It may seem that the big names of tech are eager to embrace -- and to be seen embracing -- Linux, but Google is being a little selective.
Users of the Konqueror, Falkon and Qutebrowser web browsers for Linux-based operating systems have reported that they are unable to log into Google services. What's strange is that not all users of these browsers are affected, but many people are seeing a warning
The popular Linux browsers Konqueror, Falkon and Qutebrowser are now being banned from logging into Google services as they may not be secure.
It's unclear as to when the search giant began blocking these browsers but a Reddit user recently made the discovery and wrote a post about it.
After running its own tests on Konqueror and Falcon, BleepingComputer confirmed that it was unable to login to Google services using either browser and Google suggested using another browser instead as they may not be secure.
As reported by Bleeping Computer, Google, the search giant, is banning some of the popular web browsers like Konqueror, Falkon, and Qutebrowser. If you’re using any of the mentioned browsers, there are chances that you’ll be restricted from logging into Google services.
The ban was discovered by a Reddit user who posted about the same on the platform. The post garnered attention from several Linux enthusiasts who also reported they aren’t able to access Google services from some Linux browsers.
Container frameworks like Docker allow software to be deployed in a modular fashion and provide the foundation for cloud architectures. With the release of container extensions, IBM’s z/OS platform now supports containerized workloads and enables future deployments through orchestration mechanisms like Kubernetes and OpenShift. This allows z/OS to operate more seamlessly with Linux-based open source workloads that require access to local mainframe resources and subsystems.
Zulip version 2.1 is out, LibreOffice has a new manual, the Linux Foundation announces yet another initiative, and individual talks from the Linux App Summit have hit the web.
Friday marked not only the release of QEMU 4.2 for Linux virtualization but Intel's open-source crew developing the Cloud-Hypervisor as the Rustlang-based VMM built around Linux's KVM and VirtIO interfaces is out with a big feature release.
Cloud-Hypervisor took shape this year and has been quick to evolve since its inaugural release in July. Cloud-Hypervisor during its pre-alpha stage is catered to Clear Linux and Ubuntu while also focusing on x86_64 CPU support but AArch64 coverae is said to be coming in the future. Windows 64-bit guest support is also under evaluation.
While the Mesa 20.0 cycle is quite young and still over one month to go until the feature freeze for this next quarterly installment of these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers, it's quite exciting already with the changes building up. In particular, on the Intel side they are still positioning for the Intel Gallium3D driver to become the new default on hardware of generations Broadwell and newer. Here is a quick look at how the Intel Gallium3D performance is looking compared to their legacy "i965" classic OpenGL driver that is the current default.
As you should already know if you've been reading Phoronix for any real length of time, the new Intel Gallium3D driver is quite competitive and for supported generations is generally now ahead of their classic OpenGL driver. The Intel Gallium3D driver supports OpenGL 4.6 like the i965 driver and the lingering bugs are just being addressed before turning it on as the default Intel OpenGL Linux driver while i965 will be sticking around as the default for Haswell and older.
Canonical's Alan Griffiths continues leading the Mir efforts and his team had a very busy 2019 continuing to push along Mir even though it's not featured on the Ubuntu desktop right now is still playing a big role at the company due to IoT use-cases like digital signage. Griffiths provided a look back at Mir in 2019 on Ubuntu Discourse. Here were some of the highlights:
Now step forward almost six months and the drivers for the 5700 and 5500 lines still don’t exist. OK sure there are drivers for Ubuntu 18.04.03, and ONLY for Ubuntu 18.04.03, nothing newer.
When it comes to PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, the drives we have been using are the Corsair Force MP600 that have been working out great for pairing with the newest AMD Ryzen systems. But a Black Friday deal had the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD on sale, so I decided to pick one up to see how it was performing on Ubuntu Linux. Here are benchmarks of the Sabrent Gen4 NVMe SSD, which in the 1TB capacity can be found for $150~170 USD.
The Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 (SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB) features Toshiba BiCS4 96L BGA132 TLC NAND flash memory, Phison PS5016-E16 flash controller, and Sabrent rates its performance for sequential reads up to 5000MB/s and sequential writes up to 4400MB/s. Obviously for hitting those peak performance figures this solid-state drive needs to be installed in a PCI Express 4.0 M.2 slot.
VirtualBox 6.1 Released: The Oracle team announced in their blog as “The Final version of VirtualBox 6.1 Released Today“. The VirtualBox is a cross-platform software available for Windows, Mac & Linux operating systems. According the them, VirtualBox 6.1 is one of the best edition released ever. It is the largest and open-source version released now. This version is designed to work with cloud application and servers.
The New Version VirtualBox 6.1 introduces the option to “Import from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure”
This unique feature allows us to run a virtual machine environment locally on your 32 bit x86 Desktop System. The new version will run the virtual machine on x86 based Windows, Linux, Mac, Oracle Solaris machines. The version 6.1 allows you to update the VirtualBox version locally on your x86 systems.
Log file management is essential for apps, operating systems, servers, and anything software related. Realistically, there are some specific file management best practices that are fundamental, and tools which tend to make the process easier while outpacing the rest. We’ll briefly explore ten of these tools in this writing.
Linux and Unix require log management that’s as convenient as possible for best server management. Servers are the core of many businesses in terms of technology, and different businesses have different needs. From Papertrail to Lnav to LOGalyze, there are plenty of worthwhile options. Find those that best fit your business and needs of its tech personnel.
Following yesterday's release of QEMU 4.2, the next version of this open-source processor emulator for hardware virtualization entering development is QEMU 5.0.
QEMU 4.0 launched just this past April while QEMU 5.0 is the new version entering development to succeed QEMU 4.2.
Development for QEMU 5.0 is now open but as of writing there hasn't been any mad rush of new features to land. But among the "5.0" patches that have been residing on their mailing list include VirtIO IOMMU device support, XIVE support for POWER KVM guests, support for real-time clock ioctls, and other mostly routine patches around s390x / 9pfs / other common areas of code churn for QEMU.
The Wine development release 5.0-rc1 is now available.
This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 5.0. It marks the beginning of the yearly code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing to help us make 5.0 as good as possible.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Gecko update, with support for running from a global location. - Unicode data updated to Unicode version 12.1. - Initial version of the MSADO (ActiveX Data Objects) library. - Update installation support in the WUSA (Windows Update Standalone) tool. - More progress on the kernel32/kernelbase restructuring. - Support for signing with ECDSA keys. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.0/wine-5.0-rc1.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/5.0/wine-5.0-rc1.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Making it into Wine 5.0-rc1 is an updated Mozilla Gecko revision, Unicode 12.1 support, an initial MSADO ActiveX Data Objects library implementation, updating the installation support within the WUSA (Windows Update Standalone_ utility, continued Kernel32/Kernelbase restructuring, support for signing with ECDSA keys, and the usual variety of bug fixes.
The Wine hackers have announced the first Release Candidate for the big 5.0, marking the beginning of the code freeze period where only bug fixes make it in and no new features after this.
With yesterday's release of Wine 5.0-RC1 as the last feature release prior to the code freeze for this forthcoming annual Wine stable release, a number of the patches merged came via way of Wine-Staging.
Upstreamed out of Wine-Staging and into Wine ahead of the 5.0-RC1 release were the WUSA (Windows Update Standalone) patches, support for reading SCSI devices via Linux's sysfs, quieting a warning/FIXME in the WineD3D code, correctly parsing Unicode property storage dictionaries, and other work.
For use with Wine and Steam Play Proton, D9VK is the awesome project based on DXVK which translates Direct3D9 to Vulkan for better performance. A big new release just went out.
Codenamed Croakacola, D9VK 0.40 is a big one. D9VK can now use more than 4GB VRAM on 32-bit applications/games, with it being noted to help modded Skyrim/Oblivion and obviously more too. There's also now async presentation across all vendors, some "query flushing" improvements, performance fixes for Risen and Legend of the Heroes: Trails of the Sky, bloom rendering fixes for SpinTyres/Mudrunner and other misc updates.
D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK.
D9VK lead developer Joshua Ashton released version 0.40 today as the "Croakacola" release and it includes some big features like for 32-bit applications to be able to utilize more than 4GB of video RAM, which should help Skyrim, Oblivion, and other games.
David Evans and The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild have a brand new trailer out for their upcoming naval action and adventure game Sail Forth.
While previously Evans was working alone on Sail Forth doing graphics, audio and programming they've recently announced the team up with The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild who've developed and published multiple other titles with Linux support like The Bridge, Tumblestone and Almost There: The Platformer.
Backspace Bouken isn't your standard dungeon crawler, it mashes it together with a typing game and the end result is pretty hilarious.
Receiver is getting a much expanded sequel! Wolfire Games (Overgrowth, Lugaru) have confirmed Receiver 2 is releasing with Linux support next year.
Announcing the game on Twitter, they said "Receiver. Is. Back. The most realistic gun simulator ever returns in #Receiver2, a brand new game from Wolfire Games.".
For a good number of years, there was a desktop operating system (OS) based on FreeBSD called PC-BSD. It was intended as an OS for general use, which was noteworthy because BSD development mostly focuses on servers. For most of its life, PC-BSD shipped with the KDE desktop by default, but the more KDE came to depend on Linux-specific technology, the more PC-BSD migrated away from it. PC-BSD became Trident, and its default desktop is Lumina, a collection of widgets written to use the same Qt toolkit that KDE is based upon, running on the Fluxbox window manager.
You may find the Lumina desktop in your Linux distribution's software repository or in BSD's ports tree. If you install Lumina and you're already running another desktop, you may find yourself with redundant applications (two PDF readers, two file managers, and so on) because Lumina includes a few integrated applications. If you just want to try the Lumina desktop, you can install a Lumina-based BSD distribution in a virtual machine, such as GNOME Boxes.
KDE Frameworks are over 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks web page.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
I’ll be attending the Chaos Communication Congress this year finally for the first time, after having failed to obtain a ticket in the past. This week I got the actual ticket document, and seeing it contain an UIC 918.3 barcode I of course had to make KDE Itinerary support this ticket too :)
[...]
The QR code is fairly useless for our purposes, it basically just contains a random number. Good from a privacy point of view, but therefore providing nothing the extractor can work with. Not so the second one, that contains some very specific markers we can use for selecting the extractor, such as the unassigned UIC operator code “9997” and the passenger name “36C3”.
The preparations are under way and we’ve opened the Call for Papers. We truly believe that we bring together the best audience with the best speakers. Being a part of this is a great experience, so make sure to get your talk proposal submitted.
Another part of the foss-north experience is the community day. The day before the actual conference, a large set of community groups arrange workshops, hackatons, dev sprints, even mini conferences. This year we’ve already confirmed the participation of KDE, FreeBSD, and “something embedded” arranged by Endian (last year they did a full day workshop on the Zephyr Project).
We’ve got some really big things planned and in progress for Plasma 5.18 and Frameworks, and work proceeds smoothly. None of it is quite done yet, but we did land a number of nice bugfixes and user interface polish for issues that have been irritating people for years…and mere days!
Developer Bastien Nocera has written a blog post talking about improvements coming to GNOME 3.36 and Fedora Linux, to help those of you switching between GPUs.
While the GNOME desktop has had the ability to launch items with a dedicated GPU for some time, it was quite limited. Thankfully, SwitcherooControl and the API used has been extended to improve it and add support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
That very ambitious 10x10 goal is still documented on the GNOME Wiki and is about "10% of the global desktop market." Perhaps in some very select geographic regions, the Linux desktop marketshare may be close to 10%, but on any large scale that goal is still a pipe-dream.
[...]
In any case, GNOME has advanced a lot over the past decade and particularly the past 2~3 years since Canonical switched back to GNOME Shell by default and has helped in addressing many bugs -- including several high profile performance issues. GNOME 3.34 is a hell of a lot better than the state of GNOME 3.0 from at the start of this decade. In reliving GNOME's highlights from the past decade, here is a look at the twenty most viewed GNOME stories since 2010.
It was a really productive week. I am almost done with the current tasks. I’ve finished replicating the wire-frame of gnome-builder’s search-and-replace-bar widget into the libdazzle-example application. There are a couple (or maybe a couple more) of final nitpicks to do to actually mark these as finished.
At the moment, I am far more comfortable with the project. Nothing seems really alien-sih now, rather most of the stuffs (from the project) looks quite familier (and imparts somewhat proper sense).
Sadly, Xubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine is an average distro. And it aligns with how the cycle of enthusiasm typically works in the Linux world, matching the whims of its decentralized developer community. A couple of years back, I was talking about the freshness in the Xfce world, just before Plasma kicked into high gear, and seemingly, Xfce took its place. Which explains why you get nominal, by-the-book, zero-excitement Xubuntu releases more recently. Alas, Ermine takes it one step further with functional issues.
Most of the stuff actually works - solid networking, media, phones support, good app collection, excellent performance. But then, the packaging of it all is quite lackluster, and even a seemingly innocent thing like an icon theme seems to bring the distro to its proverbial knees. Thunar is quite rigid, and there's no sense of passion. I mean yes, desktops should be boring - but they should also allow their users to be able to explore and try new things, and in this regard, Xfce seems to have fallen behind. I's say 6/10. Okay, but going through motions ain't fun. Curtain.
We’re pleased to announce the third release candidate for Qubes 4.0.2!
Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond.
Fedora optical media and any issues pertaining to that would be considered non-blocking for Fedora releases. This reflects the fact a majority of Linux users these days are copying their Linux distributions to USB flash drives and installing from there rather than still burning CDs/DVDs. Particularly with many computers these days lacking CD/DVD drives, not having to worry about optical install issues as blocker bugs would free up resources to deal with more pressing bugs around release time.
was always in a need of some bootable operating system, which could be started on a broken computer or server to restore and backup data. I also wanted to impress my friends with a fully functional Linux desktop started from a removable media, which they can try without installing. But carrying full-sized CD was not much convenient, and floppy drives didn’t provide sufficient space. So my goal was to make a full featured Linux system, but small enough so it could fit those small 200MB mini CDs.
But since I was a beginner with Linux as well myself, I didn’t know much options to start with. All the distributions I tried at that time (Mandrake, Fedora) were too big, I didn’t know how to install minimalistic versions of them. Slackware provided very clever installer, which allowed me to select individual packages to install, so I started using Slackware as my base.
Last month on November 13th, the Debian Project shipped updated CPU microcode for various types of Intel CPUs to mitigate the TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort) vulnerability (CVE-2019-11135). But not all Intel CPU models were covered by the update, so they released a new intel-microcode security update that addresses this flaw for Coffe Lake processors too.
"This update ships updated CPU microcode for CFL-S (Coffe Lake Desktop) models of Intel CPUs which were not yet included in the Intel microcode update released as DSA 4565-1," reads the security advisory. "We recommend that you upgrade your intel-microcode packages."
Pi foundation released their first system-on-a-chip (SOC) in 2012, they had no idea how overwhelming the response would be. The credit-card-sized computer once meant to be an easy entry point for British students to get into programming and computer science has burgeoned into a whole community of add-on boards (“hats”), screens and extras that people all around the world are using for all kinds of things.
Raspberry Pi computers have ARM processors on them and most Linux distributions that support those processors will run on them. There are also Windows 10 IOT (Internet of Things) embedded platforms that will run on them as well.
The most popular operating system for it by far is Raspbian, which is a derivative of Debian Linux. The Raspberry Pi foundation also has an OS image called NOOBS, which will allow you to install a number of different options on it as well.
Getting started is as easy as buying a Pi, a case and its accompanying necessities, which you might already own, namely a microSD card, a 5V-2A wall-wart-type supply with a micro USB connection, an HDMI cable and a USB keyboard and mouse.
Several starter kits are available that include cases, power supplies and NOOBS already installed on a microSD card. If you already have access to a microSD card, it is simple enough to go to www.raspberrypi.org and download any of the OS images that they have there. There are also details on how to get the image onto the card.
Waveshare’s $38 “Compute Module PoE Board” extends the Raspberry Pi CM3 with a PoE-enabled 10/100 LAN port, 4x USB, HDMI, MIPI-DSI and -CSI, 40-pin GPIO, and an optional case.
We’ve seen a variety of embedded systems based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, including IoT gateways such as CompuLab’s IOT-GATE-RPi and automation controllers like Techbase’s ModBerry or Brainboxes’ BB-400 NeuronEdge Controller, which is based on the wider temp, up to 32GB eMMC RPi CM3+. CM3-based development boards include Gumstix’s Alexa Voice Service, Kontron’s Passepartout, and balena’s balenaFin. among others. Waveshare‘s new Compute Module PoE Board joins this second group with a low $38 price and Power-over-Ethernet.
Deepwave Digital’s v0.2 release of the Ubuntu-based AirStack software for its Nvidia TX2 and Artix-7 equipped AIR-T SDR dev board adds variable sample rate, phase locking for MIMO, easier updates, and support for Jetpack 4.2.2, Docker, and the Jetson TX2i.
Philadelphia-based Deepwave Digital has released version 0.2.0 of the Ubuntu-driven stack that drives its Jetson TX2-enabled AIR-T (Artificial Intelligence Radio — Transceiver) board for software defined radio (SDR). AirStack 0.2.0 offers improved hardware support, easier upgrades, and new features like variable sample rate support. The release takes a step toward the company’s eventual goal of turning AIR-T into a field-deployable system, says Deepwave Digital.
Development effort from our end went into build.postmarketos.org (in short BPO). This is the name of both the website seen in the second screenshot, as well as the source code for the program that generates the website. Besides that, it manages the jobs that run on sourcehut builds.
BPO has 91% test coverage. A rather unusual design decision is that the website is generated as static HTML page whenever there is a change. It is not generated on demand when requested via HTTP. This seems highly appropriate though, as the content at most changes a few times per second.
We have come a long way from initially having no binary repository and expecting all developers to build everything from source at the project's public launch in May of 2017. During the following months we had an inofficial repository of binary packages for Plasma Mobile packages on postmarketOS at one point. Until we got the first official binary repository at the end of 2017. But that one had to be manually triggered and the build logs where not available online.
Now it's completely automated and transparent, and multiple developers of the core team are able to fix things if they go south. Therefore we allow more people to merge incoming patches, and it is already apparent that this has resulted in increased productivity.
Wall Street’s adoption of open-source development has come to a crossroads, according to recent research published by industry analyst firm Aite Group. In the 28 years since Linus Torvalds released his open-source Linux operating system kernel, it has taken 23 years for the adoption of the development model to gain prominence with financial services institutions, according to Tosha Ellison, director of member success at the Fintech Open Source Foundation as whose organization sponsored the research,
Over the past few months, we’ve been working on CC Vocabulary, a new open source software project that provides a cohesive design system to unite the web-facing Creative Commons (CC).
Various Linux distributions provide a number of lightweight browsers that can easily run without eating up too much of your machine’s memory. So, without any further ado, here are Top 5 Lightweight Web Browsers that you can use on your Linux System.
Firefox 72, currently in beta, received some fixes to the Accessibility Inspector this week. Here they are.
The first fix is to a longer standing issue. If you opened Accessibility Inspector by right-clicking an element and choosing Inspect Accessibility Properties, keyboard focus would not land on the Inspector or Properties tree view, but in limbo somewhere on the document. You had to tab a couple of times to get focus to the correct place. Well, that will be no more. From now on, keyboard focus will land in the properties tree, so you can directly start exploring the name, role, states etc., of the element you are interested in.
Related to that, if you selected to inspect an accessibility element’s property either from the browser or DOM Inspector context menus, the selected row in the Accessible Objects tree would not always scroll to actually show the selected item. That too has been fixed.
I'm ramping up on a project to understand how Firefox retains users. Right now I'm trying to build some context quickly. For example, what's our monthly retention? How about our annual retention? There's a bunch of interesting and nuanced measurement questions that we'll eventually have to answer, but for now I'm just interested in getting some quick back-of-the-envelope numbers.
Love LibreOffice? Want to help spread the word? And do you speak another language than English? Then we’d appreciate your help! We have lots of community-created LibreOffice accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but some haven’t been updated for a while. The full list is below, with the date the account was last active – if you’re interested in helping to maintain one, join our marketing list and let us know!
The free and open source photo-editing program called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a nice alternative to the subscription-based or boxed versions of its competition (including PhotoShop). Whether you’re a beginner with GIMP or a seasoned pro, there’s lots to love.
Some of GIMP’s greatest assets are the plugins and scripts created by numerous independent programmers. At one time, there was a massive collection called the GIMP Plugin Registry, but that resource is no longer available. Consequently, you must search the Internet for GIMP plug-ins and scripts.
To start you on the right track, we’ve selected our favorite plugins and scripts for you to try, with a brief description of each, and a link to the resource location. First; however, we should explain the complicated process of how to install these treasures and where to find them on the GIMP menus.
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the formation of the Edge Native Working Group, which will drive the adoption of open source software for edge computing. Founding members include Adlink, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Kynetics, Huawei, Intel, and Siemens. The working group plans to focus on creating an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today’s most transformative technologies, including the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles.
Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that brings compute power and storage physically closer to applications. The goal of doing so is to improve performance, increase efficiency, and save bandwidth. Over the years, the Eclipse Foundation has built up a sizable IoT community — 41 open source projects from over 40 members, with over 4 million lines of code produced. Now the foundation wants to do the same thing for edge computing.
TL;DR: we made a fully automated luxury gay space communist type-in-listing book. Buy it now and get it in time for Christmas.
Java was first introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1995. The project was started in the lab of Sun Microsystems by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, Patrick Naughton. There were more people in the team but these three were main. The name of this team was the Green Team.
The first version’s name was the Java Alpha Beta version in 1995. Java Development Kit also called JDK was first introduced in 1996. When Sun Microsystems released the first version of Java in 1996, it was called JDK 1.0 and the code name for this project was OAK. The OAK word was taken from the name of OAK Tree. The picture of the OAK tree is shown below.
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a nonprofit organization behind the Python programming language. I am fortunate to be a PSF Fellow (honorable member for life,) a Python core developer, and the liaison between my company, Red Hat, and the PSF. Part of that liaison work is providing updates on what’s happening in the Python community. Here’s a look at what we have going on in December.
Upcoming events
A significant part of the Python community is its in-person events. These events are where users and contributors intermingle and learn together. Here are the big announcements of upcoming opportunities to connect.
PyCon US 2020
PyCon US is by far the largest annual Python event. The next PyCon is April 15-23, 2020, in Pittsburgh. The call for proposals is open to all until December 20, 2019. I’m planning to attend PyCon for the conference and its famous post-con sprints.
Heroku is great but it's sometimes painful when your app isn't just in one single language.
Today I tested another python package for Django named django-admin-shell.
Christmas can be a clarifying time. It clarified that yes, the fervent Mariah Carey, not The Beatles is the best Western music act of all time. On a less serious note, we learn a great deal about the woke postmodern subject this time of year. The postmodern subject may see Karl Marx as just another theorist to be modified, corrected, and therefore continually individualized (therefore continually resold, marketed and divided). But somehow this subject also manages to see right through the scam of Christmas as a materialist plot that was never about the transcendence of love but only another event in the game of capitalism.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (c. 1500-1700) in Europe—beginning with Copernicus (1493-1543) and ending with Isaac Newton (1642-1727)—precipitated a momentous transformative learning moment for humankind.
A lawsuit is taking on the University of California system’s use of the SAT and ACT standardized tests in admissions. The suit claims the tests are “deeply biased and provide no meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed.”
Western civilization has always had a fascination with the civilization which grew up along the Nile River around 3,000 BC. Greek intellectuals, such as Thales, visited Egypt and were enamored by the design and mathematical exactness of the shape of the pyramids. For millennia, ancient Egypt has been considered synonymous with wisdom by the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin, but especially the West. One text that reveals an example of that wisdom is the Rhind papyrus, a document that appears to be an otherwise mundane primer on mathematics. But much of what scholars know of Egyptian mathematics comes from this text.
Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral slogan was “Make America Great Again” and it was supposed to foreshadow his promise — if elected – to recapture the promise that the post-WW-II recovery inspired.€ € Well, after being elected and three years in office, Trump is ending the promise that long was the “American Dream.”€ € And this end is coming in a deeply troubling manner – the U.S. mortality rate is increasing, reversing a half-century increase in life expectancy.
Earlier this month, I witnessed a paid Culinary 226 Union organizer heckle Bernie Sanders and I haven't€ stopped wondering why
The Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) passed a resolution supporting the principle that intersex children should not be operated on until they are old enough to make the decision themselves.
This deferral of all medically unnecessary intervention is in line with medical evidence, bioethics, human rights standards, and every intersex-led policy organization in the US.
"We will defend our public services—especially the NHS—from attempts to degrade or destroy them, and support, as well as we are able, the overworked heroes who keep them afloat."
"ICE is operating exactly as the Trump administration wants it to when migrants are being so violently neglected."
Instead of addressing the "alarming increase in the number of uninsured children across the country," the state chose to put up "more barriers to coverage that will worsen this trend."
Back in August was the release of the very big CUPS 2.3 update that shifted the source code license, added support for IPP Printer presets, added a new utility, and other improvements for this Apple-controlled Unix/Linux printing system. Available now is CUPS 2.3.1 with various fixes.
EFF has long fought to end the FBI’s ability to impose gag orders via National Security Letters (NSLs). They violate the First Amendment and result in indefinite prohibitions on recipients’ ability to speak publicly about controversial government surveillance powers. Records and data released by the FBI earlier this year confirm that, despite congressional reforms in 2015, the vast majority of NSL recipients remain gagged. What’s more, the FBI has not taking meaningful steps to dissolve those gag orders.
Today, EFF is publishing “The Failed Fix to NSL Gag Orders,” a new report based on an in-depth analysis of records EFF obtained after we won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit earlier this year. Our report is based on records we obtained that identified more than 700 NSL recipients that the FBI had freed from lengthy gag orders, the subject of a front-page New York Times story in September.
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report of the FBI’s Russian investigation has fully exposed one more dangerous aspect of the steady abuses of national-security surveillance against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of the national security abuses of the National Security Agency exposed the massive surveillance of U.S. citizens in the expanded campaign against terrorism. Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the DoJ, has highlighted the abuses of the FBI and the misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over an extended period.€ It will require a comprehensive and bipartisan congressional reform program to gain control over national-security wiretapping.
About 25 to 40 applications go before a few top officials at the Justice Department every week; most are not singled out for additional review, the report said.
“It would be surprising if the Carter Page case were the only one that had serious problems,” said Steven Aftergood, who works on intelligence policy at the Federation of American Scientists. “And in fact, the inspector general makes several systemic recommendations that suggest that the problem is broader than a single case.”
These problems, though not political, are equally troubling, experts said.
While use of these apps may seem trivial, when abused, this data can have a significant effect on people’s lives. In a 2019 paper presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, researchers performing a field study of computer security and intimate partner violence found two of the top three concerns for clients in their study were related to location tracking or spyware.
To add to all the bad news that is Ring camera's life cycle to this point comes the report that a group of malcontents has been exploiting default/weak credentials to gain access to cameras. Joseph Cox has the this-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-scary details at Motherboard.
The war in Afghanistan, America’s longest, has cost about 2,300 US lives, over 20,000 wounded, and about $1 trillion. Now, thanks to the persistence of the Washington Post, we have an abundance of interviews which, like the Pentagon Papers, reveal the enormous wastefulness, ignorance, and deceit that make Afghanistan, like Vietnam, a chapter in the history of failed US interventions.
When I lived in the Bronx in 1973 and early 1974, I used to go to a bar up Fordham Road. I was attending Fordham University at the time and it was the custodian who cleaned our dorm hallways and bathrooms who first took me there. He was IRA through and through. So was the bar. There was nothing but Irish songs on the jukebox and various revolutionary flags hung on the walls. The regulars at the bar were mostly in their thirties and forties and were mostly working-class men. IRA newspapers and pamphlets were available for purchase. Like the conversation at the bar, the tables and around the pool table, some were in English and some were in Gaelic. I was not privy to any of those conversations, but I did learn about boilermakers there. And read the newspapers.
The move could "exacerbate tensions with Russia, China, and North Korea—all of whom would be in range of this type of missile."
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, boasting revenues of more than $230 billion last year. But last month the company sued the US Department of Defense over a paltry potential € $10 billion spread over ten years.
Donald Trump is famed for his head-snapping reversals. One day he’s taking troops out of the Middle East; the next he’s sending more in. One day he’s on the verge of an agreement with China on trade; the next he’s tweeting about holding off until after the election.
“To be a red in the summer of 1919 was worse than being a Hun in the summer of 1917,” reckoned Dos Passos, in Nineteen Nineteen, his novel of the war years.
I have often wondered if Pakistan would have been a better country and South Asia a more peaceful region if the crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 had been handled differently. As we know that did not happen when Pakistani forces went to war to prevent the secession of East Pakistan.
It has recently been€ announced€ that “a confidential trove of government documents obtained by€ The Washington Post€ reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”€ € Fascinating, of course, but the underlying message is that lying and deception continue — and not only as regards the Afghan war catastrophe.
Tis the season! Season of giving.
In 1966, during the early years of the America’s war against Vietnam, Congress passed and President Johnson signed into law a Freedom of Information Act. It wasn’t all that great at the time, though. Indeed, it took the courageous act of two men, Daniel Ellsberg and his co-conspirator, Anthony Russo, to steal and then copy thousands of pages of a secret US government study of the history of that war, known as the Pentagon Papers, in 1969, and to then, at great personal risk, to get them, in 1971, printed in the€ New York Times.
This week, ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune co-published an investigation about Gages Lake School, a therapeutic day school in Lake County for students in kindergarten through fifth grade with emotional and behavioral disabilities. It is our latest story in “The Quiet Rooms,” an investigation into the way schools across Illinois have used — and often misused — seclusion. Over the 15-month period reporters examined, Gages Lake used seclusion more than almost any other Illinois school included in the analysis.
We also published a video, based on surveillance footage from Gages Lake, of a 7-year-old boy, Staley Sandy-Ester, who was routinely put in the school’s seclusion rooms last spring. The April 30 video, obtained from the school by the boy’s family and then provided to us, shows him trying to leave the room while a school aide, sitting in a rolling chair, blocks the doorway. At one point, the aide pins Staley’s wrist against the wall. He gets increasingly upset and kicks at her. She then stands up, chases Staley, grabs a folded piece of paper from his hand and shoves him toward a wall.
In 1953, they deposed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadiq, with the help of the British. In the 60s, they were there at the Gulf of Tonkin, false flagging the North Vietnamese; and there pushing exiles onto the shores of the Bay of Pigs, shouting “Cuba Si, Castro No.” In the 60s and 70s, they spied on American activists, violating the Agency’s charter against domestic surveillance, and in 1975 were chastised by Frank Church’s committee. They fomented regime changes in Central America throughout the 80s, leading to Irangate and the Contra-Sandinista standoff. The Gulf War, economic sabotage, MK-ULTRA, intellectual property theft, 70 years of war with Russia (with two-way electoral interference), and spook Duane Clarridge, who helped bring down Chile’s Allende, telling us to “lump it.”
Seasons Beatings!
[...]
I really wish that Nancy Pelosi had had the cajones to impeach that other, arguably worse MF, George W. Pussy-Bush, along with his abidingly evil consigliere Dick-tator Cheney, for war crimes based on a pile of lies (some of which are *just* coming out) that murdered a million people and put us on the dreadful course of a Perma War that is good for nothing and no one except the top players in fossil fuels and the Military Industrial-Complex.
Nancy Pelosi should thank Donald Trump for helping her get over a bad case of IAS, Impeachment Aversion Syndrome. We all should.
The ongoing impeachment of one Donald J. Trump is bullshit. There, I said it and I’ll say it again just to make sure you heard me right. This impeachment is fucking bullshit, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise. I don’t care if this makes me a bad leftist or a bad libertarian or whatever, its the stone cold honest truth and I stand by it.
In an increasingly globalized world, relations between nations can lead to a more general climate of antagonism or to one of cooperation that extends beyond the countries in conflict. Relations between Cuba and the United States are such a case, since the continuous US embargo on Cuba has soured the relations between the US and its Latin American neighbors and the world at large.
There are three obvious reasons why the House of Representative is determined to move with all deliberate speed to impeach President Donald J. Trump.
John Bolton might be the one to save us.
Experts have long suspected that the United States badly undercounts the number of children who die from abuse and neglect. The voluntary reporting system relied on for decades may be off by at least 200%, they say, missing thousands of fatalities.
In 2012, Congress moved to make information about the deaths more accessible to the public by requiring states to release detailed reports on child fatalities and near-fatalities. But when The Boston Globe and ProPublica set out to collect these reports, it turned into a frustrating, three-year slog through child welfare offices from Maine to Hawaii.
KOSCIUSKO, Miss. — The adults in her life began failing Jasmine Irwin before she ever left the hospital.
Born severely underweight — just 4 pounds, 3 ounces — to a mother with a history of dealing and abusing methamphetamine, Jasmine might have been exposed to drugs in the womb, doctors believed, which should have jump-started intensive efforts to keep her safe.
On December 11, the International Criminal Court (ICC) confirmed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for Central African Republic militia leaders Patrice-Edouard Ngaissona and Alfred Yekatom. While they can appeal the charges, as it stands, they will be the highest ranking anti-balaka leaders to face trial for crimes committed during the country’s most recent conflict.
Beginning in 2013, fighting between the Seleka, a brutal rebel coalition of mostly Muslims from the Central African Republic’s northeast that had assumed control of the country, and militias called anti-balaka, displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Targeting any Muslims perceived to be Seleka, anti-balaka fighters launched gruesome attacks on civilians in Muslim neighborhoods.
The geographical scope of the US military is larger than the world, as even without the “Space Force” the militarization of space has proceeded apace. On this earth, there is its division into “commands.”
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), released on December 9, signals that the US will continue to render assistance to the coalition led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates which has killed 100,000 Yemenis, including 12,000 civilians.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has removed three Russian companies — TsAO, Vertikal, and Unicom — from its list of sanctioned entities. They were first added to the list on December 5 for their alleged ties to Denis Gusev, whom U.S. officials say is the leader of the Evil Corp hacking collective. Evil Corp stands accused of stealing about $50 million in total from banks around the world.
The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?
After deposing Evo Morales in a US-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales supporters near the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz.
Today WikiLeaks releases more documents showing internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of a report on an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.
Amongst these is a memorandum written in protest by one of the scientists sent on a fact finding mission (FFM) to investigate the attack. It is dated 14 March 2019 and is addressed to Fernando Arias, Director General of the organisation. This was exactly two weeks after the organisation published its final report on the Douma investigation.
WikiLeaks is also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission. These documents should help clarify the series of changes that the report went through, which skewed the facts and introduced bias according to statements made by the members of the FFM.
The aforementioned memo states that around 20 inspectors have expressed concerns over the final FFM report, which they feel “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma”. Only one member of the fact finding team that went to Douma, a paramedic, is said to have contributed to the final version of the report. Apart from that one person, an entirely new team was gathered to assemble the final report, referred to as the “FFM core team”.
This new team was staffed with people who “had only operated in country X”, according to the memorandum. It is not clear what country that refers to, except that it is presumably not Syria. It is possible, though only speculation, that country X refers to Turkey, as OPCW has sent teams into refugee camps there to interview survivors from Douma.
The author of the memorandum states that he was the one originally tasked with analysis and assessment of the two cylinders found on the scene of the alleged chemical attack. This was a task he undertook “in the understanding [he] was clearly the most qualified team member, having been to the location in Douma and because of [his] expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering (including pressure vessel design), artillery and Defence R&D”. He continues: “In subsequent weeks I found that I was being excluded from the work, for reasons not made clear”.
The author explains that he had frequently asked to be updated on the progress of the final report and to be allowed to review the draft, but was turned down on both counts. “The response was utmost secrecy”.
Once the final report was released on the 1st of March 2019, it became clear that the conclusions of the report had changed significantly in the hands of the new “core” team that assembled it into its final form: “At the conclusion of the in-country activities in the Syrian Arab Republic, the consensus within the FFM team was that there were indications of serious inconsistencies in findings. After the exclusion of all team members other than a small cadre of members who had deployed (and deployed again in October 2018) to Country X, the conclusion seems to have turned completely in the opposite direction. The FFM team members find this confusing, and are concerned to know how this occurred.”
Towards the end of the memo he writes:
“In conclusion, I must stress that I hold no opinion, interest or strong views on the technical part of the matter, nor any interest in the political outcomes. My interest is in sound technical rigour; the science, engineering and facts will speak for themselves.”
WikiLeaks is releasing supporting documents that back up these claims in great technical detail, including the original interim report and appraisal of the changes each iteration went through.
It was the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre who finally admitted before an Australian Parliament committee that she had unilaterally directed and pressured CyberCon to drop myself and an€ academic research professor (an Australian citizen) from the University of Melbourne as speakers.
In this week’s “Dissenter Weekly Update” episode, we highlight the Boeing 737 MAX whistleblower, who testified before the House Transportation Committee.
We highlight a whistleblower at Miami-Dade County jail, who was reportedly barred from talking to a Miami Herald reporter about brutality in the facility.
In just over 6,500 words, Time Magazine € makes the case for Greta Thunberg being 2019’s Person of the Year. For much of the left, this confirms that she is a corporate tool. Founded in 1923 by Henry Luce, Time was the flagship of the Luce empire. Print newsmagazines have gone into a steep decline with the advent of the Internet. Despite a steep decline in circulation, Time remains the second-largest weekly after People.
"Just as we thought the slow pace and weak ambition shown at the climate talks couldn't get worse, along comes COP 25."
The austral spring of 2019 marked a historical watershed in the history of Latin America, with a series of popular mobilizations in several nations denouncing economic inequality and environmental injustice. Of particular intensity is the popular uprising in Chile that was used to justify the last-minute relocation of the United Nations climate summit, COP25, from Chile to Madrid, Spain.
More than half of the delegation from Kuwait and almost a third of Saudi Arabia’s representatives attending the Madrid meeting, known as COP25, are associated with the oil and gas industry. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar collectively sent at least 16 delegates associated with the fossil fuel€ industry.
“It’s like two parallel worlds,” says Sara Shaw, part of the Friends of the Earth International delegation at the meeting, known as COP25. “It’s so stark, the contrast between climate breakdown, the potential of massive expansion of fossil fuels, using markets to game the system, the access polluters have to these talks when civil society is really marginalised. I think it’s just coming together in a huge amount of frustration at the injustice of it€ all.”
As this year’s United Nations climate summit wraps up in Madrid, Spain, many activists, scientists, indigenous and grassroots climate leaders say that rich countries most responsible for the climate emergency have spent the talks dialing back ambition and blocking progress. This comes as deadly droughts, flooding, cyclones and wildfires rage around the world. This week, more than 70 developing countries have announced they will accelerate their climate plans, and 72 countries have signed onto goals to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But major emitters Australia, China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia have made no such promises, while the U.S. is slated to pull out of the Paris Agreement entirely by next year. For more on the negotiations at COP25, we speak with Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He is advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate talks.
The world can be saved. It needs global co-operation, careful research and the building of ultra-fast computers.
I occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office and went on hunger strike for 13 days. Still she wouldn’t meet us. Instead she flew off to attend the UN Climate Conference in Spain. That’s not enough.
Here’s the good news: The debate is over.€ 75% of US citizens€ believe climate change is human-caused; more than half say we have to do something and fast.
The proposed rollback of existing methane standards would allow oil and gas wells to release both methane and VOCs with virtually no control.
Ruffalo’s film, directed by Todd Haynes, debuted to critical acclaim, earning a Rotten Tomatoes critics' rating of 91 percent, with The Atlantic calling it a “chilling true story of corporate€ indifference.”
Mongolian dignitaries made an Eastertime pilgrimage to see the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago. And whoosh…. By September, Donald Trump Jr. had a Mongolian permit to kill one of the world’s few remaining argali sheep.
To most of the world, the Maldives are a tempting tourist destination, with over 1,192 islands of coral reefs and pristine beaches.
But the Maldivian government has long ignored its own environmental regulations and the needs of communities in developing these precarious, low-lying islands.
More damage to our nation’s most successful anti-hunger program is on the horizon.
A new report reveals how long-term disasters, including sea level rise and desertification, and short-term disasters, such as storms and fires, are especially threatening to people living in the Global South and island nations. We speak with the co-author of a new study that finds the climate crisis is already leading to a massive increase in the number of refugees being displaced around the world. Hossein Ayazi is a policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. We’re also joined at the U.N. Climate Summit in Madrid by Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He is advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate negotiations.
The board's only Democrat said the move "places an unjustified burden on workers seeking to exercise their fundamental workplace rights."
Political rottenness may be bottomless. Consider the following description of a political aspirant for the White House, this person being from the Democratic Party. His “liabilities as a political candidate are so glaringly obvious that it’s easy to dismiss his presidential bid as a vanity project.” The author goes on to describe what can only be seen as a template of sorts. “He is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”
Here in the United States, the socio-political climate has never been pristine. Normally, it amounts to maintaining an environment wherein the rich stay rich and all others stay hopeful—except for the segregated and downtrodden. Therefore, it is notable that between the 1960s and early 2000s, the social environment did improve: it got more equalitarian—the social rules favored tolerance. But, of course, it didn’t last.
At the beginning of August I drove from the Oregon Coast to the middle of New York State mostly on U. S. Highways and state and county roads. I spent the second night of the trip in Idaho Falls at a cheap motel with a view of the Mormon Temple just across the roaring Snake River. This was Mormon country—irrigation, rural-urban sprawl, golden angels gleaming against mountain backdrop, large families on vacation come to visit the shrine—but on request, the motel front desk supplied a corkscrew. Back in my room with bottle opened and plastic cup full of red wine, I took in the scene. The riparian setting and big church strutting its stuff in the glowing twilight made me think of Florence and its Duomo—the neon signs and parking lots full of minivans notwithstanding.
[...]
Maybe the West-Kardashian pair was returning on one of those planes. As I found out later, West was indeed at that time shopping for real estate in the area.
In September he bought the 4,000-acre Monster Lake Ranch in Cody, Wyoming, a hundred miles from increasingly crowded Jackson, where the spreads were too small for West’s territorial ambitions and where prices have shot up faster than Old Faithful, still steadily at its tourist-attracting work two hours to the north in Yellowstone Park.
Less than a month ago the rapper snapped up a 7,000-acre ranch, just fifty miles to the east of Cody in Greybull, Wyoming. The pair of ranches set him back to the tune of just under $15 million each.
A proposed Trump administration rule to exempt some “dark money” groups from disclosing their donors to the Internal Revenue Service is making progress after experiencing roadblocks earlier this year.
In what is currently a four-way race for the Democratic nomination – featuring Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg – the recent war of words between Warren and Buttigieg has done little for them.
The lurch to the right by the entire US political establishment over the last twenty years has been both significant and alarming.
After a much contested election process, the largest union of journalists in North America has chosen a 32-year old reporter at the€ Los Angeles Times€ to be its new leader, in the U.S. and Canada.
Why does the "big lie" work? For one thing, there's big money it.
Major questions have been raised about presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s work for global consulting firm McKinsey, with even the New York Times editorial board demanding that he release the information. After Buttigieg issued a sparse and vague overview on December 7, questions remain unanswered about his work for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010.
“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” is how 98-year-old civil rights legend Rev. Joseph Lowery describes “Interstate Crosscheck,” the questionable “purge” operation run by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach that has cost 1.1 million voters their registrations in 30 states. The victims: mostly voters of color.
The 2021 State Duma elections will be crucially important for the current regime. The next session of parliament will either facilitate the transfer of power to a new president in Russia, or it will change the country’s laws to preserve the powers of Vladimir Putin. The leaders of United Russia, Russia’s ruling party, discussed the start of their Duma election campaign as they gathered for their party congress on November 23.€ They plan to maintain their constitutional majority in the Russian parliament — in other words, to win more than 301 seats out of 450. As was disclosed on November 26, United Russia will also create a separate legal entity for the campaign: a special non-profit organization that will conduct opinion polls for the party and mobilize political strategists to work in different regions of the country. At the same time, there is a mechanism for financing political campaigns that has existed in Russia for many years — so-called election cash boxes, which finance candidates loyal to the Kremlin and its local leaders, as well as campaigns to discredit the opposition. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev examined how these funding mechanisms work.
"Unless he is removed from office, Trump's corruption will only become more brazen."
"Given what I fear the Tory government now has in store for Scotland, that right to choose our own future has never been more important or more urgent."
Sometimes election nights contain great drama; other times, the exit polls, released the moment the polls close, shut down all argument.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that the House would formally take up an impeachment investigation on Sept. 24. Sometime on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will almost certainly vote to send two Articles of Impeachment to the full House. If a whistleblower hadn’t stepped up and set this ball in motion, we would still be seeing President Trump at his rallies screaming about the Ukrainian government’s interference in the election and the corruption of Joe Biden — and the mainstream media would be chasing the story like it was a private email server. Team Trump was only days away from getting away with it.
"The jury—Senate Republicans—are going to coordinate with the defendant—Donald Trump—on how exactly the kangaroo court is going to be run."
"No court in the country would allow a member of the jury to also serve as the accused's defense attorney."
There is no way to spin the results of this election as anything other than disastrous. So what should be done?
"Don't let neoliberals use Jeremy Corbyn's defeat as an attack on Bernie Sanders," warned one progressive commentator.
+ For four years, Jeremy Corbyn was smeared in a relentless and savage campaign of vilification and outrageous slander by the British press, much of it orchestrated by liberal outlets like The Guardian (and the New York Times), using a kind of berserker Zionism as truncheon. And so, the dreadful result was predictable: the worst showing of Labour since 1935. But it’s the poor and the immigrant communities that will bear the brunt of what they have wrought.
Russiagate, Ukrainegate and impeachment aren’t conspicuously economic issues. But they are, to a large extent, class issues. They are inside-the-beltway dramas about foreign policy arcana that are important to people who see their lots tied in one way or another to the established order. This includes, by degree, those of us who would like to make room for outside-the-beltway concerns like ending militarism, solving environmental crises, providing meaningful employment for all who want it and creating functioning healthcare and educational systems.
Along the Line, is a member of the Demcast network, brought to you by the Media Freedom Foundation. On today’s episode€ hosts Nicholas Baham III (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo,€ and Nolan Higdon€ revisit the Ukraine Impeachment Process by analyzing the House Intelligence Report.€ ATL’s€ Creative Director is Dylan Lazaga.€ Mickey Huff is ATL’s producer. ATL’s engineer is Janice Domingo. Adam Armstrong is ATL’s webmaster.
After the progressive senators announced they would not be crossing the picket line, the rest of the Democratic field followed.
The Washington Post‘s function as a bullhorn for centrist Democrats continues full force this week, with an article (12/11/19) headlined, “As Democrats Trade Barbs on Business Ties, Some Worry Purity Tests Are Going Too Far” (or, in the print edition, “Democrats’ Purity Tests Over Business Ties Could Backfire: Some Observers Worry That Voters Will Perceive a War on Prosperity”). It’s a greatest-hits of an election piece, rounding up a posse of centrist sources to accuse progressive candidates of imposing “purity tests,” and argue that a leftist turn by Democrats will hurt the party.
It is very difficult to collect my thoughts into something coherent after four hours sleep in the last 48 hours, but these are heads of key issues to be developed later.
From three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Pete Buttigieg has made big gains. A timeworn ally of corporate power, Joe Biden, is on a campaign for his last hurrah. And Michael Bloomberg is swooping down from plutocratic heights.
Comparing Howard Zinn and Yogi Berra in the same sentence probably leaves most on the left with their mouths wide open. But not so with baby boomers still on the left, and others who cling to sanity near the ninth circle of hell. Historian and Professor Howard Zinn and the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra knew something not only about how history often irregularly repeats itself, but also how consistent that repetition is in general. Howard Zinn said that governments “lie” and Yogi said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
I find surprising the detailed manner in which history repeats itself. The result of the landslide described here seems to have been replicated in the USA of our times in ways that all of us witness each day. The Germany of say 1939 seems like the blueprint for the US role in the world of today.
Roger Hallam is of course right in his short book,€ Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse. While some portion of humanity heaps scorn on the victims of the fossil fuel propaganda who deny climate science, only a much smaller portion points out the equally delusional and disastrous denial of the need for nonviolent revolution.
Various health fads come and go. One particular one that I guess has been around for a bit is the idea of drinking "green smoothies." This was made popular by Robyn Openshaw, who is called "The Green Smoothie Girl" and has written a bunch of books, all around her views on approaches to losing weight and health, including the aforementioned green smoothies, and various "detox" plans. There's also something about "vibrations," but that's about as deep into the weeds as I was going to get on her views on staying healthy.
More nonsense is being perpetrated in Tennessee, the recent home to an inordinate amount of stupid defamation lawsuits. The timing on this one is a bit off. Tennessee just adopted a new anti-SLAPP law -- one that actually has some teeth.
Some good news for journalists in Nevada, via FourthAmendment.com. A decision made earlier this year by a state court has been reversed, resulting in an expansion of the protections offered by the state's journalist shield law.
The perpetually red, glaring figure of Coach Bobby Knight was a kind of weed in the Clinton era that combined a Popeye Doyle ‘70s with contemporary Wall Street Nasty. Strutting the college basketball court, hurling chairs, and ‘getting results’ while ratcheting up the Hoosier cash cow for the corrupt administration at Indiana U – his employers with whom he remained on theatrically strained terms until he outlived his usefulness – Knight personified the stagey violence of a decade of pension fraud, corporate raiding and cultic glitz. The same President who pardoned Iran Contra crooks could do the NYT crossword in less than 5 minutes (Golly! Jeez!), a skeevy lawyer’s compliment to Knight’s famous tantrums. In short, the President was a genius. So were Bobby Knight and Michael Milken. Clinton’s friend Jeffrey Epstein was also a genius. We are perpetually drowning in such Genius.
Knight’s ‘genius’ is well on display in ESPN’s absorbing doc, The Last Days of Knight, both a good introduction for the uninitiated and an intriguing summary of the so-called Season on the Brink. Several Sports Illustrated journalists crow over Knight’s rough and bumble profundity, his renegade yet devastatingly effective ‘style’ of coaching and – occasionally, predictably, pitifully – anecdotes showing his deep sense of care for the team. Robert Abbott’s film is no hagiography, but the insistence of several key dramatis personae is telling. Most of the guilt remains with the athletes. Everyone else seems to feel absolved. Knight appears only in flashback footage, a gusty and ghostly figure staring down scholarships. To illustrate this, the camera wanders around the empty stadium like it was Amityville.
Knight’s losing streak began around 1993, the year of his final college basketball conference championship. It is folk wisdom that his bullying, gaudy explosions had become archaic in a new age of sensitivity and equality in the Republic. Such Prussian techniques were archaic, counterproductive, a liability – as if that was the only reason Knight looked ridiculous (It should be noted that Abbott himself is agnostic about this explanation). Remember that this is while the US was starving Iraq (and bombing it by Navy), signing NAFTA, blitzkrieging both Serbia and Waco, gutting welfare and screwing Monica Lewinsky. Capital gains and junk bonds, university property grabs – the latter at least facilitated by bastards like Bobby Knight, whose winning streak at Indiana U was so wide he was able to throw its wretched President, Myles Brand, out of the gym in front of the whole basketball team. If even Knight is a model of Zen restraint when compared to Janet Reno and Secretary Albright, there is still nothing enlightened about any of them.
For Dolese Bros. Co. construction and supply company, which has a fleet of 300 trucks, recruiting enough qualified drivers in rural Oklahoma has been a challenge. The company has hung up banners at its plants. It has bought classified ads in newspapers. It has even turned its massive mixer trucks into moving billboards, with bumper stickers telling people how to apply.
But Dolese fills most jobs, according to community relations director Kermit Frank, by advertising on Facebook. On Nov. 4, the company placed a video ad featuring a longtime driver in a hardhat wiping down his truck, talking about all the reasons he appreciates the company: “Here, I’m home every night. And I make really good money. And I get to see my family a lot more.”
The Globe and ProPublica measured states’ and territories’ compliance with the primary federal child abuse law for children not in foster care, known by its acronym CAPTA, focusing on five provisions identified by experts as among the most important. Over more than two years, child welfare agencies were surveyed about their efforts to protect children. The survey responses, which were also reviewed by child welfare experts from around the country, showed that every child welfare agency fell short in at least one category.
Tamiki Banks’ life was turned upside down when her husband was arrested, leaving her the sole breadwinner and caregiver to their twins. More than two years later, she’s still struggling, and he’s still in custody, even though he hasn’t been convicted of any crime. From Atlanta, Pamela Kirkland reports on the heavy burden women of color like Tamiki bear when a loved one is jailed.
At one of his permanent fascist-style campaign rallies on December 10, 2019, the day the U.S. House of Representatives rolled out Articles of Impeachment, United States President Donald J. Trump told an adoring Pennsylvania crowd that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren “has a fresh mouth.” The meaning of this insult was understood by his audience. It was that Senator Warren is an uppity woman who talks back inappropriately to male superiors. Trump also repeated his mocking racist reference to Warren as “Pocahontas,” a derisive term he fixed on her in 2016 to make fun of her claims of Native American ancestry.
ProPublica’s Documenting Hate collaboration comes to a close next month after nearly three years. It brought together hundreds of newsrooms around the country to cover hate crimes and bias incidents.
The project started because we wanted to gather as much data as we could, to find untold stories and to fill in gaps in woefully inadequate federal data collection on hate crimes. Our approach included asking people to tell us their stories of experiencing or witnessing hate crimes and bias incidents.
We've long noted how community broadband networks are often an organic response to the expensive, slow, or just-plain unavailable service that's the direct product of a broken telecom market and regulatory capture. While you'll occasionally see some deployment duds if the business models aren't well crafted, studies have shown such local networks (there are 750 and counting now in the States) offer cheaper, faster service than many incumbents. Chattanooga's EPB, for example, was rated the best ISP in America last year by Consumer Reports.
Unless you're in fairly stark denial, it's clear the Trump Federal Communications Commision has been a rubber stamp for the every fleeting whim of the telecom sector, be it the agency's decision to effectively neuter itself at telecom lobbyist behest, or the attack on net neutrality rules with widespread bipartisan support. But such revolving door regulation has more subtle casualties, as well. The Wall Street Journal this week for example offered up an interesting deep dive into how ISPs successfully pressure the FCC to ignore slower broadband speed test data when analyzing whether ISPs are delivering the speeds they promise:
A top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to online marketers. The allegations stemmed from a three-year investigation by a U.S.-based researcher whose findings shed light on a murky area of Internet governance that is all too often exploited by spammers and scammers alike.
There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version 4” or IPv4 addresses available for use, but the vast majority of them have already been allocated. The global dearth of available IP addresses has turned them into a commodity wherein each IP can fetch between $15-$25 on the open market. This has led to boom times for those engaged in the acquisition and sale of IP address blocks, but it has likewise emboldened those who specialize in absconding with and spamming from dormant IP address blocks without permission from the rightful owners.
Jailbreaking is a household word for iOS users who forayed into customisation by surpassing the company restrictions. However with each OTA update, they find it difficult to reinstate the elated privileges because chances are high for their preferred tool to go unusable.
Released in November, checkra1n solved this concern to a great extent as it takes advantage of checkm8 bootrom exploit. You might have read our coverage on its previous beta version, which made Apple TV support possible.
With young consumers increasingly worried about social and environmental issues, brands can seek to capitalise in explaining the dangers of counterfeits, say counsel
Brand owners believe that the latest EU opinion on the role of intermediaries in the fight against counterfeits will result in e-commerce platforms taking more care and start a shift away from the current ‘shop-owner’ model.
On 4 December 2019, the Supreme People’s Court of China (SPC) held a press conference at Wuzhen, Zhejiang, in conjunction with the publication of a significant white paper titled Chinese Courts and the Internet Judiciary (downloadable here, in Chinese and in English).
This 135-page document is a must-read for anyone who would like to have an overview of what efforts China has made towards building online judiciary courts using big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain, to understand how the online frameworks for diversified dispute resolution and litigation services have taken shape, and to know how judicial rules and policies on cyberspace governance have been established in China.
Following several rounds of consultation, The UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (UKJT) has issued a legal statement on the status of cryptoassets and smart contracts under the English and Welsh law. [The IPKat has previously written about the potential challenges of smart contracts here].
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The term “property” describes a legal relationship rather than an object...
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The courts have historically been reluctant to treat informationper se (as opposed to the medium on which it is recorded) as property. This is based on the rationale that information is not exclusive in nature, i.e. it can be easily duplicated, used simultaneously by different people, and cannot be alienated, which makes it difficult to exercise control and determine an ownership interest. However, in UKTJ’s view, the transaction ledger and consensus mechanisms preclude such difficulties by preventing double-spending or simultaneous control.
Such reasoning applies to the cryptoasset viewed as a conglomeration of public data, private key and system rules. It does not apply to the private key viewed in isolation, which is “no more than an item of pure information and, like a password or a telephone number, it cannot in itself be treated as property”.
Another potential difficulty might arise from the fact that the law has traditionally recognised two distinct types of personal property: things in possession and things in action. A cryptoasset is not a thing in possession because it not tangible and so cannot be possessed. Does it mean that since an intangible thing is not in action, it may not be a property at all?
Back in August 2019, the USPTO published a notice requesting public input on the interplay between patent law and artificial intelligence (AI). In October, the USPTO expanded its notice to extend the inquiry to include copyright, trademark, and other IP rights. The PTO has now extended that deadline for comments until January 10, 2020. 84 FR 66176.
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3. To the extent an AI algorithm or process learns its function(s) by ingesting large volumes of copyrighted material, does the existing statutory language (e.g., the fair use doctrine) and related case law adequately address the legality of making such use? Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works? If so, how?
4. Are current laws for assigning liability for copyright infringement adequate to address a situation in which an AI process creates a work that infringes a copyrighted work?
5. Should an entity or entities other than a natural person, or company to which a natural person assigns a copyrighted work, be able to own the copyright on the AI work? For example: Should a company who trains the artificial intelligence process that creates the work be able to be an owner?
SAS. To be clear, if the no-appeal statute’s sole function is to block appeal of the reasonable-likelihood decision, then the decision is foreclosed in favor of the patentee (allowing appeal of the time-bar question). However, as I suggested in a prior essay, I believe that Justice Gorsuch SAS opinion overstated Cuozzo’s holding. I suspect this was an intentional shading of Cuozzo made possible because of 5-4 split. A smaller majority allows for a more extreme opinion.
This issue was ripe for discussion in the oral arguments with Thryv’s counsel Adam Charnes attempting to explain that Gorsuch’s SAS statement isn’t “wrong” per se, it just isn’t complete. Charnes would obviously rather not require overturning of the Supreme Court’s most recent case on the subject in order to win.
I have sympathy for the PTO in this case. It is expensive for the agency to defend itself in district court litigation and those costs must be recouped somehow. If the PTO spends $300,000 on defending a €§ 145 trial, that money will likely be taken-away from examination and lead to increased fees for next year. From the PTO’s perspective, almost every substantial request from the patent applicant comes with an associated fee that is related to the cost of providing the service and why should this be different? The answer, of course, is that a trial in Federal Court is a far cry from agency action and is particularly designed to cut-off and avoid agency overreach. The Supreme Court correctly decided the case today based upon the tradition and long history of the “American rule” that is also supported by are culture of providing access to the courts.
The accused infringer is Hong-Kong based TTI. TTI owns Ryobi, and Ryobi makes the accused garage door opening system. hamberlain filed its case in the USITC which issued exclusion orders against the appellants. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has reversed and vacated on claim construction.
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The court appears to note that one problem with this additional invention is that the specification was not very specific. The claimed “digital data bus”, for instance, is not expressly discussed in the specification other than an oblique reference to “lines carrying the normal wall control switch signals.”
Chamberlain also argues that disavowal is not clear because nothing in the specification suggests that it would be impossible or infeasible to put a passive infrared detector elsewhere. On appeal, the Federal Circuit found some merit to that argument, but concluded that the specification here “plainly represents the scope of the invention to the exclusion of some embodiments.”
What follows is a succinct statement of the Precise Relief Requests (pursuant to PTAB rules) and support in the P1 specification for this relief, recited in the alternative with the other priority documents recited in CVC's request for relief. The standard, undisputed by the parties, is that to be accorded benefit of priority a prior application must show constructive reduction to practice (CRTP) regarding at least one embodiment falling within the scope of the count, citing Falkner v. Inglis, 448 F.3d 1357, 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2006). After setting out the legal grounds for CRTP, the brief then applies these rubrics to the disclosure in P1 for subject matter falling within the scope of the interference Count (which CVC argues satisfies these requirements). Along the way the brief also suggests that "Broad will doubtlessly rely on cherry-picked quotes about whether or not the inventors or experts knew CRISPR would work in eukaryotic cells before testing it," rejecting these anticipated arguments on the ground that CTRP is grounded on what is disclosed in the specification citing Ariad Pharms., Inc. v. Eli Lilly and Co., 598 F.3d 1336, 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (en banc); Frazer v. Schlegel, F.3d 1283, 1288 (Fed. Cir. 2007); and Centrak, Inc. v. Sonitor Tech., Inc., 915 F.3d 1360, 1369 (Fed. Cir. 2019). The relevant P1 disclosure for CVC is that CRISPR is functional "when removed from its natural prokaryotic cellular milieu, which is highly relevant here because it establishes CVC's possession of the necessary and sufficient components for a functional CRISPR-Cas9 DNA-cleavage complex regardless of its environment" (emphasis in brief).
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Finally, the brief argues in the alternative that the other applications CVC asserts for priority contain the P1 disclosure relied upon for priority in this brief, and thus for the same reasons (set forth in brief for each reference) CVC is entitled to priority to these applications, based on the "continuous chain" of priority in these CVC applications.
Early last month (November 7th), Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier; collectively, "CVC") filed its Responsive Motion (Contingent) to the Broad's motion no. 2, to be awarded priority to its earlier applications for the subject matter of proposed new Count 2. (Careful readers with appreciate that in many ways this brief is substantially identical to CVC's Substantive Motion No. 1 filed to be accorded benefit to the same priority applications for the current Count.) As required by the rather formulaic procedural rules of interferences, the brief is structured to address (and rebut) Senior Party's argument; the argument (simply stated) is that CVC is entitled to priority to the following priority applications: USSN 61/652,086, filed May 25, 2012 (P1); USSN 61/716,256, filed October 19, 2012 (P2): USSN 61/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 (P3); USSN 13/842,859, filed March 15, 2013; USSN 14/685,504, filed April 13, 2015; or USSN 15/138,604, filed April 26, 2016.
Mirroring the Broad's motion, CVC sets forth in detail the disclosure in its earlier priority applications for at least one embodiment falling within the scope of proposed Count 2. And as the Broad did in its motion, the brief hagiograhically recites the "ground-breaking" nature of their work, stating that the earliest priority document (P1) disclosed "the minimal components required to generate a functional CRISPR-Cas9 DNA-cleavage complex—Cas9, crRNA, and tracrRNA." In addition, and addressing the Broad's argument that CVC's disclosure (and this interference) were directed to single-molecule embodiments of CRISPR, CVC argues that on the contrary this priority document "disclosed, for the first time, that complexes of Cas9 and a double- or single-molecule DNA-targeting RNA . . . are useful for targeted DNA cleavage and described numerous applications of this gene-editing technology, including modifying target DNA in eukaryotic cells" and that "[t]he CVC inventors immediately understood that the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA-cleavage complex could be used in a variety of different cellular and noncellular settings." The brief recites (prophetic) Example 1 in the P1 specification, asserting that the failure of the P1 specification to show actual reduction to practice is not required to satisfy the requirement for entitlement benefit. CVC also cautions the Board against any attempt by the Broad to "erroneously to link the issues in this motion to the PTAB's termination of Interference No. 106,048 due to no interference-in-fact," stating that "the legal and factual issues raised here are fundamentally different from those decided in the prior '048 proceeding" based on the PTAB's own prior statements of the grounds for its no interference-in-fact determination.
In view of the upcoming Christmas season, in light of a judgment of 15 October 2019 from the Court of Appeal of Valencia published recently, a call for caution for Father Christmas is in order. The facts of the case may be summarized as follows.
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In relation to novelty, the Court found that none of the references of the prior art cited by Famosa disclosed the combination of elements of claim 1. Moving on to inventive step, this judgment is a rather harsh example of how important formal aspects are in Spanish patent litigation. In this regard, the Court noted that patent EP ‘917 had been revoked due to lack of inventive step by the German Federal Patent Court. However, this did not impress the Court of Appeal of Valencia, which noted that the document (a French patent) relied on by the Federal Patent Court to annul the same patent in Germany had not been translated into Spanish in the case at hand. The Court highlighted that the omission of this translation was a fundamental defect of the revocation counterclaim that could not be remedied at a later stage (for example, at the Preliminary Hearing or when filing the writ of appeal). So, as mentioned, the harsh lesson from this part of the judgment is that, in Spain, what has not been translated into Spanish does not exist in this world.
Moving on to infringement, Famosa alleged that its product did not reproduce the first element of the claim which, as set out above, refers to “A tricycle (800,810) operable between a first mode of operation steerable by a tricycle rider, and a second mode of operation steerable by an individual pushing the tricycle.” Famosa filed an expert opinion which, in short, argued that this product does not offer one single vehicle with two modes of operation, but two different vehicles that share elements, each of which with different modes of operation. As mentioned, this line of defence persuaded the Court of First Instance, which denied infringement, finding, among other aspects, that this product had three modes of operation (not only two). However, the argument did not pass muster before the Court of Appeal, which found that claim 1 did not have limitations regarding the way the two modes of operation should be performed (simultaneously or not, with additional modes of operation, etc.). So, the Court concluded that the product reproduced this element literally.
Famosa also alleged that its product did not reproduce element 1.04, that is, “a head tube (707)”. In short, Famosa argued that its product did not have “a head tube” as required by claim 1, but a “complex” composed of a cylinder and an embellishment cover that entailed advantages not offered by the “head tube” of claim 1. This was actually the most controversial and deeply discussed aspect of the case. In the end, the Court of Appeal leaned towards the conclusion that although such “complex” was not a literal reproduction of the “head tube” element, it performs the same function, in the same way to obtain the same result. So, the Court applied the well-known “same function-same way-same result” test applied by U.S. Courts (see judgment of 29 May 1950 of U.S. Supreme Court in Graver Tank v. The Linde Air Products) to find infringement under the doctrine of equivalents. It may be added, in passing, that Spanish Courts tend to apply this test in the case of mechanical patents.
A new bill, introduced by Sens. Coons, Tillis, Hirono, and Cassidy, would give Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers the authority to seize goods at the border if they involve design patent violations. Customs already has this authority for goods that violate copyrights or trademarks.
But design patents work differently. Trying to use the same form of enforcement for design patents is likely to lead to perfectly legal goods being excluded, increasing prices for American consumers and hurting American businesses.
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But that’s not the test for design patents. For design patent infringement, you need to show not just that a design appears to be substantially similar to an ordinary observer, but that it is substantially similar in light of the prior art. In other words, after showing that the patented design and the article aren’t plainly dissimilar, you also need to evaluate the similarities between the two in the context of what was already known and used in the field of design.
As one example, a Supreme Court design patent case addressed a design patent on a saddle that had a particular cantle and a drop at the rear of the pommel. The allegedly infringing article had the cantle, but not the drop, and both saddles were broadly similar in shape otherwise. If you only looked for substantial similarity, the saddle might have infringed. But the prior art also contained saddles with that cantle—in light of the prior art, the similarity was insufficient to find infringement.
When lawyers filing design patent cases frequently fail to properly apply the design patent infringement test, as amply documented by Prof. Sarah Burstein, it’s unreasonable to think a Customs officer will be able to do so.
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There isn’t even a reason to think this would have a significant impact on counterfeit goods. Many counterfeit goods that violate a design patent would also violate a trademark or copyright, meaning that the ability to exclude them already exists—the problem is in detecting those goods when they’re being imported, a problem this bill won’t solve. At the same time, the bill would likely create serious problems.
This bill would put new obligations onto Customs, obligations they will likely find extremely difficult to properly execute. It’s telling that Customs hasn’t asked for this authority—they probably don’t want to have it. The primary impact of this bill would be creating numerous false negatives, allowing rights owners to take advantage of a system designed to over-exclude, helping them prevent legitimate competition.
The only people asking for this are the rightsholders who can use it to harm competitors without going through the courts and the lawyers who stand to benefit from the increases in legal disputes that the bill would create.
FOSS Patents has found out from unnamed but reliable sources that, just this week, German automotive supplier Continental has made a legally binding offer to Nokia for taking a license to its cellular standard-essential patent (SEP) portfolio. The offer forces the Finnish former mobile device maker to come clean on whether it trluy intends to address and alleviate the competition concerns raised under EU antitrust law (Art. 102 TFEU) by Daimler and four of its suppliers (Continental, Valeo, Gemalto, BURY Technologies).
Nokia announced yesterday that Daimler and its tier 1 (= direct) suppliers agreed to mediation, which theoretically could put the highest-profile EU antitrust matter pending at the moment to rest. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, usually not one to shy away from decisive action, is oddly going to hold off until the outcome of the mediation effort will be reported to the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) by mid-February.
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But neither a venue transfer nor an anti-antisuit injunction (no matter how spectacular the latter actually is) have the potential to answer the underlying question of access to component-level licenses. Earlier this decade, when some SEP holders abusively sought and enforced injunctive relief over SEPs, they argued that unwilling licensees were engaging in "holdout." Now there is a totally willing licensee--Continental--who has made every effort, up to the point of bringing a U.S. antitrust lawsuit, lodging an EU complaint, and now making Nokia an offer even though it's a SEP holder's obligation to make a first offer when requested. And there's a company that now risks being fined for an EU antitrust violation by being an unwilling licensor, unless Nokia departs from its prior refusal to grant the type of license requested.
The mediation effort will be farcical if Nokia continues to offer only insufficient (from a competition perspective) types of arrangements, such as "have made" rights that come down to extending a true license only to the car maker while hobbling component makers (who under such structure could not simply sell their components to any customer of their choosing).
Berkheimer v. HP Inc. was decided by the Federal Circuit in February 2018 and stands for -- in the words of Judge Moore of that Court -- "the unremarkable proposition that whether a claim element or combination of elements would have been well-understood, routine, and conventional to a skilled artisan in the relevant field at a particular point in time is a question of fact." The Supreme Court's patent-eligibility opinions in Mayo Collaborative Srvs. v. Prometheus Labs, Inc. and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l had not been perfectly clear on this issue, and the Federal Circuit appeared to have taken both sides at various times. Berkheimer settled the issue, for a while at least.
HP petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari in September 2018. In January of this year, the Court requested that the Solicitor General file a brief expressing the views of the United States in this matter. That brief finally arrived last week. In short, the Solicitor General is of the opinion that the overall lack of clarity regarding the fundamental issues surrounding patent-eligibility under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 makes addressing the points of Berkheimer premature.
The Supreme Court has previously identified patent eligibility as a question of law. However, in Berkheimer, the Federal Circuit recognized that the ultimate legal conclusion may be based upon factual conclusions. For example, the level of skill in the art (or state-of-the-art) is a classic factual question that may be relevant to the question of inventive contribution (Alice step 2).
Russia’s Court for Intellectual Property Rights has rejected a lawsuit by the company “Intellect and Rights” attempting to overturn a patent office decision not to grant the company ownership over the brand “Pseudonym Platov.” The court’s decision indicates that the brand name was rejected because it uses a pseudonym that belonged to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his KGB training years.
IMPEACH 45. President Trump is the 45th President and so the meaning of this proposed mark (IMPEACH 45) is clear. The USPTO examiner caught the implication and rejected the application “because the applied-for mark consists of or includes something identifying a particular living individual whose written consent to register the mark is not of record.” The applicant then abandoned the registration application. A slightly more cryptic mark made it through the registration process. The image to the right shows the general prohibition sign (“no-sign”) covering the number 45 that is now a registered mark owned by Kamyar Shadan of Tiburon, CA.
Back in August 2016, it looked like Hillary Clinton would be No. 45. Thus when Mark Allan filed for IMPEACH THAT BITCH, the TM examiner similarly found that the proposed mark improperly “identifies Hillary Clinton, a living individual.” That registration application has also been abandoned. Other anti-Hillary registration applications include ANYBODY BUT CLINTON, WOMEN AGAINST CLINTON, and the catchy HILLARY.CON. These registration applications have all been abandoned.
On Thursday, December 12, Russian law enforcement raided the Moscow office of the IT company “Nginx,” which owns the eponymous web-server used by almost 500 million websites around the world. According to several reports, Nginx co-founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov spent several hours in police interrogation. The search is part of a criminal case based on charges by a company tied to the Russian billionaire and Rambler Group co-owner Alexander Mamut, whose businesses believe they own the rights to the Nginx web-server because Sysoev started developing the code while working for Rambler in 2004. Meduza’s correspondent Maria Kolomychenko looks at how Sysoev and his partners spent 15 years creating the world’s most popular web-server before selling it to an American firm for $670 million, and how Rambler decided, half a year later, that it owns the technology.
Russia’s IT industry is in the midst of a major conflict between businesses belonging to “Rambler Group” co-owner Alexander Mamut and the company “Nginx,” created by Igor Sysoev and his partner Maxim Konovalov. Nginx’s key product is the eponymous web-server used by more than a third of the world’s websites. Sysoev first released the software in 2004, while still an employee at Rambler, which is now claiming exclusive rights to Nginx, based on its interpretation of Russian law. The police have already joined the dispute, launching a criminal investigation and searching Nginx’s Moscow office. In an interview with Meduza, Nginx co-founder Maxim Konovalov described the police raid and explained why he thinks it took Rambler 15 years to claim ownership over the coveted web-server technology, which recently sold to the American corporation “F5 Networks” for $670 million.
Strike 3 Holdings has been the most active copyright litigant in the U.S. this year but, during the summer, it suddenly stopped filing lawsuits in federal courts. Further research now reveals that the adult entertainment company moved its efforts to the state level, which can be a much cheaper option. However, several defense attorneys are protesting this move, noting that it's not allowed.
Copyright continues to serve its purpose as a tool for censorship, it seems. This week there was some hubbub over Apple's highly questionable decision to send a DMCA takedown notice over a tweet by a security researcher who goes by "Siguza," and who appeared to publish an iPhone encryption key on Twitter:
A DMCA notice that targeted Reddit's /r/jailbreak sub-Reddit earlier this week was fraudulent. Fingers were pointed firmly towards Apple on the basis it had previously targeted a tweet containing an encryption key. However, it now transpires that the notice sent to Reddit was created by an imposter. The targets of this malicious act are now calling on Reddit to share DMCA notices by default, to prevent abuse.
As we've discussed in the past, the DMCA system is enforced in such a way as to make it wide open for abuse. One of the chief problems is that, while the DMCA does include potential punishments for filing bogus notices under 512(f), the courts have traditionally appeared to have forgotten that this part of the law even exists. The end result is that anyone looking to censor or extort others by either filing or threatening to file bogus DMCA notices is mostly free to do so without risk. The times when 512(f) actually gets a spotlight are so few and far between as to be news when it happens. This has been going on, and has been pointed out by various publications, for years.
Rapper 50 Cent attacked media mogul Oprah Winfrey in an Instagram post after learning that she was producing a documentary on allegations that producer Drew Dixon made against Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons.
