Summary: Interview with Greedy Car Thieves (GCT) developers
Today’s show is primarily dedicated to a video/computer game called Greedy Car Thieves (GCT), which is similar to Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 2. We talked to two of the game’s developers. Tim has played the game and Roy tried to install it but faced a dependency barrier. We spoke with the developers about the technical aspects of the game, distribution of the game through various channels including the Humble Bundle, and we also spoke about licence in the context of compiling for Linux. Later in the show there was a long discussion about dirty tricks against Linux and its proponents. This discussion was focused on Microsoft. After the interview we play “It’s Because of People Like You” by Obi Best and at the end of the show we play “Washington Heights” by Glenn White’s Sacred Machines.
“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”
Summary: The Linux Foundation, which funds core Linux developers, receives money from Microsoft in exchange for favours
TWO readers have contacted us regarding this matter. It is pretty serious and unprecedented in the sense that this time it’s the Linux Foundation which takes the dirty money and not some Linux-unaffiliated party like LinuxTag [1, 2, 3, 4].
So now we know that the Linux Foundation too puts principles aside and lets Microsoft buy a session to promote proprietary software including running of Windows, or essentially to fund the company which is suing Linux over software patents.
Richard Stallman said that in sponsorships such as this the “price might be, let someone from Microsoft give a speech. The price might be, don’t say that proprietary software is evil. The price might be, present Microsoft sponsorship in a way that inhibits you from denouncing Microsoft’s software as unethical.”
Well, after it took over Novell and Nokia Microsoft already had some bridges into the Linux Foundation. When the foundation is getting money from Microsoft it leaves itself open not just to criticism but also subversion from the inside. As we showed in prior years, other FOSS foundations died pretty much as soon as they had accepted money from the enemy, Microsoft, instantaneously collapsing like ALEC. Anyway, here is the news:
I’m not exactly sure how Microsoft ended up being a Gold Sponsor of the Linuxcon event. At the Gold Level for an event, sponsorship is worth approximately $20,000 and it looks like it also comes with a guaranteed session speaking opportunity too.
One reader called it “[c]orruption within the Linux Foundation” and another called it “interesting news”. One asked: “What was that Comes v Microsoft document about killing two mac conferences. Now it’s happening to Linux. Is it greed or has someone defected and now trying to bring down LF?
“Amazing,” he added later, “I was able to find it in Techrights only because I knew it existed. But as far as Google goes, it and Comes V Microsoft don’t exist.” █
Posted in GPL, Microsoft, OIN at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The goals of Black Duck are doubted by former Debian Leader and key OSI man
Bruce Perens, a key person in the FOSS movement, previously named OpenLogic negatively for their founder and manager from Microsoft.
Well, Black Duck is a similar story. It has strong Microsoft connections. It does not like the GPL, either. So who benefits from this if not Microsoft and perhaps some other proprietary software (and pro-patents) companies like Black Duck itself?
“I think it’s 100% B.S. And it appears to me that it’s driven by Black Duck and it really is time that someone called them upon it. ” –Bruce PerensPerens was asked the following question some days ago: “What is your reaction to the frequent stories in various media about people migrating away from the GPL ”
Perens replied: “I think it’s 100% B.S. And it appears to me that it’s driven by Black Duck and it really is time that someone called them upon it. I think the stories get them publicity, and maybe they are appealing to a prospective customer base who are indeed nervous about the GPL. But the trend they portray isn’t a real one.” █
A federal judge in Madison, Wis., on Monday threw out a suit by Apple Inc. claiming that Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility is seeking unreasonably high license fees for the use of patents on wireless technology.
The suit is part of a world-spanning battle between Apple and Google, whose Android software powers the smartphones that compete with Apple’s iPhone. Google bought Motorola Mobility, a once pioneering maker of cellphones, this summer to gain control of its patents and gain leverage against Apple in its court battles.
Even the Microsoft booster who did a lot to promote the patent agenda of Microsoft covered the news, not just the opposite side, e.g. Groklaw with this analysis and IDG with a fairly objective report. It says:
A highly anticipated patent infringement case between Apple and Motorola Mobility was dismissed Monday by a federal court judge in Wisconsin, hours before the trial was due to begin.
The two companies were arguing over license rates for patents owned by Motorola that cover parts of the wireless UMTS, GPRS, GSM and 802.11 standards. The patents are vital parts of the technologies and so Motorola Mobility is required to license them to competitors on “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms,” often referred to by the acronym FRAND.
This ruling ought to alert the FTC, which foolishly go after the victim and not the conspiracy. Here is one take on it: “The recent news reports that the FTC may be nearing a decision point in its Google investigation should remind us of the stakes involved. At one level, the Google matter raises a host of interesting questions involving antitrust law and economics. At another, more fundamental level, a decision to charge Google with a violation of the antitrust laws would have far-reaching effects beyond the case at hand. If our government signals that it is willing to use the antitrust laws to punish success, the future Googles of the world will be less willing to take chances, and more likely to pull their competitive punches. Competition for consumers, moreover, increasingly will be replaced by competition for the favor of antitrust regulators. Although the owners of websites like Kayak and Nextag may enjoy temporary victories if events play out this way, they will come at the expense of consumers.”
Apparently Apple didn’t need two weeks to put up a new “apology” statement on its UK website after the first obnoxious one was deemed not good enough by the UK courts. As you may recall, Apple was told by the court that it had to tell the world that Samsung didn’t copy Apple’s design on some of its devices, after a judge ruled that Apple’s devices were simply much cooler.
[...]
I find Apple’s response to this ridiculous and that much more perplexing. Each attempt to somehow not fully comply with the judge’s demand just calls that much more attention to the situation and the fact that Apple lost and Samsung didn’t copy it. If Apple had just complied normally, this story would already be over.
Apple has been using patents like a sword, so feds should go after Apple. The FSFE wrote about the subject in its latest newsletter. To quote the relevant part:
The New York Times published an article entitled “The Patent, Used as a Sword” about the patent system. Hugo Roy summaries it. It is about how Apple and Google were spending more on patents than on research and development in 2011. Among other issues, it focuses on the number of lawsuits filed each year in the US, which has tripled from 1990 to 2010, and how 70% of patent applications are approved after the applicant altered claims.
On the same topic, Karsten Gerloff gave a talk about “How Software Patents Are Delaying The Future”, on a discussion panel organised by the European Patent Office. “Currently, a lot of policy on patents (as well as copyright) is made on the basis of faith and rather dubious argument. We urgently need to move on towards evidence-based policy making”, concludes Karsten.
Skype illegally distributed a user’s personal information to a private company during a police investigation into Anonymous-sanctioned cyberattacks on PayPal.
For those who quickly slam the accused, recall that PayPal used sanctions against Wikileaks, which had exposed crimes such as the above handover of data. As Slashdot put it:
According to the article, Skype voluntarily disclosed the information to the third party firm without any kind of police order, possibly violating a few privacy laws and their own policies.
Laws exist for a reason, especially privacy laws that can protect people from corporations. This is the latest example of terrible privacy policy at Microsoft, which also gets heaps of data from Facebook (as covered before).
For those who think that they are safe from Facebook (and by inference Microsoft) surveillance, think again. Another reader of ours says: “A few weeks ago I added the following blacklist to my router, all Facebook: 69.63.176.0/20 69.171.224.0/19 66.220.144.0/20 31.13.64.0/18
“It’s amazing how many web sites feature callbacks to Facebook. By blocking Facebook, these become visible by the small errors in the web pages.”
The FSF has a campaign going against this. Facebook shares its data with Microsoft and others. Reportedly, Canonical will also give users’ data to Facebook, so just connect the dots. “So in practice,” says our reader, “these blocked links were callbacks to Microsoft.”
Canonical will need to explain why it promotes Skype in its front page and what data on Ubuntu users it will hand over to Facebook. Facebook happens to promote a fair deal of Skype, among other tools and services that facilitate Microsoft surveillance. Facebook is partly owned by Microsoft and its founder had been groomed by Microsoft for a long time. █
Brocade, the networking and switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software, in a bid to compete in a networking world where software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on.
Thanks to projects like OpenStack and the mighty operation that is Amazon’s EC2, open source and Linux are quickly becoming the building blocks of “cloud” computing.
OpenStack, which started life in 2010, releases compute, storage, networking and other components under an Apache licence, and it is being adopted by huge companies such as telecom giant NTT in Japan and IT behemoth Hewlett-Packard in its fledgling cloud.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated toaccelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that HP is making astrategic, long-term investment in Linux by upgrading to Platinummembership. Linux Foundation Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM,Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center and Samsung. HP waspreviously a Gold member.
At LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, Spain, the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, announced that HP “is making a strategic, long-term investment in Linux by upgrading to Platinum membership. Other Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, and Samsung.”
Hewlett-Packard has become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, the organization responsible for Linux and other open-source software projects.
A Platinum membership costs $500,000 a year and brings with it a seat on the board of directors and a say in which kinds of projects the group pursues.
At the start of LinuxCon Europe 2012, currently being held in Barcelona, the Linux Foundation has announced that both Citrix and HP have moved up the membership hierarchy of the organisation. The foundation has also announced four new members, which are all cloud service and hosting companies.
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, November 5, the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.6 kernel series.
After looking at Wayland’s development history this weekend, uploaded today are some visualizations that reflect upon the X11 Server’s development as well as Mesa.
The game engine behind Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis 2 may soon land up in Linux. According to Chris Robert, the creator of Wing Commander series, Crytek are currently discussing plans of porting the game engine to Linux.
Gnome developers are working on a model that allows a user to search everything and anything right from Gnome search box. This will hopefully be integrated in the next big Gnome release, Gnome 3.8. Gnome 3.8 is scheduled to release next year with some new apps and a hell lot of improvements.
Mutter and Gnome Shell 3.8 will be port to use latest input X.org extensions XI2! Porting Mutter to XI2 is the prerequisite for enabling multitouch and gesture support in gnome-shell. It is also needed for triggering the message tray by downwards pressure, as it was designed to do.
Red Hat Inc, the No 1 Linux developer in the United States, is considering investing more in its research and development and sales team in China, said the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst.
In its fiscal year 2012, Red Hat’s revenue exceeded $1 billion. The company wants to reach $3 billion in the next five years.
In order to fulfill this goal, the US-based open-source software company said it will place greater emphasis on the Chinese market, where IT spending and cloud computing technology are booming.
Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is looking to invest more in its research and development in China.
The company, which stands as the No. 1 Linux developer in the United States, is planning to expand by 100 new employees by the end of the year and could open more offices in China.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says in an interview with China Daily that the world’s top Linux software developer and services provider wants to do more business in that country.
As part of that plan, Red Hat will add 100 additional employees by the end of this year and also consider opening new offices.
Debian, my favorite OS, is frozen and on schedule to make another stable release, Wheezy, within the next few months. I’ve installed Wheezy on my “new” Thinkpad T420 and got some interesting results to report, particularly on idle power consumption (battery life). But let me build up to that.
He was reacting to allegations by a fellow kernel developer Matthew Garrett, who called him a “rape apologist” over comments that Ts’o had made on a mailing list in February 2011.
Garrett’s comments came after the executive director of The Ada Initiative, Valerie Aurora, exhumed Ts’o’s comments and commented on them in an article on the organisation’s website; she used recent comments on rape made by a US Republican Senate candidate as the lead-in.
Tualatrix Chou proudly announced that the famous Ubuntu Tweak utility has been updated and it now has full support for the Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
The latest release of Ubuntu, when compared to the previous release in April 2012, has only two significant feature addition — the inclusion of Web applets that serve as quick links to websites and the Ubuntu Music store right from the desktop dashboard.
But these enhancements have created a tumult in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities because the default Web applet on the dashboard is that owned by Amazon, the dada in the e-commerce space. Many in the community, see this as an indicator of Ubuntu’s growing tendency to go against its grain by succumbing to commercial considerations. Whatever Ubuntu may say in its defence, it is clear that it is charting a course that is very different from its origins.
Ubuntu started off as a tributary project (derivative) of the Debian operating system, which aimed at making the desktop experience for users on Linux-based operating systems better. With this primary focus, Ubuntu, under the reigns of Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu project) steered the diverse skills of the Ubuntu community to yield a stable and refined operating system.
Ubuntu started off with support for purchasing applications from the Ubuntu Software Center, on the models of the Apple application store.
A new version of Ubuntu customization and tweaking tool, Ubuntu Tweak is out. This is the second release after the developer had announced his plans to abandon the development of Ubuntu Tweak. However, with awesome support from other users, he restored the development of this app. This version packs some new features, along with bug fixes and comes with full support for recently released Ubuntu 12.10.
After almost deciding to end all development on the project last month, Ubuntu Tweak founder and lead developer Tualatrix Chou released a new version his open source application for customising the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The most notable change in version 0.8.2 of the tool is the addition of official support for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the latest stable release of the operating system.
Companies like Steam, Lightworks and others are discovering that Ubuntu has the largest user base and a stable company supporting it.
Still, some users out there may not be all that thrilled with Ubuntu or the Ubuntu core underpinnings. For these folks, I believe that it’s worth exploring Ubuntu alternatives. There are plenty of Linux distros that aren’t related to Ubuntu in any way, yet are still usable for new and intermediate Linux users alike.
Experimental graphics driver updates will be needed on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for properly running Valve’s Source Engine games through the forthcoming Linux Steam client.
While the Valve Wiki page was created on Ubuntu.com a few weeks ago, it cites a new AMD Catalyst driver is needed for being able to properly support the Source Engine on Linux. This new Catalyst driver will be packaged in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as fglrx-experimental-9. This new fglrx/Catalyst driver that works really well with the Source Engine games has yet to be released (likely it will be fglrx 9.02/9.03 release streams).
Bulgarian device maker Olimex is offering a small single-board computer called the OLinuXino. At first glance it looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi, but the OLinuXino has a faster processor, more built-in input and output ports, and the developers say the project is completely open source, including the hardware and software.
John Lagerling, director of business development for Android, talked to Brian X. Chen of NYTimes and spoke about the range of Nexus devices Google recently announced, the aggressive pricing and why Motorola is missing from the Nexus program.
We hope there’s still room for more numbers and statistics regarding the mobile space in your life. While we’ve seen IDC released its worldwide figures for the smartphone and tablet race in Q3, here’s one more coming your way from Mary Meeker, an analyst and a partner of research firm KPCB, renowned for her annual Internet Trends report.
The 2012 Internet Trends report was actually released in May this year, so the following is more of a mid-year update of what’s hot and what’s not, instead of a full-blown report.
Lots of people may have bought Apple’s new iPad mini, but that doesn’t mean that they bought the best 7″ tablet. When it comes to the display, graphics expert Raymond M. Soneira, president of DisplayMate, found that the two most popular 7″ Android tablets, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus 7, had better displays.
Kobian has announced the Diwali Festive scheme on their Mercury range of tablets. Here’s how it works: If you buy a Mercury tablet between 1st to 25th November, you’ll get a gift of a 4GB Micro SD card and be in with a chance to win prizes like a LCD TV.
The company’s latest tablets are the Mercury MercurymagiQ, running Android 4.0.3, with a ARMv7 processor, 4GB Internal Storage, 5 inch display (a thin line between tablet and smartphone) 512 MB of RAM and a 0.3 Mega Pixel Front Camera with a 12 Mega Pixel Camera in the rear. Selling for around 12,700 Rupees.
There’s so much going on in the small tablet device space, with Apple recently announcing the iPad Mini and Google heavily pushing its Nexus 7 tablet devices. The Nexus 7 is notable because the entry-level device is priced at under $200.
Indian company Mitashi, maker of video games, TV’s and DVD, MP3/MP4 players and so on, has dipped its toe in the tablet market with the Play BE100.
It’s billed as a ‘first of its kind Business Entertainment Tablet’ with a 7 inch display, Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, 1GHZ processor, 512MB RAM and has the option of a KB 100 Keyboard, aiming it at the business market.
I live in one of the most wired parts of the United States—the San Francisco Bay Area—but for the presidential election, I’ve already voted by mail. On a piece of paper. From the comfort of my living room. Between folks like me who vote by mail and everyone else who votes by marking paper in some way, we comprise about two-thirds of all American voters. Approximately 25 percent of all Americans, however, will use paperless and electronic voting machines to cast their ballots on November 6.
In the extremely overcrowded open source marketplace, marketing managers find it difficult to think of innovative ways to raise their brand’s visibility. With so many brands jostling for attention, the low signal-to-noise ratio might tempt marketers into adopting an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach, attempting every idea from the marketing playbook in the hope that one will stick. However, this would be a mistake: careful niche marketing offers greater opportunities for brand advancements and market share. Let’s see how.
The ongoing discussion about the “readiness” of HTML5 is based on a lot of false assumptions. These lead to myths about HTML5 that get uttered once and then continuously repeated – a lot of times without checking their validity at all.
Any industry requires a proper technology set-up to accelerate growth. Modern trend speaks out loud about the use of ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) in the corporate world for a smooth and efficient functioning of any enterprise.
On shifting the focus to SME specific market, one needs to be well verse with the barriers in the path of SME growth and be aware of the investment capacity.
Therefore there is a need for an Open Source technology which is available at exceptionally low prices and custom made for these SMEs.
The clustering-centric DragonFly BSD distribution has had its database performance boosted in the newly released version 3.2.1. Work on the scheduler has allowed performance with PostgreSQL to perform five times as many transactions per second compared to the previous DragonFly BSD 3.0 in some scenarios, according to benchmarksPDF. The performance is now roughly of the same magnitude as that of Scientific Linux 6.2 (and by extension, probably similar to that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2).
Remember when we told you about MediaGoblin, the open source media publishing system? Now they’re building higher and higher, and they’re looking for help.
“I like the fact that they approached this in a more light-hearted manner than the Free Software Foundation sometimes does,” offered Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “I am proud to be a FSF member, but I sometimes cringe when they get a little too much ‘holier than thou.’ I thought this hit the right tone.”
But all things have their season and it may be that GCC’s significance will now begin to reduce over time. Or it may respond to competitive pressure being brought to bear by LLVM.
Sometimes free costs too much. As of January 1, 2013, Flat World Knowledge, which used to describe itself as the world’s largest publisher of free and open textbooks online, will no longer offer content at no charge.
Cost partly motivated the decision, according to Jeff Shelstad, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We’ve got to be smart with the limited capital that we have” if the company is to survive 10 years from now, he said.
The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.
That is the case with Class2Go, Stanford’s homegrown, team-built platform for hosting online classes. When the director of a software center at an Australian university caught a glimpse of the platform after its September launch, he immediately envisioned how his university could adapt it and at the same time contribute to it.
You might not be a fan of it, but there are a few things to admire about the Amazon Kindle. It’s an eReader with a simple job and employs the technology it needs to do it and not much more. At a point in time where people routinely ask whether a Core i3 or Core i5 system is best for word processing, it’s refreshing to have technology that’s chosen and tailored for a specific task.
A growing number of the inquiries we field at RedMonk center around the need for quantitative guidance on technology uptake. Even with technologies on clear growth trajectories, developers, enterprises and vendors alike frequently want better, more detailed data on growth. How fast is it growing? What impact is this having on competitive projects or products? And so on.
Recently, the inquiry volume regarding decentralized or distributed version control technologies such as Git has spiked. Some organizations are considering migrations to such technologies, others have committed to the move but require data to justify their decisions internally.
The three Florida Supreme Court justices had angered lawmakers and voters, embarrassed the high court and faced uncertain futures.
In 1975, Justices Joseph Boyd, Hal Dekle, and David McCain were accused of giving behind-the-scenes favors to friends and writing opinions to benefit campaign-contributors. Boyd eventually was reprimanded after lawmakers required he take and pass a mental exam. Dekle and McCain resigned before the Florida House of Representatives could impeach them.
THE PRESIDENTIAL election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is incredibly close.
It’s close in the way you read about every day in the media: Opinion polls show the two candidates are neck and neck, with just days to go. But it’s also close in ways you never hear about–not from the press, nor the candidates, nor their supporters. On important political questions, Obama and Romney stand so close to each other that their similarities outweigh their differences.
For years the Nutz Poker League, along with several competitors, has been running free tournaments at bars and restaurants in the Tampa Bay area. It makes money by taking a cut of what players spend on food and drinks. The players accumulate points based on their spending as well as their poker performance and can ultimately win prizes such as vacations, cruises, laptops, cameras, and “various unique poker gifts.”
What was missing was nearly as disturbing as what was scattered; a Passport, credit card, cash and Emily’s grandmother’s jewelry were missing from the locked, smashed up closet; also missing were an external backup drive containing “my entire life,” and an iPod, camera and old laptop; Ugg boots and a Roots cap. Also creepy was how the vandal emailed her repeatedly during his or her week long stay, “thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy, telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight.”
Emily has been working with the San Francisco police — they reportedly have a suspect — and with her banks and the credit bureaus. She says she hasn’t slept or eaten in days.
In the microprocessor wars, ARM and its many partner allies have always had the most units sold in the market. But Intel, which can sell chips for $100 or more, has always had the lion’s share of the profits in a $30 billion-plus industry. With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, ARM is a rising star while Intel’s core PC market is weakening. And this week, Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices announced it would move beyond Intel-compatible chips to making ones based on ARM designs.
The Mexican military is trying to dismantle an extensive network of radio antennas built and operated by the notorious Zeta drug cartel. But the authorities haven’t had much luck shutting Radio Zeta down. Not only is much of the equipment super-easy to replace. But the cartel has also apparently found some unwilling — and alarming — assistance by kidnapping and enslaving technicians to help build it.
Kuwaiti security forces have fired teargas to disperse a banned demonstration by about 2,000 opposition supporters against new voting rules for parliamentary elections due on 1 December.
Kuwait, a US ally and member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has so far avoided the mass pro-democracy unrest that has toppled rulers in four other Arab countries since last year, but tension has mounted this year in a long-running power struggle between parliament and the government which is dominated by the ruling al-Sabah family.
Aldo the German shepherd and Franky the chocolate Lab are drug-detecting dogs who have been retired to opposite ends of the ultimate retiree state.
But their work is still being evaluated, and on Wednesday it will be before the Supreme Court. The justices must decide whether man’s best friend is an honest broker as blind to prejudice as Lady Justice, or as prone as the rest of us to a bad day at the office or the manipulation of our partners.
The District Court in Jeddah pronounced the verdict on Saturday after the girl confessed that she had a forced sexual intercourse with a man who had offered her a ride. The man, the girl confessed, took her to a rest house, east of Jeddah, where he and four of friends assaulted her all night long.
Environmental and climate change evangelist James Cameron – best known for being non-executive Chairman of UK-based Climate Change Capital (CCC) – gave an inspiring talk at the international Open Knowledge [OK] Festival, recently held in Finland.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection produces incomplete lab reports and uses them to dismiss complaints that Marcellus Shale gas development operations have contaminated residential water supplies and made people sick, according to court documents.
In response, state Rep. Jesse White, D-Cecil, Thursday called on state and federal agencies to investigate the DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud” revealed by sworn depositions in a civil case currently in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
“This is beyond outrageous,” Mr. White said. “Anyone who relied on the DEP for the truth about whether their water has been impacted by drilling activities has apparently been intentionally deprived of critical health and safety information by their own government.”
The shock of Sandy is still rippling across the northeastern United States. But in the microcosm of New York City, we can already see who’s going to bear the brunt of the damage. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, floodwaters have a way of exposing the race and class divisions that stratify our cities.
Hurricane Sandy’s wrath shows that U.S. regulators should swiftly implement nuclear-safety rules developed after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, a top lawmaker said, as industry officials said the lack of major problems during the storm showed that they were ready.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a mortgage securities class-action lawsuit that it said could cost Wall Street tens of billions of dollars.
On Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolff, Wolff and guests will discuss the current state of the economy, both locally and globally in relation to the economic crisis.
Many MMT posts and other writings on fiscal responsibility, including my own, focus on the myths of neoliberalism, pointing out why they are myths and developing an alternative MMT perspective in some detail. Off hand, and I may have forgotten something, I couldn’t think of a brief positive MMT narrative containing primarily the truths, rather than the myths. So, here’s my version. Comments, criticisms, recasting in more effective form, are all welcome.
The White House race has narrowed to a fight over less than 10 states ahead of Tuesday’s tight election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
IN this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.
It’s election day. While your actual ballot is (supposed to be) secret, a lot of people don’t know that whether or not you voted at all is public information. A few weeks back, On the Media covered some ways that campaigns try to get out the vote and looked at some research suggesting that letters to people with a “voter report card” showing when they’ve voted in the past was a somewhat effective way of shaming people into voting.
A court in Vietnam has sentenced two musicians to prison for writing and distributing protest songs, a decision that drew fire from the United States and international human-rights groups, The Associated Press reported. The musicians, Vo Minh Tri and Tran Vu Anh Binh, were convicted on Tuesday of spreading propaganda against the state after a half-day trial in Ho Chi Minh City, a defense lawyer said. Mr. Tri received four years in prison, Mr. Binh six.
According to reports this morning, Twitter has withheld the first Tweet from one of its users on copyright grounds. Normally, disputed Tweets will simply disappear if there is a complaint, but one belonging to F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has now been replaced with a copyright notice. While Twitter has indeed introduced a welcome policy change that will lead to more transparency, the first ever “withheld” Twitter comment was faked by a rather mischievous F-Secure employee.
Now, Craig Brittain, the owner of “revenge porn” site “Is Anybody Down” (whose first skirmishes with Marc Randazza were covered here) is trying to remove posts criticizing his site, his inability to keep his story straight, his likely extortionate “photo takedown service,” and, well, pretty much everything, actually. He’s sent a DMCA notice demanding the removal of three posts at Popehat, claiming that these posts contain copyrighted material.
On January 16, 2006, two federal agents pulled off of Oregon’s Route 66 and onto a dirt road in the Southern Cascades, about nineteen miles northeast of downtown Ashland. They didn’t get far. There was a blizzard, and the road was buried in snow. The agents were forced to stop just a couple miles short of their destination.
We’ve seen some absurd trademark threats in recent years, but this one sets the bar at a new low: The Village Voice is suing Yelp for trademark infringement based on Yelp’s creation of various “Best of” lists. Yes, that’s correct, the publisher behind the paper (as well as several other weeklies around the U.S.) has managed to register trademarks in the term “Best of ” in connection with several cities, including San Francisco, Miami, St. Louis and Phoenix. And it now claims that Yelp’s use of those terms infringes those trademarks and deceives consumers.
Internet millionaire Kim Dotcom’s American lawyers have launched another bid to dismiss charges against his file storage company Megaupload.
His lawyers today filed documents in the United States Federal Court in Virginia, arguing Megaupload is being denied due process by not having been granted a court hearing, ten months after Dotcom was arrested at his mansion in Auckland.
Kim DotCom, the flamboyant founder of the now defunct MegaUpload, made news today by announcing the coming of Mega, a new cloud storage service that is similar to MegaUpload.
The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files risks “compound[ing] the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation” unless proper safeguards are taken to prevent the further dissemination of illegally copied material. (See the MPAA’s brief embedded below.)
There’s nothing like the smell of duplicity in the morning and maybe that stench is strongest around the annals of the copyright parasites that seek to lobby, legislate and fine, those “evil” people they call “Pirates”.
Of course over the years there has been much pillaging and plundering, but I’d suggest thats more from the large corporatations selling you second rate entertainment products under the false promises of big budget advertising. ”Piracy” has a nasty habit of exposing the rubbish, whilst highlighting the good stuff (which seems to make healthy profits). So maybe Piracy is responsible for highlighting the poor, low quality products that people dump onto the market? No wonder some people in the industry are scared.
Okay, maybe “love” is too strong a word, but a new study suggests that newspapers enacting paywalls should emphasize financial need, not profit motives, when announcing them to readers.
The study, “Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall,” is by Columbia University associate research scientist Jonathan Cook and Indiana University assistant professor Shahzeen Attari. They surveyed 954 New York Times readers shortly after the paper announced, in March 2011, that it would enact a metered paywall, and then again 11 weeks after the paywall was implemented. In the post-paywall survey, participants read one of two “justification” paragraphs, one emphasizing a profit motive and one emphasizing financial need (that paragraph concluded, “if the NY Times does not implement digital subscriptions, the likelihood that it will go bankrupt seems high”).
So I hear there’s some sort of election happening this week (have you heard anything about it?). Earlier this year, we wrote about an awesome effort by the folks at NPR’s Planet Money to bring together a group of five different economists, from all over the political spectrum, and see if they could find points that all of them agreed upon. They came up with a list of six things that all of them agreed would be smart ideas for a President to implement — and what was striking about all six was that not a single one of them was anywhere near politically tenable. Every one of them would be argued down immediately.
On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload’s pending resurrection as Me.ga, Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service.
For all their talk about piracy and yearly losses measured in billions, the big movie studios sure do seem to enjoy smacking their paying customers around with anti-piracy warnings and ads. Consider the poor sucker who actually went out and paid cash money for the latest shiny disc and now has to watch a multitude of eagle-laden logos and horrible analogies parade unskippably across his or her screen before finally being allowed to watch the unskippable trailers before finally being allowed to watch 15 seconds of unskippable animation before they can actually watch the movie they’re now regretting having shelled out actual retail price for.
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