A European Commission official originally chosen to lead its antitrust case against Microsoft left on Friday last week to work for a consultancy that has the software firm as a client, a spokesman said.
Friday was his last day,the Commission spokesman said on Tuesday of Henri Piffaut, the official involved.Piffaut has a one-year leave of absence to work for LECG, an economic consultancy in Brussels, London and other cities.
Category Archives: Politicos
DRM-less storage for the Day Against DRM!
Today is the Day Against DRM and there are 10 things you can do to oppose DRM. The DefectiveByDesign.org group has been steadily opposing DRM, teaching people what DRM is and why it matters in their daily life, and linking us to anti-DRM projects around the world.
In my post opposing Wil Wheaton’s unquestioning support of DRM and his take on iTunes (going “beyond the call of duty” to restore the tracks he lost on his iPod), I raised the idea that what Apple did for him then is the least they can do for any of their customers at any time (not just once). Now we’re closer to doing this for ourselves.
Dreamhost is a large webhoster based in California. If you need to run a website, Dreamhost is one corporation which will sell you space to store your stuff on and bandwidth to use. Dreamhost opposes DRM. Hence, Dreamhost has set up Files Forever.
All cards on the table: Digital Citizen is hosted on Dreamhost. But I don’t make any money with your hits. My relationship with Dreamhost is that I am a Dreamhost customer.
How’s your proprietor treating you?
In what is turning out to be an ongoing series here on Digital Citizen, Apple has pulled another stunt on their customers: Endgadget.com says that Apple is upsampling lower resolution videos. In other words, Apple starts with a video at a rather low resolution and sells copies of it. Then they blow up that low resolution video and sell their customers videos that version too. These newer videos have worse pictures than they ought to. Why do this? Because Apple customers can be charged twice for the same thing—once for the low resolution version they sold earlier and again for the version which has more pixels but is really just a blown up version of the old version.
And all with Apple’s proprietary DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) in place, of course.
Like Prof. Moglen said, Steve Jobs gets the prize for being the last manufacturer of the Gilette razor: you make a cheap razor and you sell expensive blades. Apple hardware is not cheap, but the songs are morally and physically expensive, expensive to your belief that you can carry songs with you for the rest of your life as we have been up to now. He’s turned unfree into hip.
EFF urges action on surveillance amendment sneaking into port security bill
As per usual, the EFF has important information and action tips on this surveillance amendment that Congress can sneak in through a port security bill.
One Laptop Per Child progress report and tips for Free Software hackers
From FISL7.0: James Gettys of One Laptop Per Child (audio) talking about the project. This recording is distributed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
If you’ve ever wondered about this project or are interested in getting viable modern computers to children around the world, OLPC has an exciting project. OLPC needs your help too. Plenty of information about the status of the project and technical help for hackers who want to see their programs running on millions of computers in the near future.
Fedora Core is the GNU/Linux distribution to keep your eye on for this. From what I can see, FISL is turning out to be the premier event in the free software world.
Did HP try to plant spying software on a journalist’s computer?
According to the New York Times:
Those briefed on the company’s review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.
I don’t tend to take the Times at face value because they’ve been so spectacularly wrong on their front page regarding matters of life and death. Look up the stories from the Times by Judith Miller (either credited to her alone or working with her colleagues at the Times) regarding the rationale for invading and occupying Iraq (even referred to by Vice President Cheney in a Sunday morning political chat show). Then compare her leaving of her own accord to how the Times treated Jayson Blair before Miller’s lies became common knowledge; Blair being another lying Times reporter whose articles focused on matters of far less significance. Whether viewed as an ugly pattern of poor peer review or cooperating with leaders whose feet should have been held to the fire, the Times isn’t a paper to be trusted.
I think Alexander Cockburn’s article from August 18, 2003, co-proprietor of Counterpunch.org said it well:
We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.
What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.
And what does Miller’s performance make the New York Times? Didn’t any senior editors at the New York Times or even the boss, A.O. Sulzberger, ask themselves whether it was appropriate to have a trio of Times reporters touting their book Germs on tv and radio, while simultaneously running stories in the New York Times headlining the risks of biowar and thus creating just the sort of public alarm beneficial to the sales of their book. Isn’t that the sort of conflict of interest prosecutors have been hounding Wall Street punters for?
Hence, I wonder if the Times is lying to us again or if this news about HP is so.
What is the cost of poverty?
More than 43 million children living in conflict-affected countries are not able to attend school, according to a new report released Tuesday by the International Save the Children Alliance, which called on donor countries and multilateral agencies to commit 5.8 billion dollars a year to address the problem.
Relatedly, CommonDreams.org carries this essay on universal health care in California and Gov. Schwartenegger’s unwillingness to sign it into law
You generally figure a thirteen point poll deficit will set a campaign looking to scare up a little excitement out on the hustings. So when California Senator Sheila Kuehl delivered Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides’ trailing campaign a hot issue, in the form of universal health insurance bill that has everything but a governor willing to sign it into law, a lot of people might have thought he’d grab at it. But so far he’s acted like it’s too hot an issue for him.
So, what’s more important to you: a system where the wealthy get wealthier hoarding their money, or establishing a floor underneath people which defines a set of guaranteed benefits? At some point, situations cause you to take a long hard look at a system of wealth distribution that allows some to have more money than they’ll ever need to live a fruitful life while others die from lack of basic needs (one of which I’d say is education). Thus, the question is one of values. Will there ever be a way to justify placing a metaphorical floor underneath people—a way of saying “You will not have less than this because it’s unethical and because society can’t afford to not give you a chance to benefit the rest of us with your wisdom”?
Pity the rich?
LISnews reports that J.K. Rowling might have chosen not to fly home if she couldn’t take a copy of her latest Harry Potter book with her instead of trusting it to airline luggage handlers. You’ll forgive me if I have no pity when someone worth billions of dollars is mildly inconvenienced to the point where she chooses to find an alternate form of transport home.
Has she managed to find the time to distance herself from the comments where some of her readers were told they have no right to read? This still strikes me as a far more important issue.
The naive hail DRM as a success, wise users like keeping their rights.
Apple released a new version of their proprietary music player iTunes. iTunes is both a music player program and a music download service. Apparently this new version can make your purchased iTunes music vanish and only the administrators at Apple can restore what you lost if you made no backups of your own. When you buy iTunes tracks (like with so many other online music services) you are buying patent-encumbered, lossy, DRMed audio tracks you can often get less expensively and with more rights elsewhere by purchasing physical CD media instead. Wil Wheaton tries to convince you that Apple’s iTunes is a good thing and you should be heartened to know Apple treated him so well. He wraps up with a bit of namecalling to dissuade dissenters.
Wheaton, probably best known for his role as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, had purchased a lot of music through the iTunes music service. He lost “his” music upon “upgrading” to the latest iTunes program. He contacted Apple and they restored the music he had already paid for:
I think that’s worth mentioning again, in hey-look-at-me bold text: If you make a purchase from the iTunes Music Store, and something horrible happens and you lose all your music, Apple will give you a one-time only do-over to replace all of your purchased music, free of charge.
Only once?
Wheaton says that Apple’s actions “seemed excessive to me, and way above what would be reasonably expected” instead of seeing this as the least any online media store could do for their users, and one small benefit to help overcome the tremendous loss of user’s rights. He follows this up with an apology to the proprietor and a reference to digg.com where stories like this are almost never viewed in terms of user’s rights and weighing the value of those rights (users are fooled into giving up their rights for convenience).
Wheaton tries set up (what he believes to be) the corollary with physical unencumbered media:
Can you imagine walking into a record store and telling them, “Hey, guys, I lost all my CDs over the weekend. I know it’s my fault, but . . . can I have some new ones?”
Upgrading to the latest release of the proprietor’s software should not be considered the user’s fault; after all, the user is just doing what the proprietor recommends (and in some cases, depending on the DRM involved, what the proprietor requires) in order to continue to play the media the user already has paid for. That’s one of the traps of DRM—the proprietor gets to control the terms well after the sale and in perpetuity. At least on paper, copyright expires, but DRM never expires. You had better hope that the DRM isn’t that strong and that the proprietor never goes out of business, leaving you with music you can never really free from their grasp.
Wheaton says this is not his first time dealing with Apple on an iTunes issue:
Though the company was unresponsive last time I contacted them about an iTunes Music Store purchase issue…
He doesn’t go into further details about what happened then.
So what about that corollary he claims, and why the scare quotes around “his” in “‘his’ music”?
“Tasini who?” or “Watch Hillary Clinton hawk her way back into the Senate”
Apparently the BBC can’t be bothered to name Sen. Clinton’s opponent, Jonathan Tasini, who was basically excluded from any real competition by colluding media opposition to Tasini’s campaign:
In New York, former First Lady Mrs Clinton trounced an anti-war candidate by an 83-17% margin for the chance to face Republican John Spencer in the mid-terms.
There’s a juicy story behind how Clinton won her primary, but apparently few repeat it. It’s no accident that Tasini’s opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t make the news and that New York 1, a cable television channel, set the barrier too high for anyone but Clinton to debate. As we’ve seen with Ralph Nader, no TV coverage means no real chance of winning an election no matter how hard it was to get on the ballot.
And there weren’t enough anti-war voters in New York to stop her from retaining her senate seat.
As the Democratic Party allegiance to multinational corporations continues we’ll soon get to see a bunch of self-styled “progressives” argue that voting for Clinton is better than the other corporate-funded pro-war hawk running against her (lesser evilism rearing its ugly head). When all the candidates people can stomach voting for are pro-war, the war is effectively off the table as a debating issue (except when used to delay talking about issues where the candidates differ). It becomes harder for progressives to argue that the country opposes the invasion and occupation of Iraq when even they can’t find the strength to vote anti-war. Progressives insist that the public is now against the war, but this election certainly didn’t reflect that (and Lieberman’s opponent is not really against the war). I don’t care about what the polls say about the country in between elections; apparently it’s too easy to tell a phone poller that one is not in favor of the war. If you want to say that the war is the most important issue on the table and show that you’re anti-war, vote anti-war.