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05.31.14

Manufacturing Propaganda in Microsoft-funded Circles to Belittle FOSS and Magnify Microsoft

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 3:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Some timely examples of facts being abandoned and an alternative reality being introduced by Microsoft-funded firms and lobbyists

FOR nearly 8 years we have focused on tackling FUD and showing where the FUD came from. Public perceptions and truths (objective facts) are an abyss apart when massive PR agencies do what they’re paid to do, which is to screw with public perceptions and drive the population further away from the truth (for a profit).

In Microsoft’s parallel universe, only the desktop counts and GNU/Linux is still somewhat of an underdog with 1% market share. Microsoft relies on corruptible voices to spread such myths and it is improperly counting share in other areas, not just on desktops/laptops.

Charlie Demerjian, whom Microsoft tried to corrupt with some freebies (he declined), has published this long article titled “Microsoft is now irrelevant to computing, and they want you to know it” (highly recommended read).

To quote one portion: “With two major cave-ins in the past few weeks, Microsoft is screaming at the top of its lungs about how irrelevant it is. If you didn’t understand the fall of Microsoft from powerful monopolist to computing afterthought, let SemiAccurate explain it to you.

“For the past few decades, Microsoft has been a monopoly with one game plan, leverage what they have to exclude competition. If someone had a good idea, Microsoft would come out with a barely functional copy, give it away, and shut out the income stream of the innovator. Novell, Netscape, Pen, and countless others were crushed by this one dirty trick, and the hardware world bowed to Redmond’s whims.”

Here is more: “Competition was likewise non-existent, anyone that tried was shut out of new PCs, shut out of interoperability, had revenues devastated by free offerings from Microsoft, and many other similar monopoly games. Microsoft was the proverbial fat and lazy behemoth that was quite content to count their money and turn screws on customers whenever they needed more. If you doubt the seriousness of this stagnation, ask yourself what the last innovation Microsoft came up with was, not evolution but true innovation. I can’t think of any either.”

Here is the part about GNU/Linux: “Similarly with Linux, Microsoft just made sure that no OEM could bundle it with PCs, any that tried paid a high price. It was shut out. On the datacenter side however, Microsoft couldn’t force bundle Windows Server, customers put their own software on. For some strange reason, most large datacenters balk at paying $2000+ per two sockets for something that is vastly inferior to manage, slower, more resource hungry, and completely insecure versus the free alternative.

“Microsoft’s server market share went from 66%+ of sockets to less than 30% in five years, mostly due to datacenters and consolidation. Please don’t look for this to be reflected in the numbers from the big consulting houses, they are too afraid of revenue loss to count sockets. Instead they use the metrics that their customers want them to use, and only count sales of servers from certain vendors and sold OSes, a small fraction of the market. Microsoft didn’t just lose the server market, they were blown out of the water and have no way to recover. Other than internal services, Microsoft is just not relevant in the cloud. If you doubt this, go price a server instance from Rackspace, keep hardware constant and only vary the OS. Game over.”

Demerjian is alluding right there at the start to Gartner and IDC, two firms that create an illusion that Microsoft is relevant on servers (in top Web servers Microsoft is at around 9% and in HPC Microsoft is hardly even at 1%).

Then come mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) which basically count as computers quite comparable to laptops. Demerjian writes: “That said most people didn’t grasp how badly Microsoft had fallen, they were totally irrelevant and had no more monopoly to leverage. This played out with the Windows 8 launch, Microsoft was desperately trying to stay relevant in mobile by forcing the entire computing ecosystem to adopt their new mobile OS. In theory this would lead to software being leveraged across platforms, and between Office and Exchange, they could force people to use Microsoft mobile products.

“A funny thing happened though, an entire generation of users didn’t want to give up their beloved iPhones or Android devices for an inferior, slower, more expensive, app-free Microsoft device. Microsoft repeated their threat loudly, “Use our mobile OS or you won’t get Office or Exchange on your phone!” To their abject horror the response was almost universally, “OK, bye”.”

Microsoft is now attempting to fight Linux domination in mobile devices by taxing them. Mike Masnick becomes an accidental victim of spin and deception from Microsoft lobbyist Florian Müller, spreading another myth by naming only potential costs and making it look like patents add up to $120 on a phone. It’s a shame that Masnick fell for it. Everyone knows that many phones cost far less than $120 and the nature of this warped analysis seeks to ‘normalise’ patent extortion against the likes of Android/Linux. There is agenda there. Hopefully Masnick will recognise this error because other than that he has done great work exposing Microsoft trolls like Intellectual Ventures that still do evil every month (usually via proxies). Masnick has also covered the sham of a ‘reform’ against patent trolls, which did not happen because trolls like Intellectual Ventures lobbied Congress for years and are still doing everything to keep this broken system of endless scope in place.

In order to artificially make Android more expensive Microsoft has been passing patents to patent trolls such as MOSAID. This is how Microsoft ‘competes’. Microsoft wants taxes on phones to be seen as ‘normal’, or a status quo. █

05.30.14

Microsoft-backed Mono is Still Trying to Spread to More Linux-Based Platforms

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

API trap and dependency

Summary: Amid openwashing of .NET there are yet more attempts to make mobile Linux dependent on Microsoft’s APIs

The peripheral Microsoft Corporation (allies/staff at companies such as
Xamarin) continues to push Mono into all sorts of Linux-centric projects such as MeeGo (we covered this in prior years) and now its successor Tizen is at risk. “Kitsilano Software are bringing C# to Tizen, in the form of the MonoTizen project,” says this article. This is part of the openwashing of .NET and also the intrusion of patented/copyrighted Microsoft APIs, not to mention code (Mono is partly written by Microsoft, with Microsoft copyrights and Microsoft licences). Serdar Yegulalp continues to contribute to this issue (lots of .NET openwashing this month [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). Several expected sites aid a perception management campaign of Microsoft by painting .NET as “open”, including folks over at IDG, whose bias is now further revealed because the ‘former Computerworld editor” (top IDG site) calls FOSS vendors “losers”.

Watch this other Microsoft-friendly (.NET-boosting) site openwashing .NET from another angle:

JetBrains recently open sourced Nitra, a set of tooling for working with programming languages on the CLR.

The CLR is proprietary; hence, this Nitra thing is incompatible with the promise of FOSS. But that is the type of nonsense promotes by CodePlex and other Microsoft openwashing proxies. It is not about FOSS; rather, it is about looking kind of like FOSS, deceiving people and luring them into lock-in or spyware.

.NET APIs are a dangerous threat especially after the CAFC's decision in Oracle vs. Google.

One story that we have ignored in recent days (it’s not in daily links) is about Mono. There has been a lot of media coverage of Unity3D because of a new release (days ago). Almost nobody who reported on bother to say it was Mono-plagued. Some FOSS sites gave it positive coverage, making the risk more alluring. █

Software Patents Are Still a Threat to Europe Due to ‘Unitary’ Patent

Posted in Patents at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Large corporations unite to occupy Europe

Unitary Patent
Picture from FFII

Summary: New report about the unitary patent and its progress in Europe which worries European software proponents because it can bring software patents (and patent trolls) to the whole of the EU

Glyn Moody has read a PDF-formatted document which circulated among the likes of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (whose Web site has been almost dead for several years, just like its vocal members’ sites). This document deals with the state of the Unitary Patent and it says that things are not looking good. “That’s particularly the case for software patents,” writes Moody, “where the US experiences shows us how much damage trolls can cause. The UPC will open up Europe for software patent trolling on a massive scale.”

It has been a while since we last wrote about software patents in Europe. It does not look like things are improving. Perhaps we will return to covering these issues soon (time permitting). █

WhiteSource is a Trojan Horse

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

White horse

Summary: Behind the negative marketing of WhiteSource, which seeks to portray FOSS as a risk and WhiteSource as the solution

Last year we wrote about FUD from WhiteSource, which sounds like something 'open source' but is actually against it. An article by Microsoft proponent (for decades) Scott M. Fulton helps amplify the signal of WhiteSource, stating: “Software development teams continue to implement open source components as boilerplate, cut-and-paste code. Now, one repository service may have a way of estimating the costs.”

Like Black Duck‘s ‘software’, this effort continues to create fear and not too surprisingly some companies blacklist sites where FOSS code is available. A lot of new sites that target IT managers help spread the message from the likes of Black Duck. It’s all business.

You know who rips off stuff? Black Duck. Just ask Palamida. It’s not developers who rip off others. It’s the one hypocritical exploiter of the fear created by oneself. Black Duck is not alone in this meta ‘industry’; there are other such firms, led by ‘former’ Microsoft managers. Their business model is beneficial not only to themselves but also to Microsoft.

Some companies try to make money out of fear, specifically the phobia against FOSS. We need to learn to reject such companies. They are not trying to help. The more afraid people are of FOSS, the more money they make. █

When NSA/PRISM/Microsoft Skype Turns Voice Conversations Into Text in Real Time

Posted in Microsoft at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Clapper must be unwittingly impressed

Microphone

Summary: Microsoft reveals that the NSA-friendly Skype is already capable of turning voice into text in real time, adding to existing concerns over Microsoft ‘reading’ people’s IM sessions in real time (and following links)

Thanks to some good reporting from Germany we already know that Microsoft is reading people’s text chats in Skype (almost certainly saving them all with no retention policy to limit this secret collection). Microsoft is now using Skype for bribes in Brazil, as we already noted the other day, but we should importantly remember that Microsoft is a PRISM company, the first one in fact (Microsoft is how PRISM started). Skype is a spying operation, so when Slashdot says Microsoft processes speech at its end we know there is no node-to-node communication. Microsoft intercepts the sound and processes it. Microsoft shows it has capability of saving as text people’s voice conversations as text as well (easier to process and later to search or assign triggers to).

Welcome to 2014. With strong NSA connections Microsoft sure became Stalin’s dream (Stallman’s phrase). Careful what you say. █

Desperate Microsoft Too Busy Attacking the Competition (Primarily GNU/Linux), Not Creating Products

Posted in Microsoft at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The sinking ship tries to pull FOSS down with it

Rodrigues island

Summary: Some of the latest examples of Microsoft disruption (interfering with the competition) rather than Microsoft production

Earlier this week we showed how Microsoft (through CIS) was recruiting moles to help fight FOSS by confusion and infiltration. It is typical and very routine an exercise for Microsoft. Nokia is one recent example. Microsoft is actively recruiting moles who would come across to the public as pro-FOSS while also pro-Microsoft (while on Microsoft’s payroll), contributing — covertly — to a false perception that Microsoft is now accepted by FOSS and is a FOSS player. It is a bit like the strategy of undercover spies; it’s how the CIA infiltrates humanitarian groups (such as HRW) and pushes its agenda as pro-human rights, or commending the CIA (from supposedly humanitarian groups) for its aggressive action under the guise of “pro-rights” (women’s rights, democracy, freedom and so on).

Microsoft is not genuinely changing. It hardly changes anything at all. It is definitely not honest about changing its attitude towards FOSS. All it does is send AstroTurfers to critical sites like Techrights (as Microsoft did with horrible insults) while running attack ads against FOSS projects. All that Microsoft is trying to change (and barely succeeds at doing) is the public’s perception. Microsoft’s ads that seek to recruit moles state this explicitly. Under the supposed leadership of Satya N. Microsoft continues to extort FOSS using patents. Ballmer seems to be moving further away from Microsoft, but Gates who is the bigger bully (always has been) recrntly increased his role at Microsoft. Wired (Condé Nast) helps openwash Gates these days, but this is clearly part of the marketing charade. People like Mozilla’s CEO get pushed out with much help from Microsoft-linked press (never mind the bizarre nature of these tactics [1]), but a longtime criminal like Gates gets portrayed as a Saint. He buys media companies and pays many off, including a lot of blogs.

Speaking of marketing, watch Samsung‘s actions and this news about what Microsoft does to Android and Linux:

Microsoft sends astronauts to troll Samsung’s “Terminal Galaxy 5”

[•••]

With that said, Microsoft, you could’ve done better, though this is still a class above your ill-fated Scroogled campaign against Google.

Microsoft won’t get far with this strategy, but it sure can cause a lot of damage. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Bill Maher rails against political correctness

    A few weeks ago, the CEO of Mozilla was forced to resign because it was revealed that in 2008, he supported Prop. 8, California’s ban on gay marriage. A bad law, yes, but 52% of Californians voted for it. Do they all have to resign? Obama was against gay marriage in 2008! Does he have to resign? Hillary came around just last year. Can she be President?

Links 30/5/2014: GOG GNU/Linux Expansion, LGP Down, Valve Delays

Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Oregon’s GMO Sellout

      Even though the state of Oregon enacted a law to override the ability of localities to regulate their own food systems, local ballot measures to ban GMO crops passed overwhelmingly in Jackson and Josephine Counties on May 20, according to news reports. “We fought the most powerful and influential chemical companies in the world and we won,” Elise Higley, a local farmer with the anti-GMO group Our Family Farms Coalition, told The Oregonian. The Progressive magazine tells the backstory below and reveals that the preemption measure shares language with an ALEC model bill.

    • Cynical? – It’s bad for your health……apparently.

      That’s right. If you don’t buy into everything told you, it’s bad for your health. This is the stuff of dreams for anyone who wants you to buy into everything they say. I’m currently writing about the City of London Police so I’ll pass this link onto them, I’m sure they can use it. The researchers, who amongst the many things they fail to grasp (from the report I read) go on to say:

    • Britain does so much cocaine it’s now in the drinking water

  • Security

    • WordPress Gets Flagged for Insecure Cookie Risk
    • Exim 4.82.1 security release
    • Wednesday’s security advisories
    • Write secure code using Open Web Application Security Project guidelines

      The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving software security. OWASP works on the principles of open source software, particularly the idea that the community is the force of creation and contribution. The unique aspect here is that OWASP is not software, rather a set of guidelines created by the community to help developers plug security holes in their code.

      Security has become a very important aspect of software development lately, but not everyone is aware of ways to write secure code. You may think, “my team of developers is very experienced/skilled/efficient, they can write 100% secure code,” but if you follow the news you are aware that even bigshot websites are regularly brought down or have their user data compromised. Your website should be well-prepared to avoid such attacks by following these guidelines by OWASP.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • After Safety Concerns Over Its Southern Leg, Keystone XL Is Getting New Regulations

      TransCanada will have to meet two extra safety conditions if it gets the go-ahead to build the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, due to concerns from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that defects could occur during construction.

      PHMSA slipped in the two conditions towards the end of the appendices of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement, released this January. They dictate that TransCanada hires a third-party contractor chosen by PHMSA to monitor Keystone XL’s construction and report any faulty construction techniques back to the agency. In addition, TransCanada will be required to adopt a quality management program to make sure that Keystone XL is “built to the highest standards by both Keystone personnel and its many contractors.”

  • Finance

    • Exceptionalism – The Mind Killer

      It is so deeply embedded, so seamlessly rooted and integrated into what we think of as ‘our self’, that when expressed oftentimes it is (intentionally) mistaken for something else entirely. Our indoctrination begins at birth in tiny little ways, mostly personal in nature, with our parents and care givers the initial delivery system. From day one out of the womb we are conditioned via adoring smiles and Coochie Coochie Coo’s that we are exceptional, one of a kind and King of the house. A few minutes of screaming has everyone running to stem the tears and change the pee pants. And it is all downhill from here.

    • Death of money’: Author Rickards predicts collapse of global monetary system

      The collapse of the monetary system awaits the world in the near future, says financial expert James Rickards. Russia and China’s desire to rid the US dollar of its global reserve currency status is an early sign of the “increasingly inevitable” crisis.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Do you know what information your smart device collects?

      Are you aware that smart devices can collect information about your personal activities? If not, you are one of the 53% of British internet users that were unaware that smart devices such as smart TVs, fitness devices and in car-navigation systems can collect data.

    • Actual Former Government Official Makes Totally Ridiculous Argument That Snowden’s ‘Harms’ Are That Other Countries Are Angry

      Sometimes you have to wonder about people who hold government positions and the absolutely ludicrous statements they make. Following Ed Snowden’s big NBC interview, NBC apparently asked former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to respond to Snowden’s pretty convincing claims that all the hand-wringing about “harms” he caused have no basis in fact. In the interview, Snowden points out, accurately, that no one has yet been able to show a single individual harmed by the revelations. McFaul then makes what may be the single dumbest statement we’ve heard to date on this whole debate, arguing that the “harm” is that other countries now trust us less — and that this is somehow Snowden’s fault, rather than, you know, the fault of the NSA which is doing the surveillance…

    • Kerry Tells Snowden to “Man Up” and Come Home

      A near-complete failure as Secretary of State (if you are not sure, read this), Kerry is apparently relegated within the Obama administration to the role of mumbling bully-boy statements, faux-machismo rantings whose intended audience and purpose are very, very unclear. Did Kerry think he might persuade Snowden to take up the challenge and fly back to the U.S.? Maybe meet Kerry in the Octagon mano-a-mano? No, Kerry sounded much more like Grandpa Simpson than America’s Senior Diplomat. – See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/29/kerry-tells-snowden-to-man-up-and-come-home/#sthash.PUdzNxZj.dpuf

    • How will government share your data?

      The Cabinet Office has started an early pre-consultation process looking at removing barriers to sharing or linking different databases across government departments. The rationale is that this can help Government “design and implement evidence based policy, for example to tackle social mobility, assist economic growth and prevent crime”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • City of London Police – Getting results or using weasel words?

        iracy is wrong, piracy is theft. That’s that we are told. I personally refuse to watch the trash from Hollywood or your mainstream music et al, mainly because I think its manufactured nonsense aimed at markets either too lazy or too slow witted to find entertainment in more engaging mediums (such as reading, listening to the radio…you heard of those?)

        Now despite Piracy NOT being theft (if applied to Sec 1 of the Theft Act in the UK, which for me clearly defines what theft is), today we are looking at some claims made by the City of London police and finding out exactly what they are doing to combat the threat they claim of “piracy”.

        This is not an article on if you agree with infringement of copyright or not. I support CC and FOSS – I have no care or interest in the industries which make these multi-million pound movies, nor the movies themselves.

        [...]

        City of London Police – Why won’t you name the sites you claim to have closed down? – I believe I know the answer and its because they are not closed at all and just some word play by people who either don’t understand the concepts they are talking about or are intentionally looking to mislead. – Is there any other reason? Are my opinions incorrect? Please by all means give your reasons.

05.28.14

Links 28/5/2014: TogetherJS, PHP Next Generation

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is ‘Open’ the ‘Organic’ of the IT Industry?

    First let’s talk about what ‘open’ is not. Open is not merely publishing an API, it’s not submitting your proprietary way of doing things to a standards body, nor is it throwing some code on GitHub. These things aren’t enough.

    Open isn’t about fundamentally changing the equation for the end user. What end users of technology are looking for is the ability to select technology from multiple vendors and have it work together. The ability to not be dependent on a single vendor and to switch non-disruptively if a vendor chooses to go in a different direction.

    So what is ‘open’? First of all it’s something everyone can see, everyone can access, the community can change and anyone can build on. It’s not easy, it’s hard. Good open source is open. How do you know good open source? Look at the community. If there is diversity, meritocracy and a high level of activity it’s probably ‘open’. Hadoop, MySQL, Linux, and OpenStack all make the grade. Cloud Foundry is getting there; Open vSwitch has really come a long way.

  • Nginx passes Apache as Web server of choice among top sites

    According to W3Techs’ figures, Nginx runs 38.8 percent of the top 1,000 sites, with Apache Httpd running 33.7 percent and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running 9.2 percent. The overall rankings still put Apache at the top, though, with 60.5 percent of all known sites running Apache and only 20.7 percent running Nginx. But the closer one gets to the top of Alexa’s rankings, the greater the odds the site in question is running Nginx.

  • Top 4 open source alternatives to LDAP

    When you want to set up an application, most likely you will need to create an administrative account and add users with different privileges. This scenario happens frequently with content management, wiki, file sharing, and mailing lists as well as code versioning and continuous integration tools. When thinking about user and group centralization, you will need to select an application that fits your needs.

  • Blender 2.71 Test Release Issued With New Features

    Blender 2.71 with its Cycles rendering now supports fire and smoke rendering, deformation motion blur, various optimizations, and support for NVIDIA Maxwell cards when it comes to CUDA support. Blender 2.71 also adds OpenGL render options to its UI, animation improvements, multi-threaded animations within the Blender Game Engine, and many improvements within the Freestyle NPR Rendering.

  • Open Source in high integrity systems

    For example, the Linux operating system is pervasive and open source tools such as the GCC compiler collection are widely used. I even have a copy of Linux running the refrigerator in my kitchen.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Can you name all ten OpenStack releases?

      Can you name all of the OpenStack releases? It’s harder than you think, even for some of the core members of the development team.

      During OpenStack Summit, a sampling of attendees were surveyed to see if they could. The results were, well, mixed.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Expands Open-Source High-Availability with MySQL Database Fabric

      Oracle is aiming to make it easier for open-source users of its MySQL database to scale.

      Today Oracle announced the new MySQL Fabric technology as an open-source tool that is available in the MySQL Utilities 1.4 release.

      “If you want to build a high-availability MySQL database, you typically have to setup replication, manage the failover and write some scripts to manage the failover,” Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL Engineering explained toDatabaseJournal. “MySQL Fabric hides most of that and will manage the high-availability for you.”

    • Oracle launches database scalability service MySQL Fabric
    • Met Office selects 2ndQuadrant to help with data migration to open source

      The Met Office has selected PostgreSQL specialists 2ndQuadrant to provide training, support and consultancy as the weather service bids to shift from proprietary database solutions that require a licence fee to other alternatives.

      The selection of 2ndQuadrant comes after two pilot projects went into production in April when the Met Office’s locations management database (Strabo) and LIDAR (light detector) data capture system were implemented again into object-relational database management system PostgreSQL and open source software program PostGIS.

  • CMS

    • Open source CMS Tendenci launches service provider program

      The creators of open source CMS project Tendenci want to free up time to focus on developing the platform, so they’ve launched the Web Alliance Marketing Program to partner with service providers to help organizations with their post-deployment needs.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • TogetherJS

      Want to add real-time collaboration to your Web application? Mozilla’s TogetherJS is worth a look.

    • PHP Next Generation

      Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted.

      During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API’s should be changed.

      This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API’s.

    • PHP Working On A “Next Generation” Branch

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Counties sue narcotics makers, alleging ‘campaign of deception’

      Two California counties sued five of the world’s largest narcotics manufacturers on Wednesday, accusing the companies of causing the nation’s prescription drug epidemic by waging a “campaign of deception” aimed at boosting sales of potent painkillers such as OxyContin.

  • Security

    • The Half-Baked Security Of Our ‘Internet of Things’

      It is a strange series of events that link two Armenian software engineers; a Shenzen, China-based webcam company; two sets of new parents in the U.S.; and an unknown creep who likes to hack baby monitors to yell obscenities at children. “Wake up, you little slut,” the hacker screamed at the top of his digital lungs last summer when a two-year-old in Houston wouldn’t stir; she happened to be deaf. A year later, a baby monitor hacker struck again yelling obscenities at a 10-month-old in Ohio.

    • Apps on your Android phone can take photos without you knowing

      A researcher has demonstrated that it’s possible for malicious attackers to create an Android app that will surreptitiously take pictures and upload them to a remote server without the user being aware of or noticing it.

    • Avast Takes Down User Forum After Breach

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • No UK troops for Nato’s Ukraine war games

      We note with great concern that UK and US troops will participate alongside Ukrainian troops in joint military exercises on Ukrainian territory in July as part of NATO’s Rapid Trident manoeuvres. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Its participation in military exercises by a nuclear-armed alliance with a first-strike policy can only further destabilise the situation in the Ukraine, making it more difficult to achieve a political resolution to the crisis.

    • One Year After Obama’s Big Drone Speech, Many Promises Left Unkept

      One year ago last Friday, President Barack Obama gave a major address on drones, targeted killing and terrorism. The president and administration officials promised that the drone program would operate within limits protecting civilians, control would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon, and a new era of transparency would begin.

      The number of drone strikes has fallen since then, but it is far from clear that the drop was a result of a shift in administration policy. Frustrated in part by Congress and the facts on the ground in Pakistan and Yemen, when it comes to drones, Obama has fulfilled few of his promises.

    • Drones will be focus of protests at Obama’s speech
    • NYPD Renews Push For Drones To Help Police The City

      While unmanned aircraft could offer outstanding benefits to both the NYPD and the city’s fire department, these benefits may not outweigh the concerns of citizens and civil liberties groups.

    • Robot Warfare: What Happens When Humans Cede Combat Duty to Automated Forces?

      With the increasing use of drones in military operations, it is perhaps only a matter of time before robots replace soldiers. Whether fully automated war is on the immediate horizon, one researcher says it’s not too early to start examining the ethical issues that robot armies raise. In her recent thesis on the ethics of automation in war, Linda Johansson, a researcher in robot ethics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, suggests that it is necessary to reconsider the international laws of war, and to begin examining whether advanced robots should be held accountable for their actions.

    • Is US Domestic Case Law Providing a Moral Hazard for Covert Killings of Americans Overseas?

      One of the most controversial decisions of the Obama presidency has been his authorization to target and kill Americans overseas who decide to take up arms against the United States. In 2011, a drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who moved to Yemen and became a high level cleric within al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, which has been deemed by the United States to be al-Qaeda’s most dangerous branch. According to US officials, Awlaki was too dangerous to be left alive as his work and teachings were radicalizing others to join in jihad.

    • White House Can’t Regain a Deterrence It Never Had

      The stories previewing President Obama’s upcoming foreign-policy address at West Point leaves the impression that the president might somehow just verbalize a word cloud of catchphrases instead of an actual speech. The New York Times story over the weekend, for example, explains that the president will seek to “chart a middle course between isolationism and military intervention.” It quotes national-security aide Ben Rhodes as saying the speech, at tomorrow’s commencement ceremony, is “a case for interventionism but not overreach.”

    • The Uncomfortable Truth Is That Targeted Killings Are Legal Until Congress Says Otherwise

      At the most superficial level, Judge David Barron, who the Senate confirmed last week to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, is easy to compare to the infamous Bush Administration attorney John Yoo. Yoo authored several infamous memos while he was a senior attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which argued that it was perfectly legal to torture so-called “enemy combatants” captured during the Bush Administration’s efforts to fight terrorism. Barron, also as a senior attorney in the same Justice Department office, authored several memos concerning the use of drones to target suspected terrorists during the Obama Administration — including at least two concerning whether the president may order a senior enemy combatant who is also an American citizen killed without trial.

    • Feds seek extra redactions in drone memo

      The Justice Department plans to ask a federal appeals court to delete additional material from a drone-related legal opinion before it’s made public—redactions that would go beyond those the court approved last month, a government lawyer said in a legal filing Tuesday night.

      Last week, officials speaking on condititon of anonymity said the Obama Administration had decided not to appeal the pro-disclosure ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Word of the decision to acquiesce in the the appeals court ruling and release the Office of Legal Counsel memo in redacted form came on the eve of a Senate vote on the confirmation of former DOJ official David Barron to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. Indeed, word of the decision to make some of the legal opinion public may have helped clear the way for Barron’s confirmation by the Senate, 53-45.

    • UK government faces legal action over failure to investigate BT drones link

      The legal charity Reprieve has threatened legal action against the British government over its failure to investigate the role of UK telecoms giant BT in facilitating covert US drone strikes in Yemen.

      BT has earned an estimated $23 million from a US government contract to supply key communications infrastructure between RAF Croughton – a US military base in Northamptonshire – and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the secret base from which armed drones reportedly carry out lethal strikes in Yemen. According to the US military, American forces stationed at RAF Croughton provide “global strike operations.”

      Legal investigations have begun on behalf of Mohammed al-Qawli, a Yemeni civil servant who lost his brother, a primary school teacher, and cousin, a 20-year-old student, in a drone strike in January 2013. They follow a July 2013 complaint by Reprieve to the UK government watchdog, the National Contact Point (NCP) for the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) Guidelines. That complaint was rejected after the NCP said it had no duty to “conduct research or interrogate” BT.

    • An Advocate For One-Branch Tyranny

      President Barack Obama has employed the limitless executive power defended by Mr. McCarthy…

    • Yemen’s Military Really Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know About Civilian Casualties

      It’s clear that when journalists and activists have been prevented by the governments of Yemen and the US from covering conflicts in Yemen — or persecuted for challenging official versions of events — the goal of authorities has repeatedly been to conceal atrocities against civilians. As the Yemeni military, backed by the US, continues both its fight against al Qaeda and its persecution of journalists, we must continue to ask: What are they trying to hide this time?

    • Conor Friedersdorf: Killing of American a dangerous precedent

      Consider the most extremist act President Barack Obama has taken: he put an American on a secret kill list, sent a drone to find the man, and blew him up. No judge. No jury. Just a summary execution. The target might have deserved to die. But he had a right to a trial, even in absentia. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one will be deprived of life without due process.

    • Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death

      What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses!

    • 10K troops to ‘finish’ Afghan job

      President Obama revealed his long-awaited plan for Afghanistan on Tuesday, announcing that a residual force of 9,800 U.S. troops will remain there for one year after the end of combat operations in December. That number will be cut in half at the end of 2015 and reduced at the end of 2016 to a small military presence at the U.S. Embassy.

    • Monster Capitalism and the Complicit State

      The phrase “close-embrace” to describe the incestuous relationship between business and government in advanced capitalism is by Masao Maryuma, a Japanese political scientist to describe corporate concentration under the blessing and encouragement of government. This is, along with the centrality of war and market expansion, among the most salient integral features of capitalist development in its progression to monopolism, hierarchical class structure, and establishing a full-blown partnership with government: the Corporate and National-Security States merging, with national security concerned as much with protecting the market share and freedom from adverse regulation of the dominant firms in the industrial and financial sectors, as with putatively repelling a foreign foe and protecting the “homeland”. The upshot, fascism without, necessarily, the concentration camp—fascism predicated on the internalized repression of the populace, conditioned to look to the business system as the genius of the nation, its arbiter of taste, its salvation. The trickle-down paradigm follows, as does the moral superiority of those at the top AND the enterprises they lead—conversely, justified class-stratification where the lazy and/or subversive (i.e., those maladapted to the incentives offered by capitalism) fall deservedly into an underclass.

    • 50 Years Later, CIA Still Refuses to Release One Volume of Report on Invasion of Cuba

      The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted the legal authority to refuse to release an historical report on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion more than 50 years ago.

      The matter arose after the National Security Archive, a nonprofit historical organization at George Washington University, sued the CIA to obtain the last portion of an internal history about the April 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba.

      The first four volumes of the report, written by CIA staff historian Jack Pfeiffer, have been released over the years. But the CIA refused to release the Volume V draft, claiming it was authorized under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to withhold the information. A final version of the report has not been produced.

  • Finance

    • Can capitalism ever be ethical?

      Bank of England governor Mark Carney says capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish

    • Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

      Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.

      Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

      Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists—Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day and Noam Chomsky—and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups—Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West and bell hooks—but we don’t have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

    • Is David Koch Getting a Tax Writeoff for Dropping $900K on the Walker Race?

      The “charitable” wing of David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has dropped nearly $900,000 on ads to boost Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reelection campaign, just days after polls showed Walker tied with his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke.

  • Censorship

    • Europe On The Verge Of Destroying Online Comments And Free Speech

      We’ve written many times about the importance of protection against secondary liability for websites, such that they’re not held liable for what their users do. In the US, thankfully, we have Section 230 of the CDA, which clearly states that websites cannot be held liable for speech made by their users. Frankly, we shouldn’t need such a law, because it should be obvious: you don’t blame the site for the comments made by others. That’s just a basic question of properly placing liability on those responsible. But, in a world of Steve Dallas lawsuits, in which people will always sue companies with deep pockets, it makes sense to have explicit safe harbors to stop bogus litigation.

    • BBC Accused Of Censorship After Editing Out ‘Girl’ For Fear Of Offending
    • OSCE against Internet censorship in Serbia

      OSCE representative in charge of media freedom, Dunja Mijatovic, criticized today Serbian authorities over a disturbing trend of efforts to censor media content on the Internet.

    • Censorship in an online age
    • Film Censorship Board set to revise outdated fees

      Filmmakers and importers will soon have to dip deeper into their pockets to have their film certified by the Film Censorship Board.

    • Saudi Arabia Steps Up Censorship, Snaring Activists

      Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools — a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities — are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.

    • In Kansas, Professors Must Now Watch What They Tweet

      The Kansas Board of Regents gave final approval Wednesday to a strict new policy on what employees may say on social media. Critics say the policy violates both the First Amendment and academic freedom, but school officials say providing faculty with more specific guidelines will actually bolster academic freedom on campus.

  • Privacy

    • FBI Says Free App Could Help In Child Abduction Cases
    • Saving Time & Lives: FBI Unveils New Child ID App
    • FBI Joins The 20th Century, Will Begin Using Recording Equipment During Custodial Interviews

      No, that’s not a typo. The FBI has finally reached the 20th century when it comes to advancements in recording technology. No longer will records of custodial questionings be limited to agents’ handwritten notes — the sort of thing that’s impossible to independently verify and prone to “spin” by the transcriptionist. (via emptywheel)

    • DOJ reverses no-recording policy for interrogations

      Since the FBI began under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, agents have not only shunned the use of tape recorders, they’ve been prohibited by policy from making audio records of statements by criminal suspects without special approval.

    • NSA aims for absolute surveillance

      He said the NSA aims to have utter surveillance of everything it wants, and there is no boundary or limit to what it wants to do.

    • Deputy Pm: ‘Fnm Govt Knew Of N.S.A. Spying’

      DEPUTY Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis suggested yesterday that the former government “was aware of” an arrangement to accommodate alleged cell phone spying conducted by the United State’s National Security Agency (NSA) on the Bahamas.

    • Where was the NSA before the Isla Vista Mass Shooting?

      He stabbed three men to death in his apartment and shot the others as he opened fire on bystanders on the crowded streets of Isla Vista, California. Rodger then killed himself. Three semi automatic handguns, along with 41 loaded ten-round magazines— all bought at local gun stores— were found in his car. There could have been many more dead.

    • Do Personal Computers Come With NSA Surveillance Devices Built-In As Standard?

      Just over a year ago, only the most paranoid would have worried about the fact that the GCHQ sent two people to destroy these seemingly trivial components. But in the wake of Snowden’s revelations about the astonishing range of technologies that the NSA has developed in order to infiltrate hardware systems — things like radio transmitters built into USB leads — the GCHQ’s actions immediately raise a troubling thought: that most or all mainstream computers routinely contain various components that can be used to spy on us.

    • Importing network gear from the US is “a big f***ing mistake”

      Ever since the revelations from Edward Snowden regarding the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) mass interception of online communications, many individuals have taken measures to secure their data connections. Use of services designed to improve personal privacy has spiked, and many companies – like Google and Facebook – have begun fully encrypting traffic on their networks to try and avoid the prying eyes of spooks.

    • What’s Wrong With Cisco and IBM Today? Blame the NSA
    • China Said to Study IBM Servers for Bank Security Risks

      The Chinese government is reviewing whether domestic banks’ reliance on high-end servers from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) compromises the nation’s financial security, people familiar with the matter said, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.

      Government agencies, including the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, are asking banks to remove the IBM servers and replace them with a local brand as part of a trial program, said the four people, who asked not to be identified because the review hasn’t been made public.

    • Google’s Brin says NSA surveillance revelations were a ‘huge disappointment’
    • Google’s Brin Says NSA Surveillance Revelations Were a “Huge Disappointment”

      Onstage at Code Conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that recent revelations of National Security Agency surveillance were “a huge disappointment, certainly to me and obviously to the world as a whole.”

      He suggested that some level of surveillance for national security may be appropriate, but that limited spying on a few foreign generals to prevent “total nuclear annihilation” during the Cold War is not the same as mass surveillance of Internet traffic in the modern age.

    • Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy

      Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless

    • Edward Snowden Says He Assisted NSA and CIA as Undercover Agent Overseas

      Edward Snowden, former contractor at the US National Security Agency who leaked top secret documents about massive surveillance programmes conducted by the US government, said he “was trained as a spy” and rejected claims that he was a low-level analyst.

    • Snowden: I Was a Spy, Given a Fake Name

      Edward Snowden wants the world to know he was more than the “low-level systems administrator” US authorities have described him as—he was a trained spy and technical expert. In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, the National Security Agency leaker says he was a spy “in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas—pretending to work in a job that I’m not—and even being assigned a name that was not mine.” He says he has worked for the CIA as well as the NSA, and as a lecturer at a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the CIA as well as the NSA..

    • Edward Snowden: ‘I Worked As A Spy Overseas’
    • Edward Snowden: I was a spy ‘at all levels’

      Fugitive leaker disputes US government claims he was a low-level administrator

    • Why it’s impossible to make an NSA-proof computer

      The past year has not been a great one for computer security. Last summer, Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA has been exploiting vulnerabilities to spy on people, Target suffered a massive security breach that exposed the credit card information for as much as a third of the American population, the Heartbleed bug was a major vulnerability found in the Internet’s most common encryption standard, and eBay just asked all 145 million of its customers to change their passwords after a security breach. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

      [...]

      She argues that every computer and every piece of software we use is vulnerable to hackers because of terrible security flaws. The reason for all these flaws, Norton says, it that these programs are being written by developers who face immense pressure to ship software quickly. Security is simply not a top priority in this context. Even the people who focus on computer security struggle to keep track of every vulnerability.

    • Spectacular NSA-saga finale coming: Greenwald

      Glenn Greenwald, one of the main journalists behind the exposé of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)’s global mass surveillance of Internet and telephone communications, said that the “biggest yet” revelations were yet to come in days ahead — the names of numerous U.S. persons and organisations who were the targets of the automated mega-snooping.

    • Names of American citizens spied on by NSA to be published
    • ‘Biggest yet’: Greenwald to publish names of Americans whom NSA is spying on
    • House Moves to Sever Crypto-ties Between NSA and NIST
    • House Committee Initiates NIST-NSA Separation on Crypto Standards

      Eight months after an explosive revelation that encryption standards developed and evaluated by the National Security Agency were allegedly subverted by the intelligence outfit, a House committee has moved to sever the NSA’s involvement in the standards process.

      An amendment to the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act, or FIRST Act, was passed by the House Science and Technology Committee late last week that strikes a requirement that the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) work hand-in-hand on encryption standards.

    • Secrets and Lies: Should we know how far surveillance goes?

  • Civil Rights

    • Karl Rove Whitewashes His Role In Outing CIA Agent

      Fox News contributor Karl Rove exploited the Obama administration’s accidental exposure of a CIA operative’s identity to absolve his own culpability in deliberately leaking former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity during the Bush administration.

    • Oops … the CIA does it again!

      The resultant chaos in the wake of Arab Spring, however, tops the chart. In other words, it is very rare to read anything positive about the CIA in any US paper. So, from where does these sleuths receive positive reports about their achievements to satisfy the US Senate Intelligence Committee or the White House?

    • The CIA and the Misuse of Public Health

      After the deception was revealed by the British newspaper, however, the ruse had an unexpected outcome. Angry villagers in several tribal areas on the Afghan border chased away legitimate health workers. They accused those workers of being spies who wanted to gather information on the people living in that region.

    • US asks judge to reconsider his CIA prison order

      Pohl ordered prosecutors last month to turn over never-revealed details about al-Nashiri’s treatment. A CIA inspector general’s report says he was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and power drill.

    • Right-Wing Media Draw False Equivalence To Downplay Bush Administration’s Deliberate Leak Of CIA Covert Agent’s Identity
    • Expensive TSA Nudie Scanners Find A New Home: Prisons

      It’s been quite a while since we’ve had much news about the TSA’s nudie scanners, other than the admission by one TSA employee that they, you know, don’t work to do anything other than show people being naked. Yes, the federal government’s oddly belated overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which they don’t think will be attempted again, required a massive influx of taxpayer cash to pay for all this uselessness. That would be your money, my money, all of our money going into a program that didn’t work, wasn’t needed, and violated our rights. But a story of this kind of futility and waste needs a nice little bow put on it for an ending. The federal government never seems to fail us in this kind of request.

  • DRM

    • Accepting Amazon’s DRM Makes It Impossible To Challenge Its Monopoly

      Amazon was the target of some well-deserved criticism this past week for making the anti-customer move of suspending sales of books published by Hachette, reportedly as a hardball tactic in its ongoing negotiations over ebook revenue splits. In an excellent article, Mathew Ingram connects this with other recent bad behavior by Internet giants leveraging their monopolies. Others have made the connection between this move and a similar one in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan books off its digital shelves.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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