So, remember how we wrote about the big EFF filing in the Jewel v. NSA case, about how the NSA and DOJ had been knowingly destroying key evidence by pretending that they thought the preservation orders only applied to one kind of spying, and not the kind that was approved by the FISA Court (despite at other times admitting that the surveillance at issue in the case was approved by the FISA Court)? Yeah, so, yesterday, the EFF realized that despite the big kerfuffle this whole thing had caused, the NSA and DOJ were still destroying that evidence, and sprinted over to the court to file for an emergency temporary restraining order on the government.

The existential crisis that has gripped Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm began with a rude discovery just after 2pm on Wednesday afternoon. The Crikey news website had stumbled across some of News Corp’s most intimate lingerie, and had just put it all up on the the net. ... The 276-page document is called the Blue Book, a weekly and year-to-date rundown of results at June 30, 2013 for every News Corp business in the country. ... The great newspaper engine which was Rupert Murdoch’s original springboard to take over the world was already under stress. In 2013, 70 per cent of its earnings disappeared, leaving operating income precariously balanced at $87.6 million. As Crikey pointed out, trying hard not to gloat, another year even half as bad as 2013 could put News Australia into the red.

Crikey published what the Rupert Murdoch company calls internally "the blue book", the company's operating accounts for all its businesses. The documents, which date from last year, show News Corp's print and digital publications were suffering from large falls in revenue, with flagship paper The Australian losing $27 million. Late on Thursday afternoon Crikey removed hundreds of pages of the documents.

Normally, I'm not one to defend CEOs, even in the relatively genteel world of publishing. But this is really scummy:

Amazon publishes Hachette CEO's email address in pricing spat New York (AFP) — Amazon revealed Saturday the email address of the American head of publishing group Hachette, urging readers to pressure him in writing to end the two groups' simmering dispute over book pricing.

Ferguson, Missouri's Police Department has been put on notice. International hacktivist group Anonymous has launched "Operation Ferguson" and promised swift action against authorities in city in response to the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a member of the Ferguson Police Department.

Anonymous has promised to take every web-based asset of the Ferguson Police Department and other corroborating agencies offline as well as release personal information of every officer should any protester by harmed or harassed while protesting Brown's death.

It seems that the mayor saw this coming.

Anticipating a problem, the mayor of Ferguson had the IT Department take down all personal information from the site on Saturday

As a corruption investigation of political funding began private hearings last July, the NSW National Party updated its 2010-11 accounts with an extra $300,000 that it had not declared to the Australian Electoral Commission.

The money involved an obscure funding body called the National Free Enterprise Foundation. It was spectacularly bad timing, coming as investigators for the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s Operation Spicer were tracing the links between property developers, a different body based in Canberra called the Free Enterprise Foundation and the NSW Liberal Party.

ICAC’s public hearings for Operation Spicer, which resume on Wednesday, have already put the blowtorch on the Free Enterprise Foundation’s role in channelling prohibited donations to the NSW Liberals.

What is less known is that the National Party has its own Free Enterprise Foundation.

On December 6, 1994, Richardson, who had retired from politics eight months earlier, faxed hand-written instructions to the manager of his account, called Streeton Foundation, at Swiss finance company EBC Zurich.

Richardson was a political operator without parallel but a novice to the world of high finance. Did he get the details wrong?

“Ref Streeton Foundation,” Richardson wrote.

“Please pay value 30 December 1994 $A1.0 mill as per separate instructions [from the account at EBC Zurich]. Graham Richardson 6-12-94.”

The handwriting, in documents obtained by Israeli journalist Shraga Elam, is clear. What happened to Richardson’s money next isn’t.

EBC records, revealed by The Australian Financial Review in 2009, show the money was transferred on January 5, 1995, to Dennis Jamil Lattous in Beirut. ...

... Somewhere during the transmission of Richardson’s other instructions an “f” became an “s”.

A record-setting number of Americans weighed in with their thoughts on this matter. But there's one problem, according to George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce.

"The vast majority of the comments are utterly worthless," Pierce says.

Oh really? and precisely what makes a comment valuable?

The folks who do comment with the detail, data and analysis that can change minds? Deep-pocketed industries.

"Those comments that have some potential to influence are the very lengthy, very well-tailored comments that include a lot of discussion of legal issues, a lot of discussion of policy issues, lots of data, lots of analysis," Pierce says. "Those are submitted exclusively by firms that have a large amount of money at stake in the rule-making and the lawyers and trade associations that are represented by those firms."

The FCC's Gigi Sohn also cautions against using the high number of comments in this matter as a tea leaf, because of the unknown content in the comments.

"A lot of these comments are one paragraph, two paragraphs, they don't have much substance beyond, 'we want strong net neutrality, ' " she says.

Murdoch’s skill is not just hiring the right people; he has been able to maintain control over them. They have his support as long as they produce results.

His executives are the hired help. There is never any threat to his control. When a Murdoch favourite begins to get more headlines than the chairman, the clock begins ticking for their departure.

But with the Time Warner bid, that balance may change. Chase Carey has put together a deal that, because of Murdoch’s history, is almost irresistible to him. But it’s a deal only Carey can put together.

If he succeeds, the $US160 billion company that will emerge will be an ungainly beast that will depend on Carey making the merger work. He’s indispensable.

Since December of last year, JPMorgan Chase has been experiencing tragic, sudden deaths of workers on a scale which sets it alarmingly apart from other Wall Street mega banks. Adding to the concern generated by the deaths is the recent revelation that JPMorgan has an estimated $180 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers.

Public Knowledge is rallying its supporters after learning that some House members plan to try and add an amendment to H.R. 5016, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act to block funding of FCC network neutrality rules. H.R. 5016 is the bill that keeps funding the government and whose failure to pass can shut it down. The White House has already said it opposed the existing FCC budget cuts and threatened a veto of a bill it says politicized the budget process.

A group of privacy and security organizations have just sent President Obama a letter (PDF) asking him to issue a veto threat over the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. It’s a great explanation of why this bill sucks, and doesn’t do what it needs to to make us safer from cyberattacks. It argues that CISA’s exclusive focus on information sharing — and not on communications security more generally — isn’t going to keep us safe.

It seems that Keith Alexander has convinced SIFMA to demand a public-private cyber war council, involving all the stars of revolving door fearmongering for profit.

This is not — contrary to what people like Dianne Feinstein are pretending — protecting the millions who had their credit card data stolen because Target was not using the cyberdefenses it put into place. Rather, this is about doing the banksters’ bidding, setting up a public-private war council, without first requiring them to do basic things — like limiting High Frequency Trading — to make their industry more resilient to all kinds of attacks, from even themselves.

There is a problem with Google Chrome on Microsoft Windows that is potentially very bad news for laptop users. It can drastically affect battery life, and even slow down your computer.

So, why is Chrome eating through your battery quicker than other internet browsers? The problem is down to something called the “system clock tick rate”. This is something that Windows uses internally that you won’t hear about unless you go looking. What Chrome does, as soon as it is opened, is set the rate to 1.000ms. The idle, under Windows, should be 15.625ms. The numbers are a bit confusing, but it’s what’s happening that matters here rather than the figures themselves.