11.14.11

^{Gemini version available ♊︎}

Links – Anti-Trust and US Parasite Laws.

Posted in Site News at 4:50 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

Hardware
- Color profile collector.
  
  For the past 3 weeks I’ve been working long nights on an open source colorimeter called the ColorHug. This is hardware that measures the colors shown on the screen and creates a color profile.
- Integrated color management with colord
  
  color management is essentially a solved problem that has yet to be implemented system-wide on Linux. Every display or input device can be profiled — that is, its color characteristics measured and saved in a standardized format like an ICC color profile. With profiles in hand, applications need only to perform a transformation on RGB data to map it from one profile (say, a camera’s) to another (a display’s). … Colord is a framework for automating the storage and retrieval of color profiles. …
Defence/Police/Aggression
- Killer Drones to Fly Over Texas
  
  The police in Montgomery County – and area north of Houston, Texas – is the first local police in the united States to deploy a drone that can carry weapons. … The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems …
- US Presidential hopefuls are dangerous lunatics.
  
  At debate, most of the GOP contenders come out in favor of torture (waterboarding), Perry says, “Until I die!” — and oppose Arab “anti-Christian” Spring. Cain says we should have supported (1) Mubarak, (2) Mussolini, or (3) Hitler (pick one).
  
  See also 5 Reasons To Be Glad That You Didn’t Watch the CBS News Debate
- Secret Snoop Conference for Gov’t Spying: Go Stealth, Hit a Hundred Thousand Targets
  
  The war on your rights carries on.
Finance
- Insider trading by US Congressmen recieves some attention
Anti-Trust
- Gates groupie, Warren Buffet, buys ten billion share of IBM.
  
  Parrish said Buffett was probably attracted to IBM because of its practice of buying back stock to increase earnings per share — not because of any hot patents IBM owns or because Buffett is now a fan of servers and open source software …
  
  Ted Parrish should not be confused with the astute Bill Parish, but we can be sure that Buffet is not a fan of free software. The purchase is roughly five percent of IBM. The same amount of money would purchase all of Red Hat.
- Piracy bill could waylay FLOSS projects
  
  It would also harm non free software too but big publishers don’t mind that.
- EFF: Hollywood’s New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation
  
  for the free and open source software community — which contributes many billions of dollars a year to the American economy — legal obligations to blacklist domains would be an utter catastrophe. … any software product or service, such as many encryption programs, that is not responsive to blocking orders could be under threat.
  
  One of the points of free software is that users can remove malicious features. Laws that outlaw such removals are laws that violate your freedom.
Censorship
- The Coming Fascist Internet
  
  The attacks on fundamental freedoms to communicate that are represented by various government repression of the Internet around the world, and in the U.S. by hypocritical legislation like PROTECT IP and SOPA (E-PARASITE), are fundamentally fascist in nature … Anyone or anything that is an enabler of communications not willingly conforming to this model are subject to attack by authorities from a variety of levels — with the targets ranging from individuals like you and me, to unbiased enablers of organic knowledge availability like Google. For all the patriotic frosting, the attacks on the Internet are really attacks on what has become popularly known as the 99%, deployed by the 1% powers who are used to having their own way and claiming the largest chunks of the pie …
Privacy
- I2P, an interesting alternative to TOR
Civil Rights
- http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/11/11/367055/on-veterans-day-state-rep-rick-womick-r-tn-calls-for-purging-muslims-from-the-military/
Copyrights
- Recording Industry of South Africa (RISA) tells us to kill people who share.
  
  With their “Shoot the Pirate” campaign, music and TV industry players have taken to the streets with threats to “fight violence with violence.” Hacks into Sony computers to obtain content and warnings of a blood bath only add to the bizarre mix.
  
  It’s not surprising that people who use violent language to demonize their neighbors resort to real violence to keep power.