12.10.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Alberto Casado Cerniño (Vice-President of DG2) uses managers’ incomprehensible language to insinuate that all is fine and dandy inside the EPO
THE European Patent Office (EPO) became infamous in Europe because of its insatiable appetite for (or endless pursuit of) mass surveillance with visitors to the Office as ‘collateral damage’, especially amid surveillance backlash in Europe and outside Europe, partly because of leaks from Edward Snowden and several people after him (including some inside Germany).
We found it amusing that the EPO now brags about a surveillance audit. A “surveillance audit” is an ongoing periodic review of an organisation’s quality management system. It’s basically management nonsense, designed to keep managers occupied with self-serving things. An ISO 9001 Certification (in the British context) “is a Quality Management Standard. It suits all organisations large or small and covers all sectors, including charities and the voluntary sector. It aims to help organisations become structured and efficient.”
That’s because, as everyone probably knows by now, people are treated like machines inside the EPO these days. There is extreme disregard for human factors, as mass surveillance itself serves to show.
“On 12 October Mr Cassado,” we’ve learned (that’s just a few days before the EPO sent me the first threatening letter), “Vice-President of DG2 and Management Representative for Quality informed staff as below.”
ISO 9001 surveillance and certification audits show we are on the right track… Recently I informed you of upcoming surveillance audits in the patent granting process from 5 – 9 October. At the same time, the new procedures extending the scope of the Quality Management System (QMS) to PD 54, were audited for ISO 9001 certification… On all sites, colleagues at all levels were interviewed by external auditors. I am pleased to inform you that preliminary results are very positive for both the surveillance and certification exercise… A recommendation will be made to extend our current patent granting process to the full patent process… This confirms both the positive results of the work done this year in patent information to enhance our QMS and the continual improvement of the quality of our core processes.
What Cassado is basically saying here — or at least trying to insinuate using mumbo jumbo PHB speak — is that everything is alright, even when it clearly isn’t (recall the first part, second part and third part of an old scandal implicating Cassado). █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original photo: Minister-president Rutte from Nederland
Summary: How the EPO continues to chill the media around Europe and even outside Europe, in addition to legally abusing staff representatives in an effort to scare the media
THE EPO is a lying organisation. But it gets worse. It now adopts Erdoğanian methods. It pretends to respect the freedom of the press when in practice, contrary to such jaw-dropping statements (shamelessly made to the media upon inquiry), it overzealous attacks the freedom of the press like no other institution in Europe.
I used to find important leaks in IP Kat (whose most prominent person has just retired) and sometimes I found interesting pointers in IP Kat comments. Increasingly, however, I find little more than jokes, speculations, and what sometimes looks like EPO AstroTurfing. Since the most recent attacks on free speech and a PR contract with FTI Consulting we’re just not seeing the same kind of journalistic atmosphere online. The EPO is now considered “scary”, or a dangerous territory to explore and write about.
“The EPO is now considered “scary”, or a dangerous territory to explore and write about.”The EPO’s threats against me clearly had the intended effect. A lot of EPO-hostile sites are now afraid or reluctant to criticise EPO (or do so very gently, almost tip-toeing). Some sites like these have known about the legal threats against me for nearly 2 months (because I informed them). Today one commenter at IP Kat wrote: “The AC [the EPO's potential Nemesis, the Administrative Council] can order the third party to come and resolve the problem.”
Well, whenever the EPO uses the term “investigation” it should be read as union busting and the term “productivity” or “efficiency” means lax granting of patents. People or businesses who apply for a patent at EPO should think long term. Given declining patent quality and ever-increasing fees, are they getting their money’s worth? The EPO is a lunatic institution whose eventual state of affairs will likely be horrible, unless the employees manage to rescue it from Team Battistelli (before it’s too late).
Florian Müller, who has also just found out about being targeted by the EPO (because I showed him), wrote this widely-cited article this morning and stated: “The EPO leadership is just paranoid about bloggers who criticize what’s wrong with the way that organization is run. But those EPO folks don’t appear to understand that they’re only making things worse by the day. They threatened legal action on at least four occasions against TechRights author Dr. Roy Schestowitz, who is still the most prolific writer on the EPO labor dispute. Now they blame a staff representative for my commentary without a factual basis.”
People in the media — including the BBC — ought to be aware of the EPO’s chilling of the media. Almost a million dollar for a 1-year media manipulation campaign sure goes a long way.
“Now they blame a staff representative for my commentary without a factual basis.”
–Florian MüllerWhat we deal with here is not an ordinary institution but an out-of-control nut house, run by a cabal of people drunk on power. Recall the threats to take away Christmas vacation (contrary to what EPO publicly states) and (nearly) threats to people who are ill, whose basic rights are stomped on, especially when they fall ill (depression weakens the immune system) and are thus incapable of working. In the future we’ll show how the EPO even takes advantage of cancer in the family. People’s jaws should drop to the floor; this isn’t even close to being compatible with European human rights standards. Even China is probably better.
SUEPO alludes to the Politico article “Labor relations turn toxic in the European Patent Office”, which says a lot about suicides and even calls for an investigation into the cause of such an irregular frequency of suicides. “The political journalism organization Politico,” SUEPO wrote today, “comments here (article of 08 December 2015) on the labor relations at the European Patent Office, in particular on the spike of suicides and staff unhappiness.”
The EPO’s management is trying to simply ignore all the bad publicity. The EPO’s Web site and Twitter feed say nothing about it (lies by omission). Well, just watch the EPO’s Twitter feed this week, it’s a never-ending PR campaign. WIPR too falls for the ‘green’-themed campaign from the EPO (just a senseless greenwashing campaign).
The EPO’s management started an information war. Unless writers are brave enough to challenge these thugs, it’s possible that the thugs will prevail, which means that the EPO will collapse (jeopardizing the jobs of all EPO employees, not just the thugs). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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I’m announcing the release of the 4.3.1 kernel.
All users of the 4.3 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.3.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.3.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
thanks,
greg k-h
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Gender gap is one of the hottest topics in the tech industry. To address this, many organizations in the open source world, including the Gnome Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and The Linux Foundation, organize programs to encourage female participation.
The Linux Foundation’s Linux Training Scholarship Program offers free training to individuals. Vaishali Thakkar was one of the recipients this year under the Kernel Guru category. She lives in India and recently completed an Outreachy internship on project Coccinelle.
I reached out to Vaishali to learn more about her experience with the Linux community, the atmosphere in India for Linux developers and much more.
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Graphics Stack
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While Mesa 11.1 is right around the corner, Emil Velikov today announced the release of Mesa 11.0.7 as the latest collection of stable fixes.
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Intel is hooking their Beignet open-source OpenCL Linux implementation into the CMRT, the 01.org C for Media Runtime.
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Benchmarks
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If looking for budget laptops right now, the Core i3 5010U and Core i5 5200U “Broadwell” processors tend to be very common, but how do they compare under Linux? Here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu 15.10 with the Linux 4.4 kernel to answer that question.
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Applications
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It may be a relatively niche market, but not all video editing is done in post production. There are use cases for live, on-the-fly video editing and basic compositing. You’ve seen it done yourself, whether you realize it or not—news broadcasts, live webcasts, and live TV events usually use multiple-camera setups controlled by one central software suite.
Open Broadcast Studio (formerly Open Broadcaster Software) is an open source central control room for live, realtime video editing. It features instant encoding using x264 (an open source h.264 encoder) and AAC and streams to services like YouTube, DailyMotion, Twitch, your own streaming server, or just to a file.
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Proprietary
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Excel Software simplified QuickLicense protection and licensing of 32-Bit or 64-Bit application software with the release of two companion products, QuickLicenseRT Linux 2.0 and PluginXojoQLRT 2.0. QuickLicenseRT Linux includes 32 and 64-Bit runtime files. PluginXojoQLRT provides a Xojo plugin for 32 and 64-Bit apps on Mac or Windows.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I’m going to be honest, I’ve never heard of Guy Lunardi until now. He went to New York Linux Users Group (NYLUG) to do a talk on SteamOS.
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I’m going to be honest, I had never heard of InSomnia, but it was sent in by a reader and I’m certainly interested now. An RPG set on a massive space station, with good looking graphics that’s now planned for a same-day Linux release!
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A viking with a gun you say? Okay, I’m interested. At the end of October Gunnheim released for Linux, and it looks quite fun.
I actually really like the colourful and simple graphics, as it reminds me of Albion Online which I’ve been slaving away at.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Calligra developers have been happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the tenth maintenance version in the Calligra 2.9 series.
According to the release notes, which we’ve attached at the end of the article for reference, Calligra 2.9.10 is a yet another bugfix release that resolves several issues reported by users since the previous maintenance version, Calligra 2.9.9. Moreover, it addresses a single Kexi issue, and adds great improvements to the Krita 2.9.10 software, for which we already published a separate article the other day.
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KDE – desktop environment written in C++/Qt/QML and better for users which need more and love the powerful instruments. KDE can help you in everyday tasks like work with web, multimedia (photo, video, music), text and specific tasks: programming, video editing, education, games and many others. Many peoples say that KDE is very good for users with Windows experience, but I’m not sure. I highly recommend to try KDE: this desktop environment can give you many positive emotions.
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Tuesday, 8 December 2015. Today KDE releases a feature update to its desktop software, Plasma 5.5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Dell Edge Gateway will be available for purchase soon. When it goes on sale, firmware updates in Linux will work out-of-the-box. I’ve been told that Dell are considering expanding out the LVFS support to all new models supporting UEFI updates. In order to prioritize what models to work on first, I’ve been asked to share this anonymous survey on what Dell hardware people are using on Linux and to gauge if people actually care about being able to upgrade the firmware easily in Linux.
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While the GNOME developers have already released the third development milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, it appears the some of its core components have not even gotten a release from the 3.19 devel branch.
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Today in Linux news, Tecmint posted a look at the top 10 distributions of the year. Jim Zemlin said today that Linux Foundation and Microsoft’s partnership is off to a “great start.” KDE Plasma 5.5 was released yesterday “with beautiful new artwork” and The Linux Homefront Project gave it the once over. Elsewhere, Clement Lefebvre posted the 17.3 upgrade process and Chris Hoffman reviewed 17.3 for PCWorld.
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As the end of 2015 approaches, it is not only a time to start drafting your new year’s resolutions but also to check out what were the most popular Linux distributions in 2015. A brief comparison with 2014 will also help us whether those distros are actually experiencing sustained growth or not. Ready to start? Let’s begin.
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New Releases
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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Ringo de Kroon, the maintainer of the Manjaro Linux Cinnamon and Manjaro Linux MATE computer operating systems, has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux MATE 15.12 distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Cox Automotive sees all kinds of customers pouring into its online portals — from dealers in the auction lanes to potential buyers considering a vehicle purchase.
Open source technology solutions provider Red Hat highlighted on Tuesday how Cox Automotive deployed three major tools — Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization — to scale its internal cloud infrastructure to meet the increasing requests from its customer base.
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Jennison Associates cut its stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 2.4% during the third quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The hedge fund owned 15,549,632 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after selling 386,599 shares during the period. Red Hat makes up approximately 1.1% of Jennison Associates’ holdings, making the stock its 22nd largest position. Jennison Associates owned 8.47% of Red Hat worth $1,117,708,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.
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RBC Capital reiterated their buy rating on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research report report published on Wednesday, ARN reports.
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Channel partners need to become more innovative in their thinking and strive to improve the experience client’s get from as-a-service offerings, Red Hat director AppDev solutions APAC, Ben Henshall, said.
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One-time server foes Microsoft and Red Hat have come a step closer on the emerging platform of cloud.
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Red Hat has introduced CloudForms 4.0, and the cloud management platform can now manage cloud resources in Microsoft Azure and picks up container support.
Both features are indispensable for any cloud-management system. The former is necessary because of Azure’s status as a top-tier cloud offering, and the latter because containers are involved in nearly every aspect of software use, especially cloud deployment.
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In many organizations the culture is not open; people know that if you want to get ahead you need to shut up and keep your head down. But, that’s a recipe for failure. And it’s more expensive, because (often) processes or products are much further developed before anyone detects problems with them.
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RBC Capital Markets have a $90.00 price target on the stock. The price target would suggest a potential upside of 11.77 % from Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)’s last stock close price. This rating was released in an analyst note on Tuesday, 8 December.
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Fedora
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Saturday we arrived at Red Hat APAC office by around 9 AM. The MRT station locates just under AXA building so it did not take us much time there.
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As we are productive Saturday, we decide to start a little late today. So we arrived at the office by around 10 AM. Then we start by each ambassador introduce the community in their country. There is a outstanding problem is, reimbursement usually takes a long time. And some area have problems in receiving money by paypal. So we talked about having another credit card in APAC. And then we talks about DVD distribution in APAC. As of strict import/export laws in China, we are not able to take DVDs into China directly. So we still need to ask Red Hat guys to send DVDs into Red Hat Beijing by company way. And Sirko mentioned that someone need to raise request for combined media so that the engineer team will take into consideration. Otherwise they will not make any combined ISO.
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Debian Family
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The recent transition of such mails from the PTS to Debian’s instance of Distro Tracker reminded me about this, and some info on how to transition current filtering may be useful for more than just me.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Touch will receive a new OTA update before the end of the year, but it’s a small hotfix. From the looks of it, developers still have one more thing to implement, but some regressions spotted during Q&A are delaying the release.
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There are a lot of naive users and customers out there, and then there are companies and websites out there only to trick them. That’s why we can find an Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Flash Drive with just 8 GB of space selling for a huge price.
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Flavours and Variants
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Now that the Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Cinnamon and MATE flavors have been released, the users of the previous version have been given a green light for the upgrade.
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One such Linux-based operating system that puts a priority on design and user experience is the fabulous elementary OS. Luckily, it is not form over function, as its stability and usefulness matches the beauty on the surface, thanks to its Ubuntu base. Today, a new version of the popular distro, Freya 0.3.2, becomes available for download. Will you download it?
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The awesome guys from elementary announced a few minutes ago, December 10, 2015, the release and immediate availability for download of the elementary OS 0.3.2 “Freya” computer operating system.
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Linux is one of the best operating systems around and there are many distro’s which are popular among developers but what about the normal people like you and me. Well, there is a Linux distro just made for home users and desktop environment. Called elementary OS Freya, the version 0.3.0 of this Linux distro is now available for download.
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It is now possible to upgrade the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17, 17.1 and 17.2 to version 17.3.
If you’ve been waiting for this I’d like to thank you for your patience.
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We introduced you guys to the PINE64 single-board computer (SBC) a couple of days ago, when we’ve stated that it is the world’s first $15 open source gaming machine that runs Android and Linux.
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As computers get smaller and more powerful, more options are starting to surface for palm sized computers which can be used for a number of DIY projects. The latest to be unveiled, the PINE64 and PINE64+, launches on Kickstarter today and promises a more simple, affordable, and expandable computing solution.
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We have just been informed by Dylan MCallahan about the immediate availability for download of the second build of his Chromium OS operating system for the Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer (SBC).
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Phones
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But perhaps these smaller companies like Jolla are content to keep their customer base little; after all, it’s hard to imagine any of their executives believing that their devices would soar into, say, the top 10 figures of sales around the world. Especially given how mammoth shipment figures are now for smartphones, and how mobile giants are lowering the costs of some of their devices to appeal to more markets. The intent for some of these open source companies has been more to provide alternative options for mobile users who can afford such products, while also steering customers away from juggernauts like Apple and Samsung. While Mozilla’s announcement is disheartening to some in the open source market, there are still several other entities who haven’t thrown in the towel.
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Android
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Between August and October, the iPhone’s smartphone share in the US fell fell by 8.3 percentage points to 33.6 percent, compared with the same period in 2014, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech reported on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the US share for phones with Google’s Android operating system jumped by 9.5 percentage points to 62.8 percent from the same period a year ago, Kantar reported.
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In this Ask A Dev, Android engineer Waylon Brown gives aspiring Android engineers a road map to getting their apps on the Google Play store.
“All you need is some knowledge of Java, $30 for the developer account, and an app idea,” Waylon says, before getting more specific. In two minutes, you’ll be equipped with all the training guides, emulators and accounts you’ll need to become a full-fledged Android developer. Waylon finishes up with some helpful suggestions about how to market your app.
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You’re probably aware of most of these uses – checking social media, sending emails, even making phone calls and sending texts – but you might not have discovered all of the ways you can use your Android smartphone. Here are 10 superpowers your phone has that you can take advantage of.
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For specifications, the Oukitel K10000 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, and is a dual-SIM dual standby smartphone with 4G LTE functionality on both SIM card slots. The handset supports dual Micro-SIMs. The online retailer’s listing confirms that the handset supports Indian LTE bands as well.
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Do you think music software is only the domain of expensive proprietary software? Think again. There are literally hundreds of applications out there designed by, and for, those with a musical bent. Music projects, including many projects specifically for the Linux operating system, flourish in the open source community as musicians take to coding to produce tools to make their lives easier.
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The world’s fastest cracking tool Hashcat is now open source. The company has called it a very important step and listed out the reasons that inspired them to take this step.
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Steube said that many of these researchers can’t reveal the exact changes they would need to make due to non-disclosure agreements (NDA) so making the software open source allows them to make the changes themselves.
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Just over a year after being open sourced by creator eBay Inc., the Kylin project — a Big Data distributed analytics engine — has been advanced by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to top-level status.
Apache Kylin is designed to provide a SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, with support for extremely large datasets.
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AMID the ongoing fallout over the software in some Volkswagen cars that was able to cheat emissions tests, the public may well be pondering a wider question: can we trust the software in the gadgets we use every day? If a car’s software can deceive, what might our devices be programmed to do that is not in our interests?
Some TVs and fridges already stand accused of manipulating energy efficiency tests. But software can’t just be used to make beating such tests easier. It also makes it easier to lock consumers into proprietary systems and raises suspicions of planned obsolescence.
Whenever devices go online, manufacturers (and others) gain the ability to invade privacy: recall Samsung’s TVs with voice recognition that also happened to gather private conversations.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.
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The Firefox OS smartphone has been discontinued by Mozilla. This comes as no real surprise, given the intense competition in the smartphone market and the domination of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android phones.
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Databases
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The makers of ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database, have open-sourced their application, making the code available on GitHub.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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IBM has already put the Linux port of Apple’s Swift programming language to good use, releasing the IBM Swift Sandbox: A way to code in the cloud.
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BSD
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My November 11, 2015 mug.org talk about SSH is now on YouTube. This is one way to lose 90 minutes.
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Licensing
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Question two. From a GNU/Linux PC, I want the capability to connect to a USA cell phone network and make a voice call to an old-school 9600 bps landline audio modem, and have serial comms with this landline audio modem.
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The question is, is this an objection to copyleft, or is it an objection to code of conducts? I’ve seen objections raised to both that go along these lines. I think there’s little coincidence, since both of them are objections to added process which define (and provide enforcement mechanisms for) doing the right thing.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Being open source all the design files for the Witbox 2 3D Printer can be found over on GitHub via the link below, if you are interested. For more details and specifications on the Witbox 2 Jumbo to the official website via the link below where it is also now available to purchase priced at €1,690.
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Security
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SECURITY FIRM Symantec has warned that the hacker threat to Apple users has reached unprecedented levels.
The firm reckons that Apple is a victim of its success, becoming a bigger target as its user base grows. To be fair to Apple most of the problem relates to jailbroken devices, which is not a thing that the firm recommends. We have seen incidents recently that make the most of this. The threat applies to mobile software and the desktop.
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According to the Telegraph newspaper, universities across the country have been hit by DoS attacks. This means in some cases no internet access, and that means students will have to study like it’s 1980 something.
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It was a summer morning, officer Paul Hastings recalls, when he arrived at a suspected hacker’s house in the northern English city of Hull. There, police had tracked one of the people who’d signed up online for a hacking service called Lizard Stresser that was used to attack companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Sony at the end of 2014. This particularly fearsome cybervigilante was asleep when Hastings knocked, so his dad answered the door.
The visit was one of about 50 U.K. police made this year to people they say used the Lizard Stresser site, many of them children. The Hull suspect, a teenager, couldn’t have done anything wrong, his dad told Hastings. He spent all his time upstairs, on his computer.
[...]
Teen hackers have been pop culture figures since Matthew Broderick starred in WarGames, and the U.K. has a long history with juvenile black hats. In 1994, when U.S. Air Force researchers found an unauthorized user on their systems downloading data, they tracked the hacker to a North London suburb. Working with London police, they found their culprit: a 16-year-old boy in an attic bedroom, as journalist Gordon Corera recounts in Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Isis now has support from 42 different international groups in countries ranging from the Philippines to Egypt, it has been revealed.
The map, produced for The Independent by statistics agency Statista, shows the 30 groups to have pledged formal affiliation to the terrorist group and 12 more that have pledged their support, as identified in a Global Terrorism Index report.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California.
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The recent fires in Indonesia were something of a lightbulb moment for Indonesia in the way it views its development model and the threats from climate change, a senior member of the country’s delegation to the Paris climate talks said on Tuesday.
It also triggered a rethink of how the country should represent itself at the talks, said Mr Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, chairman of Indonesia’s Advisory Council for Climate Change, and a former environment minister.
Indonesia has brought about 400 delegates to the talks, a large number by any measure.
About 80 are directly paid for by the government. The delegation comprises business and opinion leaders, non-governmental organisations, members of local communities and interfaith networks, he told a press conference on the sidelines of the talks.
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As 190 nations grapple with the world’s future at the global climate summit in Paris, forest fires in Indonesia have been continuing to rage since July 2015.
Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2, bumping Indonesia up from sixth largest to fourth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter in the world, surpassing Russia in a matter of six weeks and the entire US economy in just 38 days. [1]
Global Forest Watch Fires detected at least 127,000 fires across Indonesia this year, the worst since 1997. These fires were mostly caused by the clearing of forested peat lands to plant palms for oil.
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While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”
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Finance
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The love of money for money’s sake is the social disease of our time. We see it all around us: in the celebration of ill-gotten stock gains, public admiration for the heads of criminal banks, the words of Kanye West, in the commercialization of charity and even spirituality.
This adoration of wealth isn’t a new thing, of course. When I was in elementary school I was sent to a school counselor for being moody, introspective – in other words, for being either a proto-goth or a writer in the making. I was asked to draw a picture of myself as a happy adult, and the resulting portrait showed a rich man standing beside a Rolls-Royce with an ascot around his neck.
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Poor people, right? Visit the “news of the weird” section of a major media site and you’ll find a gauntlet of undesirables engaging in such wacky antics as getting into drunk fistfights at McDonald’s and whatnot. And, in basically all of these cases, what you’re reading barely qualifies as news. It’s Internet rubbernecking and — as far as most news outlets are concerned — anyone below the poverty line is fair game as a source of national amusement (and it’s not unlike similar stunts the news pulls on Asian people and the youths).
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Privacy
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Starting on January 1, the country of Kazakhstan has formally declared war on privacy, encryption, and a secure Internet. A new law takes effect in the new year that will require all citizens of the country to install a national, government-mandated security certificate allowing the interception of all encrypted citizen communications. In short, the country has decided that it would be a downright nifty idea to break HTTPS and SSL, essentially launching a “man in the middle” attack on every resident of the country.
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After the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, encryption has once again become a political target in Washington. Despite there still being no solid evidence the attackers benefited from or even used encryption (in at least one case, they coordinated via distinctly unencrypted text messages) law enforcement and national security hawks have used the tragedies to continue pressing tech companies to give the US government access to encrypted communications—even if that means rolling back security and changing the nature of their businesses.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI director James Comey went so far as to suggest that companies providing users with end-to-end encryption might need to simply, well, stop doing that.
“It’s not a technical issue, it’s a business model question,” said Comey, referring to companies like Apple and WhatsApp which encrypt data so that it can’t be read by any third party, including the companies themselves. “Lots of good people have designed their systems and their devices so that judges’ orders can not be complied with, for reasons that I understand, I’m not questioning their motivations.”
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SNAP. You press the shutter icon on your phone and capture a photo of your baby daughter. With a couple of swipes, you attach it to an email in your Gmail app and fire it off to your mother-in-law.
As personal data goes, it doesn’t get much more innocuous. But the truth is that spraying around any private information is risky. You might think that’s overblown. As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.
It’s not that simple. Just look at this summer’s hack that exposed the data from Ashley Madison, a site catering for people looking for an affair, and imagine if the same happened with all your emails stored by Google, or your photos on Facebook. Even if you’ve done nothing illegal or immoral, faced with a database of every photograph and comment you’ve ever shared privately, friendships and business deals could dissolve the world over.
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Data-analysis company Palantir Technologies has raised $125 million in new funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The financing increased the size of the company’s current funding round to about $680 million.
Palantir, a secretive company co-founded by investor Peter Thiel in 2004, builds software for searching through and analyzing reams of data. Banks, police departments, and intelligence agencies are among the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s customers.
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and chairman Maynard Webb appeared on CNBC today to explain why the company’s board of directors decided not to spin off its stake Alibaba.
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There is no liberty without privacy. As the culture of surveillance grows, liberty recedes. The New American has reported on many of the threats to privacy that are becoming more and more commonplace. Some Smart TVs are spying on users via their integrated cameras, microphones, and Internet connectivity and then reporting back to the manufacturers, who sell that data to advertisers. Other “Internet of Things” devices have surveillance capabilities that are marketed as features promising convenience to users. Facebook performs social/psychological experiments on its users and also harvests users’ data to sell to advertisers.
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Civil Rights
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MSNBC host Chris Hayes called out Rep. Steve King (R-IA) for repeating a conspiracy theory that originated from an outrageous article out of Alex Jones’ far right Infowars site. The article claimed that an imam in Jerusalem encouraged followers to breed with Europeans in order to “conquer their countries.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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With less than a week to go before a trial, a class-action lawsuit over the copyright status of “Happy Birthday” has been resolved. Details of the settlement, including what kind of uses will be allowed going forward, are not clear.
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The European Commission has officially presented its plan to abolish geo-blocking and filtering restrictions across EU member states. The new proposal requires online services to allow users to access their accounts all across Europe, even in countries where it’s officially not available yet.
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Ironically, the changes may not always be beneficial. In some cases people use a VPN to access a broader library of films and video in another EU country, which will no longer be possible under the new rules.
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12.09.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The military-grade attack on staff unions at the EPO
Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO) is attacking popular staff figureheads inside the institution and disguises this as just an investigation, with outside (paid-for) help from highly abusive firms such as Control Risks (which we call ‘British Blackwater’ because of its past)
Yesterday we wrote about the “J’accuse” against staff representative Elizabeth Hardon — a highly flawed dossier that the EPO‘s technically inept staff put together. We have decided to write a rebuttal based on our own understanding of the situation. It serves to show what the EPO’s management is really up to. Here is a point-by-point response to the early part of this “J’accuse”:
2.1. acting as an accomplice in a campaign to disseminate information and opinions detrimental to the EPO, its proper functioning and its reputation as well as the reputation of its employees;
Aside from the fact that proof is lacking or insufficient to implicate this one person in “disseminate information” (which in itself is not a crime), it should be no offense to inform others, e.g. journalists, in case something has gone rogue. The use of terms like “accomplice” and “campaign” shows the bias of the accuser. Facts themselves are treated like an enemy now. The word “reputation” is mentioned twice, as if there is some God-given right for the EPO to guard its precious reputation irrespective of the management’s actions.
2.3. disregarding (i) the express instruction of her employer and (ii) her concurrent obligation under Art. 4 of Circulars No. 341 and No. 342 to keep confidential the investigation C- 071/2015.
Some requests are inherently unjust, such as the request to keep an unjust “investigation” (accusations and destruction, as part of union-busting actions) secret. It’s clear why Team Battistelli would want to avoid facing the music. They are trying to save face.
3. The defendant is a Dutch national who joined the Office in 1988 as an examiner at Grade A2.
In other words, the defendant has spent more time at the EPO than Battistelli and all of his French buddies (whom he brought from INPI) combined.
4. She has, for a number of years, been active in the leadership of the Munich local section of the Locals Staff Committee (LSC) and of a staff trade union (SUEPO).
She is provably popular too. That’s why she must be crushed. Move over, Elizabeth; It’s Benoît’s time to shine, but you have evidently stolen his thunder.
5. The background to this report is formed by two recent wider investigations.
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6. The first, C-62/2014, was conducted by the Investigative Unit (IU). Its report was submitted to the Administrative Council on 06.03.2015 which initiated and conducted disciplinary case D1/2015. The IU had found C, a member of the Technical Boards of Appeal, guilty of an electronic campaign of unauthorised disclosure and publication of confidential, non-public documents and information as well as of threatening, insulting, defaming, and libellous and/or racist messages to politicians, journalists, bloggers and EPO staff.
These accusations, which have been made by people salaried by (and thus loyal to) Team Battistelli, have been categorically rejected by an independent board. Any convictions coming from the IU should be treated with extreme prejudice. These people’s track record is rather poor.
7. On 12.10.2015, the IU presented the investigation C-62a/2015 reviewing the background of the C-62/2015 case and possible involvement of other parties. Its report found that C had acted with a network of staff and external contacts, including the defendant.
Notice where they’re going here. Guilt by association. If you can’t find a person guilty of something, then look for another person’s alleged actions and try to link these to another person. Welcome to Stalin’s USSR.
8. The President of the EPO has more recently been provided with a summary of findings in IU report C-62b/2015 (Annex I), which were forwarded to him…
IU working for the President and serving him heads on a silver platter. Envision where this is going…
9. The second investigation, C-071/2015, was conducted by external investigators, the firm Control Risk Group, under the authority of the IU, into allegations against unknown suspects of a campaign of harassment and intimidation against
So “Control Risk Group” goons (CRG not even spelled correctly by the EPO, as it should say “Risks”) are now named by the EPO itself and are working “under the authority of the IU”, which works under the authority of the President. So much for “external” investigators. It’s just a waste of money and lipstick on a pig.
10. The Control Risk Group…
OK, so it definitely wasn’t a typo. The EPO doesn’t even know who it’s hiring. It’s “Risks”, not “Risk”. How sloppy can one be? For some background about CRG, see the following articles of ours:
Next come “The Charges”, which range from unbacked by evidence to utterly laughable. It’s something between Kafka and Orwell.
In the interests of brevity, we’ll leave it at that for today. There’s lots more to come. Don’t believe anything that the management says about Hardon (or any other critic of the EPO’s management for that matter). █
“The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.”
–H.G. Wells
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A view from above, in layman’s terms
Summary: A beginner’s guide to the EPO crisis, which is basically an altercation/quarrel between the assets of the office, highly knowledgeable patent examiners, and those assigned to manage them, only to pursue completely orthogonal goals that are clearly detrimental to Europe
THIS concise article assumes that the reader has no prior knowledge about the EPO scandals, or that only the EPO’s misleading narrative has been thus far accepted as fact. Links are intentionally omitted so as to make this article self-contained.
The European Patent Office, or EPO (not to be confused with the drug), is a multinational organisation whose members are mostly EU states. EPO staff is located primarily at the centre of Europe although the staff comes from a wide range of places (EPO members). Due to the way the EPO was set up more than 40 years ago — predating the European Union by several decades — no single country’s laws apply. This means that human rights and various protections are unexplored territory, which in practice means that the EPO’s administration can neglect staff’s health (as it does), ignore court rulings (as has become very notorious a point), chill freedom of speech, and lobby politicians without any apparent restrictions.
The EPO enjoys a monopoly in Europe. It is supposed to be a benevolent monopoly, but in practice it has gone rogue. Rather than adhere to public interests when it comes to patent scope, the EPO now operates like a private business and seeks to maximise profit. It means that patent scope has gone off the rails and to make matters worse, incestuous relationships between large international companies and EPO management have developed, leading to unequal service to different applicants. Some receive preferential treatment, whereas others suffer neglect, with applications taking even more than a decade before being handled.
The EPO practices gross censorship and intimidation against critics. Its grossly overpaid (and at times under-qualified, chosen based on nepotism) managerial staff staged a de facto coup. It now repels, discourages, and even ejects anyone who is even remotely sceptical of the management’s choices, often made in secret without public scrutiny being even tolerated.
The patterns of the EPO’s abuses are overwhelmingly detrimental to those who help sponsor it.
First, the EPO allows applicants to receive abstract patents, patents on life, etc. and it generally blurs the gap between European patent regulations and those from the United States, often to the benefit of foreign corporations with highly dubious ethical standards. Patent maximalism, which is further facilitated by a systemic hogwash or synthesis, threatens to bring patent trolls (non-practising litigious firms) to Europe, essentially taxing everything, to the detriment of every single ‘consumer’ in Europe.
Second, the EPO disregards human rights, especially in its pursuit of the objectives above. Repressions inside and outside the EPO include institutional abuse and violation of the EPO’s own rules, censorship of the media, alleged DDOS attacks (technical or physical) against critics, legal bullying against critics, and illegal surveillance on staff and visitors, not to mention on journalists. These are the hallmarks of imperialistic regimes.
Third, in order to control everything and everyone by fear, the EPO openly demonstrates its maniacal tendencies and makes an example of scapegoats inside and outside the organisation. Staff suicides are a likely outcome of these maniacal moves, crushing of protests is a de facto standard (in spite of EU laws), union-busting is now taken for granted (with the helping hand of private firms from the outside), and there is not even due process. The management of the EPO, which has become a cabal surrounding the megalomaniac President, is systematically abolishing workers’ rights and acts like an absolute power (a state within the state of Germany for the most part). The President is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. In order to secure this unacceptable state of affairs, the management insists on ignoring court orders, crushing oversight or critical (of the management) branches like the boards, tightening the relationship with the Administrative Council by means of entryism (even accepting into its ranks people who are alleged to have bribed, and even worse), character assassination or defamation of (typically anonymous) critics, and disseminating propaganda or misinformation in the media (sometimes literally paying the media or paying vast amounts of money to PR agencies).
To EPO insiders, the EPO seems almost unstoppable. No matter how many abuses the management resorts to, it’ll always get away with them. The EPO’s workers, therefore, harnesses power in numbers, in spite of the management’s relentless efforts to crush anyone who dares organise the staff for direct action.
Staff complains about the above points, as well as monetary waste, nepotism in top-level appointments, conflicts of interest, and so on. All of these crises put not only the management at risk but also threaten the reputation and the status of the EPO itself, hence the jobs of patent examiners. It is clear that the goal of the angry staff is to actually save the EPO and salvage its reputation, whereas the existing management is just looking after its own interests, hence it is working hard to silence and suppress the staff. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 9:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Software development environments neither need nor want patents
Summary: An interlude regarding the subject of software patents in Europe and the United States
THE main subject of this site has always been software patents (we are not anti-patents in general). It’s why the site came into existence in the first place. There is a war going on in the software domain and it is fought between protectionists and programmers. Alice denialists typically fall under the former group and Free/Open Source software developers are just a subset of the latter (it includes proprietary software programmers too).
Alice denialists, who are mostly patent lawyers, only ever choose to comment (cherry-picking) about Alice when it’s some Microsoft-connected patent aggressor like Finjan managing to convince a court to uphold a software patent, as we recently noted. This new article by Monte Cooper and Cam Phan from Orrick says: “This goes to show that despite the significant shift that has occurred since the Alice decision, all hope is not lost for plaintiffs asserting patents in the software space.”
“There is a war going on in the software domain and it is fought between protectionists and programmers.”Well, Alice denialists wouldn’t want to admit that SCOTUS and the USPTO don’t quite tolerate software patents like they used to. Even the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is said to have brought software patents to this world, is finding itself rejecting a lot of software patents these days, on grounds of abstractness.
Despite the EPO‘s troubling leanings towards software patents in Europe (because it helps management improve so-called EPO ‘productivity’ figures, measured in misguided terms or yardsticks like number of patents granted), it’s still not easy to get patents on software in Europe, either.
The mainstream media is increasingly covering various EPO scandals these days (there are many scandals, not one). It happens on a daily basis right now. See Stefan Krempl’s new article in German (if SUEPO doesn’t produce a translation, maybe one of our readers wants to).
The European Commission and second-biggest EU establishment — the EPO — apparently have something in common. The EPO is clearly dysfunctional right now and “at the EPO,” according to this new article, “oppositions can take 12 years” (if not longer).
There are many aspects to the EPO situation and our Wiki page breaks these down into various loose categories. Some readers have asked us for an overview of everything. This, in preparation for the protest on Thursday, is something we intend to do next. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News of interest to anyone who seriously considers Microsoft a suitable host for GNU/Linux instances
THE Linux Foundation no longer shocks us when it decides to become even more financially dependent on Microsoft. We have written many articles on this subject — articles in which we explained many of the reasons why this was a bad idea. Our focus these days is software patents, not Microsoft’s subversive attacks on Linux. This is why we don’t want to compose any more long articles on the subject of today’s Linux Foundation announcement, however disturbing it may be. The arguments made back in the days (see the 10 links below) are still valid and applicable today.
To remind people of what it means to host with Microsoft, consider this new article titled “Microsoft begins migrating Office 365 SMB customers to new plans”.
“Proof that once Microsoft can ransom users’ data,” a reader of ours called it, “they can pull the rug out from under them at any future date without notice.”
The same would inevitably go for people who decided to host GNU/Linux with Microsoft. Control is lost and Microsoft’s price-gouging practices are like no other company’s practices. We already highlighted other malicious business plans Microsoft would subject clients to, such as in-place Linux-to-Windows migrations with financial incentives. Watch what Microsoft is doing to Android right now.
One must also bear in mind that Microsoft’s software is designed for remote control by people who are in power, notably the NSA. Consider this new article which shows just how deep this goes:
It’s nearly 2016, and Windows DNS servers can be pwned remotely
Microsoft is closing out the year with a fix for 71 security vulnerabilities in Windows Server, client-side Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Edge.
Among the patches are two vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in the wild for elevation of privilege and remote code execution.
Put in very simple terms, DNS, which can serve as a gateway to GNU/Linux-based sites, can be remotely controlled through vulnerabilities which Microsoft didn’t bother addressing until they were already exploited by players other than the NSA et al.
There are many old articles which come to mind in light of today’s mistake from the Linux Foundation. Among them:
- Microsoft Gradually Embraces, Extends, Extinguishes Linux Foundation as a Foundation of GNU/Linux
- Only Months After Microsoft’s Ramji Enters the Linux Foundation Microsoft Gradually Joins Him
- Message to LinuxCon Regarding Microsoft: “It is Necessary to Get Behind Someone in Order to Stab Them in the Back.” -Sir Humphrey Appleby
- More People With Microsoft Roots Enter the Linux Foundation, Occupying Top Positions
- They ‘R’ Coming: More Microsoft Money for the Linux Foundation
- Microsoft is Interjecting Itself Into GNU/Linux and Free Software News, Even Events and Foundations
- The ‘Microsoft Loves Linux’ Baloney is Still Being Floated in the Media While Microsoft Attacks Linux With Patents, New Lawsuits Reported
- Microsoft is Trying to Subsume GNU/Linux and Free/Libre Software
- The Linux Foundation Appoints Former Microsoft Manager for Management of OpenDaylight
- When ‘Former’ Microsoft Influence Lands in Free/Open Source Software
We will probably refrain, as matter of principle in fact, from any further comments regarding the Linux Foundation, at least for the time being (we have a lot more to say). Not because it’s unimportant but because it wouldn’t be our top priority at this point in time…
We have a lot to say about the EPO these days and it is generally more urgent (people’s careers or lives are at stake). We write about it as quickly as we receive new material in order to cope or catch up with the growing backlog. We have reached a critical point and tomorrow there will be massive protests in Munich again. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Recently, I have been adding a lot of patches to the version of Eclipse (Mars.1) that is packaged in Fedora Linux. This post attempts to explain why.
In my opinion, one of the chief benefits to packaging your software for a Linux distribution is the ability of the distribution to carry patches. These patches generally come in two flavours.
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Kernel Space
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Linux is not only the future, but the present too. Even if you do not directly use an operating system based on the kernel, there is a good chance that it impacts you every day. Much of your precious internet traffic is routed through servers that run Linux. Many set-top boxes and devices are powered by the kernel and you may not even know it. Of course, Android is one such Linux-based operating system that millions upon millions of people use daily.
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Microsoft’s newfound embrace of open-source software continues with the news today that the company will now offer a Linux on Azure certificate through its Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate program.
Those who pass both Microsoft’s 70-533 exam and the Linux Foundation’s Certified System Administrator exam will receive the Linux on Azure cert from the MCSA program. The cert is available as of today, according to a joint announcement.
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The Linux Foundation collaborative project formalizes its governance structure for standardizing containers, though it doesn’t answer all questions about container interoperability.
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From participating in Node.js, the Core Infrastructure Initiative and other Collaborative Projects at Linux Foundation to its recent partnerships with Red Hat and SUSE, Microsoft is demonstrating a sincere, smart and practical approach to how it builds new technologies and supports its vast customer base. Microsoft open sourced .NET; it open sourced key parts of its web browser; and it uses Linux for its Azure Cloud Switch. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft share a common, strategic approach to technology development: balance internal R&D with external R&D to create the most important technologies of our time.
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Right after Microsoft releasing MS-Linux, a few years ago I would have said the next most unlikely thing for Microsoft to do would be to offer a Linux certification. Guess what? They are.
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Shuah Khan was the very first engineer to join Samsung’s North American Open Source Group shortly after it was founded in 2013. Since then, she has been extremely valuable to the company through her contributions to the Linux Kernel. She was recently elected to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, presenting her with a wonderful opportunity to help direct the Linux Kernel community from the highest technical level.
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While KDBUS has yet to be mainlined as it was sent back to the drawing board, at least some of the systemd developers are working on a new kernel bus implementation called BUS1.
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Graphics Stack
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Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has done his usual recap of the i915 DRM graphics driver changes to be found in Linux 4.4.
There is a lot of code being converted over to the new atomic interfaces, Panel Self Refresh fixes (PSR), frame-buffer compression fixes (FBC), 48-bit GPU address space support with GEM for Broadwell and newer, GuC-based command submission, XenGT virtualized GPU support for Broadwell, and a variety of other changes.
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The design is to move the input event code off to its own thread rather than running on the same main thread as the X.Org Server. Keith Packard cleaned up the threaded input code and patches it for the xf86 and KDrive/FBDEV areas. As part of this work, Keith is proposing that SIGIO support be dropped from the X.Org Server, which will break DRI1 support. This patch series is part of the reason why DRI1 support was proposed to be killed off yesterday in the X.Org Server.
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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As of this morning in NetworkManager is support for creating MAC VLAN and MAC VTAP devices.
MAC VLAN is like a reverse VLAN where a single network connection creates multiple virtual connections with different MAC addresses. MacVTap meanwhile is a new driver to simplify virtualized bridged networking. MacVTap is described in more detail here.
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The Git developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance build for the stable Git 2.6 branch of the world’s most popular distributed version control system.
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This time the focus was mostly on fixing problems introduced in 1.36.7.
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I’m a researcher at the interface between physics, chemistry and biology, and in our team, we pride ourselves on making the most of the data we acquire, especially through quantitative analysis and modelling. In fact, we spend a lot of time doing fitting simple formulas or complex differential equations to our data. As we were not really satisfied with the data fitting capacities of the software available, we’ve had our custom data processing/fitting tool, SOAS, for ages. However, that tool was hard to maintain (Fortran + Fortran libraries interfacing with X11 with ABI changing every once in a while without notice), impossible to port to non-X11 platforms, not very user-friendly, and not easy to extend at all. So, when I got my permanent position, a rewrote a completely new version from scratch, called QSoas using C++, Qt, Ruby and the GNU Scientific Library. The result is incomparably more powerful, more easy to maintain, more user-friendly, and more portable (I build it for Linux, Mac and Windows).
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Proprietary
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Unsurprisingly called SoftMaker Office 2016, the company, which won an INQUIRER Tech Hero award earlier this year, claims it’s the fastest office suite for Linux, being five quicker than Microsoft Office. It also offers more than 400 new features including vastly improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.
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BeyondTrust says it is making life easier for Linux and Unix systems administrators who use sudo for security and authentication. The company has a new product, PowerBroker for Sudo, that simplifies sudo file and log management.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Back during E3 in June, CodeWeavers was talking about “support for DirectX 11 [in the coming months].” It’s been nearly six months and it looks like we’re still a ways out from seeing support in Wine.
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Games
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First of all it was a great year. The number of Linux titles that we received is good, but shouldn’t it be better? Personally I think it should. And I hope it still can be.
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Lucius II is a game we sadly overlooked, once again due to it not showing up in Steam’s new releases section due to adding the Linux version later. I really wish Valve would fix that, as it comes up quite often.
I tested it, and while it could be interesting it doesn’t play very well with the Steam Controller, during a tutorial it told me to throw an item, but it didn’t pick up the right trigger at all.
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I’ve been sent Sunken by a user, and I have to say it looks like quite a good addition to the action RPG genre, the good news is the developer is already planning a Linux version.
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The Mean Greens – Plastic Warfare is a pretty damn good looking action game about plastic toy soldiers, reminds me of a game I played like it years ago. The developers are interested in a Linux version, and want testers.
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The Last NightMary – A Lenda do Cabeça de Cuia is an interesting hybrid of a point and click game with survival elements, has nice artwork too.
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The Unity game engine has been upgraded to version 5.3, and its developers have made a series of very important improvements to it.
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When the HTC Vive launched there was hopes of it launching in November along with the Steam Machines, Steam Controller, and Steam Link. As time went on we heard by the “holidays 2015″ for a limited release and full availability in Q1’2016. HTC has now announced their new retail target, which slightly misses the old window. The new expectation is for the retail launch of HTC Vive in April 2016.
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Well this was a surprise, the Humble NEOGEO 25th Anniversary Bundle has been released, and it features plenty of games nearly all of which are available on Linux. Right now Linux is leading the pack with the highest average payment too.
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I’m a pretty big fan of Albion Online, as we had a big drought of MMORPG games on Linux. Albion Online is in closed beta (you can buy in anytime) and it just had a juicy update.
The new update is named Aurelius, and it comes with a ton of fixes, new abilities for weapons, and more! The new dungeons to fight PvE sounds like a well needed addition for the game.
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Hatred, that weird shooter about killing anyone and everyone is now in testing for Linux the developer has confirmed, and SteamDB shows it too.
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The wildly popular game Rocket League is expected to be playable on GNU/Linux soon. Rocket League is a multiplayer physics based Soccer game played with fast booster, rigged vehicles in place of athletes, and is the sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars! Since its release last year for Playstation 4 and Windows, Rocket League has gathered a huge following, which has only increased the demand for a Linux version.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We are happy to announce the release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.10. It is recommended update for the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
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Krita 2.9.10 has been released today as part of the Calligra 2.9.10 open-source office suite, for which we will publish a separate article later today, when an official announcement is made available.
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Ark 15.08 was the first Ark release after the port to KF5, so there wasn’t much room for new features.
With the upcoming 15.12 release the situation is quite different, as there are a significant number of changes that are worth of a blog post.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME’s Epiphany web-browser is under heavy development for the GNOME 3.20 cycle. Epiphany 3.19.1 was just released and it’s packing a lot of new features.
First off, WebGL and WebAudio support are finally enabled in this browser by default while most tier-one browsers have long exposed these web APIs.
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Last week I attended the Content Apps Hackfest in Madrid. A group of about 12 us met for three days to work on GNOME’s content apps: Documents, Files, Music, Photos and Videos. The goal for the hackfest was to make as much progress with these apps as possible, although we also ended up talking about other apps, due to who was in attendance.
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New Releases
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Neofytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux project has had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of new updates for the latest stable release of the Chakra GNU/Linux computer operating system.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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I was recently looking into Pulp’s ability to sync and publish SUSE repositories, including those from openSUSE, SLES 11, and (after a little bit of work) SLES 12.
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SUSE® has joined the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project, a carrier-grade, integrated open source platform that is accelerating the introduction of new products and services using network functions virtualization (NFV). The addition of NFV capabilities enhances SUSE’s software-defined data center offerings, including OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure and Ceph-based software-defined storage.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) has earned an average recommendation of “Buy” from the thirty-five ratings firms that are currently covering the company, Market Beat.com reports. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, eight have issued a hold rating and twenty-five have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12-month target price among analysts that have issued a report on the stock in the last year is $83.26.
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Red Hat Inc has had its stock rating noted as ‘Reiterated’ with the recommendation being set at ‘OUTPERFORM’ today by analysts at RBC Capital Mkts. Red Hat Inc are listed in the Technology sector within NYSE. RBC Capital Mkts have set a target price of 90 USD on its stock. This is indicating the analyst believes there is a potential upside of 12.5% from the opening price of 80.02 USD.
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A cloud of bioinformatics intelligence has been harmonised by Red Hat to create ‘virtual supercomputers’ that can be shared by the eMedlab collective of research institutes.
The upshot is that researchers at institutes such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger, UCL and King’s College London can carry out much more powerful data analysis when researching cancers, cardio-vascular conditions and rare diseases.
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The company is using the Node package manager to develop connectors linking Node.js to ActiveMQ, the Java messaging service, said Rich Marples, senior director for product management at the Red Hat app platforms business group.
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optionMONSTER’s monitoring systems detected the sale of 3,300 January 72.50 puts in one print for $0.85 this morning. Volume was more than 7 times the open interest in the strike, which indicates that this is a new position.
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In a report released today, Matthew Hedberg from RBC Capital reiterated a Buy rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), with a price target of $90. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $80.52, close to its 52-week high of $83.
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Fedora
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He first started using Linux in 1996 when he installed Slackware on an 80386-based computer. That attempt was not successful, so he tried Red Hat Linux, which worked. At the time, he was a data systems technician for the United States Navy and was responsible for a wide array of systems running everything from HPUX, SunOS, Solaris, and Windows NT. While the Navy was not running Linux at the time, Dan saw its potential and has been running at least one Linux system at home since that first install. It has been an integral part of his job for nearly fifteen years.
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The Fedora Hosted lists will be migrated on November 16th, and the Fedora Project lists later in the week. After migration you should be able to use the new Hyperkitty UI to post and read the lists if you choose or continue to get emails in the traditional way.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UAVIA, a French company that develops inspection and surveillance drones controlled remotely without human intervention on the ground, has announced the availability of the first commercial 100% remotely operable drones powered by Ubuntu.
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The MeegoPad T02 is a PC-on-a-stick with an Intel Atom Bay Trail processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. Plug it into the HDMI port of your TV or monitor and you’ve basically got a low-power desktop computer.
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Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has announced the availability of this week’s Ubuntu Kernel Team Newsletter, published on Tuesday, December 8, 2015, on the Ubuntu Wiki.
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The Ubuntu developers have finally merged the Plymouth package from Debian, and they are preparing for some important changes.
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Ubuntu’s kernel team has temporarily moved up to the Linux 4.3 kernel in the archive, but it will be short-lived.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will end up using the Linux 4.4 kernel but while that version is still weeks away from release and being fixed up, Ubuntu “Xenial Xerus” users have the Linux 4.3 kernel upgrade, as confirmed by this week’s kernel team news.
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Flavours and Variants
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While other operating systems dabble with mobile or push the bleeding edge, Mint’s shaping up to be the Old Faithful of the Linux desktop world.
Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” continues a series of stable releases built on the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS code. Rather than hacking away on experimental features or adding all the latest low-level software, Mint’s developers have been spending their time polishing the Cinnamon and MATE desktops. “Rosa” is yet another solid release that will please fans of Mint and anyone who misses the more traditional Linux desktop.
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Pi2Design has won Kickstarter funding for a $49 multifunction SSD shield for the Raspberry Pi 2 with an mSATA socket, WiFi, dual USBs, and an 8-25V supply.
Pi2Design, a Rhode Island based startup focused on Raspberry Pi shields and other Pi-based projects, has surpassed its modest, $15,000 Kickstarter goal for a “CSB502SSD” multifunction storage shield for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. The device is designed and manufactured by Cogent Computer Systems, makers of embedded modules and boards such as the Marvell Armada XP-based CSB1726 module. Pi2Design handles marketing, sales, and distribution.
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The day before the announcement of the Raspberry Pi Zero, a new version of Raspbian Linux very quietly appeared in the Raspberry Pi Downloads, along with a new NOOBS archive that included it.
As there was no release announcement made at that time, and then there was so much excitement about the Raspberry Pi Zero the next day, the Raspbian release slipped past almost entirely unnoticed.
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Like many LJ readers these days, I’ve been leading a bit of a techno-nomadic lifestyle as of the past few years—jumping from network to network, access point to access point, as I bounce around the real world while maintaining my connection to the Internet and other networks I use on a daily basis. As of late, I’ve found that more and more networks are starting to block outbound ports like SMTP (port 25), SSH (port 22) and others. It becomes really frustrating when you drop into a local coffee house expecting to be able to fire up your SSH client and get a few things done, and you can’t, because the network’s blocking you.
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Beyond all the recent kernel work with landing the initial Raspberry Pi KMS driver for the Linux 4.4 kernel, Eric Anholt at Broadcom has remained busy in user-space too with more improvements to the VC4 Gallium3D driver.
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Phones
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Where will 2016 take us? Will we see Ubuntu Touch get some broader distribution and hardware support? Will Jolla survive as a company? Will some other company or organization come along and surprise us all with the Linux mobile OS of the future?
No, really. I’m asking. Does anyone know? Because I have absolutely no idea. I just hope 2016 is a bit better than 2015 for mobile Linux.
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Android
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The Pixel C marks several firsts for Google and Android: It’s the first tablet Google has designed and manufactured on its own. It’s the first device other than the Chromebook Pixel to bear the “Pixel” name (and thus also the first Android device to use that moniker). And it’s the first time Google has actively pursued a convertible gadget that attempts to straddle the worlds of both touch-centric computing and keyboard-based input.
Beyond all that surface-level stuff, though, the Pixel C holds an interesting extra surprise: It’s the first time since 2011′s short-lived Honeycomb era that Google is moving back toward the idea of providing a tablet-optimized interface for large-screened devices.
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The previously rumoured flagship smartphone codenamed HTC O2 has reportedly been abandoned by HTC. The company instead might launch a new handset, with codename HTC Perfume.
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The tech industry loves to watch platforms and products duke it out, and the competition can produce truly useful innovation that betters us all. It can also lead to lots of wasted effort and shattered dreams once the actual war is over but people keep trying to pretend it’s still on.
That’s certainly the case in mobile, where for years it’s been clear that only two operating system mattered: iOS and Android. Yet there were always a bunch of hopefuls that the tech industry cheered on, for sport if nothing else.
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The open-source nature of Google’s Android is both a curse and a blessing. Google conquered the post-PC world by making sure its mobile OS is the dominant platform in the smartphone business. Over 1.4 billion smartphone users have an Android device that can be used to browse the web and bring in some ad-based cash to Google – though many reports still say that iPhone owners are even more profitable for Google when it comes to ad money.
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Back in early October, Motorola published a preliminary list of its smartphones that are scheduled to receive the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update. At the time, many Motorola fans have been disappointed to find out that the 2nd-gen Motorola Moto E, a handset that the manufacturer launched earlier this year, was not included among the Moto smartphone models scheduled to be updated to the latest Android version.
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Google is back with yet another Android tablet. The latest hardware effort, the Pixel C, comes from an odd place inside Google: the Pixel team. Usually a “Pixel” is the latest, fancy high-end Chromebook, but with the Pixel C, the traditionally Chrome OS-centric team decided to make an Android tablet. It’s not just a tablet, though, there’s also a clip-on keyboard base making it a Surface-style convertible.
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HTC’s next flagship smartphone will be called Perfume, and it will come loaded with the yet-to-be-announced Android 6.1 OS, according to the usually reliable leakster @LlabTooFeR, who made the revelation in a tweet. He also said that the device will run version 8.0 of the company’s Sense UI.
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The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech for the three months ending in October 2015 shows Android returning to growth in Europe’s big five markets (“EU5”), after a decline that began in October 2014. Meanwhile, iOS registered a small decline in the EU5 for the three months ending in October 2015, the first such decline since the three-month period ending in August 2014.
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The first age of Android saw Google’s OS attain popularity on smartphones in its early days. The second age took that approach to the next level, with a coherent design language and a move into tablets. Now, as we approach the end of 2015, it is the dawn of the third age of Android.
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Google has said a quiet goodbye to the Nexus 6: as of today, you’re no longer able to buy it from the Play Store. The decision appears to mark the end of the road for the 6-inch handset now that both the Nexus 5X and its successor, the Nexus 6P, are up for sale. If you’re still itching to get your hands on one — though we can’t think of a reason you’d want to — Amazon is still selling a 32GB version for $349.99. Google was not immediately available for comment on whether the phone has been permanently discontinued.
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The Linux Foundation brought the container powers, including CoreOS, Docker, and Google, together to form the Open Container Initiative (OIC). Its job? To create a vendor-neutral, portable and open specification and runtime for container-based solutions.
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Open source is in your best interest, whether you’re an individual, a corporation, a small business, a non-profit, or a government agency.
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List: These skills are the foundations for a strong career in open source development.
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The Hashcat password recovery tool and cracker is now available to developers under an open source license, sending the Github community into meltdown with the news.
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A few of weeks ago I got a email from a friend who was attending an education technology conference. In the note he referenced PyGaze, an open source project I might be interested in.
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There’s a lot to be said for open source software. The ability to change code to suit one’s needs, the fact that security vulnerabilities can be easier to find, and the overall transparency are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the strengths of using open source software. And, while Microsoft is no Apple when it comes to locking down their source code, their operating system is still, unfortunately, closed.
Don’t despair, though! There is a project out there that aims to change this. No, they’re not stealing anything or breaking into any computers to obtain Microsoft’s code. They’re writing their own version of Windows called ReactOS that aims to be binary-compatible with Windows. The software has been in development for over a decade, but they’re ready to release version 0.4 which will bring USB, sound, networking, wireless, SATA, and many more features to the operating system.
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A popular European cable modem has seen its software open-sourced by Technicolor in order to comply with the GPL.
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In the Summer of 2015 the Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced the extension of its Affiliate Member Program to include institutions of higher education, and shortly after announced admission of our first member from the higher education community, the University of Southern Queensland. Today the OSI announces Marist College has joined as well. Marist College is an important supporter and contributor to not only the advancement of open source software within colleges and universities, but also as a community member of another OSI Affiliate, the Apereo Foundation. Marist College’s experiences in open source software adoption, community development and policy advocacy within the higher education landscape will inform the OSI’s work throughout the education sector and help shape the Affiliate Member Program to best serve institutions of higher education exploring, using and producing open source software.
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Events
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The FOSDEM Distro Devroom will take place 30 & 31 January, 2016 at FOSDEM, in room K.4.201 at Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Brussels, Belgium.
As Linux distributions converge on similar tools, the problem space overlapping different distributions is growing. This standardization across the distributions presents an opportunity to develop generic solutions to the problems of aggregating, building, and maintaining the pieces that go into a distribution.
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In this year’s edition of Google Code-in, students can choose from tasks provided by the following organizations / projects: Apertium, Copyleft Games, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, MetaBrainz, OpenMRS, RTEMS, SCoRe, Sugar Labs, Systers, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With Mozilla’s recent Firefox 42 Web browser release, a new tracking protection feature became available to Mozilla’s users. Now Mozilla is extending its protections even further with the new Focus by Firefox app, which is available now in the Apple App Store as a free content blocker for iOS 9 users running the Safari Web browser.
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Farewell Firefox OS smartphones. Mozilla today announced an end to its smartphone experiment, and said that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. It will continue to experiment on how it might work on other connected devices and Internet of Things networks.
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I first started writing about FirefoxOS when it was called Boot2Gecko. The idea was sound, a mobile operating system that uses the web to deliver the web and web applications.
Unfortunately good ideas don’t always turn into good business. Mozilla was not able to push FirefoxOS through the crowded mobile landscape dominated by IOS and Android at the top end. Smaller efforts like Blackberry, Windows mobile, Tizen and even Ubuntu Phone have all been trying to gain share against the Android and IOS too, but little movement occurs.
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Mozilla announced at the Mozlando developer conference in Florida that it has officially abandoned attempts to get a foothold in the smartphone market with its Firefox OS system.
“We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow,” said Ari Jaaksi, SVP of Connected Devices at Mozilla in a statement to El Reg.
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Mozilla made the announcement earlier today that they are ending Firefox OS. However, there is some unrelated bright news today for Firefox fans.
Mozilla has announced that in 2016 they will begin shipping components of Rust and Servo in Firefox! It’s been confirmed by the official @RustLang, the account for this programming language backed by Mozilla.
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The results of our latest poll have been tallied and FOSS Force readers evidently think that Mozilla should keep Thunderbird instead of helping the project find a new home. Mozilla executive chairperson, Mitchell Baker, announced on November 30 that the foundation intended to eventually separate itself from the popular desktop email client it first released in 2004.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As many of you have found out, I am relatively willing to help people out with Keystone related questions. Here are a couple guidelines.
Don’t ask me support questions here on the blog. I’ll lie or make something up and you will never know it. Instead, ask in #openstack-keystone if you can find me on IRC or on the #openstack or #oepnstack-dev mailing list with [keystone] in the title. I might not answer, but someone that knows will. Or someone that doesn’t know, will answer, and I’ll correct the answer, and then someone else will correct my correction.
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CMS
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Version 4.4 of WordPress, named “Clifford” in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.4 make your site more connected and responsive. Clifford also introduces a new default theme, Twenty Sixteen.
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today I’ll show you how you can make your website more useful for your readers by installing more plugins to your WordPress site. In this article you will know how to install WordPress plugins.
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In this article you will know more about responsive WordPress themes and also how important these themes are for your site ranking in the search engines. So let’s dive in and discuss responsive WordPress themes.
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More than 3,000 people contribute to the core Drupal codebase that provides a base level of functionality with a modular architecture. Over 10,000 developers contribute and maintain more than 25,000 contributed open source modules that modify and extend the core capabilities, changing behavior, adding new features, and integrating Drupal with other systems. Users can add their own modules, as well as third-party PHP libraries, and leverage a lot of existing functionality, so they can focus on their unique needs, branding and design, and business logic to get up and running quickly.
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Education
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I stared at a blinking cursor when confronted with the question, “Your profession and position?”
It can be difficult to define the entire spectrum of my role at Reglue. Yeah, I am founder and executive director, but outside of that, in the real world where people are identified by their professional roles, how do I answer such a question?
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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EMC open sources more storage software [Ed: only mere components; also recall the back doors fiasco of RSA, owned by EMC]
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Apple’s open source release of OS X (aka Darwin) has been around since 2000 and usually arrives in the weeks following the public release of OS X.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We’ve put together a gorgeous 2015 Giving Guide to encourage people to shop ethically for tech gifts, just as they might for other kinds of gifts. Now it’s time to get it into the hands of holiday shoppers! In what is now an FSF tradition, we’ll be in elf and gnu costumes at Davis Square, handing out print copies of the Giving Guide to people buying their loved ones presents for Christmas, Hanukkah, and everything else.
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Licensing
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Should governments be able to force source code to be open? Arguably, yes. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement prevents authorities from requiring that, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned recently. As a result, the TPP places severe restrictions on open source software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Last week, the Dutch Minister of the Interior, Ronald Plasterk sent the government’s National Open Data Agenda (NODA) in a letter to the Dutch parliament. The agenda aims to make as many high-value datasets as possible available for re-use. It will provide tools to keep track of progress and quality, and support for data managers in opening up their datasets.
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Open Hardware
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Users looking to connect their existing smart home setup to Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem can turn to Homebridge, an open-source tool that brings voice control to popular devices from Nest, Sonos and others.
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Programming
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It was a 1 day workshop the day before PyCon and it took place in Fit Vut (Faculty of Information Technology). There were several reasons I applied for it:
it’s free;
it’s for women;
you don’t have to be an experienced programmer. In fact the only requirement was to have a laptop;
it’s an amazing opportunity to learn some code and get guidance;
you can meet many great people from open source community.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Italian government agency Agenzia per Italia Digital (agID) has been asked by the European Commission to preside over a working group to address the interoperability of public data and public services, the agency said on its blog. The work of the agency was presented during a Share-PSI workshop in Berlin on November 25 and 26. The main topic of this workshop was “maximising interoperability — core vocabularies, location-aware data and more”.
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Hardware
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Samsung has always been at the forefront of technology, making advances which are well out of reach of most companies. Their latest is 128GB DDR4 Ram.
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Security
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IDG Enterprise’s latest cloud computing study is out, and it points to robust trends in the cloud market for next year. The study summary is found here, and you can view a related infographic. Today, according to study findings, 72% of organizations have at least one application in the cloud or a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud, and they are not stopping there. Here are more details.
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The malware uses a configuration file encrypted through the XOR algorithm to make it difficult for security firms to detect Rekoobe. According to a blog post on the Dr. Web website, “Once the file is read, the Trojan periodically refers to the C&C server to receive commands.”
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It doesn’t matter how good your computer security systems are if your users just let attackers know how to log in. Social engineering is the black art of persuading victims to tell you everything you need to know to break into their computers. Sometimes this can mean persuading them to hand over usernames or passwords, sometimes it can mean granting you physical access to their computer, and sometimes it can mean deleting any incriminating evidence. In truth, the skilled social engineer can persuade victims to bypass all sorts of computer security that would be hard to compromise using just technical means.
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Adobe abandoned active development for the Flash Player on Linux a while back and is now only releasing security upgrades. The company just released a massive security update, and it looks like the Linux platform is covered as well.
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In what some might see as swimming against the political mainstream, the Netherlands parliament has just decided to back open-source web security with hard cash.
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The Netherlands’ Lower House has thrown its weight behind a plan to improve key open source security solutions, and has voted €500,000 towards a range of projects.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Germany’s vice-chancellor has publicly accused Saudi Arabia of financing terrorists in the West.
Sigmar Gabriel claimed the country was funding mosques linked to extremism, which he said were becoming a threat to public security.
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Where could Trump have gotten the idea that his “infantile threats of massive bombing” would be taken seriously as foreign policy proposals? Well, as a resident of New York City, maybe he reads the New York Times…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suffered the loss of another major corporate sponsor, the Guardian reported Tuesday, with the electric utility American Electric Power (AEP) announcing it will no longer provide the climate change denial group with funding from 2016.
AEP becomes the 107th identified corporation to have withdrawn funding since the Center for Media and Democracy launched the ALEC Exposed project in 2011, joining others such as Shell, BP, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
The loss of AEP will be particularly troubling for ALEC. AEP lobbyist Paul Loeffelman is still listed on the ALEC website as the private sector chairman for the group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force. This task force is the arm of ALEC promoting climate change denial to state legislators and driving its anti-environmental agenda, which includes working to block President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and oppose the development of renewable energy in the United States.
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But Sir David has warned that future generations of holidaymakers could soon be unable to enjoy the same experience because of the damage global warming is doing to the reef.
Speaking at a screening of his new documentary on the reef at Australia House in London last week, he said: ‘The real danger is the rising temperatures and acidity and the effect that has – if the acidity grows to a certain limit it will damage the coral itself.
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Finance
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A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and perplexing new evidence in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. According to a cache of documents provided to Gizmodo which were corroborated in interviews, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian businessman based in Sydney, and Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, were involved in the development of the digital currency.
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Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.
The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of “featured speakers.” Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a “former academic who does research that no one ever hears about,” when she interrupted him.
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Police have raided the home of an Australian tech entrepreneur identified by two US publications as one of the early developers of the digital currency bitcoin.
On Wednesday afternoon, police gained entry to a home belonging to Craig Wright, who had hours earlier been identified in investigations by Gizmodo and Wired, based on leaked transcripts of legal interviews and files. Both publications have indicated that they believe Wright to have been involved in the creation of the cryptocurrency.
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It seems that there will be a rare UK debate about TTIP tomorrow. This is a great opportunity to contact your MPs and let them know what you think. Here’s what I’ve just sent – you can use WritetoThem to make things easier.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Back on September 17, as Donald Trump basked in the post-Labor Day glow of being the Republican Party’s undisputed frontrunner, he spoke to a boisterous crowd in New Hampshire and took a question from an especially boisterous fan. “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American,” said the Trump t-shirt-wearing man. “We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
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Privacy
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Back in October, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which has nothing to with cybersecurity at all, and is almost entirely a surveillance bill in disguise. Want to know the proof: many of the most vocal supporters of CISA, who talked up how important “cybersecurity” is these days are the very same people now looking to undermine encryption.
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The Obama administration just responded to the 104,109 people who asked the president to stand up for strong encryption. The response—penned by Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felton [sic] and Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel—acknowledged the importance of the conversation but offered no conclusions. Instead, they asked us to share our thoughts on encryption.
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On Friday the FBI classified the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, as “an act of terrorism”. Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, don’t seem to have been in direct contact with ISIS, but the extremist militant group called the couple “supporters” on Saturday.
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As of last week, the National Security Agency can no longer cull through Americans’ phone records, but it can continue to eavesdrop on our emails, video chats, and documents. The NSA can keep metadata already collected until Feb. 29, 2016, and your phone data will continue to be collected by telecom companies.
But the fact that phone records can no longer be easily searched is nearly meaningless to the world of cloud computing. If the data is still up for grabs — and it is — then we’re likely to have the same concerns we did before the USA Freedom Act that curtailed some of the NSA’s activities last week.
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After we gave it some more thought, we realized we were hypocrites. Since inception, SpiderOak has been an advocate for online privacy. Unlike many others in our market, we strive to be very clear about how our product design truly delivers Zero Knowledge privacy for our users. We tell potential supporters, what matters most is who has the keys and how they are stored. But you can read more about how we solved those problems from our many other posts our site.
For the past five years, we had been using Google Analytics for monitoring our web traffic. Innocent enough decision, right? Then we asked ourselves, “are we contributing to the mass surveillance of the web by using a feature-rich, yet free service that tracks web visitors?” Sadly. we didn’t like the answer to that question. “Yes, by using Google Analytics, we are furthering the erosion of privacy on the web.”
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Privacy and encryption have been two very hot topics for the last few years. The Tor browser can help protect your privacy while online, but it may come at the cost of being spied on by the NSA.
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Worried about the NSA monitoring you? If you take certain steps to mask your identity online, such as using the encryption service TOR, or even investigating an alternative to the buggy Windows operating system, you’re all but asking for “deep” monitoring by the NSA.
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Civil Rights
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The Henry Jackson Society seconds staff to the Quilliam Foundation. This extraordinary organisation is a career vehicle for “reformed jihadists” to milk huge salaries and luxury lifestyles from government money, in return for fronting an organisation run by the security services. Quilliam specialises in denouncement of Muslim organisations and talking up the Jihadi threat, offering “expert advice” on the government’s anti-free speech strategy. At the same time, it seeks to maximise the income of its directors. One interesting collaboration to make money was its collaboration with the current head of Pergida UK, and former head of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Alias Tommy Robinson).
Quilliam have received millions from the taxpayer for their dubious “work”. But their application for Home Office funding to split with Yaxley-Lennon remains an episode beyond belief. Several of Quilliam’s staff are “lent” by the CIA-funded Henry Jackson Society.
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Jacob Appelbaum read a powerful statement at this year’s Aaron Swartz Day Celebration. I’m still processing everything he revealed to us that night.
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The Internet is a diverse ecosystem of private and public stakeholders. By excluding a large sector of communities—like security researchers, artists, libraries, and user rights groups—trade negotiators skewed the priorities of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) towards major tech companies and copyright industries that have a strong interest in maintaining and expanding their monopolies of digital services and content. Negotiated in secret for several years with overwhelming influence from powerful multinational corporate interests, it’s no wonder that its provisions do little to nothing to protect our rights online or our autonomy over our own devices. For example, everything in the TPP that increases corporate rights and interests is binding, whereas every provision that is meant to protect the public interest is non-binding and is susceptible to get bulldozed by efforts to protect corporations.
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Despite al this, I would not be tremendously concerned about the result if Alistair had the decency to be a bit chastened by it. It is only because of our ridiculously undemocratic electoral system that representation is so skewed. You didn’t ought to get over 95% of the seats on 52% of the votes, and I am not sure what is gained by magnifying that other wrong. But any mixed feelings I have on those grounds are dispelled by the utterly inappropriate triumphalism the Lib Dems are displaying, as though to be found a blatant liar by a court is something to be proud of. The brass neck of it all is sickening.
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News Corporation and 21st Century Fox executive co-chairman Rupert Murdoch cited “radical Muslim dangers” to endorse a “complete refugee pause” one day after Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a total ban on Muslims immigrating to or visiting the United States.
On December 7, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United states until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” citing a flawed poll from an Islamophobic organization to claim that Muslims are a danger to America.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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All of our YouTube party playlists and Netlix-and-chill date nights are starting to add up: streaming video now accounts for 70 percent of broadband usage, according to data newly released by broadband services company Sandvine.
This statistic might look pretty innocuous and simple on its face, but our dependence on massive amounts of data for our daily use has some dangerous implications. Because cable providers would rather you be watching actual cable programming versus streaming shows from Hulu and Netflix, they impose arbitrary data caps on your Internet usage, like the ones Comcast has been quietly implementing in markets across the country. You end up shelling out for something that costs the providers next to nothing.
[...]
And T-Mobile isn’t the only culprit: on the broadband side, Comcast is launching its own streaming service that—you guessed it—won’t count toward your household’s data cap. This practice, called “zero-rating,” is as much a threat to net neutrality as anything else has been, directing consumers to certain data channels and making the free market less free.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today, the European Commission has presented its proposal to reform copyright law in the European Union. This package includes a proposal for a regulation on portability of online services, as well as a communication to announcing future reforms to follow in 2016. The European Commission has thus confirmed that it does not wish to reopen the file on the InfoSoc directive 1, reflecting its reluctance and lack of ambition on this issue.
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It has been obvious for decades that copyright law is ill-matched for the opportunities and challenges created by the Internet. It’s been equally obvious, however, that sensible copyright policies face huge practical barriers, in large part because few are willing to challenge the default assumption of copyright law that every time a copy is made the rightsholder’s permission is required. That assumption makes no sense in the digital age, but it’s hugely difficult to dislodge, especially at the international stage.
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Leaks from a confidential auditor report into the activities of bankrupt anti-piracy law firm Johan Schlüter suggest that the company defrauded its entertainment industry clients out of $25m. One lawyer was singled out for most criticism after enriching both herself and family members.
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People selling unwanted eBooks online have been warned that their activities could result in six months imprisonment. However, anti-piracy group BREIN, the alleged sender of the threats, says it is not responsible. Nevertheless, given a legal case to be heard next week, the timing is certainly curious.
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New data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent can be credited for a quarter of all upstream Internet traffic in North America, more than any other traffic source. With heavy competition from Netflix and other real-time entertainment, BitTorrent’s overall traffic share is falling.
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Further Recent Posts
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Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day