Catching Up on Interesting Stuff

May 27, 2013 — xanthippa

Over the last little while,  have come across some very interesting articles and such which I want to post about – but simply don’t have the capacity to fully explore.  So, I’d like to catch up by presenting a whole bunch of them in one post for your pleasure!

UPDATE:  A pregnant British woman is arrested for walking down the street in Great Britain and carrying the British flag.  Really!

Interesting DIY inventions are coming out of China.

The mystery of the ‘Skeleton Lake’ (India) seems to be solved.

Were the Eastern Crusades defensive wars?

On the copyright/erosion-of-privacy/governments-spying-on-citizens/corporatism front:

Meanwhile, in Science:

And in the economy:

Islam:

Political Islam/Creeping Sharia:

General politics:

And if you want more links to various articles to read, check out Steynian 468nth.

Posted in freedoms, politics, religion, science, society, technology, war. Tags: , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Thunderf00t: The Potential of Mankind

May 23, 2013 — xanthippa

 

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Patent-troll Alcatel Gets a Legal Spanking

May 16, 2013 — xanthippa

Oh, this is music to my ears!

“There’s good news and there’s bad news,” said Cheng in an interview with Ars. “The good news is, we won this case on every point. The bad news is, we’re running out of lawsuits. There are fewer trolls for us to fight. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last seven years figuring out what to do with these guys. There are strategies I think would be really neat and effective that I literally can’t execute. I can’t make good law because I don’t have any appellate cases left. They [the trolls] are dismissing cases against us before any dispositive motions.”

Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng
Newegg

Newegg has already won two other patent appeals this year from Kelora Systems and Soverain Software. Even though Alcatel-Lucent has billions in revenue from real businesses, when it comes to patent battles Cheng doesn’t see them as being so different. Since Alcatel is asserting patents in markets it’s nowhere near actually participating in he sees them as a kind of “corporate troll.”

I’m celebrating by heading over to Newegg and buying something!

Posted in society, technology. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

NASA, Google to share a quantum computer

May 16, 2013 — xanthippa

Let me just say – quantum computers are neat!

Not that I know that much about them, but my older son is rather fascinated with them and is actively focusing his education so as to work with them.  As a matter of fact, he recently started his first research job in Mathematics – and, yes, it is in the field of combinatorics.

When I heard that NASA is getting a quantum computer, and that Google is going in on the deal, I got very excited indeed!

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.

Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.’

Science rules!

Posted in science, technology. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Meanwhile, a message from Anonymous

April 17, 2013 — xanthippa

UPDATE:  follow the money!

Posted in freedoms, politics, technology. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Why BitCoin is here to stay

April 17, 2013 — xanthippa
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The ‘rule-of-law’is breaking down in the US

April 12, 2013 — xanthippa

The processes regarding the Grand Juries are so terribly flawed – and there is no ‘taking the fifth’!  It is precisely the Grand Jury process that was so abused during the Aaron Swartz investigation.

P.S.  I have officially joined the Evangelical Church of Kopimism.

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Donglegate…

March 26, 2013 — xanthippa

If you have not heard of ‘Donglegate’, you are likely not plugged in to the IT world – because anyone even remotely connected to the tech world has not been so lucky.

In a nutshell – Adria Richards, a non-technical person whose job was to make life easier for socially-awkward software developers (her actual job title was ‘developer evangelist’) eavesdropped on a ‘big dongle’ joke by a couple of socially-awkward software developers at a Python software developers conference and made such a public spectacle of just how offensive that was that she managed to get the guy who told the joke fired from his job.  Anonymous – the hactivist group – took exception to her actions and targeted both her blog (where she continued to make a big fuss over the dongle joke and revealed herself to be an even more unstable flake than before) and her employer with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – until, that is, her employer realized that Adria was not, after all, very good at evangelizing on behalf of developers, making the world a nicer place for them… and fired her.

Here is a most excellent account of the event and its fallout.

And, since he’s been talking about feminism lately, here is Thunderf00t’s take on it:

Frankly, I think people like Adria Richards should never work in a position of influence or power over anyone – and hope she never does!

UPDATE:  A couple of days before she overheard the ‘dongle’ joke, Adria Richards Tweeted a sexist joke about a male friend stuffing a sock down his pants to appear to have a larger penis.…’Nough said!

Posted in freedoms, Humour, politics, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Internet Defense League

March 18, 2013 — xanthippa

Just received this:

Dear Internet Defense League member,

Last year, right on the heels of our historic victory against SOPA, a piece of really nasty legislation almost passed that would have radically undermined online privacy.

It was called CISPA.  And it raced through the US House of Representatives, passing before any of us had a chance to react.  We stalled the bill in the Senate, but now CISPA is back, and we don’t want to make the same mistake twice.  Before there is *any* movement on the bill, we want to send a strong message to Congress that CISPA shouldn’t pass.

That’s why we’re partnering with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to launch an Internet Defense League action starting tomorrow, Tuesday March 19th.

Can you participate? If so, get the code for your site here: http://members.internetdefenseleague.org

And help get more people signed up by sharing this page with your social network:

      

Wait, what is CISPA?  And why does it matter so much?

CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) would give companies complete freedom to share your personal data with the US government.  It doesn’t *require* them to do so, but if the government asked it would be hard to say no, and they’d have no reason to– CISPA would free them from any promises made to customers in public statements or privacy policies.

Your emails, your Facebook account, your bank statements, the websites you visit, your real-time location (courtesy of your cellphone company)– all of it could soon belong to a slew of government agencies and even local police, who could use it against you without a warrant.

Get the code: http://members.internetdefenseleague.org

The IDL action will display only tomorrow. The banner looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/mVG9kVX.png The modal looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/tCOtoEC.png

And they both link to this action page hosted by the EFF: https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9048

Please spread the word.

Thanks!  Sincerely,
Holmes Wilson – Internet Defense League

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about CISPA, the EFF has a great FAQ page here: https://www.eff.org/cybersecurity-bill-faq

Posted in freedoms, politics, technology. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

EU parliamentarians consider emails from citizens to be spam

March 7, 2013 — xanthippa

Just received this email – thought I’d share:

Friend,

If you complain about censorship to the European Parliament, they’ll just censor you.

That’s the message that concerned citizens in the EU have been receiving after the European Parliament’s IT department began blocking thousands of emails from citizens opposed to a controversial new policy (one that itself could have a serious impact on Europeans’ freedom of expression online).

And if we complain? I suppose they’ll block those emails too. So instead of emailing, help us make this petition go viral!

Everyone deserves a voice! Don’t let the European Parliament silence the people they are supposed to represent. Click here to take action and demand that they immediately stop blocking emails from their citizens.

Politicians need to know that silencing people’s opinions is not an option. Share this petition on Twitter and Facebook to make sure they get the message:

      

The censorship was uncovered earlier today by an MEP from the Pirate Party. Here’s his first hand account of what went down:

“Next week the European parliament will be voting on a resolution to ‘ban all forms of pornography in media.’ After this information became known to a wider audience, many citizens have decided to contact members of the European parliament to express their views on this issue … Before noon, some 350 emails had arrived in my office. But around noon, these mails suddenly stopped arriving. When we started investigating why this happened so suddenly, we soon found out: The IT department of the European Parliament is blocking the delivery of the emails on this issue, after some members of the parliament complained about getting emails from citizens.”

You can read his full account here.

Shockingly, this is not the first time this has happened. During the widespread outcry against ACTA, Parliamentary authorities decided to send all emails related to ACTA to MEP’s spam folders.

Tell the members of the European Parliament to do their jobs. Censoring opinions from concerned citizens is unacceptable and undemocratic. Sign the petition now.

Thank you for taking action against censorship. If everyone shares this petition and forwards this email to friends, we can generate enough outcry to ensure that the public’s voice is heard.

For Internet freedom,
Holmes, Tiffiniy, Evan, and the whole team.
Center for Rights / Fight for the Future

p.s. Protecting freedom of expression everywhere is what keeps us up at night. After you sign the petition, can you donate to support Center for Rights’s international anti-censorship efforts? Every contribution makes a difference!

Posted in corruption, freedoms, politics, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »
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