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07.21.13

Intellectual Ventures Called a Microsoft Spinoff, Has Strong Ties to Bill Gates

Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft, Patents at 2:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bill and Nathan
Microsoft’s ‘gentle’ side and the thuggish side.
Good cop, bad cop. Credit: Reuters

Summary: How the cult of Microsoft, which includes Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold (peripherally), is taxing everything in society while working in cohesion

Having exposed one patent troll of rather large scale very recently, the New York Times moves on to the largest one. It notes the Microsoft connection: “Co-founded by Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, a prolific inventor and the author of a $625 cookbook called “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,” Intellectual Ventures has vacuumed up 70,000 patents and related assets in the last 13 years. This year, the company has been busier than ever at the courthouse, filing 14 lawsuits so far — more than all the lawsuits it had previously filed since its founding in 2000. It also is expanding its fight beyond traditional technology companies. Eight of the 14 lawsuits are against banks, which Intellectual Ventures says infringed on patents that cover data encryption techniques, firewall protection systems or digital imaging.”

There is also a connection to the Gates Foundation, which uses patents to profit. IV’s chief troll is dodging probe by deposition and his sidekick at Intellectual Ventures keeps on lying and deceiving. “We don’t litigate through shell companies,” said Intellectual Ventures, but these are lies. As correctly pointed out here, we should treat this troll as a Microsoft spinoff:

The New York Times went after another big patent troll yesterday, the second in less than a week link here. This one is called Intellectual Ventures. It seems to be a spinoff from Microsoft, a major patent holder, as it is run by Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold. Its origin may raise the question as to how much business it does with Microsoft and whether it profits in some way from the new enterprise.

Here is another take on it:

A study out of Stanford says the term “patent troll” may have come from the Norwegian folk tale, “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Researchers claimed it was coined, ironically, by a co-founder of the country’s biggest PAE — Intellectual Ventures. A troll makes three billy goats pay a price to cross a bridge. Adorable. But less adorable, and more exciting, is the version of trolls in “The Lord of the Rings,” where trolls try to eat their nemeses, so let’s go with that.

This troll also helps Gates with nuclear patents, as we covered several times before. Bill Gates and his close friend Nathan Myhrvold like to share a table and conspire to gain patents, as previously reported in the press. Gates promotes GMO (DNA) and medicine patents, pushing patents in an evil direction while calling it charity. Dr. Glyn Moody is upset that even blood is being patented now. He writes: “Two of the key arguments during the Myriad Genetics trial were that gene patent monopolies stifle innovation by preventing others from building on and extending key knowledge, and that they can cause unnecessary suffering and even death by driving up prices for medical treatment beyond the reach of many people. Even though the Supreme Court struck down Myriad’s key patents, reducing those issues for DNA, a new technology with major ramifications for health runs the risk of suffering from precisely the same problems.”

Further down it says: “Not all clinical trials offer compensation, because people are often willing to help without payment in order to benefit society as a whole. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for making clinical trial information freely available is that it is largely the result of members of the public agreeing to take part in trials for precisely this reason — not in order to boost the profits of some pharmaceutical company that keeps the results for itself. That suggests one way of encouraging people to become stem cell donors and transfusion recipients would be to promise that the results based on their participation will be made freely available for all scientists and companies to use. In other words, that no patents would be taken out on key discoveries.”

Here is the original article. Recall that an AIDS organisation manager told the New York Times that “Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

Incidentally, earlier today we found this new article which chastised plutocrats for hoarding more money at the expense of the poor and then blaming teachers. Gates, which is eliminating the poor rather than poverty is mentioned in the article. To quote:

Poverty is what’s crippling public education in the US—not bad teachers

[...]

Teachers are important, and of course we want to recruit the most expert and brightest possible, and give them lots of support. But the expansion of tests, and efforts to make teacher jobs depend on ever-rising scores, are turning our schools into test preparation factories.

Hanushek’s ideas have been driving a vast school reform project, which has been underwritten by the largest philanthropies on earth—starting with the Gates and Walton foundations. Now that this project is a decade old, and showing little signs of success, the time has come for a major reappraisal.

Rather than vesting our trust in tests to identify and weed out the worst teachers, why not invest some confidence in these teachers themselves, and empower them to engage in peer observation and growth through proven programs like Peer Assistance and Review? These programs feature experienced teacher coaches working with peers who have been identified as struggling. This has been found to be an effective way to strengthen teachers—and remove those who are unable to improve.

Opportunists love monopolies. Government services are monopolies, but can Gates privatise these to ‘own’ for profit a system fed by taxpayers? He sure made progress by bribing much of the press. The same is done to promote patent trolling.

It is worth noting that the other Microsoft co-founder is now a patent troll, who just like Attachmate's CEO and Microsoft’s OEM-terrorising thug (shooting animals illegally) is now getting sued for being a sociopath who contributes to illegal hunting. A short while ago we found this new report from Africa:

Microsoft co-founder and American billionaire, Paul Allen, will appear before a Botswana court in October for allegedly attempting to smuggle giraffe bones from the country to the United States of America.

According to the King County Superior Court, a safari guide was arrested and detained in Maun, Botswana’s tourism capital, by customs officials after the Microsoft co-founder and current Seahawks owner, Allen, and his sister, Jody Allen, tried to sneak home the bones while on safari in Botswana.

Court papers charge that a review of the trip to Botswana by the Allens has revealed a pattern of illegality.

Microsoft has always shown a pattern of illegality, so this would not at all be shocking. See our 2011 post titled “Microsoft’s Three Musketeers (Gates, Allen, Myhrvold) Still Assault the Market With Patents.” █

07.20.13

Microsoft Collusion With the NSA Shows the Harms of Monopoly: No Perceived Threat in Hurting Users

Posted in Microsoft at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

NSA

Summary: Why an arrogant company (invincible in its own mind) is more likely to conspire against its users/customers than most companies

MICROSOFT has more users than customers. They never choose to become customers and many never purchase anything from Microsoft, it’s merely the network effect which has them use Microsoft products. Microsoft, in turn, can treat them like garbage. The idea that they don’t pay makes it easier to justify selling them out, turning them into products or prey.

Mike Linksvayer asks a good question: “Why Doesn’t Skype Include Stronger Protections Against Eavesdropping?”

Well, Microsoft’s close (some would say incestuous) relationship with the NSA, which includes live Skype wiretapping and Windows back doors, can be explained and reasoned about as something which only a vain monopolist can get away with (domination in desktop operating systems and VoIP):

In short Skype has not protected users or informed them about lack of protection because they face near zero threat (regulatory or competitive product) which would interest them in doing so.

That is a good point. So it is time to break the monopoly. It is worth noting that one good thing which the Microsoft monopoly did is that it left a hole for the NSA leaks to become possible. A new report says:

The NSA has admitted that the organization’s use of Microsoft SharePoint allowed an unnamed sysadmin to leak information.

In what can be perceived as either a ringing endorsement of SharePoint’s “collaborative power”, or a depressing admission that, yes, spooks use the same infuriating software as we do, NSA chief General Keith Alexander indicated recent leaks came from a sysadmin being given SharePoint privileges.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making rubbish software that fails on security.

It is also worth remembering what Yahoo did before Microsoft took over most of the company. Unlike Microsoft which had colluded with the NSA, Yahoo fought the NSA. As FOSS Force put it:

I’m beginning to rethink Yahoo, just as I reappraised my feelings on the old Novel after they went to bat against SCO for the benefit of IBM and Linux.

On Monday, the Sunnyvale, California company pulled a honest-to-goodness rabbit out of the hat when they managed to persuade a FISA court to order the Obama administration to declassify as much as possible of a 2008 court decision justifying Prism before releasing it to the public.

Yahoo’s victory came one day before Microsoft went into damage control mode by denying allegations revealed by the publication last Thursday of documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper and website.

As reported on FOSS Force, the Guardian reported that Microsoft had helped the NSA “circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal.” In addition, “The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail.” In other words, according to the Guardian it would appear that Microsoft was going well beyond mere legal obligations in their dealings with the NSA.

Don’t forget what Microsoft has in mind based on its patents:

Could the NSA use Microsoft’s Xbox One to spy on you?

Skype swore wiretaps weren’t possible before recent reports. Is Kinect next?

After the lies about Skype (gross and systematic), expect this latest spin to be nothing different. Microsoft intended and probably still intends to do Orwellian spying using Xbox One. Stallman asked me about it just a few days ago. █

OEMs Are Dumping Microsoft, Leading to Biggest Sell-off of Microsoft in 13 Years

Posted in Dell, Finance, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft shares

Summary: Microsoft is trying to write off a billion dollars as its hardware ambitions are pretty much dead and OEMs (other hardware makers) leave Microsoft for Linux/Android; Microsoft’s shares crash (as shown above)

Microsoft had a very bad week last week, just after the ‘reorg’ PR campaign [1, 2, 3, 4]. Gregg Keizer said that “Microsoft’s attempt to transform its dog-eat-dog corporate culture into a kinder, gentler cooperative climate is likely doomed, according to an expert in failed business strategies.”

“Note that Microsoft takes almost a billion-dollar charge on Surface (way to hide the losses).”What “kinder, gentler cooperative climate”? The bribes? The patent extortion? Those are just baseless promises. Anyway, the article goes on, citing Carroll. Here is some background: “Carroll’s book, which he wrote with fellow Devil’s Advocate co-founder Chunka Mui, conducted postmortems on some of the most famous business failures, and is based on research into 2,500 enterprise flops. Devil’s Advocate, meanwhile, is an alliance of experts who help corporations evaluate strategy shifts.”

What shifts of strategy have been seen in Microsoft? That has been mostly PR. The real business was the illegal monopoly on formats and a common carrier, Windows, which is rotting because of form factors diversity that even bribes cannot make up for.

We recently wrote about Dell‘s resistance to Vista 8 and now we witness resistance to Microsoft as a whole, accompanying news about the company’s shares collapsing shortly after ‘reorg’. Well, here is what Pogson makes of the ‘reorg’ and here is a noteworthy observation about OEMs walking away from Microsoft, one recent example being Microsoft’s partner Samsung (older news from this year) and a new example being Lenovo, which has some former Microsoft staff at the top. Here is the news:

Microsoft has been having a rough time with its fledgling Windows RT operating system. Devices using the tablet-centric operating system, have sold poorly since the operating system was introduced last year. The flagship tablet running the operating system from Microsoft, Surface RT, recently received a significant price cut in an effort to spur sales.

Note that Microsoft takes almost a billion-dollar charge on Surface (way to hide the losses). This is ruining Microsoft’s relationship with OEMs. To quote this one article: “Less than a year after Microsoft entered the tablet computer market with the Surface, the cracks are starting to show.”

“he NSA scandals definitely won’t help Microsoft this year.”Just starting to show? No, people pointed them out just weeks or months after the debut. Here is coverage from IDG which is not really shocking. It says that days ago Microsoft “booked a large write-off to its Surface RT business after it slashed prices on the tablets to stimulate demand this week. Its quarterly earnings results also showed that Windows 8, an operating system designed to bridge the divide between PCs and tablets, has been so poorly received that it contributed to a revenue drop in its operating system software unit.”

This Vista 8 stunt is similar or reminiscent of how Microsoft previously hid massive losses. Some coverage is filled with understatements. These financial tricks are nothing new and the scams begin. As Will Hill put it:

Microsoft took an 11% decline in value, $32 Billion, on their latest earnings report. No one is buying Vista H8, Microsoft’s crappy tablets, which had $900 million in unsold inventory, or Nokia’s crippled phones. The reorg fooled no one.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/it9853xDVVC

As usual, the Microsoft press and Warren Buffet say, Buy some Now! Even the CNN article claims “decent numbers”. What fraud.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dividendchannel/2013/07/19/microsoft-corporation-enters-oversold-territory-msft/

Here is a report which calls it the biggest sell off in 13 years. To quote: “Shares suffer biggest one-day percentage sell-off since 2000 as investors fret over weak demand for Microsoft’s latest Windows operating system and Surface tablet.”

Following many high-level departures, including those two CFOs who got extra money just to keep their mouth shut, something big is happening here. The NSA scandals definitely won’t help Microsoft this year. █

Links 20/7/2013: Ubuntu Hardware Imminent, Russia Extorted Over Snowden

Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Nikon Camera Control: An Open Source App for Remote DSLR Control
  • VLC media player returns to the iOS App Store after 30-month hiatus
  • VLC returns to the App Store as a free, open-source video player compatible with every format

    When VLC for iOS left the App Store in mid-2011 after months of contention between its creators, the real owners of VLC (VideoLAN) and Apple, thousands of users were sorry to see it go. The free app allowed for playback of video files, such as MKVs and other esoteric file formats that Apple’s native player didn’t support and other developers charged up to $10 for.

  • Open Source: Internet Association Website Connects Users, Policymakers
  • Open source virtualization software still trails, despite improvements

    Open source virtualization is still a niche technology, despite the rise of multi-hypervisor infrastructures.

    Recent open source virtualization software releases have packed in new features with impressive specs, and there’s a clear appetite for VMware Inc. alternatives in enterprise data centers.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A Planetary Nebula That Looks Like the Firefox Logo

        If you’re reading this web page using Chrome or Safari, beware: you are probably angering the universe. There is reason to believe, you see, that the universe — the collection of all the planets, stars, galaxies, matter, and energy that have ever existed, and the sum total of all that we do and will know — is actually partial to Mozilla products. Which means that there is reason to believe that the universe would really prefer, as you browse the web that connects our tiny little world, that you use Firefox.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.7

      Berlin, July 18, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.7 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, which will be the last maintenance release of the leading free office suite’s 3.6 series. All users, from enterprises to individual end users, are encouraged to update to the current and stable 4.0 series, or have a look at the upcoming 4.1 version.

  • Funding

    • The Daily Startup: Firms Launch Open-Source Accelerator

      Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures and a new firm, The Valley Fund–have formed an accelerator called OpenIncubate for open-source startups. It offers joint funding, workspace and help for companies that are using open-source software frameworks to contribute to the emergence of the software-defined data center. Each firm has committed $1 million to the effort, according to The Valley Fund General Partner Steve O’Hara, with investments ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.

    • Top venture firms put out call-to-arms for open source innovators

      The Greater Boston startup scene is beginning to resemble the NICU at Mass. General — incubators everywhere. The latest is OpenIncubate, which launched Thursday, offering funding and workspace to entrepreneurs committed to open-source computing.

    • OpenIncubate launches to supercharge infrastructure startups with open-source cred

      All systems are go for OpenIncubate, a new accelerator seeking startups focused on open IT infrastructure. Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures and The Valley Fund are behind the accelerator, which plans to officially launch Thursday and hopes to shake up staid, proprietary corners of IT.

    • SourceForge’s DevShare Offers Open Source Developers Monetization

      Earlier this month, SourceForge–known as a central hosting and services site for countless open source projects–unveiled a beta version of a service called DevShare. DevShare is an opt-in revenue-sharing program “aimed at giving developers a better way to monetize their projects in a transparent, honest and sustainable way.” The plan presents a way for developers of open source projects to monetize downloads and usage of their creations. After a few weeks of beta testing, some interesting reviews are coming in.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview with Shiv Shankar Dayal of Kunjika

      The latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

    • Best IDEs for Octave, Python and R

      Code-wise, I’ve been getting my hands dirty with some digital grease over the past few months, and it’s been fun. Most of the fun has resolved around learning Python, which appears to be the language of choice these days.

      Python is almost a requirement everywhere you turn. Many introductory programming classes use Python as the main or default high-level programming language.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source EV Home Charger Offered at $99, With Caveats

      Think home electric car charging equipment is too expensive? Well, maybe you heard about The Juicebox, the new 240-volt charger available for a bargain basement price of $99. Sounds great, but expect to face additional costs, possible safety concerns and, like a piece of furniture from Ikea, once you get it home the device must be assembled.

  • Programming

    • Apache Kills Off Its C++ Standard Library

      While not as widely-used as GCC’s libstdc++ or even LLVM’s libc++ for a C++ standard library, since 2005 Apache has backed the stdcxx C++ standard library. The Apache C++ Standard Library has been a free implementation of the ISO/IEC 14882 standard for C++ and came to the Apache Software Foundation after Rogue Wave Software open-sourced their commercial implementation the better part of a decade ago.

    • LLDB Gains Linux 64-bit Core FIle Support

      The LLVM debugger is back to having ELF core file support for 64-bit Linux.

      The LLVM Debugger, LLDB, that is of growing interest to companies and is showing much promise for developers continues to see better Linux support.

Leftovers

  • A Book Is Better Than a Box of Chocolates

    Summer is an ideal season for jolting your mind into action by expanding your reading horizons. So shut off the computer and the television, put away the various gadgets, close your email and pick up a good book. There are plenty of entertaining choices for your reading pleasure, but the following titles are ones that I have enjoyed. They all address the serious pursuit of justice/happiness side of the written word.

  • Tewksbury motel owner lobbying Congress for reform of federal civil-forfeiture laws

    After winning a landmark federal forfeiture case against the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Russell Caswell, owner of the Motel Caswell in Tewksbury, is headed to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to take part in a legislative briefing called “Policing For Profit” on the campaign to reform the federal civil-forfeiture laws.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres
    • “The Act of Killing”: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres

      We spend the hour with Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called “The Act of Killing.” The film is set in Indonesia, where, beginning in 1965, military and paramilitary forces slaughtered up to a million Indonesians after overthrowing the democratically elected government. That military was backed by the United States and led by General Suharto, who would rule Indonesia for decades. There has been no truth and reconciliation commission, nor have any of the murderers been brought to justice. As the film reveals, Indonesia is a country where the killers are to this day celebrated as heroes by many. Oppenheimer spent more than eight years interviewing the Indonesian death squad leaders, and in “The Act of Killing,” he works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies in which the men love to watch — this includes classic Hollywood gangster movies and lavish musical numbers. A key figure he follows is Anwar Congo, who killed hundreds,
      if not a thousand people with his own hands and is now revered as a founding father of an active right-wing paramilitary organization. We also ask Oppenheimer to discusses the film’s impact in Indonesia, where he screened it for survivors and journalists who have launched new investigations into the massacres. The film is co-directed by Christine Cynn and an Indonesian co-director who remains anonymous for fear of retribution, as does much of the Indonesian film crew. Its executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. “The Act of Killing” opens today in New York City, and comes to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., on July 26, then to theaters nationwide.

    • You Are a Terrorist If You Film Animal Abuse or Unsanitary Conditions

      In five states of the U.S.—Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Utah, and South Carolina—you are a criminal for exposing public health dangers and animal rights abuses. If a person takes pictures or films at animal facilities, that person can be prosecuted under laws modeled after a document called “Animal and Ecological Terrorism in America.”

      How did such an obscene thing come to be? As we have documented at REALfarmacy, there is a little-known but powerful group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that introduces model bills across the country on behalf of its corporate members.

    • Multiple NYPD Cars Caught Blasting Star Wars “Imperial March” Theme Song on Patrol

      NYPD Vehicles have been spotted on multiple occasions cruising around the city with their windows down, blaring Darth Vader’s infamous theme song.

    • Explosion in arrivals hall at Beijing airport – media reports

      The blast occurred in the arrivals hall of terminal three, Xinhua news agency reported. The agency gave no immediate details on the cause of the blast or the potential number of casualties.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Bradley Manning Wins Peace Prize

      U.S. whistleblower and international hero Bradley Manning has just been awarded the 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Bureau, itself a former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Manning is a nominee this year

    • US vs. Bradley Manning: defense rests, Manning won’t testify, Wikileaks gets respect

      I traveled to Ft. Meade, Maryland today to observe the trial of Army PFC. Bradley Manning. The 25-year-old Oklahoma native has admitted to providing Wikileaks with more than 700,000 leaked documents, which included battle reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department diplomatic cables, and military videos from combat zones.

  • Finance

    • Thank neoliberalism for our enslavement to capitalism

      The corporations now ruling the world owe their dominance to the application of economist Milton Friedman’s ideas

    • So that’s how H-1B visa fraud is done!

      Reader Mark Surich was looking for a lawyer with Croatian connections to help with a family matter back in the old country. He Googled some candidate lawyers and in one search came up with this federal indictment. It makes very interesting reading and shows one way H-1B visa fraud can be conducted.

      The lawyer under indictment is Marijan Cvjeticanin. Please understand that this is just an indictment, not a conviction. I’m not saying this guy is guilty of anything. My point here is to describe the crime of which he is accused, which I find very interesting. He could be innocent for all I know, but the crime, itself, is I think fairly common and worth understanding.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • What It Takes to Get a Reporter to Correct An Error

      But, as Scahill pointed out, issuing a correction via Twitter for something you said on the air was insufficient. Baldwin apparently agreed, because later on in her show she said, “And earlier we said that he was killed in the same drone strike that killed his father. That was not the case. We regret that mistake.”

      Accuracy, of course, is a big deal in journalism– and thus it’s a big deal for people who want to hold journalism accountable. Baldwin’s initial response was unfortunate, but she eventually made the right call. Would she have made the same decision if there wasn’t such a public effort to get her to correct the record? Probably not.

    • Pest Control: Syngenta’s Secret Campaign to Discredit Atrazine’s Critics

      To protect profits threatened by a lawsuit over its controversial herbicide atrazine, Syngenta Crop Protection launched an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign that included hiring a detective agency to investigate scientists on a federal advisory panel, looking into the personal life of a judge and commissioning a psychological profile of a leading scientist critical of atrazine.

  • Censorship

    • Yahoo’s Sneaky Strike to Tumble Tumblr’s Adult Artifacts

      Exactly two months ago, when we heard that Yahoo was buying Tumblr for over a billion dollars in cash, I posed a somewhat provocative question.

      To wit: What was Yahoo gonna do with all that porn on Tumblr?

    • HBO Asks Google to Take Down “Infringing” VLC Media Player

      It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but their targeting of open source software is something new. In an attempt to remove pirated copies of Game of Thrones from the Internet, HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.

  • Privacy

    • Former NSA Chief Smears Glenn Greenwald

      newspaper’s Glenn Greenwald,” writes former NSA director Michael Hayden today in a CNN op-ed, is “more deserving of the Justice Department’s characterization of a co-conspirator than Fox’s James Rosen ever was.” Hayden’s smear came in a column in which he argues that Edward Snowden, whose story Greenwald has been telling in the Guardian, “will likely prove to be the most costly leaker of American secrets in the history of the Republic.”

      Those thuggish words are particularly disturbing coming from a figure who is, as CNN’s editor’s note at the top of the column explains, still tied to military and intelligence elites.

    • NSA admits to spying on more people than previously thought

      Testimony elicited during a Wednesday oversight hearing in Washington revealed that the United States intelligence community regularly collects email and telephone metadata from way more persons than previously thought.

    • Amash Forcing the Issue on NSA

      Representative Justin Amash of Michigan is on his way to forcing the first legislative showdown over the National Security Agency’s controversial policy of collecting the phone logs of every American.

    • NSA head admits the agency made “huge set of mistakes” in 2009

      President then established an internal watchdog group within spy agency.

    • NSA Phone Snooping Cannot Be Challenged in Court, Feds Say

      The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the “public interest,” does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.

    • Biden calls Brazil’s Rousseff over NSA spying tensions

      U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Friday to try to smooth tensions caused by allegations that the United States spied on Brazilian Internet communications, Rousseff’s office said.

    • Biden calls Brazil’s Rousseff over NSA spying tensions

      U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Friday to try to smooth tensions caused by allegations that the United States spied on Brazilian Internet communications, Rousseff’s office said.

      Latin America’s largest nation has said Washington’s explanations about the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs have been unsatisfactory.

      “He lamented the negative repercussions in Brazil and reiterated the U.S. government’s willingness to provide more information on the matter,” Rousseff’s communications minister, Helena Chagas, told reporters after the 25-minute telephone call.

    • NSA surveillance order set to expire Friday

      If the Obama administration elects not to act before Friday evening, the National Security Agency could for the first time in years be unable to collect the phone records of millions of Americans.

      It’s been but six weeks since NSA leaker Edward Snowden first started exposing the surveillance policies used by the United States government, and that month-and-a-half has provided President Barack Obama with a number of opportunities to engage the Congress and citizenry alike with regards to striking a proper balance between privacy and security. But while the recently disclosed surveillance programs could be stopped at any time, Friday allows the administration the opportunity to not renew one of those policies for the first time since the public began to pipe up.

    • Senator to Snowden: ‘You have done the right thing’

      While some current members of Congress continue to rally for the prosecution of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, a long-serving United States senator has sent a letter of support to the NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower.

      According to correspondence published Tuesday by the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, former two-term senator Gordon Humphrey (R-New Hampshire) wrote the exiled Mr. Snowden to say, “you have done the right thing in exposing what I regard as massive violation of the United States Constitution.”

    • “What Is That Box?” — When The NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company

      When people say the feds are monitoring what people are doing online, what does that mean? How does that work? When, and where, does it start?

      Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, an internet service provider in Utah, knows. He received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers, through his facility. He also received a broad gag order. In his own words:

      The first thing I do when I get a law enforcement request is look for a court signature on it. Then I pass it to my attorneys and say, “Is this legitimate? Does this qualify as a warrant?” If it does, then we will respond to it. We are very up front that we respond to warrants.

      If it isn’t, then the attorneys write back: “We don’t believe it is in jurisdiction or is constitutional. We are happy to respond if you do get an FBI request in jurisdiction or you get a court order to do so.”

      The FISA request was a tricky one, because it was a warrant through the FISA court — whether you believe that is legitimate or not. I have a hard time with secret courts. I ran it past my attorney and asked, “Is there anyway we can fight this?” and he said “No. It is legitimate.”

    • FISA court renews NSA surveillance program

      The Obama administration has renewed the authority for the National Security Agency to regularly collect the phone records of millions of Americas as allowed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

    • Fight over NSA Spying Spills into U.S. Courts

      ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 19 (IPS) – A wide variety of individuals and organisations have filed lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency (NSA) and other federal agencies and officials for conducting a massive, dragnet spying operation on U.S. citizens that was recently confirmed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Secret court lets NSA extend its trawl of Verizon customers’ phone records

      Latest revelation an indication of how Obama administration has opened up hidden world of mass communications surveillance

    • Senators suggest moving G20 summit over NSA leaker

      Two senators urged President Barack Obama on Friday to consider recommending a new site for the September international summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, if Moscow continues to allow National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to remain in the country.

    • Obama may cancel Moscow trip over NSA leaker

      President Barack Obama may cancel a scheduled trip to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in September as the standoff over the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor seeking asylum there, takes its toll on already strained relations between the United States and Russia, officials said Thursday.

    • Pressure Builds for Data-Sweep Alternative

      White House and Congress Urge National Security Agency to Rethink Its Approach to Terrorism-Related Surveillance

    • CIA Huawei Spying Claims Denounced, US Told To ‘Put Up Or Shut Up’
    • The Internet Sector calls for Greater Transparency in Requests for User Data

      Mozilla is joining with over 60 leading technology companies, startups, investors, technology trade groups and public interest groups today to call on the US government to allow the release of information pertaining to national security requests for user data.

      Mozilla is one of the organizers behind today’s letter. We gathered the signatures of a broad range of Internet and VC leaders for many of whom this is their first time publicly weighing in on this issue. Mozilla has also been one of the leading groups behind the StopWatching.Us campaign, which has gathered over 550,000 signatures and brought together one of the most diverse coalitions of public interest organizations ever assembled on an Internet policy topic.

    • The Philosophy of NSA Surveillance

      What kind of society do we want to live in? That’s the philosophical question at the heart of the debate about the National Security Agency collecting call logs and Internet content on millions of Americans in the name of finding terrorists. I hang my head in disbelief at the continual framing of the debate in solely practical terms. I instinctively think in philosophical terms.

      When the news broke, I had a visceral reaction. The confirmation of the existence of these sweeping programs was like a punch in the gut for this centrist civil libertarian. Yet people whom I know and many pundits and politicians simply shrugged. They seemed uninterested in taking a stand. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland said in 1937 that “the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”

    • NSA secret data to be protected as nuclear weapon

      The National Security Agency is implementing new security measures because of the disclosures by former NSA employee Edward Snowden, a top defense official said. First among the new procedures is a “two-man rule”, often used in guarding nuclear weapons.

    • Lawsuits against NSA: will any of them bring substantial results?

      A coalition of 19 groups in San Francisco is suing the US National Security Agency. The groups, supporting everything from religion and digital rights to drugs and the environment, demand that a federal judge immediately stop the activity of the “unconstitutional program”. At least 3 federal lawsuits have been previously lodged in the country, challenging the US government’s surveillance programs. Tomas Moore, principal attorney at “The Moore Law Team”. And the plaintiffs attorney in the lawsuit, shares his opinion on the issue with the Voice of Russia.
      Read more: http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_07_19/Lawsuits-against-NSA-will-bring-any-of-them-substantial-results-3271/

    • 5 Companies That Are Watching You More Than the NSA

      In the digital age, it’s difficult to define exactly what is public and when we should reasonably expect privacy. Revelations regarding the surveillance reach of the NSA have many questioning who knows what and how much.

      On a daily basis, your activity is being monitored by companies through one simple device – your cell phone. And they know more about you than the government.

    • FISA Court Secretly Renews NSA Telephone Surveillance
    • A Single NSA Wiretap Could Lead To Snooping On ’2.5 Million Americans’
    • Android app randomly takes photos, tweets them to NSA
    • Facebook Event For ‘NSA Nature Walk’ Leads To Police Visit For German Man

      People outside of the United States have been alarmed by revelations about the degree of NSA access to information held by American technology companies given that foreigners are not granted the same privacy protections as U.S. citizens. Daniel Bangert, a 28-year-old German man, has been following news articles about the Edward Snowden leaks closely. Last month, after discovering that the NSA has a facility near his home in Griesheim, he posted a screed to Facebook lamenting “hav[ing] the NSA spies on my doorstep.”

    • Thanks to a Secret Court the NSA Can Continue Spying on Americas

      On Friday, the secret court that oversees cases related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewed the order that enables the NSA to compel telecom companies to hand over records whenever it wants. Translation: No end in sight to the NSA spying on phone records.

    • FISA Court Rubber Stamps Continued Collection Of All Phone Records, While DOJ Insists No One Can Challenge This

      As of this morning, the Feds didn’t want to say if they’d asked the FISA court to renew the order allowing it to collect the data on every single phone call from Verizon (and likely every other major phone carrier, though it’s unclear if the orders for those others also expired today).

    • ACLU warns of mass tracking through license plate scanners

      The American Civil Liberties Union is warning that law enforcement officials are using license plate scanners to amass massive and unregulated databases that can be used to track law-abiding citizens as their go about their daily lives.

    • The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People’s Data Than Previously Revealed
    • The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping

      The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing “the Internet’s backbone.” How does that work?

    • Metadata, the NSA, and the Fourth Amendment: A Constitutional Analysis of Collecting and Querying Call Records Databases

      In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, my co-blogger Randy Barnett argues that massive-scale collection of communications metadata by the NSA violates the Fourth Amendment because it is an unreasonable seizure. Randy’s colleague Laura K. Donohue recently argued in the Washington Post that such collection violates the Fourth Amendment as an unreasonable search. Jennifer Granick and Chris Sprigman made a similar argument in the New York Times.

    • The Dangers of Surveillance

      From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to films like Minority Report and The Lives of Others, our law and culture are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad and why we should be wary of it. To the extent that the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context and why it matters. We’ve been able to live with this state of affairs largely because the threat of constant surveillance has been relegated to the realms of science fiction and failed totalitarian states.

    • NSA comes clean on metadata: Are you within 3 degrees of a target?

      The NSA finally admitted Wednesday why it wants to track your phone’s metadata, like the stats of who you call and when.

      They’re looking to see if you ever call anybody who’s called anybody who’s called anybody who might be of real interest.

    • First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA

      Nineteen organizations including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency today for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by EFF.

  • Civil Rights

    • American justice scandal: FBI could be at fault in 27 death row cases

      Unprecedented federal review rules that the FBI may have exaggerated forensics in case of Willie Jerome Manning – a decision that puts other convictions in doubt

    • Senate and C.I.A. Spar Over Secret Report on Interrogation Program
    • [Old:] Freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association and the internet

      The internet, social networks and mobile phones enhance human freedoms to come together around social, political and economic issues, to build associations and networks, and to assemble online to advocate for and to defend human rights. This has been reflected in demonstrations and protests in the middle-east and North Africa; anti- austerity protests in Greece, Italy and Spain; “Occupy” protests; advocacy and protests against the Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) and PROTECT IP (PIPA) bills in the United States; student protests in Quebec and Chile; and protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

    • ICC not fit for purpose?

      The Interception of Communications Commissioner (ICC) 2012 Annual Report has raised serious questions about whether the commissioner’s office is actually fit for purpose. The report has failed to make any mention of Tempora and PRISM whilst at the same time seriously lacks the impression that the ICC has been enforcing serious oversight of the way security agencies acquire and use communications data.

    • Dick Durbin to Hold Senate Hearings on ALEC, the NRA, and “Stand Your Ground”

      Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced Friday that he will hold hearings this fall on the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the NRA in spreading “Stand Your Ground” laws across the country, which the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered last year, after launching ALECexposed.org.

    • Journalist James Risen ordered to testify in CIA leaker trial

      A federal appeals court has delivered a blow to investigative journalism in America by ruling that reporters have no first amendment protection that would safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial.

      In a two-to-one ruling from the fourth circuit appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, two judges ruled that a New York Times reporter, James Risen, must give evidence at the criminal trial of a former CIA agent who is being prosecuted for unauthorised leaking of state secrets.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Guantanamo’s Indefinite Prisoners To Have Cases Reviewed

      Eighty-six of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo have already been cleared for release. In May, President Obama announced a series of steps his administration intended to undertake to release the men, including lifting a moratorium on the transfer of Yemeni prisoners. The reviews of individual cases are another step toward reducing the population of the prison.

    • McDonald’s Employees Walk Out In Protest Of No Air Conditioning After Crew Member Collapses

      A New York City McDonald’s crew walked out Friday, saying they were forced to work without air conditioning amid record-high temperatures. One worker collapsed from the heat.

    • Anti-corruption blogger Navalny sentenced to 5 years behind bars for embezzlement

      Prominent anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Aleksey Navalny has been found guilty of embezzlement on a large scale, and sentenced to 5 years in jail.

      [...]

      Navalny was also the man who coined the phrase “party of crooks and thieves,” which became a ubiquitous nickname in opposition circles for the country’s ruling United Russia party.

Techrights Needs Readers’ Support

Posted in Site News at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A call to readers who are able to keep Techrights strong

IN YESTERDAY'S daily links we took note of the fact that The H, a fantastic source of information, is shutting down. Less than a day before that (only hours earlier) we mentioned how DesktopLinux and LinuxDevices had gone offline and we worked to bring the stories back online (there is progress on that, but we will provide an update only when that’s confirmed).

“As the body of knowledge and information accumulates, it builds up to provide accurate documentation that certainly helped deter several bad companies from doing their bad deeds (knowing that they are being watched).”Speaking as one who runs Techrights at great expense (my own time and my own money, of which I have little), I really related to what Michael Larabel wrote, especially him saying that Phoronix had “taken quite a physical toll on my health with the insane hours required to keep everything afloat.” Susan Linton, another person who essentially sacrificed her life to GNU/Linux news, had her take on this too (I donated what I could to her site just earlier this month in order to help keep it running).

The reality is, running a GNU/Linux-oriented site is almost always done for no personal gain and it does take a toll on one’s personal life (I still need to keep up with my young family and full-time job), so if readers wish to support the site (which has neither ads nor any other source of income), then they can donate in support and expression of gratitude. Help keep Techrights strong (as Wikileaks often puts it) and actively running for a long time to come. As the body of knowledge and information accumulates, it builds up to provide accurate documentation that certainly helped deter several bad companies from doing their bad deeds (knowing that they are being watched). Novell is just one example among several we know of. Some are patent trolls. Scrutiny does impact policy and behaviour. Imagine how free they would be to mistreat people had they suffered no public scrutiny. We have amassed almost 17,000 blog posts. We serve over a million hits a week now. Some companies really hate this site. And if you knew which companies, then you would know the site’s value to society.

For the remainder of this year we have the ability to produce a weekly audio/video with Richard Stallman, so there are certainly things to look forward to and invest in (at the very least basics like Web hosting). Charging money for access to information (i.e. paywall) is unethical, but voluntarily helping to sponsor traffic would be nice. Another way to support us is to spread links to the site, increasing its impact and motivating new stories. Don’t let this site end up like The H did. Information is power. █

Richard Stallman and the GPLv3

07.19.13

Links 19/7/2013: Slackware Turns 20, Nexus 7 2 Images Leaked

Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The H is closing down

    Although The H has produced many widely read stories, it has not been possible to effectively monetise that traffic to produce a working business model.

    Because of this, after four and a half years as The H and six years online, The H is, sadly, closing its doors. We thank all our readers for their deep interest and engagement. Work is taking place to create an archive to ensure that the content of the site will remain publicly accessible.

  • Desktop

    • Who’s Winning the PC OS War? Who Cares?!

      Henry Blodget in Business Insider: “In the late 1990s, a single technology company became so unfathomably rich and powerful — and so hellbent on dominating not just its own industry but a massive and rapidly growing new one — that the U.S. government dragged the company into court and threatened to break it up over anti-trust violations.

      [...]

      Now, thanks to the rise of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Windows’ global share has been cut in half, to about 30%. More remarkably, Android is now a bigger platform than Windows.

  • Server

    • IBM’s Smart CSL Buy

      If you think provisioning, monitoring, managing and maintaining the virtualized resources on IBM mainframes can be complex, you’d be entirely correct. Yet simplifying those processes and increasing the productivity of mainframe sysadmins have been among CSL International’s primary goals since the company’s founding in 2004. Overall, CSL International should be a perfect fit for IBM.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • All About the Linux Kernel: Bcache

      The 3.10 Linux kernel release late last month brought a raft of new features worth celebrating for Linux developers and sysadmins alike. This release was especially satisfying, though, to kernel developer Kent Overstreet who saw years of hard work pay off with the inclusion of the Bcache patch set in 3.10.

      Bcache allows Linux machines to use flash-based SSDs (solid-state drives) as cache for other, slower and less expensive, hard disk drives. It can be used in servers, workstations, high-end storage arrays, or “anywhere you want IO to be faster, really,” Overstreet said.

    • AMD Talks Up HSA Architecture On Linux ARM

      Greg Stoner of AMD and representing the HSA Foundation talked last week at the Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event about the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as it concerns ARM.

    • Linus Torvalds Calls For More Linux Kernel Patches

      Linus Torvalds is usually complaining about too many pull requests during the Linux kernel development cycle when past its merge window, but this time around he’s complaining about too few patches this week. He’s also proclaimed himself the Goldilocks of kernel development.

      This week there’s been much drama in the Linux kernel development world over Intel’s Sarah Sharp and others wanting Torvalds and others to be less “verbally abusive” on the Linux kernel mailing list when criticizing kernel patches and other work. There’s been a proposal to discuss the tone of the Linux kernel mailing list at the upcoming Linux Kernel Summit.

      With developers discussing their views on appropriate behaviour for the Linux kernel mailing list, it’s taken away from kernel development time and that’s making Linus less than happy.

    • Why This Hacker Stood Up Against ‘Verbal Abuse’ in Linux Land

      When Sarah Sharp was a 20-year-old university student in Portland, she took on an extra-credit project writing USB driver code for the Linux kernel. She was too young to stay past 10 p.m. in some of the brew pubs where the local Linux-heads met, but she hung in as long as she could, learned a lot about Linux, and embraced the community.

    • Childish names are becoming a real problem for Linux

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds is an interesting fellow. He is notorious for speaking his mind, demeaning developers and using profanity — behavior which is appreciated by some members of the Linux community. On July 14, the RC-1 of Linux Kernel 3.11 was announced. Continuing his quirky behavior, Mr. Torvalds has named it “Linux for Workgroups”.

    • Linus, Linux, Civility and Fighting in Hockey
    • How to Find Best and Fast DNS Servers to Optimize Internet Speed

    • Graphics Stack

      • Virgil: Experimental Virtual 3D Support For QEMU

        David Airlie publicly announced plans today for his new Virgil project, a virtual GPU capable of 3D acceleration for QEMU. Guest OpenGL (and potentially Direct3D) commands from the virtualized KVM/QEMU guest are passed onto the host for hardware acceleration.

      • OpenGL Frame Latency / Jitter Testing On Linux
      • XBMC Now Runs Well On Wayland
      • XBMC Now Runs Well On Wayland

        Sam Spilsbury, the Compiz developer and former Canonical employee, has made progress in being able to run the XBMC media application directly on Wayland.

      • Direct3D 9 Support Released For Linux Via Gallium3D, Running Games

        Linux desktop systems can now have working support for Microsoft’s Direct3D 9 API via a new Gallium3D state tracker. Unlike the earlier Direct3D 10/11 state tracker for Gallium3D on Linux, this new code actually can run D3D9 games and at better performance than what’s offered by Wine.

      • Nouveau VP2 H.264/MPEG2 Decoding Now In Gallium3D

        While Radeon DPM for Linux 3.11 is most of what Linux enthusiasts are talking about, the Nouveau changes in Linux 3.11 include support for H.264 and MPEG2 video decoding. The necessary user-space driver changes have now been made for supporting this accelerated video decode process from Nouveau Gallium3D.

      • R600 Radeon Gallium3D Gets More SB Back-End Work

        Vadim Girlin has merged another set of patches concerning his “SB” shader optimization back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver, including some code that has the potential to affect the performance.

      • Radeon Power Management Gets More Fixes For 3.11

        Just days after the first release candidate of the Linux 3.11 kernel, additional user testing of the new Radeon dynamic power management support has revealed more bugs in the open-source driver. Fortunately, there’s already another pull request for Linux 3.11 to take care of some more Radeon “DPM” issues.

      • Mesa 9.2 Can Boost Intel Haswell Graphics 30~40% On Linux

        Yesterday I shared open-source Linux graphics benchmarks showing the Intel Ivy Bridge performance improving on Mesa 9.2 over the earlier releases of this important open-source Linux graphics driver component. However, for the latest-generation Intel “Haswell” graphics, Mesa 9.2 is an even more important upgrade. Here’s a look at the performance benefits in moving from Mesa 9.1 to the soon-to-be-released Mesa 9.2.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • ROSA Recruits Fresh GNOME Desktop

        ROSA has primarily been a customized KDE desktop distribution. But today the ROSA folks announced an officially supported GNOME 3 variation of their Fresh R1 release. And, ROSA somehow managed to make GNOME 3 consistent with the look of their ROSA desktop.

  • Distributions

    • Slackware Family

      • Slackware Turns 20

        Slackware Linux turned 20 years old yesterday and no one gave them a party. Even I, who commonly remembered the illustrious distribution’s birthdays in my now former column, had to be reminded by LWN. Well, that won’t do. Let’s look back at some history of Slack.

        As I look back over my history with Slack, I’m struck by how many distributions were once based on Slackware. Most are no longer maintained, but some names may still be familiar. GoblinX was a strange looking but quite stable and fun distribution. It’s biggest issue in adoption is their pay-to-play business model that often fails in Linuxville. Austrumi is a tiny distro from Latvia, a tiny Northern European country most Americans’ education didn’t include. It was fast and stable and looks to be abandoned. Ultima 4 was trying to provide an easy to use Slackware and Mutagenix was a really cool distro that has disappeared off the face of the Earth. But Slackware is still here. There are many more derivative epitaphs, but the oldest surviving Linux distribution is 20 years old and is still very actively and enthusiastically maintained.

      • Happy 20th Anniversary, Slackware!

        Slackware Linux, a complete 32-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system that is currently based around the 3.2 Linux kernel series, has just reached the venerable age of 20.

      • Happy 20th Birthday, Slackware!!!

    • Red Hat Family

      • Cigna Named 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year

        Cigna , a global health service company that offers health, life, accident, dental, and disability insurance, and related health services, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cigna has been named the 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Cigna was recognized during a ceremony at Red Hat Summit for its innovative use of Red Hat technologies to revitalize the company’s IT infrastructure and solidify the company’s position as a leader in the health care industry. Cigna also won an Innovation Award in the “Outstanding Open Source Architecture” category.

      • Down but not out on Red Hat’s sign

        OK, I hear you loud and clear. Disagreement with my view of Red Hat’s sign atop its downtown Raleigh building – “hideously out of place” – has been clear, but polite.

        I thank you for the polite part.

      • Red Hat: People like our “cereal box sign”

        Red Hat’s “cereal box sign,” the red billboard crowning the top of what is now known as Red Hat Tower, may be meeting controversy online, but officials at the open-source software company say they’re hearing nothing but compliments.

      • Red Hat building’s top has some seeing red

        Raleigh’s skyline got a bold new splash of color this month, and it has some people in downtown buzzing.

        Software company Red Hat unveiled a bright red sign atop its Wilmington Street high-rise building. However, the reviews range from great to downright ugly.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Tops Our Community Distro Poll

        The results have been tallied and Debian got the most votes in our Community Distro Poll. We would call them the “winner,” but this wasn’t about winners and losers. It was about trying to reach a consensus on what we mean by the term “community distro.” We asked, “Which GNU/Linux distros do you consider to be legitimate community distros?” Choices weren’t limited to one; voters could choose as many as they wanted and even add more through a text box supplied by choosing “Other.”

      • Derivatives

        • Movin’ on up

          As I’ve said in the past, the DistroWatch.com listing of page hit rankings is a good way to see if one’s distro’s page is being looked at. With folks looking at the pages, one would hope that downloads and actual use of the distro would follow. So while it may not give an accurate description of actual use of the distro, the page hit rankings do give folks an idea which distros are doing well and which may not be.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linaro enhances Linux support for ARM Big.Little

      Linaro has developed a new way for Linux and Android developers to implement ARM’s Big.Little multi-core load balancing architecture, in a manner that optimizes power/performance tradeoffs. In addition to the In-kernel Switcher (IKS) released in May, the new Global Task Scheduler (GTS) offers faster, more granular scheduling control, support for non-symmetrical core combos, and the ability to run all cores simultaneously.

    • Lernstift Linux Smart Pen Vibrates When You Spell Something Wrong

      If you’re particularly bad at spelling, then this pen can help you out. It’s the Lernstift smart pen, and it vibrates gently whenever its user makes a spelling error. It looks like a regular pen on the outside, but it packs some pretty unique and sophisticated tech on the inside. The Lernstift actually has an embedded Linux inside it’s tiny frame, which is equipped with a motion sensor, memory, and processor, along with a WiFi and vibrating module.

    • Meet Lernstift: the Linux-powered ink pen that can spell-check

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Nexus 2 7 Pricing Details Revealed

          All of the netizens, who are somewhat enlightened on the Android scene, have been holding their wallets under immense restraint for the next Nexus pricing to be announced. Now finally there might be concrete evidence suggesting a price point for the upcoming device.

        • Nexus 7 2 Images Leaked Ahead Of Official Reveal

          The Nexus 7 rumours have been floating around the internet for quite a long time. However, like all secrets that end up being leaked, this is the first time that definitive pictures of Nexus 7 have been revealed and leaked over the internet.

        • GlassUp: A Google Glass Competitor for Android Device Users

          If you thought Google Glass was going to march forward without any competition, think again. GlassUp, an Italian startup company, has already collected over $30,000 of seed money on campaign funding site Indiegogo for its GlassUp concept. According to project leaders, the GlassUp device will focus on Android phone users who want to view messages and notifications, in addition to other possible augmented reality information, on glasses via Bluetooth.

          GlassUp has already been shown at CeBIT, and is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory with a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display. Project leaders note that they will still produce the project even if they don’t reach crowdsourced funding goals, as they have investors. They also note this: “We are in agreements with some of the most famous eyewear brands for the design, so the final ones will be trendier and more varied.”

        • Google’s Android 4.3 leaks ahead of launch

          We reported yesterday that Google is planning an event on the 24th of July where Sundar Pichai will possibly be unveiling the next Nexus 7 and Android 4.3, but today we’ve got word that Android 4.3 for the Nexus has already been leaked.

        • BitTorrent Sync now available for Android, Linux, Mac and Windows
        • Android’s HWComposer Being Toyed With On KMS

          At last week’s Linaro Connect Europe 2013 conference, there was a presentation regarding bringing Android’s HWComposer on Linux KMS.

        • Hacker gives Google Glass facial recognition using his own OS

          Google Glass has been in the hands of developers on Google’s Explorer programme for a while now, but some of those who have got their hands on the high-tech specs have been pushing the boundaries of what Google wants them to do.

          One hacker has successfully managed to get facial recognition technology to run on Glass, despite Google explicitly stating in its developer policy that this isn’t allowed. Stephen Balaban, founder of Lambda Labs in San Francisco, is challenging Google and hoping that others will do the same, actively encouraging people to use the hashtag #ihackglass on Twitter.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • HTC One Mini Officially Revealed

        After all the leaks, rumours and speculations, HTC has finally officially announced the HTC One Mini. HTC had teased the announcement of One Mini on twitter earlier, and now they have finally revealed the first look.

      • The Competition Between Tablets and Notebooks

        Part of the OS wars is definitely the competition between tablets and notebooks. In a recent bit of spam, a retailer sent me these choices:

        * “New! Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Now available! Starting at $199.99″

        * “Save $49 – Acer Gateway 15.6″ notebook for $379.99″

Free Software/Open Source

  • More than 100 free open source apps and games!

    Today in Open Source: Tons of free apps and games. Plus: Linux Mint 15 Xfce install guide, and Ubuntu versus Debian!

  • Boffin Thrills Its Readers With Its New List of Open Source Audio Converter Software

    Its top recommended free audio converter software revealed today by Boffin, after the site reviewers assessed numerous candidates.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Collusion: See who’s tracking you – in real-time

        At a time when your ISP is tracking your online activities, sites you visit are doing the same (even the one you do not visit are able to track you), Google is not to be left out in the game, and the NSA is tracking everybody else, it’s easy to be depressed.

      • Mozilla Comes under Attack – and of Age

        Back in March, I wrote about the odd little attack by the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on Mozilla’s plans to put control of cookies firmly in the hands of users. Alas, the IAB seems not to have come to its senses since then, but has instead doubled down, and launched one of the most bizarre assaults on Mozilla and the open Web that I have ever read. I warmly recommend you to read it – I suspect you will find it as entertaining in its utter absurdity as I do.

        It’s entitled “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”, which is strange, because what follows is a rambling moan about precisely those values, and Mozilla for daring to adhere to them. As you might expect, Mozilla has not “lost its values”, it’s defending them here just as it has always defended them. Here’s the central argument of the IAB piece.

      • Mozilla’s Firefox Privacy Plans Draw More Objections from Ad Community

        It was only a few weeks ago when the news broke that Mozilla would join forces with Stanford’s Center for Internet Society to support a new Cookie Clearinghouse that will oversee easy-to-use “allow lists” and “block lists” to help Internet users protect their privacy. The privacy scheme could have become a default setup in the Firefox browser, and paved the way for usage in other browsers. As that news broke, it seemed likely that it might draw a caustic reaction from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has blasted Mozilla’s attempts to control online ads and cookies before.

      • Is Mozilla anti-business, led by ‘techno-libertarians’?

        The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) blasted Mozilla over its third party cookie blocking plans and said that the non-profit organization has an anti-business bent.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Healthcare

    • Immigrants Put Billions More into Medicare Than They Use

      Conservatives have argued that unchecked immigration contributes to the rising costs of health care because immigrants do not put the same amount of money into healthcare as citizens do. As Seth Freed Wessler of Colorlines reports, a recent study proves otherwise.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Mesa Improves Support For OpenBSD

      While the popular kernel DRM drivers are still being ported to OpenBSD, support for the OpenBSD operating system within Mesa is being improved.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Students map their university campus with MapKnitter

      In the fall of 2010, I asked the biology class I teach at Western Carolina University for volunteers to help map the campus. Three years later, dozens of students have participated in learning how to use aerial photography and cartography techniques created by Public Lab.

    • UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project

      I recently spoke with Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Larry also serves on the boards of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University. I asked Larry about UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project.

    • Open Access/Content

      • MIT Moves to Intervene in Release of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File

        awyers representing MIT are filing a motion to intervene in my FOIA lawsuit over thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz.

        I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit. In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding. Other requestors reported receiving the same respons

      • MIT Trying To Block The Release Of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File

        We recently noted that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had ordered Homeland Security to release the Secret Service file on Aaron Swartz that had been requested by Wired reporter/editor Kevin Poulsen. However, MIT has now stepped into the case trying to block the release of the information. The judge has consented to putting a stay on the initial order until MIT can file its motion.

        MIT’s concern — as it was in a separate legal fight concerning releasing the evidence used against Aaron — is apparently that the released documents will reveal which MIT employees helped with the investigation, and that could lead to unwarranted harassment. However, as Poulsen notes, the documents that have already been released have been redacting those names, so it’s unlikely that these further releases would leave those same names unredacted.

      • Free Courses for a Big Problem

        Free online courses have run into a backlash of late. But a handful of community colleges may have found a way to dial up open-source content to help tackle one of higher education’s thorniest problems: remedial education.

    • Open Hardware

      • Arduino and the (tinker) light workshop

        Last month, Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project, held a workshop at the Foundation Achille Castiglioni in Milan called: Arduino and the light.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The Slavoj Žižek v Noam Chomsky spat is worth a ringside seat

    Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left of this tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically verifiable and rooted in reality.

  • Science

    • When Autonomous Cars Kill Somebody

      As drones, bipedal robots, and algorithm technologies continue to improve, the world of autonomous everything is looming. Perhaps looming isn’t the right word, but I feel compelled to set an ominous tone in order to provide an interesting conclusion. Beyond the iPad, synchronized quad-copters, and even 3D printers, one of the world’s most powerful forms of emerging technology is the ability to make more machines and devices autonomous.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Peru to Provide Free Solar Power to its 2 Million Poorest Citizens

      The country of Peru is looking to provide free electricity to over 2 million of its poorest citizens by harvesting energy from the sun. Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino said that the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program will provide electricity to poor households through the installation of photovoltaic panels.

  • Finance

    • Detroit files for bankruptcy

      Detroit has become the largest city in US history to file for bankruptcy after accumulating spiralling long term debt estimated at $18.5 billion.

    • ‘Is there no limit to what this Government will privatise?’: UK’s blood supply sold to US private equity firm Bain Capital

      The Government was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply by selling the state owned NHS plasma supplier to a US private equity firm.

      The Department of Health overlooked several healthcare or pharmaceutical firms and at least one blood plasma specialist before choosing to sell an 80 per cent stake in Plasma Resources UK to Bain Capital, the company co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a £230m deal. The Government will retain a 20 per stake and a share of potential future profits.

    • Detroit’s Bankruptcy and America’s Future: Robots, Race, Globalization and the 1%

      The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and likely further decline is a fluke or whether it tells us something about the dystopia that the United States is becoming. It seems to me that the city’s problems are the difficulties of the country as a whole, especially the issues of deindustrialization, robotification, structural unemployment, the rise of the 1% in gated communities, and the racial divide. The mayor has called on families living in the largely depopulated west of the city to come in toward the center, so that they can be taken care of. It struck me as post-apocalyptic. Sometimes the abandoned neighborhoods accidentally catch fire, and 30 buildings will abruptly go up in smoke.

    • Plan to close international tax loopholes puts Apple, Google, Amazon, and others on notice

      Moscow plays host today to the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting, the crowning jewel of which is the freshly unveiled Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. Released under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this document sets out 15 specific recommendations for national governments to implement in order to stem the widespread abuse of tax loopholes by multinational companies.

      At the center of the issue has been the asymmetry between tightly integrated global corporations and the fragmented, piecemeal responses from individual states. One of the best known and most derided examples of this is the practice of setting up shell companies in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland, which are then used to account for profits from higher-tax nations — something that Google, Facebook, and Starbucks have all been accused of. The new Action Plan tackles this issue head-on, by urging that tax should be paid in the territory where goods or services are sold, not where the company is based. That would thwart Amazon’s practice of booking its Europe-wide profits in Luxembourg, forcing it to compete on the same terms as local retailers.

  • Censorship

    • Immigrants Excluded in News Coverage of Immigration Reform

      Though immigration figured prominently on the national political agenda in February 2013, an analysis by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of news coverage during that month shows that immigrants themselves are not getting their say. The study examined all ABC, CBS and NBC news programs, the PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Situation Room, Fox News’ Special Report and MSNBC’s Hardball for all of February. It found 54 reports on immigration featuring 157 news sources during that time.

    • ORG asks court for web blocking documents

      Courts have not been forthcoming with access to website blocking orders, citing administrative reasons for refusing to treat them as public documents.

    • ‘High Tech, Low Life’ puts Chinese censorship in spotlight

      ”
The second documentary showed in the series was “High tech, low life.” The cameras followed two citizen journalists as they reported what they saw in China, where censorship is prevalent and penalties for those reporting on unfavorable topics can be strict.

    • Questions ISPs must answer about Internet filtering

      Internet Service Providers have agreed to roll out network level filtering to protect children online, following significant political pressure. We have sent them 20 questions on how their Internet filtering systems will work – questions policy makers have failed to ask.

    • Letter to ISPs concerning child protection Internet filtering

      The below letter was sent to TalkTalk, Virgin, BSkyB and BT. We’ve written a blog post about this, which has some more background.

    • ‘The Movie the Koch Brothers Don’t Want You to See’ Launches Kickstarter Campaign

      Tia Lessen and Carl Deal are far from giving up after public television pulled funding for their film “Citizen Koch:” the filmmakers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the funds necessary to release their documentary on money, power and democracy.

    • Yahoo Censors Tumblr Porn: New Policy Makes 10 Percent Of Tumblr Users Invisible

      When Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) purchased Tumblr in May for $1.1 billion in cash, many wondered what changes Yahoo would bring to the hip microblogging service. One of the top questions was what Yahoo would do with the massive amount of pornographic content hosted on Tumblr pages.

  • Privacy

    • Huawei’s Headaches Keep Growing

      The headaches for Huawei Technologies Co. keep growing, fresh after the U.K. government said that it would conduct a review of the Chinese company’s cybersecurity arrangements and a former U.S. intelligence official reportedly accused it of spying for Beijing.

    • Huawei: Ex-CIA Head’s Claims Of Spying for China ‘Unsubstantiated’

      Huawei Technologies Co. strongly denied a former U.S. intelligence official’s reported remarks that accused the telecommunications equipment supplier of spying for the Chinese government, saying that such “unsubstantiated” accusations are distractions from real cybersecurity issues.

    • White House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order

      Officials decline to comment on whether they will seek to renew order that permits bulk collection of Americans’ phone records

    • Sysadmins: Keep YOUR data away from NSA spooks

      I love this question simply because it means I’m making progress getting companies up to speed on their IT requirements. What set this encounter apart was the unexpected question that followed: “What about the sovereignty of our data?”

      I have researched data sovereignty issues for my clients since the NSA’s PRISM project first hit the news – and I think I’m about ready to answer this question. So let’s take a look at what I’ve learnt about data sovereignty.

    • Tech firms call for NSA data snooping disclosures

      Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organisations including Apple, Google and Facebook have written to the US government asking for more disclosures on the government’s national security-related requests for user data.

    • NSA Puts Limits on Systems Staff in Wake of Snowden Leaks
    • Snowden’s NSA Disclosures a Service, ACLU Director Says

      Fugitive security contractor Edward Snowden“did this country a service” by igniting a debate about the reach of the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance programs, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

    • NSA and GCHQ siphoning huge quantities of data from undersea fiber optic cables

      The plot thickens as the NSA’s data collection net widens. NSA leaks reveal that governments are tapping into “the Internet’s backbone” to siphon off huge quantities of data. That is, government programs in the US and UK are able to gain access to tremendous amounts of data by accessing networks of undersea fiber optic cable, according to a report from The Atlantic.

    • The USA Prism Plus app makes sure the NSA is watching

      If you head over to the Play Store, you can download US Prism Plus and lend a helping hand! The app will take pictures from your mobile device, automatically, and send them to the NSA twitter account. That’s right, all you have to do is download the app and you’re on your way to being a helpful citizen.

    • Furious Europeans Want Snowden and NSA Head to Testify — Yeah Right

      The European Parliament (EP) is calling for the appearance and testimony of Edward Snowden and General Keith Alexander in the incipient investigation into National Security Agency (NSA) information-gathering programs that have affected Europeans. The NSA’s internet surveillance program, PRISM, is of particular interest. These two individuals, for very different reasons, will be very difficult to get a hold of. One is stranded without travel documents in a Russian airport and the other is America’s greatest spymaster. The EP will get its investigation, but it will not get its desired results and likely neither of these two testimonies.

    • The NSA May Be Watching Way More People Than You Think

      The National Security Agency appears to be tracking data from more people—way, way more people—than it had previously admitted, the Atlantic Wire reported. In congressional testimony yesterday, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis “casually” indicated that the agency looks “two to three hops” from terror suspects. That means the agency monitor not only the people terror suspects talk to on the phone, but also who those people talk to—and then who those people talk to.

    • CIA invests in geodata expert OpenGeo

      The world might be fed up with the idea of government surveillance, but that hasn’t quelled the intelligence community’s thirst for more data and better tools to analyze it. The latest example: On Thursday, geospatial data expert OpenGeo announced a investment from In-Q-Tel, an arm of the U.S. intelligence community, originally spun out of the CIA, that makes strategic investments in technologies that could benefit the community’s mission.

      Reading through In-Q-Tel’s list of investments is like reading a who’s who of data startups: 10gen, Cloudera, Narrative Science, Palantir and Platfora are among the companies into which it has put money. When it comes to technologies that can store lots of data or new types of data, or analyze or visualize data in novel ways, In-Q-Tel is interested.

    • When wiretaps won’t do, the CIA’s ‘black bag’ squads get data the old-fashioned way

      There’s been lots of talk about electronic surveillance and government-sponsored hacking lately, but Foreign Policy takes a fascinating look at how the Central Intelligence Agency’s digital “black bag” squads get access the old fashioned way — by breaking into peoples’ houses.

    • It was the CIA that helped jail Nelson Mandela

      Crocodile tears to mask US imperialism’s role as the enemy of African liberation

    • Could This Woman Keep the NSA from Tapping Your Phone Calls?

      A coalition of 19 organizations s formed to file a lawsuit Tuesday (PDF) against the National Security Administration, alleging that the government is supporting “an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

    • Germany’s Merkel urges patience on NSA answers
    • Members of Congress Say NSA Violated U.S. Law
    • Lawmakers: NSA phone records collection violated law

      The U.S. National Security Agency and Department of Justice exceeded their legal authority to conduct surveillance when collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. residents, several U.S. lawmakers said Wednesday.

    • Need to change definition of privacy in cyberworld: NSA
    • Dear Edward Snowden

      We thought you might be getting a little bored while you’re stuck in the airport, so we sent you some reading material. We don’t know if you like Linux, but given your technical background, we hope it’ll be of interest. It’s just a tiny indication of our gratitude.

    • Everything you need to know about PRISM

      Classified presentation slides detailing aspects of PRISM were leaked by a former NSA contractor. On June 6th, The Guardian and The Washington Post published reports based on the leaked slides, which state that the NSA has “direct access” to the servers of Google, Facebook, and others. In the days since the leak, the implicated companies have vehemently denied knowledge of and participation in PRISM, and have rejected allegations that the US government is able to directly tap into their users’ data.

      Both the companies and the government insist that data is only collected with court approval and for specific targets. As The Washington Post reported, PRISM is said to merely be a streamlined system — varying between companies — that allows them to expedite court-approved data collection requests. Because there are few technical details about how PRISM operates, and because of the fact that the FISA court operates in secret, critics are concerned about the extent of the program and whether it violates the constitutional rights of US citizens.

    • DHS warns employees not to read leaked NSA information

      The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications.

    • Former President Jimmy Carter comes out in support of Edward Snowden

      The Obama administration tried to placate Europe’s anger over spying programs. Not as ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharp. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was “useful.”

      Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in the wake of the NSA Scandals criticized the American political system. “America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the “Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta.

    • ‘Snowden won’t disclose more docs, I have thousands’ – Greenwald

      Edward Snowden is unlikely to make new revelations since “he doesn’t want to end up in a cage like Bradley Manning”, said The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, adding that he himself decides what to publish from the thousands of leaked documents.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why the EU Commission’s True Intent is to Kill Net Neutrality

      Since last week, after citizen groups started criticizing the EU Commission over its leaked draft regulation threatening to kill Net neutrality, Commissioner Neelie Kroes and her staff have tried to defend their proposal on Twitter, arguing that these criticisms were “misleading European citizens”. Here is a summary of what was said, not said, and how it reveals that these criticisms are absolutely right.

The Chronicle of Higher Education Criticises Bill Gates’ Agenda of Controlling US Schools (Indoctrination for Profit), the Gates Propaganda Machine Responds Poorly

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

While the Seattle Times receives another major bribe from Bill Gates, to cover “educational reform in K-12 and higher education”

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Summary: The Gates Foundation’s lobbying for privatisation of a public service (taxpayers-funded service circulating half a trillion dollars per year) finally comes to the attention of the “big boys” among education publications

Some Web sites, a certain proportion of which is Gates-bribed, hail Gates’ involvement in the schools system like the agenda of privatisation is commendable and necessary. Bribes can really tilt coverage and seed deceiving ‘reporting’ (public relations). Are there any sites left which are not (yet) corrupted by the Gates propaganda machine? Well, it seems so.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a highly-regarded site/newspaper, writes a polite set of articles about the Gates Foundation et al. Remember that some years ago we were mostly alone in criticising them and now it is becoming the norm because people are becoming better informed and Gates a controversial figure even when it comes to his pseudo ‘charity’ (set up after he committed serious crimes and then, consequently, spent a fortune on whitewashing/PR). The main question is, what took the “big boys” (prominent publications) so long to properly investigate and chastise Gates when it may already be too late to undo the damage? Well, according to one Gates-funded ‘news’ site, the Chronicle of Higher Education has been Gates-bribed itself, just like a lot of such sites. It’s hard to dodge the bribes and this messenger is no exception. The Chronicle of Higher Education “received two contracts totaling about $850,000 from the foundation to support work on two stand-alone websites, College Completion and College Reality Check,” according to Seattle Times (more on that later).

“The main question is, what took the “big boys” (prominent publications) so long to properly investigate and chastise Gates when it may already be too late to undo the damage?”While bringing patents to Africa (misreported in press releases) Gates is also bringing government-imposed monopolies like schooling into his own pocket. People in the field have had enough of that.

In a long, non-PR piece titled “The Gates Effect” there is clearly a lot of investigative journalism. To quote one of those approached for an insight, “I think foundations have an ability to set an agenda, to help clarify an agenda and rally momentum around an agenda.”

For whose interests? Those foundations are front groups of plutocrats, they are not civil rights groups like the EFF, EPIC, or the ACLU.

“It’s hard to dodge the bribes and this messenger is no exception.”Is the author accusing people in the area for not thanking Gates? Not really, but it’s a provocative summary which helps show how public opinion shifted in recent years. Gates’ profit is increasing, so people must not mistake him for a ‘giver’. Last year alone he made more money (gains) than all the education ‘giving’ (combined) by a factor of 1:15. In other words, all the money he ever ‘gave’ (lobbied) to ‘education’ is just a little fraction of what he made last year alone. Something here just doesn’t compute, does it? His investment in agenda and lobbying should not be described as “giving” or charity. It is an insult to those who do real charitable things, at great expense to themselves (not to enrich themselves or to make themselves famous).

Here is another article from this series. To quote the opening parts:

How Gates Shapes State Higher-Education Policy

Over the past several years, lawmakers in dozens of states have passed laws restricting remedial college courses and tying appropriations to graduation rates. The changes have been advanced by an unusual alliance of private foundations and state policy makers who are shaping higher-education strategies in profound ways.

Valerie Strauss, who is never too shy to criticise Gates, comments on it under the headline “Bill Gates expands influence — and money — into higher education”. To quote her analysis: “Then Gates, believing in the power of “data” to drive instruction and the notion that everything is measurable, plowed hundreds of million of dollars into experiments to develop controversial teacher assessment systems that link jobs and pay to test scores. He also put money into a project to videotape teachers to help them see how they do their job, spent at least $150 million to help the Common Core State Standards initiative, and provided $100 million to build a controversial student database.

“Of course people who agree with his reforms are delighted with his philanthropy. But plenty of others are very concerned that a private citizen can wield so much influence on public policy because he was talented and lucky enough to become impossibly rich.”

Here is more from her:

The Gates Foundation also sent me a piece about what it says are erroneous reports that Gates was pushing a $5 billion plan to videotape teachers in every classroom in the country as part of an effort for teachers to see how they perform.

Ki Mae Heussner says that “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent $472 million on higher education but, according to a report, it’s accumulating critics along with its influence.”

“That is what Gates bribes newspapers and blogs for, at the expense of about $300,000,000 per year (they call it “advocacy” rather than “bribing the media”).”High education what? Lobbying, which is not charity at all. Watch the Gates-funded (since years ago [1, 2]) Seattle Times (Katherine Long in this case) responding poorly to “A well-respected national newspaper that covers higher education” (can’t deny that). It says that the “package of stories… describes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as having an outsized influence on higher-education policy, one that narrowly focuses on programs that lead to short-term employability.”

Not really. It has nothing to do with employment. They are printing some Gates talking points, showing their loyalty to Sugar Daddy Gates. That is what Gates bribes newspapers and blogs for, at the expense of about $300,000,000 per year (they call it “advocacy” rather than “bribing the media”). It’s what we have come to know as the Gates propaganda machine, which is massive. More people need to challenge this malicious machinery that’s designed to deceive.

It seems clear that the Seattle Times, which in this case is being used as a platform to quote Gates’ apologists, recently received another massive bribe from Gates. It even admits this by writing: “The Seattle Times recently received a grant from Solutions Journalism Network to explore some of the vexing issues of educational reform in K-12 and higher education, and to write about potential solutions. The Gates Foundation is a major funder of Solutions Journalism Network, and provided much of the money for the grant.”

Thanks for at least admitting being bribed by proxy, with the goal of pumping out propaganda with a clear agenda echoing Gates’ business model. These bribes are always being characterised this way (even when The Guardian and the BBC receive these Gates bribes). Today’s media is enormously corrupted and one just needs to follow the money in order to know who it’s designed to serve. █

The Foot in Stallman’s Face: Bill Gates Still Redefines Free Software

Posted in Bill Gates, FSF, FUD, GPL at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“There’s free software and then there’s open source… there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

–Bill Gates, April 2008

“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

–Bill Gates

Summary: The ongoing war by Microsoft and its proxies against software freedom, which gives more value to the world’s industry than the FUD would have people believe

There is another reason to abandon the term “Open Source”, which left the term “Free software” more vulnerable to abuse by bad people, makers of proprietary software. Here is Bill Gates’ latest attempt to run over Free/libre software, characterising his trap as “free”. To quote a Romanian site:

Bill Gates had a very interesting opening keynote speech at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2013, explaining that he was grateful for the existence of free software, when asked about patents and their influence on technology.

“Thank God for commercial software. It actually funds salaries, gives people jobs. And thank God for free software, it lets people get things out there, you can play around, build on. The two work very well in an ecosystem,” stated Bill Gates during the Q&A.

This is nonsense, as anybody with a clue knows that commercial means not proprietary and Free/libre can be used commercially, paying wages to users and developers.

A lot of this kind of attacks on Free software usually goes back to Microsoft and its proxies. Right now we have Black Duck, a company created by a marketing guy from Microsoft, throwing around some numbers, looking for sites that will print them. Here is one:

Here is the press release. What nonsense. Trying to quantify code in terms of revenue is not the only silliness; it is the idea that money is being lost as a result of having no licence. Similar propaganda was previously used to describe FOSS as a jobs destroyer, as if people are writing software with such aims. Some tried to portray FOSS as a cause for losses in the industry, not a saver of money and elevator of productivity (which in turn makes room for more hirings per given budget). This is the type of propaganda we are up against and we keep seeing it brought up also in public talks.

Here is another new example of Black Duck being used to reinforce FUD — namely the idea that Free software is about cost, not freedom, and that it is chosen for price, not other qualities. Watch how the Black Duck-run Future of Open Source survey [1, 2, 3, 4] is being used to spread misconceptions. This new FOSS-hostile article (“The Hidden Cost of Free”) says: “Bottom line, open source may be “eating the software world,” but not all of it. For ISVs and other software development professionals, open source is a no-brainer. We use it in development and in our commercial products wherever and whenever it makes sense. It is free, after all, and the quality is second to none, as this year’s Future of Open Source survey reinforces.”

Black Duck reinforces all sorts of proprietary software talking points. Black Duck is, after all, a proprietary software company.

“This is the type of propaganda we are up against and we keep seeing it brought up also in public talks.”Speaking of FUD against FOSS, the latest Android security fear-mongering comes from a Microsoft partner created and managed by a Microsoft guy (who hopes to turn Android perceptions into Windows perceptions when it comes to security). To quote the company’s description: “He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Visual Developer Security, a frequent speaker, press resource, and is featured regularly in the Associated Press and global security media.”

“Bluebox was founded in mid-2012,” it says, and it was groomed by the Gartner Group (currently fully dedicated to Android FUD and monetisation attempts, akin to Black Duck).

The war on FOSS is very real and Microsoft partners are trying to remove the F from FOSS or altogether make it proprietary. A few days ago we showed how three Micrososft-controlled entities threw around (or under the bus) and blurred out the FOSS identity of Zimbra (here is more on that); we should also pay attention to the hallmark of effective FOSS FUD because it’s quite consistent. As explained a week ago by Eben Moglen at the EU Parliament, the GPL brought enormous value to the industry, more so than Apple and Microsoft combined. Unfortunately the video is only on YouTube, hence embedded below.

Will politicians ‘get’ it? █

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