04.24.13
Posted in Site News at 1:39 am by Guest Editorial Team
Silence or support for CISPA plays into Microsoft’s long standing smear campaign against Google.
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.
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10.09.12
Posted in Site News at 8:19 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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.
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Education
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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
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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.
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07.12.12
Posted in Site News at 6:44 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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Good riddance.
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Health/Nutrition
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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,
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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.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Censorship
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Even after millions rallied against the passage of SOPA/PIPA, the House is still quietly trying to pass a related bill …
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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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.”
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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.
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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]
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Consolidated media does not publish news, it publishes propaganda.
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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.
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Education Watch
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News you might have missed.
Devastating look at Louisiana charter schools, abuse of students, nonsense in Seattle and “leveraged philanthropy,” and some other badness.
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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06.20.12
Posted in Site News at 3:36 pm by Guest Editorial Team
05.31.12
Posted in Site News at 11:08 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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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.
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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.
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Hardware
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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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.
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Police drones will also be able to shoot and gas people.
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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.
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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
Anti-Trust
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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“You’re using a web browser we don’t support.”
Facebook does Microsoft’s bidding, again.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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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
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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
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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.
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Privacy
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The US police state is more oppressive by the day.
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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.
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This is judicial terrorism.
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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.
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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.
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Civil Rights
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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.
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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
Digital Restrictions
Intellectual Monopolies
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Day 23, From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google Trial – Jury: No Patent Infringement ~pj Updated 3Xs
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Copyrights
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05.21.12
Posted in Site News at 4:42 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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“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.’
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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).
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Hardware
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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.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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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
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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Trashy ways to scrape the bottom of the barrel even harder.
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Anti-Trust
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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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.
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Censorship
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If you are using non free software, you might not really see what’s published here.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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“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.
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Copyrights
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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05.14.12
Posted in Site News at 5:50 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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05.10.12
Posted in Site News at 1:21 am by Guest Editorial Team
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Hardware
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… 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.
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Anti-Trust
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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.
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“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.
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Mozilla’s response is unnecessarily restrained. Microsoft has dropped the bomb on them, so they might as well give up Windows.
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[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.
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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.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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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.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Digital Handcuffs
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Intellectual Monopolies
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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.
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I would not want an internet connected, non free thermostat but this is a good example of the harm caused by software patents.
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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.
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Copyrights
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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…
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