News

The US Government has gone and done something that they have been trying to claim they would never do. They have put forward an Executive Order that outlines their ability to control communications in the event of an “emergency”. The new order has the interesting title of “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions”. You could say that the new Executive Order does assign functions to different offices in the government and also assigns duties to the rest of the country including “the private and nonprofit sectors, and the public”. If you read the new EO in its entirety (and we highly recommend you do) you will see that this is a precursor to the enablement of the US Government to require surveillance and control measures all across the internet. So it looks like the big content holders have managed to get their way all in the name of “National Security”.

In a world where corporate interests are slavishly followed to the detriment of society by elected officials one man stands above it all. Lamar Smith is that man, out for justice for the people that pay his campaign bills and he will stop at nothing… Ok so enough of the very cheesy intro here. Out point is that Lamar Smith is back and trying to find a way to implement SOPA any way he can. If you are surprised then you must have been living under a rock for a while.

With some of Apple’s latest products it seems as if they have built in some obsolescence into them or just made the cost of repair too high for most consumers and repair shops. They have done this in a number of ways including gluing the batteries to the cases, gluing the glass to the displays (and then gluing them to the case!) and more. This heavy shift towards disposable products (meaning that people are more likely to throw them out than try to get them fixed) has been noted by sites like iFixIt who recently called the Mac Book Pro Retina one of the least repairable laptops they have ever worked with.

Anonymous is back in the headlines; this time it is not for doxing a large and corrupt corporation or a DDoS attack on a government website. This time it is all about the kids. In what certain members of the collective are calling OpPedoChat the activist movement it targeting websites and forums that cater to pedophiles. The group has vowed to wipe them from the internet and expose anyone that uses these sites.