Bonum Certa Men Certa

How the European Patent Office (Management) is Spying on Its Very Own Staff

Summary: EPO surveillance explained by another source, revealing a connection to Blue Coat, the notorious firm that performs surveillance on behalf of private clients

YESTERDAY we published an unconfirmed report about how the EPO conducts surveillance on staff, which has increasingly turned against the corrupt management. We have since been contacted by more sources, some of which reinforce what we wrote but some refute it. In the interest of accuracy, here is another explanation of how the EPO conducts its notorious surveillance. It has been no secret that the EPO spies on its staff, but some allege that it happens even outside of the workplace.

"The EPO monitors all electronic communications," said one source, "but the suggestion that traffic may be routed through Moscow is rather fanciful, as they wouldn't need Putin's help at all.

"The EPOrg acquired a large B-address block in the 1990s, at the time when IP address were cheap and plentiful, with 65536 endpoints of the form 145.64.xx.xx. These are normally routed either to The Hague or Munich. EPO users are thus rather easy to spot in server log files. (Many EPO online services such as Espacenet now use Amazon web services as a front end, but that's another story).

"Since a few years, web access from within the EPO is preceded in a flash by another one from 8.28.16.254 (US Pennsylvania), which belongs to an infamous US company called Blue Coat." See the RSF report for more information. The EPO is acting not much more ethically than the BND or the NSA now. To quote RSF, "American Company Blue Coat, specialized in online security, is best known for its Internet censorship equipment. This equipment also allows for the supervision of journalists, netizens and their sources. Its censorship devices use Deep Packet Inspection, a technology employed by many western Internet Service Providers to manage network traffic and suppress unwanted connections."

"I have a server with some documents occasionally accessed from the EPO," said our source, "and I started seeing these weird accessions in my log files. A telltale signature of BlueCoat is the dated browser signature, which is "Mozilla 4.0", usually followed by garbage or obsolete browser IDs.

"It has been no secret that the EPO spies on its staff, but some allege that it happens even outside of the workplace.""I have also seen strange accesses to the same documents from other continents which seem to correlate with BlueCoat probes, but even though the coincidences are troubling I can't quite see the connection or the use of these transfers.

"Try giving a look at your own Techrights.org or schestowitz.com log files.

"You can also perform traceroute to an EPO address, and see where it goes through. My own test do not show anything suspicious, but I don't live in Russia."

Curiously enough, one source of DDOS against Techrights.org has been looking like this (from less than one minute ago):

10.0.2.11 - - [19/Mar/2015:02:47:01 -0700] "GET /2011/12/ HTTP/1.1" 200 148164 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)" 10.0.2.11 - - [19/Mar/2015:02:47:00 -0700] "GET /2013/11/ HTTP/1.1" 200 136439 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)"

These requests basically hit the site almost every second, demanding about 8 aggregated articles (very greedy) at an alarmingly high pace, thus inducing very high load on the server. In addition to that, there are many cracking attempts (several per second, with increase at times of important releases about EPO). As every systems administrator ought to know (I do this also for a living, as part of my daytime job), determining the source of a DDOS attacks of cracking is very hard, especially if one pursues 100% certainty and has no privileged access to routers (like governments have). Let's leave it all an open question.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
where Microsoft put its money
No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
What happened? Good luck guessing.
Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
Expect a new series to kick off very soon
Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
Links for the day
Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
It's not hard to see what's happening here
Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
"It was a great success"
Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025