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04.09.13

Apple Sues Linux/Android Over Text Selection

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Patents at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

As Supreme Leaders Steve 'thermonuclear' Jobs would have wanted…

Steve Jobs
Original photo by Matthew Yohe, modified

Summary: Apple, the imitator that the press likes to glorify, is suing Android leaders with yet another ridiculous patent

A good column from the British Linux press reminds readers that Apple’s patent battles are completely hypocritical because Apple copies many designs and technologies. It concludes as follows:

The instrument for Apple’s war has been the acquiescence of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the US courts, ownership of scores of debatable utility and design patents, and its claims against Samsung and others of ‘trade dress infringement’. The good news in recent months is that some of these entitlements, such as Apple’s patent entitled ‘Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics’ and ‘the rubber band patent’ have come up for review and been found wanting by the USPTO. The bad news is that Apple still has a vast portfolio of debatable patents to draw upon.

Patents are not a defence of the rights of the innovator, but a weapon against competition and invention and the rights of the user. Android is no more a ‘rip-off’ or ‘stolen product’ than the iPhone itself, or the music of Stravinsky or poetry of Eliot.

Meanwhile, says this other article, Apple uses a patent on text selection to sue Android:

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd infringed a key portion of an Apple Inc patent by including a text-selection feature in its smartphones and tablets, an International Trade Commission judge said in a preliminary decision.

“Lord,” wrote Pamela Jones, “Text selection. Nothing obvious there. No prior art that you and I might think of off the top of our heads. Sigh. Anyway, it’s just preliminary. Time for some prior art searching, though.”

Watch patents crippling Apple’s OS:

After losing a patent dispute, Apple has modified the VPN behaviour of iOS 6.1. In a support document published last week, the company announced that the “VPN On Demand” feature will no longer initiate a secure connection by default, even if it is set to “Always”. Instead, the iOS VPN will behave as if it were set to “Establish when needed”.

Does anyone still believe that patents promote faster innovation and benefit customers? How many lawsuits against Apple will it take for Apple to walk away from this strategy which comes from Steve Jobs’ megalomaniac complex? █

OEMs Ditch Microsoft for Linux, Microsoft Plans Emergency Rerelease of Windows

Posted in GNU/Linux, Vista 8, Windows at 10:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

BSOD

Summary: With Vista 8, Microsoft finds itself unable to outsell Linux-based operating systems

Several years ago we showed — using hard evidence — how Microsoft created groups named “task forces” [1, 2, 3] (or whatever other euphemisms) to gun down the competition, notably GNU/Linux, wherever it appeared. Mr. Pogson alludes to this when he says:”It is well-documented that M$ spies on friends and foe in IT. Now the OEMs are taking counter-measures.”

The report he cites is from Taiwan and it says that:

Rumors have also spread that Microsoft is developing another operating system, which will serve as the next-generation Windows and will be released in October.

We wrote about this before. Well, this is another sign that Windows is in trouble. Android is the top operating system at the moment. █

USPTO is Out of Control and Needs to be Rebooted (or Booted Out)

Posted in Patents at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

David Kappos

Summary: More stories about the US patent system granting monopolies on too broad a range of ideas

The patent boosters say that Twitter, which promised not to sue with patents, claims to have ‘invented’ tweeting. Maybe it’s just not aware of syndication and SMS, which predate Twitter. To quote the patent boosters:

Now those of you who know me and have read my posts in the past, know that I am not a patent attorney myself (although I am married to one who is rather well known). Rather, I am a social media strategist — sometimes called The Social Media Diva™ — who uses Twitter and other social media platforms to assist my clients in their online marketing strategies. Quite frequently we will feature posts that analyze the technologies of an issued patent from the IP attorney perspective. We thought it would be fun for me to analyze this patent from a non-attorney standpoint as it pertains to social media platforms as a whole.

Rather than promising not to sue, as we said last year, Twitter could just refuse to patent. This is of no use against trolls anyway.

Rackspace, which is fighting patent trolls these days, is getting a hand from some lawyers who search for prior art along with geeks in Groklaw:

Rackspace is going after a troll, Parallel Iron and its “agent”, IP Navigation (or IPNav), bringing a declaratory judgment of noninfringement action against Parallel Iron, because it owns the patents and is asserting them against the Open Source Hadoop distributed file system ( Parallel’s patents being on storage-area-network and network-attached-storage equipment) and a breach of contract action against both. Since Rackspace says, as the H Online reports, one goal is “to highlight the tactics that IP Nav uses to divert hard-earned profits and precious capital from American businesses”, I thought we could pitch in and spread the word.

Why are those patents granted in the first place? Quite simply, the USPTO decided to give up on quality assessment and now it just grants almost everything. It’s the guilty until proven innocent mentality. Here is new analysis from Ars, citing a study of the backlog:

When David Kappos announced his resignation as head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) late last year, one of his most touted accomplishments was a significant reduction in the backlog of pending patent applications. Kappos’s fans have attributed this to the hiring of hundreds of additional patent examiners.

But a new study suggests another explanation for the declining backlog: the patent office may have lowered its standards, approving many patents that would have been (and in some cases, had been) rejected under the administration of George W. Bush. The authors—Chris Cotropia and Cecil Quillen of the University of Richmond and independent researcher Ogden Webster—used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain detailed data about the fate of patent applications considered by the USPTO since 1996.

Watch what the USPTO has been causing. As covered by Ars as well:

Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action.

The USPTO should be slammed for enabling extortion by granting a government-endorsed monopoly (privatisation) on scanning. Rather than slamming the trolls we should target the system which enables those trolls and call for its reform or complete demise. There is a coup going on against creativity, innovation, and freedom of thought. We need to defend ourselves from this corporate coup which passes fees from customers to some billionaires at the top (patent hoarders like Intellectual Ventures). █

The Linux Foundation and Microsoft Take Another Step Ahead

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Virtualisation at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2009 and before:

Linux Foundation

Summary: Money from Microsoft helps influence a Linux banding of companies that need virtualisation

AS Red Hat recently hired from Microsoft for virtualisation leadership we needn’t be shocked that in a Linux Foundation article from Zemlin [1, 2], with help or a boost from New York Times blogs that label it “Corporate Style” (as if ethics can be neglected when you deal with a corporation), Red Hat et al. enter into bed with Microsoft. This is widely covered, naming both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft. “Is Microsoft influence already making itself felt at Red Hat?” This is what Will Hill thinks. It is about virtualisation:

Recently, I argued that while there’s been a lot of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) hype, it’s also real and will redefine corporate networking in the coming years. The Linux Foundation agrees and — in its OpenDaylight Project — has introduced a community-led and industry-supported open-source framework to accelerate SDN adoption, foster new innovation, and give it a more open and transparent approach.

[...]

Red Hat will be working on building and delivering an SDN solution that integrates with OpenStack and Linux’s built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

Microsoft hasn’t spelled out what it plans to contribute to the project yet.

For now, it provides funding and insists on making its virtualisation purely proprietary. Last year Microsoft indirectly (but more directly than before) paid the Linux Foundation as well. We has seen that before and it leads to self-censorship. █

Links 9/4/2013: Linux 3.9 RC 6, Darktable 1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • BULL : launches its high-end Linux server offering for the modernization of critical IT infrastructures
  • Getting the masses on-side: openSUSE’s community manager speaks

    There are community managers for Linux distributions who spend their whole time spinning this or that and trying to influence opinion without dealing with the reality.

    There are others in similar roles who spend all their time contradicting people on mailing lists and discussion forums and flinging mud at anybody who says the smallest thing negative about their distribution.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • HP Moonshot Servers: Intel Atom Beats ARM (For Now)

      When HP Moonshot servers launched today, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) was quick to note that the new Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) servers will leverage Atom processors — though HP does eventually plan to offer ARM-based support as well. It’s a significant near-term win for Intel, which hopes to defeat potential rivals like ARM in the emerging market for so-called “microservers.”

      According to an Intel spokesperson, Atom is an ideal choice for the HP servers because the architecture can run excisting operating systems (Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.) with no porting requirements.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.9-rc6

      Things seem to be on track, and it’s been a mostly boring week. Lots of small fixes, a few reverts. Networking, some small arch fixes (arm, mips, s390, alpha, tile, x86), drivers, minor filesystem updates (gfs2, ext4, tiny reiserfs xattr fix). Nothing really exciting stands out, I think the appended ShortLog gives a good overview for people who want to wallow in the details..

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Linux fatware? These distros need to slim down

      As I prepped a new virtual server template the other day, it occurred to me that we need more virtualization-specific Linux distributions or at least specific VM-only options when performing an install. A few distros take steps in this direction, such as Ubuntu and OEL jeOS (just enough OS), but they’re not necessarily tuned for virtual servers.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Exploring Linux Mint’s “Debian” edition

        All in all Mint’s Debian branch offers a pleasant experience with a friendly graphical installer, useful tools and lots of software all in a convenient package. The one detractor Mint’s Debian Edition may have is, oddly enough, Mint’s own Main Edition. While the Debian branch of Mint is a fine distribution its technology base prevents users from having access to certain helpful features available in other Mint editions. For example Mint’s Debian Edition isn’t able to use Ubuntu PPAs, it is missing some third-party software packages built for Ubuntu, and One storage & store support is missing. It would also appear as though the kernel which ships with Mint’s Debian Edition doesn’t have all the hardware support available in the Main Edition. These features tend to be edge cases and many people will probably get along fine without them, but I still suspect the strongest competitors to Mint Debian Edition are Mint’s other flavours.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 13.04 goes beta
          • Second Beta Release of Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Is Available for Download

            Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Beta 2 was also released today, April 5, along with all the others Linux distributions that are part of the Ubuntu family.

            Ubuntu Kylin is a new flavor of Ubuntu Linux, and Raring Ringtail (version 13.04) will be its first ever stable release. Today’s final testing version fixes last minute bugs, such as an updated PM2.5 API in the China Weather Indicator, and saving note issue with the Chinese Calendar.

          • Ubuntu File Sharing

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Trying Linux Mint 14

              My wife now has a new desktop computer. Her netbook computer (Acer Aspire One) works fine, but its Linux distro (Fedora 11) is getting positively antiquated. I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop (Compaq Presario 2170CA), so it needs a Linux. And the “hand-me-down” process means I have upgrades for my other two PCs (audio processing and ham radio); they also need Linux upgrades. Ideally I’d like to put the same Linux on all five of them. Which Linux?

              Although I like Debian on my desktop, I must admit that it is difficult for a novice to administer. (Hell, it’s difficult for me to administer.) And while I like the economy of LXDE, I confess that its tools are still a work in progress; it’s a bother to administer, too.

            • Fuduntu 2013.2 Linux released, comes in full and “lite” editions

              Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu. The OS uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but takes design and usability cues from Ubuntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Spotlight on Linux-ready embedded ARM modules

      In a post at Linux.com, Eric Brown, former editor of LinuxDevices.com, presents a slideshow of 10 new ARM-powered COMs. The current boom in ARM boards is, in part, fueled by the continuing growth of ARM-friendly Linux, and more recently Android, in the general embedded market, he suggests.

    • Software adds motion-awareness to TV STBs

      Movea’s motion-processing software now supports TV set-top boxes (STBs) built with STMicroelectronics “Orly Platform” STB SOCs (system-on-chips). The “SmartMotion Server” software can add gesture-based user interface features to TV STBs running Linux and Android.

      The SmartMotion Server motion-processing software is intended to ease the process of developing intuitive motion-based user interfaces for TV STBs and other connected home systems, according to Movea. The SmartMotion framework provides gesture-based interaction support for applications such as web browsing, video-on-demand catalogs, media center and social media navigation, and gaming.

    • Phones

      • BlackBerry 10, Windows 8 Phone, Ubuntu And More vs Android, iOS: Can It Mean Good Things For Apple And Google?

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung Expects 1Q2013 Earnings Of $7.7B, Up 53% Thanks To Smartphone Sales

          Samsung said that it expects to post first quarter operating profit of about 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion USD), up 53 percent from the 5.7 trillion won operating profit it earned a year earlier. The South Korean tech giant also said that its sales likely rose to between 51 trillion won and 53 trillion won from 45.3 trillion won a year earlier.

      • Android

        • YouTube employee Eileen Rivera supposedly ‘leaked’ the screenshot of the ‘new’ Google Play Store, version 4.0.

          Is the brand new Google Play Store coming? Timed for I/O summit?

        • OUYA: The initial impressions

          This past week at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a big one for third party publishers like Electronic Arts and Konami. It was also the place where supporters for the OUYA system got a first look at what they invested in. The company held a private event Thursday evening for a number of its KickStarter backers and other guests, providing plenty of food, drink and hands-on time with the system before it ships in June. We managed to go a few rounds with it to see what it was like.

        • Facebook Home: Brilliant Stroke or Desperate Measure?

          Facebook Home “is an idea that deserves to be copied,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “If your primary use for a smartphone is some activity, why not have it front and center of your Android experience rather than buried in an app or widget somewhere? Flipboard, Twitter, Edomondo, Max MP, Gameloft, Androidslide and other Android developers should explore this avenue.”

        • UNSW researchers push open source, Android for archaeology

          Researchers at the University of NSW are preparing to launch a public beta of a new open source system that could drive a digital revolution in the field of archaeology.

          the Federated Archaeological Information Management System (FAIMS) Project, led by UNSW’s Dr Shawn Ross, a senior lecturer at UNSW’s UNSW’s School of Humanities, received funding from the federal government’s the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.

        • Chameleon OS First Look: An Open Source MIUI-esque ROM
        • RedReader for Android: Open Source Reddit application
        • Tips to avoid Android spyware

          If you own an Android the chances are you’ve heard, or experienced, one horror story after another about data theft and privacy invasion that comes as first nature to malware meant for Android phones. Android spyware is nothing new and the platform is home to a plethora of cell phone spy apps. There are apps that will pretend to be games (like the Drop.dialer fiasco earlier this year) and steal your information and cost you a buck load of money you never knew you were spending, and then there are apps that other people can use to spy on you, using your own phone. Sure the Jelly Bean is slated to slash all security issues to pieces, but just because it’s coming out doesn’t mean your phone will be compatible with it – unless you can easily jump from one phone to another.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Check Cyrus : DIY open source 3D printer
  • Profound Framework Moves to Open Source

    Application development tool vendor Profound Logic has taken its user interface framework open source citing benefits such as increased capability for users to control their own software, improved integration between the IBM i and other platforms, no-cost opportunities for companies and developers to test the application modernization waters, and a route to development that avoids vendor lock-in. It’s Profound’s latest step in providing IBM midrange shops with an RPG tool that is more open and transparent.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Will Mozilla Firefox 21 Be a Healthy Open Source Browser?

        Firefox 21 is now in Beta and it introduces a number of new features that will become generally available inside of the next 6 weeks.

        At the top of the list is a new Health Reporting feature that Mozilla first publicly started talking about in September of 2012.

      • Mozilla pulls tracking trigger for Firefox 22, ignores ad industry attacks

        Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.

      • Future Firefox to Offer More Social, Privacy Choices

        The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.

        If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.

      • Mozilla: the Next 15 Years

        That is, there were two key aspects to Mozilla’s previous work: hacking code, and hacking the system. Both will be important in the years to come. The following comment from Baker in her post shows how the two are intertwined:

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

  • Education

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.5.0 (Unstable) released

      PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.

    • FTP 0.4
    • Guile meets PHP

      Challenge #5 in the Guile 100 Programs Project is to write a CGI script that serves up HTML pages with embedded Scheme, a la PHP. It is the first challenge in this month’s theme, which is “Web 1.0 — Web 1990s style”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Condopedia Launches As Open-Source Wiki For NYC Buildings

      There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you everything you want to know about a residential building in New York City. StreetEasy can show you floorplans and amenities. The Department of Buildings can tell you how a place is zoned or what its roof is used for. The library can give you a detailed history. But there’s no resource that brings all these elements together. Enter, Condopedia, a wiki for condo and co-op buildings. Founded by real estate agent Laurence Putnam, the site provides all of the above, plus more, in the easy-to-use Wikipedia format that people are familiar with.

    • Is training to become a better contributor worth considering?

      Loïc Dachary, a Free Software developer and activist and the President of the Free Software Foundation in France, noticed something while attending the OpenStack summit in April 2012.

      As corporations joined the project and assigned developers to work on OpenStack, all of them knew about Free Software and some even contributed to it from time to time. They were all surfing the wave of the Cloud and it was an unprecedented opportunity for them to make a difference, to share their work on a daily basis.

    • Open Data

      • Medicine’s ‘Hard Drive’ Is Crashing

        Medicine’s evidence base — our hard drive — is corrupt, in all senses of that word.

        She was 86 years old, frail, with limited income. Her aching and fever had started two days ago. Although she had gotten the flu shot like I had asked her to, this was still most likely the flu. Ads for Tamiflu came immediately to mind, but like Ben Goldacre, I knew that the published data on Tamiflu has been as cherry-picked as your weekend bounty from the farmers’ market. My patient asked me: “Should I be on Tamiflu?” Should she, indeed. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know because I don’t trust the hallowed literature. I don’t trust PubMed, or highly cited articles in prominent journals, or the glossy circulars in my mailbox. Sitting across from her, at that moment, I felt my desire to practice evidence-based medicine completely undercut by the systematic suppression of “unfavorable” studies. The corruption of the evidence by publication bias isn’t theoretical. It’s there every day in our clinics and bedsides, affecting every patient and every doctor, breeding cynicism and distrust.

Leftovers

  • Ken Loach: Bring back the Spirit of ‘45

    Who or what inspires you?

    People who fight back.

  • Facebook starts charging users up to £11 to contact celebrities

    Trial charge for messages to people outside users’ social circle, from 71p for Robert Peston to £10.68 for Tom Daley

    [...]

    Facebook was ridiculed for setting a $100 (£61) fee to contact founder Mark Zuckerberg. He has previously said he would like Facebook messaging to become an alternative to email. The network rolled out @facebook.com email addresses to all users last June.

  • Owen Jones: Thatcherism was a national catastrophe that still poisons us

    We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade

  • Margaret Thatcher

    So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.

  • Margaret Thatcher: CNN in Jimmy Savile picture gaffe

    CNN has drawn unwanted attention on the internet after broadcasting a picture of Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.

  • Science

    • Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe

      The Polynesians’ epic voyages of exploration and colonization across the Pacific are one of humanity’s most impressive accomplishments (even if the local bird life wasn’t likely to have enjoyed it). Having most probably started in Taiwan, the explorers reached and settled on islands across most of the Pacific, as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand. And recent evidence shows that they also stopped in South America, where they stayed long enough to pick up food crops that eventually wound up distributed across the Pacific as well.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Threatens to Sue Vermont if Legislators Pass a Bill Requiring GMO Food to Be Labeled

      Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.

    • “American Dream”: Food loaded into Dumpsters while Hundreds of Hungry Americans Restrained by Police

      Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.

      The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

    • Cutting Social Security and Medicare? That’s the ‘Middle’

      The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. As the New York Times (4/5/13) put it, Obama “will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Apparently the most important risk is to the one to him, and not to millions of people whose benefits will be cut.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Iraq executing more people than it has for almost a decade, says Amnesty report

      Iraq is executing more people than it has done for almost a decade. The country now has the third highest number of executions in the world, according to a report to be published this week.

    • Fernandes ‘sought CIA funding’ during Emergency

      At the height of Emergency, fiery Socialist labour leader George Fernandes sought to get funding from the American Central Intelligence Agency and the French government while he was underground organising sabotage activities.

      Mr. Fernandes, who liked to project himself as a sworn enemy of American imperialism and foreign capital, said in November 1975 that “he was even now prepared to accept money from the CIA,” according to a new set of U.S. diplomatic cables from the Henry Kissinger era obtained by WikiLeaks and accessed by The Hindu.

    • CIA Iran Agents Allegedly Exposed by SSL CA Hack

      A group of Iranians reported to be involved in a sophisticated operation involving a deal with Chinese intelligence and involvements of Huawei have been able to obtain information about the certificate authority infrastructure produced and operated by Equifax at first, then sold to GeoTrust, Verisign and finally Symantec.

    • Terror camps targeting India spared from drone strikes in ISI-CIA deal

      US media on Sunday repo rted that Pakistan’s ISI and CIA made a secret pact to facilitate drone strikes against selective terrorist targets. Citing excerpts of a soon-to-be released book, American media said Pakistan gave access to US drone strikes on condition they would not target nuclear facilities and terrorist camps where Kashmiri militants underwent training for attacks against India.

    • CIA Does Not Submit Congressionally Mandated Data Mining Report

      Despite the CIA chief technology officer’s stunning claim last month that “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the agency does not submit a congressionally mandated report on data mining, The Huffington Post has learned.

      That’s because under the CIA’s reading of the law, it doesn’t do any data mining at all. A legal loophole allows it to skip submitting the report even though other agencies, like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, do.

    • ‘Way Of The Knife’ Explains CIA Shift From Spying To Killing

      When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.

    • CIA-ISI deal: When will Delhi speak up?

      This does raise the question that the US fight against terrorism is self-centred, and that its rhetoric against international terrorism is one-sided and need hardly be taken at face value (as many here tend to do). Evidently, the US agreed to Pakistan’s terms on drones in their self-interest. That is not surprising.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Seven State Keystone XL Resolutions, Where Are the Environmentalists?

      The cleanup is still underway from a massive pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, but you don’t hear anything about it at public hearings across the nation dealing with the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Resolutions supporting the controversial KXL pipeline have now been introduced in seven states, but while TransCanada, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Chamber of Commerce have been lobbying in force for the bills to pass, there have been few opposing voices by either Democrats or environmentalists at public hearings dealing on the measures. The massive pipeline project will transport tar sands crude oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for processing and export and once underway, the project will be a major contributor to global warming.

    • Reporters Say Exxon Is Impeding Spill Coverage in Arkansas

      Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they’ve been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

    • Activists claim Arkansas oil spill diverted into wetland

  • Finance

    • Spain’s youth rally against unemployment
    • The MF fraud: As bad as you thought

      Corzine, the former New Jersey senator and governor, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, led MF Global, a futures broker and bond dealer that collapsed in 2011. MF Global investors lost as much as $2.1 billion. At the time MF ran into trouble, Corzine was eligible for as much as a $12.1 millon golden parachute. However, Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, told me this afternoon that Corzine didn’t take any compensation when he stepped down. He also said Corzine has been unemployed since then, spending time with his family and doing philanthropic work.

    • Just Say Nao

      Sorry about the silence — I spent yesterday being human (the High Line in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be!), and then had a hellishly busy day today. If I had more energy left I’d plunge into the next stage in the European crisis; the moving finger of instability has now reached Portugal, with the government, of course, proposing to cure matters with More Austerity. But it will have to hold until tomorrow.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • French Intelligence Agency Forces Wikipedia Volunteer to Delete Article; Re-Instated, It Becomes Most-Read Page On French Wikipedia
    • Ways and Memes: PA Lawmakers Seek To Ban Photography Of Gas Drilling Activity

      A picture may be worth a thousand words, but apparently it says a lot more when it’s a photo of frackers fracking. In Pennsylvania recently, the battle to control the images used to depict the national debate over shale gas drilling has officially heated up.

      In February, 2013 PA House Bill 683 was proposed by nine Pennsylvania lawmakers – Reps. Gary Haluska [D-73rd], Carl Metzgar [R-69th], Stephen Barrar [R-160th], M. K. Keller [R-86th], Dick Hess [R-78th], Dan Moul [R-91st], Mike Fleck [R-81st], C. Adam Harris [R-82nd] and Tom Murt [R-152nd]. Steve Todd was among the first to report on it in his February 26 post, PA State House Judiciary Committee: NO on HB683. This bill would prohibit people from photographing oil and gas operations because they are occurring on agricultural lands. By fracking farmland, gas drillers would gain new impunity under a piece of anti-whitsle blower legislation, commonly known as an “Ag-gag.”

    • President of the European Parliament defends treating emails from citizens as spam

      On March 7, 2013, a large number of citizens tried to email members of the European Parliament to express their views on the ”Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”. The report had attracted public attention on the internet and in media, since it called for ”a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.

      One of the bloggers writing about this was the Pirate Party’s founder Rick Falkvinge, who asked citizens to email members of the European Parliament to let their views be heard, and set up a simple internet service to make it easy to find the addresses to the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).

      Around noon on March 7, approximately 350 emails from concerned citizens had arrived, but then they suddenly stopped appearing.

    • Manchester police to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes

      Decision follows campaign by Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up in memory of girl fatally attacked in 2007

    • Twitter account suspended after mocking Exxon’s response to oil spill

      A Twitter account called @ExxonCares has been suspended after tweeting about Ninja Turtles and finding the men who built the Pegasus pipeline 65 years ago.

      The parody account was created last week in response to the Arkansas pipeline rupture that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, a suburb 25 miles outside Little Rock.

  • Privacy

    • Email: A Fundamentally Broken System

      Phil Zimmerman has always been a privacy advocate, and while he developed PGP, others fortunately saw fit to follow and extend his work and developed an open source and compatible equivalent, called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG).

      Today, GnuPG or GPG is the linch-pin for the vast majority of Linux Distributions (Distros) and provides a ‘keyring’ feature to ensure that software obtained from a Distro’s repository will be guaranteed to be safe from tampering (trojan horses, viral code insertions). So, too, GPG is compatible with PGP email and allows users to encrypt (envelope) their email correspondences to guarantee privacy.

      Thus far, however, the implementation of low-cost or free, ‘easy-to-use’ email systems with standard encryption have been few, so there truly is a huge unmet need here–world-wide.

      As more users embrace the Internet and become comfortable incorporating it into their daily lives, they have also come to understand the crucial importance of privacy. In fact, many feel that such privacy is their given right. I agree with that. The right to privacy is implicit and incorporated into our nation’s Bill of Rights. It’s no different than the paper mail envelope analogy I gave above.

    • Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet

      It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

    • CIA keeping tab on Goa casinos?

      Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar Tuesday dodged a query from a legislator who asked if US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials are in the state to probe casinos and their alleged links to terrorist activities.

  • Civil Rights

    • Opinion: Cameron Wants to Forget The Right to be Forgotten

      Online privacy is something I feel very strongly about, and when I heard about the current government’s plans to opt out of new EU social media laws, I decided enough was enough and it was time to take bigger stand. I won’t get into the depths of my views in this post but here is a brief idea of the situation.

    • Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA!

      When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he’d been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn’t the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely — even though the website didn’t want to press the matter — the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to “exceed your authorization” on any online service.

    • Fix the CFAA
    • Help Us Remember Aaron Swartz By Participating in Our Week-of-Action, Demanding Congress Reform the CFAA

      Today, EFF and a host of organizations across the political spectrum are launching a week-of-action imploring Congress to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the expansive law used to prosecute the late activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz.

    • New figures suggest Scottish CCTV is spiralling out of control

      Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.

      The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.

    • Four race-crime convictions for neo-Nazi website

      Four men were convicted of inciting race hatred Monday from the Italian website of the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. The four, aged 23 to 42 and from various towns across Italy, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 months to three years for “promoting and directing a group whose purpose was the instigation to ethnic, religious and racial discrimination and violence”. A Rome judge found the four guilty of targeting “Jews and immigrants, advocating the supremacy of the white race and instigating racism and Holocaust-denial”. The four, who were placed under house arrest Monday, were arrested November 16 after police shut down the website, which had regularly posted anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • In our digital world you don’t own stuff, you just license it

        Corporations and lawmakers have put us on course for a world where consumers do not own the things they buy

      • The Pirate Bay Moves to .GL Domain in Anticipation of Domain Seizure
      • Pirate Party evangelist Rick Falkvinge vows that the copyright cartels won’t grind him down

        PIRATE PARTY FOUNDER Rick Falkvinge is a travelling evangelist for the political group and its ideals, and he says that Pirate Parties will spring up when and where they are needed and that they are becoming needed more and more often.
        Falkvinge founded the Pirate Party when he realised that political change needed to come from the inside.
        “I realised activism isn’t enough. Politicians won’t care about an issue if their job isn’t on the line over it; they’ll look at all the activists and remember their own time on the barricades nostalgically, then go back to serving corporate interests,” he said. “My key insight was that votes beat all the money in the world when it comes to getting politicians’ attention.”
        The Pirate Party won its place in the European Parliament in 2009 after gaining success in the Swedish elections, and Falkvinge said that gave it credibility that previously it had been lacking. “Well, we certainly got credibility we didn’t have before,” he said. “Kicking the first politicians out of office forced them to take the threat to their power – us, not their incomprehension of the issues – seriously.”

      • YouTube’s Deal With Universal Blocks DMCA Counter Notices

04.08.13

Gagging Critics: Bill Gates Bribes Crosscut for Favourable Coverage and Immediate Censorship, Then Abducts It

Posted in Bill Gates at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gates’ power grab advances

Power grab

Summary: A site which criticised Gates and Microsoft — a news outlet called Crosscut — has been taken over by Gates’ staff

The Gates Foundation likes to buy the press and sometimes blogs too, as it helps Gates control information, especially in particular fields where he pillages and plunders. A site called Crosscut had published some hostile pieces about Microsoft and Gates but negative coverage stopped, even erased (see first link in the list below) when Bill Gates paid them. It’s censorship followed by self-censorship. See the following as a reminder:

A report from last year said that the site had been taken over (we missed this report at the time):

“Big coup for us,” Brewster said in an email.

Shaw brings a background in journalism, marketing and philanthropy to his new duties. He has worked since 2004 as part of the senior leadership team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is currently director of grantee partner engagement. He has headed the foundation’s Pacific Northwest Program.

Well played, gagging your critics one at a time. Money talks. And now there is another unofficial mouthpiece for Gates, run by his own staff. █

Patents on DNA and Molecules (or How Bill Gates is Still Making Billions of Dollars)

Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bubble

Summary: Another timely analysis, filled with new links to articles, about where Bill Gates is investing his great wealth which he gained by illegal practices at Microsoft

A lot of press, excluding the corporate press, is covering the criminal behavior of those who stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens. This is what’s causing an economic turmoil and it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense. They just get better at hiding it. Bill Gates, who has a tax-exempting foundation, is widely lauded for giving away his money, but he actually increased his wealth by about ten percent or more in the past year alone. He makes a lot of money from his investment in monopolies, one of which he co-founded after dropping out of college.

There is a report in the Gates-funded Seattle Times about the PR campaign which seeks to capture the minds of gullible people. Despite a promising opening paragraph, this piece is hogwash as it in no way follows through with a sceptical analysis of Gates’ agenda.

“…it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense.”Over at at TED, a favoured venue for Gates marketing [1, 2], PR is being seeded yet again, leading to suggestions that Oprah, a routine Gates/Microsoft PR outlet [1, 2], is being replaced in some sense by the less superstitions-unfriendly TED. Well, as put last year by Gates’ boosters at Forbes (which glorifies the world’s richest without exceptions), TED is turned into something like Oprah, i.e. PR in disguise (Oprah is also notorious for promoting superstitions), for those in the business of power, which necessitates dumbing people down.

Gates has been trying to seed ignorance in the minds of the world’s less educated by teaching them to depend on corporations for their basic needs. It’s not gentle capitalism but coerced capitalism. Sadly enough, Imperial College does some PR along those lines (probably begging for grants) passing off the GMO investor and lobbyist as “pro-farming” in pieces like this (marketing photo included).

The world’s poorest people need not more dependence on the super-rich. They need social-economic justice. They need not a ‘handout’ of patents. As put last year in the Indian press:

However, it [Gates Foundation] faces the criticism of aligning with interests of big pharma and agri-business giants such as Monsanto and Cargill. Raikes debunks such criticism.

Of course he does, that’s his job. But as we have shown here before, those critics are exactly those who understand the big agenda. Will Hill quoted the other day an article/book which says:

From The Great American Fraud, 1905 – Why Medicine Should Not be Run Like a Business

“One of the most disgusting and disgraceful features of the patent medicine business is the marketing of letters sent by patients to patent medicine firms Correspondence is solicited by these firms under the seal of sacred confidence. When the concern is unable to do further business with a patient it disposes of the patient’s correspondence to a letter broker who in turn disposes of it to other patent medicine concerns at the rate of half a cent for each letter”

Microsoft ran like this and Bill Gates wants to be in medicine.

http://books.google.com/books?id=tdf8na3fqNUC&lpg=PA163&ots=WX0A8QyTsT&dq=patent%20medicine%20letters%20sold%20by%20the%20lot&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false

A PDF of the book can be downloaded from Google.

Recently we saw Indian patent battles over the sorts of patents which Gates has been promoting in poorer nations in Asia and Africa. See the article “Patent’s Defeat in India Is Key Victory for Generic Drugs“. Gates is investing (for profit) in some of these patents that impede generics and he routinely tells us the lie that without patents effective drugs would no longer be discovered. He actually used this logic to slam Free software and promote software patents in April 2008. On that same occasions he said “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.” In other words, Gates hates genuine sharing, he only pretends to share, when it comes to seeding a patents dependency.

“…Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does.”The reality of the matter is, as we wrote in dozens of articles before (with many supportive citations), Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does. Watch this new article from India Brian Druker is said to have “invented the drug’s molecule,” whatever it means to ‘invent’ a molecule. We need to stop ‘owning’ or monopolising everything. It is good for nobody except the tiny minority which hoards all the patents. At the top of this pyramid, considering where the capital for patents comes from, we have people like Bill Gates and his friend Nathan Myhrvold. Resist them, they’re your biggest enemies. They try to ‘own’ the world. █

Bill Gates is Occupying the Department of Education, Education Press, Education Forums/Debates, and Ultimately Politicians

Posted in Bill Gates at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A ruthless campaign to privatise what’s public

Department of Education

Summary: Gates-funded sites are trying to demonise protesters against Gates’ corporate agenda at the Department of Education; complaints multiply as people become better informed, or properly educated

There is a massive campaign — a “coup” one might call it — waged by the world’s richest people (i.e. people rich enough to avoid tax) against the system which indoctrinates future generations and has a state monopoly, tax subsidies, and compulsory culture built around it. The public is becoming increasingly aware of it. This is not a difficult thing to show and to explain, despite the occasional decoys and PR.

“Mark Naison refuses to call this building The #us #department of #education,” says one person about the building “to be known from now on (until we reclaim it for the people) as The Gates-Pearson Building!”

Yes, there is another protest and Gates is under fire. Watch this photo (reproduced above).

As we showed before, a lot of the teachers’ press is already bribed by Gates and therefore eager to push his propaganda. Some of it is demonising these protesters. Way to go, eh? ‘Education’. By bribed press. Here is a new puff piece for Gates. Not all publications relating to education have been subverted by Gates. Michelle McNeil of EdWeek noted multiple Gates employees filling the Department of Education and there is occasional warning alarm there over Gates agenda [1, 2].

The Gates Foundation, a backer of groups like ALEC (it stopped after public backlash), uses astroturf tactics and keeps buying of the press for consent, but blogs do complain that Gates is manufacturing “data” for consent from politicians and there is a new complaint from EdWeek, albeit only in a blog:

Bill Gates, who is more responsible than anyone for the absurd evaluations by which teachers are now being held accountable, had the gall to write this week in a tone of exasperation about the results of his own advocacy for these very practices.

Yesterday I asked when Mr. Gates, the great enthusiast for accountability for others, might hold himself accountable for his own handiwork.

As wealth has concentrated in the accounts of individuals such as the Gates, Walton and Broad families, they have used this to wield unprecedented power over the lives of those of us without access to such resources. They pay for research that creates the very “facts” upon which public debate is based. They pay for their own media outlets, and heavily subsidize others. Their money redirects existing grassroots groups, and underwrites new ones. They work with ALEC to write legislation, and funnel money through PACs to buy off politicians to move it forward across the country. They are utterly insulated from any sort of accountability. They do not face voters in any election. Nobody “evaluates” them. They cannot be fired. They may on occasion choose to engage in a dialogue, but they are not obliged to respond to the substance of the criticisms raised. As my question indicated, this accountability they demand from teachers is a street that goes one way only.

But let’s imagine we could turn the tables on Mr. Gates and evaluate his performance as a philanthropist. Might we establish some goals to which we could hold our billionaires accountable? We do not have any measurable indicators such as test scores to use, but since I do not find these to be of great value in any case, I will offer a more qualitative metric, based on my knowledge of the subject’s work. Since he has spoken glowingly of the salutary effect of feedback on teachers, surely he will welcome this feedback, even though it is unsolicited.

Having bribed some schools, people like Zuckerberg and Gates are trying to pass themselves off as “for education” (Facebook is partly owned by Microsoft) and the PR is evident, just like press complicity. The ultimate goal is to control US education and thus US youth. They are planning to do the same thing here in the UK and last year a report was published which drops some numbers:

“We’re now the biggest recipient of Gates Foundation money in the UK by quite a margin,” she said.

Gates has also established some institutional proxies in the UK to help him privatise (for profit) public education. We covered this several times before. █

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