06.10.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Perhaps what Battistelli is up to was all along the plan of some ‘higher’ agenda?
Summary: Remarks on conspicuous inaction from the Commission in the face is very serious abuses at the EPO’s management
THE EPO continues to come under fire from European politicians, who are powerless when it comes to taking action against EPO managerial thugs, due to the misguided way the EPO had been set up (like a state within a state).
SUEPO now highlights the questions from Agnes Jongerius (covered here days ago) and translations are available in French and in German from SUEPO’s Web site.
Interestingly enough, SUEPO found another question from Marc Tarabella (same party as Jongerius), whom we mentioned here last year. It turns out that months later he asked this:
Parliamentary questions
2 February 2016
E-000938-16
Question for written answer
to the Commission
Rule 130
Marc Tarabella (S&D)
Subject: EU representation in the European Patent Office
Written Questions E-009256/2015 and E-010497/2015 drew the Commission’s attention to the appalling situation at the European Patent Office (EPO).
Following the implementation of the 2010 plan to increase productivity, a ban on trade union activity, repeated privacy violations, harassment and unachievable productivity targets which make a mockery of European workers’ rights have put the EPO’s 7 000 staff in a very difficult position. Since 2012, four of them have committed suicide.
The Commission has a representative with observer status on the EPO’s Administrative Council who rarely intervenes, despite the governance problems.
What is the exact role of the Commission representative?
Does he/she report back to the Commission on the management problems?
This is an interesting point because the EPO has just published this piece of nonsense (warning: epo.org
link) which says “Benoît Battistelli greets Carlos Moedas” (there is also a photograph). That’s basically Benoît Battistelli lobbying Carlos Moedas (European Commission), as we noted yesterday. It seems to have worked. As we noted here in previous years, the Commission was unwilling to step in despite requests, so what does it make the Commission if not complicit in all these human rights abuses? Not only the Administrative Council should be contacted perhaps… █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cannot say the truth even outside the EPO (Office) without severe consequences
![Room 101](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/room-101.png)
Reference: Ministries of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Summary: More information about the hearing that is just 4 days away and deals with people who allegedly blew the whistle and tried to expose seriously abusive actions taken by Battistelli and his team
AS last noted yesterday, in a few days there may be a major event which relates to a defamed and suspended judge. As secrecy cannot be assured this time around, there is opportunity for judicial oversight, but EPO management “was again creative in finding way to circumvent the effective presence of the public,” according to this new comment which suggests that Team Battistelli chose a very small room:
Indeed, the public announcement of the oral proceedings in Art. 23 1/16 at the entrance of the Isar building indicates the hearing is public.
It is also known room 131 is a very small one! If the EBA as it seems in fact decided to held a public hearing, the administration was again creative in finding way to circumvent the effective presence of the public…
Somebody responded as follows:
Ah yes, the famous “Hitchhiker’s Guide” approach to public proceedings:
M. BATTISTELLI: But, Mr Dent, the notice of the hearing has been available in the EPO for the last week!
ARTHUR DENT (PATENT ATTORNEY): Yes! I went round to find it yesterday afternoon. You’d hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to pull much attention to them have you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.
M. BATTISTELLI: The announcement was on display.
ARTHUR DENT: Ah! And how many members of the public are in the habit of casually dropping around the EPO of an evening?
M. BATTISTELLI: Er – ah!
ARTHUR DENT: It’s not exactly a noted social venue is it? And even if you had popped in on the off chance that some raving bureaucrat wanted to fire a member of the Board of Appeal, the announcement wasn’t immediately obvious to the eye, was it?
M. BATTISTELLI: That depends where you were looking.
ARTHUR DENT: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!
M. BATTISTELLI: That’s the public area of the Office.
ARTHUR DENT: With a torch!
M. BATTISTELLI: The lights, had… probably gone.
ARTHUR DENT: So had the stairs!
M. BATTISTELLI: Well you found the notice didn’t you?
ARTHUR DENT: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.
Maybe someone should bring a recording device to the meeting on Tuesday and help ensure there’s a proper record of everything that goes on there. Transparency begets oversight and accountability.
The retaliation or demolition of the boards was mentioned here before. According to Alexander Esslinger, it may proceed to the next stage as early as 3 weeks for now. To quote Esslinger: “The EPO published a new notice concerning the opposition procedure coming into effect on July 1, 2016. The aim is to reduce the average duration of opposition procedures before the EPO to 18 months.”
Battistelli does not seem to want oppositions. These probably seem to him like an ‘obstacle’ on the path to ‘production’, even if it’s essential for maintenance of patent quality. Battistelli is selfishly nuts. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I will wrap this up with just a few words about Linux Mint 18, since I used it to write this. The Release Candidate is on the mirrors now but I haven’t seen an announcement of it yet. I assume that the RC announcement will come along very soon. I have installed it so far on a couple of my systems with absolutely no problem – as evidenced by the screen shots and descriptions above. My first impression is that it is just what we have come to expect from Linux Mint, a solid distribution which looks good and works well. Cinnamon 3.0 seems very nice, although I haven’t had a chance to really look at the new features yet.
Based on past releases, having the Release Candidate out now means that the final release will probably be made before the end of the month.
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Desktop
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For years I’ve been toying with the idea of tinkering with Linux and seeing what this whole open source thing is all about. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been mostly a Windows (and sometimes an OS X) user for most of my adult life (and a Commodore 64 and Apple IIe user when I was much less of an adult). In truth though, I’ve always had a healthy respect for those who dabble in the arcane arts of open source. The DIY aesthetic reminds me of the kids in high school shop class who would make their own guitars, and the punk bands I knew who would record demo tapes in their garages and tour the country in rusty, decades-old vans. The community exudes a spirit of exploration and an overall attitude of “permission be damned” that, as an outsider, I admire.
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Maru OS is a platform that lets you run both Google Android and Debian Linux on a smartphone. Use your device as a phone, and it’ll act like any other Android phone. Connect an external display, mouse, and keyboard and you’ve got a full-fledged Debian Linux desktop environment.
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Flatpak delivers Linux desktop apps across distributions with a single download, but it also relies on Red Hat’s controversial systemd
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I asked her whether she had accidentally clicked “OK” on any upgrade notifications, ignored any warnings that she had received or gotten any other notices about the upgrade. No on all counts, she answered before leaving to wrestle with her new operating system.
I admit to having been skeptical. Would Microsoft really take over someone’s computer without warning and install a significant chunk of software without explicit permission? That’s what malware does, I thought, not software from one of the biggest tech firms on the planet with the largest operating system installed base on desktop and laptops PCs.
Turns out, she was right. And I wasn’t the only tech writer whose spouse had this experience: The same thing happened to the wife of PC World’s Brad Chacos.
All this made me wonder: If software from any other company behaved the way the Windows 10 upgrade does, would it be considered malware?
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Microsoft said it is not tricking users on Windows 7 and 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10, as was recently reported.
Recent changes in the way the Windows 10 upgrade is delivered to customers is an effort to ensure that everyone who wants their free upgrade to Windows 10 receives it, said Microsoft.
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Server
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All too often we hear about breaches in security where usernames and passwords were obtained and published online. Most of the time, what’s revealed is that most passwords are very simple or iterative of a previous version (e.g., 12345 followed by 123456 on the next change). Implementing password requirements can help keep weak passwords out of your environment. These forced changes have their pros and cons, but when it comes down to it there are still flaws in authentication.
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An iTWire article appears to have resulted in Linux Australia seeing the folly of not having proper arrangements in place for hosting its website.
Further, a member of Linux Australia has suggested the office-bearers should resign en masse for not anticipating a breakdown in hosting the organisation’s website recently.
Linux Australia secretary, Sae Ra Germaine, posted to the Linux-aus mailing list in April to explain why the organisation experienced server downtime, ultimately because the team charged with managing this task, while recognising a risk of disruption, did not engage with the University hosting the server instead choosing only to liaise with ex-employees, and discontinued searching for a new host between December 2015 and March 2016.
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Docker, with its containerized technology, is leaping into the enterprise with its Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) partnership.
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Kernel Space
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Complementing the significant amount of Intel DRM driver code already vetted and queued up for the Linux 4.8 cycle via DRM-Next, more code was pulled in last night for the various Direct Rendering Manager drivers in preparation for this next kernel cycle later in the summer.
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Yesterday, we reported on the release of Linux kernel 4.6.2, Linux kernel 4.5.7, Linux kernel 4.4.13 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.14.72 LTS, and it now looks like Linux kernel 4.1.26 LTS has been released into the wild as well.
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LTFS – the Linear Tape File System – seemed like a great idea when it emerged but not many storage vendors seem to have made much of it. It puts a file system on top of a tape library and turns it into something like a tape-NAS, making it suitable for archive use cases.
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Graphics Stack
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The cross-platform GLFW library that provides an API similar to SDL for abstracting out differences in window creation, contexts, inputs/events, and more, is now up to version 3.2.
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Benchmarks
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Last week when posting my initial NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review the Radeon Linux performance numbers I included were from the latest open-source driver stack, since that’s what most Phoronix readers seem interested in as of late given the rapid progress recently of OpenGL 4.x support inside Mesa, the hybrid driver stack also using the AMDGPU kernel driver, etc. But some people expressed curiosity over the AMDGPU-PRO performance relative to NVIDIA particularly with their new GTX 1080 graphics processor. So here is a fresh NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO graphics card comparison on Linux.
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Applications
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Git, the open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system, has been updated to version 2.8.4, a maintenance release that adds assorted bugfixes and new features to the current stable 2.8 branch of the software.
Git 2.8.4 is the fourth point release in the Git 2.8 stable series, released three weeks after the third maintenance build. Git 2.8 is a major update that everyone should use, as it brought many exciting new features, such as parallel fetch of submodules, the ability to tell Git not to guess your identity, as well as support for turning off Git’s smudge and clean filters.
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A couple of days ago, we were in for a great surprise: we saw the release of Atom 1.8, a new milestone of GitHub’s open-source, cross-platform and powerful hackable text editor, bringing various new features and many bug fixes.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s looking quite possible like Hitman 2016 will be released for Linux.
Linux gamers appear very excited this morning after Linux references for the game appeared on SteamDB. SteamDB Linux references generally have panned out more often than not but there isn’t any official announcement yet of Hitman 2016 coming to Linux.
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This is one series I had hoped we would get and it looks like we will be. HITMAN (the new 2016 version) looks like it’s coming to SteamOS & Linux.
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I really do love open source game engines. Keeping older titles alive on new platforms and bringing bug fixes with them. This time Dungeon Keeper II gets the treatment.
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Yooka-Laylee, from the “key creative talent” behind Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country has a new trailer. The release has also been delayed until 2017.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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A new stable version of the Enlightenment 0.20 lightweight and eye-candy desktop environment/window manager has arrived, version 0.20.9, which might just be one of the last maintenance versions in the series.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Ex-Kubuntu leader Jonathan Riddell announced the general availability of the KDE Neon User Edition 5.6 operating system, based on the latest KDE technologies.
Finally! There’s now a user edition of the KDE Neon project, an open source initiative that promises to bring the latest KDE software to PCs, always. KDE Neon is known for being both a layer on top of any Ubuntu or Kubuntu-based operating system, as well as an operating system distributed via installable ISO images.
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The first User Edition release is out for KDE Neon, which allows you to easily experience the latest Plasma stable experience and other updated KDE components.
KDE Neon continues to be based off of Ubuntu but with packaging the very latest KDE components. KDE Neon Developer Edition packages up all of the latest KDE Git code while this KDE Neon User Edition 5.6 release is riding on the Plasma 5.6 stable series.
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New Releases
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Solus 1.2 is coming very soon, believe it, and we had the pleasure of chatting with Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty during the last few days about various Solus-related things, including what’s coming in the major release.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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What are containers and microservices? What are they not? These are questions that Lars Herrmann, general manager of Integrated Solutions Business Unit at Red Hat, answered recently for The VAR Guy in comments about popular container misconceptions and myths.
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I’d read The Open Organization (and many other articles along the way) as I tried to navigate the path forward, discover my authentic leadership and management style within this (still very foreign) context, and lead change in a non-threatening manner. I’d adopted and promoted “All Hill” language and events to help break down siloes. We’d engaged in an All Hill “strategic visioning” process that was faculty/staff-centric, rather than being led by the board, and that resulted in some new relationships, dialogue, and common language. We had hired, retired, or exited many faculty and staff, resulting in an organization that was suddenly fairly evenly split—almost exactly one third newer personnel, one third in the three-to-ten-year range, and one third employees who had been at the school more than a decade (half for more than 20 years). And we were still very, very far from being an “open organization.”
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Finance
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Fedora
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The decision of the Fedora 24 Final Go/No-Go Meeting is NO-GO.
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Today was a Go/No-Go meeting and the Fedora stakeholders have determined the final release must slip by another week.
Due to outstanding F24 blocker bugs, it’s been determined to delay the official Fedora 24 release by another week in hopes of being able to clear out the blockers. The next Go/No-Go meeting will happen on 16 January to see if Fedora 24 can then ship.
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Well, believe it or not, the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system has been delayed once more, this time due to a bug in the GRUB2 bootloader, where the OS wasn’t capable of booting on a Dell Precision M6800 machine with Windows 10.
The decision to delay the June 14 release of Fedora 24 was taken today, June 9, during the usual Fedora 24 Final Go/No-Go meeting. This is the fourth delay for the Fedora 24 Linux operating system, and it now looks like the final launch should happen on June 21, 2016.
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Debian Family
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We reported last week on the general availability of new install mediums for the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” operating system, as well as the release of the last update for Debian GNU/Linux 7 “Wheezy.”
It took a week, but the Debian Project team manage to publish, just a few moments ago, the Live DVD editions of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” distribution, which are specially designed Live flavors built around various popular desktop environments. These can be used to showcase the latest Debian release to your friends or customers.
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Derivatives
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Tails is a Linux distribution most famously used by Edward Snowden. Boot Tails from a live DVD, USB drive, or SD card and it will turn any PC into a more private and anonymous system. Tails forces all network activity to go through the Tor network, preserving anonymity and bypassing Internet censorship. Shut down your computer and the memory will be wiped, with no trace of the Tails activity left on the system.
This important Linux distribution has been advancing steadily with release after release since I last covered it with the release of Tails 1.4. The project just released Tails 2.4 on June 7, 2016.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Online Summit which went underway during the first week of May saw a lot of discussions and planning for Ubuntu 16.10. The three-day long event showed us some glimpses on what to expect from “Yakkety Yak“.
So to all those who missed out the event or eager to know more about the Ubuntu 16.10, here’s some sneak peek on the major expectations that is bound to come bundles with Ubuntu 16.10.
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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is shipping right now with the Linux 4.4 kernel while for the Ubuntu 16.10 release in October they are expected to jump ahead to Linux 4.8.
With being an LTS+1 release, they are more liberal in their packages for this release that’s codenamed Yakkety Yak. Linux 4.7 should land in July and Linux 4.8 should be officially released around the end of September, if all goes well and the release candidates don’t drag on for Linux 4.7 or 4.8.
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Upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) will be driven by Linux Kernel 4.8
The Canonical headquarters of Ubuntu is finally gaining movement on the development of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.
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The design team as Canonical has responded to concerns raised in the community about the design of the Ubuntu Web Browser icon.
But if you were hoping for a resolution, you’ll be left wanting.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre today announced the availability of Linux Mint 18 Beta in the Cinnamon and MATE flavors. Jan Kurik announced another delay in Fedora 24 development due to a bug that keeps Windows from booting after GRUB installation. Elsewhere, Jonathan Riddell announced the release of KDE neon for users and, apparently, there’s been another Ubuntu “brouhaha” to report. Microsoft’s Anthony Doherty was quoted as saying they’re not tricking anyone into upgrading to Windows 10 while Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols today said that Microsoft is going “all open source, all the time.”
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With all of the negative press surrounding Windows 10, many folks in my private life are asking me about alternatives. Believe it or not, Linux is often the answer. The first thing I ask them is, for what do you use your computer? Almost everyone tells me things like Facebook, email, and word processing. Well, a combination of Google Chrome and LibreOffice on top of an easy-to-use distro meets those needs perfectly.
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Last week, Clem Lefebvre took to the Linux Mint blog to announce that the beta releases of the upcoming Linux Mint 18 release were “just around the corner.” Just under a week after that announcement, Lefebvre has made good on his promise, publishing download links to the Mint 18 beta.
The Cinnamon release comes in at 1.6 GB while the MATE release is an even larger 1.7 GB, which is strange considering MATE is supposed to be the more conservative, lighter-weight version of the two. In the Cinnamon edition, the desktop has been upgraded to version 3.0; you can see an overview of its features in the Linux Scoop video below. Meanwhile, MATE was bumped to version 1.14.
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May 2016 Donation Totals [Susan Linton: Bodhi Linux Gets $1111 Donation, Largest Ever]
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One of the main themes of this year’s Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit was the challenge of bridging the growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) standards. Many speakers were hopeful about the potential for achieving functional interoperability, if not a unifying standard, and there were even calls for a possible merger between two of the largest open source efforts: AllSeen and IoTivity.
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Gumstix and Arrow launched a customizable DragonBoard 410C expansion board for UAV and MAV applications, that adds NimbeLink LTE and camera support.
Gumstix and Arrow Electronics announced the availability of a $149 variant of its AeroCore 2 board called the “AeroCore 2 Expansion Board for DragonBoard 410C.” This more advanced version of the existing Gumstix AeroCore 2 baseboard for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) uses Arrow’s DragonBoard 410C SBC for its controller brain, rather than usual Gumstix DuoVero COM. The combo not only offers a far more powerful Linux and Android compatible computer, but also a new MIPI-CSI-2 camera connector along with a connector for a NimbeLink LTE radio.
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A company that designs MIPS processors for networking hardware says it is developing technology that would allow installation of open source firmware on wireless routers while still complying with the US Federal Communications Commission’s latest anti-interference rules.
The FCC now requires router makers to prevent third-party firmware from changing radio frequency parameters in ways that could cause interference with other devices, such as FAA Doppler weather radar systems.
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It might bear a passing resemblance to ET, but Mycroft’s smart home system is more than a pretty face: it’s an attempt to define what it means to be human through technology.
The first seeds of the open source home hardware AI platform that was to become Mycroft came to Joshua Montgomery during a refit of a Kansas maker-and-enterpreneurship space he was setting up. Montgomery wanted the building to have the same abilities as the systems seen on classic sci-fi films and series.
“It was inspired by the Star Trek computers, by Jarvis in Iron Man,” Montgomery told ZDNet. He wanted to create the type of artificial intelligence platform that “if you spoke to it when you walked in the room, it could control the music, control the lights, the doors” and more.
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Designed for a small footprint, the L4Re hypervisor, which is maintained by Kernkonzept, can run on the hardware virtualization technology in MIPS CPUs. The aim of this is to provide more efficient context switching and to make better use of CPU cycles.
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Phones
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Tizen
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We have recently covered many news stories relating to the Gear Fit 2, but there was also the announcement of another Tizen based fitness wearable that we kinda overlooked, the Gear Icon X. At the time of the release it was not confirmed as a Tizen wearable device, which later our sources close to the situation confirmed, “Houston we have another Tizen device”.
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Android
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There is little left to the imagination when it comes to the OnePlus 3. The smartphone has been subjected to numerous leaks ahead of its June 14 unveil, and now, we get treated with camera samples, and some leaked pricing details.
After releasing camera samples a few days ago, OnePlus has released more images to show what the OnePlus 3 camera can do. The four images are stunning; capturing movement, depth of field, and colours adeptly.
[...]
The company in the meanwhile has also released the kernel and device tree of OxygenOS to the community for further development.
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Yesterday, we pushed out an article where we claimed that OnePlus had open sourced OxygenOS. The basis of our claim was the recent activity on OnePlus’s github. Based on the information that we had on hand at that exact moment, and a precursory look at the code that indicated a lot of code pulled over from CAF, we wrongly concluded that OnePlus had open sourced part of OxygenOS.
What happened in fact was that OnePlus released the device tree and some HALs for the OnePlus 2. This is still big news by itself, as it will be of great use for 3rd party development efforts on the OnePlus 2. However, it is not in any way related to OnePlus open sourcing their OS.
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The $60 Arduino-compatible “Mayfly Data Logger” board has 128KB flash, offers Grove module and XBee wireless expansion, and targets environmental apps.
EnviroDIY.org, an open source spinoff of the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania, announced the EnviroDIY Mayfly Logger in December, and began selling it on Amazon in mid-May, as reported in this Adafruit blog entry from May 31. Although primarily designed for environmental monitoring — especially for the “citizen science” community water quality monitoring projects encouraged by Stroud and EnviroDIY — the Mayfly Data Logger can be used for any sensor-driven data logging, especially when remote operation is necessary.
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Events/Courses
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A fascinating interview conducted by Jenn Webb at this year’s OSCON with Karen Sandler, open source evangelist and executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, was uploaded to YouTube this week. These thoughts of hers really hit home — “We’re only as safe as our weakest leak…. With the Internet of Things, all the software that seems not-so-critical is becoming critical — because everything talks to each other and interacts with each other. And so free and open source software has never been so important.”
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During the Cloud Foundry Summit last month, applications performance management services provider Dynatrace announced a partnership with Pivotal, Cloud Foundry’s steward. The object? Open the floodgates for performance metrics from the PaaS platform.
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Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ!
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The Linux Foundation, the body promoting the open source software ecosystem, has introduced a new online training course for engineers who want to move into networking, with the skills necessary to manage a software-defined network (SDN) deployment.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Open source software is used by millions of businesses and thousands of educational and government institutions for critical applications and services. From Google and Microsoft to the United Nations, open source code is now tightly woven into the fabric of the software that powers the world. Indeed, much of the Internet – including the network infrastructure that supports it – runs using open source technologies. As the Internet moves from connecting browsers to connecting devices (cars and medical equipment), software security becomes a life and death consideration.
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Open source software is ideal for security. Its transparency allows code to be publicly reviewed and audited. This not only helps to detect bugs and vulnerabilities, but intentional backdoors too. In contrast, closed source software can be a mystery to users — who knows what is lurking in your favorite such programs?
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The Mozilla Firefox web browser has landed today, June 9, 2016, in the software repositories of all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, on June 8 on the Arch Linux repos, and on June 10 for Solus.
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Mozilla provided 13 security advisories with Firefox 47. The updated browser also supports encrypted HTML5 video support.
Firefox 47, which Mozilla released on June 7, provides users of the open-source Web browser with a baker’s dozen security updates and a number of incremental feature improvements.
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Mozilla is finally rolling out the much-anticipated multi-process feature in its Firefox web browser. Named Electrolysis, this project is being called the biggest change ever made to Firefox. To give you the power-user ability and avoid crashing, Electrolysis will split the Firefox UI and content rendering processes.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Byfield’s thoughtful book on design using LibreOffice can help improve the quality of both online and print material you create with LibreOffice — or even with its progenitor, OpenOffice.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE (HPE) has opened up The Machine, its next-generation project to reinvent the computer that doesn’t exist yet, to developers.
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Let’s go through the list shall we? Microsoft just released its own version of FreeBSD for Azure. So what, you say? Who uses FreeBSD? Well, you’ve probably heard of a little company called Netflix. Then, there’s Citrix, Array Networks, Gemalto. and Netgate, which already have virtual appliances on the Azure Marketplace.
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BSD
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Today in Linux news Niels Thykier, of the Debian release team, put out the call for Debian 9 Stretch artwork. The Register covered the announcement of a Microsoft FreeBSD release and Slackware-current received more updates today. Also, let’s take a closer look at the new development structure for Firefox beginning with version 48.
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Microsoft has released its own FreeBSD distribution and offered official support to Azure users. The kernel level changes/investments made by Redmond will be up-streamed into the official FreeBSD 10.3 release. Justin T. Gibbs, the FreeBSD Foundation’s President, called its an important milestone for the community.
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Microsoft has created its own cut of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure.
Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center says Redmond “took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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He went some way to achieving that goal of providing general access to human knowledge. In 1856, after 20 years of labour as Keeper of Printed Books, he had helped boost the British Museum’s collection to over half a million books, making it the largest library in the world at the time. But there was a serious problem: to enjoy the benefits of those volumes, visitors needed to go to the British Museum in London.
Imagine, for a moment, if it were possible to provide access not just to those books, but to all knowledge for everyone, everywhere—the ultimate realisation of Panizzi’s dream. In fact, we don’t have to imagine: it is possible today, thanks to the combined technologies of digital texts and the Internet. The former means that we can make as many copies of a work as we want, for vanishingly small cost; the latter provides a way to provide those copies to anyone with an Internet connection. The global rise of low-cost smartphones means that group will soon include even the poorest members of society in every country.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Open source hardware, as defined by the Open source Hardware Association, lowers the barriers to innovation by making reuse and redesign explicitly allowed from day one, without needing to involve a lawyer. You are explicitly allowed to make money from it. That’s expected and encouraged. Open source hardware has one very interesting difference from software. Nobody seriously expects hardware to be free, so the business model for open source hardware is the same as proprietary. People pay for objects.
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Health/Nutrition
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Mergers have become commonplace as hospital mega-chains increasingly dominate the American health-care market. But these deals often go unscrutinized by state regulators, who fail to address potential risks to patients losing access to care, according to a new report released today.
MergerWatch, which analyzes the hospital industry and opposes faith-based health care restrictions, surveyed health care statutes and regulations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It found that only 10 states require government review before hospital facilities and services can be shut down. Only eight states and the District of Columbia mandate regulatory review when hospitals enter into more informal partnerships rather than full-scale mergers, closing a loophole that exists in other states for deals to pass with minimal state oversight.
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Since 2009 the people of Dimock, Pennsylvania, have insisted that, as natural gas companies drilled into their hillsides, shaking and fracturing their ground, their water had become undrinkable. It turned a milky brown, with percolating bubbles of explosive methane gas. People said it made them sick.
Their stories — told first through an investigation into the safety of gas drilling by ProPublica — turned Dimock into an epicenter of what would evolve into a national debate about natural gas energy and the dangers of the process of “fracking,” or shattering layers of bedrock in order to release trapped natural gas.
But the last word about the quality of Dimock’s water came from assurances in a 2012 statement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — the federal department charged with safeguarding the Americans’ drinking water. The agency declared that the water coming out of Dimock’s taps did not require emergency action, such as a federal cleanup. The agency’s stance was widely interpreted to mean the water was safe.
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Defence/Aggression
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US intelligence agencies have ramped up their operations intended to remove Bolivian President Evo Morales from office. All options are on the table, including assassination. Barack Obama, who sees the weakening of Latin America’s “hostile bloc of populist states” as one of his administration’s foreign-policy victories, intends to buoy this success before stepping down.
Washington also feels under the gun in Bolivia because of China’s successful expansion in the country. Morales is steadily strengthening his financial, economic, trade, and military relationship with Beijing. Chinese businesses in La Paz are thriving – making investments and loans and taking part in projects to secure a key position for Bolivia in the modernization of the continent’s transportation industry. In the next 10 years, thanks to Bolivia’s plentiful gas reserves, that country will become the energy hub of South America. Evo Morales sees his country’s development as his top priority, and the Chinese, unlike the Americans, have always viewed Bolivia as an ally and partner in a relationship that eschews double standards.
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Today life on Planet Earth is far less secure than during the darkest days of the Cold War. Whatever threat global warming poses, it is miniscule compared to the threat of nuclear winter. If the evil that is concentrated in Washington and its vassals perpetrates nuclear war, cockroaches will inherit the earth.
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While victorious Hillary Clinton is expected to pivot right to attract disenchanted Republicans, Alon Ben-Meir hopes she will at least adopt Sen. Sanders’s more evenhanded approach toward peace negotiations between Israel-Palestine.
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Memorial Day is over. You had your barbeque. Now, you can stop thinking about America’s wars and the casualties from them for another year. As for me, I only wish it were so.
It’s been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met Tomas Young. And in truth, it should have felt that way from the moment I hunkered down in Somalia in 1993 and the firing began. After all, we’ve been at war across the Greater Middle East ever since. But somehow it was Tomas who, in 2013, first brought my own experience in the U.S. military home to me in ways I hadn’t been able to do on my own.
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Kyl is no longer in the Senate. But his modernization plan lives on. In fact, it’s metastasized into a nearly $1 trillion program over a 30-year period. Sure, given reports of a decrepit network of labs and manufacturing facilities, funds for some upgrade of the nuclear complex makes sense. You don’t want the most dangerous weapons in the world to be housed in substandard accommodations. But the modernization plan goes way beyond any reasonable concerns for safety.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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General Petraeus, despite turning over “little black books” filled with classified info to his mistress/biographer (Paula Broadwell), is now serving out his mild non-sentence by suffering through high-paying speaking gigs. The government — “punishing” one of its own — ended up implying there was somehow a difference between Petraeus and others who turned over classified information to journalists.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has never been on a shakier footing, given widespread (and well justified) public mistrust of the process and the outcome, opposition from all of the Presidential candidates, and to top it all off a decidedly lackluster forecast even from the administration’s own International Trade Commission. Is it too much to hope that the TPP is on its last legs?
Perhaps, yes. It would be a critical error to underestimate the political power of the industry sectors that have been pushing the TPP negotiations through this decade. And those powerful forces may have one final trick up their sleeve. According to our sources on Capitol Hill, TPP proponents are planning to schedule a vote immediately after the election, during the “lame duck” session of Congress, in the short window when the old Congress continues to sit before the new one takes office. Members of the “lame duck” Congress may have already retired or been voted out of office, yet they still have the authority to make law. As a result of their minimal accountability to their constituents during this period, it is inappropriate that a vote on TPP should come before the lame duck session.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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If not Donald, someone else would be Trump. America has been waiting for him.
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Trump University promised to help students get rich. Enrollees would study the wisdom of The Donald and get mentoring from other terrific businesspeople. But a class-action suit by former students and a suit brought by the New York attorney general allege that the unaccredited “school” mainly helped students part with the money in their wallets. (Trump has called the suits a “scam” and “thug politics.”)
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The Democratic Party’s California primary made it hard for pro-Sanders independents to vote, with many denied the right ballots and many young voters forced to vote “provisionally,” giving Hillary Clinton a boost toward victory, writes Rick Sterling.
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With former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now having finally won enough pledged delegates to sew up the Democratic nomination for president, the months-long calls for Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) to abandon his campaign have finally ceased being senseless. This is not, however, to say that they should be heeded. They should not. Sanders should continue his campaign, even as he lightly modifies its aims and tonalities. The modifications should track the reasons for continuing the campaign, which are three in number.
The first reason for continuing the campaign is the easiest and most obvious: Much still can happen between now and the Democratic convention later this summer. Clinton is not yet entirely out of the woods where her use of private email to conduct public business is concerned. While a full-on indictment looks unlikely, it is not yet out of the question; nor is further fallout from the secretary’s inaccurate account of the State Department rules that she stands accused of having violated. It is accordingly important for the Democratic Party to have its other principal candidate for president at the ready, how ever unlikely it is that he will be needed for this particular purposes.
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But maybe that was as it should be. After all, this entire campaign has been a long lesson in democratic dysfunction.
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Oh brothers and sisters, what an odd time. I hear great energy going into whether or not Bernie should now concede or how the next few weeks look if he stays in the race as he proclaimed he would late Tuesday night. Will Bernie delegates or supporters disrupt the DNC convention? That’s another point to consider for pundits and others. Bernie or bust is one group’s battle cry, while others call for Party unity. I think all of these issues are missing the point and the moment at hand.
Bernie repeated the theme during his speech that this campaign, this political revolution, is about changing this country and addressing the issues he has framed so well over the last year. To the extent that we can exert pressure on the Democratic Party or even on the American public to support those changes, staying in the fight is critical for Bernie.
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As we look for signs of which presidential candidate major corporations will see as best serving their interests, the head of the largest pharmaceutical company in the world is saying he can’t really tell.
Ian Read, the chief executive of Pfizer, said that he cannot “at this moment distinguish between the policies that Donald Trump may support or those that Hillary Clinton may support.”
Read, attending the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference last week, was asked who makes him “more nervous.” He said he’s more concerned about control of Congress. “I’m sort of more focused really on understanding where the House control is going to be and where the Senate control is going to be,” Read said.
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The DNC chair and Florida congresswoman changed her mind on an important issue but she and other corporate Democrats continue to betray the legacy of their party.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Several media experts have demanded the government ease internet censorship due to the enforcement of the 2008 Information and Electronic Transaction (ITE) Law.
“Every stakeholder should pay attention to this messy law, which has violated the principle of network neutrality, because it could penalize everyone for defamation,” Arfi Bambani, the Alliance of Independence Journalists (AJI) secretary-general, said during a discussion in Jakarta on Wednesday.
Network neutrality principle means that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally. Hence, it promotes the idea of open internet, which upholds transparency and proscribes censorship, he added.
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The Internet should be an equal world for all of its users, without any discrimination in terms of accessing content or expressing ideas, activists have said. However, the 2008 Information and Electronic Transaction (ITE) Law has failed to preserve that principle, they said, and most likely, the revised version of the law would as well.
“Every stakeholder should pay attention to this messy law which has violated the principle of network neutrality, because it could penalize everyone for defamation,” Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) secretary general Arfi Bambani said during a discussion in Jakarta on Wednesday.
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The Ethiopian government has passed a dangerous cybercrime law that criminalizes an array of substantive computer activities including the distribution of defamatory speech, spam, and pornography online among others offenses. The law, dubbed the “Computer Crime Proclamation,” was passed, the government says, in an effort to more accurately attune the country’s laws to technological advances and provide the government better mechanisms and procedures to “prevent, control, investigate, and prosecute the suspects of computer crimes.”
While the law aims to facilitate and accelerate the way in which the country penalizes computer crimes, it criminalizes legitimate forms of online speech. Based on the law’s exhaustive list of offenses and penalties that are grossly disproportionate to the outlined crimes, it will undoubtedly have a chilling effect and could serve as a tool for silencing political opposition, which relies heavily on online publishing since the government has cracked down on traditional media.
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The Supreme Court has made it clear that government can’t punish entities on the basis of free expression, such as boycotts.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order this week requiring state agencies and authorities to divest from any company or institution that supports the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. The order not only threatens to punish constitutionally protected political speech but also requires the state of New York to create a blacklist of allies of the movement, which BDS supporters describe as an effort to ensure human rights for Palestinians.
“It’s very simple: If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you,” Cuomo said when he announced the order.
The directive requires all agencies and departments over which the governor has executive authority as well as certain public benefit corporations, public authorities, boards, and commissions to divest funds from any company or institution supporting BDS. The entities are also banned from investing in those companies in the future.
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Nearly two years ago, we wrote about a bonkers lawsuit against the makers of the film American Hustle, brought by a journalist who used to make remarks about what microwaves do to the food we eat. The lawsuit was essentially over Jennifer Lawrence’s character, who had been built up in the film as a complete know-nothing whack-job, misinterpreting a historical article by Paul Brodeur in the film. This kind of thing is not remotely actionable, and such portrayals are not only protected against the libel and defamation claims Brodeur made by that pesky First Amendment thing we have, but in the context of the film there was simply zero chance of Brodeur suffering any harm from an insane character’s misunderstanding of his article’s position. I took the time to write about it because the idea of someone suing over this is hilarious, but the court forced to listen to this insanity couldn’t take the same snarky position I did.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Proposed anti-encryption legislation known as “Burr-Feinstein,” filed in the wake of Apple’s legal showdown with the FBI, had such alarmingly broad business ramifications that apparently common sense prevailed. According to a Reuters report, sources in Congress say the bill had trouble gaining support and will probably not be introduced this year.
Ever since Apple’s refusal to assist the FBI in unlocking an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters — and the subsequent legal battles — encryption has been on the minds of law enforcement and national security hawks.
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A new update to the Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of the Criminal Procedure has been proposed which will empower FBI to gain remote access to any device after obtaining a single search warrant authorized by any federal judge in the United States.
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Here’s Source Assured’s pitch: landlords, if you write a requirement for tenants (and prospective tenants) to let us access their social media accounts into your lease/application process, we’ll scrape all that data, use an unaccountable system to analyze it, and produce libelous, life-destroying dossiers on them that you can use to discriminate against people who seek shelter, the most fundamental human need after sustenance.
And this is the UK, where 40% of the national wealth is in the form of property in the southeast, where whole neighborhoods are being razed and replaced with high-rise safe-deposit boxes in the sky for offshore millionaires, where defined-benefits pensions are a laughable memory of the distant past, where the entire country is leveraged to the eyeballs to afford shelter, and where, consequently, even the tiniest, eensiest bobble in the value of property threatens the entire nation.
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A growing number of American politicians (and their constituents) are calling for the elimination of the National Security Agency (NSA).
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A reassuring thought – this is the man charged with defending us from the threat of global terror.
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For all the idiotic things said about Ed Snowden, at least US bureaucrats appear to have come around to the idea that he helped kick off a necessary debate on surveillance powers and privacy. Just recently we had former Attorney General Eric Holder admit that Snowden “performed a public service by raising the debate.” And regular surveillance apologist and former Defense Department lawyer Jack Goldsmith just said that “Snowden forced the intelligence community out of its suboptimal and unsustainable obsession with secrecy.”
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Yet another vehicle heavily advertised as being “smart” has proven to be notably less secure than its older, dumber counterparts. This week, researchers discovered that flaws in the Mitsubishi Outlander leave the vehicle’s on-board network vulnerable to all manner of hacker attack, allowing an intruder to disable the alarm system, drain the car’s battery, control multiple vehicle functions, and worse.
The app for most “smart” vehicles connects to a web-based service hosted by the manufacturer. This service in turn connects to a GSM module inside of the automobile, letting a user control the vehicle from anywhere. While convenient, this has proven to be problematic when poorly implemented — something Nissan recently discovered after the company failed to implement any real authentication, letting an attacker use the Leaf app to track a driver’s driving behavior, physically control the Leaf’s heating and cooling systems, and drain the car’s battery.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Not sure what’s going on in California, but it’s been suddenly issuing a bunch of really bad rulings concerning Section 230 of the CDA (the most important law on the internet). As we’ve explained many times, Section 230 says that online services cannot be held liable for actions of their users (and also, importantly, that if those platforms do decide to moderate content in any way, that doesn’t impact their protections from liability). This is massively important for protecting free speech online, because it means that platforms don’t have to proactively monitor user behavior out of fear of legal liability and they don’t feel the need to over-aggressively take down content to avoid being sued.
Over and over again the courts have interpreted Section 230 quite broadly to protect internet platforms. This has been good for free speech and good for the internet overall (and, yes, good for online companies, which is why some are so against Section 230). But, as we’ve been noting, Section 230 has been under attack in the past year or so, and all of a sudden courts seem to be chipping away at the protections of Section 230. Last week we wrote about a bad appeals court ruling that said Section 230 did not protect a website from being sued over failing to warn users of potential harm that could come from some users on the site. Then, earlier this week, we wrote about an even worse ruling in San Mateo Superior Court (just a block away from my office…) exempting publicity rights from Section 230.
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In it, the CBC’s Neil MacDonald pointed out that being “not from around here,” coupled with rental vehicles and cash — made visiting Canadians little more than rolling ATMs for “drug interdiction task forces” sporting nifty acronyms and friendly asset-sharing partnerships with federal agencies.
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Teenage blogger Amos Yee, has grabbed international media attention again when he was featured in the US-based political talk show, The Rubin Report. The video-blogger who has about 40,000 subscribers on his Youtube channel Brain and Butter, is facing charges for posting anti-religious content on his Youtube and for failing to show up to Court.
In talking to Rubin, Amos styled himself as atheist who specialises in refuting religion by using its own teachings (via the Bible or the Quran). Amos further discussed the recent charges and claimed that he has been targeted by the government because he is a “political threat”.
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The European Parliament on Wednesday condemned the “apathy shown by member states and EU institutions” over torture in secret CIA prisons in Europe.
A non-binding resolution, passed 329-299, urged member states to “investigate, insuring full transparency, the allegations that there were secret prisons on their territory in which people were held under the CIA programme.” It also called on the European Union to undertake fact-finding missions into countries that were known to house American black sites.
The resolution named Lithuania, Poland, Italy, and the United Kingdom as countries complicit in CIA operations.
The Parliament also expressed “regret” that none of the architects of the U.S. torture program faced criminal charges, and that the U.S. has failed to cooperate with European criminal probes.
Despite banning torture when he came into office, President Obama has fought all attempts to hold Bush administration officials accountable, including by invoking the state secrets privilege to block lawsuits, and delaying the release of the Senate Torture Report.
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Anybody who is in any way surprised at today’s announcement that nobody will be prosecuted for extraordinary rendition and torture, is in deep denial about what a corrupt and rotten state the United Kingdom is.
Among the many documents the Metropolitan Police (who are genuinely furious) handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and which now lies in a bin, is my own sworn evidence of the complicity in torture of Jack Straw and senior FCO officials. I therefore now publish the statement I made to the Metropolitan Police.
I should explain this is not my language. The Metropolitan Police officers interviewed me for two days at my home and then wrote the statement which I signed. This is not the signed copy because I did not have a photocopier at my home. Two copies were printed off on my printer, one of which I signed and gave to them. This is the other copy, and is exactly the same as the signed copy.
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When Facebook launched a new system in January to help news outlets and other groups target posts to particular audiences, a representative of the New York Times said it had the potential to kindle “vibrant discussions” within “niche Facebook communities” that might otherwise get lost amid the social network’s 1.6 billion users. And indeed, in the system’s first several months, software algorithms have generated hundreds of thousands of special tags for connecting to even the most obscure groups, including 7,800 Facebook users who are interested in “Water motorsports at the 1908 Summer Olympics.”
But there’s one set of people who can’t be reached via Facebook’s system: those interested in Black Lives Matter, the nationwide grassroots movement protesting police violence against black people.
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Louisiana’s prisons are so overcrowded that more than half the state’s prisoners can’t fit in them and have been sent to serve their sentences in county jails instead, where they occupy more than 75 percent of the beds normally reserved for local detainees awaiting trial or serving short sentences. In Mississippi, state prisoners take up more than 55 percent of local jails’ beds; in Kentucky, the proportion is more than 45 percent.
These numbers, released today as part of a Prison Policy Initiative report on “jail leasing,” expose the extent of a practice that advocates say harms prisoners and raises ethical questions about public institutions profiting off incarceration. But as some states embark on efforts to reduce prison populations, local officials who for years have received financial incentives to house state prisoners in their jails are now faced with the threat of a loss of revenue.
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This is what was left of Leo Lech’s home after the Greenwood Village police were done with it. Lech had done nothing wrong. In fact, he wasn’t even home. By the point the local PD had decided to turn a standoff with a suspect into a one-house reenactment of the Battle of Fallujah, the only person inside was Robert Jonathan Seacat — originally wanted for nothing more than shoplifting.
This was all fully justified, according to the police chief, because Seacat had opened fire on police officers during the standoff.
According to Lech’s lawsuit, those shots — five of them, nine hours into the standoff — by Seacat were met by tear gas, flash bangs, and “72 chemical bombs.” Sure, it turns out Seacat had a backpack (and lower intestine) full of drugs, but the police didn’t know that when they began their assault. Of course, the complete destruction of an unrelated family’s house was considered copacetic because no one died.
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The death of boxing great Muhammad Ali touched many people, especially those fortunate enough to have known him as a brash and brave young man who transformed sports and challenged the Vietnam War, as Mollie Dickenson recalls.
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With all the discussion and debate these days about intersectionality and the need for progressives to link our movements against racism and against war, the name of Muhammad Ali belongs right up in our pantheon with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Howard Zinn, and so many other women and men who fought and continue to fight those linked battles together.
In the history of our movements for peace and for justice, the most strategic activists, analysts, and cultural workers were always those who understood the centrality of racism at the core of U.S. wars. They grasped the ways in which US militarism relied on racism at home to recruit its cannon-fodder and to build public support for wars against “the other” – be they Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Yemenis, Afghans, or anyone else.
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Democrat Rep. Joaquín Castro criticized Republicans for blocking the Library of Congress from dropping the use of the term “alien” to refer to immigrants, saying the refusal demonstrates how the GOP became the party of Trump.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Some 800 registered participants gathered for the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) in Brussels today to talk about internet privacy, security and access. Besides the topical issues, the opening sessions speakers came back time and again to the discrepancy of theory and practice of the much-belaboured “multi-stakeholder principle.”
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The United States Commerce Department National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced today it found the proposal developed by the global internet multistakeholder community to fully privatise oversight over the central root zone of the internet domain name system (DNS) satisfactory.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Union presenting its new Trademark Directive during this week’s meeting of the World Trade Organization intellectual property council heard concerns of possible seizures of generic medicines transiting through Europe. Meanwhile, the new Council chair’s attempts at revitalising discussions between member states received general approval. And a new agenda item on e-commerce was launched.
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Copyrights
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Geocoder, the Ottawa-based company that managed to develop a database of postal codes using crowdsourcing techniques, has settled a controversial lawsuit brought by Canada Post. Canada Post sued in 2012 claiming intellectual property rights in postal codes. Geocoder did not copy the postal codes, however. Instead, it used crowdsourcing to develop a database containing over one million Canadian postal codes after asking people to submit their postal codes with their address. The database is freely available under a Creative Commons licence and is enormously valuable for organizations that need access to the data but are unable to pay the steep fees levied by Canada Post. While many open data advocates have long argued that this information should be available under government open data initiatives, Canada Post has steadfastly refused.
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That freely-available Canadian Postal Code Geocoded Database became so useful that NGOs and others started using it for serious purposes, much to the chagrin of Canada Post, which provided the “official” database of postal codes and was really rather keen to license it to you for a hefty sum.
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Politico (6/9/16) reports that the New York Times is under fire for demanding that two media critics—Daniel Hallin and Charles Briggs—pay the newspaper a total of $1,884 for using three brief quotes from Times articles in their new book Making Health Public.
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That last point about the unanimous cross-party political support shows that the copyright maximalists care as little about democracy as they do about the public. All they want is to retain the privileges they have enjoyed for hundreds of years, and to hell with anyone else.
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Following the jury verdict finding in favor of fair use for Google and its use of Oracle’s Java APIs (if you haven’t yet, you should listen to our podcast about the trial), Oracle asked Judge Alsup to basically ignore the jury ruling. Specifically, Oracle asked Judge Alsup to rule that “as a matter of law” that Google’s use was not fair use, thus negating the need for the jury to settle any dispute. This is actually how the original Alsup ruling in this case came about. After the first trial had a jury find Google had infringed, Alsup said that, as a matter of law, APIs were not eligible for copyright protection and effectively dumped the jury ruling… until the appeals court overturned that ruling and sent the case back for a second trial focused solely on the fair use question.
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Can the ‘fair compensation’ for private copying pursuant to Article 5(2)(b) of the InfoSoc Directive be funded through a Member State’s general state budget?
This is in a nutshell the issue that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had been asked to consider in EGEDA, C-470/14, a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Spanish Supreme Court seeking clarification about the compatibility of Spanish law on private copying with EU law.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In spite of terrible weather conditions at the site of the EPO’s main (and far bigger) ‘branch’, many people still attended, expressing solidarity and support for their staff representatives who are under attack from the Battistelli regime
“The participation in the solidarity demo in the center of The Hague was good today,” a source told us. “Between start and end point, where staff representatives made brief speeches, between 550 and 650 EPO protesters marched about one hour along the French, Portuguese, UK, Swiss and Spanish embassies.”
“Another source reported that there were about 600 colleagues in Munich under a pouring rain and also about 600 colleagues in The Hague under a blue sky.”
Indeed, another source — sending us additional photos (which we have blurred further) — said “ca. 600 colleagues in Munich under a pouring rain and also about 600 colleagues in The Hague this time under a blue sky.”
This seems to be the consensus regarding this round of protests. If weather conditions were better, the usual participation of well over a thousand if not two thousand Munich workers would probably be expected, so this lower turnout shouldn’t mistaken for pacification.
We have a lot more EPO coverage on the way today. █
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06.09.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Battistelli cannot tolerate dissent, as his actions demonstrate, not even from outside the Office (like Erdoğan in Germany)
Summary: ‘Sun King’ Battistelli is losing the plot and is apparently, as recent actions serve to suggest, brewing a new set of vicious attacks of people whom he already sacked based on extremely dubious allegations and a bogus ‘trial’ (where the accuser is the jury, judge, executioner and so on)
THE EPO is worse than abusive. It’s probably, at least at the moment, Europe’s most abusive institution (unless someone can point out to us one which is worse). Mr. Battistelli staying inside the EPO means sustained damage to the Office’s (and Organisation’s) reputation; this translates into brand erosion and jeopardised demand for European Patents (EPs) in the long run, or decreased (perceived) value, even for patents granted over a decade ago. What would happen to people’s pensions, inventors’ protection, and so on? Examiners are right to be worried. Even the EPO is milking itself dry right now, with untold millions of Euros spent on things which have nothing whatsoever to do with examination (waste of money, corruption). Consider bodyguards, purchased media, secret private contracts with dubious firms for the purpose of PR, union-busting, censorship and surveillance. What on Earth has the EPO become? It’s a state within a state, even with its own police and military. Maybe Battistelli took the job title “President” way too far.
“When will Battistelli throw truth-telling staff representatives and judges into the lion’s den for his entertainment purposes?”EPO staff protests started about three hours ago in The Hague and in Munich. We wrote about these protests even yesterday. These are justified protests, even if some provocative comments at IP Kat try to discredit the protesters/examiners, portraying them as spoiled millionaires with high-end sport cars (we don’t wish to link to these smears). Is that a compromise strategy after trying to just block the whole of IP Kat (this backfired pretty badly)?
A few days ago we said that EBoA can decide whether the illegally-suspended judge will have his case heard openly. We believe he was serious defamed and the Munich State Attorney was reportedly considering criminal charges against the European Patent Office over this. “An announcement of the oral proceedings in Art. 23 1/16 can be found in the public area of the Isar building,” said this one comment in IP Kat. One response to this was: “Public? If the accused him or herself is banned from the building?”
That’s a good point actually. Medieval/Ottoman notion of 'justice' is prevalent under Battistelli; even worse — it dates back to the Roman Empire. When will Battistelli throw truth-telling staff representatives and judges into the lion’s den for his entertainment purposes? Will he pay “media partners” to broadcast such an event in some Portuguese Colosseum?
“We are entering phase two of the Battistelli strategy to “improve” the EPO,” one comment noted, explaining the current situation as follows:
Oh dear. The EPO used to be a “golden cage”, where employees were trapped by the generous salary and benefits package. Now the golden bars are apparently not enough, and require steel reinforcement.
I fear that this is a very ominous sign. We are entering phase two of the Battistelli strategy to “improve” the EPO:
1) decapitate the staff representation
2) block all the exits
3) do whatever you want to the staff, because you’ve got them exactly where you want them, and there’s b****r all they can do about it.
That’s an excellent point actually. It was further expanded on by this comment which said, “as soon as the new rules will enter into force, petty vindictive Battistelli will use them to bar the dismissed Mrs. Hardon to collaborate with SUEPO.” As a reminder (of what we covered here before), Hardon was re-elected to SUEPO leadership, even after Battistelli had fired her, wrongly believing she would be history thereafter.
“As a reminder (of what we covered here before), Hardon was re-elected to SUEPO leadership, even after Battistelli had fired her, wrongly believing she would be history thereafter.”These comments make perfect sense and every single member of the Administrative Council should be made aware of it. Here are the contact details for members of the Administrative Council. It seems rather apparent, as our previous post serves to indicate, that the EPO’s staff union (not the yellow one which increasingly acts racist) is still under extreme attacks from Battistelli and his thugs; only the strategy changed a little bit. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Worse than doing none of what the Administrative Council demanded
Summary: “Last week,” says Dutch media, Laurent Prunier from SUEPO in The Hague “got delivered its final report. Conclusion: guilty of “misconduct” that undermine Battistelli’s leadership.”
THE EPO is busy distracting from today's protests which we'll expand on in our next post. But not all the media received money from the EPO (at Battistelli’s request), nor does it drink that silly EIA16 Kool-Aid.
As one person pointed out in IP Kat the other day, “the EPO is back again in the NL reputable press” (pointing to this new bit of negative publicity from the Dutch mainstream media).
Well, “translations welcome,” we said, and we believe the article was well overdue because of the latest protests (to be covered later). Only a day later SUEPO added a link to this article and Petra Kramer, a native Dutch speaker, prepared a translation for us and remarked: “Not one bit of progress has been made.”
Here is the full translation with important bits highlighted in yellow:
Private war between CEO and and the union of the patent office is not over yet
Labour conflict Again there is hassle in the European Patent Office. The ruthless nature of CEO Battistelli is a concern for Member States.
Eppo König
June 9, 2016
Earlier this year it seemed or Battistelli President of the EPO would resign.
The war between President Benoît Battistelli of the European Patent Office (EPO) and its trade union continues. While the Frenchman Thursday in Lisbon rewards the inventor of the year, his staff in The Hague holds a protest march along the embassies of EU Member States. “Our management is bullying and intimidating trade union and works council members in a manner that would be unacceptable in your country,” they wrote to the ambassadors.
The patent office (38 States, 7,000 employees) is the largest intergovernmental organization in Europe, after the European Commission. The agency reviews patent applications and grants European patents. Headquartered in Munich, inter alia, an office in Rijswijk.
Early this year, tensions at the EPO were so high that it seemed as if Battistelli (65) would resign. The highest body of the Agency, the Management Board representing the 38 Member States, forced Battistelli to hold back against union SUEPO.
The intervention followed the dismissal of two trade union leaders, the Dutch Els Hardon, union president in Munich, its German predecessor Ion Brumme. Treasurer Malika Weaver is cut in her salary. The official accusations are conspiring against Battistelli and bullying a member of the council who was pro-Battistelli.
Guilty of misconduct
But the president is not finished with the union, which represents half of the employees. The own research unit of the EPO completed the research of union secretary Laurent Prunier, who was too stressed to work and has been on unpaid leave for five months. Last week he got delivered its final report. Conclusion: guilty of “misconduct” that undermine Battistelli’s leadership.
“Either you have not understood the resolution of the Member States or you ignored it from the beginning,” Prunier’s lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld wrote in a letter to all Member States and Battistelli last week. The president was indeed summoned to suspend all pending proceedings against trade unionists. He needs the review the ‘disciplinary procedures’ to ensure that they are fair and that the are seen that way by the outside world.
The point is that the patent office as an international organization is not covered by national labour law. We are immune to our rules and can not be judged through Dutch eyes, says Battistelli. In refusing to recognize trade union SUEPO he is in defiance of the Hague Court. Employees with a labour dispute should go to the International Labour Organization, a slow UN body in Geneva. The office in Rijwijk uses a Belgian company doctor that is not registered as a doctor in the Netherlands.
Just as the agency has its own research unit – which hears employees without a lawyer present, is the criticism of the union. Even independent research confirms that the “integrity” and “ethical behavior” in this package can be improved. A “very clear” definition of misconduct must be drawn up, according to a report from May. The service should clearly explain how e-mail and computers are investigated. And above all: the unit must operate independently of the president.
“The research unit will answer without a lawyer workers there”
The case Prunier can end up as a sensitive issue this month as the management board meets again. Major countries, such as Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden and Switzerland, have heavily criticized by Battistelli, according to sources. The negative publicity about the conflicts harm the reputation of the agency, which has outstanding patent researchers. The incidents embarrass host countries such as the Netherlands because intervention is almost impossible.
In substantive terms critical Member States do agree with Battistelli. They support the reforms he has implemented, such as investment in IT and bonuses for performance instead of seniority. The Member States’ concern lies primarily with the ruthless, irascible character Battistelli. He seems to wage a private war against a union, which is just as war-like as the president himself. The conflict thereby is also hindering business operations, such as the reform of the pension system.
As the president of the EPO Battistelli has a lot of power, the 38 Member States can not do much. There is no impeachment procedure in the regulations, apart from the question of whether or not a majority of the Member States would support it. The more time passes, the closer Battistelli gets to the end of his term. That could mean two long years of conflict, lawsuits and bad publicity.
The patent office does not respond to individual cases, said a spokesman. The agency says that the management board is regularly informed on the reform of investigations and sanctions.
As we are going to show in our next post, it’s likely that not only Prunier is under additional attacks from Battistelli, who is truly crazy and detached from reality (perhaps he feels like he’s totally unsackable). Is Jesus, who reportedly suffered mental breakdowns due to the vicious attacks on him (and apparently his wife too came under veiled attacks), next in Battistelli’s firing line, for the alleged ‘crime’ of helping to conduct a staff survey? Based on patterns of the EPO's actions against SUEPO, The Hague is next, after all the attacks in Munich (which still exacerbate further). █
Correction (10/6/2016): The “NRC Translation,” a reader told us, had a “factual error” as follows:
I spotted an important factual error from the document translated that requires clarification to best illustrate how the current regime acts:
Laurent Prunier is not on unpaid leave contrary to what is here written. The current administration cut 100% of his remuneration since January (!) although Laurent has been certified sick by his treating GP and by the GP designated as Arbiter. This is of course nothing else but a harsh disciplinary sanction, this time without even a board of discipline! That’s very different than being on unpaid leave
Thanks for correcting this small but important detail!
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
UPC ratification and other favours among the real motivations and paid-for media the means
Summary: The truly terrible reality behind EIA16, which is nothing other than self-serving Battistelli propaganda which costs a lot of money and distorts European media
THE EPO (Organisation) as a whole merely embarrasses itself with the silly (and risky) EIA16 charade, which is somewhat like a beauty pageant dressed up as “science”. It mirrors what Blatter was doing at FIFA in his last days.
Just over an hour ago the EPO's PR folks retweeted the following from Carlos Moedas (with the photo at the top): “Inspiring #EIA16 opening ceremony with EPOorg President Mr. Battistelli and Prime Minister Costa” (Moedas is European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, so he too is being lobbied and was perhaps invited to be brainwashed).
“Battistelli, who had the EPO cover the costs for this charade of his, is about as crazy as Blatter (totally out of touch with reality).”Mr. Battistelli is lobbying Portugal very much as expected, as correctly predicted in our previous coverage of this. To use the words of someone from the EPO who saw that: “My stomach churns as this theater is absurd!”
The EPO shows us that not only politicians can buy the media. Mr. Battistelli does the same thing; he literally paid an estimated millions of Euros to the media (the exact number is unknown to us, but we can extrapolate based on last year).
Battistelli, who had the EPO cover the costs for this charade of his, is about as crazy as Blatter (totally out of touch with reality). He apparently said: “Our ambition is that the European Inventor Award becomes the Nobel Prize for innovation” (who does he think he is, Alfred Nobel? No wonder he wastes a fortune on six unnecessary bodyguards, demonstrating his megalomania and having the EPO cover all the costs with dubious pretexts).
“EIA2016 may not effective enough a distraction (e.g. from today’s protests), but does Battistelli care? He doesn’t pay a dime for this. He’s draining the Office dry just to cover his own behind right now.”viEUws, which is a media partner of the EPO this year (we assume it got paid by Battistelli’s EPO, but we don’t know how much), continues to to do puff pieces, having already produced some for Battistelli several months ago (as it already did a softball questions ‘interview’ with Battistelli). How much was spent on this? The EPO certainly paid a lot of money to the Financial Times (London) to play along with this charade and it still shows. More EPO-sponsored propaganda from the Financial Times can be seen today and it’s part of a broader wave of puff pieces in France, in Germany, and several other countries (the EPO paid another half a dozen media companies).
EIA2016 may not effective enough a distraction (e.g. from today’s protests), but does Battistelli care? He doesn’t pay a dime for this. He’s draining the Office dry just to cover his own behind right now.
The EPO is collapsing while spending millions of Euros hiding this collapse. Battistelli has totally destroyed the EPO and if he’s not ejected later this month, there will be serious consequences. Board 28 certainly knows this. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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For many, the announcement of Android apps running on Chromebooks — and other Chrome OS powered devices like Chromebases and Chromeboxes — was a highlight from Google I/O 2016. All of us here agree, and we’re ready for the first developer builds so we can give it a spin.
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Server
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The Machine page of HPE explained, “The Machine puts the data first. Instead of processors, we put memory at the core of what we call “Memory-Driven Computing.” Memory-Driven Computing collapses the memory and storage into one vast pool of memory called universal memory. To connect the memory and processing power, we’re using advanced photonic fabric. Using light instead of electricity is key to rapidly accessing any part of the massive memory pool while using much less energy.”
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Kernel Space
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I started using Linux in 1996. The idea of an open source operating system, where it’s possible to access and customize a lot of things, amazed me.
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I’m announcing the release of the 4.6.2 kernel.
All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.6.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.6.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
thanks,
greg k-h
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The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report is now available! Partnering again with Dice, we went beyond Linux and received feedback from nearly 5,000 open source professionals to examine employment trends.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Albion Online is a pretty great start for a Linux-native MMO, but one of the problems has been the rather plain looking map. The developers are working on a bigger and more varied map and did a video to highlight the work.
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Nothing more satisfying than harpooning a colossal creature and pulling off its limbs is there? It’s not exactly easy though, there’s creatures of all shapes and sizes wanting to eat you.
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The cutesy artillery game has added Linux support in its ongoing beta test. Development apparently still has a ways to go which makes this early support extra nice.
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Fans of shooting stuff up with mechs will have to wait a while to play this action game on Linux. The developer has explained why this Early Access game isn’t yet ready for penguin enjoyment.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today we announce the launch of the first generation of the Qt Automotive Suite.
The idea for the Qt Automotive Suite was born when The Qt Company, Pelagicore and KDAB sat down and shared their experiences of projects using Qt for In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI). With cumulative experience from over 20 automotive projects it was noted how Qt is really well suited to the needs of building IVIs and Instrument Clusters, that there were already millions of vehicles on the road with Qt inside, and that there were a lot of ongoing projects. There was though a feeling that things could be even better, that there were still a few things holding back the industry, contributing to the sense that shipped IVI systems could be built faster, cheaper and with a higher quality.
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Qt 5.6.1 has been released today. Since Qt 5.6 is long-term supported for three years, there will still be more patch releases to come. While the patch releases do not bring new features, they do contain security fixes, error corrections and general improvements. The New Qt Creator 4.0.1 is included in the Qt 5.6.1 offline installer packages.
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New Releases
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Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software (PC/OpenSystems LLC), the company behind the Black Lab Linux operating system series, informs Softpedia today about the general availability of the NetOS, NetOS Enterprise, and NetOS Education OSes.
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Today PC/OpenSystems LLC is proud to announce the release of our NetOS line of network operating systems. The development team has been working for over a year and a half, honing our cloud based offerings to the cutting edge, bringing the very latest-and-greatest to our faithful customers. As the computing world continues to migrate towards that model, PC/OpenSystems LLC decided that it was time for us to position ourselves in the vanguard of cloud-focused Linux.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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We introduced you last week to the PCLinuxOS 64 2016.06 MATE Edition, and the other day to the PCLinuxOS 64 2016.06 Xfce Community Edition, and now the time has come for you to make acquaintance with the LXDE flavor of PCLinuxOS.
PCLinuxOS 64 2016.06 LXDE Community Edition was launched earlier this month, created by a PCLinuxOS community user and tester who goes by the name Ika, the same one that brought us the PCLinuxOS 64 2016.06 Xfce Community Edition operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, was proud to announce the general availability of its Red Hat Software Collection 2.2 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 4.1.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Linux users tend to pride themselves on their position at the leading edge of a fast-moving development community. But, in truth, much of what we do is rooted in many decades of Unix tradition, and we tend to get grumpy when young developers show up and start changing things around. A recent change of default in systemd represents such a change and the kind of response that it brings out; as a result, Linux distributors are going to have to make a decision on whether they should preserve the way things have always worked or make a change that, while potentially disruptive to users, is arguably a step toward more predictable, controllable, and secure behavior.
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If you’re looking for a way to contribute to Fedora, what about release validation testing? Completing test cases is a quick way to get started. Every release of Fedora that you download and use is tested by the Fedora QA team according to the Release Validation Test Plan. Each test compose of the Alpha, Beta, and Final Fedora releases is tested to see if it meets specific release criteria for that release. This post will walk you through the steps of getting set up, performing the release validation tests, and reporting them to the test matrix.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project has made the final maintenance release version, Debian GNU/Linux 7.11 available for download. This is the eleventh release in the series and will be the last maintenance release in the stable Debian GNU/Linux 7 “Wheezy” operating system. The update is available for download to all the users of the Debian GNU/Linux 7 “Wheezy” OS. The Debian Project took to twitter to announce the availability of this download.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The development the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system is starting to take off slowly at the Canonical’s headquarters, and today we have some excellent news for our Ubuntu readers.
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Today, June 9, 2016, Canonical has pushed a new major milestone of the Snapcraft tool for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, version 2.10, which users can use to package their apps as Snaps.
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But that was then and this is now. Enfeebled beyond practicality in its current condition, I gave the old machine a choice: take its place among the other dusty monuments to obsolescence in my office closet, or volunteer for a potentially revitalizing project that could ensure its most exciting days were yet to come. Admittedly, it wasn’t enthusiastic about either option, but that was hardly a surprise. It had been ages since it could muster enthusiasm about anything. I aimed to turn that situation around with the power of Linux!
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The open source prpl Foundation, which was established in 2014 by MIPS IP vendor Imagination Technologies and other companies, has proposed a way for router companies to let their U.S. customers upload Linux distributions such as OpenWrt without running afoul of a new FCC ruling that went into effect June 2. The virtualization security solution, called prplSecurity, is built around the open source L4Re hypervisor, optimized to run on Imagination’s MIPS Warrior-P processors. PrplSecurity, which will be formally announced June 9, separates and secures WiFi functions from general router functions with the help of secure OpenWrt, WiFi, and third-party VMs…
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Phones
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Android
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There are new smartphones hitting the market constantly, but which is the best buy when you’re trying to save a buck or two (or hundred)? We’ve seen some great launches this year and we’re only expecting more over the coming weeks, but for now, let’s go over the best budget Android smartphones you can go pick up today…
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Security biz Pentest is sounding alarms after it found an Android app it says has been downloaded 50 millions times despite being “little more than malware.”
UK-based Pentest said a whitepaper study [PDF] of the popular Flash Keyboard found that the Android app is “abusing” OS permissions, inserting potentially malicious ads, and tracking user behavior, then sending data to servers in China.
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BlackBerry is reportedly having some issues in its transition to Android. A report from CNET quotes a “high-level executive” at AT&T as saying “The BlackBerry Priv is really struggling.”
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As we know that Xiaomi has launched its new phone in India in May 2016. We all know about the Xiaomi devices and so far this Chinese company has done a tremendous job in making smartphones and some wearable technology. We have used Xiaomi devices and they run very well and the best part of buying and using Xiaomi devices is that they are really cheap. Well, don’t be negative when I say Cheap because I used that word because of the cost of the device and that has nothing to do with the overall quality and functionality of the device. They have been doing it for a while now and they are matured in this business and now they make really good device those can be compared with flagship devices made by some giants such has Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and others.
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We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the DevOps mode of software development is fast becoming one of the new big forces in the channel. Here’s a look at some of the key projects and products in the open source DevOps space, and an explanation of how each one will change the way organizations create and VARs integrate software.
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Fortunately, there are many great open source alternatives. Depending on exactly what your objective is, you may find one or another to more aptly fit your specific needs. Here are three to consider:
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I find it sad that most people don’t realize how many options there are for photography software on Linux. While most Linux users are aware of GIMP, their knowledge beyond that is sorely limited. Surprising to many is the fact that professional photography on Linux is such a serious business that there are even closed source proprietary programs that are developed and sold to run on Linux.
The ability to work with RAW files from a camera is a must for professional and amateur photographers alike. While this initially may seem like a very specific niche where the options would be limited, the open source philosophy has helped create many options. Darktable, Lightzone, Shotwell, RawTherapee, digiKam, Photivo, UFRaw, and Fotoxx are all open source options that a Linux user can choose from.
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The Fiorano Open Source ESB is available at:
http://www.fiorano.com/products/open-source-esb/fiorano-esb/
https://github.com/FioranoSoftware/FioranoESB
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Events
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AGL.automotiveITThe Linux Foundation, which promotes the general adoption of the open-source operating system, will host the Automotive Linux Summit in Tokyo July 13-14.
The conference will bring together a range of automotive engineers, Linux experts, business executives and open-source licensing and compliance specialists.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With Firefox 47 having been released, attention is now turning to Firefox 48 with what’s said to be the largest change ever shipped in Firefox.
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SaaS/Back End
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According to Alan Gates, co-founder of Hortonworks and ODPi member, that’s the issue the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi) is here to solve: create a single test specification that works across all Hadoop distributions so developers can get back to creating innovative applications and end users can get back to making money, or curing cancer, or sending people into space.
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Earlier this year, Databricks came out with the beta release of Databricks Community Edition, a free version of its cloud-based Spark platform. Since then, Spark has been commanding everyone’s attention, and now Databricks, which is the company founded by the team that created Apache Spark, has announced the General Availability of Databricks Community Edition (DCE), a free version of the just-in-time data platform built on top of Apache Spark, at Spark Summit 2016.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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In a quest for productivity, developers may opt for APIs over source code. The convenience of the cloud could trump the freedom of choice that comes with open source.
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Funding
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Network virtualization specialist Midokura today announced it has raised a $20 million Series B round with participation from Japanese fintech company Simplex and existing investors like Allen Miner and the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan. With this round, Midokura’s total funding has now hit $44 million.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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In a growing climate of “publish or perish” for university faculty members, forfeiting a publishing opportunity is a unique and strong stance in any discipline. Add that to the recent news of shrinking opportunities for faculty positions in liberal arts disciplines, and Jhangiani’s position seems even bolder.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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If like me you are lacking green fingers but would like to be able to grow your own vegetables you may be interested in a new open source CNC farming robot that has been created using Arduino hardware and awesome programming, called FarmBot.
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Hardware
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According to reports, AMD’s Zen processors have been delayed until the start of the next year and it’s also affecting Intel’s Kabylake launch.
While we were looking for AMD’s much anticipated Zen processors were expected to launch by the end of Q3 according to information from AMD just recently, now it’s believed that Zen might not be shipping until January 2017.
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Security
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Calgary officials agreed to pay the ransom but it will take some time for the encryption keys to be used on all of the university’s infected machines, of which there are over 100. The process is time-consuming and it is not yet known if the keys will even work.
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A chain of hospitals in Washington, D.C., was hit in March, while a Los Angeles medical centre shelled out $17,000 earlier this year to hackers following a ransomware attack.
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Obviously many use That Other OS for valid purposes but few would do so if this incident was on their radar. There are hundreds of such malwares. How many times will the university pay up for permission to use the hardware they own? They’ve already likely paid Intel double the value for their chips, M$, even more for permission to use Intel’s chips and now a steady stream of cyber-criminals.
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I’ll be discussing these topics, and how they apply to open source systems and to service providers further in my keynote (“Complexity: The enemy of Security”) at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin on June 22-23. See you in Berlin!
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A few weeks ago an unknown person walked into a mobile phone store, claimed to be me, asked to upgrade my mobile phones, and walked out with two brand new iPhones assigned to my telephone numbers. My phones immediately stopped receiving calls, and I was left with a large bill and the anxiety and fear of financial injury that spring from identity theft. This post describes my experiences as a victim of ID theft, explains the growing problem of phone account hijacking, and suggests ways consumers and mobile phone carriers can help combat these scams.
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In the wake of megabreaches at some of the Internet’s most-recognized destinations, don’t be surprised if you receive password reset requests from numerous companies that didn’t experience a breach: Some big name companies — including Facebook and Netflix — are in the habit of combing through huge data leak troves for credentials that match those of their customers and then forcing a password reset for those users.
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A new “heat map of the internet” has revealed the countries most vulnerable to hacking attacks, by scanning the entire internet for servers with their front doors wide open.
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Australia ranks fourth among the countries most vulnerable to hacking attacks, according to a study by penetration testing and information security form Rapid7.
Belgium tops the list, followed by Tajikistan and Samoa.
The company compiled what it calls a “heat map” of the Internet, looking for servers that had exposed ports that could be compromised.
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Canada’s University of Calgary paid almost $16,000 ($20,000 Canadian, ~£10,800) to recover crucial data that has been held hostage for more than a week by crypto ransomware attackers.
The ransom was disclosed on Wednesday morning in a statement issued by University of Calgary officials. It said university IT personnel had made progress in isolating the unnamed ransomware infection and restoring affected parts of the university network. It went on to warn that there’s no guarantee paying the controversial ransom will lead to the lost data being recovered.
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Defence/Aggression
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Ex-Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen became NATO secretary general in 2009 in exchange for a secret deal with Turkey and the United States to close the Kurdish Roj TV satellite broadcaster operating in Denmark, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday.
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The ban, implemented in January, prohibits the private, person-to-person sales of guns, but allows gun clubs and licensed dealers to continue to operate Facebook and Instagram accounts. As Vocativ reported in February, the ban didn’t stop the online sale of guns, it just moved several online firearm marketplaces to other social media websites. Now, it appears private marketplaces on Facebook are still flourishing and in many cases do not appear to be adhering to the social network’s gun policy.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday vowed a “decisive” response to Wednesday’s deadly terror attack in Tel Aviv, and said Israel’s security services would track down any who may have aided the shooters.
Netanyahu, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan visited the Sarona Market in central Tel Aviv, site of Wednesday night’s shooting attack, following an emergency briefing at IDF headquarters, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office.
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Contrary to Article 44 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, to which the UK and Russia are both party, the UK has engaged in extensive illegal harassment of a Russian naval submarine engaged in fully lawful transit of the Dover Strait.
A Russian naval vessel en route between the Baltic and Black Seas is fully and specifically entitled under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea Articles 37 and 38 to the right of passage through the strait. This is in addition to the general right of passage through the territorial sea at Article 17. The Russian navy was in full compliance with the provision at Article 20 that, while in territorial waters, the submarine must be on the surface and displaying its flag, and in compliance with Articles 29 to 32 on warships.
Not only does the Russian Navy have every right to sail through the Dover strait on passage, it has been exercising that right – along with many other navies – for over a hundred years. The decision of the British government now to employ military harassment and threat is not only illegal, it is a gross and entirely deliberate act of provocation designed to sour international relations and disturb the atmosphere of world peace.
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Newly released Cambridge Police Department records cast doubt on FBI claims about its agents’ activities in Cambridge in the critical hours before the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly shot and killed MIT police officer Sean Collier, carjacked another man, and engaged in a spectacular firefight with police officers in a quiet suburban residential neighborhood in Watertown. The new records provide additional backdrop to rumors among local law enforcement that the FBI has greatly misrepresented the truth about its knowledge of and relationship to the elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
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The civilian’s demand for the immediate, extrajudicial killing of the suspected gunman by officers echoes a similar call heard on another Tel Aviv street in March, when a police volunteer shot a Palestinian suspected of killing an American tourist, after he had already been wounded and immobilized.
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Night and day, U.S. “pilots” sit in cushioned chairs near Las Vegas, commanding drones on the other side of the planet, tracking and killing people, what retired Col. Ann Wright and other activists call a war crime, writes Dennis J Bernstein.
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For nearly a half century – since late in the Vietnam War – the Democrats have been the less warlike of the two parties, but that has flipped with the choice of war hawk Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.
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“A 2014 study, “Inventing Terrorists: the Lawfare of Preventive Prosecution” by Project Salam and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, found that almost every domestic terrorist plot from 2001 to 2010 was in some way cooked up or assisted (and eventually ‘busted’) by the FBI. The report analyzed about 400 domestic terror cases and found only that only four cases were initiated or driven without the encouragement of the bureau.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Notching another victory for the growing national anti-fracking movement, voters in Butte County, California on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a measure that bans the controversial oil and gas drilling process in their communities.
Measure E won with 71 percent of the vote, making Butte the fourth California county to pass such a measure, following Mendocino, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties, and adding to the growing list of states and municipalities across the nation that have come out against fracking.
Agriculture is the top industry in Butte County, which sits just north of Sacramento. Proponents of the measure argued that threatening the aquifers with toxic fracking chemicals would destroy the “lifeblood” of the local economy.
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Finance
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The Turnbull government is considering adding a controversial provision to the Japan-Australia free-trade agreement that would allow foreign corporations to sue the Australian government.
It has been negotiating with Japan’s government about the plan but no conclusion has been reached.
The provision is called an “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS).
ISDS provisions allow foreign corporations to sue the Australian government in an international tribunal if they think the government has introduced or changed laws that significantly hurt their interests.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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There are a mind-blowing 4.2 million voters in California registered NPP – and they share a love for sunshine and Bernie Sanders. According to the reliable Golden State poll, among NPP voters, Sen. Sanders whoops Sec. Hillary Clinton by a stunning 40 percentage points.
[...]
On the other team, registered Democrats prefer Clinton by a YUGE 30 points. NPP’s can vote in the Democratic primary, so, the California primary comes down to a fight between D’s and NPP’s.
And there’s the rub. In some counties like Los Angeles, it’s not easy for an NPP to claim their right vote in the Democratic primary – and in other counties, nearly impossible.
Example: In Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, if you don’t say the magic words, “I want a Democratic crossover ballot,” you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race. And ready for this, if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, “How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary, they are instructed to say that, “NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.” They are ordered not to breathe a word that the voter can get a “crossover” ballot that includes the presidential race.
I’m not kidding. This is from the official Election Officer Training Manual page 49:
“A No Party Preference voter will need to request a crossover ballot from the Roster Index Officer. (Do not offer them a crossover ballot if they do not ask).”
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A quiet burst of activity from the Sanders campaign seems to all but guarantee that Sanders will run as an independent this election cycle. All across the country Sanders’ core infrastructure of volunteers and paid staff are mobilizing to collect signatures and perform necessary paperwork to get him on the general election ballots in the states.
Officials highly placed within the Sanders campaign remain evasive and deny that the senator plans, at this time, to run as an independent. Bernie’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, has stated time and time again that they intend to go all the way to the convention and make the case that Sanders should be the Democratic nominee for the 2016 general election. But the Sanders campaign is actively engaging in activities, within the states, that have no other purpose besides putting Sanders in the position of being able to run as an independent candidate against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
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Moreover, the Internet giant Google is heavily integrated with the US establishment and is allying with the US exceptionalism campaign, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday.
“Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at personal level and at business level… Google which has increasing control over the distribution channels… is intensely allying itself US exceptionalism,” Assange added.
Speaking about about Hillary Clinton as presumptive presidential nominee from the US Democrat party Assange said that she “seemingly” wants to start wars, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday.
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A former technology adviser to Hillary Clinton is seeking to keep under wraps an immunity deal the aide reached with the Justice Department in its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.
A lawyer for Bryan Pagliano submitted a sealed motion and exhibits to U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan Tuesday afternoon, less than two hours before the 5 p.m. deadline Sullivan set for the filing of Pagliano’s immunity agreement.
A legal memorandum filed publicly Tuesday confirms for the first time that Pagliano reached such an immunity agreement, and lays out arguments for why he should still be able to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a Freedom of Information Act suit a conservative group, Judicial Watch, is pursuing over Clinton’s email set-up.
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Like all movements in the fascism family, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is based on an ethnonationalist fear that impure elements within our borders (Muslims, Mexicans, “welfare thugs” and other powerless people) will fatally corrode this great nation if they’re not purged. A roundup by the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that white nationalists are celebrating Trump as the savior for whom they’ve waited so long. Their hopes are captured in a popular neo-Nazi edit of the movie 300, which shows Trump rambling about globalism before kicking President Obama down a well shaft. The message: Emperor Trump will save white America (the one true America) from the hordes.
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Sharing the bittersweet aftermath of Clinton’s likely victory, Bernie supporters have flooded the hashtag #ThankYouBernie with heartfelt thanks for a remarkable campaign by a man who’s already spent 50 years fighting to give a voice to the voiceless. They’ve thanked him for ignoring the experts, taking on the Democratic establishment, and fighting like hell; for recognizing black and poor and Palestinian lives; for newly inspiring the young and not-so-young who’d years back gave up on being inspired, but who now vow to keep on fighting; for being humble, gracious, tireless despite the denial and condescension of most mainstream media; for “accepting misfits, radicals, rabble-rousers and rappers into the inner circle of your campaign”; for speaking the truth, doing what’s right, staying on track, giving a damn. One meme circulating: “Do no harm, but take no shit.” May he, and we, prevail.f
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I met a few of them in the town of Pibor last year. These battle-tested veterans had just completed two or three years of military service. They told me about the rigors of a soldier’s life, about toting AK-47s, about the circumstances that led them to take up arms. In the United States, not one of these soldiers would have met the age requirements to enlist in the Army. None were older than 16.
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If you were one of millions of Americans who went to the polls Tuesday night in the hope of putting Bernie Sanders in the White House, you were probably disappointed with the outcome of the most recent round of primaries. But supporters of Hillary Clinton were likely thrilled, and it seems that much of the mainstream media joined in on the revelry.
Amid the onslaught of news coverage surrounding Clinton’s victories, perhaps the media was simply trying to engage readers with gripping headlines. But in an election season that has already seen complaints of media bias against Sanders, several of Tuesday night’s top headlines seemed to bask in Sanders’ defeat.
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Stein also pushed back on the notion that introducing a viable third-party element into the presidential contest at this stage would represent another “spoiler” situation that would boost presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump’s chances of taking over the White House. In other words, although a ballot featuring Trump’s and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s names may induce déjà vu for many voters, this isn’t a repeat of the 2000 election, when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was branded a fatal distraction by Democratic contender Al Gore’s supporters.
“Let me just say that ‘spoiler’ presumes that democracy is bad and that choices are bad,” Stein said. “And actually what’s really different from 2000 is that voters are saying, ‘Screw the system. Throw it under the bus!’ And not only the system but the candidates … and people are clamoring for independent parties and independent candidates and more voices and more choices.”
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The desultory, divided, and demoralized state Democratic party held its annual convention over the past weekend in Green Bay, home of the Packers. Bernie Sanders had won the state handily, and the Superdelegates went right along with the Clinton team anyway. Why would they concern themselves with the popular vote, the mass rallies, and the contrast to Hillary’s appearance in small venues or (in Madison) by-invitation-only events?
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Censorship/Free Speech
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And this is why Facebook should get out of the morality business to every last degree possible. An article about a hilarious, but innocent, educational illustration is being flagged, users are being hassled about their other photos on the site, and some folks are even getting banned. Because? Well, because it appears that Facebook moderators have the same perverse baseline psyche as the rest of us, resulting in an image of a man and a horse being compared physiologically becoming suspected horse-man-porn. And the article pointing out what it actually is is the one that got flagged. That’s as much of a failure of this sort of thing as we could hope for.
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Another day, another factory farm with disgusting conditions and inhumane treatment. On Tuesday, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released details on an undercover investigation of a factory egg farm in Maine where dead chickens were left to rot until they mummified, and 4 million birds were each kept in cages smaller in area than a sheet of paper.
But in some parts of the country, the agricultural sector is successfully campaigning for laws that would make it illegal to publicly expose these kind of conditions, and even snapping the photo at the top of this post would be against the law.
Photos and videos show conditions on the egg farm that Paul Shapiro, HSUS’s vice president of farm animal protection, called “hideously cruel and inhumane.” Chickens are shown living in cramped cages, sometimes injured and caught on rusty wire and unable to reach food or water, and sometimes surrounded by excrement, dead birds, or poisoned rodents.
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THE South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has responded to criticism that its banning of reading newspaper headlines on-air is a form of censorship.
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After taking action against people using VPNs and proxies, Netflix is engaged in enhanced efforts to stop users accessing geo-blocked content. According to several reports, Netflix is now blocking users who use IPv4 to IPv6 tunnel brokers, even when doing so legitimately.
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The state media and internet watchdog Roskomnadzor has put the popular international news site Vice.com on the list of banned internet resources after a court in Siberia recognized one of the outlet’s articles as propaganda of shoplifting.
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Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor has blacklisted an online Vice Magazine article from November 2012 on grounds that it “promotes shoplifting.”
Roskomnadzor announced the move on their page on Russian social media site VKontakte, citing a court decision from the Siberian city of Tobolsk in December 2015. The court ruled that the article contained information that encouraged readers to engage in theft.
The article is now listed in the Roskomnadzor’s registry of websites and pages which are illegal to distribute in Russia. In the social media post, the organization urged any witnesses to such illegal distribution to contact law enforcement authorities.
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Copyright as censorship is one thing. Copyright as blundering, drunken bull in the DMCA china shop is another. We’ve seen this before: sloppy algorithms generating DMCA notices targeting not only possibly infringing content, but also the rights holders’ own websites, listings as IMDb, critics’ reviews — basically anything that might have the copyrighted content’s name in the URL.
Now, there’s this, uncovered by TorrentFreak: some thing calling itself “Copyright UNIVERSAL” (but not apparently related at all to Universal Pictures) has issued a string of colossal failures in DMCA notice form.
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SABC chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng has again jumped to the defence of the embattled public broadcaster’s editorial policy, saying that their decisions to halt the use of protest footage and can long-running SAfm programme The Editors is not tantamount to censorship.
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Shahid Kapur said: “If the youth don’t have the right to know that drugs are bad, it is a clear assault on freedom of expression.”
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“I hope we can devise a system where there is certification rather than censorship,” he said.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In our piece on NSA’s response to requests for records of Edward Snowden’s complaints, Jason Leopold and I reported that a senior NSA official apologized to Admiral Mike Rogers for providing insufficient context about Snowden’s contacts with oversight entities before Snowden’s email to OGC got released on May 29, 2014. (See PDF 6 for the email and response as they got publicly released.) More importantly, we reported that the apology — written after several days of fact-checking — included at least one clear error. After we pointed that out to the intelligence community and asked questions for clarification, the NSA significantly moved the goalposts on its claims about whether Snowden had raised concerns, denying that Snowden had talked to the top three NSA officials rather than lower level ones. Here’s why I think that’s significant.
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The U.K. House of Commons on Tuesday passed a controversial bill giving spy agencies the power to engage in bulk surveillance and computer hacking.
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This isn’t necessarily a huge surprise, but the UK’s House of Commons overwhelmingly voted in support of the Snooper’s Charter, officially known as the Investigatory Powers Bill. As we’ve discussed, this is a dangerous bill that will give the UK government significantly more surveillance powers (or, in many cases, will “authorize” things that the UK government has already been doing on dubious legal authority), with little to no real oversight. And despite people being upset about it, it still was approved by a vote of 444 to 69. And, yes, the current version of the bill still asks for backdoors to encryption, but leaves a vague exemption if a company claims that it would not be feasible or would be too expensive. That’s better than the alternative, but it’s still a step in the wrong direction. The bill still needs to be considered by the House of Lords, but it’s disappointing that the House of Commons seemed so willing to cave to demands for more surveillance powers.
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The National Crime Agency gave a briefing to press yesterday about how it believed investigatory powers are necessary for the organisation to perform its role, and how it would like internet communication information to be displayed.
Speaking to the press at a briefing yesterday, the same day the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill – or Snooper’s Charter – continued its journey into UK law, the National Crime Agency (NCA) laid out how it wants the internet connection records (ICR) of suspects it’s investigating to look, should the bill pass.
The NCA is responsible for investigating organised crime like human, weapon and drug trafficking; cyber crime; economic crime and plays an increasingly important role in investigating terrorism.
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Like most online publishers, the New York Times is fighting an ongoing guerrilla war against ad blocking, a phenomenon that a recent study said could lead to more than $35 billion in losses for media companies by 2020. NYT chief executive Mark Thompson now says he is even considering what amounts to a nuclear option: Banning users with ad blockers completely.
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Google said that it will initiate on June 16 a gradual deprecation of SSLv3 and RC4 for Gmail IMAP/POP mail clients.
Both the crypto protocols cipher are notoriously unsafe and are being phased out in big chunks of the Internet. Google, for its part, had already announced in May that it would no longer support SSLv3 and RC4 connections for Gmail SMTP.
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For years, and in secret, UK law enforcement agencies have had access to metadata collected by the country’s powerful signals intelligence agency GCHQ.
The fact this power has only been revealed now raises serious questions around government transparency, especially while Home Secretary Theresa May and others are pushing a controversial surveillance law on the premise that law enforcement need greater visibility into criminals using the internet.
Through a program called MILKWHITE, revealed on Tuesday in Snowden documents published by The Intercept, the Metropolitan Police, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and more have been able to dig through GCHQ’s intercepts for things such as IP addresses.
According to The Intercept, MILKWHITE stretches all the way back to September 2009, and may include information on British calls, emails and browsing data. (It’s not totally clear what amount or exact type of data has been provided to law enforcement—The Intercept suggests it was collected by GCHQ’s tapping of undersea cables).
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However, the NSA maintained then and still maintains that it could find only one email message from Snowden that touched on the subject.
Snowden did much more than send a single email warning, Vice found.
He had an in-person interaction with one of the people who responded to his email, for example. The NSA, the administration and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., all made efforts to discredit him, the FOIA documents revealed.
After releasing the documents to Vice, the NSA posted them to its website, along with a reaffirmation of its original position.
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Over the weekend, VICE published a story entitled “Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal.” If you haven’t read it, don’t bother. By its incendiary headline, the story—the product of documents released as part of a FOIA lawsuit—would purport to be an outright validation of Edward Snowden’s claims that he repeatedly tried to raise surveillance concerns with NSA officials but was ignored. But as journalist Mike Sacks put it, the story is “thousands of words promising fire and there’s not even any smoke.”
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The full episode of VICE on HBO’s ‘State of Surveillance’ is available to stream for free on VICE News.
When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of massive government surveillance programs in 2013, he ignited a raging debate over digital privacy and security. That debate came to a head this year, when Apple refused an FBI court order to access the iPhone of alleged San Bernardino Terrorist Syed Farook. Meanwhile, journalists and activists are under increasing attack from foreign agents. To find out the government’s real capabilities, and whether any of us can truly protect our sensitive information, VICE founder Shane Smith heads to Moscow to meet the man who started the conversation, Edward Snowden.
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With the recent passing of the boxer considered by many to be “the greatest of all time,” the world has stopped to reflect upon his legacy outside of the ring. It was no secret that Ali was just as outspoken about his political and religious beliefs as he was about his opinions of his boxing opponents. At the height of his career, the man formerly known as Cassius Clay spoke out against U.S. War in Vietnam and became a conscientious objector to the draft.
Because of his actions that he took because of his commitment to his Islamic faith, the U.S. government jailed him for draft evasion. In response to requests for explanation of his actions, the world heavyweight champ said, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
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When Rep. Jason Chaffetz began asking the Secret Service about its string of high-profile failures, agents were quick to respond… with attempts to undermine the Congressman’s credibility. Eighteen minutes after the hearings started, Secret Service agents — dozens of them — began poring through his 2003 Secret Service application in hopes of finding a few skeletons in his previously-vetted closet.
Even Secret Service Assistant Director Ed Lowery got in on the illegal fun, suggesting via email that “some information [Chaffetz] finds embarrassing needs to get out.” Information did get out, but it had no effect on Chaffetz’s reputation. The only people embarassed were the Secret Service and DHS head Jeh Johnson, who was forced to apologize on its behalf.
Johnson’s press release, detailing the results of the DHS’s investigation of the incident, shows dozens were questioned about this violation of the Privacy Act. Better yet, it shows dozens were punished for their misconduct.
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A SUPPOSED independent reviewer for the Snoopers’ Charter worked at UK spy agency GCHQ for five years.
MPs have already voted in favour of a third reading of the Investigatory Powers Bill, by a margin of 444 to 69, despite a huge backlash from people and pressure groups who want to see the bill shredded and never spoken of again.
David Anderson QC, an independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has condemned the bill and has now started a new review.
“I will be asking whether the government has established a robust operational case for the bulk powers it says it needs, and examining whether similar results could have been reached by other, less intrusive, means,” he said.
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The investigation that led CIA Director David Petraeus to resign and ultimately plead guilty to a criminal charge of mishandling classified information also uncovered evidence that he discussed highly classified information with journalists, according to a court document obtained Tuesday by POLITICO.
Requesting a search warrant for Petraeus’ Arlington, Virginia home in 2013, an FBI agent told a federal magistrate the agency had two audio recordings in which the retired four-star Army general spoke with reporters about matters that authorities believed were “top secret.”
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“Collect it all,” they said. “You can’t find needles without haystacks,” they proclaimed. “The more you know,” they rainbowed. All well and good, except the NSA, GCHQ, et al. appear to have far more in common with the protagonists of “Hoarding: Buried Alive” than with effective, finely-tuned terrorism-fighting machines.
[...]
This isn’t just an MI5 problem. And it’s not just a bulk surveillance problem. GCHQ uses the same “data broker” — a program called PRESTON, run by the National Technical Assistance Center, which is supposed to act as a go-between for intelligence agencies in order to prevent the siloing of data. But it doesn’t work. It has prevented agencies from walling each other off, but the info firehose is still too much for agencies to handle — even with more-targeted surveillance.
Targeted collections fare little better than the bulk collections, in terms of needle location. The following chart shows how much data goes unutilized in cases where suspects are known and targeted with individualized warrants.
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We have already discussed BitTorrent’s new Project Maelstrom which has the potential to change the way we interact with the Internet. When BitTorrent first announced Project Maelstrom, somewhere back in December 2014, a bunch of open source developers started a project called ZeroNet — an open alternative of Project Maelstrom.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Yesterday we wrote about an already troubling attempt by Senator John Cornyn to attach a dangerous amendment to the Senate’s ECPA reform bill that would massively expand what kinds of electronic communications the FBI has access to (as we noted, the FBI already pretends it has access to this very info, so really this law would be papering over the FBI’s illegal collection of this info). But there’s another amendment, put forth by Senator Jeff Sessions, that is just as, if not more, troubling. It’s basically creating a massive loophole in the 4th Amendment, saying that any and all basic oversight can be tossed out the second the FBI declares the situation to be an “emergency.”
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We just wrote about the big social media companies agreeing to quickly take down content for “hate speech” in the EU, and warned about how problematic this was. The definition of “hate speech” matters quite a bit, and we’ve pointed out in the past how “hate speech” laws frequently morph into a tool for government censorship. So perhaps it should be no surprise at all that just around the same time that Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft agreed to start censoring “hate speech” in the EU, we get another story from the Associated Press about how Russia is using its own hate speech laws to imprison dozens of critics who mocked the government on social media.
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Suppose someone is accused of rape, or some other horrifying crime. If the accusation is true then the perpetrator should go to jail. If the accusation is false then the source of this false accusation should pay for this slander. Clearly someone has broken the law.
A lynch mob forms to punish the alleged rapist by whatever means possible. A second lynch mob forms to punish the accuser, the alleged slanderer, again by whatever means possible. These mobs are full of angry people who want to be judges and juries and executioners. The members of the first lynch mob dismiss the possibility that the accusation is false. The members of the second lynch mob dismiss the possibility that the accusation is true.
Evidently many of these people are wrong: accidentally or maliciously deceived. At the same time all of these people are convinced that they know who deserves punishment.
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In the past few days, a calculated and targeted attack has been launched to spread vicious and spurious allegations against me. Given the way these accusations have been handled, I had little choice but to resign from my position as an advocate at the Tor Project and devote my full attention to completing my doctoral work on cryptography at the Technical University of Eindhoven.
Vague rumors and smear campaigns against me are nothing new. As a longtime public advocate for free speech and a secure internet, there have been plenty of attempts to undermine my work over the years.
Now, however, these unsubstantiated and unfounded attacks have become so aggressive that I feel it’s necessary to set the record straight. Not only have I been the target of a fake website in my name that has falsely accused me of serious crimes, but I have also received death threats (including a Twitter handle entitled ‘TimeToDieJake’).
I think it’s extremely damaging to the community that these character-assassination tactics are being deployed, especially given their ugly history of being used against fellow members of the LGBT community. It pains me to watch the community to which I’ve dedicated so much of my life engage in such self-destructive behavior. Nonetheless, I am prepared to use legal channels, if necessary, to defend my reputation from these libelous accusations.
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In light of the allegations that have been made, Jacob Appelbaum is no longer a member of our outside volunteer technical advisory board. We hope that the serious accusations made against him, and his denial of them, are resolved as fairly and as expeditiously as possible.
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The accused, Jacob Appelbaum, is a friend of mine, and I was quite surprised of the accusations.
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As for the people being accused, we also need to understand that they could end up being innocent. We need to understand that they could also end up being guilty – but that they still have rights even if so. To a fair trial for instance. It’s important that we keep our heads cool and don’t fuel fires just because we want revenge. We should use that energy to support victims and to do what the tech community does best in other circumstances: rip up the old code and reimplement new code with the new experience you have. Let’s make a community version 2.0 – now for everyone and with exception handlers for the things we miss.
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British police are teaching Saudi Arabian officers skills that could lead to the torture and execution of pro-democracy activists, a charity has warned.
Personnel from the Arab kingdom’s interior ministry have been trained in detective work and high-tech forensics as a money-maker for the College of Policing, according to Reprieve, which has branded the programme “scandalous”.
The anti-death penalty campaigning charity said an internal document showed the long-running partnership had continued despite a brutal crackdown by the regime following the 2011 Arab Spring that led to the torture of dozens of young protesters who were sentenced to death.
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You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture.
That’s where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime.
Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
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A Pakistani mother has been arrested on suspicion of burning her 16-year-old daughter alive for marrying without family consent in the latest so-called “honour killing” to shock the country.
Perveen Bibi, tied her daughter, Zeenat, to a bed, doused her with fuel and then set fire to her in Lahore, police said.
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The best reporting on the depth of America’s dictatorship is probably that being done by Atlanta Georgia’s NBC-affiliated, Gannett-owned, TV Channel “11 Alive”, WXIA television, “The Investigators” series of local investigative news reports, which show, up close and at a cellularly detailed level, the way things actually work in today’s America. Although it’s only local, it displays what meets the legal standards of the US federal government in actually any state in the union; so, it exposes the character of the US government, such that what’s shown to be true here, meets America’s standard for ‘democracy’, or else the federal government isn’t enforcing federal laws against it (which is the same thing as its meeting the federal government’s standards).
The links to three of these local TV news reports will be provided, along with a summary of each of the videos; and then the broader context will be provided, which ties the local picture in with the national, and then the resulting international, picture. So, this will be like a zoom-lens view, starting with three selected close-ups, and then broadening the view to wide-angle, showing the context in terms of which what’s happening in that fine detail (those close-up views) makes sense.
The central video will be the second of the three, which deals with the impact that the national organization called ALEC plays in creating the entire situation in the US, and which ties the Georgia-state reality in with the reality of the US federal government.
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While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling in their final round in the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump is arguing that Clinton should be in prison for failing to safeguard state secrets while she was secretary of state, the same FBI that is diligently investigating her is quietly and perniciously seeking to cut more holes in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
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The treatment of America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants has been a political football…
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The Newseum — a private Washington, D.C.-based museum dedicated to exhibits and events about the free press — began the week on Monday by rededicating its Journalists Memorial, which honors reporters who died in the line of fire.
The next day, it hosted a discussion on the use of social media in war featuring a retired Israeli military official, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, who in 2012 justified the targeted killing of Palestinian journalists whose names appear on that memorial.
Leibovich, who now works as the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel office, used her time on stage to essentially reprise her role as a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), using slides and videos to show how the IDF is trying to rebut what she called a biased image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Western media and Palestinians.
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BuzzFeed has terminated a deal with the Republican National Committee to run political advertisements in the fall, the company’s CEO, Jonah Peretti, informed employees Monday morning.
In an email, Peretti cited Donald Trump’s rhetoric and campaign promises as the reason for the decision to terminate the buy, worth $1.3 million according to a source who spoke with Politico.
“Earlier today, BuzzFeed informed the RNC that we would not accept Trump for President ads and that we would be terminating our agreement with them,” Peretti said. “The Trump campaign is directly opposed to the freedoms of our employees in the United States and around the world and in some cases, such as his proposed ban on international travel for Muslims, would make it impossible for our employees to do their jobs.”
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An upcoming auction in Texas intends to sell over 100 Native American items — including ceremonial pipes that are deeply sacred to the Oglala Sioux and guns that were used in the Massacre at Wounded Knee — over the objections of tribes who say it’s disrespectful.
Attorneys for the Dallas-based Heritage Auctions say they can legally proceed with the sale. But the Oglala Sioux tribe intends to file an affidavit to prevent the sale of the ceremonial pipes.
“These are our items, these are our laws,” Trina Lone Hill, the historic preservation officer for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, told ThinkProgress.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Back in February the FCC voted to open up the captive cable set top box market to competition, potentially opening the door to better, cheaper hardware, but also putting an end to the $21 billion the cable industry makes annually in set top box rental fees. Shortly thereafter the cable industry responded by pushing an absolute torrent of misleading editorials in newspapers and in websites nationwide. Some of these editorials claim set top box competition will result in privacy, security, or piracy Armageddon. Most try to claim set top box competition is some kind of nefarious plan by Google to freeload on cable’s “amazing history of innovation.”
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Disappointed by the current state of the web, the World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee wishes to reinvent the web and make some amends. He feels that due to increased surveillance and barricades, the internet has deviated from its true purpose. “We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem,” Berners-Lee say pointing out the problem.
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Brexit
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A government website used by British citizens to register to vote spectacularly failed at a key moment on Tuesday night—50,000 potential voters scrambled to log in at the same time during a major debate on the upcoming EU referendum.
Brits had until midnight on June 7 to register to vote in the referendum. The government said that more than half a million people had added themselves to the electoral register on Tuesday. However, the number of people who attempted to access the site during the debate led to it falling over roughly an hour before the deadline for votes kicked in.
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During last night’s EU referendum debate on ITV, Farage said: “[The boss of Europol] said that the migrant policy – and by the way these are not refugees, they are mostly economic – over the last year, sparked by Angela Merkel last year, led to up to 5,000 jihadis coming to the European Union in the space of the last 15 months.”
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Nigel Farage was blasted by a TV audience member after he told a woman to ‘calm down a little bit’ during an intense debate on the EU referendum .
A woman grilled the UKIP leader about his views on the German sex attacks earlier this year.
She questioned him about his comments that remaining in the EU could lead to similar attacks in the UK.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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A High Court trade mark judgment suggests that a foreign trade mark registration entitles the owner to registration of that trade mark in Uganda, despite conflicting Ugandan registrations. The decision shines a spotlight on the Paris Convention, some unusual provisions of the Ugandan Trademarks Act, and the East African Community, as Chris Walters explains
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Copyrights
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California’s A.B. 2880 will give government agencies the power to put copyright restrictions on their work. That means state bureaucrats will be able to wrap their reports, research, e-mails, and even videos of public meetings in onerous legal restrictions, backed by federal lawsuits and six-figure penalties. The bill would change California from one of the most open state governments to one of the least open. EFF opposed the bill and explained its dangers to the State Assembly.
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- Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released
Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day