Car technology is on the increase with self-driving cars and health-monitoring seats all turning from science fiction to science fact.
As such, when V3's sister site THE INQUIRER headed to the North American and International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit to see some of the latest innovations on show, we were keen to see what they unearthed.
Following hard on the heels of the launch last week of the classically minded Fuduntu 2013.1, the SolusOS Linux project on Wednesday launched a new fork of GNOME Classic.
The Chromebook is now officially 2 years old, with the original model CR-48 officially long-in-the-tooth and left behind. After the initially testing period of the CR-48, Samsung and Acer have made their best, and different efforts at selling the platform for outrageously low prices. Since the release of Samsung and Acer’s latest Chromebooks, the Samsung model we reported on late last year is now the best selling laptop on Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer.
SIOS Technology Corporation, a leading provider of high availability and data protection software solutions for Linux and Windows, today announced it was the first Linux high availability player in the world to achieve SAP Application Server High Availability (HA) Interface Certification for its SteelEye€® Protection Suite (SPS).
An experimental system device hot-plug framework for the Linux kernel is still being developed. This framework is meant to be commomon for system device hot-plugging for system devices like CPU and RAM while being platform-neutral.
It's been one year since AMD introduced their Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards, but the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for providing an open-source OpenGL driver for this latest-generation of AMD GPUs is still far from being in a readied state for AMD Linux customers.
Linux is getting quite popular with the game developers and publishes. Steam's arrival to Linux has got the community really excited and more and more games are now coming to Linux. Two more titles have been added to Steam's games for Linux category.
Live a week in the life of "The Postal Dude"; a hapless everyman just trying to check off some chores. Buying milk, returning an overdue library book, getting Gary Coleman's autograph, what could possibly go wrong?
Daniel Solis (@danielsolis), an art director by day and game designer by night, describes what sets ancient games apart from the ones sold in today's market. Beyond big boxes, colorful pieces, and lots of noise, ancient games employ three main criteria: access, elegance, and fun. Access—across language and geographic barriers. Elegance—applying a few rules that are easily understood but take a long time to master. And fun—we all know about that.
Solis tells us that while Chess is only 800 years old, older games like those from ancient Babylon are unplayable by us today: we simply don't know the rules! Interested by this, Solis started a challenge for anyone to create a game today that might still be played 1000 years from now. He asked contestants to use what he identifies as the base characteristics of long-lasting games: access, elegance, and fun.
The Debian-powered SolusOS Linux distribution has forked GNOME Classic into the Consort Desktop Environment.
While there's already the MATE Desktop fork of GNOME 2.x plus Cinnamon and other open-source initiatives for those not liking the current taste of upstream GNOME 3.x with its Shell, SolusOS felt the need to bring another alternative.
ROSA Desktop Fresh is the latest addition to the line of Linux distributions published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. The first stable edition is ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012, released on December 19 2012.
Before its release, ROSA Desktop Enterprise was the only other stable desktop line from ROSA Laboratory. The difference between Desktop Fresh and Desktop Enterprise is that the former will feature the latest and greatest (read: bleeding-edge) Linux kernel and applications, while the later will always ship with more stable (Debian-style) applications.
CentOS team has announced the release of version 5.9 which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9. The greatest improvement in this release is the inclusion of Java 7 (openjdk-7) and upgradation of Microsoft Hyper V drivers. Thus you will now be able to run CentOS in a Windows workstation as a virtual machine without worry.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) now generates 65 percent of quarterly bookings from partners, up from 53 percent in the company’s Fiscal Year 2008. That’s impressive. But how is Red Hat going to train partners to cross-sell the company’s growing portfolio of software — Linux, storage, virtualization, middleware, etc.? Oh, and who are Red Hat’s top current partners? Here are all the answers — or so The VAR Guy claims.
Now that Fedora 18, aka Spherical Cow, has been released, users of Fedora 17 will likely be gearing up to upgrade. Before this latest release, upgrading an installation of Fedora requires a procedure that’s not very elegant.
Fedora 18 much anticipated and delayed release is finally here. And it is worth its wait. There are numerous new features incorporated into the opensource linux operating system including (but not limited to):
I don’t care, just re-enable the logout in Fedora 18
For most, Mint will likely be the better choice...
South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth is planning to bring his Ubuntu operating system (OS) to smartphones, allowing the little devices to work as fully functional Ubuntu desktops when docked and connected to a monitor and keyboard.
Rumours about the next generation HTC flagship phone, the M7 have been doing rounds since a long time and very first images of the device seems to have finally surfaced. The image is a render from what is supposed to be the animation clip instruction for first time users of the phone.
If the source of the information is to be trusted, at first look the image suggest a strong resemblance of the phone to the iPhone 5. However the device will have a 4.7 inch full HD Display which will be larger than Apple’s offering and smaller than the current phablets from other manufacturers.
While we’re waiting for the folks at Ubuntu to bring us the early Galaxy Nexus-compatible images for its mobile operating system, one user decided to throw together the best of both worlds. User Armando Ferreira employed the use of TSF Launcher and several other tools to give his Nexus 4 the Ubuntu Phone look and feel. The lock screen is minimalistic and gives you quick information at a glance. You can pull your favorite apps up with a swipe from the left edge of the display.
Microsoft may have rebuffed Linux's early advance in the domain of the emerging netbook, but Glyn Moody thinks that the rise of the tablet has neutralised the "must-have" nature of Windows.
Glyn Moody as usual gives the big picture over space and time. M$ fought off the charge of small cheap netbook PCs running GNU/Linux by choking OEMs. Today those same OEMs and a bunch more new OEMs of PCs are shipping */Linux like there’s no tomorrow.
Having been writing about commercial open source for years, I finally decided to start a new blog category at SourceForge blog to cover the business side of open source. I’ll be posting on SourceForge blog interviews to people who can tell us stories about how they combine open source and business at SourceForge blog, and I’ll comment on them here.
Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s cofounder and actual CEO, while sharing his experience about how Liferay grew its project into a product provided me with additional information.
France Telecom-Orange's development center in San Francisco has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) with the aim of to benefitting from its community.
The Open Compute Project Foundation is a community of engineers whose openly stated mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and datacentre hardware designs for scalable computing.
NOTE: The OCP says that it believes that openly sharing ideas, specifications and other intellectual property is the key to "maximising innovation and reducing operational complexity" in the scalable computing space.
It seems we are not alone in being curious about how the growing number of open source businesses are making revenue.
Kirk Wylie, of OpenGamma, has written this blog post to answer a question that he probably gets asked several times a day. In a nutshell, it seems that commercial clients of OpenGamma need a range of services to tailor OS software to their needs, services that sometimes, an open community cannot provide (Kirk will be speaking at CEO Tales: Open Source Business Models on the 6th February if you want to ask him more detailed questions).
This week, we reported on Mozilla's plans, in upcoming versions of Firefox, to launch Firefox Health Report (FHR) -- a prototype Firefox feature that enables users to optimize their Firefox configurations and get reports on Firefox's status similar to the kinds of diagnostic information that many cars provide. At the same time, these reports will help Mozilla tune Firefox based on information culled from the reports about causes for performance problems and more.
I've had the good fortune to talk to many CTOs as part of my day-to-day job as a tech journalist over the last decade here at InternetNews. One thing that I can say for certain is that the role of CTO is a varied one and the definition of what a CTO is or does is not definite.
At some organizations, the CTO is a technical cheerleader and a product evangelist. In other organizations, the CTO is the person that actually leads and directs development. In the case of Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, he is now set to combine the best of all CTO worlds.
There are so many parts to the institutions running the European Union that it's easy to lose sight of them all and their varied activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.
Version 5.9 of Oracle Linux, the company's incarnation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, is now available. This release also ships with Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2.
The members of the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice called to the larger open source community to submit artwork to be used as the new branding with the release of LibreOffice 4, which is due early in February 2013. LibreOffice itself was forked from OpenOffice back in January 2011 and the latest release candidate of version 4 was released on 10 January 2013. Early adopters can test the release candidate by downloading the package from the LibreOffice website.
Magnolia, the open source Java content management system (CMS) company, has confirmed its guest speakers for the first ‘Magnolia Amplify’ active learning event to be held March 6th-8th at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.
Open-source storage software is software that is available for download, typically at no cost, that can provide valuable data services to traditional storage hardware. These services include features we have grown accustomed to, such as thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning. Prior to open-storage software, these services typically came with the storage array that you purchased and were specific to that vendor's products. Open-source storage software offers the advantage of letting you use commodity storage hardware.
He doesn’t buy DVDs, doesn’t use Windows or Mac OS laptops and doesn’t use closed-source commercial software. He is not on Facebook and has never owned a car.
But he isn't a Luddite or computer illiterate. In fact, he loves technology and the Internet. At one point, he hoped the Internet would stop censorship around the world.
The jQuery developers are preparing to drop support in the popular JavaScript framework for older versions of Internet Explorer with the release of jQuery 1.9 and a beta of jQuery 2.0. The dropping of support for Internet Explorer versions before IE 9 and the migration plan has been in place since June 2012.
The success of the NHS’ new national database, dubbed SPINE 2, will be down to the use of open source technologies and agile development techniques, according to its supplier BJSS.
The original SPINE database was core to the previous government’s failed National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
Germany should change a law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source, a German parliamentary committee has advised.
German public administrations currently are not allowed to give away goods, including software, said Jimmy Schulz, a member of Parliament and chairman of the Interoperability, Standards and Free Software Project Group. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community, he said.
GitHub, the code sharing site based around Linus Torvald's distributed version control system Git, has announced that the service now has over three million registered users. The commercial service, which was founded in 2008, reached the one million user milestone in September 2011 and, less than a year later, in August 2012, the company reported reaching two million users. That GitHub has reached this third milestone in under half a year shows both its, and Git's, rapidly rising popularity with developers.
Public sector organisations need to quicken adoption of open source and open standards software in order to meet government aims for digitising services, Cabinet Office Director for Digital Mike Bracken has said.
Speaking at the Government ICT conference in London this week, Bracken warned that a bigger push is needed in order to introduce a wave of digital services during this parliament, including digitising hundreds of thousands of transactions across government.
Last November departments were told they must comply with Open Standards Principles (OSPs) in order to enable interoperability and reduce costs. However Bracken said more needs to be done to open the doors to innovative technologies that will enable a swift IT transformation.
Public sector organisations need to quicken adoption of open source and open standards software in order to meet government aims for digitising services, Cabinet Office Director for Digital Mike Bracken has said.
Women who say they were tricked into sexual relationships with undercover police officers will have their cases heard in secret, a judge has ruled.
PRESIDENT OBAMA has refused to tell Congress or the American people why he believes the Constitution gives, or fails to deny, him the authority to secretly target and kill American citizens who he suspects are involved in terrorist activities overseas. So far he has killed three that we know of.
Presidents had never before, to our knowledge, targeted specific Americans for military strikes. There are no court decisions that tell us if he is acting lawfully. Mr. Obama tells us not to worry, though, because his lawyers say it is fine, because experts guide the decisions and because his advisers have set up a careful process to help him decide whom he should kill.
The Burmese army appears to have indiscriminately shelled the town of Laiza in northern Burma’s Kachin State in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch urged the government to allow humanitarian agencies access to tens of thousands of ethnic Kachin displaced by the fighting.
The Department of Defense was forced to release this "extraordinary" transcript by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch -- where it has stayed largely unseen, 16 pages buried in a file of 153 pages of emails and memos. Judicial Watch did use Bigelow and Boal's access to Vickers (and to then-CIA Deputy Director Michael J. Morell, who "gushed" over their previous film The Hurt Locker) and then-CIA Director Leon Panetta's "full knowledge and full approval/support" of their access) to accuse the Obama administration of improperly giving "politically-connected film makers...extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information
Does a tweet about unmanned warfare equal endorsement?
The following is a transcript of an upcoming discussion between Sam Seder and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the un-American use of torture and drone strikes by American forces. The full discussion will be aired this weekend on Ring of Fire.
They share contempt for the Constitution’s separation of powers, allowing the executive branch to ignore Congress and the courts in the name of national security. When Obama first became president, for example, he wanted Brennan to head the CIA, but there was so much opposition to Brennan’s deep involvement in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s extra-judicial “dark side” (torture, including renditions of suspects to be tortured in other countries) that Brennan had to withdraw his name from consideration.
More broadly, democracy cannot survive where judges are constrained by "Alice-in-Wonderland catch-22s" from requiring the government to explain why it can kill people without charges or trials. The Obama administration needs to step up with increased transparency and much greater detail on drone policy. Only then will we know whether US targeted killings are legal and whether they make us safer or place us at greater risk.
The U.S. is reported to be "mulling" drone strikes in Mali, and has at the very least dispatched spy drones and support materials to aid French legionnaires and its Air Force.
In recent weeks, more than 50,000 Americans have signed a petition to Ban Weaponized Drones from the World.
...support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists fell from 83 percent to 62 percent...
Nick Turse's new book "Kill Anything that Moves" reveals that massacres like My Lai were downright common
According to current and former American government officials, as well as classified government cables made public by the group WikiLeaks, in recent years the military has set up a constellation of small bases in Africa for aerial surveillance missions flown by turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft. One of the principal bases used for the missions in Mali is in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, according to one former official and the government cables.
In addition, the American-led coalition said that it had asked the Afghan government to investigate allegations of torture by Afghan Local Police units that have been trained and advised by American Special Operations forces.
...the "heroes" got their key information from torture.
[...]
That's pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie so good it'll be seen everywhere in the world – and all it does is prove him right about us.
CIA-Torture Whistleblower Latest in 'Americans Who Tell the Truth' Series by Artist Robert Shetterly
In his Jan. 11 opinion piece "Just When You Thought Soviet Propaganda Was Dead," Ronald Radosh attacks our "Untold History of the United States" as "discredited leftist Cold War 'revisionist' history." But his main point of contention is that we have not only rescued Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President Henry Wallace from the dustbin of history but that we've restored him to the heroic stature we believe he deserves.
The segment he had on with Jessica Chastain last night - a simply extraordinary actress, by the way - shook me up. I may be wrong, but I got the very strong impression that after seeing the movie, he had moved toward supporting torture.
France’s decision to intervene in Mali put an abrupt end to the cautious approach favored by the U.S. and others in the international community in dealing with hardline Islamists who overran much of the north last year and highlighted possible “missteps” by the U.S, analysts say.
A man calling himself "Matthew Waluk" from Slovenia, said that he worked for the CIA and described how the operation was set up.
During Panetta’s time as CIA Director and Secretary of Defense US illegal wars (illegal, even according to Ron Paul), have gone on un-mercilessly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen at the cost of thousands of lives of men,women and children murdered in their own beloved, innocent and poor nations. Under Panetta thugs were paid to destroy the government in the most prosperous and democratic nation in Africa before US NATO bombing took place while a near million Libyans in a population of only six million demonstrated for their Green democracy government and Gaddafi. At last count 60,OOO have died in Syria for the attempt of the former former colonial powers led by the US and satellites like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to do the same there in the face to similar massive pro-government rallies which are denied coverage in the Pentagon fed network news programs.
A member of a Danish motorcycle gang converts to Islam, travels to Yemen to learn more about his new faith, meets radical imams preaching death to the infidels, and just as the preaching is sinking in and he’s about to embrace a life as a militant Muslim, the gang member jilts the jihadists and decides to switch sides and go undercover for the CIA and help the intelligence agency track, target, and kill his erstwhile militant brethren.
A key part of the legal fight concerning Bradley Manning over the past few weeks was whether or not he'd be able to present his own motives as part of his defense -- showing that he believed that he was engaged in act of whistleblowing that would be good for the US. His legal team argued that this intent would push back on the Espionage Act claims, since the intent was never to help Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but rather to help the US. However, the court has mostly -- but not entirely -- barred Manning from using this defense, meaning that he will have a much more difficult time arguing that his acts were a form of whistleblowing.
A military judge granted a government motion and ruled the defense could not argue motive during the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier being prosecuted by the military for releasing classified information to WikiLeaks.
The decision, which is not available to the press or public, found the defense would not be able to discuss whether Manning had “good faith” when presenting argument on charges that he “wrongfully and wantonly cause[d] to be published on the internet intelligence belonging to the United States government,” or for charges where the government only has to prove Manning had “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
A group of Swiss artists has come up with a novel way to try to communicate with Julian Assange, currently being given asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy: they have sent him a package.
Andy Greenberg talks Bradley Manning, cryptographic anonymity, and Icelandic information activists
An independent scientist tasked with testing water samples in Fort Worth, Texas concluded that the water could have been contaminated with gas from a nearby Range Resources drilling operation. Yet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency abandoned its investigation under pressure from Range Resources.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have agreed to a $557 million settlement over alleged loan servicing and foreclosure abuses, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday.
Two key memos outlining the Justice Department’s views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their release. The FBI’s general counsel discussed the existence of the two memos publicly last year, yet the Justice Department is refusing to release them without huge redactions. (You can see the heavily censored versions sent to the ACLU here and here, and our original FOIA request here.)
FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann was sitting on a panel last February discussing the Supreme Court's recent decision that found installing a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car constituted a search and would require a warrant.
The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous — strings of the billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people in a study. But all it took was a little clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to zero in on the identities of five people he randomly selected. Not only that, he found their entire families, even though the relatives had no part in the study — identifying nearly 50 people.
The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous — strings of billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people. But all it took was some clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to identify five people he randomly selected from the study group. Not only that, he found their entire families, even though the relatives had no part in the study — identifying nearly 50 people.
Nonetheless, a public/private cooperation like this is unnerving. It would seem that private profit-making corporations, competing in a market economy, do not have the public interest stature to start using government capabilities – particularly surveillance capabilities – for their own unsupervised ends.
Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings has been testing a pair of surveillance drones that he hopes to begin deploying this summer to patrol Metro Orlando.
Two generations later, some observations:
1) Drones are not new.
2) How far has the movement come in 42 years if we are once again focusing on the particular evils of drones?
3) Does this teach us anything about our strategy or lack thereof?
To be sure, drones are a malevolent manifestation of the Empire’s capabilities. We revile them for all the right reasons. Shining a light on them can be a good tactic. I don’t argue we ignore them.
But what does it say about us, about our ability to work successfully for social change, if today we think we’re doing something significant by campaigning against drones, 42 years after they caught the attention of the G.I. resistance movement? If in the intervening decades since 1971 we had been more conscious and strategic about our organizing, might we be further down the road of social change by now?
In an Op-Ed in Libération (in French), Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Internet-related policies, can be found giving in to telecom operator pressure and giving up on Net Neutrality. Ms. Kroes supports the creation of a fragmented Internet, banning innovation and opening the door to unacceptable censorship.
Thirty-one family farmers, plaintiffs in the landmark lawsuit OSGATA et al v. Monsanto, travelled to Washington, DC, from across North America to attend the Oral Argument in the Appeal of Dismissal heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and also to protest in demand of the right to farm without the threat of harassment by the world’s largest biotech seed company. Monsanto has sued, or settled in court with, more than 844 family farms since 1997 over ‘patent infringement’ after their seeds naturally spread to nearby farms.
A U.S. federal appeal court in Washington heard arguments Thursday in a case brought by smallholder, traditional and organic farmers seeking protection from lawsuits by agribusiness giant Monsanto, which has sued dozens of farmers for illegally using genetically modified seeds. “Under the law as it stands, if Monsanto’s genetically modified seed contaminates an organic farmer’s property, Monsanto can sue them for patent infringement. And Monsanto’s done this in the past,” Attorney Daniel Ravicher, who is representing the farmers pro bono, told reporters after the hearing.
The cost of a patent infringement trial in the United States is “between $2 million and $4 million,” said Ravicher, who is executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT). “Farmers we represent can’t afford that. They can’t even afford to hire an attorney to respond to an initial letter.”
It's usually a mistake to leap to conclusions after a tragedy like the suicide of Aaron Swartz. I know nothing about the details of the case or his state of mind apart from what I've read in newspapers and online. But my unguarded reaction is that the story does seem an instance of reckless prosecutorial excess, and that the prosecutors bear some responsibility for his death.
A prominent retired federal judge is adding to the chorus of criticism of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz following the suicide of Aaron Swartz last Friday. Ortiz’s prosecution of the acclaimed Internet activist for hacking has drawn harsh comment from newspaper editorials, online users and a petition to the White House with 35,000 signatures.
Still, it turns out that digital copies of pirated movies and TV shows aren't just the subject of committee debates on Capitol Hill—they're also being downloaded onto Capitol Hill computers. A post today in US News & World Report's tech blog published new information from anti-piracy forensics company ScanEye, a company that offers BitTorrent monitoring services in the name of fighting piracy. The ScanEye report [PDF] shows apparently pirated movie files being downloaded via IP addresses associated with the US House of Representatives.
I haven't bothered to mention the whole sad Aaron Swartz saga, because it's been covered elsewhere.
But having the involved US attorney then basically lie about it all in a very public statement is something that I find particularly offensive. Compare these two statements - one from July 2011, one from yesterday, and tell me Carmen Ortiz isn't lying..
Yesterday (as reported by the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere):
"At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law."
And July 2011 (as posted by justice.gov itself):
"SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million"
Maybe that official and very public PR thing wasn't "telling Mr. Swartz’s attorneys", right? Because in private, Ms Ortiz was probably talking about how she wanted to pay Aaron for his services, and just hug him. Right? Anybody?
Ms Ortiz, just admit you were an ass-hat, and apologize. Instead of this kind of crap. Weasel-wording and misleading about your actions is not making your office look any better.
Outrage is growing over the U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of the 26-year-old who committed suicide last week just weeks before he was to go on trial. Pioneering computer programmer and cyber activist Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted for using computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of academic articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR. As the chief prosecutor Carmen Ortiz defends her actions, we speak to Swartz’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and computer security consultant Alex Stamos, who would have been the chief expert witness at Swartz’s trial. We invited representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office and MIT to join us, but they declin
This will put a bright spin on your day: Apparently the unstoppable force of Westboro Baptist Church has finally met its own immovable object in the hactivist collective known as Anonymous.
Westboro has never backed down from anything to our knowledge, but they recently pulled out of their planned picket of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s funeral. Why? Because Anonymous apparently threatened them, and after causing them all sorts of “financial difficulties,” WBC apparently listened.
We previously discussed how the Justice Department hounded Aaron Swartz in a prosecution that sought 35 years in prison for his effort to make academic papers available to the public — even though MIT did not ask for such charges and later released the papers free of charge to the public. United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz and the Obama Administration were long criticized for the prosecution but remained committed to destroying Swartz — a move that clearly delighted copyright hawks that have tremendous influence over the Administration as discussed earlier.
The suicide of Internet activist and pioneer Aaron Swartz has focused attention on what some activists say is the overzealous use of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act anti-hacking statute.
Basically, this whole system is wide open to abuse, and it's clear from Ortiz's actions that she, too, was abusing the system in this manner: pushing for super high possible jail time as a huge and scary weapon to try to pressure Swartz into accepting a lower rate -- but also making him a convicted felon. Using the plea offer as some sort of "proof" of reasonableness is really quite incredible and despicable. It's like pointing a gun at someone, telling them that you're planning to shoot them... and then saying that if they agree to confess to something they don't believe, you'll just pinch them instead. And then, when they complain, you say "well, clearly, I just thought the pinch was appropriate." That's clearly a bullshit explanation. Ortiz was better off with "no comment" than trying to pass this off as a reasonable claim.
We the undersigned ask that MIT issue an apology for its silence regarding the unjust federal prosecution against Aaron Swartz for actions that caused little or no harm to MIT or any individuals. Faced with a maximum fine of $1 million and over 35 years in prison if convicted of 13 felony counts related to the downloading of academic journal articles on MIT’s internet network [1], Aaron committed suicide on January 11, 2013.
A new lawsuit objects to the way the music giant has licensed famous compositions and booked revenue.
Ah, Hollywood copyright math. In the past, we've discussed a few instances of how massively profitable films use funny accounting tricks in order to avoid ever having to show an official profit, even as the studios themselves make out nicely. The key trick: the studios set up special subsidiaries just for each film, and then charge those subsidiaries huge sums of money for effectively doing very little. Thus, the studio gets all the money, but the actual "film" is shown as remaining in the red.