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Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Wednesday Web Pluckings

"IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie." 242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.

For about a week or so my Firefox browser has been exhibiting unexplained odd behavior. There has been a sluggishness when I do the work that I do on this blog that has never in all the years I have been blogging happened before. And then I came across this...

  "Mozilla has sent a cease-and-desist order to Gamma International, after it was revealed the controversial creator of spyware for governments was disguising itself as Firefox on PCs. 'We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be — and in several cases actually have been — used by Gamma's customers to violate citizens' human rights and online privacy,' Mozilla said." DavidGilbert99 writes on the wider implications of the Citizen Lab report: "Governmental spying software has been in the news a lot in recent months and today Citizen Lab has revealed its latest findings, showing that one of the most prolific tools in use, Finfisher, is now in use in 36 countries around the world [beware the auto playing video ads with sound]." And, Voulnet adds "According to analysis and report by CitizenLab of the Gamma FinFisher trojan spyware used against dissidents in the middle east and around the world, the FinFisher codebase uses the LGPL GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library, possibly without adhering to its distribution restrictions."

Looks like I will have to go to another browser...
Poor Firefox damage to their brand has certainly occurred. Lawsuit will happen.It's a clear trademark law violation.
"Firefox" is a name owned and controller by Mozilla, and is used to clearly designate one specific product: the Firefox browser.
Gamma are abusing the same name, "Firefox", to masquerade their surveillance tool as a browser. They use the same name with intent to create confusion.
This is not allowed by trademark law and is punishable. It's almost a textbook's case.
 It was a bad idea...


36 governments are known to spy on citizens, how many are that are not known?

So who has your back?
 "Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands. Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation 'Who Has Your Back?' report. Apple, AT&T and Yahoo ranked near the bottom, each scoring just one star. 'While we are pleased by the strides these companies have made over the past couple years, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Amazon holds huge quantities of information as part of its cloud computing services and retail operations, yet does not promise to inform users when their data is sought by the government, produce annual transparency reports, or publish a law enforcement guide. Facebook has yet to publish a transparency report. Yahoo! has a public record of standing up for user privacy in courts, but it hasn't earned recognition in any of our other categories. Apple and AT&T are members of the Digital Due Process coalition, but don’t observe any of the other best practices we’re measuring. ... We remain disappointed by the overall poor showing of ISPs like AT&T and Verizon in our best practice categories.'"

 

 You Won't Believe What's In Your Turkey Burger

In the war for our minds the spin doctors have to make anyone who ask questions and think for them selves appear to be a lunatic...I am not a lunatic. You are not a lunatic, keep asking questions.

An inquiry into whether U.S. intelligence agencies could have done more to help prevent the Boston Marathon bombing is just getting started. But America’s top spy is already convinced that the deadly April 15 attacks do not represent an intelligence failure.

My generation was all about love..."All You Need Is Love" by the Beatles and the "Summer Of Love" and the "Jesus Movement" identified us. Too bad about today's generation...

Why Fantastically Wealthy Apple Is Borrowing Money

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