I was recently asked to consider signing onto an electronic protest against the US’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) recent suspension of a blogger who linked to websites that allegedly distributed copyrighted movies without license. A group called “Demand Progress” rightly complained: Brian McCarthy ran a website, channelsurfing.net, that [...]
From today’s Democracy Now! headlines a WikiLeaks leak that is making mainstream news as well: WikiLeaks Documents Reveal Over 150 Innocent Men Knowingly Held at Guantánamo The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing thousands of secret documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The documents reveal the Bush and Obama administrations knowingly [...]
Free Software Foundation’s new executive director John Sullivan wants you to give him your feedback and criticism. Specifically, he wants to know: By what measures do you judge the success of the FSF’s public advocacy campaigns, and how do you think they have been doing? As he says, “it’s all fair game. Please share your [...]
In 2009, Amazon.com took away copies of purchased electronic books sold through Amazon’s “Kindle” book service. Amazon.com’s embarrassment at being caught was widely disseminated in the mainstream press and Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, wrote apologetically about the incident. In December 2010, Selena Kitt, erotic fiction author, told us Amazon did it again: On December [...]
Background Straight from Judge Chin’s opinion, “In 2004, Google announced that it had entered into agreements with several major research libraries to digitally copy books and other writings in their collections. Since then, Google has scanned more than 12 million books. It has delivered digital copies to the participating libraries, created an electronic database of [...]
An informative new documentary is out about Arduino, “an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software” (source: arduino.cc). You can find all sorts of free software to use with your Arduino board so you can make a lot of interesting devices: robots that crawl, 3-D printers to make other real-world objects, [...]
In light of US President Barack Obama’s recent appointment of what Glenn Greenwald calls “JP Morgan’s Midwest Chairman, a Boeing director, and a long-time corporatist — Bill Daley” Greenwald posted another mostly spot-on article in which he criticizes so-called “Progressives” who blindly support the Democrats regardless of what that party does: Progressives who do this [...]
DN!’s headlines today included Amnesty: Prosecute Bush for Torture And the human rights group Amnesty International is calling on the Obama administration to prosecute former president George W. Bush following his admission to authorizing the waterboarding torture technique. Writing in his new memoir Decision Points, Bush says he first granted the CIA permission to waterboard [...]
Background In May 2010 Apple distributed copies of a computer version of the classic board game Go through its App Store. This GNU Go variant is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GNU GPL) which does not allow additional restrictions to be added to the license. Apple’s App Store imposes additional restrictions [...]
US President Barack Obama’s program-length (27 minute) appearance on The Daily Show just aired. There was no mention of the preeminent moral and financial issue of our time: occupation and war. The US is killing civilians, occupying foreign lands, engaging in torture beyond what is being owned up to (thanks to WikiLeaks for publishing war [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley Richard Stallman