is critical to limiting Iranian influence has had real resonance with the Bahraini leadership.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Sterility in frogs caused by environmental pharmaceutical progestogens

      Frogs appear to be very sensitive to progestogens, a kind of pharmaceutical that is released into the environment. Female tadpoles that swim in water containing a specific progestogen, levonorgestrel, are subject to abnormal ovarian and oviduct development, resulting in adult sterility. This is shown by a new study conducted at Uppsala University and published today in the scientific journal Aquatic Toxicology.

    • The True Cost Of Coal – Up To A Half Trillion Dollars Per Year

      Dr. Paul Epstein from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard’s Medical School has written an article set for publication this month in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences quantifying the true costs of coal in terms of economic, health and environmental impacts.

      Dr. Epstein’s study details how each stage of coal’s life cycle (extraction, transportation, processing, and combustion) has enormous costs, all of which are directly borne by the public. Notably, the report estimates some $74.6 billion a year in public health costs for Appalachian communities, mainly from increasing healthcare burdens, injury and death.

    • Video: Carnivorous Bladderworts Catch Meals With Vacuum Power
    • Amazon pollution: Chevron hits back in row with Ecuador

      US oil giant Chevron says it will appeal against an $8.6bn (£5.3bn) fine imposed by Ecuador judges, carrying on a long-running row over pollution.

      Chevron’s Kent Robertson told the BBC the case was an “extortion scheme”, and accused Ecuador’s state-run firm of polluting the country’s Amazon region.

    • Mining giants bury Canadian critics with lawsuits

      Canadian academics and free speech advocates are up in arms over two mining multinationals’ use of libel law to bury their critics in lawsuits. Alain Deneault, Delphine Abadie, and William Sacher published a book called Noir Canada. Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique that detailed well-sourced human rights abuses by the multinational resource companies Barrick Gold and Banro Corporation.

  • Finance

    • NYSE traders say yes to Germany, no to lederhosen

      A German takeover of the New York Stock Exchange, the citadel of American capitalism, would have shocked its floor traders in years gone by. But not now.

    • Is the Great Stagnation a great opportunity?

      As Tyler points out in this book, and catalogued at length in his other excellent book, Create Your Own Economy, recent increases in happiness come from growth in internal economies. That is, internal to humans. In the past, increased well-being came from not having a toilet and then having one, or the invention of cheap air travel. Today they come from blogging, watching Lost on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with your friends, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover basic needs, greater happiness and well-being can be had for virtually nothing.

    • We All Work at Enron Now

      Remember Enron? That paragon of turn-of-the-century new-economy triumphalism, gushed over by pundits, lauded by investors, celebrated by the cognoscenti — until it turned out to be a roadside bomb in disguise? The cause of its demise, ultimately: overstating benefits and understating costs. The result, of course, was a spectacular flameout, today the stuff of legend.

      So here’s a question. Is the global economy going Enron? Just like Enron, does it systematically and chronically overstate real benefits (consider just how vanishingly little “profit” reflects trust, happiness, joy, delight, inspiration, passion, wisdom, or a sense of meaning) and understate real costs (like damage to nature, the future, communities, society, or human achievement itself)? And is that, perhaps, the prime mover of what both Tyler Cowen and I have termed a Great Stagnation?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Egypt’s Lobbyists Worked To Block Pro-Human Rights, Democracy Resolution

      New disclosures filed in the past few weeks by Egypt’s lobbying team in Washington shine a light on the activity the country took last summer and fall to block the discussion and passage of a resolution calling on the United States to support human rights in Egypt and demand an end to the emergency law, two key demands of the protesters who, last week, toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

    • Beck warns against searching his conspiracy theories on Google

      Okay, Glenn Beck has completely lost it. Now he’s warning his audience against looking up his conspiracy theories on Google…

    • UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

      According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

  • Censorship

    • Algeria tried to block internet and Facebook as protest mounted

      The Algerian government was blamed by protesters for preventing access to internet providers across much of the capital, Algiers, and other cities including Annaba for much of Saturday morning and afternoon in an attempt to prevent planned demonstrations gathering pace.

      Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

    • Salinger’s Ghost Censors From The Grave

      Jay McInerney in the NY Times reminds us why there will never be a biographical account of J.D. Salinger that is as accurate and insightful as it could be, all thanks to a bit of stifling censorship from the current copyright regime…

  • Privacy

    • Using Real Names has Real Consequences

      I post under my own name, but I do it with a consciousness of the risk.

      I’ve been on the net (it was the ARPANET then) since 1977. At that time, we actually had user profiles with a place to supply your social security number, and people often complied because there was no reason to suppose it was dangerous. Those were certainly different times. People today are often horrified as they look back at the practices of those days, but everyone’s sensibilities were different then. At some point we noticed that there was danger in having such information out in the open, so the data was erased and the ability to attach it was removed. But initially we were more trusting.

    • Council survey causes privacy concern

      A survey issued by Wiltshire Council has stirred up a privacy debate in the local community, as it asks questions about resident’s sexuality, debt levels and qualifications.

      According to the Salisbury Journal, the document has been sent out to 26,500 households across the county “to help the council develop its housing and planning policy” to provide affordable housing in the area.

    • Obama assertion: FBI can get phone records without oversight

      The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.

      That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

      Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.

    • Congressmen Urge State Department to Investigate Internet Spying Company

      To recap, Narus is a Sunnyvale, California, Internet surveillance and filtering company begun by Israeli security experts, and subsequently bought by Boeing. The company has nefarious links to the NSA, and to AT&T efforts to monitor phone communications domestically.

      Among Narus’ many cyber-sleuthing products is one called “Hone,” which can filter through billions of packets of online data to target individuals on social networks and then link that information to their “VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.” Those using cell phones or Wi-Fi connections can then be located geographically.

  • Civil Rights

    • WATCH: Our new ad opposing the PATRIOT Act
    • Free Press Congratulates Electronic Frontier Foundation on 21 Years of Service

      Free Press wishes to offer our congratulations and thanks to EFF for their work on behalf of the American public.

      Long before most people had heard of the Internet, EFF was on the job to ensure that it remained an open space for the free exchange of ideas. Little could anyone have imagined then the global impact it would have 21 years later, and in many ways, we have EFF to thank.

    • Happy 21st Birthday EFF
    • EFF Appoints Jonathan Zittrain to the Board of Directors

      EFF is extremely pleased to announce a new addition to our Board of Directors: Harvard Law and Computer Science Professor Jonathan Zittrain.

      For many of you, Jonathan does not need an introduction, as he is one of the true luminaries of Internet scholarship. His work encompasses the critical issues at the heart of EFF’s work, including privacy, speech, digital property, and the role played by private intermediaries in Internet architecture.

    • Thousands protest anti-union bill in Wisconsin

      Thousands of teachers, prison guards and students descended on the Wisconsin Capitol for a second day Wednesday to fight a move to take union rights away from government workers in the state that first granted them more than a half-century ago.

      The Statehouse filled with as many as 10,000 demonstrators who chanted, sang the national anthem and beat drums for hours. The noise level in the Rotunda rose to the level of a chainsaw, and many Madison teachers joined the protest by calling in sick in such numbers that the district had to cancel classes.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Does Secretary Clinton Have a Double Standard on Internet Freedom?

      Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday highlighted new U.S. Internet freedom policy that is designed to help democracy movements gain access to open networks and speak out against authoritarian regimes.

      According to Clinton, the program will provide $25 million in new grants to support “technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against Internet repression.”

    • French Parliament to Consider Net Neutrality Law

      Net Neutrality in France is the subject simultaneously of government attacks and parliamentary efforts to protect it. After French Minister for Digital Economy Éric Besson’s direct attack, the French Parliament will on Thursday discuss a bill which strongly supports the principles of Net Neutrality. La Quadrature du Net calls on its supporters to contact French MPs and ask them to support this proposal in order to protect a free Internet.

    • We’re helping to make a safer internet – but it’s a shared responsibility!

      Anyone can be affected by security issues on the internet. It sounds like a boring cliché, but it is true. I recently I found out about someone attempting to impersonate me and my work at the Commission – using fake webmail and other tactics. My advice is to check how your name is being used online! Not only that – be sure you know who you are communicating with. Most of us like to share personal information online, but we rarely think about how embarrassing – or worse! – it could be if that information was forwarded or simply available to the wrong people. That is the thinking behind the theme of this year’s Safer Internet Day: “it’s more than a game – it’s your life.” (see the video above from the recent Data Protection Day which highlights this exact point)

    • The Internet Strikes Back: Tell Congress to Stand Up for Net Neutrality

      Make no mistake: this will be a decisive vote. This is the only time that Congress will vote “yes or no” on Net Neutrality, so it’s crucial that they vote the right way. Help us send a clear message to Congress: a vote for the repeal act is a vote against internet users.

  • DRM

    • PS3 Sparks Debate

      This device has caused a great deal of controversy Ranging a possible band in Norway due to unfair ToS’s that protect the consumer to Hackers entering into the system and breaching it Which has lead to a Lawsuit with an infamous hacker “gehot”
      to a Lawsuit that is pending Known as the “Other OS” Lawsuit that states SCEA wrongfully had removed the “Other OS” function in which was deemed as a security threat , The lawsuit also states that the “Other OS” was taken from a group of consoles that a Consumer had purchased.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Flip side of IPR protection

      Champions of intellectual property rights (IPR) say it is the driving force of economic growth and technological innovation. China has made its legislators perfect IPR laws ever since it decided to embrace market economy, and asked its law-enforcement agencies to ensure that they are properly implemented and protected. The country’s increasing foreign trade has further strengthened this demand, and the government and judicial authorities have made great efforts to perfect the IPR system.

      China has enacted and implemented a series of laws and regulations on IPR protection and issued the Outline of the National Intellectual Property Strategy in 2008. Its judicial authorities at various levels continue to crack down on people and companies violating IPR. On the whole, the country has made considerable progress both in legislation and enforcement of IPR laws.

      But the purpose of an IPR system is not only to protect intellectual property, but also to encourage innovation, maintain social justice and thus promote comprehensive economic and social progress.

      The present tendency to lay undue emphasis on intellectual property both at home and abroad may go against the original intention of an IPR system. Some practices and disputes in the United States and other Western countries have taught a lesson to China, rather than being experiences worthy of emulation.

      The fundamental driving force of innovation is competition, while IPR protection in substance is a kind of monopoly. Monopoly can provide incentives for innovation, but it can also prompt former innovators to gain high return by relying on the products they have already innovated, rather than pushing them toward further innovation. Such a situation will ultimately weaken the power of technological innovation.

    • International Civil Society Demands End To Secrecy In TPPA talks

      Negotiators in Santiago, Chile for the fifth round of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks were delivered a forceful message today by prominent civil society groups, demanding an end to the secrecy that shields their negotiations from the scrutiny of national lawmakers and the general public.

      Jane Kelsey, who is at the meeting, said that open letters addressed to government leaders in Australia, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand and the United States of America, signed by trade unions, environmentalists, faith and social justice organisations that speak for hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens, were handed to each delegation.

      The letters object that the proposed agreement is deeply undemocratic in its process and its effect.

    • Copyrights

      • KEI comments on USTR 2011 Special 301 Review

        KEI’s comments on the USTR 2011 Special 301 Review are available here.

      • Movie theatres generating record results in Canada

        Cineplex Inc, (CGX) the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada has recently released its 2010 year end totals, and its net revenue is up 17.8 percent from 2009.

        The entertainment company has interest in over 132 theatres across Canada with 1,366 screens, and it’s currently serving approximately 70 million guests annually. The latest financial report shows that they’re making record gains aside from attendance which is down .09% from last year.

      • Premium VOD Is Doomed If This Piracy Study Is Correct

        A new PricewaterhouseCoopers study casts serious doubt on consumer willingness to pay for movies on digital platforms. Warning: Film-industy executives interested in reading further may want to first increase dosage of any anti-depressants they might be taking.

        If, as recent comments made on media-conglomerate earnings calls would suggest, studios are gearing up to charge consumers $20-25 to watch movies in their homes two months or so after theatrical release, the new revenue stream known as premium VOD is headed for quite a bumpy ride.

      • Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?
      • UK Law Enforcement Also Looking To Be Able To Seize Domains

        And with both the US and the UK looking for such rights, won’t more and more countries now start to follow? It certainly makes you wonder about the impact of the overall internet, when various countries can just seek to shut down various domains without any trial determination.

      • An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee

        Today, 87 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA). The text of the letter is below.

      • Don’t Mess With Texas: Another Texas Judge Scrutinizes Mass Copyright Litigation

        Looks like the Texas courts are no place to file suit if you want to bypass due process. A few weeks ago, we reported that Mick Haig Productions had dismissed its copyright infringement lawsuit against 670 “John Does,” complaining that the court’s appointment of attorneys from EFF and Public Citizen had impeded its ability to prosecute its case. In a brief filed on behalf of the Does, EFF and Public Citizen had argued that Mick Haig should not be allowed to send subpoenas for the Does’ identifying information, because it had sued hundreds of people in one case, in the wrong jurisdiction and without meeting the constitutional standard for obtaining identifying information. We have also raised questions about the plaintiff’s conduct, as it appears it sent out subpoenas without the court’s permission.

      • 6,374 DISMISSED John Doe Defendants cheer as the LFP Internet Group lawsuits go down in flames.

        I would like to personally congratulate the 6,374+ John Doe Defendants (3,120 + 635 + 2,619) who have been dismissed from the LFP Internet Group, LLC (Larry Flynt Productions) cases. This is a huge victory for our clients and internet users in general. What makes this case significant is not the daunting number of defendants, but that this case provides great case law for future cases.

      • the “specter of e-book piracy” is a crock

        Used to be copyright was justified as an encouragement to creators to create more. The thing is the terms have become downright silly… extending copyright terms from fifty to seventy years after the death of the author is not going to encourage the author to create more. Once you’re dead that’s it. The current trend in ridiculous copyright laws don’t benefit the creators, but rather the corporations, who have never been particularly beneficial to creators. Corporations do NOT have the same objectives as creators.

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

        • Concerns over the DEA Costs Sharing Order

          First is an acknowledgement that the Act will have implications on affordability of broadband. The Government “has acknowledged that there may be an effect on broadband take-up should ISPs pass on the full cost of the process. This is regrettable, but needs to be balanced against the wider benefit to the UK’s digital economy.”

Clip of the Day

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data


Credit: TinyOgg

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