TechrightsSearch results for 'hilf' (page 1 of 4) http://techrights.org Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Tue, 03 Jan 2017 16:25:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC) http://techrights.org/2017/01/01/select-committee-on-unitary-patent/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/01/select-committee-on-unitary-patent/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2017 14:40:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98101 This great search was powered by Search Unleashed.
Help to remove this message by getting the site owner to support this software.

… von Menschen gemacht werden, wenn sie sinnvoll sein soll. Software ist und bleibt immer nur ein Hilfsmittel. Beachten Sie also, dass eine Steigerung der Effizienz bedeutet, dass pro Patentanmeldung im Durchschnitt weniger Zeit investiert wurde. Der Patentprüfer hat weniger Zeit für die Bearbeitung der Anmeldung gehabt. Wir sind bereit, zur hohen Qualität des Einheitlichen Patents beizutragen. Hierzu benötigen wir aber eben auch genügend Zeit, und ich hoffe darauf, dass Sie dies nicht …

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/01/select-committee-on-unitary-patent/feed/ 0 Links 9/8/2016: Chrome 53 Beta, SQLite 3.14 http://techrights.org/2016/08/09/sqlite-3-14/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/09/sqlite-3-14/#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2016 15:05:47 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94835

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • STEAMpunking Linux: The Physical Computing Stack

    I’ve been on a quest lately to add nano-Linux boards to steampunk projects. The effort has been pretty successful and it’s fun doing things like putting a Raspberry Pi into my “Conference Personality Identification Device,” which everyone recognizes as a name badge. The badge sports a 1.8-inch color TFT screen that plays little sepia toned promotional videos and an orbing tricolor LED “ozone tube.” I wear the badge to my conference tech talks and it tends to be a big hit.

  • More Fun with Windows 10, Yabba Dabba Do Bedrock Linux

    Windows 10 is back in the news and back up to their old tricks. The latest Windows 10 updates has been reported to delete Linux partitions without confirmation or even warning. Even pure Windows users have reported unbootable systems and Linux is the bad guy in a security question with Linux on Windows. Elsewhere, Lumina Desktop Environment hit milestone version 1.0.0 today and Linux Mint had an oopsy with their Firefox 48 update. New Bedrock Linux introduced a different approach to universal packaging and Christine Hall shared her top five favorite Linux distributions.

  • Desktop

    • London’s Met Police has missed the Windows XP escape deadline [Ed: known problem, London’s police is a prisoner of NSA and also China, Russia etc. [1, 2]]

      London’s Metropolitan Police has missed its deadline to dump Windows XP, with tens of thousands of copper still running the risky OS.

      The force, on the front line against terrorist threats and criminals in the capital city, is running Windows XP on around 27,000 PCs.

      At last count, in May 2015, the Met had a total of 35,640 PCs, with 34,920 of them running XP. Policemen set themselves a deadline of March 2016 to finish migrating to Windows 8.1.

      London Mayor Sadiq Khan, however, has apparently now revealed that just 8,000 of the force’s PCs have moved to Windows 8.1 since last September. The target is for another 6,000 by the end of September 2016.

      Khan provided the update in response to a question from Conservative Greater London Assembly member Andrew Boff.

    • Met Police still running Windows XP on 27,000 computers [iophk: "forget XP, Windows in general is dangerously out of date"]

      LONDON BOYS IN BLUE the Metropolitan Police may be armed with tasers and extendable batons, but they are backed up by Windows XP in a lot of cases, which is a really bad thing.

      Windows XP no longer gets official security updates, and Microsoft sees it as the sort of thing that should be scraped off shoes before walking on the carpet.

      The company will let people pay to keep using it, but only on a case-by-case basis. We do not know the police arrangement with Microsoft, but the Met needs to accelerate the updating of its computer systems as it puts Londoners’ information at risk, according to London Assembly member Andrew Boff.

  • Server

    • What is Private Cloud?
    • Safety first: The best use of the public cloud for analytics apps and data
    • Huawei Launches Labs to Drive Open Cloud Networks

      The Cloud Open Labs are part of the vendor’s All Cloud strategy to make it easier for telco operators to migrate their infrastructures to the cloud.
      Huawei is unveiling an interconnected group of laboratories that are designed to help network operators more quickly and easily embrace and deploy cloud computing solutions in their environments.

    • Data Center Architecture Lessons From Isaac Newton

      Sir Isaac Newton remains our favorite source for axiomatic laws of physics, despite giving us the language of calculus. Particularly relevant for today’s discussion is Newton’s third law as formally stated: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

      In the cosmology of the data center, this existentially proves itself in the network whenever there are significant changes in application infrastructure and architectures. As evidence, consider the reaction to first, virtualization, and now, containerization, APIs, and microservice architectures.

      These changes, while improving speed and agility of application development and delivery, have created greater mass in the data center, essentially changing the center of gravity and pulling many network services toward it. Application-focused services like load balancing and even web application security have been pulled toward the development environment as scale and security have become a necessary component of application architectures.

      [...]

      Achieving the agility and speed necessary in the app network requires software — virtual or containerized — with APIs and programmatic methods of integration into the orchestration engines driving the build and release process. These components must also be scalable, but not of the same magnitude as the core network. Software solutions rule in this growing division in the data center.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Open vSwitch Joins Linux Foundation Open Networking Ecosystem
    • Refereed Talk Deadline Approaching for Linux Plumbers Conference

      The refereed talk deadline for Linux Plumbers Conference is only a few weeks off, September 1, 2016 at 11:59PM CET. So there is still some time to get your proposals in, but time is growing short.

      Note that this year’s Plumbers is co-located with Linux Kernel Summit rather than LinuxCon, so the refereed track is all Plumbers this year. We are therefore looking forward to seeing your all-Plumbers refereed-track submission!

    • Graphics Stack

      • Radeon RX 460 Released, Linux Review Later This Week

        Just days after the Radeon RX 470 began shipping, the Radeon RX 460 is shipping this morning and the embargo concerning the RX 460 has expired.

        This Polaris 11 graphics card has 14 compute units, 896 stream process, 1090MHz boost clock speed with 1200MHz boost clock speed, and is rated for up to 2.2 TFLOPS of compute power. The video memory is GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus. The TDP for this graphics card is less than 75 Watts.

      • AMD GPUOpen’s CodeXL 2.2 Now Supports Linux With AMDGPU-PRO

        Earlier this year AMD made CodeXL 2.0 open-source as a developer tool with GUI centered around profiling/optimizing D3D, OpenGL, and Vulkan (since CodeXL 2.1) under Windows and Linux. Today marks the release of CodeXL 2.2.

      • Lower Memory Use For The VC4 Raspberry Pi Gallium3D Driver

        One of the latest initiatives worked on by Eric Anholt at Broadcom for the VC4 Gallium3D driver — the open-source driver used most famously by the Raspberry Pi hardware — is lower memory use.

        Over the past week he’s been working on lowering the memory use for the VC4 open-source Linux driver stack. Eric ended up making various fixes and optimizations to reduce the memory consumption, which is important considering the limited RAM available on the Raspberry Pi boards.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Rainbow Folders

        Breeze Icons follow the colorscheme that’s not new but now the folder icons also follow the color scheme.

      • QRPC: A Qt remoting library

        This project of mine has been around for quite a while already. I’ve never much publicised it, however, and for the past year the code hasn’t seen any changes (until a few days ago, anyway). But related to my current job, I’ve found a new need for remote procedure calls, so I came back to the code after all.

      • Qt 5.8 Is Preparing For Its Feature Freeze

        Qt developers are preparing for the feature-freeze of the upcoming Qt 5.8 tool-kit.

        The branching of “dev” to “5.8″ is happening with developers preparing for Qt 5.8 to set out on its final course ahead of the official release later this year. The actual feature freeze is set to happen one week from today on 15 August.

        Qt developers concerned about the logistics of the 5.8 branching can see this mailing list post.

      • My experiences with SOCIS 2016

        This post is a small synopsis of my experiences so far as a student in this years Summer of Code in Space, where I shall recount the whole adventure of integrating Sentinel-2 data into Marble Virtual Globe.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Need an ARM board to do GNOME development?

        As per the Qualcomm boards, they run with the freedreno driver (by the way, props to Rob Clark for his amazing work on this driver) and I was able to run a GNOME on Wayland on them using the official Debian image, so they are more suitable if you want to focus on the upper layers of the stack.

        I would like to reiterate my gratitude to Banana Pi and Qualcomm for their generosity for the hardware, as well as ARM and Codethink for the server side stuff that is already being used in our GNOME Continuous efforts.

        And of course, I’m going to GUADEC! I’ll be taking the boards with me, so if you think you have something interesting to do with them and you are attending just find me around.

      • Missing GUADEC this week

        This week is the annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (“GUADEC”). I’m sad that I am not able to attend this year. I was looking forward to being there.

        As I’ve reported before, I have a few work conflicts this year. I started a new job in late December, as CIO in county government. The new position comes with new responsibilities and a new schedule.

      • GSoC coding – Part 4

        Yes, I know it has been a while since I did any update on my GSoC project with GNOME. The reasons being that, I was busy with my visa and travel documents for Germany (GUADEC). As this trip would mark my international travel debut (yay!), it took some time for me to get familiarize with the process of visa and required travel documents. I applied in Ahmedabad (where I live currently), but looks like visa granting people were not satisfied and they called for a personal interview at Mumbai.

      • GNOME Improves Handling of Unknown Audio Devices (Thanks to Unity)

        Is it a mic? Is it a speaker? No, it’s a … Well, actually GNOME doesn’t know either — but the open-source desktop is about to be smarter about finding out.

      • Blog backlog, Post 4, Headset fixes for Dell machines

        Many thanks to David Henningsson for the original code, and his help integrating the functionality into GNOME, Bednet for providing hardware to test and maintain this functionality, and Allan, Florian and Rui for working on the UI notification part of the functionality, and wiring it all up after I abandoned them to go on holidays ;)

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Trying two new distributions

        I recently decided to do something different and, instead of reviewing one of the distributions in the DistroWatch database, I opted to select two projects at random from the waiting list. I was not sure what I would get when I spun the virtual roulette wheel, but I was eager to try something new.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 opens up event registration

        openSUSE.Asia Summit is a 2 day event hosted every year in different regions of Asia to promote openSUSE and open source. Hosting a variety of workshops, talks and a hackathon, openSUSE Asia summit is expecting over 400 participants. Attendees will learn how to use openSUSE and incorporate it in their personal as well as professional lives. They will also understand the dynamics of the openSUSE project and meet the openSUSE contributors and board.

        In addition, we have chance to learn free and open technologies, to share experiences with each other, and most of all, have fun at the Summit, and, in beautiful tropical scene of Yogyakarta region (a travel guide for you coming soon). In previous years openSUSE.Asia Summit has been held in Beijing, China in 2014 and National Taipei University of Education,Taipei / Taiwan, Republic Of China 2015.

    • Red Hat Family

      • A new technology called ‘containers’ is creating ‘winners and losers’ says Red Hat CEO

        By now you may have heard of a three-year old tech startup called Docker, valued at over a billion dollars, and the new tech market it created called containers.

        But what you may not realize is that the insane popularity of containers, a tech used by computer programmers, promises to completely change the multi-trillion-dollar enterprise software market, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst tells us.

      • Could Red Hat’s Acquisition of API Management Technology Revolutionize Software Development Again?

        Open source is a big part of my life. So far, I’ve been the CEO of three open source companies. Red Hat is a superlative example of how to create revenue and maintain an organization through the monetization of open source technology via subscriptions and support. And yet, as the entire tech industry transforms with a dramatic shift toward the cloud, Red Hat will have to modify its business structure in order to stay ahead of the game. Their acquisition of 3scale shows that they’ve already identified this necessity, and are taking steps to address it.

      • Managers: Do you delegate or donate?
      • The Red Hat Paradox

        When one thinks of Red Hat, Linux emerges as the top of mind software application. The Red Hat Linux software solution paradigm represented, to many, a “crazy” business model in its early days. Prior to the emergence, the likes of Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc. had defined the software development, sales and support model narrative in a clear objectified manner. Organizations paid a monetized licencing fee, and monetized annual support. Modifications to core software were often reliant upon the vendor, based upon established pricing models. Also, core product upgrades were solely the responsibility of the provider.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Flock 2016

          The annual Flock was held last week in Poland. This year was much busier for me than last year. I’ve been on the team for well over a year now (my how time flies!) so I was more involved with everything.

          I gave the annual kernel talk. This was mostly a status report/update. If you’ve been to Flock in the past, this talk will seem very familiar. One item I tried to emphasize this year was that we really wanted to get more people involved. Our policy is still ‘go upstream’ but we still want to build an active Fedora community of kernel participants as well. The distro is probably going to be most users first interaction with the kernel and we want the best experience possible. The slides are super boring but you can read them if you want.

        • Flock 2016 – krakow – Travel home (saturday/sunday)
        • Identifying Fedora Contributors – Stats for Flock

          I was working on generating statistics for Flock this week. Bhagyashree (bee2502), my GSoC mentor, had delivered a talk on Fedora Contributors and Newcomers Onboarding and I was assigned the task of generating statistics of the whole Fedora Community. At first thought, this was a pretty hectic thing to do. To accomplish this, I will need data of all the contributors from the beginning of fedmsg -i.e from 2012. And, I will have to find when a user had signed up for a FAS account and track his/her activity. Phew!

        • Siddarth Sharma: How do you Fedora?

          Sharma is a software engineer on the Red Hat product security team. He focuses on security of storage products such as Ceph and Gluster. He used to work as a software maintenance engineer at Red Hat, looking after the GNOME and KDE desktop packages. “I learned from the most talented people in the software security industry and still have a lot to learn,” said Sharma. He started using Linux in 2004 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, but later switched to Fedora Core 2.

        • Fedora 25 Alpha Freeze Goes Into Effect, Still Eyeing November Release

          Today marks the Fedora 25 Alpha release that also means it’s time for the software string freeze and Bodhi activation point. If all goes well, Fedora 25 will be released three months from yesterday.

          The various freezes are beginning to take place for Fedora 25 so it can hopefully be on target for its release on 8 November. Details on the various milestones hit today can be found via this mailing list post.

        • Flock 2016 & my talk on ABI checking in Fedora

          Flock is the annual Fedora conference where you can find Fedora contributors as the main audience. This year the conference was held at the beautiful city Kraków, Poland from 2nd to 5th August. Being a schedule of 4 days, it was split into first 2 days of talks and later on workshops. Majority of talks were enriched with various Fedora related topics.

        • FAD and Flock to Fedora 2016

          Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one! In the past 2 weeks I’ve been traveling a lot: first to Westford, US for Design Team Fedora Activity Days 2016 and then to Krakow, Poland for Flock to Fedora 2016.

    • Debian Family

      • Is that a Debian all-in-one PC in your pocket?

        I’ve experimented with Next Thing’s Chip SBC, connected to a big screen TV via its composite video output, and controlled with a wireless keyboard/mousepad, for about a month now. It’s a nice little full-featured Linux machine that runs LibreOffice and other desktop applications reasonably well.

        The Chip sports a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 based Allwinner R8 processor, accompanied by 512MB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC flash. The board’s built-in WiFi is convenient, and its $9 cost is easy on the wallet.

      • My Debian Activities in July 2016

      • Derivatives

        • Emmabuntus Debian Edition 1.0: the new story begins

          Emmabuntus Debian Edition is a nice distribution that works for the particular niche. It delivers Linux and computer enablement into remote areas of the world where computers are rare and Internet connection could be something exotic. That is why it contains “all you can eat” software in the same ISO image.

          It is the reason of one of the issues I listed above as different applications may use different design styles.

          However, there are some more issues mentioned above that could be solved if the team looked into the distribution polishing a bit more. Luckily, they are mostly in the design area, meaning they are very likely to be resolved in the next releases.

          I remember the early version of Emmabuntus which had many similar issues at that time. Most of them are no longer in the system. Let’s hope that Emmabuntus DE will follow the case.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Business of Open Source Software

    Although open source software (OSS) has been around for decades, only within the past several years has there been a surge in its acceptance within the business world. Today, open source is perceived as a viable business alternative to commercial solutions, and is used by 64 percent of companies. Several factors have led to this shift in perception of OSS, including an evolving culture of software developers, undeniable business advantages, and, perhaps most importantly, the success of Linux—the leading open source operating system. The background of how and why the open source model has matured is also a key to understanding why organizations of all sizes continue to not only adopt OSS but to also actively support and contribute to open source projects.

  • Open Source Can Drive True Innovation and Growth

    To win in today’s market, in which disruptive startups and nimble competitors are advancing on all sides, digitizing the enterprise to inject greater agility and promote innovation is critical. You need to transform your operating model and reinvent products, services, and business processes and business functions across the entire enterprise. Undeniably, software is a central part of this transformation. And open-source software is leading the way, because what the digital era needs are “connected economies of expertise” that can capitalize on the power of our collaborative imagination.

  • Advice for building a career in open source

    Back in 1998 when I discovered Linux and open source, I never would have believed that I would make a career out of this. Back in those days I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted it to involve technology in some way.

    Since those dim distant days filled with teenage inexperience and … well, hair … I have learned so many things about what works and what doesn’t in building a career in open source. So here are some broader principles I have learned that may be handy for those of you starting out on your journey. Irrespective of whether you want to be a programmer, community leader, documentation writer, entrepreneur, or something else, I think these principles will help in setting you up for success and differentiating you from the pack.

  • Google open-sources Parsey’s Cousins, a set of parsers for 40 more languages

    Google today is announcing that it’s open-sourcing pre-trained models for parsing text in 40 languages. Think of it as an extension of Google’s decision in May to open-source the interestingly named Parsey McParseface English-language parser. The new parsers are available on GitHub under an open-source Apache license.

    Parsing language might not sound like a big deal — it involves looking at a sentence and picking out the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. But Parsey McParseface works at Google scale, that is to say it is very good, good enough for machines to use it to understand users’ web search queries. Researchers can now take advantage of the technology in more languages without worrying about where they’ll get the data for teaching the models.http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/08/google-open-sources-parseys-cousins-a-set-of-parsers-for-40-more-languages/

  • Events

    • Doha and the Supreme Court of DFSG Free

      So, it was a sheer stroke of luck that I met Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn who works with Karen Sandler on Software Conservancy. While I wanted to be there for his presentation, it was just one of those days which doesn’t go as planned. However, as we met socially and over e-mail there were two basic questions which I asked him which also imbibes why we need to fight for software freedom in the court of law. Below is a re-wording of what he shared .

      Q1. why do people think that GPL still needs to be challenged in the court of law while there are gpl-violations which has been more or less successfully defended in the court of law ?

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • The Importance of Bell Labs Unix

      Unix was first developed by Ken Thompson in the summer of 1969 on the DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. By 1979 Unix version 7 was making the rounds at universities all over the world. Bell Labs Unix has enormous importance: It was the basis for many operating systems that followed including BSD, and the template for Minix and Linux.

    • Lumina Desktop 1.0.0 released
    • Version 1.0.0 Released

      After roughly four years of development, I am pleased to announce the first official release of the Lumina desktop environment! This release is an incredible realization of the initial idea of Lumina – a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment meant for users to configure to match their individual needs. I hope you all enjoy it, and I look forward to working with all of you on the next iterations of this desktop!

    • Lumina Desktop 1.0 Released

  • Public Services/Government

    • White House software code sharing policy gains steam

      The White House has released its Federal Source Code policy that promotes reuse of new source code developed by government agencies across the federal government.

      The new policy also sets up a pilot program “that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years,” Tony Scott, U.S. CIO and Anne E. Rung, chief acquisition officer, wrote in a memorandum to heads of departments and agencies on Monday.

    • US government to Open Source bespoke code and allow contributions
    • Consider government open source, don’t mandate it [Ed: Not everyone agrees with ACT. This one could be titled "government should be allowed to pay for back-doored binaries."]
    • Argentina introduced the Czech open source system FRED for the administration of its internet domains

      The Argentinian national domain registrar will use the Czech registration system FRED (Free Registry for ENUM and Domains) for the administration of its internet domains with the .AR extension. NIC Argentina currently administers around 530,000 domains and has used FRED for their administration since the beginning of July 2016. The FRED registration system was developed by the Czech national domain registrar, the CZ.NIC association, in 2007 and besides Argentina and the Czech Republic it is also used in Albania, Angola, Costa Rica, Macedonia, Malawi, Tanzania and the Faroe Islands.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • ETSI workshop on FRAND and open source controversy

      The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is organising a workshop on the conundrum between FRAND intellectual property rights (patents) and open source software. The organisation, one of the key players in European standardisation, also hopes to increase cooperation with open source communities.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Medical Researchers Want Up To Five Years Exclusivity For Clinical Trial Data Derived From Volunteers

      A year ago, we wrote about how TPP’s requirement for “data exclusivity” risked undermining one of science’s fundamental principles: that facts cannot be owned. Data exclusivity is just the latest attempt by Big Pharma to extend its monopoly over drugs, whether using patents or other means. To a certain extent, you might expect that: after all, companies are designed to maximize profits, and if it means more people suffer or die along the way, well, that’s regrettable but sort of beside the point. However, it’s surprising to see a group of medical researchers writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) calling for just the same kind of data exclusivity. The post is in response to an earlier NEJM article by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), entitled “Sharing Clinical Trial Data”…

  • Programming/Development

    • 7 reasons to love Vim

      When I started using the vi text editor, I hated it. I thought it was the most painful and counter-intuitive editor ever designed. But I’d decided I had to learn the thing, because if you’re using Unix, vi was everywhere and was the only editor you were guaranteed to have access to. That was back in 1998, but it remains true today—vi is available, usually as part of the base install, on almost every Linux distribution in existence.

      It took about a month before I could do anything with any proficiency in vi and I still didn’t love it, but by then I’d realized that there was an insanely powerful editor hiding behind this bizarre facade. So I stuck with it, and eventually found out that once you know what you’re doing, it’s an incredibly fast editor.

    • devRant Releases The Most Annoying Programming Languages List — Which One Do You Use?

      devRant, an online community for developers, has released its data, revealing the most annoying programming languages. The developers with SQL in their profile skills rant +56.0 percent more than the average rate. On the contrary, Objective-C developers are the most content

    • ELLCC 0.1.32 Embedded Cross-Compiler Released
    • ELLCC 0.1.32 Released

      A new binary release of the ELLCC cross compilation tool chain is available. ELLCC is a pre-packaged set of tools designed to support cross compilation for a variety of target processors.

Leftovers

  • Will Uber Go Under?

    Uber, the huge taxi service, is undoubtedly still reeling from its defeat in China. After investing $2 billion to get a foothold in the Chinese market, Uber sold out to its competitor, Didi Chuxing, and agreed to be a junior partner in China.

    While this is a dramatic story that made headlines across the country, a less covered story could have a far more impact on Uber’s future. This is the story of Uber’s departure from Austin, Texas.

    Uber, along with Lyft, stopped operating in Austin in early May after the city’s voters endorsed a requirement that drivers for these services had to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks. The companies complained that the requirement placed an onerous burden on them and instead said that they would just stop operating in the city.

  • Find This Secret Command In MS-DOS Code To Win $100,000 And “Embarrass” Microsoft

    If we start reading Microsoft’s history, the MS-DOS chapter comes very early. The operating system acts as a foundation of the Microsoft Empire. Bill Gates got his big break in 1980 when he licensed this OS to IBM.

    You might know that Microsoft didn’t develop this operating system in-house. Instead, it acquired another operating system named QDOS–Quick and Dirty Operating System. QDOS was developed by SCP’s Tim Paterson, who was later hired by Gates to modify QDOS into MS-DOS.

    If you turn more pages of the history, you’ll come across another technology pioneer named the late Gary Kildall. He was the founder of DRI (Digital Research Inc.) and creator of an early PC OS named CP/M.

  • Man held after climbing Buckingham Palace fence

    A 22-year-old man has been arrested after he climbed over a security fence at Buckingham Palace, police have said.

    The man from Croydon, south London, was arrested in the early hours after he was seen by officers who were monitoring CCTV cameras.

    He was arrested at 04:15 BST within a security perimeter. He did not gain access to the palace.

    The Met said the suspected intruder had been drinking and that the incident was not thought to be terrorism related.

    The force added the man was not armed and no Taser was deployed by officers.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Medicaid expansion under ACA linked with better health care, improved health for low-income adults

      Two years after Medicaid coverage was expanded under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their states, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, made fewer emergency departments visits, and reported higher quality care and improved health compared with low-income adults in Texas, which did not expand Medicaid, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The findings provide new evidence for states that are debating whether to expand or how to expand coverage to low-income adults.

    • Despite GOP Opposition, Mounting Evidence That Medicaid Improves Health

      Bolstering the call for universal coverage and undercutting a key Republican talking point, a new study finds that Medicaid expansion in Arkansas and Kentucky resulted in better healthcare and improved health outcomes among low-income Americans.

      The research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows that two years after Medicaid coverage was expanded under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their states, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, made fewer emergency room visits, had less trouble paying bills, and reported higher quality care and improved health compared with their counterparts in Texas, one of 19 states that did not expand Medicaid.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • We’re figuring out the security problem (finally)

      If you attended Black Hat last week, the single biggest message I kept hearing over and over again is that what we do today in the security industry isn’t working. They say the first step is admitting you have a problem (and we have a big one). Of course it’s easy to proclaim this, if you just look at the numbers it’s pretty clear. The numbers haven’t really ever been in our favor though, we’ve mostly ignored them in the past, I think we’re taking real looks at them now.

    • Hackers Fool Tesla S’s Autopilot to Hide and Spoof Obstacles [Ed: When Tesla makes a lot of noise about “Open Source” it talks about patents, must make all its software Free as well, or else…]
    • Computers That Don’t Track You

      Todd Weaver, the Founder and CEO of Purism shows Leo Laporte and Aaron Newcomb the Librem line of secure Linux computers. They discuss PureOS the operating system based on Debian, and how the computers are sourced and built. Plus, he talks about their line of no-carrier, encrypted smartphone coming next year.

    • The state of cyber security: we’re all screwed

      When cybersecurity professionals converged in Las Vegas last week to expose vulnerabilities and swap hacking techniques at Black Hat and Defcon, a consistent theme emerged: the internet is broken, and if we don’t do something soon, we risk permanent damage to our economy.

      “Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy,” longtime tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said in his Black Hat keynote speech, citing a July 2015 study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “We need to go ahead and get the internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.”

    • Oh, not again: US reportedly finds new secret software in VW diesels [Ed: cannot trust proprietary software]

      Volkswagen first ended up in this situation after it admitted to intentionally installing secret software in its 2.0-liter diesels. That software curtailed nitrogen oxide emissions in lab-testing environments, but once on the road, the diesels would pollute well in excess of legal limitations. It was allegedly used in response to ever-stricter emissions regulations.

    • Chinese Hunting Chinese Over POP3 In Fjord Country

      More specifically, here at bsdly.net we’ve been seeing attempts at logging in to the pop3 mail retrieval service using usernames that sound distinctively like Chinese names, and the attempts originate almost exclusively from Chinese networks.

    • ‘Sauron’ spyware attacking targets in Belgium, China, Russia and Sweden

      A previously unknown hacking group called Strider has been conducting cyber espionage against selected targets in Belgium, China, Russia and Sweden, according to Symantec.

      The security firm suggested that the product of the espionage would be of interest to a nation state’s intelligence services.

      Strider uses malware known as Remsec that appears primarily to have been designed for espionage, rather than as ransomware or any other nefarious software.

      Symantec has linked Strider with a group called Flamer which uses similar attack techniques and malware.

      The Lord of the Rings reference is deliberate as the Remsec stealth tool contains a reference to Sauron, the necromancer and main protagonist in a number of Tolkien’s stories.

      “Strider has been active since at least October 2011. The group has maintained a low profile until now and its targets have been mainly organisations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state’s intelligence services,” said Symantec in a blog post.

    • New MacBooks expected to feature Touch ID power button as well as OLED touch-panel [iophk: "as UID or password? Former is ok latter is insecure"]

      A source who has provided reliable information in the past has informed us that the new MacBook Pro models, expected to be launched in the fall, will feature a Touch ID power button as well as the previously-reported OLED touch-sensitive function keys.

    • it’s hard work printing nothing

      It all starts with a bug report to LibreSSL that the openssl tool crashes when it tries to print NULL. This bug doesn’t manifest on OpenBSD because libc will convert NULL strings to ”(null)” when printing. However, this behavior is not required, and as observed, it’s not universal. When snprintf silently accepts NULL, that simply leads to propagating the error.

    • Researchers crack open unusually advanced malware that hid for 5 years [Ed: Windows]

      Security experts have discovered a malware platform that’s so advanced in its design and execution that it could probably have been developed only with the active support of a nation-state.

      The malware—known alternatively as “ProjectSauron” by researchers from Kaspersky Lab and “Remsec” by their counterparts from Symantec—has been active since at least 2011 and has been discovered on 30 or so targets. Its ability to operate undetected for five years is a testament to its creators, who clearly studied other state-sponsored hacking groups in an attempt to replicate their advances and avoid their mistakes. State-sponsored groups have been responsible for malware like the Stuxnet- or National Security Agency-linked Flame, Duqu, and Regin. Much of ProjectSauron resides solely in computer memory and was written in the form of Binary Large Objects, making it hard to detect using antivirus.

    • 5 Best Hacks From The Black Hat 2016

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The U.S. Government Accused a Salvadorian Human Rights Activist of Gang Activity – Now He’s In Jail

      In the early morning hours of July 28, Salvadoran police arrested 77 people in a nationwide raid of alleged members of a multimillion-dollar financial network run by El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha gang, known as MS-13. Among those arrested was Dany Balmore Romero García, a former member of MS-13 who for the past decade has served as the director of the OPERA Youth Group, a violence-prevention organization that works with former and current gang members.

      At a hearing on August 1, the judge presented three formal charges against Romero: being a leader of a terrorist organization, conspiring to commit terrorist acts, and conspiring to commit homicide against someone with the code name “Meme,” who will serve as a key witness in the trial, according to a lawyer present for the proceedings. The judge announced that the investigation to substantiate the charges will last at least six months.

    • Drone warfare: Why the whole truth matters

      The Defence White Paper released early this year signals that the Australian Government will spend $2 billion acquiring armed drones by the early 2020s. They will be used to assist the US in the ongoing “war on terror”. Before this investment is made, it is important the Australian public has a chance to debate the ethics of drone warfare. Is the use of armed drones ethically justifiable? Should our taxpayer dollars go on acquiring drones?

    • The Classified Appendix Fifth Bullet on “Certain Counterterrorism Matters”

      As part of its implementation of the Rule Book, DOD released a Report on Congressional Notification of Sensitive Military Operations and Counterterrorism Operational Briefings (DOD released several related documents; CIA released nothing). Throughout the short document, it says the 2014 Defense Authorization (which was introduced after the Rule Book was signed but before DOD issued its Drone Rule Book implementation procedures and signed into law on December 23, 2013) and the PPG require Congress be informed of sensitive military operations. That’s the Executive Branch’s way of saying, “Congress has required we tell it what we’re doing but so has the President” as if they came up with the idea to do that additional reporting in the first place.

      [...]

      As I said, this is a fairly minor point. But it also suggests that even while the Executive was leaking wildly to get good press about this Drone Rule book, Congress was at the same time mandating specifically some of the things the Rule Book only nodded to in theory.

    • Details Abound in Drone ‘Playbook’ — Except for the Ones That Really Matter Most

      In response to a court order in an ACLU lawsuit, the government late Friday evening (as is its wont) released five documents relating to its process for nominating terrorism suspects for kill or capture. Most notable was the “Presidential Policy Guidance,” a document particularly central to the government’s targeted killing program.

      The release is important and illuminating, especially considering the backdrop of extreme secrecy surrounding the program since its inception. Before a 2013 ACLU victory in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the government had claimed that it could neither “confirm nor deny” that the program existed at all. But surprisingly, and disappointingly, the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) and other records released over the weekend do nothing to assuage concerns about the government’s standards governing who it decides to kill.

    • More Neocon Excuses to Bomb Syria

      Official Washington’s influential neocons continue to dream up new excuses for expanding U.S. military intervention in Syria, including why to bomb Syrian government forces and confront Russia, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Canada resistance to Iraq War resisters must end

      The time has come for Prime Minister Trudeau to allow American deserters who resisted the war begun in Iraq by the U.S. and the U.K. in 2003 to stay in Canada. During the election, he signalled this was where his moral instincts lay. Unfortunately, so far his Liberal government is not showing leadership on this issue.

      I have a double worry about where a Trudeau government may be heading. One is that this government is prone to buying into certain Harper-era ‘moral’ and geopolitical arguments. A second worry is that factual confusion amongst Canadians who are against allowing these conscientious objectors to stay will be used as a political shield by the government.

      Let’s start with this second worry. Letters to the Editor in the Star’s pages following a column by Bob Hepburn (“Trudeau should act on U.S. war resisters,” July 20, 2016) show some think they have a knock-down argument against the war resisters because the Vietnam analogy does not work. We are told that, when former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government gave sanctuary to war resisters, they were “draft dodgers” being compelled to fight whereas the current Iraq War resisters are “deserters” who volunteered.

    • Hospital Bombing in Pakistan Targeted Lawyers, Killed 70

      A suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than a hundred in Quetta, Pakistan, on Monday.

      “There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister, to Reuters.

      Many of those killed were lawyers who had gathered at the hospital “after the body of their colleague, prominent attorney Bilal Kasi was brought there,” Associated Press (AP) reports.

    • Suicide Attack Targets Lawyers at Pakistan Hospital, 70 Dead

      Pakistani militants struck at the heart of the country’s legal profession on Monday, killing a prominent attorney and then bombing the hospital where dozens of other lawyers had gathered to mourn. The twin attacks killed at least 70 people, most of them lawyers, authorities said.

      A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks in Quetta, the capital of restive Baluchistan province, which also wounded dozens of others.

      In a statement, Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militant group, said its fighters killed Bilal Kasi, the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, then as dozens of lawyers gathered at the government-run Civil Hospital, a suicide bomber targeted the mourners.

    • A Job Well Done: Someone Made Bond For the Inmate Who Assaulted Dylann Roof

      In a much-hailed if modestly problematic act of righteous revenge, an African-American inmate allegedly sucker-punched racist creep and murderer Dylann Roof – an act that sparked much online praise for the “vigilante hero,” a fundraiser for donations to his commissary account, and, finally, the posting of his $100,000 bond by a supporter. Roof is in protective custody at the Charleston County Detention Center for killing nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015; he was in the shower when Dwayne Stafford, a 26-year-old inmate reportedly doing time for either weed violations or strong arm burglary, allegedly got out of his cell, reached Roof, and landed a couple of punches to his face. The sheriff said Roof was attacked “for no reason,” which many would argue was less than accurate.

    • Terror group Lashkar-e-Islam threatens Kashmiri pandits asking them to leave or get killed

      Posters in Pulwama are threatening Kashmiri Hindus to exit the valley of Kashmir. The poster is allegedly been put up by Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI) militant.

      This is not the first time that Kashmiri Hindus have been threatened. In mass rapes and killings in the 90’s, a genocide by Kashmiri Hidus, there was a mass exodus of Hindus from the valley. Initially the government provided security to the population, but the then governor asked the minority population to exit to safety.

      The black and white poster flaunts the flag and the logo of the outfit. What has created a flutter is the flag that is similar to the Jamat-ud-dawa, the fountainhead of Lashkar-e-Taiba headed by Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

    • Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in WW2 then disappeared was ‘liquidated by Soviet KGB’

      The newly-published memoirs of the first chief of the KGB may shed light on the fate of a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust only to disappear in the final weeks of the Second World War.

      Raoul Wallenberg is honoured around the world for rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis by issuing them with fake Swedish passports or housing them in diplomatic buildings.

      But in January 1945 he vanished from the streets of Soviet-occupied Budapest and was never seen again.

      His family has long suspected that he was kidnapped by the Soviet Union but have never received definitive proof of what happened to him.

      Moscow’s story has changed over the decades. At first Russia claimed that Soviet intelligence had nothing to do with Wallenberg’s case, they later said he died of a heart attack in a prison camp.

      Now, the memoirs of KGB chief Ivan Serov offer another explanation – he was executed at Stalin’s orders.

      “I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947,” Serov wrote in his memoirs, according to the New York Times.

    • Looming Aleppo Battle indicts both sides of Civil War for breaking Cease-Fire

      The only thing worse than the new hero status of now-covert al-Qaeda operative Abu Muhammad al-Julani and his Army of Syrian Conquest (ASC) is the news that he plans to subject all of Aleppo.

      Aleppo is Syria’s largest city, or at least it used to be, with some 2.5 million people. Some reporters who have been there think that although a lot of people have left, others have come flooding in from the countryside, so that its current population may be similar but rearranged. Many more people, perhaps 1.2 million, live in relatively well-off West Aleppo, still controlled by the Syrian regime, which by all accounts is still very popular among them. Some 250,000 live in slummy East Aleppo, ruled by a congeries of fundamentalist militias who are supported from the outside by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Julani.

    • Washington Slapdown: Turkey Turns to Moscow for Help

      On August 9, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg The two leaders will discuss political developments following the recent coup-attempt in Turkey, tourism, and the launching of Turkstream, the natural gas pipeline that will transform Turkey into southern Europe’s biggest energy hub.. They are also expected to explore options for ending the fighting in Syria. Putin will insist that Erdogan make a concerted effort to stop Islamic militants from crossing back-and-forth into Syria, while Erdogan will demand that Putin do everything in his power to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on Turkey’s southern border. The meeting will end with the typical smiles and handshakes accompanied by a joint statement pledging to work together peacefully to resolve regional issues and to put an end to the proxy war that has left Syria in tatters.

      All in all, the confab will seem like another public relations charade devoid of any larger meaning, but that’s certainly not the case. The fact is, the normalizing of relations between Russia and Turkey will foreshadow a bigger geopolitical shift that will link Ankara to Tehran, Damascus and other Russian allies across Eurasia. The alliance will alter the global chessboard in a way that eviscerates the imperial plan to control the flow of energy from Qatar to Europe, redraw the map of the Middle East and pivot to Asia. That strategy will either be decimated or suffer a severe setback. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious to anyone who can read a map. Turkey’s location makes it the indispensable state, the landbridge that connects the wealth and modernity of the EU with the vast resources and growing population of Asia. That vital connecting piece of the geopolitical puzzle is gradually slipping out of Washington’s orbit and into enemy territory. The July 15 coup is likely the final nail in the NWO coffin for reasons we will discuss later. Here’s a clip from Eric Draitser’s insightful piece titled “Erdogan’s Checkmate: CIA-Backed Coup in Turkey Fails, Upsets Global Chessboard” that summarizes what’s going on:

    • Team Clinton Focuses on the Demise of Hezbollah

      This according to sources at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Judicial Council on which this observer served representing his State of Oregon many moons ago. One staffer reports that the Neocon-Zionist lobby has a Middle East Policy deal with the Clinton campaign as a linchpin of her pledge to “eternally cover Israel’s back.” The Clinton camp, which appears to be gaining adherents within the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon, believes that the Obama administration’s policy toward Russia and Syria is badly flawed partly because, so they claim, Obama wrongly assumes that Russia wants to limit its involvement in Syria. Clinton advisers claim that, on the contrary, Putin’s key objectives include demonstrating that Russia is winning in Syria, that the US has become a paper tiger in the region, and that the Arab states best follow Russia’s lead as it dramatically returns to the region a la the former USSR.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate politics heat up Ohio’s role as an electoral battleground

      With Ohio shaping up to once again be a battleground state for this year’s presidential election, contrasts on energy and climate policy could affect whether Democrats or Republicans win the state’s 18 votes in the Electoral College.

      And while Republican nominee Donald Trump’s promises to revive the state’s coal industry may resonate with some voters, the party’s continued denial of climate science appears to be a growing political liability.

      “Most people believe that climate change is happening,” Mercury political strategist Jai Chabria said at a panel in Cleveland last month, hosted during the Republican National Convention by Politico and sponsored by Vote4Energy, a project of the American Petroleum Institute. Chabria previously served as an advisor to Ohio Gov. John Kasich and helped launch his bid for the Republican nomination.

    • Iowa could go 100% Green with Wind in only 14 years, w/ Few Birds Killed, Mr. Trump

      Iowa gets 31% of its electricity from wind turbines, the highest percentage in the nation (though Texas generates more than twice as many megawatts from wind). But you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Some Iowa planners think that in only 14 years Iowa will be able to power its entire grid with wind and have some electrical generation capacity to spare, enabling it to supply other states, as well.

      Trump has notoriously pronounced that the wind turbines kill all the birds. Actually as the turbines have gotten taller it has been found that the birds typically fly under them. But if Trump is so concerned about the birds, maybe he should take on the mighty house cat instead. According to the Nature Conservancy, house cats polish off 2.4 billion birds annually. Wind turbines? Only 500k a year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

    • Greenpeace Responds to New Energy Proposals from Donald Trump
    • Our Deteriorating Environment: Is Anybody Listening?

      *Five scientists from the Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in College Park, Maryland, give findings on the rate of climate change increase—“unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years”—and therefore the need for an accelerated response.

      *To the now familiar melting of the Arctic ice packs—which the most recent study shows is likely to cause a sea level rise of “at least several meters”– should be added the equally if not more dangerous thawing of the permafrost, which means increasing emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. “Indeed,” Chris Mooney reports, “scientists have discovered a simple statistic that underscores the scale of the potential problem: There may be more than twice as much carbon contained in northern permafrost as there is in the atmosphere itself. That’s a staggering thought.” (Methane, by the way, seems to be the unsung villain: all the attention to carbon dioxide, Bill McKibben tells us in The Nation, detracts from methane’s equally potent heat trapping. Increased use of natural gas, plus fracking, are significantly increasing methane emissions in the U.S.)

      *The world’s largest forest “carbon sink,” the Amazon basin, is losing its ability to soak up excess carbon dioxide, a British study reports. In a nutshell, growth—i.e., conversion of forest land to agriculture—is outpacing forest sustainability.

      *Human expansion, such as in the Amazon basin, is imperiling the ecosystem itself. A study by European scientists finds that biodiversity levels have fallen below the point where the ecosystem can remain intact. Species decline of 10 percent, the scientists estimate, is dangerous; “but their study found that overall, across the globe, the average decline is already more like 15 percent. In other words, original species are only about 85 percent as abundant (84.6 percent to be precise) as they were before human land-use changes.” Climate change will add substantially to this sobering assessment.

    • Humanity Just Ate Through Planet’s Annual Resource Budget Faster Than Ever

      Earth Overshoot Day—the day on which people worldwide have officially used up more natural resources like air, food, and water than the planet can regenerate in a year—has come early.

      The 2016 threshold was hit on Monday, making it the fastest pace yet, according to a new report by the Global Footprint Network, which measures the dubious milestone every year.

      That’s five days earlier than last year, about five weeks earlier than in 2003, and months earlier than it was in 1987, when it fell on December 19. In 1961, the global population didn’t even use up 100 percent of the world’s natural resources, according to the network. But the next decade propelled the planet into an era of overconsumption, the group said.

      “This is possible because we emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than our oceans and forests can absorb, and we deplete fisheries and harvest forests more quickly than they can reproduce and regrow,” Global Footprint Network said in a statement.

    • BP Greenwashes the Olympics … Again

      As the Olympic Games officially opened last Friday, oil giant BP placed a two-third of a page advert in the global business newspaper, the Financial Times, featuring its sponsorship of Team GB, the British Olympic team.

      “The dreaming. The training. The waiting. The hoping. The best of luck to Team GB. Its time to harness the #Energywithin,” ran the strap-line.

      The hashtag #Energywithin is no co-incidence. BP, which is also an international partner of the International Paralympic Committee and the national Olympic committees of the US, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Trinidad & Tobago, is keen to make the comparison between Olympic excellence and the oil giant.

    • Chevron wins U.S. ruling blocking $8.6 billion Ecuador rainforest award

      Chevron Corp persuaded a federal appeals court on Monday to block enforcement in the United States of an $8.65 billion Ecuadorean pollution judgment that it said, and which the court agreed, was obtained through bribery and fraud.

      The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a lower court ruling against the American lawyer Steven Donziger, who has spent more than two decades battling Chevron to hold it responsible for pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest.

    • ‘Justice Denied’ as Court Sides with Chevron in Amazon Pollution Case

      A U.S. appeals court on Monday “inexplicably” sided with oil giant Chevron in a massive case over its legacy of pollution in the Amazon.

      Chevron persuaded the court to block enforcement of an $8.65 billion judgment delivered by Ecuador against the energy company for rainforest damage.

      The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with a March 2014 ruling by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that found the judgment had been obtained through bribery, coercion, and fraud—a decision that astonished environmental rights activists following the case.

    • Siberian Child Dies After Climate Change Thaws an Anthrax-Infected Reindeer

      This story originally appeared on the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

      A 12-year-old boy in the far north of Russia has died in an outbreak of anthrax that experts believe was triggered when unusually warm weather caused the release of the bacteria.

      The boy was one of 72 nomadic herders, including 41 children, hospitalized in the town of Salekhard in the Arctic Circle, after reindeer began dying en masse from anthrax.

      Five adults and two other children have been diagnosed with the disease, which is known as “Siberian plague” in Russian and was last seen in the region in 1941. More than 2,300 reindeer have died, and at least 63 people have been evacuated from a quarantine area around the site of the outbreak. “We literally fought for the life of each person, but the infection showed its cunning,” the Yamal governor, Dmitry Kobylkin, told the Russia-based Interfax news agency. “It returned after 75 years and took the life of a child.”

    • Pence: Trump will ‘end the war on coal’

      Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) on Monday said his running mate, Donald Trump will not undermine the coal industry, should he become president.

      “Donald Trump is going to end the war on coal on Day 1 of his administration,” he said during a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, on Monday evening. “We’re going to free up coal production in this country for the American people.”

      Pence, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, said Trump is much more receptive to fossil fuels than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

      “Hillary Clinton wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels. We’re going to have an all-of-the-above energy strategy under President Trump.”

      Pence said Trump’s admiration for blue-collar voters guides the GOP presidential nominee’s economic agenda.

    • Hiroshima, Presidential Campaigns and Our Nuclear Future

      We have brief reminders of this danger from time to time and passing acknowledgements to the extreme peril we face, yet we never have the courage to take the steps necessary to eliminate this threat. In a classic bullying posture we continue to threaten the use of these weapons, effectively holding the rest of the world hostage to our delusion of safety, akin to a smoker floating on a raft in a pool of gasoline. We now recognize the dangers posed by these weapons is much greater than we had previously thought. Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S. affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has scientifically shown that the detonation of “only” 100 nuclear warheads could kill two billion people from the devastating climate change and nuclear famine that would follow. There are currently more than 15,000 weapons on the planet. The United States and Russia have approximately 7,000 each.

  • Finance

    • Brexit Britain and the political economy of undemocracy: part 1 – the right
    • Brexit Britain and the political economy of undemocracy: part 2 – the left
    • Are Basic Income Proposals Crazy?

      As much of the developed world struggles to address the growth of income inequality, there has been emerging consideration of a guaranteed basic income. There are a number of variations, but the basic idea is that government would eliminate the various forms of social welfare that are currently in place, and would instead send each citizen an annual amount sufficient to cover basic living expenses.

      Most of us understand that without economic freedom, guarantees of personal, political and religious freedom aren’t worth much. If your day-to-day existence is consumed with the struggle for survival, the fact that you have freedom of speech is small comfort.

    • American Greed: Trump’s Economic Team Is a Who’s Who of What’s Wrong

      Trump’s tone-deafness was in full effect last week, when he announced his team of economic advisers in advance of what is being billed as “a major economic address” in Detroit on Monday.

      Trump’s team isn’t just monochromatic and male. At least four, and perhaps as many six, of the men are billionaires. They range in age from 50 to 74 – or, from “younger old white guy” to “older old white guy.”

      Five team members are named Steve – which means that eight of them are not. For diversity, that will have to do.

      There are only two economists on the team – and one of them believes in the flat tax.

    • Trump Offers Huge Favors to Billionaires, and Calls It a Big Economic Speech
    • ‘America is Back,’ Trump Declares, Announcing Tax Cuts for Billionaires

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced his most detailed policy plan yet on Monday at the Detroit Economic Club, in a speech that was ostensibly targeted toward the working class but mostly outlined benefits for the wealthy.

      The speech was also widely panned for lacking substance: New York Magazine editor Annie Lowrey commented on CNN that “it was self-contradictory word salad,” adding that “there was just not much detail here.”

      Presumably channeling the advice of an economics policy team comprised of wealthy white men over age 50—five out of 13 are named “Steve”—Trump announced a hodgepodge of economic reforms that he promised would enrich the working class and “make America grow again.”

    • While Hillary Courts the Billionaire Class, Democratic Socialists Organize for a Better Future

      There has always existed a fundamental tension between those who seek to amplify the voices of the oppressed and the vulnerable and those who paint a rosier picture, one that acknowledges superficial flaws but seeks, ultimately, to justify the prevailing order, economic or otherwise.

      In January of 1963, Dwight Macdonald, in his famous essay reviewing Michael Harrington’s groundbreaking book The Other America, cast a light on this perpetual conflict.

      “For a long time now,” Macdonald wrote, “almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and — more important — the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.”

      Referring to John Kenneth Galbraith’s declaration in his 1958 work The Affluent Society that poverty “can no longer be presented as a universal or massive affliction,” Macdonald expressed dismay at the fact that such a “humane critic” as Galbraith could downplay (and, in some cases, overlook entirely) the tremendous suffering felt in marginalized communities — particularly in communities of color.

      [...]

      It is a party now dedicated to the trope that “America is already great,” a rhetorical flourish that provides both a shameful defense of the status quo and little comfort — much less material relief — to those victimized by American capitalism.

    • ‘We Triggered Something Epic’: An Interview with Naquasia LeGrand of the Fight for $15

      When Naquasia LeGrand first got involved with the Fight for $15 workers’ movement, it was, she says, “underground.” No one, least of all her, knew how far the movement would spread in the four years since she helped launch the first fast-food workers’ strike, in New York City in November 2012. New York fast-food workers won their raise in 2015, though it won’t be fully phased in in the city until 2018.

      Cities and states around the country have acted to raise wages since the movement began, and the battle has spilled over into the presidential election. Fast-food workers, including LeGrand, are demanding that the candidates endorse the $15 an hour wage. LeGrand is now in North Carolina and continues to organize her fellow workers in one of the least union-friendly states in the country, having become a national leader in the movement. We spoke about what’s changed—and what still needs changing—since the beginning of the Fight for $15.

    • Time for a UK agricultural policy that doesn’t subsidise the rich

      Let’s get one thing straight. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a disaster. It is essentially a £50 billion welfare system for the landed gentry and other big landowners across Europe. While people who genuinely need public funds find their benefits cut to the bone, these people get huge amounts of public money for doing absolutely nothing. It amounts to one of the most glaring transfers of money from poor to rich in the UK. The CAP has also been disastrous for people in the global south. For decades, Europe dumped excess agricultural produce into markets in the global south, ruining the livelihoods of local farmers who could not compete with the artificially cheap imports. But cleverly, through the WTO, rich countries have ensured that poor countries cannot raise equivalent subsidy programmes of their own. For example, India has been castigated for its food security policy that gives cheap food to the poor, while relatively rich EU farmers gets huge sums for doing not very much at all.

    • Billionaire Bonanza as Wealth Surges Among One Percent

      There is little doubt that the global one percent is winning. In fact, a new study has found that the number of billionaires reached an all-time high in 2015 at the same time that their portfolios and piggy banks also continued to grow to record proportions.

      According to the 2015-2016 Billionaire Census by international market research firm Wealth-X, which bills itself as “the global authority on wealth intelligence,” the billionaire population grew by 6.4 percent last year and now totals 2,473 people worldwide. The combined wealth of those individuals also increased by 5.4 percent, amounting to $7.7 trillion—which is more than every country’s gross domestic product (GDP), except the United States ($17.9 tr) and China ($11 tr).

      Billionaires, defined as individuals with a net worth of $1 billion or above, are not all created equal. While North America trails Europe in the number of billionaires—628 compared with 806, respectively—they hold more wealth ($2,561 bn versus $2,330 bn) than their cross-Atlantic compatriots.

      Wealth-X attributes the overall billionaire population growth largely to inherited wealth. According to the report, “billionaires with partially inherited wealth continue to be the fastest growing segment of this population, up 29.9% year on year, while responsible for nearly two thirds of total billionaire additions.”

      Also, Wealth-X found that fear of a global market collapse has prompted many to liquidate their assets, further shoring up their wealth and adding to the overall rise in combined net worth.

    • Grassroots Democrats Are Making the TPP a Big Issue in Congressional Races

      Trade policy in general—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in particular—has become a vital concern for Democrats up and down the ballot.

      Just ask Wisconsin Congressman Ron Kind, one of the few congressional Democrats who continue to make arguments for agreements such as the TPP.

      Kind, who has served almost two decades as the Democratic representative from farm and factory towns of western Wisconsin, did not receive a warm welcome from Wisconsin delegates to this month’s Democratic National Convention.

    • Ecuador’s Correa: It’s Neoliberalism, Not Socialism That Has Failed

      Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa on Sunday denounced “fantasies of trickle-down theories” and said that it’s neoliberalism, not socialism that has failed his region.

      Latin America has largely pursued “socialism of the 21st century,” TeleSUR reports the leftist leader as saying in an interview. Despite current external factors affecting his country’s economy—like the fall in the price of oil and trade partners’ economic slowdown—that model has helped the country weather the impacts far better compared to the situation in 1999 when the country was under conservative rule and “external shocks [...] made the economy crash.”

      “Neoliberalism is what failed, not socialism of the 21st century; on the contrary, socialism of the 21st century is what has us firmly on our feet, withstanding all of these difficulties,” he said.

      Correa also said, “Inequality in a poor country means misery,” and added that only the pursuit of the kind of growth “that favors the poor, growth with social justice, growth with equity,” was important.

    • Brexit was a crisis long in the making

      The Brexit vote was the reaping of years of deepening inequality, sown by the neoliberal policy programmes of successive governments.

    • Three million working families are ‘one pay cheque away from losing their home’

      Cash-strapped working families in England are so “stretched to breaking point” that one in three could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage for more than a month if they lost their job, according to new figures.

      The high cost of housing added to having little or no personal savings to fall back on, and means that three million working families could be just one pay cheque away from losing their home, the Shelter and YouGov study found.

      The figures come from a July 2016 poll of 8,381 adults which included 1,581 working families with children. They were asked how long, if at all, did they think they could afford to pay their rent or mortgage from their savings if they lost their job and could not find work?

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Lead Attorney In Anti-Clinton DNC Fraud Case Mysteriously Found Dead

      Call it conspiracy theory, coincidence or just bad luck, but any time someone is in a position to bring down Hillary Clinton they wind up dead. In fact, as we noted previously, there’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts, with scores of people dying under mysterious circumstances. While Vince Foster remains the most infamous, the body count is starting to build ominously this election cycle – from the mysterious “crushing his own throat” death of a UN official to the latest death of an attorney who served the DNC with a fraud suit.

      As GatewayPundit’s Jim Hoft reports, on July 3, 2016, Shawn Lucas and filmmaker Ricardo Villaba served the DNC Services Corp. and Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz at DNC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in the fraud class action suit against the Democrat Party on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters (this was before Wikileaks released documents proving the DNC was working against the Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary).

    • Pentagon, CIA Form Praetorian Guard for Clinton as Warmonger President

      Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael J Morell is the latest in a phalanx of senior US military-intelligence figures who are shedding any pretense of political neutrality and giving their full-throated endorsement to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

      In a New York Times opinion piece, Morell starkly backed Clinton as the most «highly qualified to be commander-in-chief… keeping our nation safe».

      The ex-CIA chief’s op-ed piece also served as a blunt hatchet job on Republican presidential rival Donald J Trump. Morell said the New York billionaire-turned politician is «not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security».

      The hoary, old scare-theme of «national security» is being rehabilitated as the criterion for electing Clinton. It also has the disturbing connotation of an increasingly militarized totalitarian regime that the United States is becoming.

    • The Real Threat to American Sovereignty

      “Without a border, we just don’t have a country,“ Donald Trump says repeatedly. For him, the biggest threats to American sovereignty are three-dimensional items that cross our borders, such as unwanted imports and undocumented immigrants.

      He’s wrong. The biggest threats to American sovereignty are invisible digital dollars wired into U.S. election campaigns from abroad.

      Yet Trump seems to welcome foreign influence over our democracy.

      Sovereignty is mainly about a government’s capacity to govern. A government not fully accountable to its citizens won’t pass laws that benefit and protect those citizens – not just laws about trade and immigration but about national security, the environment, labor standards, the economy, and all else.

    • A Former CIA Officer Enters the Presidential Race as a Republican Alternative to Trump

      On Monday, a new GOP presidential contender threw their hat in the ring. Anti-Trump Republican Evan McMullin announced he’s running for president to offer voters a choice other than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in November. McMullin resigned from his position as the chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in order to run and previously worked as a CIA counterterrorism officer.

    • Collins Dumps Trump, and About Time

      Maine’s four-term Sen. Susan Collins, one of the last of a dying breed of moderate, occasionally coherent Republicans , has finally summoned the strength of character to announce she will not support Trump in the election, thus becoming one of the most high-profile GOP members to abandon their lunatic flag-bearer. After months of waffling and cautious criticism of Trump’s more outrageous stands, Collins announced her decision in a Washington Post op-ed, listing several excellent examples of Trump’s “unsuitability for office” – even at a Burger King. Those include his “lack of self-restraint,” “barrage of ill-informed comments,” and “disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics.” She adds, “Donald Trump does not reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.” You think? As Maine goes, so goes, hopefully, the nation.

    • Not Alone, But Together: Sanders Campaign Declares Creation of ‘Our Revolution’
    • 2020 Vision: Four Steps to Get There

      The progressive vision for 2020 is focused on the needs of average working people, on the strength of society rather than on winner-take-all individualism, on the cooperative efforts of underpaid people who have been forced out of the middle class.

    • Hopelessly Divided? Think Again.

      Surprisingly, though, despite all the handwringing about dysfunctional division, there is much that unites us — even on contentious topics. A 2014 study comparing red congressional districts and states to blue ones asked 388 questions on hot-topic issues ranging from abortion to gun control. In two-thirds of cases, researchers found “no statistical differences” in the answers between Republican and Democratic strongholds.

    • Not All Bernie Backers Buying His Clinton Pitch

      Bernie Sanders has urged his supporters to back Hillary Clinton—a point he reiterated in an op-ed at the Los Angeles Times last week.

      But a string of recent polls shows that about one-third of Sanders backers aren’t willing to do that, as political website FiveThirtyEight points out.

      Harry Enten writes Monday that since the Democratic National Convention, Clinton has seen a boost in support from Sanders supporters. Looking at the average of four post-convention polls—CNN, Fox News, Marist, and YouGov—78 percent of Sanders backers said they’d vote for Clinton compared to nine percent for Donald Trump when presented with a two-way match-up. That’s up from about half of Sanders supporters ahead of the conventions, he writes.

      But when given the option of third party candidates, the number drops, with the four polls showing an average of 63 percent of Sanders supporters saying they’d back Clinton.

    • Can Clinton corner Condi, Kissinger?

      As Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign reaches out to Republicans alarmed by Donald Trump’s national security blunders, there’s a group of high-profile GOP hold-outs whose endorsement would be a major coup if the Democrat could win them over.

      Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger are among a handful of so-called Republican “elders” with foreign policy and national security experience — people who have held Cabinet-level or otherwise high-ranking positions in past administrations — who have yet to come out for or against Trump.

    • Clinton Bonds with Neocons as GOP Elites Launch Final Bid Against Trump

      Hillary Clinton is reaching out to Republican elites—including fellow former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger—to support her campaign over Donald Trump’s, suggesting a growing alliance between Clinton and neoconservatives, according to Politico.

      Clinton’s charm offensive comes amid a growing public rift between the Republican party and its own nominee. The backlash against Trump has seen numerous high-profile Republicans defecting to the Democrats and explicitly denouncing Trump’s suitability for office. At a fundraiser for ‘foreign policy professionals’ in July, prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan told attendees that “a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”

    • Trump and Authoritarianism

      In the 1930s in key countries, it was a Hitler in Germany, a Mussolini in Italy, a Stalin in the USSR, a Franco in Spain, et al. In our own time, it’s a Putin in Russia, an Erdogan in Turkey, a Xi in China, a Thaksin in Thailand, a Mugabe in Zimbabwe, a Duterte in the Philippines, an al-Sisi in Egypt — and, our own homegrown Mussolini in America, Donald J. Trump. 

It must be understood that these authoritarians often differ widely in their origins (Erdogan, for example, assumed power through elections) and methods of operation, degree of brutality, etc. Every society has a multiplicity of forces affecting its manner of governance. There is no one template that explains the various expressions of authoritarianism across the globe.

But there are enough similarities to draw some tentative conclusions.

    • 50 Former National Security Officials and Advisers From GOP Administrations Denounce Trump
    • Hillary Clinton Should Push Hard for Disability Civil Rights

      This year, the Democratic National Convention mentioned the civil rights of Americans with disabilities. That this happened now, decades into a movement, speaks volumes about the priorities of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Hillary Clinton deserves credit for being the first United States presidential candidate from a major party to address the civil rights of these 56 million Americans.

      Does Clinton assume that all those votes are going her way? Even after Clinton launched an ad focused on Donald Trump’s bullying of a reporter with a disability, the DNC balked at mentioning the Disability Integration Act in Philadelphia.

      The DIA was introduced to the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., on Dec. 18, 2015, and into the House of Representatives by Christopher Gibson, R-N.Y., on July 8. According to DIA advocate Bruce Darling, “Democrats need to not take disabled voters for granted and support DIA like they support the [LGBTQ] Equality Act. It isn’t enough to say Trump made fun of a disabled journalist.”

    • The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism

      College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.

      There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.

      These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiment

    • Jeremy Corbyn Launches Bold Progressive Vision to Transform UK

      Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn announced a 10-point plan on Thursday designed to “rebuild and transform” the U.K. while undoing the damage wrought by privatization schemes and concerted attacks on the public good.

    • Gunning for Corbyn, not the Conservatives, is Labour’s tragedy

      Give the grown-ups back control of the Labour party. Wasn’t that supposed to be the idea? Yet with each fresh turn of events, the coup against Jeremy Corbyn looks less like an adult intervention, and more like a slapstick farce.

    • Can Corbynism claim the centre ground?

      Whatever happens this summer, Jeremy Corbyn leaves a major legacy. Most notable is the longterm leftwards shift in Labour’s centre of gravity. The party’s right in retreat, Corbyn’s challenger Owen Smith campaigns on an almost identical platform, Trident and the EU aside. Smith’s pitch is to present it better and add much-need policy heft. The course steered may need a new captain, but politically Corbyn binds Labour left for the foreseeable future.

    • Green Party Nominee Jill Stein: “We Are Saying No to the ‘Lesser Evil’ and Yes to the Greater Good”

      In Houston, Texas, Dr. Jill Stein formally accepted the Green Party’s nomination for president at the party’s convention over the weekend. Interest in the Green Party has jumped in recent weeks since Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, defeating Bernie Sanders. In 2012, Dr. Stein ran on the Green ticket and won less than 1 percent of the national vote. But according to CNN’s Poll of Polls, Stein is now polling at 5 percent. The same poll finds Clinton at 45 percent, Republican Donald Trump at 35 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson at 9 percent. Neither Stein nor Johnson will be invited to take part in this fall’s presidential debates, however, unless they top 15 percent in national polls. For more, we hear excerpts of Dr. Jill Stein speaking at the Green Party convention.

    • What the Democratic Party Could Learn From Its Overseas Footsoldiers

      Party politics is messy and often inefficient. And in today’s political climate, one filled with distrust and apathy, ensuring representation and active participation is more important than ever. Democrats Abroad serves as a very successful model for how other state parties can reinvigorate faith in the party.

    • AARP to Drop Membership in Right-Wing Lobby Group ALEC After Progressive Groups Apply Pressure

      Progressives dedicated to protecting safety nets for seniors have pressured AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired People, to drop its dues-paying membership at ALEC, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, whose work includes drafting and promoting bills that would undermine and privatize Social Security and Medicare.

      “After hearing from many of you, we’ve decided not to renew our membership to ALEC,” said a post on AARP’s Facebook page Friday. “We would never work against the interests of older Americans and our engagement with ALEC was NOT an endorsement of the organization’s policies, but an opportunity to engage with state legislators and advance our members’ priorities.”

      “AARP is and always has been non-partisan,” the statement continued. “We meet with legislators from both sides of the aisle in order to do our job: fighting to improve the lives of people 50+. We will continue to explore ways to serve our diverse membership and fulfill our responsibility.”

    • How Repealing the Johnson Amendment Could Ruin Politics Forever

      Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and despite his previous time as a Democrat and his Johnny-come-lately stances on many of the social conservative issues that the religious right has come to love, he has managed to get a myriad of Christian leaders to back him in his battle for the White House. Exactly what magical spell has he worked that has brought around the values voters and made them believe that a business mogul with multiple ex-wives is now the person who should lead their country?

    • We Have to Stop Demeaning or Ignoring Trump Voters—Elitism Won’t Defeat Trumpism

      Anyone with confidence in the American people (and I have quite a lot of it) had to believe that Donald Trump’s unpreparedness, instability and just plain meanness would catch up with him eventually. This, as the polls show, is what happened over the last week or so. Simply by revealing who he really is, Trump sent millions of voters fleeing him in disgust.

      But understanding what still attracts many voters to Trump is important, not only to those who want to prevent Trump from staging a comeback but also to anyone who wants to make our democracy thrive in the long run. Those of us who are horrified by Trump’s hideous lack of empathy need empathy ourselves.

      It’s certainly true that Trump appeals to outright racists and nativists. He is, first and foremost, the product of a Republican Party that has exploited extremism since President Obama took office. GOP leaders should be called to account whenever they try to prettify Trump by ignoring his assaults on Mexican-Americans and Muslims or a checkered business record that belies his pretensions of being a friend to the working class.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • John Oliver Warns That Problems Plaguing Journalism Will Lead to Widespread Corruption (Video)
    • Newspaper Association Of America Complains That Comedian John Oliver Failed To Solve Newspaper Biz Model Problem

      This is pretty ridiculous. First of all, much of the mocking was over the Tribune Company’s ridiculous rebranding as “tronc,” and specifically the absolutely ridiculous “tronc employee video” the company put together, that I still am partially convinced is a parody of the kind of idiocy big newspapers put out these days to pretend they get technology. “Artificial intelligence!” “The future of journalism!” “Tech startup culture!” “Evolving, changing — the fun part!” “Optimization group!” “Feed it into a funnel and then optimize it!” “Maximize all the time.” “Monetize video!” “The role of tronc is to transform journalism — from pixels to Pulitzers.”

    • John Oliver Exposes the Abject Dangers of Billionaires Buying Up Newspapers

      We’re so used to getting our news for free that we’ve forgotten what that means for journalism. And as “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver points out, the decades long financial battle newsrooms have been facing affects all of us. Think about local government reporting. While it’s not as clickbaity as puppies or a “raccoon cats,” it’s a crucial part of urban reform. But often, because it does not pay, good local civic reporting is the first thing to go.

      “A study of over 200 papers found between 2003 and 2014, the number of full-time State House reporters declined by thirty-five percent,” Oliver pointed out. “And that’s not good because while there are some great web outlets some of which do cover local government there aren’t nearly enough to replace what has been lost.”

    • Heresy: A Reporter Investigates Evidence That Jesus Had a Wife

      Walter Fritz had been an East German museum director, a real estate agent, an auto-parts business executive, an Egyptology student, and an amateur pornographer.

      But his most recent achievement might well be his most lasting and ignominious – his involvement in an audacious antiquity transaction, wherein a piece of papyrus made its way into the hands of Harvard scholar Karen King, who then declared before the Vatican that it showed Jesus may have been married.

    • Federal Health Officials Seek to Stop Social Media Abuse of Nursing Home Residents

      Federal health regulators have announced plans to crack down on nursing home employees who take demeaning photographs and videos of residents and post them on social media.

      The move follows a series of ProPublica reports that have documented abuses in nursing homes and assisted living centers using social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. These include photos and videos of residents who were naked, covered in feces or even deceased. They also include images of abuse.

      The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees nursing homes, said in a memo to state health departments on Friday that they should begin checking to make sure that all nursing homes have policies prohibiting staff from taking demeaning photographs of residents. The memo also calls on state officials to quickly investigate such complaints and report offending workers to state licensing agencies for investigation and possible discipline. State health departments help enforce nursing home rules for the federal government.

    • Israel Calls on Citizens to Track and Report Activists in ‘Ruthless’ War Against BDS

      Amplifying the growing crackdown on dissent and specifically the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, the Israeli government this weekend unveiled a new initiative to track and deport activists suspected of supporting the campaign.

      Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan and Interior Minister Arye Dery on Sunday announced the creation of a new government task force charged with gathering intelligence on pro-Palestininian activists and organizations with the intent, as Haaretz put it, of collecting enough evidence to legally deport them from Israel or the occupied West Bank.

      “We have the responsibility to do all we can to crush the boycott and say clearly that we will not allow the State of Israel to be harmed,” Dery said.

      Later, Erdan took to Facebook to call on Israeli citizens to help by informing the government of suspicious activities.

    • Olympics fan claims Twitter killed his account after posting Rio videos

      Venezuelan free software activist Luigino Bracci Roa has claimed that his Twitter account was closed down permanently by the US company without any prior warning, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) complained about videos he had posted on the micro-blogging service.

      The @Lubrio account was popular: Bracci says that he tweeted 133,000 times since he created the account in 2008, and had garnered nearly 43,000 followers in that time.

      On his blog, Bracci shared the letters of complaint sent by the IOC to Twitter, which show that the committee did not demand that his account be shut down, but instead asked Twitter to “immediately and permanently remove the material” from its website. That’s hardly surprising given the IOC’s attempts to impose strict controls on all media outlets and how they use material connected with the Olympics.

    • Art magazine covers nipples of nude by celebrated artist with huge yellow stickers

      Controversy over the cover of an Australian art magazine has resurrected a debate of the digital age: when, if ever, are nipples acceptable?

      The latest issue of Vault, a quarterly art periodical, was distributed last week with round yellow stickers covering the nipples of a female nude in a painting on its cover.

      Its editor, Neha Kale, told Guardian Australia the stickers were added at the request of its distributor, which feared its stockists would refuse to display the magazine.

    • Art magazine questions censorship of Lisa Yuskavage nude

      The latest issue of art periodical Vault Magazine is being censored in Australian newsagents because it features a Lisa Yuskavage painting of a nude pregnant woman on the front cover. What does this say about how Australia responds to women in art?

    • Divya Khosla speaks up on ‘Pyaar Manga Hai’ being termed as ‘semi-porn’
    • There Is No Censorship for Internet: Divya Khosla Kumar
    • Divya Khosla Kumar: We cater to demand
    • Zareen Khan hot kissing scenes video crosses 1 crore mark on Youtube

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CensusFail: the ABS hasn’t convinced the public their privacy is protected

      The Australian Census, which takes a snapshot of the demographics of the Australian population, is embroiled in a last minute furore around the mandatory collection of names and addresses.

      South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon has declared he will not be providing his name and address. In doing so, he risks a A$180 fine for each day of “non-compliance”.

      Xenophon argues that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has not made “a compelling case why names must be provided”. However, the rationale is actually quite simple.

      With names and addresses, the Census data can be linked to other data sets where we have already allowed our name and address to be used. This includes health, education and other data. Together, they should help give a more complete and accurate picture of how the distribution of people in Australia matches present and future services.

    • Police Scotland told to pay journalist £10,000 over illegal intercepts

      Police Scotland has been ordered to pay a journalist £10,000 in damages after it illegally intercepted his communications data in an investigation into a botched murder case.

      The investigatory powers tribunal ruled the force had breached the human rights of Gerard Gallacher, a former police officer turned freelance journalist, who had spent 18 months investigating a cold murder case in which a prime suspect had been released without charge.

      Gallacher said he suffered “invasion of privacy, familial strife, personal stress and strain and loss of long-standing friendships” after detectives accessed 32 days of his communications data, ignoring clear court rulings to protect journalists and their sources.

      Police Scotland had been braced for an adverse ruling after Sir Stanley Burnton, the communications interception commissioner, ruled last November that the force had been reckless in its repeated abuse of its powers.

      Detectives in an elite anti-corruption unit breached the law five times when they collected phone records for Gallacher and two police officers suspected of leaking information, Burnton said.

      In its ruling on Monday on the cases of the six people affected – Gerard Gallacher and his wife Marjorie, the two officers David Moran and Steven Adams and a former officer and his wife named only as Mr and Mrs O – the tribunal agreed that the collection of their data breached the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights.

    • The US Marines are testing a pocket-sized helicopter drone

      The U.S. Marine Corps is testing a pocket-sized drone that can deliver live video feeds from three cameras and is small enough that it’s almost invisible from the ground.

      The Black Hornet PD-100 can stay aloft for 25 minutes and has a range of 1.6 km (1 mile). That means Marines can use it for surveillance far beyond their current position.

      It can fly missions guided by GPS yet fits in a pocket. The cable hanging out the back in this image is an antenna, not a cord for power or data.

    • ABS head must take blame if census compromised

      If the data that is collected in the Australian census in any way lacks integrity, then one man will have to bear the blame: the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch.

      Remember, just a 5% non-response will screw up the whole works.

      For the uninitiated, or those who have been living under a rock for the last two months, there has been an uncharacteristic amount of jaw about the census this time.

      And all because an unelected bureaucrat suddenly decided to act like a mini-dictator and make changes in what was once a source of excellent detail about the population at large.

      First, the ABS announced, in the quiet news period in December, that the names and addresses of Australians would be retained indefinitely in this year’s census.

      And while the ABS had claimed all along that it was not retaining names and addresses and tying them to personal data, Kalisch revealed that this had been a big lie and since 2006, these personal details had indeed been retained for 18 months.

    • The founder of the Pirate Party joins to share liberty ideas with Steem

      Hi! I’m Rick Falkvinge, and during business hours, I’m Head of Privacy at the VPN company Private Internet Access, which ttobmk is the only VPN company to have court records prove we don’t keep any logs whatsoever. We love decentralization and privacy.

      However, I’m more known for being the founder of the Pirate Party, an international collection of technopunk parties that have won elections to take office in the European Parliament and elsewhere. The Pirate Party in Iceland is currently the largest party in the polls there, leading to very interesting scenarios worldwide after the next election. (It only takes one country out of 196 to create a safe data haven and guarantee freedoms of speech and expression worldwide.)

      I’ve also written a book, Swarmwise, that outlines how we were able to beat the establishment in the elections – their struggle for centralized power – despite having less than one percent of their campaign budget. Basically, it comes down to the tactical and strategic advantage of running an organization on decentralized voluntaryism.

    • SoylentNews Deploys HSTS and Mandates HTTPS Everywhere

      So after an extended period of inactivity, I’ve finally decided to jump back into working on SoylentNews and rehash (the code that powers the site). As such, I’ve decided to scratch some long-standing itches. The first (and easiest) to deploy was HSTS to SoylentNews. What is HSTS you may ask?

    • Want cheaper Internet access? Hand over your privacy

      It seems a simple enough proposition: Would you agree to receive marketing pitches in return for a discount on your high-speed Internet service?

      Telecom heavyweight Comcast made just such a case last week in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The company defended what it called “a bargained-for exchange of information for service,” which it said “is a perfectly acceptable and widely used model throughout the U.S. economy.”

      And that’s true. You can spend less on a Kindle e-reader from Amazon if you agree to see “special offers” when you turn on the device. Your free use of online search engines, email and other services is subsidized in part by an acceptance of marketers peeking at your browsing habits.

      But privacy advocates are starting to worry about a society of privacy haves and have-nots. That is, keeping one’s personal info under wraps or avoiding incessant intrusions from advertisers would be a privilege enjoyed only by those who can afford it.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Facebook Removes Potential Evidence of Police Brutality Too Readily, Activists Say

      As more details emerge about last week’s killing by Baltimore County police of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, activists have directed growing anger not only at local law enforcement but also at Facebook, the social media platform where Gaines posted parts of her five-hour standoff with police.

      At the request of law enforcement, Facebook deleted Gaines’ account, as well her account on Instagram, which it also owns, during her confrontation with authorities. While many of her videos remain inaccessible, in one, which was re-uploaded to YouTube, an officer can be seen pointing a gun as he peers into a living room from behind a door, while a child’s voice is heard in the background. In another video, which remains on Instagram, Gaines can be heard speaking to her five-year-old son, who’s sitting on the floor wearing red pajamas.

      “Who’s outside?” she asks him. “The police,” he replies timidly. “What are they trying to do?” “They trying to kill us.”

    • Just Another Misogynist Monday

      I’m not watching the Olympics on NBC. I see more than enough of the events in my social media feed that I don’t need to turn on the television. This post is based on the observations and media content shared online, an indicator of just how much content there is about the Olympics, both corporate and personal.

      And I am SO glad I haven’t bothered to watch based on the persistent anger in my timeline. NBC’s coverage has been a bunch of sexist and racist nonsense, framing female athletes not by their performance but by the men or white family members in their lives.

      Like noting a particular athlete became a mother since her last competition — gee, how many of the male athletes became fathers? The narrative NBC built around each woman competitor sounds more like an observation of their performing femininity. “She’s turned in the best time and look, she can still clean house and wear a dress!” Obnoxious.

    • An Impolitic Situation: When Rights Disappear

      For months, political parties and presidential candidates fight for the highest office in the land, where the job duties include protecting the consitutional rights of all Americans.

      Few things illustrate the practice of our most basic rights—namely those of speech, assembly and petitioning our government— better than the run-up to the presidential election. Candidates stake out their turf and the public listens, discusses, and absorbs the constant 24-hour election media cycle, opposing and supporting candidates with friends and family, on Facebook and in the streets. The product of this constitutional civics lesson is our new national political leadership.

      So it’s ironic that both parties’ showcases—their national conventions—have historically been constitutional black holes. In 2004, hundreds of protesters at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York were wrongly arrested and held in abysmal detention conditions. Of course, the ACLU was there for them—the New York Civil Liberties Union and others filed suit on behalf of protesters that resulted in a total victory and a nearly $18 million award for those wrongly arrested, detained and fingerprinted.

    • Obama Prepares to Reinforce the Militarized Police Occupation of Black America

      Barack Obama is “responsible for the biggest escalation in the history of the one-sided war against Black America.” He increased militarization of local police 24-fold before banning some kinds of Pentagon weapons transfers, but is now preparing to send more battlefield weaponry to the streets of our cities. “Clinton or Trump will surely build on Obama’s lethal legacy.”

    • Apartheid Israel’s war on water

      Sumaya Awad explains how Israel uses access to the essential resource of water to impose horrific conditions on life for Palestinians in the West Bank.

    • ‘On Contact’ With Chris Hedges: The Big Business of Keeping People in Cages

      On this week’s episode of RT’s “On Contact,” Chris Hedges discusses mass incarceration with prison reform advocates Walter Fortson and Boris Franklin.

      From the school-to-prison pipeline, to solitary confinement, to preventing recidivism, they reflect on their experiences to address how to fix one of today’s major civil rights issues. RT correspondent Anya Parampil also reports on the business of locking people up.

    • Remembering Lenny Bruce, 50 years after his death

      It’s almost 50 years since the death of Lenny Bruce. The groundbreaking comedian died on Aug. 3, 1966 from an overdose of morphine while his New York obscenity conviction was still on appeal. On that same day he received a foreclosure notice at his Los Angeles home.

      But his death was an overdose, not a suicide. In the kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling, and in his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word: “Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const” … constitutes what, I wonder?

      Lenny was a subscriber to my satirical magazine, the Realist, and in 1959 we met for the first time in his Times Square hotel. He was amazed that I got away with publishing those profane words for which other periodicals used asterisks or dashes. He had been using euphemisms and asked, “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?” I replied, “The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.”

    • Hillary Clinton is no feminist: Just look at her stance on Palestine

      With Hillary Clinton now running as the Democratic Party’s official nominee, there has been much discussion about the glass ceiling finally shattering now that a woman is running for president on a major party ticket for the first time in US history.

      “I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet,” she told the convention crowd in Philadelphia last month after she was introduced with shattering glass sound effects.

      But this accolade needs to be qualified on a number of levels.

      Firstly, Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to be nominated to run for president, at the 1964 Republican National Convention (she eventually lost out to Barry Goldwater).

      And in 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democrat nomination. She also broke another barrier, that of being the first black politician to run for president for a major political party.

    • The dangers of exposing corruption in Russia’s jails

      Campaigner Vladimir Osechkin, who has exposed corruption and torture in Russian prisons, fled the country after being targeted by Russia’s secret police. But life outside Russia hasn’t been easy.

    • Police Violence: Peace Isn’t The Priority

      Precisely how did Korryn Gaines die? We don’t know, and probably never will.

      The Baltimore County, Maryland Police Department admits that one of its officers shot her dead on August 1. In fact, the department admits that the officer shot first and that Gaines then returned fire in self-defense and defense of her five-year-old son (no, the department does not use those terms) before being gunned down.

      The police also admit that before forcing their way into Gaines’s apartment and killing her, they went out of their way to ensure their actions would be hidden from public view. The department contacted two social media services, Facebook and Instagram, asking that Gaines’s accounts be disabled so as to cut off her photo and video streams of what was happening. To their everlasting shame, the two firms complied with the request.

    • What Brexit could mean for refugee protection in Britain

      Survivors of Torture and other refugees who came here for protection and a safe recovery environment now worry about their future in this country. For their sake, we need to use this time to work out what we want to fight for within the EU asylum acquis, and what we are willing or even happy to let go. We need to be clear on what trade-offs to support and which ones to prevent. And we need to be ready to exploit the opportunities that present themselves along the way. Only then will we be in a position to effectively influence the course and impact of a withdrawal from the EU to maximise protection for refugees.

    • Turkey’s Constitutional Court stirs outrage by annulling child sex abuse clause

      The Constitutional Court has ruled to annul a provision that punishes all sexual acts against children under the age of 15 as “sexual abuse,” stirring outrage from academics and women’s rights activists who warn that the decision will lead to cases of child abuse going unpunished.

      The Constitutional Court discussed the issue upon an application from a district court, which complained that the current law does not discriminate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse and treats a 14-year-old as equal to a four-year-old.

      The local court said the law does not provide legal consequences for the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim is from 12 to 15 years of age and able to understand the meaning of the sexual act. “This creates an imbalance between legal benefits and sanctions that should be preserved in crime and punishment,” the application stated.

      With seven votes against six, the Constitutional Court agreed with the local court and decided to annul the provision. The decision will come into effect on Jan. 13, 2017.

      The local court’s argument and the Constitutional Court’s endorsement have drawn a backlash from academic and human rights circles, which underlined that all individuals under the age of 18 are considered children according to international conventions to which Turkey is a party.

    • Forced underage marriages rise in Switzerland

      The number of forced marriages involving minors has increased significantly in Switzerland, with a specialist Swiss website reporting 119 cases so far this year, compared with fewer than 60 for all of 2015.

      According to zwangsheirat.ch (a website focused on forced marriages) of particular concern is that of the 119 cases, 26 were with girls under the age of 16, most of whom came from Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia. This figure is five times the total number reported between 2005 and 2015.

      One case involved a ten-year-old Somali girl at a Swiss school where a social worker discovered that the girl was married, Anu Sivaganesan, president of zwangsheirat.ch, told the NZZ am Sonntag.

    • Iran regime tries to justify the execution of young people

      A notorious torture expert and official of the mullahs’ regime has attempted to justify the executions in Iran of young adults, who were under 18 when they were charged.

      On August 4, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, who in a bizarre twist is the secretary of the Iranian regime’s so-called Human Rights Council, told the regime-affiliated Tasnim News Agency that minors are not executed until they have reached the age of 18.

      Indeed, he blamed Western criticism for bringing this to media attention and suggested that the United Nations take the mullahs’ so-called ‘Islamic laws’ into account when addressing the rights of children in legal cases. He attacked the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran for exposing the regime’s brutal intimidation tactics and bloody history of human rights abuses.

      He said: “Ahmed Shaheed was the least successful choice in case of discussing our human rights. We have never authorized his position and we will not also accept the newly elected person for this position.”

    • “Clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed sues Irving schools, police for wrongful arrest

      Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested last year after showing a home-made clock to a teacher at his high school, has filed a lawsuit against his former school district, its principal, and the city of Irving, Texas.

      Mohamed’s lawsuit (PDF), filed earlier today, claims that the school district has a history of racial discrimination, and that the treatment he received violated both US civil rights laws and his 14th Amendment right to equal treatment under the law.

    • Is the Fight to End Mass Incarceration Wasting Away in Washington?

      Mass incarceration’s profile as a national issue appears to be on the wane. Throughout 2015, the nation’s over-reliance on imprisonment drew a constant spotlight, producing a plethora of bipartisan policy proposals and expressions of moral outrage in Beltway circles. In March last year, Newt Gingrich and Democrat stalwart Van Jones co-hosted an unprecedented Washington, D.C. conference of nearly 500 key role players billed as a “Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform.” The Koch Brothers Foundation teamed up with George Soros’ Open Society forces to sponsor it. Author and formerly incarcerated activist Shaka Senghor spoke, as did Georgia’s Republican governor Nathan Deal. At a moment of great congressional discord, people across the spectrum were finally agreeing on at least one thing: the U.S. was spending too much money on corrections and locking up too many people, especially black folks.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • The Coming Copyright Fight Over Viral News Videos, Such As Police Shootings

        There are two subjects we write about frequently on Techdirt that we didn’t think would ever have all that much overlap: copyright and people using their mobile phones to record events in real time. This can cover a lot of stuff, but lately it’s been getting extra attention in the world of police shootings and police protests. We didn’t necessarily think these two kinds of stories would overlap very often, but when you’ve got video, you’ve got copyright. Last year, for example, there was a bit of a copyright dustup when the guy who shot the infamous video of Walter Scott being shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager, started demanding to get paid. As we pointed out at the time, news programs using the video were almost certainly protected by fair use.

        And that’s still true. But… eventually this is going to go to courts. And that’s especially true because of the new group of middlemen who are racing to buy up any viral video within hours (or minutes!) of it going viral, and then trying to license it everywhere. If you follow the space, you may have heard of some of these guys: Jukin Media is the most well-known, but there are others like ViralHog, ViralNova and Newsflare. And they don’t seem all that thrilled about this part of the law called fair use.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/09/sqlite-3-14/feed/ 0 As Bavarian Parliament Expresses Disdain Over EPO Leadership’s Abuses German Media Listens and Staff Union Releases New Survey http://techrights.org/2016/06/01/bavarian-parliament-responds/ http://techrights.org/2016/06/01/bavarian-parliament-responds/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2016 18:55:28 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=93090 Bavarian media informed politicians, who now feed information back into the German media

Technologia summary

Summary: Staff of the European Patent Office manages to get its collective voice heard in spite of truly wasteful white-washing ‘studies’ and ‘surveys’ that Battistelli and his circle commission to mischaracterise and badly portray the situation

BACK in March we published slides from a staff survey conducted by Technologia with help from SUEPO members. This survey indicated that, based on thousands of respondents, Battistelli is trusted by nobody at all. It was a damning if not unbelievable outcome, as this suggests that not even ‘moles’ (infiltrators) have snuck into the union. Earlier today SUEPO released more of the same, under the banner “Results of the 2016 European Patent Office Staff Survey”.

Here is the full thing with links to all the corresponding PDFs.

The results of the 2016 EPO Staff Survey by Technologia are now available. With a participation rate of 39% this third edition allows to assess reliably the current situation and the development of psychosocial risk among EPO staff under Mr Battistelli’s presidentship. The situation and the trend are worrying.

Most important findings are available in the “Executive Summary” (also available in German, French and Dutch). Other relevant information has been gathered in a summary presentation (also available in German and French).

The raw results to all questions (compared with the results of the 2010 and 2013 editions) are also available in three languages:  English, German and French.

In the mean time, despite the fact that SUEPO says nothing about it and there is no coverage in English, German media writes about yesterday afternoon’s debate about the EPO’s debacles at the Bavarian Parliament (we could use translations of these articles about it [1, 2]). With the data above they should be able to assess the situation; Battistelli now engages in information war with help from dodgy firms and PR giants from the United States. It’s an extraordinary waste of money. SUEPO took note of another bit of coverage from German media, but again, without English translation there’s not much we can publish herein. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/06/01/bavarian-parliament-responds/feed/ 0 Links 25/5/2016: Nginx 1.11, F1 2015 Coming to GNU/Linux Tomorrow http://techrights.org/2016/05/25/nginx-1-11/ http://techrights.org/2016/05/25/nginx-1-11/#comments Wed, 25 May 2016 13:27:21 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=92846

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Your Occasional Reminder to Use Plain Text Whenever Possible

    I myself have lost access to many WordPerfect files from the ’80s in their original form, though I have been migrating their content to other formats over the years. I was fortunate, though, to do most of my early work in VMS and Unix, so a surprising number of my programs and papers from that era are still readable as they were then. (Occasionally, this requires me to dust off troff to see what I intended for them to look like then.)

  • Science

  • Networking

    • Disruption in the Networking Hardware Marketplace

      The idea behind software-defined networking (SDN) is to abstract physical elements from networking hardware and control them with software. Part of this is decoupling network control from forwarding functions so you can program it directly, but the main idea is that this separation allows for a dynamic approach to networking – something that the increasing disaggregation in IT makes a necessity.

    • Facebook Lauds Terragraph Cost Savings

      Facebook says its Terragraph system could revolutionize service provider economics, insisting the cost point it is targeting for the wireless technology is “significantly” less than that of rival connectivity solutions.

      Announced last month, Terragraph uses unlicensed spectrum in the 60GHz range to provide high-speed connectivity in densely populated communities. (See Facebook Debuts Terragraph & ARIES to Extend Wireless.)

      The social networking giant says it plans to make Terragaph available to service providers through its recently launched Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which is developing open source network technologies in partnership with various telecom operators and vendors. (See Facebook TIPs Telcos Towards Open Source Networks.)

    • AT&T will launch SDN service in 63 countries simultaneously this year, de la Vega says

      Ralph de la Vega, vice chairman of AT&T and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions and AT&T International, told investors during the 44th Annual JP Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference that while he could not name the service yet, it’s something that the company could not have achieved on traditional hardware architectures.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • What the Media and Congress Are Missing on Zika and Poverty

      Somewhere along the way the focus shifted. What began as coordinating a response to Zika that is rooted in smart public health policy and caring for our fellow citizens became a funding fight on Capitol Hill in which many conservatives seem completely divorced from reality—particularly the reality of low-income women and children of color living in the South.

    • Commission may offer defining criteria on hormone disruptors by June

      After a delay of more than two years, the criteria defining hormone disruptors could be presented at the meeting of the College of European Commissioners on 15 June, Le Monde reported on Friday (20 May). EurActiv’s partner Journal de l’Environnement reports.

      Vytenis Andriukaitis, the European Commissioner for Health, had promised MEPs in February to present the criteria for the definition of endocrine (hormone) disruptors by this summer. Their publication was originally planned for December 2013.

      Hormone disruptors are already mentioned in two European regulations, one from 2009 on biocides and the other from 2012 on crop protection products, but they remain undefined.

    • Initiative To Find New Antibiotics Being Launched At WHA

      A new initiative seeking to develop new antibiotic treatments is being launched today at the annual World Health Assembly. The Global Antibiotic Research and Development (GARD) is a partnership between the World Health Organization and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi).

      The partnership has secured the necessary seed funding to build its scientific strategy, initial research and development (R&D) portfolio, and start-up team, according to a DNDi release.

    • Marijuana social network is denied listing on Nasdaq

      The Denver-based social network has 775,000 users from the 24 states where marijuana is legal medicinally (including those states where it’s also legal recreationally), who use the platform to find like-minded people in their area, learn about nearby dispensaries, and follow pot legalization news. MassRoots has said it meets the criteria for listing on Nasdaq—it has a $40 million market capitalization value and “well over 300 shareholders” through over-the-counter markets, according to CNN Money.

      MassRoots alleges that the decision to deny the social media platform a place on Nasdaq was due to the fact that marijuana use and cultivation remains a federal crime. “On May 23, 2016, Nasdaq denied MassRoots’ application to list on its exchange for being cannabis-related,” the company wrote. “We believe this dangerous precedent could prevent nearly every company in the regulated cannabis industry from listing on a national exchange, making it more difficult for cannabis entrepreneurs to raise capital and slow the progression of cannabis legalization in the United States.”

    • WHO Engagement With Outside Actors: Delegates Tight-Lipped, Civil Society Worried

      This week, country delegates meeting at the annual World Health Assembly are expected to come to an agreement on a framework managing the UN World Health Organization’s relationship with outside actors, such as the private sector, philanthropic organisations and civil society groups.

    • Global Health R&D Under Debate At World Health Assembly

      Panellists included David Kaslow, who oversees PATH’s product development partnerships; Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general in charge of the Health Systems and Innovation Cluster at WHO; Suerie Moon, research director and co-chair of the Forum on Global Governance for Health at the Harvard Global Health Institute; Bernard Pécoul, who leads the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi); and Ambassador Guilherme Patriota, the deputy permanent representative of Brazil to the UN organisations in Geneva.

    • Samantha Bee: In the Big Tobacco vs. Little Vape Fight, the Underdog Keeps on Puffing

      New government regulations announced earlier this month may give Big Tobacco a huge advantage over its major competitor—the vape market.

    • GMOs Are Complicated, And Our Food System Is Not Designed To Handle Complicated. That’s A Problem.

      The report comes at an important time in the overall debate about GMOs and their place in the American food system. In a country almost constantly polarized, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that GMOs should be labeled. According to a Pew poll, more than half of Americans believe that GMOs are unsafe. At the same time, proponents of the technology argue that GMOs are safe for human consumption and will help farmers meet growing demands for food, even as population increases and climate change intensifies.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Kerry Threatens War-Without-End on Syria

      Alleged peace-maker John Kerry threatened to wage war-without-end on Syria – if the Middle East country does accept the US demand for regime change.

      That’s hardly the language of a supposed bona fide diplomat who presents an image to the world as a politician concerned to bring about an end to the five-year Syrian conflict.

      The US Secretary of State repeatedly sounds anxious to alleviate the appalling suffering of the Syrian nation, where over the past five years some 400,000 people have been killed and millions displaced as refugees.

    • More Game-Playing on MH-17?

      The West keeps piling the blame for the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Russian President Putin although there are many holes in the case and the U.S. government still withholds its evidence, writes Robert Parry.

    • House simmers with criticism for Saudi Arabia

      House lawmakers appear eager for an opportunity to beat up on Saudi Arabia, amid persistent allegations about the kingdom’s support for international terrorism.

      Legislators from both parties took shots at the kingdom during a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, in what could presage a one-sided effort to pass legislation opening the kingdom up to legal jeopardy for alleged activity ahead of 9/11.

      “If a foreign country — any country — can be shown to have significantly supported a terrorist attack on the United States, the victims and their families ought to be able to sue that foreign country, no matter who it is,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), the head of the subcommittee on Terrorism and a co-sponsor of the bill that would allow 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. “Like any other issue, we should let a jury decide that issue and the damages, if any.”

      “What concerns me is the Saudi government comes to us and say ‘You’re our friend and you should protect us from this statute,’ while defending every day the Wahhabi mullahs who not only preach orthodox practices of Islam, but preach violence and murder against those whom they disagree with,” added Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.)

    • Tony Blair Admits His Ignorance of Middle East; Immediately Calls for New War

      Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted underestimating “forces of destabilization” in the Middle East when Britain joined the U.S. in invading Iraq in 2003, the Guardian reports, but stopped short of actually apologizing for the U.K.’s role in the Iraq War in remarks at an event on Tuesday.

    • How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style

      The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the military this year — more, that is, than was spent at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup, and more than the military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined. And keep in mind that that’s just a partial total. As an analysis by the Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities like homeland security, veterans’ affairs, nuclear warhead production at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.

    • Kosovo: Hillary Clinton’s Legacy of Terror

      Hillary owns Kosovo – she is not only personally responsible for its evolution from a province of the former Yugoslavia into a Mafia state, she is also the mother of the policy that made its very existence possible and which she carried into her years as Secretary of State under Barack Obama.

      As the “Arab Spring” threatened to topple regimes throughout the Middle East, Mrs. Clinton decided to get on board the revolutionary choo-choo train and hitch her wagon to “moderate” Islamists who seemed like the wave of the future. She dumped Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak, whom she had previously described as a friend of the family, and supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s bid for power. In Libya, she sided with Islamist rebels out to overthrow Moammar Ghaddafi, celebrating his gruesome death by declaring “We came, we saw, he died.” And in Syria, she plotted with Gen. David Petraeus to get around President Obama’s reluctance to step into the Syrian quagmire by arming Syrian rebels allied with al-Qaeda and other terrorist gangs.

    • Israel’s Army Goes to War With Its Politicians

      IN most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel, the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs of the Israel Defense Forces and the heads of the intelligence agencies try to calm and restrain them.

      Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer last week of the post of defense minister to Avigdor Lieberman, a pugnacious ultranationalist politician, is the latest act in the war between Mr. Netanyahu and the military and intelligence leaders, a conflict that has no end in sight but could further erode the rule of law and human rights, or lead to a dangerous, superfluous military campaign.

      The prime minister sees the defense establishment as a competitor to his authority and an opponent of his goals. Putting Mr. Lieberman, an impulsive and reckless extremist, in charge of the military is a clear signal that the generals’ and the intelligence chiefs’ opposition will no longer be tolerated. Mr. Lieberman is known for ruthlessly quashing people who hold opposing views.

      This latest round of this conflict began on March 24: Elor Azariah, a sergeant in the I.D.F., shot and killed a Palestinian assailant who was lying wounded on the ground after stabbing one of Sergeant Azariah’s comrades. The I.D.F. top brass condemned the killing. A spokesman for Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff, said, “This isn’t the I.D.F., these are not the I.D.F.’s values.”

    • A Worrisome New Plan to Send U.S. Troops to Libya as ‘Advisers’

      The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Dunford, said last week that the United States is engaged in a “period of intense dialogue” that could lead to an agreement with the government of Libya that would allow U.S. “military advisers” to be deployed there in the fight against Islamic State.

      “There’s a lot of activity going on underneath the surface,” Dunford told The Washington Post. “We’re just not ready to deploy capabilities yet because there hasn’t been an agreement. And frankly, any day that could happen.”

      This plan should worry every American. If the past is any lesson, the new U.S. military advisers will likely be permanent and will presage a large combat contingent in Libya.

      U.S. military advisers first arrived in Vietnam in 1950, a move that presaged the eventual arrival of 9,087,000 military personnel, and reaching a peak in 1967 of 545,000 combat troops. The last U.S. troops didn’t leave Vietnam until 1975, and only after 58,220 had been killed. U.S. troops entered Kuwait in February 1991 to push invading Iraqi forces out of that country. Twenty-five years later, 13,500 troops remain.

    • Jeremy Scahill: Corporations Are Making a Killing Off US Targeted Killing

      If drone warfare has come up at all this election season, it’s been in passing. The candidates don’t differ much on the use of pilotless drones. But how is the face of war changing, and how do our peace movements need to respond?

      Jeremy Scahill is an award-winning investigative journalist and a founding editor of The Intercept. He’s the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Dirty Wars (the book and the film), and now The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, written with the staff of The Intercept.

    • As Hillary Clinton Defends Her Role in 2009 Coup, Is U.S. Aid to Honduras Adding “Fuel to the Fire”?

      We speak with Annie Bird about Hillary Clinton’s role as secretary of state during the 2009 coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. “There’s no other way to categorize what happened in 2009 other than a military coup with no legal basis,” Bird says. “The U.S. was not willing to cut off assistance to Honduras, and that is the only reason it was not called a coup, a military coup. At the time, activists like Berta called for the assistance to be cut off, and today her children are calling for it to be cut off, because the U.S. assistance is actually adding fuel to the fire and stoking the economic interests of the people behind the coup.”

    • Philippine death squads very much in business as Duterte set for presidency

      On May 14, five days after voters in the Philippines chose Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte as their next president, two masked gunmen cruised this southern city’s suburbs on a motorbike, looking for their kill.

      Gil Gabrillo, 47, a drug user, was returning from a cockfight when the gunmen approached. One of them pumped four bullets into Gabrillo’s head and body, killing the small-time trader of goods instantly. Then the motorbike roared off.

      The murder made no headlines in Davao, where Duterte’s loud approval for hundreds of execution-style killings of drug users and criminals over nearly two decades helped propel him to the highest office of a crime-weary land.

      Human rights groups have documented at least 1,400 killings in Davao that they allege had been carried out by death squads since 1998. Most of those murdered were drug users, petty criminals and street children.

    • Insane NRA video warns Iran: Americans are crazier and more violent than ‘flower child’ Obama

      The National Rifle Association wants the government of Iran to take heed: The United States of America is much crazier than President Barack Obama is letting on. In a new video message that’s addressed to the “ayatollahs of Iran and every terrorist you enable,” an NRA supporter warns Iran that the real America is nothing like “our fresh-faced flower child president and his weak-kneed, Ivy League friends.”

    • Obama in Hiroshima: A Case Study in Hypocrisy

      Interestingly, the question of nuclear weapons will likely also not be addressed in a substantive way. There may indeed be some discussion of the subject in general terms, but it will be veiled in the typically flowery, but utterly vacuous, Obama rhetoric. Given the opportunity, an intrepid reporter might venture to ask the President why, despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples [and] vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” he has presided over an administration that will spend more than $1 trillion upgrading, modernizing, and expanding the US nuclear arsenal.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Scientists Warn of 10C Warming as we “Dial up Earth’s Thermostat”

      So far this year we have had warnings that the Great Barrier reef is “dying on our watch” due to coral bleaching caused by record temperatures; dramatic early seasonal melting of the Arctic Ocean sea ice and Greenland’s massive ice sheet; devastating wild-fires in Canada which are being linked to climate change, and month after month of record temperatures.

    • Trump’s Climate Change Denial Is Already Complicating the Paris Climate Deal

      If Donald Trump wins and pulls the U.S. out of its climate change commitments, some countries wonder, why should they keep their own?

    • Into the Zone

      This is the countryside of Fukushima. Five years after the nuclear meltdown, it remains full of radiation, and virtually empty of people.

    • World could warm by massive 10C if all fossil fuels are burned

      Arctic would warm by as much as 20C by 2300 with disastrous impacts if action is not taken on climate change, warns new study

    • Businessman’s arrest for forest fires is “slap in the face” for Indonesian government

      Tensions between Indonesia and Singapore are simmering as a kerfuffle is developing over the decision by a Singaporean court to grant a warrant to the National Environment Agency (NEA) for an Indonesian businessman suspected of involvement in last year’s forest fires. The warrant was obtained after the businessman, whose identity remains hidden, failed to turn up for an interview with the Singaporean authorities while he was in the city-state.

      The saga took an interesting twist as Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied its counterpart’s repeated claims that a formal complaint against the warrant had been lodged by the Indonesian Embassy in Singapore.

      The reason for Indonesia’s umbrage remains unclear, although implicit in the protest was the notion that Singapore had tried to force Indonesia’s hand in acting against responsible parties for last year’s environmental disaster, which saw much of South East Asia engulfed in a haze. Jakarta’s reaction suggests that it deemed Singapore to have overstepped its scope of action. By contrast, Singapore’s NEA felt that it had every right to prosecute those deemed responsible, based on the 2014 Transboundary Haze Pollution Act.

    • Shock and Awe, The Chevron Way

      With pockets deep enough, you can buy justice. That’s what Chevron assumes since they lost a $9.5 billion verdict at the Supreme Court of Ecuador in 2013. But can Chevron justify their mockery of the justice system at the shareholder meeting on Wednesday, May 25th? Some shareholders are gearing up for a battle.

      The funds from the $9.5 billion judgment are needed to set up a health programme for the tens of thousands of victims of Chevron’s toxic dumping in Ecuador, and to clean up a contaminated part of the Amazon rainforest bigger than Lake District. Chevron left Ecuador years ago, but it “forgot” to take home 16 billion gallons of toxic waste that contaminates streams and rivers relied on by local inhabitants for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing.

    • Ecuador Activist Accuses Chevron of ‘Harassment and Defamation’

      Santiago Escobar began getting death threats after he revealed information against the oil giant. Now he says publications financed by Chevron are trying to smear him.

    • Anti-Frackers Vow Fierce Resistance as UK Goes Back ‘Up for Shale’

      Furious environmental campaigners vowed to fight back on Tuesday after councilors in North Yorkshire approved the UK’s first fracking permit in five years.

      The North Yorkshire County Council on Monday approved Third Energy’s application to frack the fields near the North York Moors National Park—just days after people across the country celebrated five years of being “frack-free.”

    • ExxonMobil tried to censor climate scientists to Congress during Bush era

      ExxonMobil moved to squash a well-established congressional lecture series on climate science just nine days after the presidential inauguration of George W Bush, a former oil executive, the Guardian has learned.

      Exxon’s intervention on the briefings, revealed here for the first time, adds to evidence the oil company was acutely aware of the state of climate science and its implications for government policy and the energy industry – despite Exxon’s public protestations for decades about the uncertainties of global warming science.

      Indeed, the company moved swiftly during the earliest days of the Bush administration to block public debate on global warming and delay domestic and international regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to former officials of the US Global Change Research Program, or USGCRP.

      The Bush White House is now notorious for censoring climate scientists and blocking international action on climate change by pulling the US out of the Kyoto agreement.

    • China’s New Dietary Guidelines Could Be Good News For The Climate

      Chinese food has fans around the world, but in China it’s creating a problem. A recent study found obesity and other diet-related diseases are skyrocketing.

      Recently, the Chinese government took a major step to reverse that trend by issuing a new set of dietary guidelines.

      While dietary experts will weigh in on the nutritional aspects, buried in the pages is a recommendation with potentially huge implications for climate change.

    • Gulf Coast Activist Crashes Shell Meeting to Decry Destruction of Her Home

      Just two weeks after Royal Dutch Shell’s offshore drilling operations released nearly 90,000 gallons of oil into the water off the Louisiana coast, an Indigenous activist from the Gulf region spoke out at Shell’s annual shareholders meeting in the Netherlands on Tuesday, highlighting the company’s history of environmental devastation in the place she calls home.

      “In the late 90s, after learning that their community was plagued by an open-air, toxic, oil-field waste facility, I began documenting my Houma relatives living in a small, mostly American Indian and Cajun community called Grand Bois, located just south of Houma, Louisiana,” Monique Verdin told Common Dreams via email. “As I was taken further and further down the bayous I also became more and more aware of our rapid land loss and the other environmental impacts caused by the oil and gas industry.”

  • Finance

    • Elizabeth Warren Calls On Americans To Fight Wall Street

      On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) headlined an event that launched a new coalition calling itself “Take On Wall Street.”

      The group includes lawmakers like Warren, Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), labor leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka and the AFT’s Randi Weingarten, as well as civil rights groups, community groups, and the organizing giant Move On. It aims to put pressure on lawmakers at all levels to pass stricter rules governing the financial system.

    • Armed with Policy Solutions and Populist Rage, Campaign Vows to ‘Take on Wall Street’

      On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 20 progressive activist and labor groups is launching a new campaign to reform the financial industry.

      The group, Take on Wall Street, aims to utilize public anger at the banking industry and the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as the efforts of groups like the AFL-CIO and Communications Workers of America (CWA), to introduce an agenda that would change the way the financial sector operates.

      Take On Wall Street will formally announce its campaign launch at an event Tuesday night, which will feature a headlining speech by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken proponent of financial reform.

    • Obama Overtime Plan Won’t Hurt Businesses, Executives Admit

      Business interest groups and their allies engaged in hyperbolic rhetoric about the supposed negative impact of overtime regulations before they were announced last week. By changing a salary threshold, the new rules will make millions of workers newly eligible to be paid for their overtime hours.

      “Businesses will be forced to look for cuts in the face of such massive costs,” Competitive Enterprise Institute policy analyst Trey Kovacs predicted. Right-wing economist analyst Michael Carr even worried that the overtime rules could help start another recession.

    • Apple, Microsoft and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash, as tech sector accumulates wealth

      Apple, Microsoft and Google are the top three cash-rich U.S. companies across all sectors of business, not including banks and other financial institutions — holding a combined $391 billion in cash as of the end of 2015, or more than 23 percent of the entire $1.68 trillion held by the nation’s non-financial corporations.

    • McDonald’s ex-CEO: $15/hr minimum wage will unleash the robot rebellion

      For years, economists have been issuing predictions about how automation will impact the world’s job markets, but those studies and guesses have yet to make a call based on what would happen if a given sector’s wages rose. Instead, that specific guesswork mantle has been taken up by a former McDonald’s CEO, who declared on Tuesday that a rise in the American minimum wage will set our nation’s robotic revolution into motion.

      In an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, Ed Rensi claimed that a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour would result in “job loss like you can’t believe” before ceding ground to our new robotic overlords. “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday, and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry—it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries.”

    • CEOs Paid 335 Times Average Rank-and-File Worker; Outsourcing Results in Even Higher Inequality

      CEO pay for major U.S. companies continues to soar as income inequality and outsourcing of good-paying American jobs increases. Outsourcing has become a hot presidential election topic with candidates calling out corporations who say they need to save money by sending jobs overseas. Meanwhile, according to the new AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company made $12.4 million per year in 2015 – 335 times more money than the average rank-and-file worker.

    • ‘Desperate’ Verizon Seeks Scabs to Offset Labor Strike

      Telecom giant Verizon has put out an urgent call for temporary employees as the company’s bitter feud with thousands of striking workers enters its seventh week.

      Last month, some 40,000 Verizon technicians and service employees walked off the job after a year of labor negotiations failed to produce a new contract.

      The workers, who are represented by the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, argue that Verizon wants to freeze pensions, slash benefits, and outsource jobs to Mexico and the Philippines. The unions also say that the company has refused to negotiate improvements to wages, benefits and working conditions for a group of Verizon Wireless workers who joined CWA in 2014.

    • Takin’ It to the Streets—Brazilians Protest President’s Ouster

      Another Temer miscue was appointing Brazil’s first all-white, all-male cabinet in seventy years, going back even further than the military dictatorship of 1965-1984. The move, in a land that is majority Afro-Brazilian, has angered and energized women and Afro-Brazilians opposed to Temer’s government.

    • Brazil’s New Government Is Already Planning to Balance the Budget on the Backs of the Poor

      Just days after the Brazilian Senate voted to suspend former President Dilma Rousseff and subject her to an impeachment trial, the country’s new right-wing government is already planning to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

    • The Embarrassing Referendum

      Personally I remain an EU enthusiast, but I am horrified by the arguments being put forward by the Remain campaign, and even more by the personalities associated with it. I could never display a Remain poster in case people felt I agreed with David Cameron. I strongly suspect that explains the mass public apathy, which friends tell me is no different down south. Whatever their views on the EU, people do not want in any way to be associated with George Osborne, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair or Peter Mandelson on one side, or with Ian Duncan Smith, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson et al on the other.

    • Study confirms that the national press is biased in favour of Brexit

      A new research study has confirmed what most people, including this commentator, knew: national press coverage of EU referendum campaign has been “heavily skewed in favour of Brexit.”

      The bald figures produced by researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism tell the story: 45% of 928 referendum articles it studied were in favour of leaving while 27% backed the remain case.

      Some 19% were categorised as “mixed or undecided” and 9% were designated as adopting no position.

    • Obama Visits Vietnam To Promote TPP. Wait, VIETNAM? Really?

      President Obama is in Vietnam promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Vietnam? Really?

      A year ago the post “Obama To Visit Nike To Promote the TPP. Wait, NIKE? Really?,” noted how Nike pioneered moving jobs out of the country to take advantage of low wages and lack of environmental protections in places like Vietnam, which led to many of the problems in our economy today. It seemed that Nike was possibly the worst company to use to support claims that TPP would benefit the American economy.

    • Sanders Bucks Dem Leaders, Calls for Opposition to Puerto Rico Bill

      In a message to fellow Senate Democratic caucus members, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday called for the defeat of emergency legislation to address Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis.

      A bill introduced last week by House Republicans would require the island territory to give up its budget-making autonomy in exchange for debt relief. The measure has the tentative support of the Obama administration and Democratic leadership.

      Puerto Rico is currently $72 billion in the hole, and already defaulting on financial obligations. Sanders, a presidential hopeful, said in a statement that the proposed initiative would “make a terrible situation even worse.”

    • INTO THE WORLD OF WORK

      What do you need to know – about the new world of work, but also about yourself – as you graduate and launch yourself into the world of work? We made a short film of my last class of the semester, where I speak to graduating seniors about these questions and more. If you’re a graduating senior (or know one) we hope this is helpful.

    • Warren Incensed at GOP Effort to Gut Financial Protections for Retirees

      The Labor Department rule, issued last month, requires financial advisors to adhere to a “fiduciary standard” that places client interests ahead of potential profits for themselves.

    • Armed with Policy Solutions and Populist Rage, Campaign Vows to ‘Take on Wall Street’

      On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 20 progressive activist and labor groups is launching a new campaign to reform the financial industry.

      The group, Take on Wall Street, aims to utilize public anger at the banking industry and the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as the efforts of groups like the AFL-CIO and Communications Workers of America (CWA), to introduce an agenda that would change the way the financial sector operates.

    • Does Venezuela’s Crisis Prove Socialism Doesn’t Work?

      When the price of oil slumped, it was therefore inevitable that Venezuelans would see a downturn. Indeed, in some ways, the current crisis isn’t anything new: Venezuela has experienced boom and bust cycles coinciding with oil prices since the 1970s. With historically high oil prices, Chavez had luck on his side during his golden years, while Maduro has drawn a short straw. However, it’s worth noting that no other petro state in the world is facing the same kind of crisis that has hit Venezuela. Back luck aside, the Maduro administration could avoided the current conditions by reforming monetary policy in 2013 or 2014. While low productivity or anti-government sabotage are issues that can’t be resolved overnight with the wave of a hand, monetary policy could have been shored up in a relatively short period of time. Unlike international oil prices or long term issues like Dutch Disease, the Maduro administration had meaningful agency here, but failed to act. If serious reforms had been enacted, Venezuela would still be facing a nasty downturn, but probably not a fully fledged economic and political crisis. Likewise, even if the oil crash never happened, Venezuela would almost certainly still be heading towards a crisis sometime down the road anyway, largely thanks to failed monetary policy.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The massive scale of the Clintons’ speech-making industry

      Last week, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released her most recent personal financial disclosure, detailing ways in which she and her husband earned money in 2015. Most of their income came from book royalties and giving paid speeches. Bill Clinton, for example, gave a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in March 2015, being paid $325,000 for his time.

    • LISTEN: Amy Goodman on NPR’s Weekend Edition

      NPR’s Scott Simon asks Amy Goodman about Bernie Sanders’ chances of getting the delegates he needs to claim the Democratic nomination.

    • Americans’ Dislike for Trump and Clinton Bolsters Sanders’ Superdelegate Pitch

      Most Americans can’t stand the frontrunner of either major political party, a new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released Tuesday has found.

      Almost 60 percent of respondents said they “dislike” or “hate” Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, and 63 percent said the same about Republican nominee Donald Trump.

      In fact, the poll found that the roughly one-third of respondents on either side of the political aisle were voting for their candidate solely to defeat the other nominee.

    • Why I Am #NeverHillary

      It’s one hell of a choice. The more I delve into Donald Trump and his past (to research my biography, which comes out in June), the more scared I get. Nevertheless, there is no way I’ll vote for Hillary. I won’t vote for her if she stops shaking down rich right-wing Republicans for donations. I won’t vote for her if she adopts Bernie’s platform. I won’t vote for her if she names Bernie her vice president. I won’t even vote for her if Bernie invites me to spend the summer with him and Jane in Vermont.

      #NeverHillary. That’s me.

      There are millions of us.

    • Bernie’s not-so-secret-weapon

      For months, Bernie Sanders and his supporters have pointed to polls that show him running comfortably ahead of Donald Trump in November. But now that Hillary Clinton’s lead over Trump has disappeared — and the two likely nominees are now running neck-and-neck in national polls — his argument is gaining new resonance.

      Clinton and her campaign argue that the Vermont senator hasn’t undergone the kind of scrutiny that Clinton and Trump have — and that his poll numbers are over-inflated compared to candidates who have faced intense political attacks from the other party.

    • I watched Hillary Clinton’s forces swipe Nevada: This is what the media’s not telling you

      It probably wasn’t the best time for me to go to Vegas. My beloved father had just died the week before, and I was feeling hazy and vulnerable, prone to weeping at the slightest provocation. Grief made me feel like I had no skin and no brain; grief had turned me into a cloud, and I was in that floaty state when I got on the plane with my husband—a state delegate headed to the Nevada Democratic Convention—and our 6-year-old son. I wasn’t sure what would happen once we got to Vegas, whether all the lights and bells would hammer me back into my body, or whether I would drift even further away from myself, hover like the cigarette smoke over the casino floor.

      I had wanted to be a delegate, myself, but knew I was going to be out of town during the county convention in April, so I didn’t put my hat in the ring at the February caucus, where I had served as a precinct captain for Bernie. It was my first election season in Nevada, my first caucus, and the whole process seemed wild to me, taking what was normally such a private experience—voting quietly in an individual booth—and turning it into a political game of Red Rover, people taking sides in a room, trying to sway folks to come over to their side, their candidate; it was a civil game in our precinct, but I could see how easily things could turn nasty. I was grateful my husband had volunteered himself to be a county delegate, and was excited when he got the email that he was chosen to be a state delegate, as well. Nevada has a strange three-tier system—Hillary had won a majority at the February caucus, but more Bernie delegates showed up at the county caucus, negating Hillary’s win, so the race for delegates at the state convention promised to be a tight one. I looked forward to seeing the process in action; I never expected that process would become so chaotic and surreal, although I had become used to surreal of late.

      We arrived late Friday night and all around me, women were dressed to the nines and looking miserable. My heart broke for them. I wanted to know their stories; why were they so unhappy? The weight of crumbling expectations seemed to fill the smoky air. I found myself sending little silent affirmations to all these sad, fancy women—You are beautiful, I beamed to them. It will be okay. Perhaps I was channeling my dad, who always did whatever he could to make people feel better about themselves.

    • Study: One Out Of Every 178 Posts To Chinese Social Media Is Government Propaganda

      In Russia, we’ve talked about how Vladimir Putin employs a massive army of Internet trolls to ridicule and shout down political opponents and critics. In China, the government’s tactics are notably different. According to a new study out of Harvard (pdf), the Chinese government posts about 488 million fake social media comments — or roughly one day of Twitter’s total global volume — each year. In China, these propagandists have historically been dubbed the “50 Cent Party,” because it was generally believed they were paid 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

    • Across Europe, distrust of mainstream political parties is on the rise

      The narrow defeat – by just 0.6 percentage points – of the nationalist Freedom party’s Norbert Hofer in this week’s Austrian presidential elections has focused attention once more on the rise of far-right parties in Europe.

      But despite what some headlines might claim, it is oversimplifying things to say the far right is suddenly on the march across an entire continent. In some countries, the hard right’s share of the vote in national elections has been stable or declined.

      In others – particularly the nations of southern Europe, which, with memories of fascism and dictatorship still very much alive, have proved reluctant to flirt with rightwing extremism – it is the far left that is advancing.

      Some rightwing populist parties are relatively new, but others have been a force to be reckoned with for many years now, sometimes – as in France – enjoying a large share of the vote but being unable, as yet, to break through nationally.

    • Bernie Sanders Draws Thousands at ‘A Future to Believe In’ Rally

      The California primary is only eight days away, and Bernie Sanders isn’t slowing down.

      If anything, the 74-year-old Vermont Senator is picking up the pace as he tours California this week, stopping at as many as three cities a day for rallies and events.

      On Monday night, Sanders held a rally on the football field of Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica, Calif. The Sanders campaign estimated a turnout of 10,000 people—and the numbers may have swelled to more than that, considering the vast numbers of people who turned up but couldn’t fit inside the football field. Sanders told ABC News that he hopes to speak with “200,000 Californians at rallies statewide.”

    • Tim Canova on Bernie Sanders’ Endorsement, Challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Video)

      Canova, a lawyer and activist who supported the Occupy Wall Street movement and opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among other causes, recently received a big boost in the form of an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, with whom Canova has worked previously. Sanders’ backing has helped Canova’s cause, both financially and in terms of publicity, as has the scrutiny focused on Wasserman Schultz in the ongoing controversy about her leadership of the DNC vis-a-vis Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s bids for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    • Elites vs. Too Much Democracy: Andrew Sullivan’s Afraid of Popular Self-Government

      British expatriate writer Andrew Sullivan recently returned to the public eye with a piece that has aroused considerable comment, some of it reasonably on point, and some bloviatingly incoherent.

      What is all the fuss about? Sullivan, in critiquing the Donald Trump phenomenon and the political factors that gave rise to it, makes a few good points, but buries them under a ridiculous premise: The culprit responsible for Trump is too much democracy, and the cure is more elite control of the political process.

    • Sanders: Yes, A Convention About Real Issues Might Be ‘Messy’

      DNC should focus on welcoming energized newcomers, not attending private fundraisers hosted by big donors and corporate lobbyists

    • The BBC has lost touch: here’s how it could re-connect

      A filmmaker advises BBC news staff on how to better engage with the harsh realities of life for many in Britain.

    • Hillary’s Cowgirl Diplomacy?

      Like Obama, Hillary Clinton is a liberal internationalist and a strong believer in American exceptionalism, meaning she is convinced that the world looks to America for leadership, that US involvement everywhere is unavoidable as well as desirable, that US-based multinational corporations are a positive force for global development, and that the US should be ready to commit force in support of humanitarian ideals and American values—but not necessarily in accordance with US or international laws—as much as because of concrete strategic interests. It’s the traditional marriage of realism and idealism that we find in every president (though a Trump presidency would drop the idealism). But each president, as Henry Kissinger once said, inclines somewhat to one side or the other, and in Hillary Clinton’s case, she is more the realist than Obama—more prepared, that is, to commit US power, unilaterally if she believes necessary, in support of a very broad conception of national security.

    • Shock Poll: Sanders Ahead of Trump by 15 Points, Hillary Just by 3

      A shocker. A new NBC News/Wall St Journal poll has Bernie up 54 to 39 over Donald Trump.

      Meanwhile, according to the same poll, Hillary Clinton no longer has a double digit lead over Donald Trump like she did just a month ago — her lead over Trump is just 3 points.

    • Sanders Endorses Down-Ticket Democrats Running for ‘Bold Change’

      “These candidates are standing up against the wealthy interests and biggest corporations, and putting working families first.”

    • Green Party’s Jill Stein Shares Her “Plan B” for Bernie Sanders Supporters: A Green New Deal

      As Bernie Sanders’ voters begin facing the question of whether or not to support Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton if she becomes the party’s nominee, many of his supporters have pledged never to support her. In fact, voters in both major parties are seeking alternatives in this year’s presidential election — and third-party candidates are seeing an explosion in social media interest in their campaigns.

    • Donald Trump: He can’t win, can he?

      In a book published in 2004, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that Latino immigration was endangering the American way of life. Trump has campaigned on a shrill version of the same sinister idea.

    • Progressive women are running for office all over the country

      Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president has gotten far more attention in the media, but there are hundreds of female candidates running for office in 2016. And although Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is rightly credited for calling attention to the fundamental unfairness of our rigged economic and political systems, inspiring women such as Zephyr Teachout, Pramila Jayapal and Lucy Flores are carrying the mantle of progressive populism in congressional races across the country. Notably, Sanders has endorsed and fundraised for all three women in their upcoming primaries, recognizing them as important allies in the battle to create progressive change.

    • ‘Fighting For Every Last Delegate,’ Sanders Requests Kentucky Primary Recanvass

      A recanvass is not the same thing as a recount “but a review of the voting totals,” notes AP.

      If the process finds that Sanders actually won the primary, it would mean that one delegate will go to Sanders instead of Clinton.

    • Sanders campaign requests Kentucky vote recanvass

      Clinton holds 1,924-vote lead over Sanders out of 454,573 votes cast…

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Web Sheriff Abuses DMCA In Weak Attempt To Hide Info Under UK High Court Injunction, Fails Miserably

      Last week, Twitter engaged in some dubious behavior on behalf of a few super-secret someones who’d rather the press didn’t discuss their sexual activity. Twitter was apparently firing off “letters of warning” to users who had dared break an injunction issued by the UK Supreme Court forbidding anyone in the media from discussing a threesome involving a prominent British celebrity.

      There was very little legal force behind the “warning letters” (despite threats from local authorities) and Twitter users were under no obligation to comply with the company’s request. The fact that Twitter even bothered to issue these highlights the utter futility of injunctions/super-injunctions of this variety, which are really just a way for British citizens of a certain level of importance to control local media. It doesn’t really matter if the UK’s highest court upholds a super-injunction if it has no way of enforcing it beyond its super-limited purview.

    • Fantastic: Now British Firms Are Getting In On The Bogus Website/Bogus DMCA Notice Scam

      Here we go again: intellectual property laws being abused to silence critics. In this case — which resembles the tactics exposed by Pissed Consumer recently — bogus copyright claims contained in bogus DMCA notices are being used to remove negative reviews from websites.

      In this case, it’s a British firm — one that first tried to abuse that country’s oft-abused defamation laws.

    • Glenn Beck and other conservatives are in denial about Facebook censorship — so how do we fight back?

      Twitter was recently caught for shadowbanning conservatives and now it’s been leaked that Facebook is equally biased. You can’t have right wing opinions anywhere these days without mass amounts of backlash and censorship.

    • Mapping Media Freedom marks second year of monitoring censorship in Europe

      Journalists have been murdered and burned in effigy. Reporters have been publicly discredited by government officials, prosecuted for under anti-terrorism laws and excluded from public meetings on the refugee crisis. We’ve even recorded journalists being menaced with mechanical diggers.

      Mapping Media Freedom launched to the public on 24 May 2014 to monitor media censorship and press freedom violations throughout Europe. Two years on, the platform has verified over 1,800 incidents, ranging from insults and cyberbullying to physical assaults and assassination.

    • Google To France: No You Don’t Get To Censor The Global Internet

      As we’ve been covering here at Techdirt, French regulators have been pushing Google to censor the global internet whenever it receives “right to be forgotten” requests. If you don’t recall, two years ago, there was a dangerous ruling in the EU that effectively said that people could demand Google remove certain links from showing up when people searched on their names. This “right to be forgotten” is now being abused by a ton of people trying to hide true information they just don’t like being known. Google grudgingly has agreed to this, having little choice to do otherwise. But it initially did so only on Google’s EU domain searches. Last year, a French regulator said that it needed to apply globally. Google said no, explaining why this was a “troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web.”

      French regulators responded with “don’t care, do it!” Google tried to appease the French regulators earlier this year with a small change where even if you went to Google.com, say, from France (rather than the default of Google.fr), Google would still censor the links based on your IP address. And, again, the French regulators said not good enough, and told Google it needed to censor globally. It also issued a fine.

    • Timeline of Amos Yee’s latest arrest by the Singapore Police Force over Section 298 of penal code

      TOC understands that Amos has uploaded a video titled “Refuting Islam With Their Own Quran” on 19 May 2016. The video is taken off of Youtube within an hour (possibly for violating Youtube community standards). Amos then re-uploads the video on Vimeo.

    • EU:s EPP group calls for Internet censorship

      If we introduce far-reaching online censorship you can be absolutely sure that it will be extended beyond its’ original purpose.

    • Myanmar court convicts man over penis tattoo poem

      A court in Myanmar has sentenced a young poet to six months in jail for defaming former president Thein Sein, making him one of the first political activists sentenced since Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi took power in April.

      Maung Saung Kha, 23, used his Facebook account to publish a poem about having a tattoo of a president on his penis. He was charged for defaming Thein Sein under telecommunications laws, used to curb free speech in several other recent cases.

    • Mohawk Regional releases yearbooks in censorship flap; will reprint page that was removed

      The yearbook was supposed to have been released on Friday, but was held back at the last minute by Superintendent Michael Buoniconti, who had previously ordered a single page cut from each book so as not to “harm the well-being of several students.”

      The page contained a photograph of former teacher Ivan Grail, who earlier this year was accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with students, said Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

      Grail was placed on paid leave in March. His current employment status is not known. Buoniconti did not respond to an email and telephone message from The Republican seeking comment.

    • Lessons in Censorship

      Public schools, we all agree, should teach civics and promote democracy, including respect for constitutional rights. Unfortunately, regardless of the official curriculum, schools routinely teach students through censorship and punishment that those in charge decide what may be said.

      In Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights, George Washington University law professor Catherine Ross presents and analyzes dozens of legal cases concerning the free speech rights of students in K-12 public schools. She also provides a convincing critique of the state of the law, an urgent warning about what students experience in school, and concrete suggestions for protecting student speech.

      Ross does not address censorship of college students, which has been much in the news over the past year. But her book is an important reminder that censorship of students begins long before they get to college. She organizes her presentation around five key U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

    • Censorship or justified Concern?

      While the University accepted that the proposed conference was a legitimate academic event, it became increasingly concerned by the end of March 2015 that the conference speakers had a ‘distinct leaning’ to one point of view (essentially anti-Israel) rather than the original intention of a balanced exchange of views, and more significantly that there was an unacceptably high risk of disorder if the conference were to go ahead.

    • Campus censorship is holding women back

      That a significant proportion of female students is willingly supporting censorship is very depressing. But it’s hardly surprising. The vast majority of censorship on campus is aimed at protecting women from offence. spiked’s 2016 Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) found that almost a third of UK universities banned the Sun and the Daily Star, as part of the No More Page 3 campaign, and 25 banned the controversial pop song ‘Blurred Lines’. All of this is done in the name of cleansing campus of ‘demeaning’ representations of women.

    • Facebook changes policies on Trending Topics after activist accused site of right-wing censorship – and blames any bias on rogue employees
    • Facebook Censorship Concerns Could Hurt Engagement, Advertising Dollars
    • Facebook denies systemic bias in Trending Topics but changes how they are chosen
    • Facebook Makes ‘Trending Topic’ Change Following Conservative Backlash
    • Facebook Inc makes changes to ‘Trending Topics’ policies after conservative criticism
    • Facebook’s ‘sweeping’ reforms to trending topics won’t actually change much
    • Facebook tweaks ‘Trending Topics’ policy: Will it restore faith in neutrality?
    • Facebook denies ‘systematic’ content bias, but admits possibility of rogue employees
    • Facebook Trending Topics Will Undergo Changes Following Allegations of Political Bias
    • Facebook is tweaking Trending Topics to counter charges of bias

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Another Court Finds FBI’s NIT Warrants To Be Invalid, But Credits Agents’ ‘Good Faith’ To Deny Suppression

      Yet another court has found that the warrant used by the FBI in the Playpen child porn investigation is invalid, rendering its NIT-assisted “search” unconstitutional. As USA Today’s Brad Heath points out, this is at least the sixth court to find that Rule 41′s jurisdictional limitations do not permit warrants issued in Virginia to support searches performed all over the nation.

      While the court agrees that the warrant is invalid, it places the blame at the feet of the magistrate judge who issued it, rather than the agents who obtained it.

    • British govt hackers report vulnerabilities to Apple [Ed: Yet another one of those “saves the day” puff pieces]

      Britain’s main spy agency has reported two serious operating system vulnerabilites to Apple, as concerns over government stockpiling of zero-day exploits continue.

    • Huge Scale Of Road Camera Surveillance Revealed

      The massive scale of surveillance cameras on the UK’s roads has been revealed in new figures obtained by Sky News.

      Automatic number plate recognition – or ANPR – technology uses cameras to scan number plates and log car journeys.

      Whenever a car passes a camera, its registration is scanned and added to a central database, accessible by police forces.

    • Consumers Demanding Online Privacy in Light of Snowden Leaks

      He pointed to companies in Germany that market their social networking services by underscoring their commitment to enhanced privacy, meaning that the security of personal information has become something that can be sold.

    • The U.S. Surveillance State

      It was the most significant government leak since the Pentagon Papers and revealed an unprecedented level of spying by the U.S. state on the American people and those far beyond the America’s borders. We’ll feature highlights from the Academy Award-winning documentary film “Citizenfour” about whistleblower Edward Snowden and his revelations of massive NSA surveillance.

    • Where The 2016 Candidates Stand On Cybersecurity And Civil Liberties

      While Trump wants to strengthen the government’s surveillance and cyberattack capabilities, the Democrats have fought for civil liberties.

    • Pentagon Whistleblower’s Disclosures Put a Lie to Obama, Clinton Claims About Snowden

      Mark Hertsgaard broke the story of Pentagon whistleblower John Crane in his new book, “Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in the Age of Snowden.” The book details how senior Pentagon officials may have broken the law to punish National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake for leaking information about waste, mismanagement and surveillance. “I think that’s what’s important about John Crane’s story, is it puts the lie to what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are saying and have been saying about Edward Snowden from the beginning,” Hertsgaard said.

    • ‘Lots of surprises inside’: Activist David Miranda tells RT about planned mass Snowden file leak

      On August 18, 2013, Miranda’s life was turned upside down when he was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport for 12 hours under anti-terrorism laws. This came after his partner Glenn Greenwald had published numerous documents released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

      Now the Brazilian-born Miranda says the public has the right to “see what is inside” the documents, which he plans to leak within the next few weeks, despite coming under pressure from governments not to publish the files.

    • Edward Snowden wants you to give a damn about privacy

      In October last year the Government passed the metadata legislation, with bipartisan support, that forces all telecommunications companies to keep the records of their customers for two years.

    • A new study shows how government-collected “anonymous” data can be used to profile you

      After Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, showed the world that intelligence agencies in the US and the UK were monitoring call records on a massive scale, there was a collective gasp, but then mostly silence. There was outrage at the discovery that elected governments had been snooping on law-abiding citizens, but there was also confusion about what information, exactly, those governments were gathering, and what they could use it for.

    • We Asked Edward Snowden if Online Privacy Has Improved Since His Massive NSA Leak

      This Friday, May 27, HBO will air a new episode from season four of our Emmy-winning show. On the last episode, we met the team of female volunteers working to eradicate polio in Pakistan, as well as expert disposal teams trying to detonate unexploded land mines in Southeast Asia. This week we head to Russia to meet Edward Snowden to discuss the current state of digital privacy and government surveillance in America.

    • Scoop: VICE on HBO on Friday, May 27, 2016

      “State of Surveillance” The show is also available on HBO NOW, HBO GO and HBO On Demand. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of massive government surveillance programs in 2013, igniting a raging debate over digital privacy and security. That debate came to a head this year, when Apple fought an FBI court order seeking to access the iPhone of alleged San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook. Meanwhile, journalists and activists are under increasing attack from foreign agents.

    • NSA Whistleblowers Before Snowden Illegally Suppressed By Pentagon
    • FSB’s Snowden War:Using the American NSA against Itself [Ed: The idea that if one distrusts corporate/Western media, then one is fooled by Russia and alternative media is “Russian propaganda”]

      It is important to note that this form of intelligence media propaganda is not effective in isolation. It was not Russian propaganda that caused widespread distrust of the US government. However, the FSB and Russian media conglomerates are able to effectively profit from the damning Snowden disclosures by casting the US in a suspicious, negative light, while at the same time minimizing its own supposed flaws and political sins. More study should be devoted in future to this softer but still significant aspect of US-Russian relational conflict.

    • Observations and thoughts on the LinkedIn data breach

      Last week there was no escaping news of the latest data breach. The LinkedIn hack of 2012 which we thought had “only” exposed 6.5M password hashes (not even the associated email addresses so in practice, useless data), was now being sold on the dark web. It was allegedly 167 million accounts and for a mere 5 bitcoins (about US$2.2k) you could jump over to the Tor-based trading site, pay your Bitcoins and retrieve what is one of the largest data breaches ever to hit the airwaves.

      But this is not a straightforward incident for many reasons and there are numerous issues raised by the data itself and the nature of the hack. I’ve had a heap of calls and emails from various parties doing stories on it over the last week so I thought I’d address some of those queries here and add my own thoughts having now seen the data. I’ll also talk about Have I been pwned (HIBP) and the broader issue of searchable breach data.

    • Five Years of Cookie Law: Politicians’ good intentions and incompetence create security, privacy nightmare

      Five years with the “cookie law”, taking effect in 2011, shows how politicians’ good intentions – when coupled with incompetence – can create a security and privacy nightmare. It was supposed to give users choice, privacy, and security. Its effect, over and above causing developer facedesks and headaches, has been the exact opposite.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Cocky-Doody Politics and World Affairs

      Truman, for instance, on civil rights: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” (He regularly referred to Jews as kikes, to Mexicans as greasers.)

      When Oppenheimer expressed to Truman his misgivings about having developed the atomic bombs, the president told his chief of staff, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.” He later called Oppenheimer a “crybaby scientist”.

    • Federal Judge Catches DOJ Lying, Sanctions Lawyers With Mandatory Ethics Classes

      The lies the DOJ told involve a 2014 DHS directive that changed its handling of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The DOJ told the court and opposing counsel that no action under the new guidelines would commence until February 2015. These statements were made both orally (January 15, 2015) and in a filing (December 19, 2014). But in reality, the guidelines were already being used to process immigrants, resulting in over 100,000 modified DACA applications being granted or renewed by the DHS prior to either of these statements.

      This was caught by the court in April 2015, but the DOJ insisted its statements weren’t lies, but rather the “innocent mistakes” of poorly-informed counsel, shifting the blame towards the DHS. Months later, the real truth has come out.

      [...]

      This isn’t the DOJ lying about a minor procedural detail. This is the DOJ lying about the DACA modification central to the states’ lawsuit against the US government. To purposely mislead the court and the defendants about the status of DACA applicants cannot be waved away with claims of foggy memories. It also cannot be waved away with claims that the DOJ had no idea so many applicants were already being processed using guidelines still being contested in federal court.

      [...]

      Unfortunately, the court is limited to what it can do in response to the DOJ’s misconduct. Holding the DOJ responsible for the involved states’ legal fees would result in the participating states effectively paying their own legal fees. It would be nothing more than moving around money collected from taxpayers and, thanks to federal taxes, robbing plaintiffs to pay plaintiffs. Instead, Judge Hanen has ordered that any DOJ lawyer who has — or will — appear in the courts of the 26 states involved in the lawsuit attend legal ethics courses. The courses will be provided by a legal agency unaffiliated with the DOJ, and the DOJ itself will be required to provide annual reports to the court confirming these courses are being attended.

    • 1,000 fake 999 calls by G4S to raise performance figures

      Another day another scandal at G4S, this time it has been claimed that staff made fake calls to a 999 emergency contact centre to ensure they met targets of answering 92 per cent of calls within ten seconds.

      This dire situation took place between November and December 2015 reports the Daily Mirror.

      There have been five staff who are now on suspension after they supposedly made over a thousand “test calls” at quiet times to ensure they were picked up quickly.

    • Judge Rules Edward Nero ‘Not Guilty’ in Freddie Gray Case, but Social Media Disagrees

      A judge has found Officer Edward Nero not guilty on all charges in the Freddie Gray case on Monday, but many on social media disagreed with the verdict.

      Nero was one of six Baltimore police officers charged in the 2015 arrest and death of Gray. Nero was accused of assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.

    • Oklahoma’s Insane Rush to Execute

      Ever since the dramatic last-minute halt of the execution of Richard Glossip in Oklahoma last fall, exactly what happened that day has remained a mystery. In Washington, D.C., the U.S. Supreme Court had given the green light for Oklahoma to proceed with the execution using a protocol the justices had upheld just months before, in Glossip v. Gross. Outside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary that afternoon, Glossip’s lawyers, his family, and members of the press were all convinced the execution was imminent. Inside, witnesses thought they were about to be escorted to the death chamber. Glossip, meanwhile, stood in his boxer shorts inside a holding cell, waiting to be taken to the gurney.

      Instead, just before 4 p.m. on September 30, 2015, Gov. Mary Fallin — who had repeatedly denied relief for Glossip despite his vociferous claims of innocence — suddenly intervened, stopping the execution while making an embarrassing admission: The state did not have the correct execution drug in its possession. In a short statement, Fallin announced a temporary stay of 37 days to determine whether a drug named potassium acetate was “compliant” with the state’s lethal injection protocol.

    • When a Killer Cop Retires: The Resignation of Dante Servin

      On May 19, organizers and community members around the United States engaged in #SayHerName actions in support of women and femmes who have been harmed by state violence. This national day of action should have coincided with the start of the termination proceedings for Dante Servin, the Chicago police officer who murdered 22-year-old Rekia Boyd on March 22, 2012. Instead, Servin resigned on May 17, two days before an evidentiary hearing was scheduled to begin: as the last stage in his firing process.

    • The “Moscow Consensus”: Constructing autocracy in post-Soviet Eurasia

      Across the former Soviet Union, a new type of authoritarianism has become the default — with commerce, parliaments, military, media and civil society used to consolidate elite economic and political power.

    • T.S.A. Replaces Security Chief as Tension Grows at Airports and Agency

      Facing a backlash over long security lines and management problems, the head of the Transportation Security Administration shook up his leadership team on Monday, replacing the agency’s top security official and adding a new group of administrators at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

      In an email to staff members, Peter V. Neffenger, the T.S.A. administrator, announced a series of changes that included the removal of Kelly Hoggan, who had been the assistant administrator for the Office of Security Operations since 2013.

      Beginning late that year, Mr. Hoggan received $90,000 in bonuses over a 13-month period, even though a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security showed that auditors were able to get fake weapons and explosives past security screeners 95 percent of the time in 70 covert tests.

    • How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

      I opened Twitter recently and saw 20+ notifications. Most of the time that means the new generation of white nationalist Twitter trolls are filling my feed with racist and anti-Semitic cartoons. It was the trolls, but this was different. They were celebrating my use of the word “anti-white” in a tweet. They saw it as a victory that a “mainstream conservative” was using this term that for so long has been their calling card.

      They had a point. Until recently I would have been unlikely to use the term. Not because I didn’t believe some people harbored animosity towards whites, but because that was a fringe attitude removed from power, which represented little real threat. That is no longer the case. Progressive rhetoric on race has turned an ugly corner and the existence of “anti-white” attitudes can no longer be ignored.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Freedom of choice of terminal, key issue for Net Neutrality

      La Quadrature du Net publishes an article from Benjamin Bayart, member of the Strategic Directions Council of La Quadrature du Net. This article was written on behalf of the Federation FDN and was initially plublished in French here.

    • Transition Of Core Internet Functions (IANA) Oversight From US Government No Done Deal

      Will the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) be able to handover oversight over the management of the DNS root zone and other core databases of the internet in September? At a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington today, proponents and opponents showed off and Senator Marco Rubio, former presidential candidate, strongly supported a delay.

    • Reddit, Mozilla, Others Urge FCC To Formally Investigate Broadband Usage Caps And Zero Rating

      We’ve noted how the FCC’s latest net neutrality rules do a lot of things right, but they failed to seriously address zero rating or broadband usage caps, opening the door to ISPs violently abusing net neutrality — just as long as they’re relatively clever about it. And plenty of companies have been walking right through that open door. Both Verizon and Comcast for example now exempt their own streaming services from these caps, giving them an unfair leg up in the marketplace. AT&T meanwhile is now using usage caps to force customers to subscribe to TV services if they want to enjoy unlimited data.

      In each instance you’ve got companies using usage caps for clear anti-competitive advantage, while industry-associated think tanks push misleading studies and news outlet editorials claiming that zero rating’s a great boon to consumers and innovation alike.

      The FCC’s net neutrality rules don’t ban usage caps or zero rating, unlike rules in Chile, Slovenia, Japan, India, Norway and The Netherlands. The FCC did however state that the agency would examine such practices on a “case by case” basis under the “general conduct” portion of the rules. But so far, that has consisted of closed door meetings and a casual, informal letter sent to a handful of carriers as part of what the FCC says is an “information exercise,” not a formal inquiry.

    • Medium, Mozilla, and Kickstarter Signed a Letter Against Zero-Rating

      A coalition of leading open internet advocates is pressuring federal regulators to crack down on the controversial broadband industry practice of “zero-rating,” calling it a threat to net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible.

      Zero-rating refers to a variety of practices that broadband companies use to exempt certain internet content and services from data caps, effectively favoring those services by giving consumers an economic incentive to use them instead of rival offerings.

    • AT&T Begins Capping Broadband Users Today

      Just a reminder to AT&T customers: the company’s usage caps on U-Verse broadband connections take effect today. When AT&T originally announced broadband caps on fixed-line connections back in 2011, it capped DSL customers at 150 GB per month and U-Verse customers at 250 GB per month. But while the DSL customer cap was enforced (by and large because AT&T wants these users to migrate to wireless anyway), AT&T didn’t enforce caps for its U-Verse customers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • What does the timing of the US Defend Trade Secrets Act and EU Trade Secrets Directive really mean for companies? [Ed: Those who promote UPC (for big foreign corporations, AmeriKat in this case) also promote ‘law’ for corporations to punish staff]

      So with two new trade secrets laws on both sides of the Atlantic, what does this really mean for companies seeking to protect and enforce their valuable trade secrets?

    • Copyrights

      • Australia Officially Abandons Three Strikes Anti-Piracy Scheme

        After indications earlier this year that copyright holders and ISPs were having serious problems reaching agreement on who will pay for the three-strikes anti-piracy regime, the project has now officially been canned. In a letter to the Australian Media and Communications Authority, the Communications Alliance and rightsholders have confirmed its demise.

      • Hollywood Withdraws Funding for UK Anti-Piracy Group FACT

        The UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft has received a major blow after the Motion Picture Association advised the anti-piracy group it will not renew its membership. The termination of the 30-year long relationship means that FACT will lose 50% of its budget and the backing of the six major Hollywood movie studios.

      • Hollywood Writers: Set-top Box Piracy Fears Are Overblown

        Copyright holders and cable companies are fiercely against FCC’s plan to open up the set-top box market. They fear that this will facilitate piracy and degrade security. As a notable exception, the Writers Guild of America West contradicts these concerns, arguing that more choice for consumers is likely to benefit all sides.

      • How Piracy Became a Cause Celebre in the World of Academics

        In October 2008, two of the big names in academic publishing, Elsevier and Thieme, celebrated victory against an “international piracy scheme involving the unlawful copying, sale, and distribution of scientific journals.”

        In the defeated scheme, a Vietnamese entrepreneur had used throwaway email accounts to pose as a salesman. He contacted academics, offering discounted access to subscription journals. The unsuspecting marks made payment through fake websites that mimicked the publishers’, and received paper printouts of the journals in the mail.

        Now, another international piracy scheme commands the attention of Elsevier—but this one looks more like a Silicon Valley startup than a black market.

      • Sony Thinks It Can Charge An ‘Administrative Fee’ For Fair Use

        Mitch Stoltz, over at EFF, has been writing about a ridiculous situation in which Sony Music has been using ContentID to take down fair use videos — and then to ask for money to put them back up. As Stoltz notes, the videos in question are clearly fair use. They’re videos of lectures put on by the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, teaching people about bluegrass music. They’re hourlong lectures in a classroom setting, that do include snippets of music here and there as part of a lecture, with the music usually less than 30 seconds long.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/05/25/nginx-1-11/feed/ 0 German Transcript of Bayerischer Rundfunk Coverage About EPO http://techrights.org/2016/03/14/bayerischer-rundfunk-german-coverage/ http://techrights.org/2016/03/14/bayerischer-rundfunk-german-coverage/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2016 03:46:43 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=90511 Summary: The full German transcript of the TV program shown earlier this month in Germany


Dialogue time: 00:00.000:07.00: Bayerischer Rundfunk FernsehenMagazin „Kontrovers“ 02.03.2016 21:00Die Story:„Wenn der Traumjob zum Albtraum wird“
Dialogue time: 00:07.94,0:00:11.40: Klaus Schießl besucht das Grab seines Bruders
Dialogue time: 00:12.32,0:00:16.98: Sein Bruder Wolfgang war jahrelang Mitarbeiter des Europäischen Patentamtes, …
Dialogue time: 00:16.98,0:00:21.86: … bis er sich im Sommer 2014 umgebracht hat.
Dialogue time: 00:23.86,0:00:27.76: „Ja, ich denke, er ist da voll und ganz in der Arbeit aufgegangen.
Dialogue time: 00:27.92,0:00:30.84: Der war hilfsbereit, der war immer da.
Dialogue time: 00:30.84,0:00:33.28: Er hat versucht, alles genauestens zu machen.
Dialogue time: 00:33.28,0:00:38.28: Und, ja, er war, Gott sei Dank, bei Kolleginnen und Kollegen sehr geschätzt.“
Dialogue time: 00:42.28,0:00:46.20: Klaus Schießl weiß lange Zeit nichts von den Problemen seines Bruders,
Dialogue time: 00:46.200:53.94: weder dass er schwere Depressionen hat, noch dass das Europäische Patentamt ein Disziplinarverfahren gegen ihn anstrengt.
Dialogue time: 00:54.02,0:00:59.78: Doch als sich sein Bruder im Sommer 2014 tagelang nicht meldet, wird er unruhig.
Dialogue time: 00:59.78,0:01:03.48: Deshalb beschließt er, in dessen Haus zu gehen.
Dialogue time: 01:07.16,0:01:09.52: „Hier habe ich ihn tot gefunden.
Dialogue time: 01:09.52,0:01:16.80: Es war ja damals so warm.Ungefähr den dreifachen Körperumfang hat er gehabt.
Dialogue time: 01:16.801:22.10: Da vorn ist der Fernseher gelaufen.
Dialogue time: 01:22.58,0:01:29.92: Das war ein bestialischer Geruch. Und im Gesicht war er schon fast ganz schwarz.“
Dialogue time: 01:33.92,0:01:39.96: Das Europäische Patentamt hatte Wolfgang Schießl verdächtigt, anonyme Beschimpfungen verschickt zu haben,
Dialogue time: 01:39.96,0:01:43.93: deswegen das Disziplinarverfahren gegen ihn.
Dialogue time: 01:43.93,0:01:48.00: Klaus Schießl findet noch einen Abschiedsbrief.
Dialogue time: 01:50.26,0:02:04.83: „An meinen Bruder Klaus! Bitte verdamme mich nicht! Meine Depressionen waren so übermächtig. Ich habe im Leben total versagt.“
Dialogue time: 02:06.33,0:02:11.23: Klaus Schießl glaubt, dass auch der Konflikt in der Arbeit ein Auslöser war.
Dialogue time: 02:11.53,0:02:15.96: Wenn er schreibt, er hat Depressionen, er kann nicht mehr,
Dialogue time: 02:15.96,0:02:22.93: und dann gerade an dem Tag, wo wieder ein Brief kommt, wie es mit dem Disziplinarverfahren weitergeht,
Dialogue time: 02:23.402:28.90: ich denke, das hat ihm letztendlich das Kreuz gebrochen.
Dialogue time: 02:32.03,0:02:34.03: Gibt es diesen Zusammenhang?
Dialogue time: 02:34.03,0:02:38.56: Bekannt ist: Die Stimmung im Europäischen Patentamt ist schlecht.
Dialogue time: 02:38.86,0:02:42.55: Immer wieder demonstrieren die Mitarbeiter vor ihrer Verwaltung,
Dialogue time: 02:42.55,0:02:49.23: und das, obwohl die Mitarbeiter hier hoch bezahlt sind und viele Privilegien haben.
Dialogue time: 02:49.23,0:02:53.20: Wir wollen wissen, was die Menschen hier trotzdem auf die Straße treibt.
Dialogue time: 02:53.202:58.46: Doch als wir mit der Kamera auftauchen, bitten uns viele, sie nicht offen zu zeigen.
Dialogue time: 02:58.46,0:03:00.46: Hier herrscht offensichtlich Angst.
Dialogue time: 03:00.46,0:03:02.26: „Hmm, ich sag’ gar nichts.“
Dialogue time: 03:02.26,0:03:04.26: “Weil, wir dürfen nicht mit Journalisten sprechen.“
Dialogue time: 03:05.96,0:03:08.26: „Warum können Sie mir nichts sagen?“
Dialogue time: 03:08.56,0:03:11.36: „Weil wir eine Verantwortung unseren Familien gegenüber haben.
Dialogue time: 03:11.36,0:03:16.24: Es ist so: Die ganze Familie hängt daran, die Ausbildung der Kinder, die Schule, Sozialsystem, soziale Absicherung,
Dialogue time: 03:16.28,0:03:17.93: alles hängt an diesem Job.
Dialogue time: 03:17.93,0:03:20.76: Und jetzt, wenn wir den Job verlieren, verlieren wir alles.“
Dialogue time: 03:20.76,0:03:23.80: „Aber man verliert normalerweise nicht so schnell den Job?“
Dialogue time: 03:23.803:25.13: „Hier schon!“
Dialogue time: 03:25.13,0:03:28.92: Das Europäische Patentamt ist eine außerstaatliche Institution.
Dialogue time: 03:28.92,0:03:31.70: Deshalb gilt hier das deutsche Arbeitsrecht nicht.
Dialogue time: 03:31.703:34.31: Was geht da vor, hinter den Kulissen?
Dialogue time: 03:34.31,0:03:37.53: Warum haben die Mitarbeiter so große Angst?
Dialogue time: 03:37.56,0:03:41.40: Im Münchener Justizpalast treffen wir Siegfried Broß.
Dialogue time: 03:41.403:43.60: Er war Richter beim Bundesverfassungsgericht.
Dialogue time: 03:43.603:47.80: Sein Spezialgebiet: öffentliches Recht und Patentrecht.
Dialogue time: 03:47.803:53.50: Er erklärt, weshalb die Angestellten diesem Arbeitgeber so ausgeliefert sind.
Dialogue time: 03:53.504:03.36: „Ich stelle fest, dass dort ganz erhebliche Defizite bestehen, was die arbeitsrechtliche Stellung der Bediensteten anbetrifft.
Dialogue time: 04:03.36,0:04:09.86: Es gibt zwar Personalvertretung, aber die hat keine konstitutiven Mitwirkungsrechte,
Dialogue time: 04:09.86,0:04:14.55: sondern kann nur Empfehlungen abgeben, an die der Präsident nicht gebunden ist.“
Dialogue time: 04:16.404:20.19: Während unserer Recherchen wenden sich viele Menschen an uns,
Dialogue time: 04:20.19,0:04:23.50: berichten von Schikanen im Europäischen Patentamt,
Dialogue time: 04:23.504:27.46: aber niemand wagt sich vor die Kamera.
Dialogue time: 04:27.46,0:04:30.10: Nicht einmal die Vertreter des Personalrats.
Dialogue time: 04:30.104:36.03: Schließlich erklärt sich ein Patentprüfer aus Den Haag bereit, uns in Köln zu treffen.
Dialogue time: 04:36.804:39.16: Auch er will nicht erkannt werden.
Dialogue time: 04:39.16,0:04:42.66: Deswegen sprechen wir seinen Bericht nach.
Dialogue time: 04:47.03,0:04:51.40: „Der Druck gerade auf die Patentprüfer hat sich enorm erhöht.
Dialogue time: 04:51.404:57.56: Das kann man daran lesen, dass die Tage pro Patentprodukt stetig abgenommen haben,
Dialogue time: 04:57.56,0:04:59.56: das Zeitbudget, das man da hat.
Dialogue time: 04:59.56,0:05:03.86: Es ist schon sehr fließbandmäßig geworden.
Dialogue time: 05:03.86,0:05:13.46: Also man kann den komplexen technischen Gebieten, der Sache wirklich nur noch, ja, grenzwertig gerecht werden, wenn man mal ehrlich ist.
Dialogue time: 05:13.46,0:05:19.40: Weil: Es wird ja nur noch Wert gelegt auf den quantitativen Output.“
Dialogue time: 05:21.705:27.83: Man sagt uns, dass der Druck seit dem Amtsantritt von Präsident Benoît Battistelli enorm gestiegen ist.
Dialogue time: 05:27.83,0:05:31.50: Sein Ziel: das Patentamt reformieren und Kosten senken.
Dialogue time: 05:31.505:33.16: Doch zu welchem Preis?
Dialogue time: 05:33.16,0:05:38.26: Wir fragen nach.Zu einem Hintergrundgespräch lädt uns das Europäische Patentamt ein.
Dialogue time: 05:38.26,0:05:40.96: Ein Interview vor der Kamera bekommen wir nicht.
Dialogue time: 05:40.96,0:05:45.36: Schriftlich bestätigt das Amt die durch die Reform gestiegenen Anforderungen.
Dialogue time: 05:45.36,0:05:54.90: „Schließlich hat das Amt ein jährliches Anmeldewachstum von durchschnittlich 4 % zu bewältigen, und dies bei gleichbleibendem Personalbestand.“
Dialogue time: 05:54.906:06.53: „Die Reformen haben positive Ergebnisse bewirkt: Unsere Produktivität ist im letzten Jahr um 10 % gestiegen, die Produktion gar um 14 %“.
Dialogue time: 06:08.53,0:06:11.63: Doch der Weg dahin ist fragwürdig.
Dialogue time: 06:11.63,0:06:15.73: Umstritten zum Beispiel der Umgang mit kranken Kollegen.
Dialogue time: 06:15.73,0:06:22.26: Seit 2013 dürfen diese ihre Wohnung während der Kernarbeitszeit nicht verlassen,
Dialogue time: 06:22.26,0:06:25.43: nur für angemeldete Arztbesuche.
Dialogue time: 06:25.43,0:06:32.53: Das kann das Patentamt jederzeit mit einem Anruf oder einem unangemeldeten Besuch überprüfen.
Dialogue time: 06:34.53,0:06:42.80: Wir lernen einen Mitarbeiter kennen, der wegen einer schweren chronischen Erkrankung nicht mehr arbeiten kann und jetzt ans Haus gefesselt ist.
Dialogue time: 06:44.26,0:06:50.50: „Man hat das Gefühl, dass man ein Verbrecher ist, dass man etwas Falsches gemacht hat,
Dialogue time: 06:50.506:54.03: obwohl ich leider nur krank geworden bin.
Dialogue time: 06:54.03,0:06:56.03: Es fühlt sich wie ein Gefängnis an.“
Dialogue time: 06:59.33,0:07:02.80: Die genaue Krankheitsgeschichte dürfen wir nicht erzählen.
Dialogue time: 07:02.807:06.53: Wieder jemand, der große Angst vor der Amtsleitung hat.
Dialogue time: 07:06.53,0:07:12.00: Wir sprechen mit einem Arzt, der viele Mitarbeiter des Europäischen Patentamtes betreut.
Dialogue time: 07:12.007:17.83: Auch er will nur verdeckt gedreht werden, um seine Patienten zu schützen.
Dialogue time: 07:18.53,0:07:26.60: „Das Europäische Patentamt geht mit den Patienten so um, dass die Mitarbeiter so verängstigt sind,
Dialogue time: 07:26.607:35.66: dass sie im Grunde selbst wenn es medizinisch indiziert wäre, dass sie krankgeschrieben werden, eine Krankschreibung ablehnen,
Dialogue time: 07:35.66,0:07:49.23: weil sie befürchten, wenn sie eine gewisse Anzahl an Fehltagen auf ihrem Konto aufweisen, dass sie entlassen werden, mit negativen Sanktionen belegt werden.
Dialogue time: 07:50.607:53.76: Das Patentamt sieht das anders.
Dialogue time: 07:54.53,0:08:08.36: „In Folge der stringenteren Praxis auf diesem Gebiet hat sich der durchschnittliche Krankenstand im Amt innerhalb eines Jahres bereits von über 14 Tagen auf 11,5 Tage reduziert.“
Dialogue time: 08:10.16,0:08:18.50: Während unserer Recherche bekommen wir einen immer klareren Blick hinter die Kulissen der Glaspaläste des Europäischen Patentamts…
Dialogue time: 08:18.508:24.10: und stellen fest: Die Menschen, die uns ihre Geschichte erzählt haben, sind keine Einzelfälle.
Dialogue time: 08:24.108:30.46: Sie berichten von der Angst, wegen kleinster Vergehen abgemahnt oder entlassen zu werden.
Dialogue time: 08:31.86,0:08:35.36: Der Rechtsanwalt Alexander Holtz berät viele von ihnen.
Dialogue time: 08:35.36,0:08:40.83: Die meisten brauchen vor allem seelischen Beistand, weil sie mit dem Druck nicht mehr fertigwerden.
Dialogue time: 08:42.36,0:08:49.50: „Das sind häufig Menschen, die beispielsweise zu mir als Anwalt einmal die Woche kommen, ihre Post vorbeibringen, …
Dialogue time: 08:49.508:51.64: … ich muss dann die Post für die Menschen öffnen,
Dialogue time: 08:51.64,0:08:57.34: weil sie nicht mehr in der Lage sind, solche Dinge des täglichen Lebens selbst zu erledigen,
Dialogue time: 08:57.409:03.32: … Leute, die, äh, wirklich in lebensbedrohlicher Situation sich befunden haben,
Dialogue time: 09:03.32,0:09:06.94: äh, bei denen ich froh war, wenn ich am Montag sie wieder telefonisch erreichen konnte,
Dialogue time: 09:06.94,0:09:11.75: weil ich nicht wusste, ob sie nicht übers Wochenende sich etwas antun.“
Dialogue time: 09:12.66,0:09:19.53: Innerhalb von drei Jahren haben fünf Mitarbeiter des Europäischen Patentamtes Selbstmord begangen.
Dialogue time: 09:19.53,0:09:22.46: Das Amt sieht keine Verantwortung bei sich.
Dialogue time: 09:25.13,0:09:41.30: „Gespräche unseres betriebsärztlichen Diensts, von Kollegen und Managern mit den Familien der Verstorbenen erlauben in allen Fällen keine Rückschlüsse auf berufliche Gründe für den Suizid, sondern stellen persönliche Umstände in den Vordergrund.“
Dialogue time: 09:43.76,0:09:47.83: In Deutschland hilft bei Konflikten mit dem Arbeitgeber der Personalrat.
Dialogue time: 09:47.83,0:09:50.86: Seine Mitglieder genießen besonderen Schutz.
Dialogue time: 09:50.86,0:09:58.00: Anders hier: Gewerkschaftsvertreter, wie die Biologin Elizabeth Hardon, sind zur Zielscheibe geworden.
Dialogue time: 09:58.010:03.56: Sie und ihr Kollege Ion Brumme, Vater von fünf Kindern, wurden im November [2015] suspendiert.
Dialogue time: 10:03.56,0:10:10.46: Ausgerechnet sie, als Mitarbeitervertreter, sollen Kollegen gemobbt und das Amt diffamiert haben.
Dialogue time: 10:11.03,0:10:14.86: Doch viele Mitarbeiter solidarisieren sich mit ihnen.
Dialogue time: 10:14.86,0:10:18.76: [Ion Brumme]„Ich bin wirklich, wirklich, froh, so viele von Euch hier zu sehen.
Dialogue time: 10:18.76,0:10:22.33: Danke für Euer Kommen, für Eure Unterstützung für uns.“
Dialogue time: 10:23.210:29.20: Weil das Verfahren noch läuft, dürfen sich die beiden nicht konkret äußern.Nur so viel:
Dialogue time: 10:29.210:34.10: [Elizabeth Hardon]„Es ist schon – schon sehr belastend und für meine Kollegen noch schlimmer.
Dialogue time: 10:34.110:39.80: Ich bin im Vorrentenalter also, aber meine Kollegen sind viel jünger.
Dialogue time: 10:39.810:45.63: Also da, für den ist es, den anderen suspendierten Kollegen, ist es sehr, sehr, sehr bedrohlich.“
Dialogue time: 10:48.57,0:11:05.11: „Aus meiner Sicht handelt es sich um ein systematisches Vorgehen der Amtsleitung, um die Führung der Gewerkschaft zu beseitigen, zu eliminieren.“
Dialogue time: 11:07.91,0:11:15.02: In der Zwischenzeit wurden Elizabeth Hardon und Ion Brumme sogar gekündigt. [Januar 2016]
Dialogue time: 11:19.02,0:11:25.42: Auch am Standort in Den Haag sind Personalvertreter ins Visier der Geschäftsführung geraten.
Dialogue time: 11:25.42,0:11:32.08: Unser Informant berichtet uns in Köln von einem Vorfall, der viele Mitarbeiter geschockt hat.
Dialogue time: 11:32.35,0:11:40.93: Nachdem ein Personalvertreter in Den Haag abends seinen Arbeitsplatz verlassen hat, bekommt er eine Nachricht, die er nicht mehr sieht.
Dialogue time: 11:40.93,0:11:47.42: Die interne Ermittlungseinheit des Amtes bittet ihn für den nächsten Morgen zum Gespräch.
Dialogue time: 11:47.42,0:11:53.28: Als er wieder ins Büro kommt, hat er keine Zeit mehr, sich darauf vorzubereiten, und bittet um Aufschub.
Dialogue time: 11:56.88,0:12:06.57: „Wenn jemand sagt, er habe gewisse Probleme mit einem anderen Mitarbeiter, dann wird eine Untersuchung eingeleitet. Dann werden Zeugen befragt.
Dialogue time: 12:07.11,0:12:09.88: Da ist halt der Rechtsstandard sehr niedrig,…
Dialogue time: 12:09.88,0:12:13.35: weil: man darf keinen Rechtsanwalt einschalten.“
Dialogue time: 12:15.55,0:12:22.51: Innerhalb von wenigen Minuten erscheinen zwei interne Ermittler an seinem Platz und überreden ihn mitzukommen.
Dialogue time: 12:22.51,0:12:27.20: Diese Form der Befragung ist bei den Mitarbeitern gefürchtet.
Dialogue time: 12:32.24,0:12:36.60: „Da wird man anscheinend auch schon relativ hart angegangen.
Dialogue time: 12:36.912:39.60: Da wird es auch mal richtig laut.
Dialogue time: 12:40.02,0:12:45.13: Da wird man auch schon sehr eingeschüchtert, selbst wenn man nur Zeuge ist.“
Dialogue time: 12:47.31,0:12:53.08: In Den Haag bricht der Personalrat im Anschluss an seine Befragung zusammen.
Dialogue time: 12:54.42,0:12:57.33: Seine Ehefrau muss ihn ins Krankenhaus bringen.
Dialogue time: 12:58.11,0:13:01.44: Inzwischen ist er dauerhaft krankgeschrieben.
Dialogue time: 13:03.82,0:13:10.68: Die interne Ermittlungseinheit des Europäischen Patentamtes ist unter den Arbeitnehmern auch deswegen so gefürchtet,
Dialogue time: 13:10.68,0:13:15.02: weil sie dort die Aussage nicht verweigern können, auch wenn es ihnen schadet.
Dialogue time: 13:15.02,0:13:17.11: Ist das wirklich rechtens?
Dialogue time: 13:17.64,0:13:20.15: Das Europäische Patentamt schreibt dazu:
Dialogue time: 13:20.77,0:13:35.46: „Das Untersuchungsverfahren im Europäischen Patentamt ist kein Strafverfahren, sondern ein administratives Tatsachenfeststellungsverfahren im Sinne eines Dialogs zwischen beschuldigtem Mitarbeiter und Arbeitgeber.
Dialogue time: 13:35.71,0:13:45.44: … Es entspricht damit der Praxis und den Standards in nationalen und internationalen Organisationen unserer Vertragsstaaten.“
Dialogue time: 13:46.86,0:13:53.17: Wegen der Immunität des Europäischen Patentamtes gelten deutsche Rechtsgrundsätze bei den Ermittlungsverfahren nicht.
Dialogue time: 13:53.17,0:13:56.44: Die Angestellten gehen verzweifelt auf die Straße.
Dialogue time: 13:56.44,0:14:02.11: „Wir sind ja nicht in Deutschland. Das Europäische Patentamt, das fühlt sich außerhalb des deutschen Rechts.“
Dialogue time: 14:02.11,0:14:04.60: „Da zählen keine Menschenrechte. Da zählt gar nichts mehr.
Dialogue time: 14:04.614:11.00: Was unser Herr Präsident für richtig hält, das wird durchgesetzt.“
Dialogue time: 14:11.06,0:14:13.02: Ist das wirklich möglich,
Dialogue time: 14:13.08,0:14:17.53: ein Amt mit 3.000 Mitarbeitern im quasi rechtsfreien Raum?
Dialogue time: 14:17.53,0:14:20.71: Wir bitten den Bundesjustizminister [Heiko Maas] um ein Interview.
Dialogue time: 14:20.71,0:14:22.71: Er will uns nicht direkt antworten.
Dialogue time: 14:22.71,0:14:26.60: Zu den umstrittenen Ermittlungsverfahren schreibt sein Ministerium:
Dialogue time: 14:26.614:40.82: [Bundesministerium für Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz]„Deutschland hat den Präsidenten des Europäischen Patentamtes wiederholt und nachdrücklich aufgefordert, die von ihm erlassenen Richtlinien für das Ermittlungsverfahren insofern zu ändern. Dies ist bedauerlicherweise bisher nicht geschehen.“
Dialogue time: 14:42.214:49.55: „Bloße Aufforderungen sind zu wenig“, sagt der ehemalige Bundesverfassungsrichter Siegfried Broß.
Dialogue time: 14:49.55,0:14:53.13: [Siegfried Broß, Bundesverfassungsrichter a.D.]„Das Bundesverfassungsgericht sagt ausdrücklich,
Dialogue time: 14:53.13,0:14:59.31: dass die Bundesrepublik Deutschland nicht die Hand reichen darf für menschenrechtswidrige Behandlungen,
Dialogue time: 14:59.31,0:15:04.33: und, von daher gesehen, ist Deutschland als Sitzland schon gefordert.
Dialogue time: 15:04.33,0:15:08.57: Wenn man’s etwas überspitzt und weiterdenkt,
Dialogue time: 15:08.66,0:15:12.60: bei diesen Denkstrukturen, wie sie hier zu Tage treten,
Dialogue time: 15:12.615:14.60: wäre Guantanamo möglich in Deutschland,
Dialogue time: 15:15.415:17.98: und das kann ja nicht sein. Das leuchtet jedem ein.“
Dialogue time: 15:19.68,0:15:24.66: Doch das Europäische Patentamt ignoriert sogar Gerichtsentscheidungen.
Dialogue time: 15:25.17,0:15:34.73: In den Niederlanden stellte das oberste Gericht die Verletzung von Grundrechten fest und fordert, dass die Immunität des Amtes aufgehoben wird.
Dialogue time: 15:34.73,0:15:37.88: Die endgültige Entscheidung steht noch aus.
Dialogue time: 15:37.88,0:15:47.95: Aber der Vizepräsident des Patentamts stellt im Interview mit dem niederländischen Fernsehen schon mal klar, wie er mit einer möglichen Verurteilung umgehen wird.
Dialogue time: 15:49.26,0:15:54.88: [Niederländischer TV-Reporter]„Was ist, wenn das Hohe Gericht die Immunität des Europäischen Patentamtes aufhebt?“
Dialogue time: 15:54.88,0:16:07.68: [EPO Vizepräsident]„Äh, ja, dann wird der Präsident mit dem Verwaltungsrat reden, den Vertretern der Mitgliedsstaaten, um zu sehen, was in diesem Fall geschehen soll.
Dialogue time: 16:07.71,0:16:14.75: Das Ergebnis wird wahrscheinlich sein, dass das Urteil zu den Akten gelegt wird.“
Dialogue time: 16:14.77,0:16:18.93: „Sie werden also das Urteil des höchsten Gerichtes der Niederlande nicht akzeptieren?“
Dialogue time: 16:18.93,0:16:20.93: [EPO Vizepräsident]“Ja!”
Dialogue time: 16:23.33,0:16:30.84: Wie kann es sein, dass sich eine Behörde nicht an Grundrechte gebunden fühlt und Entscheidungen oberster Gerichte ignoriert?
Dialogue time: 16:31.416:34.97: Die Ursachen dafür liegen in der Gründungsgeschichte.
Dialogue time: 16:34.97,0:16:42.66: Vor mehr als vierzig Jahren haben die Mitgliedsstaaten ein Regelwerk entwickelt, das dem Präsidenten sehr viel Macht gibt,
Dialogue time: 16:43.02,0:16:47.77: und der aktuelle Präsident Benoît Battistelli nutzt diese Macht.
Dialogue time: 16:48.04,0:16:59.76: „Ich hab’ den Eindruck, dass hier eben diese Lücken und Spielräume, die durch die Vertragsstaaten geschaffen wurden, ausgenützt werden.“
Dialogue time: 17:00.73,0:17:06.26: Die einzigen, die den Präsidenten stoppen könnten, wären die Mitglieder des Verwaltungsrats.
Dialogue time: 17:06.26,0:17:09.24: Sie kommen aus den 38 Mitgliedsstaaten.
Dialogue time: 17:09.24,0:17:14.91: Jedes Land hat eine Stimme, egal ob San Marino oder Deutschland.
Dialogue time: 17:14.91,0:17:18.75: Im Verwaltungsrat saß auch der Österreicher Friedrich Rödler.
Dialogue time: 17:18.75,0:17:22.35: Er reist extra aus Wien an, um uns einen Einblick zu geben.
Dialogue time: 17:22.35,0:17:28.08: Seiner Meinung nach findet seit Jahren keine wirksame Kontrolle der Führungsspitze mehr statt.
Dialogue time: 17:28.08,0:17:31.80: [Friedrich Rödler, ehemaliges Verwaltungsratsmitglied EPA]„Der Verwaltungsrat stößt auch an strukturelle Grenzen.
Dialogue time: 17:31.817:39.66: Der Verwaltungsrat ist bei seinen Beschlüssen auf jene Informationen angewiesen, die er selbst vom Präsidenten des Amtes erhält.
Dialogue time: 17:39.66,0:17:42.13: Über andere Informationen verfügt er nicht.
Dialogue time: 17:42.617:47.48: Und das ist genau die Basis, auf der der Verwaltungsrat seine Entscheidungen trifft…
Dialogue time: 17:47.48,0:17:50.45: oder manchmal eben leider nicht trifft.
Dialogue time: 17:52.217:55.51: Die Patentamtsmitarbeiter protestieren weiter.
Dialogue time: 17:55.51,0:18:01.71: Inzwischen hat der Verwaltungsrat den Präsidenten aufgefordert, das soziale Klima zu verbessern.
Dialogue time: 18:01.71,0:18:03.71: Doch viele Mitarbeiter bleiben skeptisch.
Dialogue time: 18:04.31,0:18:06.06: Wie geht es weiter?
Dialogue time: 18:06.06,0:18:10.42: Die Personalratsmitglieder wollen ihre Entlassung intern anfechten.
Dialogue time: 18:10.42,0:18:16.88: Wenn das nicht klappt, müssen sie in Genf beim Gericht der Internationalen Arbeitsorganisation [ILO] klagen.
Dialogue time: 18:16.88,0:18:24.68: Auch einige chronisch Kranke versuchen derzeit in Genf, die aus ihrer Sicht menschenunwürdigen Auflagen des Amtes anzufechten.
Dialogue time: 18:24.84,0:18:28.26: Doch bis es zu einem Urteil kommt, kann es Jahre dauern.
Dialogue time: 18:28.88,0:18:35.20: „Hier geht es um Menschen, Schicksale, um Familien, Kinder.
Dialogue time: 18:35.218:37.08: Da geht es um wirklich viel mehr.“
Dialogue time: 18:37.51,0:18:43.02: Den Präsidenten des Europäischen Patentamtes scheint das nicht zu berühren.
Dialogue time: 18:43.02,0:18:47.14: Bericht: Jutta Henkel, Irene Esmann Kamera: Harry Rensch, Dany Hunger, Nicole Christmann Schnitt: Stefan Kinnl, Florian Stronski

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/03/14/bayerischer-rundfunk-german-coverage/feed/ 0 ‘Wired’ Under New Management (Condé Nast) is a Microsoft and Bill Gates Grooming Operation http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/conde-nast-now-a-microsoft-tool/ http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/conde-nast-now-a-microsoft-tool/#comments Wed, 28 May 2014 15:04:32 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=77797 Condé Nast: the nastiest purchaser of independent media that you may never have heard of

Condé Nast
Photo by Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA

Summary: Attacks on Free/libre software and propagandised coverage of Microsoft now the standard practice (or consensus) at Condé Nast

MOST PEOPLE probably don’t know what Condé Nast is. It’s not a publication, so a lot of people never even heard of it. Residing near Wall Street in New York City, Condé Nast is the quiet owner of many publications. One can guess what the business model is. It’s not really about publication, it is about profit. It is owned by a company with a revenue of 6.56 billion dollars (as of 2013). It is part of the corporate media, which is basically made of just a few giant corporations that control information or build (one might say “manufacture” even) public perception. A lot of people don’t seem to know that even Reddit sold out to Condé Nast, which might explain Reddit’s special service to Microsoft since then and also the extensive censorship that gains media attention these days. Prior to buying Wired, this magazine was actually quite well known for being a thorn on Microsoft’s side, especially amid antitrust battles. Now we have a Wired that’s a Microsoft propaganda outlet a lot of the time.

We are deeply disturbed by the disappearance of independent media and the purchase of even communities such as Reddit by the corporate media that’s a neighbour of Wall Street. It’s too easy to see how the acquired sites and publications are changing. Ars Technica was purchased by Condé Nast only a few years ago and the difference has been stunning since then.

To give just the latest example among many, here is a very long Microsoft advertisement and hogwash. A lot of effort went into this propaganda. It is very personalised. It is one of a series of these articles, one of which was portraying Bill Gates, who wrote his Letter to Hobbyists (famous attack on FOSS) as an “open source” proponent. As usual, it is a pack of lies and spin, painting the NSA’a biggest software partner as an NSA sceptic with sentences like: “This is why, when the NSA story broke, Russinovich was part of the small team that worked to remake Microsoft’s online security.”

Nonsense like this you don’t read every day. Mind the author’s portrayal of Russinovich as a Microsoft “critic”. He must be joking, if not lying (which is worse). So a man who is on Microsoft’s payroll is now being introduced (in the headline even) as its foe, only to sell an article which is basically a Microsoft advertisement for the most NSA-friendly platform (Azure). It’s worse than deceiving because Microsoft voluntarily passes data from Azure to the NSA and to paint Microsoft as an NSA sceptic while promoting Azure is basically to entrap people and businesses, maybe even governments. But anyway, that’s Condé Nast.

Watch who used to write for Wired and who writes for it today. Condé Nast hired Microsoft boosters from The Register and when they are not busy seeding FUD against GNU/Linux (as Goodin does) they conveniently distract from Microsoft’s complicity with the NSA and the company’s utter incomptence when it comes to security. Just look at all the people who cover Microsoft, FOSS, etc. at Ars, which is run by the same owner (parent company). They are all pro-Microsoft, even those who run the so-called ‘FOSS’ section. It is quite easy to see. Cade’s series of whitewashing (Bill Hilf, Bill Gates and now Russinovich) is very telling because someone is assigning him to write such advertisements. Who are the bosses and who are their mates?

Wired, the sister publication of Ars Technica and a longtime Microsoft whitewashing powerhouse (since purchase), is on a roll this year and in some prior years. Readers of Techrights routinely show us the bias and it almost always comes down to Condé Nast. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/conde-nast-now-a-microsoft-tool/feed/ 0 Microsoft Has Failed in the Area of Hardware http://techrights.org/2014/04/27/microsoft-hardware/ http://techrights.org/2014/04/27/microsoft-hardware/#comments Sun, 27 Apr 2014 13:39:45 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=77450 Microsoft — unlike Nokia — cannot fall/revert back to the tyres business

Truck wheel

Summary: Xbox One is a failed product and “Surface” is losing hundreds of millions of dollars

THE LATEST episode of TechBytes covers the good news that “Microsoft May Halt Xbox One Production”; it’s news that reminds us of an important fact: “We know that the company has shipped 5 million consoles to retailers since launch, but Microsoft hasn’t been as forthcoming with actual end user sales data.”

When Microsoft does not divulge these figures it always means that Microsoft has something to hide. The same thing has historically been true when it comes to Windows (number of licences issued) and other Microsoft hardware. Microsoft is full of lies.

In other interesting news, Microsoft’s “Surface Loses” because it’s a losing product, by design. As Robert Pogson put it (citing a Microsoft booster, Gavin Clarke): “Do the maths: it cost M$ $2.1billion to sell $1.8billion worth of Surfaces… That’s a loss of $300 million. Eewww! Even without charging itself the tax, they can’t compete in the market.”

The headline at The Register (chosen by the editor) is Microsoft: The MORE Surfaces it sells, the MORE money it loses” (so it’s a bit like Xbox, which lost billions of dollars over the years).

Microsoft is really struggling to re-invent itself for the post-Windows world. So far it has failed and there is now some Microsoft advertising from Microsoft Peter who promotes subscription-based Windows — a horrible idea which is sure to bring rise to GNU/Linux-based operating systems ($0 purchase and subscription charges).

In this article we are citing no Microsoft-hostile sources; instead we link to props of Microsoft, rather than journalists. It helps show just how bad things have become for Microsoft. Microsoft Jack has been defecting away from Microsoft as of late (we wish him well for that), repeatedly promoting some of Microsoft’s competitors for the first time in many years, unlike some in the British press. Gavin Clarke may pretend to be covering GNU/Linux, but most of the time he is just the source/outlet of Microsoft agenda, including his new piece whitewashing Bill Hilf.

We are entering an interesting era where Microsoft is not only struggling (along with Apple) but is also fighting publicly and aggressively against GNU/Linux using attack ads (more so under the 'new' leadership) and racketeering. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2014/04/27/microsoft-hardware/feed/ 0 After Attacking GNU/Linux at Microsoft’s Behalf (and Hiring Executives From Microsoft) HP Pretends to be Against Microsoft http://techrights.org/2013/10/16/hp-on-microsoft/ http://techrights.org/2013/10/16/hp-on-microsoft/#comments Wed, 16 Oct 2013 16:05:44 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=72437 Meg Whitman talks nonsense

Meg Whitman
Author: Max Morse

Summary: HP says Microsoft is a rival, but evidence suggests that HP is being occupied by Microsoft managers and that it attacks GNU/Linux, not Windows

People should not be taking HP’s claims at face value. Realising what the cash cows are, HP is trying to sell as many servers as possible (many will use GNU/Linux), so it tries to appeal to system administrators while quietly spreading Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux FUD [1, 2] to derail government migrations to GNU/Linux. Perhaps the inefficiently of Windows helps sell more such servers (for the same task).

Either way, HP sure is suffering from the decline of Microsoft’s desktop empire, but publicly HP wants us to think that “Microsoft Is At War With Its OEM Partners” (such as HP). More “sock puppetry,” calls it iophk, saying that “Microsoft Hilf is still inside HP, Ray Ozzie is still on the board, so this is just noise.” There are more such examples, including Vice Presidents. HP is gradually becoming somewhat of a proxy to Microsoft — a bit like Nokia.

Microsoft is hardly a competitor of HP; those two are partners and actions at the management level show this. Here is another article which blindly repeats HP’s claims:

APPARENTLY NOT CONTENT with making her employees draw lots or arm-wrestle for desks by banning telecommuting, HP CEO Meg Whitman has decided to let loose the hounds on Microsoft, declaring that it and Intel have changed from being “partners to outright competitors”.

HP is still using x86 and Windows, so how are Intel and Microsoft competitors really? Sheer nonsense.

Speaking of Microsoft and pretense, the company pretended to be “nice” to FOSS while essentially banning particular FOSS licence — an action which it quietly steps away from:

With little fanfare, Microsoft — or at least one part of it — has gone from considering the GNU General Public License v.3 (GPLv3) “evil” to “acceptable.”

That’s because this licence is popular, unlike Microsoft. “A company spokesperson didn’t provide a direct answer,” says Microsoft Mary, whose inquiry helps show just how Microsoft really feels about the GPLv3. Public statements are the area controlled by marketing people and professional spinners. In order to find out what’s true we need to investigate actions — not words — for ourselves. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/10/16/hp-on-microsoft/feed/ 0 Stephen Elop Outright Lied When He Said He Was Not a Trojan Horse, Reveal New Documents http://techrights.org/2013/09/27/elop-trojan/ http://techrights.org/2013/09/27/elop-trojan/#comments Fri, 27 Sep 2013 12:56:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=72154

Summary: In the post-mortem of the fatally-ill Nokia it is revealed that Elop was inside Nokia in order to hand it over to Microsoft on a plate, but he already uses distraction tactics (family tales and irrelevant stories)

Elop and Hilf Hilf Edition">are both enormously hated individuals, with plenty of evidence to show it (Hilf apparently did a lot of work trying to whitewash his image in recent times by exploiting poor people for publicity). Both are moles. Elop is a mole inside Nokia and Hilf was a mole inside the Free/Open Source community (stabbing it behind its back). When Elop said he was not a Trojan horse he simply lied like Nixon did when he said he wasn’t a crook. Elop is the classic per-definition or personification of a mole [1]. These two individuals are inherently insidious. If they weren’t, they would not be in the position of they’re in.

“Elop’s present noise,” explains a reader from Finland, “reminds me a little of the distraction that Nixon did with his “Checkers speech”. He turned accusations into a discussion of how much kids like dogs. Elop, and the board of Nokia, were working for Microsoft and it looks like the contract and the coverup of its contents may prove that. Nokia is dead and it is time to move on. Any investors that lost money need to move on, too. It is time to look to Jolla. However, that is no reason to let Elop, the Nokia board, and Microsoft off the hook, even if it won’t bring Nokia back. Here’s the speech itself.”

Carlo Piana writes this:

A modest proposal: nationalise #Nokia back.

It would not achieve much. For the Finnish government to be joined by the hip to Microsoft would mean yet more Microsoft corruption in Finland. The solution right now is to put an end to the pathological entity known as Microsoft and the people who run it for industrial destruction and personal gain. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Now We Know Why – Nokia’s Elop had a $25M personal bonus clause from the Nokia Board if he was able to sell the handset unit to Microsoft

    Ok, the truth is seeping out, and this is smelly shit. I apologize for the language. We have news about Elop and his incentives. Yes, Elop had a contract that would pay him 25 million dollars if he managed to sell Nokia’s handset unit to Microsoft. This is a blatant conflict of interest, and one that incentivizes Elop for destructive behavior against Nokia. I had been trying to think of a good analogy, I finally thought of one. Its like a town hires a new police chief. The new police chief is paid a salary to reduce crime. But he is then promised a bonus if he can stop the people complaining about crime. The new police chief starts systematically to kill all residents who complain about crime – including complaining about him, the police chief killing citizens. Soon the complaints end and the police chief earns his bonus. This is so silly, its like from a Monty Python sketch, except its true. Elop, just like the imaginary police chief, is now being paid a massive 25 million dollar bonus for
    destroying Nokia’s profit engine and very healthy handset business unit. So lets dig in. What on earth has been happening? Lets start, as we usually do, with the facts:

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/09/27/elop-trojan/feed/ 0 Microsoft Moles in HP, the Bill Hilf Edition http://techrights.org/2013/09/26/bill-hilf-as-mole/ http://techrights.org/2013/09/26/bill-hilf-as-mole/#comments Thu, 26 Sep 2013 10:36:30 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=72105 Working for the b0rg more effectively through another company

Bill Hilf

Summary: Bill Hilf is joining several other Microsoft executives who now occupy key positions inside HP; the ugly details behind Elop’s entryism begin to lay bear

HP, a massive company in the desktops and servers sectors (and back doors facilitator [1, 2]), has already had some Microsoft executives occupy key positions in recent years (Ozzie is a recent example). Remember this when HP is rationalising FOSS-hostile decisions inside the company. HP recently collaborated in Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux FUD [1, 2] and based on this reported it hired Microsoft’s anti-Linux and pro-patents, fear-mongering bully Bill Hilf [1, 2]. The conflict of interest is clear because this man pushed hard for Windows on servers and patent tax on GNU/Linux servers. Several years ago he was probably the most hated guy (alongside Ballmer) to have come from Microsoft, as viewed by the GNU/Linux community.

We really ought to learn from experience the threat of Microsoft moles and entryism.

“San Francisco investment firm takes more active role as CEO Steve Ballmer plans retirement,” says this report. But as one of our readers put it, “who is behind ValueAct Capital?” Gates-funded sites (with Microsoft spyware on page) say “Microsoft averts proxy battle” and Microsoft friends like Dina Bass call ValueAct an “activist”. The timing was interesting: “Redmond announced the “cooperation agreement” in the late hours of Friday afternoon in San Francisco before the Labor Day three day weekend, which is an ideal time to bury news.”

Let’s also recall the case of Nokia, where Elop’s involvement now starts to smell like fraud.

Nokia Admits Giving Misleading Information About Elop’s Compensation

Nokia’s board of directors seems caught in a tragicomedy of epic proportions. The latest twist is Finland’s largest newspaper claiming that Nokia made a false statement about CEO’s bonus package last Friday. Pressed by Finnish and international media last week, chairman Siilasmaa had claimed then that the bonus structure of Stephen Elop’s contract in 2010 was “essentially the same” as the one the previous CEO had received. But the largest daily of the country, “Helsingin Sanomat”, decided to dig into SEC filings to investigate the matter. By early Tuesday morning, the newspaper had uncovered evidence that Nokia’s board had made fundamental changes in Elop’s contract compared to his predecessors.

Check out this other article about Elop, who wants to be compensated having totally destroyed Nokia. To quote an English version: “According to the early Wednesday morning edition of Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia has pleaded with former CEO Stephen Elop to accept a smaller bonus in order to silence the roar of disapproval and protest now roiling Finland. Drama in Nokia’s home country escalated on Tuesday as it was revealed that Risto Siilasmaa, Nokiia’s chairman of the board, had misrepresented facts last weeks when he claimed that Elop’s bonus arrangements were similar to those of previous chief executives. Nokia was forced to admit on Tuesday morning that Elop had in fact received a contract that seemed to have been designed to guarantee a quick $25 million pay-off if Elop was able to sell the handset unit. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia is now scrambling to contain the public relations damage the ongoing drama is causing. Asking Elop to accept a smaller bonus might silence some of the critics — on Tuesday, the head of Finland’s Equity Investor Association called Siilasmaa’s mistaken claims about Elop’s bonus package “unforgivable.””

Elop should be sued for more than $25 million. He pretended to serve Nokia, but in reality he was a Microsoft investor, whose house remains near Microsoft and whose only goal is to feed Nokia to Microsoft and feed patent trolls who pose a threat to Android/Linux. There should be prosecution here, not compensation. If anyone deserves compensation here, it’s Nokia’s shareholders. Elop should personally compensate them. He was Ballmer’s henchman. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/09/26/bill-hilf-as-mole/feed/ 0 Insulting GNU/Linux and Free Software, Courtesy of Microsoft Moles http://techrights.org/2013/06/27/stephen-walli-and-srinivasan/ http://techrights.org/2013/06/27/stephen-walli-and-srinivasan/#comments Thu, 27 Jun 2013 15:04:22 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=69875 Stephen Walli

Summary: Microsoft staff which infiltrates the opposition is smearing this opposition from the inside and pushing Microsoft’s proprietary software deep within

We are still seeing that typical smear from Walli [1, 2, 3] and fellow Microsoft staff who try to demonise FOSS users, calling them “freeloaders”. This is not the first time we see this insult, but why does Red Hat give Microsoft’s Walli a platform with which to spread the insulting ideas? Here is the link (don’t click) and here is some more brainwashing where Microsoft interviews Microsoft on Linux (at a Microsoft site), grooming another puppet and infiltrator like Hilf and Ramji [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] before he quit. This one is K.Y. Srinivasan, whom we wrote about in relation to what he does inside Linux. Some Microsoft Web site recently pushed some articles repeatedly, trying to paint Microsoft as a friend of Linux. Will they kindly just step away and stop insulting Free software advocates while pushing Microsoft into everybody’s life, even GNU/Linux users?

People will never forget how Microsoft bankrolled the SCO case, which more than a decade later is still going on:

SCO is saying, we don’t have the copyrights. But we had contracts. The “among other things” means they have more in mind they don’t wish to tell us about yet, as is SCO’s wont. It’s about post-1995 SCO products and Project Monterey and IBM allegedly turning folks against SCO. Like they needed to turn anyone away from SCO. When a company shoots itself in the foot by suing its own customers right and left, it tends to create an atmosphere of alarm and distrust, resulting in others putting space between them and the foot-shooter.

IBM gets to respond next, and I expect them to say that SCO has zero claims left standing. And then we’ll get to IBM’s counterclaims, at last. Here’s a chart of all the summary judgment motions left hanging when SCO filed for bankruptcy protection.

Remember that some people from SCO moved to Microsoft, where they now pretend to be FOSS people. notably Sandeep Gupta. █

“[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”

–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/06/27/stephen-walli-and-srinivasan/feed/ 0 Links 9/6/2013: Android Tablets Domination, Many PRISM Links http://techrights.org/2013/06/09/android-tablets-domination/ http://techrights.org/2013/06/09/android-tablets-domination/#comments Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:48:43 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=69383

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Lilbits (6-06-2013): Angry Birds on E Ink, Linux on Haswell

    I love watching people make hardware do things it wasn’t necessarily designed for. E Ink was designed for reading books, but it turns out you can also use it in a fully-functional tablet. And while Intel’s new 4th-generation Core processors were designed first and foremost to power computers running Windows, you can also run Android, Ubuntu or other operating systems.

  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Linux Desktop

    How often do you stop to look at your desktop? I can honestly say, I look at my desktop more or less depending on what OS I’m using. Is that weird?

  • Distributions: The Evolution of Linux

    Having recently said goodbye to two really great distributions in Cinnarch (reborn as Antergos) and Fuduntu (replaced by FuSE Cloverleaf Linux), I was shocked at the number of people that still think there are too many Linux distributions out there. While I was sad to see these two great distributions go, I’m excited for what we’ll see in the future both because of these distributions and because of their teams. This is exactly how the Evolution of Linux works.

  • Tell people you use Linux

    But what if there are too many people, and you can’t talk to [all of] them really… But still want to get the message “I am a Linux user” delivered? In this case, put this message on something visible. Computer sticker, mug, pen – the options are there. And, of course, with this summer season asking us to change clothes to something light, T-shirt is a nice way to promote your favourite operating system too!

  • SphinUX OS Claims To Be ~150% Faster Than GNU/Linux

    SphinUX OS is an open-source POSIX-compatible operating system developed under the GPLv3 and running the Egyptian LSX Kernel Architecture. This open-source operating system claims to be much faster than Linux and that its memory usage can even be 3x less! This is an operating system with some of the most wildest performance claims we have ever seen.

    The SphinUX OS desktop operating system release supposedly performs around 150% better than GNU/Linux, which the developers describe as their closest rival in SpinUX results. The advertised system requirements for this operating system that uses the KDE desktop is a 333MHz CPU, 256MB of system memory, 10~20GB of disk space, and any graphics adapter.

  • AMD breaks from Windows exclusivity, adopts Android and Chrome OS
  • AMD will develop chips for Android and Chrome OS, but only if someone asks first

    AMD chips could make their way into tablets and laptops running Android and Chrome OS. According to PCWorld, AMD is willing to alter the design of its chips — which are currently tailored to run Windows 8 machines — and optimize them for other operating systems. However, it won’t be immediately going ahead with the plan. Instead, AMD appears to be interested in working with its partners on specific projects, rather than developing chips for broader availability.

  • Desktop

    • Checkbook NYC goes open source

      New York City Comptroller John C. Liu today published the source code for the Checkbook NYC financial transparency website, and announced several partnerships that will enable other governments to rapidly leverage New York City’s investment in order to create similar websites of their own. The announcements were made at an event held for the press during the 10th annual Personal Democracy Forum, currently underway in NYC.

    • Still More Work To Do

      Today, Walmart sent me an e-mail. It contained all kinds of links to wonderful stuff for Father’s Day. I am sad to report there is still very little choice of OS on their site… Of the hundreds of notebook computers offered, “7″, “8″, and XP were all over and there were just a few Chromebooks. No GNU/Linux at all. This is insane considering that they sell dozens of tablets running Android/Linux.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • SATO Launches Linux and Mac OS X Printer Drivers
    • The People Who Support Linux: Giving a Public System a Web Interface Lift

      As an IT manager for the Mt. Lebanon Municipality near Pittsburgh, PA, Nick Schalles recently faced a familiar but difficult problem for those maintaining public infrastructure. How could they update an old system to meet the new demands of the digital age and stay within a public agency budget?

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.10 (Part 1)

      Linux 3.10 sees improvements in the way lost packets at the end of TCP transactions are handled, speeding up HTTP data transfer. It also sees the addition of support for VLAN stacking and Realtek’s RTL8188EE wireless chip.

    • TPPS: A New Linux Kernel I/O Scheduler

      The Tiny Parallel Proportion Scheduler (TPPS) is a new I/O scheduler for Linux to appear on the kernel mailing list.

    • GStreamer 1.1.1 Draws In New Features, Plug-Ins

      Version 1.1.1 of GStreamer Core and Plugins have been released, which provide new features and plug-ins for this important open-source multimedia framework.

    • GStreamer 1.1.1 introduces new APIs and plugins

      The GStreamer project has announced the release of GStreamer 1.1.1, the latest release in the development branch of the open source media framework. The development branch offers insights into what the framework will offer in its next stable release, which will be 1.2.x. Changes from the last stable version, GStreamer 1.0 (currently at 1.0.7) include eight new APIs, a number of new plugins, improvements to the framework’s video handling and a number of bug fixes. The GStreamer 1.x series is not backwards compatible with the 0.10.x series, which is no longer being maintained.

    • The Linus and Dirk show

      Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel sat down at LinuxCon Japan 2013 for a “fireside chat” (sans fire), ostensibly to discuss where Linux is going. While they touched on that subject, the conversation was wide-ranging over both Linux and non-Linux topics, from privacy to diversity and from educational systems to how operating systems will look in 20-30 years. Some rather interesting questions—seemingly different from those that might be asked at a US or European conference—were asked along the way.

    • Linux Kernel 3.9.5 Is Now Available for Download

      A few minutes ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman happily announced that the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.9 kernel series is now available for download.

    • Allwinner SoC Still Unlikely For Upstream Linux Kernel

      While Allwinner ARM SoCs are found within massive amounts of the low-cost Android tablets manufactured in China, and there is some open-source Allwinner Linux kernel support, it’s still unlikely that the patches will land upstream anytime soon.

    • New stable kernels

      A new batch of stable kernel releases is available.

    • ARM Mali Mesa Driver, New Code & Overclocking

      The Lima driver is slowly but surely progressing for supporting ARM Mali graphics hardware in an open-source world. A Mesa driver has been started, their demo code can be faster than the binary driver, user-space memory management is being tackled, and evidently the management at ARM Holdings isn’t too happy.

    • KVM/MIPS: Implement hardware virtualization via the MIPS-VZ extensions.

      These patches take a somewhat different approach to MIPS virtualization via the MIPS-VZ extensions than the patches previously sent by Sanjay Lal.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

        With the continued speculation and FUD about the future of Wayland at a time when Canonical is investing heavily into their own Mir Display Server alternative, Eric Griffith with input from Daniel Stone have written an article for Phoronix where they lay out all the facts. The “Wayland Situation” is explained with first going over the failings of X, the fixings of Wayland, common misconceptions about X and Wayland, and then a few other advantages to Wayland. For anyone interested in X/Wayland or the Linux desktop at a technical level, it’s an article certainly worth reading!

      • Intel 2.21.9 X.Org Driver Calls Out More Regressions

        Chris Wilson of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center is back to pushing out xf86-video-intel driver updates at an expedited rate. Rather than the new releases being about advancing the SNA acceleration architecture or new features, the past few have been about correcting regressions and other bugs.

      • Weston 1.1.1 Release Brings Bug-Fixes

        As the first point release since the exciting release of Wayland/Weston 1.1, important bug-fixes have landed for the display protocol’s reference compositor.

      • Intel Graphics Get Ready For Linux 3.11 Kernel

        While the Linux 3.10 kernel hasn’t even been released yet, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers working on the Linux graphics stack already have a lot of worthwhile changes heading into the Linux 3.11 kernel.

      • VIA DRM Driver Finally Proposed For Mainline Linux

        It looks like with the Linux 3.11 kernel there is finally the potential for the VIA DRM graphics driver that’s long been in development to enter the mainline kernel source tree.

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 Performance On Ubuntu Linux

        After delivering the Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux this week already, which focused mostly on the processor performance, in this article are the first benchmarks of the Haswell OpenGL Linux performance. Testing was of the Intel HD Graphics 4600 graphics core found on the i7-4770K, which under Linux is supported by Intel’s open-source driver.

      • The Linux Evolution For Intel Haswell’s Performance

        While the Intel Haswell CPUs were just launched days ago, there’s already quite a Linux story to them. The Haswell CPU is interesting and the performance is good, but there’s still extra headroom to make especially when it comes to the graphics driver and performance relative to Intel’s Windows driver. Even so, the Intel Haswell Linux support has already evolved a great deal.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • The state of FOSS Desktop Environments and Window Managers. Pt 1

      First off, I would like to preface this by saying that I am one of the Project leads for Cloverleaf Linux, which is a continuation of a design ideal from Fuduntu, the things I write here for FOSS Advocates are *my* opinion, and my opinion only, I am not speaking on behalf of Cloverleaf Linux, or it’s development team in any of my postings here, developing a distribution just tends to give a guy some insight into certain things… I would also like to say, that I am not a fan of GTK/Gnome, and haven’t ever been, *but* I am going to try to remain somewhat objective here.

    • Xfce Theme Manager: A Single GUI To Change Any Xfce Theme (With Previews)

      Xfce uses multiple settings GUIs for setting the window border, controls, icons, mouse cursor theme and so on and it doesn’t include any thumbnails. However, if you customize your Xfce desktop frequently, you can use a tool called Xfce Theme Manager which allows you to change the themes from a single GUI and it also includes thumbnails so you can see how the theme looks like before applying it.

    • New X DRI3 Extension Starts Working On GNOME, KDE

      Keith Packard has announced that the first of two new DRI3 (DRI3000) extensions for X.Org is working and the new extension can cooperate with the loading of the complete KDE and GNOME desktops.

      DRI3 (also known as “DRI3000″) is an update to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure that’s been talked about since last September when the X.Org crew were drinking beers in Bavaria.

    • The Snowy Desktop

      We’ve highlighted Dobbie03‘s linux desktops before, and they’ve all been great, but this week he’s changed things up a bit. There’s more useful data on-screen, ringed around the edges so it’s visible but doesn’t get in the way. The wallpaper and some themes are all you need to bring this desktop to your Linux system.

    • How-To: Make Xfce Like Unity

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • A bit more about Artikulate
      • A bit more about Artikulate

        This post is to explain to the readers more about Artikulate. Artilkuate is the pronunciation trainer software for different languages. Currently supported languages are: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Catalan, Greek, British English and American English. The user can choose the language that he would like to perfectionate and follow the units prepared for this language course such as: Tourism, Alphabet, numbers, sports, etc. In each of the units the user can choose between practicing words, expressions, whole sentences or paragraphs (2-3 sentences) which all together are called phrases. The phrases are pre-recorded by native speakers and the user can listen to them. The user can also record himself speaking the same phrase and compare how close he is to a native version. There is also an option of practicing a particular phoneme that the user has particular difficulties with.

      • New Plasma scripting features in 4.11

        Since Martin blogged about the new scripting related features in kwin coming to 4.11 today, I figured that I would do the same for plasma-desktop.

      • New KWin Scripting Feature in 4.11
      • June Updates to KDE Plasma and Applications
      • KDE 4.10.4 Officially Released, Fixes over 50 Bugs

        The KDE Project happily announced last evening, June 4, the immediate availability for download and update of the fourth maintenance release for the KDE Software Compilation 4.10 desktop environment.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Gnome Sound Recorder mock-ups!

        Gnome Sound Recorder that is now considered to be obsolete, is on the way of finally returning as a new project through the hands of Meg Ford and Google Summer of Code 2013. Although the work is still on a very early phase, some mock-ups popped up in the last few days and along with those already existed for months now, they are forming a general logic behind the design we should expect.

      • New GNOME Control Center Unstable Release Brings Dozens of Features

        The GNOME Project announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development release for the upcoming GNOME Control Center 3.10 application, which will be part of the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.

      • One Week With GNOME 3 Classic: Days Six and Seven (Conclusions)
      • How to try GNOME OS ..yes GNOME OS ;)

        A while ago I had made that post “Welcome the 50GB RAM 32Cores GNOME OSTree Server“, which is basically a server that creates boot-able daily images of GNOME Desktop. Since then I forgot to give some info how you can try them.

        At this point -just to make clear- this is not about a GNOME Distro but about a testing platform. There isn’t an upgrade tool (like yum or apt-get) and is strongly recommended to do not use sensitive data (as SSH private keys) in this installation, as there aren’t any security updates.

      • GNOME 3.9.2 Is Now Ready for Testing

        Javier Jardón Cabezas from the GNOME Release Team announced a couple of days ago that the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment is ready for download and testing.

      • Telling GNOME’s Story

        The 2013 GNOME Marketing hackfest finished yesterday. We did many things over the course of the three day event: we updated the design of the website, discussed new outreach initiatives and planned how to clean up the marketing wiki pages. But our main focus was the development of a clear story for the GNOME Project. We spent a long time talking about why GNOME is important and how we think that contributors think and feel about what they do.

        We refined and defined these ideas, pulled them together to form an integrated identity, and started the work of translating them into text and pictures with which they can be communicated.

  • Distributions

    • Meet Puppy Linux

      Many geeks know about Puppy Linux and use it for their daily needs, but there are many others that have not heard about Puppy. Puppy is an extremely small Linux operating system in which its main goal is to stay small and fulfill all daily user’s needs.

    • Review: Semplice 4 “Atom Heart Mother”

      A couple of people have asked in comments (especially of my review of #! 11 “Waldorf”) that I review Semplice. I took a look at its website and was pretty intrigued, so here is the review.

    • Void Linux: A Rolling-Release Distro From Scratch

      Void Linux is a rolling-release Linux distribution that focuses upon speed, reliability, and flexibility. Void Linux deploys is built from scratch, deploys its own XBPS package manager, and builds upon existing packages like systemd and DKMS.

    • New Releases

      • TurnKey 12.1
      • Clonezilla 2.1.2-11
      • ROSA Presents ROSA Desktop R1

        Yesterday the ROSA Company announced the release of ROSA Desktop Fresh R1, “a new name distribution based on the ROSA Fresh platform.” The announcement explained that this new “R” series is for “advanced users and enthusiasts who will appreciate rich functionality and freshness of distribution components without serious loss of quality.”

      • ROSA Desktop Fresh R1: For advanced users, but even better for new users

        Summary: This article is about ROSA Desktop Fresh R1, a “new” Linux desktop edition from ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software provider based in Moscow, Russia.

        I’m always on the search for desktop distributions that make computing very easy for new users. Whether such distributions use GNOME or KDE or any other desktop environment, if they are new user-friendly, I love to take them out for a spin.

      • SystemRescueCd 3.7.0 Includes Linux Kernel 3.9.4

        François Dupoux proudly announced last evening, June 5, the immediate availability for download of the SystemRescueCd 3.7.0 Linux-based operating system, which can be used for rescue and recovery tasks.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2013…What it might look like

        Because of all the problems that Mandriva experienced, many people have assumed that the distro is quite dead by now. However, the foundation OpenMandriva has been busy gathering infrastructure, collecting historical releases, organizing teams and basically, doing everything that they must not to let the distro that freed many from Redmond’s OS disappear.

      • They Make Mageia – the Sysadmin team : Installation and configuration of software on Mageia servers

        In the Mageia project the sysadmin team is responsible for the setup and maintenance of all the Mageia infrastructure, for users and contributors alike. To help people understand what this team does, and to share some ideas with other sysadmins, we will publish a series of posts to explain the things that we do.

      • New videos for Mandriva Pulse 2

        As the next release of Pulse 2 is almost out of the door Mandriva has uploaded a set of videos showing Pulse 2, its management software for heterogenous and distributed I.T. infrastructures.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Gluster Community and New Charter Members Take Next Step in Driving Open Software-Defined Storage Innovation

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that seven charter member organizations have signed letters of intent to join the Gluster Community, the leading open source community for open software-defined storage. This marks the second major expansion of the Gluster Community in recent weeks and follows the expansion from a single project, GlusterFS, into multiple projects under the Gluster Community umbrella.

      • OpenStack Cloud Builder Mirantis Raises $10M In Second A Round From Red Hat, Ericsson And SAP Ventures
      • Red Hat Promotes GlusterFS Distributed Storage System

        In a move that underlines the growing importance of distributed storage systems to the growth of open source in the Big Data and cloud computing worlds, Red Hat (RHT) announced this week the launch of the Gluster Community, a new consortium of organizations with stakes in open storage systems. And the identities of the charter members say a lot about where exactly this niche is headed.

      • Red Hat discloses RHEL roadmap

        We think that people who are accustomed to Gnome 2 will use classic mode until they’re ready to experiment with modern mode. Classic mode is going to be the default for RHEL 7, and we’re in the final stages now. We’re tweaking it and having people experiment with it. The last thing we want to do is disrupt our customers’ workflows.

      • Red Hat betas web-developer tool collection

        Red Hat has released a beta of its new Software Collections 1.0 add-on package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is designed to help web application developers by packaging together dynamic languages and databases. The 1.0 version of the collection contains Ruby 1.9.3 with Rails 3.2.8, Python versions 2.7 and 3.3, PHP 5.4, Perl 5.16.3, and a technology preview of node.js 0.10, which can be coupled with stable versions of MariaDB 5.5, MySQL 5.5 or PostgreSQL 9.2, all of which are also included. These versions are a lot newer than the versions that come with RHEL 6 – most of the programs in RHEL 6 are around the same versions as they were when RHEL 6 was released in November 2010.

      • Red Hat packages newer versions of Ruby, Python

        Red Hat has put out a beta release of Software Collections 1.0, in a bid to let developers use newer versions of languages such as Ruby and Python with support.

        For certain applications, a more recent version of a language than what’s included in the base Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system is needed, according to Red Hat. Software Collections 1.0 is the first in a series of releases designed to allow developers to take advantage of new capabilities in their web apps faster with the safety net of support from Red Hat, it said.

      • Red Hat announces ceremony date surrounding office tower

        Open source software giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has publicly announced a date for the ribbon cutting at Red Hat Tower, formerly the Progress Energy building.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Day One: Installation

          So far my first day with Fedora 18 has been quite a pleasant experience. However, I’ve been doing nothing but installing and configuring the OS instead of actually doing any real work. So far I have all my data moved over, some applications installed, and some basic tweaks to the system.

        • Fedora 19 XFCE + Compiz

          Recently I decided to make it effective XFCE desktop so and on XFCE Desktop If we wanna activate compiz and emerald effects. That’s easy now.

        • The heroes of Fedora 19 Beta testing

          Fedora 19 Beta was released last week. As usual, here are some interesting statistics from different areas of our testing efforts. No matter how large your contribution was, if you’ve helped us, thank you.

        • A Look Ahead to Fedora 19

          Fedora 19 is the community-supported Linux distribution that is often used as a testing ground for features that eventually find their way into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux commercial distribution and its widely used noncommercial twin, CentOS. Both distributions are enormously popular on servers and so it’s often instructive for sysadmins to keep an eye on what’s happening with Fedora.

          Fedora prides itself on being at the bleeding edge of Linux software, so all the cool new features tend to get implemented there before they are included in Ubuntu and the other popular distros.

        • Fedora’s DNF May Have App Store

          Following Rahul Sundaram’s recent update on DNF, the new Fedora software manager, comes Richard Hughes and his bullet points on the subject. A lot of brains were stormed in the making of this list and it appears that “users” are first in mind.

        • Fedora Day Two: Customisation
        • Fedora 19 Installer Comes For Google Nexus 4

          An installer has come about to easily install Fedora 19 for ARM on the unlocked Google Nexus 4 smart-phone.

        • fedora 19 installer for nexus4
        • Korora 19 (Bruce) beta is out
        • Weekly Fedora kernel bug statistics – June 07 2013

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Phone Video Demo

            Today I recorded a video demo of Ubuntu running on the Galaxy Nexus and showcasing much of the progress in May to turn the phone into a usable daily phone for early testers. The demo shows recieving a call and text, web browser, social networking integration, multitasting, a number of the apps, messaging menu, and more.

          • Ubuntu Touch progress shown off in latest video

            A lot has changed since the first images of the phone were released. The phone functionality, for instance, actually works this time. The video gives us a look at a number of things, including gestures, a couple of the native apps and notifications. As we’ve heard before, Ubuntu for mobile will use the Unity launcher—the same interface that is used in the desktop version of Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu Tweak ready for Ubuntu 13.04
          • Ubuntu 13.10 to Bring Vastly Improved Unity Dash with 50 New Scopes

            The “Unity Dash” in Ubuntu has always been designed around the goal of delivering relevant information to the user, but come version 13.10, due out in October, things are about to become vastly improved. With that release will come 50 brand-new “Scopes”, along with a “SmartScope” filtering service. With these, users will be able to fine-tune their results like never before, and also access a bunch of information that wasn’t previously possible.

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Unity Desktop Privacy Settings

            Ubuntu is taking further steps toward online integration, and it appears that these changes will continue. The last few Ubuntu releases left several users concerned about their privacy and security, but control is still in the hands of the user. Here, I will point out some of the privacy settings that will keep your data safe. 13.04 brought few significant changes for privacy settings, but more upgrades are expected for 13.10.

            [...]

            When this option is turned on, users will see Amazon listings in their dash search results.

          • Ubuntu Phone OS now supports cellular data, social sharing, more

            Ubuntu Phone OS is a Linux-based operating system for smartphones and touchscreen devices such as tablets, and it’s still very much a work in progress. When the developers at Canonical started showing off Ubuntu Phone OS in January, it didn’t support phone calls, cellular data, or much of anything else. It didn’t even really run any apps.

          • Ubuntu 13.10 Readies Arrival of Smarter Unity Dash

            Unity’s much-delayed Smart Scopes Service is preparing to land in the daily builds of Ubuntu 13.10.

          • Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.5 Fixes Ubuntu 13.04 Issues

            Ubuntu Tweak, a very useful utility designed for Ubuntu users who want to tweak various aspects of their open source operating system, reached version 0.8.5, as announced by its developer, Tualatrix Chou.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Touch Manager
          • The Current State, Preview Of The Ubuntu Phone

            For those that haven’t yet tried out the Ubuntu Phone first hand by loading it onto one of the supported devices, here’s a video of the latest Ubuntu Phone version on the Galaxy Nexus smart-phone.

          • Ubuntu Touch progress shown off in latest video

            A lot has changed since the first images of the phone were released. The phone functionality, for instance, actually works this time. The video gives us a look at a number of things, including gestures, a couple of the native apps and notifications. As we’ve heard before, Ubuntu for mobile will use the Unity launcher—the same interface that is used in the desktop version of Ubuntu.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon

              Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” has been released so it’s time for another review of one of the most popular distros of all time. Linux Mint has always been one of my favorite distros, it has so much to offer any desktop linux user. This release doesn’t disappoint either. There’s quite a bit here for fans of Linux Mint, and it’s almost certain that most of them will want to upgrade to Linux Mint 15.

            • Linux Mint 16 Will Have Cinnamon 2.0

              In a recent interview for the Linux User & Developer magazine, Clement Lefebvre, revealed some of the goals for the next major release of the Linux Mint operating system.

              When asked by the Linux User & Developer magazine reporter whether the upcoming Linux Mint 16 will include the Cinnamon 2.0 desktop environment, Clement Lefebvre answered yes, revealing that this is definitely on their to-do list.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi’s Father Speaks: Eben Upton On The Future of Technology And More

      Enthusiasm radiates from Eben Upton. By day he’s the Technical Director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. By night, and on weekends, he’s the driving force behind the Raspberry Pi, that small computer that has been revolutionising hobbyist computing and the future of technology itself since its launch in 2012.

    • Raspberry Pi gets new installation system

      A new installation system for the Raspberry Pi that allows users to experiment more easily with different Linux systems on the device has been released. Called NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software), the software installs onto a 4GB or larger SD card and offers a choice of operating systems to install on first boot.

    • Young maker says Raspberry Pi is way to go

      A few weeks ago I was able to attend the Mini Maker Faire in Cleveland, Ohio where I got to meet with local makers and discuss a variety of subjects including Raspberry Pi, 3D Printing, and programming. One of the highlights of my trip there was meeting Dave and Lauren Egts. Lauren was there presenting on the Scratch Game she designed: The Great Guinea Pig Escape.

    • BeagleBone Black: Walking the dog.

      My software guy with a soldering iron fun has recently extended to the BeagleBone Black. This is a wonderful little ARM machine with a 1Ghz CPU, a whole bunch of GPIO pins, I2C, SPI, AIN.. all the fun things packed into a $45 board.

    • Raspberry Pi offers free software for newbies

      The Raspberry Pi Foundation has introduced free software designed to get people using the tiny Linux-based computing more quickly.

      New Out of Box Software (NOOBS) has been developed with first time users in mind.

      “We don’t want people to put their Raspberry Pi down in horror after five minutes,” says the team.

      Partners will ultimately start offering SD cards pre-installed with NOOBS, but the download link at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads exists for now.

    • NOOBS: A New Way to Begin Using Raspberry Pi

      As funny as the name may sound, NOOBS (New Out of Box Software) is actually designed to get newbies comfortable with their first-time exploits of the wonderful little Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation released NOOBS to ease the installation of one of four most popular operating systems for the Pi out there.

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Report Finds Open Source Software Quality Better than Industry Average

  • Web Browsers

    • SlateKit 0.2 Shell Improves Its Web-Browser

      Last month I wrote about SlateKit Shell, a new Qt5/QML web-browser using WebKit and written entirely in QML and JavaScript. The second release of SlateKit is now out there for those entertained by this mobile-oriented open-source browser.

      Ping-Hsun Chen, the lead developer of SlateKit, wrote into Phoronix with details about their new SlateKit 0.2 release. Features include:

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla is planning a major design overhaul with the release of Firefox 25 in October: Here’s a quick peek

        Mozilla is planning a major design overhaul of its flagship browser with the release of Firefox 25, slated to arrive in October. The company makes a point to discuss its plans for changes openly, and this upcoming new version is by no means an exception.

      • Meeting Mr Firefox: Johnathan Nightingale

        Mozilla and its central Firefox project are themes that I have returned to often on this blog. That’s not so surprising: Mozilla is one of the oldest free software projects, starting back in 1998 when Netscape stunned the world by announcing that it would open up its key product, Netscape Navigator.

      • Firefox OS to Arrive at the Low End — Then Spread Out

        Back in April, Mozilla officials made clear that their plans for the first crop of phones based on Firefox OS would be focused on five global markets: Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Since then, there have been announcements of expanded plans to deliver phones in Latin America, and Foxconn has announced a broad partnerhship with Mozilla to deliver smartphones, television sets and large display boards based on the mobile operating system.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Lightweight Alternatives to WordPress

      Now don’t get me wrong, WordPress is one of my favorite applications. With good reason, it is a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It is a mature and highly polished application with development starting a decade ago, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.

  • Education

    • Stanford and edX Collaborate on Open Source edX Platform

      When we launched edX with Harvard and MIT, one of our core beliefs was that the online learning platform we were building should be freely available to students and institutions everywhere. This belief went beyond the open access typical of massively open online courses (MOOCs). Not only did we believe our courses should be freely available, we wanted the platform technology itself to be open sourced and available to all.

    • EdX Open Sources Its Super-Influential Online Learning Platform

      EdX, a non-profit online learning organization with nearly 30 global institutions under the xConsortium participating, has been a leader in the free online education arena for several years. As of June 1, the organization has released the code for its learning platform under an open source license. The goal is to get developers to contribute to a next-generation online learning platform that can be best-of-breed. Given the success that EdX has had with institutions ranging from MIT to U.C. Berkeley to Stanford, this could be a fruitful pursuit.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 8.4

      FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes (detailed version) and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 8.4. More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.

    • FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE Available

      The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.3 and introduces some new features.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government


    • Award for Czech open source library content management system Kramerius

      Kramerius, an open source database application and content management system was award this year’s Infoforum Award, at the eponymous conference, which took place in Prague on 21 May. “The award is for most important and the best Czech or Slovak product, service or action related to electronic information resources.”

    • Finnish education board funds open source cloud services for schools

      Finland’s Board of Education is funding the maintenance and enhancement of a school network, called Dream School. The network enables participating schools to procure open technologies, including solutions based on open source.

    • The New York City Comptroller Built a Fiscal Transparency Website, and Now It’s Open Source

      The source code of New York City’s Checkbook NYC platform is now available for other governments to download, modify and reuse, New York City Comptroller John Liu announced during Thursday’s Personal Democracy Forum.

      Checkbook NYC is a web application that presents data from the city’s financial management systems online. Users can view or download information about city spending, broken down by agency or vendor, for example. In addition, information about contracts, payroll and disbursements is linked together, rather than existing in separate silos. It also offers API access that developers can use to build other applications on top of raw data about city spending, as well as bulk data downloads. The comptroller’s office has also promised to make city income data available on the platform soon.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Python Software Foundation publishes Code of Conduct

      After approving a Code of Conduct (CoC) for its community in April, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has now published the text of the guidelines. The PSF’s Code of Conduct is partly based on similar documents that have been adopted by the Ubuntu and Fedora communities. The foundation also points out that the newly adopted document is separate from the PyCon Code of Conduct, which is “an entirely different document, written for use at an in-person conference.”

    • LLVM May Expand Its Use Of The Loop Vectorizer

      LLVM’s Loop Vectorizer, which is able to automatically vectorize code loops for performance benefits in many scenarios, may find its use expanded for other optimization levels in future LLVM releases.

    • An Important Radeon R600 Change In LLVM 3.4

      While LLVM 3.3 hasn’t even been released yet, there’s already an important change found in LLVM 3.4 for Radeon R600 GPU users.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Google re-opens CalDAV

      When Google announced on March 13th that it would no longer be supporting the CalDAV application programming interface (API), developers were not happy. In early June, Google reconsidered its position and re-opened CalDAV and, to top it off, Google said they’d be opening CardDAV’s API as well.

    • Feds propose agency requirement to support Open Document Format

      The once mighty proprietary influence of Microsoft over government software and operating environment standards has been dealt a further blow after the Australian Government Information Management Office revealed that it now wants the Open Document Format to be supported as a file standard in productivity application suites used by most federal agencies.

    • New HTML 5.1 working draft released

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has presented a new working draft for the HTML markup language; version 5.1 of the markup language is currently being developed. A draft of a second document describes the differences between the current state of development and the previous major version, HTML 4. This second draft lists all details that affect HTML5, or its HTML 5.1 update, compared to HTML4 in chronological order.

    • Google’s calendar API stays open for everyone

      Google has announced that it will not go ahead with its earlier plans to restrict API access to its Calendar product to registered developers. Access through the CalDAV protocol will stay open for everyone, says Google Tech Lead Piotr Stanczyk in the company’s Developers Blog. “We received many requests for access to CalDAV, giving us a better understanding of developers’ use cases and causing us to revisit that decision,” Stanczyk says.

    • Google continues CalDav support for everyone, now also adds CardDav

      A couple of weeks ago Google announced that they would restrict CalDav access to their calendars to registered developers only. That resulted in a huge uproar among developers, users and open standards advocates and made many people wondering if Google will become a closed standards/software company in the future.

Leftovers

  • Prosecutor poses as accused killer’s ex-girlfriend on Facebook, fired

    An Ohio prosecutor believes that he must break two witnesses’ alibis in a murder case. He goes on Facebook, pretends to be the accused’s ex-girlfriend and tries to contact the witnesses. His bosses aren’t impressed.

  • Science

    • Dan Brown: Video Games Lead To Violence

      Let’s get the obvious out of the way: an exhaustive look at the research into the question of violence and its relation to video games should probably be labeled inconclusive, with a nod to a ton of research that says there is simply no link. I can’t say for certain that Brown is simply shooting from the hip, here, without really researching what he’s putting out for public consumption, but I will say that he’s demonstrated the ability to do so with his books.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • New Drugs Are Barely An Improvement Over Decades-Old Standbys, Study Finds

      Despite the more than $50 billion that U.S. pharmaceutical companies have spent every year since the mid-2000s to discover new medications, drugmakers have barely improved on old standbys developed decades ago.

    • Tobacco industry-commissioned report: large decline in EU consumption, almost no change in illegal trade

      On April 17, 2013 Philip Morris International (PMI) issued a press release, based on an annual study conducted by KPMG. PMI claimed the most significant finding of the study is that: “For the sixth year in a row, the illegal trade of cigarettes in the European Union reached a new record high: in 2012 the levels rose to 11.1%, compared to 10.4% in 2011.”

      However, further analysis tells a different story. It is true the numbers show that proportion of illegal sales increased as a percentage of total tobacco sales; however this is actually due to an overall decline in the EU tobacco market. The volume of the illegal cigarette trade has barely changed.

    • OCA and Our Allies Pressure 10 Senators Who Voted Against States’ Rights to Label GMOs

      eventy-one senators voted against the Sanders Amendment to the Farm Bill, an amendment to uphold states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food.

      It’s time to take action. The Organic Consumers Association has selected 10 of the 71 senators (listed below). With help from several of our ongoing allies in the GMO labeling battle, along with MoveOn.org, and some of the state GMO campaigns, we’re launching a campaign to start pressuring these 10 senators to support their state’s right to enact a GMO labeling law.

    • Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

      I retired 10 years ago after a long career as a research scientist for Agriculture Canada. When I was on the payroll, I was the designated scientist of my institute to address public groups and reassure them that genetically engineered crops and foods were safe. There is, however, a growing body of scientific research – done mostly in Europe, Russia, and other countries – showing that diets containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in laboratory mice and rats.

    • Monsanto Says Rogue Wheat in Oregon May Be Sabotage

      Monsanto Co. (MON), the world’s largest seed company, said experimental wheat engineered to survive Roundup weedkiller may have gotten into an Oregon field through an “accidental or purposeful” act.

      Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are investigating how genetically modified wheat that hasn’t been approved for commercial planting was found growing on an Oregon farm eight years after nationwide field tests ended.

    • G8 Hunger Summit demo

      This is part of what is called the New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition (called at the G8 last year). In actual fact, this New Alliance is going to be the vehicle to spread land grabbing and genetically modified crops across the African agricultural economy. African countries are going to be signed up to aid conditionalities that will open them up for private takeover of their land and seeds and further resource extraction. Civil society in Africa is not being consulted; their demands would be to put power into the hands of small producers not large corporations.

    • Meet a plasticarian (that’s a person who does not use plastic)

      The staff might not have come across a person trying to live a plastic-free life before, but it is likely they will again. The ubiquitous material, found in or on everything from your toothbrush and your shampoo bottle to your ready meals and your computer, has become the subject of international scrutiny. And consumers are listening.

      The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) issued startling advice last week, warning pregnant women to take a “precautionary approach” and avoid food in plastic containers or cans where possible. The report highlighted “endocrine-disrupters” found in certain plastics, including Bisphenol A plastics (BPAs) and phthalates, which can disrupt normal foetal development. BPA has also been linked to breast and prostate cancer, heart disease and sexual dysfunctions. The RCOG report noted that there was “considerable uncertainty about the risks of chemical exposure”.

  • Security

    • Linux Non Root Exploits – 4 Ways In which Even A Normal User Can Cause Real Damage To Your Linux System
    • Why we need an Anti-Virus in Linux?

      The definition of a Computer Virus is kinda unclear according to Wikipedia: “A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another” and instead by Virus definition I will include all the types of malware (viruses, ransomware, worms, trojan horses, rootkits, keyloggers, dialers, spyware, adware).

      By Malware Wikipedia defines: “Malware, short for malicious (or malevolent) software, is software used or programmed by attackers to disrupt computer operation, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems”.

    • Apache Struts gets another important security fix

      Just a week ago, the Apache Struts developers released an important security fix which has now been followed by another important fix for a highly critical security flaw in the web framework. The vulnerability being closed is a combination of two problems. The framework allows action mapping based on wildcards and when a request doesn’t match an action, it tries to load a JSP file based on the name of the action. That name can be treated as an OGNL expression and in turn, that allows an attacker to execute Java code on the server side.

    • Serious vulnerabilities in QNAP storage and surveillance systems

      Many of QNAP’s NAS products are affected by security problems that, when combined, potentially allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on a system at administrator privilege level – at worst, even via the internet. Apart from pure network storage systems, this particularly affects QNAP Security’s VioStor video surveillance systems.

    • China has ‘mountains of data’ about U.S. cyber attacks: official

      China’s top Internet security official says he has “mountains of data” pointing to extensive U.S. hacking aimed at China, but it would be irresponsible to blame Washington for such attacks, and called for greater cooperation to fight hacking.

    • Police admit they’re ‘stumped’ by mystery car thefts

      This is a real mystery. You think when you lock your car and set the alarm, your car is pretty safe. But criminals have designed a new high-tech gadget giving them full access to your car. It’s so easy, it’s like the criminals have your actual door remote. Police are so baffled they want to see if you can help crack the case.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Latest Leak: Obama Wants A List Of Countries To Cyberattack
    • Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks

      Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.

    • Ex-CIA boss accused of ‘leaking’ Osama raid details to writer of Zero Dark Thirty

      Wellington, June 6 (ANI): Former CIA Director Leon Panetta has been accused of violating security rules by revealing the name of the commander of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to the writer of the film Zero Dark Thirty, according to US Defense Department investigators.

    • The FBI Raided Steubenville Anonymous Guy’s House. Here He Is.

      According to the warrant obtained by Gawker, FBI agents were looking for evidence related to the hacking of Rollredroll.com—the website of a Steubenville High School booster club that was defaced during the height of the Steubenville campaign—and the unauthorized access of the webmaster’s email address. Rollredroll.com webmaster James Park’s email account was broken into, and many of his private emails dumped online. In February, a hacker named Batcat took responsibility for the hack in an article in the Steubenville Herald-Star. He claimed he hacked Rollredroll.com in 15 minutes by guessing Jim Parks’ password security question, after being approached by KYAnonymous.

      In a statement posted on his website, Lostutter described the raid: “As I open the door to great the driver approximately 12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to ‘Get The Fuck Down’ with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed.”

    • Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists

      The Steubenville rape case, in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl at a party, helped spark a national conversation about consent, victim-blaming, and rape culture. The case gained national attention after the “hacktivist” group Anonymous leaked significant social media evidence implicating the assailants — including tweets, Instagram photos, and a 12-minute video of Steubenville high schoolers joking about the rape. But it turns out that working to expose those rapists may land one Anonymous hacker more time in prison than the rapists themselves will serve.

    • Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists

      The Steubenville rape case, in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl at a party, helped spark a national conversation about consent, victim-blaming, and rape culture. The case gained national attention after the “hacktivist” group Anonymous leaked significant social media evidence implicating the assailants — including tweets, Instagram photos, and a 12-minute video of Steubenville high schoolers joking about the rape. But it turns out that working to expose those rapists may land one Anonymous hacker more time in prison than the rapists themselves will serve.

    • Philly Closes 23 Public Schools, Generously Builds $400 Million Prison Where Kids Can Hang Instead

      Philadelphia is so broke the city is closing 23 public schools, never mind that it has the cash to build a $400 million prison.

      Construction on the penitentiary said to be “the second-most expensive state project ever” began just days after the Pennsylvania School Reform Commission voted down a plan to close only four of the 27 schools scheduled to die. Facing a $304 million debt, the Commission instead approved a measly $2.4 billion budget that would shut down 23 public schools, wiping out roughly 10% of the city’s total.

    • Anonymous Just Leaked a Trove of NSA Documents
    • Woman in red dress, sprayed with tear gas by masked policeman, becomes symbol for Turkish protesters

      In her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing tear gas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.

      Taken in Taksim Square in central Istanbul, the image has been endlessly shared on social media.

      The woman in red has even been replicated as a cartoon on posters and stickers and has become a symbol for female protesters during days of violent anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul.

      Some posters show the woman towering over a police officer and say “the more they spray, the bigger we get.”

    • New York Anarchist Jerry Koch Is in Jail for Refusing to Testify Before Grand Jury

      A New York anarchist has been jailed for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about his political beliefs, his friends, and the legal support he provided to Occupy Wall Street.

      Gerald “Jerry” Koch, 24, was subpoenaed before a grand jury that is believed to be investigating the 2008 explosion outside a military recruitment center in Times Square. The blast damaged the front door of the center and injured no one, but the FBI began a “terrorism” investigation of local anarchists.

      Koch isn’t accused of this crime—or any other crime.Prosecutors told his lawyers that they think he was at a bar in 2008 or 2009, after the bombing, and that someone else at the bar knew about another person who was involved. Koch was subpoenaed to a grand jury in 2009—when he was only 19—and publicly stated that he didn’t know anything about it and wouldn’t cooperate.

    • How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War?

      How many Iraqis died in the Iraq War? That’s the kind of question that should be asked, especially if you happen to live in the countries that launched the war that killed so many.

    • HASC approves anti-China equipment language in fiscal 2014 NDAA

      The House Armed Services Committee approved June 6 a national defense authorization act for the coming fiscal year that includes language critics say would likely lead to the exclusion of Chinese-manufactured electronic parts from the defense industrial base, including in unclassified networks.

    • Pakistan Officials Say US Drone Strike Kills 7

      During his campaign, he sometimes criticized the U.S. and its policy of using drones to kill militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Speaking to parliament earlier this week, he once again called for an end to the drone policy.

    • U.S. Drone Strike Kills at Least 7 in Pakistan as New Prime Minister Announces Cabinet

      During his campaign, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif often criticized the United States for using drone aircraft to kill militants.

      The drones that struck Friday targeted a house in Mangroti village in the Shawal area of North Waziristan, the tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan. The identities of the victims were not immediately known, but an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described them as militants.

    • First since Nawaz sworn in as PM, US drone kills 7

      The drone fired two missiles which hit a compound in Shokhel village in Shawal area, more than 100 kms southwest of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan Agency, which is known as a stronghold of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
      “The US drone fired two missiles targeting a militant compound and killing at least seven militants”, a senior local security official told AFP.

    • Q&A with Jeremy Scahill on drones, counterterrorism and ‘Dirty Wars’

      Jeremy Scahill is an investigative correspondent for The Nation magazine and has reported from hot spots around the world including Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. “Dirty Wars,” a new documentary on U.S. covert wars based on Scahill’s book of the same name, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is set for release in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, June 7. Yahoo News recently spoke to Scahill about drones policy, President Barack Obama’s recent speech on U.S. counterterrorism policy, and what Scahill believes are the greatest security threats still facing the U.S.

    • Africa: The Frontier That Drones Can Never Cross

      Waging war without any declaration is now facilitated by drones. But there are limits that drones can never cross, as machines can never handle sociopolitical contradictions. Initiating counter-moves against political maneuvers is beyond the capacity of machines.

    • EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn’t always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show

      The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.

      About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as “other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

    • Drone strikes: For better or for worse?

      However, whatever the case may be, I as a Pakistani, still find the topic of drones confusing because on one hand, the foreign office issues open protest after every drone attack and on the other hand we have ex-rulers like Pervez Musharraf conceding that the government had tacit drone agreements with the Americans.

    • Drones mean RAF Waddington could become a new Greenham Common

      We pulled up to the peace caravan, Simon and I, his maroon taxi making its diesel noises, which is the only way I can account for the speed with which the police caught up with us. RAF Waddington spreads across the road, its planes sharp-nosed and incongruously aggressive against the Lincolnshire countryside. We didn’t see any drones.

    • UN drone investigator expecting ‘dramatic’ decrease in US strikes

      Ben Emmerson tells the Guardian drone use likely to be curbed in coming months as program shifts from CIA to US military

    • Protest at the proposed drone command center

      The Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs announced on March 19, that the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, located at Horsham Air Guard Station, will take on ground control for the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial system starting Oct. 1.

    • ‘Drone strikes in Pakistan completely negate the right to life’

      When President Obama tells people that drones are more humane weapons, he tries to be a good salesman for the weapon, but forgets that it’s a weapon which kills, Shahzad Akbar, a human rights lawyer representing drone victims, told RT.

      Shahzad Akbar, Director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, and a member of the British human rights organization Reprieve, is a human rights lawyer representing drone victims in a criminal case against US officials.

    • Thank God for Drones

      Now some say hellish robotic gunfire raining down from the sky will cause an eradication of our civil liberties. But I say why is that bad?

      In the old days, cops needed warrants to take you into custody, and had to read you your rights before questioning. But that is so last century. And time-consuming! I’m sure the military wanted Drones to question people from 2000 feet but they just don’t have an app for that yet. I am told by a credible source that they do have several missiles with some excellent questions written on them.

      So if you’re accidentally killed for suspicious behavior and targeted for your high internet bandwidth, regardless if it’s for terrorism or a shopping spree on Amazon, you probably deserved it. We can sort out all those annoying accuracy factoids about your death later after we get some kill numbers up to show the system works! Just remember as you’re taken down on main street by those unseen snipers in the sky — to think of those job numbers! You’ve helped them go up!

    • The Lushest ever drone attack

      A dramatic protest against drone warfare took place on Cornmarket on Saturday of 6th week.

      The protest was staged by the Lush cosmetic store. A loudspeaker was used to stimulate a drone attack, and Lush employees, one by one, fell to the ground and acted dead. White chalk was then used to draw around each of these individuals.

      The campaign was designed to raise awareness of the American military’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

    • Drone protest hits the Quad-Cities

      The protest is being called “Covering Ground to Ground the Drones,” and it will leave from Rock Island on Monday.

    • Lawlessness of drones coming to haunt US?

      DID the FBI execute Ibragim Todashev? He appears to have been shot seven times while being interviewed at home in Orlando, Florida, about his connection to one of the Boston bombing suspects. Among the shots was the assassin’s hallmark: a bullet to the back of the head. What kind of an interview was it?

      An irregular one. There was no lawyer present. It was not recorded. By the time Todashev was shot, he had apparently been interrogated by three agents for five hours. And then? Who knows? First, we were told, he lunged at them with a knife. How he acquired it, five hours into a police interview, was not explained. How he posed such a threat while recovering from a knee operation also remains perplexing.

    • Who’s the US Killing in Pakistan? Even the CIA Doesn’t Know

      The CIA didn’t know who it was killing about 25 percent of the time it targeted suspects with drones, NBC News reports. Still, the government insists, all of those unknown people definitely deserved to die. According to classified CIA documents, only one of about 600 people the CIA killed in Pakistan in a 14-month period beginning in September 2010 was a civilian, and therefore was not a proper target.

    • Leon Panetta May Have Been the One Who Spilled CIA Secrets to Hollywood Filmmakers
    • CIA invests in robot writers

      The CIA says that it has spent a small fortune on software which can look at all the facts and write reports on them.

    • Exposed: New website reveals extent of secret CIA flight network

      A team of academics have launched the world’s largest interactive database detailing suspected CIA rendition flights, many of which may have transported detainees to Guantanamo Bay.

      Scotland is the only country so far which has raised any questions on the alleged rendition activity on home soil.

      The Rendition Project is a product of a collaborative research between Dr. Ruth Blakely from the University of Kent and Dr. Sam Raphael from Kingston University, London.

    • Ex-CIA agent insists on innocence while his national security case is stuck in limbo

      Sterling stands accused of leaking information regarding a failed CIA mission in which a Russian spy was to give erroneous plans for a nuclear bomb to Iranian scientists. Sterling is accused of giving this information to author Risen in 2003.

    • Pablo Neruda May Have Been Killed By a CIA Double Agent

      Neruda, a Nobel laureate described by famed Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, as “the first great poet of the Spanish language since the 17th century,” died in September 1973 of apparent natural causes. But in 2011 the Chilean Communist Party filed a civil case arguing that Chile’s most important literary figure was in fact murdered by a mysterious agent of the country’s right-wing dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

    • When the C.I.A. Gets Too Cozy with Hollywood

      The past six months have been a high point for the C.I.A. and Hollywood. Together, they created two of the most highly acclaimed films ever to depict the C.I.A.: “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and “Argo,” about the rescue of Americans during the Iran hostage crisis.

    • Report: CIA Unsure of Identity of Many Drone Targets

      According to one former senior intelligence official, as many as half the strikes in Pakistan between 2009 and 2010 were signature strikes.

    • CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher

      The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.

    • Mission: Assassination

      Written back in the Clinton era, the Studies in Intelligence article may seem somewhat out of date. As a recent New York Times piece on the same issue noted, after the 2001 terrorist attacks, any internal concerns over CIA involvement with targeted killings “were quickly swept aside.” But at least one major fact has not changed — the only formal constraint that exists against assassinations by the CIA is not the law but a mere presidential order, which the commander-in-chief can, in theory, easily revoke.

    • Brennan’s CIA purging political dissidents, purged CIA agent speaks out

      The news was received by the PCRE by Kent Clizbe, a former CIA counter-terrorism operations officer and author of Willing Accomplices and Obliterating Exceptionalism, of the purge of non-supporters of Obama and vicious reprisals and threats against anyone who dared to speak out against the CIA or the administration and that it began in 2009 and has escalated ever since.

  • Cablegate

    • As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point

      Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.

      In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait.

      There’s an obvious Chumpbait angle in the Bradley Manning story, and most of the mainstream press reports went with it. You can usually tell if you’re running a Chumpbait piece if you find yourself writing the same article as 10,000 other hacks.

    • WikiLeaks trial is high-profile case for low-profile lawyer

      When Private First Class Bradley Manning was seeking a civilian defense attorney to bolster his government-appointed legal team in 2010, he considered a number of lawyers experienced in courts-martial.

      His aunt, herself a lawyer, helped vet names of possible lawyers for the case suggested by Army veterans and activist supporters. The family fielded unsolicited offers from attorneys eager to take the high-profile case in which Manning is accused of passing more 700,000 classified files to WikiLeaks in the biggest unauthorized release of secret files in U.S. history.

    • Whistleblower ‘may be next Bradley Manning’, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says

      WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange said he fears the whistleblower who exposed a US surveillance program could be treated like Bradley Manning.

      In an interview with CBS This Morning from the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he has been holed up for nearly a year, Assange defended the public’s right to know about the Internet data mining program revealed late Thursday.

    • Assange: US rule of law suffering “calamitous collapse”

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency surveillance programmes.

    • Being cynical: Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt, and the year’s weirdest book

      Highlights from Cohen’s All-American Speakers Bureau bio include positions with the National Counterterrorism Center and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a highly publicized phone date with Jack Dorsey. Not bad for a man who was once labeled “Condi’s Party Starter” by The New Yorker, presumably through no fault of his own. Most recently, Cohen was named the director of Google’s “think/do” tank, Google Ideas.

      Indeed, under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the US State Department at times resembled nothing less than a “think/do” tank for the Hoover Institution, the prominent conservative policy research institute based at Jared Cohen’s alma mater, Stanford University. And it’s this world of think tanks and foundations that provides the true intellectual center of Schmidt–Cohen’s book. Rice knows this world well. She left the faculty of Stanford University to work at the Pentagon (paid for by a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations) before going to the National Security Council. Now that her government service is done, she’s gone back to Stanford.

    • WikiLeaks’ cables say George Fernandes sought funds from CIA to sustain anti-government activities

      In a sensational revelation, the WikiLeaks have alleged that firebrand socialist leader George Fernandes had sought funds from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow Indira Gandhi’s government in the 1970s.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Delight to Disappointment as Herakles Farms’ suspension order lifted

      There was dancing in the streets of Mundemba and Fabe when the news came two weeks ago that the Cameroonian government had suspended Herakles Farms’ forest clearing operations.

      Communities in this region of South West Cameroon, who had feared that they would lose their lands and their livelihoods to Herakles’ industrial palm oil plantation, now believed that their forest had been saved.

  • Finance

    • David Cameron faces battle at G8 over anti-corruption deal for firms

      With fierce opposition from some members of economic summit, getting an agreement to stop tax evasion is now looking unlikely

    • David Cameron to attend Bilderberg group meeting

      Downing Street defends visit to secretive group, where prime minister will not be accompanied by civil servants

    • O’Reilly Spins a Correction on ‘White House Visits’

      On last night’s O’Reilly Factor (6/5/13), the Fox News host asserted that there’s still a lot the White House isn’t telling us about the IRS/Tea Party scandal

    • What Goldman Sachs should admit: it drives up the cost of food

      Today, 23 May, is the annual general meeting (AGM) of financial speculator Goldman Sachs, the archetypal villain of the global economic meltdown, bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of $5.5bn. Perhaps they’ll hand out last year’s Community Impact report, which shows how they’ve tried to redeem themselves with charity, like serving up almost 30,000 meals and preparing about 250,000 others in community projects in the US and around the world.

    • IRS Audited Over Inappropriate Spending, Claims It Can’t Find Its Receipts

      Just a guess, but it probably sucks to be the IRS right now. Between reports about them snooping on people’s emails and their targeting of conservative groups, it’s quite easy to paint them as a big, evil bureaucracy. Actually, it was pretty easy to do so before all that. You can generally rely on the hatred of the people for a group that requires meticulous spending records and then collects taxes. Big, bad, evil. What could be worse?

    • The dangerous aristocrats of finance

      In many ways, the financial world has changed remarkably little in the five years since the 2008 financial crisis. Yes, banks, brokers and other intermediaries are neither as profitable nor as popular as in the pre-crisis years. However, the industry is still arrogant, isolated and ridiculously lucrative. Leading financiers look more like pre-revolutionary aristocrats than normal businessmen.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • CMD Files Open Records Suit Against ALEC Board Member Sen. Leah Vukmir

      The Center for Media and Democracy filed suit Thursday against Wisconsin State Senator Leah Vukmir, a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the treasurer of ALEC’s national board, over her failure to disclose ALEC-related materials under Wisconsin’s public records law – possibly because ALEC told her to keep the documents secret.

      CMD has discovered that ALEC has started stamping its materials with a disclaimer asserting “[b]ecause this is an internal ALEC document, ALEC believes it is not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.” There is no provision in Wisconsin law allowing private organizations to declare themselves immune from the state’s sunshine-in-government statutes.

    • What Charles G. Koch can teach us about campaign finance data

      On May 13, I wrote up an analysis of campaign finance data that asked “Did almost 600 donors break campaign finance law in 2012?” Truth is, I wasn’t sure. The bulk data made it appear that way, but as I noted at the outset, “our most troubling finding may be just how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave.”

    • Cyber soldiers promote the monarchy

      Rangers Task Force 45, in response to Army policy, has put its troops to the task of promoting and protecting the monarchy in cyber space, claiming to have posted 1.69 million comments on webboards and social media during a 4-month period of last year.

    • Turkish Protestors Take To Indiegogo, Raise Over $50,000 For Full-Page New York Times Ad

      Protests erupted in Turkey last week, fueled by government plans to redevelop an urban park and build a shopping mall and military barracks, among other things. Protestors gathered in Gezi Park and what started as opposition to redevelopment quickly transformed into widespread protests against the Turkish government.

  • Censorship

    • Grand Jury Refuses To Indict Teen Arrested For Posting ‘Threatening’ Rap Lyrics On Facebook

      Cameron D’Ambrosio, the teen charged with “communicating terrorist threats” via some daft rap lyrics posted to his Facebook profile, is apparently no longer a threat to the people of Methuen, MA, and parts beyond. Facing a possible 20-year-sentence for his inclusion of such explosive terms as “White House,” “murder charge” and “Boston bombinb” in his one-man online rap battle, D’Ambrosio has been held without bail since May 2nd. As of Thursday night, however, D’Ambrosio is free to kill terrorize rhyme again. And, as an added bonus, he now has something in common with many of the rappers he clearly aspires to be: time served.

    • Opinion: Parenting by proxy

      In a week where there has been a lot of argument about what Internet service providers and search engines should do to protect children and adults from harmful content online, we seem to have lost sight of what we want to achieve. The government, it seems, wants to teach children how to use technology and the internet, but at the same time presents a view of the internet as a medium where grave danger exists around every digital corner. This sends a contradictory message to parents about their responsibilities and does nothing to provide the resources needed to meet them.

    • DCMS call summit on dealing with extreme or illegal content online

      This morning comes news that Maria Miller, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has summoned internet companies to a summit on how they deal with illegal and extreme content online. This morning we will be writing to the Minister to make sure that Open Rights Group and representatives of civil society are present.

    • Civil society groups express concern to Culture Secretary about online content restrictions

      ORG, Index on Censorship, English PEN and Big Brother Watch have written to the Culture Secretary this morning, setting out concerns about possible new measures to deal with illegal or extreme content online.

    • Lindsey Graham Isn’t Sure If Bloggers Deserve ‘First Amendment Protection’

      Of course they do. But the question at hand is whether a media shield law should protect them as well.

    • Saudi Arabia blocks Viber messaging service

      The head of the messaging application Viber has said people in Saudi Arabia have had basic freedoms taken away, after his service was blocked there.

      Talmon Marco told the BBC he did not know the reason for the move, but that Viber would be restored soon.

    • How ASIC’s attempt to block one website took down 250,000

      Australia’s corporate watchdog has admitted to inadvertently blocking access to about 250,000 innocuous websites in addition to the 1200 it had already accidentally censored.

    • Fox News Too Cowardly To Refuse Critical Ad Because It’s Critical, Claims Copyright Instead

      It’s become something of a sport in the past decade for roughly half of America to mock, dismiss, and otherwise tear down the Fox News channel. Personally, I’d rather like to see all of cable news go away, but there are times when I think the criticism is a tad selective and unfair. For instance, it’d be very easy to lambaste the network for the man-clowns they trotted out in the wake of a Pew Research study that showed that mothers currently make up nearly half of American household’s primary wage-earners. What was for me a meh-inducing announcement was a sign of the surely-coming apocalypse for Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson and Juan Williams. They’re easily targeted as examples of the bad on the station, but if you’re blinded by ideology or party alliance, you probably didn’t bother to shine a light on the absolutely glorious rebuttal by Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

  • Privacy

    • More Details On PRISM Revealed; Twitter Deserves Kudos For Refusing To Give In
    • Rendition link to PRISM

      The Guardian is reporting that Britain’s GCHQ first started getting produtive with PRISM early 2012. It was about the same time that their buddies down under, ASIO revised their earlier assessment of a refugee, Ranjini, and scooped her up in Australia’s domestic rendition program.

      This may be more than a notable co-incidince, because it adds further support to the hypothesis that Ranjini is a victim of Big Data and PRISM. If ASIO first gained access to PRISM at the same time as GCHQ, then they may have used some tenuous PRISM data to form their revised assessment of her suitability for a visa. Making such inferences, and using them as the basis for a cruel program of indefinite detention is a gross violation of human rights and goes far beyond the claim that PRISM is about catching real terrorists.

    • Opinion: PRISM, Suspicious until proven innocent.

      It seems that every other week we have a whistleblower to thank for making us more aware of what is being done on our behalf and apparently for our own good. The most recent revelations give us a far better idea of the sorts of wide spread, in depth monitoring and surveillance that governments feel they can subject their citizens to.

    • Oh, And One More Thing: NSA Directly Accessing Information From Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple And More
    • CISPA Will Legalize PRISM Spy Program

      The PATRIOT Act and the FISA court led to the blanket wiretapping of every American citizen and a PRISM lens into all Internet activity for the NSA.

    • Once Again, Courts Struggle With Whether Or Not Forcing You To Decrypt Your Computer Is Unconstitutional
    • What We Don’t Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know

      Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted — for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It’s exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.

    • NSA spying scandal fallout: Expect big impact in Europe and elsewhere (Updated)

      UPDATE: I’ll admit I am shocked to have received this response from the European Commission to my request for comment, with particular regard to the impact on EU citizens’ privacy: “We do not have any comments. This is an internal U.S. matter.” For the reason behind my surprise, read on…

      This is a great day to be a conspiracy theorist. Vindication! The National Security Agency – part of the U.S. military – reportedly has a direct line into the systems of some of the world’s biggest web and tech companies, all of which are of course sited in the U.S.

    • Cowards

      Will not one tech CEO stand up and tell the truth?

      The NSA story of the secret assassination of the Fourth Amendment continues to unfold. Today we heard from Google CEO Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

      Page was confused (the title of his post is “What the…?). Zuckerberg claimed the press reports were outrageous. Both made strong denials of specific allegations (“direct access,” “back doors”). Both were technically telling the truth. Both were also overtly misleading people.

    • How the NSA, and your boss, can intercept and break SSL

      Is the National Security Agency (NSA) really “wiretapping” the Internet? Accused accomplices Microsoft and Google deny that they have any part in it and the core evidence isn’t holding up that well under closer examination.

      Some, however, doubt that the NSA could actually intercept and break Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) protected Internet communications.

    • The NSA’s Favorite Weasel Word To Pretend It’s Claiming It Doesn’t Spy On Americans

      Most people would read this to be him saying that they do not spy on Americans. And that’s obviously what he’s trying to imply. But that’s not what he’s actually saying. He’s using the NSA’s favorite weasel word: “target.” Now, most people assume that means one of the people on the call must be outside the US. But, you could — if you were devious intelligence official trying to mislead Congress and the American public (hypothetically) — interpret the word “target” to mean “if we, in general are ‘targeting’ foreign threats, no matter what they might be like, and this information we’re collecting might help in that process, then we can snarf up this data.”

      In other words, most people think that “target” would mean one of the people on the phone. But, the NSA means “this overall investigation is about targeting foreign threats, so we can take whatever data we want because the goal is to stop foreign threats with it — and therefore our mandate not to spy on Americans doesn’t apply.”

    • U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

      The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

    • EMERGENCY ACTION: Stop The Massive Government Spying Program

      A leaked court document obtained by The Guardian, and since reported on by numerous news outlets, has exposed that the government is spying on Americans.

      Using the Patriot Act, the U.S. government has been secretly tracking the calls of every Verizon Business Network Services customer—to whom they spoke, from where, and for how long—for the past 41 days.

      Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and internet providers for corporations, so this could apply to the calls of millions of Americans.

    • UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

      Exclusive: UK security agency GCHQ gaining information from world’s biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme

    • Could the NSA be spying on the wife of China’s president?
    • US surveillance revelations deepen European fears
    • PRISM Companies Start Denying Knowledge of the NSA Data Collection
    • A Trip Down Memory Lane: People Warned What Would Happen When Congress Passed Bills To Enable Vast Spying
    • Washington Post Quietly Backtrcks On Claim That Tech Companies Knowingly Gave NSA Data, As Denials Get Stronger

      Some have pointed out that these claims can still be read carefully to mean that other forms of data access potentially did happen, though some of the direct claims are pretty strong. It’s also noteworthy that Page and Zuckerberg seem to mimic each other’s word usage. Furthermore, it does seem odd that the President more or less confirmed the existence of the program, which all these tech companies are denying. Does that mean that something else is going on? Is the NSA doing this without letting the companies know? It’s certainly unclear at this point, but it’s going to come out eventually.

    • Obama Administration Declassifies Details On “PRISM,” Blasts “Reckless” Media And Leakers
    • Tech Companies Deny Letting NSA Have Realtime Access To Their Servers, But Choose Their Words Carefully

      Note the fine distinction. Giving the NSA a clone of their data wouldn’t be giving them “access to our servers.” It would be giving copies to the NSA… and then the NSA could “access” its own servers. And you were wondering why the NSA needed so much space in Utah. If they’re basically running a replica of every major big tech company datacenter, it suddenly makes a bit more sense. Of course, at this point there’s no evidence that this is necessarily the case — and some are insisting that the denials are legit, and that the Washington Post’s story is not entirely accurate. But… the wording here is extra careful, and the government’s report really does seem to indicate that these companies are deeply involved.

    • Identi.ca and privacy

      I can say pretty clearly: categorically no. We’ve never had a request from the NSA or any other government organization to turn over data from identi.ca or status.net or any of the E14N pump servers.

    • PRISM: The FISAAA smoking gun

      Caspar Bowden has been expressing concerns about the FISAA provisions for some time.

    • European Commission should revoke US Safe Harbour status immediately.

      Given the news over the past 24 hours of the activities of the US National Security Agency, it is critical that the EU Commission immediately revoke the Safe Harbour status of the United States of America under the Data Protection Directive.

      It all started with news that the National Security Agency (NSA) are being provided “meta data” of all calls sent and received on the Verizon telecommunications network via a secret order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court under “Business Data” provisions of the PATRIOT Act – domestic and foreign.

    • Looking at PRISM – NSA’s mass surveillance program

      This recent news reveals a long-held suspicion that the GCHQ had the very powers they were seeking to place on a statutory footing with the Snooper Charter, a bill that was knocked back for being unnecessary and disproportionate. Keeping the public in the dark about secretive and potentially unlawful programs must stop – and greater oversight is needed to ensure human rights are not being trampled.

    • Why, Yes, Of Course The NSA Spying Involves More Companies Than Already Listed
    • PRISM is bigger than anything that came before it—but no-one knows how much bigger

      The mystery surrounding how much domestic spying the US government has been conducting on its own citizens will only intensify in the coming days, as a growing number of the nine major internet companies linked to an alleged top-secret data-mining program deny they had anything to do with it.

    • Intelligence Boss Claims The Real Villain Here Is The Press For Revealing His Secret Spying Program
    • Verizon: We Protect Our Customers’ Data… Until The Government Asks For It
    • Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies

      Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.

      Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.

    • What does the Prism logo mean?
    • PRISM – Diffracting non-US Citizens’ basic privacy since 2007?

      It’s being reported by the Guardian and Washington Post that the US National Security Agency can routinely access the sensitive data stored by big web firms including Facebook, Google, Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube and Apple.

    • EE debate mobile weblogs and privacy
    • Anonymous Leaks Some NSA Documents About PRISM
    • The NSA surveillance story reinforces why an entity like WikiLeaks is so important

      WikiLeaks, the secretive repository for government malfeasance, hasn’t been in the news much lately except for occasional updates about founder Julian Assange, who remains in exile inside the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain. And neither WikiLeaks nor its supporters had much to do with the latest blockbuster leak of government intelligence, which confirmed that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone-call data from Verizon customers thanks to a secret court order. But despite all that, the NSA story helps to highlight why having an independent repository for high-level leaks is a valuable thing.

      The original report on the NSA’s surveillance effort came from Glenn Greenwald, who writes about politics for The Guardian, courtesy of a leaked document that confirmed the existence of an order signed by the ultra-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. As the New York Times explains, even the existence of this kind of order is subject to the highest levels of U.S. government secrecy — much higher, in fact, than the diplomatic cables that former Army private Bradley Manning is accused of providing to WikiLeaks.

    • President Obama ‘Welcomes’ The Debate On Surveillance That He’s Avoided For Years Until It Was Forced Upon Him

      In other words, he’s not “welcoming” the debate at all. The debate is happening with or without him, and when he had the chance to “welcome” the debate, he didn’t. Now, it appears, he’s trying to appear willing “to talk” about something that’s now gone way beyond the stage where “welcoming the debate” is sufficient.

      If anything, his helps explain why over-aggressive secrecy is such a stupid government policy. If they had been open about this and there had been public discussions earlier, and people were free to express their concerns, and the government could explain its position, then the discussion would have been different, and more interesting. But having all this information denied by government officials for years, only to come out via a leak just looks so much worse.

    • Press comment: NSA spying, GCHQ and Prism
    • Blockbuster Reports Reveal Widespread Surveillance of Phone and Internet Records by Obama Administration

      In a series of blockbuster reports published in the Washington Post and in the British newspaper The Guardian, sources reveal that the National Security Agency (NSA) is running a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows federal officials to collect material including “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats” from an array of internet companies including Google, Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and more without a court order. The papers gained access to a 41-slide top secret PowerPoint presentation that lays out the parameters of the program, which has apparently been operative since 2007.

    • PRISM US Surveillance – Serious Questions for the UK Government

      Digital rights campaigners Open Rights Group are extremely concerned by these unprecedented revelations of US spying on foreign citizens.

    • Was the Communications Data Bill just a cover for Prism Data?

      Rather more concerning is the UK involvement in this. According to the Guardian, “Prism would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.”

      This is interesting in light of the recently proposed Communications Data Bill. If the security services already have access to the data, what was the bill for? One option is that it would have allowed open use of Prism data in UK courts, without raising questions as to it’s origin.

    • Told You So: If You Have Been Using A Centralized Comms Service, You Were Wiretapped

      This night, news broke that the USA’s security agencies have been wiretapping essentially every major centralized social service for private data. Photos, video conferences, text chats, and voice calls – everything. We have been saying this for years and been declared tinfoil hat and conspiracy nuts; it’s good to finally see the documents in black on white.

    • Entire Internet Thunderstruck To Discover That US+UK Intelligence Agencies Do Their Job

      It doesn’t matter how much data you collect.
      What matters is having the eyeballs to read that data.

    • Pointless Partisanship on Surveillance

      “Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other” is the way conventional Beltway reporters seem to see the world–and it’s reflected in their reporting on political events.

    • Free Software Foundation statement on PRISM revelations

      To protect their freedom and privacy, the FSF urges everyone to contact their representatives, avoid Software as a Service, and donate to support projects working for a better, safer world.

    • PRISM: Write to your MP

      If like us, you oppose mass surveillance, we would encourage you to write to your MP to make your position clear and ask them to act.

    • A lesson from history for those who strive to bring intelligence agencies to account

      The sign is deceptive in two respects. First, the facility is not controlled by the RAF. Second, its function has little to do with traditional Air Force operations. The role of Menwith Hill is to act on US instructions to spy on the world’s communications systems. The presence of at least thirty huge spherical raydomes masking the base’s satellite receiving dishes gives testimony to what goes on there. Only in recent times has this place become infamous as the world’s biggest electronic monitoring spy base.

    • Triangulating On Truth – The Totalitarian State

      The Guardian breaks a big story yesterday – a court document authorizing the FBI and NSA to secretly collect customer phone records. All of them, for all Verizon customers.

      Then today the Washington Post breaks an even bigger story – a leaked presentation stating that the NSA is “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies” to collect information on users. The project is code-named PRISM.

      These are the huge repositories of user information from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. Dropbox, we’re told, is “coming soon.” Twitter is noticeably absent.

    • The Googlisation of Surveillance: The UK Communications Data Bill

      There is a belief that democracies respect the rights of their citizens. Well, they don’t. There is a great deal of cant written about that but even the democratic modern state has become so big, so intrusive and utterly overbearing that its cancerous tentacles have insinuated themselves into every orifice of the body politic. No sooner has one threat to personal and internet freedom receded than another springs up like proverbial dragon’s teeth. One of Hecate’s children of the night has been brewing for a while and is set to make its way onto the statute book here in the UK. It’s called the Communications Data Bill and with Jimmy Wales threatening to encrypt UK users visits to the website in order to protect their privacy it’s clearly a live issue and worth looking at.

    • Senators: Why Is Everyone So Worked Up About Verizon Spying? We’ve All Known About It Since 2007
    • NSA chief, two weeks ago: ‘We’re the only ones not spying on the American people’

      The National Security Agency recently asked Verizon to turn over telephone metadata for tens of millions of Americans, the Guardian reported Wednesday, based on a leaked court document that appears to show an NSA request for customer data from April through July.

      The NSA is both vast and secretive, one of the less-understood agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. And at the top of it is Gen. Keith Alexander, the longest-serving NSA chief ever, who took over in 2005 and is planning to retire early next year. His tenure, like so much the NSA has done in the past decade, has been controversial from the beginning. At the end of the year he took over, it was revealed that the Bush administration had authorized the NSA to run a vast, warrantless program spying on Americans.

    • Privacy Advocates Demand Government Stop Snooping on Private Citizens

      Taking its cue from George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, the Obama administration is mining customer data from major Internet vendors and collecting telephone records of millions of U.S. citizens indiscriminately—regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.

      The National Security Agency (NSA) is currently collecting the records of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order issued in April. It is requiring Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its system—and also demanding Verizon’s silence on the order.

    • Modern Data Centers Fuel NSA’s Verizon Phone Spying
    • Assange: NSA leaker could face same fate as Bradley Manning

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the source who leaked details about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program could face the same fate as Bradley Manning, the Army private on trial for espionage and treason.

    • Assange fears for US Internet spying whistleblower

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Friday he fears the whistleblower who exposed a vast US surveillance programme could face the same fate as the US soldier who leaked files to his website.

      In an interview from the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he has been holed up for nearly a year, Assange defended the public’s right to know about the Internet data mining programme revealed late yesterday.

    • COLUMN – Obama’s overdue reckoning on secrecy

      All day Thursday, Washington officials from across the political spectrum scrambled to explain reports in the Guardian and Washington Post of unprecedented government collection of the phone records of Americans and the tracking of the Google, Facebook and Skype activities of Americans and non-Americans worldwide.

      James R. Clapper, director of National Intelligence, insisted in an unusual public statement that the phone programs did not involve the surveillance of American citizens. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee, asserted the government needs the information to someone those who might become a terrorist. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the ranking member and vice chairman of the intelligence committee, described the program as “meritorious” because it allows government to collect information about “bad guys.”

      President Barack Obama Friday defended his administration’s unprecedented level of surveillance.

    • GAO tells CIA to reopen $600 million cloud deal to competition
    • GAO says “not so fast” on proposed secret Amazon-CIA cloud

      Remember that proposed secure cloud that Amazon was building for the CIA but that no one would acknowledge? Well it looks like it’s on hold, because the U.S. Government Accountability Office has sided with IBM, which filed a formal protest of the awarded contract. News that the GAO was telling the CIA to re-open bids was reported by Federal Computer Week.

    • Amazon confirms CIA spook cloud contract

      Amazon Web Services has confirmed to The Register that it is set to build a massive cloud for the CIA. IBM, however, is still in the running, after the company’s protest at the choice of Amazon was recognized by the US Government Accountability Office.

    • Rand Paul: Orwell’s ’1984′ has arrived

      Senator warns of ‘astounding assault on Constitution’ by NSA

    • NSA Spying Revelations Start To Cause Outrage In Europe; China Next?

      Guardian has confirmed today that the UK has been tapping into Prism for a while

    • Uk To Brit Hacks: Shut Up

      A British Defense Ministry press advisory committee, reacting to a flurry of revelations in the American press about massive warrantless US government electronic surveillance programs, quietly warned UK organizations Friday not to publish British national security information.

      Defiance of the advisory could make British journalists vulnerable to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

    • Renowned Rights Watchdog to Downgrade United States in Freedom Rankings

      If you thought the astounding (and ongoing) revelations about the NSA’s PRISM regime were going to hurt America’s reputation, it appears you were right. Freedom House just made it official.

    • Staffordshire police officers and PSCO quit over ‘misuse of data’

      TWO police officers and a PCSO have quit after they were arrested for ‘inappropriately’ accessing the force’s computer system.

      All three were suspended last year as anti-corruption detectives launched a major investigation into their separate cases.

    • Obama defends surveillance tactics

      Barack Obama defended two secret programmes that allow the US to collect telephone records and emails on Friday amid accusations from Europe that his administration’s embrace of sweeping surveillance tactics had become “monstrous”.

    • Obama deflects criticism over NSA surveillance as Democrats sound alarm
    • NSA Says It Doesn’t Spy On Americans As Obama Administration Defends Letting NSA Spy On Americans
    • Cameron under pressure over spying claims report
    • Let’s All Just Believe What This Shifty CIA-Funded Data-Collecting Company Says

      Talking Points Memo reintroduced us all to Palantir Technologies, a data-collecting semi-private intelligence service that may or may not have been involved with the mass collection of data from private citizens by the National Security Agency. The NSA’s program is called PRISM. Palantir has a program called Prism. Connections were made.

    • Pure Storage Boosts Crypto Features, Takes CIA Money

      While the amount In-Q-Tel paid out wasn’t made public, investment from the spook community is a major endorsement when selling to security-centric government and military clients.

      On the security front, the new version of Pure’s software encrypts all data on the system at rest using self-encrypting SSDs and AES-256 encryption. I assume the self-encrypting drives come from Samsung, as it’s another of Pure’s investors.

    • Trust in government eroding, former CIA director Porter Goss says

      President Barack Obama’s appointment this week of Susan Rice as national security adviser, along with disclosures Thursday about government scrutiny of phone records and Internet data further deepen Americans’ “trust deficit” in government, said Porter Goss, former CIA director and Southwest Florida congressman.

      Goss, a Sanibel resident who’s summering on the family’s farm in Virginia, was CIA director and Director of Central Intelligence from May 2004-September 2006, appointed by President George W. Bush after 16 years in Congress.

    • On Prism

      Prism shouldn’t be viewed as a calamity but an opportunity and we should learn from China and game the market. Regardless of the trade agreements in place, parliamentary sovereignty of EU and the various nation states is absolute and there is no reason why given a will to do so that a ban on US internet giants (even if only temporary) cannot be applied. This would naturally create a vacuum for these services which then could be filled by local EU services with appropriate funding. From a national and EU security stand point this is beneficial along with providing a welcome boost to local economies remembering that many of these giants pay little taxation in the EU.

    • How supermarkets get your data – and what they do with it

      It doesn’t matter if you are part of a loyalty scheme, pay by card or even cash, ‘Big Brother’ supermarkets know your every move

    • Was Canada part of secret NSA spy operation?

      The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, says the Guardian.

      The news came just after US president Barack Obama, “offered a robust defense of the government surveillance programs revealed this week, and sought to reassure the public that his administration has not become a Big Brother with eyes and ears throughout the world of online communications,” according to the New York Times, which quoted him as promising:

    • [Old] An Israeli Trojan Horse

      As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that records of U.S. government telephone calls were ending up in foreign hands – Israel’s, in particular. In 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman’s memo was a reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order titled “2640.2D Information Technology Security.” Order 2640.2D stated that “Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT systems.” This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis, according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on background, “I’ve heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.”

    • Secret NSA Program Gives the Agency Unprecedented Access to Private Internet Communications

      The PRISM program, unlike the NSA phone records program, does not sweep up all data in a vacuum. Rather, it enables government analysts to search the private Internet company’s own data for key terms that are supposed to make it more likely than not that the target is “foreign.” But this requirement of only 51 percent certainty means that much of the information disclosed will inevitably concern Americans. The extent of the information available to the government is extraordinary. The Post reports that, according to a PRISM “User Guide,” Skype “can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.”

    • Obama defends NSA spying program as new Prism details emerge – live
    • NSA Building $860 Million Data Center in Maryland

      As its current data collection makes headlines, the National Security Agency is continuing to expand its data storage and processing capabilities. The agency recently broke ground on an $860 million data center at Fort Meade, Maryland that will span more than 600,000 square feet, including 70,000 square feet of technical space.

      Last month the NSA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building the High Performance Computing Center-2, an NSA-run facility that will be located on base at Fort Meade, which is home to much of the agency’s existing data center operations. The data center will be supported by 60 megawatts of power capacity, and will use both air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment.

    • Inside PRISM: Why the Government Hates Encryption

      Google’s Larry Page and David Drummond are categorically denying that Google gives the government open-ended, back-door access to user data. This appears to confirm my speculation (for Google at least) that these firms are still tightly controlling data access by reviewing and addressing each data demand on an individual and responsible basis. And keep something in mind — the government can use legal means to try force you to be silent about a matter, but they can’t force you to lie, unless they’re resorting to waterboarding and shock collars for Internet executives.

    • Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data

      The top-secret Boundless Informant tool details and maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks

    • Boundless Informant NSA data-mining tool – four key slides
    • Leader’s Update: The Pirate Party and PRISM

      …we do know that PRISM exists. It’s vital we get clarity.

  • Civil Rights

    • Dept. of Homeland Security: Laptops, Phones Can Be Searched Based on Hunches

      U.S. border agents should continue to be allowed to search a traveler’s laptop, cellphone or other electronic device and keep copies of any data on them based on no more than a hunch, according to an internal Homeland Security Department study. It contends limiting such searches would prevent the U.S. from detecting child pornographers or terrorists and expose the government to lawsuits.

    • Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes
    • DHS Says Agent ‘Hunches’ Trump Citizens’ Rights In Searching Your Computer At The Border
    • Why Canadians Should Be Demanding Answers About Secret Surveillance Programs

      Privacy and surveillance have taken centre stage this week with the revelations that U.S. agencies have been engaged in massive, secret surveillance programs that include years of capturing the meta-data from every cellphone call on the Verizon network (the meta-data includes the number called and the length of the call) as well as gathering information from the largest Internet companies in the world including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple in a program called PRISM. This lengthy post provides some background on the U.S. programs, but focuses primarily on the Canadian perspective, arguing that many of the same powers exist under Canadian law and that it is likely that Canadians have been caught up by these surveillance activities.

    • Aaron Swartz’ Dad Wants Justice For His Son

      This morning I received an email from Aaron Swartz’ father, Bob Swartz. It was a politically motivated mass email sent by Demand Progress. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. I get a lot of such emails, from organizations like MoveOn and Common Cause. I get so many that I don’t usually open them. There seems to be a lot of issues facing our country these days.

    • One-quarter of Gitmo prisoners now being force-fed
    • The situation in Turkey

      …website blocking used frequently and abusively; excessive fines on media outlets; journalists imprisoned.

    • Be Prepared for the Inevitable and Unpredictable Mass Movement

      People who seek justice and an end to militarism feel like they are laboring in relative obscurity, organizing seemingly unnoticed actions, but at some point a wave of mass resistance arises.

    • Will Texas Nullify Both NDAA and TSA?

      The measure also forbids removing a child younger than 18 years of age from the physical custody or control of a parent or guardian. The act would put an end to the most intrusive pat-down searches conducted by the TSA.

    • California Assembly passes bill in opposition to indefinite detention provisions of NDAA

      A California bill, AB 351, passed by the state Assembly on 5/31/13, if also passed by the California Senate and signed by the governor, would make it illegal for any California agency or employee to cooperate with the US Armed Forces in any investigation, prosecution, or detention of a person within California under the NDAA, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or any other federal law. Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a national organization which organizes grass roots support for this bill and for others like it around the country, said that the passage of AB 351 by the California Assembly demonstrates support across California “… for due process principles that have been largely ignored by Congress in its ongoing bipartisan assault on the rights of the American people.”

    • While No One Was Looking: House GOP Voted Against GITMO Closure

      Just because the whole world seems to be talking about closing Guantanamo Bay prison — not to mention the President of the United States — doesn’t mean it’s going to happen any time soon. Not if congressional Republicans have anything to do with it.

    • They Should Have Listened To Feingold: Obama Vs. The Only Senator Who Voted Against The PATRIOT Act

      Today, the President of the United States made the case for Big Brother. Yes, he said we should have a public dialogue about these issues, but the fact that it took a bunch of high-profile leaks to make him say that means it’s a load of bullshit anyway. If Obama really wanted debate on these issues, more debate would have been encouraged before quiet and not-much-talked-about votes on PATRIOT Act and NDAA reauthorizations.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Web inventor Berners-Lee warns forces are ‘trying to take control’

      The inventor of the World Wide Web said the internet is facing a “major” threat from “people who want to control it on the sly” through “worrying laws” such as SOPA, the US anti-piracy act, and through the actions of internet giants.

    • What’s the Net Net on Neelie Kroes’s EU Net Neutrality?

      It’s been a while since I wrote about net neutrality, but of course it’s never gone away as an important theme. Indeed, it was inevitable that it would start to rear its ugly head again, since so many powerful companies have vested interests in destroying it. For example, in Germany the telecom giant Deutsch Telekom (DT) has already made a move to kill net neutrality by giving preference to its own IPTV platform. This has led to a heated debate about net neutrality in that country (for those who read German, the site hilf-telekom.de offers some hilarious satire of DT on the subject.)

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • US Businesses Urge Obama To Stoke Trade War With India

      The heads of seventeen United States industry associations, including the US Chamber of Commerce, today (6 June) issued a letter to President Barack Obama alleging that the Indian government is engaging in discriminating policies against US exports and encouraging swift action by the US government. Among the concerns is the country’s treatment of patents.

      The businesses expressed concern that recent policy decisions in India undermine internationally recognised intellectual property standards that are ultimately “jeopardizing domestic jobs.”

      “Over the last year, the courts and policymakers in India have engaged in a persistent pattern of discrimination designed to benefit India’s business community at the expense of American jobs,” the letter [pdf] said. “These actions are unacceptable for a responsible middle-income country and rising global power to treat its second-largest export trading partner.”

    • People Begin To Wake Up To Massive Dangers Of Investor-State Dispute Resolution

      Techdirt has been writing about investor-state dispute resolution (ISDR) mechanisms in international trade treaties like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP for two main reasons. First, because of the scale involved: ISDR allows companies to sue entire countries for huge sums, alleging loss of future profits. And secondly, because few seem aware of this growing threat to the national sovereignty of many countries around the world. That finally seems to be changing, with a number of articles warning about the dangers of ISDR appearing recently.

    • Back African smallholders, not agribusiness

      Today sees David Cameron host a “hunger summit” in London, the first in a series of events leading up to the G8 summit in 10 days’ time. The event will include a meeting of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a private investment initiative launched by the G8 in order to expand the reach of multinational companies into Africa. The UK government has pledged £395m of taxpayers’ money to the scheme.

    • Copyrights

      • Warner Bros: We’re Fining File-Sharers Who Use Non Six-Strike ISPs

        Customers of ISPs not involved in the so-called ‘Six Strikes’ anti-piracy scheme in the United States might be under the impression that warning notices are something they can avoid. However, TorrentFreak has learned that Warner Bros. are specifically targeting users of non-participating ISPs not only with warnings, but also with fines to settle the alleged copyright infringements.

      • Audiovisual Materials in the Classroom and the WIPO treaty for the blind

        My name is Fedro De Tomassi. I am a student at St. Olaf College, class of 2014, and next week I will be a volunteer (as a guide and interpreter) at the Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities (June 17 to 28, 2013 – Marrakesh, Morocco) http://www.wipo.int/dc2013/en/

        People with disabilities including the blind and visually impaired persons must have the same educational opportunities and access to information as any other person. To do that we need to make sure this treaty includes all current and future educational methods. It has to be a relevant treaty for the 21 century and I hope the delegates will pay attention to my generation and the next one too.

      • Apple Ordered to Pay €5 Million in Private Copy Levy on iPads

        In a high profile ruling handed down on May 30th, the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance (trial court) ordered Apple to pay the princely sum of €5,000,000 to Copie France, the body tasked with collecting the private copy levy that applies to blank media and equipment capable of recording and storing such copies.

      • Utah Sheriff Claims Copyright On Mugshot Photos To Avoid Releasing Them
      • Mug shot website sues Utah sheriff for jail photos

        he owner of a website that publishes inmate booking photos is suing a Utah sheriff for denying a public records request for more than a thousand mug shots.

        The Salt Lake County Sheriff denied the records request in February, saying his office could refuse because it holds copyright control over the images.

      • Prenda seeded its own porn files via BitTorrent, new affidavit argues

        Graham Syfert is a local Florida lawyer who has been defending people caught up in Prenda purported copyright suits. Last we heard from the defense attorney, he appeared to have settled some cases with the porn trolling outfit. Nearly two weeks ago, Syfert told Ars that he was still involved in two more Florida Prenda-related cases: Sunlust Pictures v. Nguyen, and First Time Videos v. Oppold.

      • US opposes safeguards in WIPO treaty for the blind that are included in ACTA, and Beijing treaty

        As Love notes, similar language has appeared in a variety of other agreements, including ACTA and the Beijing Treaty (which would give Hollywood stars their own special copyrights). Why is this language important? Because TRIPS includes key provisions that allow countries to make some of their own decisions about how they implement the agreements, to protect the public’s rights. But, the content industry doesn’t want that same language in this treaty, which is focused on the public’s rights, because they’re afraid it will, once again, open the door to countries expanding the public’s rights, and pushing back on egregious copyright restrictions on those rights.

      • Debate Over Mobile Phone Unlocking Highlights Fantasy Thinking vs. Real World

        Today in the House Judiciary Committee, they’re holding hearings concerning cell phone unlocking, focused specifically on Rep. Goodlatte’s proposed bill, which actually seems to be the weakest of all the proposed bills. It doesn’t offer a permanent fix. It doesn’t fully tackle the problem. Actually, it barely tackles the problem, and serves only to punt the issue down the road. That is, it would “repeal” the rejection of the exemption to the DMCA for cell phone unlocking by the Librarian of Congress (if you don’t recall, the whole fight is because the DMCA ridiculously makes it illegal to circumvent “technology protection measures” even if the reason has nothing to do with infringing on someone’s copyright, but every three years, the Librarian of Congress gets to issue “exemptions”), but would allow the Librarian of Congress to revisit the issue at the next triennial review. It does nothing to address the actual problem, which is a ridiculous and broken anti-circumvention clause, section 1201 of the Copyright Act.

      • Why Did Congress Abdicate Its Power To Make Copyright Policy?

        Earlier today, we wrote about today’s Congressional hearings about legalizing the unlocking of mobile phones. That post fretted about the unwillingness of Congress to take on the actual issue. The only reason that mobile phone unlocking is illegal today is because of a broken copyright law, specifically section 1201 of the DMCA, which isn’t about copyright per se, but rather a bizarre, indirect way that entertainment industry lawyers think protects copyright by making technology illegal, and effectively gives those legacy industries veto power over technologies they don’t like. So when Congress realizes how this is abused for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting copyrights, they should respond by fixing section 1201. But that’s not what they’re doing.

      • Morgan Pietz Objects To Duffy’s Bond In Prenda Case, Points Out More Typical Prenda Tricks
]]> http://techrights.org/2013/06/09/android-tablets-domination/feed/ 0 Denying Microsoft the Ability to Spin Compliance on Samba as Goodwill http://techrights.org/2012/12/15/anticompetitive-issues/ http://techrights.org/2012/12/15/anticompetitive-issues/#comments Sat, 15 Dec 2012 16:35:05 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=65165 Jeremy Allison

Summary: Despite Microsoft’s ongoing abuses, a media attempt to rewrite history emerges

THE anticompetitive nature of Microsoft persists with UEFI, a deterrence against Linux and GNU GRUB. Mr. Varghese shows that UEFI is effective at that. It secures Microsoft’s common carrier from competition. Or in his own words:

It’s early days for secure boot, the new method that Microsoft is using to protect its desktop turf, but it would not be unfair to say that the company has succeeded in showing up the sharply fragmented nature of GNU/Linux.

Secure boot is a feature in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the replacement for the motherboard firmware or BIOS. It has been implemented by Microsoft in a manner that effectively prevents easy booting of other operating systems on machines which have secure boot enabled.

This ‘side effect’ is not an afterthought. Microsoft uses it to suppress Linux with the convenient excuse of ‘security’. Yes, offence is spun as necessity. Likewise, Microsoft spins its legal obligation as goodwill as it strives to rewrite Samba history.

Sean Michael Kerner recalls what Microsoft told him. It’s patent FUD:

Why is this so shocking? Well for one – it wasn’t that long ago (six years ago for me), when Microsoft execs weren’t all that thrilled with Samba. In April of 2006, I published an interview with Bill Hilf who at the time was the General Manager for Microsoft Platform strategy. This is what he told me in 2006:

“With Samba I’m really familiar with that technology and I’d say that a lot of what they do under the guise of interoperability is clone ability. I wouldn’t say it’s a great relationship but we have a working relationship. They ask things of us and we say, “That’s our IP.” And they say you should do it because all software should be free. ”

Now in 2012 after ten years of effort, Samba 4 is here thanks in part to Microsoft’s help. The Samba Team also thanks Microsoft for interoperability testing that Microsoft engineers helped with.

Times do change.

No, what changed since then is that multi-billion-dollar fines forced Microsoft to act differently in the practical sense. The pretence, or the act, is just a smart PR decision for them. By “IP” they meant patents and unsurprisingly Samba denounced Novell for a patent deal which the EU Commission found harmful to its case. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2012/12/15/anticompetitive-issues/feed/ 0 IDG is Again Advertising and Whitewashing Microsoft in Articles About ‘Open Source’ http://techrights.org/2011/03/03/idg-microsoft-whitewash/ http://techrights.org/2011/03/03/idg-microsoft-whitewash/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 06:49:28 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=46422 IDG on open source

Summary: Microsoft agenda is served through systematic deception and talking points which are injected by Microsoft employees (poached from an open source background)

IS IT PROVOCATION or is it simply PR? After the Microsoft “loves open source” nonsense [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Jon Brodkin from IDG (Network World) strikes again. He linked to the “loves open source” nonsense in the articles too, probably for some provocation or needless mind control. They do that a lot in Network World, embedding incorrect statements in articles that can only be corrected in rational readers’ comments. For the uninitiated, the Fox News/News Corp. of technology seems to be IDG (paid by Microsoft through IDC) because it controls a lot of publications that cover technology. It has a lot of influence to sell and it sure sells influence by taking steps such as creating a “Microsoft Subnet” and stuffing it — along with other so-called ‘subnets’ — with Microsoft sympathisers. One of them writes about Windows Live Mesh and points out that GNU/Linux is excluded. “On March 31,” she writes, “Microsoft will stop supporting the beta version of Live Mesh. Users of the file synching service must manually upgrade to the full production Windows Live Mesh service or lose the data stored in their folders. This cloud service synchs files between multiple Windows machines and Macs, but because it doesn’t support Linux, other services like Dropbox still have an edge.”

“Microsoft employee defends Microsoft? No way!”Yes, Microsoft sure loves open source, eh? It does not support a single open source platform, even on the Web which is supposed to foster open standards (Microsoft is also banning Free software in its phones). Anyway, in IDG’s Microsoft section/s there is new poison and it comes in pairs. The Microsoft PR campaign now involves its employee, Gianugo Rabellino, who Brodkin says “takes on the hardest job at Microsoft” (we have heard the same thing about Hilf and Ramji). “A few months ago,” says Brodkin ,”Gianugo Rabellino traded his Linux and Mac PCs for a Windows 7 laptop, left the open source company he founded and moved to Redmond for a new job with Microsoft. His goal: improve Microsoft’s credibility within open source circles.”

Bollocks.

His goal was to become rich. He only accepted this job because Microsoft is poaching (or at least trying) open source luminaries like Simon Phipps. His departure from “Linux and Mac PCs for a Windows 7 laptop” was just part of the deal. He sold out. There are mostly reasonable comments in the article and more in LWN (even a reference to Techrights). The whole thing is a whitewash and Dr. Glyn Moody responded to it with: “so, about those software patents MS claims OSS infringes…”

By the same author there is a second piece which got little attention. It’s still from the same source, which is a full-time Microsoft employee. To quote: ‘”Rabellino says his main focus right now “is to enable PHP to shine on our platforms,” including Windows Azure.”‘

Microsoft employee defends Microsoft? No way!

Satipera writes: ‘Rabellino “This company (Microsoft) has changed” What nonsense. If MS could kill #FLOSS today it would.’

Of course it would, but it is trying to invade it to cause harm, just like in Nokia. More remarks about these whitewash pieces from Jon Brodkin can be found in Tuesday’s IRC logs (specifically here onwards) and some of yesterday’s. To quote bits and pieces from yesterday morning (including the complete quote from Groklaw), “page two is all Microsoft talking points, ass covering and propaganda.” Pamela Jones wrote: “Of course, Microsoft wants developers to write for Windows instead of for Linux. But why in the world would a community person want to help them do it? Other than money. Because the end result will not be FOSS, with the F as in freedom.” We’re adding logs below (mostly quoting one longtime reader). █

twitter I’m having a look this finally.  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/030111-microsoft-rabellino.html Mar 02 05:36
TechrightsBot-tr Title: Open source expert takes on the hardest job at Microsoft .::. Size~: 129.16 KB Mar 02 05:36
twitter While this “Apache guy” and “Hard core Debian-ista” might not be able to talk for the free software world, we can be sure that he and Network World are talking for Microsoft and I like some of the things I’m reading. Mar 02 05:38
twitter For instance, the company finally admits, “Developers nowadays are mostly to be found in the open source world. We need to go where they are,” Mar 02 05:39
twitter This has been apparent for about ten years but Microsoft has steadfastly denied it, arguing that no one could possibly make a living off the hobby OS and slinging other insults that we all remember. Mar 02 05:40
twitter The company is also keen to avoid “theoretical” discussions and talk about “specifics” like how to make Windows less dismal by wasting developer time porting free software there.   Mar 02 05:42
twitter Ick, they brag about having an unnamed “insider” someone that, “has inside knowledge about how to connect with [free software] people even if their contact information is not publicly available. He knows all the backchannels.”  I’m guessing this is more the result of Microsoft’s careful monitoring and infiltration efforts than it is a real person but it’s really creepy either way. Mar 02 05:45
twitter barf, page two is all Microsoft talking points, ass covering and propaganda.  No one following free software can read this kind of drek without feeling ill…. why am I wasting my time on it?  To see what else slips out of the obviously prostrate company. Mar 02 05:48
[...]
twitter he he, his friends were all polite about his move to Microsoft as we might expect from free software people but not Microsoft themselves or fauxpen source exploiters. Mar 02 05:52
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[schestowitz/@schestowitz] 2011-03-01 French, English and US Special Forces Enter Libya to Reinforce Uprising #Libya #Feb17 http://ur1.ca/3dbzg Mar 02 05:54
twitter LOL, “We’re living in a mixed IT environment. If you want to develop something that has an impact, you cannot discount the community. Microsoft has a huge community of developers, and has always been about developers. Developers … ” He must have missed Steve Ballmer’s “Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers” speech where Microsoft dismissed their own community.   Mar 02 05:54
schestowitz Hi, twitter Mar 02 05:54
twitter hi Mar 02 05:54
schestowitz Hold on, lemmie read.. Mar 02 05:54
TechrightsBot-tr Title: 2011-03-01 French, English and US Special Forces Enter Libya to Reinforce Uprising #Libya #Feb17 | WL Central .::. Size~: 210.66 KB Mar 02 05:54
twitter I’m getting tired of the article, it’s mostly a puff piece. I went there because PJ laughed at it. Mar 02 05:55
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[schestowitz/@schestowitz] The #Nouveau Driver Is Moving Along Slowly But Surely http://ur1.ca/3dbzx #linux Mar 02 05:55
TechrightsBot-tr Title: [Phoronix] The Nouveau Driver Is Moving Along Slowly But Surely .::. Size~: 17.58 KB Mar 02 05:55
schestowitz It’s 2 Mar 02 05:56
schestowitz Joe Mar 02 05:56
schestowitz Posted two whitewash piece Mar 02 05:56
schestowitz Posted two whitewash pieces Mar 02 05:56
schestowitz http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/030111-microsoft-php-opensource.html?hpg1=bn Mar 02 05:57
TechrightsBot-tr Title: PHP user group lauds Microsoft’s open source contributions .::. Size~: 126.46 KB Mar 02 05:57
schestowitz It’s the same “Microsoft subnet” fluff Mar 02 05:57
twitter PJ nails it.  “Of course, Microsoft wants developers to write for Windows instead of for Linux. But why in the world would a community person want to help them do it? Other than money. Because the end result will not be FOSS, with the F as in freedom.” Mar 02 05:57
twitter What I liked was the admission that the developers are all in the free software world now. Mar 02 05:58
twitter That’s really the reason Windows sucks so bad, Microsoft drove everyone off. Mar 02 05:58
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[schestowitz/@schestowitz] ♺ @@johnsu01 The February issue of the Free Software Supporter is out, and should be landing in your mailbox shortly. Mar 02 05:59
twitter It was always a bad deal but they decided to make it absolutely unbearable for Vista.   Mar 02 05:59
twitter No developers, no work, game over. Mar 02 05:59
twitter I think nouveau is in squeeze.  Have not tried it yet but I have a desktop with nvidia and should give it a whirl.  The nv driver had always been “good enough” for my purposes.   Mar 02 06:00
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[carlopiana/@carlopiana] RT @giammi @carlopiana Also interesting – neither Salk nor Sabin patented their polio vaccines; they donated the rights as gifts to huma … Mar 02 06:00
twitter Intel had me enjoying composite, but I turn it off for the extra speed boost. Mar 02 06:01
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[schestowitz/@schestowitz] ♺ @themadhatter RT @rmcla_ca: VIDEO: “Protests and Civil Liberties” re: #G8 #G20 and Vancouver #Olympics [...] http://bit.ly/fJ0qnE Mar 02 06:02
TechrightsBot-tr Title: Sheldon Chumir Foundation :: Protests and Civil Liberties: Experiences in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver .::. Size~: 18.79 KB Mar 02 06:02
twitter more funnies -> “”When asked if Rabellino might urge Microsoft to build Windows computers that aren’t plagued by constant updates and can start up and shut down as fast as a Linux machine, Rabellino says, “You know, it’s something we should work on.” Mar 02 06:02
twitter beat badly in tech, abandoned by developers, who is Microsoft fooling? Mar 02 06:03
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[carlopiana/@carlopiana] ♻ @gbraad prediction: “I think you wanna make a phone call. Can I help you?” – #Clippy on the new #NokMsft phone <LOL Mar 02 06:04
-TRIdentica/#techrights-[schestowitz/@schestowitz] ♺ @themadhatter RT @oliviachow: My questions in Parl re Inquiry on #G20 and gov’s response: http://bit.ly/g6O5RU #hw #fb Mar 02 06:04
TechrightsBot-tr Title: Olivia Chow, MP – Olivia Chow in Question Period: Call a public inquiry now .::. Size~: 18.57 KB Mar 02 06:04
twitter Gross, he does the patent gangster thing.  “These licenses offer more patent protection than the more commonly used open source licenses, Rabellino indicates. …  It’s really about being pragmatic, it’s not about what license to choose based on an idealistic approach. I see a lot of good stuff in Microsoft licenses when it comes to patent language. There is an advantage there. Why choose one license versus another? Do you want to protect Mar 02 06:05
twitter I should probably stop reading Mar 02 06:05
]]> http://techrights.org/2011/03/03/idg-microsoft-whitewash/feed/ 3 Cronología de Microsoft Extorsión de Patentes Contra GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2010/11/14/msft-extorsion-es/ http://techrights.org/2010/11/14/msft-extorsion-es/#comments Sun, 14 Nov 2010 14:54:04 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=41859 Bogota

Summary: Microsoft’s extortion tactics summarised in Spanish

“Here it goes — the Chronology of Microsoft’s attacks against GNU/Linux in Spanish,” wrote to us Eduardo Landaveri, who kindly provides Spanish translations for us (on an occasional basis).

Landaveri added: “The text version [below] has the hyperlinks between square brackets, so sometimes it’s hard to read when you put them on a web page. I’m also sending it to you as an ODT & PDF so readers can download them.” For cleaner versions with working hyperlinks use the following:

These documents are being distributed in south America to better inform the people there. Below is the simplified text version of the above.

“He aquí una breve cronología de Microsoft extorsión de patentes contra GNU/Linux. Debe ser visto como parte de un ataque mucho más grande en contra GNU/Linux que continúa hasta nuestros días. La imagen que emerge es una llovizna constante de FUD (Miedo, Incertidumbre y Duda)y detrás de las escenas Microsoft se sigue armado. Voy a señalar las principales refutaciones en esta lista, pero el sistema de los EE.UU. Tribunal de Justicia tiene la última palabra y no es a favor de Microsoft[http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/24/1713259]. Las leyes todavía han de disuadir Microsoft para que sus patentes, derechos de autor y sus ataques al software libre hasta que ela compañía colapse. Microsoft se ve obligado a esto, porque nadie quiere que su tecnología de segunda categoría y fallan catastroficamente en los mercados libres.

Microsoft entiende que las patentes de software son un fraude[http://www.fsf.org/news/end-soft-patents], pero los ha utilizado contra la competencia desde finales de los años 90 y ahora es un innovador en el fraude. Bill Gates, ordenó a la empresa para iniciar el almacenamiento de patentes en 1991 y claramente los veían como una herramienta de extorsión judicial[http://www.std.com/obi/Bill.Gates/Challenges.and.Strategy]:

“Si la gente hubiera entendido cómo las patentes se concede cuando la mayoría de las ideas de hoy fueron inventadas, y había sacado las patentes, la industria estaría hoy en un punto muerto. Estoy seguro de que si alguna empresa grande patenta algo obvio relacionado con el modo de comunicación, la orientación a objetos, el algoritmo, la extensión o aplicación técnica u otra técnica crucial. Si asumimos que esta empresa no tiene ninguna necesidad de cualquiera de nuestras patentes entonces esta empresa tiene el derecho de 17 años para tener la mayor cantidad de nuestras ganancias a medida que desee. La solución a esto es el intercambio de patente con otras grandes empresas y patentar más que podamos.”

Microsoft considero patentes un arma anti-competitiva frente a Open Office desde 1998[http://techrights.org/2009/02/10/bill-gates-patents-vs-free-office/] y trató de imponer impuestos a Sun[http://techrights.org/2010/03/10/bill-gates-racketeering-revealed/]. En 2003 Bill Gates planea encaje descubrimiento de metadatos y dispositivos con patentes para excluir a Apple[http://boycottnovell.com/2009/07/31/bill-gates-wants-patented-stuff/]. Ahora, Microsoft ha tomado el fraude de patentes un paso más allá, al no decirle a la gente lo que “sus” patentes violan amenazando a los usuarios finales, al igual que lo hizo SCO con su falsas extorsión de derecho de autor. Sí, Microsoft fue responsable del ataque de SCO también[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20061009152706664]. Microsoft ha lanzado una campaña publicitaria fuerte para extorsionar a empresas que no tienen nada que ver con su propiedad. Como si estuvieran en condiciones de cobrar el alquiler del software libre. Así pues, aquí los seis años de los que reclaman la propiedad de todo el software libre y exigir dinero por protección por cosas no especificadas.

2002 – la planificación de alto nivel.

* 25/09 – Jim Alchin en una reunión de proveedores[http://boycottnovell.com/2009/01/21/patent-lawsuit-on-linux/], “será simple, ‘Hey, estos chicos se apropiaron de propiedad intelectual.” Y si la demanda proviene de Wind River o en X, Y, Z, tiene que haber una. Garantizado ”
* 09/27 -. Jim Alchin escribe[http://boycottnovell.com/wiki/index.php?title=GNU/Linux]: “Necesitamos a alguien para derribar la indemnización ofrecida por Red Hat e IBM para sus clientes. Tenemos que entender exactamente el riesgo que un cliente se encuentra, si una demanda de patentes es exitosa y Linux es desafiado …. DEBE haber riesgos para los clientes que se transmite. “Este correo electrónico es probablemente lo que conducen a la estafa conjunto. Véase también el pdf de Comes vs Microsoft[http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/px07168.pdf].

El Consejero delegado de Wind River declaró ante el Congreso de los EE.UU. en enero de 1994, “Mi perspectiva sobre las patentes de software es simple: dejar de emitir las patentes de software Las patentes de software no deberían existir.”.

2003 – Microsoft financia el ataque de SCO sobre derechos de autor[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20061009152706664].

2004 – Un fraude desde el primer día, el ataque de patentes se inicia.

* 02/08 – La mentira puesta en marcha por Dan Lyons[http://www.forbes.com/2004/08/02/cz_dl_0802linux.html] en el día que Ravicher de OSRM(Open Source Risk Management) publica un estudio de las amenazas de patentes a todo software. Él impulsa reivindicaciones de la patente y los ataques de “fanáticos de Linux” y la reputación de Ravicher. “Un informe que será dado a conocer hoy dice que Linux podría violar cerca de 300 patentes, incluyendo 27 en manos de Microsoft, y advierte que las empresas que utilizan Linux podrían convertirse en blancos de las demandas de varios millones de dólares. … La OSRM de 12 empleados quiere cobrar a las empresas . 150.000 dólares al año por $ 5 millones en la cobertura legal que se activa si es demandado por utilizar programas de código abierto como Linux … (esto podría asustar a) clientes y hacerlos deshacerse de Linux y volver a Unix o Windows de Microsoft – productos que no pueden ser demandados por utilizar. … El informe OSRM representa un nuevo capítulo en (la historia de SCO). ” Su compañero de pluma venenosa autor Robert Enderle[http://slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/206959]-Tecnólogo Analysta de Dataquest, GiGa Information Group, Forrester Research, el Grupo Enderle, todas bajo la nómina de pago de Microsoft- es citado diciendo las mismas cosas, haciendo ver la OSRM y toda la historia como orquestrada por Microsoft desde el principio. Hay tantas mentiras en este artículo que es imposible saber quién es inocente, todos los involucrados estan manchados.
* 11/18 – Amenaza gobiernos usuarios de GNU/Linux[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/print.html], Ballmer dijo en el Forum Microsoft Government Leaders de Asia que Linux viola más de 228 patentes. … “Algún día”, continuó, “para todos los países que están entrando en la OMC (Organización Mundial del Comercio), alguien vendrá a buscar dinero a causa de los derechos de esa propiedad intelectual.”
* 11/19 – Autor repudia el uso de Ballmer de su estudio[http://boycottnovell.com/2007/05/13/war-on-free-software/#comment-44880], “Microsoft esta a la altura de su habitual FUD (el miedo, la incertidumbre y la duda),” dijo Dan Ravicher, autor del estudio de Microsoft cita. “El código abierto no se enfrenta a más, si no menos, el riesgo legal que el software propietario. El mercado tiene que entender que el estudio que Microsoft está citando en realidad demuestra lo contrario de lo que dicen que hace.”
* Desconocido – Mucho tiempo después del hecho, consejero general de Microsoft Smith reveló extorsiones de sus clientes[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index2.htm]. Dado que bajo la GPL (Licencia Publica General) cubre sólo distribuidores de Linux, no dejó que Smith búsqueda pago de regalías directamente a los usuarios finales – muchos de los cuales son empresas de Fortune 500 (y los principales clientes de Microsoft). [Que hizo arreglos con ellos] “las grandes empresas de marca” en los servicios financieros, cuidado de la salud, de seguros y de tecnología de la información. (Dice que no quisieron ser identificado, presumiblemente por temor a enojar a la comunidad de software libre.) [http://boycottnovell.com/2007/05/15/linux-money-for-ms/]

2005 Más del mismo cansado FUD (Miedo, Incertedumbre y Duda).

* 07/10 – Socios FUDS Ballmer de Microsoft en todo el mundo[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/10/ballmer_partners/], Ballmer – inexactamente una vez más – citó una Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) encuesta a partir del verano pasado que puso de relieve la existencia de 287 patentes en el kernel de Linux. “Se rumorea Linux viola 286 patentes.” Microsoft considera que la más amplia aplicación de -las favorables a las corporaciones- derecho de propiedad intelectual, que es parte del billete de entrada a la Organización Mundial de Comercio como un arma que puede ser utilizado contra sus rivales de software.

2006 Novell se vende por $ 400 millones. FUDsters se regocijan.

* 03/26 – Steve Ballmer amenaza a todos los GNU/Linux en Forbes[http://www.forbes.com/home/enterprisetech/2006/03/22/ballmer-microsoft-linux-cz_df_0322microsoft.html], “hay expertos que afirman que Linux viola nuestra propiedad intelectual. No voy a comentar. Pero en la medida en que ese sea el caso, por supuesto, le debemos a nuestros accionistas contar con una estrategia”
* 11/02 – Microsoft y Novell tratado de Patentes.
* 11/03 – Dan Lyons(editor mayor en la revista Forbes magazine luego escritor en Newsweek) arroja acuerdo Novell como la insuficiencia de software libre[http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/03/linux-microsoft-novell-tech-cz_dl_1103linux.html] y clama que el acuerdo condena tanto a competidores como Novell y Red Hat. El jueves por la noche, le pregunté a Jeff Jaffe, CTO de Novell, si podía pensar en una empresa que se había asociado con Microsoft y haber tenido exito como resultado. … Su respuesta fue: “Creo que esta asociación está abriendo nuevos caminos.” … los nuevos caminos que son de última hora son, probablemente, la tumba de Novell. Red Hat creció, Novell se contrajo y ahora esta buscando un comprador.
* 11/03 – Más FUD de Steve Ballmer[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Ballmer-Invites-Patent-Talks-with-Competing-Linux-Vendors/], “Si un cliente dice: Mira, ¿tenemos responsabilidad por el uso de su trabajo patentado? Básicamente, si usted no está utilizando SUSE Linux, entonces yo diría que la respuesta? es “sí” Van a pensar dos veces [antes de descargar GNU/Linux] Hay una gran cantidad de distribuidores de Linux ahora (consideren una tratado como Novell). De repente usted tiene Oracle en el juego,… tienes Red Hat en el juego. ” Red Hat no cedió y no pasó nada. Tanto Ballmer y Ron Hoverspan de Novell, hicierón hincapié en los convertidores de OOXML para Open Office, pero admitieron que estos traductores no iba a funcionar al 100%. No creo que siquiera han llegado al 10% “interoperabilidad” todavía.
* 11/12 – El equipo de Samba pide a Novell reconsiderar su acuerdo de patentes con Microsoft[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061112171106871] . Muchos están disgustados que Novell no consulto con la FSF (Fundación de Software Libre)[http://www.linux.com/articles/114196], “El Equipo de Samba desaprueba firmemente las medidas adoptadas por Novell el 2 de noviembre. Una de las diferencias fundamentales entre el mundo del software propietario y el mundo del software libre es que el mundo del software propietario divide a los usuarios al obligarlos a que de acuerdo con los acuerdos de licencia coercitivos que restringen su derecho a compartir con los demás, mientras que el mundo del software libre anima a los usuarios a unirse y compartir los beneficios del software. El acuerdo sobre patentes alcanzado entre Novell y Microsoft es un acuerdo de división. … El Uso de las patentes como herramientas competitivas en el mundo del software libre no es aceptable “. – De la carta del equipo de Samba[http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/]. el abogado de la FSF, explica, “si (Microsoft) tiene éxito en conseguir una distribución pague regalías por la distribución de software libre, otras distribuciones lo harán. … Que a continuación, tendrá éxito en la marcha del sector comercial fuera de la no- sector comercial, y Microsoft será capaz de usar sus patentes para demandar y bloquear el desarrollo de software en el sector no comercial, sin el temor de demandar a sus propios clientes, que es la fuerza que ahora los mantiene a raya de mala conducta con su cartera de patentes. ” Es una buena cosa que Red Hat y otros no mordieran el anzuelo y que la GPL3 (Licencia Publica General 3) haya frustrado la operación.
* 11/16 – Steve Ballmer explica el acuerdo entre Novell y Microsoft, donde Microsoft dio a Novell 400 millones dólares[http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005171&intsrc=it_blogwatch], Microsoft firmó el acuerdo porque Linux “usa nuestra propiedad intelectual” y que quería “conseguir el retorno económico adecuado para nuestros accionistas por nuestra innovación. Novell nos paga dinero por el derecho a decir a sus clientes que cualquiera que use SUSE Linux está apropiadamente cubierto. Esto es importante para nosotros, porque creemos que cada cliente Linux tiene, básicamente, un pasivo del balance no revelada hacia nosotros. Sólo los clientes que utilizan SUSE han pagado correctamente por propiedad intelectual de Microsoft. ”
* 11/20 – Roger Levy, vicepresidente de soluciones de plataforma abierta de Novell, dijo en una conferencia de prensa en París[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/20/microsoft_claims_linux_code/], “los clientes tuvieron miedo de que ser demandado si cruzó plataformas y esto significaba que estaban dudando en decisiones de compra Como parte. del acuerdo, Microsoft se compromete a no demandar a nuestros clientes y nosotros (Novell) nos pusimos de acuerdo en no demandar a sus clientes “.
* 11/27 – Dan Lyons informa del acuerdo entre Microsoft y Novell como insuficiencia de software libre que condena a Novell y el resto de GNU/Linux vendedores[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1127/044b.html]. el movimiento es también tratada y verdadera estrategia de Microsoft: abrazar, extender – y exterminar. Funciona así: Asociarse con un jugador débil, desesperada. … Desarrollar nuevas características que te ayudan, pero hiere a otros (en este caso, Red Hat). Debilitar a todos en el mercado, a continuación, sigue adelante. Sí, él mismo lo dijo el tres de noviembre.
* 12/21 – Desarrollador de SAMBA, Jeremy Allison, renuncia a Novell por el acuerdo con Microsoft.

2007 – “Respetar la propiedad intelectual” significa pagar a Microsoft por cosas que no les pertenecen. Los proxy ataques lanzado demuestran que la venta a Microsoft no da tranquilidad a nadie.

* 05/07 – Dell se vende [http://boycottnovell.com/2007/05/07/dell-microsoft-novell/] y promete promover SLED (SUSE LinuxEnterprise Server). Los clientes mayoritariamente se oponen a la compra de cupones de Microsoft SLED [http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2007/05/07/14120.aspx] Esto tendrá un costo de ventas y cuota de mercado de Dell.
* 5 / 14 – Otro ataque de Forbes[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm]. Las citas son increíbles, pero Forbes se las arregla para superar a todas los bichos de Microsoft que entrevista. “Vivimos en un mundo donde el honor, y apoyamos el cumplimiento de, la propiedad intelectual”, dijo Ballmer en una entrevista. los usuarios de software libre van a tener que “jugar con las mismas reglas que el resto de las empresas”, insiste. “Lo justo es justo.” El Consejero general de Microsoft Brad Smith y el Jefe de Licencias Horacio Gutiérrez son citados. Revelar la cifra exacta, por primera vez, afirman que el software libre viola no menos de 235 patentes de Microsoft. [Kernel de Linux 42, 65 interfaz gráfica de usuario, Open Office 45, los programas de E-mail 15, 68 no especificados y no existe una patente en la lista. Resulta que estas cifras provienen de un estudio que concluye que el software libre infringe menos que los no libres hace y el autor rechaza las afirmaciones de Ballmer [http://techrights.org/2007/05/13/war-on-free-software/#comment-44880], la fuente[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Author-of-Linux-Patent-Study-Says-Ballmer-Got-It-Wrong/] … “Esto no es un caso de alguna infracción accidental, sin saberlo”, afirma Gutiérrez. “Hay una enorme cantidad de patentes que se ha infringido”. Para colmo, todos los usuarios de GNU/Linux están en peligro de nuevo, ¿Microsoft podría demandar a sus clientes por concepto de regalías, la forma en que la industria discográfica? “Ese no es un puente que hemos atravesado”, dice el CEO Ballmer, “y no un puente que quiero cruzar hoy por teléfono con usted.” [2 shilled por Ina Fried [http://news.cnet.com/Report-Microsoft-says-open-source-violates-235-patents/2100-1014_3-6183437.html] antes que la revista Fortune publique, “Última modificación: 13 de mayo de 2007″]
* 5 / 17 -.. Bill Hilf, Director General de Estrategia de Plataforma[http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/17/microsoft-wont-sue-over-Linux_1.html], “Así que no tenemos planes para litigar Nunca se puede decir que nunca vamos a hacer nada en el futuro, pero eso no es nuestra estrategia … Esto no es como una invención trivial. Hay un par de cientos de patentes importantes aquí. ”
* 5 / 24 – Microsoft se niega a listar las patentes violadas por razones de papeleo y amenaza de Red Hat[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/24/microsoft_novell_patents/], el abogado de patentes de Microsoft, Jim Markwith dijo en la OSBC (Open Source Business Conference), “La respuesta a eso sería administrativamente imposible de seguir.” … el Director de Microsoft de Estrategia de Plataforma Sam Ramji dijo: “Como una compañía que pone 7 billones de dólares al año en Investigación y Desarrollo, tenemos una responsabilidad financiera con nuestros accionistas No tenemos ningún deseo de litigar -. gastamos 100 millones de dólares año defendernos contra demandas por patentes . Seguimos ofreciendo acuerdos de licencia a los distribuidores de piezas específicas de software especificados en el artículo [de la revista Forbes]. Red Hat es bienvenido a venir a la mesa, al igual que cualquier otro distribuidor. ”
* 06/04 – Brian Caulfield de Forbes incluye la oferta de Xandros[http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/04/linux-software-microsoft-tech-cx_bc_0604linux.html]. Los ejecutivos de Microsoft están dando a entender que el problema podría estar gestándose – El mes pasado alegando que los productos de código abierto violan 235 patentes de la compañía. … Aparte de tener que soportar conseguir flameado en algunos foros de uso geek , sin embargo, es difícil ver una desventaja para el Xandros de 80 empleados. Por el lado negativo, leer acerca de la destrucción de la EEPC de ASUS[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/04/xandros-microsoft-teched/] y reflexionar sobre lo que el proyectado de $ 25 millones de dólares de las licencias que han hecho Xandros ($ 5 x 25 millones de unidades, una estimación del precio lowball).
* 04/10 – Steve Ballmer dice usuarios de Red Hat le debe dinero[http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/21/ballmer-talk-red-hat/], “creo que es genial la forma de Novell se enfrentó a los asuntos de propiedad intelectual Cuando las personas usan Red Hat [encogiéndose de hombros], por lo menos en lo que respecta a nuestra propiedad intelectual. en cierto sentido, tienen la obligación de compensnos. ”
* 10/21 – Microsoft proxy Acacia Research lanza una demanda de patentes contra Red Hat y Novell[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141] sobre una patente multi-monitor. Según Groklaw, esta es la primera patente demanda presentada contra GNU/Linux. Tres años más tarde, Acacia pierde. Acacia van a presentar más demandas.
* 11/15 – Bill Hilf, Director General de plataforma de estrategia “. Nos gustaría llegar a acuerdos similares de patentes con todos los vendedores de Linux, pero teníamos que empezar por algún sitio”

2008 – Los Juicios Son Buenos Para los Negocios

* 02/27 – El Grupo Garner advierte al mundo sobre la Microsoft “trampa de las patentes.”[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/02/28/patent-pill-is-in-openness-pledge/], “No utilizar la documentación de Microsoft a menos que haya procesos rigurosos para hacer un seguimiento de las patentes aplicables.” [http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206900525]
* 10/17 – Horacio Gutiérrez, abogado principal de Microsoft de propiedad imaginaria amenaza a Red Hat[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10068367-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20], “Si los esfuerzos por licenciar no resultaran fructíferos, en última instancia, tenemos la responsabilidad para los clientes que si tienen licencias y para nuestros accionistas de asegurar que nuestra propiedad intelectual se respete . ” Lo mismo de siempre, pero tiene el nervio para que apunte a el acuerdo con Novell como un ejemplo de cómo trabajar con un rival en última instancia, pueden beneficiar a ambas compañías, “Es realmente un mecanismo de negocios para iniciar las discusiones que antes no eran posibles”. Un cinismo increíble. [Control de daños[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10070008-16.html]], [perspectiva 1[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081018165715723], 2[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/24/threat-seeded-by-microsoft/], 3[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/18/microsoft-fud-red-hat/], 4[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/21/is-horacio-gutierrez-lying/]]
* 11/24 – La mayoría de la gente piensa sentencia Biski es el fin de las patentes de software[http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/24/1713259].

2009 – Microsoft no puede competir en los dispositivos móviles y de almacenamiento masivo. Microsoft lanza sus propios juicios y más ataques proxy en contra del software libre. La sentencia Biski ha terminado el juego, pero Microsft y otros titulares de patentes pretende lo contrario.

* 23/01 – Matt Assay adivina su juego[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10148928-16.html], pero erróneamente o deliberadamente piensa que Microsoft se ha convertido en “menos estridente”.
* 1 / 31 – FUD en pocas palabras[http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1489-IBM,-Microsoft,-and-the-patent-mess---how-to-protect-yourself]. En este artículo se hace un trabajo notable sobre todas las patentes FUD en temas de conversación como si Bilski nunca hubiera sucedido.
* 06/02 – El fabricante de equipos de Brother firma un acuerdo de patentes como Novell[http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/06/the-novell-sellout-model/].
* 2 / 25 – Microsoft demanda a TomTom[http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/25/232212], sobre más supuestas de una GNU/Linux infracción de patentes. La FAT patente de nombres largos y otros patentes de porquería se citan. El farol que se ha encendido va a terminar mal para Microsoft a pesar de que ganaron.
* 03/09 – Microsoft proxy Acacia Research (también conocido como software de árbol LLC) pone en marcha otra demanda en contra de GNU/Linux[http://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txedce/6:2009cv00097/114766/]. Este apunta a Red Hat, HP, Dell y Genuitec, sobre un administrador relacional de objetos. Red Hat llega a un acuerdo más tarde[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-settles-with-Software-Tree-1101646.html] y muchos de los detalles se mantienen en secreto[http://techrights.org/2010/10/03/software-tree-llc-and-red-hat/].
* 30/03 – TomTom es parcialmente derrotado[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090330130655372]. Es difícil decir quien perdio que sin saber más detalles.
* 7 / 15 – GNU/Linux fabricante NAS es agravado por Microsoft[http://slashdot.org/submission/1039369/GNULinux-NAS-Company-Taxed-by-M-Patents] Una vez más, el acuerdo es secreto.
* 23/07 – Aún tratando de extorsionar a Red Hat[http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3831226/Microsoft+Red+Hat+Renew+Linux+Patent+Spat.htm].
* 09/09 – Microsoft trata de lanzar más ataques proxy, pero fracasa su plan[http://boycottnovell.com/2009/09/11/linux-foundation-vs-ms-trolls/]. Se celebró una invitación subasta para vender las patentes a los trolls de patentes, pero el “ganador” se dio la vuelta y los vendió a la OIN (Open Invention Network). Microsoft hace lo mejor de todo por pretender la venta fue una donación y continuar exagerando el valor de las patentes y FUD.

2010 Software Armagedon de Patentes. Los trolls de Microsoft lanzan todo tipo de ataques en contra de Android de Google, y todo el mundo demanda a todos los demás. Demostrando una vez por todas que los arsenales de “defensivas” patentes sólo sirve para arruinar a la industria.

* 10/27 – Austec y Asus[http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101025PD218.html] demandan Microsoft niveles “derechos de patentes” para bloquear el uso de Android en tabletas.
* 10/20 – Pamela Jones declara el ataque de Oracle en Google SCO II[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101028111354436]. Es difícil decir si Microsoft movió las cuerdas de Oracle, pero son sin duda van a afectar sus propios valiosos recursos.

Cabos Sueltos y Otros Recursos.

02.07 – Xandros devorado por Microsoft[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/07/02/xandros-linspire-microsoft/]. [2[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/07/01/linspire-information/]].

08.09 – Linspire destruido[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/08/09/linspire-ends/] y demandado de todos modos[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/19/linspire-deep-in-lawsuits/]. Más[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/07/01/linspire-information/].

- Corel[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/08/22/selling-out-fail/] destruido por Microsoft, pero su uso de la plataforma Windows dio a Microsoft una asa mucho más grande que las patentes en si.

- Este litigio constante[http://boycottnovell.com/2008/12/18/microsoft-intellectual-welfare-etc/] que revela su respeto real de los bienes imaginarios y desmiente las declaraciones públicas de nunca litigar. Ellos violan las patentes de otras personas a su antojo y se niegan a pagar cuando se pierde en los tribunales, pero siempre se apresuran a hacer amenazas contra el software libre, demandan dinero de otras compañías y utilizar los tribunales para conseguirlo.

- Nuevas empresas troll de patentes, como Intellectual Ventures, vienen siendo creado por Microsoft y sus empleados.

Groklaw Microsoft acuerdo con Novell página de recurso[http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20061218045851480].

Descripción del Boicot Novell acerca del acuerdo Novell-Microsoft[http://boycottnovell.com/no-to-novell/]. █

“Un paisano entre dos abogados es como un pez entre dos gatos.” -Benjamín Franklin

]]> http://techrights.org/2010/11/14/msft-extorsion-es/feed/ 1 Microsoft is Apparently Push-polling for Patent Tax on GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2009/12/12/push-polling-interoperability/ http://techrights.org/2009/12/12/push-polling-interoperability/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:30:02 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=23593 Steve Ballmer license

Image from Wikimedia

Summary: Microsoft is attacking Linux using software patents (with US DOJ approval) while a Microsoft reporter spins the whole situation as “peaceful coexistence”

BACK in October we summarised Microsoft's pattern of push-polling using many examples as well as an admission from top executives. Bob Sutor from IBM warns that Microsoft is currently running a survey to inappropriately warp people’s understanding of the perception of “interoperability” (usually meaning software patents at the expense of standards, a la Novell).

Microsoft appears to be running a survey on “perceptions of interoperability.” I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this is phrased in a completely neutral and objective manner, but you might want to weigh in if you feel you want to help separate perceptions from reality.

To give previous examples of push-polling, other than suspicion alone (e.g. Forrester) we noted that “Microsoft does this all the time, e.g. against Google and in favour of the patent deal with Novell. The Microsoft-corrupted ISO did the same thing after very sheer corruption had led to formal complaints from several national bodies.”

In a step that was mentioned here twice before (earlier this week), Microsoft “urges Flash makers to pay fat dollar for exFAT format”

In March, Microsoft signed an IP licensing deal with TomTom, after the companies exchanged legal threats in court over patents related to the FAT formats. The pair eventually agreed to play nice, much to the chagrin of many in the open source world.

The role of Linux in this whole exercise is finally explained more properly. Microsoft is fighting it using software patents and our reader Oiaohm has shown us this new report which completes a circle in the strategy that came about with the EU Commission.

US DOJ lets Microsoft resume collecting protocol royalties

Microsoft may begin collecting royalties again for licensing some protocols because clear technical documentation is now available, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Tuesday.

The change comes after the DOJ issued its latest joint status report regarding its 2002 antitrust settlement with Microsoft.

The settlement required Microsoft to make available technical documentation that would allow other vendors to make products that are interoperable with Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

As we mentioned the other day, the US Department of Justice is already in Microsoft’s pocket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] (much like the rest of the government after the late nineties).

Microsoft loses ground to Free software in France (despite abuses), but Microsoft Nick does some spinning around fakers like Ramji, pretending again that Microsoft is part of the very same ecosystem that Microsoft is attacking with software patents (and thus patent tax).

Microsoft recently lost one of its key open-source advocates when Sam Ramji, the company’s senior director of Platform Strategy, officially left to become interim president of the CodePlex Foundation on Sept. 25 (although considering that CodePlex is Microsoft’s open-source software project hosting repository, I’m sort of confused as to how Ramji “left Microsoft”). In a blog post at the time written by Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy, Ramji had pushed a vision of Microsoft coexisting peacefully “in a heterogeneous IT world.”

Nice try, Nick. But Microsoft does not want to ‘coexisting peacefully “in a heterogeneous IT world.”‘ Microsoft wants to subjugate its rivals until they play by Microsoft’s own rules and become Microsoft cash cows. That’s not peaceful coexistence, it’s racketeering [1, 2]. █

“Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.”

–Mark Shuttleworth

]]> http://techrights.org/2009/12/12/push-polling-interoperability/feed/ 0 Microsoft Turncoat Quits http://techrights.org/2009/09/11/sam-ramji-leaves/ http://techrights.org/2009/09/11/sam-ramji-leaves/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:43:35 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=18062 Geisha

Summary: Like his predecessors Bill Hilf and Martin Taylor, Sam Ramji decided to give up the game

YESTERDAY afternoon we wrote about Miguel de Icaza joining a Microsoft board and shortly afterwards it was discovered that Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft. Good timing.

Then there is the whole issue of patents and the old school anti-Linux FUD (like the recent BestBuy case). I’ve seen Ramji stand at the front of a seemingly hostile open source crowd defending Microsoft. It didn’t look like much fun to me, but he did it.

Some folks were not entirely sure at the time, but it is now confirmed by Ramji himself. This is good news for Free software because Ramji was doing harm to it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Will someone like Robert Duffner take over? Maybe another new hire? This position is repeatedly left vacant after less than two years. Screwing Free software is not a fun job and those who subscribe for it are not liked; they very well know it.

Speaking of screwing Free software, in his announcement about joining the CodePlex Foundation, Miguel de Icaza makes a seemingly snide remark. He takes a little shot there at the FSF, maybe.

I hope that I can last more on this foundation than I lasted at the FSF, where I was removed by RMS after refusing to be an active part of the campaign to rename Linux as GNU/Linux.

It is not surprising that Miguel de Icaza — just like Novell — is siding with Microsoft and distancing himself from the FSF after they expressed concerns about Mono. In Novell’s case, there is the whole GPLv3 issue.

Also, yesterday in the news we found this report:

MonoDevelop, the IDE for Mono and .NET, has officially gone cross platform with support for Windows and Mac OS X in the new beta of version 2.2. In his blog, Miguel De Icaza says that this is more than just a “plain GUI port” as it also provides “installers, deep operating system integration and support for native debugging on each platform.”

“I was thinking,” writes our reader Seller Liar, “Monodevelop 2.2 does not work using Mono for Windows. It needs .NET framework 3.5 to run.

“MonoDevelop for Windows does not work with Mono for Windows.”

We pointed this out before [1, 2, 3]. MonoDevelop is a win for Microsoft, for Windows, for .NET, for C#, and maybe even for Visual Studio. It’s like a migration route/ramp to all of those things.

Regarding Microsoft’s so-called “Foundation” that is about PR and about embracing and extending “Open Source”, Redmonk, which has Redmond (Microsoft) as a client, says:

The foundation looks like it will feature an open source community around Microsoft-centric technologies, said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk.

“Thus far, that world hasn’t benefited as greatly from the open source world as say, Java has, but there have been several notable tie-ins over the past years,” Cote said. “Setting up a separate entity along with getting all of the IP and patent hoopla ironed out should start to fill that vacuum, namely, where do I go if I want to do open source in the Microsoft world?”

Here is how another person put it: “Microsoft – In need of a bloodless coup”

So here’s the real question… can this foundation be used by external collaborators to start driving the process of cultural change inside Microsoft with regard to patents?

[...]

Or people who want to see Microsoft’s patent litigation culture change can engage and participate in something like this foundation and try to drive a cultural change from inside Microsoft’s own ecosystem.

I think ultimately we are going to need both…both the carrot and the stick. We’ve gotten a good handle on hold to wield the stick. I’m not so sure we know how to comfortably hold the carrot without risking our fingers getting bitten off.

To most of the world, this foundation may seem like a farce; but for dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft developers it might be a place to escape to, pretending that they too are part of “Open Source”.

Microsoft desperately needs more people because when it comes to engineers, Microsoft is massively outnumbered by Free software developers. To make matters worse, Microsoft’s recent additional layoffs show no signs of stopping and on top of the canceled picnic Microsoft is now scaling back on its employee meeting. Todd Bishop writes:

The meeting, traditionally closed to the public and press except on rare occasions, gives Microsoft executives a chance to rally the troops. But given the company’s unprecedented job cuts, the cheerleading stands to be more subdued this year, as highlighted in a recent post by the anonymous Mini-Microsoft employee blogger.

“Folks are going to come into Safeco, grab their box lunch, sit down with their co-workers and friends and as they fold their pink paper airplane, they are going to remark, ‘I can’t believe they are spending all this money for today. <<Fill name in the blank>> and more could have kept their job if they just cancelled this horse and pony show.’ ”

The “new Microsoft” is a smaller Microsoft and a more aggressive Microsoft, as we last showed yesterday [1, 2]. █

“Do you feel like you’re screwing a porcupine and you’re one prick against thousands?” the OSCON audience member asked Ramji. Ramji politely replied: “It takes time to change and I knew that I’d be unpopular when I took this job…”

–Microsoft: Not worried about open source patents

]]> http://techrights.org/2009/09/11/sam-ramji-leaves/feed/ 2 Mono Roundup: Microsoft Following, Deception, and the Moonlight ‘Extend’ Phase http://techrights.org/2009/07/12/moonlight-extend-phase/ http://techrights.org/2009/07/12/moonlight-extend-phase/#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:31:56 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=14611 Stars
It gets dark under the Moonlight

Summary: A further look at Mono, those supporting it, and where it is all likely to be heading

TO those looking for our response to the Mono CP from Microsoft, here is the short explanation and a longer analysis. Some people still inquire about this in the IRC channel.

It is saddening — albeit hardly surprising — that Microsoft is among the big advocates of Mono right now. The pro-Microsoft spinners hold the very same position; Microsoft’s ally and Mary Jo Foley’s friend Gavin Clarke promotes Mono and the Microsoft blog at the Seattle P-I claims in light of this CP that:

The move was another indication that Microsoft increasingly is embracing open-source technology.

Saying you will not sue something based on some conditions that must be fulfilled is hardly en embrace, it is a patronising insult. As Rene Levesque-Caline puts it (in reference to Sam Ramji and other Microsoft decoys [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]):

Does Carmona not realize that tHese are recyclable guys that Redmond sends out to smile and take guff and make us believe that things have changed?
ANYTHING they say is for PR benefits but in no way woyld they have authority to do what you want.
They are low level managers with no power that are sent for PR (Carmona believes that they arent).
Their job is to distract your attention from what Ballmer, Hector Gutierrez and others with REAL power in Microsoft say about free software and Linux.
Have you EVER listened to some low level serf when you want to know which way the company is going or do you listen to Jobs?
Same goes for every big company I can think off.
But because these guys smile and act nice, were supposed to forget that Linux they claim stole from them over 200 times.”Yeah guys, I dont believe what my bald boss claims. Im one of you. Pinky swear.”
Were supposed to forget that Ballmer said that Red Hat users (U-S-E-R-S) owe them money (he also reminds us that VP de ICaza’s company, Novell, has paid the extortion fee and are the ‘legal’ Linux) because Linux stole from them.
Anything the Rajmi’s of this world say has absolutely no meaning because their boss says this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=5B0GTYf PoMo
I am a Red Hat user and Microsoft says that I owe them money because Linux stole their IP.
Has this changed?
No?
Then Rajmi is meaningless as he ever was.
Comes vs Microsoft shows us well how Microsoft acts towards Linux and NOTHING weve heard from the heads of the company has shown this is to be different.
(I dare anyone to show me one quote from a MS head which says differently. I can wait…..)
Are there people in Microsoft who use/develop FLOSS on their own?
Sure, the odds are pretty good. But in a company of that size Im sure you can find also bedwetters, pedophile, addicts and insomniacs like in any large cross section of society. Heck, Im sure you’ll find a few Windows users working at Apple. This shouldnt be considered exceptional.
None of this matters because those ‘brave groups of Redmond FLOSS lovers’ arent the ones who run the company.
And if Rajmi does make a statement now, how much do you think that will mean when Ballmer comes out with his next statement on Linux?
You think you could win in court by claiming that some meaningless peon made certain claims while no one in charge at MS says a word?
I know that we have clients sometimes claim that such and such employee promised things that they had no power or authority doing which is why we always start every partnership by specifying which empployees here speak for the company. Anyone outside these select few does not represent or have the authority to make such claims.
A Rajmi promise would be equally meaningless except it could make for great PR for Microsoft.
At least his predecessor, Bill Hilf, had a little juice then and lots more now and the only thing I remember him during his lovefest was “”The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. ”

Other people whom we consider to be Microsoft sympathisers hold a similar position to that of pro-Microsoft reporters, but they cannot ignore the caveats.

Neither parts of .NET not implemented in Mono, such as ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms, nor libraries developed by Mono specifically for GNU/Linux, have ever been affected by these or any other patents, according to Mono’s Licensing FAQ. However, the affected parts have been more than enough for sections of the free software community to reject Mono, or at least to treat it cautiously.

The same issue gets raised by longtime critics of Mono.

“In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.”

Watch this reaction from Novell’s PR team and pay attention to the fact that a Novell employee embarks on a joint .NET/Mono event (one among other such new events... like MonoSpace). Novell/Mono people are also in Gran Canaria and one reader at LinuxToday complained about “Mono Infiltration” (that’s the subject line of the message).

I run Kubuntu KDE 4.3 RC1 and I just wanted to install sysinfo to check my system specific hardware. When I tried installing it, I was surprised to see the Mono junk. I just couldn’t stand it and I immediately killed it.

Is it in Canonical’s KDE now?

Polls and reactions consistently suggest that the majority of GNU/Linux users doesn’t want Mono. People do not migrate to GNU/Linux (or escape Microsoft lock-in) just to find themselves immersed in a Microsoft movement that evolves and inflates itself from inside distributions like an illness inside GNU/Linux. And when Doctor Stallman warns about this illness [1, 2], then this doctor just gets vilified not for his expert opinion but for his personal life.

A prominent voice in Debian is meanwhile saying that Debian does not come with Mono because GNOME can be separated from Debian.

So, yes, I have overseen two issues when writing my previous blog. But I still think, that it’s wrong to say “Debian will install mono by default”. If you want to say anything at all, say “Debian might install mono with its GNOME install media, but that can still change”.

Some people are justifiably concerned:

Before You Congratulate Mono

[...]

My long held theory is that mono was never to be considered a legal threat, it is a tool to be used in a strategy of erosion … insert a compelling technology, then provide a migration path by adding on proprietary extensions. It erodes Linux and it erodes OSS… and advocacy for it, even in purely legal/ethical ways, using just the free bits, and so forth, help enhance that position and acceptability.

Dana Blankenhorn talks about the negative effect Mono has had on integrity of the Free software movement. According to Blankenhorn, Microsoft is imposing a sort of "mixed source" model on GNU/Linux. Novell, which describes itself as a “mixed source” company [1, 2, 3, 4], would probably like that. It holds the upper hand because it has special ‘protections’ from Microsoft. This includes Moonlight.

So is this just a PR stunt, or is it going to last? I suppose time will tell. If you’re looking for an answer to that question, the existing dependancy Banshee/F-Spot have on System.Data (which is not covered by the ECMA spec) is an interesting place to watch.

This debate is far from over and someone has just created a Web site called “Mono Nono”. But Moonlight is an even more complicated beast that Microsoft — through Novell — spreads in order for it to be slid into GNU/Linux distributions.

Further to this previous discussion about Mono/Moonlight in immutable systems, one person looking for an explanation for “the mischievous wording in their [Moonlight] license” learned that Debian replaces Microsoft codecs with ffmpeg. Further, it was added that:

1. Debian is not an immutable system (do they ship Moonlight on a LiveCD?)
2. Distributing ffmpeg is a patent risk (MP3 and others)

If we hypothetically assume, for one moment, that the core of Moonlight is not, itself, patent encumbered, but that reliance on these codecs pulls-in patent risks, then that would leave a choice of one of the following, equally unacceptable scenarios:

1. The vendor ships Moonlight prebuilt against ffmpeg, which is a patent risk, since ffmpeg has not licensed any of the patent encumbered codecs it uses (most notably MP3). End users won’t really care about this though … until the vendor goes to court. Fedora bans such software for this very reason: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

2. The vendor ships Moonlight prebuilt against a sanitised version of ffmpeg (essentially nothing left except vorbis and theora), thus leaving the end users with software that, in practical terms, is nearly useless

3. The vendor complies with patent law (no ffmpeg), but can/will not distribute proprietary software (Microsoft codecs), and therefore chooses to ship Moonlight “naked”. End users must then either accept Microsoft’s proprietary and patent encumbered “codec pack” as a “pushed” download, or somehow figure out how to rebuild Moonlight against ffmpeg themselves, by downloading the source from patent safe-harbours (I tried and failed to rebuild Moonlight, as seen in the link I provided). Note that unlike modular media players, such as Xine, ffmpeg does not utilise loadable plugins, therefore users must either obtain binaries that already support the required codecs, or rebuild it themselves. Rebuilding ffmpeg is not particularly difficult (for someone like me), but rebuilding Moonlight has proved to be rather less easy. Most users (noobs in particular) will just give up at the first hurdle, and default to accepting Microsoft’s proprietary blobs

4. The vendor ships Moonlight with Microsoft’s codec pack under license (e.g. Novell), and thus both the vendor and users are protected by both copyright and patent law (explicit grant). However, the vendor is now distributing proprietary software, and so end users have lost their Freedom as a de facto condition. They also have the technical disadvantages of Microsoft’s blobs (bugs, privacy, security, etc.)

Now consider that Moonlight is in fact patent encumbered, and that Microsoft only provided indemnity for direct “downstream recipients” from Novell to use this software.

Conclusion: The only practical and legal way to obtain and use this software, is to be a Novell customer running SUSE, and use their distribution of Moonlight in conjunction with Microsoft’s proprietary codec pack.

This hurts GNU/Linux, Open Standards, Free Software, developers, and users, whilst greatly benefiting Microsoft’s agenda of software and standards dominance.

Can you see why this might be a problem?

[...]

The LGPLv2.1 does not prohibit distribution under immutable systems.

The license for Moonlight does prohibit LGPL distribution under immutable systems.

Therefore Moonlight is not licensed under LGPLv2.1.

At best, it could be described as “LGPLv2.1 with modifications”, but given that the LGPL explicitly prohibits “further restrictions”, and Moonlight’s license stipulates such a “further restriction” (the “immutable” clause), then I don’t really see how it can be truthfully described as LGPL software at all. Novell would be more honest if they described it as a “Microsoft EULA”, since that’s only one small step away from what it really is.

What role (if any) does Moonlight play in Microsoft’s infamous “extend” phase? Thoughts welcome. █

Richard Stallman and the GPLv3

]]> http://techrights.org/2009/07/12/moonlight-extend-phase/feed/ 26 IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: April 20th, 2009 – Part 3 http://techrights.org/2009/04/21/irc-log-20042009-3/ http://techrights.org/2009/04/21/irc-log-20042009-3/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:41:19 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=9079 GNOME Gedit

Enter the IRC channel now

To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.

DavidGerard at least the first one Apr 20 20:02
schestowitz Anyway, it’s back now. I found the right table in the 100+MB maze Apr 20 20:02
DavidGerard :-) Apr 20 20:02
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 20:03
schestowitz DavidGerard: do you do .htaccess? Apr 20 20:03
DavidGerard i saw the css break, saw the story titles break and i knew *exactly* what you were doing Apr 20 20:03
schestowitz Thanks for helping Apr 20 20:03
DavidGerard do i set stuff up with it? not generally Apr 20 20:03
schestowitz The thing is this: Apr 20 20:03
schestowitz WordPress loop is simple Apr 20 20:03
DavidGerard the page on ‘nice urls’ on mediawiki.org has some info on this Apr 20 20:03
schestowitz It gives all URL requests to inde.php  (wordpress in home dir) Apr 20 20:03
DavidGerard you should probably add to it how not to destroy a wordpress installation on the same url Apr 20 20:04
schestowitz So how do I tell wordpress or apache to move “/” elsewhere? Apr 20 20:04
DavidGerard oh dear lord, so you have to hack in something to recognise mediawiki Apr 20 20:04
schestowitz DavidGerard: not exactly Apr 20 20:04
DavidGerard a good way is with a subdirectory Apr 20 20:04
schestowitz Maybe it’s how Apache handles PHP files Apr 20 20:04
schestowitz I never understand this Apr 20 20:05
DavidGerard hmm, hold on, does that work with wordpress? i was thinking of copperminde Apr 20 20:05
DavidGerard well, it should just run them Apr 20 20:05
DavidGerard brb, kid is yelling Apr 20 20:05
schestowitz Like… it would pass it to MediaWiki if the right URLs are asked for in a dir with .htaccess Apr 20 20:05
schestowitz I’ll flush cache Apr 20 20:07
schestowitz Flushed Apr 20 20:11
*NeonFloss (n=imsorry@rdsl-0145.tor.pathcom.com) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 20:22
NeonFloss hey you all Apr 20 20:22
NeonFloss I just noticed something cool Apr 20 20:22
NeonFloss phosphorus (FOSS For Us) lol :p Apr 20 20:22
*zer0c00l (n=zer0c00l@210.212.255.131) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 20:31
*magentar (n=magentar@94.79.137.163) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 20:32
schestowitz Not much useful help in #wordpress Apr 20 20:39
schestowitz <schestowitz> Hi, I need help with WordPress redirection. Is it possible for me to instruct wordpress to redirect from the index/root page (“/”) to another page? Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <ozmodiar> Add comments_template(); Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <ozmodiar> schestowitz: Yes, Settings -> Reading. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> I want to make the index be a MediaWiki component in another directory (one that points at WordPress posts). Any help/pointers appreciated. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> ozmodiar: I see…. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> Let me see if this can be hacked to escape WordPress’ main loop Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <ozmodiar> lewb: Youre comments_template is probebly broken. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <Duesentrieb> schestowitz: can’t you just use url rewriting? Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <lewb> it works on an actual post Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <ozmodiar> schestowitz: Else you can use .htaccess. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> Thanks. I’m trying just that Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> I just a dummy page from which to redirect. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> If this succeed, then I’d be thrilled Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <Duesentrieb> uh, for url rewrites or http redirects, you don’t need a dummy. Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <Duesentrieb> it happens before wordpress is ever executed Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <element> .htaccess -> Redirect 301|302 /old-permalink http://destination.com Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> element: thanks Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> here’s the problem I have now Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> I created a dummy page Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> I set up a redict that works for it Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> Taking me to MediaWiki Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> Assigning front page to this dummy page does not latch onto the redir though Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> It sites there on the ‘main page’ in the address bar Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> It’s as though WordPress serves the static page without touching that URL Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz <schestowitz> Any way around it? Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz I’m installing a plugin now Apr 20 20:40
schestowitz http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/… Apr 20 20:41
Balrog schestowitz: you’re learning that it’s best to keep a wp site in like /wp :) Apr 20 20:42
schestowitz Maybe. Apr 20 20:43
schestowitz I set it up this way in my personal blog Apr 20 20:43
schestowitz Ah! Apr 20 20:46
schestowitz I think it works now Apr 20 20:46
schestowitz Try it Apr 20 20:46
schestowitz Main page of BN Apr 20 20:46
schestowitz And I have a powerful tool with regexes for WordPress (one level above Apache) Apr 20 20:46
Balrog seems to work now :) Apr 20 20:47
Balrog now write about the Sun / Oracle thing Apr 20 20:48
schestowitz yaya Apr 20 20:48
schestowitz Balrog: nope Apr 20 20:48
schestowitz I think not and I’ll tell you what Apr 20 20:48
Balrog …? I think it’s important … Apr 20 20:48
schestowitz Unless you have an angel, then you’re one in a million that write about something that people developed fatgue for Apr 20 20:48
schestowitz Balrog: it is, but many people covered it by now Apr 20 20:49
Balrog ok. Apr 20 20:49
schestowitz If it’s not breaking some part of the news, then I’ll accumulate some points and see if there’s a new angle I know about Apr 20 20:49
schestowitz Like how it related to Novell, Java, Go-oo Apr 20 20:49
schestowitz Same with IBM at the time Apr 20 20:49
schestowitz I hardly mentioned it and it never materialised either Apr 20 20:49
Balrog ok. Apr 20 20:49
schestowitz If I just parroted news of the day, then we’d be Yet Another FOSS Site Apr 20 20:50
schestowitz People don’t need thta Apr 20 20:50
*NeonFloss has quit (“Going!”) Apr 20 20:50
schestowitz element,  ozmodiar, and Duesentrieb solved it with me, so I thanked them… it’s solved now. Solution: installed this thing: http://urbangiraffe.com/plug… Apr 20 20:52
schestowitz Mashup of CMSs is fun Apr 20 20:52
*kentma has quit (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out)) Apr 20 20:59
*kentma (n=user@host86-161-70-212.range86-161.btcentralplus.com) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 21:00
*PetoKraus has quit (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out)) Apr 20 21:14
schestowitz OK, final tweaks and here is the new front page of Boycott Novell: http://boycottnovell.com Apr 20 21:18
zer0c00l sam ramji blabs again: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl… Apr 20 21:21
schestowitz Get garlic Apr 20 21:23
schestowitz It’s getting dark for Microsoft: Analyst: More Layoffs Coming To Microsoft: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/41… Apr 20 21:23
*DavidGerard is back, v slightly Apr 20 21:25
DavidGerard ahhhh i see what you’ve done Apr 20 21:26
DavidGerard front page is now the wiki Apr 20 21:26
DavidGerard that’s like the setup we have at work Apr 20 21:26
*PetoKraus (n=pk@fsf/member/petokraus) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 21:26
DavidGerard you have to be very careful with your urls, and preserving old urls is a b*gg*r, but it’s lovely when you get it working Apr 20 21:27
zer0c00l schestowitz, front page looks better Apr 20 21:27
zer0c00l :) Apr 20 21:27
DavidGerard i like the front page having a list of ‘links’ stories and a list of ‘real’ stories Apr 20 21:27
schestowitz Microsoft fires, Google hires: Google Still Hiring Lots of Engineers (And Some Daycare Workers Too) < http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-g… > Apr 20 21:27
DavidGerard the way i usually read the blog is to right-click the headings for each story then read them in their tab Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz DavidGerard: :-) Apr 20 21:28
DavidGerard so seeing an index first is v helpful Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz Yes, and good news… Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz More layoffs likely coming to Microsoft Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz There are leaks Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz And Google is hiring still. Apr 20 21:28
DavidGerard more than the 3600 unspecified victims? Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz Yes Apr 20 21:28
schestowitz I will post in BN quickly Apr 20 21:29
schestowitz Fallen behind Apr 20 21:29
schestowitz After getting some tears (no really) over messing things up Apr 20 21:29
DavidGerard i know that feeling :-) Apr 20 21:29
DavidGerard it’s bad enough on a work intranet for ten people Apr 20 21:29
schestowitz I’d better knock the Wiki into shape more quickly now that it’s visited more Apr 20 21:29
DavidGerard let alone a popular news site Apr 20 21:29
DavidGerard oh yes Apr 20 21:29
DavidGerard you can do some really funky presentational stuff with css and skins on mediawiki too Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz Yes, I know Apr 20 21:30
DavidGerard you can make it not look like a wiki at all Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz But not yet Apr 20 21:30
DavidGerard yep! keep it incremental! Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz Nod Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz I lost track of some things I planned to do Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz 6-9 i burned time on the wiki Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz It’s like an addiction Apr 20 21:30
DavidGerard preserving urls is excellent Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz I said, only 15 minutes Apr 20 21:30
DavidGerard :-D Apr 20 21:30
schestowitz And then you go on and on Apr 20 21:31
DavidGerard you have a new COOL THING to HACK ON! Apr 20 21:31
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 21:31
DavidGerard mediawiki-l is a helpful list Apr 20 21:31
DavidGerard brb. phone Apr 20 21:31
DavidGerard back Apr 20 21:33
DavidGerard (i’m at home on call) Apr 20 21:33
schestowitz So anyway, things are working well this week Apr 20 21:34
schestowitz Ubuntu 9.04 out Apr 20 21:34
schestowitz And Microsoft to report major slump the same day(ish) Apr 20 21:34
schestowitz And maybe announce more closures/layoffs Apr 20 21:34
schestowitz Why the obsession over Microsoft? No other company hates FOSS and Linux so much. Apr 20 21:35
DavidGerard indeed Apr 20 21:35
DavidGerard and so many tentacles do actually trace right back to them, really obviously Apr 20 21:36
*DavidGerard has created an account on the wiki Apr 20 21:36
DavidGerard suggested extension: CheckUser Apr 20 21:36
DavidGerard it allows you to check what IP a vandal is coming in from without having to do handcrafted SELECT * on the recentchanges table Apr 20 21:36
schestowitz SCO Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz maybe SUN too Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz PJ brought it up again Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz The “Sun being offered something to sue Linux” Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz Probably MS Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard Sun was not much of a friend of OSS at the time Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard ie. mcnealy wasn’t a fan Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz I wrote about it when Jonathan Ponytail blogged it Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard yep Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard he’s a fan of OSS Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz I hear that Jonathan Ponytail has a new job as Ellison’s baber Apr 20 21:37
schestowitz *barber Apr 20 21:37
DavidGerard otoh, OSS was basically Sun’s “Hail Mary” pass to try not to go broke Apr 20 21:38
schestowitz He’ll keep the bog alias “ponytail” Apr 20 21:38
DavidGerard oracle really couldn’t give a hoot about OSS except insofar as it involves commodifying every other part of the cost of a database ssytem Apr 20 21:39
DavidGerard i am not sanguine about Oracle giving a hoot about the OSS that Sun was custodian of. They’re proprietary through and through their insanely expensive little hearts Apr 20 21:39
DavidGerard the only plus point i can think of is that ellison and gates f*cking hate each other ;-D Apr 20 21:40
*zer0c00l has quit (“bedtime”) Apr 20 21:43
schestowitz Oh Oracle Apr 20 21:44
schestowitz Pardon me being slow Apr 20 21:44
schestowitz It has been a good day, but Oracle is a mixed bad Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz Would IBM have been better? Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard yes Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard at least ibm are slightly in the business of open source Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard and very slightly in the business of free software Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz Hehe. Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard oracle have sleepycat Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz I can think of a funny post to do Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard and don’t care Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz Give me a couple of minutes Apr 20 21:45
DavidGerard and innodb, and don’t care Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz I’ll remark in one word Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz Using the video Apr 20 21:45
schestowitz Hold onb. Apr 20 21:46
DavidGerard my personal interest is that i’ve been a solaris admin for 8 years and i’d rather not have my cv go up in smoke ;-) Apr 20 21:46
DavidGerard heck, i might have to learn this ‘leengux’ that all the kids are into Apr 20 21:46
schestowitz Damn. I thought I had it as ogg Apr 20 21:47
schestowitz I never made one… Apr 20 21:47
schestowitz http://boycottnovell.com/2009/0… Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz :-) Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz hehe. Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz DavidGerard: was the same for me in a sense Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz I did my degrees in the Old (Victoria) Univ. of Manc. Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz Then they merged with UMIST which is inferior Apr 20 21:52
schestowitz So the names of the new university is… you’ve guessed it Apr 20 21:52
trmanco Digg Ends Exclusive Ad Deal with Microsoft: http://www.clickz.com/3633453 Apr 20 21:53
schestowitz Basically, the reputation of my degrees may decline although it says nothing about the university I was REALLY in (before the merger) Apr 20 21:53
schestowitz RAE 5* Apr 20 21:53
schestowitz trmanco: yes, got that Apr 20 21:53
schestowitz trmanco: I already feel like Digg is less hostile towards us Apr 20 21:55
schestowitz Also: Apr 20 21:55
schestowitz This may lead to speculations about Google and Digg Apr 20 21:55
schestowitz Google was gonna buy Digg last year Apr 20 21:56
schestowitz MS advertising was like a pawn in there Apr 20 21:56
schestowitz Making it a poison pill and acuisition unattrative Apr 20 21:56
schestowitz MS put  a stake in Facebook (and overpaid) for the same reason Apr 20 21:56
schestowitz They block Google takeover Apr 20 21:56
trmanco scary Apr 20 21:57
balzac soon there’ll be one big application Apr 20 21:57
balzac and little pockets of AGPL licensed applications Apr 20 21:58
balzac the mega webservices and applications are getting almost everyone Apr 20 21:58
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 21:58
balzac you can’t get your fair share of traffic if you don’t partake Apr 20 21:58
DavidGerard well, AGPL is enough of a licence to be copyleft Apr 20 21:59
DavidGerard free software is science rather than alchemy, so it wins *eventually* Apr 20 21:59
DavidGerard it’d just be good if it was sooner rather than later Apr 20 21:59
*DavidGerard is watching the ellison video Apr 20 21:59
balzac people should go back to saying “search” rather than “google” as a verb Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard i see he’s politely not adding “and gates is an asshole and I hate the bastard” Apr 20 22:00
balzac larry ellison is a douche Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard balzac: theoretically. however, they pretty much always mean “google.” Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard google’s monopoly on search is cos they’re REALLY GOOD Apr 20 22:00
balzac i can’t help but like Bill Gates more than him, with his 400′ yacht Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard the kids don’t understand that these days Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard i remember what search was like in 1997, 98 Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard oh my god Apr 20 22:00
DavidGerard google was the first. search engine. that didn’t. SUCK. Apr 20 22:01
schestowitz DavidGerard: Wikipedia uses some Sun, right? Apr 20 22:01
DavidGerard it’s hard to get across how remarkable this was Apr 20 22:01
schestowitz There was a recent announcemnt. Apr 20 22:01
balzac DavidGerard: there’s that, and there’s the fact that people don’t evaluate the cost of putting all their attention through one corporate entity Apr 20 22:01
DavidGerard that’s why they never advertised Apr 20 22:01
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 22:01
DavidGerard but y’know, people wouldn’t use google if they weren’t really good Apr 20 22:01
DavidGerard even ms employees use google rather than live search Apr 20 22:01
balzac well, the only way to push back is to “exploit” their web services Apr 20 22:02
DavidGerard yeah, we use lotsa sun boxes Apr 20 22:02
DavidGerard dell and sun Apr 20 22:02
DavidGerard the wmf servers are x86 ubuntu server Apr 20 22:02
balzac to make Google’s data available as a white-label service by violating their TOS Apr 20 22:02
balzac once again, it comes down to civil disobedience Apr 20 22:02
DavidGerard there are some wikimedia.de/toolserver.org servers that are solaris, i think Apr 20 22:03
DavidGerard i might be out of date on that Apr 20 22:03
DavidGerard we have some x86 sun boxes at WMF Apr 20 22:03
DavidGerard at my workplace (which isn’t WMF) we ahve sun and dell Apr 20 22:03
DavidGerard the suns are mostly solaris 10 with some linux Apr 20 22:03
DavidGerard the dells are mostly rhel/centos with one or two solaris :-) Apr 20 22:04
DavidGerard mostly x86, some old sparc boxes we want to get rid of Apr 20 22:04
balzac I was put off by Google’s refusal to host an AGPL-licensed applications Apr 20 22:04
DavidGerard some ancient x86 Fedora Core 3 boxes we desperately want to get rid of Apr 20 22:04
DavidGerard balzac: yeah. that’s … rather telling. Apr 20 22:04
DavidGerard basically, the AGPL is to Google what the GPL is to Microsoft. Apr 20 22:04
schestowitz Linux is up and Microsoft keeps collapsing: http://boycottnovell.com/2009/04/… Apr 20 22:04
DavidGerard web services apps need to be AGPL. Apr 20 22:05
DavidGerard GPL is BSD when it’s the service. Apr 20 22:05
balzac In principle, it was the same as Microsoft’s ideological opposition to the copyleft Apr 20 22:05
balzac DavidGerard: yep, I said the same as soon as Chris DiBona announced that decision Apr 20 22:05
DavidGerard it’s the one thing that could compete with them in a non-proprietisable way] Apr 20 22:05
schestowitz DavidGerard: thanks for the info re: Wikipedia Apr 20 22:06
balzac I’ll start liking Google again if they make *substantial* donations of cash to the FSF and GNU Apr 20 22:06
schestowitz I get allocated to the Ditch mirror here Apr 20 22:06
schestowitz *Dutch Apr 20 22:06
schestowitz Or maybe it’s where the host is registered Apr 20 22:07
DavidGerard yeah, europe is served from the amsterdam proxies Apr 20 22:07
DavidGerard the databases all live in florida Apr 20 22:07
DavidGerard there’s a squid farm in amsterdam Apr 20 22:07
schestowitz Florida needs lots of AC for DCs Apr 20 22:07
DavidGerard there used to be one in south korea, sponsored by yahoo, but that’s being decommissioned (i don’t know why) Apr 20 22:07
schestowitz Also, pray for no rising water level Apr 20 22:07
schestowitz Some of my relatives live in Miami Beach. It’s totally flat Apr 20 22:08
DavidGerard the servers are in tampa Apr 20 22:08
balzac if not, I’ll see them as a very big corporate blob, currently benevolent by virtue of their indifference to freedom, soon to become malevolent as time catches up with them Apr 20 22:08
schestowitz DavidGerard: where is Wales from? Apr 20 22:08
balzac Roy, that’s a pull-quote for your website Apr 20 22:08
DavidGerard (the foundation is registered in st petersburg and now runs from san francisco) Apr 20 22:08
trmanco “Tomboy is not going away, and it will continue to be developed on the extremely productive Mono/GTK# language platform. Anyone thinking about distributing Gnote should consider the impact on users and their data. When we develop, we should always be asking ourselves, “is this adding value for our users?”” Apr 20 22:08
*schestowitz too lazy to check Apr 20 22:08
DavidGerard wales is from alabama originally Apr 20 22:08
trmanco productive mono/gtk#? fail Apr 20 22:08
DavidGerard moved to florida at some stage, set up bomis, set up nupedia Apr 20 22:08
schestowitz balzac: added to quote file Apr 20 22:08
balzac ;) Apr 20 22:09
DavidGerard wow, that’s complete proprietary fud Apr 20 22:09
schestowitz “I’ll see Google as a very big corporate blob, currently benevolent by virtue of their indifference to freedom, soon to become malevolent as time catches up with them” –Paul Gaskin Apr 20 22:09
DavidGerard one of the first things people do with open source apps is file format converters Apr 20 22:09
MinceR time has caught up with them long ago Apr 20 22:09
trmanco http://automorphic.blogspot.com/2009/04… Apr 20 22:09
DavidGerard google’s advantage right now is that their products don’t suck Apr 20 22:09
trmanco scroll down to the gnote part Apr 20 22:10
DavidGerard in fact their good stuff is fantastic Apr 20 22:10
schestowitz “Some people have started asking about Gnote, Hubert Figuiere’s line-for-line port of Tomboy to C++. Our stance on Gnote is that it is counterproductive to maintain identical software in two languages. It will be harmful to the community, especially as these two apps inevitably diverge. It will result in duplication of effort, duplication of bugs, and a lot of wasted time for those who are trying to add value to the user experience Apr 20 22:10
schestowitz .” Apr 20 22:10
schestowitz Hehe. Mono devs worry Apr 20 22:10
schestowitz What? Me worry? Apr 20 22:10
schestowitz The fight against the fork… Apr 20 22:11
schestowitz Well, if they didn’t use MS SW, that would not have happened, I guess. Apr 20 22:11
balzac DavidGerard: if Google doesn’t maintain their reputation of having an interest in freedom, their programmers will lose moral and their web-services will begin to fail our expectations. Apr 20 22:11
balzac Google must pay attention to the GNU-Father’s vision because RMS has his eyes on the horizon, while Google is increasingly looking at their quarterly profits for share holders. Apr 20 22:12
MinceR it was such a great idea to replace xorg.conf with .fdi files Apr 20 22:12
MinceR it worked too well, something had to be done about it! Apr 20 22:12
balzac Google has too much momentum to fail quickly and terribly. They could make an adjustment to their corporate culture and recover from their current trend. Apr 20 22:12
schestowitz Google will be hard to dethrone in search Apr 20 22:13
schestowitz it’s dangerous because of dpeendency Apr 20 22:13
schestowitz Also ownership and control of data Apr 20 22:13
schestowitz Location wise, not just format Apr 20 22:13
schestowitz Privacy Apr 20 22:14
DavidGerard you’re not locked into gmail, you can imap your data out daily Apr 20 22:14
DavidGerard yeah. it’s the click trail. Apr 20 22:14
*DavidGerard has left a polite note on the tomboy blog asking “did you really mean what you just said?” Apr 20 22:14
schestowitz But let’s finish off Microsoft so that we can use Linux peacefully and move colleagues to it also Apr 20 22:14
Balrog with yahoo mail, you can’t use pop or imap without paying :( Apr 20 22:14
schestowitz Then the cloud will be worth worrying about more Apr 20 22:14
balzac http://www.buzzfeed.com/akdobbins/… Apr 20 22:14
*magentar has quit (Connection timed out) Apr 20 22:15
*mib_vsozp6 (i=a6be3f73@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-46fcc5ceeb80da94) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 22:17
DavidGerard the area google really needs competition is ad networks Apr 20 22:18
DavidGerard ms are fools to be pursuing search so hard Apr 20 22:18
mib_vsozp6 Orc via a webpage via my phone. Amazing. Apr 20 22:18
DavidGerard they need to make an ad network that sucks less than google’s Apr 20 22:19
DavidGerard then advertisers and publishers will flock to it Apr 20 22:19
schestowitz When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper  < http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/2… > Apr 20 22:19
balzac Microsoft is a ship of fools because of their ideological opposition to computer users’ freedom Apr 20 22:19
mib_vsozp6 Irc :) Apr 20 22:19
schestowitz mib_vsozp6: on phone? Apr 20 22:19
schestowitz Welcome Apr 20 22:19
balzac Google is a ship of fools to the extent that they’re ideologically indifferent to computer users’ freedom Apr 20 22:19
mib_vsozp6 Keyboard is a wee bit small Apr 20 22:19
schestowitz What gadget is it? Apr 20 22:20
mib_vsozp6 Sitting here bored in a bookstore waiting for new tires to be installed on the car. Apr 20 22:21
mib_vsozp6 Iphone Apr 20 22:21
DavidGerard heh Apr 20 22:21
DavidGerard we just got a nokia 5800 Apr 20 22:21
DavidGerard it’s got all the features of an iphone, except the feature of an interface that isn’t made entirely of FAIL Apr 20 22:21
DavidGerard oh, and it only takes nokia headphones Apr 20 22:22
balzac check this out Apr 20 22:22
mib_vsozp6 Would love to be using the openmoko but is not there yet Apr 20 22:22
DavidGerard that nyt story hit the nail on the head: books as vinyl records Apr 20 22:22
schestowitz I’ve just removed the <h3>Sun</h3> bits from my links template for BN Apr 20 22:22
balzac certain club owners in moscow have stayed on top of “the scene” Apr 20 22:22
DavidGerard mib_vsozp6: and you can’t even get hold of one Apr 20 22:22
balzac how they do it is that they close down a club while it’s still popular, and they’ve got a new one ready Apr 20 22:23
mib_vsozp6 I own one Apr 20 22:23
balzac they don’t wait until a club gets old Apr 20 22:23
schestowitz DavidGerard must be sulking Apr 20 22:23
balzac or someone else will build the next cool club Apr 20 22:23
schestowitz Sun is like Compaq Apr 20 22:23
mib_vsozp6 Neo freerunner Apr 20 22:23
schestowitz A giant that used to be as a brand. Sorry, DavidGerard Apr 20 22:23
balzac My analogy is that Google ought to recognize the value of tearing down their old club before people get bored of it. Apr 20 22:23
mib_vsozp6 I just hope they gol zfs Apr 20 22:24
balzac so they ought to accept that the AGPL could hurt their current business model a bit, but they’ll be needing it some day Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz balzac: but people /need/ Google Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz They take search for granted Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz No more altavista with garbage Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz mib_vsozp6: likely so Apr 20 22:24
balzac Google seems to take a lot for granted Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz mib_vsozp6: Oracle develops btrfs also Apr 20 22:24
schestowitz balzac: cause it  DoesNoEvil Apr 20 22:25
schestowitz It’s like the PromotingDemocracy Apr 20 22:25
balzac but brand loyalty to the old GNU is much stronger, albeit far less recognized by computer newbies Apr 20 22:25
schestowitz If you criticise a country for PromotingDemocracy (invading/exploiting) they call you something. Apr 20 22:25
schestowitz With Google, it’s hard not to like it. Apr 20 22:25
schestowitz So they say Apr 20 22:26
balzac any company which is listed on the NYSE is beholden to the group-foolery of share-holders Apr 20 22:26
schestowitz “What?!?!? You don’t LIKE Firefox?” Apr 20 22:26
balzac Google should buy back some shares and not allow their company to pander to quarterly profits at the expense of their dignity as a “open source” brand Apr 20 22:26
balzac however much that is worth Apr 20 22:26
mib_vsozp6 The shareholder thing is a proble Apr 20 22:27
balzac GNU Power! Apr 20 22:27
schestowitz Search engines gobble up 1.5 GB of pages per day in BN Apr 20 22:27
schestowitz That’s a lot compared to my other sites. Apr 20 22:27
mib_vsozp6 M but the only way to raise major funding Apr 20 22:27
balzac You cannot imagine the “Powah” of GNU software Apr 20 22:28
balzac Open Sourcers will bow to the hairy-side of the force Apr 20 22:28
balzac Hugo Chavez is with us Apr 20 22:29
mib_vsozp6 Bill, I am your father. – RMS Noooo – billy Apr 20 22:29
balzac Maybe he’ll straighten out President Obama on software Apr 20 22:29
*Aondo (i=stian@193.71.154.133) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 22:30
mib_vsozp6 Hugo is a dick Apr 20 22:30
balzac He said Obama was a “poor ignoramus” Apr 20 22:30
balzac then he gave President Obama a book to read Apr 20 22:30
mib_vsozp6 I have been there and seen his work. Apr 20 22:30
balzac who else has that kind of clout? Apr 20 22:30
balzac I selected Hugo Chavez as my president during the “interregnum” of Bush’s illegitimate years of treason Apr 20 22:31
balzac I’m not sweating the small stuff Apr 20 22:31
balzac he had the guts to call Bush out when no one else except Kucinich was doing that Apr 20 22:32
mib_vsozp6 You cannot have software freedom before traditional political freedom. Apr 20 22:32
balzac I like Barack Obama now, but I was skeptical Apr 20 22:32
balzac mib_vsozp6: you cannot have some idealistic kind of candy-land freedom with Bush’s CIA trying to topple you in a coup Apr 20 22:33
balzac let’s see how Venezuela goes now Apr 20 22:33
balzac Chavez could definitely use my consulting regarding issues of diplomatic nuance and economic policy Apr 20 22:34
balzac but he’s a good guy, one of few leaders who has the guts to fight when necessary and to not mince words Apr 20 22:34
mib_vsozp6 Tell that to the people he is disappearing. I know a family who has lost someone. The us or I’m are candyland in comparison. Apr 20 22:35
DavidGerard don’t worry Apr 20 22:35
balzac mib_vsozp6: citations needed, or else you’re like the guys who accused Bill Clinton of murder. Apr 20 22:36
schestowitz Canonical Announces Availability of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition http://www.emediawire.com/rel… Apr 20 22:36
DavidGerard i’m sure it will be at least another year before chavez builds a gold statue of himself in the city square of caracas taht turns to follow the sun Apr 20 22:36
DavidGerard and another year after that before he names the days of the week and months of the year after himself and his mother Apr 20 22:36
balzac mib_vsozp6: good luck convincing me without proof. I never believed the things published by the American corporate media about Moqtada al Sadr, much less Hugo Chavez. Apr 20 22:37
mib_vsozp6 Go to Venezuela as I have Apr 20 22:38
balzac The same corporate media honchos who pay the salaries of the racist pundits who compare President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to monkeys were cupping Bush’s scrotum only a short time ago. Apr 20 22:38
balzac mib_vsozp6: I will, and I expect to be greeted very nicely Apr 20 22:39
balzac But it’s not my priority Apr 20 22:39
schestowitz Linux beats BSD on performance: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php… Apr 20 22:39
balzac mib_vsozp6: just out of curiosity, what’s your cultural background? Apr 20 22:40
DavidGerard hah, one of the tests is to solve connect-4 repeatedly :-D Apr 20 22:42
*quanhm (n=quanhmor@mail.ase.org) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 22:42
*quanhm (n=quanhmor@mail.ase.org) has left #boycottnovell Apr 20 22:42
trmanco grr, the news today is all about Oracle and Sun, getting sick of it Apr 20 22:47
*mib_vsozp6 has quit (“http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client”) Apr 20 22:47
schestowitz Haha. Watch this second message: http://techdirt.com/articles/20… Apr 20 22:48
balzac mib_vsozp6 had nothing to say to back up his Chavez accusations Apr 20 22:48
schestowitz trmanco: see, that’s why I don’t write about it Apr 20 22:48
schestowitz Balrog asked. Apr 20 22:48
schestowitz Peoplw write and write and write about it as though it’s a scoop but people are just fed up Apr 20 22:49
schestowitz balzac: could be hearsay Apr 20 22:49
trmanco iy’s really frustrating to see the same’ol title over and over again, some feeds have the keyword “oracle” and “title” more then 5 times Apr 20 22:49
trmanco it’s* Apr 20 22:49
schestowitz Whisper campaigns, like the ones against other leaders Apr 20 22:50
schestowitz trmanco: which feeds? Apr 20 22:50
trmanco IIRC, compuerworld Apr 20 22:50
trmanco computerworld* Apr 20 22:50
DavidGerard that’s because the tech press has nothing to write about Apr 20 22:51
DavidGerard so when an actual event happens, they go hogwild Apr 20 22:51
DavidGerard the rest of the time they reprint ms press releases Apr 20 22:51
schestowitz Wow. Wow. Whao. http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/o… (don’t click, it’s yet another one) Apr 20 22:52
DavidGerard they’re incredibly grateful when actual news occurs, because then they can pretend to be proper journalists and meaningful analysts rather than cheap whores Apr 20 22:52
schestowitz trmanco: CW is IDG Apr 20 22:52
schestowitz Wintel garbage Apr 20 22:52
schestowitz I don’t read them anymore Apr 20 22:52
trmanco :| Apr 20 22:52
schestowitz I’m running out of sources Apr 20 22:53
schestowitz The INQ and Reg suck too Apr 20 22:53
schestowitz Their founder left and MS lackeys took over partially Apr 20 22:53
schestowitz *LOL* “hogwild” Apr 20 22:53
schestowitz “caostheory Did I pick the best week to have a few days off, or what? CAOS Theory will round up the Oracle speculation, and more, later this week.” Apr 20 22:54
schestowitz Oh noes. Apr 20 22:54
trmanco http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/20… Apr 20 22:54
schestowitz Not another one analysing the thing Apr 20 22:54
schestowitz Save it for laterz, CAON Theory; the world will carry on corvering this without the supermen of 451 Group Apr 20 22:54
schestowitz trmanco: judging by the “id” I though MS was giving it away to Wikipedia Apr 20 22:55
schestowitz Wikipedia could toss Encarta in the “Talk” page Apr 20 22:55
schestowitz You know, as an appendage (aka “CRAP”) Apr 20 22:55
trmanco it’s dying Apr 20 22:55
schestowitz Not Wikipedia Apr 20 22:56
trmanco yet another service dying Apr 20 22:56
schestowitz Encarta is dead Apr 20 22:56
schestowitz MS is dying Apr 20 22:56
schestowitz More layoffs coming Apr 20 22:56
trmanco I’m was referring to encarta Apr 20 22:56
schestowitz Digg jumps off their ship too, so they lack case studies Apr 20 22:56
schestowitz Instead of case studies they now have failure ‘study’ cases Apr 20 22:56
trmanco funny Apr 20 22:56
trmanco grr, even groklaw had something to say about todays deal Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz They wasted money on Digg to make a FAIL story Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz At least it lasted when their pseudo-journos covered the Digg deal excessively Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz Digg is dying too Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz It’s still big, but it’s shrinking Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz trmanco: at least GL was unique about it. Apr 20 22:57
schestowitz It brought back… very old news. Apr 20 22:58
trmanco yeah, it was different but still Apr 20 22:58
schestowitz Can mibbit be set to auto-login? Apr 20 22:59
schestowitz I wonder… Apr 20 22:59
schestowitz Cause we could add real-time widget to BN this way Apr 20 22:59
schestowitz http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Autoconnect Apr 20 23:00
schestowitz How do I log out in IRC Apr 20 23:01
*You are now known as royss Apr 20 23:03
*schestowitz (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-0b9ea050073937a7) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:04
*ChanServ gives channel operator status to schestowitz Apr 20 23:05
*schestowitz has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:06
*mib_8pnq2a (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-88f379869708d33f) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:07
*You are now known as schestowitz Apr 20 23:07
*services. sets mode +e schestowitz Apr 20 23:07
*mib_8pnq2a has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:08
*mib_csnqci (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-42b1066501e1970f) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:09
*mib_m7xszy (i=617621b3@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-df65a55d497bfbf8) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:10
*mib_zenz23 (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-ee97eb2e1a25563c) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:10
*mib_zenz23 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:10
*mib_al9nxq (i=47ac4f1e@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-0219042a96e3c84c) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:11
*mib_al9nxq has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:11
*mib_kpvpel (i=90e2e625@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-08ce824a46c6e4b6) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:11
*mib_kpvpel has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:11
*mib_arjklg (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-967c0448cc9cc4dc) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:11
*mib_m7xszy has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:12
*mib_csnqci has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:12
*tessier_ (n=treed@kernel-panic/sex-machines) has left #boycottnovell (“Leaving”) Apr 20 23:12
*mib_9xcbb0 (i=8258be83@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-b03026f03c040d42) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:12
*mib_9xcbb0 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:12
trmanco wow Apr 20 23:13
DavidGerard What sort of ‘real time’ do you want? Apr 20 23:13
schestowitz What do you mean by real time? Apr 20 23:14
DavidGerard there are mediawiki extensions that display the contents of an rss feed in a widget-like thing Apr 20 23:14
schestowitz The thing is, think of a mode of communicating fast Apr 20 23:14
*mib_dgbcht (i=42ead082@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-6645ad6453dde0f7) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:14
schestowitz DavidGerard: yes, that might be useful Apr 20 23:14
schestowitz But…. we already have fsdaily Apr 20 23:14
*mib_arjklg has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:14
DavidGerard (there are mediawiki extensions for *everything*. some of them are even useful and work.) Apr 20 23:14
schestowitz So there are cheaper ways to achieve this Apr 20 23:15
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 23:15
*mib_dgbcht (i=42ead082@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-6645ad6453dde0f7) has left #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:15
DavidGerard mediawiki.org is like a great big candy store Apr 20 23:15
DavidGerard and if you eat too much of what’s there you’ll be sick Apr 20 23:15
schestowitz Same with WordPress Apr 20 23:15
*mib_p9gq44 (i=5d9cd83c@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-aac157dafcd5d593) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:15
*ushimitsudoki1 (n=ushimits@p1162-ipad12yosemiya.okinawa.ocn.ne.jp) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:15
DavidGerard yes, exactly! Apr 20 23:16
DavidGerard exactly like wordpress Apr 20 23:16
schestowitz We used to have very few extensions Apr 20 23:17
DavidGerard if you run extensions that are used by lots of people you’ll be safest Apr 20 23:17
DavidGerard particularly ones used on wikimedia Apr 20 23:17
schestowitz These are upgrade nighmares Apr 20 23:17
schestowitz *nightmare Apr 20 23:17
DavidGerard they are indeed Apr 20 23:17
schestowitz IDG: “OpenSolaris, Linux could merge under Oracle” Apr 20 23:18
*mib_obw0n1 (i=836b0056@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-b04db83486f292f3) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:18
DavidGerard linux and solaris are unmergeable Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz Signs of demand for FOSS skills: Misys is looking for a Sr. Software Engineer – OS of course < http://linuxmednews.com/1239801762 > Apr 20 23:19
DavidGerard it’s like news sites that proclaim how android equals linux therefore belongs on netbooks Apr 20 23:19
*mib_p9gq44 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:19
*ushimitsudoki has quit (Read error: 60 (Operation timed out)) Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz DavidGerard: yes, I know. Apr 20 23:19
DavidGerard whereas android is almost nothing like gnu/linux as anyone knows it Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz I like strawberries Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz I also like steak Apr 20 23:19
DavidGerard i administer both for a living. they are utterly different ;-) Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz But.. Apr 20 23:19
DavidGerard heh Apr 20 23:19
schestowitz You know where it’s going. Apr 20 23:19
*mib_ddqlz7 (i=cf5dd438@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-dac0a87b21c69d65) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard mind you Apr 20 23:20
*mib_bonb8q (i=4f937f61@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-f638e5ec45fb984e) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:20
*mib_51f8uz (i=47f8544e@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-2d1f241bccd8564d) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:20
*mib_h6ssxa (i=c850b9e3@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-e607b09746f3e058) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:20
*mib_h6ssxa has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard the solaris 10 command line is actually not as horrible as it used to be Apr 20 23:20
MinceR is it more or less horrible now? :> Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard bash is now a first-class shell rather than a barely-tolerated add-on Apr 20 23:20
schestowitz DavidGerard: is it more like Linux yet? Apr 20 23:20
*mib_bonb8q has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:20
*mib_51f8uz has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard it’s a bit more gnu-ish. Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard i really don’t want the kernel to get like linux. Apr 20 23:20
*mib_1xk1ml (i=4f937f61@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-be14382e225be059) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:20
DavidGerard i hate administering linux. Apr 20 23:21
schestowitz Ga-NOO Apr 20 23:21
*mib_1xk1ml has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:21
DavidGerard gnu is fine. linux is awful. Apr 20 23:21
*mib_ddqlz7 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:21
DavidGerard anyone who thinks linux is a wonderful unix to administer has never used any other unix. Apr 20 23:21
*mib_u0hf5j (i=d0b49803@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-1c8f69361445f1a3) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:21
MinceR i have Apr 20 23:21
DavidGerard plus points: 1. it works. 2. it runs more pc hardware than anything. Apr 20 23:21
MinceR i’ve tried to administer freebsd Apr 20 23:21
MinceR i don’t miss it at all, and that’s an understatement Apr 20 23:22
*mib_rdo0e3 (i=cf5dd438@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-15c4f1e6df69c3e3) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:22
*mib_rdo0e3 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard o rly? Apr 20 23:22
MinceR someone is having fun with mibbit, i see Apr 20 23:22
MinceR ya rly Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard then you must be cosmically wrong cos that’s my good example ;-p Apr 20 23:22
MinceR no, that makes you cosmically wrong Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard i saw /etc/rc.conf and went “wow, it’s like the pain in my forehead went away” Apr 20 23:22
MinceR it makes both your example wrong and your theory wrong Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard it is true that i am cosmically wrong in many ways Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard probably this one too Apr 20 23:22
DavidGerard but i LIKE adminning freebsd Apr 20 23:23
MinceR and then you saw the stuff replicated under /usr/local and the pain came back? Apr 20 23:23
DavidGerard there is that ;-p Apr 20 23:23
DavidGerard solaris has twenty years of layers of backward compatiblitiy Apr 20 23:23
DavidGerard which is difficult sometimes Apr 20 23:23
schestowitz   Dell is ashamed of its Ubuntu-powered laptops Apr 20 23:23
schestowitz Apr 20, 2009, 16 :02 UTC (1 Talkback[s]) (2334 reads) < http://gustavonarea.net/blog/posts… > Apr 20 23:23
DavidGerard but once you know your way through it it doesn’t actively get in your face the way the backward compatibility does with windows Apr 20 23:23
*mib_u0hf5j has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:23
*mib_h3yb6i (i=57c2a6d5@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-a24b6bc5a1cd66e6) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard because they started with unix Apr 20 23:24
MinceR dell should be ashamed of its hw quality instead Apr 20 23:24
MinceR and their support Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard i stopped using freebsd because (1) the ports system is horrible (2) not as good hardware compat Apr 20 23:24
_boo_ dell should be ashamed that they sell windows with laptops Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard their server support is pretty good Apr 20 23:24
MinceR that’s great Apr 20 23:24
MinceR i have a laptop though Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard their desktops and laptops … ah. Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard i remember my old work laptop Apr 20 23:24
DavidGerard a latitude d610 Apr 20 23:25
MinceR when the gpu fried itself, it didn’t merely take a month to get a replacement Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard literally EVERY PART OF IT was replaced. except the LCD and the memory. Apr 20 23:25
*mib_h3yb6i has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard every other part. Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard some twice. Apr 20 23:25
MinceR also, along the way they never had any idea when it’s going to appear Apr 20 23:25
MinceR maybe next week, maybe never Apr 20 23:25
MinceR and they had no shame about it Apr 20 23:25
*mib_u85f62 (i=c6045334@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-71f9a977f2b610bd) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard when getting a dell, make sure you have a corporate IT department behind you Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard who can give you a replacement while you wait for dell Apr 20 23:25
DavidGerard hp are a lot better for desktop support Apr 20 23:26
MinceR i have a better idea Apr 20 23:26
MinceR when getting a dell, make sure you don’t get a dell Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard thank goodness they killed the HP pcs and sold compaqs Apr 20 23:26
MinceR that fixes the other problems too Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard i like that idea Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard that said Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard i still want a mini 9 Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard COS THEY’RE CUTE Apr 20 23:26
MinceR i want a thinkpad Apr 20 23:26
MinceR sadly, the kind of thinkpad i want doesn’t exist Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard i want a netbook, and i like the mini 9 Apr 20 23:26
DavidGerard actually, the form factor i want is the vaio not-a-netbook Apr 20 23:27
MinceR there are the ones with wimpy GPUs and there are the w700-s which are barely even portable Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard 1600×768 screen on a large keyboard Apr 20 23:27
MinceR and i can’t really justify spending that much on a laptop anyway Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard so, wide screen about the size of a kbd Apr 20 23:27
_boo_ and i want very small laptop with 19″ 4:3 screen Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard i want a netbook in that shape Apr 20 23:27
MinceR _boo_: lol Apr 20 23:27
MinceR also, i’m waiting for touchscreen Eee PC-s Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard i saw that thinkpad with the second screen hanging off the side Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard I just went o_0 Apr 20 23:27
MinceR or at least touch screen subnotebooks without the microsoft tax Apr 20 23:27
DavidGerard you could attach four legs to it and you’d have a desk Apr 20 23:28
MinceR yeah, that’s the w700 Apr 20 23:28
DavidGerard if you could fit it in your office Apr 20 23:28
MinceR :D Apr 20 23:28
DavidGerard i’m after a touch screen interface that isn’t shit Apr 20 23:28
DavidGerard i used a friend’s ipod touch for web browsing, it was almost usable Apr 20 23:28
DavidGerard not quite, but almost Apr 20 23:29
DavidGerard the nokia 5800 is horrible, just too small Apr 20 23:29
MinceR then again, i might be unfair here — i’m comparing them to the 7900 gs i have Apr 20 23:29
MinceR but this isn’t a new GPU either Apr 20 23:29
DavidGerard i’m writing this on a hp 6710b Apr 20 23:29
DavidGerard intel graphics Apr 20 23:29
DavidGerard kwin regularly decides it’s too busy to run the compositor Apr 20 23:30
schestowitz I’m checking to see if it’s possible to disable IRC messages when people enter and leave: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/i… Apr 20 23:30
schestowitz Is it possible? Apr 20 23:30
DavidGerard no idea Apr 20 23:30
DavidGerard i’m not sure why you’d want to Apr 20 23:30
MinceR you mean disabling join/part/quit messages? Apr 20 23:32
*mib_v590b5 (i=86aebb74@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-1e30618ef5e48cd4) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:32
*mib_v590b5 has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:33
schestowitz Carla on Microsoft’s Vista7 misery: “oh dear, being forced to compete” http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_st… Apr 20 23:34
_boo_ this pirated mirc has options for this Apr 20 23:34
MinceR irssi and kvirc can both do it Apr 20 23:34
schestowitz mib_obw0n1: yes Apr 20 23:34
MinceR pirated mirc sounds like punishment Apr 20 23:35
schestowitz MinceR: these messages arrive from the server, so maybe they can be disabled Apr 20 23:35
*mib_wb87lq (i=4f937f61@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-f3e76e353570ca65) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:35
*mib_wb87lq has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:35
*mib_tpwy3j (i=4f937f61@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-619aa73e8d9e1c9b) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:35
*mib_u85f62 has quit (“http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client”) Apr 20 23:36
*mib_tpwy3j has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:36
*mib_wx3kou (i=412051c0@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-fe839dac1e3ce61f) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:37
*mib_m3zqgr (i=46778cbf@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-d8f4b81cc79befa8) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:37
*mib_wx3kou has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:37
*mib_ey0o48 (i=54c30a28@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-8efcad6333def1f6) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:38
*mib_m3zqgr has quit (Client Quit) Apr 20 23:38
_boo_ i think m$ should release yet another windows to make available consistent and successive upgrades up to win7, vista and xp Apr 20 23:38
DavidGerard you should be able to disable server messages, or send them somewhere else Apr 20 23:39
schestowitz http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/… (DHS hunts for white-hat hackers) Microsoft is there on top now, after the BSA’s lobbying Apr 20 23:39
DavidGerard oh good lord. Apr 20 23:39
schestowitz DavidGerard: I don’t know how Apr 20 23:39
DavidGerard maybe they could hunt for sysadmins. Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz Some people might find them to be a nuisancxe Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz DavidGerard: maybe Apr 20 23:40
*mib_1yw6d0 (i=5d2f588f@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-9a2d4f8fc5591e32) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz They just need people with skills in adentfying crackers Apr 20 23:40
DavidGerard yeah Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz Or beaking into people’s PCs Apr 20 23:40
DavidGerard sufficiently bitter sysadmins would do the job Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz Today in /.: http://www.computerworld.com/action/ar… Apr 20 23:40
DavidGerard openbsd admins Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years  < http://blog.wired.com/27bstro… > Apr 20 23:40
DavidGerard the dhs could recruit openbsd admins, that’d be fun Apr 20 23:40
schestowitz DavidGerard: stay with the good people in Wikipedia Foundation Apr 20 23:41
schestowitz Omar from Bn did some report on you in Jordan Apr 20 23:41
MinceR _boo_: xp2? Apr 20 23:41
DavidGerard heh, the wmf admins are cynical enough ;-) Apr 20 23:41
MinceR windows metafile? Apr 20 23:41
DavidGerard get some embittered bofhs on the case. Apr 20 23:41
DavidGerard wikimedia foundation Apr 20 23:42
MinceR :) Apr 20 23:42
schestowitz Twitter riddled with worms and scams (again) < http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009… > Apr 20 23:42
MinceR WideOpenBSD admins? :> Apr 20 23:42
schestowitz DavidGerard: yes, I was not sure when I typed it Apr 20 23:42
schestowitz BSD lost to Linux in a benchmark Apr 20 23:42
DavidGerard yeah, pc-bsd versus 9.04 Apr 20 23:43
schestowitz http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar… Apr 20 23:43
DavidGerard interesting what a difference the gcc makes Apr 20 23:43
trmanco wow Apr 20 23:43
trmanco libre.fm gives the database for all users Apr 20 23:43
schestowitz Adobe’s blobs and patents want to come to TV sets now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009… Apr 20 23:44
trmanco http://turtle.libre.fm/data/ Apr 20 23:44
schestowitz Strong start for Palm’s Linux-based platform: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/arc… Apr 20 23:46
*mib_05oei7 (i=d2d4a065@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-70d3d9f2a99f7b14) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:47
*mib_1yw6d0 has quit (“http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client”) Apr 20 23:47
DavidGerard the palm pre os sounds nice Apr 20 23:48
DavidGerard my last palm was a tungsten c Apr 20 23:48
schestowitz http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.p… “LOL! Poor Cannon Fodder I mean Sam Ramji. He has the most thankless job at MS. Though it is true that people will pay more for something if they feel they are getting a good value.” –Carla, LT admin Apr 20 23:48
DavidGerard the os wasn’t a proper os, couldn’t multitask int he kernel Apr 20 23:48
schestowitz I still have my TT Apr 20 23:48
DavidGerard so nothing cool FOSS could be ported Apr 20 23:48
schestowitz Right bymy side ATM Apr 20 23:48
DavidGerard the c was *almost* the perfect pda Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard but they put mono sound in it Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard WHAT Apr 20 23:49
*mib_ermi8h (i=cb261dc2@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-bdc4f0d3e12d0684) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:49
schestowitz Palm is not for work, DavidGerard  :-) Apr 20 23:49
schestowitz It’s for particular thing Apr 20 23:49
schestowitz People can’t work on phones either Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard i got the non-sucky web browser off the zire and put it on the t-c Apr 20 23:49
schestowitz They need a proper large computer with millions of pixels Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard that and the wifi made it really nice Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard and the realplayer for palm could play in the background Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard and tcpmp could play oggs :-) Apr 20 23:49
DavidGerard then i lost it :-( Apr 20 23:50
DavidGerard but yeah. perfect except the mono headphones. argh. Apr 20 23:50
DavidGerard (and that it didn’t take standard headphones, no, you needed the palm plug. bah.) Apr 20 23:50
schestowitz Windows is catching up with Linux: WinTar Offers More stronger Features to manage uninx/linux like tarball archive files on Windows system < http://www.pr-inside.com/wintar-of… > Apr 20 23:51
schestowitz gnu tar is free and Free Apr 20 23:51
schestowitz it has many front ends also Apr 20 23:51
DavidGerard i’m amazed at the SHAREWARE for windows Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard TreeSizePro Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard this is a real application Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard do you know what it does? Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard it does … Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard du -ks Apr 20 23:52
*trmanco has quit (“ERROR: crap-talking overflow – Aborting”) Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard graphically!!!!!11!!!!!one!! Apr 20 23:52
schestowitz I don’t know, no.. Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard and you can pay them $10. Apr 20 23:52
schestowitz Wow! Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard i know! Apr 20 23:52
schestowitz Well, KDE has a nice feature Apr 20 23:52
DavidGerard who’d have thought you could do that on computers! Apr 20 23:52
schestowitz Konqeueror shows file sizes as blocks Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz By traversing dira Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz *dirs Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz There are many tools like that Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz But KDE has one built in Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz In KDE 3.5, probably in Dolphin too Apr 20 23:53
DavidGerard you could come up with an awful software business reimplementing horrible graphical versions of every unix command for windows Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz I didn’t know about it until last year Apr 20 23:53
DavidGerard base them on bsd, then you can make it closed source Apr 20 23:53
schestowitz DavidGerard: they can hardly keep what they have alive Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz Like serve Web pages (Encarta) Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz They messed up with Singularity Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz Waste of money Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz For “R&D” buzzword Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz Now it’s shelves (in bitbucket) Apr 20 23:54
DavidGerard hey, songsmith is great! Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz Linus likes it Apr 20 23:54
DavidGerard go on youtube and look for the songsmith versions of popular 80s songs Apr 20 23:54
schestowitz Well, he also live tivoisation, so… Apr 20 23:54
DavidGerard “white wedding” by billy idol is particularly hilarious Apr 20 23:54
DavidGerard http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_… – first paragraph is a coffee-spit Apr 20 23:55
schestowitz Microsoft tried to be cool. Apr 20 23:55
DavidGerard microsoft is not cool. Apr 20 23:55
DavidGerard apple is cool. Apr 20 23:55
DavidGerard they’re definitely agents of Satan and Steve Jobs wants your soul and worship Apr 20 23:55
DavidGerard but their stuff is actually *good* Apr 20 23:55
schestowitz DavidGerard: “Do you feel like you’re screwing a porcupine and you’re one prick against thousands?” the OSCON audience member asked Ramji. Ramji politely replied: “It takes time to change and I knew that I’d be unpopular when I took this job…” http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/… Apr 20 23:56
DavidGerard features are one thing – but the most important feature of the iphone is that the user doesn’t want to smash it to a million little pieces with a toffee hammer Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz Translation Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz I was asked to be the devil Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz it paid well Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz So I said hell yeah Apr 20 23:56
DavidGerard who was the one before ramji? Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz IOW, Ramji is a greedy “prick” Apr 20 23:56
DavidGerard bill something – hilf? Apr 20 23:56
schestowitz Hilf Apr 20 23:56
DavidGerard well, people don’t work for microsoft for charitable urges Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz Reminds me of someone with a similar surname Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz He ran away Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz Like Martin Taylor Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz And the other anti-Linux guys Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz Sam Ramji is hated by FOSS people Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz They don’t tell it to his face Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz Some tell me privately Apr 20 23:57
DavidGerard i’m sure he’s nice to small children and puppies. Apr 20 23:57
schestowitz In his jobs he’s like this waitress annoying you to get a tip Apr 20 23:58
DavidGerard but trusting him as his employer’s representative is another matter. Apr 20 23:58
*mib_u6dy29 (i=47ae5669@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-94604df69e8bd892) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:58
*mib_60rc3r (i=c8eff8c9@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-a48a5c95f5f80ab2) has joined #boycottnovell Apr 20 23:58
DavidGerard i’m sure when he quits he’ll have a lot more friends Apr 20 23:58
schestowitz Yes Apr 20 23:58
schestowitz Well, he might get sacked Apr 20 23:58
DavidGerard the question now is: the sam ramji resignation pool! Apr 20 23:58
schestowitz Y’know, work reductions at MS Apr 20 23:58
schestowitz Also in the news today… Apr 20 23:58
DavidGerard and will he jump or be pushed? Apr 20 23:58
schestowitz Has Microsoft lost its war on open source? < http://www.itworld.com/open-source/66652/ha… > Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz THat was written by one of the MS goons Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz Tho writes about FOSS Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz And about MS+FOSS Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz She’s one of the reason I quit IDG Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz I left CNET too Apr 20 23:59
schestowitz Rubbish press Apr 20 23:59
]]> http://techrights.org/2009/04/21/irc-log-20042009-3/feed/ 0 Novell News Summary – Part III: SCO, Finance, Netware, GroupWise, Partners, Hardware, and Marketing http://techrights.org/2009/04/04/sco-finance-netware-groupwise/ http://techrights.org/2009/04/04/sco-finance-netware-groupwise/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:38:37 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=8076 Modern Architecture in Berlin, Germany

Summary: Lots of Novell news ranging from SCO and Netware to hardware and people

WHAT a week of pranks it must have been for Novell. Between rumours of an IBM takeover to similar ones involving Microsoft, Novell sure needed a sense of humour. Here is another joke about Novell bidding for Linus Torvalds.

Ron Hovespian, Novell CEO, stopped bidding on behalf of Novell, Inc. at $2.6 Billion. “We just couldn’t justify a higher price during these already stressful and uncertain times–even for someone as important as Linus Torvalds.” Novell and Hovespian made an unsuccessful bid for Richard Stallman earlier this year.

On to serious matters, we finally have some news about SCO. Groklaw is driving at full speed again.

SCO

SCO is refusing to pay Novell, even if it’s just a small portion of what it owes altogether.

There are some filings in the SCO v. Novell litigation. SCO is objecting to some of Novell’s Bill of Costs. If you recall, Novell filed their Bill of Costs back on December 10, 2008, after final judgment was entered in the SCO v Novell litigation. SCO then moved the Court to stay taxation of costs, a motion Kimball recently denied. In that Order, Kimball gave SCO ten days to file this objection, and here we are. And in the second filing, the court tried to mail something to Jonathan Lee Riches, but the post office evidently couldn’t find him. In prison. “Mail returned as undeliverable… unable to forward.” Uh oh.

Moreover, according to Groklaw, SCO gets another slap on the cheek.

I can’t believe there’s yet more major news, all in one day. But there is, from the bankruptcy front. SCO’s period of exclusivity is over, as you can see from the minutes of today’s hearing [PDF]. Look at number 1 on the list under the heading “Proceedings” and you will see the word: “DENIED”. This was regarding the SCO motion [PDF] to extend the period of exclusivity, it’s 4th, the motion that Al Petrofsky objected to pro se, as you can see on the Notice of matters on the agenda for today.

Erwan and PJ have re-organised the material that they have about SCO vs. Novell.

Erwan has put together for us a chart of all the motions in SCO v. Novell that were decided prior to trial in the August 10, 2007 Order and the final two motions decided after trial in the July 16, 2008 Order. Since SCO is appealing that order, based in part on the idea that some motions should not have been decided on summary judgment and needed to go to trial before a jury, it seems a good time to organize them all, so you can follow the arguments in the appeal, particularly if you are thinking of attending oral argument. Novell will file its response shortly, and oral argument will be on May 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. in Courtroom I, Byron White U.S. Courthouse, Denver, CO.

SCO’s days as a business (even as a litigation business) seem numbered.

Finance

Novell’s managers are organising a meeting with their shareholders, whom they disappointed.

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) today announced that Ron Hovsepian, Chief Executive Officer, and Dana Russell, Chief Financial Officer, will be presenting to investors in New York City on Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 12:00pm ET.

This press release appears in other sites and CRN reports on Novell’s fixed prices for its broken channel.

With an aim at becoming more channel-friendly, and introducing further flexibility, Novell has decided to move to a single price list. It plans to add deal registration and other enhancements for partners and other solution providers to the list.

It is replacing its older model, which had four different price lists, with a single one. Novell is also introducing standardized volume discounts to streamline a partner’s ability to negotiate large customer opportunities.

Netware

Going back to Novell’s pre-SUSE days, there is some tire-kicking around Novell’s client, which this new video shows how to crash.

Netware didn’t win the award for yesteryear’s favourite operating system, but it was at least mentioned.

urney. Among those mentioned: AmigaOS, Apple DOS, AS/400, Atari TOS, Burroughs MCP, CP/M, DR-DOS, the GEM graphical interface, KRONOS, MPE/iX, MP/M, Multics, Novell Netware, OASIS, OS/8, OS-9, OS/360, OS/400, Pick, Plan 9, PRIMOS, QNX, RDOS, RISC OS, RSTS, RSX-11, RT-11, SSP, TENEX/TOPS-20, TOPS-10, TRS-DOS, UCSD p-System, VAX/VMS, VM, VOS, Xenix and more.

NetWare 6.5 maintains the following certified relationship with Dell:

In terms of operating systems, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Storage Server are certified on the T610, as are Novell’s NetWare 6.5 and SUSE Linux 10 SP2 and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.2. The server has flash-based embedded hypervisors for server virtualization, including special Dell editions of XenServer Express and XenServer Enterprise from Citrix Systems and ESXi 3.5 from VMware.

Mail

There was nothing here except this new reference page for SmartSYNC, which supports GroupWise.

SmartSYNC is the complete solution for synchronizing your Palm OS based handheld with Novell Groupwise®.

Governance/Management

Esj.com is preparing to write about Novell pretty shortly.

In future columns I will discuss CA’s information governance wares, as well as those of Novell and SGI. This installment focuses on a Boxborough, MA start-up with big ideas: Digital Reef Inc.

People

There is something called Human Capital Management Summit (also announced in here) and there will be Novell involvement.

A series of executive-level presentations designed around the summit theme of “Strategic Talent Management that Drives Business Execution in Any Economy” were delivered during the one and one-half day conference by a broad range of business leaders from HR and operations, including:


--  Microsoft, Mary Rose Becker, Chief of Staff of Learning and Readiness,
    SMSG Readiness
--  Novell, Kathy Betts, Vice President of Human Resources

Novell was also mentioned here:

Everything Channel Announces the 2009 Five-Star Partner Program Guide

[...]


    Novell Inc.          Novell PartnerNet      Security, Software
                                                 Infrastructure,  Storage

There are always those who are not Novell employees but are Novell-certified, such as this man.

A 1984 graduate of the American College of Technology, he earned a degree in computer electronics. Before joining the staff of Illinois Wesleyan’s Information Technology Department in 1998, Bailey was a former service manager for Thorn Services International and for STL Office Solutions, both in Bloomington. He was a certified Novell administrator for The Pantagraph, and helped custom build their computer system. Bailey also worked for Watts Copy Systems in Springfield, Ill., and for Tandy Electronics in Downers Grove, Ill.

Partners

The news helps in seeing the connections that Novell has with various other companies. Here is the latest set of reports/press releases which show the Novell-APTARE connection, the Novell-SHIFT connection, and the Novell-ANS connection:

With over 400 clients across the UK, ANS works closely with key partners Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Novell, and Smart Identity to offer an unrivalled level of expertise and experience in the multifaceted industry of IT.

On the Novell-Cisco connection:

While Cisco bared collaboration and partnerships with various IT companies such as BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, Qlogic, Red Hat, VMware and Accenture, it announced that it would also be enter the blade server market, along with its entry into the unified computing system model.

Lastly, the Novell-Trustmarque connection :

The York, UK-based value-added reseller works with Microsoft and a string of security software house such as Symantec,McAfee and Novell.

Hardware

There are some hardware-related videos that come from Novell and here is one them which was added days ago. What happened to Novell’s close relationship with AMD? There is another new video about Novell and Intel.

There were some other articles about microchips where Novell was mentioned and Intel is at their centre.

“hundreds of thousands” of the new chips. More than 100 software applications keyed to Xeon 5500 chips were released Monday from companies such as Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and SAP.

Marketing

Novell has also pushed some more marketing, the latest examples being.

This is part of a pattern. For details, see:

On the contrary, Novell sometimes uploads technical videos, which is dine. Here is the latest example from a few days ago.

Other News

In a couple of places, this press release about crowdsourcing was released to show Novell’s involvement.

Expanding its European presence, IdeaConnection is pleased to announce that Ms Marina Merlo has joined us as our Client Services Representative in Italy http://www.ideaconnection.com/about.html#marina. Ms Merlo has previously worked with Decision Lens, InnoCentive, Iomega, Kodak, Sony, Strategy Actualization, Google, Novell, Kodak, Creative, Skype, Bentley MicroStation, WPE, Iomega, Novell, and Bose.

Here is Novell mentioned in a formal press annoncement about a Web 2.0 expo:

Major vendors with booths at the show include Nokia, Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, eBay, IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Zoho.

Novell was mentioned briefly in this essay because Digium embraces something similar to the Fedora/RHEL and OpenSUSE/SLE business model.

Companies like Red Hat and Novell offer support subscriptions for enterprise customers who don’t want to walk the Linux path alone and now other open source vendors are getting into the act, too.

Here is the fate of one company (SGI) whose realisation of Free software was curtailed for too long. Novell’s fate might be similar:

This is not so complicated. SGI was a comet, soaring through the tech firmament during its brief moment of glory. But it’s only one in a list of former high-flyers to come crashing back to earth, a roster that includes the likes of Novell, Borland, WordPerfect, Digital Equipment, Wang, Data General-well, you get the point.

Novell was voted the least likely technology company to survive this year (in its current form). Sun may soon prove such prophecies to be not so far-fetched. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2009/04/04/sco-finance-netware-groupwise/feed/ 0