11.09.13
Posted in Microsoft at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New revelations about the surveillance infrastructure laid out by the United States and those who bankroll it
WHENEVER we speak about Microsoft and the NSA we should remember that Microsoft pretty much kick-started PRISM — the programme under which everything which resides on a company’s pool of data becomes available to secretive spies, including the murderous NSA.
According to a new report from the New York Times [1], US taxpayers essentially pay to be spied on whether they like it or not. The CIA is doing this. iophk wondered: “Isn’t this also just the same data they are getting from social media and e-mail logging?”
We already know, based on plenty of evidence, that black (hidden) budgets are still where trillions of dollars come to disappear, with no public oversight whatsoever. What the CIA does here is simple; it provides corporate subsidies at taxpayers’ expense (or growing national debt), essentially paying private entities like Microsoft to help incriminate customers, based on private data and communications. We already know about misuses of the NSA powers, e.g. the handing over of data to the DEA. It’s not about terrorism. For the sake of national ‘interests’ (the interests of those in power), companies which may be running at a loss are getting subsidised. And at whose expense? At the expense of national debt, which the public as a whole is required to pay back.
Speaking of Microsoft and the NSA, there is a new Microsoft back door which the NSA can now exploit. As iophk put it, given some NSA background information, those back doors should be called what they are because ‘”zero day” is just a marketing term for holes that the vendor can’t be bothered to fix.’
The Internet seems to have become just another way for spies to raid homes (or digital equipment at homes) without a warrant and without being noticed. This is a serious problem. The Internet as a whole has devolved into a militarised surveillance apparatus — a fact that even the founder of the World Wide Web (and DRM apologist) seems to have finally accepted [2]. We need an alternative to the Internet because it is probably too late to fix the Internet. The Internet came from the US military and it is still serving the US military for the most part; it’s a control mechanism — control through total oversight and assassination/marginalisation of opposition. Even the CIA turns out to be deeply involved. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company’s vast database of phone records, which includes Americans’ international calls, according to government officials.
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Having already made his feelings perfectly clear about the revelations of NSA and GCHQ internet surveillance, inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee is calling for an international protection system for whistleblowers.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The last CEO of Nokia, preceding a Microsoft mole pretending to be CEO
Summary: New evidence helps show that Stephen Elop was a Microsoft mole all along and that he is being rewarded for turning Nokia from Linux ally to Linux foe
“Stephen Elop,” explains Sosumi in IRC, “after crashing Nokia to the ground (baby!) is now positioned as one of the candidates for Microsoft CEO” (which wouldn’t be too shocking). Elop helped Microsoft amass a large number of Nokia patents, to be used offensively and sometimes get passed to patent trolls (for an assault on Android/Linux). Nokia, due to Elop’s intervention, turned from one of the leading developers of Linux into one of its biggest enemies. His first order as CEO was pretty much to dismantle all Linux efforts inside Linux. It became known as the “Burning Platforms Memo” and it is being referred to in this new analysis from Finland. Here are some fragments of interest:
“I came across this interesting article in Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (published more than a month ago on 29 Sept 2013) about Elop’s tenure while Nokia CEO (the article is in Finnish of course). It is mostly a biographical story of the departing Nokia CEO but it includes an interesting passage about the Burning Platforms memo, which may ring particular bells to our readers who were here in 2011 and lived throught its aftemath. Plus it sheds some light on the negotiations with Microsoft.”
Further down it says: “Also, no surprise from what we’ve seen of Elop’s style, but yeah, he clearly was doing his thing without bothering to tell the Board and the Board had to chase him afterwards about what he had been up to… So even more proof that yes, the actual damaging decisions and especially those damaging communications (Memo, timing of Windows announcement, sudden MeeGo death announcement etc) came before Elop had ‘remembered’ to inform the Board. Why was he doing this? He had his cool bonus that he was working towards.. Nice to ‘forget’ to inform your boss, eh?
“Lastly, we now know Elop was personally involved in the Microsoft sale – WOW what a conflict of interest and even Helsingin Sanomat speculates that Elop may have had private meetings on his regular trips to Redmond (because contrary to his original promise, he did not bring his family from Redmond to Finland.. the family was a convenient excuse to go meet up with his pal Ballmer, especially now that we learned that his marriage was so much a wreck, that the divorce proceedings were started already in 2012…)”
When people say something like “don’t pick on Microsoft employees” we should all think about Elop and the likes of him. Microsoft moles are a common problem in the industry and if we can’t recognise and speak about this problem, then we oughtn’t expect this problem to go away. Here in the UK, members of parliament are being named and shamed [1], which sure limits their ability to operate mischievously. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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MPs have come under attack for claiming £200,000 of taxpayers’ money to cover the cost of their energy bills. Some 340 MPs used the expenses system to pay for heating their second homes, according to the Sunday Mirror.
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Posted in Action at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Activism is being marginalised in the West (meaning Europe and north America for the most part), which makes it hardly any safer than it is for activists in third-world countries (meaning poorer countries, not ones which are neither with the US nor the USSR)
PESSIMISM is not a virtue, but sometimes it is important to be able to spot where — if anywhere — society becomes blind or apathetic towards its own regressions. Activism is a good indicator of where in the world the people are being oppressed and actions against activists help show where authorities are more oppressive. In so-called “developed countries” it sure seems like activism is increasingly being viewed and also treated as a crime or even terrorism. Watch the story in [1]; the US appeals court is basically treating activists like pirates (as in criminals at seas). There are some cases which are similar to it and Wikileaks likes to casually cite this important case. It demonstrates the extremely low level of tolerance that Western nations now have for activists. Russia is not much different and the whipping boy which is “Pussy Riot” helps show this [2,3,4]. Activists who use performance and stunts as a form of protest receive the same treatment as serious criminals and arguably ‘disappear’ in jail. Over in the United States, such people (minor offences if any at all) may even die in jail [5], or get anally raped by so-called law enforcement [6]. People are generally assumed guilty before any guilt is established and then they’re punished for it. This is like the CIA/Gitmo approach [7] being applied to the domestic population, including white people in Western nations [8]. Remember Aaron Swartz, the activist against copyright monopoly? It turns out now that secret services in the US knew they were driving him into depression before he committed suicide [9].
The bottom line is this: never assume your innocence just because injustice has been stereotyped the art of people in power in so-called ‘rogue’ nations or because people in power in Western nations only abuse people from so-called ‘rogue’ nations; if you are an activists, you are a target, no matter where you are. Rather than civilise the so-called ‘third world’, we in the West are inheriting the negative attributes of those whom we label “rogue”. A pile of evidence shows this every day. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A FUGITIVE activist known for attacking Japanese whaling vessels off Antarctica insisted “we’re not pirates” as he addressed a US appeals court considering whether he and the organisation he founded should be held in contempt.
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Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has disappeared into the gulag transit system between Russia’s penal colonies, and her family is worried that authorities are trying to crush her spirit.
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One of the jailed members of the Pussy Riot protest band has vanished from sight since she was moved to a new prison 10 days ago, reports from Russia say.
The husband of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova told a US news website he had not received any news about her and her current location was being kept secret.
She had been on hunger strike at a penal colony in Mordovia.
She and another band member were jailed over a protest in a Moscow cathedral.
They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment after performing a crude protest song in February 2012. A third band member was released on appeal.
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Russian prison service says Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been moved, after her husband expressed fears she had disappeared
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The first doctor the police asked to perform the procedure refused. But the police then took Eckert to Gila Regional Medical Center, where, according to his lawsuit, he was first subjected to abdominal x-rays (no drugs), two anal penetrations with fingers (no drugs), three enemas (no drugs), another round of x-rays (no drugs), and, finally, sedation, followed by a colonoscopy of his “anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines.” No drugs. All of this was of course done without Eckert’s consent.
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Doctors were asked to torture detainees for intelligence gathering, and unethical practices continue, review concludes
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Former Guantánamo Bay prisoner David Hicks, an Australian citizen, has lodged an appeal with the US Court of Military Commission Review to overturn the bogus “providing material support for terrorism” conviction imposed on him in 2007.
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The U.S. government noted in passing that Aaron Swartz suffered “depression problems” nearly two years before his suicide last January, according to a newly released Secret Service report.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Dubious strategic direction at SourceForge and Slashdot, which are becoming more like Windows malware and Microsoft PR sites, respectively
LINKEDIN, a crowdsourced spying and surveillance network, tells me that Slashdot staff has been looking for information about me. Apparently they are curious to know who exposes their scams, including the propaganda they are beaming to longtime readers of the site. According to one of our contributors, Dice.com claims to have made a lot more money from Slashdot, but it doesn’t explain how. Does it get paid for PR? Is it selling users’ data? Nobody knows. But based on the following disturbing story, Dice.com treats visitors like merchandise.
To quote IDG, which quotes the GIMP project, the increasingly-Microsoft-friendly SourceForge is up to no good:
In the past few months, we have received some complaints about the site where the GIMP installers for the Microsoft Windows platforms are hosted.
SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites – the green “Download here” buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.
The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.
So there you have it.
As lirodon put it in IRC, have “you heard about how the evil Dice.com is violating the trust of SourceForge users?”
He called the above “stupid “wrapped” installers with borderline malware,” then cited “their support of those stupid “guess the download button” ads.”
To clarify the obvious, Techrights never sold any data about visitors. It doesn’t even keep such data. The data gets deleted periodically, unlike troll comments (there will always be zero censorship). The same policy will apply at Tux Machines, which we officially take under our wing today. Susan takes time to prepare for her wedding while I take over as main site maintainer. The first and only change to the site is removal of the Slashdot feed (DistroWatch Latest Releases feed replaces it).
Remember that Dice.com is just a business. It is trying to ‘monetise’ the sites above, it doesn’t really care about truth, freedom, sharing, etc. █
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11.08.13
Posted in America at 2:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Coup d’état of the media
Photo by Steve Jurvetson
Summary: Further erosion of independence in the corporate media and another fine example of its overseers being run by the same corporations it’s supposed to oversee
It was curious to find out that the ombudsman of the Washington Post had been made redundant, as pointed out in an open letter from Ralph Nader [1]. The Washington Post, which rejected the leaks from Bradley Manning and did a lot to serve CIA agenda (or beam propaganda to China as part of a deal with the government), is now owned by the head of Amazon, which also has a massive new contract with the CIA (to help store data about people, nations, and so on). It is worth remembering Amazon’s proximity to Microsoft as well. The trend-setting media (more influential than Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg and perhaps even the New York Times) is now literally owned by a man whose net worth is $28.9 billion. Previously, before this embarrassing scandal, Bill Gates’ wife was on the board of the Washington Post, but it wasn’t ownership of the whole. At least we now know who the Washington Post needs to serve, as per the steering managers.
The United States has this apparatus called FCC, which stands for Federal Communications Commission. It is supposed to supervise the media (among other things), but given that it’s full of corruption and appointments from those who are seemingly regulated (revolving doors in the FCC were covered here before [1, 2, 3, 4]), expect nothing to be done about the loss of oversight over corporate media, which now in Bezos’ hands is more corporate-owned than before. The FCC has just shown us that corruption is its motto by appointing Tom Wheeler [2] (check his professional background).
It is important to always recall who owns the media which we choose to trust. There’s a business model and/or a political agenda, but hiding it is easy using the art of language. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Mr. Bezos would do well to reestablish the longtime ombudsman post which was abolished in March of this year, presumably to save money. For an ombudsman’s role is not just to be an internal critic at the paper but also to be the reader’s coherent voice on the ways the Washington Post is being managed.
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The confirmation of Tom Wheeler as chairman and Michael O’Rielly as a commissioner ends a deadlock over the appointment of two key FCC executives, after Republican lawmakers withdrew their opposition.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Remy Steinegger
Summary: Another new example of exploitation of a crisis (caused by oligarchy) by oligarchs who wish to profit from it (privatisation)
Will Hill, a regular contributor of this site, reminds us of this topic which we no longer explore (no time to cover it anymore). The Gates Foundation continues to do its evil deeds under the pretense of charity and teachers are not stupid enough to think that Bill Gates, a college dropout, genuinely wants to improve education. “The article goes on to expose Bill Gates’ recent, self dealing and other interference in Colorado’s schools,” Hill says. Dora Taylor, the teacher who wrote an analysis based on this news, puts it like this: “it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.
“One way to see this is to look at how the Walton family and Gates have deployed their wealth to make an opportunity out of this square state’s infamous education finance problems. Leveraging their tax-subsidized foundations, they purport to come to the financial rescue of budget-strapped schools. Yet, they typically tie their seemingly altruistic beneficence to ideological demands.”
Taylor concludes by saying: “Some go further and push specific technologies into classrooms – technologies that, not coincidentally, their corporations stand to profit from. One example: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has used $100 million from his foundation to ram his company’s corporate partner, inBloom, into the Colorado’s largest school district. InBloom collects student data to share with technology companies like Gates’ Microsoft, which then develop for-profit education software to sell back to schools. According to the New York Times, parents objecting to the surveillance-like technology feared “officials might be unable to evaluate inBloom objectively, given its backing by the Gates Foundation, a major donor to public schools whose grant money Jeffco was hoping to attract.” The school district ultimately received a coveted $5.2 million grant from the Gates foundation and – not surprisingly – decided to keep using inBloom.”
We covered inBloom before. It’s like Gates’ own mini-PRISM. What we generally have here is a huge problem and Gates is one of several who cause it. When the “corporate rule” [1] runs the country and exploits crisis (real or manufactured) it is no wonder that we see people-hostile policies being passed. Gates does this not only in education. In agriculture too, Gates pushes hard for private profits by trying to promote the agenda of Big Agriculture he invests in, including GMO [2]. Gates wouldn’t know charity even if it hit him in the face [3]. He was born a super-affluent boy. To him, making himself richer is the solution to poverty in the world. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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RT TV interview about how governing by crisis and brinkmanship is having a negative effect on the US economy.
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The agribusiness giants would have us believe that our inherently unsustainable and morally reprehensible factory farming system is the only way to feed the world’s burgeoning population. But the facts prove otherwise. Factory farming is all about maximizing profits for a handful of the world’s largest corporations.
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Studies have found the wealthy are less interested in the needs and motions of others and are not as helpful, compassionate or generous as those who possess less. One study, published in 2010, found people with less money are better at reading faces in a measure called empathy accuracy.
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Posted in Action at 1:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
By Вени Марковски
Summary: The Internet as a whole is turning into just another Facebook (advertising, surveillance, censorship, and propaganda)
CITING issues with DRM on the Web, we’re not alone in saying that the Internet got abducted by corporate interests, just like anything that’s good in the world, including Free software. Darknets are gaining popularity because there is realisation that anonymity on the Web, which is critical to free speech, is in critical condition (Tor is one remedy [1], but it’s under attack by the NSA, FBI, and so on). To make matters worse, the monopolies which took control over Net traffic are increasingly discriminating against particular sites or access protocols [2], basically denying free and equal access to speech. Given the way that alternative media gets oppressed and even crushed [3] by authority and corporations, we oughn’t assume that these issues are accidental, temporary, or the result of one person (or company) getting it all wrong. There is a strong collective force trying to turn the Web into a conduit for advertising, censorships, surveillance (profiling), propaganda, etc. I know some people who decided to more or less quit the Web due to that. Quitting Facebook is the first stage, but how about quitting the Web when the platform as a whole becomes just another Facebook (with real ID and surveillance)? █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The anonymity software has sparked controversy but who built it, what is it used for, what browser does it use – and why is the NSA so worried by it?
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Net neutrality is a dead man walking. The execution date isn’t set, but it could be days, or months (at best). And since net neutrality is the principle forbidding huge telecommunications companies from treating users, websites, or apps differently — say, by letting some work better than others over their pipes — the dead man walking isn’t some abstract or far-removed principle just for wonks: It affects the internet as we all know it.
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Posted in Ubuntu at 1:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Canonical uses dubious trademarks in dubious ways in order to silence critics
BACK in 2007 we wrote about the possibility that Novell might try to use trademarks in order to silence "Boycott Novell". Despite the fact that some Novell employees abused us (as SCO employees had done in Groklaw), it never went as far as using legal threats (intended to discourage or scare the critics). For that sort of tactless move to become reality one can always count on privacy offender Canonical. It is not unprecedented.
According to this article from a part-time Microsoft booster, “Canonical “abused trademark law” to target a site critical of Ubuntu privacy,” adding to its name-calling against critics (Mark Shuttleworth just collectively referred to them as “trolls”).
Remember that Canonical went after derivatives of Ubuntu — using trademarks to force renames — and later used its PR-esque staff (no need to name names) in order to cover this up because publicity generated by these moves was largely very negative. Canonical clearly hasn’t learned its lessons.
Canonical seriously needs some fixing. But we might not be able to say so because Canonical would go after us. Canonical Canonical Canonical Canonical Canonical Canonical. Sue us. █
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