10.05.16
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another TTIP/TPP-like spiel… because they want all the money and power and would lie for it
Reference: Peter Popoff
Mr. Popoff lied to people (said he spoke for God) and seriously harmed them in order to get their money. Likewise, the EPO and so-called ‘experts’ (a conspiracy of self-serving law firms) are lying to people (while claiming to speak for SMEs) in order to systematically rob Europe with broad lawsuits and shakedowns.
Summary: Another fine example where the echo chamber of Team UPC is trying to sell us the illusion that European businesses want the UPC
THIS Web site has spoken out against the UPC for nearly a decade, since before it was even known as “UPC”. One might think that it’s all over for UPC amid Brexit, but don’t put the guards down and rest on the laurels because history shows that foul play and nefarious tricks can accomplish all sorts of things, by pulling the right strings behind closed doors. We see this in TISA, CETA, TTIP, TPP, ACTA or whatever the powerful corporations and their lobbyists/lawyers want to have.
Also, the UPC ‘mission creep’ can still be found on the surface…
Bristows, a UPC pusher and British parasite, wants us to believe that the words of Tilmann (mentioned here before in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) count for something objective. Team UPC basically cites another Team UPC member and people notice this. One of them said that the paper was “authored under the chairmanship of Prof. Tilmann” (which isn’t OK).
IP Kat promotes the UPC quite a lot these days, at least when it’s Bristows staff authoring the posts. Here is the comment in full (under the misleading article with a misleading headline, courtesy of Bristows staff):
Since the author is keeping quite on this: “The German Bar Association’s recent position paper” was authored under the chairmanship of Prof. Tilmann who is presiding over the relevant sub-committee. For obvious reasons, this is not irrelevant and should be mentioned, at least if an objective information of the readers was intended.
So Tilmann of Team UPC interjected himself into IP Kat through Bristows (Team UPC). Nice propaganda, but people do notice:
To be fully objective, it should be stated as well that Prof. Tilmann is as well uttering a pro-domo plea as he has been heavily involved in the launching of the UPC. That the German Bar Association position paper reflects the position of its chairman is not a surprise.
In German he can be qualified as “Wendehals”, i.e. flexible neck.
In a first paper analysing Opinion 1/09 of the EuCJ, he was most adamant that the UPC was only open to EU member states. After Brexit, this opinion was not so important and a few amendments to the UPC under Art 87 would allow not only the post Brexit participation of the UK, but also further non EU member states.
It is amazing to see how an opinion can change when one’s own interests are at stake…..
We hope that IP Kat realises what it’s stooping down to. I confronted one of their writers this morning. █
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Posted in Asia, Europe, Patents at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Who needs examiners anyway? Battistelli makes the EPO more like INPI or SIPO (China).
Summary: The highly corrosive and destructive nature of Battistelli’s EPO presidency is demonstrated by his latest moves, which he foolishly advertises in the EPO’s Web site today (both the so-called ‘news’ section and his so-called ‘blog’)
WHETHER or not the EPO is becoming 'French' (i.e. no patent examination) it might be too early to tell, but in a matter of 2-3 years the stock will have run out and EPO examiners can expect massive layoffs. Insiders too tell us so.
“Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that.”The very low quality of patents in China (granted by SIPO, not the Croatian one) may be a sign of things to come at the EPO, under the leadership of Battistelli and the people he brought to the EPO (mostly from France, usually former colleagues from INPI where there’s no quality control). It’s all about quantity, not quality. Apparently, as I was told this earlier today by a university professor, Saudi Arabia had been pursing a similar strategy. They just use patents as trophies (false surrogate for innovation) and provide incentives — sometimes huge financial awards — for people to pursue the dumbest of patents just to increase the number of patents and give the illusion of scientific advancement/leadership. If this sounds like what the EPO is becoming, then it’s probably because it’s true.
“Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.”In my daily life I happen to speak to various academics and people who work in my domain. A lot of companies in Europe — as today I’ve learned — are reassessing the value of EPs (European patents) after the EPO descended to the gutter of patent quality. Dutch attorneys too are receiving queries to that effect, based on their letter which we published last week. Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that. Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.
Based on this tweet from earlier today and the Battistelli brain fart it links to (warning: epo.org address), the very low-quality patents of China are now common grounds for Battistelli. Is this what he strives for now? Attracting all the rejects, even from other countries, in order to just rubberstamp their rubbish? Is this the future of the EPO? It’s spelling doom for the EPO’s reputation and value. How much would people pay for EPs? 500 Euros apiece? What would that mean to existing grantees of EPs? How can one separate the wheat from the chaff or the noise from the signal? Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs). Here is the bogus ‘news’ from today (warning: epo.org address), complete with a photo op and glamourisation of the thug, Battistelli. To quote: “On Friday 30 September, President Benoît Battistelli welcomed Commissioner Shen of the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. The visit was held on the occasion of the annual EPO-SIPO Heads of Offices meeting, this year hosted by the EPO in Europe. The meeting is an annual fixture for the two offices and offered a valuable opportunity to discuss strategic topics of mutual interest and to take stock of the results achieved within the framework of both IP5 and bilateral co-operation.”
“Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs).”Worth noting: this meeting took place in France. Saint-Germain-en-Laye even (Battistelli was the mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye). The EPO has no branches/office in France. France is not a host country and France’s patent system is mostly a joke (some say because language barriers discourage applications from being sent there).
Battistelli has made the EPO look like something worse than a joke. It’s a banana republic!
And speaking of bananas, watch today’s news headlines to find “Seedy business: Patent war looms over Europe’s crop diversity”
Well, how far should patent scope go? Under Battistelli, anything goes…
Patents on seeds and plants are supporting a monopoly’s business model, not innovation or common interests. Here is what the article says:
An imminent EU legal opinion on food patents has raised fears among smaller businesses that agrichemical giants such as Monsanto and Syngenta will be able to monopolize varieties of staples like carrots and broccoli.
The European Commission is expected to issue an opinion before the end of the year to clarify ambiguities in EU law over the extent to which food products can be patented. The forthcoming decision has sparked a flurry of 11th-hour lobbying from industry and green campaigners.
The debate hinges on the nature of the innovation and whether the plant breeding techniques constitute genetic modification, or involve processes that are seen as altered or accelerated versions of more natural, biological processes.
Big companies argue that the ability to patent foods and seeds is critical to their business model, which involves pouring millions of euros into engineering bio-tech crops that they say are healthier for consumers and more resistant to pests. Their opponents say biological processes and their products should not be allowed to become exclusive to individual companies. They complain that food security and the environment could be at risk if crop diversity is reduced, with the most common vegetables being controlled by a handful of deep-pocketed companies.
In other news from today, the EPO has granted another crappy patent, this time on a thing that can prevent access to life-saving treatment. The patent is now partly revoked [1, 2, 3, 4]. How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly*? Verging endorsement of software patents again, today the EPO links to a notorious page that we wrote about before and soon enough the Office is going south (not just literally), to a country where software patents sort of exist.
“How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly?”If the EPO does not sort out its patent quality, for which it earned reputation in the first place, then it will lose everything. Battistelli doesn’t need to care because he can always go back to his political career in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Politicians needn’t retire in their 60s and Nicolas Sarkozy, Battistelli's political ally, is reportedly running for leadership again. █
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* Like organising stupid and self-aggrandising festivals for lobbying purposes at the expense of millions of Euros while buying the media — all this instead of focusing on actually examining patents, then granting or rejecting them based on their merit.
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Posted in Courtroom, Europe, Patents at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The file against me contains so many demonstrably fabricated accusations that I have little doubt I can defend myself – or, rather I would be able to if, our internal system were not what it is currently, a kangaroo court.”
–Laurent Prunier, EPO staff representative
Summary: The EPO’s kangaroo courts and farcical notion of justice should serve as a warning sign to anyone seeking patent justice at the EPO, either as partners/employees or stakeholders/applicants
THE EPO is a horrible, horrible place to work at. The staff survey speaks for itself and people who work for the EPO constantly remind us of the nature of the workplace, comparing it to being in the trenches.
The kangaroo courts of the EPO are some of the most jaw-dropping aspects of the EPO. Anyone can be accused of anything and so-called ‘evidence’ even fabricated or ‘sexed up’ in order to do whatever the egoistic President wants, making up for his insecurities and cluelessness by merely bullying people. We covered several examples of that over the past year. It’s not about one person. There are many victims and only few of them are courageous enough to go public.
President Battistelli believes he can be the accuser, the jury and a judge above the law (both national and international). He also acts a lot like an executioner, judging by the number of dismissal letters he sends out to people who represent staff (we might elaborate on this in some future series). Would EPO managers get away with murdering little girls because of the immunity they proudly claim inside Eponia? Read this new comment (posted today in relation to the EPO):
To: “Et sinon je reprendrais bien des croquettes”
When a drunken diplomat kills a little girl, immunity is upheld, but the diplomat is declared “persona non grata” and sent back to his or her country. The diplomat is then supposed to be judged there.
The Vienna convention was never designed so that diplomats can kill little girls with impunity. It was designed to protect, for example, USA diplomats to be judged for “anti-communist activities” in the former USSR.
In the case of International organisations, however, I am not really sure how the “persona non grata” concept is supposed to apply.
The above continues with more direct statements rather than hypothetical analogies:
Something else.
It has been 3 months since the Enlarged Board published that the EPO President violated judicial independence and nothing has happened. This is outrageous.
There is also the subject of the frivolity of the accusations. The board of appeal member who is the subject of the decision did, as far as I can tell from the available documents, nothing wrong. The accusations were downright ridiculous: having “objects which can be constructed as weapons” and “nazi memorabilia”. The exact wording at the time fails me, but it really sounded as if they combed his office and found nothing but a pocket knife and an history book to frame him.
This is also absolutely outrageous. It looks like the so called “investigation team”, even with major breaches of confidentiality (they bugged the computers used by the Council themselves, remember?) could not find anything serious and yet the board member is still guilty. Of what?
Next, we have had members of Suepo dismissed for, apparently, also nothing. Pure “coincidence”, according to a vice-president. Apparently, a few more will be dismissed soon.
As it was said on German TV: this is “Gantanamo auf Deutschem Boden”. How long will this scandal last?
From what we understand, it was sports equipment (a club), not a knife. It’s amazing how far Battistelli would go to get his way… we can also envision Parallel Construction being used to entrap or perhaps wrongly/falsely accuse the person, who in principle enjoys complete independence from the Office of Battistelli (evidently not in practice, especially when the Council and the Board of Mr. Kongstad become lapdogs rather than watchdogs of Battistelli).
The comment above is interesting and it is new. It’s a comment to which one person replied with a famous saying: “For evil to prevail it is only necessary that good men do nothing …”
I agree. There is a moral duty here. All my coverage regarding the EPO was done for zero financial gain. It’s just the right thing to do.
Another person said this:
The original accusation was that the member of the board of appeal used the public computers of the Office to spread “defamatory” material on VP3 – the weapons and nazi memorabilia were conveniently found later in his office and used for a classical case of character assassination.
To further reinforce the narrative about defamation, VP3 sued the member of the board of appeal for in a German court – you may have read the outcome above (28/09): it appears that the Procurator dismissed the case recently.
How long will this scandal last?
Scandal? Who says this is a “scandal” – you? And what about Newspapers, Lawyers, Judges, the IP world? Did you see any reaction from them? Because I didn’t. Therefore, it’s not a scandal. The Administrative Council is acting like this is totally normal. No scandal here.
If you wanna a scandal read TMZ.
The corporate media — and even so-called ‘IP’ media for that matter (we put IP in scare quotes because it’s a vague term that can refer to a plethora of entirely different things, not necessarily patents) — aids the EPO’s abuses by a conspiracy of silence and indifference. We spoke to some people from within this media and we know how and why they are gagged regarding the EPO. We think that a lot of so-called ‘IP’ media wants to just receive prepared ‘articles’ or advertise in ‘article’ form for the EPO, not engage in actual journalism. We recently covered examples from two major 'IP' media sites. Don’t expect them to cover the EPO scandals because they’re not designed or equipped for that. It’s just not their business model.
“Something is not just rotten at Eponia. Rotten is far too gentle a term and we intend to dig as deep as necessary to show what the EPO has truly become.”“Isn’t that just the point,” asked another new commenter (clustered deep inside an article from June at IP Kat, as the site no longer covers the scandals, just promotes the UPC for Battistelli). “The EPO’s immunity is designed to protect French Enarques from being pursued for “anti-union activities” on the territory of EPOnia. I see no incompatibility with the aims of the Vienna Convention …”
Tomorrow we shall continues our series about Mr. Kongstad. There will be a total of (by our estimation) nearly 10 parts.
Something is not just rotten at Eponia. Rotten is far too gentle a term and we intend to dig as deep as necessary to show what the EPO has truly become. █
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Posted in Patents at 4:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Full size | Original PDF
Summary: Pieter Hintjens died yesterday, but his campaign to end software patents won’t die
LONG before we covered the EPO in depth we had published a lot of articles about software patents in Europe. One of our most powerful voices was Pieter Hintjens, who sometimes even contributed. Pieter died yesterday. It was a sad day for many including yours truly and we are still thinking about him. Many people only discovered him after his death or while he was in his deathbed.
The Wikipedia page does him some justice. Speaking from my own experience, Hintjens had a wonderful sense of humour, playful cleverness as Stallman likes to call it, and avid activism with a technical edge. I really liked him and I will miss him forever. Many other people feel the same way.
During the software patents “war”, Wildeboer said, Hintjens did this, pointing to the image above. Georg Greve, the guy behind the FSFE, said the same thing.
“I have a big box of papers from the swpat directive at my parents’ place,” Benjamin Henrion responded. “There should be one on there. And SSP [Stop Software Patents] tshirts as well.” He later added a link to the original PDF (of the above, we’ve made a local copy).
What a great example of the clever humour of Hintjens! He did many other stunts like this.
“Before slashdot era,” Henrion recalls, “there was segfault. Pieter wrote an article in 1998 predicting that Microsoft was patent tax FOSS #visionary” (and he was right!).
So rest in piece, online friend. We shall carry on fighting against abstract patents on algorithms. █
Photo credit: Hintjens “really liked this photo,” says Adam Flaherty. Photo by Tim Lossen.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Microsoft
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Lenovo’s COO, Gianfranco Lanci, has said that the Chinese tech giant doesn’t intend to release any new phones running Windows 10 Mobile. This is because he doubts Microsoft’s commitment to its floundering smartphone platform.
Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum 2016, Lanci said that while Windows 10 for desktops has been doing well in the business world, it has no plans to build smartphones using the operating system.
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Those of you rocking a PC with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update may want to hold off on letting your system apply the latest round of fixes. There are several user complaints that Build 14393.222 (KB3194496), the seventh Cumulative Update since the Anniversary started flooding PCs in August, is borking systems by putting them into an endless reboot loop.
The latest update package is supposed to deliver “quality improvements” in the form of several bug fixes for various issues, as well as improve the reliability of certain tasks, such as downloading and updating games from the Windows Store. Unfortunately, in many cases the installation fails somewhere along the way and rolls back the changes it made, as indicated by complaints posted to Microsoft’s support forums and Twitter. It also happened to me when I tried installing the update on my primary desktop.
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Just 34.5 percent of all PCs are running Windows 10 version 1607, aka the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, according to AdDuplex, maker of a Windows 10 SDK for third-party app makers. The majority, 59.9 percent, are still running Windows 10 version 1511, also known as the Fall Update.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds gave the world Linux 4.8 earlier this week, but now appears to wish he didn’t after spotting some code he says can “kill the kernel.”
When Torvalds announced Linux 4.8 on Sunday he said the final version added “a few stragging fixes since rc8.”
But by Tuesday he was back on the Linux Kernel Mailing list apologising for a bug fix gone bad.
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The Linux Foundation announced the SPDX 2.1 and OpenChain 1.0 specs, which aim to clarify and standardize open source compliance and management.
At LinuxCon Europe in Berlin, the Linux Foundation announced two new releases from different groups attempting to standardize open source license tracking, compliance, and supply chain management. The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) Project announced SPDX 2.1 for tracking complex open source license dependencies, adding new “Snippets” and appendix features, and the OpenChain Workgroup released OpenChain 1.0 for managing the open source supply chain.
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For most of us, when we think of PCs, we think of Windows. But Microsoft’s popular and well-known operating system isn’t the only option.
Many users choose to live without Windows and run different operating systems like Linux instead.
This year is a special one for Linux, as October 5 marks 25 years since the release of the Linux kernel.
If you’re discovering Linux for the first time, find out all about it below.
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Announcing the 4.8 release on Sunday, Torvalds’ correspondence on the Linux kernel mailing list appeared calm despite a few “pretty small” issues carried over from the eighth and final 4.8 release candidate. He signed off with his usual “go forth and test” command.
The several highlights of 4.8 include support for the touchscreen on Microsoft’s Surface 3 device and the Raspberry Pi 3′s System on a Chip.
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Operating system security is top of mind right now, and Linux is a big part of that discussion. One of the questions to be solved is: How do we ensure that patches going upstream are properly reviewed?
Wolfram Sang has been a Linux kernel developer since 2008, and frequently talks at Linux conferences around the world, like LinuxCon Berlin 2016, about ways to improve kernel development practices.
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Applications
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A new version of RcppGSL in now on CRAN and in Debian. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package.
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After almost one year, I’ve finally released another small iteration of frogr with a few updates and improvements.
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On October 3, 2016, Corebird developer Timm Bäder released a new maintenance update for the native Linux Twitter client, the third one in the 1.3 stable series of the open-source software.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Mad Max [Feral Mini Site] is officially being released on the 20th of October for Linux & SteamOS, it’s finally coming!
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The Mad Max game is being released for Linux later this month on 20 October.
The Mad Max open-world action adventure game was released for Windows in September of 2015. The game achieved decent ratings with a Metacritic score around 73. The game is self-described as, “Become Mad Max, the lone warrior in a savage post-apocalyptic world where cars are the key to survival. In this action-packed, open world, third person action game, you must fight to stay alive in The Wasteland, using brutal on-ground and vehicular against vicious gangs of bandits. A reluctant hero with an instinct for survival, Max wants nothing more than to leave the madness behind and find solace in the storied “Plains of Silence.” Players are challenged with treacherous missions as they scavenge the dangerous landscape for supplies to build the ultimate combat vehicle.”
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Company of Heroes 2 is easily one of the best (top 5 easily!) RTS games available on Linux, it’s also now in a fresh Humble Bundle.
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Civilization VI was originally announced for Linux back in May, since then we’ve had a lot of silence on it, until today. Aspyr Media seem to be the developer handling it, but they are still investigating if it’s viable.
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Rocket League [Steam], the highly addictive masterpiece that’s currently in Beta on Linux has been updated with a brand new arena named ‘AquaDome’.
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Today, October 4, 2016, Humble Bundle launched a new game bundle that probably many of you hardcore gamers out there have been expected for a long time now, the Humble Company of Heroes 10th Anniversary Bundle.
Yes, you’re reading that right! Company of Heroes, the awesome real-time strategy video game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ celebrates 10 years since its first unveiling back in 2006 for the Microsoft Windows platform. The second installment, Company of Heroes 2, came seven years later, on June 25, 2013.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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My experience with Kubuntu has done nothing to convince me that I want to use KDE in the long term. If I did want to use KDE long term then my experience with Manjaro would definitely make me lean in that direction.
This is an LTS release yet there are so many little niggles. New users to Linux will not be enamoured with having to find solutions to simple things like installing software.
The problems are worse than those that I experienced with Ubuntu. At least with Ubuntu I could install a separate application for installing the good stuff like Chrome. With Kubuntu it is command line all the way and searching forums for solutions.
With Linux Mint being so good it is hard for me to recommend Kubuntu 16.04.
I am not the only person to have issues with Kubuntu, read this review by Dedoimedo, he runs into many of the same issues as I did.
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The KDE Neon development team proudly announced a few minutes ago the release of the KDE Neon 5.8 User Edition GNU/Linux distribution with the recently released KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment.
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The top story today was the release of KDE Plasma 5.8 which was covered by all the top sites. This release brings some new features and long term support. It’s already in KDE neon as well. Elsewhere, The Inquirer began a new series on the legends of Linux and Fedora’s Adam Williamson posted a public service announcement for version 24. A bit of drama emerged from Andrew Ayer’s systemd post and Martin Owens ruminated on Free Software Faith.
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The openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 3 was released today one day ahead of schedule and the last beta for 42.2 brought quite a few new versions for people to test.
VirtualBox was upgraded from version 5.0.24 in Beta 2 to version 5.1.4 and there were an enormous amount of fixes applied to this newer version, which was released in August.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Softpedia was informed today, October 4, 2016, via an email announcement, by Andre Klapper from the GNOME Project, about the availability of the official release schedule for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.
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The GNOME 3.24 release schedule has been firmed up and is now publicized.
GNOME 3.24 is scheduled to be released on 22 March 2017, which isn’t much of a surprise considering it’s coming six months after GNOME 3.22 and is generally a late-March target.
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New Releases
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Softpedia was informed today, October 4, 2016, by the Q4OS team about the release and immediate availability of the third maintenance update to the stable Q4OS 1.6 “Orion” operating system series.
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Arch Family
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It appears that there’s a new project on GitHub, called alwsl, which promises to let you install the Arch Linux operating system in the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) host.
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Red Hat Family
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Improved load balancing is accomplished through a new profile, called “load-balancer” in the default domain.xml file. Profiles in domain mode allow for centralized management of multiple nodes (physical or virtual). This allows for multiple instances of WildFly that can be configured to provide different services.
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Finance
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Fedora
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These sessions mark the beginning of FOSS Wave: Goa, India. We have seen a lot of enthusiasm in this event and many people were interested in learning about FOSS and cutting-edge technologies. Contributors are already flowing in and we expect more in the near future!
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Hi folks! This is a PSA about a fairly significant bug we’ve recently been able to pin down in Fedora 24+.
Here’s the short version: especially if your system has hybrid graphics (that is, it has an Intel video adapter and also an AMD or NVIDIA one, and it’s supposed to switch to the most appropriate one for what you’re currently doing – NVIDIA calls this ‘Optimus’), DON’T UPDATE YOUR SYSTEM BY RUNNING DNF FROM THE DESKTOP. (Also if you have multiple graphics adapters that aren’t strictly ‘hybrid graphics’; the bug affects any case with multiple graphics adapters).
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Fedora 24 users are advised against currently updating your system using the common dnf update command when running GNOME, KDE, or any other graphical desktop. Due to an awkward bug being explored, it could leave your system in an unhappy state.
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Earlier today, October 4, 2016, Fedora Project’s Adam Williamson published a public service announcement (PSA) to inform the Fedora Linux community about an important issue with the internal update process.
It appears that many users of the Fedora 24 operating system have reported in the last 24 hours that they are getting “duplicated packages” and “kernel updates not working” errors when attempting to run the “dnf update” command to update their installations with new package versions released through the official software repositories.
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Debian Family
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My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
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Derivatives
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We reported a couple of days ago that the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system had reached end of life on September 30, 2016, and its repositories will be closing too on October 10 to make room for the next Parsix GNU/Linux release.
That’s right, we’re talking here about Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev,” which was already announced last week by the developers of the Debian-based operating system and reported right here on this space. It looks like work on Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” had already begun, and the development team is teasing us with its new features.
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Arduino LLC launched an ESLOV IoT Invention Kit, featuring an Arduino compatible WiFi hub device and 25 modular sensor devices, united via an Arduino Cloud.
At the World Maker Faire New York, where Arduino LLC and Arduino Srl announced the settlement of their legal dispute, as well as plans to merge by the end of the year, Arduino LLC (Arduino.cc) showed off its new “ESLOV IoT Invention Kit.” The kit, which launched last week on Kickstarter, includes a wireless hub based on Arduino LLC’s tiny WiFi-enabled MKR1000 Arduino board, a shield for interfacing up to three I/O modules, and 25 different I/O modules, which include various sensors, switches, buzzers, servos, and more.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Some Tizen dev news for you guys today as there has been an update to the Tizen SCM Tools. This is seen as a small update to version 16.02.2, from the previous 16.02. version. Check below for major changes and also new features and enhancements that have been added:
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Android
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Forget the drama for a second: The Galaxy Note 7 is well worth its high price tag precisely because of everything that’s bundled with it. Not only does it run on the latest processor, it also offers expandable memory, compatibility with two wireless charging standards, and two different mobile payment technologies. And for those of you who are serious about your smartphone photography, it features one of the best smartphone cameras on the market: a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera equipped with OIS and a f/1.7 aperture, as well as full manual controls and RAW file support. You can then edit those photos with the precise, water resistant, pressure sensitive S-Pen that comes in tow. Now do you see why this phone costs so much?
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Google’s new Pixel phones are here. After years of overseeing reference Nexus devices running stock Android, Google is finally stepping into the smartphone fray to show what its vision of Android looks like. The Pixel and Pixel XL feature deep software integration to Google’s services, including Google Assistant, Daydream, and Google Photos. Unlike most current Android phones, it actually ships with the latest Android Nougat operating system and will continue to receive the latest OS and security updates.
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On Tuesday, Google took its best shot at making history again. The company introduced the Pixel and Pixel XL, which represent the first time it will offer superphones in the same class — complete with the full backing of Google, a lofty price tag and an exclusive partnership with Verizon Wireless — as Apple’s iPhone franchise. At long last, Google’s phones give us a showdown between two of the world’s most powerful tech titans.
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It’s fitting, in a way, that Google’s new Pixel phone resembles the iPhone. Apple’s world-changing gadget is the very device Google is aiming for. The 5-inch Pixel and 5.5-inch Pixel XL are meant to be the best, most powerful, most unified Android phones ever. They have best-in-class specs, best-in-class design, best-in-class everything. And for the first time, Google seems to want you to buy one.
If you’ve ever owned an Android phone, I can all but promise that you didn’t own the best one. The best have almost always been Google’s own Nexus devices, from the Nexus One to the Nexus 6P. Nexuses (Nexii?) offered high-end hardware specs and (usually) refined design with truly current software, which is otherwise entirely too hard to come by in the Android world.
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CIRP estimates loyal Android owners keep their phones for about the same length of time as they did three years ago. In the past three years, that length of time increased slightly, then decreased about the same amount, such that the average age of an upgraded Android phone increased only by about three weeks in the past three years.
Among buyers of a new Android smartphone that already owned an Android smartphone, in the past three years, the age of their retired Android phones increased for five quarters, then decreased since then (Chart 1).
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LinuxCon Berlin Huawei today announced OpenSDS, an open-source project to replace vendor-specific storage controllers and says it has the weight of world number three Dell EMC behind it.
It’s understood OpenSDS was presented to Linux Foundation reps on a recent visit to China.
The idea is that vendors’ products would plug into one side of the finished OpenSDS and third parties’ tools and software, such as Docker, Kubernetes or OpenStack, into the other.
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Forking is a concept that can strike terror into the heart of any CIO that relies on open source software. Here’s how to make sure you’re on the right side of the split.
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ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) group has today announced the availability of its OSM Release ONE, an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) software stack closely aligned with ETSI NFV, and focused on helping industry accelerate the implementation of network virtualization. The OSM community aims to deliver a production-quality open source MANO stack that meets the requirements of commercial NFV networks.
Available less than six months since the inaugural meeting of the OSM community, Release ONE has been engineered, tested and documented to allow for rapid installation in operator labs worldwide that seek to create a scalable and interoperable open source MANO environment. Release ONE substantially enhances interoperability with other components (VNFs, VIMs, SDN controllers) and creates a plugin framework to make platform maintenance and extensions significantly easier to provide and support.
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Amongst the most notable changes, Magisk is now fully open source from v7 onwards, including the binaries that it makes use of. In addition to this, the Magisk Manager is now a completely different app altogether, becoming a part of the core experience. New features and improvements are planned, so we can be sure that things will continue to improve in the future.
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The Nextcloud developers have released recently the first maintenance update to the Nextcloud 10 series of the open-source and cross-platform self-hosting cloud server forked from ownCloud.
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The IT security practices of some open source communities are exemplary, shows a study for the European Commission and European Parliament. Many communities use experts to ensure software security and to help their developers avoid security flaws. “These communities take security serious”, says Alberto Dominguez Serra, one of the authors working for Everis, a IT consultancy.
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Pieter Hintjens, Belgian software developer and past president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), gave much of his time and effort to the open-source community.
He did so even up until the day he planned for his own death, which was today.
Hintjens, who chose euthanasia today after dealing with terminal cancer, was a writer and a programmer who spent much of his life building large software systems and online communities, which he described as “Living Systems.”
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Open source employees in Europe have it good, especially when we compare that market to the rest of the world. This is according to a new report by Dice and The Linux Foundation. The report says that out of 1,000 European respondents, 60 per cent said it would be fairly easy to find a new job this year. Globally, the figure stands at about 50 per cent.
“Demand for open source talent is growing and companies struggle to find experienced professionals to fill open roles,” said Bob Melk, President of Dice. “Rising salaries for open source professionals indicate companies recognize the need to attract, recruit and retain qualified open source professionals on a global scale. Regardless of where they reside around the world, these professionals are motivated by the opportunity to work on interesting projects.”
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From ordering food, to finding a good doctor in the vicinity or enhancing our learning skills, most of us use an app, whether we are a teenager, in our 30s or even a septuagenarian.
Not just big brands or multi-national companies, even small and medium businesses and startups are going down the app route. In fact, even your small neighbourhood street food joint wants you to rate their food and service on a popular restaurant search and discovery app because it means better business and value.
For most organisations today, there are no second thoughts on whether an app is vital for their growth or not. The advantages of having an app are evident – from being able to stay on top of the customers’ mind and building brand loyalty, to being able to provide value to the customers, and doubling up as a marketing channel, apps are playing a vital role.
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TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration and analytics, today announced the immediate availability of its ultra-lightweight IoT integration solution, Project Flogo™. Its tiny open source integration engine allows application and business logic to run on edge devices, simplifying IoT integration challenges, avoiding technological lock-in, and reducing costs.
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Kent Dodds is a busy, busy guy. He’s a full stack JavaScript engineer at PayPal, hosts JavaScript Air, co-hosts React30, is an instructor on Egghead.io, is a Google Developer Expert, and spends a lot of time on Twitter and GitHub.
He’s speaking at All Things Open this year on automating the open source contributions and maintenance management process in two sessions: Managing an Open Source Project and How to Open Source Your Stuff.
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A number of companies today proudly wear the open source badge to show their dedication to various projects, particular communities, or simply the idea of free software licensing. Many have gone down the Red Hat business route, creating a revenue model based on support and services, while others have built their business around proprietary features and add-ons to open source projects.
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This fascinating talk from September’s GitHub Universe 2016 in San Francisco by Aditya Mukerjee, an engineer at Stripe, made me think a lot about language privilege and global digital inclusion. Mukerjee grabs you in his opening remarks, “I always keep my eye out for the ways technology can empower the disenfranchised — how it can amplify the voices of the subaltern. And it’s crucial to listen to those voices if we want to solve the biggest problems that the world faces.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For the third quarter of 2016, the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program has awarded more than US$300,000 to four projects.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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But that naturally led to the in-fighting. It’s typical for the front runner to be targeted by all the also-ran distributions. The FSF targeted Ubuntu’s practicalist concessions (even though they were fairly minimal), Other distributions ripped Ubuntu and their community apart, trying to block Ubuntu’s success. I’m not saying they meant to do it, or that it was a conspiracy. But that these other communities did not see Ubuntu’s success as their own success and naturally tried to undermine it as humans are likely to do.
So for very human reasons, we’re here with no real champion for Free Software in the practical arena. Ubuntu has fallen for its own hype and is not able to being the Free Software faith with it, even if it was successful. The societal and long term benefits of Free software remain largely unknown to the majority of the world and we wait patiently for a successor that can try again to change the world.
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apl-1.6a
autoconf-archive-2016.09.16
autogen-5.18.12
bash-4.4
denemo-2.0.12
drgeo-16.10a
emacs-25.1
gawk-4.1.4
global-6.5.5
gnucash-2.6.14
gnuchess-6.2.3
gnu-c-manual-0.2.5
gnutls-3.5.4
gsl-2.2.1
libmicrohttpd-0.9.51
libosip2-5.0.0
nano-2.7.0
parallel-20160922
readline-7.0
texinfo-6.3
unifont-9.0.02
xorriso-1.4.6
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Genotype Specification Language (GSL), is a programming language that facilitates the rapid design of large and complex DNA constructs used to engineer genomes. The GSL compiler implements a high-level language based on traditional genetic notation, as well as a set of low-level DNA manipulation primitives. The language allows facile incorporation of parts from a library of cloned DNA constructs and from the “natural” library of parts in fully sequenced and annotated genomes. GSL was designed to engage genetic engineers in their native language while providing a framework for higher level abstract tooling. GSL was developed and open sourced by Amyris.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The creator of the wireless motors Kyle Berezin explains more about their inspiration, design and features as well as some of the applications that they can be used for.
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Programming/Development
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The C programming language is not trendy. The most recent edition of the canonical C text (the excitingly named The C Programming Language) was published in 1988; C is so unfashionable that the authors have neglected to update it in light of 30 years of progress in software engineering. Everyone “has been meaning to” learn Rust or Go or Clojure over a weekend, not C. There isn’t even a cute C animal in C’s non-logo on a C decal not stuck to your laptop.
But Myles and I are not trendy people, so we insist that all of our students become fluent in C. A fresh class of C converts has just finished working through the K&R bible, making this a good time for me to reflect on why we deify this ancient tongue.
We give students four reasons for learning C:
It is still one of the most commonly used languages outside of the Bay Area web/mobile startup echo chamber;
C’s influence can be seen in many modern languages;
C helps you think like a computer; and,
Most tools for writing software are written in C (or C++)
The first is easy to dismiss if one likes the Bay Area web/mobile startup echo chamber, the second if one hates C’s influence on many more modern languages. Most engineers should take head of reason three, although our students also learn computer architecture and at least one assembly language, so have a firm mental model of how computers actually compute. But reason four is hard to ignore.
Forsaking C means forsaking anything below the level of abstraction at which one happens to currently work. Those who work for instance as web developers forsake thoroughly understanding the browsers, operating systems and languages on top of which their own work stands.
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Health/Nutrition
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Meat produced from British pigs has been shown to be infected with a livestock strain of MRSA, the Guardian can reveal, raising concerns that the UK is on the brink of another food scandal.
Tests on a sample of 97 UK-produced pork products from supermarkets show that three – sold at Asda and Sainsbury’s – were contaminated with the superbug strain which can cause serious health problems.
The Guardian, working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), has also established that a loophole in import regulations is leaving an open door for MRSA CC398-infected live pigs from countries such as Denmark, where the disease is rife.
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Thousands of Polish women dressed in black have boycotted work and taken to the streets in protest against a plan to ban abortions.
Without half their workforce, government offices, universities and schools in 60 cities across the country closed their doors.
For the day of action, dubbed “Black Monday”, women donned dark-coloured clothes in a symbol of mourning for the loss of reproductive rights they fear.
Poland already has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws and opinion surveys show very little support for an even stricter law, despite the nation’s deep Catholicism and conservative political direction.
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Residents of Flint, Mich., affected by the contaminated-water crisis have added a new complication to their lives: an outbreak of shigellosis, a bacterial illness that is easily transmitted when people do not wash their hands.
Health department officials in Genesee County, where Flint is the largest city, said there has been an increase in the gastrointestinal illness, which can lead to severe diarrhea, fever, nausea, vomiting, cramps and stools containing blood and mucus, according to a statement issued last month.
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New medicines have revolutionised HCV treatment in high-income countries, yet the lack of appropriate diagnostic tools for HCV infection remains a challenge. Catharina Boehme, chief executive officer of FIND, outlined that HCV is “a silent killer which goes unnoticed until it is almost too late.” Accordingly, 85 percent of cases occur in low- and middle-income countries, with fewer than 1 percent of persons aware of their infection.
The US$38.3 million project aims to develop “better, simpler, point-of-care diagnostic tools for HCV, and will introduce HCV testing and treatment in HIV programmes” with national governments and local implementation partners in Cameroon, Georgia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, over the next three years.
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Security
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Linux server security is a huge topic. After all, there isn’t a security checkbox. Why is that?
Every server is a little different, but the ideas to security each of them is the same, the OS doesn’t matter.
Depending on your level of expertise, the answers for each of these items will be different.
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Defence/Aggression
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resident Vladimir Putin on Monday suspended a Russia-U.S. deal on the disposal of weapons-grade plutonium, a move that comes amid escalating tensions over Syria between Moscow and Washington.
Putin’s decree released by the Kremlin cited Washington’s “unfriendly actions” and the United States’ inability to fulfill its obligations under the 2000 deal as reasons for the move.
However, the decree says that the weapons-grade plutonium that has fallen under the agreement will be kept away from weapons programs.
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Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said she doesn’t remember ever commenting — joking or otherwise — about using a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“I don’t recall any joke,” Clinton said, when asked Tuesday at a press conference in Pennsylvania.
“It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don’t recall that.”
The website TruePundit posted a report Sunday that alleged Clinton had in 2010 spoken of a drone strike against Assange.
The report cited State Department sources and claimed Clinton had said: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
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Congress has overridden Obama’s repeated veto for the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act,” which allows US citizens to sue the Saudi government over its alleged complicity in the 9/11 attacks — and which may allow people in other countries hamed by actions sponsored by the US government sue the US in those countries’ courts.
However you feel about the Saudi role in 9/11, or the US government’s actions abroad, there is one absolutely unequivocal fact: Obama opposed the bill, and Republicans in the House and Senate passed it over his strenuous, repeated objections.
But those facts haven’t stopped senior GOP senator Mitch McConnell from blaming Obama for the law, despite the fact that McConnell vote for the law, voted again for it, then voted “Aye” on the proposition, “Shall the Bill S. 2040 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?” (McConnell was joined by 28 senators who’d also written a letter condemning the law, warning of the risk of “potential unintended consequences”).
McConnell said “I hate to blame everything on him, and I don’t” but “it would have been helpful had we had a discussion about this much earlier than last week.” The White House had repeatedly sent information to the Senate about the potential negative consequences of the bill for US interests. Nevertheless, McConnell accused Obama of “dropping the ball” by merely repeatedly vetoing the bill and pleading with Congress to reconsider, which left Congress in a state where “[n]obody [in Congress] really had focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships.”
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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has told President Barack Obama “you can go to hell” in his latest tirade against the U.S. over its criticism of his deadly anti-drug campaign.
He also lashed out anew at the European Union in a speech Tuesday saying the 28-nation bloc, which has also criticized his brutal crackdown, “better choose purgatory, hell is filled up.”
Duterte, who took office in June, has been hypersensitive to criticisms over his anti-drug fight, which has left more than an estimated 3,000 suspected drug dealers and pushers dead in just three months, alarming the United Nations, the E.U., the U.S. and human rights watchdogs.
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The Tory government want British soldiers to be exempt from the European Convention on Human Rights during future conflicts so they cannot be sued, in a move that has outraged activists.
The plans were announced by prime minister Theresa May and defence secretary Michael Fallon at the Conservative party conference on Tuesday.
The ECHR was established in 1953 by the Council of Europe with Britain as a founding member. Now, after more than 60 years, May wants out of the bits she doesn’t like.
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Over and over again we keep hearing politicians and others going on and on about the need for social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to kick ISIS users off their platforms. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have called for this. And some people at these companies are supportive of this idea. Twitter regularly feels compelled to talk about how many ISIS accounts it removes.
Yet, as we’ve pointed out each time it’s done so, this seems backwards. We’ve noted that intelligence officials have claimed that they actually get really good intelligence from following these social media accounts. But generally those voices aren’t heard as much. So it’s actually great to see FBI Direct James Comey (someone we rarely agree with) come out and say it directly: kicking ISIS members off Twitter makes things more difficult for law enforcement.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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“The Public Library of US Diplomacy,” or “PlusD,” is a very large and constantly expanding collection of internal documents from the US Department of State, published by WikiLeaks in a searchable archive. The library began in 2010 and at the time of writing contains 2,325,961 individual documents made up of about 2 billion words, spread over three collections of cables: Cablegate, the Kissinger Cables, and the Carter Cables. The State Department is the foreign affairs department of the US government and oversees the embassies and consulates of the United States all over the world. Each embassy or consulate corresponds with the State Department in Washington, DC, by sending daily telegram reports, or “cables,” between them, using a special electronic communications system.
PlusD contains within it the WikiLeaks publication known as Cablegate: the collection of State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011. Cablegate itself consists of 251,287 cables, accounting for 261,276,536 words in total. If printed out in a standard-sized font, Cablegate alone would form a single line over 6,000 kilometers long — the distance to the center of the Earth. The cables are an average of 1,039 words long, revealing detailed internal information about the operation of 274 US embassies and consulates, and their activity within their host country.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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The really scary thing about climate change is not that humans will fail to get their emissions under control. The really scary thing is that at some point, the Earth will take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.
A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality — some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in permafrost, and are also vulnerable.
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The really scary thing about climate change is not simply that humans may fail to get their emissions under control. It’s that at some point, the Earth could take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.
A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality – some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in permafrost, and are also vulnerable.
In each case, if that carbon gets out of the land and into the atmosphere, then global warming will get worse. But global warming could itself up the odds of such massive carbon release. That’s a dangerous position to be in as the world continues to warm.
In the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of researchers led by Yi Yin of the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement look at the potential of peat bogs in equatorial Asia – a region that includes Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and several other smaller countries but is dominated by Indonesia and some of its largest islands, Kalimantan and Sumatra – to worsen our climate problems. It’s timely, considering that last year amid El Niño-induced drought conditions Indonesian blazes emitted over 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere. That’s more than the annual emissions of Japan (or, needless to say, of Indonesia’s fossil fuel burning).
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Finance
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A new Bitcoin ATM to be located in the southeastern city of Kouvola at the end of October will bring the number of such machines in Finland to nine. Officials say that because Bitcoin is a virtual currency that knows no borders, it’s difficult to estimate the number of users in Finland. Current guesstimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands.
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Ericsson AB said Tuesday that it plans to lay off nearly 20% of its home-country workforce, as the Swedish maker of telecom-network equipment races to cut costs amid intensifying competition from Chinese rivals and weak demand for its specialty wireless products.
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Some 175 Ericsson employees in Finland will be affected by the employer-employee negotiations that the Swedish telecom company announced it was starting on Tuesday.
The company said that it plans to reduce up to 3,000 positions globally in production, research and development and sales and administration. Most of the personnel cuts will be made in Sweden.
In a press release issued on Tuesday, Ericsson said that dismissals will be carried out using a combination of voluntary and forced reductions, as well as other measures, such as outsourcing.
Altogether some one thousand of the affected employees work in Ericsson’s production unit, about 800 in research and development and around 1,200 in other departments.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Pundits were quick to point out the benefits Sen. Tim Kaine may bring Hillary Clinton as her running mate in helping win his home-and-battleground state of Virginia.
But what flew under the radar was that Kaine may play a key role in helping Clinton raise money, especially when it comes to Wall Street.
Clinton has proven herself a capable fundraiser, announcing nearly $90 million in contributions for the past month. The former secretary of state is a known quantity with Wall Street as well, having delivered speeches to banks and representing the heart of the financial services industry as a senator from New York.
In the lead-up to Clinton’s pick of a running mate, the potential that she might choose Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has made cracking down on banks a centerpiece of her agenda — had Wall Street ready to tighten its pockets for donations.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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In July 2016, an organization called the “American Freedom Defense Initiative” joined another group called Jihad Watch in suing US Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Both entities felt slighted by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
In their 25-page civil complaint, the two anti-Muslim activists and their respective organizations made a ludicrous argument. The groups claimed that as the country’s top cop, Lynch “enforces” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that limits libel and other civil suits filed against websites, service providers, and other online publishers. However, the Communications Decency Act is a civil, rather than a criminal, statute.
AFDI—which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated last year as an anti-Muslim hate group—is the same group that opposed the proposed Park51 Islamic center that was to be built two blocks from Ground Zero. In 2013, the AFDI’s co-founder, Pamela Geller, and her fellow co-founder, Robert Spencer (who also founded JihadWatch), were banned from entering the United Kingdom for their “extremist” views.
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HBO host John Oliver achieved the destruction of Donald Trump on 29 February 2016. At least, according to the Daily Beast.
Fansided, a popular social news aggregator, dates Trump’s destruction at 1 August while the Daily Good called it for 21 March. Salon found no fewer than “13 glorious times” that Oliver had destroyed the real estate tycoon.
Sharp-eyed consumers of the news might note that it is impossible to, as the dictionary says, “put an end to the existence of something” more than a single time. But for #NeverTrump Facebook users who love any content they see as bringing Trump down a peg, the formulaic headline is indicative of the Facebook media landscape: the most shareable, clickable and likable content on the site aligns strongly with its readership’s pre-existing biases, assumptions and political affiliation.
For millennials who have never known an election without Facebook, the political landscape of the social media network has massive implications for the upcoming contest between Hillary Clinton and Trump – not least of which because of Facebook’s outsized influence on their exposure to political news.
Six out of every 10 millennials (61%) get their political news on Facebook, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, making the 1.7 billion-user social behemoth (which includes more than 200 million in the United States) the largest millennial marketplace for news and ideas in the world. But within Facebook’s ecosystem exists a warren of walled gardens, intellectual biomes created by users whose interest in interacting with opposing political views – and those who are them – is nearly nonexistent.
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The drunken travails of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim — a shambolic junior academic — have long become a byword for the excesses of university life.
Flirting, seduction and seeing how many pints you could fit in between lectures were once relatively harmless pastimes on campuses across Britain.
Yet today, too many universities seem determined to nanny students who are deemed too fragile to be exposed to the rough and tumble of the real world.
Consider the fact that, this week, it emerged that all new students arriving at Oxford and Cambridge are being asked to attend ‘consent classes’ aimed at preventing rape and sexual harassment at the universities.
At Oxford, the courses are compulsory as part of freshers’ week, while the student union is urging rugby players to attend anti-sexism workshops to fight ‘lad culture’.
At Cambridge, consent classes are also being held for freshers, with students of some colleges having to opt out if they don’t wish to attend.
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The alt-right has found a way to evade the censorship policies on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
The far, far, far-right hate group has begun using the names of Internet applications like “Yahoo” and “Google” as stand-ins for racial slurs and insults. This way, they can still congregate online to spread slander and white supremacy without the worry that their accounts will be flagged and deleted.
This amount of hatred one group can have towards — seemingly — every population of non-white non-heterosexual people is flabbergasting.
It’s hard not to feel helpless when trying to minimize the threat of a movement that is so dead-set on cultivating heinously racist views it feels it must re-code innocuous household words.
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Following part one of his conversation with Lidia Hernández Tapia, Eduardo Hernández Santos talks about his groundbreaking early exhibitions, his recent series El Muro, and the “boom of the phallus” in Cuban art.
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U.S. universities operating in China say they are given the freedom to teach what they like in class, but face restrictions such as internet censorship, according to a report by an independent, nonpartisan U.S. agency.
In the recent report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), its survey of 12 U.S. universities found that while administrators had control over curriculum content, fewer than half of them had unrestricted access to the internet.
For example, at one of the universities reviewed by GAO for the survey, users were unable to access Google’s search page and other sites that were available to users at other universities.
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Two recent court battles over historical facts have demonstrated how tight China’s ideological control is and how anxious the party leadership is about its legitimacy of rule.
Two weeks ago, a Beijing court ruled against a popular blogger and a Hong Kong-based beverage company for mocking a Communist Party propaganda tale about a Korean war hero.
And in August, a Beijing court upheld a libel ruling against a writer for two articles published in 2013 questioning certain details about five second world war heroes.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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We’ve been talking at length about how the lack of security in the Internet of Things space is seen as a sort of adorable joke, but isn’t always a laughing matter. While the hillarious stupidity of some of the “smart” products flooding the market is undeniable, the reality is that the abysmal state of security in “IoT” devices (read: little to none) is creating millions of new attack vectors every year. And as Bruce Schneier recently warned, it’s only a matter of time before the check comes due, and these vulnerabilities contribute to hacking attacks on core infrastructure resulting in notable fatalities.
Refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials are one thing, but this looming calamity is going to be made notably worse by the rush toward “smart” cities. The same hardware vendors that can’t bother to secure their consumer-side hardware haven’t done a much better job securing the gear they’re shoveling toward cities under the promise of a better, more connected tomorrow.
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A few years ago, AT&T came up with an “ingenious” idea: charge broadband consumers more money if they want to protect their privacy. Under this plan, users ordering AT&T’s U-Verse broadband service could get broadband for, say, $70 a month. But if you want to opt out of AT&T’s Internet Preferences program (which uses deep packet inspection to study your movement around the Internet down to the second) you’ll pay $30 to $50 more, per month. AT&T also made opting out as cumbersome as possible, knowing full well that few people would dare take the option.
With its decision, AT&T effectively made user privacy a luxury option.
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It has been six months since the Justice Department backed off on demands that Apple help the F.B.I. break the security of a locked iPhone.
But the government has not given up the fight with the tech industry. Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of the year for subscriber information and other details associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.
The subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year.
Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations.
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When it comes to this country’s courts, longstanding practice, history, and the Constitution make clear that openness—of doors, of evidence, of arguments, of opinions—is the rule. Like the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, that rule is not absolute. But it puts in place a default, one that forces those who want to keep court proceedings secret to show, in each case, that secrecy is warranted—and that the need for secrecy overcomes the traditions and values of openness that animate the default rule in the first place.
But in far too many cases across the country, the government appears to have reversed the presumption that the First Amendment establishes, opting to keep secret information about its demands for private data where transparency is required and would serve the public good.
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This morning the ACLU announced that it had convinced the government to remove a ridiculous gag order on a subpoena that had been sent to Open Whisper Systems, the makers of the popular Signal encrypted messaging app, and whose encrypted communication protocol is used by many others, including WhatsApp, Facebook and Google for their encrypted messaging offerings. It’s not that surprising that a grand jury would issue a subpoena to Open Whisper Systems demanding “subscriber name, address, telephone numbers, email addresses, method of payment, IP registration, IP history logs and addresses, account history, toll records, upstream and downstream providers, any associated accounts acquired through cookie data, and any other contact information from inception to the present” for certain accounts being investigated. But, of course, Open Whisper Systems has basically none of that data.
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Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens.
We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place. Facebook, Google and Twitter spring to mind as examples of companies that have grown to dangerous sizes with little competition. This is not paranoia. This is real. We make it a lot more difficult when we spread out.
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Millennials hate email, and they will finally kill this business scourge — or so you would think from popular discussions on the topic. But do a little research, and you discover that millennials not only don’t hate email, they use it more than any other age group.
Yes, the text-obsessed and social-media-loving millennials are addicted to email, a recent survey of 1,004 mobile-using American office workers by Adobe Systems has found. Millennials (born between 1981 and 2001) check their email more often than any other group — even more than Gen X (born between 1961 and 1981) and baby boomers (born between 1947 and 1961) for whom email is the mainstay business communication method.
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Former NSA technical director Bill Binney talks about the Investigatory Powers Bill and the UK government’s independent review of bulk surveillance powers
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Some surveillance experts said this represents the first known case of a US internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
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Reuters says that U.S intelligence officials were searching for a specific set of characters within Yahoo emails, but it is unknown what exactly they were looking for. Reuters also reports that the order to search user emails came in the form of a “classified directive” sent to Yahoo’s legal team.
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Without the cooperation of American companies — both voluntary and compelled — the National Security Agency’s system of mass surveillance simply would not have been possible. And on Tuesday, Reuters added the name of yet another American corporate giant to the list of those who have made it possible for American intelligence to intercept huge troves of information: Yahoo.
According to the news service, the American internet giant designed custom software to filter its users’ emails according to a set of search terms, and deliver those messages to the NSA. The decision to enable NSA surveillance was reportedly made by CEO Marissa Mayer and without the knowledge of the company’s security chief, who quit in protest when he learned of the program.
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The details of the Yahoo email surveillance program, reportedly installed in 2015, are still emerging, but they immediately raise questions about whether other companies are participating as well. So far, four tech giants say they are not.
“We’ve never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: ‘no way’,” said a spokesperson from Google in response to a query about whether the NSA asked the company to build similar custom software to scan Gmail.
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So Reuters has big exclusive report this morning about Yahoo creating “custom software to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information” at the behest of the NSA or FBI. This was built last year — which came well after the Snowden disclosures, and after Yahoo had been revealed to have legally challenged earlier NSA dragnet attempts — and after it had rolled out end to end encryption on email.
Apparently, this was a decision made at the top by Marissa Mayer, and pissed off the company’s top security guy, Alex Stamos (who is awesome and a big supporter of end-to-end encryption) leading him to leave the company (and move to Facebook, where he is currently).
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Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
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There’s no good reason to have a Yahoo account these days. But after Tuesday’s bombshell report by Reuters, indicating the enormous, faltering web company designed a bespoke email-wiretap service for the U.S. government, we now know that a Yahoo account is a toxic surveillance liability.
Reuters’s Joseph Menn is reporting that just last year, Yahoo chose to comply with a classified “directive” to build “a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials” — the NSA in particular.
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Yahoo! searched all its users’ emails using a specially built program in order to try and locate specific information demanded by American intelligence officials, according to a Reuters report.
The company, which was bought by Verizon in July for US$4.83 billion, agreed to scan all mail accounts in line with a classified directive from the US government, Reuters said, citing two former Yahoo! workers and a third person who had been informed about it.
The directive came from the NSA or the FBI, the sources said.
What the spy agencies were after was not specified by the sources, who said only that they had asked Yahoo! to search for a set of characters.
Reuters said it had not been able to determine what kind of data, if any, was handed over to the spooks, and if other email providers had been confronted with similar demands.
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Yahoo reportedly scanned hundreds of millions of email accounts at the behest of U.S. intelligence or law enforcement. The scans, reported by Reuters, allegedly selected incoming messages that contained a string of unknown characters.
Yahoo did not deny the report, saying only that it is a “law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”
According to the Tuesday report, Yahoo acceded to a 2015 government directive to give email access to the National Security Agency or the FBI. Reuters cited anonymous sources including two former employees and another person with knowledge of the events.
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Yahoo secretly scanned millions of its users’ email accounts on behalf of the US government, according to a report.
Reuters news agency says the firm built special software last year to comply with a classified request.
“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the tech firm said in a statement provided to the BBC.
The allegation comes less than a fortnight after Yahoo said hackers had stolen data about many of its users.
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Last weekend, I saw my first Christmas ad. And what a Smart Christmas it will be, judging by the haul on offer. Over the past year, companies have been teasing the various connected must-haves for the holidays: bots that can respond to kids’ questions and movements, and capture audio and video; an imitation smartwatch that chats with other devices over Bluetooth; not to mention the Barbie Hello Dreamhouse, a pink-and-white smart house for the iconic doll.
Not everyone is excited about the intelligence creeping into kids’ toys. Privacy activists and developmental psychologists have objected on grounds ranging from security and privacy to fundamental worries about the nature of play. So should you be crossing these gadgets off your list? Or is this just a new variation on a familiar old song?
As it happens, Barbie was at the centre of the last big smart toy brouhaha. Hello Barbie, perhaps 2015’s most controversial toy, could hold court on a wide range of topics – from fashion and family to dreams and paddleboarding. “Did you know that butterflies live everywhere in the world except Antarctica?” she might say, before confessing in a less guarded moment to “daydreaming about cupcakes”.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Thousands of ex-Muslims in Britain are living in fear of violent revenge for abandoning the Islamic faith while others are afraid to admit they no longer believe, a support group for ex-Muslims has said.
Maryam Namazie, founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, described a “tsunami of atheism” in Muslim communities and urged that more needs to be done to recognise the dangers often faced by those who choose to renounce their faith.
Speaking ahead of the release of Exposure, an ITV documentary that explores the lives of ex-Muslims faced with abuse and discrimination, Ms Namazie told The Independent: “There is a large group of people who are not seen and heard. Many young people living in Britain have left Islam and are facing huge ostracisation and isolation from their communities as a result.
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The US Supreme Court issued law enforcement fishing licenses with the Heien decision. Vehicle stops no longer needed to be predicated on legal violations. (If they ever were…) Law enforcement officers were no longer required to know the laws they were enforcing. The Supreme Court’s decision combined reasonable suspicion with an officer’s “reasonable” grasp of moving violations, further deteriorating the thin Fourth Amendment insulation protecting drivers from suspicionless, warrantless searches.
With the standards lowered, officers can now stop anyone for almost any reason, provided they can make the justification stated in their report sound like a reasonable approximation of what they thought the law was, or what they wanted the law to be. (The Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision still allows for bogus traffic stops. It just puts a highly-subjective time limit on the fishing expedition.)
The Supreme Court’s case originated in North Carolina. Oddly enough, further down the judicial food chain, a North Carolina state appeals court has just suppressed evidence based on a traffic stop with no legal basis. (h/t The Newspaper)
Antwon Eldridge was pulled over because his vehicle was missing the driver’s side mirror. This led to a search of his vehicle and the discovery of crack and marijuana. But the reason for the stop failed to hold up in court, even with the Heien decision in place.
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DRM
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A few weeks ago we noted how HP had effectively delivered a DRM time bomb in the form of a software update that, once detonated, crippled customers’ ability to use competing third-party print cartridges in HP printers. While such ham-fisted behavior certainly isn’t new, in this case HP had actually first deployed the “security update” to its printers back in March — but didn’t activate its stealthy payload until last month. Once activated, the software update prevented HP printers from even detecting alternative ink cartridges, resulting in owners getting a rotating crop of error messages about faulty cartridges.
HP customers were obviously annoyed, and the EFF was quick to pen an open letter to HP, quite correctly noting that HP abused its security update mechanism to trick its customers and actively erode product functionality. Ultimately HP was forced to respond via a blog post proclaiming the company was just “dedicated to the best printing experience” and wanted to correct some “confusion” about its DRM sneak attack. In short, HP strongly implied it was just trying to protect consumers from “potential security risks” (what sweethearts)…
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Way back in 2010, Mike wrote about how the Taco John’s restaurant chain had threatened a small restaurant in Oklahoma for daring to use the phrase “Taco Tuesday” in a promotion for cheap tacos on…you know…Tuesdays. Taco John’s did indeed have a trademark on the term in 49 of our 50 states, with the exception being New Jersey, because life is strange. The question at the time, as tends to be the question in most trademark disputes, was whether or not there was any potential customer confusion to worry about. Given the somewhat descriptive nature of the phrase, not to mention its widespread use both commercially and in common parlance, the whole thing seemed rather silly.
Six years does little to change things, it seems. Taco John’s recently fired off a cease and desist notice to the Old Fashioned Tavern and Restaurant in Wisconsin for using the phrase.
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When the owners of the Old Fashioned Tavern and Restaurant received a cease and desist letter demanding they stop holding Taco Tuesdays, they thought it was a joke.
For almost a decade, the restaurant had sold $2 tacos on Tuesday night. Other restaurants and bars in the area had similar promotions, and in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, Taco Tuesday specials are as plentiful as yoga classes.
But the author of the letter claimed that “Taco Tuesday” was a federally registered trademark that belonged to Taco John’s, a chain of around 400 Mexican-style fast food restaurants. And as Old Fashioned manager Jennifer DeBolt told the local Cap Times, they quickly realized that “the law firm is completely legit.”
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Copyrights
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While relatively underreported, many U.S. district courts are still swamped with lawsuits against alleged film pirates.
The copyright holders who initiate these cases generally rely on an IP address as evidence. This information is collected from BitTorrent swarms and linked to a geographical location using geolocation tools.
With this information in hand, they then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holder.
In most cases, courts sign off on these subpoenas quite easily, but in a recent case California Magistrate Judge Mitchell Dembin decided to ask for further clarification and additional evidence.
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10.04.16
Posted in Site News at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The CAFC‘s Haldane Robert Mayer has issued a detailed and abundantly clear ruling, but patent law firms are still ignoring it
Summary: The historic decision from Haldane Robert Mayer (above) is slowly starting to gain some traction in the media, but proponents of software patents pretend not to see it and hope that prospective clients (software patent applicants) won’t notice what’s happening
SOMETHING very big happened at the end of last week, but it is not being properly covered (if at all) by the patent microcosm. Today, IAM ‘magazine’ is pushing for software patents (cherry-picking cases to focus on the ones that are pro-software patents) behind a paywall [1, 2] — all this in spite of the fact that most of them are dead (more of them, more than ever before).
We didn’t expect IAM to stand out though. It was probably the first to cover the McRO outcome (pro-software patents), but regarding the above there’s radio silence. WIPR, by contrast, finally wrote about it under the headline “Software patents are deadweight loss to economy, says Federal Circuit” and it didn’t mince words:
Software patents impose a “deadweight loss on the nation’s economy”, according to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
This was the concurring opinion of Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer in the case of Intellectual Ventures v Symantec and Trend Micro, decided on September 30. He concurred with Circuit Judge Timothy Dyk.
Mayer added that software patents erect “often insurmountable barriers to innovation” and force “companies to expend exorbitant sums defending against meritless infringement suits”.
The ruling found that three patents asserted by licensing company Intellectual Ventures (IV) against anti-virus software business Symantec and IT security company Trend Micro were invalid.
US patent numbers 6,460,050; 6,073,142 and 5,987,610, which all cover anti-virus software, were held not to cover patent-eligible subject matter.
It is good that someone in MIP (Managing IP) covered it as well, albeit MIP called it “controversial” as if to antagonise software patents is something questionable. To quote:
In a controversial concurring opinion in a Federal Circuit decision finding claims of three Intellectual Ventures patents invalid, Judge Haldane Mayer argues: “It is well past time to return software to its historical dwelling place in the domain of copyright.”
This is what software developers have been arguing all along. There is nothing “controversial” about it. What likely “controversial” is a site like IAM openly promoting software patents and its editor in chief arguing with me online, insisting that being against software patents is the same as (or moral equivalent of) wanting layoffs. Whose layoffs? Definitely not software developers’. This is just a politician’s trick, trying to equate some policy with “creating” or “destroying” jobs (appeal to “families”).
How long before Watchtroll personally attacks this CAFC Judge (as usual)? And maybe Patent Docs also? Both have a tendency to go ad hominem when they dislike the outcome. Here is the patent microcosm shooting the messenger. It didn’t take long. This one dismisses the judge as “one senior judge with no business experience nor extensive technology background-baying at the moon” (there’s more here).
Some of the worst ad hominem attacks we have come across discredit the US Supreme Court, which, according to this new article from Patently-O, virtually if not practically refuses to refute (technically overturn) Alice:
Not Eligible: Supreme Court Denies All Pending Subject Matter Eligibility Petitions
The Supreme Court has greatly simplified the patent docket by denying certiorari in 10+ cases. Gone are GEA Process (IPR termination decision), Amphastar (scope of 271.e safe harbor) , Commil (appellate disregard of factual evidence), MacDermid (obvious combination), Jericho (Abstract Idea) , Trading Technologies (mandamus challenging CBM initiation), Tobinick (interference), Neev (arbitrator autonomy), Genetic Tech (eligibility), Essociate (eligibility), Dreissen, and Pactiv (ex parte reexamination procedure). Notably, all of the eligibility petitions have been denied.
“Meanwhile,” the above adds, “on October 11, the court will hear oral arguments in Samsung v. Apple.”
Yes, that’s about design patents, which are related to software patents but not quite the same. Here is patent the maximalism site MIP catching up with the latest of Apple litigation, saying that a “jury in the Eastern District of Texas has awarded VirnetX $302.4 million in a verdict against Apple for infringing four patents. This is the third time a federal jury has found Apple liable for infringing VirnetX’s patented technology.”
The VirnetX case was covered here thrice in the past week alone and it is still being covered quite a lot by media large and small all around the world (because it’s about “Apple”, which typically attracts/baits readers). Here is AOL’s coverage of it. This involves a court in Texas, i.e. the cesspool of all patent courts. They actually boast/gloat about their bias. It’s their marketing strategy.
Speaking of design patents and Apple, Vera Ranieri from the EFF published “Stupid Design Patent of the Month” (later crossposted in TechDirt) in which she wrote:
On October 11, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the long-running Apple-Samsung litigation. The issue is whether Apple, by virtue of having its designed patents infringed by Samsung, is entitled to all of Samsung’s profits made from the infringing phones (regardless of how much that design contributed to the value of the phone).
This case—in which EFF submitted an amicus brief arguing the award of Samsung’s total profit is improper—is important for many reasons. But one reason stands out: it is trivially easy to get a design patent on trivial designs and, unless the Supreme Court changes the law, that can lead to anything-but-trivial awards in court.
This month’s stupid patent, a design patent, shows just how broken the current system of design patents is. Design patents, unlike the utility patents we usually feature, consist only of a single claim followed by pictures. It is generally the pictures that inform the public as to what is claimed. Importantly, in a design patent only the features drawn in solid lines are claimed. Anything in dotted lines is generally not part of the claim.
If SCOTUS rules against Apple and in favour of Android/Linux/Samsung, this may spell the end of design patents too. Wait and watch how patent lawyers would squirm and deny everything if this was to occur. Is it not funny (or suspicious) that not a single patent law firm is ‘seeing’ (after several days) the decision where CAFC slams software patents? A lot of patent lawyers are liars, and in light of the latest silence they are more so. They refuse to inform people about decisions where software patents are trashed. It’s just not good for their business.
“Well done, Haldane Robert Mayer, for saying what a lot of us software developers have been arguing for well over a decade. Patents are not needed for software, which is a copyright domain (like prose).”Today we found the new article “Federal Circuit Finds Claims Implemented on General Purpose Cellphone Not Patentable”, but the patent microcosm is still stuck in the past, persistently pushing an old case like McRO [1, 2, 3] as if we’re in the middle of September. This so-called ‘analysis’ too got reposted (mentioned here before), provocatively asking (in the headline), “Is the Pendulum Finally Swinging Back to Center?”
No, it’s swinging in the side that’s software patents being verboten and thus worthless. Just don’t ask IAM or the patent microcosm as they’ll pretend not to know about it. Surely they saw the decision, but they probably just don’t know what to say in order to somehow save face, spin it etc. If all they can do is attack the judge (i.e. shoot the messenger), then they’d be better off keeping quiet.
Well done, Haldane Robert Mayer, for saying what a lot of us software developers have been arguing for well over a decade. Patents are not needed for software, which is a copyright domain (like prose). █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The latest increase in the FTI Consulting deal/contract targets German and Dutch media specifically
Full article: Sheldon Adelson’s Purchase of Las Vegas Paper Seen as a Power Play
Remember who attacked a judge in the German and Dutch media very shortly (a few weeks) after signing the FTI Consulting deal
Summary: The staff union of the EPO (SUEPO) is planning another couple of demonstrations next week and the EPO’s payments to European media bear fruit, serving to demonstrate the corrupting influence of Battistelli’s bizarre budget choices and mind-boggling priorities (managing perceptions, not changing behaviour)
THERE IS PLENTY to be angry about at the EPO and SUEPO will lead a march next week, having just announced that the next demonstrations are to take place on the 11th and 13th of October, coinciding with the meeting of the Administrative Council. To quote the full announcement:
On 11 October Mr Battistelli will hold his much publicised (yet another “first in the history of the Office”) Social Conference where he will be trumpeting his achievements just before the meeting of the Administrative Council on 12/13 October. Meanwhile, the attacks against SUEPO officials are continuing in The Hague with three investigations/disciplinary proceedings. SUEPO organises a demonstration on Tuesday 11 October in Munich in front of the EPO Isar building starting at 12.30h, and on Thursday 13 October in The Hague.
No doubt the media will hardly cover it, having been given a lethal injection by the EPO. The EPO is paying to control the media in the Netherlands and in Germany. It is also PAYING some French publishers like Les Echos (for self-censorship and habitual propaganda), which Battistelli later cites in his private letters as ‘proof’ of his dubious claims. Here in the UK the EPO pays FT (Financial Times) for UPC propaganda (as recently as last week) and one EPO insider found some new UPC material in relation to Brexit. It comes from Les Echos (EPO-funded) and the insider called it “Pro UPC Propaganda as expected – Le « paquet brevet » suspendu au Brexit” (published and mentioned earlier today).
Expect more of the media manipulation from the EPO’s top-level management. It’s their spiel now. They have no compelling story to tell, so instead they’re trying to sell. They literally pay the media, which in turn publishes puff pieces and even fields social media accounts to spread the EPO’s talking points (FT did this some months ago).
“Expect more of the media manipulation from the EPO’s top-level management. It’s their spiel now.”Remember the time IAM attempted to distance itself from the EPO after the EPO's foreign PR agency had paid IAM for UPC propaganda? Well, IAM has just published a new issue of its totally completely honestly objective ‘magazine’ and in it appears to be the big lie about EPO patent quality. It is paywalled, so it’s hard to say exactly what’s in it. They do, however, help the EPO and Battistelli lie about patent quality (they are the only citation the EPO and Battistelli use for such a claim, with Battistelli repeatedly mentioning IAM privately and publicly). It is really that bad and it’s verging the pathetic. Does the Administrative Council not mind that Battistelli is wasting millions of Euros buying (one might say “corrupting”) European media? And all this to mislead the public and mislead the Council’s delegates? If not, then it makes these delegates complicit.
To be sure, the UPC propaganda will end pretty soon, at least as far as its relevance to the UK and Brexit is concerned. IP Kat wrote so much on the subject (usually in favour of the UPC) and here we have a new article about EU-wide injunctions. Well, EU-wide injunctions (even beyond the EU) would be a standard occurrence if UPC (litigation chaos) was ever to sneak into Europe.
“We hope that EPO staff will join us in opposing the UPC.”One new comment, among other such comments (a thread initiated by the UPC proponents, like most others), said today: “Of course, a solution would be for the UK to enact legislation to the effect that any judgement of the UPC in respect of an EP patent for which there is a GB part to be automatically enforceable in the UK. Maybe not so good for UK litigators but good for industry.”
The self-serving Team UPC is mostly a litigation industry, hence it’s craving for the UPC (more money for them at the expense of plaintiffs and defendants in Europe). We hope that EPO staff will join us in opposing the UPC. All it does is (and we’ve been writing about this for nearly a decade*), it threatens to eliminate EPO jobs and reduce Europe into litigious chaos that’s enriching the litigation industry. The very fact that Battistelli has been pushing for the UPC for many years (previous incarnation) raises questions as well; who does this man work for? █
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* Techrights is turning 10 next month and the early efforts to unify patent litigation in Europe go even further back than that.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is often credited for pioneering the open source development model and it has led to the creation of many open source projects and communities. Here are some of the major open source projects that were created around Linux in the past 25 years.
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Server
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Linux containers are helping to change the way that IT operates. In place of large, monolithic virtual machines, organizations are finding effective ways to deploy their applications inside Linux containers, providing for faster speeds, greater density, and increased agility in their operations.
While containers can bring a number of advantages from a security perspective, they come with their own set of security challenges as well. Just as with traditional infrastructure, it is critical to ensure that the system libraries and components running within a container are regularly updated in order to avoid vulnerabilities. But how do you know what is running inside of your containers? To help manage the full set of security challenges facing container technologies, a startup named Anchore is developing an open source project of the same name to bring visibility inside of Linux containers.
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I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but one thing or another has gotten in the way. It’s important to me to provide an accurate history, definition, and proper usage of the Pets vs Cattle meme so that everyone can understand why it was successful and how it’s still vital as a tool for driving understanding of cloud. The meme has taken off because it helped created an understanding of the “old way” vs. the “new way” of doing things. That’s great, but the value of the meme becomes muddied when misused. We can all agree there’s enough muddy terminology and phraseology already, such as “cloud,” “hybrid,” and “DevOps”. So this post aims to set the record straight and assure a canonical history that everyone can reference and use.
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To appreciate how Kubernetes manages storage pools that provide persistence to applications, we need to understand the architecture and the workflow related to application deployment.
Kubernetes is used in various roles — by developers, system administrators, operations, and DevOps teams. Each of these personas, if you will, interact with the infrastructure in a distinct way. The system administration team is responsible for configuring the physical infrastructure for running Kubernetes cluster. The operations team maintains the Kubernetes cluster through patching, upgrading, and scaling the cluster. DevOps teams deal with Kubernetes to configure CI/CD, monitoring, logging, rolling upgrades, and canary deployments. Developers consume the API and the resources exposed by the Kubernetes infrastructure. They are never expected to have visibility into the underlying physical infrastructure that runs the master and nodes.
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Building happy engineering teams needs to be your top priority if you want to build great products. Through collective ownership, increasing trust, removing noise, and being bold with new ideas, you can begin to not only improve your practices but also allow new ideas to flourish organically. Allow new eyes to push you to both fix issues and take their fresh perspective not as criticism but as a catalyst for change.
After our strategic investments, our paging volume is down, service quality is up, and we’re better positioned to move even faster to make email suck less.
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I wrote “what’s up with containers: Docker and rkt” a while ago. Since then I have learned a few new things about containers! We’re going to talk about running containers in production, not on your laptop for development, since I’m trying to understand how that works in September 2016. It’s worth noting that all this stuff is moving pretty fast right now.
The concerns when you run containers in production are pretty different from running it on a laptop — I very happily use Docker on my laptop and I have no real concerns about it because I don’t care much if processes on my laptop crash like 0.5% of the time, and I haven’t seen any problems.
Here are the things I’ve learned so far. I learned many of these things with @grepory who is the best. Basically I want to talk about what some of the things you need to think about are if you want to run containers, and what is involved in “just running a container” 
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Kernel Space
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One day after Linus Torvalds’ announcement on Linux kernel 4.8, Jiri Slaby releases the sixty-fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.
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Linux Kernel 4.8 is out and once more Collabora engineers did a significant contribution to the Kernel. For the 4.8 Collabora contributed 101 patches by 8 engineers, our record to date in single kernel release! We’ve also seen the first contribution from Frederic Dalleau since he joined Collabora. LWN.net covered the new features of the new kernel in three different posts, here, here and here.
On the Collabora side of the contributions we touched a few different areas in the kernel. Bob Ham, who recently left Collabora, added support for the Alea I Random Number Generator, while Enric Balletbo improved the audio support on the Rockchip rk3288 SoC. Frederic Dalleau fixed an important memory leak on the Bluetooth stack.
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Softpedia was informed today by Collabora’s Mark Filion about the contributions made by a total of eight Collabora engineers to the recently released Linux 4.8 kernel series.
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This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your “chief meteorologist” is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments below.
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James Morris has submitted the security subsystem updates for the new Linux 4.9 kernel development cycle.
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Con Kolivas has rolled out the BFS scheduler v0.512 release for Linux 4.8, which may be his last “BFS” release as he’s getting ready to premiere a new scheduler.
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Ingo Molnar was prompt as usual in submitting his various pull requests for the opening of the Linux 4.9 merge window, including the scheduler changes.
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AS LINUXCON gets underway in earnest in Berlin, our second Legend of Linux is Tim Burke, vice president of cloud and Linux engineering at Red Hat.
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Version 10 of the Secure Memory Allocation Framework (SMAF) is now available as a large patch-set by Linaro for addressing secure-related memory allocation on Linux.
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While Intel is no longer interested in progressing its Atom CPU series, there are still a variety of products still being sold in the market powered by the low voltage processor. Perhaps the most notable of those currently available is Microsoft’s own Surface 3 tablet.
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I think that’s how you say it, anyway. Colonel Kitten here, custodian of the Linux Kernel and protector of code purity. This week I am in Berlin, a town with a fine military history and good supplies of catnip. I am attending LinuxCon, which is celebrating 25 years of protecting the code.
One of my colleagues in the German Linux regiment, Lieutenant Hund, has given me some good phrases he uses on his troops and advised me to try them. I have no idea what they mean but maybe it will make my brigade fear me even more.
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Graphics Stack
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Back in 2013 we heard how X.Org security is worse than it looks and how for a period there were many X.Org security issues. It’s been a while since last seeing a number of X.Org security vulnerabilities come about at once, but that’s changed with this morning’s disclosure.
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With the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel there is experimental AMDGPU Southern Islands support so that original AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs can optionally work with the newer AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the mature Radeon DRM driver. In this article are tests of some AMD graphics cards from GCN 1.0/1.1 era comparing the performance impact of switching the Radeon/AMDGPU kernel driver with this DRM-Next code for Linux 4.9.
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The latest version of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available and it’s a fairly important release.
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Applications
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The first days of October already brought many exciting new technologies for GNU/Linux users, and today we would like to tell you about the recent release of the FFmpeg 3.1.4 “Laplace” open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.
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Today, October 3, 2016, Git developer Junio C Hamano proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the first maintenance update to the latest stable Git 2.10 series.
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Klavaro is a free and easy to use typing tutor for Linux operating system. Though it is also available for Windows OS but we’re not talking about that. Klavaro is a very simple typing tutor without lots of bells & whistles in the interface. Let’s see some of its features and know how we can install & use it in Linux. So let’s get started!
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’ [Official Site, Steam, Humble Store] from Blendo Games is now available on Linux, with thanks to Aaron from Knockout Games for the game port.
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September wasn’t a good month for Windows 10. After enjoying uninterrupted meteoric growth since launch, usage share for the new OS actually dropped off last month, according to the latest figures from NetMarketShare announced on Saturday.
That’s not the only bad news for Microsoft either. Gamers, who typically prefer to be running the latest operating system, also turned their back on Windows 10 in September.
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It seems Homefront: The Revolution [Steam] is seeing some fresh Linux-related activity on SteamDB, with it being giving a launch configuration.
If I may direct your attention to this and this it seems that someone has started focusing on the Linux version some more. The latest update being today and only a few hours ago too.
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Stardew Valley [Official Site, Steam] 1.1 the big content update is now live on Steam, you can divorce people now, choose a different map and more.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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LXQt developers have done a desktop memory consumption comparison to show that Qt programs are not necessarily bloated.
The tests done by developer “PCMan” show that LXQt 0.11 uses a bit more memory than the GTK2-based LXDE while using less memory than the GTK2-based Xfce.
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It has always been rumored that Qt is bloated so programs written in Qt should be bloated. Some even argued that the LXDE developers made a wrong decision on the migration to LXQt.
Why not replace the assumptions with some experiments?
In fact, LXQt 0.11 even uses slightly less memory than XFCE (with gtk+ 2). After cold boot, LXQt uses 112 MB in the testing environment.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today KDE releases its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma. This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The 3.24 cycle is just getting started, and I have a few plans for Sysprof to give us a more polished profiling experience in Builder. The details can be found on the mailing list.
In particular, I’d love to land support for visualizers. I expect this to happen soon, since there is just a little bit more to work through to make that viable. This will enable us to get a more holistic view of performance and allow us to drill into callgraphs during a certain problematic period of the profile.
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This morning i got an email from Rafael Tavares about his new project, GFS (GNOME From Scratch), a personal project that makes possible to use GNOME on Slackware GNU/Linux operating system without systemd or wayland programs. The GFS project will attempt to bring GNOME 3.22 to Slackware Linux. This is the latest version of GNOME available at this moment.
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For some time I worked at Igalia to enable WebRTC on WebKitForWayland or WPE for the Raspberry Pi 2.
The goal was to have the WebKit WebRTC tests working for a demo. My fellow Igalian Alex was working on the platform itself in WebKit and assisting with some tuning for the Pi on WebKit but the main work needed to be done in OpenWebRTC.
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Over the years I’ve bought some less than impressive consumer routers, so these days I run my own self-built hardware firewall appliance. Surprisingly, deciding on which option was best for my needs was not as easy as I had hoped.
Building a hardware firewall requires you to decide on the hardware your firewall/router computer operating system will be installed on. Like myself, some people might use an old PC. Others might decide to install their selected firewall operating system onto a rack mount server. However one decides to do this, the completed act of installing this OS onto the dedicated hardware creates a dedicated hardware firewall.
And unlike a software firewall, hardware firewalls serve a single dedicated purpose – to act as a gateway appliance for your network. Having had experience with three popular firewall operating systems in the past, I found that choosing the “right one” is a matter of perspective.
In this article, I’m going to share my experience and overall impressions about those three different firewall solutions. Some of these are highly advanced while others are incredibly easy to use. Each of these solutions share something that I feel good about sharing with my readers. All of the firewalls are easily downloadable without any annoying sign-up pages (I’m looking at you, Sophos).
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New Releases
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The second day of October also brought us a new, updated ISO image of the SystemRescueCd system rescue and recovery Live CD developed by French developer François Dupoux.
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A new stable version of the unique and independent NixOS Linux-based operating system has been announced on the last day of September 2016 with multiple new features and technologies, as well as up-to-date components.
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Version 16.09 of NixOS is now available, the Linux distribution focused on being a “purely functional distribution” and built atop the Nix package manager.
NixOS 16.09 uses significantly less disk space now due to work on closure size reduction. This new NixOS release also now builds its packages with various hardening features for better security.
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NixOS 16.09 “Flounder” has been released, the fifth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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It is with a heavy heart that we address our warmest thanks to our friend Thomas Spuhler for his Mandriva and Mageia contributions over the last decade. After fighting colon cancer for over a year, he finally had to surrender on Saturday September 17, 2016, at the age of 68. He leaves behind his beloved wife, sons and grandchildren, to whom our thoughts go in this difficult time.
Thomas had been contributing to Mageia, and Mandriva before that, since 2009 as a packager, and much earlier already partaking in email discussions and bug reports. His packaging interests were mostly web and server-related components, for which his contributions were invaluable. He had to step back from his Mageia responsibilities in early August due to his health condition.
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Gentoo Family
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In summer 2015 I started to package GNUnet for Gentoo as contributor to the youbroketheinternet-overlay.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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GNOME Software developer Richard Hughes recently e-mailed the Fedora developers mailing requesting Fedora package maintainers to update their AppData files to include age ratings using OARS.
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I spent last week at Linaro Connect in Las Vegas. Nominally I was there for some discussions about Ion. The week ended up being fairly full of the gamut of ARM topics.
IoT is still a top buzzword. Linaro announced the founding of the LITE (Linaro IoT and Embedded) group. The work that this group has done so far is mostly related to Cortex-M processors which don’t run Linux. This is a change of pace from a consortium that has exclusively focused on Linux. The Linux Foundation has done the same thing, given their focus on the Zephyr Project. I see this shift for three reasons: 1) vendors want an end-to-end solution and reduced fragmentation and Linaro/Linux Foundation provide a good forum to do this because 2) both Linaro and the Linux Foundation are very good at courting companies and engaging in ‘corporate hand holding’ through open source projects especially 3) when bootstrapping relatively new projects. This is not intended to be a negative, sometimes companies need to throw money at outside entities to inform them what needs to be done (even when internal employees are shouting the same thing). Corporate influence in open source can certainly be critiqued but I’m optimistic about that not being a problem for Linaro.
Red Hat also announced its involvement in the LITE group. Red Hat’s interest aren’t in the RTOS Microcontroller space but the higher level gateway. All those IoT devices have to communicate somewhere and a centralized gateway makes it easier to manage those devices, especially for industrial use cases. Hearing the full-stack story of IoT was a good learning experience for me, as I mostly have my head in the kernel. Everyone seems to be learning everywhere and most of the work is brand new. The Zephyr project was talking about writing new IP stacks which should give you some idea of where these projects are right now.
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On October 3, 2016, DNF developer Jan Šilhan proudly announced the release of the DNF 2.0.0 package manager for Fedora Rawhide, the development version of the Fedora Linux operating system.
DNF 2.0.0 is a major update of the default package management system used in the Red Hat-based Fedora distribution, but it doesn’t look like it landed in the stable Fedora 25 version just yet, most probably because of the incompatibilities with the DNF 1.x series. Therefore, DNF 2.0.0 is now available in Fedora Rawhide.
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HackMIT is the annual hackathon event organized by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HackMIT 2016 took place on September 17th and 18th, 2016. This year, the Fedora Project partnered with Red Hat as sponsors for the hackathon. Fedora Ambassadors Charles Profitt and Justin W. Flory attended to represent the project and help mentor top students from around the country in a weekend of learning and competitive hacking. Fedora engaged with a new audience of students from various universities across America and even the globe.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project today announced the “in-kind” donation of several servers to “boost reliability of Debian’s core infrastructure.” The new hardware will be deployed in Canada, US, and Australia to replace some aging machines as well as expand core services and storage. In other news, a new project aims to provide GNOME 3.22 to Slackware without systemd or Wayland, right as a new ugly systemd bug gives another reason to avoid it. Mageia bid farewell to a lost friend and contributor today and Matt Hartley shared his picks for best firewall distribution.
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Shipping Position Independent Executables and using read-only Global Offset Table was already possible for packages but needed package maintainers to opt-in for each package (see Hardening wiki) using the “pie” and “bindnow” Dpkg hardening flags.
Many critical packages enabled the extra flags but there are still way more left out according to Lintian hardening-no-bindnow and hardening-no-pie warnings.
Now we can change that. We can make those hardening flags the default for every package.
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Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
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Over the last several months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), one of Debian’s primary hardware partners, has made several large in-kind donations in support of Debian core services. The donated equipment will be deployed in the data centers of multiple hosting partners in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
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I have been working quite hard, along with my friend and colleague Richard Maw, on getting Gitano ready for a release suitable for inclusion into Debian Stretch.
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Globalscale’s “EspressoBin” network switching Pico-ITX SBC offers Marvell’s dual-core, Cortex-A53 Armada 3720 SoC, plus 2x GbE, 1x WAN, SATA, and mini-PCIe.
Globalscale Technologies and its hardware partner Marvell, which have previously collaborated on products such as the Armada 370 Mirabox, have joined forces on a Linux-fueled EspressoBin network switching single-board computer. The EspressoBin is based on a more powerful Marvell Armada SoC: a dual-core, Cortex-A53 Armada 3720 clocked to 1.2GHz.
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ArgonBoards has launched two Linux-driven SBCs for IoT gateways: an i.MX6 SoloLite reference board and an open source QorIQ LS1021A SBC.
India-based embedded manufacturer VVDN Technogies, which owns RadiumBoards, the makers of products such as the HD Camera Cape for the BeagleBone Black and MIPI Camera Board for the Wandboard, has also launched a single-board computer subsidiary. The ArgonBoards SBC division recently announced a $499, open source LS1021A Community Board and a $199 i.MX6SL IoT gateway reference board based on the SoloLite SoC, both running Linux. (VVDN is a member of NXP’s partner ecosystem.)
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Arduino LLC and Arduino Srl have settled their legal disputes, and will reunify under an Arduino Holding company and a not-for-profit Arduino Foundation.
At the World Maker Faire New York, the Arduino LLC (Arduino.cc) and Arduino Srl (Arduino.org) organizations announced they have signed a settlement agreement concerning the legal dispute that has, for the past two years, split the open source MCU-oriented Arduino hardware community in two. The forked entities will reunite before the end of the year under a new “Arduino Holding” company and not-for-profit “Arduino Foundation.” The identical announcements were posted at Arduino.cc and Arduino.org.
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Arduino, the world’s leading open-source ecosystem for educators, Makers and IoT developers of all ages, today announced that Arduino LLC (aka Arduino.cc) and Arduino srl (aka Arduino.org) have settled their differences and signed a settlement agreement.
Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto took the stage today at World Maker Faire New York to announce the good news.
At the end of 2016, the newly created “Arduino Holding” will become the single point of contact for the wholesale distribution of all current and future products, and will continue to bring tremendous innovations to the market.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Tizen’s theme store is one of the main ways in which users can customize their Tizen smartphones. However, if you are not impressed by all the themes available in the store, then Samsung’s Tizen Theme Editor tool is just what you should be looking out for. This Windows desktop only program lest you create your Tizen themes. The theme editor doesn’t require you to have any programming knowledge as the process only involves clicks, drags and drops to get most of the work done.
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Samsung Electronics Co. and Japanese internet and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. met recently to discuss how both companies could co-operate in the world of Technology as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) , according to sources. The meeting took place between Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, and SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son at the Samsung office in Seocho Ward.
SoftBank made the news lately with its $32 billion deal to acquire ARM Holdings PLC, the UK based company that produces the microprocessors that power over 95% of the world’s smartphones. Both companies are known to want to increase their presence in the IoT sector and can complement each other in this regard.
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Android
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If you were to design a client operating system with the goal of being used by two billion people, what would it look like?
We might soon find out what Alphabet’s looks like. Today’s announcement’s from Alphabet’s Google is expected to reveal “Andromeda”, the merged Android/Chrome OS. Executives have been hyping today’s event as the most “significant” since the first Android device in 2008, and we already know they’re writing a new operating system from a clean slate. We can also have a good guess about what it looks like.
Google’s goal for the successor is to unify the rival Chrome and Android platforms while providing a clean code base free of the Java legacy. Google’s big advantage here is that it now has a blank slate.
After Google acquired Android in 2005, Sun Microsystems’ then CEO Jonathan Schwartz offered Google “congratulations on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform”. Android founder Andy Rubin had already figured Java worked, and seen how it decreased time to market, and how much developers liked it. (Anything was preferable to writing for Symbian, the dominant smartphone platform of the time.)
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Google just found out, the hard way, how difficult it can be to coordinate a major smartphone launch. Details about its first self-branded smartphones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, have been published by several retailers ahead of their official unveiling tomorrow.
The most revealing leak comes from Carphone Warehouse. The British retailer put up, and quickly removed, product listings for the Pixel and Pixel XL. The listings confirm much of what we were anticipating thanks to older leaks, and add a handful of new details. A mirror of the Pixel XL is available here, thanks to Reddit user krackers.
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Google is hosting a press event today in San Francisco… and if the rumors are true, it should be a doozy. We’ve heard whispers about everything from new phones, to new Chromecasts, to a new VR headset, to a complete rethinking of Android as we know it.
You might’ve assumed we’d be at the event covering it live with up-to-the-second updates from the scene… and, well, you’d have assumed right.
The event is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Pacific, so tune in then. In fact, chances are good we’ll start warming up the ol’ liveblog a bit before then — so if you don’t want to miss anything, tune in early.
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We told you last month that Xiaomi’s Android TV box would go on sale in the U.S. in October, and true to our word it has. The Chinese company is best known for its affordable smartphones, but today it launched a set-top box priced at $69 that looks like great value.
Originally unveiled at Google I/O in May, the new Mi Box offers 4K video at 60 FPS and supports Dolby Digital Plus audio playback and HDR content. Xiaomi partnered with Google to integrate Google Cast and Google voice search while there are Android games and apps for the likes of Netflix, HBO, and Showtime alongside support for Sling TV, which itself brings TV shows without the need for cable.
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Google unveiled the Mi Box with Android TV way back in May at Google I/O. Then for months, nothing. We were starting to wonder if the device would ever come out when it began appearing on Walmart shelves last month. Now, the Mi Box is official. It’s going on sale today on Mi.com and at Walmart for $69.
The Mi Box is one of only a few Android TV boxes that have been released. Google’s original Nexus TV was a flop, and the Razer Forge TV never even got support for Netflix (which is absolutely insane). The NVIDIA Shield has been the only Android TV box worth having, but it’s $200. The Mi Box includes many of the features of the SHIELD for a lot less cash.
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Recently there has been some anxiety amongst Android enthusiasts who are frustrated by Google’s apparent disregard for consumer satisfaction.
So what gives? A few days ago Google released a new mobile messaging app called Allo that seeks to insert some Amazon Echo-like smarts into a familiar chat interface. While the app appears to be doing well on the charts, some Android fans have criticized its mobile-only approach (it can’t be used on the desktop) and the fact that it can’t be used to talk to people using Hangouts, another Google messaging app.
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Alphabet’s Google has been given until the end of October, the fourth extension, to rebut EU antitrust charges that it uses its dominant Android mobile operating system to block competitors, the European Commission said on Monday.
The Commission in April said the U.S. technology giant’s demand that mobile phone makers pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser on their smartphones to access other Google apps harms consumers and competition.
The EU watchdog had initially set a July 27 deadline for Google to respond to the charges. This had been extended three times at the company’s request, with the previous deadline Sept. 20.
The new deadlines are Oct. 31 for the Android case and Oct. 26 and Oct. 13 for cases relating to online search advertising and shopping.
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Why Google’s EU Android Probe Bears Close Watching [Ed: Why Google’s [Microsoft proxy attack via regulators against] Android Probe Bears Close Watching]
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Details have surfaced on a benchmarking site that suggest Nokia may have a new mid-range phone waiting in the wings.
For Nokia, IoT tech is firmly in its future plans, while smartphones are out. But die-hard Nokia fans may still be able to get their hands on a Nokia smartphone thanks to a little-known Finnish firm called HMD, which has a license and $500m to design, make, and market Nokia-branded smartphones running Android.
The licensing deal was signed in May, but HMD has yet to announce its first phone, leaving fans with little more than speculation about future launches.
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If you want a smartphone with a long battery life, then testing carried out by UK consumer magazine Which? suggests that you’re far better off going with an Android device from HTC, LG, or Samsung. In fact, when the new iPhone 7 was pitted against the HTC 10, LG G5 and the Samsung Galaxy S7, it came last in all the tests.
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Open source software offers benefits like high quality and faster application development, but some businesses have concerns about support and security.
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The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the premiere organization working globally to champion open source in society through education, infrastructure and collaboration; announced today that Powering Potential has joined the OSI as an Affiliate Member.
Powering Potential provides access to educational resources on solar-powered computers running open source software at schools in rural Tanzania. The technology initiative works to enhance education and stimulate imagination of students in Tanzania while respecting and incorporating values of the local culture.
“The Board of Directors at the OSI is pleased to have Powering Potential as an OSI Affiliate Member,” said Patrick Masson, general manager and director at the Open Source Initiative. “Their work fully aligns with our mission to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and as our first African Affiliate Member, build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.”
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Initially built by developers for developers, Riot is free and open source software. It publishes all of the code on GitHub, where anyone can see, modify and run it.
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The artificial intelligence system is trained to automatically identify risque images using a probability scale between zero and one. Scores below 0.2 indicate the image is likely safe for all eyes. But those above 0.8 signal the high probability of a long chat with your boss if they spot your computer screen.
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OpenQA started in 2009 inside the openSUSE community and is now an integral part of the openSUSE ecosystem. It tests software the same way a human being does: Input is given by keyboard and mouse and results are recorded by comparing screenshots of the process to a set of predefined images. Just like a human tester, openQA detects failures and error messages by comparing what it sees with what it expects.
The first step is the package submission to a new operating system (OS) build. OpenQA runs through a basic pre-build package set to detect basic issues very early. After building a new version of the OS in the Open Build Service, this ISO will be automatically recognized by openQA and validated. The next step is extended “post-validation” testing.
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The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo v3.2.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on important new features and improved stability over previous versions.
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Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment.
There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here.
We had server release 8.0.15, server release 8.1.10, server release 8.2.8 and release 9.0.5. There are maintenance releases for the older major versions, needed to fix bugs on installations that still run on these older versions. We deliver them following this plan.
The latest and greatest server release is release 9.1.1 that has all the hardening that also went into the enterprise releases.
Aside a ton of bugfixes that you find listed in the changelog there have also been interesting changes which drive innovation. To pick just one example: The data fingerprint property. It enables the clients to detect if the server got a backup restored, and saves changes on the clients to conflict files if needed. This is a nice example of solutions which are based on feedback from enterprise customers community running ownCloud, who help with reporting problems and proposing solutions.
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When it comes to infrastructure for your open source project, you are never done, said Amye Scavarda, Gluster Community Lead at Red Hat, and Nigel Babu, Gluster CI/Automation Engineer at Red Hat. One theme during their LinuxCon Europe talk, “Making More Open: Creating Open Source Infrastructure for Your Open Source Project,” is that you can get closer to being done, but there is no such thing as “done” when it comes to infrastructure. Momentum is important – things are always moving, changing, and evolving. The work never ends as you figure out what can be left behind, what should be upgraded and how you can move into the future to incorporate new technologies.
Amye and Nigel talked about how when you start an open source project, you tend to focus on shipping and releasing your code. You don’t necessarily worry too much about how you got there and what you did to get it shipped. In the early days of Gluster, almost everyone had root access to the build machine, since it was only a few people working closely together. Fast forward a few years now that Red Hat has acquired Gluster, and there are many people across a wide variety of time zones working on the project. How to manage communication across a large, growing open source project became a big challenge.
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Walmart probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think about open-source software (or the second or third, really), but WalmartLabs, Walmart’s innovation-focused tech division, has already launched a number of open-source projects into the wild. The most interesting of these so far was OneOps, its DevOps platform, but today it is launching a similarly ambitious project.
Over the course of the last year, Walmart.com — a site that handles 80 million monthly visitors and offers 15 million items for sale — migrated to React and Node.js. In the process of this transition, the WalmartLabs team built Electrode, a React-based application platform to power Walmart.com. It’s now open sourcing this platform.
Electrode provides developers with boilerplate code to build universal React apps that consist of a number of standalone modules that developers can choose to add more functionality to their Node apps. These include a tool for managing the configuration of Node.js apps, for example, as well as a React component that helps you render above-the-fold content faster.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin will keynote Postgres Vision 2016, the international conference for technology and industry visionaries to explore the future of enterprise Postgres, open source, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Postgres Vision will be held October 11-13, 2016, at the iconic Innovation Hangar (iHangar) in the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s love of open source is nothing new — just look to the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. Loving a philosophy is one thing, but Mozilla has also put its money where its mouth is.
In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded more than $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were aligned with the organization’s mission. One of the smallest awards — $56,000 — was made to Speech Rule Engine, a text-to-speech style component that makes mathematical and scientific content more accessible.
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You can always count on Mozilla for an interesting spin on open source. Last year, Mozilla launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. As The VAR Guy notes: “The Mozilla Foundation has long injected money into the open source ecosystem through partnerships with other projects and grants. But it formalized that mission last year by launching MOSS, which originally focused on supporting open source projects that directly complement or help form the basis for Mozilla’s own products.”
Now, the company has announced that In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded over $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were in line with the Mozilla mission.
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The browser wars have been raging for many years now, and Linux users have often been on one side or the other. One Linux redditor recently noted that Chrome was much faster for him than Firefox, and a long discussion ensued with folks sharing their experiences with Chrome and Firefox.
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Databases
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Fedora 24 ships with PostgreSQL 9.5, a major upgrade from version 9.4 that is included in Fedora 23. The new version 9.5 provides several enhancements and new features, but also brings some compatibility changes, as it has been very common between PostgreSQL major versions. Note that in the PostgreSQL versioning scheme, 9.4 and 9.5 are two major versions, while the first number is mostly marketing and increments when major features are introduced in the release.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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NeatBeans doesn’t need an introduction but still who doesn’t know about NetBeans IDE then NetBeans IDE is an IDE(integrated development environment) that supports multiple programming languages like JAVA,HTML5,JAVAScript,C/C++,PHP etc. Well,It’s vastly used by many coders and developers for developing mobile,pc or web applications.
NetBeans has a great set of pre-installed tools that makes coding and developing more convenient and easy on fingers.The GUI builder really makes the things easy on head when it comes to developing JAVA SE applications.
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BSD
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The OpenBSD project is well known for its strong focus on security and for its precise documentation. The OpenBSD operating system generally gives preference to security and properly behaving software over features. OpenBSD is lightweight, sparse and relatively locked down by default. This makes the platform particularly popular among administrators who need a firewall or other minimal and stable platform.
OpenBSD 6.0 introduces many small changes and a handful of important ones. Looking through the release notes we find support for the VAX platform has been dropped. There have been several security updates to the OpenSSH secure shell service. Perhaps one of the more interesting security features in the operating system is strict enforcement of W^X: “W^X is now strictly enforced by default; a program can only violate it if the executable is marked with PT_OPENBSD_WXNEEDED and is located on a file system mounted with the wxallowed mount option. Because there are still too many ports which violate W^X, the installer mounts the /usr/local file system with wxallowed. This allows the base system to be more secure as long as /usr/local is a separate file system. If you use no W^X violating programs, consider manually revoking that option.”
I decided to play with the 64-bit x86 build of OpenBSD which is 226MB in size. Booting from this ISO presents us with a text console where we are asked if we would like to install OpenBSD, upgrade an existing copy of the operating system or perform an auto-install. I chose to perform a normal installation.
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The Japan NetBSD Users’ Group and Echigo BSD Users Group members held booth at the Open Source Conference 2016 Nagaoka on Oct.1 2016…
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I am pleased to announce the second release of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro).
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There have been 110 commits by 5 people in the 23 weeks since 2.25. See the NEWS below for a brief summary.
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On October 2, 2016, immediately after Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 4.8, Alexandre Oliva from the GNU Linux-libre project published the GNU Linux-libre 4.8 kernel for those who want 100% freedom when using a GNU/Linux OS.
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Licensing/Legal
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While there has been talk about RISC-V architecture support in the GCC compiler and for LLVM too going back months, a developer is reporting that the GCC RISC-V support is being delayed due to UC Berkeley lawyers.
Contributions to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) require a copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for this GPLv3-licensed compiler. It turns out the University of California Berkeley lawyers are taking issue with this, temporarily holding up the compiler back-end from merging.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Etalab and the CNNum (Conseil National du Numérique, the National Digital Council) planned to collaborate with civil society members and the Open Government ecosystem in France to develop an consultation platform. The idea was presented during an Open Democracy Now Hackathon, which took place in Paris on September 17 and 18.
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Etalab, the French government agency in charge of Open Data and Open Government, and the French authorities are currently working, in collaboration with other OGP members, on an Open Government toolkit.
This is aimed at helping governments to implement Open Government principles in their countries. This OGP Toolkit is to be finalised for the OGP Paris Summit in December. Every OGP member will have access to the toolkit.
“This toolkit is designed to facilitate the implementation of OGP commitments, by referencing the available solutions and documenting their uses”, Etalab said on its website.
It is being developed to be “a database of digital tools and uses made of them by organisations and citizens all over the world”. Basically, “the aim of this catalogue is to increase the visibility of these tools and encourage their sharing and reuse”.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s no secret that textbooks are expensive, but Rutgers Libraries are giving students’ wallets a break with a new open source textbook program.
“Hopefully going forward we will have more students who will not have to make the difficult decision of deciding whether or not to purchase a book for their class because of the cost,” said Lily Todorinova, undergraduate experience librarian and liaison to School of Communication and Information.
The Rutgers libraries are working closely with the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group to launch the Open and Affordable Textbook Project for all Rutgers campuses — New Brunswick, Camden and Newark, she said.
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The infamous message board 4chan is struggling to stay afloat and will have to make changes to reduce costs, the site’s owner wrote in a post on Sunday. “4chan can’t afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc, now,” writes Hiroyuki Nisimura, who bought the site from its founder last year.
Nisimura says ads haven’t been effective enough to support the site, nor have subscriptions offering additional features. “We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed,” Nisimura writes. “I am sincerely sorry.”
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Over the next few weeks, they would unknowingly be the subjects of one of the most widely known psychological studies of our time. And the ways these groups bonded and interacted with each other draw some interesting parallels to our understanding of workplace culture.
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Todd Orr’s story isn’t for the faint of heart.
The 50-year-old was enjoying a solo hike Saturday near Ennis, Montana, when he was attacked by a grizzly bear.
Bitten and bleeding, Orr managed to start back down the trail toward his truck ― only to be attacked again by the same bear a few minutes later.
The encounter left him mangled and drenched in blood, but alive.
“Legs are good, internal organs are good, eyes are good,” Orr says in a graphic 50-second video that he filmed just after the second attack. “I just walked out three miles and now I’ve got to go to the hospital.”
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Science
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Federal law mandates that school districts provide special education services to students with disabilities–physical, emotional or developmental. But outside the public’s view, the state of Texas has decided that fewer students should get those services. It pressured school districts to meet an artificial benchmark of 8.5 percent, a rate far below that of any state, according to a Houston Chronicle investigation.
The article, by Brian M. Rosenthal, documents how “unelected state officials have quietly devised a system that has kept thousands of disabled kids” out of special education.
“We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs,” one former teacher told Rosenthal. “It was all a numbers game.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Women wearing black clothes and waving black flags are demonstrating across Poland, boycotting their jobs and classes as part of a nationwide strike in protest against a new law that would in effect ban abortion.
Many men also took part in demonstrations on the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk and elsewhere across the largely Catholic nation.
Thousands of people also protested on Saturday in front of the parliament in Warsaw. Women were wearing black in a sign of mourning for the feared loss of reproductive rights; they have also warned that some women will die if the proposal passes as it stands now.
Poland already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with terminations legally permitted only when there is severe foetal abnormality, when there is a grave threat to the health of the mother, or if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.
But the new law would criminalise all terminations, with women punishable with up to five years in prison. Doctors found to have assisted with a termination would also be liable for prosecution and a prison term.
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Security
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Sometimes when you plan for a security event, it would be expected that the thing you’re doing will be making some outcome (something bad probably) impossible. The goal of the security group is to keep the bad guys out, or keep the data in, or keep the servers patched, or find all the security bugs in the code. One way to look at this is security is often in the business of preventing things from happening, such as making data exfiltration impossible. I’m here to tell you it’s impossible to make something impossible.
As you think about that statement for a bit, let me explain what’s happening here, and how we’re going to tie this back to security, business needs, and some common sense. We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule, one of the forms is that the last 20% of the features are 80% of the cost. It’s a bit more nuanced than that if you really think about it. If your goal is impossible it would be more accurate to say 1% of the features are 2000% of the cost. What’s really being described here is a curve that looks like this
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If you are on an SELinux system, and run docker with SELinux separation turned off, the containers will run with the spc_t type.
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Trust is important in any kind of interpersonal relationship. It’s inevitable that there will be cases where something you do will irritate or upset others, even if only to a small degree. Handling small cases well helps build trust that you will do the right thing in more significant cases, whereas ignoring things that seem fairly insignificant (or saying that you’ll do something about them and then failing to do so) suggests that you’ll also fail when there’s a major problem. Getting the small details right is a major part of creating the impression that you’ll deal with significant challenges in a responsible and considerate way.
This isn’t limited to individual relationships. Something that distinguishes good customer service from bad customer service is getting the details right. There are many industries where significant failures happen infrequently, but minor ones happen a lot. Would you prefer to give your business to a company that handles those small details well (even if they’re not overly annoying) or one that just tells you to deal with them?
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As medical implants become more common, sophisticated and versatile, understanding the code that runs them is vital. A pacemaker or insulin-releasing implant can be lifesaving, but they are also vulnerable not just to malicious attacks, but also to faulty code.
For commercial reasons, companies have been reluctant to open up their code to researchers. But with lives at stake, we need to be allowed to take a peek under the hood.
Over the past few years several researchers have revealed lethal vulnerabilities in the code that runs some medical implants. The late Barnaby Jack, for example, showed that pacemakers could be “hacked” to deliver lethal electric shocks. Jay Radcliffe demonstrated a way of wirelessly making an implanted insulin pump deliver a lethal dose of insulin.
But “bugs” in the code are also an issue. Researcher Marie Moe recently discovered this first-hand, when her Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) unexpectedly went into “safe mode”. This caused her heart rate to drop by half, with drastic consequences.
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With just a mere 48 characters of code, Linux admin and SSLMate founder Andrew Ayer has figured out how to crash major Linux distributions by locally exploiting a flaw in systemd.
Ayer said the following command, when run as any user, will crash systemd: “NOTIFY_SOCKET=/run/systemd/notify systemd-notify”
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Systemd maintainer David Strauss has published a response to my blog post about systemd. The first part of his post is replete with ad hominem fallacies, strawmen, and factual errors. Ironically, in the same breath that he attacks me for not understanding the issues around threads and umasks, he betrays an ignorance of how the very project which he works on uses threads and umasks. This doesn’t deserve a response beyond what I’ve called out on Twitter.
In the second part of his blog post, Strauss argues that systemd improves security by making it easy to apply hardening techniques to the network services which he calls the “keepers of data attackers want.” According to Strauss, I’m “fighting one of the most powerful tools we have to harden the front lines against the real attacks we see every day.” Although systemd does make it easy to restrict the privileges of services, Strauss vastly overstates the value of these features.
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We are going into our third year of living in the Gardens of Taylor. When you come off of the city street and onto this property, you can sometimes get a creepy feeling, like this is familiar in an unpleasant sort of way. It can feel like you’ve just stepped into Stepford Village. Every yard has been manicured to match the ones on either side of it. The edging along all driveways and sidewalks is a perfect two inches across and if a weed or mushroom happens to grow within that etched space, it is gone the next time you look for it.
Stuff like that just vanishes. Spooky like.
Fact is, the property manager pays the lawn service to make a drive through every other day in order to take care of any anomalies. Once I got used to it, I became comfortable with living here, being that it’s for people with physical disabilities and age 55 or over.
On moving-in day, we hadn’t been there an hour before people began to take notice of us from across the street. They would stop just long enough to pretend they weren’t checking us out, then they would be on their way. Some even stopped to help.
[...]
Now Claude and Jane both run Linux. Their money is safe, and if anyone calls giving them instructions how to get a virus off of their Windows’ computer, they just laugh and hang up, but not before telling them they run Linux.
There will come a day, maybe sooner than any of us think, when a scam like this might actually work on a Linux machine. In the past two years we’ve seen stories of Linux servers being compromised, and there is constant news that this or that piece of malicious code might be making its way to Linux computers soon.
Being prudent, I run both Avast for day-to-day stuff and various Clam iterations for biweekly sweeps for rootkits. I exchange a lot of Windows stuff with my Reglue kids, so that’s only smart. Not that I expect anything to go south in the near future. Everything I’ve seen coming down the Linux pike demands hands-on the target computer to inject the badware.
Here’s a Helios Helpful Hint: Don’t let someone you don’t know have access to your computer, sans the repair guy.
However I do believe in preparedness. Jane’s Linux Mint install runs the same security as mine and I administrate it remotely (from home. I’ll get Claude up to speed on Wednesday.
How long ago was it that many of us gave up on the “disconnected generation?” For a while I didn’t work with people who were so set in their ways that they bucked any suggestion of having to learn something new. And honest-to-goodness, a lady in the neighborhood asked me to make her computer the same way it was when she bought it. That would be the Windows Vista release. Sigh.
“No ma’am. Not for any amount of money. Sorry.”
I’m not into any more stress than necessary these days.
Vista? Really?
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Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization’s grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as “teachable moments” for others. “If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training,” they say, “the Internet would be a much safer place.”
Enough of that. The problem isn’t the users: it’s that we’ve designed our computer systems’ security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can’t users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can’t they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can’t they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?
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Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User [It says (scroll down) "Getting a virus simply by opening an email was an urban legend, a technically impossible but scary sounding thing to frighten normies with, as late as the 90s. ...Microsoft made that myth real with the first release of Outlook"]
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We needed a router and wifi access point in the office, and simultaneously both I and my co-worker Ivan needed such a thing at our respective homes. After some discussion, and after reading articles in Ars Technica about building PCs to act as routers, we decided to do just that.
The PC solution seem to offer better performance, but this is actually not a major reason for us.
We want to have systems we understand and can hack. A standard x86 PC running Debian sounds ideal to use.
Why not a cheap commercial router? They tend to be opaque and mysterious, and can’t be managed with standard tooling such as Ansible. They may or may not have good security support. Also, they may or may not have sufficient functionality to be nice things, such as DNS for local machines, or the full power if iptables for firewalling.
Why not OpenWRT? Some models of commercial routers are supported by OpenWRT. Finding good hardware that is also supported by OpenWRT is a task in itself, and not the kind of task especially I like to do. Even if one goes this route, the environment isn’t quite a standard Linux system, because of various hardware limitations. (OpenWRT is a worthy project, just not our preference.)
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Defence/Aggression
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“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.” Ida B. Wells
The Black radical tradition has always understood the inextricable link between racism and militarism: racism as a manifestation of white supremacist ideology, and militarism as the mechanism to enforce that ideology.
That fundamental link grounds our analysis of the Obama administration’s policies in Iraq and Syria. But the link between race ( white supremacy) and the deployment of violence to enforce the interests of white supremacy also explains the repressive mission and role of the police in the colonized barrios and segregated African American communities within the U.S.
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Targeting or “taking out” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange via military drone strike would be a criminal violation of international human rights laws, a United Nations envoy said Monday.
“A State could theoretically seek to justify the use of drones by invoking the right to anticipatory self-defence against a non-state actor and by arguing that it had no means to capture their targets or cause another state to capture the target,” said Dr. Agnes Callamard, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Executions during an interview with True Pundit. “To do so, the State would have to demonstrate an ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation’ necessity. This is not only a very high threshold to meet; it is also impossible to see how this could be used or justified in the case of Mr. Julian Assange.”
Dr. Callamard’s statements come on the heels of a scathing published account by True Pundit detailing that in 2010 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly asked top aides if it was possible to use a drone strike against Assange. While Dr. Callamard said she had no knowledge of the assertions contained in the True Pundit story, she did speak to the alarming generalities of using a drone strike to silence someone of Assange’s global stature. Dr. Callamard stated “the use of drones for targeted killing outside the context of armed conflict, is almost never likely to be legal and to meet human rights law limitations on the use of lethal force.”
Dr. Callamard, an expert on human rights and humanitarian work globally, in civil society organizations, the United Nations and in academia. Prior to her post at the UN, Dr. Callamard spent nine years as the Executive Director of ARTICLE 19, the international human rights organization promoting freedom of expression globally. Dr. Callamard also serves as director of Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression initiative.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reportedly wanted to drone Wikileaks founder Julian Assange when she was secretary of state.
According to True Pundit, Clinton and the state department were under pressure to silence Assange and Wikileaks in the months before the whistleblowing site released a massive dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables from 1966 up to 2010, dubbed CableGate.
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton asked, according to unidentified state department sources.
Published by True Pundit on Sunday, Wikileaks posted a link to the story on their official Twitter account on Monday, along with a screenshot of the article.
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A new report reveals that an angry and frustrated Hillary Clinton once pondered obliterating Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with a drone strike.
The shocking revelation comes as the Democratic presidential nominee and the party’s brain trust brace themselves for an “October Surprise” from Assange.
Wikileaks has vowed to unleash a torrent of emails expected to be highly damaging to the former secretary of state — and her bid for the White House.
The True Pundit says the U.S. government was tasked with neutralizing Assange. And Clinton was the point person.
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” she pondered during one high-charged meeting, State Department sources reportedly told True Pundit. According to the website, others in the room laughed.
But not Clinton, who called the Assange a “soft target.”
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The Pentagon gave a controversial U.K. PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.
Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.
The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.
Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy documents.”
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When Islamic State beheads someone it is terrorism. When an Iraqi housewife beheads an ISIS fighter and cooks his skull, it is freedom. That is the CNN doctrine.
CNN reports the story of 39-year-old Wahida Mohamed aka Um Hanadi, an Iraqi woman who supposedly leads a tribal militia force of around 70 men south of Mosul. She and her band allegedly helped “government forces” drive Islamic State out of a small town.
“I began fighting the terrorists in 2004, working with Iraqi security forces and the coalition,” she told CNN. CNN cites no other source other than Um Hanadi herself and Facebook in its coverage.
As a result, Um Hanadi said, she attracted the wrath of what eventually became al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which later morphed into ISIS. “I received threats from the top leadership of ISIS, including from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself,” she says. “I’m at the top of their most wanted list, even more than the [Iraqi] Prime Minister.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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It often feels like everyone inside and outside the government agrees that over-classification of government records is a major problem. Yet a series of Freedom of Information Act requests by EFF has found that even when Congress allowed agencies to offer cash rewards to government employees to be less secretive, nobody has been collecting the money.
Recognizing the threat posed by over-classification, Congress passed legislation in 2010 to counter the pervasive problem of bureaucrats making benign government records secret. One of the most highlighted provisions of the Reducing Over-Classification Act (ROCA) was a new tool for agencies: cash incentives for employees who accurately classify (and declassify) documents.
Congress hoped that by offering a proverbial carrot to the line-level employees making initial and derivative classification decisions within federal agencies, it could increase transparency and allow greater information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement. Responses to EFF’s FOIA requests with 27 agencies demonstrates, however, that those carrots have rotted on the shelf.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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A team of top scientists is telling world leaders to stop congratulating themselves on the Paris agreement to fight climate change because if more isn’t done, global temperatures will likely hit dangerous warming levels in about 35 years.
Six scientists who were leaders in past international climate conferences joined with the Universal Ecological Fund in Argentina to release a brief report Thursday, saying that if even more cuts in heat-trapping gases aren’t agreed upon soon, the world will warm by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit by around 2050.
That 1.8 degree mark is key because in 2009 world leaders agreed that they wanted to avoid warming of 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Temperatures have already risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, so that 2 degree goal is really about preventing a rise of another degree going forward.
Examining the carbon pollution cuts and curbs promised by 190 nations in an agreement made in Paris last December, the scientists said it’s simply not enough.
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Search is on for ancient or near-extinct crops that might be better suited for this new reality
Throughout history, different types of food have surged and dropped in popularity, and some foods that existed at one point just aren’t around anymore. But we’re not talking about foods that aren’t popular, quite the opposite in fact. Some of our favorite foods and drinks could be considered “endangered” because the places where they are grown are being severely impacted by climate change. If this isn’t proof that we need to do something about climate change, I don’t know what is. To start off, here are a few foods that are part of our every lives that might not be around for long.
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India, one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, has ratified the Paris global climate agreement.
Under the deal, India has committed to ensuring that at least 40% of its electricity will be generated from non-fossil sources by 2030.
CO2 emissions are believed to be the driving force behind climate change.
Last December in Paris, countries agreed to cut emissions in a bid to keep the global average rise in temperatures below 2C.
The Paris deal is the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement.
It will only come into force legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries which between them produce at least 55% of global carbon emissions.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last month that India would ratify the agreement on 2 October, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the struggle for independence from Britain.
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According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute FMI, September’s balmy weather was caused by temperatures that were one to two degrees higher than usual across the country. Temperatures were particularly mild in northwest Lapland, where they were from two to four degrees higher than the norm.
Last month’s highest temperature, 23.2 degrees Celsius was recorded at Kumpula in Helsinki on September 7. It was coolest in Naruska, Salla, in the northeast on September 18, when the mercury dropped to -5.3 degrees.
The summery conditions persisted throughout the month, given that the last time daytime highs crossed the 20-degree mark was on the 15th and even as late as the 27th, highs passed 17 degrees as far north as Oulu.
September marked the eighth year running that temperature records were higher than usual. Last year, the month that typically heralds autumn and the advent of decidedly cooler conditions was even warmer than this September. However according to FMI it’s still too early to make predictions about what the rest of the autumn will be like.
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Finance
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The International Monetary Fund has cut its forecast for the UK economy next year for the second time since the Brexit vote.
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ANYONE who did not believe that the European Question is the defining attribute of politics in these islands is in no doubt after Sunday. Different people come to independence for different reasons. I’ve always been motivated by the difference Scotland could make in the world, and the difference we could make to the lives of Scots by taking control over our own lives and making decisions here.
So Sunday was a stand-out awful day in what has been a pretty bleak few months, watching a Tory party we didn’t vote for making statements about how we’ll interact with the world, and presuming to make the decisions for us, to boot. And by any yardstick not giving one jot about the national interest, neither ours nor the UK’s. We have seen, clearly, that the UK Government’s first priority is the unity of the governing party itself.
Party conferences can be awful things for outsiders. Part reunion, part beauty contest, part theatre and, somewhere among the open or crypto power-struggles, some business might actually get done. But, much as it pains me, this Tory conference matters, and isn’t just the usual theatre because it is the first glimpse of a carefully constructed facade put forward by the people who seek to make decisions over our lives and the lives of future generations. And it isn’t pretty. I was actually more hopeful. I still had some hope that the canny Remain-voting new PM was keeping her powder dry while the UK civil service worked on a clever fix. But even I have to admit now that the extremists are in charge.
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Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren published an open letter to FBI director James Comey observing that, in revealing details of its investigation into the Clinton email scandal, the Bureau had seemingly abandoned its longstanding policy of not sharing its deliberations, meaning that there was no longer any reason to keep secret its reasoning for not bringing criminal charges against the bankers who did trillions of dollars’ worth of damage to the world economy, sparking wars, starvation, and personal ruin for millions of people.
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Saudi Arabia has switched to the “Western” Gregorian calendar to pay its civil servants in one of a number of financial reforms announced by the Council of Ministers.
The Kingdom has used the lunar-based Hijri calendar since it was founded in 1932, but switched to the solar-based Gregorian calendar for paying public sector staff on 1 October.
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Imagine a little gadget called an i-Everything. You can’t get it yet, but if technology keeps moving as fast as it is now, the i-Everything will be with us before you know it.
A combination of intelligent computing, 3-D manufacturing, big data crunching, and advanced bio-technology, this little machine will be able to do everything you want and give you everything you need.
There’s only one hitch. As the economy is now organized, no one will be able to buy it, because there won’t be any paying jobs left. You see, the i-Everything will do … everything.
We’re heading toward the i-Everything far quicker than most people realize. Even now, we’re producing more and more with fewer and fewer people.
Internet sales are on the way to replacing millions of retail workers. Diagnostic apps will be replacing hundreds of thousands of health-care workers. Self-driving cars and trucks will replace 5 million drivers.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager declined Monday to comment on recent reports alleging the Democratic nominee once suggested sending a drone strike after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“I’m reticent to comment on anything that the WikiLeaks people have said. They’ve made a lot of accusations in the past,” Robby Mook said Monday in an interview with WTTG.com.
WikiLeaks tweeted a screen grab Sunday evening from a report alleging that Clinton once asked during a State Department briefing, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
She supposedly asked this when she served as secretary of state.
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Vice President Joe Biden chastised Donald Trump Monday for his comments about veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), calling the GOP presidential nominee “thoroughly and completely uninformed.”
Many have interpreted remarks Trump made Monday about veterans and PTSD as a slight, though the campaign insists his comments were misrepresented by the media.
“Where in the hell is he from?” Biden asked at a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Sarasota, Fla.
“I don’t think he was trying to be mean. He is just so thoroughly, completely uninformed.”
Biden, who said he has been “in and out” of Afghanistan and Iraq more than 29 times, said the U.S. has only one sacred obligation and that is to “care for those we send to war and to care for them and their family when they come home.”
“What are the chances Trump honors commitment to those who are wounded?
“It’s not just that he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want to find out,” Biden added.
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I don’t support Trump. I don’t support Clinton. But what I really don’t support is shoddy journalism, and that’s what is all awhirl regarding the leak of three pages of Trumps’ federal tax return from 21 years ago.
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Once again a story that Trump did nothing illegal is somehow front page news. His crime this time? Continuing to legally rent out office space to a bank already in a building he bought 18 years ago.
So the big news is that Donald Trump’s real estate organization rented space to an Iranian bank later linked to Iran’s nuclear program.
Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-controlled banks, was already a tenant in 1998 when Trump purchased the General Motors Building, above, in Manhattan, but he kept them on for another five years, until 2003.
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On Tuesday night, two men who want to be vice president will face off in a debate. If Bill Weld had his way, he’d be up on that stage, too.
Mr. Weld, who served as governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, is running as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential pick this year, alongside Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Last week, Mr. Weld spoke to students and supporters at Temple University in Philadelphia. Outside Morgan Hall, two students wearing Gary Johnson shirts directed people to the event.
A group of young white men wearing baseball caps walked past, saw the Gary Johnson shirts, and jeered: “What’s Aleppo?”
One of Mr. Johnson’s supporters, Alex Pack, rolled his eyes. Were those guys Trump supporters?
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Backward hats.”
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When Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine take the stage Tuesday night for the 2016 vice presidential debate, there are a few things we hope that debate moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News will ask Pence to account for.
While promoted as the sane member of a GOP ticket headed by the likes of Donald Trump, Pence, who is governor of Indiana, uses a demeanor of reasonableness to offset some mighty extreme views on the role of women, climate change, creationism and Social Security, to name a few. The vice presidential candidates meet only once before a national television audience, so this forum will likely be an introduction of these candidates to most voters.
Kaine, the U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, is pretty much your basic liberal; not much by way of surprise in his background. But Pence, a convert to hard-core right-wing Protestant evangelicalism, embraces a range of positions far afield of the views of mainstream voters—views he doesn’t flaunt on the campaign trail. He’s a favorite of donors to the Koch network, as well as Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the ground-organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers at the helm of Koch Industries. (According to Follow the Money, David Koch has spent some $300,000 on Pence’s political campaigns.) Pence has also enjoyed the largess of Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary firm once known as Blackwater (since renamed Academi), from whom he received thousands of dollars in donations for his congressional campaigns.
If voters are to know what they’re getting when they pull the lever on November 8, Quijano will need to dig deep into Pence’s record. Here a few topics that would prove most enlightening to the electorate.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Yesterday we exposed the dangers of Shadow Regulation; the secretive web of backroom agreements between companies that seeks to control our behavior online, often driven by governments as a shortcut and less accountable alternative to regulation.
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Once again, major record labels are asking a court to give them power over the Internet’s basic infrastructure. This is the very power that Congress has refused to give them, and the very power they have proven unable and unwilling to use responsibly. This time, their alleged target is the website Youtube-MP3.org, a site that extracts the audio tracks from YouTube videos and allows users to download them. But as in other recent lawsuits, the labels’ real target appears to be nearly every company that operates or supports the operation of the Internet. The labels are seeking a court order that would bind all of these companies to assist the labels in making Youtube-MP3 disappear from the Internet.
Even if that website is found to be liable for copyright infringement, the law doesn’t give copyright or trademark holders such sweeping power to edit the Internet. And it never should.
Record labels have been filing many lawsuits against websites that they deem to be connected to copyright infringement. These sites, run from outside the U.S., don’t bother appearing in U.S. court to defend themselves—and the labels know this. When one party doesn’t show up to court and the other wins by default, judges often grant the winning party everything they ask for. Record labels, along with luxury brands and other frequent filers of copyright and trademark suits, have been using this tactic to write sweeping orders that claim to bind every kind of Internet intermediary: hosting providers, DNS registrars and registries, CDNs, Internet service providers, and more. Some of these requested orders claim to cover payment providers, search engines, and even Web browsers. Judges often sign these orders without much scrutiny.
Then, the labels and brands, armed with an overbroad and often, in our view, legally invalid order they wrote themselves, try to force Internet intermediaries into helping make the website disappear, and sometimes to filter their services to keep the website from coming back. The central defect of these orders is that they purport to bind third-parties who have no notice or opportunity to challenge them before they issue. Some intermediaries, faced with these orders, cut off websites without asking questions. Others, including Automattic (WordPress), CloudFlare, and the domain name registrar Tucows, have stood up for Internet users by insisting on proper, legally binding orders. A group of major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo! also pushed back against this abuse in an amicus brief last year.
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Amos Yee, 17, a blogger from Singapore, has been sentenced to six weeks in prison, plus a fine of $1,500 U.S., because he “deliberately elected to do harm by using offensive and insulting words and profane gestures to hurt the feelings of Christians and Muslims.”
Such was the pronouncement of district judge Ong Hian Sun, according to CNN, which reports Yee was facing six charges of “wounding religious feeling” with his social media posts — he has a preference for YouTube rants. He was also slapped with two charges of failing to report to the police station when summoned.
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Microsoft’s Bing has just debuted a new system which allows any copyright holder to submit and monitor the status of their DMCA complaints to the search engine. At the center of the tool is a brand new dashboard, available to anyone with a Microsoft account.
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Internet provider Cox Communications is demanding over $100,000 in compensation from Round Hill Music, for the legal fees it incurred based on false copyright claims. The music group sued Cox last year over alleged infringements committed by the ISP’s subscribers, without actually owning any of the copyrights in question.
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There simply aren’t enough derogatives in the dictionary to apply to Pam Geller’s lawsuit against the DOJ for its “enforcement” of Section 230. Geller doesn’t appear to know what she’s doing, much less who she’s suing. Her blog posts portray her lawsuit against the DOJ as being against Facebook. Facebook has earned the ire of Geller by enforcing its terms of use — rules Geller clearly disagrees with.
Somehow, Geller has managed to construe the actions of a private platform as government infringement on her First Amendment rights. The connective tissue in her litigious conspiracy theory is Section 230 — the statute that protects service providers from being sued for the actions of their users.
Considering Geller’s fondness for posting inflammatory content, you’d think the last thing she’d want to attack is Section 230. A successful dismantling of this important protection would mean Geller would be even less welcome on any social media platform.
But the burning stupidity propelling Geller’s white-hot hazardous waste dump of a lawsuit knows no bounds. Somehow, actual lawyers — working in concert with Geller — came up with this breathtakingly wrong interpretation of Section 230.
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In a small room in the back of Wicker Park’s Davenport Piano Bar Sept. 26, performers, including Columbia students and alumni, squeezed onto the small stage to act out 14 scenes with censored content previously deemed unworthy for theater.
The censored content performed at the bar, 1383 N. Milwaukee Ave., is part of “Banned Together: A Censorship Cabaret” and was chosen after being challenged or banned by schools and organizations in the past. “A Censorship Cabaret” was organized by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization created by the Dramatists Guild to advocate freedom of expression in theater.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Aaron Graham — the defendant at the center of a Fourth Amendment dispute over the warrantless acquisition of cell site location info — is hoping to get one more court to take a look at his case.
Last summer, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to institute a warrant requirement for historical CSLI. As was noted then, the court found that the records generated by cell phones (and held by phone companies) had an expectation of privacy — at least when obtained for a significant period of time. In Graham’s case, the government obtained 221 days of historical cell site location data — the sort of extended period the Appeals Court found troubling… originally.
The government appealed and attempted to differentiate its long-term, post-facto tracking of Graham’s movements with eight months of CSLI from the Supreme Court’s Jones decision — which (sort of) found that deploying a surreptitious GPS tracker required the use of a warrant. It claimed this form of location tracking was completely different than the other form of location tracking, mainly because in Graham’s case the tracking was done by the phone company. The government simply benefitted from the warrantless collection of records the phone company was already compiling.
The court bought the government’s arguments the second time around. The short-lived warrant requirement was removed and the 1979 definition of the Third Party Doctrine (Smith v. Maryland) was reinstated. The dissent correctly pointed out that no cell phone user voluntarily turns over location data to service providers. It’s just something that has to happen for phones to make calls or access data. It also pointed out that, unlike other third-party records, customers aren’t allowed to access their own cell site location data. Only the phone company and the government can do that, even though it’s the customer generating the records and paying for their collection and storage.
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Over the last few weeks, a broad coalition of civil liberties and social justice organizations rained down letters, tweets, and op-eds on Gov. Jerry Brown, urging him to sign A.B. 2298, a bill to begin the process of overhauling the state’s CalGang gang affiliation database.
On Wednesday, it all paid off.
Gov. Brown signed the legislation, creating a requirement that law enforcement inform a person before they add them to a shared gang database such as CalGang. The new law also gives the person the opportunity to challenge their inclusion in a gang database in court. Starting in January 2018, law enforcement agencies will be required to produce detailed transparency reports on each of their shared gang databases.
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The U.S. government needs to be ready to use its offensive cyberweapons in response to attacks from other nations, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Monday.
The U.S. has significant offensive cybercapabilities, but it has been shy about deploying them, Trump said during a speech in Herdon, Virginia. “This is the warfare of the future,” he said.
The U.S. should also increase its use of cyberweapons to attack terrorists, Trump said.
President Barack Obama has failed to protect the nation’s cybersecurity and a new focus is needed, added Trump, who has largely avoided technology issues in his campaign.
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Donald Trump has made no secret of his “bomb the s&*$t out of them” approach to foreign conflict. But when it comes to America’s digital security, his prescriptions have mostly been limited to vague calls to “get tough on cyber” and invitations to Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. Today, however, Trump got a bit more specific about the digital security postures he would favor as president—and set a new benchmark for a hawkish approach the online world.
“As a deterrent against attacks on our critical resources the United States must possess…the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling cyber counter attacks,” Trump told the crowd at a Retired American Warriors town hall in Virginia today. “I mean crippling. Crippling.”
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There is strong evidence that the US social media colossus Facebook is keen on setting up shop in Denmark by erecting a massive 184,000 sqm data centre near Odense.
According to Fyens Stiftstidende newspaper, Facebook wants to build three large server halls and a number of other buildings in the business area of Tietgenbyen, located just south of Odense.
Facebook, meanwhile, has not yet revealed any of its hands, although it has conceded it is interested in the Odense site.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The warrant the FBI used in the Playpen investigation—which resulted in the delivery of malware to over a thousand computers, located around the world—violated Rule 41, an important rule of federal criminal procedure. Although Rule 41 may seem obscure, it plays a vital role in limiting when federal law enforcement agencies can conduct lawful searches and seizures.
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When voters go to the polls this November, they will encounter a patchwork of different laws and policies, many of them new since the 2012 presidential election — on everything from new voter registration deadlines to new identification requirements at the polls.
Since the last presidential election, 17 states have sought to implement new barriers to voting — including states like Alabama, Kansas, and Texas — with new ID requirements, disproportionately affecting minorities and low-income communities. As discussed below, some but not all of these laws have been blocked thanks to litigation by the ACLU and other organizations.
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A NYCLU lawsuit exposes a nightmarish jail where children are kept for months in isolation for minor misbehavior.
Charnasha still suffers through sleepless nights because of her experience at the Onondaga County Justice Center.
The Syracuse, New York, jail keeps 16- and 17-year-old children — many of whom have mental illness — locked up in solitary, often for weeks or even months for transgressions as insignificant as wearing the wrong shoes or getting into a water fight. For the benign “offense” of speaking too loudly, Charnasha was sentenced to solitary for 32 days.
Young girls in solitary at the Justice Center are watched by adult male guards and forced to shower without a curtain. Charnasha described a guard making comments about her naked body and calling her and other girls “little bitches.” Her experience in solitary was so traumatic that Charnasha wrote a letter to her mom telling her she wanted to end her life.
“I felt uncomfortable and exposed. I still can’t sleep at night because of the nightmares,” Charnasha said. “No other kids should be allowed to go through what we went through.”
Since 2015, at least 86 children were placed in solitary more than 250 times at the Onondaga County Justice Center.
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Passengers are to be charged up to up to £17.50 for the chance to jump lengthy queues at airport passport control points.
Ministers have confirmed they are ‘working closely’ with airports across the country to extend a scheme that allows travellers to pay a premium to avoid delays at border security when they arrive in the UK.
The ‘fast-track’ fees would be aimed at easing congestion at passport desks, which has soared to unprecedented levels at some airports.
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A paedophile who led a child a child sex grooming ring in Rochdale tried – and failed – to overturn his convictions with a European court claiming an all-white jury was part of a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims.
Shabir Ahmed wrote to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) claiming his convictions for child sex offences were part of anti-Islam witch hunt.
The 63-year-old attempted to use human rights laws to argue his criminal convictions were unsafe and unfair, but failed.
Ahmed is in Wakefield prison having being caged in 2012 and given a 19-year sentence.
European Court of Human Rights papers show he claimed the all-white jury at his trial was biased.
He desperately claimed that breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a fair trial.
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As various opposition parties begin to corral against BN, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang said those who want to court them must be mindful that only “Islam” can rule the country.
“Islam has to be the leader and ruler, those who are not of Islam must be followers (pak turut).
“Let’s not place religion and politics in separate corners,” he was reported saying in Sinar Harian today.
“Don’t ask PAS to cooperate with you, when you will not make any change towards (prioritising) Islam, that is wrong.
“As long as the power of Islamic governance isn’t upheld, then those who rule would not care about sin and reward, would rob the people’s wealth and so on.
“Only Islam can correct people’s (behaviour). PAS can only cooperate with those who are willing to uphold Islam only,” he was reported saying at an event in Kemaman last Thursday night, at the launch of the Harapan Semua (Harap) gathering attended by roughly 1,500.
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For more than a decade, Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa has served as a Muslim cleric in Maryland, working as a prison chaplain and as an imam at mosques in Annapolis and outside Baltimore. He gave a two-week course in 2011 on Islamic teachings on marriage at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama made a much-publicized visit this year.
But in the last two years, Imam Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas. The “Islamic Jurisprudence Center” website he set up last year has condemned American mosques as un-Islamic and declared that homosexual acts should be punished by death.
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This month, a unique lawsuit was filed in Michigan against Gov. Rick Snyder and numerous state education officials, claiming that students in Detroit are being denied their constitutional right to literacy. The 133-page complaint, filed by the pro-bono Los Angeles-based firm Public Counsel, is attempting to gain class action status.
The lawsuit highlights poor conditions in Michigan schools, like classrooms so hot teachers and students literally vomit, vermin in schools, outdated and limited books, an overall lack of teachers, and much more. Detroit’s school districts have some of the lowest performing schools in the country.
“In one elementary school, the playground slide has jagged edges, causing students to tear their clothing and gash their skin, and students frequently find bullets, used condoms, sex toys, and dead vermin around the playground equipment,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit is attempting to build off of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education, and assert that students have a right to literacy under the Fourteenth Amendment. That may sound like a heavy lift, but many legal scholars not involved in the case believe the case could be successful and historic.
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In First Amendment victory, the court unanimously struck down New Hampshire’s law banning “ballot selfies.”
In a victory for the First Amendment, a federal appeals court unanimously struck down New Hampshire’s law banning “ballot selfies.”
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Last week in Charlotte, North Carolina, police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, a Black man with a disability. This happens with gut-wrenching frequency. It happened again this week in El Cajon, California, where police shot and killed Alfred Olango, a Black man with mental illness. Yet disability is often overlooked as a factor in police killings and use of force.
A recent widely cited report on the issue estimates that up to one half of all use of force incidents involve individuals with disabilities, noting that “[d]isability is the missing word in media coverage of police misuse of force.” People with mental disabilities, especially people of color, are particularly at risk of being shot or beaten by the police.
Mr. Scott’s horrific killing, captured on video, is far too typical. Just before police shot and killed Mr. Scott while he was sitting in his car, his wife shouted, “He has a TBI. He’s not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine.”
A “TBI” is a traumatic brain injury, and it’s a term widely known within law enforcement and other emergency service providers. As with a number of disabilities in the U.S., African-Americans are more likely to have a TBI. People with brain injuries experience problems in cognitive skills and typically think, speak, and process information more slowly than other people. A person with a traumatic brain injury easily becomes confused with sudden changes in their environment and may not be able to immediately understand and comply with police commands.
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And that’s exactly what has happened. Officers — sheltered by extra rights, less-than-strenuous internal investigations, policies that allow for the destruction of discipline records, civil immunity, revolving door policies that allow “bad apples” to infect new law enforcement agencies — basically answer to no one.
In rare, rare cases, police officers have been convicted and jailed. But this is usually the end result of outside pressure or behavior so repulsive and toxic the agency housing the officer can’t bring itself to defend them.
As Oliver points out, when officers are caught committing criminal acts, they’re often given the option to resign rather than face an investigation. In other cases, they’re swiftly cleared of serious charges and allowed to desk job their way back into their old positions.
Until recently, the DOJ and FBI expressed zero interest in compiling data on police use of force — to say nothing about regular, non-deadly police misconduct. Years of neglect have resulted in a data gap, with private citizens picking up the government’s slack to produce more credible numbers about civilians killed by law enforcement officers.
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The more journalists and other FOIA enthusiasts gain access to public records, the more we discover that a combination of access and power tends to result in abuse. Even as this abuse goes unaddressed, law enforcement agencies are striving to add more personal information to their databases, extending far past the usual “name/last known location” to encompass a vast array of biometric data.
Privacy watchdogs have been fighting against these for good reason: very little is known about the contents of these databases or the controls put in place to protect the info from inappropriate access. What is known is that these databases are misused by law enforcement officers routinely. What’s also been discovered is that this routine misuse is rarely ever punished to the extent the law allows. Warnings about possible jail time are meaningless when the usual punishment usually ranges from nothing at all to short suspensions.
The Associated Press has obtained another pile of documents from public records request that show little has changed. Abuse of access is still a common occurrence, as is the lack of meaningful consequences. There’s no almost no oversight and no federal law enforcement body holding agencies accountable for misuse of databases under their control.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A few more wrinkles have appeared in the EFF’s attempted legal destruction of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause. Back in July, the EFF — along with researchers Bunny Huang and Matthew Green — sued the government, challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA. As it stands now, researchers are restricted by the limitations built into the anti-circumvention clause. The Library of Congress can grant exceptions, but these are only temporary, lasting three years and generally vanishing at the end of that term.
Projects and research efforts continue to be thwarted by this provision, opening up those who circumvent DRM and other protective measures to the possibility of prosecution. And their options when facing charges are severely limited. There is no “fair use” exception to Section 1201 of the DMCA — something the EFF would like to see changed.
The threat of prosecution may be mostly existential, but it’s still far from nonexistent. This is why the EFF has requested a preliminary injunction that would prevent the DOJ from trying to put its client in jail.
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Last week we noted how the FCC had to scrap its plan to bring competition to the cable box after an unprecedented PR and disinformation campaign by the cable and entertainment industries. In short, using consultants, think tanks, payrolled politicians, a soundwall of misleading editorials and even the US Copyright Office, the cable industry was able to convince many in the press, public and even at the FCC that the plan would have ripped the planet off its very orbital access, violated copyright, eroded consumer privacy, and even harmed diversity programming.
[...]
Except the FCC’s proposal wouldn’t hurt jobs in the slightest. Under the FCC’s plan, customers still would pay for cable, they’d just have more flexibility in how that programming is consumed. And if anything, you’d see more jobs as the cable hardware itself was opened to multiple hardware competitors and streaming vendors looking to make headway in the space. But just like their previous whining session on this subject, the MPAA can’t just admit it’s terrified of evolution and consumer empowerment, so it apparently has to conflate “copyright” with a loss of control.
Meanwhile, while many media outlets continue to insist this plan is simply on hold, there’s really only two likely outcomes moving forward thanks to cable lobbyists, the US Copyright Office, and folks like the MPAA: either the plan gets scrapped entirely, or the end result winds up being so watered down as to be utterly useless.
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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently announced its decision in Sony v McFadden with important consequences for open wireless in the European Union. The court held that providers of open wifi are not liable for copyright violations committed by others, but can be ordered to prevent further infringements by restricting access to registered users with passwords. EFF reported on the legal aspects of the case last year and collaborated on an open letter to the ECJ on the costs to economic growth, safety and innovation of a password lockdown.
Free wifi is rare in Germany compared with other EU countries due to legal uncertainty generated by the doctrine of Störerhaftung, a form of indirect liability for the actions of others, which has deterred cafes, municipalities and others from offering free connectivity. Many in Germany hoped that the McFadden case would remove these doubts, but it is now clear that a legislative fix is needed instead.
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The European Commission’s Copyright Directive – full of bad ideas, or full of the worst ideas ever?
That’s the question that many of us campaigning for positive copyright reform are asking ourselves in the wake of the Commission’s recently announced copyright package.
We’ve extensively discussed the problems with the Commission’s link tax – see here, here and here – but equally important, are the Commission’s proposals with regards to intermediaries, such as websites like Wikipedia which host user-generated content, and the role of ‘Internet cops’ they will be forced to play if the Commission is successful in its aims.
Right now, many such websites have an exemption under the current rules and, quite sensibly, are not expected to police the activities of all their users. Unfortunately this might not be the case for much longer. In the Commission’s new paradigm, websites will suddenly be responsible for monitoring the activity of their users, and filtering content to disable and remove instances of alleged copyright infringement.
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