03.21.13
Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Anticompetitive elements of Microsoft’s latest OS version and why it’s worth minding
The fiasco around UEFI as an instrument of control through Restricted Boot is not benefiting from companies like SUSE or Canonical. Their complicity is noted to give the illusion that UEFI is openly accepted in the Linux world. It’s a lie. GNU/Linux users hate it. Here is a new press release from UEFI stakeholders:
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Forum, a world-class, non-profit industry standards body of leading technology companies that promotes firmware innovation by creating specifications that enable the continual evolution of platform technologies, is gaining momentum as use of UEFI specifications increases in Linux-based operating systems, such as Ubuntu 12.10, Fedora 18 and OpenSUSE 12.3.
UEFI specifications enable cross-functionality between devices, software and systems. By design, UEFI technology lends itself to utility and applicability across a range of platforms. Including UEFI Secure Boot in Linux-based distributions allows users to boot alternate operating systems without disabling UEFI Secure Boot. It also allows users to run the software they choose in the most secure and efficient way possible, promoting interoperability and technical innovation.
Nonsense and hogwash. This was published elsewhere too. What UEFI promotion basically does is it ensures that PCs come with Vista 8 lock-in and Microsoft control. This is clearly abusive, but not as abusive as Vista 8 itself. Will Hill shares a claim that “Vista 8 wipes chromium browser, scribus, AV and a host of other user installed software with the “optimize tool”. Vista H8 is optimized for Microsoft. Please boycott Microsoft and dump Windows.” (source)
Here is the full rant, which says:
The optimize your PC tool, which comes with Windows 8 is very dangerous.
I ran the tool earlier today, and without asking for confirmation it optimized my system by removing Google Chrome Browser, Avast! Antivirus, PDF Creator, LibreOffice 4, OCR Software by IRIS, HP Photosmart driver and applications, Scribus, Skype and Posterazor.
At the same time all icons except the desktop was removed from the Metro page. This optimizer tool is VERY dangerous!
The other day we saw this review of Vista 8 from a GNU/Linux user. He says:
It has been a few months since Windows 8 came out, so a lot of enthusiasts have messed around with it and found out what it’s all about. Many people have feared that Windows 8 would be an entirely new experience, and that our traditional workflow would be disrupted. Some people have even claimed that Windows 8 may cause them to abandon the operating system family and switch to Linux so that they can run up to date code without upgrading Windows. However, is any of this really the case?
See the comments. A lot of people are rightly pissed off these days because there is more pressure on people to pay for and use something they reject. Windows is losing market share, but not as quickly as it deserves.
Take a look at what happened in the Falkland Islands, a country with a farming/fishing population and few NATed PCs. There are only a few thousand people.
They seem to be leaving Windows, but that’s not the most important data point. As a whole, Windows is losing its grip, but Microsoft continues to use an illegal grip on this market. Just because Microsoft is going away doesn’t mean it should be allowed to get away with criminal behaviour as last noted in the previous post.
For Microsoft to say that OEMs actually want to embrace Vista 8 with UEFI lock-down would be a lie. OEMs already try to escape Vista 8 and this affects Intel’s x86 monopoly too. As Pogson put it last ight:
There goes the Wintel monopoly. It’s foundation is crumbling. Wintel has only one leg upon which to stand now, that restrictive EULA. Fortunately, that’s easy to get around. JUST DON’T BUY THEIR DAMNED OS!
Microsoft has made that difficult though. And it is becoming ever more aggressive in its hardware tying and applications bundling. Where is the antitrust action? █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is under fire for bribery allegations in governments; now that the UK government says it will adopt Free and open source software while the Swiss government refuses to do so there is more food for thought about the motives and backdoor dealings
Governments are not only being robbed by Microsoft through tax evasion. Taxpayer are constantly being hit by Microsoft tax when they buy PCs and when the government buys PCs. Now we know, based on Murdoch’s press that “U.S. Probes Microsoft, Partners Over Bribery Claims”. Microsoft is Obama’s second among companies that bribed him in 2012, so we doubt anyone will go to jail over it. Bribery is a crime when the small person does it; for a corporation like Microsoft it is just a standard way of doing business. We saw a lot of it amid OOXML scandals.
Here is what the Wall Street Journal says:
Lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining kickback allegations made by a former Microsoft representative in China, as well as the company’s relationship with certain resellers and consultants in Romania and Italy, these people said.
The investigation is in a preliminary phase, according to people familiar with the probe, and the government hasn’t accused Microsoft or any of its business associates of wrongdoing. Such investigations can end with no charges being filed.
The Slashdot summary includes more news links. There are reports in other languages as well. It’s an international fiasco and the thing about the invetigation is that it’s well overdue. Microsoft is a criminal firm with criminal past, so there’s not much of a reputation to keep and not much reason for hesitation in investigating the practices.
Today in the mail I received two letters. One tells me that City Council tax is up almost ten percent and the other says that the bank is slashing an already low interest rate by around 12.5 percent. Inflation is a popular form of hidden tax, more hidden than the notorious bank levy in Cyprus.
So, how does my government save money other than by taxing ordinary citizens who have no access to offshore tax havens like the multi-millionaires and billionaires? Well , it recently seemed like Microsoft was on its way out. As one report puts it:
Open source use in UK government has been establishing itself, in both the Government’s G-Cloud and in procurement standards. Now, the publication of a beta of the UK’s “Government Service Design Manual”, part of the Digital by Default Standard for government services, is writing in a preference towards using open source into the guidance for service managers, developers and web operations.
Robert Pogson, responding to this move from the government, says:
If you read the comments on that blog post you find that previously the IT department were afraid of the security of WordPress, used on tens of millions of web-facing sites…
Sometimes top-down leadership is needed to break log-jams and catch the wave.
Here is another report. We are waiting to see what Microsoft will do other than bribe, openwash, or intimidate rivals or politicians (like in Massachusetts). It affects me personally in my daytime job. Here is some widely-cited post about the news:
Since I’m writing this on St. Patrick’s Day, covering news involving the British government–those perfidious Hanoverians who dispossessed my Irish ancestors several centuries ago–feels just a little off-base. Still, the United Kingdom’s official endorsement of open source software, which became public just a few days ago, seems too important to miss, particularly for the implications it could have for businesses, governments and other organizations throughout the channel.
[...]
In other words, this is bad news for companies such as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), whose products the guide discourages.
Microsoft will definitely lobby behind the scenes, as it always does to derail such policies. Bribes are possible too. We saw it before.
Switzerland is a country where Microsoft corruption in government contracts led to a lawsuit which we covered before in:
Here is a nice analogy for what’s happening in Switzerland:
The reason behind the motion was an application called Agate which is used by farmers to report on transport of their animals. The application is available only for Microsoft Windows so if someone is running GNU/Linux system they can’t file the report. So in other words the government is ‘forcing’ people to pay Microsoft tax, buy Windows operating system and then file the reports.
Government related activities should be vendor neutral and citizens must be able to file report using any operating system they deem fit instead of being forced to buy proprietary and extremely insecure Microsoft products.
Corruption in the Swiss government was covered in the following posts around 2009:
- Switzerland and the UK Under Fire for Perpetual Microsoft Engagements
- Microsoft Sued Over Its Corruption in Switzerland, Microsoft Debt Revisited
- Can the United Kingdom and Hungary Still be Sued for Excluding Free Software?
- 3 New Counts of Antitrust Violation by Microsoft?
- Is Microsoft Breaking the Law in Switzerland Too?
- Microsoft Uses Lobbyists to Attack Holland’s Migration to Free Software and Sort of Bribes South African Teachers Who Use Windows
- ZDNet/eWeek Ruins Peter Judge’s Good Article by Attacking Red Hat When Microsoft Does the Crime
- Week of Microsoft Government Affairs: a Look Back, a Look Ahead
- Lawsuit Against Microsoft/Switzerland Succeeds So Far, More Countries/Companies Should Follow Suit
- Latest Reports on Microsoft Bulk Deals Being Blocked in Switzerland, New Zealand
- Swiss Government and Federal Computer Weekly: Why the Hostility Towards Free Software?
Corruption in the Swiss banks makes it not far-fetched to assume corruption in the government as well. Here’s where things stand:
The Swiss Parliament on Wednesday rejected a motion calling on the government to create vendor independent e-government services, Swiss newspapers report. With 14 votes against and 12 vote in favour, the Swiss Council of States (Ständerat) threw out a motion, submitted in 2011, requesting the government to create ‘Non-discriminatory eGovernment solutions for Swiss farmers’.
Pogson responds by saying:
I hope the voters wake up their representatives. Apparently a bunch of them are asleep. It is the 21st century and many governments recognize that there is more than one supplier of software for personal computing.
Remember what happened in Switzerland amid OOXML abuses. Someone should investigate to see if here too there are bribes. The outcome of the anti-ODF campaign was clear and today we found this article which says:
…both [ODF and OOMXL] are ISO standard document formats
They neglect to say how Microsoft corrupted ISO to make this happen. Bribes too were involved. Whether Microsoft is found guilty in this latest investigation won’t change Microsoft’s record on bribes. Microsoft is corrupt. █
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03.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Open source fans like to brag that Linux needs no antivirus software. Yet as executives at security vendor ESET were keen to remind me in a recent interview, that truism holds true only to a certain extent. In an age where Linux commands greater market share, and where a growing number of threats are platform-agnostic, demand for security enhancements may well be on the rise. Is the channel ready?
That is, of course, what one would expect ESET representatives to say. As a major developer of security software for all operating systems, with a strong presence in the MSP world and about 2,500 VARs in North America alone, the company stands to grow along with demand for antivirus and other security products for Linux.
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Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7′s code and Fusion-io has just bought the company.
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Sainsbury’s in the UK is selling the HP HD-2200 Webcam for a very cheap price…
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The automotive industry is undergoing a major technological shift and Jaguar Land Rover is at the forefront. The UK-based JLR has embraced Linux as the operating system underlying its next generation In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. The company has also taken a leadership role in advocating for open source development within the automotive industry.
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After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement.
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Desktop
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Dolores has an interesting setup, especially her window manager, but I’m really most impressed by the amount of outreach she does in the Linux and Free and Open Source communities. I found Dolores through Arch Linux Women, as I was trying to diversify the kind of people I interview here. Linux is an amazing concept that speaks to lots of different people, but the public face can be a bit homogenous. Dolores and her work helps to more accurately represent the typical Linux users, which seems to be getting less typical—both demographically and in terms of technical skill—all of the time.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: OpenSUSE 12.3 is out, Red Hat takes ownership of Java 6, SecureBoot is coming to FreeBSD and Ubuntu ditches Wayland for Mir. We report back on our challenge from a couple of episodes ago, come up with a new challenge, and discuss IT education in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel community, including the closing of the development ‘merge window’ for the 3.8 kernel
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End of February devconf.cz took place in Brno, Czech Republic. At the conference Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer and I did two presentations about our work on systemd and about the systemd Journal. These talks were taped and the recordings are now available online.
First, here’s our talk about What Are We Breaking Now?, in which we try to give an overview on what we are working on currently in the systemd context, and what we expect to do in the next few months. We cover Predictable Network Interface Names, the Boot Loader Spec, kdbus, the Apps framework, and more.
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Not as small as -rc2, but that one really was unusually calm. So there
was clearly some pending stuff that came in for -rc3, with network drivers and USB leading the charge. But there’s other misc drivers, arch updates, btrfs fixes, etc etc too.
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Graphics Stack
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The X.Org Foundation hasn’t firmly decided on their position of Canonical’s Mir Display Server versus Wayland.
The meeting logs for an X.Org Foundation Board of Directors’ IRC meeting from earlier this month have finally been published to the X.Org Wiki.
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Applications
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I came upon Yocto-reader in the Debian repositories in my search for a replacement of Google Reader. The front-end is fine, it feels comfortable and familiar. People who live in their browsers and want to keep up with numerous of news should love it.
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Hamsi Manager, a file manager that can process multiple files at once and that aims to be really simply to use, is now at version 1.2.
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Last Friday I decided to migrate from Kopete to Telepathy. Believe it or not it was Microsoft that convinced me to migrate. I explain, I used to use Kopete for gtalk, jabber, Windows Live Messenger (wlm), skype and icq. I have just a few contacts in the alternative (to gtalk) jabber server and icq and most of them I can contact using other protocols. Now that wlm contacts are migrating to skype and Kopete’s skype support is kind of broken* I used to use Kopete only for gtalk, so there was no need to wait for the metacontact bug to be fixed anymore.
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I am really enjoying playing some of my long-time favorite games under Linux now, and I hope every day when I open Steam that I will see that Valve has ported Counter Strike: Global Offensive. I’m still waiting though 
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Video editing software are not a rarity in Linux. OpenShot and Kdenlive are two good examples. But when it comes to professional grade video editing software, Linux lacks good alternatives. But according to redshark news, that is all going to end now. Lightworks for Linux is not a distant dream anymore. It seems like the first beta release of Lightworks for Linux is almost here. Here’s a live video demo of Lightworks running on Ubuntu.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This is one of several articles I will be writing on the subject of the Linux command shell. In Windows-land, you had “CMD” or what some might remember as the DOS prompt. In Linux, we call it a command shell, or simply “a shell”. There are many types of shells, each of which works similarly (e.g. they all allow you to run commands) but each sports many different capabilities. The default on Linux is called bash, or the GNU Bourne Again Shell, so named because it is based on the UNIX Bourne shell.
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A lot of the software packages I’ve covered in recent articles have been focused strictly on doing computations on your machine, separate from the real world. So in this article, I explore how to use your computer to design something you can build and use in the real world: your own model rocket. Let’s take a look at the OpenRocket utility and see how it can help you design your own rockets. OpenRocket even can run simulations on your designs to show how they should behave in flight.
Most distributions should include a package for OpenRocket. For example, in Ubuntu, you would install it with apt-get install openrocket. It is actually a Java program, so you always can download the jar file directly from the Web site. To run it, you need to have a reasonably up-to-date Java VM installed as well.
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Games
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Don’t expect to survive in Legend of Dungeon – at least, that’s what the creepy announcer in the above video warns. From developer Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon is a roguelike action RPG beat-em-up with dynamic lighting and soundtrack systems, featuring more than 240 responsive music tracks. Legend of Dungeon is available now for PC, Mac and Linux in “nearly beta,” for $10.
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So the Steam Hardware Survey got updated again, this time they are now including lots of Linux distro’s so we can see just how popular they are!
It’s good to see see them do it, but we really need a Linux only category like they have for Mac.
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Mike Zaimont, the creator of the fighting engine powering Skullgirls, has revealed that a Linux port is currently in the works. Word came via Zaimont’s Salty Cupcakes tournament series, which he’s been hosting on a weekly basis in Los Angeles and streaming through Twitch.
Skullgirls is currently seeking donations through Indiegogo, having already successfully funded the DLC characters Squigly and Big Band. During his weekly stream, Zaimont also revealed that Squigly will be voiced by Lauren Landa, the voice actress perhaps best known for her voice work as Kasumi from Dead or Alive. Squigly’s sidekick Leviathan will be voiced by Liam O’Brien, who has belted out lines as Rig in Dead or Alive 5 and himself every other time he says anything.
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Jason Rohrer of Passage fame has released his first Alpha build of The Castle Doctrine. He describes it as A massively-multiplayer game of burglary and home defense.”
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KSP is a game where the players create and manage their own space program. Build spacecraft, fly them, and try to help the Kerbals to fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space.
The game is currently under heavy development. This means the game will be improved on a regular basis, so be sure to check back for new updates. Right now, KSP is in Sandbox Complete state, but we want you to try it out and have fun with it. The first versions are free to download and play, and will remain so forever.
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Valve’s hardware/software survey for Steam that shows details about their user-base, is now showing a lot more Linux distribution details.
At the beginning of March, the February details were revealed that showed overall about ~2% Linux usage and about one percent behind the Apple OS X adoption levels. Only Ubuntu and a few other distributions were shown but now in an updated version of the list are a whole lot more.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment is starting to take shape on Wayland with its own compositor.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture.
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Digikam has released a new version of their popular photo management software. Exciting new features and plug-ins are now available for users to try. Unfortunately 3.1 has also just been released, though the changes are not as significant. I still wanted to look back to make sure nothing important was overlooked. Here I will investigate some of the most important changes offered with the Digikam 3.0 release.
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Following the GNOME developers’ decision to focus on porting their desktop environment to the Wayland display server, the KDE project has also indicated that it will go ahead with a Wayland port of its own project. Currently, the developers are debating which display manager will be used in the port. KDM, the display manager the project is using currently, has apparently already been discounted in favour of LightDM or possibly the QML-based SDDM.
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Slax, a modern, portable, small and fast Linux operating system with a modular approach and outstanding design, is now at version 7.0.6.
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Me again. I haven’t been online for a week – went on some pub crawls in Dublin : ) – so I haven’t been able to reply to the comments to my last post which showed some nice things coming to Plasma.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Matthias Clasen sent an email today, March 15, to the GNOME mailing list, in which he proposes the porting of the GNOME desktop environment to the Wayland display server.
Many of us thought (read: believed) – including myself – that Wayland is the next-generation X.Org server for Linux operating systems, but in order for it to be that popular, it requires a big push from a ginormous project, such as GNOME.
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GNOME 3.8 is due March 27 and developer Giovanni Campagna says it’s looking good. Campagna is proud of how many bugs and details were addressed this cycle describing the detail board color coding as eco-friendly because of all the green. This evening he spoke of several in particular.
Campagna reports that “OSDs and global keybindings work in the overview, the screen lock and when a modal dialog is up” in addition to addressing a number of little “annoyances and inconsistencies in the shell.” Campagna also worked quite a bit on adding filters and toggles to Notifications, and with this the Panel can be tidied up a bit. He continues to discuss his work on a new application framework, so see the rest of his post for that.
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For a fair amount of time now there’s been work on client side decorations for Wayland so that the Weston compositor with GTK+ can do the window decorations on the client-side rather than server-side as done with the X.Org Server. That work has now been merged to master.
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Via twitter I just discovered that Pcwizz have done a video review on Youtube of Skolelinux / Debian Edu version 6. He installed the standalone profile and the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of a few programs and his view of our distribution.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon will be a featured keynote speaker at Open Source Think Tank on March 21, 2013. Open Source Think Tank brings leading global industry experts and visionaries together to discuss the future of open source. This year’s event will focus on building the bridge to innovation with open source in the enterprise.
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[Christian Schaller:] So I assume most of you have read Jonathan Blanfords blog post about leaving Red Hat and me taking over for him as head of the Red Hat desktop team. First of all I would like to thank Jonathan for both his contributions to GNOME and Red Hat, but also for being a good friend for over a decade now. Luckily Linux is also a major piece of his new job, so I am certain we have not seen the last of Jonathan in the community.
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Fedora
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If you have tried to install Fedora 18 you’ll have seen the new Anaconda installer. Many have found major issues with its design and function. I also had some trouble with it. To learn more about it, you can watch a demo presented at FUDCon 2013: An intro to the new Fedora 18 installer (YouTube). One thing that caught my attention was that until you click “Begin Installation” no actual changes are made. Instead, as you go through the installer, steps before you click “Begin Installation” are written to a Kickstart file. This Kickstart file does the actual installation when you click “Begin Installation”.
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Debian Family
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I’ve been using Debian 7/Wheezy for more than a year but Debian is still working at getting the bug-count down to meet the high standards for Debian Stable:
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Holger Levsen announced the first update of Debian Edu Squeeze since its initial release. “This update contains all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7, as well as Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements”, explained Holger. The updated installer images are available for downloading.
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Welcome to this year’s sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Debian Edu Squeeze updated
* DPL election campaign
* A deeper look inside the freeze
* Kali Linux: a new Debian derivative for penetration tests
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So . . . I had written a blog post addressing the remote hope that I’d at least get a postcard from the vacation from reality that Canonical’s self-appointed hubris-monger Mark Shuttleworth has recently taken, while urging those in the various *buntu communities do some soul searching when your project leader says, “If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on.”
Then I sat on the blog post for a few days, wondering if it was too incendiary. I took walks. I had coffee with friends. I bounced the theme of what I was writing off a few people. I embarrassingly lost a huge Tetris smackdown to my darling daughter at the arcade at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
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Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall that the Ubuntu 13.04 development cycle is a little different from those of versions past, as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth outlined back in October.
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Our very first keypress after turning on the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (running Ubuntu 12.04) drew no response from the Unity desktop. And with that we thought our test of Dell’s Ubuntu Ultrabook for developers was set to go the way of most Linux laptop tests – Linux kind of works, but not really.
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Good news for Ubuntu fans. Unity Tweak Tool is now available in the Ubuntu 13.04 repository. The tool brings a lot of customization to Ubuntu’s Unity shell and allows users to manage everything – from fonts to Web Apps.
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We had a spectacular response to the Ubuntu SDK Days yesterday. Lots of people showed up, asked their questions and found out how their app for Ubuntu might work best.
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There will always be a lot of things to do after a fresh Ubuntu installation. Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was scheduled to be released on April 25th. Here are some steps may help after installing Ubuntu 13.04.
1. Select Best Download Server: The default server may not be the “Best Server” which will speed up your regular update and software installation by apt command or software center.
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In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical’s Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) on 25 April.
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It seems like every time Ubuntu makes any sort of change, the Linux community finds itself up in arms as if the world is about to end. First, they expressed concern over Unity, then the Amazon search results inclusion and now Mir vs Wayland. Admittedly, I don’t personally use Unity as my default desktop these days, as I don’t use any of its features. That said, however, I’m a big fan of the Ubuntu base that I run with XFCE. This desktop environment serves me well, and my experience with the Ubuntu base has never given me any serious problems.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu held it’s own mid-release cycle virtual meeting today. The primary technical output was an agreed community position on the latest release management proposal. Rather than quote the whole thing here, I’ll provide a link to the message I sent on behalf of Kubuntu to the Ubuntu Technical Board. The bottom line is that this is a pretty good proposal from our point of view.
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A project to develop a low-cost ARM Cortex A15-based single-board computer (SBC) reportedly has been abandoned. Initially named “ARMBRIX Zero,” the $145 board got as far as its prototype debug phase when the company behind it abruptly shuttered its doors.
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We were having dinner with our friends at their place when our friends asked my advice on getting a hard-drive which he can connect to his TV to watch the media he has on it; it was non-networked TV. I looked around and saw they had an iPad two Android smartphones, 3 PCs and to watch movies or listen to music they used the traditional method of copying the media on the device they wanted to play it on. He wanted a hard-drive which had a build-in PC. Well, I think he never heard of a media server; just like the most of us.
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Recently I was looking for a way to SSH from a network that blocked my outgoing SSH connection. I’d be nice to have a way around firewalls and be able to access your private Linux terminal. To be able to debug a problem from an remote location, for example.
A collegue suggested a tool called ‘Shell In A Box‘. Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator using just JavaScript and CSS without any additional browser plugins. This means: connecting your browser via HTTPS to your own hosted Shell In A Box web site, and access a Linux terminal from there.
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Phones
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So we’re up to the Smartphone Wars, Bloodbath Year 4, Smartphones Galore. We’ve seen the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4. We’ve seen Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8. We’ve seen announcements from Tizen and Firefox and Sailfish and Ubuntu. What will this year bring? I do think this year brings ‘stability’ and ‘predictability’ to what has been the most volatile industry in economic history of any 100 Billion dollar annual business or bigger (the handset industry is worth $240 Billion dollars annually and the vast majority of that revenue is from the smartphone side). And within the context of smartphones, that is ‘relative’ stability, less volatile than the past three years.
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Last week, a never-before-seen Motorola device surfaced that caught most of us by surprise. The device, sort of deemed “mid-range” is actually far from being mid-range. In fact, the more you look at the specs, the more you can see that it’s as good as the Nexus 4, just not necessarily where the Galaxy S4 or HTC One sit because it lacks the newest processor available and a 1080p screen. But that device with model number XT912A could be our first preview at a new Google-powered Motorola. Gone was the kevlar backing and RAZR styling – in was a more rounded Nexus design. If this is Motorola’s next, though, will it be good enough to compete with Samsung and HTC’s newest? Or does Motorola have something else in the works. It appears as if they do.
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Ballnux
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Android
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For the sheer variety of virtual reality headsets available, there’s been few resources available for those who want to craft their own devices. USC wants to save us the effort of searching around. Its MxR Lab has just launched a showcase of creations and modifications that DIY enthusiasts can build, including open source code for both the devices and integrating full-body motion control through Kinect for Windows or OpenNI. The most ambitious is Socket HMD, a complete 1,280 x 800 headset that involves a 3D-printed shell and custom-assembled electronics. If your own ambitions don’t stretch that far, you can still build the VR2GO viewer, which uses iPhones and iPod touch players as the eyepieces, as well as mods for the Oculus Rift developer kit that add stereo cameras or increase the field of view. Yes, you’ll need a 3D printer and a knack for programming to get most of these projects going, but you won’t have to wait for someone to make them for you — a big help when many ready-made VR displays are either in development or priced out of reach for the average person.
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If you’ve followed Google for any length of time, you already know that the company has donated many open source projects and leverages a lot of open source code internally. But did you know that the company has a dedicated video channel for information on open source topics? If you haven’t explored it, it’s worth visiting, found here. Here is more on what’s available there, and other good open source resources from Google.
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If you need evidence of the spread of interest in open source, look to the history of SXSW Interactive schedules. Just between this year and last, the number of talks tagged with “open source” grew from 17 to 26, and that doesn’t include the growth in relevant book readings, meetups, sponsors, and parties. Even one of this year’s keynotes was delivered by Julie Uhrman, founder and CEO of OUYA.
And it’s not just about the code, though there’s plenty of that, from sessions on APIs and datacenters to (of course), the cloud. Daniel Buckley, a design researcher at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design talked about his work studying interpersonal connection and what it means to be human, which he titled, “open source empathy.”
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Open source software is an easy punching bag when security breaches arise. But getting rid of open source isn’t the answer — it is too valuable. Instead, we need to take some key steps to ensure the security of components throughout development.
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Independent developer James McClain has developed a program which uses Google Voice API in the back-end to conduct various tasks on a GNU/Linux machine, just the way Siri does on the iDevices. The program allows a user to open sites, ask questions and perform other tasks just by voice. While initially developed for Ubuntu it is distro agnostic and can be used by other distributions as well.
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I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before that SourceForge has been acquired by Dice Holdings back in Septmeber 2012. As a result the name of our parent company has been changed in Slashdot Media. As you could easily guess the name comes from the heritage of Slashdot, one of the three Geeknet media properties bought by Dice (namely FreeCode, Slashdot and SourceForge).
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Genealogy is a fun hobby for many people around the globe. While there are lots of programs for Windows, Linux options have been lacking. Gramps helps fill this gap
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CTO of Getable, Mikeal Rogers, talks open source and the Github generation. What’s the next big thing on the innovation horizon? And who’s leading the charge? Find out in this interview.
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Imagine a large vault that houses everyone’s personal information: medical records, financial data, Facebook pictures, etc. Now imagine everyone in the world has a key to that vault.
That’s how several students at Coahulla Creek High School describe an extreme version of an “open source society” where digital coding blueprints are freely accessible and easily understood to the point where all digital information can be accessed and redistributed.
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Events
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Next month’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) to be held April 22-25 in San Jose, Calif. will offer embedded developers a sumptuous menu of embedded Linux, Android, and open source session topics. ESC, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is now part of UBM’s big Design West show.
UBM describes Design West as “the world’s only technical conference and expo for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals.” In addition to the venerable ESC event, Design West now also includes Black Hat and Android design summits.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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“Hackers have a hard enough time with a full version of Linux, let alone a pared down version with only a secured browser running as the interface,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “All the potential options from Linux? They are gone. The hackers couldn’t get in when they were there — they have no hope of getting in now.”
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While the Linux-based operating system wasn’t really cracked at Pwnium, Google has decided to award a hacker $40,000 for finding an unreliable Chrome OS exploit.
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Mozilla
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle announced a few minutes ago, March 15, that a new stable version (4.2.10) of its VirtualBox virtualization software for end users and enterprises is now available for download.
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BSD
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For quite sometime I was thinking of trying out a Unix operating system, something a bit different from the usual Linux distros I try out every week. I didn’t want to jump directly to FreeBSD and hence, I chose the Gnome derivative of FreeBSD, GhostBSD. Eric Turgeon announced the release of GhostBSD 3.0 on 10th March 2013. The reason for my choice of GhostBSD over FreeBSD is obvious – I wanted to use something easier and ready-to-use over FreeBSD.
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GNU/Project Releases
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It has been a very quiet month this month. The GCC sources are still closed to new features, pending the creation of the 4.8 branch.
The binutils sources now have support for a 64-bit cygwin target called x86_64-cygwin. Patches for GCC are currently under development and a full gcc port should be ready soon.
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Challenge #2 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a version of the Posix program ls. ls is a program that lists the files in a directory, and it is the second challenge in this month’s theme, which is “/bin – reimplementing common Posix tools”.
The completed version need only support the standard flags -a -l and -R
The Guile 100 Programs Project is an attempt to collaboratively generate a set of examples of how to use the GNU Guile implementation of Scheme.
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Openness/Sharing
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In October, I used “We the People” as an example of how to get citizens engaged with government in an open manner. In November, those engaged citizens petitioned the government to consider building a Death Star. By January, enough signatures had been gathered to garner the administration’s consideration and, in my mind, a well authored response. The exercise may have been a geeky back and forth which you may see as a joke, but I feel any citizen engagement is good engagement. You may also think that’s the end of the story, however, someone who read my earlier post sent me a link to the Death Star Kickstarter page.
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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On the opening day of this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, an audience gathered in a giant conference hall to remember the life and tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, spoke of Swartz’s curious and restless mind. Swartz’s girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman described him as a man who was constantly asking whether what he was doing was the most important thing that he could be doing. (A quality extensively documented by Larissa MacFarquhar in “>her profile of Swartz.) The proceedings were yet another reminder that Swartz’s suicide was heartbreaking beyond belief, and that something must be done about the law that he was aggressively prosecuted under, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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Post’s parent company last month announced losses of $45.4m as newspaper asks readers to ‘help support our news-gathering’
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If dating were like the cellphone industry, you would have to sign a contract when you entered a relationship stating that you would remain monogamous for two years, even if you wanted to break up. That’s what cellular carriers have pulled off by successfully lobbying for a recent government ruling that you cannot take the phone you paid for and switch to another provider.
It’s the latest reminder that owning a cellphone on one of the biggest United States providers can sometimes feel like an unhappy relationship. Time and again, in the minds of many customers, these companies take advantage of us and there isn’t much we can do about it.
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Science
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Security
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A high-roller and hacker accomplices made off with about $33 million after they gamed a casino in Australia by hacking its surveillance cameras and gaining an advantage in several rounds of high-stakes card games.
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A hacker charged with federal crimes for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T’s publicly accessible website was sentenced on Monday to 41 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
The judge handed down the sentence following a minor skirmish in the courtroom when the defendant, Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, was pinned and cuffed. Auernheimer was reportedly asked to hand the court a mobile phone he had with him during the hearing, and after handing it to his defense attorney instead, court agents cuffed him.
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Don’t expect to survive in Legend of Dungeon – at least, that’s what the creepy announcer in the above video warns. From developer Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon is a roguelike action RPG beat-em-up with dynamic lighting and soundtrack systems, featuring more than 240 responsive music tracks. Legend of Dungeon is available now for PC, Mac and Linux in “nearly beta,” for $10.
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Last week, we had talked about some concerns about how various cybersecurity provisions would allow those hit by malicious hackers to “hack back” or, as some call it, engage in an “active defense.” There were significant concerns about this, but as Marvin Ammori briefly mentioned in last week’s favorites post, Rep. Louis Gohmert seems to not only think hacking back is a good idea, but that it should be explicitly allowed under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).
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Norwegian telecoms firm Telenor has, for the the first time, reported a case of serious industrial espionage to the national police unit Kripos. Newspaper Aftenposten reported Sunday that high tech-spies managed to infiltrate Telenor’s extensive security network and empty the contents of top executives’ personal computers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Rumors and whispers of Richard Nixon’s ‘treason’ — sabotaging Vietnam peace talks to help his Presidential campaign — have floated around for years, but newly released tapes from Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency confirm that LBJ knew about Nixon’s behaviour and didn’t bother to report it.
In previously released tapes from Johnson’s Presidency, we had heard about Johnson having a substantial body of evidence showing Nixon schemed to keep the South Vietnamese away from the negotiating table at the 1968 Paris peace talks. Johnson recorded all of his conversations held inside the White House while he was President. (Where do you think Nixon got the idea?) Nixon was accused or dispatching Anna Chennault, a senior advisor, to convince the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal if they didn’t agree to peace, effectively ending the Vietnam war, until after the U.S. Presidential election. Chennault confirmed she spoke with the Vietnamese in her autobiography, The Education of Anna, but nothing more than that. If true, the charge would likely amount to treason.
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President Barack Obama, who vastly expanded U.S. drone strikes against terrorism suspects overseas under the cloak of secrecy, is now openly seeking to influence global guidelines for their use as China and other countries pursue their own drone programs.
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The gang rape of a 39-year-old Swiss tourist while on a camping trip with her husband has further ratcheted up the spotlight on sexual violence in India.
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Successive US presidents, including Barack Obama, have abused the system for handling classified information to expand their executive powers, the former senior official who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush has claimed.
William Leonard, who was entrusted with ensuring proper treatment of state secrets by government agencies in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, said that over the past decade both the Obama and the previous Bush administrations had manipulated their classification authority to create new executive powers without congressional oversight or judicial review.
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A judge had just ruled that the military dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, now 86, should stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed under his rule in the 1980s, a decision Mr. Utuy and other Maya survivors of Guatemala’s 34-year civil war had gathered in the courtroom to hear in person.
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A federal judge in California ruled today that the FBI cannot secretly demand data from banks and phone companies in national security cases. The judge said orders that keep those requests secret violate the First Amendment.
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Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.
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In an important victory for transparency, a federal appeals court today put an end to the CIA’s absurd claims that it “cannot confirm or deny” whether it has information about the government’s use of drones to carry out targeted killings.
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An analyst says Washington’s so called ‘war on terrorism’ is in actual fact nothing but a permit to murder whoever they wish at times under such a flimsy excuse as disapproving of the victim’s associates.
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Back in June of last year I requested everything the RCMP had on drones from the past three years, including agreements with the DHS. What I got back was a large 79.8 MB PDF talking about various drone studies and all the current plans the RCMP have for drones. It seems that the main use for drones is currently for traffic accidents. It details the various drones that certain divisions are using.
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The Iraq War will ultimately cost US taxpayers at least $2.2 trillion.
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It appears that Bergoglio, who was head of the Jesuit order in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s grim “dirty war,” mostly tended to his bureaucratic rise within the Church as Argentine security forces “disappeared” some 30,000 people for torture and murder from 1976 to 1983, including 150 Catholic priests suspected of believing in “liberation theology.”
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The Bush administration’s Iraq war has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion so far and with interest could swell to more than $6 trillion, according to a study released Thursday.
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Venezuela’s acting president Nicolás Maduro said that US officials may be advising Venezuelan dissenters “to withdraw from or sabotage” the presidential election to be held next April 14 in an attempt “to avoid defeat”
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Venezuela’s interim president, Nicolas Maduro, has claimed the U.S. government is plotting to assassinate his political rival in order to sew unrest before the April 14 elections.
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Britain’s secret intelligence service MI6 paid at least 90,000 pounds ($136,000) to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned in London in 2006, The Sunday Times has reported.
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There’s a sense that many in the media have never come to terms with their Iraq War failures.
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Audio obtained by The Nation confirms an instance of New York City’s police union cooperating with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department’s officers. According to some officers and critics of quotas, the practice has played a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters since Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to office. Patrolmen who spoke to The Nation explained that the pressure from superiors to meet quota goals has caused some officers to seek out or even manufacture arrests to avoid department retaliation.
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BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief
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Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.
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When Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen rushed to the scene of a battle in eastern Baghdad on July 12, 2007, he had no idea the story eventually would introduce the world to a new online publisher of secret information.
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Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by insurgents. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again, and in fact, for the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks that allowed him to survive only with the help of extensive medical procedures and the care of his wife, Claudia.
The incident turned Young into one of the most vocal veteran critics of the Iraq War. He has, however, saved his most powerful criticism for what he claims will be his last. Young says he’ll die soon, but not before writing a letter to Bush and former Vice President Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.
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You wouldn’t really know it from reading press accounts about cyber-warfare, but the National Security Agency has been the executive agent for precisely that capability since 1997, according to newly declassified documents. “Executive agent” is the government’s term for “the entity that does the stuff.” “Capability” is the government’s way of saying “weapon.”
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The boy, who was 10 years old at the time, shot his father point-blank with a .357 Magnum while the man slept on a sofa in the family’s Riverside home on May 1, 2011. Jeff Hall, 32, was a regional leader for the National Socialist Movement.
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Vital intelligence used to justify Iraq invasion ten years ago was based on “fabrication”, a media report has claimed, citing that CIA and MI6 were told that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
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Cablegate
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The release of the Iraq documents, some 391,000 in number, was originally set for August. But a week before that happened, Julian Assange told The Guardian’s David Leigh that he wanted a more diverse group of partners for this round, “and asked that Leigh delay publication to give the other outlets time to prepare programs,” Sarah Ellison would recount in Vanity Fair.
Leigh said he’d agree to a six-week delay if Assange handed over so-called “package three,” the biggest leak of all (which would become Cablegate). According to Leigh, Assange said, “You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by The Guardian editor saying you won’t publish package three until I say so.” Leigh agreed.
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On February 28, at his pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, Private Bradley Manning revealed that before releasing government files to WikiLeaks, he contacted major newspapers, including the New York Times, in an effort to pass on the documents in his possession. Manning did so, he explained, because the files contained “some of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.” These files exposed government crimes and atrocities, including the deliberate murder of civilians by the US military.
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Since the audio of whistleblower Bradley Manning’s statement to the court leaked last week, it’s becoming clear how much of a threat the government’s “aiding the enemy” charge against Manning threatens all whistleblowers. Famed law professor Yochai Benkler and First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams wrote an op-ed in the New York Times denouncing the unprecedented charge, and this past weekend, On The Media dedicated its whole program to Manning’s trial.
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Um, might that have something to do with the fact that the US government went absolutely apeshit over the release and charged Manning with a variety of offenses that have the possibility of capital punishment? We’ve already discussed the fact that the administration’s reaction likely created massive chilling effects for whistleblowers around the world. Pointing to the lack of anyone willing to step into that breach doesn’t mean Manning was necessarily an “outlier.” It just means the government’s intimidation campaign against whistleblowers may have been quite effective.
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Former US National Intelligence Council chairperson Thomas Fingar received the 2013 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence on January 23 for his role overseeing the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.
The NIE finding’s that all 16 US intelligence agencies judged “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” removed the immediate threat of a US-Israeli military attack on Iran.
It contradicted the previous NIE report from 2005, which had judged with “high confidence” that “Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure”.
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Tens of thousands of Haitians spontaneously poured into the streets of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on the morning of March 12, 2007. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had just arrived in Haiti all but unannounced.
A multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President Rene Preval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).
There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help the impoverished Caribbean half-island by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams.
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The Wall Street Journal has an article about Bradley Manning that is self-serving and dangerously wrong on the facts and law–including the assertion that he aided the enemy.
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Crovitz has a history of being fact-challenged…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Bills being shopped in six states by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) would make it a crime to film animal abuse at factory farms or lie on job applications, in hopes of shutting down animal rights activists who infiltrate slaughterhouses to expose ghastly conditions.
“The meat industry’s response to these exposes has not been to try to prevent these abuses from taking place, but rather it’s really just been to prevent Americans from finding out about those abuses in the first place,” Paul Shapiro, spokesperson for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), told Raw Story. “What they’re doing is trying to pass laws throughout the country that don’t just shoot the messenger, they seek to imprison the messenger.”
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Finance
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What is wrong with today’s banking system? The past few years have shown that risks in banking can impose significant costs on the economy. Many claim, however, that a safer banking system would require sacrificing lending and economic growth. The Bankers’ New Clothes examines this claim and the narratives used by bankers, politicians, and regulators to rationalize the lack of reform, exposing them as invalid.
The book argues that we can have a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society. Banks are as fragile as they are not because they must be, but because they want to be–and they get away with it. Whereas this situation benefits bankers, it distorts the economy and exposes the public to unnecessary risks.
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A year and a half after the fences first went up around Chase Manhattan Plaza, new court filings show the fight over public access to the space is still heated.
We’ve written extensively about the fight over the fences, which were first erected the day before Occupy Wall Street protesters first gathered in Lower Manhattan. Open space activists initially challenged Chase’s unilateral closure of a treasured downtown plaza on the grounds that the fencing violated prohibitions against altering the exterior of landmarked buildings. Chase countered that the fencing was only temporary, and was needed not to keep out the bank’s critics, but rather to protect the public during scheduled maintenance on the plaza. The landmarks challenge fizzled, and the fences stayed up, though neighborhood residents saw little if any maintenance work being performed behind the fences.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider an appeal by subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) that sought to derail a class-action lawsuit alleging the company provided false and misleading information about mortgage-backed securities it underwrote and issued.
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Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades agreed to the deal, which completely reversed his previous assurances that it would not happen. It sets a very dangerous precedent for future bailouts. As if brutal austerity wasn’t enough, the EU is now demanding a bailout tax making citizens and expat depositors alike personally liable for government and private bank debts. Reuters also notes that according to a draft of the legislation, criminal penalties of up to 3 years in jail and 50,000 euros could be imposed upon anyone who doesn’t comply.
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In a brief 30-second clip during a Bloomberg TV interview, none other than Anthanasios Orphanides, the former Central Bank of Cyprus Governor, explains the terrible reality of what just happened in Europe: “What we have seen in the last few days is a very serious blunder by the European governments that are essentially blackmailing the government of Cyprus to confiscate the money that belongs rightfully to the depositors in the banking system in Cyprus.” He then concludes quite clearly, “It is not clear how this can affect in a positive manner the European project going forward.” The Cypriot then goes on to explain how the EU is making a mockery of the idea of a banking union…
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on March 18 to decide whether an Arizona statute that imposes restrictions on voter registration conflicts with federal law. The case could potentially decide the balance between the state and federal governments when it comes to elections and voting rights. After becoming law in Arizona, the bill at issue was adopted as a “model” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
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While one could argue what event would qualify as a liberal/left alternative to CPAC, it’s safe to say that none of them get as much media attention as CPAC.
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Censorship
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Alec Muffett points out that the new Royal Charter being rushed through the UK Parliament includes some drafting that appears to drag blogs, Twitter and other social media into the penalty net. This is an extremely worrying development that needs rapid response from the meshed society of citizen creator-consumers (that almost certainly means you).
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The Lib/Lab version amended the test for third party reduced the threshold for ‘representative’ groups to make complaints to the new regulatory body. Will this remain?
The amended version was: “b) where there is an alleged breach of the code and there is substantial public interest in the Board giving formal consideration to the complaint from a representative group affected by the alleged breach”
Why do we need ‘representative’ bodies making complaints to a press regulator? If so much harm is done to individuals and we have a regulator with a simple and accessible process, what is wrong with having a test of a substantial public interest? Will the EDL use this loophole to complain about its coverage? How about
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The new Royal Charter being rushed through the UK Parliament includes some drafting that appears to drag blogs, Twitter and other social media into the penalty net. This is an extremely worrying development that needs rapid response from the meshed society of citizen creator-consumers (that almost certainly means you).
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Privacy
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Amazon has signed a contract with the CIA that will see Bezos and Co. help the intelligence agency build a big yellow cloud, according to reports.
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The new icon of Hollywood is not a celebrity or a movie franchise — it’s the CIA.
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Our latest report highlights the growing use of private investigators by local and public authorities, particularly the number of times they are used without RIPA authorisation.
The law in the UK, particularly the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, is broadly drawn to allow evidence to be introduced in court that in other jurisdictions would not be deemed admissible. Contrasted with the fruit of the poisonous tree provisions in the US, and broader protection offered by the Fourth Amendment, UK law risks failing to join up the evidential admissibility process and the regulation of surveillance.
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A Federal appeals court last week ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency must comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for details on the agency’s drone program filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
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On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.
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Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens.
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University of Toronto researchers have discovered a new group of servers in several countries, including Canada, linked to an elusive espionage campaign.
The research by the Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, is providing new details about a German-made, high-tech piece of spy software that some fear may be used to target dissidents by oppressive regimes.
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The “Legal Affairs” (JURI) Committee, the fourth and last one on this matter, had just voted its opinion on the European Commission’s proposal of data protection regulation, led by Marielle Gallo (France – EPP). With this latest opinion vote, slightly less catastrophic than the previous ones, the European Parliament weakened once again the protection of citizen’s personal data. Members of the four committees who gave their opinion chose to side with giant US corporations such as Facebook and Google that collect, process and trade data about our everyday life. Citizen mobilization is slowly starting to bear fruit, yet it must be tremendously amplified before the crucial vote of the main “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) Committee -scheduled for 24-25 April, but likely to be postponed- on its report.
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On Monday, March 18, 2013, Seattle City Council passed C.B. 117730, which restricts City all departments’ acquisition and use of surveillance equipment. This is generally a good thing, but there are games being played, and the public are losing.
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“Before this city buys any [more] surveillance equipment or drones, [we're saying] they cannot do this without prior council approval,” explained Seattle City Council member Nick Licata before the council unanimously approved new legislation governing how and when the city can use and operate surveillance equipment or ariel unmanned drones.
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The President Barack Obama administration is claiming that authorities do not need court warrants to affix GPS devices to vehicles to monitor their every move.
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A coalition of Internet advocacy organizations and individuals are launching a week of action to combat the CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
Viewing CISPA as one of the greatest threats to Internet users since SOPA, the coalition intends to leverage popular outrage to oppose the dangerously broad cybersecurity bill.
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Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer was sentenced today to 41 months in prison for figuring out a security flaw in AT&T’s website, writes Matt Brian.
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Civil Rights
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One of the stable of writers at Huffpo is getting the Left all up in arms over the latest complaint from the ACLU. This week, the new topic of outrage is drones, but not the ones flying over Afghanistan. (At least not today.) They’re more concerned with the idea of domestic law enforcement using the new technology to fight crime. Because they’re way worse than helicopters or something.
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Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy social media editor charged with helping Anonymous attack the website of his former employer, acted as an “undercover” journalist when he communicated with members of the hacker group, his attorneys told The Huffington Post Friday.
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Israeli settlements within the West Bank are connected by a highly regulated road system. Palestinians are unable to access some roads within the West Bank, and forced through checkpoints on many others. The International Court of Justice concluded in 2004 that “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law.” An independent UN inquiry has also called for a halt to all settlement activity due to resulting human rights violations in the region.
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If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
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If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
[...]
The bodies of poor, unemployed youths are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are behind bars.
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At the direction of President Vladimir Putin, the FSB is not only monitoring social networks but using one of their features to create problems for those opponents of the regime who use them by posting statements on their sites and then invoking the appearance of those materials to intimidate or even bring charges against them.
This disturbing new development is documented by Irina Borogan, a researcher on Russia’s security services who writes for the Agentura.ru site. In an article last week entitled “Social Networks as a Field for Provocations,” she describes how FSB has begun to operate in this regard (agentura.ru/projects/identification/provocation/).
When Putin met with the FSB leadership a month ago, Borogan says, he called on the security service to act “decisively to block the attempts of radicals to use the possibilities of information technologies and he resources of the Internet and social networks for their propaganda (kremlin.ru/transcripts/17516).
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A class-action suit challenging the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy got under way Monday with a lawyer saying that officers have been wrongly stopping tens of thousands of young men based solely on their race.
Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the policy is legal, but the department is doing stops illegally. Changes must be ordered by a federal judge to ensure the department stops wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men, he said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Python Software Foundation (PSF) announced it has reached a settlement with POBox Hosting Ltd. of the United Kingdom over the latter’s trademark application for the term “Python” in connection with cloud hosting and its application for a figurative trademark in Europe incorporating the word “Python.” While the PSF owns the trademark for Python within the United States, it did not have an equivalent filing within the European Union.
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Copyrights
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Last year, millions of Americans told their government not to undermine the open internet. We sent the SOPA and PIPA bills down to defeat.
Soon after, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Europe to protest against ACTA, a secretive trade agreement that would have violated our rights online and chilled generic drug competition.
Meanwhile, leaked trade texts revealed US and EU threats to access to affordable medicines, which significantly disrupted trade talks in India and the Pacific.
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Yet more embarrassing information on the Kim Dotcom spying fiasco has surfaced in New Zealand. Documents show that in December 2011 when the spying began, police already had information which stated that Dotcom – codenamed “Billy Big Steps” – was a NZ resident. As those deemed responsible are held accountable, the GCSB spy agency’s deputy director has become the first high-profile casualty, and the Prime Minister is warning of more “big changes” to come.
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Posted in America, Patents at 12:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ambiguous message from the US government, which has so far failed to make progress on patent reform and even contributes to the problems
Some days ago we wrote about how MPEG-LA managed to extort even free codecs. As one site notes:
Last week, MPEG LA and Google announced that they entered into agreements granting Google a license to technologies that “may” be essential to VP8, the video codec fueling WebM. While this agreement may have little impact in the traditional streaming market, it could be very significant in other markets, particularly WebRTC. No financial terms of the agreement were announced, and MPEG LA declined to answer our questions.
These secret deals usually mean payment. Neither party wants the public to know about it as they collude against the public interest. It was only last Thursday that the Committee on the Judiciary in the US House of Representatives spoke about patent abuse. This comes from the US government:
Hearing on: Abusive Patent Litigation: The Impact on American Innovation & Jobs, and Potential Solutions
One notable victim, SAS, issued some feedback. The SAS statement [PDF] says: “In none of the cases where SAS has been sued for patent infringement is the plaintiff an operating company that makes anything, sells anything, produces anything or employs anyone (other than a bunch of lawyers). All of these cases involve what I call “patent trolls” – which others more demurely call Non-Practicing Entities, or Patent Assertion Entities — as plaintiff. It is a problem that is only becoming worse for companies like SAS for one simple reason: it is a business model that is incredibly cheap to pursue, remarkably profitable to the pursuers, and disproportionately damaging to the victims.”
This statement was highlighted by Groklaw, which recently made some suggestions for the debate of the USPTO. Here is more of it:
Here’s Groklaw’s response to the USPTO’s request for suggested topics for discussion in the future by the Software Partnership. We just sent it to the USPTO today.
We are also publishing here on Groklaw a more detailed supplement on those four topics, explaining in depth why we propose them, with references, on the theme, “Using Semiotics to Identify Patent-Eligible Software”. The supplement is referenced in the document sent, if they wish to read more in-depth arguments, based on interest level.
Groklaw shows how, based on the report “Top U.S. lawyer to high court focuses on antitrust, patent cases”, further action is expected to be taken. Lastly, the troll InterDigital [1, 2] is mentioned by patent lawyers. No signs of trolls being impeded by government action just yet. Lots of rhetoric and promises, no actions at all.
Here is a former US prosecutor turning into a troll:
High-profile former U.S. federal prosecutor Andrew Stolper said Tuesday he had teamed up with an ex-FBI agent to form a private equity firm specializing in litigation finance, a growing business in the legal industry.
Stolper, whose career included the ill-fated Broadcom case in 2009, said Crux Capital launched on Monday. He resigned last week from his position with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Santa Ana, where he had worked for 10 years.
The litigation finance boutique, based in Irvine, Calif., will specialize in plaintiff’s commercial litigation and eventually staff up to about five people.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment about Stolper’s move into private practice.
A U.S. District Court judge singled out Stolper for criticism when he dismissed criminal stock fraud charges against Broadcom Corp co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III in 2009, citing a “shameful” prosecution campaign to intimidate witnesses.
And now, having had a career as a ‘servant’, this man simply becomes a patent troll. The government seems to manufacture more trolls than it ever stops (zero). What ever happened to the antitrust complaint against MPEG-LA? Despite Promises™ and Hope® (when it comes to patent policy), President Obama is no better than his predecessors when it comes to tackling patent mess. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Patents at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Professor Michael Risch talks about WebOS, responds to our criticism
There is a fascinating story about WebOS, the operating system built on Linux and optimised to work well on the Web, using some portable framework that is Web-compatible (a growing trend in SDKs). Apple’s devices are poor at Web browsing, so WebOS (now open source as we hoped but unfortunately patents-encumbered) and some platforms like Android, which now has Chrome, have had a huge potential for growth, mostly at Apple’s and Nokia’s expense. Android is well ahead of Apple in technical terms and “Samsung [is] Innovating Faster Than Apple” claims a minister. So anyway, after Apple threatened Palm with lawsuits [1, 2] we find out in Risch’s rant about the already-controversial SHIELD act that WebOS was derailed by Apple:
Consider Palm, which developed WebOS, and made stuff. Consider HP, which has spent billions of dollars in research and development. HP bought Palm, and made WebOS tablets. For various reasons, maybe in part due to patent claims from other tablet makers like Apple, HP decides to stop selling WebOS tablets. HP then decides to enforce Palm’s patents. Mind you, HP didn’t just buy the patents, it bought the company. And then it made stuff, it researched, it developed, and it has even licensed WebOS out to LG try to resurrect it for televisions. Is HP a troll now? It falls under the text of this act. I think that just cannot be right, and yet there it is, in black and white.
Pamela Jones wrote: “Apple did that? I didn’t know that. If so, then I spit in their general direction. I love WebOS, and Apple needs to cut it out. It can’t be the only tablet maker in the universe. The more they sue and threaten, the more determined I am never to buy anything from them again.”
Wired had Risch (prominent in the debate over patent trolls) as a guest in a debate full of lawyers whose opinions omit the obvious solution (here is
another recent example) and after our criticism of his suggestions he wrote to me to say: “Thanks for reading, even if you don’t agree. I’m glad to hear that I’m even slightly controversial, as I usually see myself as plain vanilla.
“I outside us was a bit surprised by your characterization of the op-ed, though. For one thing, I quote Stallman’s editorial. For another, my very first suggestion was: ” More patents should be rejected, and especially weak software patents. Limiting these should continue regardless of who – troll or product company – owns those patents.” I realize that this doesn’t go far enough for those who would abolish software patents, but it’s hardly a defense. Indeed, at least one person shared this sentiment as the takeaway from the op-ed on twitter. I actually had a lot more written about software patents, but they limited me to 1100 words, so anything not core to the primary argument got slashed – so it goes.”
I replied by saying that “I do believe that we need to end software patents as a whole.”
“I hear you,” he said, “I know a lot a people feel that way. Even though I disagree, at least that would be owner neutral!”
That’s why it’s a debate. Every debate has some factions on each side. Anup Malani, writing this paper about patents, says: “Counter-intuitively, we propose raising the stakes of patent litigation by providing enhanced rewards to victorious patent holders and imposing enhanced penalties on owners of patents that are invalidated at trial.” This is not the obvious solution, either. It evades the obvious fix which is related to scope, not legal action.
Stephen Ornes, a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote this article in the New Scientist yesterday. He opposes software patents on the ground that they are akin to patenting mathematics. To quote:
AT SOME point in their career every mathematician comes up against the question, is mathematics invented or discovered? The query makes some cranky. The answer doesn’t directly affect their work, after all, and the discussion often leads nowhere useful. Spending time debating the ultimate nature of mathematics takes away from actually doing it.
Some scholars take issue with the terms themselves. In his 2008 essay Mathematical Platonism and Its Opposites, Harvard University mathematician Barry Mazur called discovery and invention “those two too-brittle words”. One might be tempted to defuse the question altogether with a merger: perhaps maths involves inventing new relationships between things we have discovered.
It’s a metaphysical query, a nerdy way to ask whether or not some pre-existing truths underlie our existence. Here we bump up against theology. If mathematical ideas are discovered – the Platonist position – then a proof is a real-world encounter with an immortal truth. But then where, exactly, is this ethereal pool of truths? Did prime numbers exist before the big bang?
If, on the other hand, mathematics is invented, then proofs spring from human intelligence a bit like art or law. But then why do mathematicians across time and space always agree on what’s right and wrong?
The question about invention versus discovery flares up every few years, often in a different guise. The latest incarnation concerns something very down to earth: money. In this case, the discovery versus invention question has profound consequences. In fact, there may be no mathematical question with higher stakes. That’s because mathematics powers the algorithms that drive computer software, and software is big business, worth over $300 billion a year to the global economy.
If we start with the hypothesis that algorithms are reducible to maths — which they are — then it becomes apparent that the patent system is inherently broken in the scope sense. Talking about damages in litigation is not the point. We must identify and address root causes, not symptoms. █
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03.18.13
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: British government says it will back FOSS, but this policy is assured to get opposition from Microsoft and its UK partners, as usual
So, government policy in the UK is again announced as being FOSS-friendly. We heard this before, but is this time different? The MSBBC seems not to cover it and Microsoft partners ganging up against Free/open source software support suppliers is how it typically ends up. Here is the one report we see cited widely regarding the policy:
The government has, for the first time, mandated a preference for using open source software for future developments.
The new Government Service Design Manual, released as a beta version on 14 March and effective from April, lays out the standards that must be used for all new digital public services developed across Whitehall.
Iophk asks: “Is it real or just a bid to get better prices on the next M$ contract?”
“It’s just cynicism,” he clarifies. “Part of it comes from M$ reaction teams swooping in, part of it comes from otherwise good people knuckling under to M$ when the reactions teams swoop in.”
Here is what Robert Pogson wrote about it: “That’s the official position of the government of the UK and that’s very similar to what I recommended to the government of Canada a while back. It makes no sense to prefer or to accept lock-in, EULAs and restrictions on IT and pay for that rather than making FLOSS the default choice.”
Here is the original message.
Iophk writes: “The part about avoiding lock-in through open standards is very important. The catch there is that while M$ often has support for standards on paper, in practice they are usually broken in such a way as to prevent interoperability.”
The source says “take care to mitigate the risk of lock-in to a single supplier by ensuring open standards are available…”
iophk concludes with: “Yet another risk is that the manual is only in beta. M$ could change it, if there is corruption before the release in April.”
Here is the latest report on this from JoinUp. Let’s keep our eyes open because Microsoft et al. must already be lobbying. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: When the FTC receives reports about rogue activity which it claims to be tackling it either ignores or sends out non-personalised responses saying it would take no action
Sometimes it seems like the institution known as the FTC is about saving face, not about regulation. Of course its purpose was real and sincere, but over the years we wrote a lot about the FTC’s incompetence. When I filed a complaint (to the FTC) about Microsoft AstroTurfing I received this response as a PDF (by E-mail). It reveals no action being taken even though the FTC publicly claims to crack down on AstroTurfing, which is why I submit letters almost every year. Here is the latest FTC PR:
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Earlier this month the FTC updated its online advertising disclosure rules. They’re intended to protect the public from online promotions that may be “deceptive or unfair” in the absence of clear disclosures that they’re compensated advertising.
Advertising and promotional messaging on social and mobile media are at least partly responsible for the update of the guidelines, which is the first such update since they were originally issued in 2000.
The problem is, they don’t seem to enforce their policy. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 12:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hardware lock-in and penalties of getting around it
The UEFI fiasco continues as Michael Larabel reports that:
disabling #SecureBoot from UEFI on this #ASUS #Ultrabook causes the CPU fan to run at full-speed constantly… weird.
In other news, tells us Will Hill, hardware is being tied to Vista 8:
GNU/Linux laptop maker closing down. Says they can’t find hardware without an OS since Windows 8.
Here is the original:
We have to announce that we, the team of Hettes, can no longer deliver laptops with Ubuntu Linux or another Linux distribution. This is not because we want to or because of time or resources, but it’s because we can’t buy computers (anymore) without operating system.
We started our webshop a few years ago with a lot of ambition and fun, continued developing it, and helped lots of customers with satisfaction. Since the beginning of our passion and ambition for the webshop with laptops and desktops with pre-installed Ubuntu Linux we’ve had problems with buying systems without operating system, or simply said without Windows.
We have tried to continue our work in different ways and we have had small successes. However with Windows 8 all doors are being closed permanently and we see no way to open these.
Considering the fact that OEMs and companies like Samsung complain about Vista 8, saying that this is what the market wants would not work.
Notice that there is an ongoing attempt to bash Samsung with the “women’s rights” stick; this is done as means of suppressing Galaxy S4 launch publicity that’s positive. We saw this distraction strategy before. █
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