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05.08.12

LInks – Oracle’s war on Google falters.

Posted in Site News at 2:30 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

    Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

  • Lib-Ray: An Open HD Video Standard for Free Culture and Independent Film

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

      …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

      This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

    • Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

      “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

      US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

    • ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets
    • Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

      The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

    • Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

      An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

  • Finance

  • Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

    • Barnes & Noble Press Release

      Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

      It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

    • Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

      Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

    • Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

      Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

      Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

    • Oracle-Google verdict signals need for copyright reform
    • Oracle v. Google and the Dangerous Implications of Treating APIs as Copyrightable

      significant outstanding questions remain, including whether copyright can in fact apply (the judge alone will decide this) and whether Google made a legal fair use of those APIs (we believe it did).


    • From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google, Day 1 of Patent Phase ~pj – Updated 7Xs- Partial Verdict; Oracle Wins Nothing That Matters
    • Evidence of paid anti-Google bias in patent “news” coverage is troubling

      Yesterday it was revealed that Oracle has hired Mr. Mueller to “work together for the long haul” on “competition related issues,” of which FRAND law was the only provided example. Mueller claims this is a “very recent” relationship, but by his own admission he and Oracle have been discussing his employment for a long time … We don’t want to impugn his word, so … it’s not Mr. Mueller’s intent that should be questioned, but the results.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

      The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

    • ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

      Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

  • Privacy

    • Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

      Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

    • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

      Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

      They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

    • To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

      a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

      So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

    • To Facebook You’re Worth $80.95

      What’s interesting is not the smoke and mirrors valuation fraud, it’s the disgusting attitude about selling people’s private information.

    • FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now

      CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory. … The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

      It’s time to remove CALEA.

  • Civil Rights

  • Education Watch

    • Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

      the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

      I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

    • School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

      You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

      The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

    • Mass student strike in Quebec continues

      Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

      The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

    • Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%

      Severe and chronic trauma (such as living with an alcoholic parent, or watching in terror as your mom gets beat up) causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible. … this “discipline with dignity” stuff is, well, useless. Punishing misbehavior just doesn’t work. You’re simply adding trauma to an already traumatized kid. … Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.”

  • Copyrights

04.30.12

Links – Microsoft Extortion of B&N Successful.

Posted in Site News at 10:56 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

    Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

      …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

      This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

    • Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

      “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

      US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

    • ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets
    • Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

      The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

    • Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

      An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

  • Finance

  • Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

    • Barnes & Noble Press Release

      Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

      It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

    • Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

      Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

    • Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

      Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

      Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

      The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

    • ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

      Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

  • Privacy

    • Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

      Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

    • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

      Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

      They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

    • To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

      a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

      So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

  • Civil Rights

  • Education Watch

    • Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

      the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

      I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

    • School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

      You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

      The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

    • Mass student strike in Quebec continues

      Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

      The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

  • Copyrights

04.26.12

Links – ACTA/CISPA Update, Other Crimes, Corruption and Failure.

Posted in Site News at 7:20 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • Seattle Rex vs. Apple: The Verdict Is In

    A few years ago, Apple sold me a $4,000 computer with a defective graphics chip/logic board. The defective part was the Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and when it was discovered that the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and issue me a refund.

  • Seems German parliament (Bundestag) has an email blackout. IIRC they switched from Linux to MSFT Exchange. How ironic.

    That’s not ironic, it’s night follows day predictable.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Equipment Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Account in Control System Code

      The backdoor, which cannot be disabled, is found in all versions of the Rgged Operating System made by RuggedCom … a static username, “factory,” that was assigned by the vendor and can’t be changed by customers, and a dynamically gnerated password that is based on the individual MAC …

    • Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: the disastrous conclusion

      [why?] … to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. … I’d also set up Hotmail to import all my Gmail and its associated contacts. Not to mention the Facebook and LinkedIn contacts that Hotmail merges into your online address book. It soon became painfully clear that pretty much anyone I’d had personal or professional contact with over the past decade had been sent an email containing a link to a malicious site. From my account. Me – the editor of a PC magazine. … what’s even more worrying is that it’s not only my webmail that’s been compromised, but my Xbox login (which holds my credit card details) and now my PC login too. Because Windows 8 practically forces you to login with your Windows Live/Hotmail details

      He tries to change his passwords but probably did so with another Windows computer.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Remarkable Week for Corporate Crime

      First Criminal Prosecution in BP Case is an Individual, not a Corporation. Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP plc, was arrested on charges of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal criminal authorities investigating the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster. David Uhlmann, the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at he Justice Department is puzzled why the government has yet to bring criminal charges against BP and the other companies involved. “The government has a slam dunk criminal case against BP, TransOcean and Halliburton for the negligence that caused the Gulf oil spill,” Uhlmann told Marketplace Radio yesterday “They should bring those criminal charges.”

      Article has 9 other cases of corporate crime that includes bribery, padded billing and poorly labled medicine.

  • Finance

  • Anti-Trust

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • PR agency is hiring students for a Pro-ACTA demonstration. 100 € for 2 hours. Disgusting, much?
    • Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit

      “Crowdturfing” is a term that combines crowdsourcing and astroturfing to describe the use of crowdsurfing sites to create artificial campaigns on microblog sites, forums, instant message groups and blogs. … ing systems. More specifically, we define crowdturfing systems as systems where customers initiate “campaigns,” and a significant number of users obtain financial compensation in exchange for per-forming simple “tasks” that go against accepted user policies.

    • UK: Open Standards consultation – important update

      One of our first discussion roundtables held on the 4th of April (Competition and European Interaction) was facilitated by Dr Andrew Hopkirk who blogged about the event for Computer Weekly and who was engaged by Cabinet Office as an independent facilitator on a pro-bono basis. … he did not declare the fact that he was advising Microsoft directly on the Open Standards consultation. … For this reason any outcomes from the original roundtable discussion will be discounted in the consultation responses and we will rerun that session and give time for people to prepare for it.

      Seel also this CW article setting the stage. The most important thing to remember about the Microsoft game is that they are trying to corrupt your channels of communication too.

    • Lost in translation: Anti-TPP campaign befuddles Washington

      Japan’s agricultural lobby has taken its campaign against a global free trade agreement to the U.S., buying a full-page advertisement in Tuesday’s Washington Post opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

      TPP is a terrible, anti-democratic treaty.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails
    • Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

      At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms.

      Love the $4 billion dollar boon doggle by big Microsoft partner SAIC. ATT also earns special shame and should be boycotted.

    • If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move

      The rollout of this technology means there are now at least three ways that users can track their locations indoors, where GPS is generally useless — bluetooth beacon, Spotrank (and proprietary vendor) databases of Wi-Fi hotspots, and Navizon’s I.T.S. nodes. It also marks the second way (that I know of) for you to be tracked via the location of your phone, whether you want to be or not. (The first requires access to your cell phone carrier, and is used for example to locate your position when you make a 911 call.)

      Inadequate privacy laws in the US allow companies to aggregate this data to know exactly what device belongs to who. That means your location can easily be tracked in real time. Non free phones may give you away in other ways as well, regardless of laws. Any laws that block sharing of information like this would be undone by CISPA.

    • Drone Use Takes Off on the Home Front

      Occupy AA stations! Three people with surgical tubing, a funnel and some gravel should be able to bring the smaller spies down.

  • Civil Rights

    • TSA’s PreCheck express airport screening hinges on fragile trust

      The agent explained that her record is clean but that “someone I know has gotten into trouble or is under investigation and that it affects me,” she said. … A TSA spokesman confirmed that loss of any other E-ZPass-like government program for travelers, such as Sentri, Global Entry or Nexus, will have similar repercussions for their PreCheck membership. “If your card is revoked by CBP, you’re no longer eligible for PreCheck,” says Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman.

      Guilt by association is a typical police state tactic used to keep people helpless and divided. So are restrictions on travel for people who have not been accused or convicted of any crimes.

    • The TSA’s mission creep is making the US a police state

      In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying “people [who] want to travel by some other means” have that right. (In other words: if you don’t like it, don’t fly.) But now TSA is invading travel by other means, too. No surprise, really: as soon as she established groping in airports, Napolitano expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. … “Don’t like the new rules for mass transit? Then drive.” Except even that doesn’t work anymore. Earlier this month, the VIPRs came out again in Virginia and infested the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, also known as the stretch of Interstate 64 connecting the cities of Hampton and Norfolk. … Local commenters at the Travel Underground forums reported delays of 90 minutes. … If you don’t like it, walk. And remember to be respectfully submissive to any TSA agents or police you encounter in your travels, especially now that the US supreme court has ruled mass strip-searches are acceptable …

    • May Day Directory: Occupy General Strike In Over 115 Cities

      Need a break from work? Take a long weekend for May Day by taking Monday and Tuesday off.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why Preserving an Open Internet is Now the Most Important Thing in the World

      An Open Internet is increasingly absolutely essential to freedom of communications, freedom to search, freedom to learn, and just about every other freedom you or I could list. Communications. Information. It is through these concepts, these realities, that innovations are created, problems are solved, dictators are vanquished, and the world advances. And similarly, it is through control of these constructs, restrictions on information and communications, that ideas are crushed, lives are enslaved, and dictators flourish.

  • Education Watch

    • Free Open Source Software in Oregon Government

      instead of adopting Open Source governments in Oregon continue to mostly shun it or use it as little as possible. A good example is non-profit FreeGeek has a contract with the City of Portland in which they get used City computers and hardware and refurbish them and install Ubuntu but must distribute those refurbished machines to local schools however the Portland Public School system has not yet requested any of these computers for their classrooms and students. How can local schools do teacher layoffs and cut programs yet turn down free computers and technology that would save the millions from their budget over time.

  • ACTA

    • EDRI: ACTA – If You Think We’ve Won, We’ve Lost

      Following the announcement of David Martin, the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in charge of the ACTA dossier in the European Parliament, that he will advise his colleagues to vote against the proposal, a widespread assumption appears to have developed that ACTA is now dead. This is not just wrong. It is dangerous and wrong. … [we can assume it's over and relax or] we do our duty for European democracy and maintain our pressure right up until the vote. And then we win. And Europe wins.

    • Liberals and Democrats Announce Rejection of ACTA

      Everyone should do this.

04.20.12

Links – CISPA = (SOPA + US PAT RIOT ACT)**3 Privacy and Censorship Round Up

Posted in Site News at 1:19 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

04.19.12

Links – CISPA threatens US Citizens. Death to Word

Posted in Site News at 1:58 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • How LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word: 12 Features

    It amazes me that anyone would consider using Word or Windows but here are some technical reasons not to.

  • Death to Word. It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor
  • Google Chrome OS Review: Heading Towards Microsoft Market?
  • Behind the Scenes at Instagram: Tools for Building Reliable Web Services

    how do you build a service and scale it to the size and success of Instagram? At least part of the answer lies in choosing your tools wisely.

    Hint: they don’t use IIS.

  • An effort to upgrade SSH, from MIT

    This paper describes Mosh, a mobile shell application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and provides speculative local echo of user keystrokes. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol, a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across client IP address changes.

  • Play the eyballing game

  • Hardware

    • ESR: Making simple connections

      It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. … In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. … Wow…it really is the 21st century! …

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report
    • Cop Watcher Jailed Twice

      Cop watching — the act of turning a camera on police — is not illegal. But in areas policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it can still land you in jail. … She spent a hellish night in a cell with no bed, forced to sleep on a cold floor. “They kept the air-conditioning running full blast like they wanted to punish me,” she says … when the jailers returned her belongings, her camcorder footage had been erased — an act that First Amendment attorneys say is illegal. It also violates department policy. She was told the obstruction charge had been dropped and was handed a written citation for being “under the influence of a controlled substance.”

    • What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records

      The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?

      Drug use seems to be a catch all accusation thrown against people the police don’t like.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule

      You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening.

    • Excerpt: At Goldman Sachs Servicer, ‘Total Disaster’

      “Had companies changed their philosophy and said, ‘You know what? We’re not going to beef up our collections staff; we’re going to beef up our loss mitigation staff.’ Had they done that and come up with loan modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

    • Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money

      Ongoing anti-competitive business and government granted monopolies are not even mentioned.

  • Anti-Trust

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

      Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win. … His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that’s stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can’t read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.

    • ACLU: Kicking off “Stop Cyber Spying Week”

      The bill would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws, allowing companies to share Internet users’ data with the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the world — without any legal oversight. If CISPA passes, companies like Google and Facebook could pass your online communications to the military, just by claiming they were motivated by “cybersecurity purposes.” CISPA would give the companies immunity from lawsuits if you want to challenge what they are doing. Once the government has the information, the bill allows them to use it for any legal purpose other than regulation, not just for stopping cybersecurity threats.

      This bill would complete the public/private cooperation started by the U SAP AT RIOT ACT and legalize the worst abuses.

    • Revealed: CISPA — Internet Spying Law — Pushed by For-Profit Spy Lobby

      defense contractors, many already working with the National Security Agency on related data-mining projects, are lobbying to press forward. Like many bad policy ideas, entrenched government contractors seem to be using taxpayer money to lobby for even more power and profit.

      Microsoft, of course, is on the list but so are other big hitters like Lockheed Martin. Richard Stallman, in his political notes, says, “The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.”

  • Civil Rights

    • An economic recovery that leaves workers further behind

      American workers have lost all their bargaining power. … First, American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. Second, with the rate of private-sector unionization down to a microscopic 6.9 percent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay. Employers can serenely blow them off — and judging by the data, that’s exactly what employers are doing.

  • Education Watch

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why one in five U.S. adults don’t use the Internet

      Expensive and ratty networks keep US citizens off the internet. Big publishers try to convince us all those without don’t want it by quoting people who don’t know any better and can’t tell us if they have been misrepresented.

  • DRM

  • Copyrights

    • Yes, Copyright’s Sole Purpose Is To Benefit The Public

      to claim that the protections of the author are greater than or even equal to the benefits to the nation, is a clear flip-flopping of the method with the purpose. Of course, in doing so, it not only flip flops the method and the purpose, but it completely distorts the nature of copyright law, and leads to maximalist-style positions, where absolutely no consideration is given to how the public benefits (or, more importantly, is hurt) from specific changes to copyright law.

    • The case was thrown out but Goldman Sach’s programmer spent a year in jail and the judges recommended changes to law that would criminalize what he did.

    • Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He’s Not Monetizing

      The propaganda machine is failing as artists succeed.

04.10.12

Links – New and Old Censorship, Anti-trust, Privacy Violations and Pollution.

Posted in Site News at 12:55 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • Anti-Trust

    • Pay TV piracy hits News

      The actions are documented in an archive of 14,400 emails held by former Metropolitan Police commander Ray Adams who was European chief for Operational Security between 1996 and 2002. The Financial Review is publishing thousands of the emails on its website at URL afr.com.

      The emails show that Murdoch used “piracy” as a competitive weapon, helping people to break the digital handcuffs of rival’s pay TV boxes. The loss of face and revenue helped Murdoch to consolidate his media empire.

    • Microsoft all but buys Netscape with AOL patent acqusition

      This Microsoft friendly news source uses gloats over this superposed “end of the browser wars” and uses the term “intellectual property” while glorifying and validating software patents.

  • Censorship

    • The reason I’m helping Chris Hedges’ lawsuit against the NDAA

      the Homeland Battlefield Bill has already a chilling effect upon my ability to investigate and document matters of national controversy that would ordinarily be subject to my professional inquiry. It has therefore prevented my readers from receiving the full spectrum of truthful reporting which, in a functioning democracy, they have a right to expect.

    • Iraq’s internet on the brink

      A year since the Arab Spring, the internet in the region is facing significant threats from governments trying to gain more control over it.

    • Media companies & ISPs outline plan to stop piracy

      Not so voluntary censorship is set to roll out on people in the US. Appealing accusations of sharing will cost people $35.

    • World Without Web

      … we underestimate the alarming degree of contingency lurking behind ‘inevitable’ developments. … The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. … what if DARPA had been caught in that lie, funding for its network research scaled back, and a serious effort made to kick randoms off the early net?

    • CISPA – The Sneaky Son Of SOPA

      A good collection of links about a nasty law against sharing.

  • Civil Rights

  • Privacy

  • Education Watch

  • DRM

    • How Adobe DRM Requires People to Pirate Library Books

      Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. … It turns out that a majority of the 6,495 titles available at my local library were accessible only through a locked .acsm file format. …you can think of a .acsm file as being very much like a .torrent file. If you use Windows or Mac, you can (theoretically) download and install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This software reads the .acsm file and then it will download the actual .epub book, complete with DRM. … there is no legal way to access the content without breaking the law if you are using free (libre) software.

      Tell your local librarian to never use a system like this!

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Another Patent Attack on Google with More Wild $$ Predictions ~pj

      Nokia and Microsoft. Partners at law, so to speak. Is this another Microsoft/Nokia outsourced production? Remember when Barnes & Noble told us that it views Microsoft and Nokia’s patent campaign as an antitrust violation, a deliberate campaign to destroy Android and maintain Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop and extend it to smartphones, with Nokia piggybacking with its patents for weapons and MOSAID being brought in to do some of the dirty work?
      So when you read the scare headlines, remember this: Google is awesome at patent litigation. It tends to prevail. I told you that when Oracle first sued Google

    • Oracle’s Position is Worse Than I Thought
    • USPTO Issues Interim Mayo Guidance ~pj

      “…the claimed product or process amounts to significantly more than a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea with conventional steps specified at a high level of generality appended thereto.” Why *wouldn’t* that apply to software?

    • Mayo Decision Impacts Myriad Genetics – Judgment Vacated, Remanded ~pj

      Things are looking up in PatentLand

    • Prometheus bound: An important precedent for the next software patent case

      Plainly, this was not a dispute about software patents, but the Court’s unanimous opinion will guide it and lower courts as they analyze future software patent cases.

    • Copyrights

      • Judge rules file sharing is not a “conspiracy”

        The litigators are trying to get around the fact that judges aren’t happy with allowing mass lawsuits, so what they are doing is taking one internet user to court but using that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. … James Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois raised his eyebrow in disgust at this trick, saying that it was trying to get around the “stiffening judicial headwind.”

      • 5000+ Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion

        “We’re one of the worlds top 60 sites in the Internet. This brings us a responsibility to use the site to do something good. When I think about it, it’s insane that all the other top 100 sites only blast ads and self-centered stuff on their front pages. We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not.”

      • 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up

        See also this excllent summary

        To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.

      • DRM is crushing indie booksellers online
      • MPAA Lines Up With Porn Studio in Steamy Copyright Dispute

        A video site that published movies as urls is surprised that people would download those movies. They also found a judge that agrees enough to shut down a website where users share the urls, sometimes as embedded movies.

    • 04.01.12

    Links – An Outbreak of Laws to Justify the Worst Spying. Exposed Racism and Pollution

    Posted in Site News at 2:40 pm by Guest Editorial Team

    Reader’s Picks

    • Building a GSM network with open source
    • Microsoft Office 365 vs Google Apps

      Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology recently polled 150 students who tested Google Apps’ Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 and results showed only two preferred the latter.

    • Science

    • Health/Nutrition

    • Security

      • Paul Vixie tells us how he and the FBI are dealing with the Windows born malware, DNS Changer and Conficker

        Many victims would have to reinstall Windows on their computers — which at first was the only sure cure for this particular infection. On top of that, many of the victims have had their DSL or Cable modems (“home routers”) reconfigured by the DNS Changer malware, so that they were using ISC’s replacement DNS servers even if none of their computers are still infected and even if none of their computers were running Windows. Most Internet users do not have the skills necessary to check and repair the configuration of their home routers, and most Windows users are also unwilling to reinstall Windows. So, even when we could identify and notify a victim, we had a hard time “closing the deal”. … We still don’t know the identities of any of the criminals who foisted Conficker on an unready world back in 2008. But we do know that the victim population has not dropped below six million (6,000,000). So we still collect the “sinkhole” data about these victims, we still report on it to network operators, and every year we buy another rack of disk drives to hold the next year or so worth of data. We’re out of ideas for how to get people to care that their computers are infected with Conficker.

        The new deadline is July 9 2012. You can check your own non free embedded systems at http://dns-ok.us/.

      • The Illusion of Security Or: How to hack CitiBank

        Several years ago, I was working as a trainer in a Citibank call center. … The building was locked down. … since every computer in the building had access to the complete financial history of every single person who’d ever done business with Citibank … [but] … I went to my own computer, and found many other sites I could access. The Center for Information Technology Integration. Cities Restaurant. The Cape IT Initiative. Random websites that had one thing in common. They started with the letters CITI. … That night, I registered citi.ryanestrada.com

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Finance

      • Who Makes $250,000 a Year? Not Small Business Owners
      • The Rich Get Even Richer

        In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income.

      • Banksters

        The US required cities and states to buy, from the banksters, billions of dollars worth of fixed-rate loans as a hedge against possible high interest rates. Then the US drove down interest rates to cater to the banksters, making our cities lose while the banksters win.

    • Anti-Trust

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • CMD/PRWatch Asks Ethics Board to Examine Corporate-Funded Gifts to ALEC Legislators

        Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.

    • Censorship

      • China’s Twitter-Spam War Against Pro-Tibet Activists

        Over the last week, supporters of Tibet, and the merely curious, have seen information warfare up close. On Twitter, several hundred bots (automated programs that generate content) flooded discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam. If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject. … More malevolently, Tibetan activists have been threatened on Twitter.

        It’s nice to see mainstream media understand some of the problems that people on technical forums pointed out a decade ago. It’s too bad they only took note when it happened to something they cared about.

      • Protesters See Tweets Used Against Them

        This and recent demands of Facebook passwords are an attempt by the rich and powerful to intimidate people and keep them from organizing. Don’t let them shut you up or drive you underground.

      • Study Finds China Censorship Of Social Media Is Real, Pervasive

        an online publication of the University of Illinois, Chicago, finds that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese version of Twitter.

      • Sarkozy’s plan to criminalize the mere viewing of Islamist web sites is running into some opposition.

        Note how Sarkozy cites the prohibition of “child pornography” as a precedent for prohibiting access to a political opinion. The idea that this was the thin edge of the wedge is no longer just a theory. It is an excuse for censoring all sorts of things. No matter how disgusting some works may be, censorship is more disgusting.

      • A Colossal Mistake of Historic Proportions: The “JOBS” Bill

        From the 1970s until recently, Congress allowed and encouraged a great deal of financial market deregulation … Congress is about to make the same kind of mistake again – this time abandoning much of the 1930s-era securities legislation that both served investors well and helped make the US one of the best places in the world to raise capital. … A new venture could raise up to $1-2 million through internet solicitations, as long as no investor puts in more than $10,000 (section 301 of HR3606). The level of disclosure would be minimal and there would be no real penalties for outright lying. There would also be no effective oversight of such stock promotion – returning us precisely to the situation that prevailed in the 1920s.

        See also, “This business startups act is a hucksters’ charter“

    • Privacy

      • Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords

        Many big firms use “lawful interception” appliances that monitor all employee communications … [and] may use keyloggers, screenloggers, and other spying tools to watch what you do and capture your passwords. If your employer, school or institution gets to control the software on your computer, you can’t know that it’s not snooping on you at all times. … the presence of your employer’s self-signed certificate in your computers’ list of trusted certs means that your employer can (nearly) undetectably impersonate all the computers on the internet, tricking your browser into thinking that it has a secure connection to your bank, Facebook, or Gmail, all the while eavesdropping on your connection.

      • Consumer Privacy Defended In FTC’s Caution To Congress On Data Brokers

        the FTC called for legislation to give consumers access to personal data held by brokers and allow them to correct any inaccurate information. … to create a national standard for notifying customers if their data is lost in a data breach, suggested mobile application companies — and websites more generally — create “short, meaningful” privacy disclosures and urged the software industry to create a “Do Not Track” mechanism on browsers to let consumers choose how much of their information is collected online and how it is used. … Though largely unknown to the general public, data brokers gather information from a variety of public and private sources, including home purchase histories, change of address forms, credit card activity and even address information from local pizza delivery shops … Then they sell that data to buyers who use it for a variety of purposes, often for online marketing.

      • Don’t Let Congress Use “Cybersecurity” Fears to Erode Digital Rights

        H.R. 3523, also known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a “cybersecurity” exemption to all existing laws.

        See also this

      • This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy

        See also, TLO aggregation service founded by Hank Asher.

      • Yes, the States Really Reject Real ID

    • Civil Rights

      • Cancer v. the Constitution

        I had never encountered this clinical scenario during my training in Canada. I had never seen a woman suffer because she couldn’t afford something as simple as a Pap smear, never mind deal with the indignities of shopping around her sorrow and hard luck to try to patch together what would inevitably be inadequate medical therapy. It is this reality of medical care in America for which I was wholly unprepared.

      • Who is Insulting the Middle Class?

        A deep irony, underlying our political season, is that the U.S. middle class…the biggest victims of the first decade of this century, are also being slandered relentlessly. The ongoing campaign of propaganda that democracy can’t work and we should turn to oligarchy has many threads.

      • Anna Brown: 29-year-old Black Woman Dies in Jail After Being Dragged By Police Out of Hospital
      • All Parties Ignore the One Way to Reduce Health Care Costs: Single-Payer

        Research shows that single-payer reform could save about $380 billion annually that’s currently wasted on insurers’ overhead and the unnecessary paperwork (and screen-work) they inflict on hospitals, doctors and patients. That’s enough money to fully cover the uninsured and eliminate copayments and deductibles for the rest of us

        The non free software business managers tend to favor are another problem that take years to undo.

      • Police face racism scandal after black man records abuse

    • Internet/Net Neutrality

      • The House GOP Plan to Gut the FCC

        The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.” … will disable the FCC, not reform it. … by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. … [and] significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account … making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.

        I imagine this is mostly aimed at stopping the FCC’s TV white space Open Spectrum initiatives. Big media already has egregious monopolies but Open Spectrum can undo them, so publishers seek government unjust government protection of their technically obsolete business models.

      • Mobile operators seek to ‘block’ Skype in Sweden

        Now that Microsoft has admitted to spying on Skype users, this is a good idea but that’s not what ISPs have in mind.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

    03.21.12

    Links – Man Flies like a Bird, Education Watch, Privacy and US Network Neutrality

    Posted in Site News at 2:11 am by Guest Editorial Team

    Reader’s Picks

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