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07.22.16

Links 22/7/2016: Wine 1.9.15, KaOS 2016.07 ISO

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • UK employers still reluctant to hire recent CompSci grads

      Computer science graduates continue to top the UK’s higher education unemployment rankings, according to the latest figures compiled by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

      Ten per cent of computer science graduates failed to find a job six months after graduation in the academic year 2014/2015 – a figure higher than students who had studied Mass Communications and documentation, Physical sciences, or Engineering and technology (all 7.7 per cent).

      But the percentage is improving, albeit slowly. Last year’s statistics by HESA revealed 11.3 per cent of computer science graduates in 2013/2014 were unemployed.

  • Hardware

    • Digitimes Research: SoftBank chairman overoptimistic about benefits from acquiring ARM

      For Japan-based SoftBank’s plan to acquire a 100% stake in UK-based ARM at GBP24.3 billion (US$32.0 billion), SoftBank chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that the acquisition is motivated by the large business potential for IoT (Internet of Things). However, Son overestimated real benefits from the acquisition and underestimated difficulties in vertical and horizontal integration of industries for IoT application, according to Digitimes Research.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Civil Society Calls On India To Backtrack On Policy Threatening Global HIV Response

      The International AIDS Society made a statement today at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, voicing concerns about India’s recent policy which, according to the group, is threatening access to HIV treatment in India and around the world.

      The International AIDS Conference is taking place from 18-22 July.

      The statement co-signed by a number of civil society groups, said civil society is concerned “about the closing space both for the civil society groups that have been critical in the AIDS response nationally and internationally and for the public health-supporting policies that ensure quality, affordable generic drugs for the world.”

    • Emails reveal role of Monsanto in Séralini study retraction

      In September 2012 the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published the research of a team led by the French biologist Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, which found liver and kidney toxicity and hormonal disturbances in rats fed Monsanto’s GM maize NK603 and very small doses of the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, over a long-term period. An additional observation was a trend of increased tumours in most treatment groups.

      In November 2013 the study was retracted by the journal’s editor, A. Wallace Hayes, after the appointment of a former Monsanto scientist, Richard E. Goodman, to the editorial board and a non-transparent review process by nameless people that took several months.

      Did Monsanto pressure the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) to retract the study? French journalist Stéphane Foucart addresses this question in an article for Le Monde.

    • The U.S. Lags Far Behind Other Developed Countries In Access To Affordable Abortion

      Seventy-four percent of countries with liberal abortion laws cover abortion costs. Why doesn’t the U.S.?

    • New French Law Opens Market For Non-Profits Selling Public Domain Seeds

      New legislation on biodiversity has been adopted by the French National Assembly, opening doors for the sharing and selling of seeds in the public domain to amateur gardeners. For some associations that had been illegally trading public domain seeds, this is seen as a major victory.

      Prior to the newly adopted legislation, only seeds listed in the national catalogue could be commercialised in France. The new law allows non-governmental organisations to transfer, share or sell seeds that are in the public domain to non-commercial users (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 7 July 2016).

  • Security

    • As a blockchain-based project teeters, questions about the technology’s security

      There’s no shortage of futurists, industry analysts, entrepreneurs and IT columnists who in the past year have churned out reports, articles and books touting blockchain-based ledgers as the next technology that will run the world.

    • Fix Bugs, Go Fast, and Update: 3 Approaches to Container Security

      Containers are becoming the central piece of the future of IT. Linux has had containers for ages, but they are still maturing as a technology to be used in production or mission-critical enterprise scenarios. With that, security is becoming a central theme around containers. There are many proposed solutions to the problem, including identifying exactly what technology is in place, fixing known bugs, restricting change, and generally implementing sound security policies. This article looks at these issues and how organizations can adapt their approach to security to keep pace with the rapid evolution of containers.

    • Preventing the next Heartbleed and making FOSS more secure [Ed: Preventing the next Microsoft-connected trademarked bug for FOSS and making FOSS more secure from Microsoft FUD]

      David Wheeler is a long-time leader in advising and working with the U.S. government on issues related to open source software. His personal webpage is a frequently cited source on open standards, open source software, and computer security. David is leading a new project, the CII Best Practices Badging project, which is part of the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) for strengthening the security of open source software. In this interview he talks about what it means for both government and other users.

    • Container Image Signing
    • Friday’s security updates
    • Protecting the open source software supply chain [Ed: FUD for marketing of Sonatype]

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The President of Turkey has launched a bloody coup against his own people, and it’s happening right now

      After a brutal military coup in Turkey against Erdogan’s presidency failed over the weekend, the Turkish president has responded in kind: with his own brutal coup against the Turkish people.

      In the name of defending democracy from the original coup plotters, Erdogan is literally targeting tens of thousands of Turkish citizens. And standing in the firing line are not just his political opponents, but Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurds.

    • Britain’s nuclear-weapons future: no done deal

      The warheads are developed and assembled at the Aldermaston/Burghfield complex which has annual running costs of at least £1bn a year. The missile submarines need protection by nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) attack submarines, and are also given support from surface warships. One of the functions of the fleet of nine new Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime-patrol aircraft, also just ordered at a cost of a further £3 million, is to provide further protection.

    • State Department Worried About “Backsliding” in Turkey Following Failed Coup, Mass Arrests

      Secretary of State John Kerry said that he and his European counterparts will be paying close attention to developments in Turkey, after thousands of Turkish officials were punished in the wake of a failed coup attempt.

      “Obviously a lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly,” Kerry said Monday, in Brussels. “The level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant in the days ahead. Hopefully we can work in a constructive way that prevents a backsliding.”

      Kerry made the statements from a previously scheduled meeting held by the European Council, an EU executive branch organ. The Washington Post described the gathering as having morphed into “crisis management,” in response to developments in Turkey.

    • Wikileaks: Email says AK Party provided Barzani with $200 million in March

      The Wikileaks website released a cache of nearly 300,000 emails allegedly sent by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), some of which were related to the Kurdistan Region, four days after an attempted military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

      One of the leaked emails dating back to March 12, 2016 stated the AKP gave an unspecified member of the Barzani family $200 million in “financial aid” after a temporary halt in oil exports via the Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline – a major financial lifeline for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

      The KRG is not specifically mentioned in the email and the Kurdistan Region is referred to as “areas under the hand of Peshmerga.”

    • [Older] Jeremy Corbyn may have been proved right on Iraq – but he’s hopeless on the important matter of doing up his tie

      Like Tony Blair, we were all duped by the intelligence on Saddam Hussein – except for the millions that went on marches, and Nelson Mandela, and France, and the Pope, and the chief weapons inspector, and Robin Cook

    • Turkey’s Baffling Coup

      This time, it was very different. Thanks to a series of sham trials targeting secularist officers, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had managed to reconfigure the military hierarchy and place his own people at the top. While the country has been rocked by a series of terrorist attacks and faces a souring economy, there was no inkling of unrest in the military or opposition to Erdogan. On the contrary, Erdogan’s recent reconciliation with Russia and Israel, together with his apparent desire to pull back from an active role in the Syrian civil war, must have been a relief to Turkey’s top brass.

    • Donald Trump Crams Two Errors Into One Statement on Turkey

      In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, after suggesting that he might not defend another member of the NATO alliance in the event of a Russian attack, Donald Trump was asked if he was paying close attention to what was happening in Turkey, following the failed coup attempt last week.

      Trump replied that he had been impressed by the efforts of the Turkish people, who took to the streets to prevent the military from seizing power — but did so in a way that demonstrated his ignorance about a central facet of what took place last Friday night.

    • Erdogan Suspects US Sympathy for Coup

      Reports that Russian President Putin may have tipped off Turkish President Erdogan about last week’s coup attempt – while the U.S. apparently stayed silent – suggest a possible reordering of regional relationships, says John Chuckman.

    • Live updates: Several reported killed in Munich mall shooting

      Police believe three gunmen opened fire on Friday evening at and near a shopping mall in the German city of Munich, killing several people, authorities said. The shooting at Olympia shopping mall “looks like a terror attack,” a police representative said.

    • ‘Boom boom boom – he’s killing the kids’: Gunman shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ executed children in Munich McDonald’s before rampaging through mall killing NINE with police now hunting three attackers
    • Munich shooting: ‘Multiple deaths’ after shots fired at OEZ German shopping centre
    • Nice attack: City refuses police call to delete CCTV images

      The local authorities in Nice have refused a request by French anti-terror police to destroy CCTV images of last week’s lorry attack.
      The Paris prosecutor’s office said the request had been made to avoid the “uncontrolled dissemination” of images.

      But officials in Nice have responded by filing a legal document, arguing the footage could constitute evidence.

      It is the latest evidence of a growing dispute between the local and national authorities in the wake of the attack.

    • Nuclear weapons contractors repeatedly stifle whistleblowers, auditors say

      At laboratories and factories where American nuclear weapons are designed and built, and at the sites still being cleansed of the toxic wastes created by such work, contractor employees outnumber federal workers six to one. That makes them key sentinels when something goes awry, a circumstance that officials say explains why they get legal protections when whistleblowing.

      That’s the theory. It turns out that the Energy Department has actually handed most of the oversight over these protections to the contractors themselves, robbing workers at key nuclear weapons sites of confidence that pointing out security and safety dangers or other mistakes won’t bring retaliation, according to an audit released by the Government Accountability Office on July 14.

      The Energy Department’s decision to embrace contractor self-regulation of its whistleblowing protection system means in many cases that those overseeing it work for the contractors’ top lawyers, who must defend the contractor against employee claims of wrongdoing, or for those officials responsible for deciding about job cuts, the report disclosed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Big Oil, Not Big Tobacco, Wrote the Public Skepticism Playbook: Report

      The playbook on sowing public skepticism about health and climate issues originated not with Big Tobacco—as long believed—but with Big Oil, a new investigation reveals.

      Documents published Wednesday by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) show that the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used the same public relations firms, the same think tanks, and in many cases, the very same researchers, to foment doubt about public interest issues—starting with climate change. The documents show that the “direct connections” between the industries go back even earlier than previously believed, CIEL says.

      “Again and again we found both the PR firms and the researchers worked first for oil, then for tobacco. It was a pedigree the tobacco companies recognized, and sought out,” said the center’s president, Carroll Muffett.

    • Greenland Is Still Melting Away

      A new paper just published by scientists in Geophysical Research Letters presents results of their investigation into the ice sheet covering Greenland. They found that over the four-year period from Jan. 1, 2011 to Dec. 31, 2014 Greenland lost over a trillion tons of ice.

    • The “Denial Playbook”: An Original Product Of The Oil Industry

      New documents reveal that the oil and tobacco industries took pages from the same book to engineer their decade long campaigns on denying the existence of climate change and smoking-related cancer. The playbook also appears to have originated not with tobacco, but with the oil industry itself, and the two even appeared to share patents.

      In their research, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), found that the two industries collaborated from the 1950s onwards, more closely and earlier than previously thought. Both industries had used the same PR firms, research institutes and researchers, many of whom began working for first the oil industry, and then tobacco.

  • Finance

    • Success! Leader Pelosi Stands Up for Users and Opposes the TPP

      Thank you, Leader Pelosi, for standing up for users to block this undemocratic, anti-user deal. Combined with the stated opposition to the TPP of both presidential candidates, and the likelihood that other House Democrats will follow Leader Pelosi’s courageous lead, it is now significantly less likely that the TPP will be introduced during the lame duck session, or if introduced, that it will pass the House.

    • HSBC’s Johnson Out on Bond After Airport Arrest in Currency Case

      Federal agents surprised an HSBC Holdings Plc executive as he prepared to fly out of New York’s Kennedy airport, arresting him for an alleged front-running scheme involving a $3.5 billion currency transaction in 2011.

    • Hours Before Hillary Clinton’s VP Decision, Likely Pick Tim Kaine Praises the TPP

      Hillary Clinton’s rumored vice presidential pick Sen. Tim Kaine defended his vote for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Thursday.

      Kaine, who spoke to The Intercept after an event at a Northern Virginia mosque, praised the agreement as an improvement of the status quo, but maintained that he had not yet decided how to vote on final approval of the agreement. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has qualified her previous encouragement of the agreement, and now says she opposes it.

      Kaine’s measured praise of the agreement could signal one of two things. Either he is out of the running for the vice presidential spot, as his position on this major issue stands in opposition to hers. Or, by picking him, Clinton is signaling that her newly declared opposition to the agreement is not sincere. The latter explanation would confirm the theory offered by U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, among others, who has said that Clinton is campaigning against the TPP for political reasons but would ultimately implement the deal.

    • Brexit, Austerity and the Future of the European Union

      Many commentators have focused on racism and xenophobia as major factors in the move to leave the EU. Undoubtedly these were important considerations. Many people in England, especially older ones, are uncomfortable with the country becoming more diverse. They fear and resent the people coming in from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.

      But racism and xenophobia are not new for the United Kingdom. What is new is that these forces are powerful enough to force the country to break with a political union it joined more than four decades ago. Needless to say, there have been other situations where such forces came to dominate politics and they have not ended well.

      The issue in the UK and elsewhere is that there are real grievances which demagogues have been able to exploit. First and foremost is the austerity that had curbed growth in the U.K. and cut back funding for important programs. While austerity has not been as severe in the U.K. as in the euro zone (the U.K. is not in the euro), the conservative government sharply cut government spending in 2010, ostensibly out of concern that deficits and debt were harming the economy.

    • Lori Wallach, Peter Maybarduk and Karen Hansen-Kuhn on Corporate Globalization

      This week on CounterSpin: Few ideas are as hard-wired into current corporate media as the notion that so-called “free trade” agreements of the sort we have are, despite concerns, best for everyone. Given that the deals are not primarily about trade, and that what freedom they entail accrues to corporations and not people, you could say the very use of the term “free trade” implies a bias, against clarity if nothing else. This week, CounterSpin will revisit three interviews we’ve done on this issue.

    • #CETA #TTIP The next generation trade deals – We need to ask who benefits and why?

      The EU on behalf of the member states is current negotiating an EU US trade deal called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Talks around another trade deal between the EU and Canada have concluded – this deal is called The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)

      Aside from the lack of coverage in the Irish media of the actual substance of these very critical trade talks, there are a number of concerns being expressed by campaign and civil society groups – in particular that a special court system will be incorporated into CETA & TTIP to allow corporations to sue EU member states who wish to introduce strong legislation to protect public health, food safety and environmental legislation for example.

    • Good as Goldman: Hillary and Wall Street

      Nothing seems to rattle Hillary Clinton quite so much as pointed questions about her personal finances. How much she’s made. How she made it. Where it all came from. From her miraculous adventures in the cattle futures market to the Whitewater real estate scam, many of the most venal Clinton scandals down the decades have involved Hillary’s financial entanglements and the serpentine measures she has taken to conceal them from public scrutiny.

      Hillary is both driven to acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so much of it. One might be tempted to ascribe her squeamishness about wealth to her rigid Methodism, but her friends say that Hillary’s covetousness derives from a deep obsession with feeling secure, which makes a kind of sense given Bill’s free-wheeling proclivities. She’s not, after all, a child of the Depression, but a baby boomer. Hillary was raised in comfortable circumstances in the Chicago suburbs and, unlike her husband, has never in her life felt the sting of want.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Leaked emails reveal Politico reporter made ‘agreement’ to send advanced Clinton story to DNC

      An influential reporter at Politico made an apparent “agreement” with the Democratic National Committee to let it review a story about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine before it was submitted to his editors, leaked emails published by WikiLeaks on Friday revealed.

    • DNC Staffers Mocked the Bernie Sanders Campaign, Leaked Emails Show

      A new trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails, stretching back to April 2016, released by Wikileaks show that the organization’s senior staff chafed at Bernie Sanders’s continued presence in the presidential primary. Staffers were also irritated by criticism that they were biased towards Hillary Clinton.

      In May, chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DWS) reacted to an MSNBC anchor criticizing her treatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential primary by trying to force her to apologize.

      On May 18th, DNC staffer Kate Houghton forwarded to Wasserman-Schultz a Breitbart News story highlighting remarks by MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski in which she called for the chairwoman to step down over perceived bias against Sanders during the presidential primary.

      Wasserman-Schultz reacted angrily, writing that this was the “LAST straw” and instructing communications director Luis Miranda to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski.

    • Wikileaks emails: Democratic officials ‘plotted to expose Bernie Sanders’ as an atheist

      The Democratic National Committee – a supposedly neutral organisation – apparently hatched a plan to try and undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary Clinton by getting someone to claim he was an atheist.

      The Sanders campaign for months complained that people in the DNC were biased in favour of the establishment candidate, Ms Clinton. The campaign even sued the DNC to allow it access to its voter database.

    • New Leak: Top DNC Official Wanted to Use Bernie Sanders’s Religious Beliefs Against Him

      Among the nearly 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, released Friday by Wikileaks and presumably provided by the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” is a May 2016 message from DNC CFO Brad Marshall. In it, he suggested that the party should “get someone to ask” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders about his religious beliefs.

    • Major Errors In Reporting On Polling Data Must Be Corrected By International And Brazilian Media – OpEd

      A report on polling data first published on Saturday by Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest-circulation newspaper, contained errors that were so “huge and fundamentally important to the current political crisis that they require much more than the usual correction,” according to CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot.

      “Bad polling happens quite often, but these are errors in both polling and reporting of a whole different magnitude,” said Weisbrot.

      As noted by The Intercept yesterday, Folha de São Paulo had reported that according to a poll conducted by the firm Datafolha, 50 percent of Brazilians wanted the interim president Michel Temer to serve through 2018; 32 percent wanted the elected president Dilma Rousseff to do this (the end of her current term of office); 4 percent wanted neither of the two; and just 3 percent wanted new elections.

    • Donald Trump’s Long Rant Thrilled David Duke, But Alienated Many Others

      As Donald Trump shouted for 76 minutes on Thursday night about how horrible everything is in the dystopian fiction he’s confused for America, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan found himself nodding along in agreement.

      So the white supremacist David Duke, who was nearly elected governor of Louisiana in 1991 by channeling white resentment, posted a rave review of the address on Twitter.

    • In Cleveland, Lonely Protesters Marched Through Empty Streets

      In total, 24 people were arrested in convention-related incidents as of Friday morning, most at a flag burning protest on Wednesday. But while legal observers denounced those arrests, and delays in the processing of arrestees, as “troubling,” the final count was significantly lower than what most expected, with the city having announced ahead of the convention that it was prepared to “handle upwards of 1,000 arrests per day.”

    • Republican Leaders Choose Their Own Future Over Donald Trump’s

      Republicans have nominated the least popular presidential nominee in recent history — and it showed. Throughout the week, the biggest names on the convention schedule consciously avoided lavishing too much praise on the nominee himself, for fear of their own political futures.

      House Speaker Paul Ryan mentioned Trump just twice in his address. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, locked in a tough re-election race, mentioned the nominee just once. Ted Cruz, the second-place finisher in the primary, refused to endorse Trump at all, telling attendees instead to “vote your conscience.”

      And these were the Republicans who showed up to speak. Many major party figures didn’t attend at all. Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake told the press he wasn’t attending because he had to mow his lawn. None of the Bushes showed up.

    • Ivanka Said Her Dad Cares About Child Care. Here’s What Happened When A Woman Asked Him About It.

      Ivanka Trump tried to portray her father as a champion of women while introducing him on the last night of the RNC. But not only is there no evidence that the man who has a reputation for demeaning women is actually a champion for them — an examination of his platform and history indicates quite the opposite.

      [...]

      Trump Organization’s salaries are not public, but that claim doesn’t hold up on his campaign. Trump pays his male campaign staffers 35 percent more money than female staffers. That’s partly because he has only two women among his senior-level staff, and just 28 percent of his staff is made up of women. One former staffer filed a complaint earlier this year saying she was paid $2,000 a month — about half what several men with the same title make.

      She also talked about how Trump would help families. “As president, my father will change the labor laws,” she said, suggested he’d make “child care affordable and accessible for all” and provide support for working mothers.

      While affordable child care is a cornerstone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Trump has not released any plan for child care. The candidate has also shown zero interest in thinking about the issue. When an organizer asked him for his thoughts on child care back in December, he replied, “I love children” but refused to engage further, saying, “It’s a big subject, darling.”

    • Robert Scheer: Americans Shouldn’t Settle for Candidates ‘Who Have Created This Tremendous Mess’

      In a recent interview on The Real News Network, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer sat down with Paul Jay, senior editor of The Real News Network, to discuss the current election and the future of the American democratic system. The interview begins with Scheer talking about the Republican National Convention and neofascist rhetoric. “You don’t get fascist movements taking over, rising to power, without people being in pain,” Scheer says. “And we have a situation now in the United States that is increasingly resembling a kind of post-Weimar Germany.”

      Jay then brings the conversation around to new movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, which Scheer says save “a reasonable established order” by forcing those in power to respond to the needs of the people. “It’s only when the established order is failing to respond to the real needs of people that you get madness and chaos, and that’s what I think you’re hearing at the Republican convention.”

    • Never Mind the RNC — This Is What Voters Care About This Election

      Despite their absence from the Republican National Convention, voters prioritize campaign finance reform and action on climate change.

    • Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells

      Donald Trump’s speech tonight accepting the Republican nomination for president will probably go down as one of the most frightening pieces of political rhetoric in U.S. history.

      Even for people who believe the danger of genuine authoritarianism on the U.S. right is often exaggerated, it’s impossible not to hear in Trump’s speech echoes of the words and strategies of the world’s worst leaders.

      Trump had just one message for Americans: Be afraid. You are under terrible threats from forces inside and outside your country, and he’s the only person who can save us.

    • Volatile America

      Then the headlines shifted and, for the moment, “normalcy” returned. It’s a Trump-sated normalcy that’s anything but, of course, and the most recent heavily reported violence (at least as I write these words) — the murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge — blends into the endlessly simmering turmoil known as the United States of America.

      And the civil war, in fact, started long ago. But until recently, only one side has been armed and organized. That’s why the two latest police killings, by disciplined, heavily armed former military men, loose a terrifying despair. The victims are fighting back — in the worst way possible, but in a way sure to inspire replication.

      When people are armed and outraged, the world so easily collapses into us vs. them. All complexity vanishes. People’s life purpose clarifies into a simplistic certainty: Kill the enemy. Indeed, sacrifice your life to do so, if necessary. I fear this is still the nation’s dominant attitude toward its troubles. We’re eating ourselves alive.

      One way this is happening was described in a recent New York Times story, headlined: “Philando Castile Was Pulled Over 49 Times in 13 Years, Often for Minor Infractions.” Castile, who as the world knows was shot and killed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop on July 6, was a young man caught in a carnivorous system pretty much all his adult life. Every time he started his car, he risked arrest for “driving while black.” The Times quotes a Minneapolis public defender, who described Castile as “typical of low-income drivers who lose their licenses, then become overwhelmed by snowballing fines and fees.” They “just start to feel hopeless.”

      The story goes on: “The episode, to many, is a heartbreaking illustration of the disproportionate risks black motorists face with the police. . . . The killings have helped fuel a growing national debate over racial bias in law enforcement.”

      A growing national “debate”? Oh, the politeness! How much racism should we allow the police to show before we censure them? It’s like talking about the “debate” we used to have over the moral legitimacy of lynching.

    • Ted Cruz Booed and Heckled for Refusing to Endorse Donald Trump

      In a remarkable show of disunity at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Sen. Ted Cruz was booed and heckled by many delegates on Wednesday night as it became clear that he had no intention of endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency.

      Cruz, who called Trump “a pathological liar” and “utterly amoral” when he dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination in May, refused to follow the lead of two of the other defeated candidates, Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio, who did endorse the billionaire in their speeches.

      Watching Cruz give what seemed like a campaign speech for himself, Trump’s children sat in silence. Then there were cheers and a ripple of applause from the delegates as Cruz looked into the camera and said, “to those listening, please don’t stay home in November.”

    • Donald Trump is the Loneliest Man in America

      Donald Trump may well be the loneliest man in America. And I’m only 45%-60% kidding. This belief springs from his use of one single word—a word that every native speaker of the English language other than Trump knows does not, in fact, exist: the word “bigly.”

      Consider this: Donald Trump is so rich, so insulated–and so truly bereft of friends—that he’s managed to walk around on this planet for more than 70 years without ever realizing that “bigly” is not an actual word.

    • Chamber of Commerce May Prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump

      The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday signaled that the big-business community is still undecided between newly minted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Chamber President Tom Donohue’s statements to Fox Business News on Wednesday morning represented an astonishing break from the organization’s nearly invariable support for Republican candidates.

      “Trump talks about some important things in energy and taxes and financial areas,” Donohue said. “Hillary perhaps has more experience and businessmen like that — businessmen and women like that — but I don’t think that’ll be decided until you hear the speeches here and next week and you see the first debate, and I think people will start to move more clearly to where they’re going to vote.”

    • On violence, neoliberalism and the hallucinatory anti-politics of the Trump era.

      “If we can’t change consciousness, if we can’t get people to identify with the issues in a way that make them appear very real to their lives, then all of a sudden anger gets distorted and rerouted into something worse – it becomes racism, it becomes a movement mobilized by the need for saviors, it becomes a movement that embodies the worst possible political alternative.”

    • Roger Ailes leaves Fox News in wake of sexual harassment claims

      Roger Ailes, the longtime Fox News chairman who helped found the network and build it into a cable ratings behemoth, has been forced out of the company following allegations that he sexually harassed numerous subordinates, including former host Gretchen Carlson and star anchor Megyn Kelly.

    • Black Cleveland Residents Tell Tale of Two Cities in the Shadow of Republican Convention

      A day after Republican National Convention speakers discussed how to “make America safe again,” a group of young Clevelanders held their own “make America safe again” event at a downtown park.

      As police officers on horseback and bikes fended off a small rally down the block and helicopters buzzed overhead, the group of mostly black and Latino college students huddled around a picnic table Tuesday and talked about how irrelevant and offensive the Republican event is to many residents of its host city.

    • 9 Lies In Donald Trump’s Big Speech To The Republican Convention

      At the beginning of his big RNC-closing speech, Trump called for “a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation,” and said he would “present the facts plainly and honestly.” He didn’t follow through on that promise.

      Trump’s speech was much more scripted than his typically ad-libbed rally performances, which are riddled with falsehoods. But his formal acceptance of the nomination was also full of deception. Here’s a rundown of some of the misleading claims made by the man whose campaign statements were named the “lie of the year” by Politifact.

    • Trump Spent A Lot Of His Speech Fear-Mongering About Crime. These 3 Charts Prove Him Wrong.

      Donald Trump wants you to think that America is a scary, scary place. In his speech accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Trump claims that “decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” He unleashes a blizzard of cherry-picked statistics all directed at one purpose — convincing you that crime has run amok and that he is the only thing that can save you.

      Don’t believe him. The reality is that crime isn’t just on a downward trend, but it has been for a very long time.

    • Trump Campaign Manager Makes Astonishingly Sexist Argument For Why Women Should Vote For Trump

      “Many women feel they can’t afford their lives, their husbands can’t afford to be paying for the family bills,” Manafort said. “Hillary Clinton is guilty of being part of the establishment that created that problem. They will hear the message. As they hear the message, that’s how we will appeal to them.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The CIA, NSA and Pokémon Go

      Before heading out to capture Pokémon, you might want to consider the data the game has access to and the history of the company that created the game

    • Snowden: ‘I never thought I’d be saved’ after NSA leaks

      When Edward Snowden leaked highly classified secrets about government spying in 2013, the undertaking took meticulous coordination.

      Snowden, a former NSA contractor, chatted with Guardian reporters Glenn Greenwald and documentary maker Laura Poitras over encrypted email exchanges. Their first meeting hinged on code words and a secret signal involving a Rubik’s cube.

      But when the first article revealing hush-hush surveillance programs went live that June while he was in a Hong Kong hotel room, that’s as far as Snowden had thought things through, he said over a live internet feed from Russia, where he’s been living in exile since the leaks.

    • China To Ban Ad Blockers As Part Of New Regulations For Online Advertising

      Since it’s hard to see the Chinese government really caring too much about the problems that ad-blocking software causes for online publishers, there is presumably another motivation behind this particular move. One possibility is that the Chinese authorities use the tracking capabilities of online ads for surveillance purposes, and the increasing use of ad blockers in China is making that harder. That clearly runs against the current policy of keeping an eye on everything that online users do in China, which is perhaps why the authorities want ad blockers banned in the country, despite the inconvenience and risks for users of doing so.

      It remains to be seen how successful the Chinese government will be in stamping out such popular software, or whether this will be another regulation that is largely ignored.

    • Former Homeland Security Advisor: Tech Companies Have The Burden Of Proving Harm Of Backdoored Encryption

      Last week’s one-sided “hearing” on encryption — hosted by an irritated John McCain, who kept interrupting things to complain that Apple hadn’t showed up to field false accusations and his general disdain — presented three sides of the same coin. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance again argued that the only way through this supposed impasse was legislation forcing companies to decrypt communications for the government. The other two offering testimony were former Homeland Security Advisor Ken Wainstein and former NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis.

      Not much was said in defense of protections for cellphone users. Much was made of the supposed wrongness of law enforcement not being able to access content and communications presumed to be full of culpatory evidence.

      But one of the more surprising assertions was delivered by a former government official. Wainstein’s testimony [PDF] — like Vance’s — suggested the government and phone makers start “working together.” “Working together” is nothing more than a euphemism for “make heavy concessions to the government and prepare to deliver the impossible,” as Patrick Tucker of Defense One points out. Wainstein says phone manufacturers must do more than theorize that weakened encryption would harm them or their companies. They must hand over “hard data” on things that haven’t happened yet.

    • Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones

      Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.

      Wall Street Journal reporter Maria Abi-Habib – a US-born citizen traveling into the States with her valid passport — discovered this at the Los Angeles International Airport. Her Facebook post describes her interaction with DHS agents who suddenly decided they needed to detain her and seize her electronics.

    • France calls end to Microsoft’s ‘excessive’ user data collection

      France is not happy about the amount of data collection and lack of security in Windows 10 and has given the firm three months to sort it out.

    • Microsoft responds to allegations that Windows 10 collects ‘excessive personal data’

      Yesterday France’s National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) slapped a formal order on Microsoft to comply with data protection laws after it found Windows 10 was collecting “excessive data” about users. The company has been given three months to meet the demands or it will face fines.

      Microsoft has now responded, saying it is happy to work with the CNIL to work towards an acceptable solution. Interestingly, while not denying the allegations set against it, the company does nothing to defend the amount of data collected by Windows 10, and also fails to address the privacy concerns it raises.

      Microsoft does address concerns about the transfer of data between Europe and the US, saying that while the Safe Harbor agreement is no longer valid, the company still complied with it up until the adoption of Privacy Shield.

    • Cloud Encryption Threat Map

      The Cloud has gained quite a bit of popularity within the past decade such that many companies can roll out their own or one hosted by a cloud provider with relative ease. However with this new world come new threats and it is important that organizations adequately model their networks, data and possible threats to ensure sensitive data is kept secure. Kenn White was kind enough to create this threat scenarios mind map and I thought it was worth sharing as it does a great job of showing scenarios that different security technologies help protect against.

    • Tor Could Protect Your Smart Fridge From Spies and Hackers

      There’s a growing fear that the exploding internet of things — from baby cams to pacemakers — could be a goldmine for spies and criminal hackers, allowing them access to all kinds of personal photos, videos, audio recordings, and other data. It’s a concern bolstered by remarks from top national security officials.

    • Opera browser sold to a Chinese consortium for $600 million

      After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera’s browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV. The consumer arm has 560 workers, but the company hasn’t said what will happen to its other 1,109 employees.

    • Maxthon browser is a wolf in sheep’s clothing

      You may have installed the Maxthon browser on your mobile devices. If so, here’s why you should remove it. Immediately.

      [...]

      What exactly has been discovered that could be so damaging to this underdog browser? Fidelis Cybersecurity reported that Poland-based Exatel uncovered the Maxthon browser regularly sends a file, via HTTP, named ueipdata.zip, to a server in Beijing, China. The ueipdata.zip contains a file called dat.txt which stores information about the following:

      Operating system
      CPU
      Ad blocker status
      Homepage URL
      Browser history
      Installed applications (and their version number)

    • French State of Emergency: Overbidding Mass Surveillance

      Once again. The State of Emergency in France has been extended until January. In reaction to violence shaking the country and with the presidential election of 2017 only a few months away, political leaders are indulging an ignominious orgy of security-driven policy. Not satisfied with merely prolonging the state of emergency, lawmakers have also amended the 2015 Intelligence Act passed last year to legalize domestic mass surveillance.

      It is hard to believe that only 48 hours have passed since the bill was sent to the French National Assembly. With incredible speed, in the middle of summer, the Committee on Legal Affairs of the French Senate has given carte blanche to rapporteur Michel Mercier (UDI – centre-right wing and former Minister of Justice) to erase so-called “rigidities” in the Surveillance Law adopted last year.

      The provision, much criticised during the parliamentary debates at that time, provides for real-time scanning the connection data of individuals suspected of terrorist activities.

    • Snowden director Oliver Stone calls Pokemon Go new level of ‘surveillance capitalism’

      Filmmaker Oliver Stone tore into the Pokemon Go smartphone phenomenon on Thursday, describing it as “a new level of invasion” that could lead to totalitarianism.

      During a panel for his new movie Snowden on the first day of San Diego Comic-Con 2016, the director said the app was part of a larger culture of “surveillance capitalism.”

    • NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden collaborates on ultra-secure iPhone case
    • Marines, NSA to Bring Combat-Adapted Smartphone Tech to the Battlefield

      The program will mirror a similar approach adopted by the US Army that will provide soldiers with the ability to transmit strike coordinates, access visual maps, and potentially engage weapon systems using a heavily-modified consumer-level smartphone.

    • WSJ Reporter: Homeland Security Tried to Take My Phones at the Border

      On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter claimed that the Department of Homeland Security demanded access to her mobile phones when she was crossing the border at the Los Angeles airport.

    • Edward Snowden’s New Research Aims to Keep Smartphones From Betraying Their Owners

      In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist and injuring two others.

    • Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance

      Front-line journalists risk their lives to report from conflict regions. Casting a spotlight on atrocities, their updates can alter the tides of war and outcomes of elections. As a result, front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them. In the past decade, hundreds of journalists have been captured, tortured and killed. These journalists have been reporting in conflict zones, such as Iraq and Syria, or in regions of political instability, such as the Philippines, Mexico, and Somalia.

    • Snowden Designs a Device to Warn if Your iPhone’s Radios Are Snitching

      When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.

    • New Snowden-Developed Smartphone Device Aims to Shield Journalists
    • Edward Snowden Makes An Open Source Anti-NSA Battery Case For iPhone 6
    • Snowden designs device to warn when an iPhone is ratting out users [iophk: "aside from the iphone problem, the real need is for an OSS baseband OS"]
    • Ed Snowden And Bunnie Huang Design Phone Case To Warn You If Your Phone Is Compromised

      Bunnie Huang is having quite a day — and it’s a day the US government perhaps isn’t too happy about. Huang has worked on a number of interesting projects over the years from hacking the Xbox over a dozen years ago to highlighting innovation happening without patents in China. This morning we wrote about him suing the US government over Section 1201 of the DMCA. And now he’s teamed up with Ed Snowden (you’ve heard of him) to design a device to warn you if your phone’s radios are broadcasting without your consent. Basically, they’re noting that your standard software based controls (i.e., turning on “airplane mode”) can be circumvented by, say, spies or hackers.

    • Edward Snowden designed an iPhone attachment that detects unwanted radio transmissions

      Edward Snowden thinks about phone security a lot more than the average person. And with good reason, as the world-famous whistleblower revealed methods of government data collection on phone calls, and even from his exile in Russia, still remains a major advocate for digital privacy.

    • Elon Musk’s Master Plan Includes Turning Tesla Into An Autonomous Uber

      Tesla’s Elon Musk is not afraid to think big and then go for it. He famously published the Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan ten years ago, and has pretty much stuck to that plan.

    • Data ruling should kill off the investigatory powers bill

      The European court of justice ruling that bulk data collection is only lawful if it is used to tackle serious crime (Report, 20 July) makes it clearer than ever that the monstrous (in size and aims) investigatory powers bill currently passing through the House of Lords is simply not fit for purpose.

      The proposed legislation sanctions the mass collection of citizens’ telephone and email data – something that is both ineffective and, as we now know, unlawful – and fails to put in place sufficient safeguards against the misuse of the powers granted to the intelligence services.

      The US last year ended the bulk collection of data from telephone calls when a report found that its counter-terrorism benefits were few or none. Firsthand evidence suggests that mass surveillance makes the security services’ jobs harder, not easier; you don’t look for a needle in a haystack more efficiently by making the haystack bigger.

    • Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case

      Exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and legendary hardware hacker Andrew bunnie” Huang have published a paper detailing their new “introspection engine” for the Iphone, an external hardware case that clips over the phone and probes its internal components with a miniature oscilloscope that reads all the radio traffic in and out of the device to see whether malicious software is secretly keeping the radio on after you put it in airplane mode.

    • Film director Oliver Stone thinks Pokemon Go could lead to ‘totalitarianism’
    • ‘Snowden’ director Stone talks NSA, Pokemon GO at Comic Con
    • Oliver Stone Calls Pokemon Go a ‘New Level of Invasion’ at Comic-Con ‘Snowden’ Panel
    • Why Oliver Stone Thinks ‘Pokemon Go’ Could Create Totalitarianism
    • Edward Snowden On Oliver Stone, A Society Of Surveillance & Seeing His Story Onscreen – Comic-Con
    • 35 Years after Saint Reagan’s Order, Treasury Still Dawdles

      The other day, I Con the Record released an updated index of the procedures intelligence components use to comply with Executive Order 12333’s rules on sharing information about US persons. As is typical of I Con the Record, it didn’t admit that this new “transparency” really just incorporates information demanded under FOIA. In this case, the index released three newly available documents liberated by ACLU in their 12333 FOIA. I Con the Record also misrepresented how long the renewed effort to make sure agencies have such procedures in place has gone on; as I’ve noted, PCLOB has been pursuing this issue since 2013.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Foreign embassy staff accused of human trafficking and child sex offences

      Diplomatic staff with immunity, working in embassies in the UK, have been accused of child sex offences and human trafficking, the Foreign Office says.

      A total of 11 “serious and significant” offences were allegedly committed by such people in the past year.

      Diplomatic missions and international organisations ran up nearly £500,000 in unpaid parking fines in London last year, it was also revealed.

      Diplomats and some embassy staff are entitled to diplomatic immunity.

      This means they can be exempt from being tried for crimes.

      The allegations, contained a written ministerial statement by new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, include someone at the Mexican embassy allegedly causing a child aged 13 to 15 to watch or look at an image of sexual activity.

    • Public servant says Australian Bureau of Statistics forced him out because he was blind

      Ex-Bureau of Statistics worker Matthew Artis says he was unfairly moved around different sections of the ABS, treated as a liability and once told he was a “fish out of water” by one of his bosses.

      Mr Artis is suing his former employer in the Federal Circuit Court where he is alleging he was the victim of serious and blatant disability discrimination by the Commonwealth.

    • Can the British monarchy last forever?

      Increasing awareness of the shady dealings of the monarchy – and the institutions that protect it – are leading to a growing republican movement in the UK.

    • If the Risk Is Low, Let Them Go

      How a man who served 33 years on a 15-to-life sentence is pushing New York’s intransigent parole board to release violent offenders who have aged out of crime, the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

    • Court Says Cop Calling 911 With Suspect’s Phone To Obtain Owner Info Is Not A Search

      The background is this: James Brandon Hill exited a taxi cab without paying, leaving his phone behind. The cab driver reported this to the police and an officer dialed 911 to obtain the owner’s info. The court doesn’t touch the issue of abandonment — which would likely have made the search legal. But its decision that the method used to obtain this info isn’t a search seems to be a bit off.

      While the information received may have had no expectation of privacy, an officer accessing a cell phone without a warrant is questionable under the Supreme Court’s Riley decision. As noted above, the warrantless search still likely would have survived a motion to suppress as the phone was abandoned in the cab. In fact, Hill does not challenge the seizure of the phone — only the search.

    • Police brutality: Is America teetering on edge of sectarian violence?

      The tragic shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile occured because soldiers and police officers alike view themselves on the frontline and dangerous edge of preventing terrorist and criminal attacks.

    • May gets Hollande ultimatum: free trade depends on free movement

      Theresa May was warned by the French president, François Hollande, at their first meeting in Paris that the UK cannot expect access to the single market if it wants to put immigration controls on EU citizens.

      At a joint press conference in the Élysée Palace, Hollande made it clear that the new British prime minister was facing a choice about whether to accept free movement of people in return for free trade.

    • Chinese anti-graft protest leader arrested for taking bribes: Xinhua

      A former leader of a Chinese village who was democratically elected five years ago after taking a stand against corruption has been arrested for taking bribes, said Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

      Lin Zuluan, one of the Wukan village protest leaders in 2011 whose calls for an uprising attracted global attention, had called for fresh protests in June against new land grabs and graft in the fishing village in Guangdong province.

      His arrest is the latest move on the core group of Wukan village protest leaders from 2011.

    • From yurt-dwellers to bankers, Mongolians worn out by ‘corrupt’ politics

      Mongolia is known for the nomadic lifestyle of many of its citizens, its mines of global importance and for being an unlikely – if troubled – democracy landlocked by Russia and China. On 29 June, amid deep economic problems Mongolians showed their discontent by voting opposition Mongolian People’s Party into the State Grand Khural (parliament) in a landslide victory.

      The party took 85% of the seats in the parliament, defeating main rival the Democratic Party, which led a coalition from 2012-2016; about half of the elected candidates are first timers in the Khural. Voter turnout was above 72%, indicative of the electorate’s overwhelming discontent, and its apetite for change. The election period raised questions that stretch beyond the immediate economic crisis, making many reflect on the state of democracy, trust and public ethics.

    • ACLU of Florida Statement on the Police Shooting of an Unarmed Man in North Miami

      “We are extremely disturbed by the police shooting of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed caretaker helping a patient with autism outside a group home facility in North Miami. Thankfully, Mr. Kinsey is alive and not more gravely injured – but had the officer’s weapon been pointed just a few degrees differently, this senseless incident could have been a much greater tragedy.

      “This is the latest in what seems like an endless litany of police shootings of individuals who should not have been shot. Philando Castile in Minnesota, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, Vernell Bing in Jacksonville: there are too many to name them all here. Of the 598 people killed by U.S. police this year, 88 were unarmed. Mr. Kinsey or his patient could very easily have become number 89.

      “We have to stem the tide of violence, both nationwide and here in Florida. It starts with holding people accountable for their actions. There must be a thorough and independent investigation into this shooting that covers both whether officers violated internal use of deadly force policies and whether criminal charges should be brought.

    • With Arms in Air, Unarmed Black Caregiver Shot by Police

      Charles Kinsey, a black man and caregiver at a group home, was shot by police on Monday in North Miami, Florida.

    • Hong Kong ‘Umbrella Movement’ student leaders found guilty

      It’s a dark day for the student leaders of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in 2014 that came to be known as the “Umbrella Movement.”

      On Thursday, a court convicted Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow for unlawful assembly, for their role in starting the protests.

    • Want police reform? Charge rich people more for speeding tickets

      Soon after the horrific video of Minneapolis-St Paul resident Philando Castile being killed by a cop during a routine traffic stop was broadcast live over Facebook, evidence of just how “routine” the stop actually was also became public.

      Castile, it turned out, had been pulled over at least 52 times in 13 years for a variety of minor infractions – a broken seat belt, an unlit license plate, tinted windows, a missing muffler – or what his mother called “driving while black”.

    • Immigrants Told To ‘Get In Line’ Are Waiting For Years Because Of Court Case Backlog

      Critics often tell immigrants to “get in line” to legally stay in the United States — but the only line in place spans years, as there are now more than half a million cases backlogged in the federal immigration court system.

      Based on new Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) findings by the Associated Press, the total number of immigration cases still pending has reached 500,051 — a number driven by Central American mothers and children who began arriving at the southern U.S. border beginning in late 2013.

      Immigration courts have been inundated with cases after the Obama administration prioritized and expedited court hearings for Central Americans in a process critically called a “rocket docket,” which gives lawyers and immigrants little time to gather evidence to support their claims for humanitarian relief.

    • Texas Governor Latest To Ask For A ‘Hate Crime’ Law That Covers Attacks On Cops

      Yet another politician can be added to the list of people who think police officers just don’t have enough protections as is. Following in the footsteps of legislators in New Jersey and Minnesota — along with Rep. Ken Buck (CO) — Texas governor Greg Abbott has decided it’s time to treat attacking officers as a “hate crime.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • I wanna go fast: HTTPS’ massive speed advantage

      In fact, a bunch of the internet was pretty upset. “It’s not fair!”, they cried. “You’re comparing apples and oranges!”, they raged.

    • CenturyLink Claims Broadband Caps Improve The ‘Internet Experience’ And Empower Consumers

      Broadband ISP CenturyLink this week confirmed it’s following on Comcast’s heels and starting to impose usage caps and overage fees on the company’s already pricey DSL services. As we’ve long noted, there’s no reasonable defense for what’s effectively a glorified rate hike on uncompetitive markets, but watching ISP PR departments try to justify these hikes has traditionally been a great source of entertainment (at least until you get the bill).

  • DRM

    • Statement on DMCA lawsuit

      My name is Matthew Green. I am a professor of computer science and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I focus on computer security and applied cryptography.

      Today I filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, to strike down Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law violates my First Amendment right to gather information and speak about an urgent matter of public concern: computer security. I am asking a federal judge to strike down key parts of this law so they cannot be enforced against me or anyone else.

    • Why I’m Suing the US Government

      Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights, and I am asking the court to order the federal government to stop enforcing Section 1201.

    • America’s broken digital copyright law is about to be challenged in court

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

    • EFF Lawsuit Challenges DMCA’s Digital Locks Provision As First Amendment Violation

      Computer security professor Matthew Green and famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang have teamed up with the EFF to sue the US government, challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, also known as the “anti-circumvention” clause. As we’ve discussed for many years, 1201 makes it against the law to “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” that is designed to “circumvent” DRM or other “technological protection measures.” There are all sorts of problems with this part of the law, including the fact that it doesn’t matter why you have that tool or why you’re circumventing the DRM. For example, it would still be considered infringement if you cracked DRM on a public domain work. That’s… insane.

      The only “safety valve” on this is the ridiculous triennial review process, whereby people can beg and plead with the Librarian of Congress to “exempt” certain scenarios from being covered by 1201. The process is something of a joke, and even if you get an exemption one time, it automatically expires after three years, and the Library of Congress might not renew it.

    • Ever Buy Music From Apple? Use Linux? You Need This Tool

      Sure, you’re a hardcore superuser, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the finer things in life — like shiny squircles and getting every new app first. But, what’s an OS-indiscriminate person like yourself going to do when it comes time to purchase music? That’s where the recover_itunes tool shines, and if you’re a Linux user with an iPhone, it might just be your new best friend.

      iPhones and other Apple products work great when you’ve purchased music from iTunes, but can be a headache when your music comes from other sources. On the other hand, music purchased from iTunes is notoriously difficult to listen to on anything other than an Apple product. One major reason for the difficulty with the latter is in the way that iTunes handles metadata.

    • EFF sues US government, saying copyright rules on DRM are unconstitutional

      Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in 1998, it has been a federal crime to copy a DVD or do anything else that subverts digital copy-protection schemes.

      Soon, government lawyers will have to show up in court to defend those rules. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit (PDF) claiming the parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that deal with copy protection and digital locks are unconstitutional.

      Under the DMCA, any hacking or breaking of digital locks, often referred to as digital rights management or DRM, is a criminal act. That means modding a game console, hacking a car’s software, and copying a DVD are all acts that violate the law, no matter what the purpose. Those rules are encapsulated in Section 1201 of the DMCA, which was lobbied for by the entertainment industry and some large tech companies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Report: Lifesaving New AIDS Drugs Remain Costly; Older Versions Get Cheaper

      The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has found that prices of older HIV drugs continue to decline, but newer drugs largely remain expensive.

      The results were released on 21 July in Untangling the Web, the 18th edition of MSF’s report on HIV drug pricing and access, at the International AIDS Conference in Durban.

    • Commitment On Investment In Access To Essential Medicines Signed At UNCTAD14

      A commitment signed this week to facilitate investment in Africa’s pharmaceutical industry is expected to boost the sector’s production and make available essential medicines for millions of needy people.

      UNAIDS and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the African Union (AU), and the Kenyan and South African governments signed the pledge on 21 July, on the sidelines of the fourteen session of UNCTAD (UNCTAD-14), which is convening in Nairobi from July 17-22.

    • Trademarks

      • Running Out Of Puns: Get Ready For The Damn To Burst On Craft Beer Trademark Disputes

        With all the trademark actions we’ve seen taken these past few years that have revolved around the craft beer and distilling industries, it seems like some of the other folks in the mass media are finally picking up on what I’ve been saying for at least three years: the trademark apocalypse is coming for the liquor industries. It’s sort of a strange study in how an industry can evolve, starting as something artisan built on friendly competition and morphing into exactly the kind of legal-heavy, protectionist profit-beast that seems like the very antithesis of the craft brewing concept. And it should also be instructive as to how trademark law, something of the darling of intellectual properties in its intent if not application, can quickly become a major speed bump for what is an otherwise quickly growing market.

      • Dear US Olympic Committee: Tweeting About The Olympics Is Never Trademark Infringement

        It seems the USOC is just getting started with its bullying bullshit this Olympic season. Fresh off the heels of threatening Oiselle, a corporate sponsor of an Olympic athlete (but not a sponsor of the Olympics themselves), over trademark concerns because the company posted a congratulatory tweet for its sponsored athlete that included the Olympic bib she was wearing, the USOC is now sending out a helpful little reminder to other companies that have sponsored athletes but not the games. And by helpful, I mean that it’s helpful in seeing just how blatantly the USOC will outright lie in order to continue its bullying ways.

    • Copyrights

      • Kickass Torrents Gets The Megaupload Treatment: Site Seized, Owner Arrested And Charged With Criminal Infringement

        So just as the US government itself is accused of being engaged in massive copyright infringement itself, the Justice Department proudly announces that it has charged the owner of Kickass Torrents with criminal copyright infringement claims. The site has also been seized and the owner, Artem Vaulin, has been arrested in Poland. As with the original Kim Dotcom/Megaupload indictment, the full criminal complaint against Vaulin is worth reading.

        As with the case against Dotcom/Megaupload, the DOJ seems to ignore the fact that there is no such thing as secondary liability in criminal infringement. That’s a big concern. Even though Kickass Torrents does not host the actual infringing files at all, the complaint argues that Vaulin is still legally responsible for others doing so. But that’s not actually how criminal copyright infringement works. The complaint barely even shows how Vaulin could be liable for the infringement conducted via Kickass Torrents.

        But, of course, that doesn’t matter because the guy at Homeland Security Investigations (formerly: ICE: Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) just spoke to the MPAA and the MPAA said that Kickass Torrents had no permission to link to their content. Yes, link.

      • Amazon, Cable Industry Molest The Definition Of Copyright In Ongoing Scuff Up Over Cable Box Reform

        Last week we noted how copyright has once again become a straw man, this time as part of an attempt to kill the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box. Under the FCC’s plan, cable providers would have to provide their programming to third-party hardware vendors — using any copy protection of their choice — without forcing consumers to pay for a CableCARD. The plan has little to actually do with copyright, but cable providers have tried to scuttle the effort by trying to claim more cable box competition will magically result in a piracy apocalypse (stop me if you’ve heard this sort of thing before somewhere).

        The cable industry’s attack on the FCC’s plan has been threefold: hire sock puppets to make violently misleading claims in newspapers and websites nationwide; push industry-loyal politicians (who have no real clue what the plan does) to derail the plan publicly as the worst sort of villainy, and present a counter proposal packed with caveats that makes it all but useless. This counter proposal involves the cable industry delivering its programming via apps (much like it already does), but forces consumers to continue renting a cable box if they want to record programs via DVR.

        Given the cable industry’s plan is little more than a press release, that’s only the caveat we know of. But anybody thinking the cable industry’s going to just give up $21 billion in set top rental fees and their walled garden control over the user experience is utterly adorable.

      • Following KickassTorrents Death, Streaming Website Solarmovie Disappears
      • IsoHunt Launches A Working KickassTorrent Mirror — kickasstorrents.website

        Shortly after the U.S. Government seized the domains of KickassTorrents, IsoHunt is here with a working mirror of the world’s largest torrent website. The mirror can be accessed by visiting a URL similar to KAT’s domains i.e. kickasstorrents.website. The new website also displays a manifesto, demanding KAT founder’s freedom.

      • How Apple And Facebook Got KickassTorrents Founder Arrested

        The founder of the world’s largest torrent hosting website KickassTorrents is now behind the bars. The cause of his arrest are the legal purchases he made on Apple’s iTunes Store which helped the homeland security department to track him down.

      • Trump campaign admits Melania’s speech plagiarized Michelle Obama

        Donald Trump’s campaign has acknowledged that Melania Trump’s speech on Monday at the Republican National Convention used identical phrasing as a speech from Michelle Obama in 2008.

        The admission came in a written statement (viewable below in its entirety) on Wednesday from Meredith McIver, the writer who worked with Melania on the speech. McIver identified herself as an “in-house staff writer for the Trump Organization” and a friend of the Trump family.

Haar Mentioned as Likely Site of Appeal Boards as Their Eradication or Marginalisation Envisioned by UPC Proponent Benoît Battistelli

Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Wouldn’t that be metaphorical given Battistelli's plan (all along) for the boards and mistreatment of ill staff?

Haar hospital
Reference: The Killing of Psychiatric Patients in Nazi-Germany between 1939 – 1945 [PDF]

Summary: Not only the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) is under severe attack and possibly in mortal danger; the increasingly understaffed Boards of Appeal too are coming under attack and may (according to rumours) be sent to Haar, a good distance away from Munich and the airport (half an hour drive), not to mention lack of facilities for visitors from overseas

SUEPO (the only dominant EPO trade/staff union) leaders must be busy with their legal cases against EPO management (one to start/resume upon appeal later this year in the Supreme Court at The Hague, the other one having just started exactly a week ago), so it is not saying much about the monumental injustices at the EPO, at least not publicly. Having said that, anonymous voices continue to appear at IP Kat‘s comments, in spite of lack of coverage there about the EPO’s situation (nothing for weeks now).

A few comments there are floating new rumours about the fate of the appeal boards after they got punished for disloyalty (to Battistelli, not to the Office or the Organisation). Much of this began with a discussion about the UPC, which all along threatened to make the appeal boards obsolete, in due time. The UPC was first brought up in light of the decline/demise of justice at patent courts, as we noted a couple of hours ago (tackling patent examination justice). To quote the whole comment:

What good will it be to them to have good patents if their competitors can shut them down with vague and broad patents at the UPC?

A very important fact has been forgotten in Merpel’s article: the president of the council did not distanciate himself from the interference from Battistelli. Look at the text of the decision. Basically, what this means is that both the council and Battistelli view the enlarged board of appeal as subordinate to them and not as independent. The council did not object in their latest session.

In plain words: the enlarged board of appeal was expected to simply rubber-stamp a decision already taken. Even if the investigation was fraught with problems as some of the earliest comments in this thread noted.

These are the standards of justice of Battistelli and, we now understand, from the council. That is basically what the decision says.

Now, the all new UPC is created behind closed doors by the very same persons. How high do you expect the judicial standards of the new court to be?

Bonus question: how do you expect your clients to protect themselves against future decisions of the UPC?

There is a direct response to the above concerns about the UPC. “The danger comes when a court (UPC or any other) starts with a presumption of validity, just because it’s a European patent,” the following comment notes, reminding us of what happens in the USPTO and US courts, especially the ones in Texas:

Not sure I follow the logic here. I’m not saying that the national route produces stronger patents. I’m saying that, whereas the EPO previously provided a useful due diligence service (search and examination), this has now been diluted to the point where the national offices offer a competitive and lower-risk alternative.

Crap patents are fine, just as long as everyone recognises that they’re crap. The danger comes when a court (UPC or any other) starts with a presumption of validity, just because it’s a European patent.

An anonymous response to this said:

Crap patents are not fine, even the USPTO is getting convinced. And if the UPC independence is of the same kind as the enlarged board of appeal indepence, that is not fine either.

The article above describes a very serious problem. In most countries, interfering with the independence of justice would trigger a constitutional crisis.

In response to that, once again, the Turkey analogies came up:

The article above describes a very serious problem. In most countries, interfering with the independence of justice would trigger a constitutional crisis.

Apart from Turkey where a constitutional crisis triggers an interference with the independence of justice … :-)

“The Boards of Appeal are now paying a very high price for asserting their independence,” noted the following commenter, correctly insinuating that this ‘exile’ (not as far as Vienna as feared last year) is a sort of punishment:

The Boards of Appeal are now paying a very high price for asserting their independence. Following the approval by the Administrative Council of the reform proposed by Mr Battistelli, they will firstly be exiled to a corner of the Munich area, viz. Haar, which is very well known for its psychiatric hospital, possibly a humorous touch introduced by the president.

Secondly, renewal of the members’ appointment every five years, which used to be the default (in fact, it has never happened that a member was not re-appointed) is now subject to, among other, a performance evaluation. Coupled with another element of the proposal, i.e. to increase the cost coverage for appeals from 6,3% to 20-25%, firstly by increasing the members’ productivity, there will now be a high pressure on members to focus on production if they don’t want to lose their job. And if they lose their job, taking up another job will now only be possible after approval by the Administrative Council.

Finally, Board of Appeal members will be excluded from “step advancements”, which are open to all other staff at the EPO, i.e. the members’ salaries will be frozen.

It was already known that if Mr Battistelli doesn’t like you, he will hit hard. He has proven this again with the reform package for the Boards of Appeal.

Here is more about the Haar rumour:

Do you have good reason for believing that the BoA will be moved to Haar?

EPO – CA-43-16 Rev. 1:
“As a main precondition, criteria like good traffic links and appropriate accommodation standards were taken into account”.

Although I do not know much about it, I doubt that Haar would satisfy this main precondition. For a start, there appear to be very limited hotel and restaurant facilities in the immediate vicinity of the S-Bahn stop, which is itself a significantly longer journey (by S-Bahn) to / from the airport.

Also, is there not going to be any consultation with users about this? If the decision is Haar, then I can envisage the users getting hopping mad about this – especially as they would be paying significantly more in appeal fees for the “privilege” of having an additional journey out of Munich centre to stay in hotels that may be unappealing to some. And all to address what the users have consistently argued was a non-issue, whilst no real progress (in fact, quite the opposite) has been made in addressing the substantive issues relating to the independence of the BoAs.

I know that a proposal for a new BoA location has to be put to the Budget and Finance Committee, but am unsure if the AC needs to take a formal decision upon that proposal. If so, then it looks like users will need to engage in intensive lobbying of AC representatives if the proposal really is for somewhere outside of Munich centre.

And responding to the above one person wrote:

Like someone wrote above, GET REAL.

What consultations were there in the first place regarding the so-called “reform” of the BoA? What was the public’s input in that hastily load of garbage pompously called a “plan”?

Were the outcries of the public, judges, etc. heeded when a BoA member was given the virtual sack for what was apparently a crime of lèse-majesté?

The latest comment was posted this morning and said:

If the rumours are true, it looks EPO will be gaining an office that is outside of Munich city centre and that (compared to the Isar building) is more difficult for visitors to Munich to reach and is by far less well supplied with hotel accommodation, restaurants and other facilities that such visitors will need.

If the EPO management were being truly practical about this, then they would decide that such an office really ought to be occupied by the department(s) of the EPO that receive the fewest visitors. Given that pretty much everything that the Boards of Appeal do involves summoning visitors to Munich, I am certain that it makes no sense whatsoever to move them to Haar.

With this in mind, if the EPO president really is determined to physically separate the two current residents of the Isar building, then logic dictates that it really ought to be the other resident (that is, the president himself) who moves to Haar. Anyone up for lobbying the representatives to the AC to vote for this alternative?

Well, “lobbying the representatives to the AC,” as the above put it, might be an exercise in futility given their demonstration of (almost) blind loyalty to Battistelli in the last AC meeting. One person earlier on wrote:

The Enlarged Board of appeal did not rubber-stamped the decision that the president and the council asked them.
Probably for this reason they are going to be moved, although several suitable buildings are available in Munich, to Haar, a village outside Munich mostly known for its lunatic asylum.
Next time they will think twice before taking a decision that does not please BB or the council.
So much for the judicial independence.

There is no judicial independence and there is no justice at the EPO anymore. To make matters worse, as one commenter put it:

It seems that some applicants have their offices in the same building complex.

The board members will improve their perceived independence by discussing the inventions directly with the inventors at lunch.

Yes, exactly. What a horrible move that would be. Instead of sending the boards to Haar maybe it’s time to send Battistelli to Haar. As one of the above comments noted, Haar “is very well known for its psychiatric hospital,” which sounds like something Battistelli could use. They can give him some toys to break rather than let him break people (and lives or even families as per the recent survey) at the EPO. █

EPO Attaché Albert Keyack Viewed as Somewhat of a Mole, Reporting From the US Embassy in Brazil Until Shortly Before the Temer Coup

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Another French term in Benoît Battistelli’s EPO after his de facto coup d’état

Brazil coup
Reference: The Intercept (among many more at the time)

Summary: Public responses to the role played by Albert Keyack on behalf of the United States inside the European [sic] Patent Office

TECHRIGHTS is not a political site in nature, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid a little bit of politics. Half a decade ago we wrote about the Brazil-based US Ambassador Sobel (now Republican fundraiser) lobbying/working for Microsoft in Brazil in his capacity as a diplomat (Microsoft Brazil President at the time was Michel Levy) — a subject on which we expanded in later posts on the subject, citing diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning quite shortly thereafter. Corruption levels in Brazil are relatively high and some people try to capitalise on weak regulatory powers. It kind of sounds like Benoît Battistelli and his EPO cronies, but it’s not. We used to say that the only European thing about the European [sic] Patent Office is the staff, but right now even the (external) PR team belongs to a US company (meddling inside European media) and some of the staff — at partial capacity at least — is from the US.

Days ago we wrote about Albert Keyack's new role at the EPO (announced only internally). Keyack is not an EU national. The following comment cites Techrights and says:

Sovereign principality of EPOnia appoints consul to the United States.

My mind is so boggled that it’s becoming numb.

Well, Battistelli breaks the rules, including his very own Code of Conduct, so the above isn’t thoroughly shocking. What’s interesting are the following legitimate points about the sovereignty of the EPO and issues pertaining to loyalty. As one person put it, “could he rather be the US envoy to the province of EPOnia, like Rome or Imperial Britain” (as Battistelli serves the 1% and thinks of himself in Napoleonic ways, the analogy seems apt). Here is the comment in full:

Nomination of Albert Keyack als “EPO Attaché”:

Keyack was reporting from the US Embassy in Brazil as least as late as May 2015, and had an E-mail address from the State Department. That was only one year ago.

The tone of his report linked above reflects the orthodox US foreign policy on “IP”, and Keyack’s affiliation is given to be with the USPTO.

It is rather ironical that the President who wants to control for two full years the lives of anyone “disloyal” enough to leave the EPO actually hired someone whose was serving a “competing” patent office. Isn’t there a line somewhere in whatever is left of the Codex about not accepting any instructions from foreign governments?

Or is the fellow hired on a service contract concluded with an entity created ad hoc for this purpose?

Whose interests is he actually representing? Europe’s? (And then, what is that position, and who defines it?) EPOnia’s? (ditto) European or US industry? Small applicants?

Or could he rather be the US envoy to the province of EPOnia, like Rome or Imperial Britain sent governors to their vanquished peoples? (If then, why should he be paid by the EPO?)

The President does have a little leeway under the Codex to appoint staff under the EPC from states which are soon to become EPC signatories. Could the US accede the EPC? Is EPOnia about to be moved somewhere in Virginia?

Here is another comment which explains why it’s improper or inappropriate:

I thought the ServRegs forbid to hire nationals of non-EPC member states (actually, other way around: allows only hiring of employees with a nationality of member states)…. The last time I checked, the USoA was not a signatory of the EPC…
But then, this person is granted an easy income the next few years, for virtually nothing. Whatever he does will not influence filing strategies anyway….
And since he’s neither French, Corsican, or Croatian, nepotism seems to be less of a problem this time….

Man, I chose the wrong career… But then, I love my job…

Incidentally, in response to “Use of English as an official EU language” (by CIPA) Benjamin Henrion wrote “as long as other languages are not discriminated like for the horrible “automated translations” Unitary Patent deal.”

Well, the EPO’s management now brags about US stakeholders being dominant, even if no country in ‘mainland’ Europe has English as its main language (only a few islands do). MIP’s latest catchup with Canada on trademarks and patents speaks about “Brexit putting the brakes on CETA” and says (the complete summary of the latter part): “A dismissal of a suit against Pfizer indicating consumers cannot be compensated for expenditures on invalidated patents, the NAFTA arbitration hearing of Eli Lilly’s complaint against the government, IP agents getting confidentiality privilege, the Federal Court awarding Janssen nearly C$20 million, and Brexit putting the brakes on CETA were among recent Canadian patent stories” (Brexit also undermines the UPC, as we noted here many times before).

Well, even after Brexit (assuming it happens) the US is working to impose TTIP/ISDS on Britain, reveals the latest article from Dr. Glyn Moody. It’s not hard to see who often holds the leash. We’ll say more on that in our next post. █

EPO Insiders Explain Why the EPO’s Examination Quality Rapidly Declines and Will Get Even Worse Because of Willy Minnoye

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Arrogant and abusive top-level management a major culprit

Willy Minnoye caricature

Summary: Public comments from anonymous insiders serve to highlight a growing crisis inside the European Patent Office (EPO), where experienced/senior examiners are walking away and leaving an irreplaceable bunch of seats (due to high experience demands)

THE EPO is in great danger because the people who now run it only care about short-term gains and are willing to destroy the Office (and the whole Organisation) in the long run if that personally suits them better. It’s a question of personal, institutional, and collective accountability. Both Benoît Battistelli and Willy Minnoye (hated even by the Directors, we've been told) are already in retirement age and accordingly, they were not supposed to be given the positions they now hold in the first place (as per the rules/guidelines).

What the heck is going on inside the EPO and what happened to the EPO so many of us were once so proud of?

The following comment makes the point that new recruits take a long time to be productive and for a long period of time they actually slow down their colleagues, meaning that they can either do very little (while on probationary employment period) of just grant lots of patents with minimal examination so as to satisfy Battistelli’s appetite for ‘production’ (as measured by number of grants, which is a terrible yardstick). Here is the comment in full:

Interesting timeline. When are the new recruits expected to start making a positive contribution?

In an area as complex as patents, my own experience teaches me that new recruits usually decrease productivity for quite some time (approx. 1 year). Assuming that it will take 6 to 12 months to recruit the numbers being targeted, that means that the management is effectively expecting the increased capacity provided by the new recruits to enable the backlog to be completely eliminated within about 2 years. Is that at all possible, do you think? Or is this just yet another indicator that quality will go out of the window?

On Wednesday the EPO made it rather apparent that it is unable to recruit the type of people it is looking for, having lost a lot of its talent (as insiders openly admit) and lost public respect. They’re actively lying to staff about it, but the truth of the matter is, the EPO is no longer an attractive employer. The EPO asks: “Know any engineers or scientists interested in joining an international team at the forefront of technology?”

Well, even if I knew of one, I would not recommend setting a single toe in Eponia, seeing the kind of mess Battistelli and his henchmen have sown there. It’s utterly scary and even SUEPO publicly warned about it. It said that the EPO’s management (or HR department) should be more honest/upfront about what it means to join the EPO (potentially ending up unable to find a job for years thereafter, under presidential sanctions).

Here is an EPO sceptic/apologist writing:

I see comments about overrecruiting, inflated production demands for newcomers, contracts for examiners.
It is a pity that there are no numbers attached to these allegations, no evidence.
Could any of you shed some light on this?

As I see it, the EPO has almost 4500 examiners who work, more or less, 30 years as examiner.
Doesn’t this mean that you have to recruit 150 examiners per year just to remain at constant workforce?

Has any examiner been employed on a contract already?

I think it is great that the EPO finally is doing the work they have already been paid for!

The following very detailed comment certainly comes from an insider or a former insider, based on the broad knowledge and in-house terminology. He or she explains why this policy dooms the EPO:

In order to correctly train people at the EPO you need at least three years, and this does not mean that the cost put into training are recouped. It needs in my opinion at least another two years. If the search backlog has to be down by 2020, which means in 4 years, provided the candidates are numerous enough to fill all corresponding posts. One should rather think of 3 years, as any present recruitment efforts will not bring the candidates into the office before 2017.

Creating overcapacity is always dangerous. The only way not to have a permanent problem is to give those people a five year contract. For examiners this is ludicrous for the reasons given above.

So by 2022 those people will have to leave the EPO if they are not fired before. Good scientists and engineers are getting scarce on the market. The perspective of going to The Hague/Berlin or Munich and having to leave again is very high and not encouraging. For sure no scientist or engineer having a good job will leave it for a stint at the EPO, as this also means to transplant the family. The possible candidates will be newly graduates. And for those the grass will be always greener on the other side.

One way to recoup the training costs quicker is simply to lower the training level. And request people to produce in the first year as much as 2/3 of what an experienced examiner produces. Before BEST, training in search and in examination was scheduled to be 3 years for search and 3 years for examination. When BEST came, which allegedly was giving a gain of productivity of 18%, the training time was halved. In three years an examiner has to be a good searcher and a good substantive examiner, i.e. a jack of all trades.

The quickest way to catapult the production/productivity is to use BEST as best as possible (sorry for the pun). Carry out a search with no results and then a direct grant is at the end. If this is in the interest of the applicants, even the big ones, is doubtful. It is certainly not in the interests of the so cherished SME’s by Battistelli and consorts.

And here you have your answer about the quality of what will come out. Skip corners in training and the quality goes inevitably down.

But by then VP1 who only has a faint idea of what a search is as he only ever searched in paper, will benefit from a super pension, and will have been congratulated by the AC for being an extraordinary manager, with probably an extra bonus on top.

On top of this the boards of appeal are wilfully destroyed thanks to Battistelli and consorts, with the help of an AC lacking any spine. One wonders if the AC could even be compared to a spineless shell fish. At least they have a shell. The AC seems to be nothing more than mollusc pushed around by Battistelli and consorts.

It is sickening!

Regarding decreasing experience of examiners and directors who ‘fake ‘production and were promoted for ‘loyalty’, the following comment says:

I am not an examiner, but I have understood that all reference numbers for production have been abolished. In other words: the number of files an examiner is told to produce is entirely decided by his or her director. The director gives you a number at the beginning of the year and the examiner must bring that output in december. There is a formal complaint procedure, but it brings out the same number anyway.

We have old school directors close to retirement who are trying to keep the numbers somewhat reasonable. We have newly promoted directors who have been chosen for “loyalty”.

Newly employed examiners are on a probation period. They get a set of formal courses and then they get a number of files to output till the end of the period. If they don’t bring out the number, they don’t get the contract. I would think that most of them bring out a fairly large output already in the first year. I would expect them to contribute significantly to the reduction of the backlog soon.

The problem will be to get them. Who will be desperate or ignorant enough to come to the office knowing that there will be “overcapacity” in 4 years, that you may be prevented to work for 2 years afterwards and that the Council may change any regulations (including retirement and insurances) whenever they want? The pay may be ok for someone fresh from University, but is not much higher than other places in Munich and whatever career opportunities examiners had (like being promoted to the board of appeal) has disappeared.

The issue with artificial “targets” for examination are brought up in this comment which asks for further information or brings up half-rhetorical questions:

Thanks for the info. Would you happen to know whether the “production” targets for newly-appointed examiners are significantly lower than those of their more experienced colleagues? It would be insane for new recruits to have (nearly) the same targets as experienced examiners, but you never know with the EPO these days…

The response to this was as follows:

I don’t know, but I imagine the number depends on the director. This is why the problem is not out: there are no official instructions, it just depends on the hierarchy being “loyal”. Of course, they were chosen accordingly.

What you should also realise is that the system works entirely in one direction: Minnoye thinks aloud the figures he wants (say: divide the stock by 4 for 4 years…) and the hierarchy pass them down. Reportedly, with the new style of “loyal” directors, some examiners were presented with figures much higher than last year. Tough luck, they just have to comply or face disciplinary sanctions. If I understood correctly, in the next council Battistelli wants to make these dismissals a simple administrative measure.
How do you think we were able to increase production 15% last year with less examiners?

What I don’t understand is how they expect to recruit any people at all, but Minnoye probably has a plan.

Well, with staff suicides and other bad news in the press (the EPO spends a fortune trying to change the media and dilute it with paid puff pieces), how would they attract skilled examiners?

Well, one day in the future we shall give an example of stories of people who favour the UK-IPO over EPO for reasons to do with sheer incompetence at the EPO. It’s too early to write about this because there’s a dispute ongoing and we don’t want to compromise or interfere with it. In light of that consider the following new comment:

Meanwhile, while the EPO has been eroding its USP (excellent search and examination quality), external parameters have changed, and the national route is increasingly attractive. Translation is now very cheap. You don’t need a middleman in each country (at least not in most EU/EEA/EFTA countries), and most importantly you don’t get tied up in fatuous, artificial arguments with examiners who haven’t had time to consider the facts and arguments properly.

To end it with somewhat of a joke:

Secret FAQ …

would like to reassure any applicant that every application will get the same high quality treatment as before, yet we’ll by give more responsibility to the Division (read: pressure to the Division) to bring a case to a conclusion (under pressure).

Early Certainty sooner than you expected.

We need a new thread for this.

Well, as leaked documents serve to show, pressure is put on examiners to grant to Microsoft faster (demonstrating that the above observations are definitely true in practice). Sadly, the EPO sent me a series of threatening legal letters on this matter alone, after my earlier leaks had caused huge backlash from stakeholders.

Today’s EPO is the kind of employer that anyone with a clue would not join (it’s different if one is already there), unless one is fanatic about the “following orders” mentality.

Battistelli, a French republican, has cultivated a culture of fear at all levels (examination, administration, management) and even outside the Office, e.g. appeal boards and delegations. He ruined the whole Office and time will tell if the ‘old’ (widely-respected) EPO can still be salvaged somehow. We sure hope so. █

Patents Roundup: BlackBerry, Huawei, PTAB, GAO, Aggressive Universities With Patents, and Software Patents in Europe

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.”

–IP Watch on Professor Joseph Stiglitz

Summary: Various bits and pieces of news regarding patents and their fast-changing nature in the United States nowadays

AS WE wish to resume our EPO coverage (there is a lot more material on the way), we have decided to lump together various bits of news from the (primarily US) patent system, subdivided below and split into themes.

BlackBerry Still Dangerous

When Canadian powerhouse BlackBerry introduced not only one but several Android-based phones were were rather relieved, as at one point several years ago it seemed like BlackBerry was slowly transforming to become a patent troll or preparing to sell its very many patents to notorious trolls (or patent assertion firms/entities, PAEs for short). BlackBerry, which is still struggling based on the number of sales, may somehow be bound to become like a patent troll, judging by this new report which makes the company (now run by a Turbolinux executive who previously sold out to Microsoft on the patent front) sound like a PAE. “He also hinted at a future based around brand and technology licensing,” says the summary. Watch out for BlackBerry because if Android doesn’t give it the success it is looking for, then BlackBerry might simply choose to sue Android OEMs (directly or indirectly, like Ericsson and Nokia). They can always try to blame such aggression on “shareholders!”

China Comes Knocking, Not Knockoffs

“Watch out for BlackBerry because if Android doesn’t give it the success it is looking for, then BlackBerry might simply choose to sue Android OEMs (directly or indirectly, like Ericsson and Nokia).”Yesterday my wife and I had lunch with a businessman who is a distributor of goods from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines. He warned about Chinese protectionism via SIPO and spoke about unusual restrictions, such as the imperative registration (can take about a year) in order to proceed to the simplest of enforcement inside China (even purely defensive enforcement in the face of counterfeiting or cheap imitations).

Put old stigmas aside for a moment. China is not stupid. China is also more than an imitator. It actually brings out some innovations these days and it is willing to go abroad to sue Western rivals. It’s not just on the defensive and increasingly it’s on the offensive. “Knocking out Chinese patents may be a lot harder than you think,” IAM wrote the other day and Dr. Glyn Moody, citing his colleague (article from 6 years ago), says “Just As We Warned: A Chinese Tech Giant Goes On The Patent Attack — In East Texas”. So, how is it working out for multinational US companies which relied so much on the USPTO and faithfully (or blindly) trusted it for protectionism? “Techdirt,” Moody explains, “has been warning for years that the West’s repeated demands for China to “respect” patents could backfire badly. In 2010 [before Moody wrote for Techdirt], Mike [Techdirt founder] pointed out that Chinese companies were starting to amass huge patent portfolios, which were soon used as weapons against foreign firms operating in China, most notably Apple.”

“China is not stupid. China is also more than an imitator. It actually brings out some innovations these days and it is willing to go abroad to sue Western rivals.”Based on articles like this new one, not only Huawei is suing; it is also being sued, this time by Samsung (from Korea). Samsung and Huawei have become top Android OEMs and there is a lot of money at stake when people pay up to $1,000 per phone. IAM seems to have taken an interest in many east Asian markets recently; one new article is titled “Korea’s antitrust watchdog hints Qualcomm can expect another near $1b fine in patent probe” and another is titled “Transpacific denied Enfish lifeline as Taiwanese companies’ NPE experiment hangs in the balance”. These are IAM’s latest attempts to float software patents because of an old patent case involving Microsoft. To quote: “Sensing a glimmer of hope from the US Federal Circuit’s judgment in Enfish v Microsoft – which went some way towards clawing back patent eligibility for software inventions in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice – Kinglite filed a motion asking that the Central California court to reconsider its decision on the invalidity of the ‘304 patent. However, this was rejected on the basis that Kinglite’s patent does not “disclose any of those mathematical algorithms that actually represent an application of the ‘abstract’ idea of securing the BIOS through authentication, nor a new concrete means of applying those algorithms… [unlike] the patent in Enfish which apparently disclosed a new method of building a database”.”

Enfish does not really change much, but IAM would use anything it can to promote the interests of its paymasters, often unproductive (or counterproductive) patent parasites like this one it has just written about.

USPTO Wants ‘Certainty’

“Samsung and Huawei have become top Android OEMs and there is a lot of money at stake when people pay up to $1,000 per phone.”Certainty (or contrariwise, uncertainty) has become one of those buzzwords that David Kappos and fellow patent maximalists (especially proponents of software patents) use to say that Alice is nasty and needs to be buried. Two more articles have been published about the efforts to trigger changes with a new memorandum [1, 2]. The latter says: “The extent to which these disparate analyses can be reconciled will depend, of course, on future case law, leaving the question of subject matter eligibility in its current state of uncertainty.”

When the author (patent maximalist who shamed even a SOCTUS Justice) says “leaving the question of subject matter eligibility in its current state of uncertainty” the simplest translation is “leaving the question of subject matter eligibility in its current state of denying software patents.”

This is a subject which was mentioned here the other day, especially in relation to IBM.

Dying Software Patents

“Certainty (or contrariwise, uncertainty) has become one of those buzzwords that David Kappos and fellow patent maximalists (especially proponents of software patents) use to say that Alice is nasty and needs to be buried.”Upon reassessment most software patents are invalidated these days. There are some exceptions like the BASCOM case and patent lawyers love latching onto those. An article from Jason Rantanen (Patently-O) is an example of this bias among professors as well. He wrote: “Since Alice v. CLS Bank, the Federal Circuit has issued four opinions rejecting a lack of patent eligible subject matter challenge: DDR Holdings, LLC v. Hotels.com, L.P., 773 F.3d 1245 (Fed. Cir. 2014); Enfish LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 2016 WL 2756255 (Fed. Cir. May 12, 2016); Rapid Litigation Management Ltd. v. Cellzdirect, Inc., 2016 WL 3606624 (Fed. Cir. 2016), and BASCOM v. AT&T, with the latter three coming the last few months.”

Well, still, those are clearly in the minority and they come from a crooked court which is responsible for bringing software patents to the US in the first place.

Another software patent has in fact just died, thanks to Alice again. Patent Buddy wrote that “PTAB Holds Lottery Patent Claims Invalid under 101/ Alice: http://assets.law360news.com/0819000/819445/cbm2015-00105_termination_decision_document_36.pdf …”

“Another software patent has in fact just died, thanks to Alice again.”PTAB is very much dedicated to elimination of such patents because it has no incentive to empower plaintiffs, unlike CAFC. The US needs a lot less of CAFC (or anything like CAFC) and more of PTAB. Don’t be misled by all those spinners who equate PTAB with “death squads”. Patent law firms, for instance, still conveniently cherry-pick cases that support software patents (see “Another Software Patent Survives an Alice Challenge” by Seyfarth Shaw LLP). They put “abstract idea” in quotes (probably scare quotes, depending on style) and even add the word “alleged”, certainly not hiding their bias too well. To quote this latest ‘analysis’ (marketing): “In a rather complex case, Yodlee again focused on the definition of the “abstract idea” by the defendant. Many times, defendants frame the alleged “abstract idea” too broadly to improve their 101 invalidity argument, and courts or the PTAB find the definition is too broad. Other times, defendants frame the abstract idea too narrowly and courts agree with the defendant on the definition of the invention, but find such a narrow definition to not be drawn to an abstract idea. Here, the defendant framed the abstract idea in a manner inconsistent with the claimed invention, and the court found no apples to apples comparison.”

Improving Patent Quality

In our previous post we praised the USPTO (or PTAB by extension) for at least working to improve patent quality somewhat. Professor Crouch says that a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) report alluded to patent quality. “Patent Office Must Define and Improve Patent Quality” says the headline and the body of the short article says: “Regarding patent quality, the GAO suggested that the USPTO’s standard of patent quality should focus solely on the basics: defining “a quality patent as one that would meet the statutory requirements for novelty and clarity, among others, and would be upheld if challenged in a lawsuit or other proceeding.” However, patent clarity must be an important element of that definition.”

“For those who don’t know it yet, when IAM precedes something with “REPORT” it’s actually a euphemism for “SPONSORED CONTENT” or “ADVERTISING” (disguised as analysis by some particular firm).”This is good news. Compare that to propaganda sites like IAM where there is a new “REPORT” (i.e. paid-for marketing placement for a firm) titled “International report – Federal Circuit distinguishes between tests for obviousness and patent-eligible subject matter”. For those who don’t know it yet, when IAM precedes something with “REPORT” it’s actually a euphemism for “SPONSORED CONTENT” or “ADVERTISING” (disguised as analysis by some particular firm).

GAO’s input basically says that the Office must tighten patent scope, whereas the latter (propaganda/marketing) offers ‘tricks’ for getting around scope restrictions.

Using Taxpayers’ Money for Patent Stockpiling

“GAO’s input basically says that the Office must tighten patent scope, whereas the latter (propaganda/marketing) offers ‘tricks’ for getting around scope restrictions.”We quite liked IP Watch‘s article “Patenting By Universities Unhelpful, Paper Says; WIPO Programme To Be Reviewed” [1]. It was published a few days ago, just in time for IAM’s ‘report’ on Harvard University’s use of patents (granted using public money) to sue the private sector. IAM wrote: “Late last month Harvard University took the very unusual step of filing two infringement lawsuits against semiconductor manufacturers Micron and Global Foundries over their alleged infringement of two patents that are owned by the Ivy League institution. That in itself is a pretty rare occurrence – combing the Lex Machina database I found that Harvard has been a co-plaintiff on just one other patent suit since 2011, so it seems that this is the only case in at least the last five years that it has been the sole plaintiff in an action.”

This isn’t the first time that we write about universities getting aggressive with patents, not just selling patents to trolls who become aggressive with these (like Intellectual Ventures). What they do here is extremely unethical and should be grounds or basis for revocation of government grants. When universities are becoming like patent trolls (not producing but suing) it’s worse than classic patent trolls because taxpayers fund it and get punished for it, usually for the enrichment of some shady people.

“When universities are becoming like patent trolls (not producing but suing) it’s worse than classic patent trolls because taxpayers fund it and get punished for it, usually for the enrichment of some shady people.”In other IAM propaganda this week, watch this spin on patent litigation decline in the US. So patent trolls, which rely on software patents more than most (and pay IAM), lose momentum. A cause for celebration or for sobbing? Probably for sobbing at IAM. Bezos-owned news site Washington Post meanwhile reports, somewhat contradictorily (in light of the latest figures from Lex Machina), that “Patent lawsuits swell and watchdog says the government is to blame” (they actually decreased year-to-year in the past few months). To quote:

Inventors are filing an exploding number of lawsuits against companies that appropriate their products illegally — and a new report puts the blame for these costly disputes squarely at the feet of the federal government.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so focused on rewarding its employees for the number of applications they review that the quality of patents they give out is in jeopardy, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The result is that licenses conferring someone’s sole right to an invention are “unclear and overly broad” and vulnerable to infringement by competitors.

“Software patents are not legal in Europe, but the likes of Battistelli don’t obey the rules anyway and more attempts to interject software patents into Europe are made by those who could not care less.”Here again we have GAO saying what it has been saying for quite some time. Will anyone listen? Will the advice be taken seriously? See what happened after an Australian (almost) equivalent had said something to the same effect. Local patent law firms got rather aggressive.

Software Patenting in Europe Still Being Attempted

Software patents are not legal in Europe, but the likes of Battistelli don’t obey the rules anyway and more attempts to interject software patents into Europe are made by those who could not care less. According to this article, there’s a Dutch dispute over a patented “superformula” (i.e. algorithm). As the author correctly notes: “Despite the noise being made by Genicap, there’s some question as to whether the company’s patent actually applies to No Man’s Sky. The European Patent Convention says directly that “discoveries, scientific theories, and mathematical methods” are not directly patentable, and US patent law also excepts “disembodied mathematical algorithms and formula” from patentability.”

“The Dutch people don’t need software patents; they’re usually just victims of such patents.”Well, such patents oughtn’t exist in the first place. The last time we heard of software patents in relation to the Netherlands it was Microsoft’s lawsuit against TomTom (Dutch company) and a Dutch developer who had his work killed [1, 2, 3] by a patent aggressor, Shazam. The Dutch people don’t need software patents; they’re usually just victims of such patents. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Patenting By Universities Unhelpful, Paper Says; WIPO Programme To Be Reviewed

    A new publication analysing the relationship between intellectual property and access to science explores ways countries have developed to counter the potential barriers created by IP rights, and says patenting by universities is counterproductive.

Glimpse at Patent Systems Across the World: Better Quality Control at the USPTO Post-America Invents Act (2011), Unlike the EPO Post-Battistelli (2010)

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The pendency at the USPTO stands at around five years, as scrutiny has been increased

AIA Patents
Image credit: Professor Dennis Crouch, Patently-O

Summary: While the EPO reportedly strives to eliminate pendency and appeal windows altogether (rubberstamping being optimal performance as per the yardstick du jour), the USPTO introduces changes that would strengthen the system and shield innovation, not protect the business model of serial litigants

PATENT systems across the world vary, but they’re streamlined/unified by various programs which enable litigation across nations and entire continents. We’ve covered some of these programs here before and half a decade ago we wrote numerous articles about the vision of a global patent system, at times citing leaked diplomatic cables that had been published by Wikileaks. ‘National’ patent offices are actually not so national and the ‘European’ Patent Office isn’t really about Europe (some of its member states, for example, are not in Europe). The same is true in the UK-IPO, which is going ‘to bed’ with Facebook right now (surveillance, censorship and propaganda site from another continent). Here is a new MIP article on patent litigation trends in Russia. It’s not often that we hear about Russian plaintiffs in European, Australian or American courts; domestic policy there probably does not incentivise pursuing patents in other countries (especially NATO members), either. As we shall show in a later article, China is increasingly going abroad for litigation, albeit it wasn’t traditionally the case (the West wrongly assumed all China could do was knockoffs or ‘piracy’ [sic] as the think tanks label it).

“It’s not hard to envision the beneficiaries of a global patent system and their actions.”Days ago IP Kat wrote about the Rhodia v Molycorp “patent jurisdiction tussle,” to quote the author’s headline. Here is some background for the uninitiated: “Rhodia is the exclusive licensee of the UK and German designations of a European patent entitled “Ceric Oxide and method for production thereof, and catalyst for exhaust gas clarification”. Rhodia commenced infringement proceedings in the English High Court alleging that the English domiciled Defendant, Molycorp, had infringed the UK and German designations of the patent.” Here we have a reminder of the unifying patent factor which does not even necessitate a so-called ‘unitary’ patent. Do we really need a ‘globalisation’ of patent systems? That is a rhetorical question of course. It’s not hard to envision the beneficiaries of a global patent system and their actions.

One country dominates the world’s patent systems (including the EPO where it’s ranked number one) and that country is not China, albeit it’s by far the largest population in the world. “In today’s free-trade environment, the USITC’s role is somewhat counter — protecting of U.S. industry,” Patently-O wrote the other day about the ITC, guardian of large US corporations, a nationalist body which has the word “international” in its name/acronym. To quote Patently-O, the “USITC Procedure sets up the USITC as the party prosecuting the case rather than the patentee. As such, the agency is the named respondent and will be represented by the Solicitor’s Office. I expect that the patentee BriarTek will also weigh-in. The patent at issue is U.S. Patent No. 7,991,380 and covers an emergency satellite communication system. The asserted claims were found invalid as anticipated and/or obvious. That holding was then affirmed on appeal by the Federal Circuit.”

“Suffice to say, calls to abolish CAFC altogether increased in recent years.”Well, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), as we noted here repeatedly, is an exceptionally abusive court which not only bypasses constitutional issues but also works for large corporations and for patent lawyers rather than the public (or justice). Simply put, it’s corruptible. Suffice to say, calls to abolish CAFC altogether increased in recent years. And speaking of CAFC, MIP says: “The Federal Circuit has provided some guidance on the issue of 180 days’ notice of launch in a recent biosimilars ruling, in Amgen v Apotex, but practitioners say there will be a lot more litigation before the patent dance is fully clarified” (we are not optimistic).

About the USPTO Patently-O wrote that “Patent Filings Rising Slowly,” according to figures plotted by Professor Dennis Crouch. Is this a case of the more, the merrier? Well, for patent lawyers surely it is merrier (more profitable). Here is what Crouch wrote about it:

The chart above shows USPTO application filings for non-provisional patent applications as well as RCE’s. Both have been on the rise for many years. The filing numbers appear to have continued to rise since implementation of the America Invents Act, although at a slower rate (acceleration has slowed). The USPTO expects that applications filed today will receive a first action within 16 months.

America Invents Act (AIA), with PTAB in particular, has served to introduce some new quality control (potential slowdown and greater pendency to be expected), albeit at too slow a pace as PTAB needs to be expanded to be able to deal with more than just a couple of thousands of patents per year (such workload keeps growing fast).

Patently-O wrote another article exclusively about AIA in which it’s said:

Although more than three years have passed since the changeover date, most new patents still fall under the old-rule. This long transition period is explained by the reality that most patents that issue claim priority to a prior patent filing document such as a foreign priority filing, international PCT application, US provisional application or parent non-provisional US filing. Once the non-provisional application is filed, patent prosecution process still that typically takes around three years. This results in an average pendency from priority filing to issuance of around five years.

The chart there shows that, even though there's a patent litigation slowdown (we’ll expand on that in a later article), problems are far from over. There’s a capacity problem and there’s growing demand. An article by Zachary Kinnaird (posted on his behalf by Professor Jason Rantanen), a patent attorney with International IP Law Group, looks at the number of patent practitioners. He shows some fancy charts and notes: “The number of practitioners removed from the USPTO database reveals a practitioner percentage removal trend that can be seen as a retirement estimate for patent practitioners. This trend shows that the longer a practitioner has had a registration number, the more likely they are to have retired, or otherwise been removed, from the roster.

“The health of the patent system worldwide is oftentimes improving, except at the EPO where patent quality declines* (more on that later today) and human rights are routinely violated.”“The chart below shows the percentage of patent practitioners who still remain registered on the USPTO roster as a function of each practitioner’s year of registration. The further to the right, the more recently the practitioner earned their registration number.”

Not much can be deduced from this (the way it’s presented is not too helpful), unless one is interested in a sob story which serves the party line of the patent microcosm, or the industry associated with patent activity as opposed to production of merchandise, software, etc.

The health of the patent system worldwide is oftentimes improving, except at the EPO where patent quality declines (more on that later today) and human rights are routinely violated. As a European national I am sad and ashamed to see what was once the best patent system in the world becoming one of the worst and most notorious (unless one asks the EPO's mouthpieces). Battistelli tramples everyone and everything. █
____
* Pressured examiners, unskilled (new) examiners and expensive appeals (short duration, very high fees) in an already-understaffed department make the entire process applicants-friendly at the expense of long-term reputation (which made the EPO appealing and worth the exceptionally high prices).

Blockstream Has No Patents, But Pledges Not to Sue Using Patents

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, IBM, Patents at 4:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Read between the lines then…

Blockstream logo

Summary: Blockstream says that it comes in peace when it comes to software patents, which triggers speculations about coming Blockchain patent wars

THE PAST few years were baffling as companies equated promises not to sue with “Open Source” or “open-source” (with a dash, to help dodge the trademark perhaps). Examples we covered here included, notably, Tesla and Panasonic.

A couple of days ago we saw that Blockstream had claimed the following: “Today we are excited to announce some important steps we are taking on the patent front, why these defensive steps are necessary, and our hope that others will see merit in our approach and follow our lead.

“The system as it stands is inherently hostile towards GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source software, which is what Blockchain is all about.”“Core to the Bitcoin ethos is permissionless innovation. Without it and the level of contribution to which it gave rise Blockstream would not be on the exciting path we find ourselves today. It should not come as a surprise then that permissionless innovation is also core to Blockstream’s ethos. We firmly believe that in order for Bitcoin and related technologies’ potential to be fully realized they must be underpinned by a global platform that is free for any innovator to use without hesitation.”

As Benjamin Henrion rightly asked, “where do you have patents? which numbers?” Another person, a patent attorney who specialises in patent data/statistics, noted that “Blockstream Does Not Have Any Patents Assigned to It.” This is not entirely shocking. Having written about Blockstream in the past (we have very broad scope in our daily links), not once did we mention it in relation to patents. Patently German hypothesised: “Preparation for future #blockchain #patent wars? Blockstream announces defensive patent pledge and patent agreement…” (IBM, a patent bully with software patents, is also heavily involved in the same Linux-centric space)

IP Watch, a decent watchdog of patent matters, wrote the headline “Trust Us, We Won’t Sue You” (it sounds rather humourous or sarcastic). It said that “Blockstream, which developed the blockchain technology and bitcoin, has announced a defensive patent strategy. The crux of it: assurance that users of its technology won’t be sued.”

“It seems like shameless self-promotion or a publicity stunt with a “patents” angle.”The EFF wrote about this as follows: “We’ve written many times about the need for comprehensive patent reform to stop innovation-killing trolls. While we continue to push for reform in Congress, there are a number of steps that companies and inventors can take to keep from contributing to the patent troll problem. These steps include pledges and defensive patent licenses. In recent years, companies like Twitter and Tesla have promised not to use their patents offensively. This week, blockchain startup Blockstream joins them with a robust set of commitments over how it uses software patents.”

Bob Summerwill told me [1, 2]: “I see this as hugely positive. Looks directly analogous to what the GPL does for copyrights. Use system against itself.”

Right, but unless Blockstream actually has some patents (there is no evidence of it so far), what can they really use against the system? The system as it stands is inherently hostile towards GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source software, which is what Blockchain is all about.

Blockstream’s message is suggestive of unknown context (like something they know but are not telling us). It seems like shameless self-promotion or a publicity stunt with a “patents” angle. We have become accustomed to it. One company that should definitely do the same thing (but has not) is Red Hat. OIN membership does not guarantee this and if Red Hat got sold to some relatively hostile entity (like Sun to Oracle), there is no guarantee that Red Hat’s patents would not be used to wreak havoc (like a $10 billion lawsuit over a programming language alone, i.e. an order of magnitude worse than SCO versus IBM). █

07.21.16

Links 21/7/2016: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Xfce Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • 7 Differences Between Linux and Windows: User Expectations

      When I was a boy, I imagined that other languages were codes, whose words had a one-to-one correspondence to English. In the same way, many Windows users expect Linux to be an exact equivalent.

      The reality, of course, is quite different. Both Windows and Linux are operating systems — the programs used to run other applications — but they often fulfill basic functions in different ways. Like any application, they have their own unspoken logic, and part of learning either is to learn their logic.

    • Feral Linux users should learn when to shut up

      The very words alpha in the name of the release indicate that the Skype which was announced on 14 July is not ready for prime time. That should be apparent to anyone with the IQ of the common cockroach.

      But it is apparently not evident to some Linux users.

      Things do not seem to be clear to some so-called Linux writers, either. Here is one claiming that “The Skype for Linux alpha does not have all the features that will be released into the final version.”

    • Intel Developer Has Been Working On Systemd Support For Chrome OS

      Google’s Chrome OS currently relies upon Upstart as its init system, but work done by an Intel developer is pushing towards systemd support.

    • The Linux Setup – Jerry Bezencon, Linux Lite

      My name is Jerry Bezencon and I’m a technology consultant, investor, programmer and promoter of/advocate for free and open source software.

    • Microsoft ordered to fix ‘excessively intrusive, insecure’ Windows 10

      A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.

      The warning comes from the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), an independent data privacy watchdog with the power to levy fines against companies. The CNIL has been investigating Windows 10 since its launch and has now drawn up a damning list of criticisms.

      “The CNIL has decided to issue a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to comply with the Act within three months,” said the group on Wednesday.

      “The purpose of the notice is not to prohibit any advertising on the company’s services but, rather, to enable users to make their choice freely, having been properly informed of their rights. It has been decided to make the formal notice public due to, among other reasons, the seriousness of the breaches and the number of individuals concerned.”

  • Server

    • Containers rated more secure than conventional apps

      Containers are more secure than apps running on a bare OS and organisations that like not being hacked therefore need to seriously consider a move, according to analyst firm Gartner.

    • Evolution of Linux Containers and Future

      Linux containers are an operating system level virtualization technology for providing multiple isolated Linux environments on a single Linux host. Unlike virtual machines (VMs), containers do not run dedicated guest operating systems. Rather, they share the host operating system kernel and make use of the guest operating system system libraries for providing the required OS capabilities. Since there is no dedicated operating system, containers start much faster than VMs.

    • 10 Essential Skills for Novice, Junior and Senior SysAdmins

      As the world evolves for systems administrators, “Linux is exploding with new ideas and it’s a little scary …,” as commenter Mike Tarkowski put it.

      Keeping up with emerging technologies in cloud computing such as OpenStack will be key to navigating this changing landscape, according to Randy Russell, director of certification for Red Hat.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 397: CoreOS Update
    • SJVN Talks FOSS, Linux, Microsoft & More…

      The official Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols LinkedIn page says, “I’ve written over 9,000 articles on business and technology subjects. Highlights include the first popular news story about the web and the first Linux benchmarks. My articles range from features to reviews to OpEd to news reporting.”

      A large percentage of those articles have been about Linux and FOSS, so it was logical for us to ring up SJVN (as he is commonly known) and ask him what’s the biggest news about FOSS so far in 2016, and what we can expect in the rest of the year.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • GSoC Update: Tinkering with KIO

        Secondly, the ioslave is now completely independent from Dolphin, or any KIO application for that matter. This means it works exactly the same way across the entire suite of KIO apps. Given that at one point we were planning to make the ioslave fully functional only with Dolphin, this is a major plus point for the project.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Writing an ebook about usability?

        I write more about this on my Coaching Buttons blog, that I’m thinking about writing an ebook. Actually, it’s several ebooks. But the one that applies here is Open Source Usability.

      • GNOME Mutter 3.21.4 Released WIth New Screen Capture API, NVIDIA vRAM Robustness

        Various GNOME software components were checked in today in preparation for this week’s GNOME 3.21.4 development release.

        When it comes to the Mutter 3.21.4 compositor / window manager release, there are a few new features on top of fixes. This 3.21.4 release includes the frame-buffer / display work I talked about this morning that should allow multiple monitor setups to have different DPIs, among other design improvements. There is also improved X11 to/from Wayland copy/paste interaction, support for the NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension, a screen capture API has been added to Mutter itself, and various other fixes/improvements.

      • Mutter 3.21.4

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Linux Top 3: Network Security Toolkit, Untangle NG Firewall and IPFire

        There is no shortage of Linux distributions that provide a platform for security researcher to conduct various security research. Among them is the Network Security Toolkit (NST), which was recently updated to version 24-7977. The 24 is a referenced to Fedora, which NST is based on.

        Aside from simply integrating existing tools, NST goes a step further and provides a number of innovative capabilities including a new Multi-Traceroute (MTR) networking tool.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 3 Released

        Ludwig Nussel has announced the release today of the third alpha release for the forthcoming openSUSE “Leap” 42.2 update.

        OpenSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 finishes up the merge of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 components, updates to GNOME, KDE Plasma 5.7 integration, and various other changes.

      • openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha3 released
      • SUSE LLC’s SUSE Manager

        SUSE Manager is a open-source IT management solution with a centralized console for managing multiple Linux distributions, hardware platforms (x86, IBM Power Systems and z Systems), as well as physical, virtual and cloud environments. SUSE says that the solution helps customers reduce the complexities of managing their IT infrastructures, a key advantage as customers look to cut costs and increase the responsiveness required to adopt DevOps and hybrid cloud solutions.

      • Tally ERP 9 on Linux

        Recently we implemented Tally ERP 9 solution for Antico Pumps. That itself is not interesting, the interesting part is they are using LTSP Fat client system on openSUSE. They have only one server from which all their client computers boot over the network, the clients do not have hard disk, client OS with all softwares they need including wine(Tally is Windows only software), as well as users’ data resides on the server. Once the client boots all the local resources are used so single low power server can be used to serve many clients.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Interoute gets certification from Red Hat

        Interoute was named a Certified Cloud and Service Provider by Red Hat for its networked cloud infrastructure platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC).

      • Interoute becomes first European Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider with Red Hat Cloud Access Designation

        Interoute, owner operator of a global cloud services platform and one of Europe’s largest networks, has today announced that it has been named a Certified Cloud and Service Provider by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, for its global networked cloud infrastructure platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC).

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Microsoft Privacy Violations, Fedora: Season’s Pick

          Topping today’s Linux news is the wrist slapping of Microsoft by French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés for excessive spying. Back in Linuxland, openSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 and Mint 18 Xfce Beta were released for early testers. Bruce Byfield compares Linux and Windows users and Dedoimedo found another distribution he likes. VarGuy Christopher Tozzi ran down five Open Source projects that didn’t work out and Sam Varghese scolds Linux users for expecting Final quality out of Alpha releases.

        • Fedora 24 – And we represent!

          I am pleased. I am really pleased. Fedora 24 delivers an excellent, modern experience. Such a refreshing departure from all the sadness I had to deal with it in the last two months. While it’s not aimed at new users and does not offer D2D fun right away, Fedora still managed to give a most satisfying and a highly consistent experience. With a little bit of tweaking, it’s superb.

          Looking across the board, we have good networking support overall with a permanent workaround for Realtek woes, good smartphone support, stability, speed, battery life, excellent hardware compatibility, a much improved package management system. After pimping, the fun extends to multimedia and some extra customization. And Gnome isn’t half as bad as it used to be. Really lovely.

          There are some small problems still, here and there, the chief amongst them being the ultra short support life of a typical Fedora release. But then, just look at my CentOS 7.2 reviews, the recent Gnome and Xfce ones. You get pretty much the same experience plus a whooping 10 years of support. That’s what I’ve always been waiting for in Linux. Anyhow, Fedora 24 is a very good summer release. 9/10, and I’ve had a lot of fun sorting things out, because they remained sorted out, there are no silly errors, and the network is solid and stable. Linux as it should be. This is your pick for this season. Enjoy.

        • Fedora APAC FAD KL 2016

          Fedora APAC budget panning FAD 2016 was held on 9th-10th of July 2016 in Malaysia. I was there with Fedora ambassadors from other countries within APAC region.

        • Search for Code in Pagure

          I was trying to get into code search in Pagure, thing that I land up on got really interesting and amazing. If you want to have a code searching mechanism in your website you need to look into something called Indexing.

          The way search happens in some E-commerce sites like Amazon or be it the search happening on Google, with Google its web scrapping and then indexing on the results. The point being the response time , while you are searching for something you get results in few microseconds.

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible builds: week 62 in Stretch cycle

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The Ubuntu-powered BQ Aquaris M10 tablet: Almost amazing

            BQ Aquaris M10, the first Ubuntu-powered tablet to ship, has some flaws, but the fact that it runs traditional Linux desktop apps will make many Linux users happy

          • Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition Review – The King of All Ubuntu Phones

            It has been one year since our previous review of an Ubuntu Phone, namely examining the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, and the time has come for us to take a look at the best handset powered by Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system that you can buy right now, the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition.

          • Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS released

            The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
            (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well
            as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

            As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated
            installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to
            be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and
            corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining
            stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

          • Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Released
          • Howdy, Ubuntu on Windows! An Intro From Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland

            Hi there! My name is Dustin Kirkland, a Linux user for nearly 20 years, and an open source developer for almost as long. I worked on Linux at IBM for most of a decade, on site at Red Hat for a bit, and now at Canonical for nearly another decade. I started at Canonical as an engineer on the Ubuntu Server team and eventually evolved into the product manager responsible for Ubuntu as a server and cloud platform. I’ve authored many open source utilities used by millions of Ubuntu users every day. Open source software is my passion, my heart, and my soul.

            I was working in Cape Town, South Africa when I received a strange call from a friend and colleague at Microsoft in January of 2016. The call was decorated with subtlety as he danced around the technology underpinning what you and I today know as “Ubuntu on Windows,” but without any detail. There was plenty of confusion. Confusion around exactly what we were talking about. Confusion about how this could even work. Confusion about how I should feel about this.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Xfce – BETA Release

              Linux Mint 18 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

            • Linux Mint 18 Sarah Xfce released in Beta

              So after the release of Linux Mint 18 sarah in the flavours of Cinnamon and MATE,now the team is focoused on working over other flavours too.As a result Xfce has been choosen to be the next flavour to be provided officially.

              So,If you were waiting for Linux Mint 18 to be available in Xfce DE(Desktop Environment) then Linux Mint team has started to roll the beta release of Sarah in Xfce DE. Linux Mint team announced the release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce Beta with some already known issues and workarounds too.This xfce edition features Xfce 4.12, MDM 2.0 and it is coming with Linux Kernel 4.4.

            • Linux Mint 18 Xfce beta is out

              While the release comes with the new X-Apps, the Mint-Y theme, new artwork, an Ubuntu 16.04 base, and version 4.4 of the Linux kernel, it still runs Xfce 4.12 and MDM 2.0, both of which were present in Mint 17.3. The reason Xfce and MDM are at the same versions is because they are the latest upstream versions. They’ll likely be updated with new point releases in the Mint 18 cycle.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Microsoft Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

    The only major negative for Microsoft in this report comes from the usual suspect: mobile. Microsoft phone revenue fell by 71 percent, for a dollar loss estimated by the Register to be $870 million. Even search advertising, which forever was a big loser for Redmond, saw in increase of over a half billion dollars.

  • Science

    • Something Is Causing Siberia’s Tundra to Literally Bubble Underground

      The frigid plains of northern Siberia are becoming a hotspot for mysterious geological phenomena. Over the past couple of years, sudden craters have been exploding from the permafrost-laden ground. Last month, we reported on a giant chasm in the Sakha Republic that looms so wide and deep, locals refer to it as a “gateway to the underworld.”

      Now, the frozen tundra on Siberia’s remote Belyy Island is home to the region’s newest aberration: eerie, rippling, underground bubbles.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • New Report: Problem Care Harms Almost One-Third of Rehab Hospital Patients

      Patients may go to rehabilitation hospitals to recover from a stroke, injury, or recent surgery. But sometimes the care makes things worse. In a government report published Thursday, 29 percent of patients in rehab facilities suffered a medication error, bedsore, infection or some other type of harm as a result of the care they received.

      Doctors who reviewed cases from a broad sampling of rehab facilities say that almost half of the 158 incidents they spotted among 417 patients were clearly or likely preventable.

      “This is the latest study over a long time period now that says we still have high rates of harm,” says Dr. David Classen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who developed the analytic tool used in the report to identify the harm to patients.

    • Free Trade Agreements Threaten Farmers’ Rights, Food Security, Group Says

      Small farmers around the world are threatened by new free trade agreements, a civil society group has argued. Those agreements go beyond the requirements of agreed international intellectual property rules and jeopardise the ability of small farmers to save, produce, and exchange seeds, the group said.

      GRAIN just published its latest opinion piece [pdf], part of its “Against the grain” series. This one focuses on the potential threat of free trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Asia.

    • The Significance Of Uruguay’s Win Over Philip Morris International

      The tobacco industry’s global efforts to use bilateral and multilateral agreements to challenge the spread of tobacco control measures such as trademark-minimising plain packages were dealt a significant blow last week when the World Bank dispute settlement body dismissed a case brought by Philip Morris against the government of Uruguay.The decision is seen a landmark for those who view the company as using test cases to continually challenge and delay public health protection measures and discourage other countries, particularly those with fewer resources, from strengthening their health regulations. Additionally, the case reasserted that trademarks are subject to government regulations and also illustrated the role that international organisations and actors can play in support of national governments defending their health measures.

    • After Japan Embraces ‘Sensational’ Anti-Vaxxer Report, HPV Vaccination Rates Collapse

      Just three years after the Japanese government withdrew support for a vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a new report finds the country’s girls are dramatically more vulnerable to contracting the cancerous disease. Japan’s decision was solely informed by one “sensationalized” report from a non-medical anti-vaccine activist group called Vaccine Victims, which is under investigation by the Japanese government.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Open Source Information Security Tool Aimed at MSSPs

      A Virginia software developer announced today the release of what’s billed as the first open source information security analytics tool for managed security services providers (MSSP) and enterprise.

      IKANOW says its new platform features multi-tenancy, enterprise scalability and is fully customizable.

    • Most companies still can’t spot incoming cyberattacks

      Four out of five businesses lack the required infrastructure or security professionals with relevant skills to spot and defend against incoming cyberattacks.

      According to a new report by US cybersecurity and privacy think tank Ponemon Institute on behalf of cybersecurity firm BrandProtect, 79 percent of cybersecurity professionals say that their organisations are struggling to monitor the internet for the external threats posed by hackers and cybercriminals.

    • HTTpoxy Flaw Re-emerges After 15 Years and Gets Fixed

      After lying dormant for years, flaws in the HTTP Proxy header used in programming languages and applications, such as PHP, Go and Python, have now been fixed.
      Some flaws take longer—a lot longer—than others to get fixed. The newly named HTTpoxy vulnerability was first discovered back in March 2001 and fixed in the open-source Perl programming language, but it has sat dormant in multiple other languages and applications until July 18.

      The HTTPoxy flaw is a misconfiguration vulnerability in the HTTP_PROXY variable that is commonly used by Common Gateway Interface (CGI) environment scripts. The HTTPoxy flaw could potentially enable a remotely exploitable vulnerability on servers, enabling an attacker to run code or redirect traffic. The flaw at its core is a name space conflict between two different uses for a server variable known as HTTP Proxy.

    • Hack The World

      Currently HackerOne has 550+ customers, has paid over $8.9 million in bounties, and fixed over 25,000 vulnerabilities, which makes for a safer Internet.

    • EU aims to increase the security of password manager and web server software: KeePass and Apache chosen for open source audits [“pyrrhic because of Keepass : flushing the audit money down the toilet on MS based cruft” -iophk]

      For the FOSSA pilot project to improve the security of open source software that my colleague Max and I proposed, the European Commission sought your input on which tools to audit.

      The results are now in: The two overwhelming public favorites were KeePass (23%) and the Apache HTTP Server (19%). The EU has decided to follow these recommendations and audit both of these software projects for potential security issues.

    • KeeThief – A Case Study in Attacking KeePass Part 2

      The other week I published the “A Case Study in Attacking KeePass” post detailing a few notes on how to operationally “attack” KeePass installations. This generated an unexpected amount of responses, most good, but a few negative and dismissive. Some comments centered around the mentality of “if an attacker has code execution on your system you’re screwed already so who cares“. Our counterpoint to this is that protecting your computer from malicious compromise is a very different problem when it’s joined to a domain versus isolated for home use. As professional pentesters/red teamers we’re highly interested in post-exploitation techniques applicable to enterprise environments, which is why we started looking into ways to “attack” KeePass installations in the first place. Our targets are not isolated home users.

    • Giuliani calls for cybersecurity push

      Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani made a surprise appearance at the BlackBerry Security Summit, warning of the rapid growth of cybercrime and cyberterrorism.

      Cybercrime and cyberterrorism are both growing at rates between 20% and 40%, said Giuliani, who made a brief return from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to speak at BlackBerry’s New York event.

      “Think of it like cancer. We can’t cure it… but if we catch it early we can put it into remission,” he said. The quicker you can spot an attack, the less chance there is of loss.

    • Notorious Hacker ‘Phineas Fisher’ Says He Hacked The Turkish Government

      A notorious hacker has claimed responsibility for hacking Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, and stealing more than 300,000 internal emails and other files.

      The hacker, who’s known as Phineas Fisher and has gained international attention for his previous attacks on the surveillance tech companies FinFisher and Hacking Team, took credit for breaching the servers of Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party or AKP.

      “I hacked AKP,” Phineas Fisher, who also goes by the nickname Hack Back, said in a message he spread through his Twitter account on Wednesday evening.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Coup in Turkey has Thrown a Wrench in Uncle Sam’s “Pivot” Plan

      A failed coup in Turkey has changed the geopolitical landscape overnight realigning Ankara with Moscow while shattering Washington’s plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. Whether Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan staged the coup or not is of little importance in the bigger scheme of things. The fact is, the incident has consolidated his power domestically while derailing Washington’s plan to control critical resources and pipeline corridors from Qatar to Europe. The Obama administrations disregard for the national security interests of its allies, has pushed the Turkish president into Moscow’s camp, removing the crucial landbridge between Europe and Asia that Washington needs to maintain its global hegemony into the new century. Washington’s plan to pivot to Asia, surround and break up Russia, control China’s growth and maintain its iron grip on global power is now in a shambles. The events of the last few days have changed everything.

    • US-Led Airstrikes Kill as Many Civilians as Nice Attack–but Get No Front-Page Headlines in Major US Papers

      A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, the New York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, with the actual stories buried on pages A-16 and A-15, respectively.

      According to the London Telegraph (7/19/16), the airstrike killed “more than 85 civilians” after the “coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.” Eight families were represented among the dead, with victims “as young as three.” The Intercept (7/19/16) reported the death toll could end up being well over 100.

    • NYT’s ‘Journalistic Detachment’ Before Iraq War Is Detached From Reality

      One has to ask where the New York Times’ “journalistic detachment” was in 2002 and 2003. Rutenberg himself (2/18/03) in the lead up to the invasion reported on the use of “embedded journalists” for the first time since World War II. How “detached” from a war effort can journalists be if they are literally attached to an invading army?

      It’s a subtle piece of revisionism, but an important one: For those in center-left media, the impulse to rewrite their own role in selling the Iraq War is all too tempting–to turn Fox News into a cartoon propaganda outlet, and their own editorial drum-beating, war protester-mocking, aluminum tube-peddling and Dick Cheney water-carrying as “detached” journalism, simply calling balls and strikes. Certainly Ailes’ Fox News was more naked in its war promotion, but the New York Times, with its nominal liberal reputation and air of objectivity, was almost certainly more effective.

    • The ’28 Pages’ Explained

      It took fourteen years for the public to see this document…

    • Stomping the Embers of Turkey’s Democracy

      Whatever motivated Turkey’s failed coup, President Erdogan is exploiting the outcome to round up his political enemies and consolidate his dictatorial style rule, a challenge to the U.S. and E.U., as Alon Ben-Meir describes.

    • Failed Turkish Coup’s Big-Power Impact

      Turkey’s failed “coup” has shaken up the region’s geopolitics, splintering the powerful Turkish military, forcing President Erdogan to focus on internal “enemies,” and undermining the Syrian rebels next door, says ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

    • Orlando Shooter’s Statements Vindicate Ron Paul

      Despite all the articles and analysis in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting, one important fact seems to have been completely overlooked: the shooter validated Ron Paul’s warning that American military intervention in the Mideast causes terrorist attacks.

    • US-Backed Syrian ‘Moderates’ Behead 12-Year-Old

      The grisly beheading of a 12-year-old boy by U.S.-backed Syrian rebels spotlights Washington’s creepy excuses for arming “moderate” jihadists who are barely distinguishable from Al Qaeda and ISIS, reports Daniel Lazare.

    • Cashing in on a Failed Coup

      Mr. Erdogan, who has long attempted to create pliable state institutions, said that the coup was a “gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army”. The government arrested more than 6,000 people from the military and other state institutions. Saying that the Gülen movement had become a “cancer virus” on society, Mr. Erdogan pledged to purge its membership from positions of authority. The ultimate arbiter of who is or is not in the Gülen movement will be left to Mr. Erdogan’s own loyalists, who are likely to remove those who have long resisted the President’s own bid to monopolise power. Mr. Erdogan deliberately linked the Gülen movement to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the Turkish army has attacked in its bases in south-eastern Turkey and in Iraq. To call both the Gülen movement and the PKK ‘terrorists’ is a convenient way to sweep up all Erdogan enemies into one target and use the coup — a “gift from God” — as the opportunity to go after them with vehemence.

    • The Surprising Popularity of Military Coups

      The attempted military coup in Turkey and the possibility of a President Trump may have more Americans considering the military option.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Hottest ever June marks 14th month of record-breaking temperatures

      As the string of record-breaking global temperatures continues unabated, June 2016 marks the 14th consecutive month of record-breaking heat.

      According to two US agencies – Nasa and Noaa – June 2016 was 0.9C hotter than the average for the 20th century, and the hottest June in the record which goes back to 1880. It broke the previous record, set in 2015, by 0.02C.

      The 14-month streak of record-breaking temperatures was the longest in the 137-year record. And it has been 40 years since the world saw a June that was below the 20th century average.

    • Republicans in Cleveland Deny Climate Change as Arctic Snow Turns Pink

      Donald Trump’s reported top pick for energy secretary, oil and fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, declared on the Republican National Convention stage on Wednesday night, “Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded.”

      One day earlier, NASA had announced that this June was the hottest June on record, and that the same could be said for every month in 2016 — part of a long-term climate trend that has exacerbated geopolitical conflicts.

      The convention adopted a platform that rejected the Paris climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Meanwhile, researchers published a study indicating that climate change worsened a 2003 heat wave enough to kill 570 more people in Paris and London than would have died in an unchanged world.

      Rep. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, who will take the convention stage Thursday, told a Cleveland panel on Monday that “the earth is no longer warming and has not. For about the past 13 years, it has begun to cool.”

    • A Climate Change Op-Ed the Wall Street Journal Simply Doesn’t Need

      I bet not many high schoolers read the Wall Street Journal. And, as a recent graduate, I can tell you confidently it’s because we’re too busy with other things. And I don’t mean busy playing Pokémon Go. I guess I’d consider myself an outlier as an unusually high consumer of news and opinion, particularly from the Wall Street Journal. Either way, as a young person that will feel the worst effects of climate change as I get older, it’s extremely important to me that the issue receives the attention it deserves from mainstream media.

      The Wall Street Journal hasn’t exactly been at the forefront when it comes to leading fair and unbiased commentary on climate change, especially on its editorial page. That’s why I was truly shocked by the full page ad series about man-made climate change currently running. I saw the first ad that ran back on June 14 and those that have run every few days since. The shock came partly just because the ad existed, but the fact that it was actually slamming the Wall Street Journal for its overt climate denial was almost unbelievable. I dug deeper and learned through a piece by the Washington Post that only for a fee higher than it normally charges for ad space was the Journal willing to place the ads… not exactly equitable. Does the WSJ charge Big Oil more to run their ads?

    • Trump’s Killer Kids
    • Taxpayer Groups, Environmentalists, Students Call on Congress to End $4 Billion Annual Oil Industry Subsidies

      In an open letter sent to Congress today, a coalition of 40 national taxpayer, labor, environmental and other groups called on the federal government to repeal almost $4 billion in annual tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, calling them wasteful and lambasting Congress for subsidizing activities that will make climate change worse.

      The groups called on Senators to support the FAIR Energy Policy Act, which would slowly phase out nine special tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

      “Oil companies receive billions in tax breaks, despite being among the world’s largest and most profitable corporations,” the groups wrote. “For too long, America has subsidized the oil industry’s bottom line at middle class Americans’ expense.”

      Another law passed earlier this year revokes the wind industry’s production tax credit, and the FAIR Energy Policy Act would wind down some of the oil industry’s subsidies on the same schedule.

  • Finance

    • Why Public Needs Go Begging

      For decades, Americans have been sold on rugged individualism and told to disdain collectivism and community, a philosophy that has starved many public institutions and fattened up the few at the top, as Lawrence Davidson explains.

    • Barroso: from Europeanist to Global Banker

      Mr. Barroso’s appointment as Goldman Sachs non-executive chairman is shameful. As a former President of the European Commission, he should be held to higher ethical standards.

    • Sovereignty and responsibility after Brexit
    • US eyes quick post-Brexit trade deal with UK to get stalled TTIP moving

      The US is hoping that a quick trade and investment deal with the UK after it leaves the EU could kickstart the stalled negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has met increasing resistance on the continent.

      As well as serving the US’s purposes, such an agreement would be welcomed by the UK government as proof that it can recreate the necessary web of trade links post-Brexit.

      The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has just spent two days in the UK talking with the prime minister’s officials and with the new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, exploring what form such a UK-US trade deal might take.

      As The Guardian explains: “The UK cannot formally sign any trade deals with other countries or trading blocs until it has left the EU, but it appears to be accepted that negotiations on the outline shape of such deals can start before that happens.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History

      Still, I wouldn’t have missed the film for the world. After all, it’s the first action movie that — as you’ll see from TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild’s piece today — has ever based itself in any way on a book I edited, in this case his classic King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. As a result, I left the theater filled with wild fantasies. (Even editors can dream, can’t they?) I began to imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomsky’s latest book, absorbed into a future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp. Or Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation. Or, in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevich’s writing on America’s twenty-first-century Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of Arabia — perhaps King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Top VP Pick Lets Big Banks Know He’s in Their Corner

      Sounding another alarm for progressives wary of the Democratic establishment’s support for Wall Street, the man said to be leading the pack of potential Hillary Clinton running mates—Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine—has just this week sent a clear message to big banks: He’s in their corner.

      Kaine, who is reportedly Bill Clinton’s favorite for the vice presidential slot, signed onto two letters on Monday pushing for financial deregulation—letters that show the Clinton camp “how Kaine could be an asset with banking interests on the fundraising trail,” according to David Dayen at The Intercept on Wednesday.

      The first missive, signed by 16 Democrats and every Republican senator, calls on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to exempt community banks and credit unions from certain regulations.

    • Tim Kaine, Possible Hillary Clinton Pick for Vice President, Goes to Bat for Banks

      Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, considered a leading contender for the Democratic vice presidential nomination, has spent this week signaling to the financial industry that he’ll go to bat for them.

      On Monday, Kaine signed onto two letters, one to federal banking regulators and the other to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, urging them to loosen regulations on certain financial players. The timing of the letters, sent while Kaine is being vetted for the top of the ticket, could show potential financial industry donors that he is willing to serve as an ally on their regulatory issues.

      In the letters, Kaine is offering to support community banks, credit unions, and even large regional banks. While separate from the Wall Street mega-banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, these financial institutions often partner with the larger industry to fight regulations and can be hostile to government efforts to safeguard the public, especially if it crimps their profits.

      They also represent a key source of donor funds, one that has trended away from Democrats. The Independent Community Bankers of America have given 74 percent of their $873,949 in donations this cycle to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Regional banks like PNC Financial Services, SunTrust Bank, and First Republic Bank, have given even higher percentages to the Republicans.

    • Saudi Arabia’s PR Machine Uses the 28 Pages to Blame Iran for 9/11 Attacks

      Last Friday the U.S. government finally released 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report that detail possible ties between the Saudi Arabian government and the 9/11 hijackers.

      The document lists various forms of assistance provided by Saudi agents to the hijackers, including help finding a flight school and various forms of financial support when the hijackers arrived in the United States. Many of the findings in the report have not been fully vetted as several of the Saudi agents named in the 28 pages have refused to cooperate.

      But that has not stopped Saudi-funded lobbyists and media outlets from claiming that the disclosure of the 28 pages ends all speculation about the role of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 terror attacks. Several outlets controlled by Saudi Arabia’s vast public relations machine are trumpeting the document as a vindication that closes the door on any suggestion that the Saudi government had any ties to the 9/11 terrorists.

      “The question of Saudi involvement in 9/11 should be entirely put to rest,” said Fran Townsend, a former Bush administration official, in a 28 pages-related video posted on social media this week. The video was produced by Focus Washington, an interview series managed by Qorvis MSL, a lobbying firm retained by the Saudi government to influence American policymakers. The Saudi Embassy Twitter account distributed the video.

    • This Is What a Broken Party Looks Like

      Cruz doesn’t disagree with Trump. He thinks Trump is a pretender to the cause, or he remains angry at how Trump personally insulted him, his wife and his father – or both.

      The person who really disagrees with Trump is his vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, who said in December that “calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.” In 2006 he concluded “it is not logistically possible to round up 12 million illegal aliens.” He supports NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). And he disavowed negative campaigning 25 years ago.

    • VP Choice Pence Reaffirms Israel Devotion

      Donald Trump may alarm Washington’s foreign policy establishment with his “America First” rhetoric but Mike Pence, Trump’s VP choice, reaffirms a commitment to the traditional “Israel First” doctrine, as Sam Husseini shows.

      [...]

      I’ve heard him say that before. Being a journalist based in the Washington, D.C. area, I try to ask tough questions of political figures when I can. Perhaps my favorite question is some variation of “do you acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons?” I’ve asked this of many political figures and virtually no one has given me a straightforward response.

    • In the US, Money Talks When It Comes to Israel

      The grubby underside of US electoral politics is on show once again as the Democratic and Republican candidates prepare to fight it out for the presidency. And it doesn’t get seamier than the battle to prove how loyal each candidate is to Israel.

      New depths are likely to be plumbed this week at the Republican convention in Cleveland, as Donald Trump is crowned the party’s nominee. His platform breaks with decades of United States policy to effectively deny the Palestinians any hope of statehood.

    • This Anti-Feminist Leader Is Very Pleased With The GOP Platform

      As delegates at the Republican National Convention approved a platform banning women from combat, restricting a woman’s right to an abortion in cases of rape or incest, and without any mention of equal pay or paid family leave, Phyllis Schlafly looked on with a huge smile.

      The notorious 91-year-old anti-feminist and RNC delegate sat in her wheelchair in the back of Missouri’s delegation, craning to get a look at Donald Trump as he entered the arena for the first time on Wednesday night. During the 1970s, Schlafly led the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to ban discrimination based on gender. Schlafly, who has participated in every convention since 1952, told ThinkProgress that Trump is the candidate to best represent the needs of women from the White House. In fact, she said, there’s no need for a woman in the Oval Office at all.

    • Folha’s Journalistic Fraud Far Worse Than We Reported Yesterday: A Smoking Gun Emerges

      On Wednesday, The Intercept published an article documenting the extraordinary journalistic fraud committed by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, in radically distorting the views of Brazilians on the key questions of the country’s political crisis. Specifically, Folha blasted headlines to the country announcing that 50 percent of Brazilians now want the extremely unpopular interim president, Michel Temer, to complete Dilma’s term and remain as president through 2018, while only 3 percent favor new elections and only 4 percent want both Dilma and Temer to resign. That was squarely at odds with prior polling showing vast majorities opposed to Temer and favoring new elections. As we documented, the actual polling data — which Folha’s polling firm, Datafolha, only published days after the article — did not remotely support Folha’s claims.

      But after our article was published, much more evidence was found — through amazing collaborative work by internet sleuths — showing how extreme Folha’s behavior was, including the discovery of a smoking gun proving that it was much worse than we knew when we published yesterday. Do not let the fact that this story involves polling data and methodologies obscure how significant this episode is:

      Weeks before the conclusion of the country’s most virulent political conflict in at least a generation — the final Senate vote on Dilma’s impeachment — Folha, Brazil’s largest and most influential newspaper, not only distorted, but actively concealed, crucial polling data that completely negated what they “reported”: data that establishes that a large majority of Brazilians want “interim President” Michel Temer to resign, not remain in office as the paper claimed. Put simply, this is one of the most remarkable, flagrant, and serious cases of journalistic malfeasance one can imagine.

      [...]

      Most amazingly of all, this was all done in service of denying the need for democracy: deceiving the country into believing that most Brazilians support the person who seized power undemocratically and that there is no need for elections, when in fact the majority of the country wants this “interim President” to quit and new elections to be held to choose the legitimate leader.

      As we noted yesterday, it’s impossible to say whether Folha acted with deliberate intent to deceive or with extreme journalistic ineptitude and recklessness, although evidence suggesting the former is certainly more abundant now than it was yesterday. But motives aside, what is now beyond debate is that Folha misled the country in fundamental ways about this generation’s most consequential political conflict, and hid from the public vital evidence that they only admitted existed once they got caught red-handed doing all this.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Not censorship but responsible journalism is the need of the hour

      Even as newspaper printing resumed in the Kashmir valley on Wednesday after four days, a group of journalists who gathered here for a panel discussion condemned the alleged ban as a gag on the freedom of speech and expression.

      They also said that coverage by a certain section of the media was alienating the local population even further.

      During the panel discussion, Rahul Jalali, president of Press Club of India said, “It was one of the most bizarre incidents of censorship that took place in the country. As of now no assurance has been given to the journalists that they are free to function and would not be touched hereafter.”

    • Editors’ body condemns ‘undeclared censorship’ on newspapers in Kashmir
    • Does Delhi media care enough for Kashmiri media?

      Early this year, in February, the who’s who of Delhi journalism had assembled at the Press Club of India, at Raisina Road, to defend their right to report. The reason was the attack on journalists who were covering the Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition case at the Patiala House Court.

      Almost five months later, a motley group of journalists gathered at the same venue for same reasons – except this time, the attack was not on Delhi media but a ban on Kashmiri media. Barely 10 journalists sat on a dharna at about 1pm at the press club with the placard: “Journalists with Kashmir”.

    • As Constitutional Referendum Nears, Thailand Intensifies Censorship

      Thailand’s military-backed government has authorized the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) to shut down TV and radio stations which are found guilty of broadcasting programs that threaten national security. Furthermore, the junta gave NBTC officials immunity from legal accountability.

      Human rights groups believe this ruling aims to prevent activists and other political forces from campaigning against the approval of a draft constitution in a national referendum scheduled for August 7.

    • Stop censorship of student journalists

      Censorship must be resisted on all fronts, at all times, wherever conflict occurs. Nowhere is that message more important than in our schools, and that’s why we applaud a newly re-introduced bill aimed at preventing administrative censorship of student newspapers.

      The bipartisan legislation sponsored by Assembly members Gail Phoebus, R-Sussex, and Troy Singleton, D-Burlington, would be similar to a Maryland initiative that has already been signed into law. It is rooted in concerns that oversensitive school officials have been preventing student publications from using certain stories of which they disapprove. That’s insufficient cause to ignore First Amendment principles, and the bill would forbid any requirement that all content be subject to administrative review before publication.

    • SABC censorship runs deeper than protest ban, says fired journalist

      THE SABC’s protest footage ban is just one of a slew of policies and “draconian anti-journalistic practices” at the public broadcaster, one of the fired journalists said on Thursday.

      “You can withdraw the protest policy but you still have an environment that is not conducive to the practice of ethical journalism in the SABC,” Thandeka Gqubule said.

    • Serbia populists exhibit criticism to fight censorship claim

      Serbia’s ruling populists have created an exhibition highlighting media critical of their leader and his government in a bid to counter mounting allegations of censorship in the Balkan country, which is seeking EU membership

    • Onlinecensorship.org Launches in Spanish

      We are excited to announce that Onlinecensorship.org, a joint project of EFF and Visualizing Impact, is now available in Spanish. Onlinecensorship.org seeks to expose how social media sites moderate user-generated content. By launching the platform in the second-most widely spoken language in the world, we hope to reach several million more individuals who’ve experienced censorship on social media. Now, more users than ever can report on content takedowns from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube and use Onlinecensorship.org as a resource to appeal unfair takedowns.

    • Censorship in Venezuela: Over 370 Internet Addresses Blocked

      In Venezuela, at least 372 web portals have been blocked by main Internet service providers (ISP). Also, 43 Internet domains have been blocked by these same providers, both public and private.

      Of those, 44 percent are web pages related to black market dollars. An additional 19 percent of the pages are news media and an additional 12 percent feature blogs critical of Nicolás Maduro’s administration.

    • The South African Broadcasting Corporation in court over censorship saga
    • The SABC makes U-turn on its ‘censorship’ ruling
    • Court order prohibits SABC from implementing ‘the censorship decision’
    • SABC interdicted from protest censorship
    • Milo Yiannopoulos, rightwing writer, permanently banned from Twitter
    • Twitter Bans Milo Yiannopoulos for Leading Abuse Campaign Against Actress

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Edward Snowden’s New Research Aims to Keep Smartphones from Betraying Their Owners

      In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist, and injuring two others.

      Syrian forces may have found Colvin by tracing her phone, according to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this month. Syrian military intelligence used “signal interception devices to monitor satellite dish and cell phone communications and trace journalists’ locations,” the suit says.

      In dangerous environments like war-torn Syria, smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human rights workers, and activists. But at the same time they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location.

      National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been working with prominent hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang to solve this problem. The pair are developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. They argue that a smartphone’s user interface can’t be relied to tell you the truth about that state of its radios.

    • The Secret Documents That Detail How Patients’ Privacy is Breached

      When the federal government takes the rare step of fining medical providers for violating the privacy and security of patients’ medical information, it issues a press release and posts details on the web.

      But thousands of times a year, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resolves complaints about possible violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act quietly, outside public view. It sends letters reminding providers of their legal obligations, advising them on how to fix purported problems, and, sometimes, prodding them to make voluntary changes.

    • Internet of Things in healthcare: What’s next for IoT technology in the health sector

      Internet of Things technology holds the potential to revolutionise the healthcare industry, but not before overcoming barriers of security and data ownership.

      Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any physical object embedded with technology capable of exchanging data and is pegged to create a more efficient healthcare system in terms of time, energy and cost. One area where the technology could prove transformative is in healthcare – with analysts at MarketResearch.com claiming the sector will be worth $117 million by 2020.

    • The Snooper’s Charter still has an encryption problem: Parliament continues to grapple with end-to-end encryption in the Investigatory Powers Bill

      With everything else that has been happening in the UK and abroad over the past month you could be excused for missing a House of Lords debate over the Investigatory Powers Bill last week.

      With the majority of the country distracted by Brexit and the upheaval among the two major political parties – including the former Home Secretary and architect of the controversial Bill Theresa May becoming the UK Primer Minister – this vital legislation has not been quite so high on the news agenda.

      However, discussions around encryption at the 13 July Investigatory Powers Bill committee stage debate could have a huge impact on personal and enterprise data security – in particular the ability to ban end-to-end encryption. You can read the entire debate here.

    • Snooper’s Charter: What you need to know about the Investigatory Powers Bill

      Since December last year, the government’s Investigatory Powers Bill has sparked debate over the balance between privacy concerns and national security in the post-Snowden era, with controversy around encryption, bulk data and hacking being aimed at the former home secretary Theresa May.

    • This Guy Trains Computers to Find Future Criminals

      When historians look back at the turmoil over prejudice and policing in the U.S. over the past few years, they’re unlikely to dwell on the case of Eric Loomis. Police in La Crosse, Wis., arrested Loomis in February 2013 for driving a car that was used in a drive-by shooting. He had been arrested a dozen times before. Loomis took a plea, and was sentenced to six years in prison plus five years of probation.

      The episode was unremarkable compared with the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police, which were captured on camera and distributed widely online. But Loomis’s story marks an important point in a quieter debate over the role of fairness and technology in policing. Before his sentence, the judge in the case received an automatically generated risk score that determined Loomis was likely to commit violent crimes in the future.

    • Revealed: Rail companies’ plans to track your movements and make you pay more to stand on packed trains

      Rail passengers could be forced to pay more to stand on packed trains as the country’s biggest train ticket website plans to monitor their movements to “ease congestion”.

      Clare Gilmartin, chief executive of the Trainline, told The Telegraph that the website was planning to use GPS technology installed within its app constantly to let rail firms update ticket prices, under a scheme which could be rolled out in less than two years.

    • European court rights adviser recommends ‘strict’ guidelines on UK spying laws

      UK GOVERNMENT plans to retain communications data do not sit well with the European Court of Justice, which has warned that such plans should not be rushed through.

      Advocate general Henrik Saugmandsgaard Øe and his peers have issued their opinion on British and Swedish plans to make communications providers sit on customer data for an extended period of time.

    • EU Court Of Justice Advisor Suggests UK’s Last Surveillance Bill May Be Legal, But Hints That The New One Might Not Be

      Over at the EU Court of Justice, the Advocate General has weighed in on the legal challenge to DRIPA, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIPA) that was rushed through the UK Parliament almost exactly two years ago. The law was challenged by a group made up of cross-party Parliament Members, and the Advocate General has sort of punted on the issue. If you don’t recall, the Advocate General’s role in the EU Court of Justice is basically to make a recommendation for the actual rulings. The court doesn’t have to (and doesn’t always) follow the Advocate General’s suggestion, but does so often enough that the opinions certainly carry a lot of weight and suggest what’s likely to happen. In this case, the opinion stated that, even though the court had previously rejected the EU-wide Data Retention Directive as intruding on privacy — the UK’s data retention law might be okay.

      The opinion basically says some data retention laws may be okay if the powers are “circumscribed by strict safeguards” set up by the national courts.

    • Marines, NSA To Bring Smartphones To Rifle Squad

      The Marine Corps and National Security Agency have joined forces to bring cellphones to the battlefield by 2019. Working with the NSA’s new Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program should let the Marines acquire cutting-edge civilian technology swiftly without sacrificing security, said Maj. Kevin Shepherd of Marine Corps Systems Command.

    • From revolutionary art to dystopian comics: Ganzeer on Snowden, censorship and global warming

      It is 949 years since a global flood of biblical proportions. The world is reliant upon a vast grid of solar panels to power its factories around the clock. Night-time has been consigned to legend. In the aftermath of environmental catastrophe, the world’s clean water is now confined to a network of towers built by the world’s richest man.

      While the dystopian scenario of Ganzeer’s debut graphic novel, The Solar Grid, is science fiction, the story is rooted in history, political and personal. The Egyptian artist, best known for murals that championed the spirit of the 2011 Cairo revolution, took inspiration from his first sighting of the Nile’s Aswan dam. As child, he felt awe. Today, Ganzeer sees the environmental impact of the dam on Egypt as emblematic of humanity’s adverse impact across the whole planet.

    • Former NSA Official Sentenced to 12 Years in Death of Adopted Special-Needs Son

      A former division chief for the National Security Agency was sentenced to prison on Tuesday for causing the 2014 death of his 3-year-old adopted special needs son by throwing him against a wall, PEOPLE confirms.

    • For The Third Time, Whatsapp Blocked (And Then Unblocked) By Brazilian Judges For Failing To Decrypt

      What’s up with Brazilian judges not understanding Whatsapp? In the last few months, judges keep freaking out that Whatsapp messages are end to end encrypted, and that the company is unable to decrypt them at all. On Tuesday morning, the news broke that Judge Daniela Barbosa had ordered Whatsapp blocked yet again, along with a $50,000 per day fine until it decrypts information that it cannot decrypt. While various ISPs set about blocking the extremely popular app, as with the previous times, it took only a few hours for a higher court to suspend Barbosa’s ruling, and to make the app available again.

      Of course, this is the third time that Brazilian courts have done this particular dance. It happened in December and again in May. And who can forget the time in March where a Brazilian judge ordered a Facebook exec arrested over the same issue (Facebook owns Whatsapp).

    • Microsoft kills P2P Skype, native OS X, Linux clients [Ed: Microsoft is making it easier to do mass surveillance; will record all your calls, not just keystrokes.]

      In the same month as Microsoft announced its alpha WebRTC-based Skype for Linux, Redmond has put it and the native OS X Skype client on the end-of-life list due to a rebuild for Skype that will replace its peer-to-peer architecture with cloud-centric code.

    • Forget Trump: Peter Thiel Is So Dangerous and Fascinating You Have to Watch Him Tonight

      Thiel has also postured as a libertarian, and even as his ideology shifts toward something more nihilistic — The Economist now calls him a “corporate Nietzschean” — he continues to rail against government programs like Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile, he is chairman and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a mass-surveillance-software company that makes a good deal of its money selling to the government; Palantir’s clients reportedly include the Department of Defense (including the NSA and various military branches), the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA. Thiel is, inexplicably, pro-monopoly. And don’t forget that Peter Thiel believes death is nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Florida police shoot black man lying down with arms in air

      An autistic man’s therapist was shot and wounded by police in Florida while lying on the street with his hands in the air.

      Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, was trying to get his 27-year-old patient back to a facility from where he wandered, North Miami assistant police chief Neal Cuevas told the Miami Herald.

      Cuevas said police – who were responding to reports of a man threatening to shoot himself – ordered Kinsey and the patient, who was sitting in the street playing with a toy truck, to lie on the ground.

      Kinsey, who is black, lay down and put his hands up while trying to get his patient to comply. An officer fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, Cuevas said. No weapon was found on either Kinsey or his patient.

    • American Academy Of Pediatrics Claims Broad Consensus On Violent Media Effect That Doesn’t Remotely Exist

      Search through all of our stories about the supposed link between violent movies and games and real world violence by those that enjoy them, and you should come away with the impression that, at the very least, the science isn’t settled on the issue. The more specific impression you should get is that violent media might — might — have a short-term impact on behavior, but that there isn’t anything like a general agreement on the long term effects, which is obviously the vastly more important question.

    • Kudos To Senator Leahy: Fighting To Keep Privacy & Civil Liberties Board From Being Hobbled

      While I think that Senator Patrick Leahy has been ridiculously and dangerously wrong on copyright issues for years, he’s actually quite good on a number of other issues that are of interest to us here at Techdirt. In particular, he’s been a strong supporter of civil liberties on the internet and protecting the 4th Amendment (it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t see how his desired copyright policies might undermine some of that, but that’s another post for another day). Thankfully, his latest move is to push back against a plan by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees to strip the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB).

      Back in May, we wrote about this effort, whereby Congress appeared to be deliberately stripping powers from the PCLOB in order to limit the board’s ability to actually make sure that the intelligence community wasn’t abusing its powers. Senator Leahy has now sent a fairly direct letter to Senate Intelligence chair Senator Richard Burr and vice chair Senator Dianne Feinstein calling out how terrible this plan is.

    • Turkey coup attempt: Crackdown toll passes 50,000

      More than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs by Turkey’s government in the wake of last week’s failed coup.

      The purge of those deemed disloyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan widened on Tuesday to include teachers, university deans and the media.

      The government says they are allied to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who denies claims he directed the uprising.

    • Turkey Coup: Erdogan declares three-month state of emergency

      Turkey’s president has declared a state of emergency for three months following a failed coup to oust his government.

      President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the measure was being taken to counter threats to Turkish democracy. He said the move was not intended to curb basic freedoms.

      Speaking after a meeting of the National Security Council in Ankara lasting nearly five hours, he said the state of emergency was needed “to remove this threat as soon as possible”.

    • In Secret Email, CIA’s Chief Lawyer Mocked ‘Pesky Little International Obligations’

      Bush administration lawyers made the law into a joke, and no one has been held accountable.

      In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government has released several documents that shed new light on Bush administration lawyers’ attempts to evade the absolute prohibition on torture and abuse of prisoners. The documents concern the widely-discredited legal process that purported to authorize the CIA to commit war crimes and include shocking new details.

      One revelation is an email by John Rizzo, the CIA’s acting general counsel, which displays the ways in which government lawyers actively undermined the laws they were sworn to uphold. Rizzo, a key architect of the torture program, has claimed, “[M]y major concern as the chief lawyer was: Were these techniques legal?”

    • Cleveland Police to RNC Protesters: Don’t Hide Your Faces (Facial Recognition)

      Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams issued a warning to an undisclosed number of masked protesters outside the Republican National Convention: “If you are a member of a group that causes you to have to hide your face, then you probably need a different cause.”

    • Welcoming Constitutional Expert David Cole as Our New National Legal Director

      Cole will oversee the ACLU’s Supreme Court practice and the work of the organization’s nearly 300 lawyers

      We’re excited to tap David Cole, a leading constitutional law expert and litigator, to become our National Legal Director, leading our Supreme Court practice and overseeing the work of the organization’s nearly 300 lawyers. The ACLU has participated in nearly every landmark case involving political expression, freedom of the press, speech on the internet, and separation of church and state in the U.S. Supreme Court during the last 96 years. Cole will replace Steven R. Shapiro, who has served as National Legal Director for a quarter century.

      In his role as National Legal Director, Cole will direct a program that includes approximately 1,400 state and federal lawsuits on a broad range of civil liberties issues. He will directly manage 100 ACLU staff attorneys in New York headquarters, oversee the organization’s U.S. Supreme Court docket, and provide leadership to more than 200 staff attorneys who work in ACLU affiliate offices in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. Another 1,700 volunteer cooperating attorneys throughout the country are engaged in ACLU litigation. With an annual headquarters budget of $140 million, and 1.3 million supporters, the ACLU is the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization.

    • Cornel West: Justice and Accountability are Necessary to End Tension over Killings by Police

      We discuss the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge and the recent nationwide protests against police brutality with Cornel West. Cornel West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary. “When I hear the authorities call for peace,” West says, “I say, yes, but it’s not the absence of tension. It’s got to be the presence of that justice and accountability.”

    • Terror, Tennis Balls and Tamir Rice

      Welcome to Cleveland, where the Republican National Convention (RNC) is underway. The RNC is a highly scripted, elaborately staged and lavishly publicly funded private party. Here, credentialed Republican delegates, most of them party activists from around the country, circulate within a militarized perimeter of what authorities have designated a “national special security event.” As such, the U.S. Secret Service is handed complete control of an area, in the case downtown Cleveland. The area is ringed with a temporary but imposing black steel fence, patrolled by the full spectrum of law enforcement, from local police to federal SWAT teams. Yet because Ohio has extremely lenient gun laws, people can “open carry” here. And they do. Scores of Trump supporters have proudly shown up with their guns at their sides, including semi-automatic AR-15s, walking the downtown streets.

      It is not a total free-for-all, however. Many things are banned: tennis balls, sleeping bags, selfie sticks and canned goods. To highlight the absurdity of the situation, the women’s peace organization Code Pink staged a demonstration at the security checkpoint to enter the RNC. In their bags, the dozen or so pink-clad women carried 500 pink and green tennis balls with the phrase “Ban Guns, Not Balls” written on them. They began tossing them to each other.

      A line of Cleveland police officers quickly formed and tried to encircle the protest. They started to confiscate the tennis balls. There was confusion, as one officer asked a superior, “What do we do with the balls?” “Put them in your pocket,” came the exasperated reply. The police aggressively expanded their line, pushing observers, and us journalists, farther away. We managed to dodge them and got in close to ask Code Pink member Chelsea Byers what was going on: “We’re here saying that it’s ridiculous that the RNC has banned tennis balls, and yet they continue to let open carry happen in these streets. If they’re concerned about safety, they should be taking the guns off of these streets, not banning toys.” To reinforce the Cleveland police, a large contingent of Indiana State Police showed up, then riot police were deployed. Finally, a phalanx of police on horseback arrived. All this for about 15 women and one man from Code Pink and their 500 tennis balls.

      The second evening of the RNC was about to begin. Thousands were packing into the Quicken Loans Arena. For the first time ever, an official from the National Rifle Association was invited to address the convention.

      Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told us at the protest, “We think that the NRA has, unfortunately, been setting the agenda for this entire nation, especially the Republican Party. It’s unfortunate that the NRA has so much power in this country. That’s why we see guns on our streets and people being shot every single day, every single hour of every single day.” Eventually, with all the tennis balls safely confiscated, the police marched away.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Tennessee Study Shows State Remains A Broadband Backwater Thanks To AT&T Lobbyists, Clueless Politicians, And Protectionist State Law

      We’ve talked at great lengths about how AT&T’s gruesomely cozy relationship with many state legislatures has severely damaged broadband expansion and adoption across huge swaths of the country. That’s particularly true in Tennessee, one of nineteen states where AT&T lobbyists have literally written protectionist state laws defending AT&T’s monopoly from broadband competition. AT&T’s goal has been to stop the rise of public/private partnerships, which have only emerged as a direct response to AT&T’s apathy.

      AT&T lobbyists have been happily getting such laws passed for fifteen years with little attention by the media. That began to change with the rise of efforts like Google Fiber, which more clearly illustrated how public/private partnerships have become essential in bringing broadband competition to countless areas incumbent ISPs deem “not profitable enough” to care about. Last year, the FCC finally woke up from its own long slumber on the subject, stating it would be preempting measures in two such state laws (in North Carolina and Tennessee) that hindered municipal broadband efforts from expanding.

      Tennessee’s response? To sue the FCC — claiming that state rights were being violated (letting AT&T write bad state law? Perfectly ok, though).

    • Internet 3.0: How we take back control from the giants

      AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data.

      These server farms are the engine rooms of the internet. Operated by some of the world’s most powerful companies, they process photos of our children, emails to our bosses and lovers, and our late-night searches. Such digital shards reveal far more of ourselves than we might like, and they are worth a lot of money. They are not only used to target advertising and sell stuff back to us, but also form the building blocks for a new generation of artificial intelligence that will determine the future of the web.

      “Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data – have lost control.

      The time has come to push back. Sambra is part of a growing movement to wrest back control over our digital lives by breaking the monopolies of the server farms and the people who own them. Tweak the technology on which the web runs and we can each keep our own little part of it in our pockets, they say – and determine who or what makes money out of who we are.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WHO Updates Patent Status Info For New Hepatitis C Medicines

      The World Health Organization has issued updated information on the patent status of hepatitis C medicines, including assessments of hurdles for affordable generic versions of latest drugs.

    • Quia timet, de minimus and Novartis v Hospira: Mr Justice Arnold speeds through Napp v Dr Reddy pain dispute

      The invention lay in the use of certain penetration-enhancing excipients which are solid at room temperature and were therefore thought to be of limited use in assisting diffusion out of the matrix into the skin. The patent disclosed that on melting and cooling, these excipients formed so called “supercooled melts”, which have a melting point above room temperature, but remain liquid after cooling to room temperature.

    • Trademarks

      • Miami Brewing Co. Sends Cease And Desist To M.I.A. Beer Co. Over Trademark Concerns

        We talk a lot about silly trademark disputes here at Techdirt. But the really infuriating trademark stories tend to deal with not just overly broad terms that have been granted marks by the USPTO, but terms that are so broad because they are simple geographic identifiers. The other aspect of trademark disputes that can be face-palm inducing are claims of confusion that are laughable in the extreme. The dispute we’re about to discuss mixes both of these, supercharging the frustration to dangerous levels.

      • Federal Court of Justice greenlights colour mark red

        In the ongoing dispute between the Sparkassen Group and Banco Santander, which led to the CJEU’s decision in cases C‑217/13 and C‑218/13, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has annulled the decision of the Federal Patent Court which invalidated Sparkassen’s contourless colour mark “red” and held that the mark had acquired distinctiveness at the time of the Federal Patent Court’s decision in 2015.

        Sparkassen Group has been using the colour red in connection with financial services, namely retail banking, in Germany since the 1960s. In 2002, it filed a trade mark application for the contourless colour “red” (HSK 13) for financial services, namely retail banking, which was granted – after an initial rejection – sometime in 2007. Banco Santander and Oberbank, two new entrants to the German retail banking market that also used the colour red in their home markets, filed for invalidity. In 2009, the German IPO (DPMA) dismissed the actions. On appeal, the Federal Patent Court referred several questions to the CJEU, which the CJEU answered in joined cases C-217/13 and C-218/13 in 2014.

      • US Justice Department Nails Three In Mass Mailing Trademark Scam

        US Justice Department Nails Three In Mass Mailing #Trademark Scam http://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/20/us-justice-department-nails-three-in-mass-mailing-trademark-scam/

    • Copyrights

      • Research and Remixes the Law Won’t Allow

        Some day, your life may depend on the work of a security researcher. Whether it’s a simple malfunction in a piece of computerized medical equipment or a malicious compromise of your networked car, it’s critically important that people working in security can find and fix the problem before the worst happens.

        And yet, an expansive United States law, passed in 1998 and emulated in legal codes all over the world, casts a dark legal cloud over the work of those researchers. It gives companies a blunt instrument with which to threaten that research, keeping potentially embarrassing or costly errors from seeing the light of day.

        That law is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Simply put, Section 1201 means that you can be sued or even jailed if you bypass digital locks on copyrighted works—from DVDs to software in your car—even if you are doing so for an otherwise lawful reason, like security testing.

      • EFF Lawsuit Takes on DMCA Section 1201: Research and Technology Restrictions Violate the First Amendment

        Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.

        EFF’s lawsuit, filed with co-counsel Brian Willen, Stephen Gikow, and Lauren Gallo White of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, challenges the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the 18-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These provisions—contained in Section 1201 of the DMCA—make it unlawful for people to get around the software that restricts access to lawfully-purchased copyrighted material, such as films, songs, and the computer code that controls vehicles, devices, and appliances. This ban applies even where people want to make noninfringing fair uses of the materials they are accessing.

        Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people’s ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.

      • Section 1201 of the DMCA Cannot Pass Constitutional Scrutiny

        Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids a wide range of speech, from remix videos that rely upon circumvention, to academic security research, to publication of software that can help repair your car or back up your favorite show. It potentially implicates the entire range of speech that relies on access to copyrighted works or describes flaws in access controls—even where that speech is clearly noninfringing.

        At EFF, we’ve been worried about this law since before it was passed. We were counsel in one of the first major tests of the law, but in those early days, we failed to convince the courts of its dangerous risk to speech. Ever since, we’ve documented those speech consequences. We’ve called on Congress to reform the law, to no avail. So today, we’re going to back to court, armed with nearly twenty years of knowledge about Section 1201’s interference with lawful speech and with key Supreme Court cases that have been decided in that time. For more about the problems caused by this law, see our companion post on the issue.

        Section 1201 was billed as a tool to prevent infringement by punishing those who interfered with technological restrictions on copyrighted works. After the DMCA was passed, the Supreme Court was asked to evaluate other overreaching copyright laws, and offered new guidance on the balance between copyright protections and free speech. It found that copyright rules can be consistent with the First Amendment so long as they adhere to copyright’s “traditional contours.” These contours include fair use and the idea/expression dichotomy.

      • KickassTorrents Alternative? KAT Makes A Comeback With ‘Dxtorrent.com’ Domain

        It looks like the world’s most popular torrent website KickassTorrents is back with a new domain dxtorrent.com. The website features the same layout and seems like a mirror of notorious torrent sharing website KAT. The original KickassTorrents domain was recently seized by the U.S. Government.

      • Paris Court Says Search Engines Don’t Need To Block Torrent Searches

        Copyright rulings in France have occasionally been a complete disaster in the past, so it’s nice to see the High Court of Paris recognize that Google and Microsoft cannot be forced to block any searches that include the word “torrent.” The two separate lawsuits were brought by SNEP, which could be seen as the French version of the RIAA. The organization argued that since the law allowed “all appropriate measures” to be used to block infringement, it could demand that search engines block any searches that include the word torrent.

      • Prenda (Mostly) Loses Again; Court Says ‘We Warned You To Stop Digging, But You Still Did’

        Because Steele and Hansmeier can’t help themselves, they appealed again, leading to this latest ruling. Believe it or not, Steele actually may be temporarily happy with this latest ruling as he actually won on one point (but may lose even bigger in the long run). Still, the court is clearly not happy with either Steele or Hansmeier. It does note that since Hansmeier has filed for a (highly questionable) bankruptcy, he cannot pursue the appeal and thus his appeal is dismissed out of hand.

      • U.S. Government Sued for Software Piracy, Maker Claims $600m
      • Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
      • Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains, Arrest Alleged Owner (Updated)
      • KickassTorrents domains seized after alleged owner is arrested in Poland
      • KickassTorrents Domains Seized, Alleged Founder Arrested

        KickassTorrent, the world’s most popular torrent website, has faced a major setback. The U.S. Government has arrested the alleged owner of the website and seized all of its domains.

      • More Copyright Law ≠ Less Copyright Infringement

        If you only listened to entertainment industry lobbyists, you’d think that music and film studios are fighting a losing battle against copyright infringement over the Internet. Hollywood representatives routinely tell policymakers that the only response to the barrage of online infringement is to expand copyright or even create new copyright-adjacent rights.

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