Techrights http://techrights.org Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Thu, 06 Oct 2016 22:55:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 Team Battistelli Keeps Lying About Judges and Staff Representatives in Order to Decapitate EPO Staff and Even the ‘Independent’ Boards of Appeal http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/decapitating-epo-staff/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/decapitating-epo-staff/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 22:55:44 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95906 Sending a warning shot the boards’ way (Chairman of the Enlarged Board of Appeal is next to go)…

Battistelli liar
Source (original): Rospatent

Summary: Staff of the EPO is still fighting back against the chopper and liar in chief, Mr. Battistelli, whose flagrant disregard for the law is odious as he keeps “turning a blind eye on infringements of fundamental rights in the EPO”

LAST NIGHT we wrote about the EPO‘s kangaroo courts, which have become a hallmark of Battistelli’s horrible, horrendous regime. The following latest comment discusses how Battistelli keeps defaming a judge whom he dislikes, using the “Nazi” bat (not the judge's club). He would have everyone laid off if he could. Instead he systematically fires/sanctions/silences all or most of the staff’s representatives (a top-down approach). Nobody is safe when allegations can be made up, fabricated, or sexed up/distorted based on half-truths. There is no access to justice within the EPO or even outside of it.

“Every bit of negative publicity which the EPO has received is something that Battistelli and his goons deserve; they have done this to themselves, not just with their words but also with their actions.”“Yeah,” a new comment says, “so ridiculous that they were eventually dropped by the “prosecution” and did not feature in the June proceedings. However, rumour has it that a certain batty-brain keeps trotting them out at regular intervals to remind his retainers why the suspension should be maintained.”

Quoting the previous message that said: “The accusations were downright ridiculous: having “objects which can be constructed as weapons” and “nazi memorabilia”. The exact wording at the time fails me, but it really sounded as if they combed his office and found nothing but a pocket knife and an history book to frame him.”

It wasn’t a pocket knife but sporting equipment (a club). Would a tennis racket qualify as a weapon? How about a bowling bowl? For weaponry fetishes look no further than Jesper Kongstad and his political friends who like to murder large animals for reaction/leisure (we covered this in the morning).

“The guy is a chronic liar and as time goes by he needs to lie more and more (keeping up with previous lies), to the point where almost every sentence out of his mouth is a lie…”Every bit of negative publicity which the EPO has received is something that Battistelli and his goons deserve; they have done this to themselves, not just with their words but also with their actions. “Is it just me,” I publicly asked earlier today, “or has someone else noticed that a lot of the media distances itself from/avoids Battistelli for fear of reputation damage?” The guy is a chronic liar and as time goes by he needs to lie more and more (keeping up with previous lies), to the point where almost every sentence out of his mouth is a lie (see this latest interview with him).

We have meanwhile been learning more about next week's EPO protest. “Forthcoming demonstration[s] on 13 October,” we learned, are planned for The Hague (there is also a demonstration planned for Munich).

People are said to be “organizing a demonstration on 13 October at lunch time in The Hague to draw the attention of the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of The Netherlands and the Representation of the EU in The Netherlands that urgent action is needed. Letting Mr Battistelli ignore the AC resolution CA/26/16 or turning a blind eye on infringements of fundamental rights in the EPO cannot be the policy of democratic EU members states.”

This coincides with the meeting of the Administrative Council. The main question on people’s mind is, will Jesper Kongstad be Battistelli’s lapdog, lap chinchilla, or maybe he’ll finally wake up and realise he’s supposed to be a watchdog? █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/decapitating-epo-staff/feed/ 0 Links 6/10/2016: KDE Student Programs, Dell With Ubuntu Linux http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/dell-with-ubuntu-linux/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/dell-with-ubuntu-linux/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 20:41:13 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95903

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux is a new frontier for young developer

    When I was 17 years old, I started using Linux because I wanted a desktop that resembled my brother-in-law’s Gentoo laptop, which used the KDE environment. Instead, I got the now-nostalgic brown and orange GNOME 2 environment because I’d installed Ubuntu. (Ubuntu has since changed its color palette.)

  • Server

    • HPE, Dell & Cisco Lead Cloud Infrastructure Sales

      Fifth place was a five-way tie between Lenovo, NetApp, IBM, Huawei, and Inspur. IDC declares a statistical tie when there is less than a one percent difference in revenue among two or more vendors.

    • Automation is not DevOps

      It may sound counterproductive from an Automation specialist to reveal the limitations of his job, but I have seen a wide range of inefficiencies, and many failed attempt to fix them.

    • Making Sense of Cloud Native Applications, Platforms, Microservices, and More

      As more and more of our infrastructure moves into the cloud, the proliferation of buzzwords, new terms, and new ways of doing things can be daunting. Fabio Chiodini, Principal System Engineer at EMC, spent some time helping us make sense of these concepts during his LinuxCon Europe talk, “Cloud Native Applications, Containers, Microservices, Platforms, CI-CD…Oh My!!”

    • Introducing InfraKit, an open source toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure

      Docker’s mission is to build tools of mass innovation, starting with a programmable layer for the Internet that enables developers and IT operations teams to build and run distributed applications. As part of this mission, we have always endeavored to contribute software plumbing toolkits back to the community, following the UNIX philosophy of building small loosely coupled tools that are created to simply do one thing well. As Docker adoption has grown from 0 to 6 billion pulls, we have worked to address the needs of a growing and diverse set of distributed systems users. This work has led to the creation of many infrastructure plumbing components that have been contributed back to the community.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Wireshark 2.2.1 Network Protocol Analyzer Adds Ascend & K12 Capture File Support

      Today, October 5, 2016, the Wireshark development team announced the release of the first maintenance update for the Wireshark 2.2 series of the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer software.

    • Docker 1.12.2 App Container Engine Is Almost Here, Second RC Brings More Fixes

      The development cycle of the Docker 1.12.2 maintenance update to the widely-used open-source and cross-platform application container engine continues with a second Released Candidate, as announced on October 3, 2016, by Docker engineer Victor Vieux.

      Docker 1.12.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) comes one week after the unveiling of the first RC milestone, mainly to address more of the bugs and annoyance discovered lately or reported by users since the first point release of the major Docker 1.12 release. Again, the entire changelog is attached below if you like to read the technical details.

      As you might know, Docker 1.12 introduced a lot of exciting new features, such as the built-in orchestration and routing mesh, the brand new Swarm Mode, as well as a bunch of networking improvements for better security. And it looks like Docker 1.12.2 will attempt to further improve the Swarm Mode and networking functionalities.

    • Kodi 17 “Krypton” Beta 3 Adds More PVR and Video Playback Improvements, Bugfixes

      The day of October 5, 2016, also brought us a new Beta of the upcoming Kodi 17 “Krypton” open-source and cross-platform media center software, the third and most probably the last for this development cycle.

      As we told you in the report about the second Beta of Kodi 17, the final release of the popular media center is launching later this fall with numerous new features and improvements in areas like skinning, video playback, PVR/DVR, live TV, music library, etc. Beta 3 comes three weeks after the release of the second Beta milestone, and it includes a bunch of fixes for various issues reported by users since then.

    • Frogr 1.2 released

      Of course, just a few hours after releasing frogr 1.1, I’ve noticed that there was actually no good reason to depend on gettext 0.19.8 for the purposes of removing the intltool dependency only, since 0.19.7 would be enough.

    • Frogr Flickr Uploader for Linux Is Now Available as a Flatpak

      Like most people living in 2016 I don’t use Flickr. But if I did, I’d probably use Frogr to manage and upload my photos. Frogr is one of a few apps that I’ve written about across all 7+ years I’ve run this site.

    • Libvirt 2.3 Virtualization API Released

      The libvirt Linux virtualization API has been updated to version 2.3 today with some new features and plenty of bug fixes.

    • Harmony Music Player Gets A Gorgeous Dark Mode, Other Improvements

      If you’re a fan of the Harmony music player then listen up: there’s a new update waiting for you to download.

    • This Extension Adds Dynamic Transparency to GNOME Shell’s Top Bar

      Making the GNOME top panel transparent is something a lot of users like to do — but it can look a little out of place when you maximise a window. Dynamic TopBar is a nifty little extension for the GNOME Shell desktop that “makes the top bar transparent when no window is maximized.”

    • ActivityPub and MediaGoblin at TPAC 2016 (or: ActivityPub needs your review!)

      It seems a recurring meme in MediaGoblin land to say “we’ve been quiet, because we’ve been busy” (or maybe historically on every tech blog ever), but I guess I can’t resist repeating the mantra. It’s true! Though the weight of my focus has been shifted from where I expected it to be. From the last few updates over the last year, you would be right to anticipate that the main thing I would be working on would be merging the federation code Jessica has written and getting 1.0 out the door. That was the plan, and we’re still working towards that, but priorities shifted as we realized the opportunities and time pressures we were under with ActivityPub. After the Social Working Group face to face meeting in June, Jessica and I sat down and talked about what we should do. Jessica had recently started working at Igalia (great people!) and was busy with that and other transitions in her life, so we discussed whether we thought it was most sensible to focus my energy on MediaGoblin or on ActivityPub. It was clear that ActivityPub was shaping into a solid specification, but it was also made clear that the Social Working Group’s charter was running out by the end of 2016. We both think ActivityPub is key to MediaGoblin’s success and didn’t want to see our invested time go to waste, so decided my immediate focus should switch to ActivityPub so it could successfully make it as a standard.

      Which isn’t doom and gloom for MediaGoblin! MediaGoblin development has continued… the community is good enough that people have been able to work while I’ve been busy. I’m happy to say we also appointed longtime contributor Boris Bobrov as co-maintainer to help reduce me being a bottleneck. (Thank you Boris, and congrats!) Other contributors have also stepped up to the plate. I’m especially thankful of Ben Sturmfels for hosting MediaGoblin hackathons and being so responsive to community members. (And of course, there are many others to thank, too!)

      Anyway, I’m not going anywhere, I’ve just been shifting focus to standards work for a bit… but it’s all for the greater good of MediaGoblin. (Well, and the greater federated social web!) Soon, we’ll be putting the work we’re doing on ActivityPub directly into MediaGoblin. When we merge Jessica’s work on federation, we will also retool it so that the first federated release of MediaGoblin will be blazing the trails with ActivityPub.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Kickstarter-Funded Game Drops DRM-Free Version It Promised, Then Promises It Again After The Backlash

        Readers of this site should know by now that, as a general rule, DRM is equal parts dumb and ineffective. What in theory is a way for game publishers to stave off piracy typically instead amounts to a grand digital method for making sure legitimate customers can’t play the games they buy. Now, not all DRM is created equally shitty, of course — one of the more benign forms of DRM is Valve’s Steam platform. Because games purchased on the platform check in with Steam servers for product keys and otherwise encrypts the individual files for the game each user downloads, it’s a form of DRM.

        And because DRM is almost always annoying even at its best, there are some gamers who will only buy DRM-free games. Many Kickstarter campaigns for video games, in fact, explicitly state that backers and non-backers will have a DRM-free option for the game available, either through platforms like GOG and HumbleBundle, or directly from the developer. Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler! was one such game, with developer Venture Moon Industries promising both a Steam release and a DRM-free release when it collected funds from backers. Then, suddenly, once the company got a publisher on board for the project, it announced that the game would only be available on Steam.

      • Steam woes in OpenMandriva…. Again!

        Steam updated today and, as a nasty surprise, I hit the same problem I had before with it.

        I tried the solution here, but it was not working this time: the code reverted to its original form, preventing the Steam runtime to work.

      • Mad Max Open World Action-Adventure Video Game Is Coming to SteamOS and Linux

        You won’t believe this, by Feral Interactive announced a few hours ago, October 5, 2016, that it will port the awesome Mad Max open world action-adventure video game to the SteamOS, Linux, and Mac platforms.

        Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the Mad Max has been officially released for Microsoft Windows operating systems, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One gaming consoles a year ago, on September 2015.

      • A general guide for the best practices of buying Linux games

        Quite a number of people have asked me to talk about where to buy Linux games, how to make sure developers are supported and so on, so here I am.

        First of all, I am fully aware there will likely be a small backlash in the comments on certain points. We do seem to have a small minority of very vocal people who like to boast about buying dirt cheap games from places like G2A, which makes me sad. We also have a few who like to advocate piracy, which is not only sad, but makes us look really bad in the eyes of developers. For the most part though, the people commenting here are fantastic to talk to.

        To make this a point: I am not aiming to single anyone out, nor am I aiming to be hostile towards anyone. Read this as if we are all sitting around the table having a *insert favourite drink* and discussing the best way to support our platform. That’s what this is all about, everything I do is to help Linux gaming progress somehow.

        To get this out of the way; I flat out do not recommend buying from places like G2A and Kinguin, Samsai already wrote about that here. Read that as a starting point if you please. Basically, don’t pre-order, don’t buy from random reseller stores.

      • Shadow Warrior 2 may not come to Linux after all, it’s getting a bit confusing

        Shadow Warrior 2 was due to get a Linux version, then suddenly information on it vanished from the Steam page and Humble Store. The plot thickens from there.

        When queried about it, a developer for Flying Wild Hog blamed it on a publisher decision (Devolver Digital) not to have Linux at day-1. I personally spoke to Devolver on twitter, who claimed this was false and they didn’t know why the developer said so. That developer very quickly deleted their post after this, and then made a new one that was entirely different.

      • BUTCHER from Transhuman Design releases with day-1 Linux support, it’s brutal

        BUTCHER is a blood-soaked action platformer from Transhuman Design, the developer behind King Arthur’s Gold and Trench Run.

        It’s brutal, difficult, fast paced and it’s actually rather good. It’s almost as if Doom or Quake were re-designed as an action platformer, with the difficulty and speed of Broforce thrown in for good measure. That’s how I can best describe it. It has a similar atmosphere to Doom and Quake, and great action. There’s very little plot to it, no tutorials to get through and nothing standing in the way of getting in, killing stuff and getting on with it.

      • Slime Rancher updated, new slime types, new crops, and more
      • Dead Island Definitive Edition & Riptide Definitive Edition both patched to fix major issues

        It’s good to see both Dead Island Definitive Edition [Steam] & Riptide Definitive Edition [Steam] still being supported. Both have been patched to fix major issues.

      • ‘Stellar Tactics’, a space exploration RPG with classless character progression will come to Linux

        ‘Stellar Tactics’ [Official Site, Steam] is a rather expansive looking space exploration RPG and the good news is that the developer already has plans for a Linux version.

      • Wasteland 3 now on Fig ready to be funded, nearly hit the goal already
      • 7 Days to Die massive update released, Linux version seems to work okay now [Ed: Mono...]
      • Day of Infamy, the WWII FPS from New World Interactive updated, looks pretty good on Linux

        Day of Infamy [Steam] is the new FPS from the Insurgency developers New World Interactive. It has a Linux version, even though it’s not advertised yet. It seems to work pretty well and they just updated the game.

      • My triumph in Rocket League and why you need to own it on Linux

        I’m going to be honest, this is quite easily going to be my Game Of The Year on Linux.

      • If you need a decent action platformer, be sure to check out Super Time Force Ultra

        Super Time Force Ultra [GOG, Steam] was recently ported to Linux thanks to Aaron from Knockout Games, now I’ve had a chance to check out this action platformer I’ve given it a few thoughts.

      • Mad Max Is Making It’s Way To Mac And Linux

        Feral Interactive announced today that the open world, third-person action game Mad Max is coming to Mac and Linux on October 20th, 2016.

      • Mad Max is coming to Mac and Linux on October 20th
      • Feral Announces Open World Action Game ‘Mad Max’ is Coming to the Mac
      • ‘Wasteland Weekend’ Is Mad Max Meets Burning Man In The Coolest Possible Way

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Student Programs announces Season of KDE 2016-2017

        KDE Student Programs announces the 2016-2017 Season of KDE for those who want to participate in mentored projects which enhance KDE in some way. Projects from past Seasons of KDE include new application features, the KDE Continuous Integration system, new reporting for developers, as well as a web framework, porting and a plethora of other work.

        Successful mentees earn a certificate of completion along with a very cool t-shirt and other goodies. Any person who wants to complete a project is eligible to enter.

      • KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS released

        After many work around in the previous beta version of KDE Plasma 5.8 beta,KDE team is finally here with their first LTS of Plasma desktop software release, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS.
        Believe it or not, this release is surely gong to attract plenty of non-techie or simple users.But Techies are also not going to lose interest, this Ubuntu based beauty is going to prove the beast features as well.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Web Engines Hackfest 2016!

        It had great talks that will eventually end up in videos uploaded to the web site. We were amazed at the progress being made to Servo, including some performance results that blew our minds. We also discussed the next steps for WebKitGTK+, WebKit for Wayland (or WPE), our own Clutter wrapper to WebKitGTK+ which is used for the Apertis project, and much more.

        [...]

        One of the main problems people reported was applications that use WebKitGTK+ not showing anything where the content was supposed to appear. It turns out the problem was caused by GTK+ not being able to create a GL context. If the system was simply not able to use GL there would be no problem: WebKit would then just disable accelerated compositing and things would work, albeit slower.

      • The GNOME 3.24 Release Date Is Set

        GNOME 3.24 is to be released on March 22, 2017 — providing that development goes to plan between now and then, of course!

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • i.MX6 UL COM has a carrier board with Raspberry Pi style expansion

      The Armadeus “Opos6UL” COM runs Linux on an i.MX6 UL SoC, and has eMMC, optional wireless, extended temp support, and a carrier board with RPi-style I/O.

      French embedded manufacturer Armadeus Systems, which last year shipped an APF6_SP computer-on-module with an i.MX6 and a Cyclone V GX FPGA, has now unveiled a more modest, but similarly Linux- and NXP-based COM aimed at IoT applications. The i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) based Opos6UL is designed for industrial products like IoT gateways, medical devices, small HMI, and autonomous robotics.

    • Phones

      • [Early Access] Sailfish OS Fiskarsinjoki

        It’s our great pleasure to announce that we are now starting to speed up deliveries of Sailfish OS updates.

        This post, as mentioned in the title, is about the next early access iteration, update Fiskarsinjoki. Fiskarsinjoki is a small Finnish river in the village of Fiskars. It passes through a park-like cultural landscape and lands in the Gulf of Finland – just some trivia for you to learn!

      • Jolla Puts Out Sailfish OS “Fiskarsinjoki” In Early Access

        Jolla is looking to push out Sailfish OS releases faster and thus today announced “Fiskarsinjoki” in early access form.

        This next iteration of Sailfish OS is codenamed Fiskarsinjoki over a small Finnish river. Fiskarsinjoki adds support for saving images/video directly to an SD card, easy conference calls support, an integrated scientific calculator, more editing options in the image gallery, file sharing support in the file manager, and various other small features and refinements.

      • While Google’s Ara Modular Phone Is Dead, Greybus Still Appears To Have A Future

        With the Linux 4.9 staging pull request comes the addition of the Greybus subsystem.

      • Tizen/ARTIK

        • Pre-Order Gear S3 Classic and Frontier Smartwatch in the UK

          The latest Tizen based smartwatch, the Gear S3, has been launched at the end of August. This gear device builds on the hit features of the Gear S2, the circular screen and rotating bezel immediately come to mind, and adds more features for the fashion and sports conscious amongst us.

        • Samsung Z2 is to be Launched in Kenya Today

          We’ve been following the launch of the Samsung Z2 closely, as you would expect from Tizen Experts, and we knew that Kenya was the next market to be graced by the Z2 and its 4G capabilities. Well it looks like today is the day as Samsung has been sending out Press Invites for the event over the last few days.

        • Xender File Transfer Sharing App Launched on the Tizen Store

          Many of our readers have been waiting for Xender, a file transfer & sharing app, to be released on the Tizen Store and today it finally has. Do you need to transfer a file between mobile phones or between your phone and the pc? This is what Xender is designed to do and it does it quite well. The app boasts at being the fastest all-in-one file transfer and sharing app!

        • SmartHome prototype using ARTIK Cloud and Particle Photon

          Samsung and hackster.io had announced an ‘IOT challenge Using ARTIK Cloud” a couple of months ago in order to bring the maker and developer community on board to samsung’s cloud platform. The deadlines for submissions of project ideas are about to close in 5 days at the time of writing. A huge list of entries have been flooding the doors of hackster.io and Samsung ever since the contest was announced.

      • Android

        • Google melts 78 Android security holes, two of which were critical
        • Remix OS Brings Android For PC
        • Lenovo exec: Nope, not building Windows Phones [Ed: learning from mistakes?]

          Lenovo will not build smartmobes running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system because it doubts the software giant’s long term commitment to the market.

          This is the view from Lenovo’s chief operations officer Gianfranco Lanci, who told attendees at the Canalys Channel Forum 2016 that Windows 10 was generating interest in the corporate market for PCs but that his company won’t entertain basing its phones on the OS.

          “We don’t have Windows phones or any plans to introduce a Windows Phone,” he said.

          “I don’t see the need to introduce a Windows Phone and I am not convinced Microsoft is supporting the phone for the future,” Lanci added.

          According to Gartner, Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile was the third most popular OS on the planet behind Android and iOS during Q2, running on 1.97 million phones compared to 297 million on Google’s OS and 44.39 million on Apple’s software.

        • Six reasons to have the Probox2 Air Android TV box in your home

          When it comes to home entertainment, especially the new wave of 4K-enabled products, it gets pretty expensive to kit out your home with equipment. And if you’re in a home with multiple screens, it’s even more so.

          The Probox2 is the latest Android-based TV box to hit the market and has a great number of features to at least tempt you to consider stumping up the cash to get quality visuals in all your rooms.

        • Introducing the Android Central Smartphone Buyer’s Guide

          It’s increasingly likely that you’re reading this on your smartphone. In fact, it’s likely you’re doing more on your phone than ever before, which is why it’s so important to buy the right one — for you and the people in your life.

          Here at Android Central, we don’t just play with phones — we live and breathe them. We’re constantly comparing them to the competition, seeking out the ideal device for each particular use case. We believe in the Android mantra of, “Be together, not the same,” which is why we are launching the Smartphone Buyer’s Guide to help you pick the right phone for your unique situation.

        • Android 7.1 Nougat Update vs. Pixel Android 7.1: Leaked Changelog Reveals Difference Between Pixel OS Features And Upcoming Update
        • Pixel’s best features aren’t coming to the new version of Android

          At Google’s hardware event this week, the new version of the Android operating system, Android 7.1 (Nougat 7.1), was barely mentioned. As it turns out, there was a reason for that: some of the new Pixel smartphones‘ best features won’t be arriving in the new OS. This includes features like Google Assistant, the built-in customer support service, unlimited and free backup of full-res photos and videos, Smart Storage, and more.

          Details on which features were “Pixel-only” were previously reported by Android Police, citing a changelog provided by a Google source. Google confirmed to us those changes are accurate.

          Some of the omissions make sense. For example, only Pixel phones will ship with the new, “quick switch” adapter that makes it easier to move your data from iPhone to Android. That requires hardware in the form of the adapter cable.

        • Google destroys the Android fan myth that the iPhone is too expensive

          For years the Android fanboy argument has been that the iPhone is too expensive and that Android offers them a way to get a high-end smartphone for a fraction of the price.

        • Andromeda Looks Like Android’s Ticket To The Big Screen

          Blending traditional and touch computer user input methods to create a satisfying experience and commercial success has proven elusive for the three big consumer operating system vendors. Apple, in fact, has mostly avoided the challenge by keeping the Mac and ther iPad distinct, with Tim Cook likening attempts to meld laptop and tablet interfaces to combining a refrigerator with a toaster.

          [...]

          If putting Android apps on Chrome OS has failed to excite, how about imbuing Android with elements of Chrome OS? That seems to be the idea behind Andromeda, a rumored forthcoming Google OS that would presumably aim to incorporate the best of both worlds. One model for how it may look and work comes from Remix OS, a tweaking of Android that debuted on a Surface-like device and has since become far more broadly available. It borrows desktop user interface elements from Windows even more aggressively than Chrome does.

          Five years ago, I wrote that Chrome OS was heading toward a niche—ultimately the education market—versus Android. Now, with Andromeda, the security and simplicity that makes Chrome OS great and the windowing user interface that makes it usable on laptops could become key ingredients in finally allowing Android to have an impact on larger-screen computing devices.

        • Best Android Camera

          Samsung introduced this camera setup in the Galaxy S7, and it’s just as fantastic today in the newer Galaxy Note 7. The 12MP resolution gives you plenty of pixels to work with, and the optical image stabilization (OIS) keeps everything clear whether you’re taking low-light shots or shooting video on the move.

          Just as important as the photo output is how quickly the camera operates. Two presses of the home button launch the camera in less than a second, and photos are taken instantaneously even when shooting in HDR or a tough lighting situation. The camera interface is simple but also powerful if you choose to move to the full Manual mode, which can enable great shots if you want to tweak and use a tripod.

        • Google’s new phones won’t solve Android’s fundamental problems

          It’s been a tougher question to answer recently, as Android phones have approached and in some cases beaten the iPhone in terms of design and capability.

          But there’s one major thing that keeps me recommending the iPhone over any Android phone: the iOS ecosystem.

          It’s the only platform with the best developer support and consistent updates with new features throughout the life of your device. Android can’t do that. In fact, many Android phones stop getting new updates and features after a year or so.

        • Best Rugged Android Phone

          It is truly a bummer that the Galaxy S7 Active is an AT&T exclusive because this is a smartphone worthy of all SIMs. Inside, it’s packed with the same stellar components as the rest of the Galaxy S7 family, including a Snapdragon 820 processor and 4GB of RAM. It also offers a massive 4000mAh battery, in addition to a rugged, dust-proof, and water-resistant enclosure. Its 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display is bright enough to see in the great outdoors and sits behind a shatter-resistant protective coating that can withstand the toughest of falls.

          Bottom line: The Galaxy S7 Active is what other consumer-oriented rugged smartphones should aim to be like.

        • ‘Android is not invincible’: What Google is risking by releasing its Pixel smartphone

          Android may be the dominant smartphone operating system (OS) but “it’s not invincible,” according to analysis firm IHS Markit, which argues that Google’s latest Pixel smartphone could risk antagonizing manufacturers reliant on the software.

          On Tuesday, Google – a subsidiary of Alphabet – held a hardware event in which it launched two smartphones – the Pixel and Pixel XL – a smart home hub called Google Home, a virtual reality (VR) headset, Wi-Fi routers and a new version of its Chromecast streaming device.

          The Pixel smartphone runs Google’s Android software and comes with Google Assistant – the technology giant’s digital personal assistant similar to Apple’s Siri, which is also present on its Home hub.

        • Google Play is reportedly streaming Android game demos
        • Google Patches Android for 78 Vulnerabilities in October Update
        • Shazam Lite for Android requires less storage and data
        • Samsung Galaxy S7 Android 7.0 Nougat Update Imminent? S7 Running Nougat Spotted On GFXBench

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Pros Confident in Europe Job Market

    Open source careers may be even more in demand and rewarding in Europe than the rest of the world, according to new data from the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report released today by The Linux Foundation and Dice. European open source pros are more confident in the job market, get more incentives from employers, and more calls from recruiters than their counterparts worldwide, according to the data.

    The full report, released earlier this year, analyzed trends for open source careers and the motivations of professionals in the industry. Now, the data have been broken down to focus specifically on responses from more than 1,000 open source professionals in Europe, and how they compare to respondents from around the world.

  • How open source is enabling the digital art age

    This project was incredibly exciting to me because it demonstrated the freedom that digital art represents. Digital art allows traditional audio and visual methods to take on new forms by adding layers of data and interactivity. This means that your project can respond to events happening in its environment, or on the other side of the world. When a project begins acquiring hardware components like lighting or moving objects, the term digital art seems inadequate since the entire environment becomes the art piece.

    It is well-established that the open source movement has created an enormous amount of value for businesses and organizations. Often overlooked, however, is the amount of value that it has created for those looking to pursue creative ventures. The open source community has created a plethora of libraries and frameworks that reduce the barrier of entry for aspiring digital artists and musicians. Though there are many out there, I would like to focus on Processing and Arduino because they have most shaped my approach to both art and programming.

  • 4 open source alternatives for Google Calendar

    For many of us, our calendar is our lifeblood. Without it, we would be lost, perhaps both literally and figuratively.

    While some people can get away with a wall calendar or a paper day planner to organize their schedule, a whole lot of us have turned over the process of managing time allotments to a digital calendar. In truth, most of us are juggling quite a few calendars from both our work and personal lives, and often a few other organizations that we’re involved with, including anything from non-profits to tech meetups to social clubs.

  • Google releases open source ‘Cartographer’

    Machine learning and vision are essential technologies for the advancement of robotics. When sensors come together, they can enable a computer or robot to collect data and images in real-time.

    A good example of this technology in real-world use is the latest Roomba vacuums. As the robot cleans your dirty floor, it is using sensors combined with a camera to map your home. Today, Google releases Cartographer — an open source project that developers can use for many things, such as robots and self-driving cars.

  • Google open-sources Cartographer 3D mapping library

    Google today said that it’s open-sourced Cartographer, a library for mapping movement in space in both 2D and 3D. the technology works with the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), which makes the software easier to deploy in software systems for robots, self-driving cars, and drones.

    Cartographer is an implementation of simultaneous localization and mapping, better known by its acronym SLAM. But it’s not the only open source SLAM library; there are plenty others, like hector_slam. Proprietary alternatives are also available; for example, Apple recently acquired one company with SLAM software, Flyby Media. But this is Google we’re talking about — Google, the company with self-driving cars that have already driven more than 2 million miles without human control.

    “Our focus is on advancing and democratizing SLAM as a technology,” Googlers Damon Kohler, Wolfgang Hess, and Holger Rapp wrote in a blog post. “Currently, Cartographer is heavily focused on LIDAR SLAM. Through continued development and community contributions, we hope to add both support for more sensors and platforms as well as new features, such as lifelong mapping and localizing in a pre-existing map.”

  • Open Source As a Business

    It’s a script we’ve seen played out many times in the open source community. A great software idea becomes popular, and continues to be developed by a core group of people. Those people build a business around servicing the software. The business grows, and so does the company. In an effort to sustain growth, the company chooses to monetize their software.

    The business logic for this timeline is very clear, and from a certain point of view, hard to refute. Businesses exist to make money. Despite servicing a customer base that believes in the principles of open source, many companies choose – after a time – to abandon those principles to a larger or lesser degree for a traditional software business model.

  • FOSS Organizations, Judged on their Merits?

    The free and open source software community depends heavily upon the work of community-funded nonprofit organizations. These organizations develop software, organize community events, manage key infrastructure, and educate people about FOSS. They serve as key organizing points for the people and companies that develop and sustain FOSS.

    Historically, some of the most important FOSS nonprofits have been U.S. tax-exempt organizations—entities recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as exempt from federal income tax according to IRS regulations. But over the last few years, the community has witnessed changes in the IRS’s handling of applications for tax-exempt status from FOSS organizations. Most troubling, the IRS has denied applications from organizations whose missions and activities differ very little from existing (and exempt) FOSS nonprofits. The IRS’s actions raised concerns within the community about whether tax exempt status would be available to future FOSS organizations and what these changes might mean for the exempt organizations upon which the community already depends. The Open Source Initiative and the Software Freedom Conservancy formed a working group to explore these questions and gather more information about the issue.

    This post will cover what the working group has learned about how this issue developed, where things stand now, and what recent developments at the IRS mean for the future. In future posts, we’ll provide additional guidance to FOSS projects about organizational options, including when U.S. tax-exempt status is a viable option.

  • A guide to building trust in teams and organizations

    My travels globally have given me a feeling for how best to work in many different contexts—like Latin America, West Africa, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, to name a few. And I’ve found that I can more easily adapt my work style in these countries if I focus on something that plays a role in all of them: trust.

    In The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst mentions that accountability and meritocracy are both central components of open organizations. Trust is linked to both of those concepts. But the truth, I’ve found, is that many people don’t have the information they need to determine whether they can trust a person or not. They need data, along with a system to evaluate that data and make decisions.

    I’ve found a way to measure trust, studied trust building, and developed a strategy for cultivating trust that’s worked for me over the years. I think it could work well in open organizations, where building trust is critical.

    Let me explain.

  • 5 Tips on Using OAuth 2.0 for Secure Authorization

    OAuth is an open standard in authorization that allows delegating access to remote resources without sharing the owner’s credentials. Instead of credentials, OAuth introduces tokens generated by the authorization server and accepted by the resource owner.

    In OAuth 1.0, each registered client was given a client secret and the token was provided in response to an authentication request signed by the client secret. That produced a secure implementation even in the case of communicating through an insecure channel, because the secret itself was only used to sign the request and was not passed across the network.

    OAuth 2.0 is a more straightforward protocol passing the client secret with every authentication request. Therefore, this protocol is not backward compatible with OAuth 1.0. Moreover, it is deemed less secure because it relies solely on the SSL/TLS layer. One of OAuth contributors, Eran Hammer, even said that OAuth 2.0 may become “the road to hell,” because:

    “… OAuth 2.0 at the hand of a developer with deep understanding of web security will likely result in a secure implementation. However, at the hands of most developers – as has been the experience from the past two years – 2.0 is likely to produce insecure implementations.”

    Despite this opinion, making a secure implementation of OAuth 2.0 is not that hard, because there are frameworks supporting it and best practices listed. SSL itself is a very reliable protocol that is impossible to compromise when proper certificate checks are thoroughly performed.

    Of course, if you are using OAuth 1.0, then continue to use it; there is no point in migrating to OAuth 2.0. But if you are developing a new mobile or an Angular web application (and often mobile and web applications come together, sharing the same server), then OAuth 2.0 will be a better choice. It already has some built-in support in the OWIN framework for .NET that can be easily extended to create different clients and use different security settings.

  • Tips for Evaluating a Company’s Open Source Culture

    There are four essential questions a company should ask before it decides to create an open source project, according to Duane O’Brien, open source programs evangelist at PayPal.

    Who cares?

    Are we still using it?

    Are we committing our own resources?

    Can we develop it all in the open?

    This framework, developed by O’Brien’s boss Danese Cooper, is useful in vetting internal software for release as open source projects.

  • Buggy code to the left of me, perfect source to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with EU

    Midway through SUPERSEDE, the EU three-year project backed by €3.25m in funding to make software better, software still sucks.

    It’s always been thus, but now that computer code has a say in the driving of Teslas, confronts everyone daily on smartphones, and has crept into appliances, medical devices, and infrastructure, it’s a more visible problem.

    Robert Vamosi, security strategist at Synopsys, told The Register in a phone interview that software quality matters more than ever.

    “We’re seeing real-world examples of automobiles remotely attacked and medical devices being suspended when they need to keep functioning,” he said. “It’s becoming life-critical.”

    The organizations involved in SUPERSEDE – ATOS, Delta Informatica, SEnerCon, Siemens, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), and the University of Zurich (UZH) – aim to improve the user experience of their software products with a toolkit to provide better feedback and analytics data to application developers.

  • ETSI Releases Its Open Source MANO Software Stack

    ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) group today announced Release ONE, the first code out of the NFV management and orchestration (MANO) project.

    ETSI touts that OSM can natively support VIMs from VMware and OpenStack and can also support various software-defined networking (SDN) controllers. It can also create a plug-in framework to improve platform maintenance and extensions.

  • The Evolution of Open Source Networking at AT&T

    For many years AT&T has been on the forefront of virtualizing a Tier 1 carrier network. They’ve done so in a very open fashion and are actively participating in, and driving, many open sources initiatives. Their open initiatives include Domain 2.0, ECOMP, and CORD, all of which are driving innovation in the global service provider market. Chris Rice, Sr. VP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design of AT&T, provided an overview of how AT&T got where they are today during his keynote address at the ODL Summit.

    Providing a bit of history of this journey, Rice noted that today’s implementations and visions started years ago. One of the first steps was the creation of what he called a router farm, which was initiated because of the end of life of a router and there wasn’t a new router that could just take its place. The goal was to remove the static relationship between the edge router and the customer. Once this was done, AT&T could provide better resiliency to their customers, detect failures, do planned maintenance, and schedule backups. They could also move configurations from one router to another vendor’s router. The result was faster and cheaper; however, “it just wasn’t as reusable as they wanted.” They learned the importance of separating services from the network and from the devices.

  • The legacy of Pieter Hintjens

    When I watched Chad Fowler’s GOTO Amsterdam 2014 Keynote it got me thinking about what our aims should be in life.

    He mentions Joel Spolsky’s post from 2001: Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It, and says software typically only lasts five years so rarely gets to be very good.

    He asks, what does it take create legacy software with a positive meaning, that is software so good that you are fondly remembered for it for many years to come.

    [...]

    Pieter was a man who knew all of this. His deep passion for optimal collaboration lead to the creation of C4: The Collective Code Construction Contract. Not only was he very talented technically, he also understood people and how to foster a strong community.

  • Events

    • FOSSCON

      This post is long past due, but I figured it is better late than never. At the start of the year, I set a goal to get more involved with attending and speaking at conferences. Through work, I was able to attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Pasadena, CA in January. I also got to give a talk at O’Relly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Austin, TX in May. However, I really wanted to give a talk about my experience contributing in the Ubuntu community.

      José Antonio Rey encouraged me to submit the talk to FOSSCON. While I’ve been aware of FOSSCON for years thanks to my involvement with the freenode IRC network (which has had a reference to FOSSCON in the /motd for years), I had never actually attended it before. I also wasn’t quite sure how I would handle traveling from San Francisco, CA to Philadelphia, PA. Regardless, I decided to go ahead and apply.

      Fast forward a few weeks, and imagine my surprise when I woke up to an email saying that my talk proposal was accepted. People were actually interested in me and what I had to say. I immediately began researching flights. While they weren’t crazy expensive, they were still more money than I was comfortable spending. Luckily, José had a solution to this problem as well; he suggested applying for funding through the Ubuntu Community Donations fund. While I’ve been an Ubuntu Member for over 8 years, I’ve never used this resource before. However, I was happy when I received a very quick approval.

    • FOSS Wave: Bangalore at UVCE

      It was another lazy Saturday with a rare sight of empty Bangalore roads. This FOSS Wave event in Bangalore had been in planning for almost a month. Finally, here we were on September 10th, 2016 in front of the almost a century old structure of University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering.

      Five speakers reached the venue by 9:30am. We were to talk in two different sessions starting from 10:30am until 4:00pm on the following topics.

    • Fedora Join Meeting 26 September 2016 – Summary
    • systemd.conf 2016 is Over Now!

      A few days ago systemd.conf 2016 ended, our second conference of this kind. I personally enjoyed this conference a lot: the talks, the atmosphere, the audience, the organization, the location, they all were excellent!

      I’d like to take the opportunity to thanks everybody involved. In particular I’d like to thank Chris, Daniel, Sandra and Henrike for organizing the conference, your work was stellar!

      I’d also like to thank our sponsors, without which the conference couldn’t take place like this, of course. In particular I’d like to thank our gold sponsor, Red Hat, our organizing sponsor Kinvolk, as well as our silver sponsors CoreOS and Facebook. I’d also like to thank our bronze sponsors Collabora, OpenSUSE, Pantheon, Pengutronix, our supporting sponsor Codethink and last but not least our media sponsor Linux Magazin. Thank you all!

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Databricks Findings Show That Spark is Driving Cutting-Edge Innovation

      This summer, Databricks conducted a comprehensive Apache Spark Survey to identify insights on how organizations are using Spark and highlight growth trends since the company’s last Spark Survey in 2015. The 2016 survey results reflect answers from 900 distinct organizations and 1615 respondents, who were predominantly Apache Spark users, and the results are available now.

      The results show that the Spark community is still growing fast: the number of meetup members worldwide has tripled, and the number of contributors to the project has grown by 67% since last year. Moreover, Spark is driving cutting-edge innovation. Users arebuilding diverse apps, with significant growth in machine learning and streaming.

    • Transitioning from OpenStack Hobbyist to Professional

      To land your first OpenStack job, you’ll want to prove you have a functional understanding of OpenStack basics, can navigate the resources to solve problems, and have recognized competency in your focus area.
      Used with permission

      The hardest part of pivoting your career is proving that you are qualified in your new focus area. To land your first OpenStack job, you’ll want to prove you have a functional understanding of OpenStack basics, can navigate the resources to solve problems, and have recognized competency in your focus area.

      “A functional understanding of OpenStack” means you know how to work in OpenStack––not just naming the projects in alphabetical order or giving an overview of its history. While you’ll want to read up on its origins and future roadmap, you’ll also want to jump in by using tools like DevStack or TryStack to explore.

  • CMS

    • CMSpotlight: 5 CMS apps that deserve more attention

      Everybody knows about WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, although they are great and they are popular for a reason, there are quite a few other alternatives that you may have never heard of. Thousands of quality developers and designers work hard to create amazing masterpieces of applications. Most of them release their applications for free and they make them open source. The least we can do is spread the word so they can get the attention they well deserve. We’ve already listed a dozen CMS apps in our self-hosted alternatives post, but in this article, we’ll focus more on each CMS and its features. Here, 5 open source CMS apps will get the spotlight.

  • Education

    • Charlie Reisinger: FOSS in Education Proponent…and Practitioner

      “Charlie serves as the Technology Director for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. A member of the senior leadership team, he directs instructional technology programs and technical infrastructure and operations. A passionate advocate and speaker on open source values in education, Charlie and his team implemented the largest classroom desktop Linux program in Pennsylvania.

      “Under his leadership, Penn Manor School District received the 2011 School of Excellence in Technology Award from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA). In 2016, Penn Manor was recognized with the Districts of Distinction Award for the Open Source one-to-one Laptop Program.”

      The book’s title is The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students. The Kindle version is only $4.99. I’ve read it. You should read it, too, if you’re a teacher, school administrator, student, parent, uncle or aunt or have friends or family with kids in school — or even if you’re a taxpayer someplace where they have public school or you’re connected in some way with a charter school or private school.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Classic Emacs editor gets a new-school makeover

      A new distribution of the Emacs editor, called Spacemacs, repackages the classic developer’s tool in a new skin for greater usefulness to a new generation of programmers.

      Emacs is one of the oldest text editors in existence. Its most popular variant (now 31 years old) is GNU Emacs, originally developed by Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman. The editor’s enduring popularity comes from its extensibility and programmability courtesy of the built-in Emacs Lisp scripting language — and from the culture of tooling that’s sprung up as a result. Extensions for Emacs (and, thus, Spacemacs) provide everything from integration with GitHub to Slack chat windows.

  • Project Releases

    • FontForge release

      There’s a new release of FontForge available. “This release introduces a new icon set, new functionality for custom icon selection graphics, support for GlyphOrderAndAliasDB files, and support for Unicode 9.0.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • IBM, Microsoft, Oracle beware: Russia wants open source, sees you as security risk

      Russia is drafting a new law requiring Russian government agencies to give preference to open source and to block US software from computer systems, citing security concerns.

      Just weeks after Moscow committed to removing Microsoft Outlook and Exchange on 600,000 systems under orders from Russian president Vladimir Putin, the nation’s lower house, the State Duma, is drafting a bill to make it harder for agencies even to buy Russian software products that are based on foreign-made proprietary middleware and programming frameworks.

      The bill marks Russia’s latest attempt at substituting imported software with local products, but casts a wider net than existing restrictions on IT procurement by agencies and state-run enterprises.

    • Russia Weighs Replacing IBM, Microsoft With Open-Source Software

      Russia is taking another step to reduce dependence on Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. technologies in the country’s $3 billion software market amid political tensions with the U.S.

      The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to restrict government agencies from buying licensed software, giving preference to open-source software. This would complement legislation that curbed state purchases of foreign programs last year, restricting the choice to about 2,000 local software makers.

      “Many local software firms are offering products based on foreign frameworks such as IBM’s WebSphere or Microsoft’s ASP.net,” said Andrey Chernogorov, executive secretary of the Duma’s commission on strategic information systems. “We are seeking to close this loophole for state purchases as it causes security risks.”

      The end of IBM’s partnership with Russian vendor Lanit last year created a potential vulnerability for the government’s website zakupki.gov.ru, which is based on a proprietary IBM platform, according to an explanatory note to the draft law. Additionally, license fees that Russian software makers pay foreign partners inflate their products’ cost of use.

      Some Russian regional administrations already started switching from Oracle to free database software adapted for their needs by local programmers, according to Duma documents.

    • Public review of German municipal eGovernment manual

      Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior is organising a three-month, online public review of a new manual for municipal eGovernment services. From 22 September until 30 November, a website will allow readers to comment on the document.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Udacity open sources an additional 183GB of driving data

        On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last month, Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun announced that the online education company would be building its own autonomous car as part of its self-driving car nanodegree program. To get there, Udacity has created a series of challenges to leverage the power of community to build the safest car possible — meaning anyone and everyone is welcome to become a part of the open-sourced project. Challenge one was all about building a 3D model for a camera mount, but challenge two has brought deep learning into the mix.

        In the latest challenge, participants have been tasked with using driving data to predict steering angles. Initially, Udacity released 40GB of data to help at-home tinkerers build competitive models without access to the type of driving data that Tesla of Google would have. However, because deep learning models drink data by the pond rather than the gallon, the company pushed out an additional 183GB of driving data.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Mike Pence’s Defining Moment As Governor? Enabling An HIV Outbreak

      With the exception of a brief detour into Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s (R) anti-abortion beliefs during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 4, the night centered around foreign policy, not public health.

      It’s a shame, since lackluster public health efforts are what led to the defining moment of Pence’s one-term Indiana governorship: a massive HIV outbreak spurred by public health funding cuts and Pence’s moralistic stance against needle exchanges.

      A timeline of the HIV outbreak, the worst in state history, reads like a roadmap of what to do if you want to create a public health crisis.

    • Poland abortion: Parliament rejects abortion ban after women stage all-out strike

      Polish lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to reject draft legislation that would introduce a near-total ban on abortion following mass protests in over 60 cities across the country.

      Some 100,000 women dressed in black staged nationwide demonstrations in Poland on Monday against plans to tighten the country’s already restrictive abortion rules, including banning the procedure even in cases of rape, with prison terms for women ending a pregnancy.

      The hastily arranged vote presents the first major domestic setback for the ruling conservatives, of which many members initially backed the proposal.

    • Water Wars: Two Indian States Are Fighting for This River’s Water

      As the world gets hotter, we’ve been warned that the next wars will be over water. In India, that future is here, and the latest proof is a battle between two neighboring states fighting over the river that runs through them.

      In the latest chapter of a century-old water war in southern India, riots rocked Bangalore, the techie capital city of Karnataka state, in September. Buses were set ablaze, and a man was killed by police trying to control the crowds. Protestors opposed a Supreme Court order for the state to release about 120,000 cusecs, or cubic feet per second of water, from the Cauvery river to Tamil Nadu, the state downstream, over 10 days.

    • Amid water crisis, Flint faces a Shigellosis outbreak

      Flint, Michigan, is dealing with another outbreak. This time it’s an infectious bacterial disease called Shigellosis, which can cause bloody diarrhea and fever and typically spreads when people don’t wash their hands.
      That’s exactly what’s happening in Flint, the county health director told CNN.

      A water crisis has plagued residents there for more than two years. Last year, people experienced rashes and hair loss when high levels of lead were found in the local water supply. In 2014, the area faced one of the worst outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in US history.
      Still afraid and mistrustful of the water, people in Flint — who are still forced to use either filtered or bottled water because of damaged water pipes — are bathing less, and refusing to wash their hands.

    • GOP seeks to block ObamaCare settlements with insurers

      Republicans in Congress are plotting ways to block the Obama administration from paying insurance companies hundreds of millions of dollars as part of an ObamaCare program.

      GOP lawmakers say they are looking at “a dozen” options — including a possible provision in the year-end spending bill — to prevent the administration from using an obscure fund within the Treasury Department to pay out massive settlements to insurers.

      The insurance companies are suing over a shortfall in an ObamaCare program that they say is damaging their businesses.

      Settling the cases could help insurers deal with losses on the ObamaCare marketplaces, but Republicans argue the move would be a “bailout” that would circumvent the will of Congress.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • 10 basic linux security measures everyone should be doing

      Akin to locking your doors and closing your windows there’s some really basic things everyone should be doing with their Linux installs (This is of course written from a Fedora viewpoint, but I think this pretty much applies to all computer OSes).

    • EFF Asks Court to Block U.S. From Prosecuting Security Researcher For Detecting and Publishing Computer Vulnerabilities

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a court Thursday for an order that would prevent the government from prosecuting its client, security researcher Matthew Green, for publishing a book about making computer systems more secure.

      Green is writing a book about methods of security research to recognize vulnerabilities in computer systems. This important work helps keep everyone safer by finding weaknesses in computer code running devices critical to our lives—electronic devices, cars, medical record systems, credit card processing, and ATM transactions. Green’s aim is to publish research that can be used to build more secure software.

    • Malta unveils Cyber Security Strategy

      The government of Malta has unveiled a National Cyber Security Strategy. The strategy provides the legal context to defend the country’s computer networks infrastructure and its users from threats.

    • Mirai “internet of things” malware from Krebs DDoS attack goes open source

      Last week, we wrote about a DDoS attack on well-known investigative cybercrime journalist Brian Krebs.

      To explain.

      A DDoS attack is an aggressive sort of DoS attack, where DoS is short for denial of service.

      A DoS is a bit like getting into the queue at the station to buy a ticket for the next train, only to have a time-waster squeeze in front of you and slow you down.

      By the time the miscreant has asked, innocently enough, about the different sorts of ticket available, and whether it costs extra to take a bicycle, and how much longer it would take if he were to change trains in Manchester, only to walk off without buying a ticket at all…

      …you’ve watched your train arrive, load up with passengers, and depart without you.

      A DDoS attack is worse: it’s short for distributed denial of service attack, and it’s much the same thing as a DoS, except that the trouble-stirrer doesn’t show up on his own.

    • Johnson & Johnson Warns Insulin Pump Owners They Could Be Killed By Hackers

      Initially the lack of security on “smart” Internet of Things devices was kind of funny as companies rushed to make a buck and put device security on the back burner. And while hackable tea kettles and refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials just seem kind of stupid on the surface, people are slowly realizing that at scale — we’re introducing millions of new attack vectors into homes and businesses annually. Worse, compromised devices are now being used as part of massive new DDoS attacks like the one we recently saw launched against Brian Krebs.

      Unfortunately, companies that service the medical industry also decided a few years ago that it would be a good idea to connect every-damn-thing to networks without first understanding the security ramifications of the decision. As a result, we’re seeing a rise in not only the number of ransomware attacks launched on hospitals, but a spike in hackable devices like pacemakers that could mean life and death for some customers.

    • J&J warns diabetic patients: Insulin pump vulnerable to hacking

      Johnson & Johnson is telling patients that it has learned of a security vulnerability in one of its insulin pumps that a hacker could exploit to overdose diabetic patients with insulin, though it describes the risk as low.

      Medical device experts said they believe it was the first time a manufacturer had issued such a warning to patients about a cyber vulnerability, a hot topic in the industry following revelations last month about possible bugs in pacemakers and defibrillators.

      J&J executives told Reuters they knew of no examples of attempted hacking attacks on the device, the J&J Animas OneTouch Ping insulin pump. The company is nonetheless warning customers and providing advice on how to fix the problem.

    • Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack?

      As KrebsOnSecurity observed over the weekend, the source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released. Here’s a look at which devices are being targeted by this malware.

      The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default usernames and passwords. Many readers have asked for more information about which devices and hardware makers were being targeted. As it happens, this is fairly easy to tell just from looking at the list of usernames and passwords included in the Mirai source code.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Is WikiLeaks still relevant?

      It was once celebrated as a champion of transparency. But now 10 years old, WikiLeaks has lost a lot of friends.

      The whistle-blowing website serves as the world’s best known source for leaked government and intelligence information.

      It has exposed corruption and misuse of power in many countries, including the United States.

      But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has become increasingly controversial over the past decade.

      Critics say his site is manipulated by politicians, and the way it releases classified documents is irresponsible.

      Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid possible extradition to Sweden, where he faces questions over allegations of sexual assault.

    • What Really Happens When You FOIA UK Police

      British authorities have a reputation for keeping incredibly tight-lipped about surveillance, especially when asked to release even basic details of programs or technologies under the Freedom of Information Act.

      But a lot more goes on behind the scenes of requests around surveillance topics than one might realise. By requesting the processing notes and communications for FOIA requests, it’s possible to gain insight into what really happens when someone asks for information on a controversial subject, and how, in some cases, police forces develop a national strategy to ensure that no information seeps out.

      For example, Motherboard has been using the FOIA to dig up details of UK law enforcement’s use of “equipment interference”, the government’s term for hacking. While managing to get some information out of agencies, such as how a few of them will share hacking technologies, many of the requests have been stonewalled.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Great Pacific garbage patch’ far bigger than imagined, aerial survey shows

      The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined.

      A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the “great Pacific garbage patch”, located between Hawaii and California.

      The density of rubbish was several times higher than the Ocean Cleanup, a foundation part-funded by the Dutch government to rid the oceans of plastics, expected to find even at the heart of the patch, where most of the waste is concentrated.

      “Normally when you do an aerial survey of dolphins or whales, you make a sighting and record it,” said Boyan Slat, the founder of the Ocean Cleanup.

      “That was the plan for this survey. But then we opened the door and we saw the debris everywhere. Every half second you see something. So we had to take snapshots – it was impossible to record everything. It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean.”

    • Indonesia’s peat fires add to global warming

      The really scary thing about climate change is not simply that humans may fail to get their emissions under control. It is that, at some point, the Earth could take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.

      A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality – some 70 billion tonnes of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in permafrost, and is also vulnerable.

      In each case, if that carbon gets out of the land and into the atmosphere, then global warming will get worse. But global warming could itself raise the odds of such massive carbon release. That is a dangerous position to be in as the world continues to warm.

    • Enjoy Earth While It Lasts: Atmospheric Carbon Levels Pass the Point of No Return

      The bad news: Earth’s climate change problem just passed a point of no return. Atmospheric carbon levels have passed 400 parts per million, and they won’t return to more environment-friendly levels “ever again for the indefinite future.”

    • Disappearing Yosemite glacier becomes symbol of climate change

      When naturalist John Muir explored Lyell Glacier in Yosemite National Park about 150 years ago, the river of ice stretched as far as 10 football fields between the peaks of the Lyell Canyon, a glacier one might expect to see in Alaska, not California.

      Today, it’s a sliver of the natural feature Muir called a “living glacier.” Over the last 130 years, the glacier has lost 78 percent of its surface, shrunk from about a half square mile to 66 acres.

      Stand on the glacier and it’s hard to hear anything except the sound of melting water rushing underneath. A big patch of bedrock is exposed in its middle.

      In its dying state, Lyell Glacier has become a vivid example of the effects of climate change and a touchstone for National Park Service officials increasingly concerned about global warming.

      In a speech about climate change at Yosemite this summer, President Barack Obama highlighted Lyell Glacier as a warning for the future.

    • Hurricane Matthew is about to slam Donald Trump’s most prized real estate

      Mar-a-Lago, the country club in West Palm Beach that is one of Donald Trump’s marquee pieces of real estate, is at risk of sustaining damage due to Hurricane Matthew.

      The storm will soon bear down on the east coast of Florida, with the National Hurricane Center issuing a serious warning about Matthew’s potential impact. The warning indicates the “potential for devastating damage across coastal Palm Beach County,” which is where Mar-a-Lago sits.

      In addition to seeing hurricane force winds of greater than 74 miles per hour, West Palm Beach, which is along the state’s east coast, where Mar-a-Lago sits, could receive more than three feet of standing water from the hurricane’s storm surge, according to a projection from the National Hurricane Center.

      The experimental storm surge inundation map below shows West Palm Beach with an arrow to the rough location of Mar-a-Lago.The inundation levels refer to a reasonable worst-case scenario for the flooding of normally dry land. There is about a 1-in-10 chance that storm surge flooding at any particular location, including the area where Mar-a-Lago is, could be higher than the values shown on the map.

  • Finance

    • Big Business Declares TPP the Winner in Vice Presidential Debate

      The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already picked the winner in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

      It’s free trade! (Or, more accurately, corporate-friendly trade agreements.)

      Previewing the debate Tuesday morning, the Chamber tweeted merrily that both candidates have a “great track record on trade.”

      Their running mates are both on the record opposing the hugely controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, but as the Chamber notes so happily, Kaine and Pence both have a long history of siding with big business. Both have praised the TPP and backed similar deals in the past.

      The Chamber, a trade group that represents some of the largest corporate entities in the world, from Goldman Sachs to Dow Chemical, has spent over $1.2 billion just on lobbying since 1998, making it by far the largest influence peddler in Washington, D.C.

    • Latest eGov Benchmark decries lack of decisiveness

      Europe’s governments lack decisiveness in digitising their public services and organisations, conclude the authors of the “eGovernment Benchmark 2016”, which was made public by the European Commission on 3 October. Progress in eGovernment is incremental, the study shows. The authors urge “an acceleration in order to keep up with private sector, and citizen’s expectations”.

    • Exclusive: WikiLeaks Guccifer 2.0 Teaser Exposes Pay-to-Play and Financial Data

      Hours after WikiLeaks held an early morning press conference commemorating their 10th anniversary, hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a trove of documents he claimed were from the Clinton Foundation. WikiLeaks tweeted the 800+MB of files hacked by Guccifer 2.0 shortly after. The documents include several Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Virginia Democratic Party documents, though Guccifer 2.0 said he obtained them in a hack from the Clinton Foundation.

      The Clinton Foundation has denied this. Alleged communication files were leaked from the Clinton Foundation to the Observer upon request through Guccifer 2.0’s Twitter account, but the Clinton Foundation has not yet responded to a request for a statement on those specific documents.

    • NY Times Reporter Tells the Story Behind the Story of the Trump Tax Leak

      Donald Trump is the first major party presidential candidate in 40 years not to release his tax returns. However, the New York Times has obtained three pages of Trump’s 1995 income tax returns, which it revealed in a controversial investigative report published Saturday.

      “Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found,” read the headline on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jill Stein Is The Only Presidential Candidate Embracing the Term Latinx This Election

      On September 29, Green Party nominee Jill Stein’s campaign sent out an email with the title, “Join our Latinx movement!”, marking the first official appearance of the term “Latinx” in the 2016 election. The term, which arose from the desire to find a non-binary, gender inclusive word to refer to our community, has been gaining traction since it first came into use online in October of 2014. Today, it’s increasingly common to see “Latinx” used in media headlines (including some of our own), academic texts and activist literature – but the word has not arrived on the scene without its fair share of controversy and resistance. In 2016 much ink has been spilled making cases for or against the term – and in the comments of Remezcla posts we frequently see our usage of the term hotly debated.

    • Playboy Editor Claims Trump Forced Maples to Pose: ‘He Wanted Her to Do the Nude Layout; She Didn’t’

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign have spent the week slut-shaming former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, saying she posed in Playboy and that there was a sex tape depicting her in it (there is not). An old New York Daily News article has surfaced that tells a story of Trump pressuring his future wife, against her will, to pose for Playboy magazine. Trump personally negotiated the fee, according to the report.

      The article, tweeted by historian Jeff Nichols, outlines how Trump insisted that Maples do the centerfold and negotiated a million-dollar check to compensate her.

    • Trump Joins Clinton In Pushing For Cyberwar

      We’ve noted a few times in the past our serious concerns about Hillary Clinton’s hawkish and tone deaf views on cybersecurity, in which she wants the US to go on the offensive on cyberattacking, even being willing to respond to attacks with real world military responses. She seems to ignore the fact that the US has a history of being some of the most aggressive players on offense on such things (Stuxnet, anyone?), and doesn’t seem to recognize how escalating such situations may not end well at all.

      Of course, her opponent, Donald Trump has been totally incomprehensible on cybersecurity during the course of his campaign. There was his first attempt to respond to questions about cybersecurity in which it’s not clear he understood the question, and started talking about nuclear weapons instead. Or the time he took a question on cybersecurity and answered by talking about the latest CNN poll. Or, of course, who can forget his debate performance on the topic, where his key insights were that his 10 year old was good with computers and a 400 lb. hacker may be responsible for the DNC hacks.

      It appears that the Trump campaign finally decided that maybe Trump should say something marginally coherent on the subject, and sent him out earlier this week with a prepared teleprompter speech, which Trump actually managed to get through without going too far off script. And… it’s basically the same kind of bullshit as Clinton — pushing for more aggressive and offensive cyberattacks.

    • Expanding the Debate: Green Ajamu Baraka “Debates” Pence & Kaine in Democracy Now!

      Vice-presidential candidates Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine faced off in Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, Tuesday night in their first and only debate before next month’s election. Third-party vice-presidential candidates, including Libertarian William Weld and the Green Party’s Ajamu Baraka, were excluded from the debate stage under stringent rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. On Tuesday night, Democracy Now! aired a special “Expanding the Debate” broadcast, where we gave major third-party candidates a chance to respond to the same questions in real time as the major candidates. The Green Party’s Ajamu Baraka joined us live from Richmond, Virginia. Baraka is a longtime human rights activist and the founding executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network and coordinator of the U.S.-based Black Left Unity Network’s Committee on International Affairs.

    • ‘Deplorable’: Donald Trump’s long war with veterans.

      Donald Trump Monday turned his destructive mouth on a group he ostensibly supports, displaying his trademark lack of sense and compassion when talking about the unseen wounds that too many vets carry home with them from war.

      “When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it,” he said during a question-and-answer session sponsored by the conservative Retired American Warriors PAC, referring to veterans who commit suicide.

      Most appallingly, this was probably Trump’s idea of tact and/or empathy for those who have seen combat. But contra his faux tough guy image and what he seemed to be suggesting, PTSD isn’t a symptom of weakness; it’s an at times debilitating wound of war. “To effectively argue that veterans with PTSD are somehow weak is both wrong and insulting.” Steve Benen wrote Monday. “The fact that Trump, even now, still doesn’t understand the basics of this issue is extraordinary.”

    • Jill Stein Polls: National Polling Is Likely Significantly Underestimating Support For The Green Party Candidate

      Jill Stein could soon be making a big jump in the polls, with the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton starting to turn into a blowout and polls likely underestimating the growing support for the Green Party.

      Stein, running to the left of Hillary Clinton, has been lingering around the 2 percent mark in most of the national polls to come out in recent weeks. While it would take something of a miracle for Stein to win a state — or even grab double-digit support — the Green Party’s goal may be the 5 percent threshold that would guarantee matching federal funding for the next election cycle. And that could be well within reach.

      Although Stein appears to be only about halfway there in the polling, there are a number of signs that the current polling is underestimating the support for the Green Party this election cycle.

    • Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products

      Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon – not the seller or vendor – to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process.

      Amazon has historically prohibited compensation for reviews – even going so far as to sue those businesses who pay for fake reviews, as well as the individuals who write them, in an effort to make its review and rating system fairer and more helpful to online shoppers. However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their “honest” review.

      The only condition was that those reviewers would have to disclose their affiliation with the business in question in the text of their review. Reviewers were generally offered the product for free or at a discounted price, in exchange for their review.

      Although, in theory, these reviewers could write their true opinion on the product – positive or negative – these incentivized reviews have tended to be overwhelmingly biased in favor of the product being rated.

    • Iceland’s Pirates head for power on wave of public anger

      A party that hangs a skull-and-crossbones flag at its HQ, and promises to clean up corruption, grant asylum to Edward Snowden and accept the bitcoin virtual currency, could be on course to form the next Icelandic government.

      The Pirate Party has found a formula that has eluded many anti-establishment groups across Europe. It has tempered polarising policies like looser copyright enforcement rules and drug decriminalisation with pledges of economic stability that have won confidence among voters.

      This has allowed it to ride a wave of public anger at perceived corruption among the political elite – the biggest election issue in a country where a 2008 banking collapse hit thousands of savers and government figures have been mired in an offshore tax furore following the Panama Papers leaks.

      If the Pirates emerge as the biggest party in an Oct. 29 parliamentary election – as opinion polls suggest – they will deliver another defeat to Europe’s mainstream politicians.

    • Hacking an election is about influence and disruption, not voting machines

      Every time there’s an election, the topic of hacking one comes to the surface. During a presidential election, that conversation gets louder. Yet, even the elections held every two years see some sort of vote hacking coverage. But can you really hack an election? Maybe, but that depends on your goals.

      The topic of election hacking is different this year, and that’s because someone is actually hacking political targets. Adding fuel to the fire, on Aug. 12, 2016, during an event in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump warned the crowd that if he loses the battleground state, it’s because the vote was rigged.

      “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — and I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Trump said. This was no random remark either, Pennsylvania voting has been called in to question before. Such was the case when Republican supporters claimed Mitt Romney lost the state in 2008 due to fraud.

      When it comes to hacking elections, most people imagine voting machines compromised in such a way that a vote for candidate ‘A’ actually counts as a vote for candidate ‘B’ – or the votes just disappear.

    • If the election is hacked, we may never know

      The upcoming U.S. presidential election can be rigged and sabotaged, and we might never even know it happened.

      This Election Day voters in 10 states, or parts of them, will use touch-screen voting machines with rewritable flash memory and no paper backup of an individual’s vote; some will have rewritable flash memory. If malware is inserted into these machines that’s smart enough to rewrite itself, votes can be erased or assigned to another candidate with little possibility of figuring out the actual vote.

      In precincts where vote tallies raise suspicions, computer scientists will be called in the day after the election to conduct forensics. But even if a hack is suspected, or proven, it would likely be impossible to do anything about it.

    • The Clinton Foundation’s Legacy in Haiti – “Haitians are more than upset…”

      The Miami Herald has a video of Haitian activists protesting the Democratic National Convention, primarily because of the “Clinton Foundation’s spending in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.” According to The Nation in a piece titled The Shelters That Clinton Built, the Clinton Foundation provided Haiti with trailers “structurally unsafe and laced with formaldehyde” that “came from the same company being sued for sickening Hurricane Katrina victims.” Pertaining to the Clinton Foundation’s legacy in Haiti, The New York Times writes “the Clintons have become prime targets of blame for the country’s woes.”

      As a result of the Clinton Foundation’s controversial involvement with Haiti, The Huffington Post reports that Florida’s Haitian-American community might have a profound impact on Election Day. Ryan Grim explains the influence of Florida’s Haitian-American community in a piece titled With All Eyes On Haiti, Its Diaspora In Florida Could Swing A Close Election. With a sudden shift in U.S. immigration policy dividing Haitian families, alongside the Clinton Foundation’s role in Haiti, Florida’s Haitian community’s discontent might impact other ethnic groups on Election Day.

      It’s this backdrop that motivated me to interview Harvard-trained investor and financial analyst Charles Ortel. Dady Cherry of Haiti Liberte’ refers to Ortel as “one of the world’s finest financial analysts” and Mr. Ortel has spent over one year investigating the financial peculiarities of the Clinton Foundation. He’s also researched extensively on the Foundation’s involvement with Haiti and other countries around the globe.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • EFF Exposing The Back-Room Deals That Allow Corporations And Governments To Control The Web

      The EFF is publishing a series looking at the multitude of ways gatekeepers and governments can make content disappear from the web — using everything from legislation they helped craft to applying pressure to multiple points between the content they want removed and the person who put it there.

      But not every tool used to remove content comes in a form that can be contested by the general public. Some of these tools are the result of private agreements with private entities — agreements in which users have no say. The EFF calls it “Shadow Regulation.”

    • Shadow Regulation: the Back-Room Threat to Digital Rights
    • Singapore jails teenager YouTube blogger for ‘insulting Christians and Muslims’ with videos

      A teenage boy has been jailed in Singapore for “wounding the feelings of Muslims and Christians” in a series of YouTube videos, sparking condemnation from the United Nations.

      It is the second time 17-year-old Amos Yee has been imprisoned over his blogs, being sentenced to four weeks in jail last year over footage where he compared revered former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to Hitler and Jesus.

      He has been jailed for six weeks and fined $2,000 (£1,150) on six charges of intending to wound the feelings of Muslims and/or Christians and two of failing to attend a police station, the Straits Times reported.

    • Indonesia wants to criminalize memes

      If Trump’s job was to punish every internet user who ridiculed him with a meme, he’d sure have a lot of work to do. Luckily, U.S. netizens have enough freedom of speech to laugh at him as often as Harambe memes appear on Twitter.

      Yet making the use of memes illegal is not out of this world. Indonesia’s government is looking to criminalize internet users for posting them.

      Its Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE) punishes any electronic media communication that incites fear or embarrassment under its defamation article. The public has continuously called for the article’s removal, but instead Indonesia is introducing more restrictions to freedom of expression. Posting memes, texts, pictures, or videos would be punishable if found to have a defamatory or slanderous tone.

      According to the Indonesian government, this provision stands to prevent and control cyberbullying. But it can further be used as a political tool against opposition during elections.

    • Indonesia Government Introduces Vague Law Making Offensive/Embarrassing Memes Illegal

      Confession time: I think memes generally suck. Yes, yes, I know you love them, but when I think of memes, I tend to think of political memes on Facebook that I then have to drop Snopes.com links into the comments on, stupid copyright trolling over them, and that time Axl Rose tried to DMCA a meme so that nobody would see that he dipped into the chocolate fudge too much recently.

      Which is why I’m going to move to Indonesia, where the government has decided it’s time to put a strict control policy on any memes it finds offensive, embarrassing or that incite fear.

    • Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter

      A few days before Twitter’s Sept. 8 board meeting, as the company’s finance team readied a presentation, it received conflicting directions on a crucial question. Should their slides reflect Twitter’s prospects as an independent company or delve into the benefits of getting acquired?

      Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive officer, argued that the 10-year-old company should remain on its current course and work to capitalize on recent product improvements and success in streaming live video, people familiar with the discussions said. Ev Williams, a former CEO who has a history of clashing with Dorsey, was in favor of exploring a sale. Other directors agreed they had a fiduciary duty to consider that option. The board ultimately decided to consider takeover prospects after getting an expression of interest from a potential acquirer, which led it to hire Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co. to evaluate possible bids.

    • Kerry Dougherty: Censorship backfires in Neptune Festival sand sculpture competition

      They never learn.

      When those in power try to silence the little guys, it often backfires. And when heavy-handed actions to stomp out tiny voices of dissent are exposed, the resulting tsunami of publicity often helps the group that was targeted.

      Case in point: Last weekend’s sand sculpture caper.

      A coalition of grassroots groups, opposed to light rail but unable to afford expensive radio and TV spots, entered the freelance division of the Neptune Festival sand sculpture competition. For a $15 entry fee, they created a modest little mound of sand with a simple message: “Please vote no light rail.”

    • How countries like China and Russia are able to control the internet

      In January 2011, protests broke out across Egypt to demand an end to the despotic and repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak. The protests were largely organized online, through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Mubarak quickly realized this, and launched a counterattack: He severed all access to the internet from within Egypt.

    • Dam Busters screenwriter fell foul of Hollywood’s Nazi
    • British screenwriter was caught up in a censorship battle with Nazis

      A new book has revealed that the British Dam Busters screenwriter was caught up in a censorship battle with ‘Hitler’s Hollywood consul’ over the ‘negative’ portrayal of Germany after World War I.

      The book on RC Sherriff’s life suggests that Nazi agent Georg Gyssling managed to persuade Universal Pictures to halt The Road Back, All Quiet on the Western Front and Three Comrades in the 1930s.

      Roland Wales, who has written From Journey’s End to the Dam Busters: The Life of RC Sherriff, Playwright of the Trenches, said the studios bowed down to Gyssling’s demands in fear of losing revenue from German box offices.

      He said: ‘The Germans had a Consul in LA, a man called George Gyssling, part of whose job it was to keep up to date with the studio’s plans, and to encourage them to amend their films’

    • Art, Censorship and Race in Small-Town Idaho

      A home across the street from the school, where a Confederate flag regularly flies, became the center of the counterprotest movement with people running up and down the street waving Confederate flags, shouting “All Lives Matter” and “White Power.” In one instance, counterprotesters offered the students fried chicken and watermelon, saying, “Not that fried chicken and watermelon is racist or anything.”

      In the quiet of this past Sunday morning [Sept. 25], with nobody to witness but God and the approving eyes across the street, school officials painted all the parking spaces black, including Tamia’s. I wonder who painted the spaces and how they felt. Tamia was not informed.

    • A Call for Difficult Conversations, Not Censorship

      Re “Will the Left Survive Millennials?,” by Lionel Shriver (Op-Ed, Sept. 23):

      My initial response to Ms. Shriver’s keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival last month — walking out and writing about why — seemed to be largely misunderstood. Many took the reaction to be a call for censorship and responded with fury. They took as a given the right to say and write what they want, without critique, consequence or interrogation of intent.

      The debate is not about censorship: People can write in the voices they please. The real question is whether they should. It is about the structures that define the world in which we live and work.

      Fiction does not exist in a vacuum: It becomes people’s realities, because so often the only exposure we have to those with very different lived experiences to our own is through stories. But this discussion is larger than the world of fiction.

      Ms. Shriver claimed that those who now fight for equality have become the oppressor. Her words betrayed a disappointment that the times are changing, and lamented that people are so terrified of being caught saying the wrong thing that they instead choose not to say anything at all.

    • Here Are the Racist Code Words Trump’s Twitter Fans Are Now Using to Avoid Getting Banned
    • Racist Users Use Secret Codes on Twitter to Avoid Censorship
    • Ben Affleck Called Out for Censorship During ‘Accountant’ Press Junket
    • How Media Censorship Is Bringing Journalists Out On The Streets Of Kashmir
    • Even in difficult times, primary duty is to report: Mir Hilal, editor of banned daily Kashmir Reader
    • Banning Kashmir Reader
    • #Day90: Veteran Journalist Joins Protest Against ‘Kashmir Reader’ Ban, Recounts Experiences
    • Shutting down the messenger
    • Journalists hold sit-in outside Civil Secretariat
    • Government Bans Kashmir Newspaper, Fearing Anti-India Violence
    • #Day89: Ban on ‘Kashmir Reader’, Journalists Take Protest March To Secretariat
    • To Beat YouTube Censorship, Well-Known YouTuber Experiments With WebTorrent

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Other people’s computers

      The Internet of Things (IoT), which are devices connected to the internet, is gaining momentum. On the positive side, the idea of being able to remotely activate your central heating, or for your fridge to tell you when you’re nearly out of milk, is rather exciting. However, the darker side of IoT is its vulnerability to hacking, privacy concerns and consumer rights. This was a common theme at last Friday’s Gikii conference, an event dedicated to combining law, technology and popular culture. Think of tech law enthusiasts using episodes of Hannibal to illustrate cybersecurity flaws. Stand-up for geek lawyers.

      An opening talk by Jon Crowcroft, described the IoT as, ““Take all the stuff in the world with moving parts, and now make it as easy to use and reliable as your printer – then put it the far side of the Internet.” (Quote attributed to Derek McAuley.) The idea is that everyday objects are enhanced with internet connectivity. Done well, it should convey health, energy efficiency and productivity benefits. Done badly, and you have privacy concerns, hacking and consumers not being able to access goods and services they’ve paid for.

      Crowcroft noted some challenges of current IoT models, which largely rely on conveying information from devices to the cloud, and back again. He suggested three main critiques: 1) Poor Availability & Latency (connecting through the cloud introduces latency, dependent on internet connectivity), 2) Higher energy use and expense, and 3) Lower security and vulnerability to attack. Combined, these factors imply that the IoT does not currently offer the promised automated world.

    • Neighbor Describes NSA Contractor’s Arrest: “I Thought the Third World War Started”

      The raid took place on August 27. “I thought the Third World War had started,” Bennett told me via telephone, describing the sight of his neighbor of 10 years being hauled away by heavily armed FBI agents.

      Bennett recalls seeing “two dozen of these guys in camo uniforms, with rifles, come running across the yard knocking down his fence. … They dragged him out, threw him on the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away.” He says the FBI agents remained at Martin’s home until “3 or 4 o’clock in the morning” removing computer equipment and papers.

      Prior to this conversation, Bennett had not been informed of the reason for his neighbor’s arrest. He describes Martin, age 51, as a “good neighbor,” but someone who never talked about his work: “I knew he worked in Washington, but I didn’t know what he did.” Bennett added that he didn’t recall Martin ever talking about the U.S. government or fellow Booz Allen NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • NSA has lost some terrorists because of encryption, its top lawyer says [Ed: more anti-crypto hysteria]
    • Embarrassed about your cyber hygiene? UK’s new NatCybSecCent can help

      This week, the UK’s new National Cyber Security Centre, NatCybSecCent for short (and NCSC for super-short), has begun its operations. It’s part of GCHQ and will bring together a number of related groups: CESG—the information security arm of GCHQ—the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, CERT-UK, and the Centre for Cyber Assessment. The NCSC will ultimately be based in London, with a team of around 700 led by Ciaran Martin.

      Mr Martin is a man with his finger on the pulse. Fully three weeks before prime minister Theresa May announced that the UK no longer wanted migrants coming over here and daring to save people’s lives in our health system, Mr Martin had already announced the digital equivalent: the Great British Firewall, presumably building on the glorious tradition of The Great British Bake Off.

    • UK Stands Up GCHQ National Cyber Security Center in London
    • Government takes fight to hackers with National Cyber Security Centre
    • National Cyber Security Centre opens doors
    • NSA contractor from Glen Burnie charged with stealing top-secret information
    • NSA contractor charged with stealing highly classified information
    • FBI Arrested NSA Contractor For Walking Off With ‘Highly Classified Information’

      The NY Times story about this claims that the information Martin had was “computer code.” There’s a lot of speculation on the Twitters that this is related to the infamous Shadow Brokers “leak” of NSA hacking tools. The dates don’t fully line up. The Shadow Brokers leak involved code from 2013. The DOJ claims that the code it found Martin had is from 2014 — though it’s certainly possible that the investigation into Shadow Brokers led them to Martin (the arrest came the week after the Shadow Brokers info went public).

      [...]

      As always, it will be interesting to hear the other side of this story. We’ve certainly seen the DOJ come down hard on former NSA employees and contractors, claiming they had made off with classified information, when the later details turned out to show a lot less. But this is clearly a story worth following…

      It should also make you wonder just how many “controls” the NSA has really put in place to keep employees and contractors from walking off with highly classified information. We know that Snowden did it back in 2013, but the NSA keeps insisting that it’s put in place more controls to stop it from happening again. And, if this truly is exploit code, this is much worse. Snowden made off with information about certain programs — but not actual code.

    • Judge Overturns Denied Email Search Warrant, Says Gov’t Can Get It All, Dig Through It Later

      The “Magistrate’s Revolt” was fun while it lasted. Post-Snowden, a few magistrate judges began viewing law enforcement’s electronic search warrant applications with a bit more skepticism. These judges also rolled back a bit of the deference extended to the federal government, forcing the DOJ to narrow search requests or drop gag orders.

      The first flames of the revolt to be snuffed out occurred in a DC district court — the same district where “In re Sealed Case” is the most common docket entry — when Judge Richard Roberts overrode two decisions by magistrate judge John Facciola. The deference to “government knows best” was reinstated and the feds got their gag order and broad search requests approved.

      The same thing is happening in the center of the country. Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy reports that a Kansas district court judge has reversed magistrate judge David Waxse’s denial of an email search warrant.

    • Yahoo calls report of secret email scanning ‘misleading’
    • FU Yahoo!

      The security scare that surfaced about two weeks ago after it was revealed that information on about 500 million Yahoo users had been compromised was bad enough. Even worse was the fact that the compromise began in 2014, with word just now being revealed. The bullet in the head was the revelation Wednesday by Reuters that in 2015 the company evidently searched through its customers incoming emails, spying for either the NSA or the FBI.

      With that news, any nostalgia I had left for the brand completely disappeared. As far as I’m concerned, the site can now completely disappear from the Internet and I won’t feel so much as a twinge of regret that it’s gone. I can forgive the type of incompetence that led to the big breach, but I can’t forgive a website that betrays the trust of its users.

      On Tuesday, just hours after Reuters published its exclusive story on Yahoo’s cooperation with our spymasters, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the incident “the next front in the fight against mass surveillance.”

      The EFF article concluded by saying “this is a perfect example of why we need to reform Section 702 and rein in the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Absent such reform, Congress must not reauthorize Section 702 when it expires at the end of next year.”

    • Yahoo Issues Tone Deaf Non-Denial Denial Of Email Scanning Report

      Of course, people are parsing every word of that and noting some… remaining questions. The article is misleading? Okay, how? Which parts? What did it get wrong? You narrowly interpret every government request? Great. So explain what was found here, or explain the specifics of what Yahoo is doing. “Does not exist on our systems”? Did it ever? Does it exist on someone else’s system? Does a different mail scanning system exist? Lots of people would like to know.

      More importantly, note that they say they want to minimize disclosures. But that’s not the key issue here, as Chris Soghoian points out. The Reuters report was on the searching of all emails, not the disclosure bit. Yes, sure, it seems clear that after searching everyone’s email, Yahoo likely only “disclosed” a small number to the NSA, but that’s not really the point, is it?

      I mean, I guess this statement is better than Yahoo’s original: “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States” statement. But, it’s not very reassuring. Much more important is what Yahoo could have said, but didn’t.

    • NY Times And Reuters Claim Totally Different Explanations For Yahoo’s Email Scanning

      On Wednesday afternoon the NY Times released a report that appeared to clarify some of the questions around Tuesday’s Reuters report about Yahoo scanning all emails. According to the NY Times, unlike the original Reuters report that talked about a “directive” (which would imply an NSA surveillance program such as the one under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act), the scanning was actually the result of a more traditional FISA Court order.

    • Yahoo denies building secret app to bulk scan emails for US intelligence

      YAHOO HAS unconvincingly denied accusations that it built an application to enable it to bulk-scan emails on the request of intelligence agencies following a demand by the US government.

      The decision by CEO Marissa Mayer to comply with the order, rather than fight it, reportedly led to the departure of Yahoo’s highly rated chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, although Stamos has chosen to keep schtum on the matter.

      The revelation was made on Tuesday in a Reuters report quoting three former employees of the company.

      However, Yahoo has finally got round to hitting back, describing the reports as “misleading”.

      “We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimise disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems,” said Yahoo.

      However, in a series of tweets, privacy campaigner Christopher Soghoian described the company’s curt denial as “carefully worded”, and said that Yahoo “has a history of putting out carefully written, deceptive denials when it comes to NSA surveillance”.

    • Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter

      A system intended to scan emails for child pornography and spam helped Yahoo satisfy a secret court order requiring it to search for messages containing a computer “signature” tied to the communications of a state-sponsored terrorist organization, several people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

      Two government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the Justice Department obtained an individualized order from a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year. Yahoo was barred from disclosing the matter.

    • Facebook Messenger now lets you toggle end-to-end encryption [Ed: False, misleading claims. The FBI's Comey never even mentioned or shamed Facebook with the T word. It’s not because he forgot; it’s because they’re supine, complicit. When Facebook talks about encryption, safety, privacy etc. it’s probably alluding to resistance to China/Russia/boogeyman, not NATO/5 Eyes. How much is the corporate media willing to lie about Facebook encryption and privacy to entrap, mislead, potentially kill activists? Facebook helps the governments spy, retains private keys, we bet...]

      With the flick of a switch back in April, the popular international messaging service WhatsApp turned on end-to-end encryption for every conversation in its system, dramatically boosting security for its 1 billion-person userbase. At long last, parent company Facebook has finally rolled out the same protections for users of its standard Messenger service. Today, users can toggle the “Secret Conversations” feature on in settings to enable end-to-end encryption, ensuring that nobody can pry into chat content but the participants.

    • Basically All Big Tech Companies Deny Scanning Communications For NSA Like Yahoo Is Doing

      So, the big story yesterday was clearly the report that Yahoo had secretly agreed to scan all email accounts for a certain character string as sent to them by the NSA (or possibly the FBI). There has been lots of parsing of the Reuters report (and every little word can make a difference), but there are still lots of really big questions about what is actually going on. One big one, of course, is whether or not other tech companies received and/or complied with similar demands. So it seems worth nothing that they’ve basically all issued pretty direct and strenuous denials to doing anything like what Yahoo has been accused of doing.

      Twitter initially gave a “federal law prohibits us from answering your question” answer — and a reference to Twitter’s well documented lawsuit against the US government over its desire to reveal more details about government requests for info. However, it later clarified that it too was not doing what Yahoo was doing and had never received such a request. Microsoft’s response was interesting in that it says it’s not doing what Yahoo is, but refused to say if it had ever received a demand to do so. Google said it had never received such a request and would refuse to comply if it had. Facebook has also denied receiving such a request, and, like Google, says it would fight against complying. This still leaves lots of unanswered questions about why Yahoo gave in. Again, historically, Yahoo had been known to fight against these kinds of requests, which makes you wonder what exactly was going on here.

    • Government contractor arrested for stealing top secret data

      A federal contractor suspected of leaking powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing highly classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and a law enforcement official familiar with the case.

      Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, Md., was charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, authorities said. He was arrested in August after investigators searched his home in Glen Burnie and found documents and digital information stored on various devices that contained highly classified information, authorities said.

      [Read the full criminal complaint filed against Harold Thomas Martin III]

      Investigators are probing whether Martin was responsible for an apparent leak that led to a cache of NSA hacking tools appearing online in August, according to an official familiar with the case. Those tools included “exploits” that take advantage of unknown flaws in firewalls, for instance, allowing the government to control a network.

    • N.S.A. Contractor Arrested in Possible New Theft of Secrets

      The F.B.I. secretly arrested a National Security Agency contractor in recent weeks and is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer codes developed to hack into the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials.

      The theft raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, an insider has managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the N.S.A. In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a contractor for the agency, took a vast trove of documents that were later passed to journalists, exposing N.S.A. surveillance programs in the United States and abroad.

      The contractor was identified as Harold T. Martin 3rd, 51, of Glen Burnie, Md., according to a criminal complaint filed in late August. He was charged with theft of government property, and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. During an F.B.I. raid of his house, agents seized documents and digital information stored on electronic devices. A large percentage of the materials found in his house and car contained highly classified information.

      At the time, F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Martin, and he initially denied having taken the documents and digital files. The agency later said he had stated that he knew he was not authorized to have the materials. According to the complaint, he told the agency that “he knew what he had done was wrong and that he should not have done it because he knew it was unauthorized.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • ‘National Bird’ Exclusive Trailer: Errol Morris and Wim Wenders Present Story of Drone Warfare Whistleblowers

      Errol Morris and Wim Wenders both have new films out this year: Morris’ “The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography” examines the life and work of polaroid portrait artist Elsa Dorfman, and Wenders’ “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez” captures a conversation between a man and woman that encompasses the totality of life. But the two acclaimed directors have also executive produced Sonia Kennebeck’s documentary feature debut “National Bird,” about drone warfare and the three whistleblowers determined to break the silence around the controversial affair. Watch the trailer for the film below.

    • Feds indict 80 people — including 18 corrections officers — in ‘massive’ Maryland prison corruption case

      Federal authorities have won indictments against 80 people, including corrections officers and inmates, in an alleged conspiracy to sneak heroin, cocaine, cellphones, pornography and other contraband into the Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover.

      The largest federal indictment in Maryland history is the latest to allege that officers and inmates used sex, drugs and violence to run a criminal enterprise out of a state prison facility.

      It mirrors the 2013 case in which the Black Guerrilla Family gang used similar methods of bribery and intimidation to seize control of the Baltimore City Detention Center.

      Federal prosecutors now charge 18 corrections officers, 35 inmates and 27 others in a scheme in which the officers allegedly took bribes to sneak contraband into ECI, the state’s largest prison.

    • Decolonization—not western liberals—established human rights on the global agenda

      A paradox sits at the heart of the human rights movement. For decades it has made strong claims about the universality of human rights but then proceeded to present a discounted version of the universality story.

      Standard historical accounts have privileged the role of western actors, and their perspectives on historical causalities. These have been accompanied by an overemphasis on the 1940s and 1970s in explaining the emergence of human rights—an emphasis that reveals a scholarly addiction to “human rights moments” and iconic histories, instead of more richly contextualized narratives over time.

      The above-mentioned emphasis has resulted in a huge gap in knowledge concerning the intervening period – covering about 25 years from 1948 to the mid-1970s. In this period, the largest transformation of sovereign power in world history took place, namely decolonization. Surely, this structural transformation in the international system of states played a role in the post-1945 emergence of human rights en route to their contemporary significance?

    • Court acquits activist for violent anti-Zwate Piet protest

      The court acquitted anti-Zwarte Piet activist Jerry Afriyie on Thursday. Afriyie was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during a violent protest in Gouda two years ago, NOS reports.

      During the Sinterklaas arrival festival in Gouda in 2014 supporters and opponents of blackface Zwarte Piet gathered to protest at the town hall. They had no permission to protest there and the police ordered them to leave. The atmosphere turned nasty and a total of 90 people were arrested, both in the pro- and anti-Zwarte Piet groups.

      Afriyie was the only one to end up in court, according to NOS. According to the Public Prosecutor, he resisted arrest and injured a police officer by pinching him hard in the leg.

    • Imam beaten with a SHOE on live TV after claiming women SHOULDN’T wear the burka

      The Muslim cleric was repeatedly beaten with a shoe when an on-air row over the Islamic veil turned violent.

      The fight broke out live on Egypt’s popular LTC TV during a discussion about the place of the burka in the Islamic world.

      Sydney imam Mostafa Rashid claimed that the headscarf is a cultural tradition rather than a religious duty.

    • Undercover Video Inside Islamic School In The UK — A Teacher Instructs That Gays Must Be Thrown From Tall Buildings

      Good news: If you aren’t married when you have sex with someone, you just get beaten — perhaps to death — because you are to be given 100 lashes.

    • Ramsey Orta, who filmed Eric Garner death, sentenced to 4 years

      The Staten Island man who filmed Eric Garner’s final breaths was sentenced Monday to four years in prison for possession of a weapon and drug charges.

      Ramsey Orta told his family “it will be okay” in Staten Island Supreme Court as Justice Stephen Rooney read out his sentence.

      As court officers put handcuffs on Orta, protesters stood up in the courtroom, holding their fists in the air, flashing peace signs and chanting, “No justice no peace! F–k these racist police!”

    • Thailand bars entry to teenage HK activist ‘at China’s request’

      Thailand on Wednesday barred entry to a Hong Kong student activist who helped organize pro-democracy protests in the Chinese-ruled city in 2014, with a Thai newspaper saying he had been deported and “blacklisted” at China’s request.

      Bespectacled Joshua Wong, 19, was detained in Bangkok where he had been invited to speak at universities about Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Movement” street protests and on setting up his political party, Demosisto.

      He was later put on a plane back to Hong Kong where he told reporters Thai authorities had not given him a reason for refusing him entry but had shown him a document citing a security law. One officer had mentioned a “blacklist”, he said.

      “As a Hong Kong person, I did not expect that even if I do not enter mainland China, I would be inside a foreign detention center, detained by other police. This is unbelievable,” he said.

    • Officers tried to run over man before shooting him 14 times, video shows

      In the last seconds before he was shot 14 times, Joseph Mann dodged the police cruiser once, then twice. Dashboard video recorded the officer’s words inside the car: “Fuck this guy. I’m going to hit him.”

      “OK, go for it. Go for it,” his partner replies.

      The Mann family’s attorney amended his complaint against the city of Sacramento on Friday and sent a letter to the justice department requesting a civil rights investigation into the Sacramento fatal police shooting of Mann, a 51-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness.

      “It’s disgusting,” attorney John Burris told the Guardian. “It raises the question that this might have been a deliberate, premeditated murder, that they intended to do what they did.”

    • Victims of Pakistan’s ‘honor’ killings

      Tasleem was just 18 years old when her brother shot her in the head. Her crime was marrying a man of her choice, considered a betrayal of a family’s honor among many in Pakistan who live by an ancient code of conduct.

      Last year, three people a day were killed in the name of “honor” in Pakistan: a total of 1,096 women and 88 men, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which says the true figure is likely higher because many such crimes go unreported.

      In 2014, the number was 1,005 women, including 82 children, up from 869 women killed a year earlier.

      Outrage at the practice has grown in recent months as Pakistani news channels have reported on girls who are shot, strangled or burned alive, most often by a brother or a parent.

      Pakistan’s conservative Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised to introduce legislation that will remove a legal loophole that allows the family of a murder victim to effectively pardon the murderer. The loophole is often invoked in honor killings to prevent any prosecution.

    • Tougher penalties proposed for carrying a knife

      People caught carrying knives in the street will be jailed for longer under new proposals.

      Carrying a knife while in a group or gang, or filming attacks for social media could also spell more jail time.

      The Sentencing Council for England and Wales says it wants sentences to better recognise public concern amid a rise in recorded knife offences.

      Justice Minister Sam Gyimah said sentences should reflect the “devastation” caused by knife crime.

      Police recorded almost 29,000 crimes involving knives in the 12 months to March 2016 – a 10% rise on the year before.

    • Pakistani scholar ordered home from Australian tour after anti-Semitic video emerges

      A Pakistani scholar visiting Australia for a speaking tour has been ordered home after a video sermon surfaced of him saying the world will be purified when every Jew is wiped out.

      Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, who has a Facebook fan base of almost a million people, spoke at the Ghausia Masjid in Blacktown and the Al-Madinah Masjid in Liverpool over the long weekend.

    • California Passes Asset Forfeiture Reform Bill That Closes Federal Loophole, Adds Conviction Requirement

      After years of civil asset forfeiture abuse, legislators are finally fighting back. Reform bills have been offered up all over the country. Unfortunately, very few of them have made it to state governors’ desks intact. The DOJ itself has played an integral part in thwarting true forfeiture reform, but legislators are also battling powerful police unions and a law enforcement lobby that needs to do little more than say the words “drug dealer” to convince fence-straddlers to come down on their side.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Charter Joins AT&T In Using Lawsuits To Try And Slow Down Google Fiber

      For decades, incumbent broadband ISPs have all but owned state legislatures, often to the point where they’re quite literally allowed to write awful state law that actively harms state consumers. That’s why it has proven amusing to see these same ISPs cry like petulant children at Google Fiber’s disruption of the uncompetitive broadband market. AT&T, for example, has sued Louisville and Nashville for passing pole attachment reform that would speed up broadband deployment, all while claiming that doing so gives Google Fiber an unfair advantage.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Conference Archive Missing Video Critical Of Artificial Intelligence, Social Media Giants

      This morning at the World Intellectual Property Organization General Assemblies, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry commented on the success of the WIPO Conference on the Global Digital Content Market, which took place in April. But the full video of the keynote speaker, who had sharp words for corporate internet giants and other new technologies, is missing from the archive.

      His comments were made during the WIPO General Assembly, as delegates were about to discuss the report of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. A short video was then aired presenting a summary of the conference. The keynote speaker [pdf] of the conference was Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, music composer and performer, and author of numerous books, the latest “Who Owns the Future.”

    • WIPO Development Agenda Needs More Promotion, Country Involvement, Experts Say

      Has the adoption of the World Intellectual Property Organization Development Agenda in 2007 changed the culture of the organisation, and what did it achieve? According to panellists at a side event to this week’s WIPO General Assembly, the Development Agenda has not yet changed the culture of the organisation and its primary focus to support and protect intellectual property. However, WIPO should follow the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and collaborate with other UN agencies to include development consideration in its work, they say.

    • Vibrant Lauding Of “Historic” Marrakesh Treaty For The Blind At WIPO

      “Great victory”, “life-changing”, “historic milestone” – no adjectives were strong enough yesterday to celebrate the entry into force of the Marrakesh treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The treaty, which went into effect on 30 September, “opens the door to the world’s knowledge,” to visually impaired people, but will need many more countries join, in particular countries that are major producers of special format books – the United States and the European Union.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/dell-with-ubuntu-linux/feed/ 0 Battistelli’s Preparation for a Propaganda Session That Excludes EPO Staff Representation http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/battistelli-conference-stunt/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/battistelli-conference-stunt/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 11:31:05 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95898 One must not interfere with the brainwash (a so-called 'conference') that targets Administrative Council delegates (read-only/watch-only)

EPO brainwash session
Larger (more legible) version

Summary: Another new wave of EPO propaganda is upon us, and it helps keep the world silent while EPO management drives people to suicide, breaks legitimate unions, and flagrantly disregards all sorts of laws in pursuit of quick cash (at the expense of Europe)

THE EPO‘s management is a house of cards. It’s a house of cards because the harder it tries to cover up its many abuses, the more it pisses off the staff and the more stakeholders worry. What has the EPO become if not something an order of magnitude worse than FIFA and Volkswagen (Dieselgate)? Battistelli is now fighting a battle against truth itself, combating truth-tellers as though they’re Nazis and criminals (whom he habitually compares them to).

“Battistelli is now fighting a battle against truth itself, combating truth-tellers as though they’re Nazis and criminals (whom he habitually compares them to).”A few months ago a Spanish staff representative gave a spoken/oral testimony to the Administrative Council delegates. Battistelli probably doesn’t want to risk that happening again, so watch the preparations above (published earlier today). Well, it’s on the Intranet, so everyone would have seen it. There’s no need for comment, is there? SUEPO, the EPO’s only real staff union (about half of all EPO staff are SUEPO members), has already complained about being excluded.

The media has certainly been paralysed by now, so we don’t expect it to cover this story about brainwashing the delegates. It will just watch idly (if at all) while Battistelli and his liars for hire (commissioned bogus ‘studies’) lie to the whole world. Why is the Administrative Council consenting to this horrible exercise in propaganda? Why are people who complain about it (in advance) totally ignored?

“We’re dealing with quite a monster here and it’s politically-connected, immune from the law, and highly abusive at so many levels.”The material upon which the propaganda will be based was published late on a Friday. It was only published internally. The target audience is certainly the converted (to which there’s no need to preach), so in essence they wasted a lot of money paying some dodgy firms to say what they wish to hear, under the pretense of ‘independent’ assessment/audit. Will the Chairman of the Administrative Council be a “yes man” in this meeting? We would be surprised if it didn’t turn out to be the case.

As we said last night, calling the EPO “rotten” is an understatement. We’re dealing with quite a monster here and it’s politically-connected, immune from the law, and highly abusive at so many levels. Who or what can ever stop this beast? █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/battistelli-conference-stunt/feed/ 0 Addendum II: Photos of Troel Lund Poulsen With Fur http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/danish-minister-of-fur/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/danish-minister-of-fur/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 10:58:57 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95888 Summary: The connection between the Danish Minister responsible for the DKPTO (where the EPO’s Chairman of the Administrative Council is from) and a highly controversial industry

IN today's leading article that we have just published, soon followed by the first addendum (visuals), we already explained the connection between Danish politics and the EPO — a connection to be later emphasised (in later parts of this series). Animal fur (i.e. skin/flesh) will be a recurring theme. Farmhouses too will be a recurring theme.

Some additional information about the Danish Minister might be worth taking stock of before we proceed to future parts. This post contains some further information about Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish Minister responsible for the DKPTO. Poulsen resides on a 20-hectare farm in between Tølløse and Bukkerup close to the Iselfjord on Zealand. The location of his farmstead is Bukkerupvej 153, 4340 Tølløse (Google Maps or Google Street View).

Bukkerup

Bukkerup

Bukkerup

During his time as Environment Minister he earned the nickname “Tractor Troels” due to his liking for photo ops with tractors. Some sample photos are shown below.

Tractor Troels

Tractor Troels

Tractor Troels

Regarding the connections to the fur industry, we’ve noticed that in May 2016 Kopenhagen Fur ran a puff-piece about Poulsen’s visit as Minister for Business and Growth to the Kolding Design College (Designskolen Kolding) in the harbour town of Kolding on the Jutland peninsula. The puff piece is entitled “Troels Lund Poulsen looks at fur design” and includes a photo of Poulsen looking at a piece of fur (i.e. dead animal/s). We reproduce it below (fair use under criticism criterion).

Minister Troels Lund Poulsen looking at fur design

In simple terms, the photo just shows of the Minister Troels Lund Poulsen looking at fur design during his visit to the Kolding Design College in May 2016. Photo courtesy of Kopenhagen Fur.

In the coming days we intend to publish the next part of our series. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/danish-minister-of-fur/feed/ 0 Addendum I: Photos of Troel Lund Poulsen and Michael Dithmer http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/troel-lund-poulsen-and-michael-dithmer/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/troel-lund-poulsen-and-michael-dithmer/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 10:26:10 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95876 Summary: Additional information (with visuals) regarding the article “Kongstad’s Political Masters in Denmark and Rumoured Connections to the Venstre Party”

THERE are side items which relate to the detailed article that we have just published in relation to the EPO.

Here are some photos (a collage we’ve made) of the Danish Minister Poulsen responsible for the DKPTO.

Danish Minister Poulsen
Large version

Also included is a Danish caricature referring to the “Troelex” affair where he got into trouble over accepting an expensive Rolex watch from the Saudi king:

Danish Minister Poulsen caricature

Read our detailed article to better understand the relevance and significance of this latter cartoon.

Photos of Michael Dithmer might help put a face on the name that was mentioned quite a lot in our feature article as well. Here are some photos of the Permanent Secretary Michael Dithmer, who likes to hunt (kill) animals.

Michael Dithmer
Large version

A photo of Poulsen (Minister) and Dithmer (Permanent Secretary) during an official visit to Shanghi can be found below.

Danish Minister Poulsen and Michael Dithmer

Copies of the official CVs of Poulsen [PDF] and of Dithmer [PDF] are saved here as well, in case they modify these in the future (we already covered examples where lawyers changed their CVs in order to hide their connections to Microsoft after they had been exposed by the media or by blogs). █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/troel-lund-poulsen-and-michael-dithmer/feed/ 0 Danish Stories – Part II: Kongstad’s Political Masters in Denmark and Rumoured Connections to the Venstre Party http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/kongstad-political-masters-denmark/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/kongstad-political-masters-denmark/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2016 09:44:16 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95868 Another classic graphic on the Danish theme…

Danish story

Summary: A look at the political context surrounding the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation

IN the opening part of this series and in the previous post (with addendum that contains photos) we introduced readers to the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the EPO, Mr. Kongstad. Our exploration of this topic is very much relevant to the EPO, as shall become apparent towards the end of this long series.

“Kongstad seems to be in a position of significant power as the Chairman of the EPO Administrative Council. But it’s important to remember that this position is essentially that of a “primus inter pares” in relation to the delegates of the other member states of the EPO.”Mr. Kongstad is no orodinary person. Kongstad seems to be in a position of significant power as the Chairman of the EPO Administrative Council. But it’s important to remember that this position is essentially that of a “primus inter pares” in relation to the delegates of the other member states of the EPO.

For example, under the Administrative Council’s Rules of Procedure, any delegate can raise objections to the Chairman’s conduct of business and, if the objection is not upheld, the delegate may call for a decision by the Council.

Apart from this it should not be forgotten that as Director of the DKPTO, Kongstad is effectively a mid-ranking national civil servant who is ultimately subject to the authority of his political masters back home in Denmark.

For that reason it could be interesting to have a closer look at where the buck stops back in Copenhagen.

“Apart from this it should not be forgotten that as Director of the DKPTO, Kongstad is effectively a mid-ranking national civil servant who is ultimately subject to the authority of his political masters back home in Denmark.”The Ministry responsible for oversight of the DKPTO is the Ministry of Business and Growth. The current Minister is Troels Lund Poulsen who is a member of the Venstre party.

Before scrutinising Poulsen’s colourful and chequered political career, a short digression to provide some background about the Venstre party might be useful for readers who are not familiar with Danish politics.

Venstre – a Danish political curiosity

The Danish word “Venstre” literally means “The Left” but the party which bears this name is actually a centre-right conservative-liberal party with agrarian roots.

Venstre was founded in 1870 as part of a farmers’ movement against the landed aristocracy. Traditionally it was a conservative party advocating free trade and farmers’ interests as opposed to the interests of the aristocracy which were the platform of the other conservative party Højre (The Right). In the 1960s Venstre reinvented itself as a more classical liberal party. Today it is the major party of the centre-right in Denmark, and the third largest party in the country. It espouses an economically liberal “free market” ideology and some people would classify it as belonging to the “neo-liberal” camp.

“The Danish word “Venstre” literally means “The Left” but the party which bears this name is actually a centre-right conservative-liberal party with agrarian roots.”The party has often been in government usually as a coalition partner and many Danish Prime Ministers have come from its ranks.

In the most recent Danish parliamentary elections in 2015, Venstre received 19.5% of the vote, and 34 out of 179 seats. The government which formed following the election is a minority government consisting of Venstre alone which is supported by the other right wing parties. The current party leader and Prime Minister is Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

The Minister – Troels “Troelex” Lund Poulsen

Troels Lund Poulsen was appointed as Minister of Business and Growth in June 2015.

“It espouses an economically liberal “free market” ideology and some people would classify it as belonging to the “neo-liberal” camp.”Poulsen (D.o.B 1976) is a longtime member of Venstre who became politically active at 16, when he joined Venstre’s youth organisation Venstres Ungdom (“Liberal Youth”). A few years later, he had advanced to become its national chairman.

After finishing secondary school, Poulsen started university in 1996 but he never completed his history studies and left university without a degree.

His first and only non-elected jobs were as assistant to Venstre’s press chief, Michael Kristiansen, and as press coordinator for the Danish property development firm Ørestadsselskabet — two positions where he appears to have learned the fine art of spin doctoring.

In 2001, at age 25, Poulsen was elected to the Danish Parliament. Just six years later, he was appointed to the first of four ministerial posts which he has held:

  • Minister for the Environment from November 23rd 2007 to February 23rd 2010.
  • Minister for Taxation from February 23rd 2010 to March 8th 2011.
  • Minister for Education from March 8th 2011 to October 3rd 2011.
  • Minister for Business and Growth from June 28th 2015.

Source: Troels Lund Poulsen

“After finishing secondary school, Poulsen started university in 1996 but he never completed his history studies and left university without a degree.”Despite his meteoric rise in Venstre, Poulsen’s political career has also been dogged by controversy as documented by the Copenhagen Post in an article published in December 2011 entitled “Taxgate: Just who is Troels Lund Poulsen?”.

Source: Taxgate: Just who is Troels Lund Poulsen?

The Copenhagen Post article reveals that during his first ministerial appointment as environmental minister from 2007 to 2010, he brokered a deal to import and store the poisonous waste material hexachlorbenzene (HCB), a known animal carcinogen, from Australia. HCB is banned under the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants.

It was also during that time that Poulsen was widely criticised for accepting the gift of a 65,000 DKK (approx. 8,700 EUR) Rolex watch from the king of Saudi Arabia, the leader – and for then refusing to release his tax return to prove that he had declared the expensive gift. Poulsen finally decided to return the watch in order to silence his critics.

“The Copenhagen Post article reveals that during his first ministerial appointment as environmental minister from 2007 to 2010, he brokered a deal to import and store the poisonous waste material hexachlorbenzene (HCB), a known animal carcinogen, from Australia.”This incident earned him the nickname “Troelex” in the Danish media.

From 2010 to early 2011, Poulsen was Minister of Taxation – a job which he appeared to carry out without controversy until the so-called “Taxgate affair” surfaced in late 2011 some time after he had moved on to the Education Ministry.

Poulsen’s appointment to the Education Ministry in March 2011 was the result of another Venstre-government embarrassment which forced the then-PM Rasmussen to fire his Immigration Minister Hornbech and reshuffle the cabinet. During his seven months as education minister, Poulsen – who left university without a degree – was lampooned in the media as the “uneducated education minister”.

However, the incident which seems to have been most damaging to his reputation was the “Taxgate affair” which had been simmering in the background for some time previously but only really began to attract public attention in November 2011.

A timeline of the case can be found in an article entitled “Taxgate: How it all went down” which was published in the Copenhagen Post in December 2011 as an official enquiry was beginning.

Source: Taxgate: How it all went down

“During his seven months as education minister, Poulsen – who left university without a degree – was lampooned in the media as the “uneducated education minister”.”In December 2011 an official investigation was ordered into allegations that Poulsen and officials from the Taxation Ministry had been involved attempts to influence a tax audit of the opposition Social Democratic leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt and her husband Stephen Kinnock. At the same time Poulsen announced that he was taking a six month leave of absence from Parliament. One Danish journalist quipped that Poulsen might soon have the opportunity to complete his history degree now that his future in politics was looking less promising.

The Taxgate investigation went on for 16 months and involved the hearing of a total of 45 witnesses. The final cost to the Danish taxpayer was estimated in excess of 19 million DKK (approx. 2.5 million EUR) as reported by the Copenhagen Post in an article entitled “As Taxgate finally wraps up, total tab hits 19 million” published in December 2013.

Source: As Taxgate finally wraps up, total tab hits 19 million

“Poulsen is reputed to be fully loyal to his superiors “above and beyond the call of duty” and it seems that his loyalty to the party has been rewarded in spite of the many controversies which have overshadowed his career to date.”Political commentators have described “Taxgate” as one of the biggest scandals to hit Danish politics in recent times. Politiken newspaper’s editor-in-chief Bo Lidegaard has said that the case reeked of “political corruption” and “abuse of power”.

Although Poulsen’s reputation was undoubtedly damaged by the affair, he nevertheless managed to make a political come-back in June 2015 when he was appointed as Minister of Business and Growth in the newly formed Venstre minority government.

Poulsen is reputed to be fully loyal to his superiors “above and beyond the call of duty” and it seems that his loyalty to the party has been rewarded in spite of the many controversies which have overshadowed his career to date.

The “éminence grise” – Permanent Secretary Michael Dithmer

A significant figure in the chain of command between Kongstad and his Minister appears to be the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Business and Growth, Michael Dithmer.

“Bendtsen came under investigation for corruption in 2009 as a result of allegations that large Danish companies had paid for 23 hunting trips and 25 golf tours for Bendtsen and officials from his Ministry.”A long-serving career civil servant, Dithmer is also reputed to have strong Venstre connections. Both of his parents were lawyers and were Venstre members who sat on the Copenhagen City Council. It is suspected that Dithmer might also be a party member but this has not been confirmed.

In his role as a senior civil servant Dithmer is normally less exposed to the limelight than politicians like Poulsen but it turns out that he has also been involved in a fair share of controversies during his career.

From 2001 to 2008, Bendt Bendtsen, a member of the Conservative Party, acted as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Economic and Business Affairs under Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. During this time Dithmer’s duties as Permanent Secretary included advising the Minister about potential conflicts of interest in relation to gifts and benefits in kind.

Bendtsen came under investigation for corruption in 2009 as a result of allegations that large Danish companies had paid for 23 hunting trips and 25 golf tours for Bendtsen and officials from his Ministry.

“It was also reported that in 2007 Dithmer used his official BMW 730i with chauffeur to buy a new hunting rifle during a trip to Jutland.”The total amounts of the benefits alleged to have been received were reported to be of the order of 250,000 DKK (approx. 33,500 EUR).

Source: Bendt Bendtsen meldt for bestikkelse

During the investigation into Bendtsen’s affairs it emerged that Dithmer himself had been a willing participant in a number of hunting trips which had been paid for by DHH (Det danske Hedeselskabet), a business foundation which is one of Denmark’s biggest firms in private forest management and is involved in the commercial trade of forest properties in Denmark and the Baltic region. It was also reported that in 2007 Dithmer used his official BMW 730i with chauffeur to buy a new hunting rifle during a trip to Jutland.

Source: Bendtsens højre hånd fik selv jagtture”

“By 2009 the Danish press was already reporting that the cumulative losses associated with Roskilde Bank had reached the level of DKK 10 billion (approx 1.35 billion EUR) and were expected to climb even higher.”Dithmer also came under fire in connection with the collapse of Roskilde Bank, a regional lender that had existed since 1884. During the years preceding the recent global financial crisis the bank became a test laboratory for “innovative accounting”. It was later found to have grossly exaggerated the value of its assets, while the management indulged in self-enrichment by awarding itself millions in stock options and bonuses. After unsuccessful government-backed attempts to find a buyer, Roskilde Bank was finally declared insolvent in August 2008. By 2009 the Danish press was already reporting that the cumulative losses associated with Roskilde Bank had reached the level of DKK 10 billion (approx 1.35 billion EUR) and were expected to climb even higher.

Source: Roskilde Bank – taxpayers’ nightmare

Following the Roskilde insolvency, about one-third of Denmark’s banks either collapsed or were absorbed by bigger rivals.

In September 2009, the Danish Social Democrats called for an investigation into what Bendtsen had known about Roskilde back in 2006 at a time when the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) was already aware that the bank was in trouble.

“In January 2012, reports appeared in the Danish press that Dithmer had been the main inspiration behind economic measures which had cost the treasury at least 2.1 billion DKK (approx. 280 million EUR).”It was claimed that although the Ministry had been repeatedly briefed about the situation at Roskilde, officials in the Ministry had failed to pass the relevant information on to the Minister. Dithmer’s role in the affair came under scrutiny and questions were asked about what was claimed to be his close personal relationship with the Director of the FSA, Henrik Bjerre-Nielsen.

Source: Kendte Bendtsen til Roskilde Banks problemer?

In January 2012, reports appeared in the Danish press that Dithmer had been the main inspiration behind economic measures which had cost the treasury at least 2.1 billion DKK (approx. 280 million EUR). According to one report, in his role as Permanent Secretary he had pushed through a special government guarantee of 13.6 billion DKK (approx. 1.83 billion EUR) to Amagerbanken under Brian Mikkelsen, Bendtsen’s successor as Minister of Economic and Business Affairs. The measure was approved despite the fact that the Ministry had been advised against issuing a guarantee by Finansiel Stabilitet, a state-owned public limited company which was responsible for winding up the activities taken over from distressed banks.

Source: This page about Michael Dithmer

“In the next installment we shall start to look at Mr. Kongstad’s private entrepreneurial activities which he seems to pursue with almost as much enthusiasm as his day-job as Director of the DKPTO.”As a seasoned political operator Dithmer managed to weather these storms and to hold on to his position as the ” éminence grise” of the Ministry of Business and Growth. It has been rumoured that his connections to Venstre may have helped him to emerge relatively unscathed from the various controversies in which he has been implicated but this cannot be confirmed.

That concludes our little excursion through the corridors of power in Copenhagen where the political masters of the DKPTO reside. In the next installment we shall start to look at Mr. Kongstad’s private entrepreneurial activities which he seems to pursue with almost as much enthusiasm as his day-job as Director of the DKPTO. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/06/kongstad-political-masters-denmark/feed/ 0 Echo Chamber’s Lobbying: Team UPC Citing Team UPC as ‘Proof’ Regarding the UPC http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/upc-echo-chamber/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/upc-echo-chamber/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 23:57:24 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95861 Another TTIP/TPP-like spiel… because they want all the money and power and would lie for it

Peter Popoff
Reference: Peter Popoff
Mr. Popoff lied to people (said he spoke for God) and seriously harmed them in order to get their money. Likewise, the EPO and so-called ‘experts’ (a conspiracy of self-serving law firms) are lying to people (while claiming to speak for SMEs) in order to systematically rob Europe with broad lawsuits and shakedowns.

Summary: Another fine example where the echo chamber of Team UPC is trying to sell us the illusion that European businesses want the UPC

THIS Web site has spoken out against the UPC for nearly a decade, since before it was even known as “UPC”. One might think that it’s all over for UPC amid Brexit, but don’t put the guards down and rest on the laurels because history shows that foul play and nefarious tricks can accomplish all sorts of things, by pulling the right strings behind closed doors. We see this in TISA, CETA, TTIP, TPP, ACTA or whatever the powerful corporations and their lobbyists/lawyers want to have.

Also, the UPC ‘mission creep’ can still be found on the surface…

Bristows, a UPC pusher and British parasite, wants us to believe that the words of Tilmann (mentioned here before in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) count for something objective. Team UPC basically cites another Team UPC member and people notice this. One of them said that the paper was “authored under the chairmanship of Prof. Tilmann” (which isn’t OK).

IP Kat promotes the UPC quite a lot these days, at least when it’s Bristows staff authoring the posts. Here is the comment in full (under the misleading article with a misleading headline, courtesy of Bristows staff):

Since the author is keeping quite on this: “The German Bar Association’s recent position paper” was authored under the chairmanship of Prof. Tilmann who is presiding over the relevant sub-committee. For obvious reasons, this is not irrelevant and should be mentioned, at least if an objective information of the readers was intended.

So Tilmann of Team UPC interjected himself into IP Kat through Bristows (Team UPC). Nice propaganda, but people do notice:

To be fully objective, it should be stated as well that Prof. Tilmann is as well uttering a pro-domo plea as he has been heavily involved in the launching of the UPC. That the German Bar Association position paper reflects the position of its chairman is not a surprise.

In German he can be qualified as “Wendehals”, i.e. flexible neck.

In a first paper analysing Opinion 1/09 of the EuCJ, he was most adamant that the UPC was only open to EU member states. After Brexit, this opinion was not so important and a few amendments to the UPC under Art 87 would allow not only the post Brexit participation of the UK, but also further non EU member states.

It is amazing to see how an opinion can change when one’s own interests are at stake…..

We hope that IP Kat realises what it’s stooping down to. I confronted one of their writers this morning. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/upc-echo-chamber/feed/ 2 Loose Patent Scope Becoming a Publicity Nightmare for the EPO and Battistelli Does a China Outreach (Worst/Most Notorious on Patent Quality) http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 23:38:25 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95854 Who needs examiners anyway? Battistelli makes the EPO more like INPI or SIPO (China).

SIPO and Battistelli

Summary: The highly corrosive and destructive nature of Battistelli’s EPO presidency is demonstrated by his latest moves, which he foolishly advertises in the EPO’s Web site today (both the so-called ‘news’ section and his so-called ‘blog’)

WHETHER or not the EPO is becoming 'French' (i.e. no patent examination) it might be too early to tell, but in a matter of 2-3 years the stock will have run out and EPO examiners can expect massive layoffs. Insiders too tell us so.

“Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that.”The very low quality of patents in China (granted by SIPO, not the Croatian one) may be a sign of things to come at the EPO, under the leadership of Battistelli and the people he brought to the EPO (mostly from France, usually former colleagues from INPI where there’s no quality control). It’s all about quantity, not quality. Apparently, as I was told this earlier today by a university professor, Saudi Arabia had been pursing a similar strategy. They just use patents as trophies (false surrogate for innovation) and provide incentives — sometimes huge financial awards — for people to pursue the dumbest of patents just to increase the number of patents and give the illusion of scientific advancement/leadership. If this sounds like what the EPO is becoming, then it’s probably because it’s true.

“Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.”In my daily life I happen to speak to various academics and people who work in my domain. A lot of companies in Europe — as today I’ve learned — are reassessing the value of EPs (European patents) after the EPO descended to the gutter of patent quality. Dutch attorneys too are receiving queries to that effect, based on their letter which we published last week. Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that. Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.

Based on this tweet from earlier today and the Battistelli brain fart it links to (warning: epo.org address), the very low-quality patents of China are now common grounds for Battistelli. Is this what he strives for now? Attracting all the rejects, even from other countries, in order to just rubberstamp their rubbish? Is this the future of the EPO? It’s spelling doom for the EPO’s reputation and value. How much would people pay for EPs? 500 Euros apiece? What would that mean to existing grantees of EPs? How can one separate the wheat from the chaff or the noise from the signal? Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs). Here is the bogus ‘news’ from today (warning: epo.org address), complete with a photo op and glamourisation of the thug, Battistelli. To quote: “On Friday 30 September, President Benoît Battistelli welcomed Commissioner Shen of the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. The visit was held on the occasion of the annual EPO-SIPO Heads of Offices meeting, this year hosted by the EPO in Europe. The meeting is an annual fixture for the two offices and offered a valuable opportunity to discuss strategic topics of mutual interest and to take stock of the results achieved within the framework of both IP5 and bilateral co-operation.”

“Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs).”Worth noting: this meeting took place in France. Saint-Germain-en-Laye even (Battistelli was the mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye). The EPO has no branches/office in France. France is not a host country and France’s patent system is mostly a joke (some say because language barriers discourage applications from being sent there).

Battistelli has made the EPO look like something worse than a joke. It’s a banana republic!

And speaking of bananas, watch today’s news headlines to find “Seedy business: Patent war looms over Europe’s crop diversity”

Well, how far should patent scope go? Under Battistelli, anything goes…

Patents on seeds and plants are supporting a monopoly’s business model, not innovation or common interests. Here is what the article says:

An imminent EU legal opinion on food patents has raised fears among smaller businesses that agrichemical giants such as Monsanto and Syngenta will be able to monopolize varieties of staples like carrots and broccoli.

The European Commission is expected to issue an opinion before the end of the year to clarify ambiguities in EU law over the extent to which food products can be patented. The forthcoming decision has sparked a flurry of 11th-hour lobbying from industry and green campaigners.

The debate hinges on the nature of the innovation and whether the plant breeding techniques constitute genetic modification, or involve processes that are seen as altered or accelerated versions of more natural, biological processes.

Big companies argue that the ability to patent foods and seeds is critical to their business model, which involves pouring millions of euros into engineering bio-tech crops that they say are healthier for consumers and more resistant to pests. Their opponents say biological processes and their products should not be allowed to become exclusive to individual companies. They complain that food security and the environment could be at risk if crop diversity is reduced, with the most common vegetables being controlled by a handful of deep-pocketed companies.

In other news from today, the EPO has granted another crappy patent, this time on a thing that can prevent access to life-saving treatment. The patent is now partly revoked [1, 2, 3, 4]. How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly*? Verging endorsement of software patents again, today the EPO links to a notorious page that we wrote about before and soon enough the Office is going south (not just literally), to a country where software patents sort of exist.

“How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly?”If the EPO does not sort out its patent quality, for which it earned reputation in the first place, then it will lose everything. Battistelli doesn’t need to care because he can always go back to his political career in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Politicians needn’t retire in their 60s and Nicolas Sarkozy, Battistelli's political ally, is reportedly running for leadership again. █
_____
* Like organising stupid and self-aggrandising festivals for lobbying purposes at the expense of millions of Euros while buying the media — all this instead of focusing on actually examining patents, then granting or rejecting them based on their merit.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/feed/ 0 No Justice Even for a Judge at the EPO, as the Whole Institution is Beyond Rotten and Quite Corrupt http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/epo-kangaroo-courts-justice/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/epo-kangaroo-courts-justice/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 22:28:59 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95850 “The file against me contains so many demonstrably fabricated accusations that I have little doubt I can defend myself – or, rather I would be able to if, our internal system were not what it is currently, a kangaroo court.”

–Laurent Prunier, EPO staff representative

Corruption

Summary: The EPO’s kangaroo courts and farcical notion of justice should serve as a warning sign to anyone seeking patent justice at the EPO, either as partners/employees or stakeholders/applicants

THE EPO is a horrible, horrible place to work at. The staff survey speaks for itself and people who work for the EPO constantly remind us of the nature of the workplace, comparing it to being in the trenches.

The kangaroo courts of the EPO are some of the most jaw-dropping aspects of the EPO. Anyone can be accused of anything and so-called ‘evidence’ even fabricated or ‘sexed up’ in order to do whatever the egoistic President wants, making up for his insecurities and cluelessness by merely bullying people. We covered several examples of that over the past year. It’s not about one person. There are many victims and only few of them are courageous enough to go public.

President Battistelli believes he can be the accuser, the jury and a judge above the law (both national and international). He also acts a lot like an executioner, judging by the number of dismissal letters he sends out to people who represent staff (we might elaborate on this in some future series). Would EPO managers get away with murdering little girls because of the immunity they proudly claim inside Eponia? Read this new comment (posted today in relation to the EPO):

To: “Et sinon je reprendrais bien des croquettes”

When a drunken diplomat kills a little girl, immunity is upheld, but the diplomat is declared “persona non grata” and sent back to his or her country. The diplomat is then supposed to be judged there.

The Vienna convention was never designed so that diplomats can kill little girls with impunity. It was designed to protect, for example, USA diplomats to be judged for “anti-communist activities” in the former USSR.

In the case of International organisations, however, I am not really sure how the “persona non grata” concept is supposed to apply.

The above continues with more direct statements rather than hypothetical analogies:

Something else.

It has been 3 months since the Enlarged Board published that the EPO President violated judicial independence and nothing has happened. This is outrageous.

There is also the subject of the frivolity of the accusations. The board of appeal member who is the subject of the decision did, as far as I can tell from the available documents, nothing wrong. The accusations were downright ridiculous: having “objects which can be constructed as weapons” and “nazi memorabilia”. The exact wording at the time fails me, but it really sounded as if they combed his office and found nothing but a pocket knife and an history book to frame him.

This is also absolutely outrageous. It looks like the so called “investigation team”, even with major breaches of confidentiality (they bugged the computers used by the Council themselves, remember?) could not find anything serious and yet the board member is still guilty. Of what?

Next, we have had members of Suepo dismissed for, apparently, also nothing. Pure “coincidence”, according to a vice-president. Apparently, a few more will be dismissed soon.

As it was said on German TV: this is “Gantanamo auf Deutschem Boden”. How long will this scandal last?

From what we understand, it was sports equipment (a club), not a knife. It’s amazing how far Battistelli would go to get his way… we can also envision Parallel Construction being used to entrap or perhaps wrongly/falsely accuse the person, who in principle enjoys complete independence from the Office of Battistelli (evidently not in practice, especially when the Council and the Board of Mr. Kongstad become lapdogs rather than watchdogs of Battistelli).

The comment above is interesting and it is new. It’s a comment to which one person replied with a famous saying: “For evil to prevail it is only necessary that good men do nothing …”

I agree. There is a moral duty here. All my coverage regarding the EPO was done for zero financial gain. It’s just the right thing to do.

Another person said this:

The original accusation was that the member of the board of appeal used the public computers of the Office to spread “defamatory” material on VP3 – the weapons and nazi memorabilia were conveniently found later in his office and used for a classical case of character assassination.

To further reinforce the narrative about defamation, VP3 sued the member of the board of appeal for in a German court – you may have read the outcome above (28/09): it appears that the Procurator dismissed the case recently.

How long will this scandal last?

Scandal? Who says this is a “scandal” – you? And what about Newspapers, Lawyers, Judges, the IP world? Did you see any reaction from them? Because I didn’t. Therefore, it’s not a scandal. The Administrative Council is acting like this is totally normal. No scandal here.

If you wanna a scandal read TMZ.

The corporate media — and even so-called ‘IP’ media for that matter (we put IP in scare quotes because it’s a vague term that can refer to a plethora of entirely different things, not necessarily patents) — aids the EPO’s abuses by a conspiracy of silence and indifference. We spoke to some people from within this media and we know how and why they are gagged regarding the EPO. We think that a lot of so-called ‘IP’ media wants to just receive prepared ‘articles’ or advertise in ‘article’ form for the EPO, not engage in actual journalism. We recently covered examples from two major 'IP' media sites. Don’t expect them to cover the EPO scandals because they’re not designed or equipped for that. It’s just not their business model.

“Something is not just rotten at Eponia. Rotten is far too gentle a term and we intend to dig as deep as necessary to show what the EPO has truly become.”“Isn’t that just the point,” asked another new commenter (clustered deep inside an article from June at IP Kat, as the site no longer covers the scandals, just promotes the UPC for Battistelli). “The EPO’s immunity is designed to protect French Enarques from being pursued for “anti-union activities” on the territory of EPOnia. I see no incompatibility with the aims of the Vienna Convention …”

Tomorrow we shall continues our series about Mr. Kongstad. There will be a total of (by our estimation) nearly 10 parts.

Something is not just rotten at Eponia. Rotten is far too gentle a term and we intend to dig as deep as necessary to show what the EPO has truly become. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/epo-kangaroo-courts-justice/feed/ 0 Pieter Hintjens’s Legacy of Fighting Against Software Patents Lives On http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/pieter-hintjens-swpats/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/pieter-hintjens-swpats/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 21:31:24 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95844 Poster from Pieter Hintjens
Full size | Original PDF

Summary: Pieter Hintjens died yesterday, but his campaign to end software patents won’t die

LONG before we covered the EPO in depth we had published a lot of articles about software patents in Europe. One of our most powerful voices was Pieter Hintjens, who sometimes even contributed. Pieter died yesterday. It was a sad day for many including yours truly and we are still thinking about him. Many people only discovered him after his death or while he was in his deathbed.

The Wikipedia page does him some justice. Speaking from my own experience, Hintjens had a wonderful sense of humour, playful cleverness as Stallman likes to call it, and avid activism with a technical edge. I really liked him and I will miss him forever. Many other people feel the same way.

Pieter HintjensDuring the software patents “war”, Wildeboer said, Hintjens did this, pointing to the image above. Georg Greve, the guy behind the FSFE, said the same thing.

“I have a big box of papers from the swpat directive at my parents’ place,” Benjamin Henrion responded. “There should be one on there. And SSP [Stop Software Patents] tshirts as well.” He later added a link to the original PDF (of the above, we’ve made a local copy).

What a great example of the clever humour of Hintjens! He did many other stunts like this.

“Before slashdot era,” Henrion recalls, “there was segfault. Pieter wrote an article in 1998 predicting that Microsoft was patent tax FOSS #visionary” (and he was right!).

So rest in piece, online friend. We shall carry on fighting against abstract patents on algorithms. █

Photo credit: Hintjens “really liked this photo,” says Adam Flaherty. Photo by Tim Lossen.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/pieter-hintjens-swpats/feed/ 0 Links 5/10/2016: New KDE (LTS), Mad Max Coming To GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/new-kde-lts/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/new-kde-lts/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 13:36:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95841

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop/Microsoft

    • Lenovo won’t make Windows 10 phones due to Microsoft’s commitment issues

      Lenovo’s COO, Gianfranco Lanci, has said that the Chinese tech giant doesn’t intend to release any new phones running Windows 10 Mobile. This is because he doubts Microsoft’s commitment to its floundering smartphone platform.

      Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum 2016, Lanci said that while Windows 10 for desktops has been doing well in the business world, it has no plans to build smartphones using the operating system.

    • Latest Windows 10 Anniversary Update Build Sends Some Users To Reboot Loop Hell

      Those of you rocking a PC with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update may want to hold off on letting your system apply the latest round of fixes. There are several user complaints that Build 14393.222 (KB3194496), the seventh Cumulative Update since the Anniversary started flooding PCs in August, is borking systems by putting them into an endless reboot loop.

      The latest update package is supposed to deliver “quality improvements” in the form of several bug fixes for various issues, as well as improve the reliability of certain tasks, such as downloading and updating games from the Windows Store. Unfortunately, in many cases the installation fails somewhere along the way and rolls back the changes it made, as indicated by complaints posted to Microsoft’s support forums and Twitter. It also happened to me when I tried installing the update on my primary desktop.

    • More than half of PCs don’t have Windows 10 AU yet, and no one’s quite sure why

      Just 34.5 percent of all PCs are running Windows 10 version 1607, aka the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, according to AdDuplex, maker of a Windows 10 SDK for third-party app makers. The majority, 59.9 percent, are still running Windows 10 version 1511, also known as the Fall Update.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds admits ‘buggy crap’ made it into Linux 4.8

      Linus Torvalds gave the world Linux 4.8 earlier this week, but now appears to wish he didn’t after spotting some code he says can “kill the kernel.”

      When Torvalds announced Linux 4.8 on Sunday he said the final version added “a few stragging fixes since rc8.”

      But by Tuesday he was back on the Linux Kernel Mailing list apologising for a bug fix gone bad.

    • Open source compliance specs advance at LinuxCon

      The Linux Foundation announced the SPDX 2.1 and OpenChain 1.0 specs, which aim to clarify and standardize open source compliance and management.

      At LinuxCon Europe in Berlin, the Linux Foundation announced two new releases from different groups attempting to standardize open source license tracking, compliance, and supply chain management. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) Project announced SPDX 2.1 for tracking complex open source license dependencies, adding new “Snippets” and appendix features, and the OpenChain Workgroup released OpenChain 1.0 for managing the open source supply chain.

    • Linux: The free operating system alternative that changed computing

      For most of us, when we think of PCs, we think of Windows. But Microsoft’s popular and well-known operating system isn’t the only option.

      Many users choose to live without Windows and run different operating systems like Linux instead.

      This year is a special one for Linux, as October 5 marks 25 years since the release of the Linux kernel.

      If you’re discovering Linux for the first time, find out all about it below.

    • Linux 4.8 adds Pi, Surface support but Linus Torvalds fumes over ‘kernel-killing’ bug [Ed: Linux foes go full swing to make the kernel look bad]

      Announcing the 4.8 release on Sunday, Torvalds’ correspondence on the Linux kernel mailing list appeared calm despite a few “pretty small” issues carried over from the eighth and final 4.8 release candidate. He signed off with his usual “go forth and test” command.

      The several highlights of 4.8 include support for the touchscreen on Microsoft’s Surface 3 device and the Raspberry Pi 3′s System on a Chip.

    • Linux 4.8 Kernel Support for Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen [Ed: Microsoft sites put a "Microsoft" slant on Linux]
    • Solving the Linux kernel code reviewer shortage

      Operating system security is top of mind right now, and Linux is a big part of that discussion. One of the questions to be solved is: How do we ensure that patches going upstream are properly reviewed?

      Wolfram Sang has been a Linux kernel developer since 2008, and frequently talks at Linux conferences around the world, like LinuxCon Berlin 2016, about ways to improve kernel development practices.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • An Everyday Linux User Review Of Kubuntu 16.04

        My experience with Kubuntu has done nothing to convince me that I want to use KDE in the long term. If I did want to use KDE long term then my experience with Manjaro would definitely make me lean in that direction.

        This is an LTS release yet there are so many little niggles. New users to Linux will not be enamoured with having to find solutions to simple things like installing software.

        The problems are worse than those that I experienced with Ubuntu. At least with Ubuntu I could install a separate application for installing the good stuff like Chrome. With Kubuntu it is command line all the way and searching forums for solutions.

        With Linux Mint being so good it is hard for me to recommend Kubuntu 16.04.

        I am not the only person to have issues with Kubuntu, read this review by Dedoimedo, he runs into many of the same issues as I did.

      • KDE Neon 5.8 User Edition Linux OS Offers the Latest KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop

        The KDE Neon development team proudly announced a few minutes ago the release of the KDE Neon 5.8 User Edition GNU/Linux distribution with the recently released KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment.

      • KDE 5.8 LTS, Fedora PSA, Magic Security Dust

        The top story today was the release of KDE Plasma 5.8 which was covered by all the top sites. This release brings some new features and long term support. It’s already in KDE neon as well. Elsewhere, The Inquirer began a new series on the legends of Linux and Fedora’s Adam Williamson posted a public service announcement for version 24. A bit of drama emerged from Andrew Ayer’s systemd post and Martin Owens ruminated on Free Software Faith.

      • KDE Turning 20, Launches Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop To Celebrate Its Birthday
      • openSUSE: Beta 3 Release Updates FireFox, KDE Applications, VirtualBox

        The openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 3 was released today one day ahead of schedule and the last beta for 42.2 brought quite a few new versions for people to test.

        VirtualBox was upgraded from version 5.0.24 in Beta 2 to version 5.1.4 and there were an enormous amount of fixes applied to this newer version, which was released in August.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Releases WildFly Application Server Version 10.1

        Improved load balancing is accomplished through a new profile, called “load-balancer” in the default domain.xml file. Profiles in domain mode allow for centralized management of multiple nodes (physical or virtual). This allows for multiple instances of WildFly that can be configured to provide different services.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • FOSS Wave: Goa, India

          These sessions mark the beginning of FOSS Wave: Goa, India. We have seen a lot of enthusiasm in this event and many people were interested in learning about FOSS and cutting-edge technologies. Contributors are already flowing in and we expect more in the near future!

        • X crash during Fedora update when system has hybrid graphics and systemd-udev is in update

          Hi folks! This is a PSA about a fairly significant bug we’ve recently been able to pin down in Fedora 24+.

          Here’s the short version: especially if your system has hybrid graphics (that is, it has an Intel video adapter and also an AMD or NVIDIA one, and it’s supposed to switch to the most appropriate one for what you’re currently doing – NVIDIA calls this ‘Optimus’), DON’T UPDATE YOUR SYSTEM BY RUNNING DNF FROM THE DESKTOP. (Also if you have multiple graphics adapters that aren’t strictly ‘hybrid graphics’; the bug affects any case with multiple graphics adapters).

        • Fedora 24 Users: Don’t Run “DNF Update” From The Desktop

          Fedora 24 users are advised against currently updating your system using the common dnf update command when running GNOME, KDE, or any other graphical desktop. Due to an awkward bug being explored, it could leave your system in an unhappy state.

        • Fedora Devs Warn Users Not to Run “dnf update” Inside a Desktop on Fedora 24

          Earlier today, October 4, 2016, Fedora Project’s Adam Williamson published a public service announcement (PSA) to inform the Fedora Linux community about an important issue with the internal update process.

          It appears that many users of the Fedora 24 operating system have reported in the last 24 hours that they are getting “duplicated packages” and “kernel updates not working” errors when attempting to run the “dnf update” command to update their installations with new package versions released through the official software repositories.

    • Debian Family

      • My Free Software Activities in September 2016

        My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” Is Shipping with Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS, GNOME 3.22

          We reported a couple of days ago that the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system had reached end of life on September 30, 2016, and its repositories will be closing too on October 10 to make room for the next Parsix GNU/Linux release.

          That’s right, we’re talking here about Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev,” which was already announced last week by the developers of the Debian-based operating system and reported right here on this space. It looks like work on Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” had already begun, and the development team is teasing us with its new features.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Dell EMC ‘backs’ Huawei open-source management disrupter

    LinuxCon Berlin Huawei today announced OpenSDS, an open-source project to replace vendor-specific storage controllers and says it has the weight of world number three Dell EMC behind it.

    It’s understood OpenSDS was presented to Linux Foundation reps on a recent visit to China.

    The idea is that vendors’ products would plug into one side of the finished OpenSDS and third parties’ tools and software, such as Docker, Kubernetes or OpenStack, into the other.

  • What CIOs need to know about open source forking

    Forking is a concept that can strike terror into the heart of any CIO that relies on open source software. Here’s how to make sure you’re on the right side of the split.

  • Open Source MANO Issues First Release

    ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) group has today announced the availability of its OSM Release ONE, an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) software stack closely aligned with ETSI NFV, and focused on helping industry accelerate the implementation of network virtualization. The OSM community aims to deliver a production-quality open source MANO stack that meets the requirements of commercial NFV networks.

    Available less than six months since the inaugural meeting of the OSM community, Release ONE has been engineered, tested and documented to allow for rapid installation in operator labs worldwide that seek to create a scalable and interoperable open source MANO environment. Release ONE substantially enhances interoperability with other components (VNFs, VIMs, SDN controllers) and creates a plugin framework to make platform maintenance and extensions significantly easier to provide and support.

  • Magisk Updated to v7, Now Completely Open Source

    Amongst the most notable changes, Magisk is now fully open source from v7 onwards, including the binaries that it makes use of. In addition to this, the Magisk Manager is now a completely different app altogether, becoming a part of the core experience. New features and improvements are planned, so we can be sure that things will continue to improve in the future.

  • Nextcloud 10.0.1 Maintenance Release Improves the Updater, Patches Over 40 Bugs

    The Nextcloud developers have released recently the first maintenance update to the Nextcloud 10 series of the open-source and cross-platform self-hosting cloud server forked from ownCloud.

  • Study: open source groups take security serious

    The IT security practices of some open source communities are exemplary, shows a study for the European Commission and European Parliament. Many communities use experts to ensure software security and to help their developers avoid security flaws. “These communities take security serious”, says Alberto Dominguez Serra, one of the authors working for Everis, a IT consultancy.

  • ZeroMQ founder Pieter Hintjens dies

    Pieter Hintjens, Belgian software developer and past president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), gave much of his time and effort to the open-source community.

    He did so even up until the day he planned for his own death, which was today.

    Hintjens, who chose euthanasia today after dealing with terminal cancer, was a writer and a programmer who spent much of his life building large software systems and online communities, which he described as “Living Systems.”

  • It’s good to be an open source pro in Europe

    Open source employees in Europe have it good, especially when we compare that market to the rest of the world. This is according to a new report by Dice and The Linux Foundation. The report says that out of 1,000 European respondents, 60 per cent said it would be fairly easy to find a new job this year. Globally, the figure stands at about 50 per cent.

    “Demand for open source talent is growing and companies struggle to find experienced professionals to fill open roles,” said Bob Melk, President of Dice. “Rising salaries for open source professionals indicate companies recognize the need to attract, recruit and retain qualified open source professionals on a global scale. Regardless of where they reside around the world, these professionals are motivated by the opportunity to work on interesting projects.”

  • The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report Update: Insights From European Open Source Professionals
  • Walmart opens website to OS community
  • @WalmartLabs applies Electrode to get current with web dev
  • WalmartLabs open sources platform that powers Walmart.com
  • WalmartLabs open sources its React-powered universal application platform that underlines Walmart.com
  • Introducing Electrode, an open source release from WalmartLabs
  • These open-source compute technologies can help you build and scale your apps faster

    From ordering food, to finding a good doctor in the vicinity or enhancing our learning skills, most of us use an app, whether we are a teenager, in our 30s or even a septuagenarian.

    Not just big brands or multi-national companies, even small and medium businesses and startups are going down the app route. In fact, even your small neighbourhood street food joint wants you to rate their food and service on a popular restaurant search and discovery app because it means better business and value.

    For most organisations today, there are no second thoughts on whether an app is vital for their growth or not. The advantages of having an app are evident – from being able to stay on top of the customers’ mind and building brand loyalty, to being able to provide value to the customers, and doubling up as a marketing channel, apps are playing a vital role.

  • Tibco releases IoT integration toolkit to open source
  • Open Source Project Flogo Pushes IoT Integration and Connectivity to the Edge

    TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration and analytics, today announced the immediate availability of its ultra-lightweight IoT integration solution, Project Flogo™. Its tiny open source integration engine allows application and business logic to run on edge devices, simplifying IoT integration challenges, avoiding technological lock-in, and reducing costs.

  • Tips from a software engineer for a balanced life

    Kent Dodds is a busy, busy guy. He’s a full stack JavaScript engineer at PayPal, hosts JavaScript Air, co-hosts React30, is an instructor on Egghead.io, is a Google Developer Expert, and spends a lot of time on Twitter and GitHub.

    He’s speaking at All Things Open this year on automating the open source contributions and maintenance management process in two sessions: Managing an Open Source Project and How to Open Source Your Stuff.

  • How to champion your committers

    A number of companies today proudly wear the open source badge to show their dedication to various projects, particular communities, or simply the idea of free software licensing. Many have gone down the Red Hat business route, creating a revenue model based on support and services, while others have built their business around proprietary features and add-ons to open source projects.

  • Aditya Mukerjee: Crossing the Language Divide in Open Source

    This fascinating talk from September’s GitHub Universe 2016 in San Francisco by Aditya Mukerjee, an engineer at Stripe, made me think a lot about language privilege and global digital inclusion. Mukerjee grabs you in his opening remarks, “I always keep my eye out for the ways technology can empower the disenfranchised — how it can amplify the voices of the subaltern. And it’s crucial to listen to those voices if we want to solve the biggest problems that the world faces.”

  • Web Browsers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Faith for the Long Term

      But that naturally led to the in-fighting. It’s typical for the front runner to be targeted by all the also-ran distributions. The FSF targeted Ubuntu’s practicalist concessions (even though they were fairly minimal), Other distributions ripped Ubuntu and their community apart, trying to block Ubuntu’s success. I’m not saying they meant to do it, or that it was a conspiracy. But that these other communities did not see Ubuntu’s success as their own success and naturally tried to undermine it as humans are likely to do.

      So for very human reasons, we’re here with no real champion for Free Software in the practical arena. Ubuntu has fallen for its own hype and is not able to being the Free Software faith with it, even if it was successful. The societal and long term benefits of Free software remain largely unknown to the majority of the world and we wait patiently for a successor that can try again to change the world.

    • Free Software Directory meeting recap for September 30th, 2016
    • Twenty-two new GNU releases in September

      apl-1.6a
      autoconf-archive-2016.09.16
      autogen-5.18.12
      bash-4.4
      denemo-2.0.12
      drgeo-16.10a
      emacs-25.1
      gawk-4.1.4
      global-6.5.5
      gnucash-2.6.14
      gnuchess-6.2.3
      gnu-c-manual-0.2.5
      gnutls-3.5.4
      gsl-2.2.1
      libmicrohttpd-0.9.51
      libosip2-5.0.0
      nano-2.7.0
      parallel-20160922
      readline-7.0
      texinfo-6.3
      unifont-9.0.02
      xorriso-1.4.6

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Amyris and Autodesk Offer Powerful Open Source Tools for Genetic Design to Enable Rapid DNA Engineering

        Genotype Specification Language (GSL), is a programming language that facilitates the rapid design of large and complex DNA constructs used to engineer genomes. The GSL compiler implements a high-level language based on traditional genetic notation, as well as a set of low-level DNA manipulation primitives. The language allows facile incorporation of parts from a library of cloned DNA constructs and from the “natural” library of parts in fully sequenced and annotated genomes. GSL was designed to engage genetic engineers in their native language while providing a framework for higher level abstract tooling. GSL was developed and open sourced by Amyris.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • OpenMYR Open Source Wireless Motors (video)

        The creator of the wireless motors Kyle Berezin explains more about their inspiration, design and features as well as some of the applications that they can be used for.

  • Programming/Development

    • The cost of forsaking C

      The C programming language is not trendy. The most recent edition of the canonical C text (the excitingly named The C Programming Language) was published in 1988; C is so unfashionable that the authors have neglected to update it in light of 30 years of progress in software engineering. Everyone “has been meaning to” learn Rust or Go or Clojure over a weekend, not C. There isn’t even a cute C animal in C’s non-logo on a C decal not stuck to your laptop.

      But Myles and I are not trendy people, so we insist that all of our students become fluent in C. A fresh class of C converts has just finished working through the K&R bible, making this a good time for me to reflect on why we deify this ancient tongue.

      We give students four reasons for learning C:

      It is still one of the most commonly used languages outside of the Bay Area web/mobile startup echo chamber;
      C’s influence can be seen in many modern languages;
      C helps you think like a computer; and,
      Most tools for writing software are written in C (or C++)

      The first is easy to dismiss if one likes the Bay Area web/mobile startup echo chamber, the second if one hates C’s influence on many more modern languages. Most engineers should take head of reason three, although our students also learn computer architecture and at least one assembly language, so have a firm mental model of how computers actually compute. But reason four is hard to ignore.

      Forsaking C means forsaking anything below the level of abstraction at which one happens to currently work. Those who work for instance as web developers forsake thoroughly understanding the browsers, operating systems and languages on top of which their own work stands.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Revealed: MRSA variant found in British pork at Asda and Sainsbury’s

      Meat produced from British pigs has been shown to be infected with a livestock strain of MRSA, the Guardian can reveal, raising concerns that the UK is on the brink of another food scandal.

      Tests on a sample of 97 UK-produced pork products from supermarkets show that three – sold at Asda and Sainsbury’s – were contaminated with the superbug strain which can cause serious health problems.

      The Guardian, working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), has also established that a loophole in import regulations is leaving an open door for MRSA CC398-infected live pigs from countries such as Denmark, where the disease is rife.

    • Poland abortion strike: Thousands of women in over 60 cities refuse to work in protest over restrictive laws

      Thousands of Polish women dressed in black have boycotted work and taken to the streets in protest against a plan to ban abortions.

      Without half their workforce, government offices, universities and schools in 60 cities across the country closed their doors.

      For the day of action, dubbed “Black Monday”, women donned dark-coloured clothes in a symbol of mourning for the loss of reproductive rights they fear.

      Poland already has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws and opinion surveys show very little support for an even stricter law, despite the nation’s deep Catholicism and conservative political direction.

    • Flint Hit With Bacterial Illness as Residents Shun City Water

      Residents of Flint, Mich., affected by the contaminated-water crisis have added a new complication to their lives: an outbreak of shigellosis, a bacterial illness that is easily transmitted when people do not wash their hands.

      Health department officials in Genesee County, where Flint is the largest city, said there has been an increase in the gastrointestinal illness, which can lead to severe diarrhea, fever, nausea, vomiting, cramps and stools containing blood and mucus, according to a statement issued last month.

    • UNITAID-FIND Partnership To Scale Up Hepatitis C Diagnostics

      New medicines have revolutionised HCV treatment in high-income countries, yet the lack of appropriate diagnostic tools for HCV infection remains a challenge. Catharina Boehme, chief executive officer of FIND, outlined that HCV is “a silent killer which goes unnoticed until it is almost too late.” Accordingly, 85 percent of cases occur in low- and middle-income countries, with fewer than 1 percent of persons aware of their infection.

      The US$38.3 million project aims to develop “better, simpler, point-of-care diagnostic tools for HCV, and will introduce HCV testing and treatment in HIV programmes” with national governments and local implementation partners in Cameroon, Georgia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, over the next three years.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Putin Suspends Weapons-Grade Plutonium Deal With US

      resident Vladimir Putin on Monday suspended a Russia-U.S. deal on the disposal of weapons-grade plutonium, a move that comes amid escalating tensions over Syria between Moscow and Washington.

      Putin’s decree released by the Kremlin cited Washington’s “unfriendly actions” and the United States’ inability to fulfill its obligations under the 2000 deal as reasons for the move.

      However, the decree says that the weapons-grade plutonium that has fallen under the agreement will be kept away from weapons programs.

    • Clinton: ‘I don’t recall any joke’ about droning WikiLeaks founder

      Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said she doesn’t remember ever commenting — joking or otherwise — about using a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

      “I don’t recall any joke,” Clinton said, when asked Tuesday at a press conference in Pennsylvania.

      “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don’t recall that.”

      The website TruePundit posted a report Sunday that alleged Clinton had in 2010 spoken of a drone strike against Assange.

      The report cited State Department sources and claimed Clinton had said: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

    • Sen Mitch McConnell blames Obama for bill that Obama vetoed and McConnell repeatedly voted for

      Congress has overridden Obama’s repeated veto for the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act,” which allows US citizens to sue the Saudi government over its alleged complicity in the 9/11 attacks — and which may allow people in other countries hamed by actions sponsored by the US government sue the US in those countries’ courts.

      However you feel about the Saudi role in 9/11, or the US government’s actions abroad, there is one absolutely unequivocal fact: Obama opposed the bill, and Republicans in the House and Senate passed it over his strenuous, repeated objections.

      But those facts haven’t stopped senior GOP senator Mitch McConnell from blaming Obama for the law, despite the fact that McConnell vote for the law, voted again for it, then voted “Aye” on the proposition, “Shall the Bill S. 2040 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?” (McConnell was joined by 28 senators who’d also written a letter condemning the law, warning of the risk of “potential unintended consequences”).

      McConnell said “I hate to blame everything on him, and I don’t” but “it would have been helpful had we had a discussion about this much earlier than last week.” The White House had repeatedly sent information to the Senate about the potential negative consequences of the bill for US interests. Nevertheless, McConnell accused Obama of “dropping the ball” by merely repeatedly vetoing the bill and pleading with Congress to reconsider, which left Congress in a state where “[n]obody [in Congress] really had focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships.”

    • Philippine president: Obama to hell, EU to purgatory

      Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has told President Barack Obama “you can go to hell” in his latest tirade against the U.S. over its criticism of his deadly anti-drug campaign.

      He also lashed out anew at the European Union in a speech Tuesday saying the 28-nation bloc, which has also criticized his brutal crackdown, “better choose purgatory, hell is filled up.”

      Duterte, who took office in June, has been hypersensitive to criticisms over his anti-drug fight, which has left more than an estimated 3,000 suspected drug dealers and pushers dead in just three months, alarming the United Nations, the E.U., the U.S. and human rights watchdogs.

    • PM wants British troops pulled out of European convention on human rights

      The Tory government want British soldiers to be exempt from the European Convention on Human Rights during future conflicts so they cannot be sued, in a move that has outraged activists.

      The plans were announced by prime minister Theresa May and defence secretary Michael Fallon at the Conservative party conference on Tuesday.

      The ECHR was established in 1953 by the Council of Europe with Britain as a founding member. Now, after more than 60 years, May wants out of the bits she doesn’t like.

    • FBI’s Comey: Actually, Chasing ISIS Off Twitter Makes It More Difficult For Us To Follow Them

      Over and over again we keep hearing politicians and others going on and on about the need for social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to kick ISIS users off their platforms. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have called for this. And some people at these companies are supportive of this idea. Twitter regularly feels compelled to talk about how many ISIS accounts it removes.

      Yet, as we’ve pointed out each time it’s done so, this seems backwards. We’ve noted that intelligence officials have claimed that they actually get really good intelligence from following these social media accounts. But generally those voices aren’t heard as much. So it’s actually great to see FBI Direct James Comey (someone we rarely agree with) come out and say it directly: kicking ISIS members off Twitter makes things more difficult for law enforcement.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Indexing the Empire: How to Use Wikileaks’ Public Library of US Diplomacy

      “The Public Library of US Diplomacy,” or “PlusD,” is a very large and constantly expanding collection of internal documents from the US Department of State, published by WikiLeaks in a searchable archive. The library began in 2010 and at the time of writing contains 2,325,961 individual documents made up of about 2 billion words, spread over three collections of cables: Cablegate, the Kissinger Cables, and the Carter Cables. The State Department is the foreign affairs department of the US government and oversees the embassies and consulates of the United States all over the world. Each embassy or consulate corresponds with the State Department in Washington, DC, by sending daily telegram reports, or “cables,” between them, using a special electronic communications system.

      PlusD contains within it the WikiLeaks publication known as Cablegate: the collection of State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011. Cablegate itself consists of 251,287 cables, accounting for 261,276,536 words in total. If printed out in a standard-sized font, Cablegate alone would form a single line over 6,000 kilometers long — the distance to the center of the Earth. The cables are an average of 1,039 words long, revealing detailed internal information about the operation of 274 US embassies and consulates, and their activity within their host country.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • How the Earth will pay us back for our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions

      The really scary thing about climate change is not that humans will fail to get their emissions under control. The really scary thing is that at some point, the Earth will take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.

      A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality — some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in permafrost, and are also vulnerable.

    • Research Suggests Peat Fires In Indonesia Could Worsen Global Warming In This Century

      The really scary thing about climate change is not simply that humans may fail to get their emissions under control. It’s that at some point, the Earth could take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.

      A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality – some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in permafrost, and are also vulnerable.

      In each case, if that carbon gets out of the land and into the atmosphere, then global warming will get worse. But global warming could itself up the odds of such massive carbon release. That’s a dangerous position to be in as the world continues to warm.

      In the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of researchers led by Yi Yin of the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement look at the potential of peat bogs in equatorial Asia – a region that includes Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and several other smaller countries but is dominated by Indonesia and some of its largest islands, Kalimantan and Sumatra – to worsen our climate problems. It’s timely, considering that last year amid El Niño-induced drought conditions Indonesian blazes emitted over 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere. That’s more than the annual emissions of Japan (or, needless to say, of Indonesia’s fossil fuel burning).

  • Finance

    • Bitcoin makes inroads with new ATM in Kouvola

      A new Bitcoin ATM to be located in the southeastern city of Kouvola at the end of October will bring the number of such machines in Finland to nine. Officials say that because Bitcoin is a virtual currency that knows no borders, it’s difficult to estimate the number of users in Finland. Current guesstimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands.

    • Ericsson Slashes 3,000 Jobs in Sweden

      Ericsson AB said Tuesday that it plans to lay off nearly 20% of its home-country workforce, as the Swedish maker of telecom-network equipment races to cut costs amid intensifying competition from Chinese rivals and weak demand for its specialty wireless products.

    • Ericsson to slash about 3,000 jobs – up to 175 in Finland

      Some 175 Ericsson employees in Finland will be affected by the employer-employee negotiations that the Swedish telecom company announced it was starting on Tuesday.

      The company said that it plans to reduce up to 3,000 positions globally in production, research and development and sales and administration. Most of the personnel cuts will be made in Sweden.

      In a press release issued on Tuesday, Ericsson said that dismissals will be carried out using a combination of voluntary and forced reductions, as well as other measures, such as outsourcing.

      Altogether some one thousand of the affected employees work in Ericsson’s production unit, about 800 in research and development and around 1,200 in other departments.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Tim Kaine brings Wall Street fundraising muscle to Clinton campaign

      Pundits were quick to point out the benefits Sen. Tim Kaine may bring Hillary Clinton as her running mate in helping win his home-and-battleground state of Virginia.

      But what flew under the radar was that Kaine may play a key role in helping Clinton raise money, especially when it comes to Wall Street.

      Clinton has proven herself a capable fundraiser, announcing nearly $90 million in contributions for the past month. The former secretary of state is a known quantity with Wall Street as well, having delivered speeches to banks and representing the heart of the financial services industry as a senator from New York.

      In the lead-up to Clinton’s pick of a running mate, the potential that she might choose Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has made cracking down on banks a centerpiece of her agenda — had Wall Street ready to tighten its pockets for donations.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • After Facebook “censors” anti-Muslim posts, hate groups sue US gov’t

      In July 2016, an organization called the “American Freedom Defense Initiative” joined another group called Jihad Watch in suing US Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Both entities felt slighted by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

      In their 25-page civil complaint, the two anti-Muslim activists and their respective organizations made a ludicrous argument. The groups claimed that as the country’s top cop, Lynch “enforces” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that limits libel and other civil suits filed against websites, service providers, and other online publishers. However, the Communications Decency Act is a civil, rather than a criminal, statute.

      AFDI—which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated last year as an anti-Muslim hate group—is the same group that opposed the proposed Park51 Islamic center that was to be built two blocks from Ground Zero. In 2013, the AFDI’s co-founder, Pamela Geller, and her fellow co-founder, Robert Spencer (who also founded JihadWatch), were banned from entering the United Kingdom for their “extremist” views.

    • ‘The end of Trump’: how Facebook deepens millennials’ confirmation bias

      HBO host John Oliver achieved the destruction of Donald Trump on 29 February 2016. At least, according to the Daily Beast.

      Fansided, a popular social news aggregator, dates Trump’s destruction at 1 August while the Daily Good called it for 21 March. Salon found no fewer than “13 glorious times” that Oliver had destroyed the real estate tycoon.

      Sharp-eyed consumers of the news might note that it is impossible to, as the dictionary says, “put an end to the existence of something” more than a single time. But for #NeverTrump Facebook users who love any content they see as bringing Trump down a peg, the formulaic headline is indicative of the Facebook media landscape: the most shareable, clickable and likable content on the site aligns strongly with its readership’s pre-existing biases, assumptions and political affiliation.

      For millennials who have never known an election without Facebook, the political landscape of the social media network has massive implications for the upcoming contest between Hillary Clinton and Trump – not least of which because of Facebook’s outsized influence on their exposure to political news.

      Six out of every 10 millennials (61%) get their political news on Facebook, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, making the 1.7 billion-user social behemoth (which includes more than 200 million in the United States) the largest millennial marketplace for news and ideas in the world. But within Facebook’s ecosystem exists a warren of walled gardens, intellectual biomes created by users whose interest in interacting with opposing political views – and those who are them – is nearly nonexistent.

    • Spare me the campus ayatollahs ruining my student life: An undergraduate’s fearless broadside against the joyless PC takeover of our universities

      The drunken travails of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim — a shambolic junior academic — have long become a byword for the excesses of university life.

      Flirting, seduction and seeing how many pints you could fit in between lectures were once relatively harmless pastimes on campuses across Britain.

      Yet today, too many universities seem determined to nanny students who are deemed too fragile to be exposed to the rough and tumble of the real world.

      Consider the fact that, this week, it emerged that all new students arriving at Oxford and Cambridge are being asked to attend ‘consent classes’ aimed at preventing rape and sexual harassment at the universities.

      At Oxford, the courses are compulsory as part of freshers’ week, while the student union is urging rugby players to attend anti-sexism workshops to fight ‘lad culture’.

      At Cambridge, consent classes are also being held for freshers, with students of some colleges having to opt out if they don’t wish to attend.

    • Censorship turns up the volume
    • NO, HATE CRIME LAWS AREN’T CENSORSHIP – AND HERE’S WHY
    • Far-right Twitter and Facebook users make secret code to avoid censorship
    • Right-wingers and ‘free speech’ trolls devise secret internet language to dodge online censorship
    • White supremacy worms around censorship to create larger threats

      The alt-right has found a way to evade the censorship policies on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

      The far, far, far-right hate group has begun using the names of Internet applications like “Yahoo” and “Google” as stand-ins for racial slurs and insults. This way, they can still congregate online to spread slander and white supremacy without the worry that their accounts will be flagged and deleted.

      This amount of hatred one group can have towards — seemingly — every population of non-white non-heterosexual people is flabbergasting.

      It’s hard not to feel helpless when trying to minimize the threat of a movement that is so dead-set on cultivating heinously racist views it feels it must re-code innocuous household words.

    • Eduardo Hernández Santos: Conflict, Censorship & the Male Body

      Following part one of his conversation with Lidia Hernández Tapia, Eduardo Hernández Santos talks about his groundbreaking early exhibitions, his recent series El Muro, and the “boom of the phallus” in Cuban art.

    • U.S. universities in China get academic freedom, but face internet censorship – report

      U.S. universities operating in China say they are given the freedom to teach what they like in class, but face restrictions such as internet censorship, according to a report by an independent, nonpartisan U.S. agency.

      In the recent report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), its survey of 12 U.S. universities found that while administrators had control over curriculum content, fewer than half of them had unrestricted access to the internet.

      For example, at one of the universities reviewed by GAO for the survey, users were unable to access Google’s search page and other sites that were available to users at other universities.

    • Propaganda and censorship remain China’s favoured tools of control

      Two recent court battles over historical facts have demonstrated how tight China’s ideological control is and how anxious the party leadership is about its legitimacy of rule.

      Two weeks ago, a Beijing court ruled against a popular blogger and a Hong Kong-based beverage company for mocking a Communist Party propaganda tale about a Korean war hero.

      And in August, a Beijing court upheld a libel ruling against a writer for two articles published in 2013 questioning certain details about five second world war heroes.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hackable Speed Cameras Highlight Risk Of Rush Toward IoT-Enabled ‘Smart’ Cities

      We’ve been talking at length about how the lack of security in the Internet of Things space is seen as a sort of adorable joke, but isn’t always a laughing matter. While the hillarious stupidity of some of the “smart” products flooding the market is undeniable, the reality is that the abysmal state of security in “IoT” devices (read: little to none) is creating millions of new attack vectors every year. And as Bruce Schneier recently warned, it’s only a matter of time before the check comes due, and these vulnerabilities contribute to hacking attacks on core infrastructure resulting in notable fatalities.

      Refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials are one thing, but this looming calamity is going to be made notably worse by the rush toward “smart” cities. The same hardware vendors that can’t bother to secure their consumer-side hardware haven’t done a much better job securing the gear they’re shoveling toward cities under the promise of a better, more connected tomorrow.

    • AT&T Stops Charging Broadband Users Extra For Privacy

      A few years ago, AT&T came up with an “ingenious” idea: charge broadband consumers more money if they want to protect their privacy. Under this plan, users ordering AT&T’s U-Verse broadband service could get broadband for, say, $70 a month. But if you want to opt out of AT&T’s Internet Preferences program (which uses deep packet inspection to study your movement around the Internet down to the second) you’ll pay $30 to $50 more, per month. AT&T also made opting out as cumbersome as possible, knowing full well that few people would dare take the option.

      With its decision, AT&T effectively made user privacy a luxury option.

    • Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue

      It has been six months since the Justice Department backed off on demands that Apple help the F.B.I. break the security of a locked iPhone.

      But the government has not given up the fight with the tech industry. Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of the year for subscriber information and other details associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.

      The subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year.

      Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations.

    • ShadowBrokers NSA Cyber-weapon Auction Generates Collective Yawn
    • Hackers find little demand for their stolen NSA hacking tools
    • Hacker group finds almost no takers for stolen NSA cyber tools
    • New Documents Reveal Government Effort to Impose Secrecy on Encryption Company

      When it comes to this country’s courts, longstanding practice, history, and the Constitution make clear that openness—of doors, of evidence, of arguments, of opinions—is the rule. Like the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, that rule is not absolute. But it puts in place a default, one that forces those who want to keep court proceedings secret to show, in each case, that secrecy is warranted—and that the need for secrecy overcomes the traditions and values of openness that animate the default rule in the first place.

      But in far too many cases across the country, the government appears to have reversed the presumption that the First Amendment establishes, opting to keep secret information about its demands for private data where transparency is required and would serve the public good.

    • Feds Gagged Encrypted Communications Firm Open Whisper Systems Over Massively Overbroad Subpoena

      This morning the ACLU announced that it had convinced the government to remove a ridiculous gag order on a subpoena that had been sent to Open Whisper Systems, the makers of the popular Signal encrypted messaging app, and whose encrypted communication protocol is used by many others, including WhatsApp, Facebook and Google for their encrypted messaging offerings. It’s not that surprising that a grand jury would issue a subpoena to Open Whisper Systems demanding “subscriber name, address, telephone numbers, email addresses, method of payment, IP registration, IP history logs and addresses, account history, toll records, upstream and downstream providers, any associated accounts acquired through cookie data, and any other contact information from inception to the present” for certain accounts being investigated. But, of course, Open Whisper Systems has basically none of that data.

    • Decentralise (in a kind of centralised way)

      Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens.

      We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place. Facebook, Google and Twitter spring to mind as examples of companies that have grown to dangerous sizes with little competition. This is not paranoia. This is real. We make it a lot more difficult when we spread out.

    • Surprise! Millennial office workers love email [Ed: Overreliance by young people on unencrypted communications]

      Millennials hate email, and they will finally kill this business scourge — or so you would think from popular discussions on the topic. But do a little research, and you discover that millennials not only don’t hate email, they use it more than any other age group.

      Yes, the text-obsessed and social-media-loving millennials are addicted to email, a recent survey of 1,004 mobile-using American office workers by Adobe Systems has found. Millennials (born between 1981 and 2001) check their email more often than any other group — even more than Gen X (born between 1961 and 1981) and baby boomers (born between 1947 and 1961) for whom email is the mainstay business communication method.

    • Bulk surveillance review is ‘fiction’, claims former NSA technical director

      Former NSA technical director Bill Binney talks about the Investigatory Powers Bill and the UK government’s independent review of bulk surveillance powers

    • Yahoo ‘secretly monitored emails on behalf of the US government’

      Some surveillance experts said this represents the first known case of a US internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

    • Yahoo Secretly Scanned Users’ Emails For The NSA and FBI: Report

      Reuters says that U.S intelligence officials were searching for a specific set of characters within Yahoo emails, but it is unknown what exactly they were looking for. Reuters also reports that the order to search user emails came in the form of a “classified directive” sent to Yahoo’s legal team.

    • How American Companies Enable NSA Surveillance

      Without the cooperation of American companies — both voluntary and compelled — the National Security Agency’s system of mass surveillance simply would not have been possible. And on Tuesday, Reuters added the name of yet another American corporate giant to the list of those who have made it possible for American intelligence to intercept huge troves of information: Yahoo.

      According to the news service, the American internet giant designed custom software to filter its users’ emails according to a set of search terms, and deliver those messages to the NSA. The decision to enable NSA surveillance was reportedly made by CEO Marissa Mayer and without the knowledge of the company’s security chief, who quit in protest when he learned of the program.

    • Google and Microsoft Not Part of NSA Email Scanning Tied to Yahoo

      The details of the Yahoo email surveillance program, reportedly installed in 2015, are still emerging, but they immediately raise questions about whether other companies are participating as well. So far, four tech giants say they are not.

      “We’ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: ‘no way’,” said a spokesperson from Google in response to a query about whether the NSA asked the company to build similar custom software to scan Gmail.

    • Yahoo Secretly Built Software To Scan All Emails Under Pressure From NSA Or FBI

      So Reuters has big exclusive report this morning about Yahoo creating “custom software to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information” at the behest of the NSA or FBI. This was built last year — which came well after the Snowden disclosures, and after Yahoo had been revealed to have legally challenged earlier NSA dragnet attempts — and after it had rolled out end to end encryption on email.

      Apparently, this was a decision made at the top by Marissa Mayer, and pissed off the company’s top security guy, Alex Stamos (who is awesome and a big supporter of end-to-end encryption) leading him to leave the company (and move to Facebook, where he is currently).

    • Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence – sources

      Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

      The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

    • Delete Your Yahoo Account

      There’s no good reason to have a Yahoo account these days. But after Tuesday’s bombshell report by Reuters, indicating the enormous, faltering web company designed a bespoke email-wiretap service for the U.S. government, we now know that a Yahoo account is a toxic surveillance liability.

      Reuters’s Joseph Menn is reporting that just last year, Yahoo chose to comply with a classified “directive” to build “a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials” — the NSA in particular.

    • Yahoo! spied on users’ email at spy agencies’ behest: report

      Yahoo! searched all its users’ emails using a specially built program in order to try and locate specific information demanded by American intelligence officials, according to a Reuters report.

      The company, which was bought by Verizon in July for US$4.83 billion, agreed to scan all mail accounts in line with a classified directive from the US government, Reuters said, citing two former Yahoo! workers and a third person who had been informed about it.

      The directive came from the NSA or the FBI, the sources said.

      What the spy agencies were after was not specified by the sources, who said only that they had asked Yahoo! to search for a set of characters.

      Reuters said it had not been able to determine what kind of data, if any, was handed over to the spooks, and if other email providers had been confronted with similar demands.

    • Yahoo Reportedly Scanned Millions of Email Accounts for Intelligence Agencies

      Yahoo reportedly scanned hundreds of millions of email accounts at the behest of U.S. intelligence or law enforcement. The scans, reported by Reuters, allegedly selected incoming messages that contained a string of unknown characters.

      Yahoo did not deny the report, saying only that it is a “law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”

      According to the Tuesday report, Yahoo acceded to a 2015 government directive to give email access to the National Security Agency or the FBI. Reuters cited anonymous sources including two former employees and another person with knowledge of the events.

    • Yahoo ‘secretly scanned emails for US authorities’

      Yahoo secretly scanned millions of its users’ email accounts on behalf of the US government, according to a report.

      Reuters news agency says the firm built special software last year to comply with a classified request.

      “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the tech firm said in a statement provided to the BBC.

      The allegation comes less than a fortnight after Yahoo said hackers had stolen data about many of its users.

    • Are smart toys spying on kids and stealing their imagination?

      Last weekend, I saw my first Christmas ad. And what a Smart Christmas it will be, judging by the haul on offer. Over the past year, companies have been teasing the various connected must-haves for the holidays: bots that can respond to kids’ questions and movements, and capture audio and video; an imitation smartwatch that chats with other devices over Bluetooth; not to mention the Barbie Hello Dreamhouse, a pink-and-white smart house for the iconic doll.

      Not everyone is excited about the intelligence creeping into kids’ toys. Privacy activists and developmental psychologists have objected on grounds ranging from security and privacy to fundamental worries about the nature of play. So should you be crossing these gadgets off your list? Or is this just a new variation on a familiar old song?

      As it happens, Barbie was at the centre of the last big smart toy brouhaha. Hello Barbie, perhaps 2015’s most controversial toy, could hold court on a wide range of topics – from fashion and family to dreams and paddleboarding. “Did you know that butterflies live everywhere in the world except Antarctica?” she might say, before confessing in a less guarded moment to “daydreaming about cupcakes”.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Islamic communities contain ‘tsunamis of atheism’ that are being suppressed, says leading ex-Muslim

      Thousands of ex-Muslims in Britain are living in fear of violent revenge for abandoning the Islamic faith while others are afraid to admit they no longer believe, a support group for ex-Muslims has said.

      Maryam Namazie, founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, described a “tsunami of atheism” in Muslim communities and urged that more needs to be done to recognise the dangers often faced by those who choose to renounce their faith.

      Speaking ahead of the release of Exposure, an ITV documentary that explores the lives of ex-Muslims faced with abuse and discrimination, Ms Namazie told The Independent: “There is a large group of people who are not seen and heard. Many young people living in Britain have left Islam and are facing huge ostracisation and isolation from their communities as a result.

    • State Appeals Court Says Not Just Any Nonexistent Law Can Be Used To Initiate Traffic Stops

      The US Supreme Court issued law enforcement fishing licenses with the Heien decision. Vehicle stops no longer needed to be predicated on legal violations. (If they ever were…) Law enforcement officers were no longer required to know the laws they were enforcing. The Supreme Court’s decision combined reasonable suspicion with an officer’s “reasonable” grasp of moving violations, further deteriorating the thin Fourth Amendment insulation protecting drivers from suspicionless, warrantless searches.

      With the standards lowered, officers can now stop anyone for almost any reason, provided they can make the justification stated in their report sound like a reasonable approximation of what they thought the law was, or what they wanted the law to be. (The Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision still allows for bogus traffic stops. It just puts a highly-subjective time limit on the fishing expedition.)

      The Supreme Court’s case originated in North Carolina. Oddly enough, further down the judicial food chain, a North Carolina state appeals court has just suppressed evidence based on a traffic stop with no legal basis. (h/t The Newspaper)

      Antwon Eldridge was pulled over because his vehicle was missing the driver’s side mirror. This led to a search of his vehicle and the discovery of crack and marijuana. But the reason for the stop failed to hold up in court, even with the Heien decision in place.

  • DRM

    • HP Issues Flimsy Mea Culpa For Recent Printer Cartridge DRM Idiocy, But It’s Not Enough

      A few weeks ago we noted how HP had effectively delivered a DRM time bomb in the form of a software update that, once detonated, crippled customers’ ability to use competing third-party print cartridges in HP printers. While such ham-fisted behavior certainly isn’t new, in this case HP had actually first deployed the “security update” to its printers back in March — but didn’t activate its stealthy payload until last month. Once activated, the software update prevented HP printers from even detecting alternative ink cartridges, resulting in owners getting a rotating crop of error messages about faulty cartridges.

      HP customers were obviously annoyed, and the EFF was quick to pen an open letter to HP, quite correctly noting that HP abused its security update mechanism to trick its customers and actively erode product functionality. Ultimately HP was forced to respond via a blog post proclaiming the company was just “dedicated to the best printing experience” and wanted to correct some “confusion” about its DRM sneak attack. In short, HP strongly implied it was just trying to protect consumers from “potential security risks” (what sweethearts)…

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Taco John’s Continues To Wage A Long-Lost Trademark War To Keep ‘Taco Tuesday’ From Becoming Generic

        Way back in 2010, Mike wrote about how the Taco John’s restaurant chain had threatened a small restaurant in Oklahoma for daring to use the phrase “Taco Tuesday” in a promotion for cheap tacos on…you know…Tuesdays. Taco John’s did indeed have a trademark on the term in 49 of our 50 states, with the exception being New Jersey, because life is strange. The question at the time, as tends to be the question in most trademark disputes, was whether or not there was any potential customer confusion to worry about. Given the somewhat descriptive nature of the phrase, not to mention its widespread use both commercially and in common parlance, the whole thing seemed rather silly.

        Six years does little to change things, it seems. Taco John’s recently fired off a cease and desist notice to the Old Fashioned Tavern and Restaurant in Wisconsin for using the phrase.

      • The Trademarking of “Taco Tuesday”

        When the owners of the Old Fashioned Tavern and Restaurant received a cease and desist letter demanding they stop holding Taco Tuesdays, they thought it was a joke.

        For almost a decade, the restaurant had sold $2 tacos on Tuesday night. Other restaurants and bars in the area had similar promotions, and in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, Taco Tuesday specials are as plentiful as yoga classes.

        But the author of the letter claimed that “Taco Tuesday” was a federally registered trademark that belonged to Taco John’s, a chain of around 400 Mexican-style fast food restaurants. And as Old Fashioned manager Jennifer DeBolt told the local Cap Times, they quickly realized that “the law firm is completely legit.”

      • Following Coverage Of Trademark Dispute, Lawyer Demands Image On News Story Be Taken Down As Infringing

    • Copyrights

      • Judge: Vague IP-Address Evidence is Not Enough to Expose BitTorrent ‘Pirates’

        While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.

        The copyright holders who initiate these cases generally rely on an IP address as evidence. This information is collected from BitTorrent swarms and linked to a geographical location using geolocation tools.

        With this information in hand, they then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holder.

        In most cases, courts sign off on these subpoenas quite easily, but in a recent case California Magistrate Judge Mitchell Dembin decided to ask for further clarification and additional evidence.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/new-kde-lts/feed/ 0 Radio Silence in the Quarters of Patent Lawyers as Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Likely Ends Software Patents http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/cafc-ignored-when-convenient/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/cafc-ignored-when-convenient/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 22:22:57 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95835 The CAFC‘s Haldane Robert Mayer has issued a detailed and abundantly clear ruling, but patent law firms are still ignoring it

Haldane Robert Mayer

Summary: The historic decision from Haldane Robert Mayer (above) is slowly starting to gain some traction in the media, but proponents of software patents pretend not to see it and hope that prospective clients (software patent applicants) won’t notice what’s happening

SOMETHING very big happened at the end of last week, but it is not being properly covered (if at all) by the patent microcosm. Today, IAM ‘magazine’ is pushing for software patents (cherry-picking cases to focus on the ones that are pro-software patents) behind a paywall [1, 2] — all this in spite of the fact that most of them are dead (more of them, more than ever before).

We didn’t expect IAM to stand out though. It was probably the first to cover the McRO outcome (pro-software patents), but regarding the above there’s radio silence. WIPR, by contrast, finally wrote about it under the headline “Software patents are deadweight loss to economy, says Federal Circuit” and it didn’t mince words:

Software patents impose a “deadweight loss on the nation’s economy”, according to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

This was the concurring opinion of Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer in the case of Intellectual Ventures v Symantec and Trend Micro, decided on September 30. He concurred with Circuit Judge Timothy Dyk.

Mayer added that software patents erect “often insurmountable barriers to innovation” and force “companies to expend exorbitant sums defending against meritless infringement suits”.

The ruling found that three patents asserted by licensing company Intellectual Ventures (IV) against anti-virus software business Symantec and IT security company Trend Micro were invalid.

US patent numbers 6,460,050; 6,073,142 and 5,987,610, which all cover anti-virus software, were held not to cover patent-eligible subject matter.

It is good that someone in MIP (Managing IP) covered it as well, albeit MIP called it “controversial” as if to antagonise software patents is something questionable. To quote:

In a controversial concurring opinion in a Federal Circuit decision finding claims of three Intellectual Ventures patents invalid, Judge Haldane Mayer argues: “It is well past time to return software to its historical dwelling place in the domain of copyright.”

This is what software developers have been arguing all along. There is nothing “controversial” about it. What likely “controversial” is a site like IAM openly promoting software patents and its editor in chief arguing with me online, insisting that being against software patents is the same as (or moral equivalent of) wanting layoffs. Whose layoffs? Definitely not software developers’. This is just a politician’s trick, trying to equate some policy with “creating” or “destroying” jobs (appeal to “families”).

How long before Watchtroll personally attacks this CAFC Judge (as usual)? And maybe Patent Docs also? Both have a tendency to go ad hominem when they dislike the outcome. Here is the patent microcosm shooting the messenger. It didn’t take long. This one dismisses the judge as “one senior judge with no business experience nor extensive technology background-baying at the moon” (there’s more here).

Some of the worst ad hominem attacks we have come across discredit the US Supreme Court, which, according to this new article from Patently-O, virtually if not practically refuses to refute (technically overturn) Alice:

Not Eligible: Supreme Court Denies All Pending Subject Matter Eligibility Petitions

The Supreme Court has greatly simplified the patent docket by denying certiorari in 10+ cases. Gone are GEA Process (IPR termination decision), Amphastar (scope of 271.e safe harbor) , Commil (appellate disregard of factual evidence), MacDermid (obvious combination), Jericho (Abstract Idea) , Trading Technologies (mandamus challenging CBM initiation), Tobinick (interference), Neev (arbitrator autonomy), Genetic Tech (eligibility), Essociate (eligibility), Dreissen, and Pactiv (ex parte reexamination procedure). Notably, all of the eligibility petitions have been denied.

“Meanwhile,” the above adds, “on October 11, the court will hear oral arguments in Samsung v. Apple.”

Yes, that’s about design patents, which are related to software patents but not quite the same. Here is patent the maximalism site MIP catching up with the latest of Apple litigation, saying that a “jury in the Eastern District of Texas has awarded VirnetX $302.4 million in a verdict against Apple for infringing four patents. This is the third time a federal jury has found Apple liable for infringing VirnetX’s patented technology.”

The VirnetX case was covered here thrice in the past week alone and it is still being covered quite a lot by media large and small all around the world (because it’s about “Apple”, which typically attracts/baits readers). Here is AOL’s coverage of it. This involves a court in Texas, i.e. the cesspool of all patent courts. They actually boast/gloat about their bias. It’s their marketing strategy.

Speaking of design patents and Apple, Vera Ranieri from the EFF published “Stupid Design Patent of the Month” (later crossposted in TechDirt) in which she wrote:

On October 11, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the long-running Apple-Samsung litigation. The issue is whether Apple, by virtue of having its designed patents infringed by Samsung, is entitled to all of Samsung’s profits made from the infringing phones (regardless of how much that design contributed to the value of the phone).

This case—in which EFF submitted an amicus brief arguing the award of Samsung’s total profit is improper—is important for many reasons. But one reason stands out: it is trivially easy to get a design patent on trivial designs and, unless the Supreme Court changes the law, that can lead to anything-but-trivial awards in court.

This month’s stupid patent, a design patent, shows just how broken the current system of design patents is. Design patents, unlike the utility patents we usually feature, consist only of a single claim followed by pictures. It is generally the pictures that inform the public as to what is claimed. Importantly, in a design patent only the features drawn in solid lines are claimed. Anything in dotted lines is generally not part of the claim.

If SCOTUS rules against Apple and in favour of Android/Linux/Samsung, this may spell the end of design patents too. Wait and watch how patent lawyers would squirm and deny everything if this was to occur. Is it not funny (or suspicious) that not a single patent law firm is ‘seeing’ (after several days) the decision where CAFC slams software patents? A lot of patent lawyers are liars, and in light of the latest silence they are more so. They refuse to inform people about decisions where software patents are trashed. It’s just not good for their business.

“Well done, Haldane Robert Mayer, for saying what a lot of us software developers have been arguing for well over a decade. Patents are not needed for software, which is a copyright domain (like prose).”Today we found the new article “Federal Circuit Finds Claims Implemented on General Purpose Cellphone Not Patentable”, but the patent microcosm is still stuck in the past, persistently pushing an old case like McRO [1, 2, 3] as if we’re in the middle of September. This so-called ‘analysis’ too got reposted (mentioned here before), provocatively asking (in the headline), “Is the Pendulum Finally Swinging Back to Center?”

No, it’s swinging in the side that’s software patents being verboten and thus worthless. Just don’t ask IAM or the patent microcosm as they’ll pretend not to know about it. Surely they saw the decision, but they probably just don’t know what to say in order to somehow save face, spin it etc. If all they can do is attack the judge (i.e. shoot the messenger), then they’d be better off keeping quiet.

Well done, Haldane Robert Mayer, for saying what a lot of us software developers have been arguing for well over a decade. Patents are not needed for software, which is a copyright domain (like prose). █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/cafc-ignored-when-convenient/feed/ 0 Staff of the EPO is Going Out in Protest (Munich and The Hague) While EPO Management Buys European Media to Control This Media, Promote UPC http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/epo-managing-perceptions/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/epo-managing-perceptions/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 21:22:19 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95827 The latest increase in the FTI Consulting deal/contract targets German and Dutch media specifically

Sheldon Adelson’s Purchase of Las Vegas Paper Seen as a Power Play
Full article: Sheldon Adelson’s Purchase of Las Vegas Paper Seen as a Power Play
Remember who attacked a judge in the German and Dutch media very shortly (a few weeks) after signing the FTI Consulting deal

Summary: The staff union of the EPO (SUEPO) is planning another couple of demonstrations next week and the EPO’s payments to European media bear fruit, serving to demonstrate the corrupting influence of Battistelli’s bizarre budget choices and mind-boggling priorities (managing perceptions, not changing behaviour)

THERE IS PLENTY to be angry about at the EPO and SUEPO will lead a march next week, having just announced that the next demonstrations are to take place on the 11th and 13th of October, coinciding with the meeting of the Administrative Council. To quote the full announcement:

On 11 October Mr Battistelli will hold his much publicised (yet another “first in the history of the Office”) Social Conference where he will be trumpeting his achievements just before the meeting of the Administrative Council on 12/13 October. Meanwhile, the attacks against SUEPO officials are continuing in The Hague with three investigations/disciplinary proceedings. SUEPO organises a demonstration on Tuesday 11 October in Munich in front of the EPO Isar building starting at 12.30h, and on Thursday 13 October in The Hague.

No doubt the media will hardly cover it, having been given a lethal injection by the EPO. The EPO is paying to control the media in the Netherlands and in Germany. It is also PAYING some French publishers like Les Echos (for self-censorship and habitual propaganda), which Battistelli later cites in his private letters as ‘proof’ of his dubious claims. Here in the UK the EPO pays FT (Financial Times) for UPC propaganda (as recently as last week) and one EPO insider found some new UPC material in relation to Brexit. It comes from Les Echos (EPO-funded) and the insider called it “Pro UPC Propaganda as expected – Le « paquet brevet » suspendu au Brexit” (published and mentioned earlier today).

Expect more of the media manipulation from the EPO’s top-level management. It’s their spiel now. They have no compelling story to tell, so instead they’re trying to sell. They literally pay the media, which in turn publishes puff pieces and even fields social media accounts to spread the EPO’s talking points (FT did this some months ago).

“Expect more of the media manipulation from the EPO’s top-level management. It’s their spiel now.”Remember the time IAM attempted to distance itself from the EPO after the EPO's foreign PR agency had paid IAM for UPC propaganda? Well, IAM has just published a new issue of its totally completely honestly objective ‘magazine’ and in it appears to be the big lie about EPO patent quality. It is paywalled, so it’s hard to say exactly what’s in it. They do, however, help the EPO and Battistelli lie about patent quality (they are the only citation the EPO and Battistelli use for such a claim, with Battistelli repeatedly mentioning IAM privately and publicly). It is really that bad and it’s verging the pathetic. Does the Administrative Council not mind that Battistelli is wasting millions of Euros buying (one might say “corrupting”) European media? And all this to mislead the public and mislead the Council’s delegates? If not, then it makes these delegates complicit.

To be sure, the UPC propaganda will end pretty soon, at least as far as its relevance to the UK and Brexit is concerned. IP Kat wrote so much on the subject (usually in favour of the UPC) and here we have a new article about EU-wide injunctions. Well, EU-wide injunctions (even beyond the EU) would be a standard occurrence if UPC (litigation chaos) was ever to sneak into Europe.

“We hope that EPO staff will join us in opposing the UPC.”One new comment, among other such comments (a thread initiated by the UPC proponents, like most others), said today: “Of course, a solution would be for the UK to enact legislation to the effect that any judgement of the UPC in respect of an EP patent for which there is a GB part to be automatically enforceable in the UK. Maybe not so good for UK litigators but good for industry.”

The self-serving Team UPC is mostly a litigation industry, hence it’s craving for the UPC (more money for them at the expense of plaintiffs and defendants in Europe). We hope that EPO staff will join us in opposing the UPC. All it does is (and we’ve been writing about this for nearly a decade*), it threatens to eliminate EPO jobs and reduce Europe into litigious chaos that’s enriching the litigation industry. The very fact that Battistelli has been pushing for the UPC for many years (previous incarnation) raises questions as well; who does this man work for? █
_____
* Techrights is turning 10 next month and the early efforts to unify patent litigation in Europe go even further back than that.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/epo-managing-perceptions/feed/ 0 Links 4/10/2016: KDE Plasma 5.8, Google Pixel and Andromeda Predictions http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/andromeda-predictions/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/andromeda-predictions/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 20:07:30 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95824

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 26 open source projects from Linux’s 25 years

    Linux is often credited for pioneering the open source development model and it has led to the creation of many open source projects and communities. Here are some of the major open source projects that were created around Linux in the past 25 years.

  • Server

    • Keeping Linux containers safe and secure

      Linux containers are helping to change the way that IT operates. In place of large, monolithic virtual machines, organizations are finding effective ways to deploy their applications inside Linux containers, providing for faster speeds, greater density, and increased agility in their operations.

      While containers can bring a number of advantages from a security perspective, they come with their own set of security challenges as well. Just as with traditional infrastructure, it is critical to ensure that the system libraries and components running within a container are regularly updated in order to avoid vulnerabilities. But how do you know what is running inside of your containers? To help manage the full set of security challenges facing container technologies, a startup named Anchore is developing an open source project of the same name to bring visibility inside of Linux containers.

    • The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly

      I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but one thing or another has gotten in the way. It’s important to me to provide an accurate history, definition, and proper usage of the Pets vs Cattle meme so that everyone can understand why it was successful and how it’s still vital as a tool for driving understanding of cloud. The meme has taken off because it helped created an understanding of the “old way” vs. the “new way” of doing things. That’s great, but the value of the meme becomes muddied when misused. We can all agree there’s enough muddy terminology and phraseology already, such as “cloud,” “hybrid,” and “DevOps”. So this post aims to set the record straight and assure a canonical history that everyone can reference and use.

    • Running Stateful Applications in Kubernetes: Storage Provisioning and Allocation

      To appreciate how Kubernetes manages storage pools that provide persistence to applications, we need to understand the architecture and the workflow related to application deployment.

      Kubernetes is used in various roles — by developers, system administrators, operations, and DevOps teams. Each of these personas, if you will, interact with the infrastructure in a distinct way. The system administration team is responsible for configuring the physical infrastructure for running Kubernetes cluster. The operations team maintains the Kubernetes cluster through patching, upgrading, and scaling the cluster. DevOps teams deal with Kubernetes to configure CI/CD, monitoring, logging, rolling upgrades, and canary deployments. Developers consume the API and the resources exposed by the Kubernetes infrastructure. They are never expected to have visibility into the underlying physical infrastructure that runs the master and nodes.

    • [Old] Technical Debt

      Building happy engineering teams needs to be your top priority if you want to build great products. Through collective ownership, increasing trust, removing noise, and being bold with new ideas, you can begin to not only improve your practices but also allow new ideas to flourish organically. Allow new eyes to push you to both fix issues and take their fresh perspective not as criticism but as a catalyst for change.

      After our strategic investments, our paging volume is down, service quality is up, and we’re better positioned to move even faster to make email suck less.

    • “I just want to run a container!”

      I wrote “what’s up with containers: Docker and rkt” a while ago. Since then I have learned a few new things about containers! We’re going to talk about running containers in production, not on your laptop for development, since I’m trying to understand how that works in September 2016. It’s worth noting that all this stuff is moving pretty fast right now.

      The concerns when you run containers in production are pretty different from running it on a laptop — I very happily use Docker on my laptop and I have no real concerns about it because I don’t care much if processes on my laptop crash like 0.5% of the time, and I haven’t seen any problems.

      Here are the things I’ve learned so far. I learned many of these things with @grepory who is the best. Basically I want to talk about what some of the things you need to think about are if you want to run containers, and what is involved in “just running a container” :)

    • Hot Startup Nets $5 Million to X-ray and Secure Software Containers
    • Anchore Gets $5M For Software Container Security
    • Anchore 1.0 Delivers Container-Based Compliance and Certification

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • LXQt Memory Usage On Par With LXDE, Lower Than Xfce

      LXQt developers have done a desktop memory consumption comparison to show that Qt programs are not necessarily bloated.

      The tests done by developer “PCMan” show that LXQt 0.11 uses a bit more memory than the GTK2-based LXDE while using less memory than the GTK2-based Xfce.

    • Benchmark: Memory Usage: LXQt desktop environment vs XFCE

      It has always been rumored that Qt is bloated so programs written in Qt should be bloated. Some even argued that the LXDE developers made a wrong decision on the migration to LXQt.
      Why not replace the assumptions with some experiments?
      In fact, LXQt 0.11 even uses slightly less memory than XFCE (with gtk+ 2). After cold boot, LXQt uses 112 MB in the testing environment.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Sysprof Plans for 3.24

        The 3.24 cycle is just getting started, and I have a few plans for Sysprof to give us a more polished profiling experience in Builder. The details can be found on the mailing list.

        In particular, I’d love to land support for visualizers. I expect this to happen soon, since there is just a little bit more to work through to make that viable. This will enable us to get a more holistic view of performance and allow us to drill into callgraphs during a certain problematic period of the profile.

      • GNOME From Scratch Project

        This morning i got an email from Rafael Tavares about his new project, GFS (GNOME From Scratch), a personal project that makes possible to use GNOME on Slackware GNU/Linux operating system without systemd or wayland programs. The GFS project will attempt to bring GNOME 3.22 to Slackware Linux. This is the latest version of GNOME available at this moment.

      • WebRTC in WebKit/WPE

        For some time I worked at Igalia to enable WebRTC on WebKitForWayland or WPE for the Raspberry Pi 2.

        The goal was to have the WebKit WebRTC tests working for a demo. My fellow Igalian Alex was working on the platform itself in WebKit and assisting with some tuning for the Pi on WebKit but the main work needed to be done in OpenWebRTC.

  • Distributions

    • Hardware Firewall: Choosing the Right Firewall Distribution

      Over the years I’ve bought some less than impressive consumer routers, so these days I run my own self-built hardware firewall appliance. Surprisingly, deciding on which option was best for my needs was not as easy as I had hoped.

      Building a hardware firewall requires you to decide on the hardware your firewall/router computer operating system will be installed on. Like myself, some people might use an old PC. Others might decide to install their selected firewall operating system onto a rack mount server. However one decides to do this, the completed act of installing this OS onto the dedicated hardware creates a dedicated hardware firewall.

      And unlike a software firewall, hardware firewalls serve a single dedicated purpose – to act as a gateway appliance for your network. Having had experience with three popular firewall operating systems in the past, I found that choosing the “right one” is a matter of perspective.

      In this article, I’m going to share my experience and overall impressions about those three different firewall solutions. Some of these are highly advanced while others are incredibly easy to use. Each of these solutions share something that I feel good about sharing with my readers. All of the firewalls are easily downloadable without any annoying sign-up pages (I’m looking at you, Sophos).

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • The October 2016 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

      • Our warm thanks to a long time contributor and friend

        It is with a heavy heart that we address our warmest thanks to our friend Thomas Spuhler for his Mandriva and Mageia contributions over the last decade. After fighting colon cancer for over a year, he finally had to surrender on Saturday September 17, 2016, at the age of 68. He leaves behind his beloved wife, sons and grandchildren, to whom our thoughts go in this difficult time.

        Thomas had been contributing to Mageia, and Mandriva before that, since 2009 as a packager, and much earlier already partaking in email discussions and bug reports. His packaging interests were mostly web and server-related components, for which his contributions were invaluable. He had to step back from his Mageia responsibilities in early August due to his health condition.

    • Gentoo Family

      • GNUnet for Gentoo

        In summer 2015 I started to package GNUnet for Gentoo as contributor to the youbroketheinternet-overlay.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • AppData content ratings for games shipped in Fedora

          GNOME Software developer Richard Hughes recently e-mailed the Fedora developers mailing requesting Fedora package maintainers to update their AppData files to include age ratings using OARS.

        • Linaro Connect Las Vegas 2016

          I spent last week at Linaro Connect in Las Vegas. Nominally I was there for some discussions about Ion. The week ended up being fairly full of the gamut of ARM topics.

          IoT is still a top buzzword. Linaro announced the founding of the LITE (Linaro IoT and Embedded) group. The work that this group has done so far is mostly related to Cortex-M processors which don’t run Linux. This is a change of pace from a consortium that has exclusively focused on Linux. The Linux Foundation has done the same thing, given their focus on the Zephyr Project. I see this shift for three reasons: 1) vendors want an end-to-end solution and reduced fragmentation and Linaro/Linux Foundation provide a good forum to do this because 2) both Linaro and the Linux Foundation are very good at courting companies and engaging in ‘corporate hand holding’ through open source projects especially 3) when bootstrapping relatively new projects. This is not intended to be a negative, sometimes companies need to throw money at outside entities to inform them what needs to be done (even when internal employees are shouting the same thing). Corporate influence in open source can certainly be critiqued but I’m optimistic about that not being a problem for Linaro.

          Red Hat also announced its involvement in the LITE group. Red Hat’s interest aren’t in the RTOS Microcontroller space but the higher level gateway. All those IoT devices have to communicate somewhere and a centralized gateway makes it easier to manage those devices, especially for industrial use cases. Hearing the full-stack story of IoT was a good learning experience for me, as I mostly have my head in the kernel. Everyone seems to be learning everywhere and most of the work is brand new. The Zephyr project was talking about writing new IP stacks which should give you some idea of where these projects are right now.

        • How to debug Fedora rawhide compose problems
        • Fedora Linux’s DNF Package Manager Hits the 2.0 Milestone, Now in Fedora Rawhide

          On October 3, 2016, DNF developer Jan Šilhan proudly announced the release of the DNF 2.0.0 package manager for Fedora Rawhide, the development version of the Fedora Linux operating system.

          DNF 2.0.0 is a major update of the default package management system used in the Red Hat-based Fedora distribution, but it doesn’t look like it landed in the stable Fedora 25 version just yet, most probably because of the incompatibilities with the DNF 1.x series. Therefore, DNF 2.0.0 is now available in Fedora Rawhide.

        • HackMIT meets Fedora

          HackMIT is the annual hackathon event organized by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HackMIT 2016 took place on September 17th and 18th, 2016. This year, the Fedora Project partnered with Red Hat as sponsors for the hackathon. Fedora Ambassadors Charles Profitt and Justin W. Flory attended to represent the project and help mentor top students from around the country in a weekend of learning and competitive hacking. Fedora engaged with a new audience of students from various universities across America and even the globe.

        • HackMIT meets Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • HPE Donates Hardware to Debian Project, GNOME Sans systemd

        The Debian project today announced the “in-kind” donation of several servers to “boost reliability of Debian’s core infrastructure.” The new hardware will be deployed in Canada, US, and Australia to replace some aging machines as well as expand core services and storage. In other news, a new project aims to provide GNOME 3.22 to Slackware without systemd or Wayland, right as a new ugly systemd bug gives another reason to avoid it. Mageia bid farewell to a lost friend and contributor today and Matt Hartley shared his picks for best firewall distribution.

      • Harden Debian with PIE and bindnow!

        Shipping Position Independent Executables and using read-only Global Offset Table was already possible for packages but needed package maintainers to opt-in for each package (see Hardening wiki) using the “pie” and “bindnow” Dpkg hardening flags.

        Many critical packages enabled the extra flags but there are still way more left out according to Lintian hardening-no-bindnow and hardening-no-pie warnings.

        Now we can change that. We can make those hardening flags the default for every package.

      • My Free Software Activities in September 2016

        Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

      • Several donations boost reliability of Debian’s core infrastructure

        Over the last several months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), one of Debian’s primary hardware partners, has made several large in-kind donations in support of Debian core services. The donated equipment will be deployed in the data centers of multiple hosting partners in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

      • Gitano – Approaching Release – Work

        I have been working quite hard, along with my friend and colleague Richard Maw, on getting Gitano ready for a release suitable for inclusion into Debian Stretch.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • $39 network switching Pico-ITX SBC runs Linux on Cortex-A53

      Globalscale’s “EspressoBin” network switching Pico-ITX SBC offers Marvell’s dual-core, Cortex-A53 Armada 3720 SoC, plus 2x GbE, 1x WAN, SATA, and mini-PCIe.

      Globalscale Technologies and its hardware partner Marvell, which have previously collaborated on products such as the Armada 370 Mirabox, have joined forces on a Linux-fueled EspressoBin network switching single-board computer. The EspressoBin is based on a more powerful Marvell Armada SoC: a dual-core, Cortex-A53 Armada 3720 clocked to 1.2GHz.

    • Open IoT gateway SBCs run Linux on NXP QorIQ and i.mX6 SoCs

      ArgonBoards has launched two Linux-driven SBCs for IoT gateways: an i.MX6 SoloLite reference board and an open source QorIQ LS1021A SBC.

      India-based embedded manufacturer VVDN Technogies, which owns RadiumBoards, the makers of products such as the HD Camera Cape for the BeagleBone Black and MIPI Camera Board for the Wandboard, has also launched a single-board computer subsidiary. The ArgonBoards SBC division recently announced a $499, open source LS1021A Community Board and a $199 i.MX6SL IoT gateway reference board based on the SoloLite SoC, both running Linux. (VVDN is a member of NXP’s partner ecosystem.)

    • Dueling Arduinos reunite with new Arduino Foundation

      Arduino LLC and Arduino Srl have settled their legal disputes, and will reunify under an Arduino Holding company and a not-for-profit Arduino Foundation.

      At the World Maker Faire New York, the Arduino LLC (Arduino.cc) and Arduino Srl (Arduino.org) organizations announced they have signed a settlement agreement concerning the legal dispute that has, for the past two years, split the open source MCU-oriented Arduino hardware community in two. The forked entities will reunite before the end of the year under a new “Arduino Holding” company and not-for-profit “Arduino Foundation.” The identical announcements were posted at Arduino.cc and Arduino.org.

    • Two Arduinos become one (Arduino Blog)
    • Two Arduinos become one

      Arduino, the world’s leading open-source ecosystem for educators, Makers and IoT developers of all ages, today announced that Arduino LLC (aka Arduino.cc) and Arduino srl (aka Arduino.org) have settled their differences and signed a settlement agreement.

      Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto took the stage today at World Maker Faire New York to announce the good news.

      At the end of 2016, the newly created “Arduino Holding” will become the single point of contact for the wholesale distribution of all current and future products, and will continue to bring tremendous innovations to the market.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Create your own Tizen themes with the Tizen Theme Editor

          Tizen’s theme store is one of the main ways in which users can customize their Tizen smartphones. However, if you are not impressed by all the themes available in the store, then Samsung’s Tizen Theme Editor tool is just what you should be looking out for. This Windows desktop only program lest you create your Tizen themes. The theme editor doesn’t require you to have any programming knowledge as the process only involves clicks, drags and drops to get most of the work done.

        • Samsung and SoftBank discuss IoT cooperation

          Samsung Electronics Co. and Japanese internet and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. met recently to discuss how both companies could co-operate in the world of Technology as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) , according to sources. The meeting took place between Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, and SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son at the Samsung office in Seocho Ward.

          SoftBank made the news lately with its $32 billion deal to acquire ARM Holdings PLC, the UK based company that produces the microprocessors that power over 95% of the world’s smartphones. Both companies are known to want to increase their presence in the IoT sector and can complement each other in this regard.

      • Android

        • 3 Android phones that offer long battery life
        • ‘Andromeda’ will be Google’s NT

          If you were to design a client operating system with the goal of being used by two billion people, what would it look like?

          We might soon find out what Alphabet’s looks like. Today’s announcement’s from Alphabet’s Google is expected to reveal “Andromeda”, the merged Android/Chrome OS. Executives have been hyping today’s event as the most “significant” since the first Android device in 2008, and we already know they’re writing a new operating system from a clean slate. We can also have a good guess about what it looks like.

          Google’s goal for the successor is to unify the rival Chrome and Android platforms while providing a clean code base free of the Java legacy. Google’s big advantage here is that it now has a blank slate.

          After Google acquired Android in 2005, Sun Microsystems’ then CEO Jonathan Schwartz offered Google “congratulations on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform”. Android founder Andy Rubin had already figured Java worked, and seen how it decreased time to market, and how much developers liked it. (Anything was preferable to writing for Symbian, the dominant smartphone platform of the time.)

        • Full Google Pixel and Pixel XL specifications leaked by retailer

          Google just found out, the hard way, how difficult it can be to coordinate a major smartphone launch. Details about its first self-branded smartphones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, have been published by several retailers ahead of their official unveiling tomorrow.

          The most revealing leak comes from Carphone Warehouse. The British retailer put up, and quickly removed, product listings for the Pixel and Pixel XL. The listings confirm much of what we were anticipating thanks to older leaks, and add a handful of new details. A mirror of the Pixel XL is available here, thanks to Reddit user krackers.

        • Live from Google’s mega announcement: Pixel phones, Android updates, 4K Chromecast and more!

          Google is hosting a press event today in San Francisco… and if the rumors are true, it should be a doozy. We’ve heard whispers about everything from new phones, to new Chromecasts, to a new VR headset, to a complete rethinking of Android as we know it.

          You might’ve assumed we’d be at the event covering it live with up-to-the-second updates from the scene… and, well, you’d have assumed right.

          The event is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Pacific, so tune in then. In fact, chances are good we’ll start warming up the ol’ liveblog a bit before then — so if you don’t want to miss anything, tune in early.

        • Xiaomi’s 4K Android TV box is now on sale in the U.S. for $69

          We told you last month that Xiaomi’s Android TV box would go on sale in the U.S. in October, and true to our word it has. The Chinese company is best known for its affordable smartphones, but today it launched a set-top box priced at $69 that looks like great value.

          Originally unveiled at Google I/O in May, the new Mi Box offers 4K video at 60 FPS and supports Dolby Digital Plus audio playback and HDR content. Xiaomi partnered with Google to integrate Google Cast and Google voice search while there are Android games and apps for the likes of Netflix, HBO, and Showtime alongside support for Sling TV, which itself brings TV shows without the need for cable.

        • The Mi Box is officially launching today for $69

          Google unveiled the Mi Box with Android TV way back in May at Google I/O. Then for months, nothing. We were starting to wonder if the device would ever come out when it began appearing on Walmart shelves last month. Now, the Mi Box is official. It’s going on sale today on Mi.com and at Walmart for $69.

          The Mi Box is one of only a few Android TV boxes that have been released. Google’s original Nexus TV was a flop, and the Razer Forge TV never even got support for Netflix (which is absolutely insane). The NVIDIA Shield has been the only Android TV box worth having, but it’s $200. The Mi Box includes many of the features of the SHIELD for a lot less cash.

        • Why Android Fans Are Feeling Anxious Ahead of Google’s Next Hardware Event

          Recently there has been some anxiety amongst Android enthusiasts who are frustrated by Google’s apparent disregard for consumer satisfaction.

          So what gives? A few days ago Google released a new mobile messaging app called Allo that seeks to insert some Amazon Echo-like smarts into a familiar chat interface. While the app appears to be doing well on the charts, some Android fans have criticized its mobile-only approach (it can’t be used on the desktop) and the fact that it can’t be used to talk to people using Hangouts, another Google messaging app.

        • Google has until October 31 to reply to EU’s Android antitrust charges [Ed: Google has until October 31 to reply to Microsoft’s Android antitrust charges; EU as a Microsoft proxy here]

          Alphabet’s Google has been given until the end of October, the fourth extension, to rebut EU antitrust charges that it uses its dominant Android mobile operating system to block competitors, the European Commission said on Monday.

          The Commission in April said the U.S. technology giant’s demand that mobile phone makers pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser on their smartphones to access other Google apps harms consumers and competition.

          The EU watchdog had initially set a July 27 deadline for Google to respond to the charges. This had been extended three times at the company’s request, with the previous deadline Sept. 20.

          The new deadlines are Oct. 31 for the Android case and Oct. 26 and Oct. 13 for cases relating to online search advertising and shopping.

        • Why Google’s EU Android Probe Bears Close Watching [Ed: Why Google’s [Microsoft proxy attack via regulators against] Android Probe Bears Close Watching]
        • Nokia’s Android-powered return? New mid-range smartphone surfaces [Ed: Microsoft had ruined Nokia before this happened]

          Details have surfaced on a benchmarking site that suggest Nokia may have a new mid-range phone waiting in the wings.

          For Nokia, IoT tech is firmly in its future plans, while smartphones are out. But die-hard Nokia fans may still be able to get their hands on a Nokia smartphone thanks to a little-known Finnish firm called HMD, which has a license and $500m to design, make, and market Nokia-branded smartphones running Android.

          The licensing deal was signed in May, but HMD has yet to announce its first phone, leaving fans with little more than speculation about future launches.

        • iPhone 7 comes last in battery test against Android smartphones

          If you want a smartphone with a long battery life, then testing carried out by UK consumer magazine Which? suggests that you’re far better off going with an Android device from HTC, LG, or Samsung. In fact, when the new iPhone 7 was pitted against the HTC 10, LG G5 and the Samsung Galaxy S7, it came last in all the tests.

        • How to factory reset an Android phone
        • How to Recover Deleted Photos on Android
        • Everything you need to know about Android 7.1 Nougat and the Pixel Launcher
        • Google Maps Now Displays Google Calendar Events on Android
        • Alert: some cards losing Android Pay support October 14th
        • [Finally] Nexus 6 gets official Android 7.0 Nougat with October 5th security patch

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source for Business: Pros and Cons

    Open source software offers benefits like high quality and faster application development, but some businesses have concerns about support and security.

  • OSI Welcomes Powering Potential: Open Source Advocates Extending Education in Tanzania

    The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the premiere organization working globally to champion open source in society through education, infrastructure and collaboration; announced today that Powering Potential has joined the OSI as an Affiliate Member.

    Powering Potential provides access to educational resources on solar-powered computers running open source software at schools in rural Tanzania. The technology initiative works to enhance education and stimulate imagination of students in Tanzania while respecting and incorporating values of the local culture.

    “The Board of Directors at the OSI is pleased to have Powering Potential as an OSI Affiliate Member,” said Patrick Masson, general manager and director at the Open Source Initiative. “Their work fully aligns with our mission to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and as our first African Affiliate Member, build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.”

  • Riot Founder Describes Vision of Open Source Collaboration

    Initially built by developers for developers, Riot is free and open source software. It publishes all of the code on GitHub, where anyone can see, modify and run it.

  • Yahoo Open Sources Porn-Hunting Neural Network

    The artificial intelligence system is trained to automatically identify risque images using a probability scale between zero and one. Scores below 0.2 indicate the image is likely safe for all eyes. But those above 0.8 signal the high probability of a long chat with your boss if they spot your computer screen.

  • Yahoo is open sourcing its deep learning model to identify pornography
  • Avoiding quality assurance disasters with openQA

    OpenQA started in 2009 inside the openSUSE community and is now an integral part of the openSUSE ecosystem. It tests software the same way a human being does: Input is given by keyboard and mouse and results are recorded by comparing screenshots of the process to a set of predefined images. Just like a human tester, openQA detects failures and error messages by comparing what it sees with what it expects.

    The first step is the package submission to a new operating system (OS) build. OpenQA runs through a basic pre-build package set to detect basic issues very early. After building a new version of the OS in the Open Build Service, this ISO will be automatically recognized by openQA and validated. The next step is extended “post-validation” testing.

  • SOGo v3.2.0 released

    The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo v3.2.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on important new features and improved stability over previous versions.

  • Recent ownCloud Releases

    Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment.

    There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here.

    We had server release 8.0.15, server release 8.1.10, server release 8.2.8 and release 9.0.5. There are maintenance releases for the older major versions, needed to fix bugs on installations that still run on these older versions. We deliver them following this plan.

    The latest and greatest server release is release 9.1.1 that has all the hardening that also went into the enterprise releases.

    Aside a ton of bugfixes that you find listed in the changelog there have also been interesting changes which drive innovation. To pick just one example: The data fingerprint property. It enables the clients to detect if the server got a backup restored, and saves changes on the clients to conflict files if needed. This is a nice example of solutions which are based on feedback from enterprise customers community running ownCloud, who help with reporting problems and proposing solutions.

  • Evolving Your Open Source Project Infrastructure: There’s No Such Thing As Done

    When it comes to infrastructure for your open source project, you are never done, said Amye Scavarda, Gluster Community Lead at Red Hat, and Nigel Babu, Gluster CI/Automation Engineer at Red Hat. One theme during their LinuxCon Europe talk, “Making More Open: Creating Open Source Infrastructure for Your Open Source Project,” is that you can get closer to being done, but there is no such thing as “done” when it comes to infrastructure. Momentum is important – things are always moving, changing, and evolving. The work never ends as you figure out what can be left behind, what should be upgraded and how you can move into the future to incorporate new technologies.

    Amye and Nigel talked about how when you start an open source project, you tend to focus on shipping and releasing your code. You don’t necessarily worry too much about how you got there and what you did to get it shipped. In the early days of Gluster, almost everyone had root access to the build machine, since it was only a few people working closely together. Fast forward a few years now that Red Hat has acquired Gluster, and there are many people across a wide variety of time zones working on the project. How to manage communication across a large, growing open source project became a big challenge.

  • WalmartLabs open sources the application platform that powers Walmart.com

    Walmart probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think about open-source software (or the second or third, really), but WalmartLabs, Walmart’s innovation-focused tech division, has already launched a number of open-source projects into the wild. The most interesting of these so far was OneOps, its DevOps platform, but today it is launching a similarly ambitious project.

    Over the course of the last year, Walmart.com — a site that handles 80 million monthly visitors and offers 15 million items for sale — migrated to React and Node.js. In the process of this transition, the WalmartLabs team built Electrode, a React-based application platform to power Walmart.com. It’s now open sourcing this platform.

    Electrode provides developers with boilerplate code to build universal React apps that consist of a number of standalone modules that developers can choose to add more functionality to their Node apps. These include a tool for managing the configuration of Node.js apps, for example, as well as a React component that helps you render above-the-fold content faster.

  • Walmart Open Sources Key Infrastructure Tool That Runs its Site

  • Events

    • Linux Foundation Leader Jim Zemlin to Keynote Postgres Vision 2016

      The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin will keynote Postgres Vision 2016, the international conference for technology and industry visionaries to explore the future of enterprise Postgres, open source, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Postgres Vision will be held October 11-13, 2016, at the iconic Innovation Hangar (iHangar) in the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla awards $300,000 to four open source projects

        Mozilla’s love of open source is nothing new — just look to the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. Loving a philosophy is one thing, but Mozilla has also put its money where its mouth is.

        In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded more than $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were aligned with the organization’s mission. One of the smallest awards — $56,000 — was made to Speech Rule Engine, a text-to-speech style component that makes mathematical and scientific content more accessible.

      • MOSS supports four more open source projects in Q3 2016 with $300k
      • Mozilla Funds a Series of Promising Open Source Projects

        You can always count on Mozilla for an interesting spin on open source. Last year, Mozilla launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. As The VAR Guy notes: “The Mozilla Foundation has long injected money into the open source ecosystem through partnerships with other projects and grants. But it formalized that mission last year by launching MOSS, which originally focused on supporting open source projects that directly complement or help form the basis for Mozilla’s own products.”

        Now, the company has announced that In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded over $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were in line with the Mozilla mission.

      • Is Chrome faster than Firefox in Linux?

        The browser wars have been raging for many years now, and Linux users have often been on one side or the other. One Linux redditor recently noted that Chrome was much faster for him than Firefox, and a long discussion ensued with folks sharing their experiences with Chrome and Firefox.

  • Databases

    • What’s new in PostgreSQL 9.5

      Fedora 24 ships with PostgreSQL 9.5, a major upgrade from version 9.4 that is included in Fedora 23. The new version 9.5 provides several enhancements and new features, but also brings some compatibility changes, as it has been very common between PostgreSQL major versions. Note that in the PostgreSQL versioning scheme, 9.4 and 9.5 are two major versions, while the first number is mostly marketing and increments when major features are introduced in the release.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • NetBeans IDE 8.2 Download is available now

      NeatBeans doesn’t need an introduction but still who doesn’t know about NetBeans IDE then NetBeans IDE is an IDE(integrated development environment) that supports multiple programming languages like JAVA,HTML5,JAVAScript,C/C++,PHP etc. Well,It’s vastly used by many coders and developers for developing mobile,pc or web applications.
      NetBeans has a great set of pre-installed tools that makes coding and developing more convenient and easy on fingers.The GUI builder really makes the things easy on head when it comes to developing JAVA SE applications.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 6.0 – an exercise in precision

      The OpenBSD project is well known for its strong focus on security and for its precise documentation. The OpenBSD operating system generally gives preference to security and properly behaving software over features. OpenBSD is lightweight, sparse and relatively locked down by default. This makes the platform particularly popular among administrators who need a firewall or other minimal and stable platform.

      OpenBSD 6.0 introduces many small changes and a handful of important ones. Looking through the release notes we find support for the VAX platform has been dropped. There have been several security updates to the OpenSSH secure shell service. Perhaps one of the more interesting security features in the operating system is strict enforcement of W^X: “W^X is now strictly enforced by default; a program can only violate it if the executable is marked with PT_OPENBSD_WXNEEDED and is located on a file system mounted with the wxallowed mount option. Because there are still too many ports which violate W^X, the installer mounts the /usr/local file system with wxallowed. This allows the base system to be more secure as long as /usr/local is a separate file system. If you use no W^X violating programs, consider manually revoking that option.”

      I decided to play with the 64-bit x86 build of OpenBSD which is 226MB in size. Booting from this ISO presents us with a text console where we are asked if we would like to install OpenBSD, upgrade an existing copy of the operating system or perform an auto-install. I chose to perform a normal installation.

    • OpenBSD and NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2016 Nagaoka

      The Japan NetBSD Users’ Group and Echigo BSD Users Group members held booth at the Open Source Conference 2016 Nagaoka on Oct.1 2016…

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing/Legal

    • GCC RISC-V Support Allegedly Held Up Due To University Lawyers

      While there has been talk about RISC-V architecture support in the GCC compiler and for LLVM too going back months, a developer is reporting that the GCC RISC-V support is being delayed due to UC Berkeley lawyers.

      Contributions to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) require a copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for this GPLv3-licensed compiler. It turns out the University of California Berkeley lawyers are taking issue with this, temporarily holding up the compiler back-end from merging.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • France is developing a free consultation platform for public authorities

      Etalab and the CNNum (Conseil National du Numérique, the National Digital Council) planned to collaborate with civil society members and the Open Government ecosystem in France to develop an consultation platform. The idea was presented during an Open Democracy Now Hackathon, which took place in Paris on September 17 and 18.

    • France to develop a toolbox for Open Government

      Etalab, the French government agency in charge of Open Data and Open Government, and the French authorities are currently working, in collaboration with other OGP members, on an Open Government toolkit.

      This is aimed at helping governments to implement Open Government principles in their countries. This OGP Toolkit is to be finalised for the OGP Paris Summit in December. Every OGP member will have access to the toolkit.

      “This toolkit is designed to facilitate the implementation of OGP commitments, by referencing the available solutions and documenting their uses”, Etalab said on its website.

      It is being developed to be “a database of digital tools and uses made of them by organisations and citizens all over the world”. Basically, “the aim of this catalogue is to increase the visibility of these tools and encourage their sharing and reuse”.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Rutgers libraries launch open source textbook program

        It’s no secret that textbooks are expensive, but Rutgers Libraries are giving students’ wallets a break with a new open source textbook program.

        “Hopefully going forward we will have more students who will not have to make the difficult decision of deciding whether or not to purchase a book for their class because of the cost,” said Lily Todorinova, undergraduate experience librarian and liaison to School of Communication and Information.

        The Rutgers libraries are working closely with the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group to launch the Open and Affordable Textbook Project for all Rutgers campuses — New Brunswick, Camden and Newark, she said.

Leftovers

  • 4chan is running out of money

    The infamous message board 4chan is struggling to stay afloat and will have to make changes to reduce costs, the site’s owner wrote in a post on Sunday. “4chan can’t afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc, now,” writes Hiroyuki Nisimura, who bought the site from its founder last year.

    Nisimura says ads haven’t been effective enough to support the site, nor have subscriptions offering additional features. “We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed,” Nisimura writes. “I am sincerely sorry.”

  • How to prevent coworker competition from ruining company culture

    Over the next few weeks, they would unknowingly be the subjects of one of the most widely known psychological studies of our time. And the ways these groups bonded and interacted with each other draw some interesting parallels to our understanding of workplace culture.

  • Man Gets Attacked Twice By Grizzly Bear, Films Video Of Himself Covered In Blood

    Todd Orr’s story isn’t for the faint of heart.

    The 50-year-old was enjoying a solo hike Saturday near Ennis, Montana, when he was attacked by a grizzly bear.

    Bitten and bleeding, Orr managed to start back down the trail toward his truck ― only to be attacked again by the same bear a few minutes later.

    The encounter left him mangled and drenched in blood, but alive.

    “Legs are good, internal organs are good, eyes are good,” Orr says in a graphic 50-second video that he filmed just after the second attack. “I just walked out three miles and now I’ve got to go to the hospital.”

  • Science

    • Uncovering Texas’ Strategy to Slash Much-Needed Special Education Services

      Federal law mandates that school districts provide special education services to students with disabilities–physical, emotional or developmental. But outside the public’s view, the state of Texas has decided that fewer students should get those services. It pressured school districts to meet an artificial benchmark of 8.5 percent, a rate far below that of any state, according to a Houston Chronicle investigation.

      The article, by Brian M. Rosenthal, documents how “unelected state officials have quietly devised a system that has kept thousands of disabled kids” out of special education.

      “We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs,” one former teacher told Rosenthal. “It was all a numbers game.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Polish women strike over planned abortion ban

      Women wearing black clothes and waving black flags are demonstrating across Poland, boycotting their jobs and classes as part of a nationwide strike in protest against a new law that would in effect ban abortion.

      Many men also took part in demonstrations on the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk and elsewhere across the largely Catholic nation.

      Thousands of people also protested on Saturday in front of the parliament in Warsaw. Women were wearing black in a sign of mourning for the feared loss of reproductive rights; they have also warned that some women will die if the proposal passes as it stands now.

      Poland already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with terminations legally permitted only when there is severe foetal abnormality, when there is a grave threat to the health of the mother, or if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.

      But the new law would criminalise all terminations, with women punishable with up to five years in prison. Doctors found to have assisted with a termination would also be liable for prosecution and a prison term.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Impossible is impossible!

      Sometimes when you plan for a security event, it would be expected that the thing you’re doing will be making some outcome (something bad probably) impossible. The goal of the security group is to keep the bad guys out, or keep the data in, or keep the servers patched, or find all the security bugs in the code. One way to look at this is security is often in the business of preventing things from happening, such as making data exfiltration impossible. I’m here to tell you it’s impossible to make something impossible.

      As you think about that statement for a bit, let me explain what’s happening here, and how we’re going to tie this back to security, business needs, and some common sense. We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule, one of the forms is that the last 20% of the features are 80% of the cost. It’s a bit more nuanced than that if you really think about it. If your goal is impossible it would be more accurate to say 1% of the features are 2000% of the cost. What’s really being described here is a curve that looks like this

    • What is the spc_t container type, and why didn’t we just run as unconfined_t?

      If you are on an SELinux system, and run docker with SELinux separation turned off, the containers will run with the spc_t type.

    • The importance of paying attention in building community trust

      Trust is important in any kind of interpersonal relationship. It’s inevitable that there will be cases where something you do will irritate or upset others, even if only to a small degree. Handling small cases well helps build trust that you will do the right thing in more significant cases, whereas ignoring things that seem fairly insignificant (or saying that you’ll do something about them and then failing to do so) suggests that you’ll also fail when there’s a major problem. Getting the small details right is a major part of creating the impression that you’ll deal with significant challenges in a responsible and considerate way.

      This isn’t limited to individual relationships. Something that distinguishes good customer service from bad customer service is getting the details right. There are many industries where significant failures happen infrequently, but minor ones happen a lot. Would you prefer to give your business to a company that handles those small details well (even if they’re not overly annoying) or one that just tells you to deal with them?

    • Why health implants should have open source code

      As medical implants become more common, sophisticated and versatile, understanding the code that runs them is vital. A pacemaker or insulin-releasing implant can be lifesaving, but they are also vulnerable not just to malicious attacks, but also to faulty code.

      For commercial reasons, companies have been reluctant to open up their code to researchers. But with lives at stake, we need to be allowed to take a peek under the hood.

      Over the past few years several researchers have revealed lethal vulnerabilities in the code that runs some medical implants. The late Barnaby Jack, for example, showed that pacemakers could be “hacked” to deliver lethal electric shocks. Jay Radcliffe demonstrated a way of wirelessly making an implanted insulin pump deliver a lethal dose of insulin.

      But “bugs” in the code are also an issue. Researcher Marie Moe recently discovered this first-hand, when her Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) unexpectedly went into “safe mode”. This caused her heart rate to drop by half, with drastic consequences.

    • Hack Crashes Linux Distros with 48 Characters of Code

      With just a mere 48 characters of code, Linux admin and SSLMate founder Andrew Ayer has figured out how to crash major Linux distributions by locally exploiting a flaw in systemd.

      Ayer said the following command, when run as any user, will crash systemd: “NOTIFY_SOCKET=/run/systemd/notify systemd-notify”

    • Systemd is not Magic Security Dust

      Systemd maintainer David Strauss has published a response to my blog post about systemd. The first part of his post is replete with ad hominem fallacies, strawmen, and factual errors. Ironically, in the same breath that he attacks me for not understanding the issues around threads and umasks, he betrays an ignorance of how the very project which he works on uses threads and umasks. This doesn’t deserve a response beyond what I’ve called out on Twitter.

      In the second part of his blog post, Strauss argues that systemd improves security by making it easy to apply hardening techniques to the network services which he calls the “keepers of data attackers want.” According to Strauss, I’m “fighting one of the most powerful tools we have to harden the front lines against the real attacks we see every day.” Although systemd does make it easy to restrict the privileges of services, Strauss vastly overstates the value of these features.

    • A single command needed to crash Linux server – expert
    • Bitcoin Linux Users Need To Beware of Critical Systemd Vulnerability
    • This Single Line Of Code Can Crash Your Linux System In No Time
    • 48 characters enough to crash most Linux distros, says sysadmin
    • ‘We’re From Microsoft and We’ve Been Remotely Watching Your Computer’

      We are going into our third year of living in the Gardens of Taylor. When you come off of the city street and onto this property, you can sometimes get a creepy feeling, like this is familiar in an unpleasant sort of way. It can feel like you’ve just stepped into Stepford Village. Every yard has been manicured to match the ones on either side of it. The edging along all driveways and sidewalks is a perfect two inches across and if a weed or mushroom happens to grow within that etched space, it is gone the next time you look for it.

      Stuff like that just vanishes. Spooky like.

      Fact is, the property manager pays the lawn service to make a drive through every other day in order to take care of any anomalies. Once I got used to it, I became comfortable with living here, being that it’s for people with physical disabilities and age 55 or over.

      On moving-in day, we hadn’t been there an hour before people began to take notice of us from across the street. They would stop just long enough to pretend they weren’t checking us out, then they would be on their way. Some even stopped to help.

      [...]

      Now Claude and Jane both run Linux. Their money is safe, and if anyone calls giving them instructions how to get a virus off of their Windows’ computer, they just laugh and hang up, but not before telling them they run Linux.

      There will come a day, maybe sooner than any of us think, when a scam like this might actually work on a Linux machine. In the past two years we’ve seen stories of Linux servers being compromised, and there is constant news that this or that piece of malicious code might be making its way to Linux computers soon.

      Being prudent, I run both Avast for day-to-day stuff and various Clam iterations for biweekly sweeps for rootkits. I exchange a lot of Windows stuff with my Reglue kids, so that’s only smart. Not that I expect anything to go south in the near future. Everything I’ve seen coming down the Linux pike demands hands-on the target computer to inject the badware.

      Here’s a Helios Helpful Hint: Don’t let someone you don’t know have access to your computer, sans the repair guy.

      However I do believe in preparedness. Jane’s Linux Mint install runs the same security as mine and I administrate it remotely (from home. I’ll get Claude up to speed on Wednesday.

      How long ago was it that many of us gave up on the “disconnected generation?” For a while I didn’t work with people who were so set in their ways that they bucked any suggestion of having to learn something new. And honest-to-goodness, a lady in the neighborhood asked me to make her computer the same way it was when she bought it. That would be the Windows Vista release. Sigh.

      “No ma’am. Not for any amount of money. Sorry.”

      I’m not into any more stress than necessary these days.

      Vista? Really?

    • Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User

      Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization’s grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as “teachable moments” for others. “If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training,” they say, “the Internet would be a much safer place.”

      Enough of that. The problem isn’t the users: it’s that we’ve designed our computer systems’ security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can’t users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can’t they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can’t they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?

    • Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User [It says (scroll down) "Getting a virus simply by opening an email was an urban legend, a technically impossible but scary sounding thing to frighten normies with, as late as the 90s. ...Microsoft made that myth real with the first release of Outlook"]
    • A tiny PC as a router

      We needed a router and wifi access point in the office, and simultaneously both I and my co-worker Ivan needed such a thing at our respective homes. After some discussion, and after reading articles in Ars Technica about building PCs to act as routers, we decided to do just that.

      The PC solution seem to offer better performance, but this is actually not a major reason for us.

      We want to have systems we understand and can hack. A standard x86 PC running Debian sounds ideal to use.

      Why not a cheap commercial router? They tend to be opaque and mysterious, and can’t be managed with standard tooling such as Ansible. They may or may not have good security support. Also, they may or may not have sufficient functionality to be nice things, such as DNS for local machines, or the full power if iptables for firewalling.

      Why not OpenWRT? Some models of commercial routers are supported by OpenWRT. Finding good hardware that is also supported by OpenWRT is a task in itself, and not the kind of task especially I like to do. Even if one goes this route, the environment isn’t quite a standard Linux system, because of various hardware limitations. (OpenWRT is a worthy project, just not our preference.)

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Race and Militarism from Ferguson to Syria: A letter to African Americans

      “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.” Ida B. Wells

      The Black radical tradition has always understood the inextricable link between racism and militarism: racism as a manifestation of white supremacist ideology, and militarism as the mechanism to enforce that ideology.

      That fundamental link grounds our analysis of the Obama administration’s policies in Iraq and Syria. But the link between race ( white supremacy) and the deployment of violence to enforce the interests of white supremacy also explains the repressive mission and role of the police in the colonized barrios and segregated African American communities within the U.S.

    • United Nations: Targeting Wikileaks Founder With Drone Strike Criminal Violation of Human Rights

      Targeting or “taking out” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange via military drone strike would be a criminal violation of international human rights laws, a United Nations envoy said Monday.

      “A State could theoretically seek to justify the use of drones by invoking the right to anticipatory self-defence against a non-state actor and by arguing that it had no means to capture their targets or cause another state to capture the target,” said Dr. Agnes Callamard, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Executions during an interview with True Pundit. “To do so, the State would have to demonstrate an ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation’ necessity. This is not only a very high threshold to meet; it is also impossible to see how this could be used or justified in the case of Mr. Julian Assange.”

      Dr. Callamard’s statements come on the heels of a scathing published account by True Pundit detailing that in 2010 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly asked top aides if it was possible to use a drone strike against Assange. While Dr. Callamard said she had no knowledge of the assertions contained in the True Pundit story, she did speak to the alarming generalities of using a drone strike to silence someone of Assange’s global stature. Dr. Callamard stated “the use of drones for targeted killing outside the context of armed conflict, is almost never likely to be legal and to meet human rights law limitations on the use of lethal force.”

      Dr. Callamard, an expert on human rights and humanitarian work globally, in civil society organizations, the United Nations and in academia. Prior to her post at the UN, Dr. Callamard spent nine years as the Executive Director of ARTICLE 19, the international human rights organization promoting freedom of expression globally. Dr. Callamard also serves as director of Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression initiative.

    • Hillary Clinton considered drone attack on Julian Assange – report

      Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reportedly wanted to drone Wikileaks founder Julian Assange when she was secretary of state.

      According to True Pundit, Clinton and the state department were under pressure to silence Assange and Wikileaks in the months before the whistleblowing site released a massive dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables from 1966 up to 2010, dubbed CableGate.

      “Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton asked, according to unidentified state department sources.

      Published by True Pundit on Sunday, Wikileaks posted a link to the story on their official Twitter account on Monday, along with a screenshot of the article.

    • Hillary Clinton suggested taking out Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with drone: Report

      A new report reveals that an angry and frustrated Hillary Clinton once pondered obliterating Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with a drone strike.

      The shocking revelation comes as the Democratic presidential nominee and the party’s brain trust brace themselves for an “October Surprise” from Assange.

      Wikileaks has vowed to unleash a torrent of emails expected to be highly damaging to the former secretary of state — and her bid for the White House.

      The True Pundit says the U.S. government was tasked with neutralizing Assange. And Clinton was the point person.

      “Can’t we just drone this guy?” she pondered during one high-charged meeting, State Department sources reportedly told True Pundit. According to the website, others in the room laughed.

      But not Clinton, who called the Assange a “soft target.”

    • Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos

      The Pentagon gave a controversial U.K. PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

      Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

      The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

      Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy documents.”

    • CNN Celebrates Iraqi Housewife Who Beheaded and Then Cooked the Skulls of ISIS fighters

      When Islamic State beheads someone it is terrorism. When an Iraqi housewife beheads an ISIS fighter and cooks his skull, it is freedom. That is the CNN doctrine.

      CNN reports the story of 39-year-old Wahida Mohamed aka Um Hanadi, an Iraqi woman who supposedly leads a tribal militia force of around 70 men south of Mosul. She and her band allegedly helped “government forces” drive Islamic State out of a small town.

      “I began fighting the terrorists in 2004, working with Iraqi security forces and the coalition,” she told CNN. CNN cites no other source other than Um Hanadi herself and Facebook in its coverage.

      As a result, Um Hanadi said, she attracted the wrath of what eventually became al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which later morphed into ISIS. “I received threats from the top leadership of ISIS, including from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself,” she says. “I’m at the top of their most wanted list, even more than the [Iraqi] Prime Minister.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • It Seems Like Nobody’s Getting the Cash Bonuses Promised by the Reducing Over-Classification Act

      It often feels like everyone inside and outside the government agrees that over-classification of government records is a major problem. Yet a series of Freedom of Information Act requests by EFF has found that even when Congress allowed agencies to offer cash rewards to government employees to be less secretive, nobody has been collecting the money.

      Recognizing the threat posed by over-classification, Congress passed legislation in 2010 to counter the pervasive problem of bureaucrats making benign government records secret. One of the most highlighted provisions of the Reducing Over-Classification Act (ROCA) was a new tool for agencies: cash incentives for employees who accurately classify (and declassify) documents.

      Congress hoped that by offering a proverbial carrot to the line-level employees making initial and derivative classification decisions within federal agencies, it could increase transparency and allow greater information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement. Responses to EFF’s FOIA requests with 27 agencies demonstrates, however, that those carrots have rotted on the shelf.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Scientist: World won’t avoid dangerous warming mark

      A team of top scientists is telling world leaders to stop congratulating themselves on the Paris agreement to fight climate change because if more isn’t done, global temperatures will likely hit dangerous warming levels in about 35 years.

      Six scientists who were leaders in past international climate conferences joined with the Universal Ecological Fund in Argentina to release a brief report Thursday, saying that if even more cuts in heat-trapping gases aren’t agreed upon soon, the world will warm by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit by around 2050.

      That 1.8 degree mark is key because in 2009 world leaders agreed that they wanted to avoid warming of 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Temperatures have already risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, so that 2 degree goal is really about preventing a rise of another degree going forward.

      Examining the carbon pollution cuts and curbs promised by 190 nations in an agreement made in Paris last December, the scientists said it’s simply not enough.

    • [Older] 7 Popular Foods That Might Disappear Because of Climate Change

      Search is on for ancient or near-extinct crops that might be better suited for this new reality

      Throughout history, different types of food have surged and dropped in popularity, and some foods that existed at one point just aren’t around anymore. But we’re not talking about foods that aren’t popular, quite the opposite in fact. Some of our favorite foods and drinks could be considered “endangered” because the places where they are grown are being severely impacted by climate change. If this isn’t proof that we need to do something about climate change, I don’t know what is. To start off, here are a few foods that are part of our every lives that might not be around for long.

    • India ratifies Paris climate agreement

      India, one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, has ratified the Paris global climate agreement.

      Under the deal, India has committed to ensuring that at least 40% of its electricity will be generated from non-fossil sources by 2030.

      CO2 emissions are believed to be the driving force behind climate change.

      Last December in Paris, countries agreed to cut emissions in a bid to keep the global average rise in temperatures below 2C.

      The Paris deal is the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement.

      It will only come into force legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries which between them produce at least 55% of global carbon emissions.

      Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last month that India would ratify the agreement on 2 October, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the struggle for independence from Britain.

    • FMI: September warmer than usual for eighth year running

      According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute FMI, September’s balmy weather was caused by temperatures that were one to two degrees higher than usual across the country. Temperatures were particularly mild in northwest Lapland, where they were from two to four degrees higher than the norm.

      Last month’s highest temperature, 23.2 degrees Celsius was recorded at Kumpula in Helsinki on September 7. It was coolest in Naruska, Salla, in the northeast on September 18, when the mercury dropped to -5.3 degrees.

      The summery conditions persisted throughout the month, given that the last time daytime highs crossed the 20-degree mark was on the 15th and even as late as the 27th, highs passed 17 degrees as far north as Oulu.

      September marked the eighth year running that temperature records were higher than usual. Last year, the month that typically heralds autumn and the advent of decidedly cooler conditions was even warmer than this September. However according to FMI it’s still too early to make predictions about what the rest of the autumn will be like.

  • Finance

    • IMF cuts UK economic forecast for second time since Brexit vote

      The International Monetary Fund has cut its forecast for the UK economy next year for the second time since the Brexit vote.

    • Alyn Smith: Theresa May’s speech killed off lingering hope of salvaging something from the ruins of Brexit

      ANYONE who did not believe that the European Question is the defining attribute of politics in these islands is in no doubt after Sunday. Different people come to independence for different reasons. I’ve always been motivated by the difference Scotland could make in the world, and the difference we could make to the lives of Scots by taking control over our own lives and making decisions here.

      So Sunday was a stand-out awful day in what has been a pretty bleak few months, watching a Tory party we didn’t vote for making statements about how we’ll interact with the world, and presuming to make the decisions for us, to boot. And by any yardstick not giving one jot about the national interest, neither ours nor the UK’s. We have seen, clearly, that the UK Government’s first priority is the unity of the governing party itself.

      Party conferences can be awful things for outsiders. Part reunion, part beauty contest, part theatre and, somewhere among the open or crypto power-struggles, some business might actually get done. But, much as it pains me, this Tory conference matters, and isn’t just the usual theatre because it is the first glimpse of a carefully constructed facade put forward by the people who seek to make decisions over our lives and the lives of future generations. And it isn’t pretty. I was actually more hopeful. I still had some hope that the canny Remain-voting new PM was keeping her powder dry while the UK civil service worked on a clever fix. But even I have to admit now that the extremists are in charge.

    • Petition: make the FBI explain why they didn’t bring criminal charges against bank execs

      Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren published an open letter to FBI director James Comey observing that, in revealing details of its investigation into the Clinton email scandal, the Bureau had seemingly abandoned its longstanding policy of not sharing its deliberations, meaning that there was no longer any reason to keep secret its reasoning for not bringing criminal charges against the bankers who did trillions of dollars’ worth of damage to the world economy, sparking wars, starvation, and personal ruin for millions of people.

    • Saudi Arabia switches to ‘Western’ Gregorian calendar so it can pay workers less and save money

      Saudi Arabia has switched to the “Western” Gregorian calendar to pay its civil servants in one of a number of financial reforms announced by the Council of Ministers.

      The Kingdom has used the lunar-based Hijri calendar since it was founded in 1932, but switched to the solar-based Gregorian calendar for paying public sector staff on 1 October.

    • Robert Reich: Why it’s time to start considering a universal basic income

      Imagine a little gadget called an i-Everything. You can’t get it yet, but if technology keeps moving as fast as it is now, the i-Everything will be with us before you know it.

      A combination of intelligent computing, 3-D manufacturing, big data crunching, and advanced bio-technology, this little machine will be able to do everything you want and give you everything you need.

      There’s only one hitch. As the economy is now organized, no one will be able to buy it, because there won’t be any paying jobs left. You see, the i-Everything will do … everything.

      We’re heading toward the i-Everything far quicker than most people realize. Even now, we’re producing more and more with fewer and fewer people.

      Internet sales are on the way to replacing millions of retail workers. Diagnostic apps will be replacing hundreds of thousands of health-care workers. Self-driving cars and trucks will replace 5 million drivers.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Clinton manager ‘reticent to comment’ on report about droning Assange

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager declined Monday to comment on recent reports alleging the Democratic nominee once suggested sending a drone strike after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

      “I’m reticent to comment on anything that the WikiLeaks people have said. They’ve made a lot of accusations in the past,” Robby Mook said Monday in an interview with WTTG.com.

      WikiLeaks tweeted a screen grab Sunday evening from a report alleging that Clinton once asked during a State Department briefing, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

      She supposedly asked this when she served as secretary of state.

    • Biden: Trump ‘completely uninformed’ on veterans and PTSD

      Vice President Joe Biden chastised Donald Trump Monday for his comments about veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), calling the GOP presidential nominee “thoroughly and completely uninformed.”

      Many have interpreted remarks Trump made Monday about veterans and PTSD as a slight, though the campaign insists his comments were misrepresented by the media.

      “Where in the hell is he from?” Biden asked at a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Sarasota, Fla.

      “I don’t think he was trying to be mean. He is just so thoroughly, completely uninformed.”

      Biden, who said he has been “in and out” of Afghanistan and Iraq more than 29 times, said the U.S. has only one sacred obligation and that is to “care for those we send to war and to care for them and their family when they come home.”

      “What are the chances Trump honors commitment to those who are wounded?

      “It’s not just that he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want to find out,” Biden added.

    • The New York Times and Trump’s Taxes: Another Marker on the End of Journalism

      I don’t support Trump. I don’t support Clinton. But what I really don’t support is shoddy journalism, and that’s what is all awhirl regarding the leak of three pages of Trumps’ federal tax return from 21 years ago.

    • More Media B.S. — OMG, Trump Company Legally Rented Office Space to Iranian Bank!

      Once again a story that Trump did nothing illegal is somehow front page news. His crime this time? Continuing to legally rent out office space to a bank already in a building he bought 18 years ago.

      So the big news is that Donald Trump’s real estate organization rented space to an Iranian bank later linked to Iran’s nuclear program.

      Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-controlled banks, was already a tenant in 1998 when Trump purchased the General Motors Building, above, in Manhattan, but he kept them on for another five years, until 2003.

    • Ron Paul criticizes Gary Johnson, praises Jill Stein
    • Third-Party Voters Know What They Want

      On Tuesday night, two men who want to be vice president will face off in a debate. If Bill Weld had his way, he’d be up on that stage, too.

      Mr. Weld, who served as governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, is running as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential pick this year, alongside Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Last week, Mr. Weld spoke to students and supporters at Temple University in Philadelphia. Outside Morgan Hall, two students wearing Gary Johnson shirts directed people to the event.

      A group of young white men wearing baseball caps walked past, saw the Gary Johnson shirts, and jeered: “What’s Aleppo?”

      One of Mr. Johnson’s supporters, Alex Pack, rolled his eyes. Were those guys Trump supporters?

      “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Backward hats.”

    • Here Are 7 Questions Mike Pence Should Be Asked at the Vice Presidential Debate

      When Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine take the stage Tuesday night for the 2016 vice presidential debate, there are a few things we hope that debate moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News will ask Pence to account for.

      While promoted as the sane member of a GOP ticket headed by the likes of Donald Trump, Pence, who is governor of Indiana, uses a demeanor of reasonableness to offset some mighty extreme views on the role of women, climate change, creationism and Social Security, to name a few. The vice presidential candidates meet only once before a national television audience, so this forum will likely be an introduction of these candidates to most voters.

      Kaine, the U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, is pretty much your basic liberal; not much by way of surprise in his background. But Pence, a convert to hard-core right-wing Protestant evangelicalism, embraces a range of positions far afield of the views of mainstream voters—views he doesn’t flaunt on the campaign trail. He’s a favorite of donors to the Koch network, as well as Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the ground-organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers at the helm of Koch Industries. (According to Follow the Money, David Koch has spent some $300,000 on Pence’s political campaigns.) Pence has also enjoyed the largess of Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary firm once known as Blackwater (since renamed Academi), from whom he received thousands of dollars in donations for his congressional campaigns.

      If voters are to know what they’re getting when they pull the lever on November 8, Quijano will need to dig deep into Pence’s record. Here a few topics that would prove most enlightening to the electorate.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Fair Processes, Better Outcomes

      Yesterday we exposed the dangers of Shadow Regulation; the secretive web of backroom agreements between companies that seeks to control our behavior online, often driven by governments as a shortcut and less accountable alternative to regulation.

    • Record Labels Make New Grab For Website-Blocking Power in YouTube-MP3 Suit

      Once again, major record labels are asking a court to give them power over the Internet’s basic infrastructure. This is the very power that Congress has refused to give them, and the very power they have proven unable and unwilling to use responsibly. This time, their alleged target is the website Youtube-MP3.org, a site that extracts the audio tracks from YouTube videos and allows users to download them. But as in other recent lawsuits, the labels’ real target appears to be nearly every company that operates or supports the operation of the Internet. The labels are seeking a court order that would bind all of these companies to assist the labels in making Youtube-MP3 disappear from the Internet.

      Even if that website is found to be liable for copyright infringement, the law doesn’t give copyright or trademark holders such sweeping power to edit the Internet. And it never should.

      Record labels have been filing many lawsuits against websites that they deem to be connected to copyright infringement. These sites, run from outside the U.S., don’t bother appearing in U.S. court to defend themselves—and the labels know this. When one party doesn’t show up to court and the other wins by default, judges often grant the winning party everything they ask for. Record labels, along with luxury brands and other frequent filers of copyright and trademark suits, have been using this tactic to write sweeping orders that claim to bind every kind of Internet intermediary: hosting providers, DNS registrars and registries, CDNs, Internet service providers, and more. Some of these requested orders claim to cover payment providers, search engines, and even Web browsers. Judges often sign these orders without much scrutiny.

      Then, the labels and brands, armed with an overbroad and often, in our view, legally invalid order they wrote themselves, try to force Internet intermediaries into helping make the website disappear, and sometimes to filter their services to keep the website from coming back. The central defect of these orders is that they purport to bind third-parties who have no notice or opportunity to challenge them before they issue. Some intermediaries, faced with these orders, cut off websites without asking questions. Others, including Automattic (WordPress), CloudFlare, and the domain name registrar Tucows, have stood up for Internet users by insisting on proper, legally binding orders. A group of major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo! also pushed back against this abuse in an amicus brief last year.

    • Singapore Jails Teen Blogger for Videos Critical of Islam, Christianity

      Amos Yee, 17, a blogger from Singapore, has been sentenced to six weeks in prison, plus a fine of $1,500 U.S., because he “deliberately elected to do harm by using offensive and insulting words and profane gestures to hurt the feelings of Christians and Muslims.”

      Such was the pronouncement of district judge Ong Hian Sun, according to CNN, which reports Yee was facing six charges of “wounding religious feeling” with his social media posts — he has a preference for YouTube rants. He was also slapped with two charges of failing to report to the police station when summoned.

    • Microsoft Bing Debuts New DMCA Notice Dashboard

      Microsoft’s Bing has just debuted a new system which allows any copyright holder to submit and monitor the status of their DMCA complaints to the search engine. At the center of the tool is a brand new dashboard, available to anyone with a Microsoft account.

    • Cox Wants Music Group to Pay for False Copyright Claims.

      Internet provider Cox Communications is demanding over $100,000 in compensation from Round Hill Music, for the legal fees it incurred based on false copyright claims. The music group sued Cox last year over alleged infringements committed by the ISP’s subscribers, without actually owning any of the copyrights in question.

    • DOJ To Anti-Muslim Troll Pam Geller: You’re Suing The Wrong Entity, Genius

      There simply aren’t enough derogatives in the dictionary to apply to Pam Geller’s lawsuit against the DOJ for its “enforcement” of Section 230. Geller doesn’t appear to know what she’s doing, much less who she’s suing. Her blog posts portray her lawsuit against the DOJ as being against Facebook. Facebook has earned the ire of Geller by enforcing its terms of use — rules Geller clearly disagrees with.

      Somehow, Geller has managed to construe the actions of a private platform as government infringement on her First Amendment rights. The connective tissue in her litigious conspiracy theory is Section 230 — the statute that protects service providers from being sued for the actions of their users.

      Considering Geller’s fondness for posting inflammatory content, you’d think the last thing she’d want to attack is Section 230. A successful dismantling of this important protection would mean Geller would be even less welcome on any social media platform.

      But the burning stupidity propelling Geller’s white-hot hazardous waste dump of a lawsuit knows no bounds. Somehow, actual lawyers — working in concert with Geller — came up with this breathtakingly wrong interpretation of Section 230.

    • Students, alumni, faculty ‘ban together’ against censorship

      In a small room in the back of Wicker Park’s Davenport Piano Bar Sept. 26, performers, including Columbia students and alumni, squeezed onto the small stage to act out 14 scenes with censored content previously deemed unworthy for theater.

      The censored content performed at the bar, 1383 N. Milwaukee Ave., is part of “Banned Together: A Censorship Cabaret” and was chosen after being challenged or banned by schools and organizations in the past. “A Censorship Cabaret” was organized by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization created by the Dramatists Guild to advocate freedom of expression in theater.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • After Appeals Court Flip-Flop, Aaron Graham Asks Supreme Court To Examine Warrantless Access To Cell Location Info

      Aaron Graham — the defendant at the center of a Fourth Amendment dispute over the warrantless acquisition of cell site location info — is hoping to get one more court to take a look at his case.

      Last summer, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to institute a warrant requirement for historical CSLI. As was noted then, the court found that the records generated by cell phones (and held by phone companies) had an expectation of privacy — at least when obtained for a significant period of time. In Graham’s case, the government obtained 221 days of historical cell site location data — the sort of extended period the Appeals Court found troubling… originally.

      The government appealed and attempted to differentiate its long-term, post-facto tracking of Graham’s movements with eight months of CSLI from the Supreme Court’s Jones decision — which (sort of) found that deploying a surreptitious GPS tracker required the use of a warrant. It claimed this form of location tracking was completely different than the other form of location tracking, mainly because in Graham’s case the tracking was done by the phone company. The government simply benefitted from the warrantless collection of records the phone company was already compiling.

      The court bought the government’s arguments the second time around. The short-lived warrant requirement was removed and the 1979 definition of the Third Party Doctrine (Smith v. Maryland) was reinstated. The dissent correctly pointed out that no cell phone user voluntarily turns over location data to service providers. It’s just something that has to happen for phones to make calls or access data. It also pointed out that, unlike other third-party records, customers aren’t allowed to access their own cell site location data. Only the phone company and the government can do that, even though it’s the customer generating the records and paying for their collection and storage.

    • Victory! Gov. Brown Signs Bill to Overhaul California’s Broken Gang Databases

      Over the last few weeks, a broad coalition of civil liberties and social justice organizations rained down letters, tweets, and op-eds on Gov. Jerry Brown, urging him to sign A.B. 2298, a bill to begin the process of overhauling the state’s CalGang gang affiliation database.

      On Wednesday, it all paid off.

      Gov. Brown signed the legislation, creating a requirement that law enforcement inform a person before they add them to a shared gang database such as CalGang. The new law also gives the person the opportunity to challenge their inclusion in a gang database in court. Starting in January 2018, law enforcement agencies will be required to produce detailed transparency reports on each of their shared gang databases.

    • Trump calls for U.S. to use offensive cyberweapons

      The U.S. government needs to be ready to use its offensive cyberweapons in response to attacks from other nations, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Monday.

      The U.S. has significant offensive cybercapabilities, but it has been shy about deploying them, Trump said during a speech in Herdon, Virginia. “This is the warfare of the future,” he said.

      The U.S. should also increase its use of cyberweapons to attack terrorists, Trump said.

      President Barack Obama has failed to protect the nation’s cybersecurity and a new focus is needed, added Trump, who has largely avoided technology issues in his campaign.

    • Trump Calls For ‘Crippling’ Cyberwar Attack Capabilities

      Donald Trump has made no secret of his “bomb the s&*$t out of them” approach to foreign conflict. But when it comes to America’s digital security, his prescriptions have mostly been limited to vague calls to “get tough on cyber” and invitations to Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. Today, however, Trump got a bit more specific about the digital security postures he would favor as president—and set a new benchmark for a hawkish approach the online world.

      “As a deterrent against attacks on our critical resources the United States must possess…the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling cyber counter attacks,” Trump told the crowd at a Retired American Warriors town hall in Virginia today. “I mean crippling. Crippling.”

    • Facebook eyeing data centre in Odense

      There is strong evidence that the US social media colossus Facebook is keen on setting up shop in Denmark by erecting a massive 184,000 sqm data centre near Odense.

      According to Fyens Stiftstidende newspaper, Facebook wants to build three large server halls and a number of other buildings in the business area of Tietgenbyen, located just south of Odense.

      Facebook, meanwhile, has not yet revealed any of its hands, although it has conceded it is interested in the Odense site.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The Playpen Story: Rule 41 and Global Hacking Warrants

      The warrant the FBI used in the Playpen investigation—which resulted in the delivery of malware to over a thousand computers, located around the world—violated Rule 41, an important rule of federal criminal procedure. Although Rule 41 may seem obscure, it plays a vital role in limiting when federal law enforcement agencies can conduct lawful searches and seizures.

    • This November, Know Your Voting Rights

      When voters go to the polls this November, they will encounter a patchwork of different laws and policies, many of them new since the 2012 presidential election — on everything from new voter registration deadlines to new identification requirements at the polls.

      Since the last presidential election, 17 states have sought to implement new barriers to voting — including states like Alabama, Kansas, and Texas — with new ID requirements, disproportionately affecting minorities and low-income communities. As discussed below, some but not all of these laws have been blocked thanks to litigation by the ACLU and other organizations.

    • In Syracuse, A Child Can Be Thrown in Solitary for Singing Whitney Houston

      A NYCLU lawsuit exposes a nightmarish jail where children are kept for months in isolation for minor misbehavior.

      Charnasha still suffers through sleepless nights because of her experience at the Onondaga County Justice Center.

      The Syracuse, New York, jail keeps 16- and 17-year-old children — many of whom have mental illness — locked up in solitary, often for weeks or even months for transgressions as insignificant as wearing the wrong shoes or getting into a water fight. For the benign “offense” of speaking too loudly, Charnasha was sentenced to solitary for 32 days.

      Young girls in solitary at the Justice Center are watched by adult male guards and forced to shower without a curtain. Charnasha described a guard making comments about her naked body and calling her and other girls “little bitches.” Her experience in solitary was so traumatic that Charnasha wrote a letter to her mom telling her she wanted to end her life.

      “I felt uncomfortable and exposed. I still can’t sleep at night because of the nightmares,” Charnasha said. “No other kids should be allowed to go through what we went through.”

      Since 2015, at least 86 children were placed in solitary more than 250 times at the Onondaga County Justice Center.

    • ‘Air passengers are treated like cash cows’: Fury over Government’s plan to let travellers pay £17.50 to beat queues at airport security

      Passengers are to be charged up to up to £17.50 for the chance to jump lengthy queues at airport passport control points.

      Ministers have confirmed they are ‘working closely’ with airports across the country to extend a scheme that allows travellers to pay a premium to avoid delays at border security when they arrive in the UK.

      The ‘fast-track’ fees would be aimed at easing congestion at passport desks, which has soared to unprecedented levels at some airports.

    • Grooming gang leader loses appeal after claiming all-white jury was part of anti-Islam conspiracy

      A paedophile who led a child a child sex grooming ring in Rochdale tried – and failed – to overturn his convictions with a European court claiming an all-white jury was part of a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims.

      Shabir Ahmed wrote to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) claiming his convictions for child sex offences were part of anti-Islam witch hunt.

      The 63-year-old attempted to use human rights laws to argue his criminal convictions were unsafe and unfair, but failed.

      Ahmed is in Wakefield prison having being caged in 2012 and given a 19-year sentence.

      European Court of Human Rights papers show he claimed the all-white jury at his trial was biased.

      He desperately claimed that breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a fair trial.

    • Hadi: Only Islam can rule, others must be ‘pak turut’

      As various opposition parties begin to corral against BN, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang said those who want to court them must be mindful that only “Islam” can rule the country.

      “Islam has to be the leader and ruler, those who are not of Islam must be followers (pak turut).

      “Let’s not place religion and politics in separate corners,” he was reported saying in Sinar Harian today.

      “Don’t ask PAS to cooperate with you, when you will not make any change towards (prioritising) Islam, that is wrong.

      “As long as the power of Islamic governance isn’t upheld, then those who rule would not care about sin and reward, would rob the people’s wealth and so on.

      “Only Islam can correct people’s (behaviour). PAS can only cooperate with those who are willing to uphold Islam only,” he was reported saying at an event in Kemaman last Thursday night, at the launch of the Harapan Semua (Harap) gathering attended by roughly 1,500.

    • Extremist Imam Tests F.B.I. and the Limits of the Law

      For more than a decade, Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa has served as a Muslim cleric in Maryland, working as a prison chaplain and as an imam at mosques in Annapolis and outside Baltimore. He gave a two-week course in 2011 on Islamic teachings on marriage at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama made a much-publicized visit this year.

      But in the last two years, Imam Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas. The “Islamic Jurisprudence Center” website he set up last year has condemned American mosques as un-Islamic and declared that homosexual acts should be punished by death.

    • Are students in Detroit being denied their right to literacy? Lawsuit filed against state officials in Michigan says yes

      This month, a unique lawsuit was filed in Michigan against Gov. Rick Snyder and numerous state education officials, claiming that students in Detroit are being denied their constitutional right to literacy. The 133-page complaint, filed by the pro-bono Los Angeles-based firm Public Counsel, is attempting to gain class action status.

      The lawsuit highlights poor conditions in Michigan schools, like classrooms so hot teachers and students literally vomit, vermin in schools, outdated and limited books, an overall lack of teachers, and much more. Detroit’s school districts have some of the lowest performing schools in the country.

      “In one elementary school, the playground slide has jagged edges, causing students to tear their clothing and gash their skin, and students frequently find bullets, used condoms, sex toys, and dead vermin around the playground equipment,” the lawsuit reads.

      The lawsuit is attempting to build off of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education, and assert that students have a right to literacy under the Fourteenth Amendment. That may sound like a heavy lift, but many legal scholars not involved in the case believe the case could be successful and historic.

    • Federal Court Says Ballot Selfie Ban Is Like Burning Down the House to Roast a Pig

      In First Amendment victory, the court unanimously struck down New Hampshire’s law banning “ballot selfies.”

      In a victory for the First Amendment, a federal appeals court unanimously struck down New Hampshire’s law banning “ballot selfies.”

    • Keith Lamont Scott’s Disability May Have Gotten Him Killed, and He’s Not The Only One

      Last week in Charlotte, North Carolina, police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, a Black man with a disability. This happens with gut-wrenching frequency. It happened again this week in El Cajon, California, where police shot and killed Alfred Olango, a Black man with mental illness. Yet disability is often overlooked as a factor in police killings and use of force.

      A recent widely cited report on the issue estimates that up to one half of all use of force incidents involve individuals with disabilities, noting that “[d]isability is the missing word in media coverage of police misuse of force.” People with mental disabilities, especially people of color, are particularly at risk of being shot or beaten by the police.

      Mr. Scott’s horrific killing, captured on video, is far too typical. Just before police shot and killed Mr. Scott while he was sitting in his car, his wife shouted, “He has a TBI. He’s not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine.”

      A “TBI” is a traumatic brain injury, and it’s a term widely known within law enforcement and other emergency service providers. As with a number of disabilities in the U.S., African-Americans are more likely to have a TBI. People with brain injuries experience problems in cognitive skills and typically think, speak, and process information more slowly than other people. A person with a traumatic brain injury easily becomes confused with sudden changes in their environment and may not be able to immediately understand and comply with police commands.

    • John Oliver Takes On Police Accountability And The Colossally-Stupid ‘Bad Apple’ Defense

      And that’s exactly what has happened. Officers — sheltered by extra rights, less-than-strenuous internal investigations, policies that allow for the destruction of discipline records, civil immunity, revolving door policies that allow “bad apples” to infect new law enforcement agencies — basically answer to no one.

      In rare, rare cases, police officers have been convicted and jailed. But this is usually the end result of outside pressure or behavior so repulsive and toxic the agency housing the officer can’t bring itself to defend them.

      As Oliver points out, when officers are caught committing criminal acts, they’re often given the option to resign rather than face an investigation. In other cases, they’re swiftly cleared of serious charges and allowed to desk job their way back into their old positions.

      Until recently, the DOJ and FBI expressed zero interest in compiling data on police use of force — to say nothing about regular, non-deadly police misconduct. Years of neglect have resulted in a data gap, with private citizens picking up the government’s slack to produce more credible numbers about civilians killed by law enforcement officers.

    • Yes, Police Are Snooping Through Criminal Databases For Personal Reasons All The Time

      The more journalists and other FOIA enthusiasts gain access to public records, the more we discover that a combination of access and power tends to result in abuse. Even as this abuse goes unaddressed, law enforcement agencies are striving to add more personal information to their databases, extending far past the usual “name/last known location” to encompass a vast array of biometric data.

      Privacy watchdogs have been fighting against these for good reason: very little is known about the contents of these databases or the controls put in place to protect the info from inappropriate access. What is known is that these databases are misused by law enforcement officers routinely. What’s also been discovered is that this routine misuse is rarely ever punished to the extent the law allows. Warnings about possible jail time are meaningless when the usual punishment usually ranges from nothing at all to short suspensions.

      The Associated Press has obtained another pile of documents from public records request that show little has changed. Abuse of access is still a common occurrence, as is the lack of meaningful consequences. There’s no almost no oversight and no federal law enforcement body holding agencies accountable for misuse of databases under their control.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • EFF Asks Court To Block The DOJ From Prosecuting Researcher For DMCA Violations

        A few more wrinkles have appeared in the EFF’s attempted legal destruction of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause. Back in July, the EFF — along with researchers Bunny Huang and Matthew Green — sued the government, challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA. As it stands now, researchers are restricted by the limitations built into the anti-circumvention clause. The Library of Congress can grant exceptions, but these are only temporary, lasting three years and generally vanishing at the end of that term.

        Projects and research efforts continue to be thwarted by this provision, opening up those who circumvent DRM and other protective measures to the possibility of prosecution. And their options when facing charges are severely limited. There is no “fair use” exception to Section 1201 of the DMCA — something the EFF would like to see changed.

        The threat of prosecution may be mostly existential, but it’s still far from nonexistent. This is why the EFF has requested a preliminary injunction that would prevent the DOJ from trying to put its client in jail.

      • MPAA Applauds Derailment of FCC Cable Box Competition Plan Because, Uh, Jobs!

        Last week we noted how the FCC had to scrap its plan to bring competition to the cable box after an unprecedented PR and disinformation campaign by the cable and entertainment industries. In short, using consultants, think tanks, payrolled politicians, a soundwall of misleading editorials and even the US Copyright Office, the cable industry was able to convince many in the press, public and even at the FCC that the plan would have ripped the planet off its very orbital access, violated copyright, eroded consumer privacy, and even harmed diversity programming.

        [...]

        Except the FCC’s proposal wouldn’t hurt jobs in the slightest. Under the FCC’s plan, customers still would pay for cable, they’d just have more flexibility in how that programming is consumed. And if anything, you’d see more jobs as the cable hardware itself was opened to multiple hardware competitors and streaming vendors looking to make headway in the space. But just like their previous whining session on this subject, the MPAA can’t just admit it’s terrified of evolution and consumer empowerment, so it apparently has to conflate “copyright” with a loss of control.

        Meanwhile, while many media outlets continue to insist this plan is simply on hold, there’s really only two likely outcomes moving forward thanks to cable lobbyists, the US Copyright Office, and folks like the MPAA: either the plan gets scrapped entirely, or the end result winds up being so watered down as to be utterly useless.

      • European Allows Copyright Owners to Demand Open Wifi Networks be Password Protected

        The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently announced its decision in Sony v McFadden with important consequences for open wireless in the European Union. The court held that providers of open wifi are not liable for copyright violations committed by others, but can be ordered to prevent further infringements by restricting access to registered users with passwords. EFF reported on the legal aspects of the case last year and collaborated on an open letter to the ECJ on the costs to economic growth, safety and innovation of a password lockdown.

        Free wifi is rare in Germany compared with other EU countries due to legal uncertainty generated by the doctrine of Störerhaftung, a form of indirect liability for the actions of others, which has deterred cafes, municipalities and others from offering free connectivity. Many in Germany hoped that the McFadden case would remove these doubts, but it is now clear that a legislative fix is needed instead.

      • Will the European Commission’s copyright rules spell destruction for Wikimedia?

        The European Commission’s Copyright Directive – full of bad ideas, or full of the worst ideas ever?

        That’s the question that many of us campaigning for positive copyright reform are asking ourselves in the wake of the Commission’s recently announced copyright package.

        We’ve extensively discussed the problems with the Commission’s link tax – see here, here and here – but equally important, are the Commission’s proposals with regards to intermediaries, such as websites like Wikipedia which host user-generated content, and the role of ‘Internet cops’ they will be forced to play if the Commission is successful in its aims.

        Right now, many such websites have an exemption under the current rules and, quite sensibly, are not expected to police the activities of all their users. Unfortunately this might not be the case for much longer. In the Commission’s new paradigm, websites will suddenly be responsible for monitoring the activity of their users, and filtering content to disable and remove instances of alleged copyright infringement.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/andromeda-predictions/feed/ 0 Addendum: Controversial Chinchilla Farming by the Kongstad Family http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/chinchilla-farming-jesper-kongstad/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/chinchilla-farming-jesper-kongstad/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 09:27:13 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95813 Summary: Today is World Animal Day, so the timing seems right for articles about the not-so-glamorous side of Jesper Kongstad

In the opening part of this series and in the previous post we explained the significance and relevance of Mr. Kongstad’s professional life in Denmark to the EPO. These things are clearly inseparable. Potential ethical breaches too were alluded to.

“The subject of skinning for fur (fashion for the super-rich) is not unexplored, not in the context of a company that Mr. Kongstad is professionally connected to.”In the previous part we noted that the Kongstad family used to live in Rungsted, an affluent suburban neighborhood in Hørsholm Municipality on the Øresund coast, north of Copenhagen. In 2013 they relocated to a farmhouse in Valby, Helsinge. It is a rural area in the Gribskov municipality which is situated about 80 km north-west of Copenhagen. A number of Danish press articles reported on the Kongstad family’s relocation to a more pastoral setting in Valby which was said to be motivated by a desire for a change in life-style, but our sources suspect it may have been connected to/motivated by farming small animals for their skin.

The subject of skinning for fur (fashion for the super-rich) is not unexplored, not in the context of a company that Mr. Kongstad is professionally connected to. We spent some time researching the subject and herein we shed some more light on it. Some photos that might be of interest will precede a more detailed analysis with sources.

We present some photos related to the Kongstad story/stories. The photos of the property (farmhouse) at Vibelandsvej 8, Valby, 3200 Helsinge – Gribskov come from various sources.

1. Google Maps & StreetView (the original photos are larger, but rescaled inline to fit the page)

Kongstad mansion

Kongstad mansion

2. The Facebook page of “Kongstad Chinchillas” (tagged below as “FB”, the 3 photographs below)

Kongstad mansion

Kongstad mansion

Kongstad mansion

3. Screen shots from a local news program on Danish TV (tagged below as “TV”, the 3 photographs below)

Kongstad mansion

Kongstad mansion

Kongstad mansion

There was also an article (in Danish) about the Chinchilla project in a Danish Farmer’s Magazine (LandbrugsAvisen) in 2014. In the first photo, Ms. Kongstad poses with her dog Hector in front of the farmhouse.

“But the point to remember here is that Kongstad and his wife aren’t making any secret about their Chinchilla project. In fact quite the opposite — they seem to be actively canvassing publicity from various media in Denmark and via Facebook.”We would like to emphasise that we don’t encourage or condone invasions of privacy. But the point to remember here is that Kongstad and his wife aren’t making any secret about their Chinchilla project. In fact quite the opposite — they seem to be actively canvassing publicity from various media in Denmark and via Facebook. So they hardly have any grounds for complaining if their publicised activites attract unwanted attention. We don’t see that as involving any invasion of privacy.

If someone posts photos on their Facebook page then they can hardly complain if they end up being commented on and perhaps reproduced elsewhere (although there might be copyright issues with that).

We are planning a dedicated article on the Chinchilla project so we might like to put out there some of the photos until that is ready. We shall get back to that in the near future.

“Kongstad’s farmhouse residence in Denmark is officially called “Bremelandsgård”.”Regarding Bremelandsgård, the farmhouse above, some additional information reached us only days ago.

Kongstad’s farmhouse residence in Denmark is officially called “Bremelandsgård”. “Gård” is a Danish word meaning farm so the name means “Bremelands farm”. There is a photo of the farmhouse and buildings on Panoramio. That photo was taken in 2011 which is about two years before the Kongstads acquired the property (2013). To see the road entrance to the property on Google Maps (Street View) use this link. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/chinchilla-farming-jesper-kongstad/feed/ 0 Introduction to Jesper Kongstad, EPO Chairman of the Administrative Council http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/jesper-kongstad-introduction/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/jesper-kongstad-introduction/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 08:42:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95809 Part of a series

Jesper Kongstad's mansion

Summary: A look at the professional life of the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation, including the lesser-known aspects of Jesper Kongstad’s farmhouse/mansion in Denmark (shown above)

Jesper Kongstad is the current Director of the Danish Patent and Trademark Office and Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation. He is also a member of the Board of the Nordic Patent Institute.

“Kongstad rejected this suggestion and claimed that the redundancies which he defended as “just sound management” were a justifiable reaction to the downturn in applications.”In 2009, Kongstad put his name forward as a candidate for the position of President of the European Patent Office which was due to be filled on 1 July 2010. In December 2009, he withdrew his candidacy allegedly as the result of some kind of secret deal with Battistelli.

Kongstad was subsequently elected as Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation on June 29, 2010. He took up office on 1 July 2010 for an initial period of three years, which was later extended to six years in March 2013. He was re-elected for a further period of three years in March 2016.

Kongstad has been the Director of the Danish Patent and Trademark Office (DKPTO) since 2003. In 2009 it was reported that the DKPTO had laid off 35 members of staff after seeing a slump in applications due to the global recession. This layoff amounted to somewhere around 15% of the total workforce of the DKPTO. It was criticised is some quarters as “a very drastic approach” and it was suggested that the DKPTO was using the crisis as an excuse to cut certain services. Kongstad rejected this suggestion and claimed that the redundancies which he defended as “just sound management” were a justifiable reaction to the downturn in applications.

“Despite the Scandinavian tradition for transparency and accountability, Kongstad is ironically an outspoken opponent of transparency rules for IP trading.”It’s also interesting to note that during 2009 and 2010 the DKPTO was involved in an EU twinning project with the Croatian State Intellectual property office (SIPO). This is where Željko Topić had worked before he started abusing EPO staff like he did at SIPO.

Despite the Scandinavian tradition for transparency and accountability, Kongstad is ironically an outspoken opponent of transparency rules for IP trading.

From his CV which appears on LinkedIn it can be seen that Kongstad began his professional career in Denmark as an administrative officer in the Ministry for Industry (1984-1990). In 1990 he began working at the Statens Serum Institute where he remained in various roles until 1999. Statens Serum Institute is a public enterprise under the Danish Ministry of Health. After that he switched to the private sector where he was CEO of a biopharmaceutical startup company called Astion A/S.

“He is rumored to have strong connections to the conservative-liberal Venstre party which was in government at that time. It has been speculated that his political connections might have assisted him in securing his position at the DKPTO but this cannot be confirmed.”In 2003 Kongstad returned to the public sector when he was appointed as Director of the DKPTO. He is rumored to have strong connections to the conservative-liberal Venstre party which was in government at that time. It has been speculated that his political connections might have assisted him in securing his position at the DKPTO but this cannot be confirmed.

Some sources alleged that the Kongstad family used to live in a fashionable upmarket suburb of Copenhagen, but the Kongstads did not live directly in Copenhagen as originally believed but rather in Rungsted which is an affluent suburban neighborhood in Hørsholm Municipality on the Øresund coast, north of Copenhagen. In 2013 they suddenly relocated to a farmhouse in Valby, Helsinge in the Gribskov municipality which is situated about 80 km north-west of Copenhagen. The source for this is an article published in February 2014 in a Danish Farmer’s Magazine called “LandbrugsAvisen”. The article is entitled “Fra villa til chinchilla” – From the villa to chinchillas.

According to publicly available data on Danish real estate websites, the house in Valby boasts an impressive 240 square metres of floor space and the property includes around 22 hectares of agricultural land. One recent evaluation put the property value at 4.6 million DKR (about 620k Euros at current exchange rates).

“Whatever about that, the move to the farmhouse has given Kongstad’s wife, Majbritt, the possibility to reinvent herself as a chinchilla-breeder and director of a fur farming operation which was reportedly inspired by a dinner table conversation with Torben Nielsen, the then Chief Executive of Kopenhagen Fur. “In Danish press articles which reported on the Kongstad family’s move from Rungsted to a more pastoral setting in Valby, the move was said to be motivated by a desire for a change in life-style. But some people who have looked into the matter think that there may be more to it than just this. As far as can be determined, the purchase of the farmhouse was financed mostly by credit (mortgage). At the same time, it is unclear what exactly happened to the proceeds of the sale of the previous upmarket suburban house which could have been expected to yield some gains due to the rise in property prices in the Rungsted area over the years. It has been speculated that at least some of the proceeds from the Rungsted house sale might have been used to cover losses in one or more of the various private businesses operated by Mr. Kongstad and his family.

Whatever about that, the move to the farmhouse has given Kongstad’s wife, Majbritt, the possibility to reinvent herself as a chinchilla-breeder and director of a fur farming operation which was reportedly inspired by a dinner table conversation with Torben Nielsen, the then Chief Executive of Kopenhagen Fur.

Note: For those unfamiliar with the fur industry, Kopenhagen Fur is the largest fur skin auction company in the world. Recent research has also uncovered some interesting connections between Kopenhagen Fur and allegations of attempts to buy influence in Danish politics including a donation to the Venstre party which we hope to look at in more detail later on.

In future articles we intend to take a closer look at Mr. Kongstad’s political masters in Denmark and the rumoured connections to the Venstre party. We would also like to examine his various private business ventures and the questions which these raise about potential conflicts of interest. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/jesper-kongstad-introduction/feed/ 0 Danish Fairy Tales and Legends: The Secret Life of Jesper Kongstad http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/secret-life-of-jesper-kongstad/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/secret-life-of-jesper-kongstad/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2016 07:46:33 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95805 Danish fairy tale

Summary: An introductory post to a series of articles about the Chairman of the Administrative Council at the European Patent Organisation

EVERY once in a while we publish in-depth stories about the EPO. These help both outsiders and EPO insiders better understand how the EPO operates and who operates it. This week we shall look deeper into the professional life of the Chairman of the Administrative Council, Jesper Kongstad. He is not only Battistelli’s successor but also his protector (if not facilitator rather than overseer), as we first pointed out more than 2 years ago.

Some of our contacts have been carrying out research into Mr. Kongstad’s background and they managed to unearth a lot of interesting information. We are in the process of analysing it and we estimate that there would be sufficient material for a series of articles. At the moment our current plan would be to structure the material into five parts along the following lines:

  1. Introducing Jesper Kongstad
  2. Kongstad’s political masters
  3. Kongstad’s private business ventures
  4. The curious case of Bremelandsgård: Chinchilla fur farming and Kopenhagen Fur
  5. Fjorblink Medical Apps: a possible conflict of interest?

Please be patient. We hope to be able to publish the first few installments some time this week. As a teaser we provide readers with this link to the publicly accessible Danish Register of Companies Herein, anyone can see a list of companies which are registered at Mr. Kongstad’s home address in Helsinge, which is located on Zealand in Denmark. More to follow soon. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/04/secret-life-of-jesper-kongstad/feed/ 0 Software Patents Are Against the First Amendment, Rules a CAFC Judge in Historic Decision That is Another Nail in the Software Patents Coffin http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/cafc-first-amendment/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/cafc-first-amendment/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2016 21:44:48 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95798 Screenshots taken by Jan Wildeboer (Red Hat)

Opinion on IV

Opinion on IV

Summary: Further reinforcing the current trend, software patents’ demise in the United States has just been ascertained again, even if legal firms and patent maximalists prefer not to comment on it (as it would give this latest decision more visibility)

THE latest decision (see portions above) from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is eye-catching, but either it hasn’t caught the eye of legal firms or they’re just trying to ignore it, so we’ll be covering it more than we usually cover such decisions. We have made a local copy [PDF] (original here) of the full decision. We also mentioned it earlier today and yesterday, reaffirming that several software patents are dead, potentially implicating many more (by precedence/extrapolation).

Jan Wildeboer wrote to us (and few others) [1, 2]: “Wow! Software patents can violate #1stamendment according to #CAFC judge! [...] Can’t get enough. Judge defines patent trolls. #CAFC level. Huge. Page 36…”

Some people are also writing to us about it in our IRC channels today. They want this subject covered.

Where is the news coverage about it? It has been several days since this decision and patent law firms are still a month behind the times (McRO again), obsessing over very old news. Consider as a new example Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox’s “Patent Rights in the U.S.: Is the Pendulum Finally Swinging Back to Center?” (earlier today)

They speak about McRO while ignoring everything that has happened since. Shame on them. It seems as though bad legal advice from patent law firms is becoming the norm. They mislead scientists for cash (litigation, patent applications etc.), attempting to convince them that patents on algorithms are still a ‘thing’ after Alice. One does not even need to sue a company with software patents in order to lose these patents, owing to inter partes reviews (IPRs). The above lawyers reveal their biases with their obligatory rants about PTAB, stating that “PTAB [is] causing uncertainty over validity and enforcement of patents.”

We are still waiting to see patent law firms which offer their bogus ‘analyses’ (if any) of this latest CAFC ruling on software patents; they hope we don’t see it, judging by the fact that only Patently-O wrote about it (we covered it this morning). The ruling is very important because it serves to demonstrate a loss for patent trolls and for software patents (or patent trolls that use software patents, which is typical). The decision criticises patent trolling as well.

Judging by this new press release (from Trend Micro, which is itself a patent aggressor, not the patent microcosm), some other companies breathe in relief.

So far, based on our research, only one press article has been published about this decision. It’s titled “Here’s Why Software Patents Are in Peril After the Intellectual Ventures Ruling” and it says:

The end may be in sight for software patents—which have long been highly controversial in the tech industry—in the wake of a remarkable appeals court ruling that described such patents as a “deadweight loss on the nation’s economy” and a threat to the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

The ruling, issued on Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, found that three patents asserted against anti-virus companies Symantec symc and Trend Micro were invalid because they did not describe a patentable invention. The patents were owned by Intellectual Ventures, which has a notorious reputation in the tech world as a so-called “patent troll,” a phrase that describes firms that buy up old patents and wage lawsuits in order to demand payments from productive companies.

[...]

Software Patents as a Threat to Free Speech

Friday’s ruling is also significant because Judge Mayer eschews the insider baseball language that typically dominates patent law, and addresses patents in the broader context of technology and government monopolies.

Pointing out that intellectual property monopolies can limit free speech, Mayer notes that copyright law has built-in First Amendment protections such as “fair use” and that patent law must include similar safeguards. He suggests that the safeguard comes in the form of a part of the Patent Act, known as “Section 101,” which says some things—including abstract ideas—simply can’t be patented in the first place.

IAM ‘magazine’ has not said anything about this decision. So much for ‘news’; it was so quick to crow about McRO (beating everybody to it), but not a word about Intellectual Ventures? They have just released a new issue of the magazine and this time the Intellectual Ventures troll is not on their main feature/cover page (puff pieces galore); not this time around…

Over at Twitter IAM wrote: “Trolls don’t fight it out in the courtroom. They seek to leverage low quality patents to secure quick licensing wins” (does not mention Intellectual Ventures)

Funny that IAM mentions the VirnetX case but not Intellectual Ventures, which speaks directly to IAM. This case was actually mentioned here twice in the past few days alone and it was challenged in court. David Kravets wrote about it, publishing this article that clarifies Texan courts (i.e. notorious bias) ruled on it, not CAFC:

An East Texas jury concluded late Friday that Apple must pay a patent troll $302.4 million in damages for infringing two patents connected to Apple’s FaceTime communication application.

The verdict is the third in the long-running case in which two earlier verdicts were overturned—one on appeal and the other by the Tyler, Texas federal judge presiding over the 6-year-long litigation.

The latest outcome is certain to renew the same legal arguments that were made in the earlier cases: Apple, for one, has maintained all along that the evidence doesn’t support infringement. VirnetX, as it did in the past and is now doing, is seeking more damages for what it says is “willful” infringement on Apple’s part. What’s more, in the previous litigation, the Nevada patent-holding company had asked the judge to shutter the Apple service at issue. Apple has maintained that such a demand was made “So that it can be used to extract a massive licensing fee.”

The case began with four of VirnetX’s patents (1, 2, 3, 4), which had originated at a company called Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. VirnetX has been saying for years that it plans to market various products, but its income comes from licensing patents.

If Apple can escalate this upwards, then a court like CAFC would quite likely invalidate the patents, as usual. The higher one goes (in the courts/legal system), the less room for mischief and leeway for software patents. It’s a shame that courts lower down don’t obey rulings that are handed from above, especially courts that are based in Texas. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/cafc-first-amendment/feed/ 1 Links 3/10/2016: GNU Linux-Libre 4.8, DNF 2.0.0 http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/linux-libre-4-8/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/linux-libre-4-8/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2016 20:03:00 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95795

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Down the rabbit hole, part 3: Linux and Tor are key to ensuring privacy, security

      So, I’ve decided I need to improve the privacy and security of my life (especially as it relates to computing). And I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to effectively do this, I need to focus on utilizing open source software as much as possible.

      What next?

      Let’s start at a very simple, basic level: the operating system of my laptop computers (I don’t actually have a desktop currently, but the same ideas will apply) and how they connect to the internet.

  • Server

    • Mellanox Deploys Standard Linux Operating Systems over Ethernet Switches

      Today Mellanox announced the availability of standard Linux kernel driver for the company Open Ethernet, Spectrum switch platforms. Developed within the large Linux community, the new driver enables standard Linux Operating Systems and off-the-shelf Linux-based applications to operate on the switch, including L2 and L3 switching. Open Ethernet provides data centers with the flexibility to choose the best hardware platform and the best software platform, resulting in optimized data center performance and higher return on investment.

    • Mellanox Introduces New Driver for Open Ethernet, Spectrum Switch Platforms
    • Mesos and Kubernetes on a hybrid (IBM Power and x86) architecture scenario

      Currently, there are several popular containers clustering system for Linux®, such as Kubernetes, Mesos and so on. Google Kubernetes and Apache Mesos are probably two commonly used tools to deploy containers inside a cluster. Both are created as helper tools that can be used to manage a cluster of containers. However, they differ greatly in their approaches.

      Always, our customs have a hybrid architecture that includes IBM® Power® and x86. So, this article provides the reference solutions about how to apply Mesos and Kubernetes into Linux on a hybrid architecture (including Power and x86) environment.

      See Figure 1 for the reference architecture.

  • Kernel Space

    • GNU Linux-libre 4.8-gnu Released, Deblobs More Drivers

      Hot off the release of the official upstream Linux 4.8 kernel, the GNU Linux-libre 4.8-gnu kernel is now available as the deblobbed code that strips out support for loading non-free firmware and other references to non-free kernel support.

      With GNU Linux-libre 4.8-gnu, there is a change to allow AMD Evergreen GPUs to be able to successfully initialize correctly without any binary-only blobs, a port from a change these developers did back for R600 hardware on an earlier kernel.

    • Linux Kernel 4.8 released with Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen support [Ed: How on Earth have some people spun a Linux release as a “Microsoft” thing? Part of the “Microsoft loves Linux” Big Lie or is “Microsoft” the biggest Linux feature now? Maybe just headline baiting.]
    • Linux 4.8 kernel will support newer hardware, including your Microsoft Surface 3
    • Systemd bug allows ordinary user to crash Linux systems

      The systemd project is yet to release a fix for a bug that was disclosed on 28 September but at least one GNU/Linux distribution has patched the same.

      The bug, allowing a user to crash a system by using a short command as an ordinary user, was disclosed by a developer named Andrew Ayer.

      After running this command, according to Ayer, “You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login system).”

    • Major Linux distributions suffer from the latest system crippling bug

      A system administrator, Andrew Ayer discovered a crippling bug while working with his Linux System. He reported the issue at length in a blogpost pointing out how anyone could crash Systemd by one single tweet. The system will not collapse as soon as the tweet is rendered on screen by the system. Instead, what it meant was that any Linux distribution could be crippled by a command that can fit into one tweet. He even posted a tweet with the command to prove his point.

    • Linux 4.9′s CPUFreq To Make Greater Use Of Scheduler Info, IOWait Boosting

      The past few kernel releases there’s been a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State code for being able to make use of the kernel’s scheduler utilization data by these CPU frequency scaling drivers. That work also led to the introduction of the Schedutil governor. Work along this line has continued for Linux 4.9.

    • EFI Test Driver Added To The Mainline Linux 4.9 Kernel

      The EFI material is one of the early pull requests for the Linux 4.9 kernel and its bringing a new driver via EFI_TEST.

    • Linux 4.9 On x86_64 To Support Vmapped Stacks

      With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, x86_64 builds will support CONFIG_VMAP_STACK where kernel stacks are allocated with vmalloc_node for greater security.

    • Mellanox Platform Support Coming In Linux 4.9

      The x86/platform updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel that entered development on Sunday is bringing initial support for the Mellanox systems platform.

    • Linux Should Soon Start Receiving “Make WiFi Fast” Improvements

      In the months ahead the Linux kernel should start receiving the work out of the “make-wifi-fast” initiative for improving WiFi reliability and performance.

      The Bufferbloat project has been working on the Make-WiFi-Fast project because “the current Linux WiFi stack and drivers are far from optimal.” The project aims to reduce latency, develop new packet scheduling and AQM techniques, and improve the stack to allow 802.11ac MU-MIMO to properly work.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • Apricity OS, a beautiful way to to enter Arch era

        Last time we told you about Manjaro Linux, which is an Arch based linux distribution. Now the point is there is not only one fork but there are others too. Today we will discuss about another fork of Arch in this 12th segment of “Introduction with Linux Distro”. The distribution we will see today is one of the most beautiful distributions in linux world and it is named Apricity OS.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • DNF 2.0.0 and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 1.0.0 Released

          DNF-2.0 is out! This major version release of DNF brings many user experience improvements such as more understandable dependency problem reporting messages, weak dependencies shown in transaction summary, more intuitive help usage invoking and others. Repoquery plugin has moved into DNF itself. Whole DNF stack release fixes over 60 bugs. DNF-2.0 release was focused on getting rid of yum incompatibilities i.e. treat yum configuration options the same (`include`, `includepkgs` and `exclude`). Unfortunately this release is not fully compatible with DNF-1. See the list of DNF-1 and DNF-2 incompatible changes. Especially plugins will need to be changed to the new DNF argument parser. For complete list of changes see DNF and plugins release notes.

        • DNF 2.0 Released For Improved Package Management On Fedora

          Version 2.0 of the DNF package manager is now available in release candidate form as a major update to this Yum successor. Meanwhile, DNF-Plugins-Core reached version 1.0 for testing.

        • When every Beta closes another Alpha opens…

          As many of you may know, deadlines for Beta packaging for Fedora 25 have recently come and gone. With this said, designs for the default wallpaper are underway and I’m continuing to work through quirks in the design in order to represent the subtle, yet bold and memorable aesthetic that is present in Fedora wallpapers. Getting closer to the Alpha package deadline, I figured that I’d post another progress picture of where I’m at so far. Be sure to check out https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/473 for more information as to the background and thought process of the design as well!

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Software Can Now Show Screenshots of Snap Apps

            A small fix this one, but it’s something that will help Snap apps stand out in the Ubuntu Software store.

            Snap apps are already available to find and install from the GNOME Ubuntu Software app, on both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10. As there’s (still) no way to search for Snap app specifically you need to know the Snap app you want to find before you can find it.

            But until recently Snap apps didn’t display application screenshots, a valuable feature of any app store.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Arduino on Arduino battle ends in reconciliation, merger

      On Saturday, the two rival groups—Arduino LLC (Arduino.cc) and Arduino Srl (Arduino.org)—announced that they had “settled their differences,” and agreed to merge. At present, the similarly-designed sites both carry the official Arduino logo, and both sell official Arduino products.

      The electronics platform Arduino describes itself as “the world’s leading open-source ecosystem for educators, Makers and IoT developers of all ages.” Its board plans are published under Creative Commons (CC) licences, while its software is released as open source. Ars interviewed one of Arduino’s co-founders, Massimo Banzi, back in 2013.

    • ROS: An Open Source Robotics Platform on Linux

      ROS is an open source framework allowing you to create advanced robots. Using ROS takes much of the tedious work out of creating useful robots because it supplies code for navigation, arm manipulation, and other common robot tasks. ROS allows various software components to communicate between one or more computers and microcontrollers, and it allows you to control one or more machine robot networks from a desktop, web browser, and/or other input device. Although ROS stands for Robot Operating System, it is really a framework that sits on top of an existing operating system such as GNU/Linux. Packages are provided for Ubuntu Linux to help get your robot up and rolling.

    • ORWL Open Source, Physically Secure Personal Computer $699 (video)

      First unveiled back in 2012 the ORWL open source personal computer has been designed with your data security in mind and is being marketed as the very first open source physically secure computer.

      What’s the promotional two-minute video below to learn more about the ORWL and how it can be used to keep your personal data safe. ORWL is currently in the final days of its crowdfunding campaign and has nearly raised double what the team requires to take the secure personal computer into production. For more information, full specifications and to make a pledge jump over to Crowd Supply via the link below.

    • Phones

      • Linux V4.8 on N900

        Basics work, good. GSM does not work too well, which is kind of a problem. Camera broke between 4.7 and 4.8. That is not good, either.

      • Android

        • Best Phones for Rooting and Modding

          If you’re not content with the software some company decided you are allowed to use and are willing to roll up your sleeves and do something about it, the Nexus 5X is the best phone to do it with.

          Because it’s a phone directly from Google, the bootloader is easy to unlock using tools and directions Google gives you, and you’ll have no restrictions on the software you can install. If you keep going until the phone just stops working getting back to the factory software is just as easy, and Google provides a downloadable image you can use to restore.

        • EU to Google: stop Android anti-competitive deals, or else [Ed: Remember Microsoft was behind this, remember Android is Linux based, ask yourself if "Microsoft loves Linux"]
        • White Google Pixel and Pixel XL leaked by Bell
        • Google Maps for Android Update Brings Calendar Integration, Shows Upcoming Events
        • Most Secure Android Phone

          The Nexus 6P is the most secure Android phone you can buy, and one of the most secure phones of any available today.

          Without disabling any security protections, the Nexus 6P is protected against known public security exploits and remote installations are monitored by Google’s scanning software which blocks potential malicious content. While security and privacy are two very different things, when you decide you want private things to stay private you need to make sure your phone is secure to keep them that way.

Free Software/Open Source

  • How startups can use open source software to compete against the big guys

    Open source software allows more small businesses in industries that haven’t yet been completely disrupted by technology to create agile software with a small team. This kind of access is what helped my team create our own content marketing software to better service our clients in-house. We did it with a small dev team, and we aren’t alone in that. I think we’re going to start seeing more companies use open source software to create custom tech solutions to fit their needs and make them more competitive against industry giants. – John Hall, Influence & Co.

  • Zeppelin: a Secure Smart Contracts Open-Source Framework for Blockchain Applications

    On September 15, the roadmap proposal for Zeppelin, a MIT licensed open source framework for building secure smart contracts, was published. This comes at an appropriate time as evidenced by the number of talks and discussions at DevCon2 surrounding formal verification of smart contracts.

    Demian Brener and Manuel Aráoz, founders of Smart Contract Solutions, are pioneering the effort around Zeppelin. Zeppelin is a community effort to enable the development of secure, tested and audited smart contract code. Earlier this year, “The DAO”, the largest smart contract application to date, was hacked for $60M by exploiting a loophole in its smart contract. This has justified many concerns in the community bringing formal verification to the forefront.

  • Google Open Sources Powerful Image Recognition Tool

    On the artificial intelligence front, there is a true renaissance going on right now, and it includes a slew of new open source tools, many of which are likely to give rise to businesses built around them. For example, Google recently open sourced a program called TensorFlow. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google has spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs. You can find out more about TensorFlow at its site, and you might be surprised to learn that it is the engine behind several Google tools you may already use, including Google Photos and the speech recognition found in the Google app.

    Now, Google has open sourced a “Show and Tell” algorithm to developers, who can purportedly use it recognize objects in photos with up to 93.9 percent accuracy, and help to automate smart photo captioning. It’s based on TensorFlow, and here are details.

  • Events

    • OpenStack Summit to Include Distinguished Contributor Awards

      Not long ago, the OpenStack Foundation created a Superuser publication to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving among individuals who are running OpenStack clouds. It’s actually become a very rich site, and if you are at all involved with OpenStack, it’s worth investigating.

      As the Superuser site has announced, at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, a special round of community awards will be handed out by the OpenStack Foundation. The idea is to recognize esteemed contributors, and here are the details on how you can enter a submission for consideration.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash A Free & Open Source Accounting Software For Linux

      GnuCash is a free open source accounting program launched in 1998 for small business. GnuCash implements a double entry bookkeeping system. It was first designed for Linux but later in 2004 it was released for Mac and in 2007 was available for Windows. Its current version is 2.6.14. GnuCash is also available for Android in Playstore.

  • Public Services/Government

Leftovers

  • Security

    • security things in Linux v4.7
    • Microsoft warns Windows security fix may break network shares

      The latest of these, Preview Build 14936 – for testers on what Microsoft refers to as the Fast Ring – comes with the usual set of updates, new features, and fixes for things that the previous release managed to break.

      However, what caught our eye was a warning that after updating, users may find that shared devices such as NAS boxes have mysteriously disappeared from the home network folder, and that any previously mapped network drives are unavailable.

      Microsoft offers a fix for this; if you change your network to “private” or “enterprise”, it should start working again.

      It seems that the cause of this hiccup is a fix that Microsoft made earlier in September to address a security hole severe enough that it might allow remote code execution with elevated permissions on an affected system, although this would require an attacker to create a specially crafted request.

      The fix addresses this by, among other things, “correcting how Windows enforces permissions”.

      Windows Insiders are typically no newbies and used to preview builds breaking stuff, but it is likely that this change will find its way into the Windows 10 code everybody else is running sooner or later.

    • Android Devices Are Targeted By New Lockscreen Ransomware

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Inside the Shadowy PR Firm That’s Lobbying for Regime Change in Syria

      On September 30, demonstrators gathered in city squares across the West for a “weekend of action” to “stop the bombs” raining down from Syrian government and Russian warplanes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Thousands joined the protests, holding signs that read “Topple Assad” and declaring, “Enough With Assad.” Few participants likely knew that the actions were organized under the auspices of an opposition-funded public relations company called the Syria Campaign.

    • Under Intense Pressure to Silence Wikileaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Proposed Drone Strike on Julian Assange

      Julian Assange and his free-speech brainchild Wikileaks were once lauded as global heroes of public service among United States politicians and policy makers. But by 2010, four years after its inception during the President George W. Bush administration, Assange and his organization were no longer considered lovable troublemakers and mavericks.

      A year into President Barack Obama’s first term, Wikileaks was suddenly considered an out-of-control free-speech Frankenstein wreaking havoc on United States foreign policy and intelligence gathering at the direction of Assange, its proverbial Dr. Frankenstein.

      The honeymoon for the whistle-blower web site, once a darling of the Democratic Party, was now over. Even more alarming, Assange’s personal safety and organization were increasingly at risk from U.S. concerns.

      By November 2010, Assange was a household name globally, but especially on Capitol Hill. And in the State Department alone his prowess of releasing otherwise secret, damning military documents and emails were filling conference rooms at Foggy Bottom and the White House with policy wonks and bureaucrats desperately seeking to squelch the upstart Wikileaks. At the State Department, meeting after meeting was conducted about how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her inner circle were going to squash Assange and Wikileaks latest planned document dump on the United States. Deemed “CableGate,” Assange planned to release confidential cables, or communications, unveiling damaging internal conversations between State Department personnel and its foreign assets and allies.

      Prodded by the looming CableGate, Clinton met with staff on Tuesday November 23, 2010 shortly after 8 a.m. on Mahogany Row at the State Department to attempt to formulate a strategy to avert Assange’s plans to release an enormous batch of 250,000 secret cables, dating from 1966 to 2010. Assange had professed for months to rain the internal cables down on Clinton and President Obama. The collective fear was the context of the secret cables would hamper U.S. intelligence gathering and compromise private correspondences and intelligence shared with foreign governments and opposition leaders. Splashing such juicy details on television news shows and the front pages of major newspapers in the country was great for the media but lousy for intelligence and foreign policy. Many, including Clinton and her elected boss, expressed fear these revelations would embarrass and expose intelligence allies of the United States and set America’s already fragile foreign policy back decades.

    • The Empire Strikes Back

      A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin America was turning. The interference by Washington and exploitation by international corporations might finally be defeated. Latin American governments, headed by charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations’ own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and corporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here.

      But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. The tricks long practiced by Washington and its corporate allies have returned—the black propaganda; the manipulation of the media; the bribery and corruption of politicians, generals, police, labor leaders and journalists; the legislative coups d’état; the economic strangulation; the discrediting of democratically elected leaders; the criminalization of the left; and the use of death squads to silence and disappear those fighting on behalf of the poor. It is an old, dirty game.

      President Correa, who earned enmity from Washington for granting political asylum to Julian Assange four years ago and for closing the United States’ Manta military air base in 2009, warned recently that a new version of Operation Condor is underway in Latin America. Operation Condor, which operated in the 1970s and ’80s, saw thousands of labor union organizers, community leaders, students, activists, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, journalists and artists tortured, assassinated and disappeared. The intelligence chiefs from right-wing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and, later, Brazil had overseen the campaigns of terror. They received funds from the United States and logistical support and training from the Central Intelligence Agency. Press freedom, union organizing, all forms of artistic dissent and political opposition were abolished. In a coordinated effort these regimes brutally dismembered radical and leftist movements across Latin America. In Argentina alone 30,000 people disappeared.

    • Colombia referendum: Voters reject Farc peace deal

      Voters in Colombia have rejected a landmark peace deal with Farc rebels in a shock referendum result, with 50.2% voting against it.

      The deal was signed last week by President Juan Manuel Santos and Farc leader Timoleon Jimenez after nearly four years of negotiations.

      But it needed to be ratified by Colombians in order to come into force.

      Addressing the nation, President Santos said he accepted the result but would continue working to achieve peace.

    • Democracy At Its Worst – Colombians Choose War

      The recent result in Colombia is very unsatisfactory. It allows both sides to see victory is achievable with a little more killing or screaming or whatever…

      The world is not a better place when democracy decides that war is better than a few compromises and wider participation of groups in society. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail and people care enough to do the right thing sooner or later.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Reykjavík: the geothermal city that aims to go carbon neutral

      Reykjavík used to be marketed as a place of ‘pure energy’, run on geothermal power – and now Iceland’s capital is trying to become the world’s first carbon neutral city.

      Last month, Iceland became the one of the first countries to ratify the Paris climate deal with a unilateral parliamentary vote, shortly after Reykjavik announced its aim to be carbon neutral by 2040.

      It wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 2.8 tonnes per person in 2013 to zero – largely by changing the shape of the city to reverse urban sprawl and encouraging Icelanders out of their beloved cars to walk, cycle or use public transport.

      The city already has a head-start thanks to its reliance on geothermal energy. The US, for example, has a greenhouse gas footprint of 16.5 tonnes per person.

  • Finance

    • 589 million Chinese tourists will spend $72 billion in just seven days celebrating “Golden Week”

      Nearly 600 million Chinese tourists will flock to local tourist spots or fly overseas during the country’s 67th National Day holiday, a seven-day break nicknamed “Golden Week.” Unexpectedly, the new hot destination is Morocco, the North African country.

      South Korea, Thailand and Japan continue to be the top 10 most popular travel destinations (link in Chinese) for Chinese tourists, but there was a 3500% year-on-year increase in visa applications to Morocco processed by Ctrip, a Nasdaq-listed travel agency based in Shanghai, China, according to a 2016 National Day Holiday travel prediction report by Ctrip and the state-backed China Travel Academy. The report also said the United Kingdom, Cambodia, Russia and New Zealand will each see a 60% year-on-year increase.

    • After article 50, Brexit will be easy. A trade deal will be anything but

      Article 50, providing for Brexit, will be triggered by the end of March next year, Theresa May has promised. Two years after it is triggered, Britain will find itself outside the European Union, unless there is unanimous agreement among the other member states to extend the time limit.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trump Campaign Threatens To Sue NY Times For Sharing His 1995 Tax Returns

      It’s kind of amazing how quickly Donald Trump’s lawyers seem to threaten any media outlet for publishing information about him that he doesn’t like. The latest target is the NY Times which ran a big story over the weekend with some leaked pages of his 1995 tax returns, suggesting that the guy who repeatedly claims he’s great at business, reported personal losses of $916 million. We’ll leave the analyzing of the tax returns to those who do that sort of thing (though I will recommend reading this analysis, which suggests that it’s likely a key part of the NYT article is wrong concerning Trump’s ability to use those losses to avoid taxes for 18 years), but we did want to focus in on something more relevant to what we discuss here at Techdirt.

      [...]

      But, it’s not that simple. The NY Times would have a pretty strong First Amendment defense that what they’re doing here is very much in the public interest. After all, Trump himself has made his tax returns (and his supposed acumen as a business man) an issue in this campaign by refusing to release them, despite every other major party candidate for President releasing tax returns going back decades (and even Trump himself mocked Mitt Romney for taking too long to release his own tax returns in 2012). So there’s no argument here that this isn’t newsworthy. It clearly is, and that certainly helps the NY Times’s case. To me it seems like it should be a clear First Amendment win for the Times — and plenty of others agree.

      Plus, there’s the fact that if Trump actually did sue, he’d have to admit the returns are really his and are accurate.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hackers auctioning NSA code disappointed in bidding
    • NSA Secrets Could Be Yours for Only $1,083!
    • Hacker group finds no takers for NSA exploits
    • Nobody wants hacked NSA tools; The Shadow Brokers go on an angry rant in broken English
    • No-one wants to buy the Shadow Brokers’ stolen NSA tools
    • The Peculiar Case of Email in the Cloud [Ed: All E-mail goes through a server; stop using the Clown Computing buzzword, it’s misleading and harmful]

      If you install Postfix on your server, it’s possible to use a Gmail account to send all e-mail on your system. There are a few downsides to this method, but the configuration is simple, and Google’s e-mail servers are very reliable. Plus, because you’re not acting as an e-mail server yourself, you don’t have to worry about having your e-mail rejected by recipients. It’s legitimately coming from gmail.com.

      The first unfortunate consequence is that for its simplest implementation, you need to enable “less secure apps” to log in to your Gmail account. I actually set up a separate gmail.com account for my server, and then I don’t worry about the less secure setting. Thankfully, if this is a concern, it’s possible to use two-factor authentication (more on that later).

    • Snowden — see this film!

      You’ve seen the news stories, and maybe the documentary. The film Snowden will still scare and inspire you. Oliver Stone has made a film that will draw you in, engage you, and even feel anxious about Snowden’s safety. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is amazingly like the man you’ve seen on TV or Youtube.

      Imdb says about Snowden: Its performance during its opening weekend was the lowest opening of Oliver Stone’s career for a film playing in over 2,000 theaters. So go to a theater near you, and see it!

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • UNSOLVED: The Murder of Ferguson Activist Darren Seals

      It’s been three weeks since the body of 29-year-old Ferguson, Missouri protester Darren Seals was discovered inside his burning vehicle with a gunshot wound to the head. St. Louis County police say the homicide investigation is still without leads. However, some community members are questioning the legitimacy of that investigation.

      Darren Seals was one of the most visible and vocal activists to emerge from Ferguson following the 2014 police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Seals was known as a “day one-er” – meaning he was a visible presence from the very beginning.

      Watching, from just outside the yellow police tape on the afternoon of August 9th, 2014, as Brown’s body lay in the middle of Canfield Drive, and then demonstrating later that same day just a few blocks away on West Florissant Avenue – where clashes between police and protesters would eventually capture the world’s attention.

    • Chelsea Manning’s Integrity

      In Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizenfour, Edward Snowden worries to Poitras and Glenn Greenwald that “they” (the press and government) will use his “personality” as a distraction when Greenwald starts publishing stories about the documents that Snowden has leaked. Snowden’s concern was meaningful considering the media coverage of Chelsea Manning, who was on trial at the time Poitras was filming the documentary for charges arising from the Espionage Act, including the charge of aiding the enemy.

      Manning’s queerness, gender nonconformity (she now identifies as trans*), and experiences of being bullied in the Army made her an easy target for claims that her leaking of documents was not true whistleblowing, but amounted simply to a private vendetta against the Army and government. In one of the first articles on Manning in the New York Times, for example, Ginger Thompson suggested that Manning might have leaked documents as a way of seeking revenge for being bullied in the military, or for her struggles under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or out of “delusions of grandeur.”

    • Arkansas Congressman Who Helped Protect Citizens’ Right To Record Police Arrested For Recording Police

      While the recording of police activities has been covered here for years, I think we’re starting to see what is at least a slight ratcheting down of the drama over the issue. Once almost universally rejected by law enforcement groups, the freedom to record police as they go about their public duty has become more recognized rather than less. That doesn’t mean the issue is settled, though, as shown in a recent example in which Arkansas police arrested a state Congressman who had helped push through a state law protecting the rights of citizens to film police.

    • Arkansas lawmaker who pushed law protecting right to video police is arrested for videoing an arrest

      Officer Jeff Thompson of the Little Rock Police Department arrested Arkansas state Representative John Walker for recording their treatment of a black man who had been put in handcuffs during a traffic stop.

    • Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka on Palestine and Syria

      Ajamu Baraka: Well, of course. The linking of these struggles for liberation in Central America and South Africa with the struggles in the US is a part of the tradition of black internationalism, the center of which is a struggle against the continuity of the colonial, capitalism system. So the quite natural connection has always been with Palestine. In fact, one of the first real structural, organizational connections we point to is the fact that SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee issued a statement standing in solidarity with the liberation aspirations of the Palestinians in the mid-1960s. And of course there was a very negative backlash for that. So solidarity with Palestinian struggles for self-determination has always been part of the black internationalist tradition. The connection for us has always been clear.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Domain name system transitions to private sector

      ICANN, the body that regulates the domain name system, is no longer under US government oversight as of October 1

      The contract between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration to perform the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions expired at midnight on Friday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Big Week For WIPO Marrakesh Treaty On Access For Visually Impaired; Human Rights Side Under Focus [Ed: WIPO is attacking its own staff and Gurry needs to resign]

      The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled was adopted on 27 June 2013, and the 20th WIPO member ratified it on 30 June 2016, bringing it into force 90 days later on 30 September. The first-ever meeting of the Marrakesh Treaty Assembly is scheduled to take place on 5 October at WIPO.

      The Social Forum of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is taking place from 3-5 October at the UN Palais. The theme of the 2016 session of the Social Forum is the “promotion and full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities in the context of the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD),” according to the event website.

    • External Offices, WIPO Normative Work At Heart Of General Assemblies

      WIPO Director General Francis Gurry, in his opening speech, said “very good process has been made across the organisation over the course of the past 12 months.” He remarked on the last biennium’s (2014-2015) overall surplus of CHF 70.3 million (US$ 72.3 million). WIPO is faring well in the current biennium, he said, and is foreseen to yield an overall surplus as well.

    • Copyrights

      • Phoneix Police Issues Totally Bogus Cease & Desist To Trump Campaign Claiming Copyright Infringement

        Yes, yes, we know that resorting to copyright to take down speech from a politician you don’t like is pretty common. Most of the time it involves musicians not liking politicians playing songs, but lately we’ve seen some other ones as well. Last week, for example, we wrote about a photographer successfully using the DMCA to remove the now infamous image of a bowl of Skittles that Donald Trump Jr. tweeted.

        The latest, however, is even more ridiculous. The city of Phoenix Arizona has sent a cease & desist letter to the Donald Trump campaign, arguing (incorrectly) that Trump was violating their copyrights and publicity rights, by using imagery of Phoneix police officers in an advertisement (first reported by a local NBC affiliate in Arizona). The ad is available on YouTube, and don’t blink or you might miss the Phoneix police officers. It’s a pretty generic politician ad, frankly, but there’s a very brief shot of Trump shaking hands with some Phoneix police officers on a tarmac somewhere (I’m guessing Phoenix…). It appears to last all of about a second.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/linux-libre-4-8/feed/ 0 Translation and Response to Battistelli’s Face-Saving ‘Interview’ With Juve http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/response-to-battistelli-hogwash/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/03/response-to-battistelli-hogwash/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2016 09:37:22 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95790 “There is an old joke which asks – how to tell if a politician is lying? The answer – if they are moving their lips.” (source)

Battistelli liar
Source (original): Rospatent

Summary: An interview prepared by Battistelli’s department, inclusive of all the ‘official’ narratives, is now translated into English and responded to succinctly (for accuracy and a more complete record of events)

THE EPO‘s President is basically a politician, and like most politicians he habitually lies with apparent sincerity. We recently asked for a translation of an article from Juve, which is essentially a written interview in which Battistelli and his PR people stick their ‘official’ story. We now have a complete translation to which we respond in-line (below the quotes):

Here is the introductory part:

EPO PRESIDENT BATTISTELLI IN INTERVIEW: “I AM DELEGATING RESPONSIBILITIES”

In July, the European Patent Office reformed its Boards of Appeals. This reform must be implemented by the beginning of 2017. To achieve this, a President of the Boards of Appeal has to be found. Critics complain that the reform will not give the EPO Boards enough independence. In this JUVE interview, EPO President Battistelli gives his view and explains why patent renewal fees will not necessarily reduce if the UK leaves the EU and, with it, the new European patent system.

We gave a sort of translation of the mirage of independence for the boards. AMBA later refuted that as well.

Regarding the UK, it does not have to leave the EPO if it leaves the EU as the EPO is not an EU organisation and it includes several member states outside the EU.

JUVE: The Administrative Council and the Office describe the reform of the Boards of Appeal as a milestone for the strengthening of status, efficiency and sustainability of the EPO appeal system. Why?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: The reform is pioneering because attempts at a structural reform have already failed twice, in 1995 and 2004. The Administrative Council gave the Office the mandate to develop a reform proposal which was within the boundaries of the European Patent Convention (EPC). This allowed, in spite of the scope of the reform, a fast implementation. Because otherwise a protracted process would have been needed, including a diplomatic conference and ratification by the parliaments of all 38 member states.

What he is trying to say is, suddenly he cares about the EPC, even though we showed many times in the past that Battistelli arrogantly defies the EPC.

What “fast implementation” means in this context is a forced implementation that does not allow much time for discussion and potentially resistance (same as in patent appeals). It’s just autocracy. To him, diplomacy is just a nuisance that needs to be overcome. We have seen a lot of this in the UPC.

JUVE: What have you achieved?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: The Boards of Appeal play a very important role in the European Patent System. The reform shall emphasise that and ensure the sustainability of the EPO appeal system: it strengthens the organisational and managerial autonomy of the boards, the perception of their independence, and their efficiency. In addition, a series of measures will be introduced, that will allow the Administrative Council and the future President of the Boards of Appeal to improve legal proceedings for the parties – for instance, by shortening process times and making the appeal procedures more consistent.

In reality, all that’s being achieved is shrinking of the appeals body, less opportunities to appeal (not to mention less time), higher financial barriers (for access) to appeals and no substantial separation at all, given that Battistelli is, according to Board 28, continuing to attack a judge.

JUVE: Nevertheless, not only EPO Boards of Appeal members have criticised that the emphasis has been too much on efficiency and less on the independence of the EPO Boards. How do you respond?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: The independence of the Boards of Appeal is clearly incorporated in the EPC, and their role as an independent judicial institution has always been recognised by the highest European and national courts. Therefore, the reform shall primarily improve the perception of independence. To achieve this the current DG3 will be restructured into a Boards of Appeal Unit with its own President. The President of the Boards of Appeal will be given tasks and powers which have been delegated to him by the President of the EPO. As far as management duties are concerned, he is only answerable to the Administrative Council. This is a substantial change. This is because as well as improvements to independence the President of the Boards of Appeal shall also increase the efficiency of the Boards of Appeal.

When Battistelli alludes to the EPC he basically admits that he violates it. Why? Because it’s abundantly clear that he has not respected their independence and continues doing so. He keeps speaking about “perception of independence” perhaps because he knows that he wants to give them no real independence; he’s faking it.

JUVE: Why is this at all necessary?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: The current backlog and the protracted length of the procedure need sorting out. The continuous increase in litigation in the last couple of decades is, however, in no way only limited to the EPO Boards of Appeal. However, it is necessary to confront this situation with appropriate measures.

In other words, quality control is a nuisance to Battistelli because it means that the whole process is slower and there is a queue. God forbid! He acknowledges an increase in litigation, as though this is desirable or somewhat of a given. So in short, speed and raw quantity (quantified using a dumb politician’s yardstick) trump quality now. It’s quite evident from what he is saying.

JUVE: By having, with the new Boards of Appeal Committee, a joint right of proposal for the new President you will have further influence on the Boards of Appeal. Why is the participation of the EPO President at all necessary in this matter?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: It is stipulated in the EPC that the Chairman of the Enlarged Board of Appeal shall be appointed by the Administrative Council upon a proposal by the President of the Office. According to the reform, the Office President and Boards of Appeal Committee shall jointly propose the President of the Boards of Appeal, who will be delegated managerial responsibilities. In this way the President of the EPO will share the right of proposal with the Committee – currently he alone has this right. This will allow the President of the Boards of Appeal to lead his unit without influence by the management of the EPO.

Given that the Administrative Council is almost in bed with Battistelli (hardly overseeing him at all), and given the track record of bad faith from both, it seems apparent that the above answer is lots of hogwash and hot air.

JUVE: Once more: why, as Office President, will you continue to participate in these matters?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: At the end of the day the President is legally responsible for ensuring that the whole Office functions in a proper way, including the budget. Hence, he must be able to trust that the person that takes over his powers exercises them properly. The decision to appoint the President of the Boards of Appeal lies, anyway, with the Administrative Council.

…which in itself is somewhat in the pocket — some believe almost literally — of Battistelli.

JUVE: When will you delegate your powers?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI. As soon as the President of the Boards of Appeal has been appointed I will be able to sign a document to transfer powers.

One can safely assume that Battistelli will have veto power and can therefore ensure that the person is subservient or obedient to begin with.

JUVE: Has it already been decided who the first President of the Boards of Appeal will be?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: He shall be appointed by the Administrative Council before the end of the year. It is planned that he will take up his duties when the reform comes into effect in January 2017.

Notice the word “he” (maybe an artifact of translation from German). Given the lack of diversity at the Office, it would not at all be surprising if the person turned out to be white male, possibly French and right wing.

JUVE: In the future the Office and the Boards of Appeal shall be separately housed in Munich. Has there already been a decision over the future location of the Boards of Appeal?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI. Negotiations with property owners in Munich are already very advanced and hence the decision can be made in October.

They already decided, but they are playing a game here.

JUVE: The disciplinary procedure against the judge that you suspended has still not been concluded. In June the Enlarged Board of Appeal deviated from the recommendation, by the Administrative Council, of dismissal. By October Jesper Kongstad, Chairman of the Administrative Council, has to draw up a proposal as to how to further proceed. According to the statutes he has to propose that the judge be reinstated. You wouldn’t favour that?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: According to our Convention the Administrative Council has disciplinary authority over Boards of Appeal members, while the President has the power to suggest disciplinary measures and furthermore carries total responsibility for the proper functioning of the Office. In the case in question the Council decided in December 2014, because of the knowledge of serious misconduct, to suspend the Boards of Appeal member from service. After the submission of an extensive investigation report the Council, in March 2015, initiated a disciplinary procedure. Under the chairmanship of a former ECJ judge, a disciplinary committee, which also had members of the EPO Boards of Appeal and experienced external lawyers, came unanimously to the conclusion that the serious misconduct of the Boards of Appeal member demanded his dismissal. In decisions in June and October 2015 the Council followed this review and requested that the Enlarged Board of Appeal submit a proposal for dismissal. However, almost a year after this request the Enlarged Board of Appeal decided to not follow the request, because I pointed out that at the EPO disciplinary proceedings are confidential and cannot be carried out in public. These are the facts. Let us be clear: this isn’t about personal sensitivities, but the integrity of the appeal system at the EPO.

Complete nonsense. Battistelli’s lips just move a lot.

Regarding confidentiality, it’s quite likely Battistelli and his goons who leaked smears to the media in order to defame the accused, making the Office look worse than bad, one might even say “corrupt”. A short time afterwards they began attacking me too — all this shortly after they had signed the FTI Consulting contract that was later expanded to dominate Dutch and German media (separate from the EPO’s payments to media giants which soon turned into EPO mouthpieces).

JUVE: The Brexit decision endangers the start of the new European patent system. The EPO is involved in this system. What chance do you see that the Unitary Patent and hence the whole system will start in April 2017 as planned?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: The EPO hopes to find a solution that lets the Unitary Patent come into force as soon as possible. It is here crucial that partaking member states ratify the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court. After the referendum the Dutch parliament agreed to ratification and so sent out an important political signal. Independently from the political decisions it can be assumed that the system will come, albeit very probably with a delay. The work is, however, far too advanced, and has generated too much positive momentum, for it to be shelved.

No, the UPC is almost certainly dead (in its current form), if not just in the UK then in the whole of Europe. They’ll probably try to repackage it and maybe even rename it again. This can take years and there’s no guarantee anything will come out of it. In the mean time, the EPO is rotting and there's expectation of layoffs within a couple of years if Battistelli's vision gets implemented.

JUVE: If the UK can’t take part in the system will the renewal fees for the EU patent have to be recalculated?

BENOIT BATTISTELLI: It is too early to estimate the impact on the renewal fees for the Unitary Patent. They have been so determined to correspond to the sum of the renewal fees for the four countries in which classical European patents are most frequently validated. This so-called “Top 4” solution was preceded by very long and difficult discussions of the member states. By the way, the level of the fees was already decided before the accession of Italy and wasn’t increased afterwards, because the member states didn’t want to reopen the debate. This could also be the case if the UK leaves. Finally, the model would even then still offer excellent value, because it would give patent protection in a multitude of EU member states at a very attractive cost.

The patent trolls would certainly love it, but again, why assume this can ever happen? Why suppose an inevitability? The UPC is about as dead as the EU Patent or Community Patent, which several years ago we were told were inevitable and only a matter of time. Remember Charlie McCreevy‘s and Michel Barnier‘s lobbying for this? The latter, incidentally, became the key person in Brexit negotiations.

At the end of last week IAM remarked on this Brexit update, asking, “lawyers, would this have UPC implications?”

“Depends which lawyers one asks,” I replied. Patent lawyers (especially those who invested in UPC) are not David Allen Green, who writes a lot about Brexit these days (one of the most prominent commentators on the subject in the UK). Incidentally, David Allen Green is the person who defended me from several vicious attacks from the EPO.

“Theresa May,” told us a reader last night, “said at the Conservative Party Conference that after Brexit the UK will be “a fully-independent, sovereign country” that will no longer be in the “jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice”, Bang goes the UPC then!”

“Anybody claiming from now on that UK should ratify the UPC soon should loose their illusions,” wrote another person last night [1, 2]. To quote the full comment:

It has just become known that procedure according to Art 50 will be started fore the end of March 2017.

The European communities act of 1972 will be repelled and a Great Repeal Bill will be decided.

It becomes thus clear that the Brexit is on its way. Any ratification before this date has been transferred to dream world…..

Anybody claiming from now on that UK should ratify the UPC soon should have lost its illusions; it would better think how UPC could progress without UK.

Battistelli is a chronic liar (with a track record to prove it). He said the UPC would be in effect this year (he said this as recently as last year) and he keeps changing his story every time he’s caught in a lie. Don’t believe anything that Battistelli and Team UPC say about the unitary patent system, or whatever they will choose to call next year. █

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