Group items tagged

"Call for Papers CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS We are looking for session submissions from Pirates, NGOs and Academia to following tracks: (other topics are allowed as well) Creativity: copyrights, patents, collaboration, citizen journalism, media, DRM, open access, FOI, public licensing, policy reform, education, etc… Human Rights: security, data protection, surveillance, FOI, basic income, emigration, voting rights, drones, non-proliferation, dual use technology, encryption, anonymity, transparency, net neutrality, open data, egovernment, society, whistle blowing, political science, etc… Activism|Hacktivism: Future, innovation, liquid democracy, transhumanism, cyborgs, startups, vision, 3d-printing, crowdsourcing, big data, participation, pirate parties, artificial intelligence, globalization, space travel, social networks, freemanning, freehammond, hacktivism, activism, civil disobedience, hacker culture, cyberpunk, cypherpunk, wikileaks, surveillance, digital activism, etc..."

"Call for Papers CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS We are looking for session submissions from Pirates, NGOs and Academia to following tracks: (other topics are allowed as well) Creativity: copyrights, patents, collaboration, citizen journalism, media, DRM, open access, FOI, public licensing, policy reform, education, etc… Human Rights: security, data protection, surveillance, FOI, basic income, emigration, voting rights, drones, non-proliferation, dual use technology, encryption, anonymity, transparency, net neutrality, open data, egovernment, society, whistle blowing, political science, etc… Activism|Hacktivism: Future, innovation, liquid democracy, transhumanism, cyborgs, startups, vision, 3d-printing, crowdsourcing, big data, participation, pirate parties, artificial intelligence, globalization, space travel, social networks, freemanning, freehammond, hacktivism, activism, civil disobedience, hacker culture, cyberpunk, cypherpunk, wikileaks, surveillance, digital activism, etc..."

[# Via FB's Francisco George x Arif Yıldırım] Deadline July 18th 2014 "Call for Papers CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS We are looking for session submissions from Pirates, NGOs and Academia to following tracks: (other topics are allowed as well) Creativity: copyrights, patents, collaboration, citizen journalism, media, DRM, open access, FOI, public licensing, policy reform, education, etc… Human Rights: security, data protection, surveillance, FOI, basic income, emigration, voting rights, drones, non-proliferation, dual use technology, encryption, anonymity, transparency, net neutrality, open data, egovernment, society, whistle blowing, political science, etc… Activism|Hacktivism: Future, innovation, liquid democracy, transhumanism, cyborgs, startups, vision, 3d-printing, crowdsourcing, big data, participation, pirate parties, artificial intelligence, globalization, space travel, social networks, freemanning, freehammond, hacktivism, activism, civil disobedience, hacker culture, cyberpunk, cypherpunk, wikileaks, surveillance, digital activism, etc..."

"Paris, 14 February 2014 - The European Commission's public consultation on copyright reform is open until 5 March [The European Commission extended the deadline by a month]. This consultation represents an important opportunity for European citizens to demand that access to culture and knowledge be recognised as their fundamental right. It also allows the interests of authors and creators to be defended against those of the cultural industries, major distributors and intermediaries, and heirs of rightholders who currently receive the greatest share of income from copyrighted works. La Quadrature du Net therefore calls on the maximum number of citizens and organisations to reply to the consultation and support a positive reform of copyright."

"Policy Field Internal Market, Intellectual Property ‑ Copyright Target group All stakeholders are welcome to contribute to this consultation. Contributions are particularly sought from consumers, users, authors, performers, publishers, producers, broadcasters, intermediaries, distributors and other service providers, Collective Management Organisations, public authorities and Member States. Period From 05.12.2013 to 05.02.2014. Objective The objective of this consultation is to gather input from all stakeholders on the review of the EU copyright rules. How to submit your contribution"

# One More Month: @ur #feedback, #highly #awaited.

Good story of how a UK Company responded to Microsoft's announcement if XP end of life. After examining many alternatives, they settled on a ChromeBook-ChromeBox - Citrix solution. Most of the existing desktop hardware was repurposed as ChromeTops running Chrome Browser apps and Citrix XenDesktop for legacy data apps. excerpt/intro: "There are the XP diehards, and the Windows 7 and 8 migrators. But in a world facing up to the end of Windows XP support, one UK organisation belongs to another significant group - those breaking with Microsoft as their principal OS provider. Microsoft's end of routine security patching and software updates on 8 April helped push the London borough of Barking and Dagenham to a decision it might otherwise not have taken over the fate of its 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 laptops. "They were beginning to creak but they would have gone on for a while. It's fair to say if XP wasn't going out of life, we probably wouldn't be doing this now," Barking and Dagenham general manager IT Sheyne Lucock said. Around one-eighth of corporate Windows XP users are moving away from Microsoft, according to recent Tech Pro Research. Lucock said it had become clear that the local authority was locked into a regular Windows operating system refresh cycle that it could no longer afford. "If we just replaced all the Windows desktops with newer versions running a newer version of Windows, four years later we would have to do the same again and so on," he said. "So there was an inclination to try and do something different - especially as we know that with all the budget challenges that local government is going to be faced with, we're going to have to halve the cost of our ICT service over the next five years." Barking and Dagenham outsourced its IT in December 2010 to Elevate East London, which is a joint-venture between the council and services firm Agilisys. Lucock and systems architect Rupert Hay-Campbell are responsible for strategy, policy

Meanwhile, some organizations missed the end of life deadline and are now paying Microsoft for extended support. E.g., the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which is still running 58,000 desktops on WinXP. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/irs-another-windows-xp-laggard-will-pay-microsoft-for-patches/

Superficially, this sounds like an application of the principles won by DG Competition in the Court of First Instance's Commission v. Microsoft interoperability decision. But note that here we deal with an investigation into deliberately-created interop barriers rather than those maintained by withholding full communication protocol specifications from competitors. Notice that the investigation encompasses throttling of internet connections for particular uses, an increasingly common practice by Comcast and other ISPs in the U.S., where both VOIP and P2P file-sharing are targeted uses. E.U. and U.S. antitrust law are similar, as efforts to harmonize antitrust law on both sides of The Pond are now decades old; this move does not bode well for bandwidth throttling in the U.S., particularly when aimed at throttling competition. It takes no giant mental leap to apply such principles to big vendor-dominated IT standards bodies that deliberately create or maintain interop barriers in data format standards. Indeed, DG Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has already served notice that interop barriers in standards-setting is an item of interest.

"If you've been watching from the sidelines and finally want to get into an open source project, this series is the place to start. Or, maybe you know someone who"

"If you've been watching from the sidelines and finally want to get into an open source project, this series is the place to start. Or, maybe you know someone who"

I omitted some stuff about opposition to sunsetting the provisions. They  seem to forget, as does Obama, that the proponents of the FISA Court's expansive reading of section 215 have not yet come up with a single instance where 215-derived data caught a single terrorist or prevented a single act of terrorism. Which means that if that data is of some use, it ain't in fighting terrorism, the purpose of the section.  Patriot Act § 215 is codified as 50 USCS § 1861, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 That section authorizes the FBI to obtain an iorder from the FISA Court "requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)."  Specific examples (a non-exclusive list) include: the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The Court can order that the recipient of the order tell no one of its receipt of the order or its response to it.   In other words, this is about way more than your telephone metadata. Do you trust the NSA with your medical records? 

"The European Commission is asking the public critical questions about the future of our online world, but these questions are buried throughout a lengthy consultation survey that will probably make your eyes water. We need you to tackle the survey and make your voice heard. It's not easy, so we're here to help. Go ahead, take a look at the public consultation. It's got five pages of oblique questions and too much smallprint for anyone's taste. But it's really all asking one thing: what are the roles and responsibilities of service providers in the digital world? Our survey survival guide helps you overcome the bureaucratic barrier and answer that question, because it's at risk of being ignored."

"The European Commission is asking the public critical questions about the future of our online world, but these questions are buried throughout a lengthy consultation survey that will probably make your eyes water. We need you to tackle the survey and make your voice heard. It's not easy, so we're here to help. Go ahead, take a look at the public consultation. It's got five pages of oblique questions and too much smallprint for anyone's taste. But it's really all asking one thing: what are the roles and responsibilities of service providers in the digital world? Our survey survival guide helps you overcome the bureaucratic barrier and answer that question, because it's at risk of being ignored."