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01.15.16

Massive EPO Protests After Team Battistelli Fires Legitimate Critics and Staff Representatives (Even Those With Young Children)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Firing messengers/witnesses rather than the guilty party

Sepp Blatterstelli

Summary: Team Battistelli (or Blatterstelli as Florian Müller calls him) manages to carry on just firing those who speak about abuses at the top (Team Battistelli), rather than be sacked itself

THE THUGS who run the EPO (compared to famous criminals on television, including El Chapo Guzmán who has just been arrested) have done what we knew all along they were going to do. They fired staff representatives. This is coming from sociopaths whose regime allegedly led to a tenfold rise in the number of suicides. Today’s management is undoubtedly causing depression, harming the health/wellbeing of staff, so nervous breakdowns, suicides, etc. are inevitable. Journalists should definitely look into phone surveillance, keyloggers and hidden cameras inside the EPO (targeting visitors too, not just staff). What kind of a work atmosphere is this? How many more people need to die before change takes place? The EPO is rotten at the top and those at the top just try to get rid of those who say so, obviously in an effort to protect their own jobs. This isn’t FIFA. It’s a lot worse than FIFA. People are actually dead. But because this concerns patents (a concept not many people correctly grasp) rather than football there’s insufficient interest from the mainstream media.

“This isn’t FIFA. It’s a lot worse than FIFA. People are actually dead.”There’s a lot left to be said about what EPO management did today. It won’t fit a single article as it’s not some short/simple story and it’s not over yet. They hoped that firing staff would end it all, but we are going to prove them otherwise. Streisand Effect (silencing the messengers) means that the blowback will make the initial action (firing) less than worthwhile and more than inversely proportional in force. Many leaks are on their way now, so stay tuned.

As several important sites have not yet covered the news (Friday is a good opportunity to get bad news out of the day), we are going to rely more on anonymous voices. The short story is, the EPO’s management confirmed what seemed obvious all along. It can only do show/mock trials. To make matters worse, the EPO is trying to openly defend such mock trials. Welcome to Eponia. It’s inarguably worse than Putin’s Russia in terms of human rights.

“Welcome to Eponia. It’s inarguably worse than Putin’s Russia in terms of human rights.”SUEPO wrote this afternoon that “IPKAT reports on the outcome of the disciplinary procedures against three staff representatives/union officials.” Here is what Merpel wrote: “With a heavy heart, Merpel reports that she has just learned that Mr Battistelli, President of the EPO, has just fired the current chair of SUEPO, Elizabeth Hardon, and an ex-chairman, Ion Brumme. SUEPO Treasurer, Malika Weaver has been downgraded. The charges of which Merpel has been aware (see her post here) seemed tenuous to the point of being trumped up, and in all three cases the sanction imposed has been more than was recommended by the Disciplinary Committee: in the case of Elizabeth Hardon, there has been imposed a pension sanction not suggested by the Disciplinary Committee, in the case of Ion Brumme downgrading rather than firing was suggested, and in the case of Malika Weaver the Disciplinary Committee recommended suspension of career advancement, not downgrading.”

A lot of comments are being posted there right now. If someone could please send us the Battistelli-led communiqué (regarding the firing of people who ‘dared’ to highlight his abuse), that would be awesome. We already have a bunch of new documents relating to this. EPO whistleblowers are advised not to use something like GMail unless they do so over Tor. We never compromised any of our sources in nearly 10 years and we wish to keep it that way.

It should be noted that, based on our sources, the EPO fired staff ahead of the scheduled date (which makes the mock trial even more of a sham), probably in an effort to reduce the ability to strike back (late/early afternoon on a Friday is perfect timing).

“It should be noted that, based on our sources, the EPO fired staff ahead of the scheduled date (which makes the mock trial even more of a sham), probably in an effort to reduce the ability to strike back (late/early afternoon on a Friday is perfect timing).”Navigating through some comments in IP Kat, we found just one pro-EPO voice there (anonymous) and the rest are very angry. One person wrote: “A communiqué of the president has just been issued internally. In it, we are informed that “None of the [fired or suspended staff representatives] acknowledged their wrongdoings, nor did they express their intention not to repeat them”. They are guilty, and don’t even admit it. These people are incorrigible. What a nice piece of Stalinist propaganda.”

Yes, this follows a lot of what we saw before. There is no Rule of Law inside the EPO. To assume otherwise would be unwise.

Another person asked: “Is there any way to get rid of M. Battistelli? He is a shame for the whole patent community [...] a shame for EPO and a shame for the french people. We should start a “petition” asking for his firing from EPO. We’re in a democracy, aren’t we?(except EPO apparently)”

On Battistelli one person remarked: “Yes, I did like the President’s puff-piece. What a farce, and what an incorrigible liar he is. Very sad day for the Office, an Office for which I used to proud to work, but no longer. I’m just praying that my director doesn’t “volunteer” me to meet him for his latest propaganda effort.”

One person alluded to British officials, asking: “Mr Alty and Mr Denehey, when are you going to wake up and do something?”

I contacted John Alty and his colleagues regarding abuse from Battistelli and his EPO thugs against myself. These cowards didn’t even reply.

Another person asked: “Where was the voice of the delegates from the UK?” Here is the comment in its entirety:

It has been reported that German, French and Dutch delegates to the AC spoke up at the last meeting to express concern about the “social situation” and the EPO’s actions against SUEPO representatives. Where was the voice of the delegates from the UK? Why did they not also voice concern? They surely cannot claim to have been unaware of the serious grounds for concern.

As a Brit myself, I am truly ashamed of the apparent complicity of the UK’s delegation in allowing this to come to pass. Whilst no single delegation has the power to overrule the will of the majority, surely not even BB could withstand concerted opposition from delegates of all of the TOP4 countries.

Whilst the SUEPO representatives may or may not have been whiter than white, it is not hard to see that the charges against them would not have passed muster before any competent court. I find it particularly ironic that part of (if not the core of) the charges against them relied upon a reference to provisions of German national law. Not only was no one on the disciplinary committee competent to rule on points of German national law, but the SUEPO representatives were unable to rely upon the protections that the national law would offer them!

Quite frankly, I am disgusted that applicant’s money is being wasted on this whole sham – and that waste is made even worse by the fact that the President did not even follow the DC’s recommendations!

I predict that the absence of respect for democracy and the rule of law that is so evident from recent events at the EPO will have profoundly unpleasant consequences. However, my fear is that none of those consequences will touch those who are currently shielding behind the veil of immunity. Perhaps it is time for the AC to lift that immunity?

Here come the FIFA comparisons again. This one person wrote: “The Board to which the President reports needs to do something. The man is out of control. I suspect FIFA will be looking for a new leader soon, perhaps he can take on this role where he’ll do less damage to the reputation of the patent profession in Europe. In the meantime, examiners and applicants suffer.”

If the EPO’s management or Team Battistelli thinks it’ll shut up critics by firing representatives, then it’s very wrong. It opened a can of worms and left it open. “It appears that the reputation of the EPO, and the AC, is being dragged through the mud,” this one comment said. We urged people to contact their delegates and we have published contact details.

One critic who didn’t respond anonymously is George Brock-Nannestad, who had written very detailed reports about the EPO’s abuses. Today he wrote:

I had hoped that the Battistelli administration would have saved face by letting the charges fall.

I cannot understand how a French education can bring about such a scandalous approach to fair trial.

Shame on the petty public servants in the member states who have sat on their hands. Directors General, the lot, but with a moral stamina of worms.

In utter disgust,

Stefan Krempl, a Heise writer (Germany’s biggest online IT newspaper), wrote about the firings, but an English translation is needed (any volunteers would be widely thanked).

“In over a decade of writing about such matters never have I encountered thugs who can get away with this much.”Consider this comment which said: “We need a Europe-wide co-ordinated strategy to finally rid ourselves of this pernicious President, who is harming the EPO, its staff and european industry. I am eager to know what I can do in my Member State to help achieve this. One thing that strikes me is that, as I have read somewhere in a SUEPO publication, it may be possible to sue my government directly as complicit in denying me my rights, e.g., the right to be represented by a Union, the right to a fair and timely hearing, etc, along the lines of the successful Dutch case. If such cases were to be started in every Member State, then indeed our AC members might wake up.”

This is a reign of terror and as one comment put it: “Should explain that BB had demanded that every directorate sends 5 examiners to a presentation from BB to be broadcast through the office on Feb 4th in The Hague (one to follow in Munich). Questions may be allowed but who will dare ask if risking the sack??”

See the sort of hypocritical, ridiculous accusations EPO made against staff representatives. The mock trial against Ms Hardon shows that not even law- or rules-abiding staff can feel safe. Remember how the EPO twisted British defamation law in a failed bid to silence Techrights, having done similar things before. The EPO has a long history of misusing or misrepresenting laws to shoot down critics. These people are thugs. Let’s repeat that to ensure it sinks in. These people are thugs. In over a decade of writing about such matters never have I encountered thugs who can get away with this much.

“What kind of trap do people get themselves into when joining the EPO then?”“I am a mere external observer to these events,” wrote this one person, “but I would wager that this is going to backfire very badly on BB and his clique. SUEPO now has more of a cause than ever for disgruntled or fearful employees to rally around. The numbers attending the demonstrations and taking part in future strikes will surely only grow from this point onwards.

“Then again, perhaps this was BB’s plan all along. In his eyes, SUEPO will no longer be a negotiating partner in view of such demonstrations. Hey presto! An excuse to finally call off the “social dialogue” which the management is (allegedly) committed, despite all its actions and announcements so far having shown that commitment to be a total sham.”

Another new comment said: “Do the ServRegs (or anything else) prevent the now-fired staff members from speaking out? As they are no longer employees of the office, perhaps it is time for the full details of their side of the story to emerge. The EPO no longer has any power over them. Full disclosure of all the documentary evidence might jolt a few of the more complacent AC delegates into action.”

“The office pays their pensions,” one person added, “and i think can force more than a 20% penalty if it is so malign. And BB wants the right to veto future employment. His spite has not been fully tested i fear.”

What kind of trap do people get themselves into when joining the EPO then? There needs to be a warning label on this tin. One of the latest comments (so far) asks: “Can some french-speaking reader please inform the Mr. Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’ of what is going on here?”

A lot of this reporting from Merpel can be traced back to these two comments [1, 2] that said “Hardon also loses 20% of her pension. Staff protesting at 1230 (and in The Hague too apparently). Sad day.”

“Battistelli and his clique should serve to remind us that FIFA is peanuts or small potatoes compared to the EPO, but there is media blackout.”“Mrs Elisabeth Hardon has just been fired,” said the second comment. “Of the other two suspended staff representatives, one (with 3 children, one still a baby) has been fired, the other severely downgraded.”

Battistelli and his clique should serve to remind us that FIFA is peanuts or small potatoes compared to the EPO, but there is media blackout. This is, as one person put it, “a premiere in the world of international organisations under French “leadership”….”

There are many issues at the EPO other than staff crackdown. We’ll come back to some of the other issues some other day. Another EPO patent, for example, has just been granted to help guard monopoly on cancer treatment, based on a new press release [1, 2].

“Worth noting is the fact that the EPO is so abusive that not only does it fire staff but it also reduces pensions (which hard work literally earned).”These mock trials against employees are extremely worrying because if this is where Europe is going (with impunity), then Europe rapidly loses its moral high ground, e.g. over Russia. Worth noting is the fact that the EPO is so abusive that not only does it fire staff but it also reduces pensions (which hard work literally earned). They’re sort of stealing money after causing serious personal losses in terms like legal fees. Europe or China? It’s getting hard to guess… and watch where Battistelli travels to these days.

There was a protest today (unscheduled/spontaneous) at the EPO in Munich and elsewhere, with details to be published soon (next part hopefully). “European Patent Office Munich,” one person wrote, was to have “demo in front of the EPO, today, within 2h! Police spokesman confirms that there were 1.800 participants!”

2 hours is a very good response time. That’s very spontaneous. It is a short timeframe for as many as 1,800 examiners/participants (that’s about half of them) to organise in the face of this kind of alarming news [1, 2].

The EPO has said nothing about this publicly. The EPO’s Twitter account invites people to ask questions today, so I actually asked them: “why did Battistelli fire his critics earlier today?” The EPO’s management never speaks to me, except via aggressive lawyers. While ~2000 EPO staff go to protest against the Office (which they figuratively vomit on) the latest kind of PR campaign starts. Is this part of the FTI Consulting deal? Shame on the EPO. This is far from over. Battistelli is just making himself more enemies. █

¿Porqué el Systema Político de los Estados Unidos inclinado hacia las CORPORACIONES NO Ayudara a Resolver el Caos de Patentes

Posted in America, Patents at 7:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado in America, Patents at 9:21 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Donde el dinero manda, las CORPORACIONES y sus DUEÑOS casi siempre consiguen sus deseos a expensas del público

Money envelope

Sumario: Comentario el el sistema de patentes de los Estados Unidos y por que nunca se ha saneado a sí mismo, ni será capaz de hacerlo si como ahora grandes corporaciones DOMINAN a las figuras políticas.

ANTES que nos enfoquemos en la OEP, habíamos estado escribiendo literalmente miles de artículos acerca de la Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos (USPTO), la que está completamente disfuncional, INJUSTA, y DETRIMENTAL al progreso humano.

IP watch, un sitio mayormente crítico del los existentes sistemas o estructuras, reciéntemente ha dicho que ¨Más de 50 miembros del Congreso de los Estados Unidos hoy envíaron una carta urgiendo al Departamente de Salud y Servicios Humanos (HHS) así como al Instituto Nacional de Salud (NIH) a ejercer su autoridad legal para exigir patentes medicas que han surgido de projectos de investigación médica financiados por el gobierno sean razonablemente y con términos posibles para uso público.

“Ayuda mostrar que las patentes frecuentemente tienen que ver con el PROTECCIONISMO que con innovación o servicio público. Es todo acerca de las CORPORACIONES, no el pueblo.”¨La letra [pdf], nacida en una creciente preocupacion del público por la alza de precios de medicinas prescribidas, discuten que la falla de usare esta medida nos lleva a imaginarnos que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos financia projectos con dinero de los contribuyentes que permiten ganancias sobre los pacientes llenos de dificultades y sus familias en vez de conseguir suficiente ganancia para investigación futura y los ingresos de los investigadores mismos.¨

Es fácil notar los problemas inherentes aquí, viendo lo absurdo de otorgar un monopolio de patentes, un monopolio obligado por el gobierno, derivado del dinero de los contribuyentes la cual el gobierno ordena ser dada. Ayuda mostrar que las patentes frecuentemente tienen que ver con el PROTECCIONISMO que con innovación o servicio público. Es todo acerca de las CORPORACIONES, no el pueblo.

Un nuevo artículo de centros de información de los banqueros alude al caso del Banco CLS, que es más conocido por el nombre del demandante, Alice. He aquí lo que dice acerca de las patentes de software:

Un caso prominente en esta área fue la decisión de 2014 acerca de Alice Corp. vs el CLS Bank, en la que la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos juzgo que patentes de software relacionadas a pagos de seguridades son unpatentables, ya que los reclamos de patentes fuerón fundados en ideas abstractas.

¨Pienso que hay un movimiento en las cortes y el Congreso para restringir el alcanze de la patentibiildad del software,¨ dijo Knight.

Si, bueno hace tiempo hubo un saludable debate acerca de que las patentes de software deberían ser abolidas. Aquellos días están lejanos después que grandes corporaciones secuestraron los debates y los distorsionaron en debates acerca de trolls de patentes (significando pequeñas entidades (PYMEs) quienes las usan, contra corporaciones grandes). Toda esta ¨reforma¨ (para las largas corporaciones) virtualmente se han desvanecido (de las noticias y la política) después de las vacaciones de verano. Todo quedo aplastado y perdió su impulso. Esto es política. Est totalmente una locura cuando esta OBSTRUIDA por ¨PATRONES¨, ¨DONANTES¨ etc.

“…hace tiempo hubo un saludable debate acerca de que las patentes de software deberían ser abolidas.”Florian Müller dice a IP trackeador de Trolles (Steph): ¨Estoy de acuerdo que el focus en trolss es una justificación pobre para la reforma. Los trolls son simplemente un simptoma del problema.¨ El también pregunta ¨¿Así que también sientes que los promotores de reforma de patentes han sido muy tímidos hasta ahora en su formulación del problema y sus propuestas?¨

Esto fue después de que escribió una larga y emocionada declamación acerca del rol de corrección política (o talvez en el sexto sentido que es dinero para contribuir a campañas) en la reluctancia a deshacernos de un sistema que PROMUEVE chantajeadores de patentes. Para citar la parte apolítica (no promoción del GOP):

Los promotores de reforma de patentes ha sido desilucionados termino trás termino, presidencia tras presidencia. Washington tiene a una reputacion de ¨haz nada¨, pero un mar de cambios se avistan en la esquina, y también pueda ayudar a crear un ambiente en el cual, finalmente los masivos y drámaticos problemas causados por un sistema de patentes quebrado pueda ser corregido más fuerte y con coraje que antes.

Correción política tiene terribles efectos por que evita que los políticos, medios de comunicación y el público en general discutan los asuntos reales sin disfrazar palabras, y cuando tu no puedes incluso hablar de los asuntos reales, estás muy lejos de identificar e implementar soluciones.

Corrección política es la causa raíz de muchos problemas no sólo en tales contextos como política de inmigracion o el problema de ciertas etnías índices de criminalidad.

Hay muchas areas en las cuales un dogma ha sido convertido en un axioma. Aunque soy un ambientalista (mi casa tiene un subterráneo bomba de agua caliente y usa agua subterránea para refrescar), Me gustaría estar allí para una discusión más abierta de las causas del calentamiento global. Sólo un ejemplo.

Corrección política es también un tremendo problema en el debate acerca de la reforma de patentes en los Estados Unidos. Organizaciones e individuos temem ser ¨anti-americanos¨ si simplemente dicen que el sistema de patentes de los Estados Unidos esta quebrado y NO SIRVE a los verdaderos innovadores.

En todos esos reuniones del congreso acerca de la reforma de patentes que he observado, cada uno y todo político repitió el MANTRA del systema de patentes de los Estados Unidos ´siendo´ clave para la innovación y la envidia del mundo, cuando la realidad es que es el motivo de risa de patentes y los profesionales industriales del resto del mundo. A través de los años he hablado a muchos abogados de patentes de Europa, Asia, e incluso los examinadores de patentes (aunque no a los que la OEP acusa de haber estado en contacto conmigo), acerca de la situación, y nadie cree que los jurados de los Estados Unidos están calificados para determinar infracciones e materias de validez, nadie ha mostrado desacuerdo con la calidad de las patentes otorgadas por la USPTO es generalmente más baja que de las patentes europeas.

Una reforma de patentes de impacto en los Estados Unidos no sucederá hasta que por lo menos un porcentaje de politicos y dueños de acciones participando en el debate comienzen a DECIR LA VERDAD, la que es que la mayoria de ciencias de la comunicación e informática patentes son INVALIDAMENTE otorgadas, que un alto porcentaje de todos las decisiones de reclamo son nulificadas a través de apelaciones, que incluso aquellas patentes que no son invalidas son ultimamente infringidas generalmente no protegen nada que justifique un MONOPOLIO DE VEINTE AÑOS, y que no hay objeto en incentivación a ser ¨el primero en someter¨ cuando la combinacion de derechos de autor, marcas y secretos de comercio, asi como el primer movimiento de ventaja en relativamente campos cambiantes son más que suficientes para proteger invertir en innovación. Proponentes de reformas deben poner enfásis en la realidad que ahora más que nunca patentes de los Estados Unidos no son otorgadas a compañías estadounidenses, simplemente como la mayoría de patentes europeas no pertenecen a compañías europeas. Debe ser dicho que la correlación entre patentes e innovación en determinado país es raramente causado por patentes promoviendo innovación, que las patentes sirve como substituto en vez de un incentivo para la innovación, y que estudios que unen patentes a innovación estan basados en lógica circular, considerando cada patente como innovación.

Menos es más. Cómo puede uno seriamente creer que inflación de patentes tiene algo que ver con mayor actividad innovadora? Creería alguién que a mayor cantidad de dinero impreso crea prosperidad? Proponentes de reformas deberían hablar acerca de como gradualmente disminuir el número de patentes por año a una fracción del rango presente.

El systema de patentes de los Estados Unidos noe es el único permitiendo patentes de software. Bajo el régimen (como el ¨tal como¨ salida de Brimelow) muchas compañias aplican y consiguen patentes de software en Europa. A los abogados de patentes les gusta por que significa MAYORES NEGOCIOS (entradas) para ellos. Mirando a sitios de abogados de patentes (IAM por ejemplo), encontramos reciénte evidencia que el sistema de patentes NO FUNCIONA como fué diseñado al principio (cuando leyes de patentes fueron concebidas como medios de incentivar a aquellos publicando sus propias invenciones). Como parte de la campaña de Xiaomi de amasar miles de patentes, está actualmente comprando patentes de Broadcom. Así que vemos de nuevo clara evidencia de patentes de hardware siendo pasadas de mano en mano, vendidas, cambiadas en terminos de propiedad/asignatura, sirviendo para mostrar que como recompensa para innovar NO FUNCIONA, no como la letra escrita. Son como ARMAS o HERRAMIENTAS de COERCIÓN.

“Una manera de enfrentar estos asuntos es informar al público, no a los políticos, quienes son facílmente INFLUENCIADOS POR EL DINERO DE LAS CORPORACIONES (sobórnos, donaciones, puertas giratorias) y son por lo tánto menos creíble de ser parte de la solución.”¨En una assignación fechada Octubre 23 del 2015 y archivada con el USPTO el 7 de Diciembre,¨ IAM escribió, ¨la compañía de conductores Broadcom transferió 19 patentes a una entidad llamada Xiaomi H.K.Ltd.¨

En noticias similares, ¨Qualcomm pidió a la Corte de los Estados Unidos forzar a Apple, Samsumg y otros a entregar documentos¨ y el ¨Indice de Patentes Públic declinó un 24.4% en el 2015¨.

El término ¨compañía licensiadora de patentes¨ puede ser visto como un géntil termino por TROLES DE PATENTES, como la connectada con Microsoft Acacia, que habitualmente ataca a Linux con patentes (chacal de Microsoft) De acuerdo con este reporte de ´IAM´ a Acacia no le está yendo bien. Para citar: ¨Terminó el año de continua caida de precios de acciones y la renunica de su gerente Mattew Vella. Su salida vino despues que la NPE estuvo en el mal sitio de una decisión dañina en el Distrito del Este de Texas cuando un jurado falló a favor de los acusados, incluyendo Alcate, Lucent, decreatando que la patente de Acacia era inválida y no infringida. Si aquel fallo hubiese sido favorable, es justo decir que Vella todavía tendría su trabajo.

Irrespetivamente de este trol de patentes y poniendo aparte el impacto de Alice en las patentes de sofware, el problema esta muy lejos de resolverse y algunas de las observaciones de Muller (no en la dirección política) se han ganado menciones de aprobación de criticos del systema de patentes, como Jamie Love. Una manera de enfrentar estos asuntos es informar al público, no a los políticos, quienes son facílmente INFLUENCIADOS POR EL DINERO DE LAS CORPORACIONES (sobórnos, donaciones, puertas giratorias) y son por lo tánto menos creíble de ser parte de la solución. █

01.14.16

Los Medios de Comunicación Dominados por las Grandes Corporaciones Deberían Dejar de Pretender que el Personal de Microsoft son Ahora FOSS y Linux ¨Analistas¨

Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux at 6:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Original/English

Publicado in FUD, GNU/Linux at 6:18 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sacando a la luz el aberrante y engañoso modelo de los presentes Medios de Comunicación

Linux InsiderSummario: Un sitio llamado Linux Insider, que mucha gente asume ser un sitio de noticias de Linux, esta RELLENO de material HÓSTIL a Linux proveniente de personas asalariadas de Microsoft

El ¨cancer¨ (en la Red) que es IDG (dominante cubridor de tecnología en muchos lenguajes y usualmente atacando a GNU/Linux mientras al mismo tiempo ACEPTANDO DINERO de Microsoft y Apple) está oficialmente a la venta por contrato, pero al mismo tiempo vemos que no sólo sus ¨periodistas¨ pero también sus otros empleados (ejemplo IDC) están produciendo propaganda hóstil a FOSS. Esto tiene que acabar. Un montón de gente todavía se queja acerca Gale Gruman (incluso en nuestros canales IRC) por sus últimos ATAQUES ENGAÑOSOS GRATITOUS contra GNU/Linux, pero el problema es mucho más amplio que esto y hemos estado escribiendo acerca de ello por cási una década.

“Linux Insider ¨Propaganda de Microsoft que ´parece´ noticias de Linux¨.”Richard Adhikari, quien por un número de años ha publicad muchas piezas anti-Linux (or anti-Android) como esta, usualmente alrededor de líneas como el tema de ¨seguridad¨, está hablando a Hilwa de Microsoft. Bueno, no es tán malo como hablar al trístemente célebre Enderle (lo que ECT hace frecuentemente, permitiéndole TIRAR BARRO A LOS COMPETIDORES DE MICROSOFT sin revelar sus lazos con Microsoft) (y también lo han hecho otros) Esta vez él ayuda a promover el marketing de Black Duck, una firma anti-FOSS que proviene de Microsoft. Para citar partes de esta pieza promocional de Adhikari, (PROMOVIENDO TEMOR A FOSS E INCREMENTAR las ventas de Black Duck):

¨Los containers han capturado la imaginación de los desarrolladores por que proveen convenientes paquetes para el desarrollo,¨ dijo Al Hilwa, un director de investigación en IDC.

¨Hemos estado esperándo una variedad de herramiéntas de desarrollo para agregar apoyo a containers, y en este contexto, tiene perfecto sentido ver líderes en scanning de código como Black Duck apoyar Docker containers,¨ dijo a LinuxInsider.

[...]

Herramientas de escáneo nos permite mayores seguras implementaciones, pero los desarrolladores todavía tienen que tomar acción, Hilwa de IDC dijo.

La tecnología de código scanning es análoga a software para scanning de virues, continuó.

¨Un repositorio de metadata para vulnerabilidades o firmas tiene que ser mantenida, y el código es scaneado basado en esto.¨ Hilwa said. ¨The role of the software para scanning es para mantener esta metadata actualizada.¨

¿Sabe Adhikari de dónde proviene Black Duck? ¿Chequeó de dónde Al Hilwa viene? Esto fué publicado en un sitio llamado Linux Insider, (A todos nuestros GNU/Linux usuarios en España y LatinoAmérica urgimos NO desperdiciar so dinero y tiempo en sus publicaciones), pero es anti-Linux huevada PROMOVIENDO A UNA FIRMA CONNECTADA A MICROSOFT, usando puntos hablantes de un ¨ANALISTA¨ conectado a Microsoft. Demuestra mucho lo MAL que están los medios de comunicacion cuyos dueños son grandes CORPORACIONES. Agradescamos que Jack Germain todavía escribe por Linux Insider y a diferencia de Adhikari él no escribe artículos atacándo a GNU/Linux. █

La Ultima disfrazada de ¨Abierto¨ de Microsoft Dá la FALSA Impresión de su Propietario Spyware/Malware es ¨Abierto¨ y Amigable a Linux

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 6:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Original/English

Publicado en Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:45 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Una nueva clase del caballo de Troya

Wooden idol

Sumario: Abraza, extiende y extingue (E.E.E.) tácticas que todavía siguen siendo usadas en un esfuerzo de poner el código proprietario de Microsoft (con puertas tráseras) y sus formatos propietarios (candado de Microsoft) dentro de la competencia.

Hace un año escribimos acerca de la adqusición de Revolution Analytics por parte de Microsoft. Microsoft está comprando partes de la academia (recuerdén Moodle), trayéndoles al campo proprietario. R estará MUERTO pronto. No será lo que solía ser. ABRAZA, EXTIENDE y EXTINGUE (E.E.E.) trabaja de esta manera, así que más tarde removerán los bits que no son de Microsot, incluyendo formatos/estándares neutrales.

Muchos del las redes amigables a Microsoft escribierón acerca E.E.E [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. ¿Qué bueno es ¨LIBRE y ABIERTO¨ (para citar a IDG cuando trabaja en un stack proprietari con puertas traseras? Esto es E.E.E. en acción realmente (ahora en fase uno, el ¨ABRAZA¨). Simplemente mira quien está escribiendo acerca de esto [1, 2, 3, 4]. Muchos FANS de Microsoft. El vociferoso fan de Microsoft Tim Anderson trató de añadirle un ángulo de Linux:

Microsoft a puesto al público el Sérvidor R – para análisis estadísticos usando el lenguaje R – basado en software de Revolution Analytics, una compañía comprada por el gigante en Abril de 2015

Lo que solía ser una distribucion de R ahora llamada ¨Microsoft R Abierta¨, que es destinada para Windows, SUSE Linux, y Red Hat Linux.

Lo que solía ser de FOSS y GNU/Linux ha sido efectivamente secuestrada por Microsoft. ¿Cuáles de los de arriba la gente piensa que Microsoft recomendará? Microsoft sigue ARRIMANDO SU CÓDIGO PROPRIETARIO en GNU/Linux no por que ayuda otras plataformas pero por que está TRATANDO DE DOMINAR OTRAS PLATAFORMAS, potencialmente DESTRUYÉNDOLAS a voluntad. Un artículo de Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols dice ¨Microsoft abre la JavaScript engine de su web browser Edge, planea modificarla para Linux¨, pero ¿GNU/Linux necesita esto? Esto es un esfuerzo para EXTINGUIR otras JavaScript engines que al presente son FOSS y no controladas por Microsoft. (Ese es su objetivo controlar todo en todo el mundo). Hemos escrito acerca de esto anteriormente y considerado ¨disfrazado de abierto¨ por que el todo permanece proprietario. Microsoft está jugando con nuestras percepciones. La misma jugada fué alabada por Microsoft Emil, sitios amigables to Microsoft, así como sitios que abrogan por Microsoft.

“Microsoft está jugando con nuestras percepciones.”Microfot no esta jugando amablemente aquí y el CODIGO NO ES SEGURO. Todavía otro serio hueco ha sido encontrado [1] en Vista 10, el que es promovido como ¨ABIERTO¨ (si ABIERTO a la NSA y cualquier agencia gubernamental que se los pida) usando a Chakra (no la GNU/Linux distribución, Microsft sólo está SECUESTRANDO nombres de otros projectos FOSS de nuevo, simplemente como VistA or OpenOffice). Microsoft Emil [2] y otros ahora están tratando de presionar al pueblo de adoptar el SYSTEMA OPERATIVO FAVORITO DE LA NSA (Vista 10) usando el alarmismo de ¨seguridad¨, así como Microsoft está abandonando sus propios browsers EXCEPTO el último y más HÓSTIL PARA LA PRIVACIDAD (propietario con disfraz de open por medio de ´Chakra´). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Windows 10 shattered Remote Desktop’s security defaults – so get patching

    Microsoft reckons no one is actively exploiting the security vulnerabilities addressed in this month’s patch bundle, but it’s only a matter of time before criminals reverse-engineer the updates and target them.

  2. Microsoft ends support for IE8, IE9, IE10, and Windows 8

    Microsoft today ended support for old versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE9, and IE10, as well as Windows 8. For the browsers, the company has also released a final patch (KB3123303) that includes the latest cumulative security updates and an “End of Life” upgrade notification.

Links 14/1/2016: Android Auto Adoption, SSH Hole

Posted in News Roundup at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Is Everywhere. Now There’s A Plan to Make It for Everyone

    Linux is everywhere these days. It runs our phones, the web servers that underpin everything from Facebook to Google, even our cars. That means there’s a bigger demand for people who know how to work with the operating system than ever before, and those jobs often pay good money.

  • The Airtop Is One Of The Coolest Linux-Friendly PCs Ever For Enthusiasts

    Our friends at CompuLab have come out out with their most interesting design yet: the Airtop. CompuLab told be about the Airtop a few days ago and I’ve been very excited and can’t wait to try one out soon. They describe it as, “Airtop is a small and silent desktop with very high performance. The key word is silent. Not ‘with a specially designed fan that is very quiet’. Airtop has no fans at all, yet it can dissipate 200W – enough to cool a Xeon CPU and a professional (or gaming) graphics card. Airtop cools itself by generating airflow using no moving parts, just the waste heat from the CPU and the GPU.” Yes, a Xeon-powered system with a discrete graphics card and can be all cooled without any fans?!?

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 3.12.52 LTS Has Numerous IPv6 Improvements, Lots of Updated Drivers

      After being released for download at the end of last week, the long-term supported Linux 3.12.52 kernel has been officially announced by its maintainer, Jiri Slaby, on January 11, 2016.

    • Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Vaishali Thakkar

      The Linux Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals during the past five years. In this series, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients with the hope of inspiring others.

      Vaishali Thakkar is a scholarship recipient in the Kernel Guru category. She lives in India and recently completed an Outreachy internship on project Coccinelle. The goal of her project was replacing out-of-date API uses and deprecated functions and macros in the Linux kernel with more modern equivalents. She began contributing to the Linux kernel almost a year ago, and her first contribution was running a Coccinelle semantic patch over staging directory files. She says the excitement of having that first patch accepted was amazing, and she hopes some day to have her dream job of “Linux Kernel Engineer.”

    • Participate in the 2016 ODL User Survey
    • Linux Update Improves Processor Support

      Linux 4.4 has dropped, and despite the usual humility of founder Linus Torvalds, its new features have won the kernel lots of accolades. “The changes since rc8 aren’t big,” wrote Torvalds in his release notes, “there’s about one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third ‘misc’ (mainly some core kernel and networking), but it’s all small.” What the update does include, however, is some new support for processors like Intel’s new Skylake family, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820, and a handful of improved graphics processor support. The update also includes a beta driver to improve graphics support for Raspberry Pi.

    • AMD Seattle Support In The Linux Kernel Still Getting Squared Away

      As expected, AMD today finally released the Opteron A1100 “Seattle” SoC but sadly the 96Boards HuskyBoard or other lower-cost A1100-powered products have yet to be announced.

    • F2FS & XFS File-Systems Updated For Linux 4.5

      The F2FS file-system pull request is quite exciting while the XFS churn for the Linux 4.5 merge window isn’t as meaty.

      With the XFS file-system updates for Linux 4.5 there is now better CRC validation during log recovery, log recovery fixes, DAX support fixes, an AGFL size calculation fix, code cleanups, project quota ENOSPC notification via netlink, and tracing/debug improvements. Details on the XFS changes for Linux 4.5 can be found via this pull request.

    • Reiser4 & ZFS Get Updated For The Linux 4.4 Kernel

      For those relying upon the out-of-tree ZFS or Reiser4 file-systems, they have each been updated now to work with this week’s release of the Linux 4.4 kernel.

      Last weekend ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.4 was released. ZOL v0.6.5.4 brought support for the Linux 4.4 kernel while continuing to support older kernel versions going all the way back to Linux 2.6.32. This ZFS On Linux update also brought a number of stability fixes, better support/stability for NFS-exported snapshots, and a variety of other fixes.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Scribus 1.4.6 Powerful Desktop Publishing Software Finally Supports SVG Blend Modes

      On January 13, 2016, the development team of the Scribus open source, free and cross-platform desktop publishing software was happy to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.6 for all supported operating systems.

    • PacketFence v5.6 released

      The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.6.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

    • Proprietary

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

    • Games

      • OUYA is blocking a Linux version of That Dragon, Cancer being on Steam

        They do say they should be able to do it eventually, and they should be able to get a DRM free Linux build on their website. One of our editors ‘flesk’ also got clarification that they should have a Linux build up on some DRM free stores too like GOG, Humble Store and possibly Itch.

        We shouldn’t go with pitchforks to OUYA, as the developers are as much to blame for either not reading their agreement properly, or simply not caring enough to argue their case.

        Either way, I’m personally quite annoyed by Linux gamers getting treated like this. With no word before release that this was happening, I think the developers need to learn to communicate a lot better. I personally messaged them to no reply, but I imagine they have been pretty busy to message everyone back. Still, an official note to backers would have been the right thing to do, not make people wait.

      • Medieval II: Total War Collection released for Linux & SteamOS

        The good thing is that this game is no way near as complicated as some of the others, and that keeps my simpleton brain very happy. The tutorial is quite short and to the point, and sets you up nice and easy for the battles to come.

      • Valve Releases Full Steam Link SDK and Reveals the Hardware Powering It

        Valve has just launched the complete Steam Link SDK, making way for developers and the community to build native apps for this piece of hardware.

        The idea behind the Steam Link is a really good one. Users can connect their gaming machines to the TV, via the network. This means that you don’t need a new and shiny Steam Machine if you already have a powerful computer at home. Valve wants to dominate the living room, but it doesn’t care how it’s going to achieve that.

      • Valve Puts Out The Steam Link SDK With OpenGL ES, Qt & SDL Support

        Valve has finally released the SDK for their Steam Link device that began shipping late last year for playing Steam games on any TV in a house as long as there is a computer running Steam on your network.

        Valve’s release of the Steam Links SDK has support for the OpenGL ES 2.0, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2.0 APIs. Apps can be loaded onto the Steam Link via copying them to a USB drive in a steamlink/apps folder and then power cycling the hardware. Valve also revealed there is SSH support for the Steam Link if wishing to debug any apps on the device.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kdenlive 15.12.1 released

        The latest release of Kdenlive brings many bugfixes to the 15.12.0 version. More than 20 issues were fixed and we encourage all users to upgrade. You can find more details about the fixed issues in our information page.

      • OpenDesktop.org Acquired By KDE-Loving Blue Systems
      • OwnCloud founder sells openDesktop.org

        As those in the Linux and open source communities know well, long before Apple’s App Store appeared on the scene, openDesktop.org offered applications, tools, wallpapers, sounds, icons, themes and other artwork and stuff for the Linux desktop.

        openDesktop.org was started ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, and yesterday I learned that he has sold the network of sites. I interviewed Frank over Google Hangouts about the sale of openDesktop.org; following is an edited version of that interview.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Slackware Family

      • PulseAudio comes to Slackware-current Beta

        Yup folks, thanks to the new bluetooth stack in slackware-current (brought to you by BlueZ 5.x) we have introduced a dependency on PulseAudio. Bluetooth audio no longer accepts ALSA as the output driver.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Oversold Conditions For Red Hat (RHT)

        Legendary investor Warren Buffett advises to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. One way we can try to measure the level of fear in a given stock is through a technical analysis indicator called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, which measures momentum on a scale of zero to 100. A stock is considered to be oversold if the RSI reading falls below 30.

        In trading on Thursday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) entered into oversold territory, hitting an RSI reading of 28.8, after changing hands as low as $74.48 per share. By comparison, the current RSI reading of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is 32.4. A bullish investor could look at RHT’s 28.8 RSI reading today as a sign that the recent heavy selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and begin to look for entry point opportunities on the buy side.

      • Recent Investment Analysts’ Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)
      • Red Hat ships Ansible 2.0 to boost support for hybrid cloud deployments with new automation capabilities
      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Stock Rating Reaffirmed by SunTrust

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reaffirmed by stock analysts at SunTrust in a report released on Monday, AnalystRatingsNetwork.com reports. They currently have a $73.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock. SunTrust’s price target would suggest a potential downside of 4.70% from the stock’s current price.

      • 74pc firms ‘use KPIs to measure mobile app success’

        Leading provider of open source solutions Red Hat’s mobile maturity survey, said that 85 per cent of organisations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine per cent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

      • Stock in Momentum: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • HPC research cluster get Red Hat OpenStack private cloud

        Petabyte-scale eMedLab consortium opts for private cloud on Red Hat Linux OpenStack with hybrid Cinder and IBM Spectrum Scale storage, and rejects object and cloud storage

      • Montrusco Bolton Investments Buys $8,180,000 in Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares

      • Fedora

        • Brian Proffitt: How do you Fedora?

          Brian has been involved with Linux for a long time. In the summer of 1999, he was asked to write a book about Sun StarOffice 5.1 for Linux. This was a challenge for Brian as he had never run Linux before. “I got a hold of a Caldera OpenLinux CD set and installed it on a friend’s spare PC.” He was hooked on Linux when he was able to play an in-memory game of Tetris while the operating system was being installed.

        • Future Fedora upgrades

          Most users are interested in Fedora upgrades. Each release brings improvements, and frequent releases are a hallmark of open source software. Releases of Fedora happen twice a year, and many users take advantage of improvements by upgrading to each new release. There are several methods to do this in Fedora, as outlined on the project wiki.

    • Debian Family

      • Ian Murdock In His Own Words: What Made Debian Such A Community Project

        As you may have heard, there was some tragic news a few weeks back, when the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, passed away under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Without more details, we didn’t have much to report on concerning his passing, but Gabriella Coleman put together this wonderful look at how Murdock shaped the Debian community, and why it became such a strong and lasting group and product.

      • Reproducible builds: week 37 in Stretch cycle

        David Bremner uploaded dh-elpa/0.0.18 which adds a –fix-autoload-date option (on by default) to take autoload dates from changelog.

        Lunar updated and sent the patch adding the generation of .buildinfo to dpkg.

      • Working as a paid LTS contributor

        Even though Freexian is located in France and requires you to provide invoice in EUR, there are no conditions on your nationality or country of residence. For contributors outside of the Euro zone, Freexian is using Transferwise to pay them with minimal currency conversion costs (Paypal is also possible if nothing else works).

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • CES 2016: Much ado about bots and drones

      CES 2016 reflected the hottest recent trends in gizmos and gadgetry: winged and wheeled drones and bots, with most running some form of embedded Linux.

      At last week’s CES show in Las Vegas, some of the most intriguing new gadgets were flying about within mesh fabric cages, crawling around robot pens, or ready to roll off their pedestals to cruise the Strip. And a growing number of these frenzied fiends run Linux.

    • Compact, rugged PC packs Xeon heat, keeps cool fanlessly

      Compulab’s compact, rugged “Airtop” PC uses 5th Gen Xeon and Core CPUs, supports four simultaneous displays, has dual GbE ports, and accepts PCIe GPU cards.

      Yokneam, Israel-based CompuLab is well known for its rugged Linux-friendly computer-on-modules (COMs) and single-board computers (SBCs), as well as for several lines of rugged, fanless Intel and AMD based mini-PCs, including its Fitlet-PC, Fit-PC, Intense PC, and uSVR systems, plus a Mint Box created in collaboration with the Linux Mint project. Now, the company has added a higher-end, 7.5 liter, fanless PC called “Airtop,” aimed at workers, gamers, and servers, and based on Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon and Core processors of the Broadwell variety, running at turbo clock rates up to 3.8GHz.

    • Zulu embedded inside the Internet of Things

      Java runtime solutions company Azul Systems has announced that Zulu Embedded is now available to download on the Wind River Marketplace.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Samsung to Launch Tizen Z3 in Russia and Other European Countries Early 2016

          According to a Digital Times Korean report, Samsung Electronics is still planning on expanding on the number of countries that the Samsung Z3 Tizen Smartphone will be offered in. We have previously reported on the Z3 being available in Russia for the business to business corporate and government customers, due to it attaining the Security Certification for Russian Government and Corporate use.

      • Android

        • Android Auto coming to 40 car models this year

          Google is positive about the road ahead for Android Auto, saying it will come to 40 car models and support more apps this year.

          Android Auto brings messaging, mapping, entertainment, media playback and other apps to cars, but via a smartphone. The apps run on an Android smartphone, which plugs into an in-car display via a USB port.

        • 5 ways IT leaders should prep for the mobile future

          As we move into the digital future, we’re experiencing a significant shift in what employees and customers expect from their mobile interactions. These days they expect a highly-engaging experience that’s immediate and always available. They want a responsive and attractive interface. And they want their mobile experience to be integrated into their work lives smoothly.

        • Smartphones Aren’t PC’s Only Nemesis

          There are lessons here for companies like Apple, Samsung and Google that have made hay from the smartphone boom. PCs were a great business until the world changed and once-successful companies had to scramble for new money-making ideas. Already some people are urging Apple to shift its business model to sell a collection of software, hardware and services, rather than trying to sell more and more iPhones every year. That is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do now with its Windows franchise. Let the present struggles in PCs be a guide to today’s tech winners: No empire is invincible forever, and new business models are inevitable.

        • Expect to See Large Companies Ramp Up Investment in Mobile Development for 2016

          Red Hat recently concluded a mobile development measurement survey which polled the views of IT decision makers from 200 private sector companies with at least 2,500 employees across the U.S. and Western Europe. The survey was completed in October 2015, and was carried out online.

        • Android N: Split screen, merged Chrome OS, RCS adoption and other expected features from Android 7.0

          Even as users remain excited about receiving the latest Android 6 Marshmallow updates on their smartphones and tablets, Google is gearing up for the launch of Android 7.0 or Android N version expected in the latter half of the year. With Google announcing the dates for the Google I/O address — from 18 to 20 May — it is one step closer to the latest Android OS as I/O is normally where the first look or the developer’s version is showcased. The full version will only be launched somewhere around September or October.

        • 5 Big Updates We Want From Android in 2016

          CEO Sundar Pichai took to Twitter this week to announce that Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, will be taking place in Mountain View on May 18-20. The only thing we know for certain is that we’ll get our first look at Android N, the mobile operating system’s next big update.

          Sure, part of the fun of I/O is hearing about all those far flung ideas, but before we get into autonomous cars, drone delivery, and other moonshots, here’s a modest, here-and-now wishlist for Android in 2016.

        • Add a to-do list to your notification shade on Android
        • Shopify brings its point-of-sale system to Android devices
        • Android Malware Hacks One-Time Codes
        • Android banking malware SlemBunk is part of a well-organized campaign
        • 2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone … Nah, we’re messing with you

          For the desktop Linux user, 2015 was a great year. There were major updates for nearly every single desktop available, launches of brand new desktops, even an impressive new distro that’s forging its own path.

          Popular software packages also saw impressive updates – like GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice to name just a few – and new applications continue to emerge seemingly everyday.

        • How to Put Android On Your Desktop with Remix OS

          Remix OS, which came out yesterday, is a killer Android variant that brings a slick desktop-style interface to Android. Now, you can install it on a USB stick and try it out on your computer.

          Android isn’t exactly built for a keyboard and mouse, but that hasn’t stopped some of us from trying. RemixOS, from developer Jide, wants to change that by adding a desktop, windowed apps, and more to Android. Here’s how to try out the very experimental alpha.

        • ZeroTurnaround Announces JRebel for Android 1.0

          ZeroTurnaround has announced the first stable release of JRebel for Android, the Android version of their popular plugin to modify running applications without having to redeploy or restart. JRebel for Android is available for Android Studio from the JetBrains plugin repository, and supports all phones and tablets running Android 4.0 or later. ZeroTurnaround offers a 21-day free trial, with prices beginning at $49/year.

        • Android launcher update adds auto-rotate, forces icon size consistency

          An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android’s home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.

          Google’s icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android’s app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer’s wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.

        • Living with the Pixel C: The best and worst of Android in one device
        • The only small-screened Android phone worth buying is coming to the US

          If you long for the days of 2011, when 5.3-inch smartphones were enormous outliers rather than the norm, Sony has some news that may interest you: its flagship Xperia Z5 smartphone and its smaller-but-still-high-end sibling the Xperia Z5 Compact are coming to the US on February 7, 2016.

          As usual, Sony’s small footprint in the US smartphone market means that it doesn’t have any distribution deals with major carriers. You won’t be able to buy these phones on an installment plan from AT&T or T-Mobile—you’ll have to get them at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, or another retailer, and you’ll pay the full unlocked price of $599.99 for the Z5 or $499.99 for the Z5 Compact. Both phones support GSM networks, so Verizon and Sprint customers need not apply.

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3 open source tools for supply chain management

    Keeping track of physical items, suppliers, customers, and all of the many moving parts associated with each can greatly benefit from, and in some cases be totally dependent on specialized software to help you manage these workflows. In this article, we’ll take a look at some free and open source software options for supply chain management, and some of the features of each.

  • Zimbra Collaboration Suite (Open Source Edition) review

    The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a Linux-based groupware system designed to provide your staff with unified email, calendar, contacts and basic file-sharing. Both commercial and open source versions are available. We’ve looked at the open source version as a cost-effective alternative to commercial server-based products such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems such as Google Apps for Work.

  • Events

    • How conference organizers can create better attendee experiences

      At SCaLE 14x, we will give a talk focused on helping speakers provide a more positive experience for their audiences. But there are many different facets of conference organizing that could use improvements, each facet with its own audience. In this article, I will focus on just one of those: How conference organizers can make the event more positive for the attendees.

    • FOSSASIA 2016
    • DevConf 2016 schedule is out!

      First is Jen Krieger talking about DevOps engineer. This one will hopefully open eyes of those engineers who haven’t realized that the world of individuals hacking on their cool tool is not how to get work done on evolving projects where communication and open collaboration is a key to success.

    • 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference Call for Microconferences

      The 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced its Call for Microconferences. LPC will be held in Santa Fe, NM, USA on November 2-4, co-located with the Kernel Summit. “A microconference is a collection of collaborative sessions focused on problems in a particular area of the Linux plumbing, which includes the kernel, libraries, utilities, UI, and so forth, but can also focus on cross-cutting concerns such as security, scaling, energy efficiency, or a particular use case. Good microconferences result in solutions to these problems and concerns, while the best microconferences result in patches that implement those solutions.”

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Why We Need FOSS Force

      FOSS Force is run by Christine Hall, a long-time journalist whose experience is not mainly in tech — or FOSS. Her lack of IT reporting experience in general is not as important, in the journalastic context, as a lack of FOSS reporting experience; Christine started using Linux in 2002 but didn’t start FOSS Force until 2010.

  • BSD

    • BSD Is Ready for SCALE 14X

      First things first: Were I to give an award for Best Presentation Title for SCALE 14X, it would clearly go to iX Systems’ Community Manager (and all-around BSD documentation queen) Dru Lavigne for “Doc Like an Egyptian” — she wins hands down, without question. Dru speaks at SCALE on Saturday, Jan. 23, at 3 p.m.

    • openbsd laptops

      OpenBSD 5.9 won’t be out for a little while, but it may be helpful to plan ahead, especially since there’s been some considerable progress on hardware support. Here are some notes about what works in general and a few particular models.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • AMD HSA Support Finally Appears Ready To Be Merged In GCC

      For months we have been covering the HSA patches for GCC and their hopes of getting the code merged for GCC 6. Feature development on GCC 6 is over, but there still is the possibility of release exceptions and this HSA support would be new functionality that can be optionally enabled.

    • Denemo Release 2.0.2 is imminent
    • From TPP to saving WiFi, the FSF fights for you

      Free software is built by a community of hackers and activists who care about freedom. But forces outside that community affect the work done within in it, for good or ill. While we at the FSF regularly deal with GNU General Public License (GPL) violators (who we always hope are just community members waiting for a proper introduction) , there is another force that can have a substantial effect on user freedom: governmental policy.

      Laws, regulations, and government actions can have a lasting impact on users. The GNU GPL is based in copyright but uses its power in a “copyleft” way to actually protect users from the negative impacts of copyright, patents, and proprietary license agreements. While we can sometimes turn a law on its head to make it work for users like this, other times we are forced to push back in order to guarantee their rights. In order to achieve our global mission of promoting computer user freedom and defending the rights of software users everywhere, we must often take action to petition and protest governing bodies and their regulations. For the Licensing and Compliance Lab this is particularly relevant to our work, as these rules can affect how the licenses published by the FSF protect users. 2015 was a year filled with such actions, and 2016 will see much of the same. While our work this past year often involved issues with the U.S. government, the scope of our work is global. As our worldwide actions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other international agreements demonstrate, bad laws in the U.S. have a tendency to spread around the globe. We work to educate the U.S public about problematic laws and regulations here, and we also work with supporters and partner organizations in countries around the world to achieve the same goals in their countries.

      We want to take a moment to look back on the work we’ve done on the licensing team pushing for policies that protect users, and fighting to stop laws and regulations that would harm them.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Economic Commons Sense

      Supply and demand. These two are always coupled in economics, the yin and yang of capitalism. Too much of one without enough of another disrupts industry. Every industry in the world is currently either on the brink of or in the midst of disruption. Why? Supply. Lots of supply. ‘Mountains’ of food being artificially held back and destroyed, plenty of clean, renewable energy giving oil firms a rush to sell off their reserves before the price of oil hits zero, and information that is in infinite supply as soon as it is created. Let me say that again:

    • Open Access/Content

      • Alternative education can help close IT skills gap

        Though a four-year college degree is still the gold standard, it won’t necessarily guarantee success, especially in the IT industry, where new technologies and, thus, new skillsets, are needed to help drive innovation and growth. MOOCs, bootcamps, nanodegrees and other alternative education options are critical both for IT workers and IT companies, both of whom need to quickly and cost-effectively add new technology skillsets.

      • New York Public Library Releases 180,000 Free Images

        The New York Public Library (NYPL) has released 180,000 copyright-free images into the public domain.

        The high-resolution collections were uploaded to the NYPL website on January 6 and can be viewed, downloaded and shared for free.

Leftovers

  • The Dark Side of David Bowie

    I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal for good reason. Age 15 is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way — or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t “Almost Famous” great?

  • Downtown Boys: “America’s Most Exciting Punk Band” Performs & Discusses Making Change Through Music

    Dubbed “America’s most exciting punk band” by Rolling Stone, Downtown Boys is a self-described “bilingual political dance sax punk party” from Providence, Rhode Island. They are known for their electric, politically charged performances. Downtown Boys joins us to perform four songs and discuss the political message behind tracks like “Wave of History.” The music video for that song takes viewers through history, from the theft of Native American land, to slavery and police brutality today.

  • How India Post And Customs Office Cheated fossBytes

    After the packages are handed over to Indian custom offices, things are left in God’s hands. Researching more, I found that staff at the Indian customs offices opens the packages arbitrarily to ‘verify’ the contents. Due the same issues related to customs and security, we have refused to accept multiple products for reviews in the past.

  • Humour

    • New North Korean Weapon Unleashed: Bad Video Editing

      We’ve had some fun with our North Korean friends around these parts in the past, mostly revolving around the Pyongyang regime’s adorable attempts to bolster its already nefarious reputation through its propaganda efforts. While the nation’s Orwellian policies are both stark and serious, and it certainly does have troubling weapons in its arsenal, so many of its threats have amounted to bad propaganda devised through the liberal use of video game footage, music and bad attempts at Photoshop. Well, the arms race doesn’t end, of course, which is why North Korea is pleased to display its latest weapon: bad attempts at video editing!

  • Hardware

    • Seagate Launches Its First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive

      The new HDD uses advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data centers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly.
      Seagate on Jan. 13 unveiled its highest-ever capacity enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled model that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Howard Dean, Now Employed by Health Care Lobby Firm, Opposes Bernie Sanders on Single-Payer

      Dean, a longtime supporter of single-payer, seemed to be changing his tune, a point made by host Chris Hayes during the segment.

      This evolution of Dean, known within many circles for his spirited critique of the Iraq War during the 2004 Democratic primary, comes as he has settled into a corporate lobbying career.

      Dean, though he rarely discloses the title during his media appearances, now serves as senior advisor to the law firm Dentons, where he works with the firm’s Public Policy and Regulation practice, a euphemism for Dentons’ lobbying team. Dean is not a lawyer, but neither is Newt Gingrich, who is among the growing list of former government officials and politicians that work in the Public Policy and Regulation practice of Dentons.

      The Dentons Public Policy and Regulation practice lobbies on behalf of a variety of corporate health care interests, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a powerful trade group for drugmakers like Pfizer and Merck.

    • ‘Denmark is no longer the country I loved’

      There are 800,000 employees in the public sector. The same number of people live off of the system. There are 1.2 million retirees. But there are only 1.6 million people in the private sector to pay for it all.

      Public job activation programmes cost somewhere between 15 and 30 billion kroner a year, but create no jobs.

      Doctors and nurses use up to half of their time recording and reporting information – that hardly gets used. In return, there are waiting lists for treatment and patients sleeping in the hallways.

      The City of Copenhagen has a communications staff of several hundred, while there are waiting lists for daycare institutions and a shortage of teachers.

    • EPA stayed silent on Flint’s tainted water

      The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s top Midwest official said her department knew as early as April about the lack of corrosion controls in Flint’s water supply — a situation that likely put residents at risk for lead contamination — but said her hands were tied in bringing the information to the public.

      Starting with inquiries made in February, the federal agency battled Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality behind the scenes for at least six months over whether Flint needed to use chemical treatments to keep lead lines and plumbing connections from leaching into drinking water. The EPA did not publicize its concern that Flint residents’ health was jeopardized by the state’s insistence that such controls were not required by law.

    • IAAF: Lord Coe backed despite damning report of athletics body

      Lord Coe is the right man to lead the crisis-hit IAAF according to the author of a report that claims “corruption was embedded” within the organisation.

      Coe, 59, became boss of the body that governs world athletics last August after eight years as a vice-president.

    • Lord Coe under intense pressure at IAAF after damning WADA doping report

      Lord Coe is facing renewed pressure on his position as IAAF president after a new report ruled that the IAAF Council and his right-hand man Nick Davies must have been aware of the scale of doping in athletics.

      The second report compiled by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency into the Russian doping scandal said the IAAF Council – which included Coe at the time – “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics”.

      It adds that Davies, who stepped aside from his position as IAAF chief of staff last month, was “well aware of Russian ‘skeletons’ in the cupboard”.

    • EPA Survey Shows $271 Billion Needed for Nation’s Wastewater Infrastructure

      The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today released a survey showing that $271 billion is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s wastewater infrastructure, including the pipes that carry wastewater to treatment plants, the technology that treats the water, and methods for managing stormwater runoff.

      The survey is a collaboration between EPA, states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other U.S. territories. To be included in the survey, projects must include a description and location of a water quality-related public health problem, a site-specific solution, and detailed information on project cost.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • Important SSH patch coming soon

      Subject: Important SSH patch coming soon
      Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 07:05:36 -0700
      To: misc@openbsd.org, tech@openbsd.org

      Important SSH patch coming soon. For now, every on all operating systems, please do the following:

      Add undocumented “UseRoaming no” to ssh_config or use “-oUseRoaming=no” to prevent upcoming #openssh client bug CVE-2016-0777. More later.

    • De Raadt: Important SSH patch coming soon
    • OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778
    • Pretty Nasty DHCP Vulnerabilty Closed in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

      Canonical has published details about a DHCP vulnerability that has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04.

    • Trend Micro: Internet scum grab Let’s Encrypt certs to shield malware

      It was inevitable. Trend Micro says it has spotted crooks abusing the free Let’s Encrypt certificate system to smuggle malware onto computers.

      The security biz’s fraud bod Joseph Chen noticed the caper on December 21. Folks in Japan visited a website that served up malware over encrypted HTTPS using a Let’s Encrypt-issued cert. The site used the Angler Exploit Kit to infect their machines with the software nasty, which is designed to raid their online bank accounts.

    • GM Asks Friendly Hackers to Report Its Cars’ Security Flaws

      As automotive cybersecurity has become an increasingly heated concern, security researchers and auto giants have been locked in an uneasy standoff. Now one Detroit mega-carmaker has taken a first baby step toward cooperating with friendly car hackers, asking for their help in identifying and fixing its vehicles’ security bugs.

    • The Mysterious Case of CVE-2016-0034: the hunt for a Microsoft Silverlight 0-day [Ed: back door?]

      Perhaps one of the most explosively discussed subjects of 2015 was the compromise and data dump of Hacking Team, the infamous Italian spyware company.

      For those who are not familiar with the subject, Hacking Team was founded in 2003 and specialized in selling spyware and surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies. On July 5, 2015, a large amount of data from the company was leaked to the Internet with a hacker known as “Phineas Fisher” claiming responsibility for the breach. Previously, “Phineas Fisher” did a similar attack against Gamma International, another company in the spyware/surveillance business.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hillary Clinton: A Proven Warmonger
    • Russia Is Preparing a Military Response to the Expansion of NATO

      In response to the creation of the mobile forces of NATO, Russia can dispatch heavy military equipment in a Western direction.

      The beginning of 2016 marked a new escalation in military tensions near the borders of Russia. Yesterday in Lithuania, as part of operation “Atlantic Resolve”, alongside the standard armaments, the main part of the American battalion of NATO troops from the 2nd cavalry regiment of the US army, stationed in Germany, arrived. The Northern Atlantic Alliance does not hide the fact that the military presence in the Baltic states will grow.

    • Financial collapse leads to war

      The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that’s about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that’s the pattern, isn’t it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn’t resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement?

    • From Sarajevo to Madaya: Starvation as Propaganda

      For the past two weeks, first the Western-backed Syrian “activists” and then the mainstream media reporting their every rumor as gospel truth, began spreading stories about the “Assad regime” deliberately starving some 40,000 civilians inside Madaya, a former resort town 25 miles northwest of Damascus. Sordid stories splashed across the front pages of the Anglophone press and social media, claiming the government in Damascus was deliberately withholding food from innocent civilians “for months.”

    • Their Headchoppers and Ours

      It may not be surprising to careful readers that the headchoppers described above are not the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a fiercely Wahhabi Sunni Muslim inspired nation, but rather the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As recently as News Years Day 2016 (Western Calendar) the Saudi Kingdom lopped off at least 47 heads in what was described as anti-terrorist punishments for the “guilty”, though public trials were not held in most instances. A prominent Saudi Shia cleric, who was never accused of any violent acts, was among the first to feel the blade, for angering the ruling Sunni royal family by complaining about discrimination against the large but minority Shia Saudi population, centered mostly in the eastern part of the country.

    • Woman Files Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Twitter For ‘Providing Material Support’ To ISIS

      Over the past year or so, there has been some people questioning if merely tweeting could be considered “material support for terrorism.” Taking things to another level altogether, Tamara Fields, whose husband (a government contractor for DynCorp International) was tragically killed in an ISIS strike late last year, has now sued Twitter for providing “material support” for ISIS.

      Let’s be clear on a few things: I can’t even imagine the horrors of having your loved ones killed that way. It is horrible and tragic, and the pain must be unfathomable to those who have not gone through it. But, at the same time, that’s not Twitter’s fault no matter how you look at it. The full lawsuit, filed in California by lawyers who should know better, makes a number of ridiculous assertions, including the idea that the rise of ISIS would have never happened without Twitter.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Sweden asks to question Assange, waits for Ecuador answer

      Swedish prosecutors have requested permission to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London over rape allegations and are waiting for a response, the Prosecution Authority said on Wednesday.

      “It is not possible to estimate when we will receive an answer,” the prosecution authority said in a statement. It said the request was submitted recently, but did not specify when.

      Questioning will be carried out by Chief District Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren and a police investigator.

    • Alexander Perepilichnyy: Surrey Police invoke secrecy laws to withhold documents relating to dead Russian whistleblower

      Police are to invoke secrecy laws to seek to withhold dozens of documents relating to the possible murder of a Russian whistleblower living in Britain, who may have been poisoned on Moscow’s orders, from the forthcoming inquest into his death.

      Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died outside his luxury home on a gated Surrey estate in November 2012 after he had given evidence to Swiss prosecutors implicating Russian officials and mafia figures in a $230m (£150m) tax fraud. His death was initially declared non-suspicious but traces of chemicals linked to a rare poison known to be used by Russian assassins were later found in his stomach.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • M56 chemical spill halts traffic in Greater Manchester

      A tanker crashed and shed part of its chemical load on the M56 in Greater Manchester, causing rush-hour delays.

    • We Shouldn’t Take Their Oil

      Donald Trump’s slippery slogan is delusional.

      [...]

      He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.

    • We Might Have Finally Seen Peak Coal

      Chinese coal use peaked back in 2013, as Climate Progress first reported in May. Since China was responsible for some 80 percent of the growth in global demand since 2000 — and since the United States and most of the industrialized world have also started cutting coal use — the key remaining question for the dirtiest fossil fuel was, “Will a handful of developing countries, particularly India, see enough growth in coal consumption to overcome that drop?”

    • What to make of COP21?

      Reflections on the Paris climate talks from members of the Corporate Watch collective.

    • Romanian village blocks Canadian firm from mining for gold

      “If this mine opens, Romania would lose both a historic monument unique for the gold it contains while the site would have turned into a moonscape,” he said.

      “This is an important step, we must now make sure this classification is respected,” said Eugen David, head of the Alburnus Maior Association which has been fighting the project for years.

      Gabriel Resources, which holds an 80% stake in the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, declined to comment on the move.

      Last July, the company filed a request for international arbitration to obtain compensation from Bucharest over the delays to the project.

      Initially in favour of the mine, Romania’s former leftwing government abruptly changed its position in 2013 following a wave of unprecedented protest across the country.

  • Finance

    • Winning the Fight for $15 in 2016

      Millions of low-paid Americans rang in 2016 with a raise, as a handful of state minimum wage increases went into effect on the first day of January.

      Many of those raises are a barely noticeable 15 or 20 cents an hour — little comfort to people struggling to make ends meet. But workers in the cities and states that voted for more robust wages last year saw much more significant gains.

    • “We will not treat you like Africa”

      Four specialists discuss the social and environmental impact and the perspectives of the partnership between China and Latin America in 2016.

    • From Google Payroll to Government and Back Again

      Joshua Wright, whose term as a Republican commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission ended in August, has joined the antitrust practice of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — the law firm that represented Google before the FTC.

      Being on Google’s payroll is nothing new for Wright. Before he joined the FTC, Google helped fund his academic research at George Mason University, where he will continue to teach while working for Wilson Sonsini. George Mason received $762,000 in donations directly from Google from 2011 to 2013.

    • World Bank Report: TPP Will Bring Negligible Economic Benefit To US, Canada And Australia

      Supporters of TPP generally insist it’s absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. That’s because there isn’t any: despite the impact that TPP’s measures will have on how the US and other countries do business, there are astonishingly few studies on whether it will indeed have a positive impact overall. Just over a year ago, we wrote about one of the rare attempts to model TPP, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, which came up with the following result for countries like the US and Australia…

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Requiem for a News Channel

      Al Jazeera America launched in the summer of 2013, a spin-off of the Doha-based channel’s English version to specifically target a United States audience. For the last decade, Al Jazeera had built what some might consider the one of the most coveted of journalistic reputations: It was considered anti-American and anti-Zionist in the US, while Arab governments saw its stories as pure Western propaganda. By the time of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera English became indispensable for anyone in the United States who wanted to know what was going on.

    • David Bowie, Media Critic

      In 1980, Bowie released Scary Monsters, after which every album he released was doomed to be described as his best since Scary Monsters. In the album opener “It’s No Game,” he alluded to the themes of charismatic dictatorship, martyrdom and the power of corporate media that obsessed him from the beginning of his career:

      Draw the blinds on yesterday,
      And it’s all so much scarier
      Put a bullet in my brain,
      And it makes all the papers

    • Richard Prince: ‘Media Critics Registered Admiration’ for Bowie

      Media blogger Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 1/11/16) quoted from Jim Naureckas’ review of David Bowie’s media criticism (1/11/16) in his roundup of reactions to Bowie’s death…

    • Clinton’s Lead Over Sanders Shrinking Nationwide: Poll

      New survey shows Clinton losing frontrunner status as Vermont senator gains among crucial voting blocs

    • Revealed: how Jeremy Corbyn has reshaped the Labour party

      Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.

    • The Corbyn Effect: Survey Shows Huge Support in Labour Party for Its Leader

      Jeremy Corbyn appears to be reshaping the U.K. Labour Party, with a survey showing “overwhelming support for him [and] a decisive shift to the left.”

      The Guardian “interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales,” and found that “almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Lords discusses identity cards
    • The Internet of Things that Talk About You Behind Your Back

      SilverPush is an Indian startup that’s trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the signals, and then use cookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer.

    • Institute of Directors warns against ‘Stasi-style’ surveillance of employees

      Employers should not routinely snoop on their employees communications at work, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that a company in Romania did not breach the privacy rights of an employee by monitoring their personal online communications, the Institute of Directors (IoD) has said.

      The ECHR ruled that a company in Romania didn’t breach the privacy rights of a worker after it monitored his Yahoo Messenger account. The man’s employer confronted him with 45 pages of messages that he had exchanged with his brother and fiancee using a work computer during work hours. He set up the Yahoo account at his employers’ request to talk to professional clients, according to the Financial Times.

    • Cisco kills hardcoded password bug in Wi-Fi access points

      Along with fixes for a number of older vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS and IOS XE software, the Cisco IOS Software Common Industrial Protocol, and the OpenSSL package incorporated in multiple company products, Cisco Systems has pushed out security updates that plug unauthorized access and default account/static password vulnerabilities in some of its offerings.

      The most serious of these are CVE-2015-6323, a bug in the Admin portal of devices running Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) software, which could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to an affected device and effect complete compromise of it; and CVE-2015-6314, a same type of vulnerability affecting devices running Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software.

    • Uber Scales Up Its Data Centers to Support Growth [Ed: not a good thing]

      The fast-growing ride-sharing company leased large chunks of “plug-n-play” wholesale space in three major markets during 2015, according to a new report from a data center real estate specialist. The burst of leasing comes just six months after Uber purchased a small data center from Microsoft, along with other assets that supported its mapping infrastructure.

    • Cyber: The War India Never Fought, But Lost

      As the year drew to a close, the cybersecurity industry was abuzz with a sensational disclosure whose geopolitical ramifications largely went ignored. With India so typically caught in the seasonal slumber, the global hacker community, which has never seen a dull day, tore into the networking hardware giant Juniper (its components power and protect the core of the Internet in many nations, facilitating the efficient routing of packets across networks).

    • National Cybersecurity Institute at Excelsior College hosts NSA Day of Cyber on January 28 [Ed: NSA recruiting kids]

      The National Cybersecurity Institute (NCI) at Excelsior College today announced a collaboration with the NSA Day of Cyber, a nationwide effort to raise awareness of cyber issues and encourage students to pursue STEM-related careers.

    • EFF Wants Cisco Held Responsible For Helping China Track, Torture Falun Gong Members

      Back in 2011 we noted how a group of Falun Gong members filed suit against Cisco in San Francisco, alleging that Cisco held some culpability for the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissidents, critics, and others. According to the lawsuit at the time, Cisco “competed aggressively” for the contracts to design China’s Golden Shield system, “with full knowledge that it was to be used for the suppression of the Falun Gong religion.” The full, amended complaint (pdf) accused Cisco CEO John Chambers and two other senior executives of working with the CCP to find, eavesdrop on and track Falun Gong members.

    • U.S. official sees more cyber attacks on industrial control systems
    • We keep too many hacks secret, says ex-NSA director

      In an interview with reporters this week, retired General Michael Hayden explained why he thinks companies and the government are ill-prepared to deal with cyberattacks: They both refuse to acknowledge hacks when they happen.

      “The government hideously over-classifies it,” Hayden said. “And the private sector, for fiduciary reasons, is reluctant to share it.”

    • Ex-NSA Chief Defends End-to-End Encryption. Isn’t It Surprising?

      NSA talking about the data privacy? Does not look absurd? But this is how it was. Now you might want to stop accusing NSA for violating the data privacy. Or maybe not.

    • Even the former boss of the NSA thinks encryption backdoors are a bad idea

      Debate is raging over tech companies’ use of encryption software to secure their users’ data – and the former head of the NSA isn’t on the side you might expect.

      Michael Hayden, who ran the secretive US spy agency between 1999 and 2005, told a panel on Tuesday that he doesn’t support efforts to force companies to include “backdoors” for law enforcement in their products.

    • US Intelligence director’s personal e-mail, phone hacked

      Someone going by the moniker “Cracka,” claiming to be with a group of “teenage hackers” called “Crackas With Attitude,” told Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchiarai that he had gained access to Clapper’s Verizon FiOS account and changed the settings for his phone service to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement. Cracka also claimed to have gained access to Clapper’s personal e-mail account and his wife’s Yahoo account.

      In October, Crackas With Attitude claimed responsibility for hacking CIA Director Brennan’s personal e-mail account and gaining access to a number of work-related documents he had sent through it—including his application for a security clearance and credentials. The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person’s arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records. The group published a spreadsheet of personal contact details for over 2,000 government officials. The Twitter account used to post the information was suspended shortly afterward.

    • ISIS Has Developed Its Own Secure Messaging App To Spread Terror

      The Islamic State is known to use messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp to communicate the messages to its followers. To avoid the surveillance of government agencies like FBI, ISIS has now developed its own messaging apps. These apps aren’t as sophisticated as WhatsApp or Telegram, but they have the advantage of being independent of any third-party organization that could be compromised by government agencies.

    • AT&T Says Its Voluntary Sharing of Customer Data Is Classified

      Back in October, I wondered whether companies would be able to claim they had chosen not to participate in CISA’s voluntary data sharing in their transparency reports. While CISA prohibits the involuntary disclosure of such participation, I don’t know that anything prohibits the voluntary disclosure, particularly of non-participation.

      A related question is playing out right now over a shareholder resolution filed by Arjuna Capital asking AT&T to reveal its voluntary sharing with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

      The resolution asks only for a report on sharing that is not legally mandated, and exempts any information that is legally protected.

    • White House Meets With Silicon Valley Execs to “Disrupt” ISIS Online

      This new strategy is based on the government’s firm belief that the real cause of radicalization is because some suburban kid reads a Tweet and then poof! skips Spring Break for jihad. The idea that the roots of radical actions lie deep and involve complex motivations, including being torqued off at bloodthirsty U.S. foreign policy, meh, let’s blame social media and that damn rock ‘n roll you kids like and use it all as a way to clamp down on political speech the government doesn’t like.

      [...]

      I especially love the bit in Item C about providing “metrics to help measure our efforts to counter radicalization to violence.” Exactly how does one gather metrics to prove a negative, i.e., how many people allegedly don’t join ISIS because of something they read online?

    • Big Brother Watch sign letter calling on the Home Secretary to protect encryption

      The Don’t Spy On Us coalition, which Big Brother Watch are a member of, have written to the Home Secretary calling for any plans to weaken encryption in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be scrapped.

      The indication that the draft Bill will require companies to hand over encrypted data have raised concerns amongst academics, industry experts and civil society groups. These proposals, it is believed, would undermine cyber-security in the UK, putting us at odds with a number of our allies, including the United States and the Netherlands, who have both declared their intentions to protect encryption.

    • Protecting the Choice to Speak Anonymously Is Key to Fighting Online Harassment

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Department of Education today to protect university students’ right to speak anonymously online, warning that curtailing anonymous speech as part of anti-harassment regulations would not only violate the Constitution but also jeopardize important on-campus activism.

      “Battling gender and racial harassment and threats on college campuses is vitally important,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “But some are calling for blanket bans on the use of platforms that allow anonymous comments, and that’s a counterproductive strategy. Online anonymity is crucial for students who fear retaliation for their political and social commentary. It helps many people avoid being targets of harassment in the first place.”

      EFF’s letter to the Department of Education comes after a number of groups pressed for new federal guidelines for fighting online harassment. EFF agrees with the majority of the recommendations, including ensuring prompt reporting and investigation of all reports of harassment, and disciplining and/or prosecuting perpetrators. However, preemptively removing access to anonymous online speech platforms violates all students’ First Amendment rights—threatening projects like the USG Girl Mafia at the University of Southern California, where students anonymously map locations of assault reports on campus. Anonymity was also essential for student activists at Guilford College in North Carolina, who used an online form to collect anonymous testimonials about racial violence from those who felt unsafe revealing their identities.

    • Investor to AT&T – give us a peek at your NSA data dealings

      An activist investor is pressing AT&T for more details about how it handles government data requests.

      Arjuna Capital said it will ask at the next shareholder meeting for investors to vote on a proposal [PDF] requiring AT&T to issue detailed reports of the company’s policy on providing customer information to the NSA in light of recent revelations of AT&T’s handover of information to the NSA.

      The Arujuna proposal calls on the company to provide shareholders with a one-time report detailing “to the fullest extent possible” its policies regarding NSA requests for user information.

    • Pentagon to Inquire Into NSA Monitoring of Snowden Copycats

      The Defense Department inspector general is initiating an investigation into measures by the National Security Agency to control computer users with access to sensitive information.

    • 12 NSA Patents That Prove the Future of National Security Will Be Bizarre

      Whether or not you care that the NSA has archived your personal information in a server farm somewhere and whether or not you live in America, the future of U.S. national security strategy will effect you. And that future will be governed to no small degree by the technologies employed by the NSA, which doubles as a skunkworks for out there monitoring projects and creates patents at an almost industrial pace.

    • GCHQ is More Than Likely Secretly Monitoring Our Financial and Medical Records
    • Ex-NSA chief defends end-to-end encryption, says ‘backdoors’ will make us less secure

      No one will ever accuse the National Security Agency of being champions of privacy. But General Michael Hayden, a former Director of the NSA, does see some value in preserving secure end-to-end encryption on the web without giving government agencies their own “backdoors” they can use to break it in the name of intelligence gathering. Per CNN, Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

    • Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road appeal focuses on corrupt agents

      Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht’s lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

      The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn’t do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

      As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt

      The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma’s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.

    • Perry County DA: Investigation into Penn Township shooting of 12-year-old continues

      A 12-year-old Penn Township girl died Monday morning after a bullet fired at her father by a constable during an eviction went through her father’s arm and hit her, state police said today.

      The bullet was fired at Donald Meyer, 57, by Constable Clarke Steele, 46, after Meyer confronted Steele at the door of the Meyers’ apartment with a rifle.

    • 12-year-old girl fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania

      A 12-year-old girl was fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania when an officer served an eviction warrant to her family.

      Ciara Meyer was accidentally killed in her home on Monday after Constable Clarke Steele fired a single shot at her father Donald Meyer, 57, who was allegedly armed with a rifle, Pennsylvania State Police said according to Penn Live.

      The bullet passed through Mr Meyer’s arm, striking Ciara, and the young girl was pronounced dead at the scene.

    • Rebekah Brooks: New claims that phone hacking was rife at The Sun under former editor

      Rebekah Brooks is facing a legal battle over new allegations that phone hacking was “endemic” when she was editor of The Sun, a court has heard.

      Lawyers for News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s UK print business, told a High Court hearing that a “new flank” of hacking claims had been opened against Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid.

    • Living the CES security farce

      Are you kidding me?

      I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics (CES) trade show in Las Vegas, and that question has been on my mind. The question doesn’t refer to any of the technologies vying to be the next big thing — although I do wonder how many Bluetooth controlled vibrators does one really need? No, what has me wondering is the big announcement ahead of CES about much tighter security restrictions. I wrote before the show that it would be a disaster with never-ending lines and disgruntled attendees, but that wasn’t exactly how it turned out. It was certainly chaotic, but it was a general surrender even before the event opened.

      CES is among the world’s biggest conferences, with 170,000 people shuffling into Las Vegas for a week. This year, attendees were warned that new security practices would be in place. Among the guidelines were: “Bags will be searched. We suggest you use clear bags (mesh, plastic, vinyl, etc.) to expedite this process”; “Bags and backpacks with many pockets are not helpful. Pockets slow search time”; and “Everyone will be subject to metal detector screening and body pat downs upon entering show premises.”

    • ISIS Supporter Joins Ammon Bundy’s Armed Occupation as Resident Computer Expert

      David Fry told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he drove from Ohio to join the occupation because he knew that the other militants “were pretty good people.”

      “It was (a) miracle, that I got here,” Fry said. “I’ve had quarrels with the government myself, and I feel there has to be some point where people have to put their foot down against the problems.”

      Earlier this week, Fry recorded a video from one of the government buildings that militants are using as a computer and media center. He explained that he had created a website for the occupation.

    • Outrage in Oregon

      Taking over a federal building at the point of a rifle gives protest a bad name.

    • The Stateless and the State of the Union

      The raids have provoked protests across the country. Last Friday, seven people were arrested in New York City in front of the local ICE headquarters, chaining themselves together and blocking traffic. Among those arrested was Claudia Palacios. Her story is remarkable. She was born in Texas and served for five years in the U.S. Marines, with two years in Okinawa and several years around the world deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Even though she served her country honorably, this U.S.-born military veteran has documentation issues of her own.

    • The human search for a home

      Stories from the Macedonian refugee camps in Gevgelija bordering Greece, and Tabanovce bordering Serbia, tell of kindness, of the shock and powerlessness of being “othered”, and of loving Shakespeare.

    • Hollywood Sure Loves Sequels: For The Second Year In A Row, Zero Actors Of Color Get Oscar Nominations

      This is frustrating, though not totally surprising: Industry insiders had been fretting about a repeat of an all-white acting slate for a while now. But it’s a bad look for an awards show already clinging to relevance like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to hope that someday he’ll actually win an Oscar.

    • Megyn Kelly Attacks DNC Chair For Inviting A Muslim Representative From CAIR To State Of The Union Address

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Netflix CEO ‘Loves’ Netflix Password Sharing

      For a few years now, HBO has turned a blind eye to users that decide to share their passwords for HBO Go (the streaming app for existing cable providers) and HBO Now (the standalone streaming app for cord cutters). Last year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the company’s password sharing stats, but said the sharing isn’t a huge phenomenon.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Have your say on the enforcement of intellectual property rights

      Today the European Commission has published a public consultation on the evaluation and modernisation of the legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR).

      With this consultation the Commission seeks views from all interested parties, in particular rightholders, the judiciary and legal profession, intermediaries, public authorities, consumers and civil society, on the question if the legal enforcement framework is still fit for purpose.

    • A Look At The Marrakesh Treaty Ratification In Brazil

      The main goal of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled is to establish set mandatory limitations to ensure access to printed material for the benefit of the visually impaired.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Blocking Security Research: Researchers Barred From Exploring Leaked Archive

        Two researchers for Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu and Anton Ivanov, have published an absolutely fascinating tale of how they successfully tracked down a zero day exploit in Microsoft Silverlight. The story is totally worth reading, and it stems from the researchers trying to find an exploit that was described in an Ars Technica article by Cyrus Farivar, concerning a hacker selling exploits to Hacking Team, which was revealed last summer when Hacking Team got hacked and had all its emails (among other things) released.

      • Metallica Sends 41 Page Legal Threat To Canadian Cover Band [Updated]

        Metallica, in some circles, will always be known as the band that sued Napster and promised to go after the band’s own fans that used the platform. For some former fans of the band, nothing the band has done since can redeem it. And I’m assuming the latest move probably won’t help much either: various reports note that a Canadian Metallica tribute/cover band called “Sandman” showed up at a gig recently, only to discover a 41 page cease and desist letter from the band’s lawyers, claiming that they were unfairly profiting off the Metallica name and logo.

        [...]

        No one’s getting confused. No one thinks that it’s actually Metallica. Everyone recognizes what a tribute band is. And the reason they go see and support tribute bands (hell, the reason people create tribute bands in the first place) is because they love and support the original band. None of this is done to be unfair to Metallica, but to celebrate the band, and how does the band react, but with a giant legal threat.

        That’s pretty messed up.

        Update: And… of course, now that the band is getting lots of bad publicity over this, it’s suddenly blaming “an overzealous attorney” and insisting that neither the band nor its management had any idea about this. Maybe time to find better lawyers.

The Latest Openwashing by Microsoft Gives False Impression of Microsoft’s Proprietary Spyware/Malware Being ‘Open’ and Linux-friendly

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A new kind of Trojan horse

Wooden idol

Summary: Embrace, extend, extinguish (E.E.E.) tactics are still being used in an effort to put Microsoft’s proprietary code (with back doors) and proprietary formats (Microsoft lock-in) inside the competition

ONE year ago we wrote about Microsoft’s Revolution Analytics acquisition. Microsoft is buying out parts of academia (recall Moodle), bringing them into the proprietary fold. R will be dead soon. It won’t be what it used to be; not anymore. Embrace, extend, extinguish (E.E.E.) works like this, so later on they’ll remove the non-Microsoft bits, including standard/platform-neutral formats.

A lot of Microsoft-friendly networks wrote about the latest E.E.E. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. What good is “free and open” (to quote IDG) when it’s run on proprietary stacks with back doors? E.E.E. in the making is what this really is (now at phase one, the “embrace”). Just look who’s writing about it [1, 2, 3, 4]. A lot of Microsoft fans. The Microsoft booster Tim Anderson tried adding a Linux angle to it:

Microsoft has released R Server – for statistical analysis using the R language – based on software from Revolution Analytics, a company acquired by the tech giant in April 2015.

What’s used is a distribution of R now called “Microsoft R Open”, which is available for Windows, SUSE Linux, and Red Hat Linux.

What used to be a FOSS and GNU/Linux thing has been effectively hijacked by Microsoft. Which of the above do people think Microsoft will recommend? Microsoft keeps pushing its proprietary software into GNU/Linux not because it helps other platforms but because it is trying to dominate these platforms, potentially derailing them at will. An article from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says “​Microsoft open sources Edge web browser’s JavaScript engine, plans port to Linux“, but does GNU/Linux even need that? This is an effort to extinguish other JavaScript engines that are FOSS and not controlled by Microsoft. We wrote about this move before and deemed/considered it openwashing because the whole remains proprietary. Microsoft is just messing with perceptions. This same move was hailed by Microsoft Emil, Microsoft-friendly sites, and Microsoft advocacy sites.

“Microsoft is just messing with perceptions.”Make no mistakes about it. Microsoft isn’t playing nice here and the code isn’t safe to use. Yet another serious hole has just been found [1] in Vista 10, which is being promoted as ‘open’ using Chakra (not the GNU/Linux distribution, Microsoft is just hijacking names of other FOSS projects again, just like with VistA or OpenOffice). Microsoft Emil [2] and others now try to pressure people to adopt the NSA’s favourite operating system (Vista 10) using ‘security’ alarmism, as Microsoft is abandoning its own browsers except the latest and most privacy-hostile one (proprietary with openwashing by means of ‘Chakra’). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Windows 10 shattered Remote Desktop’s security defaults – so get patching

    Microsoft reckons no one is actively exploiting the security vulnerabilities addressed in this month’s patch bundle, but it’s only a matter of time before criminals reverse-engineer the updates and target them.

  2. Microsoft ends support for IE8, IE9, IE10, and Windows 8

    Microsoft today ended support for old versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE9, and IE10, as well as Windows 8. For the browsers, the company has also released a final patch (KB3123303) that includes the latest cumulative security updates and an “End of Life” upgrade notification.

USPTO Doubled the Number of Granted Patents in Just a Few Years, Demonstrating Very Sharp Decline in Patent Quality

Posted in America, Patents at 6:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The higher one goes, the lesser/lower the quality

Graph

Summary: Numerical evidence of the great decline in US patents quality, which in recent years gave way to a lot more patent litigation, patent trolls (that exploit software patents), complaints about the patent system, and invalidations inside US courts

BOTH the EPO and the USPTO pretend that more patents would be better. It’s a dangerous, popular but nevertheless wrong assumption. IP Watch wrote yesterday that:

The number of patent applications filed worldwide continues to increase, up by 4.6 percent in 2014 for a total of nearly 2.7 million, according to the 2015 edition of the World Intellectual Property Indicators. The increasing number of patents filed worldwide demonstrates the strength of ongoing innovation and the value companies put on protecting their intellectual property where they wish to do business. The filing numbers would likely be even higher, and across more countries, if the filers were more prepared for the costs associated with filing patents.

An article by Dennis Crouch says that “the Federal Circuit has ruled that the IPR procedure allowing the same PTAB panel to both institute an IPR and issue the final decision cancelling the claims. in the process, the divided court rejected both a constitutional and statutory challenge.” Another new piece from Crouch says: “As expected, the USPTO issued just under 300,000 utility patents in calendar year 2015. The new number represents a drop from 2014 – the first drop since President Obama took office and appointed David Kappos as USPTO Director. Barring a new radical transformation of the Office, I expect that the grant numbers will hover around this mark for the next several years.”

“IBM has a history of patent aggression and it promotes software patents in Europe and in New Zealand, not just in the US.”Under David Kappos, the Office has been pressuring examiners to just approve faster, leading to the unbelievable situation where 92% of applications are ultimately approved. What’s even the point of examination with such high acceptance rates? Innovation didn’t accelerate, but the number of patents nearly doubled, which means that the quality of patents went down considerably (unless one has another explanation; the economic downturn definitely wasn’t it).

“IBM tops US patent list for 23rd year,” WIPR wrote yesterday, noting that “IBM has topped the list of recipients of US patents in 2015, beating Samsung and Canon to the top spot, but there has been a slight decline in the overall number of patents granted since 2014.”

IBM has a history of patent aggression and it promotes software patents in Europe and in New Zealand, not just in the US.

Here is what Reuters wrote about it: “International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) was granted the most U.S. patents for the 23rd year in a row in 2015, according to a ranking by patent analysis firm IFI Claims Patents Services.

“There were 298,407 utility patents granted in 2015, down slightly from 2014, IFI Claims said on Wednesday. IBM gained 7,355 patents last year. Utility patents cover function rather than design.”

Who on Earth can conceivably keep track of this many patents. The whole purpose of this system is lost due to overload. It’s good for patent lawyers (and their richest clients), bad for everybody else.

Over at TechDirt there’s a summary of some of these issues, based on a writeup from Masnick. “Qualcomm Says It’s Fighting For The Little Guy, While Really Blocking Patent Reform That Would Help The Little Guy” is the headline. To quote a part which covers trolls and Alice: “Three out of the five panelists — Kate Doerksen, Lee Cheng and Brian Mennell — represented victims of patent trolls. Kate and Brian both have experienced the perils of being a small startup and getting hit with patent lawsuits that have the potential to destroy their businesses. You can read Kate’s story here, in which she’s being sued by a large company trying to keep her startup from competing altogether. It’s even reached the point where Kate agreed to something of a deal with the devil: Erich Spangenberg. As we’ve discussed, Spangenberg, who was one of the most aggressive patent trolls, recently shifted his business into being a sort of reverse patent troll, where he makes deals with small companies like Kate’s, taking an ownership stake in the company in exchange for “helping” the company deal with patent trolls, usually by seeking post-grant review to invalidate the patents being asserted against the startups.

“Mennell has the classic patent troll story of running a startup and getting hit by a patent troll that undermines the ability of the company to stay in business (and also notes that the Supreme Court’s Alice decision made him lose a business method patent, though he doesn’t seem to see that as problematic).”

In this current landscape of patents/patenting it is only good to be a massive corporation such as IBM, a patent troll, or a patent lawyer. Finjan, which has become a bit like a patent troll, isn’t doing too badly.

If examiners are led to believe that more patents mean more “success”, then they probably need to reassess their views. More patents typically mean lower barrier to acceptance or, in other words, lower quality of patents. █

Corporate Media Should Stop Pretending That Former Microsoft Staff is Now FOSS and Linux ‘Analysts’

Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Demonstrating the rogue business model of much of today’s media

Linux InsiderSummary: A site called Linux Insider, which many people may assume to be a Linux news site, is stuffed with Linux-hostile material from people who are connected to Microsoft

The ‘cancer’ (on the Web) which is IDG (dominating technology coverage in many languages and usually attacking GNU/Linux whilst accepting money from Microsoft and Apple) is officially up for sale, but in the mean time we see that not only its writers but also its other employees (e.g. in IDC) produce some FOSS-hostile propaganda. This needs to stop. A lot of people still complain about Galen Gruman (even in our IRC channels) for his latest facts-free attack on GNU/Linux, but the problem is much broader than this and we have been writing about it for almost a decade.

“This was posted in a site called Linux Insider, but it’s anti-Linux nonsense promoting a Microsoft-connected firm, using talking points from a Microsoft-connected ‘analyst’.”Richard Adhikari, who for a number of years has published many anti-Linux (or anti-Android) pieces such as this, usually along the ‘security’ theme, is now talking to Hilwa from Microsoft. Well, it’s not as bad as speaking to Enderle (which ECT does very often, allowing him to smear Microsoft’s competitors without disclosing his ties to Microsoft), but it’s still pretty bad. ECT previously spoke to him without disclosing his relationship with Microsoft (and so have others). This time he helps bolster the marketing for Black Duck, an anti-FOSS firm that came from Microsoft. To quote parts of this promotional piece from Adhikari (promoting fear of FOSS and helping Black Duck drive sales):

“Containers have caught the imagination of developers because they provide convenient bundles for deployment,” said Al Hilwa, a research program director at IDC.

“We have been expecting a variety of software development tools to add support for containers, and in this context, it makes perfect sense to see leading code-scanning players like Black Duck support Docker containers,” he told LinuxInsider.

[...]

Scanning tools do enable more secure deployments, but developers still have to take action, IDC’s Hilwa said.

Code-scanning technology is analogous to virus-scanning software, he continued.

“A repository of vulnerability metadata or signatures has to be maintained, and the code is scanned against it.” Hilwa said. “The role of the scanning software is to keep this metadata up to date.”

Does Adhikari know where Black Duck came from? Did he check where Al Hilwa came from? This was posted in a site called Linux Insider, but it’s anti-Linux nonsense promoting a Microsoft-connected firm, using talking points from a Microsoft-connected ‘analyst’. It demonstrates a lot of what’s wrong with today’s corporate media. Thankfully, Jack Germain still writes for ECT’s Linux Insider and unlike Adhikari he doesn’t just write articles that attack Linux. █

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