Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - Copyright Maximalists turn on Libraries, Other Horrors. Will Yang Return to Yahoo?

Reader's Picks



  • Security



    • Another Nugget from M$
      Days ahead of the patch folks all around the world have been able to take over almost any PC on a LAN running that other OS just by placing a malicious .dll on some networked storage device. The mind boggles. I can see SANs intended to share files among the group to be used to own the whole LAN.


    • Google sheds some light on Iran's involvement with the Diginotar cert incident.
      It means that somebody in Iran had gone to great lengths to intercept supposedly secure Internet traffic, including Gmail messages. ... [Iran] remains one of the few nations that would have a need to defraud Western companies in order to conduct such surveillance. Many governments, including countries with a poor reputation for defending freedom of expression or privacy, are able to generate any number of fake digital certificates on their own authority. The current dependence of secure Internet traffic on a few, potentially insecure commercial companies is a profound flaw.

      Richard Stallman notes, "I am sad to report that the Chrome browser that this was done with is nonfree software."



  • Defence/Police/Aggression





  • Finance



  • Anti-Trust



    • Yahoo co-founder urged to help oust chairman
      A major Yahoo Inc. shareholder is recruiting company co-founder Jerry Yang to join a crusade to oust Chairman Roy Bostock amid the upheaval triggered by the recent firing of CEO Carol Bartz. The shareholder, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, sought Yang's help in a letter sent Wednesday.


    • MICROSOFT DONATES $8 MILLION GRANT TO THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND[sic]
      Microsoft Corporation has recently announced that it will be renewing its partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund through an additional $8 million software grant. This recent grant brings the total donation amount given by the Microsoft Corporation to $29 million, and will provide software for TMCF’s 47-member network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. ...

      There may be a hardware component to this dumping/indoctrination, but the value is a tax avoidance fiction and the hardware will be a liability using the software that comes with it.





  • Censorship



    • Child Pornography Bill Makes Privacy Experts Skittish
      The bill requires all Internet service providers to save their customers' IP addresses — or online identity numbers — for a year. The bill's stated purpose is to help police find child pornographers, but critics say that's just an excuse for another step toward Big Brother.




  • Privacy

    • Massachusetts track car location by automatically scanning license plates from police cars.
      Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour.

      I'm not sure why the system would have to be in police cars and could not be operated from other cameras like the red light cameras at every major intersection. People should be concerned about those too.





  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Returns From The Grave
      The current draft Treaty would grant exclusive, 50-year intellectual property rights to distributors of information that apply in parallel with copyright protections, even when transmitters have had no role in creating the content being transmitted.

      The treaty and article use the propaganda term Intellectual Property, and the treaty is more than an extension of copyright.



    • Copyrights



      • PJ Notes a lawsuit to prevent universities from making digital libraries, which objects even to digitization of orphaned works.
        Well, the more they try to assert their Most Holy rights, and the rights of people no one can find, the more certain I am that copyright law will end up reformed. It's like Righthaven. Or patent trolls. When people get disgusted by excessive use of the law, they decide to do something about it. Maybe it's time to go back to the prior copyright system, where you had to register your copyright to have one?

        Guardian source article intentionally not linked.







  • Comments

    Recent Techrights' Posts

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    "Lawyers who front SLAPP‑style threats on behalf of powerful institutions are not “defending reputation”; they are abusing legal process to intimidate and silence legitimate public‑interest scrutiny."
     
    Slop Gives No Real Edge, It's Just Falsely Marketed That Way (FOMO)
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    Misattributing Blame, the Core Issue is Slop
    that issue has nothing to do with Bash
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    Does The Register MS recognise what this piece is promoting and who for?
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    In the past, I and others got falsely accused of "defend[ing] a rapist"
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    IBM has become a garage of BS
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    WordPress and other such bloatware (WordPress used to be fast and light) are moving in the same trajectory that GAFAM leads
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    "Secure Boot" with capital "B" is conflating compromise with security.
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    Maybe the media is dying because it is selling its soul [...] The Register MS has no standard
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    Countries ought to be controlling all their own systems
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    Do not fall for slop or sloppy narratives
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    Narcissists and sociopaths are like that
    Too Many "Marketers on the Payroll" at IBM, Selling Impossible Products That Cannot be Delivered or Will Never Deliver
    IBM is rotting away
    Media Says Microsoft's (XBox) Layoffs May be Record-Breaking
    think somewhere in the range of ~5000 for gaming/XBox alone
    Sirius Open Source's Latest Report: Fake (False) Number of Staff, Almost No Money in the Bank, Overdraft, and Growing Debt (About £100,000 More Borrowed)
    massive (and still growing) debt
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    This is Not a Security, This is a Circus
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    Patents Are Not "Cash Cows"
    People who deliberately don't understand patents (or believe lies about them) will fail to understand how the world works (or does not work)
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    money is still a man-made concept and life is finite
    SLAPP Censorship - Part 123 Out of 200: Why Violence Against Animals Matters
    Starting tomorrow (Wednesday) we'll begin telling stories about what happened last week
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    Massive EPO Demonstration Today
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    his solicitors basically acknowledge this
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    Moments ago
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