Microsoft warns people not to install Windows and other non free software.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore. Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore

Most of the text behind that link is stupid and self serving but these two points are true.

Science

• edwards@tevetron:~/ shutdown -h now

  Fermilab staff and users are deeply involved in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. And other machines at Fermilab continue to circulate beams through underground tunnels. We’ll keep right on doing physics here.

Security

• Scammers hijack domain names by attacking service providers.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• US Wingnuts demand war with Iran.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Time for EPA to Get Moving on Risks of Drinking Water Contaminants

  The real fight raged long after Hollywood moved on to other blockbusters. The list of corporations that are responsible for the nearly 700 toxic waste sites with chromium contamination reads like a Who’s Who of the rich and powerful, including military and military contractors, pesticide companies, leather, plating, utilities, and chemical companies. These polluters successfully spent the past decade using every political maneuver in the book to delay regulations on this chemical and reduce their clean-up costs. … the EPA process is stalled on numerous dangerous contaminants in drinking water, including arsenic, perchlorate, and perchloroethylene (PCE). Attacks from anti-regulatory politicians will hinder EPA’s ability to protect the public from contaminants in the water supply.

• House Passes Incinerator Bill That The EPA Warns Will Kill Thousands

  House Republicans argued that the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 was a “timeout” from long-delayed regulations aimed at mercury that threatened to raise costs on boiler operators and incinerators. But the measure also exempts smaller burning facilities from any regulation at all.

Anti-Trust

• In IV’s New Lawsuit Against Motorola, The Devil Is In The Details

  The shell company called Pragmatus AV-which has now sued YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Yahoo-probably has a close relationship with IV. In the new lawsuit against Motorola, IV is represented by Feinberg Day, a small Silicon Valley IP firm, as well as Delaware firm Farnan LLP (both suits were filed in Delaware.) Those are the same two law firms that represent Pragmatus in the lawsuit it filed against Yahoo earlier this week, a suit we covered in The Patent Examiner yesterday.

• Google+ traffic grew by 480% in one month, so press reports a 60% decline. Wait, what?!

  Have you seen the stories lately that Google+ traffic dropped by 60%? This figure represents not the decline of Google+, but the decline of newspaper trustworthiness.

  Elswhere it is reported that profits were up 33%.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• SCO and Attachmate backer smears 99% protests by funding “reporters”

  As the New York Times has documented, Paul Singer, a Republican activist and hedge fund manager worth over $900 million, has emerged as one of the most important power brokers within the GOP. Now, it appears that the reporters financed by Singer are at the forefront of efforts to tarnish the reputation of 99 Percent Movement demonstrators… The rise of Singer’s political profile can be traced to his work as a top donor to pro-Bush character-assassination groups like the “Swift Boat Veterans.” In recent years, he has quietly worked with the right-wing billionaire industrialist Koch brothers and Republican strategist Karl Rove …

  PJ adds, “Singer is head of Elliott Associates, which tried to buy SCO’s assets and finally settled for an investment role in the Attachmate purchase of Novell”

• American Spectator Editor Admits to Being Agent Provocateur at D.C. Museum

  An editor for the magazine American Spectator infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street protests to discredit the movement. He created a violent confrontation at the National Air and Space Museum that got dozens of innocent people pepper sprayed and the museum shut down, then bragged about it on Facebook and in his magazine. It’s not apparent that the started to brag before or after Open News recognized his photograph from scenes of his intended riot. The American Spectator later changed the wording of the story, then removed it completely.

  This story reminds me of the SCO employee infiltration of a protest against SCO, where the SCO employees carried signs about “pirating music” and other things not related to the protest.

• Wikipedia shuts Italy site to protest Berlusconi “gag law”

  Wikipedia has disabled its Italian website in protest against a privacy law drafted by Silvio Berlusconi’s government which would impose new restrictions on newspapers and Internet pages and curb police wiretaps. The online encyclopedia warned it may shut its page www.wikipedia.it permanently because of provisions in the law forcing websites to correct content deemed detrimental to a person’s image within 48 hours of a complaint, with no right of appeal.

Privacy

• Facebook willing to defy EU law to keep what it knows about users secret.

• Twitter comments used to track vaccination and attitudes about vacines.

  Big Pharma is watching you, so don’t talk about conflicts of interest. [2] Facebook and Twitter were designed to sell you out.

• Verizon Phone is Spy Phone.

  Verizon changes privacy policy, is now monitoring your mobile Web browsing activities/locations and may sell the info. That is in addition to tracking your every move and being able to record all spoken conversation in earshot at will.

Civil Rights

• A partial listing of the systematic undermining of civil rights in the US over the last decade:

  The comment was in response to the story of some NY politicians claiming that we need a “more refined” interpretation of the 1st Amendment, in which free speech is seen as a privilege that the government can take away if they think you’re a jerk:
  “Are we also going to get a more refined 2nd Amendment that legalizes all guns but outlaws gunpowder? And a more refined 3rd Amendment that still disallows quartering soldiers in a time of peace, but since we’re always in half a dozen wars there never is a time of peace. The more refined 4th Amendment says they can search anything they want as long as it’s within 1000 miles of a border. The more refined 5th Amendment defines due process as a process you have to bay a due for. The more refined 6th Amendment says you get a speedy and public trial unless you’re a terrorist, which you are. The more refined 7th Amendment says don’t worry about those civil trials anymore, because we’ve made everything criminal and you’re going to prison. The more refined 8th Amendment says the death penalty is neither cruel nor unusual because we do it a lot and so far not a single person who’s been subjected to it has complained. Plus people cheered it. The more refined 9th Amendment says sure you might have other rights, but what proof do you have? The more refined 10th Amendment says, well, not the people. I mean, the States maybe, but not the people. What were we thinking?”

• The dark side of Apple

  He interviewed scores of workers and toured the factories while posing as a US businessman and was shocked to learn that people were literally being worked to death to meet Western gadget lust. … [his] gripping monologue has made Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak cry and forced the company’s new chief executive into a strident defence of Apple’s supply chain, but now Mike Daisey has a message for Australian Apple fans: open your eyes. … when they choose instead to remain children playing with toys it’s infantilism of the highest order. …

  The current CEO of Apple is the man most credited with moving all manufacturing to China.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As Expected, Alternative DNS Systems Sprouting Up To Ignore US Censorship

  What’s just as stunning as the fact that supporters of PROTECT IP still can’t figure out how this is really, really bad, is that they also don’t realize how this pretty much destroys any argument the US makes around the globe in trying to protest political censorship.

• DNS experts including Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky and now-ICANN chair Steve Crocker said that the Protect-IP Act in the US would persuade many users to switch to offshore DNS servers. They warned that this would lead to a rise in cybercrime against consumers, as disreputable or insecure DNS providers send surfers to spoofs of banks and other sensitive sites. … BlockAid’s web site says that it may financially support itself in future by showing ad-laden web pages instead of returning NXDOMAIN errors, a much-criticized money-making tactic many ISPs already use.

  So far, BlockAid is only as disreputable as ordinary US ISPs who also run DNS that are often targeted by criminals.

• DNS Bypass Systems Needed Now! — VeriSign Wants Right to Shut Down Domains for Pretty Much Any Reason

  While it is understood that long-term efforts are necessary to replace the existing increasingly co-opted and abused DNS with an entirely new, distributed system not subject to such abuses (e.g. “IDONS” or some other mechanism), it is also extremely clear that concerned organizations and individuals need to be working right now on short-term alternatives that can be brought into immediate action

Intellectual Monopolies

• WIPO boss: the Web would have been better if it was patented and its users had to pay license fees

  After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object. In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

  WIPO should be disolved.

• FOIA demanded emails show that MAFIAA and US Government drafted a supposedly voluntary copyright crackdown by ISPs.

  Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. … any substantive text in the e-mails (.pdf) was blacked out before being released to Soghoian. But the communications show that a wide range of officials — from Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff Alan Hoffman, the Justice Department’s criminal chief Lanny Breuer to copyright czar Victoria Espinel — were in the loop well ahead of the accord’s unveiling.

  It should be obvious that a “Copyright Czar” exists to please big publishers, but it’s nice to have the email to prove it.

• Trademarks

  • TV Producer tries to monopolize a popular rediscovered UK war propaganda slogan through EU Trademark.

  • Getty Images Facing Upwards To 80 Million Trademark Claims?

    Getty maintained at least 11 images in its inventory that depicted a tree-shaped air freshener. Car Freshner sued on multiple counts, including trademark infringement. Getty moved to dismiss the trademark count, arguing that it was not using the mark as a trademark, and if it was, such use was either nominative or descriptive fair use. [but ...]

• Copyrights

  • EU Greens Come On Board Pirates’ Copyright Agenda

    A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the striking success of the Pirate Party in the German local elections. Since then, an opinion poll has suggested that, currently at least, the party enjoys a similarly wide support throughout the country – around 8%

  • As a wave of legislation giving publishers the ability to kick people off the web is put forward around the world, one of the proponents is caught plagiarizing photos.

    For example, the top right-hand picture on this page uses a picture from Panoramio, but with the EXIF data of the latter stripped out in the former.

Microsoft Appears to Have Blacklisted Oxford University email

They once, in lock step with AOL and Yahoo, intentionally blocked Truthout email for political messages they did not like. Between incompetence and malice, no one should use Microsoft email services.

Microsoft partner, Lockheed Martin is replaced by IBM at the US National Archive Project, which was late and over budget

Microsoft is not explicitly mentioned but they brag about customer facing services for the agency and the group Lockheed ran included Microsoft heavy partners like EDS and SAIC.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Freedom at Apple was never for users. The corruption visible is simply the logical conclusion of non free software.

Steve Job’s passing and Bill Gate’s “retirement” mark the end of a damaging lie. Microsoft is run by a buffoon who would otherwise be selling insurance and Apple’s CEO is a businessman responsible for moving Apple’s manufacturing to sweatshops in China. Neither of these companies can parade a heroic founder as emotional justification for their oppressive practices.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Even low concentrations of BP oil are toxic to fish in Louisiana marshes.

  These effects persisted long after visible oil disappeared from a marsh’s surface. … The Gulf of Mexico study shows similar [to Valdez] early signals of sub-lethal effects after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

• Busniess as usual will make most of the US south uninhabitable.

Anti-Trust

• EU Anti-Trust Failure.

  “The Commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present,” the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust agency, said in a statement today, referring to competition concerns for consumers, who make up the bulk of Skype’s customers

  Expect gnu/linux Skype to break soon. This creates a great opportunity for free software like Ekiga. Google+ hangouts are reported to work well but that is only available in binary form so far.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The results of the Citizens United decision are being seen as governments increasingly represent the rich and powerful.

  Facing South covered the North Carolina saga in detail but the problem is everywhere in the US. This bodes poorly for free software use by government and schools.

Censorship

• Blocking misfeature of G+

  If you are blocked by someone, you can’t see their posts on your public conversations but everyone else can. A spammer or troll can unblock just long enough to troll a conversation out. Google sends emails for each post but the problem remains. Google has been notified and may be working on a fix. I do not know if other comment exchange sites have the same problem but owners can do the same or worse at any time. Join Diaspora instead.

Privacy

• US companies are using face recognition and fingerprints to control workers.

  Biometrics at Pizza Hut and KFC? How Face Recognition and Digital Fingerprinting Are Creeping Into the U.S. Workplace
  Biometric technology is being used to more closely track low-wage workers, already desperate in a bad economy.

• German Government Backdoor Spotted

  Chaos Computer Club from Germany has tonight announced that they have located a backdoor trojan used by the German Goverment. The backdoor includes a keylogger that targets certain applications. These applications include Firefox, Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ and others. The backdoor also contains code intended to take screenshots and record audio, including recording Skype calls.

  It’s not a but, it’s a feature of non free software.

Civil Rights

• Alabama Law Makes It A Felony For Undocumented Immigrants To Have Water At Their Homes

  … if an undocumented immigrant pays their taxes, they will be guilty of a felony, but if they don’t they will also be guilty of a felony because Alabama punishes tax evaders with up to five years in prison. In other words, Alabama’s anti-immigrant law effectively makes it a crime to simply live as an undocumented immigrant in the state.

Education Watch

• Gates/Broad push hard for charter schools in Washington state and seem to have corrupted the state PTA.

  Also see the response and corruption of Seattle School Board. Good luck with that and please bring it to the local Occupy protest but don’t let that disrupt the investigatory and publishing side of things.

• The week in review – Broad failure in Chicago, Standardized Cruelty in Maine.

• Wasteful executive compensation in charter schools

  The high salaries noted in this older study came at the expense of low paid and under qualified teachers. If charter schools become as widespread as the rich and powerful would like, we can be sure future administrators will be paid like WalMart staff, so these high profile salaries won’t last long.

• Attacks on public schools in Madison Wisconsin

  For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. … A big part of this campaign has been directed at unionized public school teachers who are blamed for all the ills of schools. Charters like Madison Prep promise to address these ills by stripping teachers of their rights and job security, forcing them to work longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits, while expanding administrative supervision via a top heavy structure peopled by multiple well compensated administrators

Internet/Net Neutrality

• ISPs “exaggerate the cost of data”

  Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline … claims of ballooning costs as a “myth”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Software Is Mathematics—The Need for Due Diligence

  there seems to be a category of readers who just can’t bring themselves to believe that software could possibly be mathematics. … People who think like this saw the explanation of why software is mathematics as rhetoric in support of a conclusion. They objected to the overall tenor of the article on the basis that in their opinion the very notion that software is mathematics can’t be true. They didn’t dispute the evidence I provide.

• ACTA

  • Brazil to debate ‘anti-ACTA’ bill, defying US

    key provisions include protection of net neutrality and the privacy and personal data of individuals – directly contrary to the carte blanche given by ACTA for copyright holders to demand traffic logs from ISPs to identify alleged offenders. The legislation also directly addresses the so-called “three strikes” rule advocated by ACTA, which sees internet users’ connections terminated after three warnings for illegal downloading.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• CANADIAN ICE SHELVES
  HAVE LOST HALF THEIR SIZE IN SIX YEARS

  The Ellesmere Island ice shelves, which covered 8,900 square kilometers a century ago and shrunk to 1,043 square kilometers in 2005, now cover just 563 square kilometers. … The shelves have been around thousands of years and are typically more than 125 feet thick. The scientists say that about 3 billion tons of ice have been lost.

• Stop the Keystone XL pipeline

• Coal pollution cost society twice the market value of the electricity produced.

• New Gulf oil leak matches BP’s Macondo (Deepwater Horizon)

Finance

• Sorry, But This Trader’s Banking Confession Was No Prank

  Rastani is small potatoes, but he’s a real trader. And he said nothing that would suggest otherwise; he simply described what he does, more honestly than a true insider would … “Every night I dream of another recession,” Rastani said, and explained that it’s possible to make huge money from a big crisis even when millions of others lose their life savings, and worse.

Censorship

• Obama Admin PR Flacks Blocking the Public’s Right to Know

  these policies aren’t about ensuring consistency of message (unless you count silence as a message) and efficiency. They were about censorship.

Privacy

• Sign the EFF petition to fix US electronic privacy laws.

  The government should be required to go to a judge and get a warrant before it can read our email, access private photographs and documents we store online, or track our location using our mobile phones. …

  Related story and a petition to the FBI to come clean

• 
  Internet services such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are making broad surveillance easy and cheap for governments around the world.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Free Press has sued the FCC for the weakness of its net neutrality rules for mobile Internet providers.

ACTA

• ACTA Signed last Sunday

  The United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on Saturday, an accord targeting intellectual property piracy. The European Union, Mexico and Switzerland-the only other governments participating in the accord’s creation-did not sign the deal at a ceremony in Japan but “confirmed their continuing strong support for and preparations to sign the agreement as soon as practical,” the parties said in a joint statement. The United States applauded the deal.

  The US is mostly responsible for this nasty and anti-democratic treaty that was hammered out in two years of secret negotiations CableGate exposure and increased protests have made the conspirators rush to complete sign – the treaty grants power to censor Wikileaks and the rest of the internet which was embarrassing them on this very point. Background and other ACTA news follows. See also EFF ACTA resources. 99.999 percenters should add this to their protests because it will cut them off completely.

• Public Knowledge write up about the signed version.

  Statutory damages are required, which globalizes the kind of crazy fines ordinary file sharing seen in US cases. Seizures and forfeit of counterfeit goods goes beyond the counterfiet goods themselves to the statutory value of the goods, a license to loot everything found. Even worse treaties are on the way.

• Mexico’s Congress rejected ACTA.

  Their senate had previously done the same.

• ACTA will turn ISPs into censors

• Quadrature du net analysis of leaked ACTA draft..

• 75 law professors from all around the US petitioned Obama to stop ACTA..

• ACTA targets generic medicines, not just counterfeit..

• Hundreds of people from all around the world signed up as Faces Against ACTA.

• The EU Parlament voted almost unanimously to oppose ACTA.

IBM worth more than Microsoft.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) passed Microsoft Corp. to become the world’s second-most valuable technology company, a reflection of industry changes including the shift away from the personal computer. IBM’s market value rose to $214 billion today, while Microsoft’s fell to $213.2 billion, the first time IBM has exceeded its software rival based on closing prices since 1996

SeattlePI reports gangsterism around Paul Allen’s corporate security firm.

The former security director for Vulcan Inc. and three security officers who resigned in recent weeks have sued the Seattle firm claiming they were pushed out after they saw unethical or illegal activities by company executives, including Paul Allen. … Among those who’ve filed lawsuits against the Microsoft billionaire’s personal firm are Vulcan’s former director of security – a FBI agent for more than two decades – and a SEAL school-trained Navy corpsman who worked as a contractor in Iraq.

They are all gagged by NDAs they had to sign but should probably be taking the evidence to law enforcement too. Being fired for refusing to sign unethical agreements is not a voluntary resignation.

Science

• Professional Use of GNU/Linux

  Today, I read about an engineer’s use of GNU/Linux for his work. [CAD, FEA and meshing tools listed] … So, there you have it, another profession that can use GNU/Linux satisfactorily

Hardware

• India’s $35 tablet computer arrives.

  The device is described as a 7″ screen with 2GB of memory, wifi and a camera.

Security

• Demonstration of Dibold/Microsoft Voting machine remote manipulation.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Deadly nighttime raids in Afganistan against whole villages of innocent people for “intelligence” sounds like group punishment and incompetence.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A US Court awards the people of Equador an $18 billion against Chevron for the company’s pollution there.

• US makes progress towards alternative fuels.

  Alternative fuels work; they are less expensive than gasoline and diesel; they are safe and easy to use; and they can all be made domestically by American workers.

• A long delayed report finds TCE, a common degreaser and US water pollutant, more dangerous than imagined.

  EPA finds trichloroethylene causes kidney and liver cancer, lymphoma and other health problems … The risk assessment had been subject to more than a decade of delays. … opposed by the Defense Department, the Energy Department and NASA.

Finance

• Koch hypocrisy about health care.

  a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world. Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net … In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.

Anti-Trust

• Microsoft ties to Android device makers: patently complicated

  “I go back over the reasoning, as to why a company would do that, you know pay licensing fees to one company for another company’s software,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a Massachusetts-based tech consulting and research firm. “… what seems to matter is the volume of other business they’ve got with Microsoft. If they do a relatively big Microsoft business, then they’re willing to pay something to smooth the relationship out. … we don’t know the terms for the deals, but you can assume that they’re not bleeding these companies dry on the licensing fees.”

  Microsoft has bled everyone dry, Yahoo and HP being the latest and largest victims. Microsoft business is a liability.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Microsoft friendly Blooberg buys influence in SCOTUSblog

• Big companies form shell groups to influence US voter redistricting.

Privacy

• Cory Doctorow talks about Facebook.

  He compares manipulative practices to tobacco and gambling addiction techniques. He suggest we teach kids to jailbreak and avoid surveillance rather than teach them spying and filtering are normal.

Civil Rights

• Labor Unions join the Wall Street party.

  Over 700 hundred Continental and United pilots, joined by additional pilots from other Air Line Pilots Association carriers, demonstrated in front of Wall Street on September 27, 2011 in New York City. … The New York Transit Workers union, 68,000 strong, have voted to join the protesters on October 5th at 4:00 PM.

Education Watch

• A Seattle School Board Candidates make an Issue of Gates Foundation meddling but are heavily outspent.

  See this and this about the growing blowback

  Peter Maier along with the other members of the gang of four who have also received money from donors who financially support Teach for America, Inc. all voted again in unison to allow three TFA, Inc. recruits to teach in Seattle schools without certification. … In the past two years Central Administration awarded itself 113 salary increases, ranging from 21% to 108%. During the same period they cut teachers, guidance counselors and instructional assistants to our most vulnerable students. …

• Jail for teachers who send political e-mails

  this seems like piling on by Republicans who are using their newly gained majority status to wage war on teachers’ unions. … The Michigan Education Association, the union that represents most Michigan teachers, certainly isn’t shy about its reaction to State House Bill 4052, which carries the threat of jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

  We can be sure the rules do not apply to corrupt school administrators conspiring to privatize public education.

• The Lines of Influence in Gates/Broad Funded Education Hijack, with flow chart.

  So this is how it’s been working all over the country, there is the NCTQ that comes in first waving their report around which is similar from state to state, then the faux roots organizations identifying themselves as coalitions and alliances spring up, then you get the unwitting buy-in of real organizations and others considered leaders in the community and then the editorials that are obviously scripted.

  Fake is easy to spot but the community has to be organized before it starts or the hijackers steam roll through.

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Don’t publish with IEEE!

    Before you read this page, you should understand (1) authors putting papers online to benefit readers, (2) commercial publishers using copyright to limit #1, and (3) authors dedicating papers to the public domain as one way to stop #2. I have a separate page discussing these issues. It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.

  • Princeton Demands Open Access Publishing

    Princeton University has banned researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

US citizens: sign this petition calling on the senate not to oppose network neutrality.
For even more effect, phone your senators’ offices.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

Corporate hardliners in the Senate are rushing to push through a measure to give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet. Called a “resolution of disapproval,” this measure would destroy all existing Net Neutrality protections and strip the FCC of its authority to protect Internet users – letting companies block our right to speak freely, connect with one another and share information on the Internet. We need just 51 votes in the Senate to stop this free speech-killing measure in its tracks. Take action now to stand up for online freedom.

Security

• Meet the first US Government GNU/Linux distro, the USAF Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) designed for USB and CD use.

  It comes with non free software, so it’s not really secure or private, but it’s better than Windows. The “C:\” icon on the desktop is strange.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Several pollution health and mortality tracking programs are being cut.

  President Obama has proposed major budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health, including asthma prevention programs, funds to track and investigate lead poisoning, and emergency response biomonitoring programs.

• Clean coal start ups in the Solyndra money pool are also having problems

  The difference between the two is that the coal industry is not serious about pollution control and does not need more government subsidies. The best way to sequester coal carbon and avoid pollution is it to leave it in the dirt.

Anti-Trust

• Microsoft’s Non-Response to the Secure Boot Problem

  Microsoft has provided a very detailed explanation of what UEFI secure boot is, and what its benefits are. What Microsoft hasn’t done is to actually respond to concerns raised by Matthew Garrett about its secure boot policies. … policies do not require that users be able to turn the feature off. As Garrett says, “end user is no longer in control of their PC.”

  Garrett’s collection of facts

• Microsoft to stop Linux, older Windows, from running on Windows 8 PCs

  I wonder though if what Microsoft really wants is to avoid a repeat of the Vista fiasco by making sure OEMs and end-users can’t go back to Windows 7 or XP. As Windows 7′s slow adoption and Vista’s flop has shown, users really haven’t been that interested in moving off Windows XP. Since Windows 8′s Metro interface adds an entirely new level of complications … As it stands now Microsoft is saying OEMs don’t have to do it. They just have to do it if they want to sell PCs with Windows on them. Paging the anti-trust lawyers …

  SVJN was fooling himself and ignoring attacks on Android, Google, Yahoo and others if he thought there was a “new Microsoft”

• Linux users threaten Microsoft with ACCC (Australia)

  Linux Australia president John Ferlito told ZDNet Australia today that the council will be meeting on Thursday night to determine whether it will take up a campaign against Microsoft’s secure boot practices.

  ZDNet is so twisted. Demanding that government protect people from Microsoft aggression is hardly a case of “threaten Microsoft”.

Privacy

• Media UK dumps Facebook

• I Made The Wrong Choice With Facebook

  Using Media UK, I could flag up “xxxxxx is using Media UK”, “xxxxxx is using the job section of Media UK”, “xxxxxx is reading a job vacancy on Media UK” – which would flagrantly abuse privacy of my users. I won’t do that; but I worry that, if The Guardian does it, it’ll be seen as “normal”.

• Facebook’s OpenGraph: Time to get out

  The result Zuckerberg is hoping for is that people will leave a detailed record of every aspect of their lives on Facebook’s servers. Sure, you will be sharing those details with your “friends”; but in the end, it will always be Facebook that determines who can see those details. … Facebook decides who you can talk to, and what you can say … in effect, Facebook will be acting as its own private Internet.

  See also, Not F’d by the FSF

• Logging out of Facebook is not enough

  Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.

  The separate browser advice may not work on Windows, where Microsoft already spies on users and has data sharing agreements with Facebook.

• Facebook scares Dave Winer, Scripting News

  I had somehow given access to my Facebook account to ReadWriteWeb. That’s puzzling because I have no memory of having done that. And when I went to see what other organizations I had given access to my graph, there were lots of surprises. I think there’s a good chance that by visiting a site you are now giving them access to lots more info about you.

• Facebook confesses to some tracking practices and promises to fix them.

  PJ notes,

  ‘m not sure trust is still on the table. Thank you, Nik Cubrilovic, for telling us the truth about Facebook.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• US Monopolists sit on spectrum and use the results to get exemptions to network neutrality regulations.

  538 MHz of wireless spectrum has been allocated to U.S. firms, though some 192 MHz is actually in use. And according to their calculation, at least 90% of that amount is used for … [older protocols with] transmission speeds of less than 1 megabit per second (Mbps) during peak usage hours.

  The analysts at Citi who did this study did not mention Open Spectrum, which is a real end to the problem but bad for their investments. Policies undermining network neutrality over spectrum shortages are based on a lie.

Intellectual Monopolies

• White House Petition to End Software Patents Is a Hit

  At this moment, on the White House’s official website for petitioning the government, the only thing as popular as legalizing marijuana [254 and 11,000 signatures, states rights for mj has 7,000 and 9,000, ending war on drugs 9,000] and separating church from state is a petition to “Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents.”

  The count is more than 10,000 signatures so we can expect a written response. People should sign it anyway, if they are not bothered by giving the information required. Other interesting petitions that have about as much or more interest include ending the Pat riot Act, abolishing the TSA, forgiving student loans, ending corporate personhood,

Hardware

• OEMs are on the verge of ditching Wintel over low margins

  He added that if Ultrabooks suffer from weak sales, while Apple continues to enjoy strong profit, the Wintel alliance will need to do something or else all the related IT player may be gone together.

  Ultrabooks are a last attempt to sell high margin systems the Windows way, after having been bullied out of gnu/linux netbooks. Ultrabooks are projected to cost more than $1,000, prices not enjoyed by Microsoft hardware since XP. If these computers come with “secure” Windows 8, the makers will have a hard time giving them away.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police shoot hundreds and murder dozens of peaceful protesters in Yemen.

  About 1/3 of the population is hungry and the country is on the brink of mass starvation.

• 200 people in Ecuador have been charged with “terrorism” for opposing mining and dam construction projects

• Rumsfeld and Bush face indictment and arrest for torture that was designed to extract false confessions.

• Palestinians are setting up a network to report the frequent violence and other harassment they suffer from “settlers”.

  “We’re going to go out and make it clear to the Arabs who the home owners are,” settler Itamar Ben-Gvir told Yedioth Ahronot. “We’re going to take the initiative and march [with arms] towards Palestinian towns.”

• Buddhists in Sri Lanka destroyed a mosque.

• Understanding US Capital Punishment

  Since the Supreme Court lifted a ban on death sentences in 1976, 1,264 people have been executed in the U.S. And 921 of those executions — or 73 percent of the total — took place in 13 Southern states. [the Texas death machine skews alone had 38 and is special] … As you might suspect, executions have their roots in the history of slavery.

  The cultural legacy of slavery is violence and other lawless behavior.

Cablegate

• A Wikileaks cable shows that Obama directly pressured Zapatero to escalate the War on Sharing in Spain. This surely makes Obama responsible for the nasty Ley Sinde that provides for filtering the Internet and shutting domestic websites without a trial.

  link to cable

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Actic ice at lowest level since observations began in 1972.

  Global average temperatures today are close to the maximum warmth seen during the Eemian [125,000 years ago]

• Siemens ditches nuclear power generation.

• Gulf storm floods bring BP oil miles inland in Mississippi

• The US makes a move towards flex fuel

  Flexibility might bring price reductions as long as speculation is regulated back out of the market and half of a chicken and egg problem will be solved. Hopefully, alcohol fuels won’t come from food crops.

• As poisoning cases around fracking mount, industry and the US government denies the problem.

• Groups campaign to decharter Massey Energy, a dangerous and criminal coal company.

• An environmental movement is growing in China, despite censorship and repression

Finance

• US companies are keeping cash rather than hiring workers. Thus, any proposal to create jobs through further corporate welfare are nonsense.

• October is Co-op Business Month

• Millions of US children go hungry and things are getting worse with cuts to aid programs.

Anti-Trust

• The uproar over Microsoft’s new gnu/linux boot exclusion method begins.

• Microsoft announces a new EDGI effort in the US

  Microsoft will work with state, city, nonprofit and private organizations — including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and One Economy — to develop and accelerate reduced-cost programs and policies that will include the following: Windows-based PCs optimized for students; Broadband Internet access; Microsoft education software; Job skills training.

  As usual, this is dumping to reinforce the Microsoft monopoly. The net city and state cash flow is overwhelmingly in Microsoft’s direction.

• HP continues to falter and hits a six year stock price low.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Tax dodging companies make a lobby group to demand more tax breaks.

  See this report on shell companies to see what they defend and this report on how they hoard the money rather than hire people

• Corporate media ignores the thousands of people protesting Wall Street greed.

Censorship

• Can you think of a better way to vilify yourself?

  The Zimbabwe Minister of Media, Information and Publicity, Webster Shamu, warned media organisations may have their licences revoked for misusing their licenses to ‘vilify’ Zimbabwe and its leadership.

• 50 lashes for blogging in Iran

• Berlusconi’s supporters have proposed a one strike and your out censorship law.

  Internet service providers must comply to the blacklisting of citizens who are *suspected* of copyright or trademark or patent infringements (“proscription lists” to ban citizens from any access to the Net);

  Anyone may be the accuser.

Privacy

• Facebook wants to expand their data collection efforts with Frictionless Spying as a precondition for music, video and other services.

  Not using Facebook to share with your friends this way does not keep Facebook from sharing with others behind your back.

• An intentionally unlinked NYT article claims the Obama administration is again pushing the “trusted identity” NSTIC

  The reason given is to shore up “ecommerce confidence”. That confidence problem is really a Windows insecurity problem that won’t be fixed by any government database. Techrights pointed to this excellent NSTIC write up back in January.

• Your Pay History Disclosed, via Security That Sucks

  “Interesting” site, run by Equifax. It’s a service used by most large employers to deal with requests for verification of employment and salary and such. But … it has much more information, and it’s not exactly clear why.

• US Bill makes some steps towards data privacy

  Chairman Leahy’s Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2011 (S.1151) – presumably the most likely to see action on the Senate floor – also contains amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including welcome language to focus the statute more narrowly on hackers and identity thieves.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Congratulations to the Berlin Pirate Party for winning 9% of the popular vote and 15 seats.

  Good things will come of that.

• Four years worth of US ISPs DPI wiretapping and hijacking user web pages.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • IP Regime flunkies in the UK work to criminalize copyright infringement and endorse censorship as a tool against sharing

    it’s rather a mystery who is behind this bizarre statement that everyone seems to disavow

    Corrupt policy is always a mystery that everyone seems to approve but no one wants credit for.

Security

• Chrome developer calls SSL exploit sensationalist nonsense

• Deep Packet Spying Breaches Gmail and All Security

  Another data point on SSL “trusted” root CA reliability (S Korea) … NIS admits to packet tapping Gmail If proven, international fallout could occur over insecurity of the HTTP Secure system

• There Goes Apple’s Reputation for Security

  Apple changed how authentication works and it’s all falling apart.

  There is no security with non free software because the owner can always do what they want but this wreck is amusing.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Inside the Surveillance State: How Peaceful Activists Get Swept Up onto “Terrorist” Watch Lists

Anti-Trust

• Microsoft will keep people from booting gnu/linux by making every PC a cell phone like jail through “UEFI secure booting”

  Microsoft requires that machines conforming to the Windows 8 logo program and running a client version of Windows 8 ship with secure boot enabled. … A system that ships with only OEM and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic copy of Linux.

• Google Is No Microsoft

  [Critics] analogize Google’s conduct today to that of Microsoft’s during the 1990s. That sounds appealing but it could not be more wrong…. Let’s remember the past. (I should, I was an FTC staff attorney who worked on the FTC Microsoft investigation in the early 1990s). … In its 1998 case the DOJ condemned a wide variety of exclusionary conduct, carried out (in Microsoft’s words) to “cut off the air supply” of its rivals. In particular Microsoft tied its browser to its operating system to safeguard its operating system monopoly and extend it to the web. Microsoft compelled customers to purchase products they did not want and created obstacles for rival browsers to work effectively.

• HP starts to fire WebOS people

  All things Digital is a Microsoft booster site, so this news should be taken with a grain of salt.

• EU Closes Turbo Hercules charges against IBM

  PJ adds:

  So when do Florian Mueller and the TurboHercules trolls come by and tell me they are sorry they were wrong and sincerely apologize to me for filling the Internet and Groklaw comments with attacks on me because I said nothing ought to come of the complaints against IBM? Should I hold my breath for an apology? No. But it turns out the EU Commission confirms my position. It all came to nothing…. Well. Nothing but FUD.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Microsoft creates a new astroturf group headed by a former executive with Microsoft seed money

  Presumably the BSA and other groups focused on “promoting responsible business practices including respect for intellectual property” have lost all of their credibility or the company needs a new fake independent FUD and threat source.

Privacy

• OnStar, continues to spy on drivers after useful service is terminated.