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09.08.15

Benoît Battistelli in Denial Over Suicides in EPO, Accuses and Threatens the Messengers

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A letter addressed to Benoît Battistelli about staff suicides and his controversial response to it

EARLIER this year we showed and specifically highlighted French- and German-speaking articles [1, 2, 3, 4] where Battistelli, ringleader of the scandalous EPO, expressed outrage not over suicides themselves but over people who merely ‘dared’ to point out the correlation between suicides and the EPO’s poor management. The appalling treatment of staff will be the subject of numerous posts this month. It’s a lot worse than people have come to imagine. It’s almost definitely beyond what’s permitted by law (European law), but then again, if the EPO hires thugs and felons to join even the highest of levels in the organisation, this probably is perfectly in line with the current standards.

In the following series of letters, circulated among several people, Battistelli is shown yet again fuming at staff representatives and even threatening them (more than implicitly) because of their concern for colleagues. We have deleted names and other identifying parts in respect to the privacy of the deceased person and we can safely present it below for future reference.

A letter to Battistelli

A letter from Battistelli

A letter from Battistelli

A letter to Battistelli

A letter to Battistelli

The above does not need any further comment (especially as the last letter sheds light on what was wrong with Battistelli’s reply), except a reminder that this is not the first time that Battistelli acts in such a fashion. This is systematic and it is consistent with Battistelli’s past attitude. It’s not some hot-headed tantrum. This alone helps demonstrate how toxic EPO management has become, making life very unpleasant for highly-skilled employees, many of whom are leaving (more on that we shall cover separately). █

Free Software Establishments in India Fight Back as Efforts to Spread Software Patents Are Reported

Posted in Asia, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 6:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

OOXML protests in India
From the Campaign for Document Freedom

Summary: India’s move towards software patents already encounters opposition from the Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) and China’s new obsession with software patents is addressed

SOFTWARE patents are truly a menace. Virtually no software developers would ever defend these, except maybe their ‘pioneer’. These are hurting even proprietary software companies, not just Free software developers. As the Microsoft booster Tim Anderson put it yesterday, “[l]egal woes (and cracked licence keys) cause dev favourites to throw in the towel”. He wrote about “Iron Speed, a firm which provided a rapid application development tool for creating .NET apps [which] is shuttering itself thanks to “litigation with a patent troll”, according to a letter sent to customers by co-founder and chairman Alan Fisher.”

The fight against software patents ought to be a common cause among proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers. Conglomerates such as Microsoft and IBM, which are not run by developers, want software patents in order to merely cement their monopolies, which they acquired only because of lack of software patents (back when they were small). Companies that focus on software can only succeed and thrive in the absence of monopolies on algorithms.

“The fight against software patents ought to be a common cause among proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers.”India’s policy on algorithm monopolies has been sound for a number of years, especially given the large number of software developers in India (both proprietary and Free/Open Source software developers). We were therefore rather stunned to learn that India is making a terrible, suicidal move. The Indian Patent Office sells out, causing huge issues for everyone, based on patent-centric sites. There is a panic among everyone except patent lawyers. Some rightly ask: “Will It Stifle Innovation in the IT Industry?”

Of course, it has been repeatedly shown in practice and in theory. India is making even more impact in the media (even international networks like Reuters [1, 2] by giving Pfizer the finger again. As PTI put it, “India rejects Pfizer’s patent application for arthritis drug”. Pfizer just wants another monopoly and India, realising the ethical impact, denies/declines. Why can’t the Indian Patent Office realise that patents on software too are unethical, irrational, and damaging to India? Who is this patent office working for? As one site put it: “The Indian Patent Office (IPO) has addressed limitations on patents for computer-related inventions to clarify the Patents (Amendment) Act 2002.”

It didn’t just address limitations; the word “limitations” has a negative connotation, as if patent maximalism is a good thing.

“Free Software activists against changes to patent norms” is the headline of this new article in English, which shows that the Free software types are already responding to this crisis. To quote the opening paragraph: “The Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) has alleged that the new Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions are illogical. It argues that they violate the spirit and law contained in the amended Patents Act of 1970 and could pose a grave threat to innovation in our country.”

There are meanwhile reports also from China, the other Asian technology giant. “Last year,” said this article, “for the fourth year running, China topped the patent league with 928,000 patent applications compared to 578,800 patents filed in the USA.”

This is not because of increased innovation but due to patent maximalism. As this new article indicates, software patents are becoming widespread in China (we wrote about this trend before). To quote the lawyers’ site:

Patenting computer software inventions makes sense for the Chinese e-commerce industry for three reasons. First, the Chinese government wants more businesses to patent their technological innovations. This policy is supported at the national level and the central government pays for inventors to apply for patents. Second, e-commerce is very important in China. One quarter of all consumer purchases in China are done on-line. And that number is unlikely to get smaller. Third, today’s Chinese consumers have many options and they have grown to expect quality products, quick service and reasonable prices.

For most active businesses, the third reason is the key. Finding an edge in meeting those consumer expectations has made for a fiercely competitive marketplace. Protecting process innovations that involve software improvements is, as it is everywhere, problematic. How are computer software inventions protected in China as a matter of law?

China would not gain any advantage by allowing patents on software. It would just be wasting time and other resources composing documents in Mandarin. A lot of these so-called ‘innovations’ are not innovative at all; they can be found in existing patents (maybe in other languages) and refer to ideas that got implemented a very long time ago. These patents are good for nothing, except maybe serve as trophies (although the higher the number of such ‘trophies’, the less impressive each becomes).

Business hawks in the US are not resting [1, 2]. They still lobby against patent reform in the US, pretending it would “hurt innovation”, “weaken patent laws”, and the usual nonsense about hurting businesses, which is exactly what patent law does at the moment (hence the need for reform). To quote the latter example, here is why the hawks have just resumed this lobbying (it’s about timing): “Toward the end of each summer lawmakers travel back to their home states and districts for the August recess. This time away from our nation’s capital allows elected officials to reconnect with constituents and hear which issues matter most to folks back home.”

US officials will hopefully work towards a real reform, not the diluted one which had been tabled before they went on holiday.

It is rather worrisome to see software patents spreading to large parts of the global economy (India, China, and even Europe if the corrupt EPO management gets its way) while the US itself, the original source of these patents, is coming to grips with the harms of these patents and cutting down accordingly. █

Dark Days for Microsoft as Windows Phone Further Abandoned

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10 at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Manchester at night

Summary: Microsoft is trying to label everything ’10′ (like Vista 10), despite there being no significant adoption of the ’10′ franchise

THE Vista 10 charade is not quite over yet. Microsoft is now ‘spamming’ people (using its so-called ‘decisions’ engine) to get them to use proprietary spyware, essentially lock-in with back doors. A bait title (headline) was used in a Microsoft puff piece the other day, demonstrating what we consider to be Microsoft and Vista 10 ads in ‘article’ form. It is too easy to be fooled by the artificial hype and actually believe that ’10′ is a success. It’s not.

Now that Nokia is dying (due to Microsoft) and is belatedly moving to Android, Microsoft “kills off some of Nokia’s apps for Windows Phone”. To quote IDG:

Microsoft announced Friday that it will cease development of several apps Nokia developed for Windows Phone as the company streamlines the photo experience on Windows 10 Mobile.

This will never take off. Vista 10 has been a disaster even on desktop, so why would it ever gain a foothold on mobile devices, where Microsoft has such minuscule market share whereas Linux dominates? █

Links 8/9/2015: Peppermint 6, elementary OS 0.3.1

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Viewer for Ubuntu Touch Making Great Progress

      Developers are preparing a LibreOffice viewer for the Ubuntu phones, and it looks like it’s coming along just nicely. It’s still early work, but its makers are already reporting great progress and really good performance.

    • Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let’s recap

      Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Porting Guix and GuixSD

      A few weeks ago, Manolis Ragkousis announced the completion of the GSoC project whose purpose was to port Guix to the Hurd. The system distribution, GuixSD, cannot run GNU/Hurd yet, but the package manager itself can both cross-compile from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd and build natively on GNU/Hurd. The work of Manolis is being gradually merged in the main branch.

      More recently, Mark H Weaver posted a series of patches porting GuixSD to MIPS (Lemote Yeeloong), making it the first GuixSD port to non-Intel-compatible hardware (the package manager itself has supported mips64el for two years already.) By removing several platform-specific assumptions, this work paves the way for future ports.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Munich now a major contributor to open source

      The city of Munich is a major contributor to free and open source projects, sending bugfixes to upstream developers, making available software solutions and sharing best practices and technical information. In August, Munich IT staff members shared the city’s accomplishments with the community of Debian developers, one of the main free software distributions.

    • Munich Does A Lot Of The Right Things But Still Drags Onwards

      Munich may have put out the fire but they still are far from optimal in IT. There’s no reason at all they have to support 20-year-old computers. Such things can be replaced rather readily in today’s market with savings in energy-consumption, size, space, noise, dust,… Why spend a lot on labour to maintain obsolete technology far past its “best before” date? It’s not as if they are just getting full value out of previous expenditures nor keeping junk out of the landfill. Ten years’ support does that very well. Twenty years is just silly. 20 years ago, I was using a ‘486, for pity’s sake.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)

      C is everywhere and in everything. C powers the Mars Curiosity rover, every computer operating system, every mobile OS, the Java Virtual Machine, Google Chrome, ATM machines, the computers in your car, the computers in your robot surgeon, the computers that designed the robot surgeon, the computers that designed those computers, and, eventually, C powers itself as its own implementation language.

Leftovers

  • How Apple is preparing for the end of the iPhone affair

    The launch of the iPhone 6s, fourth generation Apple TV and iPad Pro is impending…

    [...]

    Apple knows it can’t rely on the annual iPhone hype-release cycle
    forever.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

      Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

      If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation Security Checklist: Have It Your Way

      The Linux Foundation’s recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations.

    • ICT faces critical shortage of IT security execs

      There’s a critical shortage of IT security experts in Australia to meet an otherwise welcome increase in the demand for ICT executives after months of employment uncertainty for the country’s tech executives.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why Murdoch Pushes for War

      Given the disgraceful Sun front page and middle spread urging war on Syria, and the all-out propaganda on Sky News, it is important to understand why Murdoch is pushing so hard for war. I therefore reproduce my article from February 2013. It is important to note that the links are to industry publications: this is very genuine, hard information.

    • Secret RAF drone strike kills two Britons in Syria

      DAVID CAMERON revealed yesterday that the RAF carried out a secret drone strike in Syria which killed two British citizens fighting for Islamic State (Isis).

      The Prime Minister insisted the strike was “necessary and proportionate” to stop attacks being planned on Britain.

      But campaigners described it as a an “extrajudicial killing” that “violated” the will of Parliament.

  • Finance

    • ‘Why this long PayPal delay?’

      In the past I sold a few personal items on eBay that were paid for with PayPal. On those occasions I had immediate access to the money I received.

      However, in recent weeks I have sold some other items, also paid for with PayPal, but was able to access the money only after 21 days, even though PayPal deducted its fees immediately. Have things changed?

    • I Foreclose Houses For Banks: 5 Awful Realities

      About a decade ago, home prices exploded to bizarro levels, then millions of families got behind on their mortgage payments. A financial crisis spiraled out from there, almost destroying the world. Things have improved a bit since then, but it still sucks for lots of people. If you can’t make your payments, the bank squares the debt by seizing your home, and you’re left out in the cold. In the modern world, it’s one of the worst things that can happen to you that doesn’t involve a somber doctor asking you to please sit down.

      That’s where Evelyn comes in. As part of her real estate job, she works with banks to handle foreclosures, evictions, and lockouts. We asked her what it’s like watching this tragedy unfold again and again.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Says He’s Running for President

      After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal, Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig announced today on “This Week” that he is running for president.

      “I think I’m running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We have to recognize — we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn’t work.”

    • The Usual Warmongers

      To many of us who have been in conflict zones without a sanitised cordon around us, and actually seen the effects close-up (and that excludes almost all of the political class), it is astonishing that the neo-cons constantly seek to promote war, any war. They just cannot sit comfortably unless we are blowing somebody, somewhere, limb from limb.

      Little Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing Kobani, a town the US Air Force have been bombing relentlessly for weeks. Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population.

      Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria.

  • Censorship

    • Google DMCA Notice Record Smashed Again – But Why?

      Despite scaling dizzy heights in recent months, the record for DMCA notices being sent to Google’s search engine has been smashed again. In a single week Google just processed a mind-boggling 13.68 million URLs, or to put it another way, almost 23 copyright complaints every second. So what’s behind the massive surge?

    • Pirate Party Offers Uncensored DNS to Bypass Pirate Bay Blockade

      The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.

    • Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

      Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access.

  • Privacy

    • It’s Impossible to Torrent Anonymously, Lawyer Says

      With dozens of cases under his belt Oregon lawyer Carl Crowell can be considered an expert when it comes to suing BitTorrent pirates. However, a recent claim that pirates can’t be anonymous online conflicts with day-to-day reality.

  • Civil Rights

    • Sex abuse royal commission: Geelong Grammar paedophile teacher paid to retire to avoid scandal

      A former Geelong Grammar headmaster paid a teacher to retire early, in order to avoid a formal complaint about sexual abuse, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has heard.

      The former headmaster, Nicholas Sampson, is now the principal of elite New South Wales school, Cranbrook School.

      Former teacher Jonathan Harvey was jailed in 2007 for 10 months, with another 22 months suspended, after pleading guilty to abusing a former student, known as BLF, between 1976 and 1978.

      In his testimony to the royal commission on Monday, Harvey claimed the elite school’s then-headmaster Nicholas Sampson suggested that he retire early, after hearing of his misconduct relating to a student.

    • Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs

      Saljanin appears to have stopped at home in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he left the large, rented Penske truck in a parking lot overnight. When he came back the next day, he told police, the truck was gone. Of course, he told the authorities, he had no idea who could have done such a thing, nor did anyone else know that he was making the delivery.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • How Comcast is changing tactics in response to cord cutters

      Reddit user demian87 recently posted a letter from Comcast notifying him or her of a new Comcast internet access pricing plan being trialed in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, and Miami, Florida. According to this letter, Comcast will set a limit beginning on October 1 of 300 GB per household per month. Customers who exceed this limit will have to pay $10 for every additional 50 GB needed after that, or sign up for an unlimited data plan for an additional $30 per month.

      Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that the letter is authentic, along with the company’s new unlimited pricing plan. Douglas explained that “the company has trialed three other pricing plans since 2012 when Comcast had a static limit of 250 GB per month.”

      In a related development reported by the New York Times, Comcast will campaign to win over the quintessential cord-cutter class with new TV services designed to entice them into subscribing to its internet access service. Comcast will begin offering a $15-a-month TV service called Stream that includes broadcast networks and HBO for its internet customers. The new service will be available in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle later this year and across the company’s coverage areas in the United States in 2016.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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