10.14.11

Links – Lots of bad deals made behind closed doors.

Posted in Site News at 1:13 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Microsoft warns people not to install Windows and other non free software.

  Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore. Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

  Most of the text behind that link is stupid and self serving but these two points are true.

• Science

  • edwards@tevetron:~/ shutdown -h now

    Fermilab staff and users are deeply involved in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. And other machines at Fermilab continue to circulate beams through underground tunnels. We’ll keep right on doing physics here.

• Security

  • Scammers hijack domain names by attacking service providers.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • US Wingnuts demand war with Iran.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Time for EPA to Get Moving on Risks of Drinking Water Contaminants

    The real fight raged long after Hollywood moved on to other blockbusters. The list of corporations that are responsible for the nearly 700 toxic waste sites with chromium contamination reads like a Who’s Who of the rich and powerful, including military and military contractors, pesticide companies, leather, plating, utilities, and chemical companies. These polluters successfully spent the past decade using every political maneuver in the book to delay regulations on this chemical and reduce their clean-up costs. … the EPA process is stalled on numerous dangerous contaminants in drinking water, including arsenic, perchlorate, and perchloroethylene (PCE). Attacks from anti-regulatory politicians will hinder EPA’s ability to protect the public from contaminants in the water supply.

  • House Passes Incinerator Bill That The EPA Warns Will Kill Thousands

    House Republicans argued that the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 was a “timeout” from long-delayed regulations aimed at mercury that threatened to raise costs on boiler operators and incinerators. But the measure also exempts smaller burning facilities from any regulation at all.

• Anti-Trust

  • In IV’s New Lawsuit Against Motorola, The Devil Is In The Details

    The shell company called Pragmatus AV-which has now sued YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Yahoo-probably has a close relationship with IV. In the new lawsuit against Motorola, IV is represented by Feinberg Day, a small Silicon Valley IP firm, as well as Delaware firm Farnan LLP (both suits were filed in Delaware.) Those are the same two law firms that represent Pragmatus in the lawsuit it filed against Yahoo earlier this week, a suit we covered in The Patent Examiner yesterday.

  • Google+ traffic grew by 480% in one month, so press reports a 60% decline. Wait, what?!

    Have you seen the stories lately that Google+ traffic dropped by 60%? This figure represents not the decline of Google+, but the decline of newspaper trustworthiness.

    Elswhere it is reported that profits were up 33%.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • SCO and Attachmate backer smears 99% protests by funding “reporters”

    As the New York Times has documented, Paul Singer, a Republican activist and hedge fund manager worth over $900 million, has emerged as one of the most important power brokers within the GOP. Now, it appears that the reporters financed by Singer are at the forefront of efforts to tarnish the reputation of 99 Percent Movement demonstrators… The rise of Singer’s political profile can be traced to his work as a top donor to pro-Bush character-assassination groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans.” In recent years, he has quietly worked with the right-wing billionaire industrialist Koch brothers and Republican strategist Karl Rove …

    PJ adds, “Singer is head of Elliott Associates, which tried to buy SCO’s assets and finally settled for an investment role in the Attachmate purchase of Novell”

  • American Spectator Editor Admits to Being Agent Provocateur at D.C. Museum

    An editor for the magazine American Spectator infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street protests to discredit the movement. He created a violent confrontation at the National Air and Space Museum that got dozens of innocent people pepper sprayed and the museum shut down, then bragged about it on Facebook and in his magazine. It’s not apparent that the started to brag before or after Open News recognized his photograph from scenes of his intended riot. The American Spectator later changed the wording of the story, then removed it completely.

    This story reminds me of the SCO employee infiltration of a protest against SCO, where the SCO employees carried signs about “pirating music” and other things not related to the protest.

  • Wikipedia shuts Italy site to protest Berlusconi “gag law”

    Wikipedia has disabled its Italian website in protest against a privacy law drafted by Silvio Berlusconi’s government which would impose new restrictions on newspapers and Internet pages and curb police wiretaps. The online encyclopedia warned it may shut its page www.wikipedia.it permanently because of provisions in the law forcing websites to correct content deemed detrimental to a person’s image within 48 hours of a complaint, with no right of appeal.

• Privacy

  • Facebook willing to defy EU law to keep what it knows about users secret.

  • Twitter comments used to track vaccination and attitudes about vacines.

    Big Pharma is watching you, so don’t talk about conflicts of interest. [2] Facebook and Twitter were designed to sell you out.

  • Verizon Phone is Spy Phone.

    Verizon changes privacy policy, is now monitoring your mobile Web browsing activities/locations and may sell the info. That is in addition to tracking your every move and being able to record all spoken conversation in earshot at will.

• Civil Rights

  • A partial listing of the systematic undermining of civil rights in the US over the last decade:

    The comment was in response to the story of some NY politicians claiming that we need a “more refined” interpretation of the 1st Amendment, in which free speech is seen as a privilege that the government can take away if they think you’re a jerk:
    “Are we also going to get a more refined 2nd Amendment that legalizes all guns but outlaws gunpowder? And a more refined 3rd Amendment that still disallows quartering soldiers in a time of peace, but since we’re always in half a dozen wars there never is a time of peace. The more refined 4th Amendment says they can search anything they want as long as it’s within 1000 miles of a border. The more refined 5th Amendment defines due process as a process you have to bay a due for. The more refined 6th Amendment says you get a speedy and public trial unless you’re a terrorist, which you are. The more refined 7th Amendment says don’t worry about those civil trials anymore, because we’ve made everything criminal and you’re going to prison. The more refined 8th Amendment says the death penalty is neither cruel nor unusual because we do it a lot and so far not a single person who’s been subjected to it has complained. Plus people cheered it. The more refined 9th Amendment says sure you might have other rights, but what proof do you have? The more refined 10th Amendment says, well, not the people. I mean, the States maybe, but not the people. What were we thinking?”

  • The dark side of Apple

    He interviewed scores of workers and toured the factories while posing as a US businessman and was shocked to learn that people were literally being worked to death to meet Western gadget lust. … [his] gripping monologue has made Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak cry and forced the company’s new chief executive into a strident defence of Apple’s supply chain, but now Mike Daisey has a message for Australian Apple fans: open your eyes. … when they choose instead to remain children playing with toys it’s infantilism of the highest order. …

    The current CEO of Apple is the man most credited with moving all manufacturing to China.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • As Expected, Alternative DNS Systems Sprouting Up To Ignore US Censorship

    What’s just as stunning as the fact that supporters of PROTECT IP still can’t figure out how this is really, really bad, is that they also don’t realize how this pretty much destroys any argument the US makes around the globe in trying to protest political censorship.

  • DNS experts including Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky and now-ICANN chair Steve Crocker said that the Protect-IP Act in the US would persuade many users to switch to offshore DNS servers. They warned that this would lead to a rise in cybercrime against consumers, as disreputable or insecure DNS providers send surfers to spoofs of banks and other sensitive sites. … BlockAid’s web site says that it may financially support itself in future by showing ad-laden web pages instead of returning NXDOMAIN errors, a much-criticized money-making tactic many ISPs already use.

    So far, BlockAid is only as disreputable as ordinary US ISPs who also run DNS that are often targeted by criminals.

  • DNS Bypass Systems Needed Now! — VeriSign Wants Right to Shut Down Domains for Pretty Much Any Reason

    While it is understood that long-term efforts are necessary to replace the existing increasingly co-opted and abused DNS with an entirely new, distributed system not subject to such abuses (e.g. “IDONS” or some other mechanism), it is also extremely clear that concerned organizations and individuals need to be working right now on short-term alternatives that can be brought into immediate action

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • WIPO boss: the Web would have been better if it was patented and its users had to pay license fees

    After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object. In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

    WIPO should be disolved.

  • FOIA demanded emails show that MAFIAA and US Government drafted a supposedly voluntary copyright crackdown by ISPs.

    Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. … any substantive text in the e-mails (.pdf) was blacked out before being released to Soghoian. But the communications show that a wide range of officials — from Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff Alan Hoffman, the Justice Department’s criminal chief Lanny Breuer to copyright czar Victoria Espinel — were in the loop well ahead of the accord’s unveiling.

    It should be obvious that a “Copyright Czar” exists to please big publishers, but it’s nice to have the email to prove it.

  • Trademarks

    • TV Producer tries to monopolize a popular rediscovered UK war propaganda slogan through EU Trademark.

    • Getty Images Facing Upwards To 80 Million Trademark Claims?

      Getty maintained at least 11 images in its inventory that depicted a tree-shaped air freshener. Car Freshner sued on multiple counts, including trademark infringement. Getty moved to dismiss the trademark count, arguing that it was not using the mark as a trademark, and if it was, such use was either nominative or descriptive fair use. [but ...]

  • Copyrights

    • EU Greens Come On Board Pirates’ Copyright Agenda

      A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the striking success of the Pirate Party in the German local elections. Since then, an opinion poll has suggested that, currently at least, the party enjoys a similarly wide support throughout the country – around 8%

    • As a wave of legislation giving publishers the ability to kick people off the web is put forward around the world, one of the proponents is caught plagiarizing photos.

      For example, the top right-hand picture on this page uses a picture from Panoramio, but with the EXIF data of the latter stripped out in the former.

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