08.05.22
Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum d80a09b7cf13e087fc328f2095e8c689
Trouble in LinuxToday?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Web site LinuxToday.com is pushing webspam instead of news picks; it also sells data about visitors (the typical “We value your privacy” lie), so it seems like “monetisation” tactics have taken precedence/priority over readers (or what’s left of them anyway; the webspam inevitably drives more of them away)
THE WEB site ‘Linux Today’ has been around for several decades. It’s one of the first of its kind and lately it has been pushing webspam instead of actual stories. This is a familiar pattern, reminiscent of an “exit strategy” or an attempt to “monetise” remaining readers on one’s way out.
“The World Wide Web is in a bad state, but Web sites resorting to webspam, misinformation, and pure marketing would only accelerate the Web’s doom rather than salvage it with some alternative “business models”…”The video above goes through some of the latest “news” picks and shows that ZDNet‘s sister sites, as well as ZDNet, probably face an existential crisis themselves. ZDNet, for instance, used to cover “Linux” (usually anti-Linux pieces) about 3 times per day and now it’s like 0.5 per day.
The World Wide Web is in a bad state, but Web sites resorting to webspam, misinformation, and pure marketing would only accelerate the Web’s doom rather than salvage it with some alternative “business models”… █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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Back in 1999, Saski told me: “The Wintel world used to be untouchable but now a new era is coming. The opportunity for change is Linux.”
The argument went that, if the Linux operating system became mainstream, “then the basis for competition in the microprocessor market becomes cost/performance not architecture,” said Saski.
Asked if NEC would take advantage of the opportunity by seeking to establish its own proprietary microprocessor architecture Sasaki replied: “That would be difficult, but we have a strong background in the MIPS architecture.”
Sasaki did not rule out NEC developing its own microprocessor, he merely said that MIPS would be the “first priority” if the opportunity arose.
Whether or not the opportunity is there “depends on the applications software”, said Sasaki.
If this becomes available then PC makers may support Linux just as IBM and HP have supported Linux in servers.
“It all depends on our customers’ decision,” said Sasaki, “up to now we have had no way to tell. But now we have a chance.”
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Google “banking” and “disruption,” and nearly 200 hits sprawl across more than 20 pages of search results.
The high interest in banking disruption isn’t surprising. Though disruption is a favorite business buzzword that can easily lend itself to hyperbole, it truly is accurate for the banking and financial services industry.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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A Quick Overview of KaOS 2022.06
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Benchmarks
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Back at its Architecture Day 2021 event, when Intel shared the core design details of its Alder Lake CPU architecture, the firm stated that Windows 11 was optimized in a way to best take advantage of the Alder Lake’s Performance Hybrid architecture and the new Thread Director technology that helps Windows 11 task scheduling.
A comparison test in November last year indeed showed that the Intel 12th Gen chips were a bit ahead of Ubuntu and the Linux 5.15 kernel. With the succeeding Linux 5.16 too, the performance of Alder Lake was not as consistent as on Windows 11.
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Applications
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The GTK-based Metadata Cleaner app on Flathub looks ideal.
This Python-based GTK app lets you view and clean metadata from a variety of file types. The app is totally open source and leverages the mat2 library for its file-washing abilities.
While most metadata routinely embedded in files is innocuous or banal some may reveal more information than you’d like.
For example, photos taken on most cameras and smartphones embed a data about where a picture was taken, the device it was taken on, and more as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). You don’t need to be über-paranoid to want to remove location data from photos you share with others!
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Smartphone users take hundreds, if not thousands of photos every year, and many have relied on Google Photos to automatically upload and store their holiday snapshots for free. The service ceased to offer unlimited storage in 2021, meaning that users had to either fork over cash to Google or find another solution—either by moving to another provider or self-hosting.
Here are some of the best self-hosted Google Photos alternatives to create your own media server on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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With NFS (Network File System), you can share files and folders with other systems in a network. NFS is based on a client-server architecture that allows users to remotely connect and access files through the network. With NFS, users can access shared files and folders as if they exist in their own system.
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A serious flaw in the Log4j framework enables cybercriminals to gain access to vulnerable systems by injecting a single malicious code. This vulnerability is known as Log4J, a free logging library distributed by the Apache Software Foundation.
Java is used in a vast array of contemporary digital products, including web servers, cloud solutions, and applications – making all of these products vulnerable to hacking through the Log4Shell vulnerability.
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We all feel the desire to automate everything. Our cars, houses and especially our computers. Wake-on-LAN is the perfect way to automate turning your PC on.
While this guide will focus on how to enable Wake-on-LAN in Ubuntu, you can apply it to Linux distros, and you can even find the feature in Windows.
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When Windows 10 was released, it seemingly broke the ability to easily connect to Linux Samba shares. It appeared one could not write to Linux share from Windows 10. Considering how many businesses rely on Samba for the sharing of folders, this was a bad move on the part of Microsoft. Fortunately, the ability to connect to Samba shares wasn’t actually removed from the Windows platform, it was merely tucked a bit out of sight.
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SSH key authentication makes it easier to secure SSH servers and it opens the door to automation with projects such as Ansible. However, working with encrypted SSH keys becomes tedious when you have several of them for different services. This is where an SSH agent can help!
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We’ve recently celebrated the release of ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill with a post detailing how to get started developing for the new release in containers. In addition, we shared an overview of the new features included with this new release, particularly its enhanced security features.
This week we are tackling the logical next step in software development: packaging. Indeed, once we’re done developing our super cool ROS 2 Humble application, we still have to get it out into the hands of our users.
In this post, we are going to see how to package a ROS 2 Humble application as a snap with an ‘hello world’-like example.
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I noticed a fair number of commenters on my last post, “Why I use a Chromebook”, use the Linux on a Chromebook feature. More than expected, to be honest. I’ll bet only a few, if any, of them have stopped using apt, or the Advanced Package Tool, command to install Linux apps. I have. I now use Nala for Linux, which is a front-end for the apt package manager command.
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Today we are looking at how to install FreeCAD 0.19.1 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Games
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After 9 months of development, Godot 3.5 is out and it comes fully packed with features and quality of life improvements!
While most development focus is on our upcoming Godot 4.0 release, many contributors and users want a robust and mature 3.x branch to develop and publish their games today, so it’s important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. Most of work was aimed at implementing missing features or fixing bugs which are critical for publishing 2D and 3D games with Godot 3.x, and at making the existing features more optimized and reliable.
Godot 3.5 is compatible with Godot 3.4.x projects and is a recommended upgrade for all 3.4.x users.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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People like to fixate on the disk space used by installing a calculator app as a Flatpak when you don’t have any other Flatpak apps installed. For example, on my system GNOME Calculator takes up 9.3 MB for itself, plus 803.1 MB for the GNOME 42 runtime it depends on. Regular readers will not be surprised when I say that that 803.1 MB figure looks rather different when you realise that Calculator is just one of 70 apps on my system that use that runtime; 11.5 MB of runtime per app feels a lot more reasonable.
But I do have one app installed which depends on the GNOME 3.34 runtime, which has been unsupported since August 2020, and the GNOME 3.34 runtime only shares 102 MB of its files with the GNOME 42 runtime, leaving 769 MB installed solely for this one 11 MB app.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
I was in the fortunate situation of enjoying two weeks of offline time. Took a little bit of effort, but I did manage to not start my computer a single time (ok, I cheated, checked emails, and staging progress on the phone browser). During this time, Richard has been taking good care of Tumbleweed – with the limitations that were put upon him, like reduced OBS worker powers and the like. In any case, I still do want to give you an overview of what changed in Tumbleweed during those three weeks. There was a total of 8 snapshots released (0718, 0719, 0725, 0728, 0729, 0731, 0801, 0802). A few of those snapshots have only been published, but no announcement emails were sent out, as there were also some mailman issues on the factory mailing list.
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Slackware Family
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Slax, one of the lightest-weight Linux distros around, and Peppermint OS, a web-centric Debian remix, both put out new versions this week.
Slax is a very lightweight live-medium distro from Czech developer Tomáš Matějíček (Czech language). As The Reg mentioned at the time, earlier this year, Slax got its first update in a couple of years. That update, version 11.2, was based on Debian, as the last few Slax releases have been.
Slax goes back to its roots
Now, Slax 15 is out. After nine years, Slax is returning to its Slackware roots. Slax 15 is based on the recently-released Slackware 15 – which itself is the first new Slackware release in six years. (Slax’s version numbers denote the version of the underlying OS.)
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Debian Family
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This month I accepted 420 and rejected 44 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 422.
I am sad to write the following lines, but unfortunately there are people who rather take advantage of others instead of doing a proper maintenance of their packages.
So, in order to find time slots for as much packages in NEW as possible, I no longer write a debian/copyright for others. I know it is a boring task to collect the copyright information, but our policy still requires this. Of course nobody is perfect and certainly one or the other license or copyright holder can be overlooked. Luckily most of the contributors maintain their debian/copyright very thouroughly with a terrific result.
On the other hand some contributors upload only some crap and demand that I exactly list what is missing. I am no longer willing to do this. I am going to stop processing after I found a few missing things and reject the package. When I see repeatedly uploads containing only improvements with things I pointed out, I will process this package only after all others from NEW are done.
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A full eight and half years (!!) since its 0.0.4 release, version 0.0.5 of RcppXts is now on CRAN. The RcppXts package demonstrates how to access the export C API of xts which we contributed a looong time ago.
This release contains an accumulated small set of updates made as the CRAN Policies evolved. We now register and use the shared library routines (updates in both src/init.c and NAMESPACE), turned on continuous integration, switched it from the now disgraces service to another, adopted our portable r-ci along with r2, added badges to the README.md, updated to https URLs, and made sure the methods package (from base R) was actually imported (something Rcpp has a need for at startup). That latter part now triggered a recent email from the CRAN maintainers which prompted this release.
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A fast, fluent, light weight music player written in GTK4, with a beautiful, adaptive user interface, so named G4Music. It is also focusing on high performance, for those people who has huge number of songs.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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With Linux Mint 21 the upgrade process is done through a new utility that the Linux Mint team worked on during the development cycle of Linux Mint 21. The utility is called mintupgrade (Upgrade Tool) and while it launches from the command line it provides users with a full graphical upgrade process.
Upgrade Tool was first made available a few months ago for Linux Mint Debian Edition 4, allowing users to upgrade to Linux Mint Debian Edition 5. But, as of today, August 5th, 2022, it’s also available for Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” users who want to upgrade their installations to Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa”.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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AC (alternating current) meters are useful tools for measuring power draw. One might use an AC meter to monitor the power consumption of their devices and appliances with the goal of lowering their energy bill. Makers in particular can benefit from AC meters to learn about the power consumption of their own projects. Basic AC meters are cheap and easy to find, but they don’t measure inductive loads accurately. This DIY high-precision digital AC meter can handle inductive loads.
An inductive load is any device or appliance that utilizes electric coils, which are found in motors, transformers, relays, and many other basic electric parts. Those coils create both a standard resistive load and an inductive load. The higher the inductive load relative to the resistive load, the less accurate typical AC meter readings become. An air conditioning unit, for example, is a substantial inductive load. Cheap AC meters measure the peaks of the current’s sine wave, but inductive loads alter the shape of the wave so that it is no longer a sine wave and that makes the meter’s calculations inaccurate.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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OSI Blog ☛ Welcome to Deep Dive AI [Ed: Stefano Maffulli continues to make excuses for Microsoft GPL violations (Copilot) while Microsoft pays him to do this, under the guise of “AI”. Today’s OSI is run by a group of openwashing phonies.]
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Welcome, August –we’re opening the month with another great week. Here’s what the Apache community has been up to…
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Web Browsers
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Chromium
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Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 105 is beta as of DATE. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android.
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Mozilla
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I love that Thunderbird really tackled OpenPGP head on and incorporated it directly into the client. I know it’s been a bit rough for some users, but I think it’s a good long term investment.
And to demonstrate I’ll now complain about a minor issue :).
I replied to an encrypted message but couldn’t send the response using encryption. I got an error message indicating that “End-to-end encryption requires resolving certificate issues for” … and it listed the recipient email address.
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GNU Projects
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This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.17.2. In addition to the fixed in the source, the documentation websites including the handbook have been updated and consolidated: https://docs.gnunet.org .
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This release contains numerous bug fixes, and also the following new
features:
* The ELF linker will now generate a warning message if the stack is made
executable. Similarly it will warn if the output binary contains a
segment with all three of the read, write and execute permission
bits set. These warnings are intended to help developers identify
programs which might be vulnerable to attack via these executable
memory regions.
The warnings are enabled by default but can be disabled via a command
line option. It is also possible to build a linker with the warnings
disabled, should that be necessary.
* The ELF linker now supports a --package-metadata option that allows
embedding a JSON payload in accordance to the Package Metadata
specification.
* In linker scripts it is now possible to use TYPE=<type> in an output
section description to set the section type value.
* The objdump program now supports coloured/colored syntax
highlighting of its disassembler output for some architectures.
(Currently: AVR, RiscV, s390, x86, x86_64).
* The nm program now supports a --no-weak/-W option to make it ignore
weak symbols.
* The readelf and objdump programs now support a -wE option to prevent
them from attempting to access debuginfod servers when following
links.
* The objcopy program's --weaken, --weaken-symbol, and
--weaken-symbols options now works with unique symbols as well.
Our thanks go out to all of the binutils contributors, past and
present, for helping to make this release possible.
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Programming/Development
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Mintable is an open-source project that is released under the MIT License.
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Rust
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As of Rust 1.63 (releasing next week), the “non-lexical lifetimes” (NLL) work will be enabled by default. NLL is the second iteration of Rust’s borrow checker. The RFC actually does quite a nice job of highlighting some of the motivating examples. “But,” I hear you saying, “wasn’t NLL included in Rust 2018?” And yes, yes it was! But at that time, NLL was only enabled for Rust 2018 code, while Rust 2015 code ran in “migration mode”. When in “migration mode,” the compiler would run both the old and the new borrow checker and compare the results. This way, we could give warnings for older code that should never have compiled in the first place; we could also limit the impact of any bugs in the new code. Over time, we have limited migration mode to be closer and closer to just running the new-style borrow checker: in the next release, that process completes, and all Rust code will be checked with NLL.
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Leftovers
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Based, presumably, in the God’s Eye view of our limited earth home gained from his 2,842 orbits, Garan’s message of hope simply amplifies the top-down liberal order with its absolute faith in progress – especially technological progress – which if we believe in sufficiently will make limitations disappear. Although likely unintended, the unspoken subtext is, don’t bother with the (messy, dissatisfying), reality you’re in. But I must protest: Limits are not just punishment for failure of imagination! From “the bottom-up” view, from within the entanglements of embodied earth-life, the message is different: it’s by staying in the reality we are in, with its troubles and uncertainties, now intensified by the global contexts of pandemic and climate catastrophe, that the imagination that serves the “All-one” of interdependence and planetary health is engaged. Staying in our places and relationships would not be impossibly difficult – our ancestors did it! – except for its being contrary to the most fundamental lessons we’ve been taught and to which we are obedient: the work of imaginations being not to serve the “All-one” or “All-in-all” but to except us from the current troubles, to escape, surmount, achieve, strive, succeed; never to stay with limiting reality. Staying in is the stuff of failure, and that we must fear as we’d fear the hellhound on our trail.
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For anyone who grew up a baseball fan, the voice of Vin Scully was a much a part of the essence of the game as the gloves, bats, balls, and the action on the field he so deftly and at times eloquently chronicled. For a staggering sixty-seven years he was the voice of the Dodgers, first in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles, but listeners throughout the country were familiar with his voice and effortlessly literate style from his long-time stints on national broadcasts: World Series and All-Star games on TV and radio, and NBC’s Saturday game of the week, paired with Joe Garagiola.
Scully’s distinctively melodious, fluidly garrulous baritone punctuated the decades for millions of Americans who can still vividly recall his dramatic evocations of some of baseball’s most memorable moments, many conveyed with a near-preternatural verbal fluency and rhetorical flair that gave his extemporaneous exclamations the feel of polished literature: Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game in 1956, Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th homerun in 1974 (“What a great moment for the country and the world—a black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol”), Bill Buckner’s infamously booted ball in the 1986 World Series, and the hobbled Kirk Gibson’s miraculous homer in the 1988 World Series.
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Many of you will at some time have heard the unfortunate tale of [James Howells], a Welsh IT worker who threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin back in 2013. Over the years he’s hatched various schemes to persuade his local council to let him dig up the landfill where it’s reputed to be buried, and every time he’s been rebuffed. Despite the fall in the price of cryptocurrencies he’s back with another. With the added spice of AI and robot dogs alongside the cryptocurrency angle, it reads like a buzzword bingo card and adds a whole new meaning to “Bitcoin mining”. Seemingly despite generous offers the local council are still not keen on letting him dig for the drive.
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We live in a time where great software is available with the click of a mouse, often for free or — at least — low cost. But there’s a problem: how do you select from so many alternatives? We were interested in [Lee Teschler]’s review earlier this year of 30 free circuit simulators. If you are selecting one or don’t like the one you are currently using, it is well worth the time to review.
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So people were wearing all kinds of weird shit on their faces. And then a few companies like 3M said, “We got it. We’re national heroes. We’re like the dudes who landed on the moon.” And I was like, “No you aren’t! You’re fuckin’ making a boatload of cash. You’re not sacrificing your life, running into enemy fire with a knife between your teeth. No, you saw that you could make a trillion dollars by pumping out face masks. Stop acting like you cured polio with a third grade chemistry set.
Anyway, 3M made a lot of the face masks. Not mine. Mine were made by Frito-Lay so that I could wear it on the bus but then, in a pinch, eat it. They were delicious. Do you have any idea how much guac you can fit on one of those things? It’s great. But a lot of people were wearing the far less edible 3M masks.
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I left Thibodaux, Louisiana at 9 a.m. on July 27, 2022. An hour later, I arrived at Isle de Jean Charles where I had a vision of the world a hundred years in the future.
Thibodaux is a handsome town — a sort-of miniature New Orleans, but without the music, art, architecture, or sophistication of the city 60 miles to the east. What it has is a tight grid of streets, canopied sidewalks, two or three Creole restaurants, and a welcoming scale. Parking is easy and a walk through downtown takes about 15 minutes.
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In a word, the implications are unspeakable.
America’s monuments, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, and Hoover Dam are the foundations of Americana, the essence of America, its character, and its culture. Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, 96 lives lost during construction, defines America’s true grit during a bygone era that had to overcome great challenges tagged with the Great Depression, soup kitchens & breadlines (NYC 82 breadlines by 1932), the Dust Bowl, incipient fascism in Europe, and a brewing world war.
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After all, who wouldn’t like to see some more cash? Farmers, like everyone else, have been through a lot lately. Years of stagnant or falling farm income in many ways paralleled the stagnant wages of so many Americans. The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through our supply chain, crashing farm prices and disrupting markets.
But the story is not so simple.
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The occasion for such remarks, with their pugilistic zest, was the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his path-breaking City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), long regarded as both a classic and an outlier, with its blend of noir-haunted conjuring and granular, sociological exploration of L.A.’s myriad political ecologies. “In Los Angeles there are too many signs of approaching helter-skelter”, Davis writes near the close: “cops are becoming more arrogant and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible Armageddon”. Within 18 months, the reckoning he had intuited came to pass, when the city erupted in a cataclysmic uprising, sparked by the acquittal of four LAPD officers charged with the use of excessive force during the arrest of Rodney King: a typically brutal incident, but unusual in having been captured on videotape by an onlooker. As chants of “no justice, no peace” echoed through downtown L.A., swathes of the city were reduced to rubble and ash – leading President George H. W. Bush to declare a “federal disaster area” – as protestors exposed and countered a long-standing tradition of police violence with tactics of civil disobedience, arson, and looting. Six weeks after the conflagration, Daryl Gates, the notoriously authoritarian and techno-militarist police chief (accused of instituting a de facto racist law-enforcement regime), resigned his post.
America’s intellectual establishment, meanwhile, shaken from its foggily panoptic perch, began to pay attention to Davis (once viewed as a fatalist, prone to hyperbole, even by fellow radicals), deeming him worthy of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1998. For this self-described “wild, extreme leftist”, however, such plaudits, and the milieux they emanated from, have generally been treated as distractions from the work, to which he consistently brings a virtuosic analytical rigour, as well as an omnivorous array of personal passions. What other Marxist scholar has thought to compile a history of the car-bomb, as Davis did in Buda’s Wagon (2007), or invested time and energy in writing a trilogy of science fiction novels for young adults, as with his Islands Mysterious series (2003)? Wild originality is one of his hallmarks.”
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I only write this as if any of it matters.
As Cassius said to Brutus in Shakespeare’s (1654 to 1616) “Julius Caesar,” “the fault …is …that we are underlings”
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Hardware
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Attention Hackaday editors: We on the writing crew hereby formally request budget allocation for installing a Stewart platform head massager on the chair of each workstation in the secret underground writer’s bunker. We think the benefits that will accrue thanks to reduced stress alone will more than justify the modest upfront costs. Thank you for your consideration.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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I graduated from high school in 1981. My youth was framed by the AIDS epidemic. I could ignore it for several years while cloistered in college, but as soon as I ventured out into the world, there it was: the virus.
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Security
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In this video for Help Net Security, Nick Ascoli, VP of Threat Research, PIXM, discusses a multilayered phishing campaign targeting cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Attackers are sending out spoofed Coinbase emails to harvest personal credentials and use them to log into users’ legitimate accounts in real-time.
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InfoSecurity Magazine ☛ GwisinLocker Ransomware Targets Linux Systems in South Korea – Infosecurity Magazine [Ed: The issue is not Linux itself. Microsoft-friendly media loves blaming the victims of back doors in Windows, but when it comes to Linux, if the victim uses an awful password, they'll blame "Linux". Bribery leads to inherent biases.]
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Sounds like this has the potential to be creepy, right? Well, to set the record straight, House Homeland Security Committee member Clay Higgins (R-LA) argued before Congress in July that it’s just fine, just a matter of convenience.
“The image that has been presented to the citizens that we serve is that this is some sort of nefarious technology and big brother is watching you,” the congressman explained. “But really it’s using photographic images that travelers willingly have provided, or are available on their passports or visas, or driver’s licenses. We already have that information.”
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Defence/Aggression
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In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.
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77 years ago the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 and three days later, Nagasaki, resulted in immediate deaths of approximately 120,000 majority civilians and by year’s end over 210,000. This legacy continues to this day in large part through the voices of the hibakusha, atomic blast survivors, and through having planted the seeds of the first man-made existential threat, nuclear war.
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“This is a shameful failure of our democracy.”
That’s what Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said Thursday in response to survey results that show notable shares of U.S. voters are afraid of encountering intimidation or violence at polling stations.
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Safety conditions at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant are “completely out of control,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. This comes as the Russian military has deployed heavy artillery batteries and laid anti-personnel landmines at the site in recent weeks. “Nuclear plants are extremely vulnerable to external attack in the context of a war zone,” says Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace, who says something as simple as the loss of power could unleash “massive releases of radioactivity” at rates worse than the Cheronobyl disaster of 1986.
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The U.N. warned this week that humanity is “one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation” as tensions escalate globally. We speak with Ira Helfand, former president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who says the U.N. Security Council permanent members, comprising Russia, China, the U.S., the U.K. and France, are pursuing nuclear policies that are “going to lead to the end of the world that we know.” We also speak with disarmament activist Zia Mian, co-director of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, who says non-nuclear weapon states must pressure other countries to sign onto the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
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In view of this, the upper classes experienced the outbreak of war in 1914 as a deliverance after years of uncertainty, tension, and fear, and they heaved a sigh of relief. The coming of the war, writes Eric Hobsbawm,
When he learned the news, the famous Field Marshal Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener declared laconically that “it is better to have an end of the uncertainty.” And a young Briton “from a good family,” Rupert Brooke, who would later be well known as an antiwar poet, expressed his enthusiasm in these verses:
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Some may say that Pelosi, now 82, has entered her second childhood. If so, it’s a delinquent one. Certainly her political inhibitions have dissolved, allowing her natural inclination to foment trouble to run rampant. One looks in vain for a rational motivation behind her ad hoc trip to Taiwan, an act of belligerency that might have sparked a war with another nuclear power. But to what end? China is not going to relinquish its entirely legitimate claims to Taiwan. Far from a model democracy, Taiwan is a former gangster state, whose repressive government was shaped by Chiang Kai-Shek, who retreated there in 1949 with his battered gang of CIA-financed KMT thugs, where he promptly instituted a violent crackdown on leftists known as the White Terror, a vicious form of martial law that lasted for the next 45 years.
Sure Pelosi represents many rich Chinese exiles, who have made fortunes in San Francisco and now fantasize about sticking it to the CCP from the safety of their Nob Hill mansions. But Pelosi doesn’t need their money or support. She’s well beyond that now. (Though her husband Paul is surely watching with avaricious eyes the reaction of the markets to this junket of the damned.) Pelosi’s trip seems more personal, an almost pathological assertion of her autonomy. It’s the act of a playground bully and the Mad-Eyed Lady from Pac Heights has come to see the world as her playground–provocation for the sake of provocation. Damn the consequences.
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A Needless Provocation
Why did Pelosi go? She insists she went to demonstrate unwavering support of Taiwan’s democracy and confront China’s imminent threat to Taiwan’s security. “In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) accelerating aggression,” she wrote, “our congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.”
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The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman even suggested that her visit could touch off WW3. It’s a measure of the strangeness of political “face” (we denigrate the Chinese preoccupation with “face,” as if our “credibility” did not amount to exactly the same thing) when the diplomatic visit of a lone government official can become the kind of spark that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand played in setting off WW1. But almost any inadvertency could start WW3, because deterrence, to “work” (until it doesn’t “work” that is) requires hair-trigger preparedness.
It’s an outrage, it’s evil, it’s incredibly stupid, and it ought to be illegal under international law. Oh, wait a minute, it is illegal under international law. See the Kellogg-Briand pact against war, in force since 1929; the treaty on Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (NPT), in force since 1971; and also the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in the process of being ratified by a majority of the world’s nations and having the force of international law applicable to all since 22 January 2021.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most influential, if not the most notorious, pro-Israel lobbying organization. So when it decided last year to start a super PAC and get directly involved in unlimited election giving—something it had not done before—the organization was clearly making a statement. This year it has spent tens of millions on TV ads, but what speaks the loudest is the one thing those ads never mention: Israel.
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Now that Israelis are embarking on their fifth election in less than four years, it is important to raise the question: “How do Palestine and the Palestinians factor in Israeli politics?”
Israeli politicians and media, even those who are decrying the failure of the ‘peace process’, agree that peace with the Palestinians is no longer a factor, and that Israeli politics almost entirely revolves around Israel’s own socio-economic, political and strategic priorities.
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With costs mounting, Putin has increasingly promoted the need to fortify the Russian economy’s immediate and long-term position. In April, the head of Russia’s Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, stated that the Russian economy would see a “structural transformation” during the second and third quarters this year to offset inflation, supply chain issues, and reduced imports.
To alleviate domestic concerns related to the cost of the war, the Kremlin increased the minimum wage and pension payments by 10 percent in May. The initiative also appeared to help muffle any domestic opposition on June 30, when two bills were submitted to the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, to give the Russian government greater control over the domestic economy.
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Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war.
The record is clear. Time and time again we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into the imperial wars of the UK and then the US. We have forfeited our strategic autonomy.
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For the outside world, the risk of an expanded war, one that could easily slip into a battle of nukes, must not be discounted. Putin has made clear that he is ready to use chemical weapons or tactical nukes if needed to avoid a battlefield defeat.
Thanks to the inspiring leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the incredible valor of Ukrainian forces and citizen soldiers and timely arms aid from the U.S. and its NATO allies, the Ukrainians were able to repel Russian troops from their February-March advance on Kyiv. President Biden led a concerted NATO effort to contain the Russians through weapons transfers and economic sanctions.
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Once again, they’re all just a bunch of lazy slack-jawed hicks who can’t be coaxed off their tractors to bother with the greatest threat to liberal democracy since Hitler wore lederhosen. Just like those lazy peasants who dare not vote, the rural lumpenproletariat are just genetically pre-dispositioned to be indifferent to what really matters in this world and trust me when I tell you that many of my neighbors are equally mystified and annoyed by these condescending coastal elites who keep trying to sell them tickets to Washington’s biggest monster truck rally since Watergate.
As a genderqueer anarchist who has spent the better part of her life being chased by irate farm folk with rusty pitchforks and the other part trying to convince these same people to turn their rage against Washington instead from the comfort of my flaming windmill, I feel that I am somewhat absurdly equipped to explain both of these crowds of assholes in this stand-off to each other, seeing as I’m pretty much equally despised by both of them.
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Environment
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The so-called “side deal” negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin and the Democratic leadership faced growing backlash from climate organizations on Thursday after a draft copy of the legislation confirmed that the proposal would help accelerate approval of fossil fuel projects, potentially including a fracked gas pipeline running through West Virginia.
“This should no longer be considered a ‘side deal,’ it is the main event for fossil fuel polluters.”
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Energy
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Environmentalists celebrated Thursday after a federal court rejected a pair of U.S. Bureau of Land Management coal mining plans that were drawn up during the Trump presidency and defended in legal proceedings by the Biden administration.
“This ruling is a shameful confirmation that the Biden administration has no real interest in defending public lands or the climate,” said Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians. “Thankfully the courts are upholding law and science, but it’s sad that President Biden is allowing his administration to undermine his promises to protect our health and our climate.”
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“Solar panels on every surface” seems like an easy fix as long as you don’t look too closely at the processes involved. Solar electric panels are great at generating electricity. That is not the issue though. What [many places] need is heat. And solar electric panels are just shy of useless in heat generation.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Crystal Conant was camped for the night on a bluff overlooking the upper Columbia River in northeast Washington, beading necklaces by the glow of a lantern.
The next morning, hundreds would gather at Kettle Falls for the annual salmon ceremony, held since time immemorial to celebrate the year’s first fish returning from the ocean. Conant and fellow organizers needed necklaces for everyone who would come. Honoring the gift of salmon, she said, requires giving gifts in turn.
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Even after teaching biology for nearly three decades, Heather Judkins still gets excited about conducting field research. An associate professor of Integrative Biology on the USF St. Petersburg campus, Judkins will continue her studies of cephalopods, such as octopus and squid, on July 26 as part of a team of scientists aboard the R/V Point Sur for a 12-day research cruise around the Gulf of Mexico.
The goal of the cruise is to identify and quantify long-term trends in fishes, crustaceans and cephalopods in the midwaters of the Gulf in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that occurred in 2010.
“We’re collecting specimens and looking at the biodiversity in that area and how it changes over time,” Judkins said. “We want to know what we could see in the future, in the unfortunate event of another oil spill.”
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Finance
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It is an unprecedented sum of money for the Colombian state, but the coalition that makes up the Pacto Histórico considers it a necessary measure to address both the fiscal deficit that ballooned under former President Iván Duque and to finance the proposed social programs designed to alleviate poverty and reduce economic inequality.
While the bill is yet to be finalized, a progressive wealth tax on the nation’s millionaires and billionaires will be a core feature.
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Tiny houses and electric cars have been co-opted by lifestyle salesmen, so save your money or put it toward causes that can help instead, like libraries, homeless shelters, and expanding mass transit
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This Christmas, give “smart home” gadgets as gift only to people you do NOT care about, and only if you really, really can’t find anything better (or as a way to get rid of smart gadgets that someone else dumped on you).
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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So everyone got riled up about identity politics, while the one identity never mentioned, and possibly the most important, though assiduously elided in the public sphere, is class identity. Both political parties ignored working people’s economic concerns, to the delight of their mega-corporate donors. The public’s desire for single-payer health care, increased minimum wage, affordable higher education, decent infrastructure, an end to foreign military adventures and other such social benefits couldn’t be ditched fast enough by Dems and a GOP both utterly beholden to Big Money.
The role of identity politics in any sane attempt to fight back against the power of obscene wealth is discussed in Elite Capture, a new book by Olufemi Taiwo. It asks at the outset, what is identity politics? It is, according to Dominic Gustavo at the World Socialist Web Site and quoted by Taiwo, “an essential tool utilized by the bourgeoisie to maintain its class domination over the working class by keeping workers divided along racial and gender lines.” Hard to argue with that. But then alternatively, Taiwo asks, is identity politics “as embodied in critical race theory, a dangerous ideology and threat to the established order that the powers that be aim to stamp out?”
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Evidence is mounting that white nationalist groups who want to establish an all-white state played a significant role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead and dozens wounded.
Thus far, the hearings “have documented how the Proud Boys helped lead the insurrectionist mob into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C,” journalist James Risen wrote in the Intercept.
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In mid- March 2020 when the big pro and college basketball and hockey leagues canceled their tournaments (essentially leaderless under Trump’s reality TV misgovernment), Americans generally started to physically or ‘socially’ distance, shelter, and restrict contacts for public health reasons.
State governments stepped into the leadership vacuum left by federal covid dereliction. The ‘reopen’ backlash that the governor’s opponent now says she will campaign on started immediately.
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Over the past few months, Republicans in statehouses across the country have been working diligently to curtail their constituents’ civil rights. After Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in March, public school teachers have been banned from discussing sexual orientation and gender in the classroom unless it is deemed “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” One school district reportedly warned teachers not to wear rainbow-colored clothing.
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An old fish swims by a young fish, and in passing, comments, “Good morning youngster. How’s the water today?”
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Law professor Lev Menand has a new book out on that strange institution, the Federal Reserve, what it does and how its power and responsibility have grown over time.
Menand is an associate professor at Columbia Law School specializing in finance and regulation. Before he joined the law school, he held various roles at the Treasury Department during the Obama administration and was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, helping to oversee large lenders.
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We speak with international affairs scholar Kim Lane Scheppele on the rise and fall of Hungary’s constitutional democracy and how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has gained popularity among the American right ahead of his speech today at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Orbán presents, especially for the American right, a kind of irresistible combination of culture war issues,” says Scheppele. “These culture war issues in Hungary disguise the fact that underneath the surface Orbán has been changing the laws of the country so that gradually he has shut down all of the independent institutions that might tell him no.” She says U.S. Republicans are now engaging in a very “Orbán-like” campaign to rig elections so they win regardless of the popular vote.
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Cuomo’s appearances – both of which were with close friends, Maher and Abrams – were clearly an attempt to rebrand himself from unethical propagandist to fearless journalist. Cuomo explained that he was an optimistic person who was not bitter about what had happened at CNN. Looking back on his departure from CNN he said “I feel like I lost a sense of purpose for a while because of how things ended.” Cuomo’s recollection concealed that he was clearly bitter, so much so that he threatened a lawsuit against CNN and demanded $125 million in restitution for the damages to his reputation.
Nonetheless, Cuomo claimed that he wanted to serve the American people with his podcast and broadcast program by breaking the hyper-partisan frame used in most reporting. This is rich coming from someone whose success is owed to a CNN program that preached to the Democratic Party choir by ritually lampooning Trump.
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Story by Andrey Pertsev. Translation by Sam Breazeale.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A while back, we noted that there was something of a Rorschach test in how you viewed basically everything about Nick Sandmann, the MAGA-hat wearing high school student who became front page news after a video of him standing in front of a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, went viral. Everyone had their own interpretations. Context was often lacking. People’s personal beliefs may have clouded their own interpretations — across the board. But, as we noted, people’s own interpretations of what they saw… just is not defamatory. But Nick Sandmann sued anyway. He sued a whole bunch of media companies. And his fans (generally those in the Trump world), insisted he was going to end up owning these companies.
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Real problems are what legislators are supposed to be solving. The Philippines has plenty of those, ranging from (government-endorsed) extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and drug users to abuses of state power to silence journalists to the actual murders of human rights activists.
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Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thing that copyright is good for. I mean, at this point, you are either not paying attention, or are just outright lying if you claim that copyright isn’t regularly used to silence people. I could go on linking to examples, but you get the point.
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At this point, every reader here should be aware that YouTube has a copyright/DMCA problem it has yet to solve. Going through the myriad of posts we’ve done about DMCA and ContentID takedowns on YouTube, the theme is abundantly clear: YouTube’s automated systems are wide open for mistakes, fraud, and abuse. If you don’t think that’s the case, you aren’t paying attention. This is especially illuminated when either very obviously non-infringing clips get taken down via DMCA notice, or when super famous clips that have been around forever are suddenly hit with a DMCA notice and get taken down.
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Since January, the Russian Attorney General’s Office has declared 12 organizations “undesirable,” on the grounds that they pose a threat to national security. The number of organizations that Russia deems “undesirable” grows with each passing year and at this rate 2022 is also poised to see a new record. Meduza sums up what you need to know about the organizations blacklisted so far this year.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Seated in a wheelchair in a small town outside Edmonton, Pope Francis explained the reasons for his visit before directly apologizing for the Church’s past sins: “I have come to your native lands to tell you in person of my sorrow, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, to express my closeness and to pray with you and for you. I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.” The words were deeply felt by many. Several Indigenous Canadians were shown wiping away tears while the Pontiff spoke.
In a similar moral situation, and after years of hesitancy by the institution, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) President, Cornelio Sommaruga, expressed moral failure for his humanitarian organization’s lack of action during World War II. At the annual ICRC press conference in 1995, referring to the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, he said: “But believe me, every moment spent today on our humanitarian responsibilities to assist the victims of war and political violence reminds me of our institution’s moral failure with regard to the Holocaust, since it did not succeed in moving beyond the limited legal framework established by the States. Today’s ICRC can only regret the possible omissions and errors of the past.” Sommaruga expressed similar regret when he took part in the 1995 ceremony to commemorate the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
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Believe it or not this move was consistent with the postmodern post-Marxist post-left turn by the very intellectuals people see as elite. When it comes to intellectuals I am hesitant to call them elite as most trendy intellectuals like to do. If as Adorno says the radical part of art is its uselessness the same is true for ideas. If one can create ideas rather than materials that seems to be a good thing in a world where materials are destroying our ability to subsist.
My turn against the so-called populist left has earned me a lot of righteous finger wagging from elitist anti-intellectuals but it is a popular idea amongst people. The crude attempt to reclaim class-first leftism from post-Marxist intellectuals has only furthered the alienation most people feel from the left.
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The question here is whether there is something unique about anti-abortionists as distinct from people espousing other reactionary causes, expressed in their preoccupation with the life of the unborn and their disconnect or indifference to the death of born children worldwide and to the death of pregnant mothers. This dichotomy about life and death in anti-abortionists’ behavior is extremely stark as there is so much publicized about the needless and preventable cruelty and killing of children in the world today. I would even argue that historically, the present so-called liberal democracies are unprecedented in sanctioning cruelty, killing, and psychological unawareness of children.
Sibling rivalry is expressed in everyday life, in the stories of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers, and in the clinical literature. Freud interpreted Goethe’s one single memory from his ‘earliest years of childhood’ as an expression of sibling rivalry: Goethe remembered that he was ‘overjoyed’ to hurl every little dish, cooking-pot and pan out the window and smash them to bits after the birth of a brother when he was not yet four. Freud had a patient who brought out the proximity in his life of the birth of a brother and the memory of flinging objects out the window, and other analysts relayed to Freud the same sequence, of their patients’ throwing things out the window right after the birth of a sibling. Freud commented that “the new baby must be got rid of – through the window, perhaps because he came in through the window.” In everyday life, it is not uncommon for parents to mitigate or try to eliminate any anger and resentment by the pretense of providing the older child with a gift supposedly from the newborn infant as if to say that the new baby is not taking anything away but giving a present. Parents’ own ambivalent sibling feelings are apparent when they do not see and do not protect the younger sibling from many expressions of hostility. This is painfully represented in contemporary novelist Sally Rooney’s Normal People depicting a brother’s murderous behavior towards his sister with the collusion of their mother.
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In an extremely rare move, a federal court has ordered a jail into receivership, placing it under the direct control of a court-appointed third party that will (hopefully) carry out the needed changes Hinds County, Mississippi either can’t or won’t do. (h/t Scott Greenfield)
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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INCOMPAS, the DC trade policy and lobbying group primarily steered by tech giants, is urging the FCC to finally boost the U.S.’ pathetic definition of broadband. The FCC’s current definition of broadband, 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, is looking a bit pathetic, particularly on the upstream side. And the lower standard helps the uncompetitive telecom sector obscure its failure to broadly deliver next-gen speeds.
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When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector.
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Monopolies
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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When I have good dreams I wake disappointed that they aren’t my reality.
When I have bad dreams I wake shaken from the night of torment.
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It was bound to happen sooner or later. But the timing really does suck.
I started hearing a clanging noise from my truck a couple of months ago, very intermittently. Something like the sound of an exhaust pipe just starting to drag on the ground. Sometimes followed by other noises, which sounded like bearing noise of some sort. I haven’t been able to track it down.
Money is, of course, a critical concern right now. In our post-Covid economy, our once just adequate incomes have turned into a slow backpedal and decline. So taking it somewhere to have an expert work on it was out of the question. It’s heart wrenching seeing everything that you’ve worked for slowly slip away.
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I was picking up on the idea of a sort of exchange taking place as I was considering what a “contributive economy” might be in light of Marcia B.’s criticism of the commercialisation of the role-playing games hobby…
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Technical
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I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop for the past 4 years. At first for window managers I had Unity, then Gnome 3. Later I became interested in a tiling window manager. I tried a few out but settled on i3 after some time figuring out how to configure it for Dvorak. Like someone’s Vim dotfiles, it’s easy to get stuck in a continuous never-complete reconfiguring of one’s setup. I added the ability to change volume, change brightness, jump to different workscreen setups, etc etc. But I always had little bugs that would creep in. Probably a result of my particular combo of fish shell, Dvorak, i3, and my audio setups.
About 6 months ago I stumbled across RegolithOS, which bills itself as Ubuntu with i3 preconfigured. Surely I didn’t need that, I thought. But oh, what the heck, it looks nice in screenshots. Should I try it?
It’s an easy install on top of Ubuntu. And I wanted to update my (for shame) old Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to something more recent, to 20 or 22. So I backed up my computer, then updated to 20, then to 22.04 and then Regolith’s add-ons. Oh, what the heck, if it brakes, it will brake fabulously I thought.
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So, I recently switched my home router to Linux but had a network issues for devices that would get/renew their IP with DHCP. They were obtaining an IP, but they couldn’t reach the router before a while (between 5 seconds to a few minutes), which was very annoying and unreliable.
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A while ago I wrote an OpenBSD guide to fairly share the Internet bandwidth to the LAN network, it was more or less working. Now I switched my router to Linux, I wanted to achieve the same. Unfortunately, it’s not really documented as well as on OpenBSD.
The command needed for this job is “tc”, acronym for Traffic Control, the Jack of all trades when it comes to manipulate your network traffic. It can add delays or packets lost (this is fun when you want to simulate poor conditions), but also traffic shaping and Quality of Service (QoS).
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Snow Crash – A book by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992.
In 2021, the book came back into vogue following Facebook’s announcement that they were changing their name to Meta and aiming to develop a metaverse. The concept of a metaverse first appears in /Snow Crash/.
After actually reading the book, I find the link between Facebook and Snow Crash even more ironic than most journalists point out. Usually, it’s the case that Zukerberg’s vision of a metaverse is contrasted strongly with Stephenson’s.
However, the most relevant part of the book with regard to Facebook, for me, is its theme of ‘viral language’.
The theme/theory is elaborated quite a bit in the book, so I won’t try to cover it too much (actually, much of the theory it is a tad facile. I have to say I enjoyed /Cryptonomicon/ a lot more than this book).
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Programming
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I’ve upgraded to gcc v12, which has the C++ standard in it, although it’s not fully compliant. Too bad it doesn’t have “format()”, for example. There’s some nice stuff in C++20, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of what it can do. It is clear that some people have a deep understanding of C++. Perhaps I’d consider myself a journeyman in C++. I no longer work in industry, but I guess I’m around average in terms of knowledge. I think most programmers are well below mastery level, mostly banging out code that works. And that suffices. Google and Facebook are not going to be knocking on my door any day, although curiously some time ago I did have someone *claiming* to be from Google say they were interested in interviewing me. I didn’t take them up on their offer. I’m not interested in joining the Cult Of Google, and I’m confident that they wouldn’t have me as a member, either. But I digress …
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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ILOAT Judgments Ignored by EPO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The absurdity of this situation is bare and completely naked for all to see, as once again the EPO refuses to obey very explicit, unequivocal court orders, which are nearly a decade overdue. Today’s EPO seems to have been taken over by crime lords, or an embodiment of nepotism brought to us by the Frenchman Campinos and his enablers from Alicante.
THE EPO‘s dictator António Campinos (his father would hate him with a passion if he was still alive) is once again proving to be no better — perhaps even worse — than Benoît Battistelli.
How predictable this was!
“So the EPO’s management, which shamelessly violates the privacy of workers and applicants, now uses “privacy” as an excuse to not obey to law and to impede freedom of expression!”Last month we repeatedly said that complying with Judgment No. 4551 (ILOAT) should take no longer than a few minutes! Almost a month has passed and guess what… no action taken!
What is Campinos waiting for? Well, he wants to go on holiday and merely “discuss” the matter after frying himself in the Mediterranean for a few weeks (no, not Portugal; he might as well vacation in his true homeland, France).
The EPO has said nothing about ILO or ILOAT rulings against the EPO. Not a word. No statement at all in over a week already, just this site update (warning: epo.org link) which states: “Central Fee Payment will be fully deployed and Online Fee Payment decommissioned on 10 September 2022.”
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) has meanwhile revealed a very belated message (it took him over a fortnight to respond!) from “the f***ing president” (this is how Campinos refers to himself in official meetings). To quote the ridiculous excuses (using “privacy”, which Campinos grossly violates, as a straw man):
European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Chair of the Central Staff Committee
Via mail only to: centralstcom@epo.org
[...]
president@epo.org
Date: 22.07.2022
Implementation of J. No. 4551
Dear Mr Chair,
Reference is made to your letter of 7 July concerning Judgment No. 4551 delivered by the Tribunal in its 134th session concerning the use of mass e-mails within the Office as it resulted from the Communiqué of 31 May 2013.
As expressed in my letter of 22 April 2020 and in discussions in different fora, in particular the WG on Resources & Communication, the Office has meanwhile strived to facilitate open communication, including through mass e-mails, between staff and their representatives. To this end, in addition to the pilot allowing invitations to general assemblies, a number of mass e-mails has also been allowed for specific purposes and an expanded right to mass e-mails was contemplated in the draft agreement on means of communication shared with you.
The aforementioned Judgment No. 4551 now broadens the possibility to send mass e-mails. While the Office is committed to implementing the Tribunal’s orders in full, it also needs to ensure compliance with the new Data Protection Rules in force since 1 January 2022.
At the moment, the Office is clarifying technical aspects with BIT and discussing data protection related aspects with the Data Protection Office and the Data Protection Board. These notably include the need for a further data protection statement and the possibility for staff to unsubscribe from the mailing list as well as the setting up of an ethics board comprising members appointed by the staff representation and the Office.
We will keep you updated on the developments and set up a meeting after the upcoming summer break.
Yours sincerely,
António Campinos
cc:
LSC Berlin (via mail only to: lscbe@epo.org)
LSC Munich (via mail only to: msc@epo.org)
LSC The Hague (via mail only to: dhstcom@epo.org)
LSC Vienna (via mail only to: pvwien@epo.org)
So the EPO’s management, which shamelessly violates the privacy of workers and applicants, now uses “privacy” as an excuse to not obey to law and to impede freedom of expression! incredible! Welcome to Lukashenko's second home…
In an open letter the CSC responded firmly (within limits given the authoritarian nature of Team Campinos). “ILOAT Judgment 4551 on mass emails – We demand its immediate execution,” said the title, informing colleagues that “[i]n Judgment No. 4551 the Tribunal has, as of 6 July 2022, set aside in part the Communiqué of 31 May 2013 and reinstated the former rules on mass emails as published in Communiqué No. 10 and in the announcement of 28 December 2011. Therefore, the limitation to 50 addressees has been set aside and Staff Committee members have the possibility of addressing all staff in the context of their statutory and official activities. In a reply letter of 22 July 2022, the President of the Office states that time is needed to clarify technical aspects and proposes that a meeting be scheduled after the summer break. As explained in this open letter, we see no legal or technical requirements preventing the immediate execution of the judgment. Therefore, we demand its immediate execution.”
Here’s the response dated a week ago and discussed a little further in the video above:
European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Mr António Campinos
President of the EPO
By email
OPEN LETTER
[...]
centralSTCOM@epo.org
Reference: sc22109cl
Date: 28/07/2022
Execution of ILOAT Judgment No. 4551 (mass emails)
Dear Mr President,
In Judgment No. 4551 the Tribunal has, as of 6 July 2022, set aside in part the Communiqué of 31 May 2013 and reinstated the former rules on mass emails as published in Communiqué No. 10 and in the announcement of 28 December 2011. Therefore, the limitation to 50 addressees has been set aside and CSC members have the possibility of addressing staff Office-wide in the context of their statutory and official activities. Similarly, LSC members have the possibility of addressing staff in their respective site by mass emails.
We note that Staff Committees and their members still cannot technically send an email to more than 50 addresses and are not authorised to use the mailing lists DDL-ALL-STAFF(-XX) which already exist. Granting authorisation is technically a matter of seconds for BIT. It is also a necessity for any Staff Committee (member) “for the execution of [their] official business”, as recited in Article 2 of Communiqué No. 10.
In your letter of 22 July 2022, you state that the Office is clarifying technical aspects which notably include “the possibility for staff to unsubscribe from the mailing list” and “the need for a further data protection statement”.
Firstly, in considerations 10 and 11, the Tribunal held that emails fulfilling the criteria of Communiqué No. 10 and the announcement of 28 December 2011 “shall be considered lawful” and ensure a reasonable balance between the interests of the organisation and the fundamental rights to free communication, information, and speech. Therefore, executing the judgment “as ruled” means restoring the status quo ante prior to 31 May 2013, at which time there was no need for a Staff Committee to ensure that staff can unsubscribe from the official mailing list. In consideration 10, the Tribunal further recalled that freedom of communication implies the right to freely choose the means by which the communications are sent. Imposing additional constraints (such as a possibility to unsubscribe) upon Staff Committees and their members would go against the ruling of the Tribunal, in particular the necessity for a body representing the staff to be able to circulate emails to all staff members, as recalled in consideration 12.
Secondly, the judgment restored access to the EPO’s electronic (email) communications systems, whereby a Staff Committee does not need (or intend) to collect, store or process any personal data. Therefore, we do not see the need for any data protection statement.
Finally, in consideration 11, the Tribunal considered that the mass emails sent by the staff representation and provided by the parties in the present case “did not exceed the limits to freedom of opinion and speech, and therefore did not justify a mechanism of a prior authorisation”. In this respect, there is no justification derivable from Judgment 4551 for the setting up of an Ethics Board prior to the execution of the judgment.
In your letter you explain that time is needed and that a meeting will be scheduled after the upcoming summer break. As explained above, we see no legal or technical requirements preventing the immediate execution of the judgment.
Consequently, we demand the immediate execution of the judgment.
Yours sincerely,
Alain Dumont
Chairman of the Central Staff Committee
It has been rather telling. This past month Campinos carried with on the tradition of obstructing justice and finding excuse to not obey ruling, or barely obeying them (usually optics and PR, not real actions). Later they wonder why people no longer want to work for the EPO… █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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EPO HR Failed and Recruitment is Defunct
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Summary: The tyrants who have taken the reins at the EPO want obedient robots, not human beings who are inclined to obey the law. Therefore, there seems to be an effort underway to drive out well-educated, highly-qualified, conscientious, experienced and charismatic workers who can stand in the way of profoundly unlawful strategies.
IT is undeniable that the EPO has a retention and recruitment crisis. People don't wish to work for tyrants and they can properly research matters online, only to realise that Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have turned a once-reputable institution into a tyranny, compelling examiners to grant illegal patents, such as European software patents.
Over the years we’ve amassed evidence of the brain drain, the EPO’s low-ranked status as an employer, and bad reviews in Glassdoor (see screenshot on the right).
Today’s EPO has resorted to very obscenely low qualification levels, even for key positions such as “patent examiner”. The standards have fallen so sharply that the place isn’t recognisable anymore. The above video speaks of a new publication regarding Job Groups 5 and 6 and here’s the content of the message. “The team manager appointed in April retired in July and no replacement is foreseen,” it says.
Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité Central du Personnel
Munich,28/07/2022
sc22108cp
Paratechnicals: Highly skilled colleagues without a future?
When the “Paratechnicals and Paralegals” pilot project was launched in 2012, it was seen as the future of formalities work: “This project is all about offering a new and attractive professional home in which staff can reach their full potential.”1 Unfortunately, management changed its vision over the years, and with it the investment in the paratechnicals, who now find themselves in the position of “laissés pour compte”.
Dear Colleagues,
Your Staff representation continues its tour to the teams in Job group 5 and 6 and recently met with the team of paratechnicals. The dispirited colleagues shared many issues with us. We foremost noted they feel left behind.
1. Restructuration
In 2017, the team of paratechnicals (PTs) was shrunk and split into 8 teams. 6 in the different OCFD Directorates and 2 in the Classification and Documentation Department. This resulted in abruptly disrupting the cooperation between colleagues in the OCFDs. The latest reorganisation in April 2022 saw the PT being merged again into 3 teams in the Classification and File Management Directorate.
This directorate has become very large, yet the feeling of togetherness is gone and replaced by a growing uncertainty about the future. Some colleagues from Classification and File Management do not feel they should belong to the PT team as the nature of their work is different.
The team manager appointed in April retired in July and no replacement is foreseen. This reinforces the feeling that no one cares about the situation in the team. The absence of a TM also makes the rewarding exercise even more unpredictable.
Each time teams are split and later merged again, work is negatively affected, and staff suffer. It particularly harms cooperation and long-established workflow. Stability and predictability play an important role in wellbeing at work. We observe that the current management model instead produces uncertainty and disengagement.
_____
1 See Gazette November 2012, pages.12 and 13: “A new way of working designed for the future”.
2. Massive backlog and understaffing
PTs report that the backlog is considerable and automatic pre-classification fails more often than not. They would either need more staff or less manual re-distribution. Understaffing is the word that keeps popping up throughout the workday.
Management has not yet offered a solution to the persistently high workload. “Fire brigading” across technical fields cannot be done ad hoc as each field has its specificities.
Understaffing naturally poses a problem of flexibility too, it renders holiday coverage problematic, and leave requests have to be adjusted accordingly. Our colleagues like their jobs, they care about delivering the best possible quality, they wish the Office would give them the working conditions to achieve this goal.
We cannot help but notice that management is unaware of the depth of the colleagues’ knowledge, and the time they have invested in learning. We are very concerned that the understaffing observed with PTs and generally in all JG 5&6 teams will lead to burn-outs and early retirement.
3. No future?
The expectations that management places in artificial intelligence (AI) have not yet materialized but succession planning is not on the agenda.
The colleagues foresee that in 5 to 10 years PT work will be automated and they fear that in the meantime their wellbeing and job satisfaction will continue to deteriorate.
The whole situation leaves them to believe there is no future for them.
4. Inefficient IT tool
Ansera is supposed to become the IT tool for PTs in the future but it does not meet the requirements of the work. Work efficiency is foreseen to be massively disrupted by the use of Ansera.
PT colleagues would like to be involved in the development of their tools and have their feedback taken into account when implementing new functionalities or making corrections. They regret a stop in investment while intellectual (manual) classification still remains the norm.
As can be seen in all areas at the EPO but especially for PTs, management’s expectations about AI influence staffing levels. Although AI has long been announced but has not yet materialized, the number of staff members is already shrinking continuously. The remaining colleagues are faced with an ever-growing workload.
5. Job Group mismatch
The work requires in-depth knowledge of technical fields and is therefore very specialised. It also partly involves performing work for the divisions which should qualify the PTs as experts.
While procedure experts are in JG 5 grade, PTs are still graded JG 6.
We will convey to management all the issues identified, among which understaffing certainly is the most burning one.
6. In conclusion,
After an already too long period of neglect, the Office urgently needs to take action to improve the working conditions of our PT colleagues.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank our PT colleagues for a very informative meeting and for the trust they placed in us.
The Central Staff Committee
Job Groups 5 & 6 seem to be facing the fate of some mangers who opposed Battistelli or former colleagues of the fraudster Željko Topić. They’re being reassigned tasks or given unrealistic work expectations which render them obsolete or simply scuttle the whole team. The Central Staff Committee is informing other colleagues that this is happening. After Job Groups 5 & 6 it can be many of the examiners, who are not so easy to manipulate. The tyrants want obedient robots, not human beings who are inclined to obey the law. █
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Posted in Site News at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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More Migrations and Upgrades
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: We’re moving to lighter and simpler systems that are easier to maintain (Alpine, Gemini, static pages); we’ve meanwhile faced a major obstacle due to the whole neighbourhood here losing power
THE past week has been tough due to a couple of incidents, which are likely related to one another, as explained in the video above. The lesson of the story is, do not use (micro)SD cards for storage of servers, especially not for something like a full base system (like a whole operating system).
“Moving from database-driven page delivery to static site generators seems to be all the rage these days and we’re crafting our own.”For the Gemini capsule of this site, we’re starting the system afresh on new storage for the third time in less than 2 years! We rebuild everything for the second time this year and it’s only August.
The other part of the video shows that the new CMS is coming along nicely. It’s already used on a test site of Tux Machines and after further maturity (it’s considered alpha quality for now) we’ll deploy the same sort of thing or something very similar in Techrights. Moving from database-driven page delivery to static site generators seems to be all the rage these days and we’re crafting our own. Our webhost has just moved from WordPress to Hugo (hours ago). █
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