06.05.13
Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 3:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates’ very close friend, created an ever-expanding pyramid scheme
Summary: The criminal operation of Bill Gates’ close friend is getting further explored and the more gets revealed, the more urgent it seems to arrest the perpetrators
The Microsoft- and Gates Foundation-backed patent troll known as Intellectual Ventures just keeps growing and growing. It devours a lot of the industry using patent tax which accompanies extortion and lobbying. This should be criminal and those behind it would be better off in some padded cell. They are dangerous sociopaths with friends in high places.
“Remember a few months ago, when Intellectual Ventures said that there was nothing at all nefarious about their 2,000 or so shell companies?”
–Mike MasnickOne key person in this extortion racket is Peter Detkin, whom we wrote about before. Companies like CBS help whitewash him and others, impeding federal action that should shut it all down in the name of RICO Act. One longtime critic of this extortion racket writes about new facts, starting with some background: “Nearly two years ago, This American Life did an incredible episode about patents and patent trolling, which really got the issue of patent trolling into the mainstream. At the center of that episode was an exploration into Intellectual Ventures, the world’s largest, most obnoxious patent troll. The story revolved around one single patent (5,771,354), which Intellectual Ventures itself had held up as an example of how they were really just helping the poor, brilliant, lone inventor who was being ripped off. In that story, This American Life reporter/producer Alex Blumberg and NPR New reporter Laura Sydell tried to follow the story of that patent to exonerate Intellectual Ventures and show that, indeed, it was helping small inventors get their due. But the story turned out to not stand up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. Because when they went in search of the inventor, Chris Crawford, he refused to respond to them, and then IV itself noted that it had “sold off” the patent and it was currently engaged in litigation. The entity doing the litigation was a company called Oasis Research, which had an empty office in Marshall, Texas with no employees, but had sued over a dozen internet companies for broadly doing online backup.
“In a hilarious exchange with IV’s Peter Detkin, the guy who coined the phrase patent troll but now likes to delude himself that he’s not an executive at the world’s largest troll, pretended that it was some sort of “ambush” when Blumberg simply asked him to explain when IV bought the patent from Crawford and then when and to whom they sold it, based on the data on the US Patent Office’s own website. Hilariously, Detkin insisted that he hadn’t looked at the USPTO website, so he didn’t know what was going on.”
According to the following paragraph, there are now over or around 2,000 proxies, not about 1,100 as reported a few years ago. This is a pyramid schemes and there are laws against such schemes. Masnick writes: “Remember a few months ago, when Intellectual Ventures said that there was nothing at all nefarious about their 2,000 or so shell companies? Perhaps they knew what was coming… which was a pretty clear expose of how Intellectual Ventures is very much the same sort of entity that Peter Detkin once claimed were hellbent on holding up innovation. Except, now he’s profiting from it. Massively. While pretending not to.”
“There is a law against this. There may even be several laws against this.”Here is another interesting new bit about this pyramid scheme: “Well-known non-practicing entity Intellectual Ventures has been fairly quiet on the litigation front, particularly as compared to other high-profile NPEs. And when IV has filed suits, it has generally targeted technology companies, such as semiconductor manufacturers, handset makers, or telecom service providers. But earlier this week, IV branched out into new territory, suing the First National Bank of Omaha in Nebraska district court and accusing the bank of infringing several patents (including some potentially standard-essential patents).”
There is a law against this. There may even be several laws against this. The proxies act as a shield (obfuscation) against enforcement of the law, or even an investigation.
This is only starting to show the scope of this racketeering operation, which was more recently whitewashed by CBS (aided perpetually by the corporate media that won’t do journalism which can result in arrests for racketeering and pyramid schemes).
Intellectual Ventures is neither a company nor a firm. It is a criminal operation, operating with impunity. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Legal loopholes exploited
Summary: Lawsuits by proxy still a preferable strategy at Microsoft, the company which made racketeering a key business model
According to this article from Groklaw, “Microsoft Assigns Six Patents to Patent Troll Vringo — Is This an Antitrust Issue?”
Yes, well, it is not the first time, either. The article says: “A couple of things about this Vringo affair. First, Mark Cuban — who set up the chair at EFF to fight against stupid patents — also bought a 7% interest in Vringo, back when they were dreaming their Big Dreams. Blech. Gambling on litigation. That’s what patents are being used for, and that’s only part of what’s wrong with the US patent system.”
“The American Antitrust Institute is getting involved now, but it should be noted that the above is not unprecedented.”The American Antitrust Institute is getting involved now, but it should be noted that the above is not unprecedented. Nokia gave Vringo some patents before. We wrote about a Nokia boycott exactly when Vringo got fed by Nokia. When another troll, MOSAID, got fed by Nokia, we know for a fact Microsoft was directly involved. It did not even hide it, so this would not be the first time when Microsoft uses one proxy (Nokia) to feed another proxy (patent troll) to harass Google. It would be valuable to have the “smoking gun” showing why Mr. Elop (Microsoft’s mole in Nokia) gave patents to Vringo.
“It would be valuable to have the “smoking gun” showing why Elop (Microsoft’s mole in Nokia) gave patents to Vringo.”Microsoft paid Vringo an additional one million dollars. As Million put it: “The settlement also provides for Microsoft to transfer six patents to I/P engine, the patent-holding subsidiary of Vringo. “The assigned patents relate to telecommunications, data management, and other technology areas,” stated Vringo in its filing.
“Microsoft confirmed that Vringo’s description of the settlement was accurate, but declined further comment when asked about the case by Reuters.”
Here is more coverage for future record [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], inclusive of the Reuters article.
“These are very real conspiracies of common interests. What’s not in their interests? Android.”Microsoft uses some other proxies to harm Google, e.g. this long-going patent troll called MPEG-LA, which based on this analysis is compromising free multimedia codecs. As VAR Guy put it: “From headline-grabbing threats by Microsoft (MSFT) to more subdued court battles involving the cloud, the open-source ecosystem has a pretty good record of winning patent challenges. But a crushing defeat has now tarnished that record with Google’s (GOOG) grudging surrender in a campaign to make the open-source VP8 video codec ubiquitous across the Web. Free-software stalwarts need not panic, though: In this case, they can blame Google, not a systemic failure by the open-source world itself.”
No, to blame here are companies like Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft, which are behind MPEG-LA. We wrote about it in [1, 2, 3]. These are not unsubstantiated rumours or theories. These are very real conspiracies of common interests. What’s not in their interests? Android. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Setbacks for branding giant Apple and its affiliates, having just failed — yet again — to knock the Linux-powered market leader (Android) off course
“Apple”-branded products are not as perfect as Apple fans prefer to believe. As this new settlement shows, Apple too acknowledges this. To quote: “Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has filed a $53 million preliminary class settlement agreement in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, potentially allowing $200 refunds to iPhone and iPod Touch customers who claim they should be covered under warranties but were not because of liquid indicators in their devices.
“The copyright case against Android is without merit.”“A group of four class representatives were upset over Apple’s liquid damage policy prior to Dec. 31, 2009, in which the company would deny coverage under the standard warranty and purchased AppleCare Protection Plan for an iPhone whose headphone jack or dock connector was pink or red, indicating water contact, and for an iPod Touch with the same description before June 30, 2010.”
Apple has been very desperately trying to stop competing products, not by making better products but by litigation aiming at embargo. Seemingly, based on our interpretation and gradually-gathered evidence [1, 2, 3, 4], Oracle’s action against Android ties in with CPTN and the strong bond between Apple’s leader and Oracle’s leader. The copyright case against Android is without merit. It’s like SCO, thus it’s aptly named SCOracle sometimes. Just ask the many innovators and entrepreneurs who attest to it. Oracle is even antagonised by the CCIA, which we wrote about many times before. Even lawyers, or Law Professors, are against Oracle here. As Groklaw put it: “Bit by bit, the amicus briefs on behalf of Google in the Oracle v. Google appeal about the uncopyrightability of Java APIs are becoming available. They are all interesting in different ways, but they all agree — Oracle is wrong on the law and if it prevails, it will be a sad day for innovation. Copyright protection doesn’t extend to procedures, processes, systems, or methods of operation, and it shouldn’t.”
“This is bad news for Apple and Microsoft, fellow CPTN members. They were counting on patent-stacking and rising cost burdens for Android.”This is bad news for Apple and Microsoft, fellow CPTN members. They were counting on patent-stacking and rising cost burdens for Android. Joe Mullin, an excellent reporter in this area, shows Apple getting nailed by its own law firm now. Funnily enough, Muillin describes one troll there as “someone who no longer had much of a business beyond lawsuits.” Actually, that sounds like Apple, which is losing everything from technical leadership to market dominance to Samsung, including this embargo attempt. To quote the news, “The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t infringe on the design of the Apple iPad, according to reports. Although Apple does hold a European design patent, the Court has limited the applicability of the patent based on prior art. The iPad has predecessors, such as a Knight Ridder concept tablet dating back well over a decade before Apple’s product was released. The iPad may have a “unique character,” the court adds, but the Galaxy Tab is sufficiently different that an informed person can tell.”
Here is the news is Dutch. Apple is losing it fast.
It should be noted that in 2011 we asked readers to boycott Apple primarily because the company has become a direct, offensive threat to Linux, nothing less. Over time we realised that Mr. Cook, who had started some of Apple’s flirtations with patent threats (against Palm), would do nothing to reverse Steve Jobs’ legacy as a patent bully. Don’t expect Apple to change any more than Microsoft has ‘changed’ (from serial abuser to serial racketeer). █
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06.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 2:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
ChromeOS with Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot environment using crouton. This is pretty recent. Before that I was using stock Ubuntu.
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Linux is at a major tipping point, yet it faces being undermined from within. Jack Wallen calls for the Linux community to end the fighting between the Linux camps.
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This is, again, another rant along the lines of “fragmentation is killing FLOSS…”.
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No degree? No problem. Free software companies value aptitude and community involvement, and apprenticeships offer a leg up
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Desktop
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Further, it shows M$ has slipped to 64% share and “8″ is less popular than Vista… The site is not GNU/Linux-oriented but concentrates on market-share stuff with only a mention of Linux in the forums a few times a year, so it’s at least as reliable as NetApplications or StatCounter.
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Using a second monitor has been shown to increase productivity by 42% on average. Linux dual monitor support, however, is heavily fragmented. Although support is available, it differs greatly depending on the desktop environment being used.
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Server
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Well, that’s really not the question. Most of you probably don’t have a web server. If you do, you very well might be using something that’s not on our list. There are some great distros, known to make dependable and trouble-free servers, that aren’t listed here. The most glaring omission is probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), considered by some to be the Cadillac of server distros.
The list of GNU/Linux operating systems we’ve supplied in our poll is one we’ve compiled from looking at the choices of operating systems being offered by many hosting companies in virtual private servers (VPS) packages and on dedicated servers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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We’re back this Monday with our second profile (see the first one with Greg KH here) in the latest edition of 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks. This series focuses on the workspaces used by Linux kernel developers and aims to take us a little closer into the ways that some of the world’s best software developers do their work.
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The fourth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available.
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Qualcomm developers have posted their new mac80211 driver for the Qualcomm Atheros QCA98xx 802.11ac wireless adapters for use with the Linux kernel.
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PulseAudio 4.0 is now available and with it comes many changes to this commonly used but sometimes controversial audio server.
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Graphics Stack
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While there’s OpenCL drivers available for Linux, on Ubuntu there is no OpenCL driver shipped by default and the proprietary driver implementations aren’t always great.
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With new patches, multi-seat support for Wayland with the Weston compositor is beginning to work well. For showing off Wayland/Weston multi-seat handling, a video has been made.
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Benchmarks
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The news might be heavily slanted towards Haswell right now but for Linux users improvements to Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge GPU drivers are still a major focus. As there have been updates to the drivers as well as to Ubuntu, Phoronix felt it was time to revisit the performance metrics of the graphics on a Core i3 3217U. While they did see improvements when you compare it to previous driver versions it seems that there is still some work to do as the performance still lags behind the Win7 driver.
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Applications
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Email handling seem to continue to be a sore spot in the Linux software realm. Thunderbird and Kmail are two very popular applications, but both present with issues. Claws and Sylpheed had their own problems. Geary recently made an appearance, but is still far from production-ready. What’s a Linux user to do? Well, if your name is Steve Kemp, you just write your own.
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Hazel is a fantastic application that automates the task of managing files on a Mac. After moving to Linux, I nearly forgot about this essential task, and was stuck filing documents on my own. Luckily, a great new project named Maid by Benjamin Oakes is stepping up to fit the final piece of Linux desktop automation puzzle. Maid bills itself as “Hazel for hackers”, and while it is not nearly as refined as Hazel, if don’t mind learning a little Ruby, Maid can significantly increase your productivity.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team.
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The team of open-source developers and artists behind the Unvanquished game have released their sixteenth alpha with numerous improvements.
Unvanquished Alpha 16, serving as the project’s monthly development release for the month of June, brings:
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Drifter is an open-world sandbox space trading game with a procedurally-generated galaxy 100,000 light years across made up of tens of thousands of star systems to explore and features an original soundtrack by composer Danny Baranowsky.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The announcement of the students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) 2013 opens a new chapter in KDE contribution. KDE has participated in GSoC since its first season in 2005. Every year is special and exciting for both the students and the KDE Community.
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The list of accepted students for this year’s Google Summer of Code has been recently made public. Very fortunately, I’m among the 1192 students who will spend 3 months coding for various opensource projects.
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I hope that the majority of KDE contributors have at least heard of them, but they have not received much attention lately: The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
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My laptop is now dedicated to the new plasma developments, while my main system remains on the 4.x branch.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Freedreno Gallium3D graphics driver that’s a reverse-engineered incarnation of the Qualcomm Snapdragon driver, has support for the A320 graphics core coming along quite well. The A320 found in the Nexus 4 is now running the Freedreno 3D driver and can even handle bearing the load of the GNOME Shell desktop.
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There never will be a year when Linux conquers the desktop, because desktop computers are going to merge into tablet-style touch-driven devices and disappear. But desktop Linux was getting close, until Microsoft derailed it a few years back.
The GNOME project’s recent release, GNOME 3.8, served to remind me of the significance of Microsoft’s actions.
That’s because GNOME 3. 8 introduces a new GNOME desktop, something it’s calling Classic mode and which the project describes as “the traditional desktop experience”.
GNOME Classic mode brings to six the total number of GNOME desktops and takes the Linux and open-source community down a path of fragmentation they seem only too willing to venture down.
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Chakra 2013.05 is the third edition of the Arch-Linux-based distribution to come with KDE 4.10 – the latest version uses KDE 4.10.3 – and makes use of more applications built for the Qt-based desktop environment. For example, the default package manager is now Oktopi, a graphical frontend for pacman that has only recently made its way into the stable package repositories. The Akabei tool, a similar tool that the Chakra developers have been working on, is still unfinished. The new release also includes kio-mtp, which ensures that file manager Dolphin is able to access mobile devices that use the MTP protocol.
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Chakra 2013.05 is the third edition of the independently developed distribution to come with KDE 4.10 – the latest version uses KDE 4.10.3 – and makes use of more applications built for the Qt-based desktop environment. For example, the default package manager is now Oktopi, a graphical frontend for pacman that has only recently made its way into the stable package repositories. The Akabei tool, a similar tool that the Chakra developers have been working on, is still unfinished. The new release also includes kio-mtp, which ensures that file manager Dolphin is able to access mobile devices that use the MTP protocol.
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New Releases
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We are happy to announce our stable release for June 2013 – Manjaro 0.8.6 – a set of installation medias for Manjaro Linux. With this update we present to you more than 25 mirrors hosting our packages all over the world. To get the fastest mirror nearest to your current location we introduced pacman-mirrors, a tool adjusting your mirrorlist. You can rank your list by connection speed or by country. A random option is also available.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I officially became a packer on Mageia, Mandriva-based Linux distro. The date marks the creation of an account with access permission to repository and build system for me.
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Arch Family
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As expected, earlier today (June 1, 2013), the Arch Linux developers unleashed the monthly dual CD ISO image of the Arch Linux operating system for new installations.
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Allan McRae announced a few days ago that the Arch developers are preparing the merge of /lib, /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin and /usr/lib, in order to unify all binaries and libraries into a single directory.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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After spending a peaceful week with Debian’s latest Stable release I decided it was time to experiment with something a little less predictable, something a little more cutting edge. In short, I was looking for a distribution which would offer the opposite experience from Debian’s dependable, conservative approach. As it happens, the opposite of Debian Stable is Debian Unstable. One of the Debian project’s repositories is called “sid” and this repository provides a collection of new and ever changing software. The aptosid project tracks this sid repository and spins it into a cutting-edge distribution. The aptosid distribution is available in a variety of editions including KDE Full, KDE Lite (for people who wish to balance performance with features) and there is an Xfce spin. Each of these editions is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. For my experiment I decided to try aptosid’s Xfce edition, the download for which is 530MB in size.
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Dreamhost is one of the most popular web hosting companies and it has long been a strong support of Debian Linux.
Dreamhost isn’t making the move to Wheezy which was recently released. Instead Dreamhost is moving to Ubuntu – apparently because they see it as being more stable.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This project is awesome because we are all part of the same community and are all working on the same thing together. This project is important because it’s free and open, and it is reaching out to all kinds of people. This project is revolutionary because it is taking risks, redefining concepts, and developing more than just a product.
This project has a name: Ubuntu. And, therein lies the problem.
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Because Canonical was blamed for not bringing new features to Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, they work hard in order not to get the same treatment with Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander.
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Canonical isn’t the first Linux player to provide full support for the Ceph distributed storage system, but with Ubuntu’s popularity in the OpenStack world, the addition of this subscriber option is timely.
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Here’s an update on the Mir display server changes and the adjoining next-generation Unity 8 user-interface that were made to end out May.
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Since my current case mods are nearly finished (i still need a pump and the final photoshoot), i’m going to try and make a case mod based on Ubuntu. I have no money however, so i’ll either be re-using parts or needing sponsorship. I’ve sent out a few emails but i’ve not got any good responses. If anyone is willing to sponsor the build, let me know.
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One feature that didn’t land in Ubuntu 13.04 was the new Smart Scopes functionality in the Ubuntu dash. This feature greatly widens the scope (pun intended) of the dash returning results for a wide range of online services as well as local results. The whole system was re-architected to be more efficient, and designed to scale across our multi-device strategy.
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Canonical, through Daniel Holbach, had the pleasure of announcing on the last day of May that the community.ubuntu.com website is now online.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and Inktank, the company behind the open source distributed storage technology Ceph, have announced a collaboration which will result in an integrated and supported implementation of Ceph for OpenStack on Ubuntu. Ceph offers object and block storage for cloud platforms and has been available on Ubuntu for some time. The new arrangement means that customers of Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage Cloud will also get Inktank-backed support for Ceph.
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Flavours and Variants
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WattOS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and an ideal operating system for outdated computers.
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Last year, I installed and wrote a review for Linux Mint 13 Maya, the MATE version. It had worked really well on my laptop so even when Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” was released, I still kept using Maya. But after a year, I think its the time for an upgrade, and on the same occasion that Linux Mint 15 Olivia was recently out, I decided to download and install the new Linux Mint 15, MATE version.
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After many years of working away from my bedroom desk I was invited to a party at the opening of a new hotdesking space. Tech Cube is an attempt to create an entrepreneurial office space in Edinburgh. As I heard it the old Royal Dick (no sniggering at the back) vet school got sold to a nice guy with deep pockets who is turning it into an arts complex but the ugly wee tower block stuck on the side was not very artistic so get turned into this little project.
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Outside of education, the most popular use of a Raspberry Pi is to play multimedia. For starters, you can use it as a nifty little HTPC with the XBMC media centre. In this tutorial, we’ll transform the Raspberry Pi into the ultimate media streaming box.
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Intel has released new information on its more power-efficient next generation “Haswell” family of Core processors. Quad-core Core i7 Haswell CPUs will offer 15W TDP power consumption, down from 20W on similar Ivy Bridge processors, resulting in up to 9.1 hours of HD playback, while future tablet-ready dual-core parts could lower power consumption by up to 50 percent, to 7W TDP.
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Enea has integrated Yocto technology into its third generation of Linux to provide a comprehensive cross-development tool chain and runtime environment with guaranteed performance and quality of service (QoS) for communications systems.
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Inside Secure announced that its Linux- and Android-ready SafeZone Encryption Toolkit has achieved U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) FIPS 140-2 certification. SafeZone, which is integrated within Inside Secure’s MatrixDAR and QuickSec VPN Client for Android products, now secures data in transit over SSL/DTLSand IPSEC, as well as “data at rest” on Android devices.
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ARM announced a 28nm-fabricated Cortex-A12 processor design claimed to offer 40 percent higher performance than the Cortex-A9, while drawing the same power. The Cortex-A12 is paired with a power-efficient Mali-T622 GPU and Mali-V500 video coprocessor, and supports hybrid Big.Little SoC configurations in partnership with the Cortex-A7.
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Taiwan External Trade Council (TAITRA) and the International Forum Design Hannover (iF) have awarded the APC Paper the Design and Innovation Award at Computex 2013, which kicks off tomorrow and ends June 8.
APC Paper is one of two Neo-ITX form-factor computers announced by VIA Technologies in January. The other is the APC Rock, which is a plain motherboard (it has no built-in case).
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Phones
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Android
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Twitter has announced the availability of Vine app for Android devices. The app was already available for iOS devices. Android Vine users will get what iOS users don’t yet have – zoom. Twitters also teased that there may be some features which will be available exclusively to Android only.
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Insyde Software announced a development platform for deploying Android on Intel x86 reference platforms. “Software Platform for Android” offers production-ready software components built around Insyde’s UEFI Secure Boot technology and “Humanos” version of Android, and provides a variety of Android tools, as well as customization and testing services.
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Several Android tablets running on Intel Clover Trail+ Atom processors broke cover at Computex Taiwan. Intel’s dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom Z5260 is fueling a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet, as well as Asus’s 6-inch Fonepad Note and 10-inch MemoPad FHD10 tablets, while Asus also unveiled a hybrid 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio, combining an Android slate based on a 2GHz dual-core Atom Z2580 with a keyboard dock running Windows 8 on an Intel Haswell processor.
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A senior ARM executive claims that ARM is generations ahead of Intel, according to reports.
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We already know what ARM has planned for 2014′s high-end smartphones, but what about cheaper handsets? The company is preparing new mid-range silicon that it believes can offer increased performance in phones which could cost as little as $200 off-contract. The new Cortex-A12 core will offer 40 percent more performance as the existing Cortex-A9 which appears in chips like today’s Tegra 3, though it won’t be quite up to the standard set by the Cortex-A15 you’ll find in devices that have Samsung’s Exynos 5250 or Nvidia’s Tegra 4, to say nothing of next year’s Cortex-A57 based chips.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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ASUS have taken their love for Android one step ahead. As part of their products unveiling at Computex 2013, Taipei, ASUS announced a bold new member of their Transformer family, the Transformer Book Trio. This new device looks much like its not-so-distant cousin, the Transformer Book, but comes with a big differentiating edge, apart from some better hardware specs.
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Samsung, the Android market leader, has added two new tablets to its Android family of devices. The 8-inch tablet is powered by 1.5 GHz Dual Core processor and features a 8-inch WXGA TFT(1280 x 800, 189PPI) display. With 5Mpx main and 1.3 front facing camera, the tablet is complimenting its 7-inch devices. The tablet runs Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) with TouchWhiz on top of it. The tablet is clearly targeted at average tablet users who want it mainly for ‘reading.
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Tablets are just about ideal for school in terms of mobility, compact size and ease of use. One downside is loss/theft/breakage but that is offset by the lower cost of a tablet. Compare a ~$200 tablet with a notebook of ~$300 or ATX setup at ~$400. Some schools solve this problem by giving ownership of the tablets to students. Over the career of a student, two or three tablets is just a small part of the cost of education. Mobility may be just a matter of clearing desks/tables from time to time or students lugging tablets around instead of books. It’s all good. Typing is another downside but students tend to have good dexterity so they may be able to type acceptably well on touch-screens.
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HP’s first Android-based hybrid tablet, the SlateBook x2, is set to make its appearance in markets sometime in August 2013, as per HP’s official SlateBook page. With SlateBook x2, HP has finally joined ASUS in the Android-powered hybrid tablet market. For starters, a hybrid is a kind of tablet with a detachable keyboard that gives it a notebook-like experience.
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But what makes Clavin — an acronym for Cartographic Location and Vicinity Indexer — more unusual, its founders and others say, is that it is open-source software. Its source code is available for free so that users can change and customize it.
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In Atul Chitnis’s untimely death, the world of open source has lost a passionate advocate
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He was involved in much of India’s open source activities and was a columnist and consulting editor for PCQuest magazine. He was instrumental in setting up communities around Linux and open source software.
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FOSS.in founder and former PCQuest consulting editor, Chitnis, loses his battle against cancer and leaves a huge void to fill
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Tizen, the open source, standards-based mobile device platform that resides in the linux foundation now has a dedicated blinkx app, plus an open source blinkx video player. The blinkx API requires registration to see any documentation but more information on the video player for Tizen is available.
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Many years ago, there was HyperCard, included free with the Macintosh in the late 1980s. It got a lot of attention because it was one of the first tools that made it trivial to create GUI applications. Apple couldn’t figure out how to properly market or position it, so it eventually died of apathy. RunRev has been publishing Revolution, now named LiveCode, as a spiritual successor to Hypercard, for a while, and LiveCode now shares one more important trait with Hypercard: It’s now free.
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An open standard proposal by mapping giant Esri has failed after a backlash from open source developers within the geospatial community led it to withdraw from the process.
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I think it is invaluable, but let’s try to figure out how important is, as assigning a monetary value is almost impossible.
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On June 1, the City of Oakland will co-host ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. ReWrite Oakland will be an all day writeathon that will culminate with the launch of a new website called “Oakland Answers,” based on last year’s Code for America project “Honolulu Answers.”
Oakland Answers will be citizen-focused website, written in plain-language, that makes it quick and simple for people to find City information and services they are looking for online. City staff and the community will collaborate to answer common questions generated by citizens.
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Bugzilla is an open source bug-tracking system that prides itself on offering server software that is free but skillfully designed to help developers manage their work. Their installation list is long and robust. So, how do they manage to not charge expensive licensing fees like most other commercial vendors?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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If you use Google’s Chrome Mobile on either an Android or iOS device, you’re not alone. Google has been steadily increasing its focus on mobile browsing, even as Mozilla prepares to align its whole company strategy around its Firefox OS mobile platform. Now it looks like June will bring some significant news regarding Chrome Mobile, as Google has officially announced two events focused on it, one to take place on June 7, and one on June 13.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has confirmed earlier reports saying that Foxconn is entering into a “wide ranging partnership” with it to develop and use the Firefox OS in Foxconn devices. Mozilla’s SVP of Mobile Devices said: “This cooperation demonstrates the full potential of Firefox OS, the open Web mobile operating system, to enable not only the smartphone but also a wide range of mobile devices”.
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Contract manufacturer Foxconn is backing Mozilla’s open source Firefox OS. The company made the announcement in Taipei. Firefox OS already has a decent partnership will carriers and device makers to bring the OS to the market.
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Mozilla is gearing up for a major user interface overhaul for the open source Firefox web browser. Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year.
The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two releases in a year, to a rapid release cycle with new browsers released every six to eight weeks.
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Can the open-source, Linux-based Firefox mobile operating system become a mobile-space player? The question is far from answered but Mozilla has a new supporter: major electronics contract manufacturer Foxconn.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Piston Cloud Co-Founder Joshua McKenty says the OpenStack customer ecosystem has four emerging market segments. On one side are the customers who hire consultants to build them a cloud. On the other side are the IBM customers who will always be IBM customers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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As the LibreOffice project moves forward with the development on its 4.x branches we sometimes get the feedback that while new features are documented in detail as well as in a summarized fashion (on the wiki and on the website), it is not easy to understand what’s unique about the features in LibreOffice. We often hear things like “but their interface is outdated!” or people asking us to compare LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.
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From October 2013, Oracle will be releasing Java security updates as part of its Critical Patch updates. The announcement came as part of the company’s plans to revamp how it will secure Java over the coming years. In a blog post, the lead for the Java platform software development team, Nandini Ramani, outlined both the scheduling and technical security plans.
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CMS
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In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org.
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WordPress is most popular open source CMS Blogger Platform based on PHP and MySQL. It has many beautiful options and user-friendly plug-in, which help to custom temple and individual web page. WordPress Contain almost 60 million websites worldwide.
WordPress has strong and easy content management system. As WordPress is open source software it can be operate by any one for personal or professional use.
Best Part of WordPress is it’s plug-in, and this make wordpress out of the box. There are numbers of effective plug-ins in wordpress which can be use to develop website easily and make it user friendly.
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Education
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The Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop is being held this year in Philadelphia from June 2-4. To prepare for the workshop, online activites are were assigned to be completed in stages and culminated on June 1.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation’s monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 68,736 other activists. That’s 268 more than last month!
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Openness/Sharing
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If the concept of ‘open source’ (universal access and contribution to a budding idea/technology via free licence) can be applied to developing software, then why not to promoting research and development into finding cure of diseases like malaria? Former president APJ Abdul Kalam put forth this thought at an event in the city on Sunday.
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A grassroots organisation is using an open source business intelligence program to improve its chances of helping integrate ex-prisoners into the community.
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Open Access/Content
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Aaron Swartz was a tech whiz-kid and political activist devoted to a free and open internet. When he hacked a website to ‘liberate’ data, US authorities responded fiercely. He faced a fine of up to $1m and 35 years in jail. Then he took his own life. Here, his former girlfriend talks about the circumstances of his death
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Programming
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Coverity has published an annual update of those results over each of the last seven years.
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The GCC developers have now released GCC 4.8.1 – the latest update to the GNU Compiler Collection after completing their switch to C++ as the implementation language for GCC in March. With this release, the developers now consider their compiler to be the first to implement all major language features of the C++11 standard. LLVM’s Clang compiler is close behind, however, with its upcoming version 3.3 also implementing the major features of C++11. LLVM 3.3 is scheduled for release on 5 June.
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Version 2.0 of the open source Processing language and development environment for creative arts and visual design has been released. Processing was created in 2001 by Ben Fry and Casey Reas as a way for non-programmers to create electronic sketchbooks that could give instant gratification through visual feedback. Based on the Java language, but using a simplified syntax and graphics model, Processing allows creative users to build interactive, graphical programs, or sketches as they are called in Processing, quickly with a supporting simplified IDE. The project’s mission statement explains, succinctly, that
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Standards/Consortia
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Social gaming company behind FarmVille is also closing offices in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles to save $80m a year
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Hardware
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Eliminating complexity and bloat is undoing a lot of the lock-in that M$ has cultivated over the years. Instead of needing a super-computer on every desk, small businesses are discovering they just need a network and any old client and OS will do the job. Step forward, */Linux, ready, willing and able to work for less.
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Health/Nutrition
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NHS Confederation report says 64% of senior officials believe £20bn of ‘efficiency savings’ will worsen patient experience
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Security
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Google shakes up the InfoSec world with a new seven-day disclosure policy. But do top security researchers think it’s a good idea?
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New policy narrows window for software vendors’ public response to zero-day bugs discovered by Google researchers
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CCP Games has published details of repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks it has suffered over the last two days. The company develops and runs the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) EVE Online. Attackers targeted the “Tranquility” server cluster and managed to exploit a vulnerability in the backend services that support the game servers. After detecting the attack, CCP decided to take the cluster offline while “a taskforce of internal and external experts” investigated the situation. The company now says it has closed the vulnerability and all game services are back to normal.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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For Contreras, whoever the man was, “the important fact is that this was the person who ordered the injection” that allegedly killed Neruda.
Neruda’s former assistant Manuel Araya also said he believed the poet was poisoned by Pinochet’s agents.
The Nobel Prize winner’s body was exhumed on April 8, and is being analyzed by Chilean and international forensic specialists.
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Members of the military would receive a 1.8 percent pay increase in 2014 under legislation the House Armed Services Committee is considering on Wednesday.
Lawmakers are proposing a higher annual raise for service members next year than the 1 percent pay increase that President Obama recommended in his fiscal 2014 budget. Current law mandates a 1.8 percent boost for service members for 2014; the formula for determining service members’ annual pay increases is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Employment Cost Index and the growth in private-sector wages.
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The fact that drones have now caught the imagination of some in the US as the secret weapon that administrations since 9/11 have resorted to for killing – some call them assassinations – of terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, means there are questions now being asked of the legality of these engagements and the consequent issue of morality in using drones for such killings.
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Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.
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Jill Kelley, the woman described as a “Tampa socialite” who became enmeshed in last year’s scandal involving former CIA Director David Petraeus, filed a lawsuit Monday alleging employees of government agencies violated her privacy.
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As Attorney General Eric Holder wrings his hands in remorse over his feverish pursuit of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s phone records, it’s worth noting that, when it comes to national security leaks, some things are secret — and should be kept that way — for a reason.
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A proposed rule change to streamline the process of conducting security investigations of federal workers in sensitive posts potentially expands the number of positions deemed “sensitive,” and critics worry that the measure could be used to deprive whistleblowers of civil service protections.
The proposal, from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is intended to harmonize the way agencies determine eligibility for posts requiring security clearances, or otherwise afford access to sensitive information or restricted facilities. The goal is to allow agencies to rely on one another’s assessments for federal workers moving between departments, eliminating the need for duplicative investigations.
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Cablegate
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I was asked to appear twice, once after 7 and once after 8, and to explain why the case of Bradley Manning ought to concern people in the UK. BBC Breakfast is based in Salford. So the BBC sent me train tickets, booked a room in the Holiday Inn and organised a cab for me from Manchester Piccadilly. I had reached so far as Euston from St Pancras yesterday when I discovered, rather by chance that my slots on BBC breakfast had been cancelled. I was instead offered a single live interview at 6.40 am that would not be repeated.
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This is a critical time in US History, when the US Government, desperate to cover up war crimes it is committing in the Middle East and Africa, are imposing the most cruel and illegal torture against members of the US military; the sons and daughters of this nation who stepped up to fight for what they believed to be wars for our freedom. The US Government lied to them then, just as the US population is being lied to now by our government, that these wars are anything other than a profit machine for a few rich men. But now we are waking up.
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An Army investigator testified on Tuesday he found no evidence that a soldier accused of the biggest breach of classified information in U.S. history hated his country or had any terrorism-related material on his laptop.
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The trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the internet into a danger zone, legal experts have warned.
Of the 21 counts faced by the army private on Monday, at his trial at Fort Meade in Maryland, by far the most serious is that he knowingly gave intelligence information to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the open information website WikiLeaks. The leaked disclosures were first published by the Guardian and allied international newspapers.
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As Bradley Manning stands trial in the US, Channel 4 News looks back at what the soldier’s leaks published by WikiLeaks revealed – and the impact they had.
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Assange called the court-martial a “fully choreographed extravaganza” and said that rulings from the judge have compromised Manning’s ability to mount a complete defense.
The real defendant, Assange wrote, is the United States: “A runaway military, whose misdeeds have been laid bare, and a secretive government at war with the public. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists. We must not turn away.”
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The development concerning Mr. Assange came the day that the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning of the Army, who is accused of passing on sensitive diplomatic and military information, began in Maryland. Private Manning has pleaded guilty to 10 counts, but he has not admitted to the more serious charges of violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy, which could bring a life sentence.
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Alex Gibney’s new film, “We Steal Secrets,” is about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. It dutifully peddles the state’s contention that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher and that Bradley Manning, who allegedly passed half a million classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is not a legitimate whistle-blower. It interprets acts of conscience and heroism by Assange and Manning as misguided or criminal. It holds up the powerful—who are responsible for the plethora of war crimes Manning and Assange exposed—as, by comparison, trustworthy and reasonable. Manning is portrayed as a pitiful, naive and sexually confused young man. Assange, who created the WikiLeaks site so whistle-blowers could post information without fear of being traced, is presented as a paranoid, vindictive megalomaniac and a sexual deviant. “We Steal Secrets” is agitprop for the security and surveillance state.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.
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Muto, whose group is studying the prefecture’s future after the Fukushima No. 1 plant is finally decommissioned, told the crowd that since March 11, the people in Fukushima have had to make decisions every day on matters ranging from whether to evacuate and force children to wear masks to such mundane tasks as drying laundry outside and plowing their fields.
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Thousands of demonstrators have gathered in Tokyo to protest restarting of nuclear reactors the government is considering.
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California Democrats have suffered a setback in their anti-fracking efforts, but will continue to push for more rules on the controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
The California legislature opted not to follow in the footsteps of New Jersey and New York, defeating a bill that would have put a moratorium on fracking within the state until regulations could be imposed.
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Finance
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Selling off the Royal Mail is controversial enough without the Government throwing yet more petrol bombs through its letterbox. But that’s what ministers have done by selecting three banks most associated with the worst excesses of the financial crash – Goldman Sachs, UBS and Barclays – to handle the forthcoming privatisation.
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This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation received a generous donation of 726 bitcoins – worth $95,070.73 in United States dollars. See the blockchain transaction here.
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Wisconsin’s unemployed are being subject to a double attack by the state legislature. In the state that fell to 44th in the nation in job creation in March, a bill introduced to the Wisconsin State Assembly on May 24 would make it more difficult for jobless workers to collect unemployment benefits. Then, in what Representative Chris Taylor (D-Madison) called the “ultimate bait-and-switch,” a hearing on that bill occurred at the same time as a meeting of the Joint Committee on Finance that passed yet more changes related to unemployment insurance, which critics called even more extreme than the first.
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Student activists and their allies gathered outside Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting on May 30 to demand increased transparency and accountability from the nation’s largest student loan lender, and to draw attention to the worsening problem of student debt. Allie Gardner, a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison drove to Delaware from Wisconsin to attend the shareholder meeting and demand a meeting with the CEO; “Sallie Mae doesn’t exist to protect students, and they are not willing to work with students. They exist to profit off of us.”
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In the past month, the issue of debarment has bounced back-and-forth between committee hearings and the full council to the consternation of some council members who say it already gave clear signals for debarment to the city administrator’s office last year when it approved to begin the process that could ultimately lead to the prohibition of Goldman Sachs from doing business with the city.
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Meanwhile the odious Balls plans to find £100 million from pensioners while planning to blow that 1,000 times over and blow $100 Billion on the entirely worthless Trident missile system. Anybody who believes New Labour is the answer to any of our problems is certifiable.
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Heads of big tax-avoiding firms also set to attend secretive group’s four-day summit being held near Watford
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Censorship
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Facebook and Twitter reported to have been blocked in run-up to protests, with people turning to VPNs to broadcast content
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It’s that time again. Something bad happens and someone thinks it’s the “internet’s” fault. Where do they turn? Google. If people are seeing and/or doing bad things, it must be Google’s fault for not policing the internet thoroughly enough.
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Business secretary admits policing the internet is very difficult, as Keith Vaz calls for code of conduct to be set up for ISPs
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Those blocked from the PirateBay and in possession of a little common sense merely accessed TPB via a proxy and now, as Sky Broadband is stealthy blocking access to these proxies, one has to question, why?
When you consider that the people this will effect are the ones whom have sought out and facilitated a proxy for access to TPB, any blocking of these will merely result in another search? On top of that there’s hundreds of proxies out there with new ones being created far quicker than Sky Broadband or anyone else can block.
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Google has removed the first porn app from its Glassware hub, a store for Glass apps. The app was published by a porn company Mikandi and was aptly named Tits & Glass. Google banned and pulled the app within hours of availability. Mikandi says the app was already a success, “Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app.”
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Today is June 4th, a day pretty much like any other day in most parts of the world. But in China, June 4th has a unique significance because of the events that took place in Tiananmen Square on that day in 1989.
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Privacy
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“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.
The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.
The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.
“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.
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In past discussions around the use of technology to achieve school security, we have typically found that the practice has more to do with money than safety. Such was the case when a Texas school district issued RFID-chipped student IDs, the impetus for which was actually all about receiving government funding based on attendance. While there was backlash from students and parents in that case, the ire was likely somewhat muted by the fact that these were still basically just ID cards with a little extra juice in them.
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Pretty much everyone (myself included) has been reading Google+ wrongly. Because it bears many superficial resemblances to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter – you can “befriend” people, you can “follow” people without their following you back – we’ve thought that it is a social network, and judged it on that basis. By which metric, it does pretty poorly – little visible engagement, pretty much no impact on the outside world.
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Last Friday ORG met with representatives of EE to discuss the details of their mobile data analytics operation. The discussion was triggered by a Sunday Times article apparently claiming that Ipsos Mori was trying to sell highly personal information about EE customers to the Met Police, and our campaign following it.
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When the Obama administration started to pursue whistleblowers they took it to a whole new level than previous administrations by going aggressively after the journalists—the government watchdogs, and their whistleblowing sources by misusing government agencies.
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A recent, two-year bipartisan investigation by the U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations demonstrates concern – even among some members of Congress – that data centers (also known as “fusion centers”) represent a major source of government waste.
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Civil Rights
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On June 1, the next Blockupy action took place: a demonstration in Frankfurt. The march started peacefully – until riot police blocked the route. Fighting broke out, with a demonstrators throwing objects at police, and with police kettling demonstrators and attacking them with pepper spray. Exact numbers are not clear, but the Turkish news site Zaman mentions 7,000 protesters, signs reading ‘Make love, not war’ and ‘IMF, get out of Greece’”. Dutch media speak of “thousands of demonstrators”, which, translated back into the reality-based community, probably means many thousands.
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Be they lecturers or street vendors, Turkish nationalist or Kurdish separatist, the Taksim Square protests have brought together Istanbul’s disparate groups … but for how long?
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One of the hallmarks of the Tim Russert era of Meet the Press was the gotcha video: A politician would be confronted with some archival footage demonstrating that they had, once upon a time, taken a different position than the one they were taking today.
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A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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ORGCon2013 has expert speakers responding to the way the latest tragic news stories are being used for point scoring and clamping down on online freedoms, focusing on online censorship, the Snoopers’ Charter and the Digital Arms Trade, plus many more on relevant current issues.
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VICE PRESIDENT of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has spoken up on net neutrality policy, saying that choice, preferred services, and openness are key.
Kroes was talking about net neutrality and the open internet last week, and she returned to the topic today in a speech entitled, “The EU, safeguarding the open internet for all”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As anyone who has been following me recently will know, one of the most important geopolitical developments is the decision to negotiate a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which makes clear its kinship with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) currently being drawn up.
Equally, you will know that my chief concern with TAFTA/TTIP is not so much any section on intellectual monopolies – although those might well turn out to be ACTA 2.0 – but the clauses dealing with unmemorably-named “Investor State Dispute Resolution”.
I’ve explained what these are and why they are so dangerous on Techdirt (twice, actually.) In a sentence, this system allow a company to sue a country, directly, for alleged loss of future profits caused by tiresome things like environmental legislation or health and safety laws.
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Copyrights
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Chip manufacturer ARM has announced a Hollywood-approved video processor that enables content producers to prevent piracy on mobile platforms. The Mali-V500 video chip features hardware embedded anti-piracy capabilities which secure playback of high-definition video. According to ARM the new chip meets the toughest anti-piracy standards for mobile devices.
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Earlier this year, Industry Minister Christian Paradis introduced a bill aimed at ensuring that Canada complies with the discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The bill raises a host of concerns including granting border guards increased powers without court oversight or review. The bill had not been heard from since its introduction, but yesterday Paradis moved that the bill be read a second time and referred to committee for further study.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 9:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux versus Linux, not Linux versus Microsoft
Summary: Canonical is turning attention to a Linux competitor it wants to beat, setting aside its old aspiration of beating Microsoft
BACK in 2006 a company called Novell was struggling against Red Hat. It hadn’t caught up with the leader in GNU/Linux, so it liaised with Microsoft against Red Hat and started using patent FUD against Red Hat [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (in later years Novell finally realised this was counterproductive). Novell helped Microsoft normalise ‘Linux tax’. Canonical is going down a similar path right now. Having already starved a lot of GNU/Linux companies (e.g. Mandriva) and insulted them by saying there is no money in desktop GNU/Linux, Canonical is going after yet another Linux-powered rival.
Don’t expect to see any of this emphasised in the news. Failure of the press can have serious consequences. If the press helps oversight, then it sure is failing in a major way. Most of the coverage found is dodging the obvious observations and instead it does the easy job of reprinting Canonical’s claims.
Canonical is trying to tell us a story which helps it excuse Microsoft and start cannibalising Linux, instead. Here is a case of moving goalposts. FOSS Force wrote: “If you want to know why it’s considered fixed, you can read Mr. Shuttleworth’s remarks here for yourself. Or, you can save yourself the trouble and read what a Ubuntu user had to say: “The closure comment reads like something agreed to as part of a deal with Microsoft.”
“Yep. Does.”
“With Microsofters having infiltrated Ubuntu/Canonical at the top levels the distro can be led into complacency (bug #1) or down dead ends and controversy (rolling release).”
–iophkiophk says: “Complacency can still lose the desktop. Bill Gates has had only two tactics, leveraging his desktop monopoly and bluffing. Bluffing will always be an option, but the other goes away when the desktop monopoly goes away. Until then, it is a big threat. With the arrival of restricted boot, complacency can still lose the desktop, if not permanently at least for a long while. With Microsofters having infiltrated Ubuntu/Canonical at the top levels the distro can be led into complacency (bug #1) or down dead ends and controversy (rolling release).”
Here is Noyes having a go at it and the British press too. Not good enough. All the articles that we found about it neglect to challenge the claims. It’s like PR. Here is a good example of mere reprinting of damage control.
John C. Dvorak, a pundit, actually added an opinion of his own and so did FOSS Force . Dvorak must not be keeping up though. As someone told me, “Dvorak says that Shuttleworth says that linux won’t supplant windows, but android will. He means GNU, not Linux, since android is Linux as well. Dvorak fell at the first fence. He’s just a hack writer for NE corporations.”
“So basically, they move goalposts by going after Linux rather than Microsoft.”English press reports (or London-based branches, i.e. near Canonical’s main office) are not doing enough journalism. Why are they afraid of being sceptical? One British site says “Ubuntu claims to have fixed Microsoft” and another “Ubuntu closes first bug: Microsoft’s computing dominance”. These headlines don’t convey the story. Here is one article that dares question the wealthy messenger. It says: “It depends on how you look at it. On desktops and laptops, Windows is still the most dominant OS out there, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. But if you want to include mobile devices, which most research firms will say are cannibalizing PC sales, the numbers start to get interesting.”
So basically, they move goalposts by going after Linux rather than Microsoft. See “Ubuntu founder credits Android and iOS for reversing Microsoft’s dominance” (similar headline here). There is no doubt about Android becoming a major Linux player. Linux Journal has just dedicated a whole issue to it. As this article put it: “Instead of toppling Microsoft, Mark Shuttleworth says the Ubuntu community must focus on a Google Android alternative for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.”
“So cannibalising Linux is Shuttleworth’s priority now.”So cannibalising Linux is Shuttleworth’s priority now. Never mind if Microsoft is the abusive monopolist which even Mozilla has just dumped (like users) but onlu after public pressure (myself and others chastised it for it, as well as for similar deals in Thunderbird search).
It has become evident that even companies like Mozilla (platform-agnostic) are with better principles than Canonical’s. I really don’t know what happened to Ubuntu; it’s no longer about ubuntu. The only explanation I have for it is that Ubuntu is now run by former Microsoft staff. █
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Posted in Dell, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Ubuntu at 9:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image found in Reddit
Summary: Microsoft continues to dominate the “desktop” and GNU/Linux is made more expensive than Windows at Dell
THE ‘bug’ which Canonical won't fix still needs squashing. Now that Dell is dominated by Microsoft (see our newly-organised Wiki page about Dell) it is not shocking that Dell makes GNU/Linux more expensive than Windows, as before. Microsoft is paid for Ubuntu-based Dell PCs (Dell joined the Microsoft/Novell patent deal) and Pogson helps show the outcome using screenshots, too. He asks, “why does Dell promote “7″ by charging $20 less than GNU/Linux on identical hardware?”
He adds: “I suppose we should be happy that they offer GNU/Linux but that’s just the first step in liberating retail shelves. Price is still a barrier. The price of a licence for GNU/Linux is ~$0 so the product should be ~$50 less with GNU/Linux. At least be honest, Dell, and tip the teeter-totter in the right direction. Your customers would be glad to take GNU/Linux for $25 less.”
“No escape from Vista 8 on this machine, it’s still there even if you get Linux.”
–iophkThis is why we should not take as a given Canonical’s claim of pseudo victory and neglect of the community (the latest spin from Mr. Bacon is announcement of a subdomain, community.ubuntu.com).
Canonical wants to claim victory when GNU/Linux is taxed (Novell style). Linux is winning, but not on the desktop, which Ubuntu was all about. “No escape from Vista 8 on this machine,” writes iophk about this new article from the MSBBC, “it’s still there even if you get Linux.” A common phrase of wisdom is, do not declare victory prematurely. It may only help your enemy and lower morale in the long term. If people cannot get an OS-free machine from Dell, then by buying it with GNU/Linux (Ubuntu only) they help reinforce a Microsoft ‘Linux tax’. So much for choice, eh? Either way Microsoft is extorting the customer, irrespective of the ‘choice’. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
ZDNet in a nutshell: Microsoft PR and Microsoft censorship
Summary: ZDNet’s sponsor Microsoft has essentially managed to turn this tabloid into its de facto fan press, promoting Microsoft, demonising Microsoft’s rivals, and pretending to be a news outlet by withholding disclosures
The influence of Microsoft does not vanish when one leaves Microsoft. Sinofsky is currently teaching Harvard students, having engaged in illegal business practices in Microsoft. Other Microsoft executives who teach at business schools are delivering anti-GPL lessons, as we demonstrated before (e.g. Mundie). What does this teach tomorrow’s business leaders? That crime is an acceptable business model?
Over at ZDNet (part of CBS), Vista 8 is becoming some kind of a prestigious item. People whose whole livelihood is Microsoft and Windows write praises of Vista 8 all the time. There is a whole section dedicated just to this product brand, so it is safe to assume either corruption or sponsored (by Microsoft) editorial decisions.
“By letting this entryism be, ZDNet has become a Microsoft PR outlet…”Watch the latest Microsoft Zack spin (former Microsoft staff). He is dismantled by Pogson, but why should that be published in the first place? Former Microsoft staff covering Microsoft matters? In addition to Ed Bott, Microsoft Jack, Mary Jo Foley, and Perlow, current Microsoft staff?
By letting this entryism be, ZDNet has become a Microsoft PR outlet, leaving just the underfunded Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols to counter all the Microsoft PR after they fired Dana Blankenhorn and other FOSS bloggers got repressed or left.
“They even try to intervene in antitrust cases by misrepresenting the facts and neglecting took mention their ties to Microsoft.”The latest news from Vaughan-Nichols says that “Microsoft can only hope that its re-invention of Windows 8, Windows 8.1 aka Blue, works because currently stats indicate Windows 8 lags behind even Vista’s dismal market numbers.”
Don’t worry. Half a dozen Microsoft people in ZDNet sure can wash that away with a shower of Microsoft press releases and talking points. We gave many examples before. They even try to intervene in antitrust cases by misrepresenting the facts and neglecting took mention their ties to Microsoft.
ZDNet is a good example of how yellow journalism gets implemented. Treat with great caution. At ZDNet, Microsoft PR is being thrown around as routinely as monkeys fling their faeces. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
NSA must love Microsoft
Summary: With the departure of its CIO, Microsoft is diminishing as a technology company and instead it resorts to lobbying, extortion, and selling of users’ data
Some days ago we wrote about Microsoft’s increasing interest in spying on people, far more so than Google. There are many recent examples of acquisitions which Microsoft must have known would serve this kind of agenda. Now that Microsoft’s CIO is leaving, joining the exodus of many like him, we are finding that Microsoft flirts with the ever-growing spying business (subsidised by taxpayers through the increasingly-paranoid government). It is not just Skype but also Xbox, which in addition to watching users in their living room is trying to brainwash them, based on new patents.
” Microsoft also lost many billions of dollars trying to compete online. Google and other GNU/Linux-using companies crushed Microsoft there.”Microsoft tried, in vain, to be a mobile devices company. Linux won that segment. Microsoft also lost many billions of dollars trying to compete online. Google and other GNU/Linux-using companies crushed Microsoft there. Can Microsoft and Facebook (remember that they share users’ data) rise to power owing to state subsidies for spying? They have an edge and advantage already. Windows has back doors (the NSA’s other half, the one aside from spying, is cracking PCs/encryption) and Microsoft collects a lot of data on people, including private audio and video.
Watch out for Microsoft. It is a very dangerous company, especially now that it’s imploding, resulting in many lawsuits/extortion (many by proxy) and new user-hostile technologies that are not just un-Constitutional but also illegal and inhumane. Shown at the top is Keith B. Alexander, who many Americans don’t realise is America’s public enemy #1 (ignore that grin of his, he just heard and recorded your phone sex for permanent record). █
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