07.12.12

Links 13/7/2012: Android Grows Massive in Spain, City of Helsinki Hides Proprietary Dealings

Posted in News Roundup at 8:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Leftover Links – Facebook uses your reputation to push political causes without asking you, Catching up With Gates in Education, pollution, corruption.

Posted in Site News at 6:44 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• New Google Chrome beta lets webcams go plugin-free, video chat gets a lot less Flashy

  Good riddance.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Due to insufficient practical inspection, clothing often contains illegal toxic chemicals..

  • In Blow to Big Pharma, India to Hand Out Generics

    The $5 billion dollar initiative will provide free medicine to hundreds of millions of Indians who today go without access to health care, officials said Thursday. The new initiative will offer 348 types of medication to patients across the country that will not come from big pharma. Legislators in Delhi plan to utilize a network of government-funded hospitals and clinics to provide the medicine,

  • Even Low Doses Of Fast Food Do Serious Damage

    they examined results of a study conducted over a period of 16 years beginning in 1993, which looked at the eating habits of 52,000 Chinese residents of Singapore who have experienced a recent and sudden transition from traditional foods to Western-style fast food.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Poisoning Arafat

    An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it. … I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement – which was killed by the assassination of Rabin. … Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and – more important – to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it.

  • US gov’t nutty over Wikileaks

    A US official told Birgitta Jónsdóttir that the US has no wish to prosecute her or question her “involuntarily”, but there is evidence suggesting this is not true. Evidence that the US is looking to prosecute Julian Assange and others in Wikileaks. The US Army admits it is investigating the Bradley Manning Support Group.
    This group was formed after Bradley Manning was arrested to provide him with moral and legal support. Since when is that a crime?

  • Africa’s land and family farms – up for grabs?

    RMS summarizes this as, “The Gates Foundation is promoting a scheme with connections with Monsanto to “help” Africa by introducing technology that African farmers can’t afford.”

• Censorship

  • House Quiety Reintroduces a Piece of SOPA

    Even after millions rallied against the passage of SOPA/PIPA, the House is still quietly trying to pass a related bill …

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima Nuclear Disaster ‘Clearly Man-Made’, says Parliamentary Panel

    the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, rejected claims by the plant’s owner that the earthquake and tsunami ‘could not have been foreseen’ by saying: “Despite having a number of opportunities to take measures, regulatory agencies and TEPCO management deliberately postponed decisions, did not take action or took decisions that were convenient for themselves.”

  • Shocking Health Effects of Commonly Used Pesticide: Brain Problems, Sexual Deformities and Paralysis

    Endocrine disruptors are linked to breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early puberty and diabetes in humans and alarming mutations in wildlife. They are also suspected in the epidemic of behavior and learning problems in children which has coincided, many say, with wide endocrine disruptor use. … in April, research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented new evidence of the ability of endocrine disruptors–in this case the pesticide, chlorpyrifos (found in Dow’s pesticide Dursban) –to harm developing fetuses.

  • A deep drought has destroyed much of the US wheat crop and may destroy the corn crop too.

  • WTF: Monsanto to Gain Immunity from Federal Law?

    The Secretary of Agriculture would be required to grant a permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, regardless of environmental impact. [thanks to a sleazy one liner in a 9,000 page bill]

  • Dramatic Shifts in Benthic Microbial Eukaryote Communities following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

    post-spill communities contain mainly predatory and scavenger taxa alongside an abundance of juveniles. Based on this community analysis, our data suggest considerable (hidden) initial impacts across Gulf beaches may be ongoing, despite the disappearance of visible surface oil in the region.

• Finance

  • As ‘Statute of Limitations’ Approaches, Wall Street Crimes of 2008 Go Unpunished

    With time running out, federal agencies show no urgency in holding firms or executives to account

    Maddoff was chairman of the SEC. It looks like we will have to tax the “bailout” back from the banksters.

  • Plutonomy and the Precariat

    So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this. If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories.

    It’s worth noting that the callous and extreme views expressed in this essay are quotations from a Citibank memo.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage

    Consolidated media does not publish news, it publishes propaganda.

  • Is Facebook damaging your reputation with sneaky political posts?

    posts are going out under your name because at some point in the past (in some cases in the distant past) you visited a page and clicked Like. Yes, you voluntarily Liked that page and made it part of your Facebook profile. If a Facebook friend wants to go through your list of Likes, they can learn that you like the NRA or PETA or a seemingly innocuous group that you probably didn’t realize was funded by Karl Rove’s political action committee. But I doubt that you expected that simple click to result in a flood of posts under your name months later. … when Facebook uses your name to promote a page to your friends, it doesn’t provide any indication to you that it has done so.

    People should worry more about the power this gives Facebook to sway public opinion than they worry about their personal reputations.

• Education Watch

  • Louisiana Republican Supports State Funds For Religious Schools, As Long As They’re Not Islamic

  • The Weekly Update: Jindal & Co. in Louisiana, a Broadie in Arizona and Bill Gates everywhere

    News you might have missed.

    Devastating look at Louisiana charter schools, abuse of students, nonsense in Seattle and “leveraged philanthropy,” and some other badness.

  • Weekly Update, Part 2: The Gates Foundation, a smart ALEC and more charter school abuses

    ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.

    Yes, there’s much more.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • India Moves Even More Of Its Healthcare Away From Western Pharma

    Moving to generics they can produce themselves rather than pay absurd fees for patented medicine.

  • TPP

    • A Global Attack by the One Percent

      Perhaps the most controversial of these tools would be the setting up of a three attorney tribunal, with no checks on conflicts of interest, to judge foreign corporate complaints regarding government regulations in the countries they are setting up operations in. If, for instance, a foreign owned corporation argues it is losing profits because of its host nation’s overtime laws, this tribunal could rule that the country’s taxpayers owe that corporation compensation for this loss. Such costly judgments could result from any regulations including labor law, local environmental standards, financial rules, etc. In short, the TPP’s tribunal would act as the hammer of multi-national corporate interests above the power of the states’ governments they do business in

      I agree that protectionism alone is a bad idea as a countermeasure. A better countermeasure is trade restrictions that guard people’s rights with tariffs against specific, oppressive policies.

  • ACTA

    • Post-ACTA: declassified negotiation documents on criminal provisions

      These might be handy for the next dumb treaty attack.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

The End of the Road for Windows Amid Losses, Security Flaws, and Unstoppable Android Expansion

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Security, Vista 7, Vista 8 at 6:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Form factors revolution

Summary: Bad news for Microsoft and its monopoly, which lies atop Windows with all its problems

Microsoft’s financial state was discussed recently in light of the losses. One former Microsoft executive calls for the company to be broken up, probably splitting it into the part which should be decommissioned and the one that can somehow live on, notably the Windows and Office franchises (illegally-obtained monopolies). To quote CNET: “Microsoft has lost its way, says Kirk Eichenwald, who talked about his Vanity Fair piece on “CBS This Morning.””

CNET also says that “PC shipments continue downward trend” based on Microsoft’s friends at IDC and Gartner. Christine Hall goes further by invoking the “end of the Windows era” (without Windows, Office too can fade away). “I thought about this the other day while reading an article somewhere online about Windows 8,” Hall writes. “The author wrote something about how at this stage of the game, Windows 8 with its Metro interface was facing the same uncertainty that Vista faced right before it was released. I almost found myself in agreement, until I remembered my friend Phillip in those last days before the release of Vista.

“There was a big difference between the pre-release days then and the current situation as we wait for Windows 8′s big official debut. Back then, all the Windows fans were actually looking forward to Vista. XP had been a big hit, and the Redmond fan boys thought Vista would be even a couple of notches better. After all, they’d been working on it for ages; all that work was bound to turn into the most super duper operating system ever.

“Windows 8 with its Metro interface was facing the same uncertainty that Vista faced right before it was released.”
      –Christine Hall“The rest, of course, is history. Vista turned out to be an even bigger embarrassment to Microsoft than ME had been six years earlier. It wouldn’t run properly on anything but the latest NASCAR rated processors. It needed gazillabytes of RAM. Worse, a massive number of peripherals, from printers to scanners, were turned into toast because they couldn’t be installed due to a lack of drivers. Very quickly the Windows fanboys came to see that the new best-of-breed was basically a lame horse.

“Now, Microsoft is only a few months away from the official release of Windows 8. This time, all we hear from the Windows fans is that they don’t like it. They’re unsure of the Metro interface on the desktop and worry about the wisdom of offering the exact same OS to do duty on the desktop and on tablets. They’re wary, with many convinced they won’t like the new, improved and better than ever operating system. I don’t hear anybody at all anticipating this will be the Windows to beat all Windows, a trophy that still goes to XP. At this point, all I hear is some hopes from Ballmer and his friends that the new OS will keep them from entirely loosing in portable devices and whatever comes next in the new computing zeitgeist.”

There are some further comments in her site and outside the site. She has clearly struck a nerve. It’s usually proportional to the amount of pro-Microsoft trolling.

In other news, Microsoft is besieged by malware. It takes radical measures now: “Microsoft has revoked more than two dozen digital certificates used to prove its wares are genuine after discovering some of them could be subject to the same types of attacks orchestrated by the designers of the Flame espionage malware.

“Tuesday’s revocation of 28 certificates is part of a much larger overhaul of Microsoft’s cryptographic key management regimen that’s designed to make it more resistant to abuse. The housecleaning follows last month’s discovery that some of the company’s trusted digital signatures were being abused to certify the validity of the Flame malware that has infected computers in Iran and other Middle Eastern Countries. By forging the cryptographic imprimatur used to certify the legitimacy of Windows updates, Flame was able to spread from one computer to another inside an infected network.”

This is related to Stuxnet, based on some researchers. It’s a Windows-specific problem, and that’s all that matters. Incidentally, there is some story going around about alleged “malware” for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. The Microsoft booster at IDG spins it as merely a Linux story, spinning it as dishonestly as he typically does (link omitted). All this security FUD serves a broader agenda, such as the political agenda of the US versus Iran. Moreover, based on a new conference, Microsoft runs another campaign to promote online censorship, using the “child porn” excuse. This is how Microsoft’s poor security record ultimately leads to the erosion of human rights and civil liberties. For Microsoft, it is not even possible to implement GUI features without leaving massive holes. The outcome is severe: “Microsoft has advised Vista and Windows 7 users to put Gadgets and the Windows Sidebar to the sword, following the revelation of yet-to-be-detailed remote code execution vulnerabilities in the features.”

Ryan Naraine calls it “early death” and this is far from the first security menace in Vista 7. “Microsoft is pulling the plug on the Windows Sidebar and Gadgets platform ahead of news that security vulnerabilities will be disclosed at this year’s Black Hat conference,” notes the journalist. It sure looks like Microsoft is gradually being pushed to the sidebar in this age when Android/Linux grows rapidly. How come Android, despite its popularity, does not have so many security flaws?

Here is more from the news: “On its July Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released nine security updates to fix a total of 16 vulnerabilities in Windows (XP SP3 and later), Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Basic for Applications and Sharepoint Server. Three of the updates close critical holes, among them an XML Core Services vulnerability that has been actively exploited for over a month.” As The Register put it “Microsoft has patched an under-attack zero-day vulnerability in XML Core Services as part of the July edition of Patch Tuesday.” [via] █

Permalink A Single Comment      Send this to a friend

Debian Follows the FSF’s — Not Red Hat’s — Footsteps Regarding UEFI

Posted in FSF, Red Hat at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: An update on what Debian is planning to do regarding non-free boot sequences

THE coverage regarding UEFI has been started because Microsoft decided to attack computing freedom at the moment a computer boots. Red Hat stepped up with a piece of software which is seen as controversial. “For those looking to experiment with UEFI support on Linux, one of the alternatives to GRUB2 and efilinux is Gummiboot,” writes Michael Larabel. “The Gummiboot UEFI boot manager is an up and coming choice that’s under active development for playing with EFI images.

“Gummiboot is a FreeDesktop.org project that’s mentioned on this Wiki page. “gummiboot is a simple UEFI boot manager which executes configured EFI images. The default entry is selected by a configured pattern (glob) or an on-screen menu. gummiboot operates on the EFI System Partition (ESP) only. Configuration file fragments, kernels, initrds, other EFI images need to reside on the ESP. Linux kernels need to be built with CONFIG_EFI_STUB to be able to be directly executed as an EFI image.””

“If you’ve been keeping track of Matthew Garrett’s blog posts, talks, and other information concerning SecureBoot on Linux, you didn’t miss out on much from this Debian talk.”
      –Michael LarabelCompare that with Debian’s approach. To quote Larabel again, “Debian developers today at DebConf 12, aside from talking about the future Debian codename, discussed what to do about UEFI booting for Debian Linux.

“UEFI is a hot discussion topic right now with Microsoft Windows 8 approaching that mandates UEFI SecureBoot support, uncertainty about how different OEMs will implement SecureBoot, different Linux distributions taking distinctly different approaches to supporting the controversial technology, and all around this just being another headache for Linux developers and distribution vendors.

“While the room was full of Debian developers in Managua, Nicaragua, nothing really new came out of the discussion. If you’ve been keeping track of Matthew Garrett’s blog posts, talks, and other information concerning SecureBoot on Linux, you didn’t miss out on much from this Debian talk.”

The FSF’s approach was supported by Debian and we shall see what it results in. UEFI on hardware might never take off; Microsoft doesn’t command the market like it used to, especially not on ARM. █

Permalink 8 Comments      Send this to a friend

Contacting Politicians to Stop Software Patents in Europe

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The European Parliament can stop the multinationals’ plot

Summary: More time is left for politicians to be informed of the harms of the unitary patent

THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding software patents in Europe will be dealt with in Techrights in the coming days, essentially by going backwards in time and researching the subject. In the mean time, however, there is a lot that can be done, e.g. communication with politicians. The unitary patent protest site writes: “On July 10th 2012, the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) of the European Parliament has discussed about the unitary patent and how to proceed forward with the project. Following the postponement of the vote considered in plenary session, the results of the discussions are a strong criticism of the questionable way, to say the least, used by Member States to impose their modifications, along with the decision to discuss again about an hypothetical regulation on the unitary patent in September. With these last moves, the debate on provisions of the text are reopened. April calls Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to improve the text and citizen to rally in order to guarantee that fundamental rights are respected, that a genuine European Union patent is set up, and that software patents are definitively prohibited1.” (source)

If the likes of Barnier get their way, the awful outcome will be quite irreversible. Once applicants are granted patents it becomes difficult to manage the mass abolition of what they paid for,

Time is left for contacting politicians. I will do so myself very shortly. The addresses I will send this to were listed by Glyn Moody some days ago and they are:

arlene.mccarthy@europarl.europa.eu
gerard.batten@europarl.europa.eu
sharon.bowles@europarl.europa.eu
mary.honeyball@europarl.europa.eu
sajjad.karim@europarl.europa.eu
rebecca.taylor@europarl.europa.eu

The text of my mail is as follows:

“Dear public representative,

“As a computer scientist and researcher, I hereby write to warn you about the untold consequences of the unitary patent. Although it is shrewdly named to convey unity and uniformity, in practice it will lend a hand to foreign corporations which strive to expand the scope of the patents (monopolies), which, among other things, cover mathematical methods, business methods, and algorithms — all of which are abstract methods that cannot be worked around. Scholoarly work consistently shows that software patents breed patent trolls and it is therefore essential that you vote against the otherwise-irreversible move. As a computer scientists I realise this would affect both developers and customers all across Europe. Voting for the unitary patent. is akin to voting for ACTA”

If you live in Europe, please contact the above people as well. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Microsoft is Propping Up BSD

Posted in BSD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: An observation made by a Debian user regarding BSD Magazine

A NOTABLE Debian user who goes by the name of “Weaver” and occasionally writes in the Debian mailing lists wrote about a day ago about “[i]nteresting happenings in the BSD world. BSDMag are promoting a ‘buy one and get the second book free’ scenario with a comprehensive Pentesting format, ‘Inj3ct0r’.

“First thing I note Microsoft, the major sponsor.

“I hope Dru Lavigne isn’t going to too many of them there M$ cocktail parties.”

Microsoft has been trying to marginalise the GPL, e.g. though former staff (this one too looks a tad suspicious) and several years ago readers hypothesised that Microsoft used BSD folks to daemonise the FSF and GNU. We have an interview with Stallman coming, in which we will try to cover UEFI and other technical issues for the most part. █

Permalink 3 Comments      Send this to a friend

Microsoft’s Mole Stephen Elop is Hurting KDE

Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE, Microsoft at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Another look at the impact of a Microsoft-led Nokia

ONE implication of the uncertainty and imminent death of Nokia (“Nokia shares hit 16-year low as losses continue”) is that Qt is at risk of being orphaned, even if it gets passed to other entities which promise to maintain it. The damage has already been done and KDE issues some damage control, or a face-saving statement. To quote Michael Larabel, “KDE position is that they will still rely upon Qt, cooperate with Qt upstream, protect the freedom of Qt and KDE, and improve/contribute to upstream Qt. Qt will continue to be used by KDE Frameworks 5. “KDE software is built using Qt, and will continue to be so. Qt is the best UI development toolkit available, and its quality and continuous innovation have helped tremendously in making KDE successful.”

“KDE views the free software version of Qt as being fine for the future. “The biggest threat to the future of Qt is fragmentation due to forking. Another risk, a growing difference between the Free Software and commercial versions, has already been anticipated and addressed in existing formal agreements between KDE and Nokia. KDE will work actively to make sure that the Free Software and commercial versions of Qt remain identical and continue innovating, by this reducing the incentive to fork.””

“KDE will work actively to make sure that the Free Software and commercial versions of Qt remain identical and continue innovating, by this reducing the incentive to fork.”
      –KDEFab writes that “KDE assures users they can depend on Qt”.

He notes that “[a]fter Nokia struck a deal with Microsoft to distribute the Windows Phone OS on its hardware, the company discontinued its MeeGo-based products in most European and American markets. They also scaled down their Qt development and outsourced its commercial support. With this statement, the KDE community is making clear that it sees a future for Qt even if Nokia discontinues its development.”

This may be true, but nobody can deny that Microsoft harmed KDE and Qt when it infiltrated Nokia.

Someone from Finland had some more information to share with us. “These two links were forwarded to me,” he wrote. “The content is garbage, but what is very, very interesting is that Nokia is not mentioned despite its alleged role in Windows phones”. The links he sent us are from Microsoft-friendly sources and longtime boosters, but it’s worth noting the context and the absence of Nokia. “Apparently,” we are told, “even Microsoft considers Nokia not worth mentioning.”

Nokia is dying in vain and its patents get scattered to patent trolls like MOSAID, with guidance from the mother ship, Microsoft. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Novell’s Case Shows Antitrust Violations by Microsoft

Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Novell at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Groklaw’s ongoing coverage of the WordPerfect case, showing abuses by Microsoft

THE court case of old Novell against Microsoft continued last month, so Pamela Jones caught up with it. “I’ve now read through all 261 pages of the transcript of the June 7, 2012 hearing,” she writes.

“This is the antitrust case Microsoft is trying to get tossed out on a motion for judgment as a matter of law, after an 8-week jury trial that ended with mistrial. It was reported by the jurors to be 11 to 1 for Novell, with one holdout juror. That was as close as Microsoft would like to get to a jury trial on this WordPerfect litigation ever again, so it filed its renewed motion, asking the judge to let it win without having to face a second jury.”

In a later article Jones pulls an article from almost 20 years ago. She writes: “One theme of Microsoft’s lawyers in the Novell v. Microsoft antitrust litigation over WordPerfect has been that if what Microsoft did by undocumenting the APIs in Windows 95 was so terrible for Novell, why didn’t it complain at the time? And, Microsoft also argued at the most recent hearing in June, why was it that only middle management at Novell was involved?

“It turns out that even before Novell bought WordPerfect, both Novell and WordPerfect, among others, had complained to the FTC, and later to the Department of Justice, complaining specifically about undocumented calls, among other dirty tricks on Microsoft’s part.”
      –Pamela Jones“I found a November 1, 1993 article in American Lawyer by Stuart Taylor, Jr., “What to Do With the Microsoft Monster” that gives a very clear picture of the context of the events in this litigation. I think it helps answer those questions, at least contextually, as well as some questions the judge articulated at that same hearing.

“It turns out that even before Novell bought WordPerfect, both Novell and WordPerfect, among others, had complained to the FTC, and later to the Department of Justice, complaining specifically about undocumented calls, among other dirty tricks on Microsoft’s part.”

To this date, Microsoft uses such tricks to penalise competitors on Windows. This, among other reasons, is why developers oughtn’t spend time developing for Windows. Despite its age, this case is important because it helps shed light on the criminal side of Microsoft — a side that many PR agents work hard to conceal. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend