For weeks, people have been claiming that Google supports CISPA. Ten days ago, a trade group spoke up for Google [2]. Five days later, right before getting the bill passed by Congress, co author Mike Rogers took time to represent Google and most of the Silicon Valley,

They’ve been helpful and supportive of trying to find the right language in the bill … I always said if I could get Palo Alto and New York City on the same bill, I got something. We found that sweet spot in this particular bill.

Even Wikipedia claims Google support for CISPA, “Google has not taken a public position on the bill [27] but has shown previous support for it, and now says they support the idea but believe the bill needs some work”

Voice jacking may be a downside of being the most loved company in tech and the world [2] but the Microsoft press is having a field day with it. Microsoft’s long slog against Google paints the company as, an evil monopoly, really EVIL, screwing partners and violating user privacy for commercial gain at every turn, basically everything Microsoft is or wants to be. Recent examples include much noise about harmless wifi data collection, Android developers and user data, a flap over privacy policies, really, an unending flap, flap, flap. A long list of older smear jobs can be found by searching Groklaw for the proper terms. Google support for CISPA really would be a reversal and betrayal.

Google’s long standing, official silence is baffling. Google was a hero in the fight against SOPA saying all the right things about censorship and privacy. Eric Schmidt has released an excellent excerpt from his soon to be published book about dangers to network freedom but it does not mention CISPA.

Informed opinion is overwhelmingly against CISPA, but they need help. Today, 34 prominent civil rights organizations issued a statement against the bill and most have been fighting it all along [2, 3]. The same groups also opposed SOPA but were unable to effectively reach the public without help from sites like Google and Wikipedia.

Continued silence allows the wrong people to control the narrative and demoralizes opponents. There have been several articles about how no one showed up for the first round of blackouts and how passage is inevitable without Google and Wikipedia support and how that’s not going to happen. They also say not to worry because Senate does not care and Obama will veto it. This is the usual narrative of the rich and powerful: You little people are weak and helpless, don’t struggle because it will only waste your time.

Techrights firmly opposes CISPA and has written against it several times [2] Users, companies, government and the internet itself don’t have a “cybersecurity” problem, they have a problem with second rate, non free software from companies like Microsoft. CISPA makes the problem worse by giving the usual suspects power to censor and harass [2] people trying to fix things.

Readers wanting to know the basics of CISPA are urged to read the EFF FAQ. Then join us in urging lawmakers to reject CISPA. We really can’t depend on Obama’s veto for this, he’s already signed an executive order almost as bad as CISPA and the house vote is sufficient to override a veto.

I’m back after a little break and will start out with a recap of a very important topic, the private assault on public education lead by Bill Gates and other ultra wealthy rent seekers.

• Education

  • The Chicago teachers strike and where it all began

    Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education “reform” movement geared to undermine teachers’ unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of ill-conceived and failing policy “innovations” … The city’s current reform wave began in 2004 with Mayor Richard Daley’s Renaissance 2010—a massive program, funded in part by $90 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to transform the city’s schools by 2010. The strategy included firing and replacing entire staffs in low-income neighborhood schools, shutting down dozens of schools, and setting up charter schools. … Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city’s school system…

  • Seattle Education Blog: Bill Gates and me.

    Someone asked me today while we were waiting to be seated for a filming of a debate regarding I-1240 (more on that later), why everything Bill Gates, or for that matter the Walton’s, fund, I am opposed to. Well, I’m not. I appreciate the money that Bill Gates and his wife spent to create the sculpture park in Seattle that faces the sound. … Unfortunately, Bill Gates knows nothing about public education.

    This person makes the “Uncle Joe” mistake, thinking that the person giving her trouble has their best interest at heart rather than private gain.

  • School takeover by Steve Barr and the Future Is Now charter school causes student walkout in New Orleans: Is this what we want Seattle?

    Students at Walter L. Cohen in New Orleans began a walk out/protest on October 4th, 2012 when their teachers and administrators were dismissed and the announcement was made that Future Is Now Charter (Steven Barr, formerly of Green Dot in California, and Gideon Stein) would be taking over the governance of the school. … I’d say that the people of New Orleans have had their fill of charter schools.

    Many New Orleans public schools were privatized in the wake of Katrina and the effort is ongoing. Here we see what happens where people can not effectively organize resistance.

  • The No on Intiative 1240 campaign needs YOU!

    The Walton’s and Bill Gates have just added more money to the privatization till for a total of $3M from Gates and $1.8M from the Walton’s to the Yes on Initiative 1240 campaign. This has truly become a battle of the 1% versus the rest of us.

    This is what effective, local resistance looks like. We need national resistance to protect those without the resources to help themselves.

  • Let’s give President Obama a clue about Race to the Top

    Please write a letter to President Obama and send it to Anthony Cody’s e-mail address listed below by Oct. 17th. Please invite everyone you know to write to Pres. Obama. We need thousands upon thousands of letters to make a difference for Public Education!

  • A look at KIPP, Michael Feinberg, NCTQ and Bill Gates

    Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is in a rush to now dumb down education in New Zealand even though New Zealand and Australia have higher international test scores than the US and the majority of other nations. KIPP is trying to worm their way into New Zealand using the same old phrasing such as “failing schools” and “ineffective teachers” and pushing the idea of hiring “unregistered” (cheap) staff to populate charter schools. … Fortunately in New Zealand they are having an open national debate on charter schools something that never happened in the United States where venture capitalists made up their minds about what was best for our students and in a stealth like fashion went about privatizing our public schools.

    The attack is international, like other Microsoft operations.

  • EduShyster: Stuff White People Like: Education Reform

    The key take away [of the Chicago teacher's strike]: rich white people who send their kids to private schools were the only group to oppose the teachers’ strike. In other words, the very group whose children will likely grow up to become the next generation of achievement gap warriors.

    There’s an interesting list of Washington state “reform” backers, Bill Gates – $1M
    Alice Walton- Walmart heiress and daughter of founder Sam Walton- $600k Bezos family – Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon- $1.5M Nick Hanauer – described as a “venture capitalist” living in Seattle- $450k Paul Allen of Microsoft – $100k Katherine Binder – EMFCO Holdings Chairwoman -$200k The McCaw’s- a wealthy and prominent family in Seattle – $100k

  • The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman

  • Why Washington state schools are #42 in education funding: Let’s start with Bill Gates

    One person got up and said that she was willing to pay a state income tax to begin to subsidize what was needed by the community. … What is ironic about this is that the second wealthiest individual in the world and number one in the United States, according to Forbes, lives among us in Seattle and yet is not willing to pay his fair share of taxes to support the infrastructure that he used to create and maintain Microsoft including public education. On the other hand, Gates is paying millions of dollars in our state to lobby for charter schools which is the privatization of a public good.

• New Google Chrome beta lets webcams go plugin-free, video chat gets a lot less Flashy

  Good riddance.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Due to insufficient practical inspection, clothing often contains illegal toxic chemicals..

  • In Blow to Big Pharma, India to Hand Out Generics

    The $5 billion dollar initiative will provide free medicine to hundreds of millions of Indians who today go without access to health care, officials said Thursday. The new initiative will offer 348 types of medication to patients across the country that will not come from big pharma. Legislators in Delhi plan to utilize a network of government-funded hospitals and clinics to provide the medicine,

  • Even Low Doses Of Fast Food Do Serious Damage

    they examined results of a study conducted over a period of 16 years beginning in 1993, which looked at the eating habits of 52,000 Chinese residents of Singapore who have experienced a recent and sudden transition from traditional foods to Western-style fast food.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Poisoning Arafat

    An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it. … I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement – which was killed by the assassination of Rabin. … Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and – more important – to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it.

  • US gov’t nutty over Wikileaks

    A US official told Birgitta Jónsdóttir that the US has no wish to prosecute her or question her “involuntarily”, but there is evidence suggesting this is not true. Evidence that the US is looking to prosecute Julian Assange and others in Wikileaks. The US Army admits it is investigating the Bradley Manning Support Group.
    This group was formed after Bradley Manning was arrested to provide him with moral and legal support. Since when is that a crime?

  • Africa’s land and family farms – up for grabs?

    RMS summarizes this as, “The Gates Foundation is promoting a scheme with connections with Monsanto to “help” Africa by introducing technology that African farmers can’t afford.”

• Censorship

  • House Quiety Reintroduces a Piece of SOPA

    Even after millions rallied against the passage of SOPA/PIPA, the House is still quietly trying to pass a related bill …

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima Nuclear Disaster ‘Clearly Man-Made’, says Parliamentary Panel

    the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, rejected claims by the plant’s owner that the earthquake and tsunami ‘could not have been foreseen’ by saying: “Despite having a number of opportunities to take measures, regulatory agencies and TEPCO management deliberately postponed decisions, did not take action or took decisions that were convenient for themselves.”

  • Shocking Health Effects of Commonly Used Pesticide: Brain Problems, Sexual Deformities and Paralysis

    Endocrine disruptors are linked to breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early puberty and diabetes in humans and alarming mutations in wildlife. They are also suspected in the epidemic of behavior and learning problems in children which has coincided, many say, with wide endocrine disruptor use. … in April, research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented new evidence of the ability of endocrine disruptors–in this case the pesticide, chlorpyrifos (found in Dow’s pesticide Dursban) –to harm developing fetuses.

  • A deep drought has destroyed much of the US wheat crop and may destroy the corn crop too.

  • WTF: Monsanto to Gain Immunity from Federal Law?

    The Secretary of Agriculture would be required to grant a permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, regardless of environmental impact. [thanks to a sleazy one liner in a 9,000 page bill]

  • Dramatic Shifts in Benthic Microbial Eukaryote Communities following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

    post-spill communities contain mainly predatory and scavenger taxa alongside an abundance of juveniles. Based on this community analysis, our data suggest considerable (hidden) initial impacts across Gulf beaches may be ongoing, despite the disappearance of visible surface oil in the region.

• Finance

  • As ‘Statute of Limitations’ Approaches, Wall Street Crimes of 2008 Go Unpunished

    With time running out, federal agencies show no urgency in holding firms or executives to account

    Maddoff was chairman of the SEC. It looks like we will have to tax the “bailout” back from the banksters.

  • Plutonomy and the Precariat

    So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this. If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories.

    It’s worth noting that the callous and extreme views expressed in this essay are quotations from a Citibank memo.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage

    Consolidated media does not publish news, it publishes propaganda.

  • Is Facebook damaging your reputation with sneaky political posts?

    posts are going out under your name because at some point in the past (in some cases in the distant past) you visited a page and clicked Like. Yes, you voluntarily Liked that page and made it part of your Facebook profile. If a Facebook friend wants to go through your list of Likes, they can learn that you like the NRA or PETA or a seemingly innocuous group that you probably didn’t realize was funded by Karl Rove’s political action committee. But I doubt that you expected that simple click to result in a flood of posts under your name months later. … when Facebook uses your name to promote a page to your friends, it doesn’t provide any indication to you that it has done so.

    People should worry more about the power this gives Facebook to sway public opinion than they worry about their personal reputations.

• Education Watch

  • Louisiana Republican Supports State Funds For Religious Schools, As Long As They’re Not Islamic

  • The Weekly Update: Jindal & Co. in Louisiana, a Broadie in Arizona and Bill Gates everywhere

    News you might have missed.

    Devastating look at Louisiana charter schools, abuse of students, nonsense in Seattle and “leveraged philanthropy,” and some other badness.

  • Weekly Update, Part 2: The Gates Foundation, a smart ALEC and more charter school abuses

    ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.

    Yes, there’s much more.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • India Moves Even More Of Its Healthcare Away From Western Pharma

    Moving to generics they can produce themselves rather than pay absurd fees for patented medicine.

  • TPP

    • A Global Attack by the One Percent

      Perhaps the most controversial of these tools would be the setting up of a three attorney tribunal, with no checks on conflicts of interest, to judge foreign corporate complaints regarding government regulations in the countries they are setting up operations in. If, for instance, a foreign owned corporation argues it is losing profits because of its host nation’s overtime laws, this tribunal could rule that the country’s taxpayers owe that corporation compensation for this loss. Such costly judgments could result from any regulations including labor law, local environmental standards, financial rules, etc. In short, the TPP’s tribunal would act as the hammer of multi-national corporate interests above the power of the states’ governments they do business in

      I agree that protectionism alone is a bad idea as a countermeasure. A better countermeasure is trade restrictions that guard people’s rights with tariffs against specific, oppressive policies.

  • ACTA

    • Post-ACTA: declassified negotiation documents on criminal provisions

      These might be handy for the next dumb treaty attack.

• 500 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

• Innovation under Austerity

  This is a transcription of a speech given by Eben Moglen at the 2012 Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC on May 22, 2012.

• Bat rescuer awarded $6.1 million in libel suit

  A former intern accused of cyberstalking a Mineral Wells bat sanctuary and its president was ordered to pay about $6.1 million in damages Thursday for what a judge called egregious, malicious and intentional defamatory statements she spread across the Internet, court documents say. … The videos and statements, the suit said, were pervasive on the Internet, using “robots” to game Google and other search engines so the defamatory material would appear high in search results.

Security

• Microsoft XML vulnerability under active exploitation

  These attacks are being distributed both via malicious web pages intended for Internet Explorer users and through Office documents. Users running Windows XP up to and including Windows 7 are known to be vulnerable.

  Nothing changes in Windows land.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Newly Released FBI “Domestic Terrorism” Training on Anarchists, Environmentalists, Show COINTELPRO Tactics

    The FBI considers free speech and protest criminal.

  • Tribune Company Moves to Seize Occupied Chicago Tribune’s Website

    they wanted the paper to change the font, the masthead and the paper could not be any name that began with a “T” (e.g. Occupied Chicago Times). When they realized how the company was coming after the paper, they decided to get legal representation.

  • A rehab job on the criminals in blue

  • BYRON SONNE, FOUND NOT GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES, HAS PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

    Meanwhile, in Canada, another activist charged with terrorism is free from jail, curfews and not using a cell phone that lasted two years.

  • Attorney: “NATO 3″ Activists Detained on Terror Charges in Chicago Are Victims of Police Entrapment

    … they were set up by government informants who planted the explosives. Supporters also say police seized equipment that was used for brewing homemade beer.

  • Occupy Journalists Stopped, Searched, Handcuffed & Interrogated at Gunpoint

    Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days. … Chicago PD took the journalists’ hard drives and slammed them against “running boards four or five times.” They took Pool’s alternate batteries and slammed them too. Content recorded by the journalists was deleted from Ustream. … The episode was not an isolated incident. @Ghostpickles and @Korgasm who have both been covering Occupy since the early days, reported being interrogated by CPD with others in the middle of the night. … The Chicago police, possibly with help from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI or other federal agencies, appear to be working off a list of “suspected” people or spaces where they must go “check in” on what is happening simply to ensure all is safe.

  • CPD, FBI & Secret Service Claim NATO 3 Came to Chicago to Commit ‘Terrorist Acts of Violence’

    Deutsch called the investigation, targeting and raid of these activists “worse than entrapment.” According to the NLG, two police informants infiltrated the group. The NLG believes “they’re the ones who provoked this and they’re the ones,” who committed the “illegal activity” and had the “illegal materials.”
    Additionally, they said the informants didn’t provide the materials and convince the activists to engage in some plot. The activists did not take the bait. The informants simply left the materials in the apartment ahead of the raid so the materials would be there for police to find.

  • Thousands march to oppose police repression in run-up to NATO summit

    supporters of three men arrested in a Wednesday night raid at the Bridgeport apartment of Occupy Chicago activists were gathering at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California for the arrestees’ noon bail hearing. Each was slapped with a bond of $1.5 million; Cook County States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez had originally asked for $5 million bonds for each, and trotted out a litany of charges deployed in the first-ever use of the state’s anti-terrorism statutes …the afternoon’s boisterous but peaceful protest marches marred by sweeping police violence. … Neither action was permitted, in keeping with Occupy Chicago’s standing opposition to the city’s ‘Sit Down & Shut Up” protest ordinances, which were tightened earlier this year to make it virtually impossible to stage permitted actions without at least a million dollars in insurance, massive ‘marshall’ presence, and a commitment to register all signs and banners with the authorities — draconian restrictions on free speech and civil liberties that the Occupy movement and its allies have refused to embrace. The police used batons, bikes and their fists to beat people and push protesters back repeatedly today, with medics reporting numerous injuries.

  • Activists Charged With Providing Material Support for Terrorism Ahead of NATO Summit

    The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. … the three activists remaining — Bryan Church, Jarred Chase, Brent Betterly — appear in the video posted of police threatening violence during the NATO summit. It now seems clear that police are charging them in retaliation for posting the video.

  • Activists Disappeared Ahead of NATO Summit Continue To Be Held Without Charge

    the Chicago police had “disappeared” activists. … The local news reporters and journalists have been utter cowards. Because the police would not admit the police carried out a raid, the media refused to “confirm” the story. They instead ran stories that communicated lawyers or protesters were alleging.

  • Will Occupy activists get a fair trial?

    OVER 70 criminal cases against Occupy Portland activists remain in limbo following continued attempts by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office to deprive defendants of the right to a jury trial and court-appointed legal counsel.
    Over the past several months, prosecutors have specifically sought to avoid allowing defendants to exercise such rights by repeatedly changing the charges filed against them.

  See original crack down and mass arrests

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • 90 Percent of People Want Labeling on Engineered Food, But We Still Don’t Have it: Why Is that?

• Finance

  • Using US courts to go after the poor

    Vulture capitalist (to use the usual term) Singer, who wants to use US courts to force poor countries to pay debts they defaulted on, wants help from the US Congress.

  • The Austerity Agenda

    the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

  • Chicago Factory Occupiers Form Worker Cooperative

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia CEO: Our Microsoft Phones Just Aren’t Selling That Well

    “We aren’t getting the traction we prefer.” … Elop admitted that Microsoft was giving Nokia “specific support” so it can drop the price.

    The trash bag blamed retail salespeople.

  • Nokia to end ‘Meltemi’ effort for low-end smartphones

    One of the casualties of Nokia’s latest cuts is Meltemi, the company’s effort to create a new Linux-based operating system for low-end smartphones. The project was aimed at offering smartphones at prices that neither Android or Windows Phone could easily reach…

    Is there a reason they can’t do the same thing with MeGo?

  • A questionable source reports,
    

    Nokia to End “Meltemi” Effort for Low-End Smartphones

    Nokia is also exploring alternatives for another of its development environments, known as Qt, which today is used largely in embedded devices. “We’re fans of Qt, and we’ll continue to support it in the near term, but are being open about looking for opportunities which may be best for this developer framework,” Kerris said.

  • U.S. Probes Cable for Limits on Net Video

    The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video … investigators are taking a particularly close look at the data caps that pay-TV providers like Comcast and AT&T Inc. have used to deal with surging video traffic on the Internet. … Comcast fanned those fears in March, when it said that videos viewed on its own Xfinity app on Microsoft’s Xbox wouldn’t be counted against subscribers’ data caps in the same way as videos viewed using Netflix, Hulu or other apps

    This article is from Fox News and is highly slanted towards the interests of monopolists. The only reason we are hearing about this is because Microsoft’s interests are clashing with those of Fox.

• Censorship

  • EU Governments Push Global Alliance for Net Censorship

    In an unanimous decision, EU Member States have decided to promote website censorship at the global scale under the pretext of tackling child pornography.

  • Retired Judge Joins Fight Against DOJ’s ‘Outrageous’ Seizures in Megaupload Case

  • Lauren WeinsteinRegarding +Tim Bray ‘s suggestion for an HTTP 451 response (http://j.mp/KRyC2R) for “legally restricted resources”

    personally I think it’s a fine idea (and I suspect Ray would have been at least amused, even though he pretty much despised the Internet to his dying day).

  • 9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

    The school backed down again, what a good lesson.

• Privacy

  • Outrage as credit agency plans to mine Facebook data

    Facebook’s business model is selling people out this way. You don’t have to be on Facebook for them to spy on you, your friends report your activity.

  • Microsoft patents ‘emotional database’ advertising service

• Civil Rights

  • Microsoft Sorry For Gaffe That Gives New Meaning to Norwegian Wood

    Loud music with a disembodied voice rapping goofy lyrics while a half-dozen women in shorts dance in front of a roomful of bemused Norweigian software geeks, who have each paid about $1,500 to attend the three-day event. … The offending couplet: “I’m a computer gen-i-us / The words micro and soft don’t apply to my penis” On the teleprompter, genius is misspelled “genious” and the words “(or vagina)” are added below “penis” in the spirit of gender equality.

    More monkey business from Microsoft. The cost of this kind of “training” is inevitably passed on in the cost of good sold and makes us all pay the Windows Tax.

  • S-COMM to be implemented in Massachusetts over state objections

    over 70 percent of the people deported through S-COMM have never been convicted of a crime or have only minor offenses such as traffic violations. Furthermore, increases racial profiling and causes undocumented immigrants—who are more often the victims of crimes than the perpetrators—to be afraid of contacting police in an emergency situation.

  • US government’s right to torture

    The Supreme Court upheld the US government’s right to torture with impunity for “national security”.
    It also abandoned the rights of prisoners in Guantanamo, even though most of them are acknowledged to have been imprisoned for no reason. Why should anyone hold the US government in higher esteem than the Chinese government?

• Education Watch

  • States to Residents: Forget Promises to Restore School Funding

    “Over and over, we heard from our elected officials that this was the worst recession since the Great Depression, and they had no choice but to cut school funding,” he said. “We were told that once the economy improves, our funding would be restored. But this year, when they did have a choice, a very clear choice, they decided that tax cuts were more important than education.” … In at least 30 states, funding for K-12 education was lower in fiscal year 2012 than in 2008, despite growing student populations. …

• Network Neutrality

  • Frequency-Hopping Radio Wastes Less Spectrum

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Judge tentatively pulls the plug on Apple v. Motorola

  • Copyrights

    • Villages Furious about Copyright Fees for Folk Songs

    • Fair Use, Art, Swiss Cheese and Me

      Copyright maximalists threaten to destroy art museums and their ludicrous demands have made it all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Libraries will be next.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/06/20/links-nato-protest-slapdown-nokia-collapsing/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/05/31/links-red-hat-deal-highlights-the-threat-of-microsofts-secure-boot/ http://techrights.org/2012/05/31/links-red-hat-deal-highlights-the-threat-of-microsofts-secure-boot/#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 04:08:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60605 Reader’s Picks

  • Open source celebrates the freedom to leave

    What really stood out to me, though, was the reason open source is being deployed. While the top reason historically was lower costs, the market has been steadily maturing; last year’s survey put a freedom from vendor lock-in as the top reason for deployment. … Paradoxically, when a supplier tries to lock in its customers, they will try to leave; give them the freedom to do so, and they will most likely stay (all other things being equal).

    Open source business users are starting to value software freedom.

  • RMS: Call on governments to require companies to offer a choice of operating systems for PCs.

  • Open source initiatives in Spain

    The regional government of Spain’s Basque Country has decreed that all software produced for Basque government agencies and public bodies should be open sourced.

    The four software freedoms are mentioned in the linked Spanish language article.

  • Hardware

    • Fedora 17 and Mac support

      The pretty hardware is not worth the effort to me, but Debian is also reported to work on several models.

  • Security

    • A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)

      The Windows allocator places the buffers at relatively predictable locations; and the Native Client process can directly control their size as well as certain object allocation ordering. So, this afforded quite a bit of control over exactly where an overwrite would occur in the GPU process.

      I thought this would be intersting, but it was just another Windows story.

    • Meth Labs and Dead Dogs: How the Founder of McAfee Antivirus Went on the Run in Belize

      his home in Belize had just been raided by local law enforcement, he’d been rousted from the bed he shared with a 17 year old woman, naked and confused, to discover Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit at his gates.

      Your AV money went south.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Activist prevents Israeli officer from arresting Palestinian child

    • Analysis: Why we must name all drone attack victims

      At stake may be the very definition of a ‘civilian’ in the modern battlefield. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos recently pressed US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan on his remarkable claim in June 2011 that the CIA had not killed ‘a single non-combatant in almost a year.’ … when we definitively showed, with the Sunday Times, that the CIA had been bombing rescuers and funeral-goers, it was suggested that we were ‘helping al Qaeda.’

      Vilifying technicians is Unibomber logic.

    • Unmanned spy planes are being launched from 63 locations in 20 states – Is there one near you?

      Police drones will also be able to shoot and gas people.

    • Propaganda firm owner admits attacks on journalists

      The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly admitted Thursday that he was behind a series of websites used to discredit two USA TODAY journalists who had reported on the contractor. … Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook noticed that someone registered the site tomvandenbrook.com. Twitter and Facebook accounts were also registered in his name, and a Wikipedia entry and discussion group postings misrepresented his reporting on the West Virginia Sago Mine disaster.

      Looks like the usual smear job, including sock puppets, forum postings often of the most offensive character, much like we see here at Techrights. The contractor is sorry he got caught and embarrassed himself and his friends.

    • Feds seek new ways to bypass encryption

      One way to circumvent encryption: Use court orders to force Web-based providers to cough up passwords the suspect uses and see if they match.

      Thanks to the US PAT RIOT act, they don’t need a court order. The fact of the matter is that non free software vendors and media company owned ISPs have been violating your privacy for decades.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Severe Nuclear Reactor Accidents Likely Every 10 to 20 Years, European Study Suggests

    • Japan utility ups estimate of radiation released in Fukushima disaster

      In one town in the Fukushima area, the estimated thyroid doses to infants are within a dose band of 100 to 200 millisieverts (mSv), the preliminary report said. This level of radiation exposure could be associated with an increased likelihood of developing cancer.

      That’s a significant dose, 10 to 20 R. There is not much else new or insightful in this article.

  • Anti-Trust

    • LibreOffice and Windows RT (ARM)

      We have a similar problem with Windows RC that Mozilla and Google have. The only “classic” applications that will run on Windows RC are Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. That’s quite unfair for LibreOffice, as if we would like to run on Windows 8, we would need to rewrite LibreOffice for Metro.

      Windows RT is the same old thing from Microsoft, an intentionally crippled version designed to reduce the competitive threat to Intel. They are also pretending that business can’t function without Microsoft Office. Both of these strategies are badly outdated, but Microsoft is receiving deserved anti-trust review for their intentions.

    • Google files EU complaint against Nokia, Microsoft over alleged patent collusion with MOSAID

      “Nokia and Microsoft are colluding to raise the costs of mobile devices for consumers, creating patent trolls that side-step promises both companies have made. They should be held accountable, and we hope our complaint spurs others to look into these practices.”

      Perhaps someone will complain about Microsoft’s “secure boot” too. Apologists have tried to say What Microsoft is doing is no worse than what Apple is doing but that is neither true nor an excuse. Apple’s scams only harm Apple’s users. Microsoft’s scam is general, harming all computer users. Both are crimes.

    • Lockdown: free/open OS maker pays Microsoft ransom for the right to boot on users’ computers

      This is a major reversal. For many years now, free/open OSes have been by far the easiest to install on most hardware. For example, I have installed Ubuntu on a variety of machines by just sticking in a USB stick and turning them on. Because the OS and its apps are free, and because there are no finicky vendor relationships to manage, it Just Works. On some of those machines, installing a Windows OS fresh from a shrinkwrapped box was literally impossible — you had to order a special manufacturer’s version with all the right drivers … This is a tremor before an earthquake: the hardware vendors and the flagging proprietary software vendors of yesteryear are teaming up to limit competition from robust, elegant and free alternatives.

    • Facebook chooses Opera over Chrome for recommended browser

      “You’re using a web browser we don’t support.”

      Facebook does Microsoft’s bidding, again.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Canada’s Telecom Companies Have Secretly Supported Internet Surveillance Legislation

      The secret working group includes virtually all the major telecom and cable companies, whose representatives have been granted Government of Canada Secret level security clearance and signed non-disclosure agreements. The group is led by Bell Canada on the industry side and Public Safety for the government.

  • Censorship

    • Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

      For a month Pirate Pay’s technology protected the film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive,” (distributed by The Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing company) with moderate success. …The end result was that 44,845 transfers were successfully stopped. How many downloads slipped through, and whether the downloaders didn’t simply try again later is unknown. Pirate Pay don’t disclose their exact rates but say they charge between $12,000 and $50,000 depending on the scope of the project. … it is not the first company to tackle BitTorrent piracy. The now defunct MediaDefender charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack BitTorrent trackers and upload fake torrent files.

      We should not call sharing “piracy”, even if Disney is what’s shared, nor should we think that this technique will be confined to “protecting” movies. Microsoft friendly media companies already block distribution of gnu/linux

    • Techdirt Threatened With Defamation Suit Over Story On Feds Getting Royalty In Movie From Mexican Drug Cartel Money Launderer

    • Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing

      the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was… Microsoft. … either Marketly and Microsoft decide to leave up certain infringing content on Microsoft’s own search engine while taking it down from Google… or that Microsoft certainly isn’t that fast at doing removals. And yet, why don’t we hear the people who always bitch about Google complaining about Microsoft?

      Microsoft wants Bing to have things Google does not and uses DMCA to do it. Microsoft issued more than 500,000 take downs last month, more than the next four biggest violators combined.

    • Megaupload demands return of millions of dollars From US Govt.

  • Privacy

    • Local Governments Have the Power to Restrict Drone Surveillance in the US

      The US police state is more oppressive by the day.

    • ACLU Note to Self: Siri Not Just Working for Me, Working Full-Time for Apple, Too

      This data can be really personal, like if you ask Siri, “where is the nearest abortion clinic?” And once Voice Input Data and User Data is collected, Apple reserves the right to share it with “Apple’s partners who are providing related services to Apple.”

      Apple promises to delete their copy of your data if you opt out of Siri but loss of voice commands does not prove they have stopped spying on you.

    • LimeWire Sued For More Money Than Exists In The World

      This is judicial terrorism.

    • Undercover MPAA Agents Expose Alleged Movie Pirates

      This is state assisted terrorism designed to make you afraid of sharing with your neighbors. The infiltrator is a liar and should not be trusted, but what’s creepy is that a civil violation is being treated as a criminal investigation like the drug wars.

    • Welcome to the RFID Guardian Project!

    • RMS Government Abuse of Data

      When governments collect personal data, government employees frequently look at it for personal reasons. This evidence is from the UK, but it happens in the US too, which reaffirms that the only way to prevent abuse of data is not to collect it.

    • Senate Advances Expanded, “Orwellian” Gov’t Surveillance with FISA Amendments, CISPA

  • Civil Rights

    • Brussels wants e-identities for EU citizens

      The use that the Nazi regime made of identity documents to single out Jewish people and send them into concentration camps has been a powerful argument against introducing ID documents across the Channel.

      We should demand banks do a better job before we surrender privacy. “Identity theft” is the result of poor software choices and a lack of due dilligence on their part.

    • S-COMM to be implemented in Massachusetts over state objections

      The program is leading community members – including witnesses and victims of crime – to withhold information from the police for fear of deportation … The five largest detention contractors spent over $20 million lobbying Congress between 1999 and 2009, according to the National Immigration Forum. Their payback: over $5.5 million per day spent on immigration detention in 2011, an increase directly connected to the nationwide expansion of the detention-crazed S-COMM.

      It’s distressing that states which understand these issues end up with laws that are almost as bad as Alabama or Arizona. Our democracy is sick and needs help.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Chair Renews Support for Usage-Based ‘Net Pricing’; Public-Interest Groups Cry Foul

  • Digital Restrictions

    • Fedora Considers Building In a Dependency on M$…

      Fedora is considering getting M$ to sign a bootloader for them so they can boot Fedora GNU/Linux on UEFI hardware. This is a dangerous precedent.

      Matthew Garret calls the idea, an awful compromise to increase user freedom, but acceptance of a master is direct surrender of freedom.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Day 23, From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google Trial – Jury: No Patent Infringement ~pj Updated 3Xs

    • Copyrights

      • An Open Letter to Jay Leno About Stealing My Video and Then Getting It Removed From YouTube

        Your company NBC just up and blocked our video and claimed that we are copyright infringers! But we are not! We made it! And this is the video that you said you loved! Now, if you try to watch our video (and again this is the video that had nothing to do with you until you used it in your show without asking) on YouTube it’s just a big black sign that basically says, “the makers of this video stole this video from NBC, so you can’t watch it!” Jay, what in the hell is going on here?

      • Google dealt blow in book scanning lawsuit

        Judge Chin gave the green light for three individual plaintiffs—Betty Miles, Joseph Goulden, and Jim Bouton—to represent the vastly larger class of “persons residing in the United States who hold a United States copyright interest in one or more Books reproduced by Google as part of its Library Project.”

        The Copyright Guild is pretending to represent the interests of all authors when most authors disagree. Authors who disagree should write the judge and say so.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/05/31/links-red-hat-deal-highlights-the-threat-of-microsofts-secure-boot/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/05/21/links-explorer-goes-down-oracle-judge-is-coder/ http://techrights.org/2012/05/21/links-explorer-goes-down-oracle-judge-is-coder/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 21:42:17 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60249 Reader’s Picks
    

    • Ubuntu To Ship on 5% of All PCs Sold Next Year

      “We sell millions of PCs with HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Acer,” Mark Shuttleworth recently told Bussiness Insider website. ”We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.’

    • Linux accessibility – what is it and why does it matter

      I will not completely go into detail about why I use Linux. Suffice it to say that if you are a blind Windows user, you are, for the most part, a target of big name companies who make extremely pricey software products (namely screen readers and screen magnifiers as well as other technologies) which allow you the “privilege” of using your computer system. … Ever installed a system with your eyes closed, literally? … As of right now, at least to my knowledge, one can completely install Debian (see the Debian accessibility page), Ubuntu, Vinux (a Ubuntu derivative designed for blind and visually impaired users), Trisquel and Arch Linux (via Chris Brannon’s TalkingArch ISO image).

    • Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most used browser

    • Hardware

      • Lenovo dumps classic keyboard on new ThinkPad laptops

        I currently own an HP Envy laptop. I like the machine overall, but typing on its island-style keyboard is a frustrating chore, one that inevitably triggers a string of typos that don’t occur when I use a classic keyboard.

    • Health/Nutrition

      • Media Coverage of Mad Cow: USDA Calls “Misleading,” Columbia Journalism Review Calls “Sane”.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Murder for fun and “morale”: Shocking video of lethal Israeli attack on sleeping Palestinian prisoners

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Watchdog: Huge Spike in Cancers, Fertility Problems Linked to Chemicals in Household Items

        Chemicals in common household products may be behind the huge rise in cancers, diabetes and obesity, falling fertility, and an increased number of neurological development, the European Environment Agency (EEA) reported yesterday.

        See also Harmful household chemicals must be banned – health before commerce

      • Finally… Solo Farmer Fights Monsanto and Wins

        Some farmers have been able to sue Monsanto for contaminating their crops with GM. There are hundreds of others who lost everything when sued for patent infringement.

    • Finance

      • FACEBOOK’S TAX DODGE STANDS TO MAKE BILLIONS FOR COMPANY AND ZUCKERBERG

        The stock option tax loophole is the only provision of the tax code that allows companies to deduct money for costs without actually spending any money. It allows Facebook to declare to shareholders and potential investors that their expenses remain low, while at the same time declaring to the IRS that those same shares cost them $5 billion and write those higher costs off as a tax deduction. To their shareholders and the stock market, Facebook will present itself as highly profitable, while their tax return will show the opposite.

        See also, Senate Floor Statement Facebook’s $16 Billion Stock Option Tax Deduction. The worst fraud of all is the ridiculous valuation, created by the usual Microsoft/NASDAQ press tools.

      • Facebook underwriters prop up stock as it nears break-even mark

        The practice is pretty standard during IPOs, especially high-profile ones like Facebook. The big banks buy into a wave of selling as a way to prevent their customers from suffering big losses.
        The syndicate of underwriters led by Morgan Stanley helped prop up shares after the Nasdaq Stock Market experienced technical problems processing trades.

        None of that should be legal.

      • How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

        Trashy ways to scrape the bottom of the barrel even harder.

    • Anti-Trust

      • Break the Microsoft Monopoly

        sign this petition that pressures the relevant authorities in the US and EU (FTC, EU trade commission) to issue regulations that force hardware vendors to offer alternative OS software in order to break this monopoly for good!

      • Hewlett-Packard Said To Consider Cutting Up To 25,000 Jobs

      • No respite for HP, Dell in Windows 8: BMO

        Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment

        It’s Vista with an even nastier face and more digital handcuffs.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

        The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

    • Censorship

      • If you are using non free software, you might not really see what’s published here.

    • Civil Rights

      • Noam Chomsky: Plutonomy and the precariat: On the history of the US economy in decline

        The current US economy is built on ‘growing worker insecurity’ – people who are too busy and poor to make demands. … For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

        Lots of missed opportunities are listed, but the Occupy movement is reason to hope that people won’t let themselves be walked on.

      • Colonized by Corporations

        The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Technology Patent Wars Sign of Robust Innovation, Patent Office Claims

        “Passage of the AIA has provided an opportunity to restart long-stalled discussions with our foreign counterparts toward substantive harmonization that will help U.S. businesses succeed in the global business environment. … I don’t think there is any reason to believe that either copyright or patent lawsuits of the kind that we’re seeing in the so-called smartphone wars are a sign of stifling technological innovation. … [litigants] have intellectual property positions resulting from massive investments. They seek to enforce those positions, level the playing field in some way, and you have a dust-up like we’re seeing right now. I do not believe that it’s a sign that there’s anything at all wrong with the innovation environment in the U.S. In fact, I think it’s a byproduct of a very healthy overall innovation environment. These things happen. They sort themselves out.”

        The US Patent Office is hopelessly corrupt, insane and self serving. This explanation begs the question of software as an invention worthy of a monopoly grant and the validity of the 600,000 patents on backlog. A claim to business methods is turned into a “position” which is good language if you think patents should be traded as a commodity, but that contradicts the protecting innovators excuse. People in other countries should take notice of the obvious fact that US Patents are used for US protectionism. People in the US should notice that this protectionism is mostly serving the interest of a few US companies at the expense of other US companies owned by less wealthy individuals. The net result is that the US market is a backwater of inferior goods.

      • Copyrights

        • Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help

          Dr. Tenenbaum has had years of his life wasted and faces a $675,000 judgment that is completely unjust and makes him a slave for the rest of his life because he admits to having shared a few files.

        • Oracle v Google Judge Is A Programmer!

          “I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?”

          I do not think this will end well for Oracle.

        • They’re Not ‘Orphan Works’, They’re ‘Hostage Works’

          In the metaphor of the romantic author, the works he creates are his children, born of his labor and genius. … We reflexively begin to believe that orphan works need the kind of protection that society provides to abandoned children. … What these works need are “special forces” that can free them from the constraints placed on them by the combination of the regulatory effects of copyright and the lack of a locatable owner who can grant permission to avoid the consequences of the regulation.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/05/21/links-explorer-goes-down-oracle-judge-is-coder/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/05/14/links-tpp-meeting-infiltrated-more-protest-needed/ http://techrights.org/2012/05/14/links-tpp-meeting-infiltrated-more-protest-needed/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 22:50:12 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60148 Reader’s Picks

    • Will “8″ Fly or is it Cripple-ware?

      Non free software is always cripple/mal/spyware.

    • Science

      • Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge, in Our Native Language

        The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

    • Hardware

      • Chuckle. No One Wants Small Expensive Computers.

        2012 will blow away records for tablets shipped in 2011 and M$ will be a no-show.

        Don’t expect Windows on ARM tablets till 2013. A few companies are going to launch expensive WinTel tablets

      • The Setup, Eric S Raymond

        The interesting details about my desktop setup are the peripherals. I like Model-M-style clicky keyboards (I’m typing on a Unicomp Model M). I prefer trackballs over mice and use a Logitech TrackMan. I like lots of vertical pixels for my Emacs window, so I’m rocking a Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF at 1800×1440 with 120dpi. My road machine is a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 … I like intricate music playing while I hack (Liquid Tension Experiment playing now).

    • Security

      • IAmA a malware coder and botnet operator, AMA

        The author says a lot of interesting things in comments. Of course, it’s all Windows.

      • Lauren Lauren Weinstein: More details on the .secure TLD proposal

        You may recall my posting yesterday (http://j.mp/Ku8pEd) where I suggested that the .secure TLD proposal is fundamentally flawed for many reasons. The CTO of the company involved contacted me this morning, pointing at their blog with more details: http://unhandled.com/ — After reviewing this information, which includes their proposals for a broader “domain policy framework,” I’m forced to stand by my earlier characterization. … The concept of .secure is essentially 180 degrees away from the model I believe we should be working towards. Rather than centralizing security, we need to be distributing it…

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

        The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • US Citizens: Support the End Polluter Welfare Act

      • Warm water marine species spreading northwards into British waters

      • Decades of Data Show Spring Advancing Faster Than Experiments Suggest

      • Greenpeace: Demand the White House publicly release all information around the Gulf disaster and stop offshore drilling

        It’s not too late. The government has yet to announce the amount of money BP owes for the damages caused by the disaster.

        The US government blocked independent scientists, stolen samples and concealed the results of their own limited studies with lame excuses of safety and proper investigation. State and local governments, for the most part, were bought out with DHS and BP money for toys and advertising campaigns. Demand better!

    • Finance

      • Eurozone crisis: Greek left leader renounces bailout deal

        Tsipras said he would … “end the agreements of subservience”. The signing of the loan had not been “a salvation but a tragedy”

        Good for Greece.

      • Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy

      • Want to stop banks gambling on food prices? Try closing the casino

        Roosevelt’s administration came up with a simple solution: position limits. If you were not a participant in the food business – neither a farmer nor a baker – you could trade no more than 5,000 futures contracts. This prescription worked well, and endured until the late 1990s, when position limit exemptions were quietly granted to a number of large investment banks. Wall Street subsequently rushed into commodities, and the world is still reeling.

    • Anti-Trust

      • Firefox on Windows on ARM – Microsoft Says No

        you don’t get those privileges (certain API access) unless you’re the default browser and I think that’s deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we’re able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips. But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers

        Microsoft has played API games forever, what’s new is that they are pretending it’s OK and are trying to extend their death grip to ARM [2].

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • Goldman Looks to Hire Social Media Strategist

        The rich and powerful already have a tremendous astroturf presence, most graphically revealed in the HB Garry/Aaron Barr email spill. Techrights has covered Microsoft’s disgusting astroturf effort for years.

    • Censorship

      • Few Companies Fight Patriot Act Gag Orders, FBI Admits

        “Thus far, there have been only four challenges to the non-disclosure requirement,” Holder wrote, “and in two of the challenges, the FBI permitted the recipient to disclose the fact that an NSL was received.” … The FBI has sent out nearly 300,000 NSLs since 2000, about 50,000 of which have been sent out since the new policy for challenging NSL gag orders went into effect. Last year alone, the FBI sent out 16,511 NSLs requesting information pertaining to 7,201 U.S. persons.

      • If You Meet a Censor, Ask Them This One Question

      • Dutch Judge Who Ordered Pirate Bay Links Censored Fount to be Corrupt

        … the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case. … It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.

      • In the US, you can still say almost anything, but someone just may be listening in

        a new kind of corporate oligopoly is emerging. Coupled with increasingly controlling activities by government, often in concert with corporate interests, the new choke points threaten to re-centralize media, or at least return control to a few dominant parties. … wired-line carriers believe that they should be able to decide what bits of information get delivered in what order and at what speed, if they get delivered at all. … The serious potential for problems with wired-line broadband is nothing next to the actual situation with mobile carriers. … The copyright industries have every intention of being another [chokepoint]. … Private companies are creating their own ecosystems, with minimal regulatory interference … If you create a journalism app to be sold in the iPhone or iPad marketplace, you explicitly give Apple the right to decide whether your journalism content is acceptable under the company’s vague guidelines. … Facebook is another potential threat to independent journalism. … journalists need to upgrade their own techniques and technology when it comes to protecting sources.

        It is not surprising that one monopoly helps the other, as big publishers and telco helped Apple, because the monopolies are ultimately owned be the same few wealthy families that want to guard their relative position. What’s shameful is the willingness of our government to serve them at everyone else’s expense.

    • Privacy

      • Stallman: CISPA ‘nearly abolishes’ the right not to be unreasonably searched

        What CISPA says as passed by the House of Representatives is any ISP, any website, any company that has some of your data in it can voluntarily hand it over to the government for a wide range of reasons …

      • Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You

        if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place. … Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base.

        Spying on a person from miles away with a telescope is no accident, it takes pinpoint precision and advanced knowledge of the target’s location.

      • http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2012/mobile-internet-censorship

        The only sensible child protection policy is sound public education and digital freedom.

    • Civil Rights

      • Gay rights in the US, state by state

      • Caught on Tape: Walker Plans for a Single Party State

        Walker: “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. . .”

        So there you have it, the attack on civil servants in Wisconsin was not motivated by budget it was politics and class warfare.

      • Dell response regarding insensitive comments from Mads Christensen

        “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. … [more tastless stuff] … the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up bitch!”.

        Dell is sorry they got caught laughing about discrimination against women in the workplace. It’s amazing how little attention this got a month ago compared to the “Virgin of Emacs.” That’s more evidence of an organized campaign around to smear RMS.

      • Why Are People Resigning Before The Copyright Industries’ Will?

        When did people forget that legislators, and not corporations, have the final say over our laws?

    • Education Watch

      • How Private Bottling Companies Water-Down Education to Boost Profits

        Nestlé Waters North America, the organization’s main sponsor, is the last entity that should be empowered to educate the public about responsible water use. When you consider the bottled water behemoth ‘s track record of hogging global water supplies and profiting from them, Project WET’s supposed mission is a slap in the face to any community that has had its water muscled away by Nestlé.

      • Reframing the Doomday Budget Discussion

        After years of hard cuts, Califorinia’s universities are starting to shut down programs as they face even worse. Students are facing more tuition hikes.

      • Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Ruling That Trainee Teachers Not Intended as “Highly Qualified” Under NCLB eg: Teach for America

        A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

      • Weekly Update : The Philadelphia horror story, no more school libraries in DC if the school chancellor has anything to do with it, other privatizing insanity and the push back

      • More on the WSPTA Convention: Oops, the new teacher evaluation system would not impact charter schools

        So, we see that “evaluations” are mostly a tool to punish people opposed to charter schools.

      • Bringing the PTA into the 21st Century or What I learned at the Washington State PTA Convention

        Next year, the convention will be in Bellevue, a stone’s throw from Seattle. A decision with no regard for other regions attending. Bellevue is also more expensive than Seattle and farther away from SeaTac airport. I guess everyone can take a limo. (Or is it eat cake?) So how do we get the WSPTA into the 21st century and relevant again? How do we encourage and support parents, teachers and students to be involved? How does the WSPTA get the diversity of membership that it keeps attempting to obtain? First we do it with the technology that we have available and we take a look at how we handle our state and national elections. If this is to be a democratic process that is accessible to all, let’s make that happen.

    • Internet/Net Neutrality

      • Keeping the Internet Neutral

        A good history of what is wrong with US internet access.

    • Digital Handcuffs

      • Technology should help us share, not constrain us

        Printed books let us do that. I couldn’t do it with most commercial ebooks; it’s not “allowed”. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict reading, so it simply won’t allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are “not allowed” for ebooks.

    • TPP

      • Live from the Trenches: TPP Negotiations in Dallas

        The public is excluded from meaningful monitoring or input.

      • Party ends badly for U.S. trade reps, federal agents

        The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and “Haversall” continued: “I’d like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right.” … Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.

        Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed “delegates” (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted “TPP! TPP! TPP!” for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

        The look of panic on the corporate spokes drone in this video is almost as funny as US Trade representative Kirk’s “We came, we saw, we shopped”.

      • EFF petition: No Backroom Deals to Regulate the Internet: Speak Out Against the Trans-Pacific Partnership!

      • Before and After SOPA

        The defeat, even if only temporary, of SOPA and PIPA was surely one key factor in the sudden upswelling of protests against ACTA, which until that point had seemed almost certain to be ratified in the EU. The actions against SOPA and ACTA have led to renewed analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), currently being negotiated behind closed doors in Dallas.

        Let’s make these defeats permanent.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/05/14/links-tpp-meeting-infiltrated-more-protest-needed/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/05/10/links-microsoft-bans-mozilla-from-vista-8/ http://techrights.org/2012/05/10/links-microsoft-bans-mozilla-from-vista-8/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 06:21:41 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60146 Reader’s Picks

  • Android Not Only Selling Well, but Now Has The Largest Installed Base of Smart Phones

  • Walmart.com’s Best-selling Tablets

  • Hardware

    • New Dell Ubuntu ultrabooks a step in the right direction for Linux support

      … the company needs to be careful to pick components that are supported well upstream. What would be ideal is if Dell started encouraging its hardware suppliers to open their drivers and merge them into the mainline kernel tree. That would be infinitely more constructive for advancing desktop Linux than any preinstallation scheme.

  • Anti-Trust

    • Nokia hit with class action lawsuit; fraud claims ‘without merit,’ it says

      Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd … filed a class action suit against Finnish mobile giant Nokia yesterday claiming that the company made false and/or misleading statements to investors after it indicated that it believed the switch to the Windows Phone operating system “would reverse Nokia’s trends worldwide and dramatically improve its share of the U.S. market,” [but knew] that such a turnaround wouldn’t happen; the new Lumia 900 LTE model was glitchy and poorly accepted and its migration “not going as well as represented,” according to the complaint.

    • Microsoft To Block Competing Browsers In Windows 8, RT Edition

      “Windows RT will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment.

    • Windows on ARM Users Need Browser Choice Too

      Mozilla’s response is unnecessarily restrained. Microsoft has dropped the bomb on them, so they might as well give up Windows.

    • Microsoft bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows, Mozilla says

      [ARM] chips have new requirements for security and power management, and Microsoft is the only one who can meet those needs.

      Only Microsoft can manage to bring insecurity and poor power management to a platform that everyone else has been using without problems for the last decade.

    • FSF statement on jury’s partial verdict in Oracle v Google

      Were it grounded in reality, Oracle’s claim that copyright law gives them proprietary control over any software that uses a particular functional API would be terrible for free software and programmers everywhere. It is an unethical and greedy interpretation created with the express purpose of subjugating as many computer users as possible, and is particularly bad in this context because it comes at a time when the sun has barely set on the free software community’s celebration of Java as a language newly suitable for use in the free world. Fortunately, the claim is not yet reality, and we hope Judge Alsup will keep it that way.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Corporate Media’s Attempt to Kill the Occupy Movement

      The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Netherlands first country in Europe with net neutrality

  • Digital Handcuffs

    • Why Tech Review is ditching its iPad edition

      Jason Pontin, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, explains why his magazine deprecated its iPad app and went to “a simple RSS feed in a river of news,” and why it’s moving to “HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone.

    • DVDs and Blu-rays will now carry two unskippable government warnings

      This is a ridiculous escalation of rhetoric by scores of Orwellian US agencies. What else can we expect from groups with such unblushingly fascist emblems and an idiotic motto like, “Protection is our Trademark.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Google Demands $4 Billion A year From Microsoft

      Microsoft’s years of bullying smaller companies into patent submission is about to come back and bite them in the butt. Today in court Google demanded $4 billion a year in patent fees for the Xbox 360 or stop selling it in the United States. … Google recently purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what a lot of analysts saw as a means for Google to go after Microsoft in retaliation for the shady business practices Microsoft has been guilty of for years.

      This counter attack is defensive. Rather than validating the patent system, it shows how wasteful it is. I’m looking forward to a string of such lawsuits against every product Microsoft has.

    • Honeywell’s Lawsuit Against Nest: The Perfect Example Of Legacy Players Using Patents To Stifle Innovation

      I would not want an internet connected, non free thermostat but this is a good example of the harm caused by software patents.

    • SGI Back From The Dead (Again) And Suing Tons Of Companies For Patent Infringement

      Back in 2006, we noted that what remained of SGI had indicated that it planned to resurrect the company by going patent troll. However, we thought we’d avoided that ignoble result when SGI sold most of its assets to Rackable for a mere $25 million three years ago. Silly us for assuming those patents would just go away.
      While Rackable changed its name to Silicon Graphics International… the original company actually retained the patents, and renamed itself Graphics Properties Holdings … In the last year alone it has sued Apple, HTC, LG, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Acer, ASUS, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio and Motorola Mobility.

      History lesson, SGI was killed by Microsoft mole, Richard Belluzzo. I wonder why Nokia is not on the list.

    • Copyrights

      • Key Ruling In The Fight Over Artists Getting Their Copyrights Back Suggests The Labels May Be In Big Trouble

        under current copyright law [1978], content creators can “terminate” the assignment of their copyright after 35 years and regain the copyright. This is a right that cannot be negotiated away or given to anyone but direct heirs … The judge in the case has pretty decisively ruled against the publishers and said that partial copyright owners still can exercise their termination rights…

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/05/10/links-microsoft-bans-mozilla-from-vista-8/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/05/08/links-oracles-war-on-google-falters/ http://techrights.org/2012/05/08/links-oracles-war-on-google-falters/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 07:30:28 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60144 Reader’s Picks

  • How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

    Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

  • Lib-Ray: An Open HD Video Standard for Free Culture and Independent Film

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

    • Ex-CIA Officer Who Destroyed Waterboarding Videos: Torturers “Disgusted” at Being Labeled “Torturers”

      … he worried about the global repercussions if the footage leaked out and wanted to get “rid of some ugly visuals.”

      Most people don’t like the way torture looks.

    • Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment

      The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

      The rocket riders have arrived in Lon-don, En-gal-land.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

      …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

      This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

    • Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

      “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

      US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

    • ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets

    • Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

      The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

    • Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

      An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

  • Finance

    • Campaigners claim World Bank helps facilitate land grabs in Africa

    • The Lehman Bankruptcy Docs (Buy LEH!)

      How awesome is this treasure trove of emails, documents, files et. al placed online by the NY Fed? … Who was the author of this steaming piece of shit, and where is he today? Why, he is Patrick Pinschmidt, and he is a Senior Policy Advisor at U.S. Treasury Department! (You could not make up stuff this un-fucking-believable even if you tried).

  • Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

    • Barnes & Noble Press Release

      Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

      It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

    • Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

      Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

    • Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

      Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

      Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

    • Oracle-Google verdict signals need for copyright reform

    • Oracle v. Google and the Dangerous Implications of Treating APIs as Copyrightable

      significant outstanding questions remain, including whether copyright can in fact apply (the judge alone will decide this) and whether Google made a legal fair use of those APIs (we believe it did).

    • 
      From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google, Day 1 of Patent Phase ~pj – Updated 7Xs- Partial Verdict; Oracle Wins Nothing That Matters

    • Evidence of paid anti-Google bias in patent “news” coverage is troubling

      Yesterday it was revealed that Oracle has hired Mr. Mueller to “work together for the long haul” on “competition related issues,” of which FRAND law was the only provided example. Mueller claims this is a “very recent” relationship, but by his own admission he and Oracle have been discussing his employment for a long time … We don’t want to impugn his word, so … it’s not Mr. Mueller’s intent that should be questioned, but the results.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

      The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

    • ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

      Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

  • Privacy

    • Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

      Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

    • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

      Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

      They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

    • To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

      a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

      So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

    • To Facebook You’re Worth $80.95

      What’s interesting is not the smoke and mirrors valuation fraud, it’s the disgusting attitude about selling people’s private information.

    • FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now

      CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory. … The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

      It’s time to remove CALEA.

  • Civil Rights

    • US citizens: Tell Congress: Stop the Corporate Attack on Our Rights. End Forced Arbitration

  • Education Watch

    • Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

      the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

      I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

    • School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

      You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

      The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

    • Mass student strike in Quebec continues

      Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

      The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

    • Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%

      Severe and chronic trauma (such as living with an alcoholic parent, or watching in terror as your mom gets beat up) causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible. … this “discipline with dignity” stuff is, well, useless. Punishing misbehavior just doesn’t work. You’re simply adding trauma to an already traumatized kid. … Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.”

  • Copyrights

    • “FRAND is a FRAUD” Joint statement by FSFE and FSF US on UK Open Standards consultation

    • The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

    • Nina Paley at BLIP Legal Hackathon

      Nina Paley introduces the concept of Intellectual Disobedience, where people use works as they see fit regardless of what publishers and lawyers want.

    • ACTA

      • Pirate Party Presents ACTA Alternative to European Parliament

• How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

  Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

  • Ex-CIA Officer Who Destroyed Waterboarding Videos: Torturers “Disgusted” at Being Labeled “Torturers”

    … he worried about the global repercussions if the footage leaked out and wanted to get “rid of some ugly visuals.”

    Most people don’t like the way torture looks.

  • Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment

    The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

    The rocket riders have arrived in Lon-don, En-gal-land.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

    …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

    This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

  • Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

    “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

    US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

  • ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets

  • Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

    The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

  • Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

    An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

• Finance

  • Campaigners claim World Bank helps facilitate land grabs in Africa

• Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

  • Barnes & Noble Press Release

    Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

    It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

  • Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

    Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

  • Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

    Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

    Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

    The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

  • ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

    Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

• Privacy

  • Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

    Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

  • Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

    Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

    They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

  • To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

    a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

    So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

• Civil Rights

  • US citizens: Tell Congress: Stop the Corporate Attack on Our Rights. End Forced Arbitration

• Education Watch

  • Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

    the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

    I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

  • School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

    You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

    The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

  • Mass student strike in Quebec continues

    Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

    The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

• Copyrights

  • “FRAND is a FRAUD” Joint statement by FSFE and FSF US on UK Open Standards consultation

  • The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

  • ACTA

    • Pirate Party Presents ACTA Alternative to European Parliament

• Seattle Rex vs. Apple: The Verdict Is In

  A few years ago, Apple sold me a $4,000 computer with a defective graphics chip/logic board. The defective part was the Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and when it was discovered that the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and issue me a refund.

• Seems German parliament (Bundestag) has an email blackout. IIRC they switched from Linux to MSFT Exchange. How ironic.

  That’s not ironic, it’s night follows day predictable.

• Science

  • The Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed

• Health/Nutrition

  • The six qualities that transform bread from junk food to superfood.

• Security

  • Equipment Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Account in Control System Code

    The backdoor, which cannot be disabled, is found in all versions of the Rgged Operating System made by RuggedCom … a static username, “factory,” that was assigned by the vendor and can’t be changed by customers, and a dynamically gnerated password that is based on the individual MAC …

  • Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: the disastrous conclusion

    [why?] … to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. … I’d also set up Hotmail to import all my Gmail and its associated contacts. Not to mention the Facebook and LinkedIn contacts that Hotmail merges into your online address book. It soon became painfully clear that pretty much anyone I’d had personal or professional contact with over the past decade had been sent an email containing a link to a malicious site. From my account. Me – the editor of a PC magazine. … what’s even more worrying is that it’s not only my webmail that’s been compromised, but my Xbox login (which holds my credit card details) and now my PC login too. Because Windows 8 practically forces you to login with your Windows Live/Hotmail details

    He tries to change his passwords but probably did so with another Windows computer.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor

    A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.

  • 61-Year Old Woman Violently Arrested after Peacefully Protesting at Koch Brothers Meeting

    This kind of unprofessional behavior by police is too common.

  • Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD

    Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder! … 44 colleges and universities, 15 research foundations and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals and clinics, and three penal institutions across the country were used for MK-ULTRA research

  • EXCLUSIVE: DOES THIS GIRL LOOK LIKE A TERRORIST?

    Family misses flight after TSA screeners target disabled 7-year-old

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • A Remarkable Week for Corporate Crime

    First Criminal Prosecution in BP Case is an Individual, not a Corporation. Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP plc, was arrested on charges of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal criminal authorities investigating the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster. David Uhlmann, the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at he Justice Department is puzzled why the government has yet to bring criminal charges against BP and the other companies involved. “The government has a slam dunk criminal case against BP, TransOcean and Halliburton for the negligence that caused the Gulf oil spill,” Uhlmann told Marketplace Radio yesterday “They should bring those criminal charges.”

    Article has 9 other cases of corporate crime that includes bribery, padded billing and poorly labled medicine.

• Finance

  • Former Citigroup Chairman Blames Deregulation For The Financial Crisis

• Anti-Trust

  • How Verizon might kill any hope for LTE interoperability

    The US spectrum is a hopeless mess of uncooperative monopolists that should be replaced with open spectrum because the spectrum belongs to the public and there’s no good technical reason to assign it to anyone.

  • Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm

  • SolarWorld president pushes ‘Halftime in America’ review of tactics to offset trade predation on U.S. manufacturing

    Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America Inc., recommended revisions in the U.S. government response to incursions of predatory trade aggression from non-market economies such as China, as a move toward rekindling U.S. manufacturing and jobs. The need for policy updates, Brinser said, comes as China amasses a new magnitude of economic might and its central planners increasingly target pivotal U.S. industries.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • PR agency is hiring students for a Pro-ACTA demonstration. 100 € for 2 hours. Disgusting, much?

  • Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit

    “Crowdturfing” is a term that combines crowdsourcing and astroturfing to describe the use of crowdsurfing sites to create artificial campaigns on microblog sites, forums, instant message groups and blogs. … ing systems. More specifically, we define crowdturfing systems as systems where customers initiate “campaigns,” and a significant number of users obtain financial compensation in exchange for per-forming simple “tasks” that go against accepted user policies.

  • UK: Open Standards consultation – important update

    One of our first discussion roundtables held on the 4th of April (Competition and European Interaction) was facilitated by Dr Andrew Hopkirk who blogged about the event for Computer Weekly and who was engaged by Cabinet Office as an independent facilitator on a pro-bono basis. … he did not declare the fact that he was advising Microsoft directly on the Open Standards consultation. … For this reason any outcomes from the original roundtable discussion will be discounted in the consultation responses and we will rerun that session and give time for people to prepare for it.

    Seel also this CW article setting the stage. The most important thing to remember about the Microsoft game is that they are trying to corrupt your channels of communication too.

  • Lost in translation: Anti-TPP campaign befuddles Washington

    Japan’s agricultural lobby has taken its campaign against a global free trade agreement to the U.S., buying a full-page advertisement in Tuesday’s Washington Post opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    TPP is a terrible, anti-democratic treaty.

• Censorship

  • Demand Progress petition: Obama Threatens To Veto CISPA: Encourage Him To Stand Strong

  • Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote

    This is no SOPA, the jerks are moving fast.

  • Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

    Judge O’Grady informed the FBI that Megaupload was never served with criminal charges, which is a requirement to start the trial. The origin of this problem is not merely a matter of oversight. Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken says that unlike people, companies can’t be served outside US jurisdiction. … it is not the first “procedural” mistake either. Last month the New Zealand High Court declared the order used to seize Dotcom’s property “null and void” after it was discovered that the police had acted under a court order that should have never been granted.

  • Server Seizure, April 2012

    “The FBI is using a sledgehammer approach, shutting down service to hundreds of users due to the actions of one anonymous person,” said Devin Theriot-Orr, a spokesperson for Riseup. “This is particularly misguided because there is unlikely to be any information on the server regarding the source of the threatening emails.”

  • Facebook Blocking Stories About Richard O’Dwyer’s Fight Against Extradition To The US

    Facebook is shown to block mention of issues or sites that big publishers. When caught in censorship, Facebook claims to relent because it was a mistake but we should not trust them or the evidence of a few successes.

  • Spreading CISPA Awareness (Similar to SOPA, But Worse), Anonymous Initiates Tweet Bomb

    As indicated, CISPA is expected to be voted on next week … That also means you only have one more weekend to inform yourself and figure out your position on this potentially privacy-threatening piece of Internet legislation.

    The threat is not potential, it is actual.

  • Cispa cybersecurity bill opposed by Obama administration

• Privacy

  • Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

  • Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

    At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms.

    Love the $4 billion dollar boon doggle by big Microsoft partner SAIC. ATT also earns special shame and should be boycotted.

  • If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move

    The rollout of this technology means there are now at least three ways that users can track their locations indoors, where GPS is generally useless — bluetooth beacon, Spotrank (and proprietary vendor) databases of Wi-Fi hotspots, and Navizon’s I.T.S. nodes. It also marks the second way (that I know of) for you to be tracked via the location of your phone, whether you want to be or not. (The first requires access to your cell phone carrier, and is used for example to locate your position when you make a 911 call.)

    Inadequate privacy laws in the US allow companies to aggregate this data to know exactly what device belongs to who. That means your location can easily be tracked in real time. Non free phones may give you away in other ways as well, regardless of laws. Any laws that block sharing of information like this would be undone by CISPA.

  • Drone Use Takes Off on the Home Front

    Occupy AA stations! Three people with surgical tubing, a funnel and some gravel should be able to bring the smaller spies down.

• Civil Rights

  • TSA’s PreCheck express airport screening hinges on fragile trust

    The agent explained that her record is clean but that “someone I know has gotten into trouble or is under investigation and that it affects me,” she said. … A TSA spokesman confirmed that loss of any other E-ZPass-like government program for travelers, such as Sentri, Global Entry or Nexus, will have similar repercussions for their PreCheck membership. “If your card is revoked by CBP, you’re no longer eligible for PreCheck,” says Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman.

    Guilt by association is a typical police state tactic used to keep people helpless and divided. So are restrictions on travel for people who have not been accused or convicted of any crimes.

  • The TSA’s mission creep is making the US a police state

    In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying “people [who] want to travel by some other means” have that right. (In other words: if you don’t like it, don’t fly.) But now TSA is invading travel by other means, too. No surprise, really: as soon as she established groping in airports, Napolitano expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. … “Don’t like the new rules for mass transit? Then drive.” Except even that doesn’t work anymore. Earlier this month, the VIPRs came out again in Virginia and infested the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, also known as the stretch of Interstate 64 connecting the cities of Hampton and Norfolk. … Local commenters at the Travel Underground forums reported delays of 90 minutes. … If you don’t like it, walk. And remember to be respectfully submissive to any TSA agents or police you encounter in your travels, especially now that the US supreme court has ruled mass strip-searches are acceptable …

  • May Day Directory: Occupy General Strike In Over 115 Cities

    Need a break from work? Take a long weekend for May Day by taking Monday and Tuesday off.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Why Preserving an Open Internet is Now the Most Important Thing in the World

    An Open Internet is increasingly absolutely essential to freedom of communications, freedom to search, freedom to learn, and just about every other freedom you or I could list. Communications. Information. It is through these concepts, these realities, that innovations are created, problems are solved, dictators are vanquished, and the world advances. And similarly, it is through control of these constructs, restrictions on information and communications, that ideas are crushed, lives are enslaved, and dictators flourish.

• Education Watch

  • Free Open Source Software in Oregon Government

    instead of adopting Open Source governments in Oregon continue to mostly shun it or use it as little as possible. A good example is non-profit FreeGeek has a contract with the City of Portland in which they get used City computers and hardware and refurbish them and install Ubuntu but must distribute those refurbished machines to local schools however the Portland Public School system has not yet requested any of these computers for their classrooms and students. How can local schools do teacher layoffs and cut programs yet turn down free computers and technology that would save the millions from their budget over time.

• ACTA

  • EDRI: ACTA – If You Think We’ve Won, We’ve Lost

    Following the announcement of David Martin, the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in charge of the ACTA dossier in the European Parliament, that he will advise his colleagues to vote against the proposal, a widespread assumption appears to have developed that ACTA is now dead. This is not just wrong. It is dangerous and wrong. … [we can assume it's over and relax or] we do our duty for European democracy and maintain our pressure right up until the vote. And then we win. And Europe wins.

  • Liberals and Democrats Announce Rejection of ACTA

    Everyone should do this.

• Security

  • Congressional Reps Pushing CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Don’t Even Know How To Secure Their Own Websites

Finance

• Blank Check for the Military Will Send America the Way of the Soviet Union

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • H.R. 3523 – Letters of Support

    AT&T, Boeing, BSA, Business Roundtable, CSC, COMPTEL, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association, Edison Electric, EMC, Exelon, Facebook, The Financial Services Roundtable, IBM, Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, Information Technology Industry Council, Intel, Internet Security Alliance, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, National Cable & Telecommunications Association, NDIA, Oracle, Symantec, TechAmerica
    US Chamber of Commerce, US Telecom – The Broadband Association,
    Verizon

    The usual suspects. Shame on IBM.

  • CISPA emerged from the House Intelligence Committee with an overwhelming vote of 17-1. …

    No, Google has not stated support for this nasty bill.

• Censorship

  • CISPA is SOPA 2.0: petition to stop it

  • CISPA Is The New SOPA: Help Kill It

  • Save the Internet from the US

  • Rogers’ “Cybersecurity” Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay

    allows companies or the government1 free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies are encouraged to share data with the government and with one another, and the government can share data in return. … because “us[ing] cybersecurity systems” is incredibly vague, it could be interpreted to mean monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites. A company acting on a “cybersecurity threat” would be able to bypass all existing laws, including laws prohibiting telcos from routinely monitoring communications, so long as it acted in “good faith.”

• Privacy

  • EFF Joins Two Coalition Letters Opposing CISPA

    Continuing our campaign against the cyberspying bill better known as CISPA, EFF has signed on to two coalition letters urging legislators to drop their support for the Rogers cybersecurity bill (HR 3523). One coalition is focused on the disastrous privacy implications of the bill, while the other identifies major government accountability issues it would introduce.

  • Battle Over New Cybersecurity Bill CISPA Breaks Out Across The Web

  • Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Speaks Out Against CISPA

    [It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world. Even though the SOPA and PIPA acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the US government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens

  • ACLU: Proposed Amendments to CISPA Don’t Protect Privacy

  • Stop CISPA? Cybersecurity bill adds six new co-sponsors in two days

    Despite efforts to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, the bill has gained six more co-sponsors in the past two days, bringing the total to 112.

  • European Parliament Agrees to Send Airline Passenger Data to US

• How LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word: 12 Features

  It amazes me that anyone would consider using Word or Windows but here are some technical reasons not to.

• Death to Word. It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor

• Google Chrome OS Review: Heading Towards Microsoft Market?

• Behind the Scenes at Instagram: Tools for Building Reliable Web Services

  how do you build a service and scale it to the size and success of Instagram? At least part of the answer lies in choosing your tools wisely.

  Hint: they don’t use IIS.

• An effort to upgrade SSH, from MIT

  This paper describes Mosh, a mobile shell application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and provides speculative local echo of user keystrokes. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol, a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across client IP address changes.

• Play the eyballing game

• Hardware

  • ESR: Making simple connections

    It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. … In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. … Wow…it really is the 21st century! …

• Health/Nutrition

  • The Worst Farm Bill Ever?.

  • US Hospitals scramble on the front lines of drug shortages

  • Peru Passes Monumental Ten Year Ban on Genetically Engineered Foods

    Research by ASPEC confirms something that Peruvians knew all along: GM foods are on the shelves of our markets and wineries, and consumers buy them and take them into their homes to eat without knowing it. Nobody tells us, no one says anything, which involves a clear violation of our right to information

• Security

  • HP Ships Virus-Infected Flash Card With ProCurve Switch

    Anything a Microsoft OS touches can have this problem.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report

  • Cop Watcher Jailed Twice

    Cop watching — the act of turning a camera on police — is not illegal. But in areas policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it can still land you in jail. … She spent a hellish night in a cell with no bed, forced to sleep on a cold floor. “They kept the air-conditioning running full blast like they wanted to punish me,” she says … when the jailers returned her belongings, her camcorder footage had been erased — an act that First Amendment attorneys say is illegal. It also violates department policy. She was told the obstruction charge had been dropped and was handed a written citation for being “under the influence of a controlled substance.”

  • What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records

    The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?

    Drug use seems to be a catch all accusation thrown against people the police don’t like.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

    Ongoing.

• Finance

  • Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule

    You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening.

  • Excerpt: At Goldman Sachs Servicer, ‘Total Disaster’

    “Had companies changed their philosophy and said, ‘You know what? We’re not going to beef up our collections staff; we’re going to beef up our loss mitigation staff.’ Had they done that and come up with loan modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

  • Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money

    Ongoing anti-competitive business and government granted monopolies are not even mentioned.

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia makes Lumia 900 free to all AT&T customers, now through April 21st

    This is called dumping. People who fall for it will also end up with ATT/Microsoft, how miserable.

  • Proposal: Open Source Life, Not Death Sentence, for Windows XP

    Microsoft is not a free software company because they don’t think they can screw users enough that way and would rather go bankrupt.

  • Why Microsoft’s New Open Source Company?

    Both points 3 and 4 [Firewall open source licensing and patent liability so that they can give as little and threaten as much as possible] are widely understood to be part of the reason Microsoft started the Outercurve Foundation, as a destination to outsource open source projects it wanted to start while isolating itself from any perceived risks its imaginative legal time might envisage.

• Censorship

  • With Friends Like M$, Who Needs Enemies?

    M$ recently boasted how it was making the Internet safe by grabbing servers and domains connected to botnets. It turns out they were a bull in a china shop breaking all kinds of legitimate sites and blocking the work of real security businesses.

  • Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

    He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.

  • Inside Washington’s high risk mission to beat web censors

    Free speech is for people who say good things about the US.

• Privacy

  • This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

    Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win. … His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that’s stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can’t read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.

  • ACLU: Kicking off “Stop Cyber Spying Week”

    The bill would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws, allowing companies to share Internet users’ data with the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the world — without any legal oversight. If CISPA passes, companies like Google and Facebook could pass your online communications to the military, just by claiming they were motivated by “cybersecurity purposes.” CISPA would give the companies immunity from lawsuits if you want to challenge what they are doing. Once the government has the information, the bill allows them to use it for any legal purpose other than regulation, not just for stopping cybersecurity threats.

    This bill would complete the public/private cooperation started by the U SAP AT RIOT ACT and legalize the worst abuses.

  • Revealed: CISPA — Internet Spying Law — Pushed by For-Profit Spy Lobby

    defense contractors, many already working with the National Security Agency on related data-mining projects, are lobbying to press forward. Like many bad policy ideas, entrenched government contractors seem to be using taxpayer money to lobby for even more power and profit.

    Microsoft, of course, is on the list but so are other big hitters like Lockheed Martin. Richard Stallman, in his political notes, says, “The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.”

• Civil Rights

  • An economic recovery that leaves workers further behind

    American workers have lost all their bargaining power. … First, American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. Second, with the rate of private-sector unionization down to a microscopic 6.9 percent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay. Employers can serenely blow them off — and judging by the data, that’s exactly what employers are doing.

• Education Watch

  • The American Middle Class Was the Strongest in the World When It Was the Best Educated in the World

    postwar American factory workers weren’t modestly educated people by the standard of their time, they were the best-educated factory workers on the planet. And it’s not just true for the postwar decades. A still-underappreciated fact about the United States is that for the bulk of our history we were the best-educated country on earth. … Today, it’s merely middling.

  • Teacher Fired For Organizing A Fundraiser For Trayvon Martin

    This is what happens without teacher’s unions

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Why one in five U.S. adults don’t use the Internet

    Expensive and ratty networks keep US citizens off the internet. Big publishers try to convince us all those without don’t want it by quoting people who don’t know any better and can’t tell us if they have been misrepresented.

• DRM

  • International Day Against DRM — May 4, 2012

    Join the party if you can.

• Copyrights

  • Yes, Copyright’s Sole Purpose Is To Benefit The Public

    to claim that the protections of the author are greater than or even equal to the benefits to the nation, is a clear flip-flopping of the method with the purpose. Of course, in doing so, it not only flip flops the method and the purpose, but it completely distorts the nature of copyright law, and leads to maximalist-style positions, where absolutely no consideration is given to how the public benefits (or, more importantly, is hurt) from specific changes to copyright law.

  • The case was thrown out but Goldman Sach’s programmer spent a year in jail and the judges recommended changes to law that would criminalize what he did.

  • Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He’s Not Monetizing

    The propaganda machine is failing as artists succeed.

• Bootstrapped Startup Saves Over $100K By Dropping IE

  Everything about Microsoft is an expensive time suck like IE and should be abandoned.

• Building a GSM network with open source

• Microsoft Office 365 vs Google Apps

  Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology recently polled 150 students who tested Google Apps’ Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 and results showed only two preferred the latter.

• Science

  • Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells

    Simply activating a tiny number of neurons can conjure an entire memory.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Tell the FDA: No BPA in food packaging!.

• Security

  • Paul Vixie tells us how he and the FBI are dealing with the Windows born malware, DNS Changer and Conficker

    Many victims would have to reinstall Windows on their computers — which at first was the only sure cure for this particular infection. On top of that, many of the victims have had their DSL or Cable modems (“home routers”) reconfigured by the DNS Changer malware, so that they were using ISC’s replacement DNS servers even if none of their computers are still infected and even if none of their computers were running Windows. Most Internet users do not have the skills necessary to check and repair the configuration of their home routers, and most Windows users are also unwilling to reinstall Windows. So, even when we could identify and notify a victim, we had a hard time “closing the deal”. … We still don’t know the identities of any of the criminals who foisted Conficker on an unready world back in 2008. But we do know that the victim population has not dropped below six million (6,000,000). So we still collect the “sinkhole” data about these victims, we still report on it to network operators, and every year we buy another rack of disk drives to hold the next year or so worth of data. We’re out of ideas for how to get people to care that their computers are infected with Conficker.

    The new deadline is July 9 2012. You can check your own non free embedded systems at http://dns-ok.us/.

  • The Illusion of Security Or: How to hack CitiBank

    Several years ago, I was working as a trainer in a Citibank call center. … The building was locked down. … since every computer in the building had access to the complete financial history of every single person who’d ever done business with Citibank … [but] … I went to my own computer, and found many other sites I could access. The Center for Information Technology Integration. Cities Restaurant. The Cape IT Initiative. Random websites that had one thing in common. They started with the letters CITI. … That night, I registered citi.ryanestrada.com

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Abortion and Birth Defects

    Republicans are obsessed with abortion but have little interest in protecting fetuses from birth defects due to toxic chemicals from the environment. Some Republicans want to punish pregnant women who do anything that hurts a fetus. Strange that they don’t care about the problem when a factory causes it.

  • Fukushima reactor shows radiation levels much higher than thought

  • EPA Refuses to Take Action Against Acid Rain, Acid Deposition

    Agency Rejects Scientific Advisory Committee’s Recommendation to Strengthen Pollution Standard to Safeguard Wildlife and Environment

  • Whistleblower: BP Oil Platform Faces ‘Present and Imminent Danger’

    Business as usual.

  • Superbug Suit: Antibiotics Victory Will Preserve Medicines for Sick People, Not Healthy Livestock

• Finance

  • Who Makes $250,000 a Year? Not Small Business Owners

  • The Rich Get Even Richer

    In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income.

  • Banksters

    The US required cities and states to buy, from the banksters, billions of dollars worth of fixed-rate loans as a hedge against possible high interest rates. Then the US drove down interest rates to cater to the banksters, making our cities lose while the banksters win.

• Anti-Trust

  • How ASCAP Takes Money From Successful Indie Artists And Gives It To Giant Rock Stars

    to make its own life easier, ASCAP just pays those performance royalties to the top 200 grossing tours in the US, and every other touring musician is more or less screwed

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • CMD/PRWatch Asks Ethics Board to Examine Corporate-Funded Gifts to ALEC Legislators

    Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.

• Censorship

  • China’s Twitter-Spam War Against Pro-Tibet Activists

    Over the last week, supporters of Tibet, and the merely curious, have seen information warfare up close. On Twitter, several hundred bots (automated programs that generate content) flooded discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam. If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject. … More malevolently, Tibetan activists have been threatened on Twitter.

    It’s nice to see mainstream media understand some of the problems that people on technical forums pointed out a decade ago. It’s too bad they only took note when it happened to something they cared about.

  • Protesters See Tweets Used Against Them

    This and recent demands of Facebook passwords are an attempt by the rich and powerful to intimidate people and keep them from organizing. Don’t let them shut you up or drive you underground.

  • Study Finds China Censorship Of Social Media Is Real, Pervasive

    an online publication of the University of Illinois, Chicago, finds that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese version of Twitter.

  • Sarkozy’s plan to criminalize the mere viewing of Islamist web sites is running into some opposition.

    Note how Sarkozy cites the prohibition of “child pornography” as a precedent for prohibiting access to a political opinion. The idea that this was the thin edge of the wedge is no longer just a theory. It is an excuse for censoring all sorts of things. No matter how disgusting some works may be, censorship is more disgusting.

  • A Colossal Mistake of Historic Proportions: The “JOBS” Bill

    From the 1970s until recently, Congress allowed and encouraged a great deal of financial market deregulation … Congress is about to make the same kind of mistake again – this time abandoning much of the 1930s-era securities legislation that both served investors well and helped make the US one of the best places in the world to raise capital. … A new venture could raise up to $1-2 million through internet solicitations, as long as no investor puts in more than $10,000 (section 301 of HR3606). The level of disclosure would be minimal and there would be no real penalties for outright lying. There would also be no effective oversight of such stock promotion – returning us precisely to the situation that prevailed in the 1920s.

    See also, “This business startups act is a hucksters’ charter“

• Privacy

  • Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords

    Many big firms use “lawful interception” appliances that monitor all employee communications … [and] may use keyloggers, screenloggers, and other spying tools to watch what you do and capture your passwords. If your employer, school or institution gets to control the software on your computer, you can’t know that it’s not snooping on you at all times. … the presence of your employer’s self-signed certificate in your computers’ list of trusted certs means that your employer can (nearly) undetectably impersonate all the computers on the internet, tricking your browser into thinking that it has a secure connection to your bank, Facebook, or Gmail, all the while eavesdropping on your connection.

  • Consumer Privacy Defended In FTC’s Caution To Congress On Data Brokers

    the FTC called for legislation to give consumers access to personal data held by brokers and allow them to correct any inaccurate information. … to create a national standard for notifying customers if their data is lost in a data breach, suggested mobile application companies — and websites more generally — create “short, meaningful” privacy disclosures and urged the software industry to create a “Do Not Track” mechanism on browsers to let consumers choose how much of their information is collected online and how it is used. … Though largely unknown to the general public, data brokers gather information from a variety of public and private sources, including home purchase histories, change of address forms, credit card activity and even address information from local pizza delivery shops … Then they sell that data to buyers who use it for a variety of purposes, often for online marketing.

  • Don’t Let Congress Use “Cybersecurity” Fears to Erode Digital Rights

    H.R. 3523, also known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a “cybersecurity” exemption to all existing laws.

    See also this

  • This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy

    See also, TLO aggregation service founded by Hank Asher.

  • Yes, the States Really Reject Real ID

• Civil Rights

  • Cancer v. the Constitution

    I had never encountered this clinical scenario during my training in Canada. I had never seen a woman suffer because she couldn’t afford something as simple as a Pap smear, never mind deal with the indignities of shopping around her sorrow and hard luck to try to patch together what would inevitably be inadequate medical therapy. It is this reality of medical care in America for which I was wholly unprepared.

  • Who is Insulting the Middle Class?

    A deep irony, underlying our political season, is that the U.S. middle class…the biggest victims of the first decade of this century, are also being slandered relentlessly. The ongoing campaign of propaganda that democracy can’t work and we should turn to oligarchy has many threads.

  • Anna Brown: 29-year-old Black Woman Dies in Jail After Being Dragged By Police Out of Hospital

  • All Parties Ignore the One Way to Reduce Health Care Costs: Single-Payer

    Research shows that single-payer reform could save about $380 billion annually that’s currently wasted on insurers’ overhead and the unnecessary paperwork (and screen-work) they inflict on hospitals, doctors and patients. That’s enough money to fully cover the uninsured and eliminate copayments and deductibles for the rest of us

    The non free software business managers tend to favor are another problem that take years to undo.

  • Police face racism scandal after black man records abuse

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • The House GOP Plan to Gut the FCC

    The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.” … will disable the FCC, not reform it. … by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. … [and] significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account … making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.

    I imagine this is mostly aimed at stopping the FCC’s TV white space Open Spectrum initiatives. Big media already has egregious monopolies but Open Spectrum can undo them, so publishers seek government unjust government protection of their technically obsolete business models.

  • Mobile operators seek to ‘block’ Skype in Sweden

    Now that Microsoft has admitted to spying on Skype users, this is a good idea but that’s not what ISPs have in mind.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally

    “Dynamic keyboard and method for dynamically redefining keys on a keyboard” is the software patent involved.

• Science

  • Man Successfully Flies With Custom-Built Bird Wings

    As happy as this would make me if real, it is apparently a hoax.

• Security

  • Surviving a bad RNG

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Before attacking Iran, Israel should learn from its 1981 strike on Iraq

  • Miami Occupier Tells of Violent Raid

    Police state tacticts in Miami.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • There was a large spike in infant deaths in the US northwest in the weeks following the Fukushima disaster.

    the four northernmost Pacific Northwest cities in the CDC sample Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane show remarkably significant results a larger infant mortality increase than the original Sherman-Mangano results. During the ten weeks before March 11 those four cities suffered 55 deaths among infants less than one year old. In the ten weeks after Fukushima 78 infants died a 42 per cent increase and one that is statistically significant.

  • GMO Facts

  • Big Nuclear’s cosy relationship with the Obama administration

    Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: they’re going to force nuclear power on the public, despite the astronomically high risks, both financial and environmental.

  • Fledgling green industries could be hit as document reveals move to put nuclear power on equal footing with renewable energy

  • 55 Congressman Sign a Letter to the FDA Requesting GMO Labeling

• Finance

  • Tax AIG

  • The $7 Trillion Question That Haunts Banks

• Anti-Trust

  • Dennis Kucinich jerrymandered out of office.

    I suspect he will be a good advocate out of office too.

  • Rumor: Yahoo Is About To Fire Its Smartest Innovators

    The source article mentions a possible transfer to another Microsoft asset, Facebook. The goal of the Microsoft slog is for the target company to be destroyed and for all the employees to have to beg Microsoft for a job. It is apparent that Microsoft has damaged Yahoo and Yahoo may have to fire people, the rest is speculation.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • On CNN: From the Left…a Corporate PR Strategist

• Censorship

  • A new threat to media freedoms

    Guernsey is looking to become a hub of another lucrative offshore practice: libel tourism. … anyone, anywhere, who feels that their “image” has been inappropriately reproduced/copied/traduced/pirated – the correct legal terminology is hazy – can then sue through the Guernsey courts for redress.

    The new laws are being pushed by a “wealth manager”.

  • Lawrence Lessig: One Way Forward (Excerpt)

    Until the twentieth century—or, more precisely, the rise of broadcasting—all of politics was read-write. The energy of democratic politics inspired by Andrew Jackson and perfected by Martin Van Buren was to get people out of doors—to canvass, to debate, to argue, and (not to romanticize this past too much) to promise the necessary patronage or buy the necessary votes.
    The twentieth century killed this political read-write culture as well. As campaigns were professionalized, command and control were centralized. The audience was expected to shut up and listen. The worst possible idea was for ordinary supporters to produce their own copy. Campaign material was professional material. The job of the amateur was simply to show up and vote. Yet here again, the twenty-first century is reviving what the twentieth century killed.

  • Police court order Dotwrong

    A judgment from Justice Judith Potter on Friday declared the restraining order “null and void” and having “no legal effect”. The blunder might now lead to the beleaguered internet mogul getting back everything that was stripped away in the surprise dawn raid on his mansion eight weeks ago.

  • Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court

• Privacy

  • The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

  • Romney’s old company, Bain, owns a Chinese company that makes surveillance cameras.

    For something of very general use, such as pencils or general purpose computers, it is valid for the manufacturer to argue that it can’t control how purchasers use them. That argument is inapplicable for surveillance cameras in China because repression is their most significant use.

  • Private data on British drivers will be stored offshore

    The government has secretly agreed that the “particularly sensitive” personal data of all 43 million drivers in the UK can be contracted offshore to India in a move that will allow the private firm running London’s congestion zone to cut costs and make more money.

• Civil Rights

  • The World Water Forum has been designed to help transfer the world’s water resources to the wealthy, and to undermine the human right to water.

  • Around 100 countries are planning universal health care. The US, with its government controlled by business, is not one of them.

    “If all goes well, most of the world’s population will have access to affordable basic health care in one decade – a true milestone in human history.”

    Via RMS.

  • The Day ‘Due Process’ Died: Obama, Holder and the End of Rights

  • TSA security theater round up

    See also threats against the press for reporting the scanner flaw from people who don’t think pulling down old ladies’ pants is a strip search.

  • London’s Olympic Legacy: a permanent burden of new surveillance systems, repression, and debt.

  • Faculty to Bloomberg: Tell Your Police Chief to Go

    Today, we along with more than 400 other faculty sent Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City a letter (see below) calling for the resignation of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul J. Browne.

  • Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds

    If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

• Education Watch

  • ‘Occupy Education’ Debates the Gates Foundation (and Wins)

    I should admit from the start that it wasn’t a fair competition—something akin to the Varsity taking on the JV team; in our corner we had people who have attended public schools, taught in public schools, and are parents of kids in public schools; all they had were policy analysts and public relations specialists.

  • Tanya McDowell faces 5 years in prison for “stealing” access to a better public school.

  • The War on Teachers: Why Is the Public Watching It Happen?

  • Gates Foundation, “Before you can fund the charter school, you have to fund an advocacy organization that can create a climate for the charter school to exist”

    It looks like it’s going to be a Gates kind of weekend.
    We are, in the state of Washington, once again having the battle over charter schools. The good people in our state have voted it down three times but it has come up again due to the “let’s go around the voters” shenanigans of a former Republican turned Democratic Senator from the upscale suburbs of Bellevue …

  • ALEC Exposed in Wisconsin

    Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan explains in a brilliant speech how ALEC is working to eliminate public education in the state of Wisconsin … “This is part of dismantling public education in Wisconsin, and Florida, and Ohio, and every single state it’s introduced in,” Pocan explained. “This bill doesn’t come from this body, this bill is an identical bill that’s been introduced brought by special interests by ALEC and introduced state by state by state.”

  • Gov.Jindal has a death wish agenda for K-12 education in Louisiana

    Things are bad everywhere but nowhere is it worse than in Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White threaten to annihilate the state’s public schools with budget cuts, vouchers, the expansion of virtual charters, the erosion of teacher rights, and other forms of noxious corporate reform.

    Public assests are handed over to private interests that fail to provide passing education.

  • Maryland students protesting school conditions met with attack dogs

    Teaching children the way police states work.

  • ACLU letter & Moratorium on Charter Schools needed in Delaware!

    The ACLU cites many reasons for their opposition, but says NCS con­tributes to “re-segrega­tion” of public education, and that its lack of a free and reduced lunch program breaks federal and state laws.

  • California charter school aims to shut down successful public school

    our small community is faced with the unthinkable – we may be forced to close a high-performing public school to hand that school lock, stock and barrel over to a charter school. Shocking, isn’t it? How could this happen? Charter school law was originally intended to help children who are underserved and falling through the cracks of traditional education systems. Unfortunately, across the country there are more and more charter schools popping up which are taking advantage of loopholes to create pseudo-private schools with questionable admissions practices, high “suggested donation” requirements from parents and low representation of truly underprivileged children.

  • Attempted coup by ConnCAN and TFA in Bridgeport: a cautionary tale

    Very often the corporate reformers appear to view elected school boards as getting in the way of their plans to privatize public education. … recently, in Connecticut, the hedge-fund backed, pro-charter lobby group ConnCAN conspired with Teach For America and the mayor of Bridgeport, along with the state’s Governor and the appointed Chair of the State Board of Education, who is also the on the advisory board of ConnCan, to oust Bridgeport’s elected school board. Their actions have now been overturned by the courts.

    Bill Gates gets dishonorable mention for his influence on New York City schools, “experiments on mostly poor and minority school kids,” by political corruption.

  • Parents Across America hails defeat of Florida’s Parent Trigger bill

  • Parents, Students: Noble Street Profiting from Predatory Discipline Code

    With Mayor Emanuel expanding the Noble Street Charter Network as a model for public education throughout Chicago, community groups today released original data on the profits that the growing charter network is making from disciplinary fines imposed on low-income families. … Noble’s discipline system charges students $5 for minor behavior such as chewing gum, missing a button on their school uniform, or not making eye contact with their teacher, and up to $280 for required behavior classes. 90% of Noble students are low-income, yet if they can’t pay all fines, they are made to repeat the entire school year or prevented from graduating. … Noble has collected $386,745 from detention fines and behavior classes over the past three years. As the charter network has expanded, its annual revenue from these fines has grown – last school year, Noble made $188,647 from its discipline code.

  • NOLA charter schools: favoritism with community & parents shut out

    Karran Harper Royal, long time parent advocate and one of the founding members of Parents Across America – New Orleans, reports from the front lines of school privatization, where already 75 percent of the public schools have been converted to charters, and possibly all the remaining public schools run by the Recovery School District will be charters within two years: “[After Katrina] we were promised that these schools would be community-driven schools and we did not have to charter them. …

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • ITU control of the Internet would exclude civil society.

    The US control of the Internet leads to injustices such as domain name seizures, but that doesn’t mean the ITU would be better. Russia and China surely don’t care about defending netizens from the US government and its masters in Hollywood. Obama and the US Congress would love to let the ITU adopt regulations comparable to SOPA, since then they could say, “We have no choice: the ITU has forced it on us.”

  • ISPs Selling Out Customers, Pushing Backdoor SOPA

    Please sign this to demonstrate popular oposition. Media owned ISPs will ignore it but the demonstraion will make effective regulation more likely.

  • Petition for US citizens: Stop Verizon’s Shenanigans

    Verizon’s proposed deal with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other cable companies would destroy competition in the broadband market and stick Americans with higher bills. This transaction will have a dramatic impact on the affordability and accessibility of online communications. Please reject this deal, and urge the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department to do the same.

    People should also petition their local governments to build public networks. Media companies are not going to change and need to be replaced.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Breaking free of deadly and cruel patents.

    India granted a compulsory patent license for cheap manufacturing of an anti-cancer drug. The WTO rules permit compulsory licenses, but the US has persistently pressured poor countries to let people die rather than exercise that option.

  • Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus – Mayo Prevails – Judgment as Text ~pj – Updated

  • Copyrights

    • How Publishers Fail Authors

      An endless stream of headaches for people who want to buy books.

    • European Parlement Blocks Copyright Reform with 113% Turnout

      Glyn Moody points at the complaint from the Orphan Works rapporteur, Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg, about this. There was not only the 12-to-14 vote on Compromise 20 as mentioned, but also a 13-to-12 vote on amendment 71 and a 13-to-11 vote (still with 23 maximum possible votes) on amendment 32. At least three cases of “temporary democratic surplus”, for which the rapporteur requests clarification. Also, the rapporteur refers to these amendments as crucial.

    • Belgian rightsholders group wants to charge libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/03/21/links-man-flies-like-a-bird-education-watch-privacy-and-us-network-neutrality/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/03/05/links-censorship-email-and-anti-science/ http://techrights.org/2012/03/05/links-censorship-email-and-anti-science/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:50:42 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=58561 Reader’s Picks

  • Leap year bug brings down Microsoft’s Fogware

  • “8″ is Cripple-ware

    This is Phoney “7″ all over again folks. The latest revelation is that “8″ on ARM will not fit into the “management” system that M$ uses on other hardware… I imagine that will prevent most organizations from issuing ARMed gadgets running “8″ to staff or students. With GNU/Linux there is no such limitation. SSH running on an ARMed machine can do the same as on any x86/amd64 system.

  • PJ slaps Cade Metz’s inflamatory, GPL troll piece, “Open Sourcers Drop Software Religion for Common Sense”

    Puh lease. First, calling people names is not journalism. It’s also not nice. Make money if that is your goal. But don’t pretend it will keep the code more open or grow the pot of code anyone can freely use. It won’t. It will produce a lot of Apple wannabees, who will take the code and run away with it. At least be honest. What is the benefit of Open Source code if it becomes proprietized and locked up? It’s the difference between Open Source and Free Software. And it’s a difference that matters. Having code contributions back is what builds advantages for Free Software developers to be able to compete with the proprietary dudes, who otherwise have all the advantages. And that leads to more software that anyone can use, modify and share. Do you want the whole world to be like the Apple app store? *All* you can do is look. That’s where BSD-like licenses take you, because they can. And I am very sad to see IBM’s Rob Weir link to this article on Twitter, as if it’s a good thing. Businesses do what they do, because of the way they think. They will always lock you in, if they can. But the community should not be confused. I mean, what did the BSD guys get out of Apple? Apple is making megabucks from their code, and they get nothing? What businessman would consider that a good deal? Businesses want code for free and without any obligations to give back anything. They don’t want to pay and they don’t want to contribute back code, and if you are stupid you will use a license, like the Apache license, that lets them do it. Because then when you set up your business with your code in competition with them using their code for *their* business, they will out-market you, and your business will die.

    This is from Groklaw’s news feed and is worth repeating. As usual, the non free software people insult the people they would convince to give up code without strings by calling them rude, irrational and unpleasant. In reality, GPL and GPL3 are both growing and doing well.

  • Hardware

    • Openmoko is dead, long live the Openmoko …with ”GTA04” project

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Israel To Demolish Palestinian Solar Energy Program

    • Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals

    • The US must stop the strategic blunder of an attack on Iran

      Israel’s military planners may have a fantasy of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, but any rational assessment sees only disaster

    • WikiLeaks: Stratfor VP States Washington Would Have Assassinated Presidents of Bolivia and Venezuela in Past Years

      Email from thugs and whores quoted in excruciating detail. These jerks run our world.

  • Stratfor Emails

    • Wikileaks reports that, according to Stratfor, Israel and Russia betrayed the customers for their weapons by trading the secret codes to control them.

      This is an extreme case of the general point that you can’t trust nonfree software. Do you want your country to use weapons with nonfree software in them?

    • Stratfor told clients a year ago that the US had a secret indictment against Julian Assange.

    • Did Private Spy Shop Get US Intel From Bin Laden Raid?

      Has Stratfor, which maintains various contracts with the Defense Department and other federal agencies, penetrated the US intelligence establishment for its own benefit? (“Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them,” Stratfor said in a statement on Monday; the company did not respond to a message from Mother Jones.

      yes

    • Massive Leak Reveals Criminality, Paranoia, Among Corporate Titans

      Dow pays “strategic intelligence” firm to spy on Yes Men and grassroots activists. Takeaway: movement is on the right track!

    • WikiLeaks Begins Publishing 5 million Emails from STRATFOR

      Today WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. … They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods

      Wikileaks noticed 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange and outlines many of the above stories of corruption.

    • Why the ‘Hoo-Ha’ About DHS ‘Spying’ on the Occupy Movement Is Reasonable

      By saying OWS posed a threat to critical infrasctructure, the DHS was calling OWS terrorists. They did this because the owners of the infrastructure, aka banks, told them to. DHS then smeared OWS and coordinated the crackdown with local officials.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • France to EU: Stop Monsanto’s Corn

      Even Nicolas L’American Sarkozy knows better than to fool with GMOs.

    • BP Settlement Sells Out Victims

      On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out. …The judge picked the lawyers [and] side-lined the legal “A-Team,” like Cajun trial lawyer Daniel Becnel, guys with the guts, experience and financial wherewithal to go eyeball-to-eyeball with BP and not blink.

      The claims process was already a joke bad enough to merit RICO accusations, and BP hopes to squirm out of that. There is some hope for Federal lawsuits but so far the Federal government has worked for BP rather than for citizens.

    • Harmful Herbicide: EPA’s Unreasonable Delay Protecting People from 2,4-D

  • Finance

    • Obama’s settlement with the banks means they get away with perjury — millions of times.

      Move your money.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Tell the FCC to block further media consolidation

    • This should be prohibited

      In recent years, Microsoft has emerged as Google’s chief legal antagonist, working publicly and privately to get antitrust cops in Washington and Brussels interested in Google’s activities. As part of his new job, Mr. Long will likely continue those efforts before the FTC

      The source article is behind a WSJ paywall. The revolving door looks a lot like bribery and stinks of corruption. See also this failed piece of lobbying.

    • While Anonymous carries out the Internet equivalent of street protests, Antisec raids evildoers to extract and publish information.

      The difficult ethical issue concerns stealing and publishing emails, such as Antisec did to Stratfor and parties unknown did to climate scientists. This is wrong, but it is a small wrong compared to the alleged wrongs of the targets.

    • Forgetting the Past, One Military Movie at a Time
      When the entertainment industry gets in bed with the Pentagon, censorship is inevitable

      the Pentagon is getting worried and thus intensifying its agitprop to ever more manipulative extremes. Last year, for example, it cemented its first full sponsorship of a major film, X-Men: First Class, integrating the movie into recruitment ads. It’s now going even further, fully financing its own feature-length film, Act of Valor,

      the Xmen?

    • A Tale of Two Protests: Shut Down the Corporations in Portland and Tucson

      Protesters in Portland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona, faced very different weather when they hit the streets yesterday, but they had one thing in common: they were among 70 cities nationwide where Occupy activists and others spoke out against members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose decades-long history of authoring and pushing pro-corporate legislation through the nation’s statehouses has been criticized for strangling political and economic participation across the country.

    • Boehner’s last stand: House leader wants to kill transit funding

      It was apparently not enough to obliterate funding for bike lanes and walking paths and kids trying to get to school. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants to keep our tax dollars from paying for public transit as well. … Republican leaders apparently believe that bike paths, trains, and buses are all a part of a vast United Nations plot to demolish the “American way of life.”

      Oil companies don’t want people to have alternatives to burning gasoline.

  • Censorship

    • Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice

      Article was removed from Google indexes by a porn company complaint on January 20th, while it was important. An obviously non infringing article by Torrentfreak was also censored. The company sort of apologized, saying their robo-censor was in error.

    • 
      London’s new bylaws for Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, imposed in honor of the Olympic Games, ban carrying signs and making speeches.

    • Google agrees to court order in India to remove content

      The Indian government wants Google and other Internet companies to evolve a mechanism to quickly remove objectionable content … This step is in accordance with Google’s long-standing policy of responding to court orders

      Google is more often in the news than Bing/Microsoft for two reasons, Google puts up a fight and Gates owns or indirectly controls a large portion of traditional media.

    • A Saudi teacher faces criminal charges in a terrorism court for speaking to the BBC about the lack of human rights in his country.

      The idea that criticizing a government is treason because the country’s interests may suffer from resulting condemnation is one we have seen in many countries including the US.

    • Ireland has passed a law comparable to SOPA.

    • The EU has a sleazy plan to censor the Internet unofficially so that nobody has any legal rights.

    • Reporters Without Borders relates Twitter’s per-country censorship feature to a stated intention to have an office in China.

      See EFF article. Google has set up a system for per-country censorship on Blogger by redirecting access to a country-specific host name, but there is a feature to disable redirection. Lauren Weinstein argues, “the more ‘localized’ and “frictionless” a censorship system, the more governments will expand their use of such systems over time.”

    • Twitter Censors Unfavourable Sarkozy Accounts

    • PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content

      As Richard Stallman noted, “Censorship starts with things that many find disgusting, and spreads from there. So we need to fight censorship at the root.” Once censorship of disgusting things is allowed, people assume everything censored is disgusting.

    • Egypt’s Ministry of Education has ordered schools to keep students out of political activities, even debates and blogs.

    • Censorship is inseparable from surveillance

      the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world.

      To block any of us, they must watch all of us.

    • 
      Stand with the Arrested [OWS] Journalists

  • Privacy

    • NSA Power Grab: New Legislation Would Give It Broad Powers To Spy On ‘Critical’ Private Networks

  • Civil Rights

    • Al Franken does what the courts won’t: question the authority of torture lawyers

      Franken dressing down Bradbury is the worst consequence any torture architect has ever faced: Mild embarrassment.

    • Investor-State Cases

      NAFTA [and other free exploitation treaties] included an array of extraordinary new rights and privileges for foreign investors that incentivized offshoring of jobs and exposed an array of our domestic environmental health, land-use and other laws to attack. … Most stunningly, these new rights in a public treaty are privately enforceable. A little-known mechanism called “investor-state” enforcement allows foreign firms to skirt domestic court systems and directly sue governments for cash damages (our tax dollars) over alleged violations of their new rights before UN and World Bank tribunals staffed by private sector attorneys who rotate between serving as “judges” and bringing cases for corporations.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Presidential candidates face patent lawsuit for using Facebook

      Facebook is currently fighting the patent at the Patent Office. After re-examining the patent, an examiner rejected the patents claims—which would render the patent invalid—but the rejections have been appealed.

      There is speedy justice for the rich and powerful but same system allows the rich and powerful to ruin the rest of us.

    • Euro Company [MOSAID] Sues Apple Over 3GPP Standards using 8 Nokia Patents

      A Luxembourg company by the name of Core Wireless Licensing has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in the Texas Eastern District Court. Their wholly-owned subsidiary in Texas known as “Core Wireless Licensing Ltd” is holding all of the pertinent documents in this case. The bewildering twist in this case is that the eight counts brought against Apple are using Nokia patents. A settlement between Nokia and Apple was announced in June 2011. The settlement somehow now drags Apple into infringing 3GPP standards…. -

    • Go Daddy stuck paying for thrown out Eolas patent licensing.

      It’s better to fight and better still to get software patents eliminated.

    • One Reason Why The USPTO Granted Stupid Internet Patents: Examiners Were Banned From Internet

    • Copyrights

      • Latimes.com just announced it would put up a paywall.

      • Copyright Kings Are Judge, Jury and Executioner on YouTube

      • John Wiley, Physicists Sue Patent Lawyers Over Journals

        copyright lawyers are suing patent lawyers for using scientific journals to prepare patent applications.

        I wonder if there is any understanding at all in this cut and paste exercise. This story makes my skin crawl, like watching rats eat roaches.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/03/05/links-censorship-email-and-anti-science/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/02/29/links-education-watch-oil-speculation-mrsa-in-europe-censorship/ http://techrights.org/2012/02/29/links-education-watch-oil-speculation-mrsa-in-europe-censorship/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:34:48 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=58387 Reader’s Picks

    • Cablegate

      • Revealed: US plans to charge Assange

        UNITED STATES prosecutors have drawn up secret charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, according to a confidential email obtained from the private US intelligence company Stratfor.

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Please sign and promote this petition to, Protect our families’ health by ending the overuse of antibiotics in food producing animals.

        Almost 80% of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are for food animals. Industrial farms routinely feed these drugs to the animals to promote growth and compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. This overuse creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans and cause expensive, hard-to-treat illnesses. …

      • “Pig MRSA” came from humans, evolved via farm drugs

        It is possible that this finding will be viewed as no big deal: After all, since pigs tend to experience other staph strains, MRSA had to come from somewhere. That would be a mistake.

      • Rising Gas Prices: Not Demand Driven

        the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. … Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers.

      • Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies ‘could provide half of global carbon target’

        According to IEA research, 37 governments spent $409bn on artificially lowering the price of fossil fuels in 2010. Critics say the subsidies significantly boost oil and gas consumption and disadvantage renewable energy technologies, which received only $66bn of subsidies in the same year.

      • USDA to Give Monsanto’s New GMO Crops Special ‘Speed Approval’

        With the faster reviews, there will be even less time spent on evaluating the potential dangers. Why? Because Monsanto is losing sales with longer approval terms.

      • Keep Monsanto OUT of Your Veggie Patch

        In 1994, they quietly purchased Seminis for $1.4 billion in cash. Seminis seeds are carried by some of the best-known gardening catalogs, including Burpee, Park Seed, John Scheeper and others. This purchase, plus the purchase of several smaller seed concerns, has given Monsanto an estimated 40%-80% share of the home vegetable seed market.

      • Heartland Panics Over Leak: 71 Year Old Vet, Young Mom Fire Back at Threats

        A number of bloggers have now received threatening but impotent messages from Heartland thugs, including 71 year old Air Force Vet and journalist, and a young activist Mom. See their responses below.

        Heartland claimed that one of the memos is a fake and outrageously demands retractions from anyone who quoted the story, “We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.” Desmogblog, analyzed the documents and found extensive redundancy in them and support for the supposedly fake memo’s authenticity
        .

      • Peter H. Gleick: The Origin of the Heartland Documents

        My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved

        Dr. Gleick’s character was immediately attacked, which basically confirms the orginal accusation. See 1, “There are a lot of people involved with Heartland’s multimillion dollar climate denial machine who want to change the subject to anything else.” as usual, they turn to character assassination.

      • Scientists Who Had Emails Stolen Ask Heartland Institute to End Attack on Climate Science

        Seven leading climate researchers who themselves were the victims of an email theft which was promoted by the Heartland Institute have written an open letter to the organization, calling on it to refrain from spreading inaccurate information about climate science and attacking climate researchers.

    • Censorship

      • Facebook Censorship list, 2, 3

        This is a baseline censorship list. PR people are probably sold extra censorship rights.

      • The “Right to Be Forgotten”: A Threat We Dare Not Forget

        To be “forgotten” in the usual sense of the “right to be forgotten”
        proponents would typically end up requiring not only that direct
        references to sites containing “offending” materials be expunged from
        search results, but also links to any sites that so much as
        specifically (or in many cases even generally) discuss, critique,
        analyze, or otherwise mention the materials in question … we should be concentrating on providing more information, more context in case of disputes, not less

        The rich and powerful want their ability to destroy public records. The “forgotten” in the ordinary sense was an artifact of information inefficiency. The information, unless destroyed by the rich and powerful, was always available in libraries and public records, unless destroyed, it just took work to find it and the results were hard to share.

      • The Leaked Stratfor Emails regarding Julian Assange are DISGUSTING

        The USA Government is considering CHARGING Anyone who simply LINKS to these documents with a FEDERAL CRIME!

        Amazing, it’s a Federal crime to link to email from a private spy company? Is it also a crime to link to links of links, verbally at the water cooler?

    • Civil Rights

      • ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/angry-about-national-defense-authorization-act

        We’ve just released a new toolkit with resources to help you fight back against the NDAA in your community.

      • ACLU:
        

        Tell Congress: Fix the NDAA

    • Internet/Net Neutrality

      • Judge awards iPhone user $850 in throttling case

        Throttling is more about billing than it is about bandwidth but ATT should not own the spectrum in the first place

    • Education Watch

      • America’s dangerously removed elite

        Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education … refuses to live in the district that he governs. Though having no background in education administration, this longtime telecom executive used his connections to get appointed Denver superintendent, and he now acts like a king. From the confines of his distant castle in Boulder, he issues edicts to his low-income fiefdom — decrees demonizing teachers, shutting down neighborhood schools over community objections and promoting privately administered charter schools. Meanwhile, he makes sure his own royal family is insulated in a wealthy district that doesn’t experience his destructive policies.

      • Dissuading Teachers from Teaching Science: Global warming deniers creating K-12 curriculum

        thanks to leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, we know of a insidious new plan to create a whole K-12 curriculum to spread doubt and make teaching about global warming as controversial topic in public school classrooms as the theory of evolution.

      • A must read: Mass hysteria in New York City after test scores are released

        I cannot believe that the ed reform movement has come down to this, releasing teacher evaluations based on test scores and then the New York Post selecting one teacher as the worst teacher in NYC and posting her photo and information on the cover of their rag. Is this what education is supposed to be about?

        A Murdoch Gates partnership is alleged in the linked article.

      • Teacher Evaluation Bill SB 5895 and why it should be opposed vehemently

        Since the pilot program that all the ed-reformers in our state applauded, it has now been instituted in our schools. Then last month NWEA “re-calibrated” all of the test scores that had been taken for the last year and guess what? The administrators within SPS stated to use the term “negative growth” when describing test scores. … if this was New York City today, everyone would be blaming the teachers and starting the witch hunt of who should be placed on the pyre first. … One interesting point in all of this is that the test scores of teachers in charter schools have not been published.

        So the blame game has no end. When the so called reform programs produce worse results just say it’s all the teacher’s fault again.

      • Weekly Update: Smart ALEC, Black Teachers Fired En Masse in Chicago and Chalk Face Radio

      • Parents Across America on corporate interests in education: One year ago

        Happy Birthday, Parents Across America

    • Copyrights

      • IPEG-SA Announces Tapeworm Licensing

      • Repo Man director urges fans to “pirate a bunch of my stuff right away”

        It’s so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom. We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It’s complete bullshit.

        Sharing is good but I can not recommend sharing things owned by gangsters.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/29/links-education-watch-oil-speculation-mrsa-in-europe-censorship/feed/ 1 http://techrights.org/2012/02/23/links-tpp-evil-time-zones-in-the-clear-corporate-spying-and-other-fun/ http://techrights.org/2012/02/23/links-tpp-evil-time-zones-in-the-clear-corporate-spying-and-other-fun/#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:47:13 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=58238 Reader’s Picks

  • John Sullivan, FOSDEM 2012, Is copyleft being framed?

    If one could show a decline in the percentage share of the GPL license family, what would that show? More free software overall! Even data on the other side shows absolute numbers in both GPL and non-GPL category increasing. More corporations doing free software and encouraging licenses that let them make proprietary software New software distribution structures – Apple’s App Store for example prohibits distribution of copyleft software. The first is a clear win. The second can still be a win, because the companies are making free software possibly instead of proprietary. The third is a problem.

    John also shows us that GPL use is growing in Debian. Between 2005 and 2011, the proportion of GPL’d software went from 71% to 93%. If GPL3 drove developers away, it does not show in projects that matter.

  • Why FLOSS Should Use The GPL

    “pro-business” parasites would have us believe that working for free for M$ and the like is just great for the world of IT. … The GPL is great for business, competition, startups, individuals and end-users. There is no downside to using the GPL in FLOSS.

  • Study: Windows Web Browsing Market Share Drops 10% Over Past 6 Months [to 71% of 120,000 Chitika sites]

    due to the increase in browsing from mobile devices … earlier this month, analysts at Canalys reported two major shifts in computing trends: one, that smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and two, that Apple has become the world’s largest PC maker, assuming iPads are counted as PCs.

  • Microsoft’s Biggest Miss

    the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed. … Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

  • KDE PIM Sprint 10: ACCOMPLISHED!

  • Matthias Ettrich: Creator Of KDE

  • Ubuntu For Android: The Complete Story

    With Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu and Android share the same Linux Kernel on an Android phone. When you carry the phone with you, it acts just like a normal Android phone. Nothing special about that. However, when you connect the phone to an external monitor with keyboard and mouse Ubuntu OS boots and runs concurrently with Android. This allows for both mobile and desktop apps to run at the same time.

  • Science

    • NASA Powers Down Final Mainframe in Open Modernization Move

      NASA announced it has shut down its last mainframe to complete its move to smaller, distributed systems running Linux and other systems.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tell the US FDA to Label GMOs in food.

      Polls show that more than 90% of Americans support mandatory labeling. Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare. Please listen to the American public and mandate labeling of genetically engineered foods.

    • Episode 213: Young Farmers

      They are highly educated, interested in health and environment, and see not only the need – and the opportunity – for small-scale farming, but feel the pull to get personally involved and heed that call. … Part of what makes small-scale farming possible is CSA’s. CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture, and it is just that: community members purchase a share of the upcoming season’s crops, sort of like purchasing a subscription for fresh herbs and vegetables. Their advance money aids the small farm in purchasing the seed, supplies and labor they need for the season

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Me, APD [Austin Police Department], and ‘Babysitting While White,’ Part Deux

      two departments with overlapping jurisdictions responded to this complaint: One came at us based on a community policing approach where she walked up calmly, asked a few questions, and according to her report was satisfied and had begun to return to her shift until she heard on the radio APD was coming. By contrast, APD handcuffed first and asked questions later.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Great Carbon Bubble: Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard

      the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. … As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously. … a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark.

      Oil should be used for composite materials, not burnt. It will continue to have value used that way, but perhaps not enough value to satisfy greedy oil companies.

    • A brief guide to the scientific consensus on climate change

    • Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Corn Fields.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Urgent: EuroParliament to exclude Free Software with patents and FRAND

      Somehow non free software vendors have pulled the FRAND whool over EU Parliment. Contact your representatives to change this if you can.

    • Researchers attending one of the world’s major academic conferences ‘are scared to death of the anti-science lobby’

      Researchers attending one of the world’s major academic conferences ‘are scared to death of the anti-science lobby’ … university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians.

      Those of you who still doubt global warming can catch up with every science organization in this wonderful collection.

    • MPAA Hires Four Ex-Federal Government Employees, Including One From ICE & Another From The White House

      Don’t call it a bribe.

  • Censorship

    • Brazil set to test Twitter’s selective blocking policy

    • The Pirate Bay could be blocked in the UK, after a judge rules it infringes copyright

      This mirrors a case from last year, when both Sky and BT were ordered to block access to … link-sharing website Newzbin 2. This followed lobbying from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in the US, which argued that the site facilitated the sharing of pirated movies.[sharing]

      I removed propaganda terms from the quote for the sake of clarity.

    • Pirate Bay ISP Block Challenged For Censoring Lawful Content

      The censorship of The Pirate Bay, which is slowly spreading to ISPs all around Europe, is designed to reduce the availability of unauthorized media, but the site also allows artists without a corporation-backed delivery mechanism to self publish to the world. However, since blockades are a blunt instrument, their work is being wiped out too. On this basis, the legality of a recent Pirate Bay blockade is now being questioned.

  • Privacy

    • How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

      we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works

    • Congress Left in Dark on DOJ Wiretaps

      and they want to be that way.

    • McCain: Cybersecurity Bill Ineffective Without NSA Monitoring the Net

      Yet anther attempt to pass laws to justify current, illegal practice.

    • Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data

      Path was crucified for a practice that has become an unspoken industry standard. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla are among a smattering of iOS applications that have been sending the actual names, email addresses and/or phone numbers from your device’s internal address book to their servers

      Richard Stallman notes, “So much for the idea that Apple’s total censorship will protect users. The only defense for users is to have control over the software they use: that is, to insist on free software.”

  • Civil Rights

    • US citizens: tell Congress to release the drafts of the TPP free exploitation treaty.

  • Copyrights

    • Loosen up copyright law, says Dutch government

      The Dutch government wants to change copyright law so new media users can continue to do “creative remixes” of protected content. The Hague will no longer wait for the European Commission to find a compromise.

    • Trans-Pacific Partnership Proposes Copyright Suppression of Price Competition

      Global inequality strips everyone of their rights.

    • Astrolabe v. Olson

      EFF is pleased to announce that the [copyright suit against David Olsen and Paul Eggert's time zone database] was dismissed in February of 2012. Astrolabe has also apologized and agreed to a ‘covenant not to sue’ going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions.

      Good!

    • ACTA going the SOPA way

      • ACTA: Reding makes statement, EU now under immense pressure from within and without to find an exit strategy

        “Copyright protection can never be a justification for eliminating freedom of expression or freedom of information. That is why for me, blocking the Internet is never an option” (and that’s her bold, not mine).

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/23/links-tpp-evil-time-zones-in-the-clear-corporate-spying-and-other-fun/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/02/16/links-microsoft-caught-funding-anti-science-and-manipulating-education-through-a-sleazy-tobacco-pr-firm/ http://techrights.org/2012/02/16/links-microsoft-caught-funding-anti-science-and-manipulating-education-through-a-sleazy-tobacco-pr-firm/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:44:49 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=58166 Reader’s Picks

    • How Much Would Debian Cost to Develop? How About $19 Billion?

      Bromberger also looks at the cost of individual projects like PHP, Apache and MySQL. Even at more than $19 billion, the figure is likely far short of what it would actually cost to produce. … The $19.1 billion doesn’t even count the additional work added by Debian developers to upstream software. … ANSI C accounts for 40% of the Debian codebase, while C++ comes in with 20%. Next is Java, with 8% of the codebase.

      The greatest benefit of Debian is freedom, but the gift of billions of dollars worth of software is also nice.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Female Passengers Say They Were Targeted for TSA Body Scanners

      • Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an “unlimited” fine

        The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of “up to 10 years imprisonment.” Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an “unlimited fine under UK law.”

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • A look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin

        [Dr. Wojick's] effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. … Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

        Heartland Institute played up Climategate, and are well known global warming deniers and tobacco promoters. Microsoft also uses these scumbags in their fight against science.

      • Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science

        “Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education”

        This shows us why Gates and friends want control of education.

    • Censorship

      • WikiLeaks denounces UNESCO after WikiLeaks banned from UNESCO conference on WikiLeaks

        WPFC decided to exclude WikiLeaks and stack the UNESCO conference with a “who’s who” of WikiLeaks opponents and critics, no matter how insignificant or poorly informed. This includes speakers who are not merely critics, but four who have active legal conflicts with the organization.

      • US Citizens: How you can help the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) become law

        FRPAA is designed to make sure that the results of scientific research paid for by the public can be accessed by the public. Most people are surprised to learn that this isn’t automatically the case; they assume that if their tax dollars pay for a research study, they should be entitled to read the results. … Out of eleven federal agencies that fund science here in the United States, only one – the National Institutes of Health – actually has a policy that ensures that the public can freely access the results of their funded research online.

        Sanity in US copyright laws will help the rest of the world too.

      • Freedom of Information Act has not improved government, says MoJ

        The MoJ arguments are outrageous and transparently false. “Fishing for stories” is what reporters do and it’s how most of us remaine informed. Ending FOI requests or making them more expensive will not create public trust or increase transparency.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Open letter To Members of the European Parliament and European Commission

        We are writing to you to alert you to problems caused by European Patent law. We are especially concerned about patents on plants and animals, genetic material and processes for breeding of plants and animals and food derived thereof and their impact on farmers, breeders and consumers, innovation and biodiversity.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/16/links-microsoft-caught-funding-anti-science-and-manipulating-education-through-a-sleazy-tobacco-pr-firm/feed/ 0