Arnvidr

Today I’m breaking from this week’s bird theme to make a double-dedication to two Happy Tree fans… Happy birthday to Giuseppe today! And a very belated happy birthday to Sam!

Plot Twist

pitchpipe (708843) points out a study highlighted by MIT's Technology Review, which makes the bold claim that "Using the Internet can destroy your faith. That's the conclusion of a study showing that the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use," and writes "I attribute my becoming an atheist to the internet, so what the study is saying supports my anecdote. If I hadn't been exposed to all of the different arguments about religion, etc., via the internet I would probably just be another person who identifies as religious but doesn't attend services. What do you think? Have you become more religious, less religious, or about the same since being on the internet? What if you've always had it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jones_supa (887896) writes "Homeopathy is a 200-year-old form of alternative medicine based on the principle that substances that produce symptoms in a healthy person can be used to treat similar symptoms in a sick person. The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia has officially declared that homeopathic remedies are useless for human health. The body today released a guide for doctors (PDF) on how to talk to their patients about the lack of evidence for many such therapies. Doctors will also be told to warn patients of possible interactions between alternative and conventional medicines. On top of that, the council has produced a 300-page draft report that reviews the evidence for homoeopathy in treating 68 clinical conditions. It concludes 'there is no reliable evidence that homoeopathy is effective for treating health conditions'. Representing the opposite viewpoint, Australian Homeopathic Association spokesman Greg Cope said he was disappointed at the narrow evidence relied on by the NHMRC in its report. 'What they have looked at is systematic trials for named conditions when that is not how homeopathy works,' he said. Homeopathy worked on the principle of improving a person's overall health and wellness, and research such as a seven-year study conducted in Switzerland was a better measure of its usefulness, he added. There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bmahersciwriter writes: "We've all heard stories about how parasites can 'zombify' organisms, getting them to mindlessly protect a brood or infect their peers. Now UK researchers have figured out how one bacterial pathogen co-opts the behavior of a plant, causing it to attract sap-sucking insects that help the bacteria spread to other plants. From the story in Nature News: 'The plant appears alive, but it's only there for the good of the pathogen,' says plant pathologist Saskia Hogenhout from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. 'In an evolutionary sense, the plant is dead and will not produce offspring.' 'Many might balk at the concept of a zombie plant because the idea of plants behaving is strange,' says David Hughes, a parasitologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. 'But they do, and since they do, why wouldn't parasites have evolved to take over their behavior, as they do for ants and crickets?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union has argued that telecom companies must hold on to internet and phone records for long periods to help track down evildoers, but the European Court of Justice disagrees -- vehemently. It just ruled that the EU's Data Retention Directive, which preserves metadata for up to two years, is a "wide-ranging and particularly serious" violation of the EU's privacy rights. It collects more information than necessary, doesn't establish firm limits and lets companies send data outside of the EU, according to the ruling. While the Directive doesn't scoop up actual content, the court believes that the unrestricted collection allows too much insight into people's daily activities and social connections. Sound familiar? It should. The ruling acknowledges the privacy concerns that prompted the US' proposed metadata reforms, but goes one step further -- the court is contending that bulk data retention by itself is dangerous without serious restrictions.

The ruling is a victory for privacy advocates, but it doesn't solve Europe's problems just yet. EU member states still have to amend their laws to fall in line with the decision, for a start. Also, the law's invalidation leaves nations in a tricky position. They can still require that telecoms hold on to metadata, but it's not clear what the new standard should be -- or what companies should do with info they've been told to keep under EU rules. Until there are new data retention guidelines in place, those firms will have to deal with at least some uncertainty.

[Image credit: Gwenael Piaser, Flickr]

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet

Comments

Via: Reuters, Wall Street Journal

Source: EU (1), (2), CURIA (PDF)

Supreme Court strikes down legal challenge by church groups against law providing free contraception to poor Filipinos.

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April 2nd, 2014: OKAY YES changing Dinosaur Comics to a comic where the pictures constantly change was only for April Fools' Day, I GUESS. I guess this is why all those tech companies test the waters by launching new features on April 1st, huh? You can play off your hopes and dreams as a joke. If you want to recreate this experience, add "&butiwouldratherbereading=onaprilfoolsday2014" to the end of any qwantz comics URL, or, to recreate it EVEN HARDER, add "&butiwouldratherbereading=somethingthatwilldestroymybrain". There are a bunch of other overlays too! If you are vision-impaired in the way that means reading black text on white is tricky, there's also a "white-on-black" inversed version (assuming your browser supports it: Chrome does). Turns out this feature has legitimate uses! One year ago today: welcome to a world where the word "reputation" doesn't exist and everything is understood in terms of corporations – Ryan

Bringing some links buried in comments below to the top, I think these critiques of systemd’s integration and maintenance deserve some review.

First, kernel developer Theodore Ts’o, the developer of e2fsprogs and current maintainer of ext4, shares his reservations about systemd’s engineering, and the trouble he has had understanding and using it.

…a lot of the fear and uncertainty over systemd may not be so much about systemd, but the fear and loathing over radical changes that have been coming down the pike over the past few years, many of which have been not well documented, and worse, had some truly catastrophic design flaws that were extremely hard to fix.

He goes on to describe how he previously had to neuter policykit’s security (rendering his system very vulnerable) just to get his system working, and how he has found systemd “very difficult sometimes to figure out”. Should we be concerned that a kernel developer, obviously a very qualified computer user (an MIT graduate in his 40s), has trouble understanding and using policykit and systemd to configure his own system? Where does that leave the average Linux user in handling these atrociously complex and built-to-be-broken technologies?

His discussion is not a tirade against systemd, but he too warns of the complexity of the system and its XML (even javascript-based?) configuration files, and also of the very poor track record developers like Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering have:

…Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering often have the same response style to criticisms as the GNOME developers [read other Red Hat developers] — go away, you’re clueless, we know better than you, and besides, we have commit privs and you don’t, so go away.

Predictably, fanboys rush to systemd’s defense in the comments, telling us how wonderfully documented and supported it is, what a quiet, fascist paradise the systemd mailing list is, and how responsive the developers are to every bug, request and patch submission.

Yet just two days ago, we see Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux and maintainer of the Linux kernel), launching into a tirade against – yes, you guessed it – systemd developers because of their atrocious response to a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged. Linus is so upset with systemd developer Kay Sievers (gee, where I have heard that name before – oh, that’s right, he’s the moron who refused to fix udev problems) that Linus is threatening to refuse any further contributions from this Red Hat developer, not just because of this bug, but because of a pattern of this behavior – a problem for Kay because Red Hat is also foaming at the mouth to have their kernel-based, no doubt bug- and security-flaw-ridden D-Bus implementation included in our kernels. Other developers were so peeved that they suggested simply triggering a kernel panic and halting the system when systemd is so much as detected in use.

So much for systemd developers’ responsiveness, and its great engineering, witless fanboys. (Are we really sure many of these fanboys aren’t part of an Infiltrate, Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy program?)

While Ts’o’s discussion of systemd wanted to make me wretch for its usual polite, politically-correct crap, he did at least bring up some core problems in that typically watered-down way that mainstream developers express their opinions so as not to offend any fascists in their midst. Yet even Linus’s tirade, and the lengthy user discussion which followed it, completely miss what’s really happening to Linux. It seems these developers and users can’t rise up enough to get a 3D view – all they can do is focus on minute issues in isolation and fail to put the pieces together in any coherent way. Are they just afraid or feeling awkward to discuss it, or are they like other kernel developers I’ve heard from who are completely clueless about what Red Hat developers represent?

I’ll put it together for you once again. For those who missed it in my other articles, Red Hat is a billion-dollar corporation with deep ties to the US military (their largest customer), and thus inevitably the NSA (a military security organization), etc. Adding to the conflict of interest, they have as direct corporate partners Google, Apple, and other too-large-to-imagine corporations with their hands in slime. Red Hat developers dictatorially control the core engineering of Linux, including components such as udev, udisks, xorg, dbus, systemd, etc., used by every major Linux distribution, as well as other common desktop components such as GNOME and GTK. (As Ts’o put it, “we have commit privs and you don’t”.) These are simple facts, though curiously never discussed. In many developers’ views, these Red Hat developers have consistently introduced closed, overly complex, security-breaking technologies to Linux for years, and have a long and tired history of sabotaging kernel development, creating unending bugs and problems for kernel developers, which they often categorically refuse to address. Linus knows them well – or does he?

Yet the myth continues that Linux is somehow not surreptitiously developed as a product of the military-industrial complex, and that its core engineering is based on open and free contributions. Discussions like these ones above revolve around whatever the bugs of the day are, and completely fail to assess what appears to be deliberate and systemic damage done to the Linux ecosystem, primarily through Red Hat developers.

Wake up, morons – and that includes you Linus (who likes to call out morons as such himself). Start telling it like it is, and start addressing the real systemic problems in Linux’s engineering – namely that brown shirts like Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering are just front men for a much uglier reality. Otherwise you’re just trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom – your actions are useless and doomed to fail. Getting angry won’t help – start getting smart, and start developing a genuinely free and open operating system, taking you-know-who out of the loop. If you can’t or won’t do that, then you may as well just surrender Linux to them entirely, which is pretty much the case already.

Related:

• kdbus: systemd’s Kid Cousin Come To Stay (No, Not PID 1, In Your Kernel, Silly)
• Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA
• Biography of a Cypherpunk, and How Cryptography Affects Your Life (second half details Red Hat’s involvement in Linux)

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