07.01.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The problem with having Microsoft in a Linux Foundation initiative, the R Consortium
THE corrupting influence of money must never be downplayed. Over the past couple of years we have written about many examples where Microsoft injected its influence into the Linux Foundation, both in terms of staff and in terms of money. It had done so for much longer than a couple of years, sometimes through Novell, Nokia, and others. There are famous historical lessons about liaising with ruthless aggressors that want you killed, but the Linux Foundation is willing to ignore these lessons.
Another reason why the Linux Foundation cannot criticise Microsoft is money flow associated with this latest transaction (article promoted by the Linux Foundation’s own Web site). To quote: “The nonprofit Linux Foundation today announced a new initiative called the R Consortium, a new group to unite the users of the open-source R programming language, which is widely used among data scientists and statisticians.
“Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Tibco, Rstudio, and Alteryx, among others, are all sponsoring the new industry consortium. The R Foundation, a separate nonprofit dedicated to maintaining R, is a founding organization for the new consortium, which will in turn provide support to the R Foundation.”
IDG has this new R primer, composed a short while ago by a Microsoft booster. Microsoft sought to openwash itself last year by essentially buying an R company. It is beginning to look more like “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” — a tactic which Microsoft is still very much into. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Readers’ views on who might be behind the attacks on this site amid confirmation that it’s on the ‘targets’ list of the EPO
YESTERDAY we mentioned EPO spying on this site and the day before that we wrote about DDOS attacks against this site. We are still eager to get to the bottom of who’s behind the very latest attacks (different from previous attacks) and some people wrote to us with additional information.
“You should perhaps take your case with US authorities,” one person said, “i.e. the FBI, as the AWS server is located in the US, according to ping timings and traceroute performed [...] The EPO uses AWS on Amazon’s servers in Ireland to host their Open Patent Services, so they would have the technical knowledge to write a stupid stunt like that.
“But it would be amazingly daft to launch an attack from an account clearly connected to the EPO. I would imagine some shady operation running on stolen or prepaid credit cards, so you might not get very far anyway. The code needn’t be very sophisticated, and wouldn’t cost much to run.
“The FBI has acted in such cases in the past: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9411
“but their own reputation isn’t quite sterling: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/ddos-for-hire-service-works-with-blessing-of-fbi-operator-says/
Others have pointed out that, despite the patterns of attacks showing no signs of it, scrapers of the EPO or the external spies it hired could play a role. “Concerning the monitoring of IRC logs,” said one person, I “have reason to inspect that “bots” have been employed for monitoring the IRC channels which might go some way to explaining those DDOS attacks that you reported some time ago.”
The problem is, it wasn’t IRC pages that were being hammered. I “don’t have any detailed technical information about this,” the person continues, “or who exactly was involved (i.e. whether it was EPO internal or some outside “agents”). [...] just passing on what I have heard so that you are aware that you are somehow “under observation” (or at least your IRC logs are)” (we have strong evidence of that, but it is definitely not the cause of the server stress).
We are going to continue pressuring Amazon for the identity of the attacker (Amazon is still stonewalling) and maybe report abuse to the EPO’s network administrators some time quite soon. █
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06.30.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It wasn’t that long ago that Linux and open-source were thought of as toy software. Today, they dominate both business and technology.
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If you are planning to purchase SSDs for Linux, keep an eye on the drives that are blacklisted by the Linux Kernel. Also pay heed to what Sukar suggests, “…be careful, even when you don’t enable the TRIM explicitly, at least since Ubuntu 14.04 the explicit FSTRIM runs in a cron once per week on all partitions – the freeze of your storage for a couple of seconds will be your smallest problem.”
If you pay attention to these points, your data may just stay in the solid state.
Read more
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Right now, my refrigerator uses Linux, as does the thermostat that controls the climate of my home. The washer and dryer components and firmware with the touch control screens are built on Linux (Amana if you want to look it up). The navigation system on my old Ford Explorer is based on Linux. Our home entertainment center has a touch screen control based on Ubuntu.
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Kernel Space
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For those using perf for Linux profiling with performance counters, the Linux 4.2 kernel will bring many improvements to benefit Intel customers.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 4.1.1, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and the most advanced version available. It’s not a large update , but that usually happens with the early versions.
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Specifically, CII’s funds will support a new open source automated testing project, the Reproducible Builds initiative from Debian, and IT security researcher Hanno Böck’s Fuzzing Project.
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Applications
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Any Linux operating system is incomplete without a download manager. From many years, Linux based distros are using wget as default download manager. Its pretty little application which works fine from command line, if you need to install anything, download any stuff, you need to run shell scripts etc, everything uses wget on some level to complete tasks. Over the past many years, it has been identified that wget is lacking some advance features and its alternative, Aria2, has received the attention of many users due to fulfilling the thirst of advance linux users. We will be reviewing the installation process of Aria2 and the difference between Wget and Aria 2 in this article, so you may decide which download manager best suits your needs.
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Data is growing both in volume and value. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to back up and restore this information quickly and reliably. As society has adapted to technology and learned how to depend on computers and mobile devices, there are few that can deal with the reality of losing important data. Of firms that suffer the loss of data, 30% fold within a year, 70% cease trading within five years. This highlights the value of data.
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A much more powerful took is “Atop”, a powerful monitor program that allows you to see system-level counters concerning utilization of CPU and memory/swap, as well as see disk I/O and network utilization counters at the system level — in real time or historically. It also allows you to store raw counters in a file for long-term analysis on system levels and process levels, as well as seeing resource consumption for each thread within a process of a multi-processor program.
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A few months ago I reported about my advancement in my use of Emacs. This post will be a report of my further progress. Quick reminder: I started using emacs for project management and working on web sites. I still do that today, even though I spent much less time editing websites and these are very much side projects I do for and with friends.
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Proprietary
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Google Drive is an instrument that is used by many. Of course, there are many alternatives to it like Dropbox or Yandex.Drive, but nevertheless many prefer a Google-backed solution. One of the reasons for me was an ability to have several services under one “roof”, one account.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Building on Friday’s Wine 1.7.46 release, Wine-Staging 1.7.46 was released today.
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At present Wine – the open-source compatibility layer software that runs Windows applications on other operating systems – supports DirectX9, allowing many older Windows games to run on Linux, but software has moved on and developers are no longer using that older version of DirectX.
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Games
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Garry Newman, the developer behind the famous Garry’s Mod and the survival MMO Rust, has made some very interesting comments about the lack of Linux players and why his studio doesn’t really care about the open source platform.
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FPS adventure game Gone Home is now available on Steam for Linux with huge 88% price cut that will last for another day.
Gone Home is a story driven game that is like nothing you’ve ever played until now. You don’t get to meet anyone, and you don’t get to interact with any other character. You’re just trying to solve a mystery. Despite the fact that there are no enemies, and you don’t get hurt in any way, the game manages to keep the suspense going with ease, and that’s mostly due to the script and the gameplay itself.
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Unity is a game engine that managed to get a lot of developers and fans in the past couple of years. Even if it supports the Linux platform, there are no Linux tools just yet, and the developers have explained why that happened.
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Guild Software announced this past weekend the availability of a new update for their Vendetta Online science-fiction MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) for Windows, Android, Linux, Mac OS X, and iOS operating systems.
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Solar 2 is described by its developers as a sandbox universe, but that doesn’t quite cover it. And when you’re having a problem describing the gameplay, you know that you have some something special.
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Valve is pleased to announce the preview of the next SteamOS release, codenamed “brewmaster” and based on the latest Debian 8.1 stable release.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the most often voiced complaints about Open Source Software is that it tends to be “ugly” or otherwise aesthetically uninspired. A few years ago a few people in the KDE camp came together and created, what they hoped, would be a solution to that problem: The KDE Visual Design Group.
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When I wrote my Kubuntu Vivid review, I mentioned a tool called KDE Connect, which I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be doing. A bunch of you emailed me, telling me it’s a nice little applet that can keep your smartphone notifications in sync with the desktop, as well as allow you to remotely control certain parts of your KDE-flavored desktop from the smartphone.
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At beginning of June 2011 I made my first blog post about KWin support Wayland clients featuring a screenshot of Desktop Grid effect with a Wayland window shown on each desktop.
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The statistics collection feature of KActivities is slowly becoming a core part of Plasma.
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The first new feature of the GSoC project on animation in Krita is has landed in git. Until now, I have been mostly concentrating on refactoring the core structures toward their final form, which has taken much more time than I anticipated. Fortunately, it is now mostly done, and I am getting to the point where progress is more visible.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We reported earlier this week that the GNOME Project has announced the availability of the third snapshot of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, GNOME 3.17.3, a release that brought in new features and plugged numerous annoying bugs.
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Béla Markus has announced the immediate availability of piCore 6.1, a special edition of the Tiny Core Linux operating system specifically designed for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC).
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It was recently brought to our attention that there’s a Linux kernel-based operating system out there developed in Havana, Cuba by students at the University of Computer Sciences and sponsored by the Cuban government.
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New Releases
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The Solus operating system has just received its first daily ISO, and it looks like the team is well on its way to promote the first RC. The developers are moving closer to a stable version, and things seem to be on the right track.
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The main features at a glance:
Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
Add a new dashboard and widgets
Many internal improvements and bugfixes
Improved the internal network interface backend
Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
Add VLAN support
The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, …) instead of cookies.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Here is our tribute to our founder and the community he and others created.
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Arch Family
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The second update pack for Manjaro 0.8.13 has been made available, and it packs a lot of new packages, including Budgie 8.2 and a new Linux kernel.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s new Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage open-source, software-defined storage products continue to push storage’s limits.
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When Jim Whitehurst set out to write his book The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, he wasn’t looking to define the open-source movement in the same way that Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar defined open-source. Rather than define open-source as a development methodology, Whitehurst’s focus is on open-source principles as applied to the domain of company management.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst spent last week’s annual Summit praising the progress made in open source, but during his opening keynote he also warned attendees about companies that claim to be open source without actually encouraging open participation and innovation from a broad group of users.
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Fedora
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Releases of the Fedora operating system, being the mostly regular six-monthly events that they are, do not usually find themselves worthy of note — your average run-of-the-mill Fedora release can usually be summed up as: “Everything you had six months ago, only slightly better.”
With Fedora 22, though, changes arrived thick and fast. The release’s desktop environment got a new, flatter look; the package manager of choice changed; GCC was updated to the 5 series; and the next generation of display server inched towards general availability. While none of these changes alone should send the quality of the release into reverse, somewhere along the line, it hasn’t all come together.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now that Ubuntu for phones has also landed on the Meizu MX4 a lot of people might want it, but it’s difficult to get. Some people might get the idea of buying a regular Meizu MX4 with Flyme OS, but they wouldn’t be able to get Ubuntu on that device or at least not in a safe way.
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If you have any questions regarding new features and apps that are present, absent, or in the works for the Ubuntu Touch platform, you need to know that there is already a comprehensive wish list out there that takes care of everything.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” ISO images for both the Cinnamon and MATE flavors have been released, although the official announcement hasn’t been made available just yet.
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Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela has been released in its two traditional flavors, Cinnamon and MATE, but the developers did not publish any release notes yet.
Like Linux Mint 17 and Linux Mint 17.1, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and uses latest generation desktop environments: Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10, but most likely, many Linux Mint-specific improvements have been implemented.
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As usual, the Linux 4.2 kernel is bringing more improvements for ARM, including support for new SoCs and boards.
Highlights for the ARM Linux 4.2 merge window include:
- SMP support for the Allwinner A23 SoC with the SunXI code and SMP support for the Broadcom BCM63138.
- Big endian support in Socpga.
- Initial support for the Freescale I.MX7D. The dual-core i.MX7 has two Cortex-A7 cores up to 1.0GHz, Cortex-M4 up to 256MHz, LPDDR2/LPDDR3 support, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCI Express lane. The i.MX7 series is primarily aimed at “Internet of Things” devices.
- Initial support for the ZTE ZX296702 SoC with dual-core Cortex-A9 processor and ARM Mali 400 graphics.
- NVIDIA Tegra HDA support.
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The Dronecode open-source UAV platform initiative has announced that it has welcomed on board a raft of new members, who’ll help drive the project towards becoming a de facto standard for consumer and commercial drones.
The non-profit organisation – governed by the Linux Foundation – was formed in late 2014. Founding members 3D Robotics (3DR) and Yuneec International have since been joined by 27 other organisations and sponsored members, keen to participate in the “neutral, transparent initiative for advancing UAV technology”, as the Linux Foundation’s marketing big cheese Amanda McPherson described it.
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BeagleCore is a new Internet of Things development board that has been created to be 100 percent open source and provide an easy way for makers, developers and hobbyists to have access to all all the core features of BeagleBone Black in a miniaturised computer module.
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Industry-leading organizations and start-ups like Parrot, Walkera, and Team Black Sheep have joined 3DR, Intel, Qualcomm and others to create an industry-standard, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Even groups that compete against one another are working together as part of Dronecode. Change is not just coming in the future, it’s taking place now. Think advances in vision processing, obstacle avoidance, and environmental and situational awareness: Dronecode members are delivering on all of these today.
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A German startup called BeagleCore is spinning a computer-on-module version of BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black single board computer on Kickstarter. Packages start at 39 Euros ($44) for the first 500 units shipping in Feb. 2016, or 49 Euros ($55) for the second shipment in April. With a baseboard, it costs 99 Euros ($111), also with April 2016 shipment. The BeagleCore and Starter-Kit support Linux flavors including Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and Cloud9 IDE on Node.js with BoneScript library.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung now plans on delivering a Gold variant of the Z1 next month and has also confirmed more models are on the way. The Z1 launched at 5,700-Rs whist the second Tizen handset is expected to go on-sale for between the 8,000-Rs 15,000-Rs range. We have previously reported on a rumoured Samsung Z3, so this could signal it’s launch? The handsets will also be manufactured in India at Samsung’s factory in Noida.
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The SDK includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a light-weight TV Simulator for testing web apps, and a TV Emulator.
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Android
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Google has decided Android Studio is all you need to make apps, and by the end of the year will no longer support the venerable but popular Eclipse IDE.
Android product manager Jamal Eason has blogged that in recent years “our team has focused on improving the development experience for building Android apps with Android Studio”, and it’s now time to move on.
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In this video, Android Engineer Kris Pena picks out the most important pieces of information that came out of this year’s Google I/O conference.
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Along with a tweak in the application design guidelines, Google has updated its own applications for Android with a subtle graphical tweak to remind users just who the driving force behind the ecosystem actually is. Not only are splash screens now an acceptable part of Android design, Google is making immediate use of them in a defensive move against other cloud providers such as Microsoft.
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Android software service for Galaxy S3 has long been disbanded and for those who are still hanging on to their 2012 Samsung smartphone, crDroid has some good news to share.
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The mobile boom brought forth a world of opportunities to creative individuals – especially musicians. Gone are the days when these artists were bound to full studio equipment (which costs fortunes) in order to get anything done. Professional music makers still need those, but our smartphones and tablets are more than capable of taking a quantifiable load of work.
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Android is beloved by millions because it’s endlessly customizable. Want to use a different launcher? There are a ton of options in the Google Play store. Same goes for icon packs, of which we’ve covered extensively in the past. If you don’t like TouchWiz, Sense or even the way vanilla Android looks, it’s easy to change up the look and feel of your phone to make it look exactly the way you want it to. That’s the beauty Android has to offer.
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Recently, Google made a selection of Android games under 25 MB, and highlighted them in Play Store.
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Yes, Google hates lag on smartphones as much as you do — enough so that the search giant has a robot dedicated to spotting that delay between your finger input and what happens on screen. Meet the Chrome TouchBot, an OptoFidelity-made machine that gauges the touchscreen latency on Android and Chrome OS devices. As you can see in the clip below, the bot’s artificial digit pokes, prods and swipes the display in a series of web-based tests (which you can try yourself) that help pinpoint problems in both code and hardware. This isn’t the only gadget monitoring device lag at Google, but it could be the most important given how much the company’s software revolves around touch. Don’t be surprised if this automaton boosts the responsiveness of Mountain View’s future platforms.
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Back in February the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally started rolling out in the United States on multiple carriers, following a release in other regions around the globe. Since then we’ve seen the G4 arrive with Android 5.1 on board, and many G3 owners are hoping for the same treat.
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Once again, consumers in the market for a new Android phone have tough decisions to make. While hardcore Android purists will understandably opt for the Nexus 6 to get fast updates and greater tinker capabilities, the Galaxy S6 is the better choice for all others. It is a more well-rounded experience.
Samsung has crafted a phone that is not only a piece of art, but is a comfortable size and has superior security with biometrics. The fingerprint reader is more important than having the ability to run custom ROMS. In 2015, there is no excuse for any flagship smartphone to ship without a fingerprint scanner.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is Android at its finest. Highly recommended.
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Some of its biggest selling points include 4K and NVIDIA Grid support. If you love gaming, have a powerful rig with a robust NVIDIA GPU, and want to enjoy one of the best in class Android TV experiences, then the NVIDIA Shield Android TV is a sure bet. If you’re more of a casual gamer, then there are less expensive options, but if you want to have something that packs a wallop, streams your games, and is quite future proof, then we highly recommend it. Further, we’ve given it our highly coveted Editor’s Choice Award for being a rock solid Android TV device!
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The Huawei P8 represents the classiest and most capable Android from a Chinese manufacturer yet, and a strong advance from last year’s P7. The hardware design is superb and it has a terrific camera. The biggest differentiator is actually quite useful: the microSD slot doubles up as a SIM slot, too.
The stuttery performance and annoying popups that marred last year’s P7 have been banished. There’s a lot to like with thrown-in features like call blocking and security.
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Some new tidbits about Nokia’s Android future have surfaced and word is that Foxconn will be making the Android smartphones for Nokia. That is no big surprise considering that Foxconn makes many of the popular smartphones on the market today for the companies who sell them including the Nokia N1 and the iPhone.
Word has also surfaced that the first markets to get the new Nokia Android smartphones will be India, China, and a few European nations. Nokia appears to be targeting markets where smartphones are booming in popularity but aren’t as saturated as they are in other countries. These also appear to be nations where consumers show or budget devices rather than high-end devices.
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The CDE7060T is said to offer a Linux OS, but the datasheet more specifically notes that it runs the Linux-based Android 4.2.1 on an unnamed, dual-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip. Also onboard are 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of flash.
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It’s not really a surprise, but after just over six months since the “forking” of both Node.js and Docker, the two different projects have ended up back in some sort of alignment. For Node.js, it was the reunification with io.js under the Node.js Foundation, which was officially launched under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella. The Node.js and io.js technical development is now driven by a technical committee and hopefully this will all work out well for all.
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The Libreboot “fork” of Coreboot now has support for its first AMD motherboard — or more broadly, its first desktop motherboard.
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So it’s interesting when a senior IBM exec turns up in a keynote slot. Big Blue’s heritage, at least at the high end, had for years been dominated by proprietary architecture. No longer, said Doug Balog, general manager of IBM Power Systems. The founding of OpenPOWER roughly two years ago, sale of IBM’s x86 business, and the sprint away from the formidable but proprietary Blue Gene (and re-embrace of the battle-tested mainframe) are all part of IBM’s about-face.
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The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) today announced that The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) has been accepted as an Affiliate Member. “The OSI is excited to welcome OISF,” said Patrick Masson, General Manager and Director at the OSI. “Just as we’re seeing with open source software projects, more and more organizations are looking for support from mature, robust and relevant security communities. The OISF and the open source technologies they support are ready to help and we’re happy to promote their good work.”
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I caught up with Eva to get a bit of a background on her, Netflix, and how open source is being used to improve services at Netflix. Not only has Netflix used and contributed to existing open source projects, but they have released their own projects like Genie as open source. To learn more about Netflix’s open source projects you can pursue their GitHub.
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Events
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The All Things Open conference today pushed out a notification to recipients on its mailing list announcing that registration for the event, slated for October 19th and 20th. has begun. For the first time ever, event organizers are offering something of a super early bird special: Buy a ticket before July 7th and get admission for both days for only $99 — which is a deal since that’s what a single day will cost once the Early Bird Special kicks-in next Tuesday.
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SaaS/Big Data
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New Zealand-based global open source company Catalyst has announced that Kiwi software development companies can build on the Catalyst Cloud for free.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks, a leading LibreOffice developer, says the open source suite is currently being used by about 20 million Linux users. (LibreOffice is included in many Linux distributions.) He adds that update requests are also regularly received from 120 million different IP addresses – with one million new ones appearing every week — and suggests that in total there may be 80 million LibreOffice users around the globe.
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The Document Foundation has released the second RC for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0 version, and it looks like the developers are making a final push for the new version of the office suite that is scheduled to land in July.
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And yet there is a lot of really good documentation out there. For example, the documentation for LibreOffice is excellent. It includes several documents in multiple formats including HTML and PDF that range from “Getting Started” to a very complete user’s guide for each of the LibreOffice applications.
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Funding
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A couple days ago, the Roundcube Next crowdfunding campaign reached our initial funding goal. We even got a piece on Venture Beat, among other places. This was a fantastic result and a nice reward for quite a bit of effort on the entire team’s part.
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BSD
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DragonFly BSD is a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX. The developers have released a new version of the distro, and they have integrated quite a few changes and improvements.
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For the first time I installed a BSD box on a machine I control. The experience has been eye-opening, especially since I consider myself an “old-school” Linux admin, and I’ve felt out of place with the latest changes on the system administration.
Linux is now easier to use than ever, but administration has become more difficult. There are many components, most of which are interconnected in modern ways. I’m not against progress, but I needed a bit of recycling. So instead of adapting myself to the new tools, I thought, why not look for modern tools which behave like old ones?
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DragonFlyBSD 4.2 was released this morning as the next major release to this popular BSD operating system. For end-users there are a lot of notable changes with this update.
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The editors are certainly salivating over the possibility of valgrinding our way to victory.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On June 28, the GnuCash development team had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and update of the seventh maintenance release of the stable 2.6 branch of one of the best free financial accounting software, GnuCash.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Galicia (Spain) has made available three open source solutions over the past year, one for PC classrooms, one for land-management, and a third for computer network enhancement. The tools are available at Galicia’s software repository, and information about the solutions is now also available at Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer (CTT).
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The government of Aragon (Spain) has published updates of the open source software it uses for 25 eGovernment services. The updates have been available at the repository of Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer since late last month.
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The House of Representatives has officially jumped on the open source bandwagon. A June 25 announcement declared that U.S. representatives, committees and staff would be able to procure open source software, participate in open source software communities and contribute code developed with taxpayer dollars to open source repositories.
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As the executive branch of the United States government quietly works on creating an official open source policy, the legislative branch is also moving into the 21st century: Open source software is now officially permitted in the U.S. House of Representatives. That means software developed in the People’s House with taxpayer funds will eventually be available to the people. According to the nonpartisan OpenGov Foundation, there will soon be an Open Source Caucus in Congress.
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Programming
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The Simplon course was developed in France to teach skills in Linux, Ruby on Rails, CSS, Javascript, Meteor.js and other web development langauges. Co-founder Andrei Vladescu-Olt attended the opening of the SAP-funded laboratory, and explained that there’s more to the course than coding.
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Science
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It is a sad day in tech. This is such a young industry in mobile that most who built it are still alive. One of the biggest pioneers, however, died this past Friday. Matti Makkonen, the inventor of the SMS text message, was a former Telecoms Finland (later known as Sonera) exec and then Nokia VP and later Finnet Group boss and ended his career as Managing Director of Anviva before he retired from active business management work. He still continued on some part-time jobs in telecoms in Finland. In 2008 Matti received the Economist Innovation Award for inventing the SMS and we celebrated that occasion here on this blog at the time.
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Security
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It took about 2.5 hours to test, deploy and upgrade Ikea’s entire IT infrastructure to defend against Shellshock. Here’s how Ikea did it so quickly.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Serbia unveiled a statue on Sunday of the man whose killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 101 years ago lit the fuse for the First World War, feting an assassin who still divides his native Balkans.
Many Serbs regard Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, as a pan-Slavic hero, the shot he fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 marking the death knell for centuries of foreign occupation over the various nations and faiths that would make up the Yugoslavia that emerged.
To others he is a terrorist, a nationalist fanatic whose act triggered a war in which 10 million soldiers died and the world order was rewritten.
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It’s too early to say whether yesterday’s ‘day of terror’ was coordinated, or whether it was a random convergence of events whose perpetrators share the same commitment to ‘leaderless resistance’ jihad which makes it equally possible to murder ‘apostate’ Shia worshippers in a mosque or ‘kufar’ tourists in Tunisia.
Whoever they are, their broader intentions are not difficult to fathom. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Kuwait and Tunisia attacks. Both are acts of ‘strategic’ terrorism.
The attack in Kuwait is clearly intended to foment the sectarian war that IS believes it can exploit for its own purposes.
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Technologies are making humans who remote-control drones more and more like children playing video-games. That is the main problem. When deaths or killings seem to be happening so far away, the “combat mentality” can combine with the comfort zone to highly murderous effect. When it’s so easy to kill without risking your own life, will you be merciful or shoot them up?
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When Israel is criticized about its rights-abusive policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the refrain most often heard among local politicians is that the government’s hasbara—the Israeli propaganda machine—is inadequate. The problem, in other words, is not what Israel actually does to the Palestinians, but rather the inability to get its positive message across to the international community. This is usually referred to as “rebranding Israel”. The underlying assumption here is that the merchandise is fine, and only the packaging needs to be replaced.
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Here’s how Israel deals with hostages. The results aren’t pretty.
[...]
The war in Gaza, which had raged for three weeks by then and claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis and some 1,500 Palestinians, seemed to be tapering off. The ambush near Rafah would have gone down as one more skirmish. But as the surviving Palestinians retreated, they did something that would turn that Friday into the bloodiest day of the summer and embroil Israel in a possible war-crimes ordeal that reverberates even now: They dragged the third Israeli, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, with them underground.
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Conservatives immediately turned on the news agency, which released a statement saying the five photos it issued “were not intended to portray Senator Cruz in a negative light”.
After “consideration”, said the statement, “we have decided to remove those photos from further licensing through AP Images”.
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Civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discuss whether the shooting in Charleston was an act of domestic terrorism. “Dylann Roof was a human drone, and every Tuesday morning the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don’t even know and can’t pronounce,” Kevin Alexander Gray says. “So I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word ‘terror.’” But Richard Cohen calls the shooting “a classic case of terrorism.” “It’s politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who were the immediate victims,” Cohen says. “I think in some ways it’s important to talk about terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we’re facing.”
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White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States, according to a study by the New America Foundation. The Washington-based research organization did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.
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I don’t rate any of our wars since to have been justified morally. I am morally shaken by our U.S. war these days involving drone use. Innocent civilians are being killed. We call it “collateral damage,” which I believe actually means “unintended murder.” How have we come to justify that? We claim to be doing it for the right reason. We have identified terrorists in these locations. When our drones strike, there are too often innocent civilians caught in the hell fire. It was not our intention to kill innocent people, but there are too many unanticipated consequences.
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To deem behavior or opinion as extremist depends on a particular point of view.
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A pair of US drone strikes over the past 48 hours have killed at least nine people, none of them identified by name but all of them labeled “al-Qaeda suspects” by local officials on the ground in Yemen.
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Ex-chief of navy Lord West says Britain must protect covert relationships but must also clear up grey areas over involvement in non-war zone killings
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The New York Times on Wednesday reported details about American counterterrorism officials’ use of drone strikes in countries such as Yemen, as well as the working relationship between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
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The documents are said to show the extremely close cooperation between the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters better known as GCHQ, in regards to the controversial drone program.
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Britain’s murky operations against the United Nations were first made public in 2004 when government minister Clare Short stated she “had read transcripts of some of Mr Annan’s conversations. She said she recalled thinking, as she talked to Mr Annan: “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying”.” She admitted in a BBC interview that British intelligence agencies had recorded conversations of the UN Secretary General in his office in New York. This astonishing revelation attracted an intriguing reaction from her own government, with prime minister Blair declaring her statement to be “deeply irresponsible” rather than taking any action about this manifestly irresponsible and illegal operation. It was obvious that the British government was up to its neck in a program of espionage against the leader of the organization that is intended to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person,” and there was no possibility that the prime approver of such funtime capers was going to admit his culpability.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times continued their fight in court Tuesday as they try to secure nine Department of Justice memos they believe outline the federal government’s legal justification for tactical drone strikes that have killed hundreds — including U.S. citizens — across the world.
Attorneys on both sides presented their arguments to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday — the latest round of courtroom discussions that date back four years.
In 2011, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the targeted killings of U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Sameer Khan earlier that year in September.
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The appealing parties want the public to know who and why the U.S. is killing in drone strike operations.
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Five militants have been killed following a NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, a source said on Sunday.
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Wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan have killed at least 149,000 people between 2001 and 2014, says a recent report by a US think-tank.
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Recent escalation in tension between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India figured high among US international concerns last week, with Secretary John Kerry cautioning against implications of South Asian hostilities, amidst tenuous search for Afghan stability.
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Protesters from 25 UK-based campaign groups are expected to take part in the latest rally on July 6 outside the Lynn Lane factory which they claim supplies arms to Israel.
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The U.S. actually trains more unmanned pilots than traditional fighter pilots today.
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Fighting surged again this week in eastern Ukraine, where government troops are battling separatist militias and their Russian allies.
NATO is responding by sending troops and equipment to eastern Europe, and it’s also giving defensive training to Ukraine’s beleaguered army.
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Nato defence ministers are meeting in Brussels to agree their next steps in dealing with the renewed threat from Russia.
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It is harder for eyes from the sky or those pushing the drone buttons from the other end of the world to see precisely what lies wasted under the rubble of mud houses in the tribal regions of Pakistan. The loud claims of ‘successfully’ targeting wanted al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists have drowned the cries of the local populations for about a decade over their children, women and men having been killed. Over 2,000 civilian casualties must not disappear from the human radar after being termed collateral damage. True, we cannot escape human tragedies for larger ends of the war on terror, but we also need to take responsibility for errors of judgment.
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Sunday reports indicate an Israeli warplane bombed a remote Lebanese Bekaa region to destroy one of its drones apparently downed.
An IDF spokeswoman declined to comment. A Lebanese security source said it’s not entirely clear what happened “but most probably it was an Israeli airstrike to destroy its downed drone” – whether because of mechanical failure or by Hezbollah isn’t known.
America, its rogue NATO partners and Israel unilaterally or together bomb other nations in blatant violation of international law.
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The Obama administration is contemplating setting up bases in Iraq and sending hundreds of additional American troops there. And a few months ago, President Barack Obama announced that nearly 10,000 American troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of the year. This is in spite of US interventions in the two countries that have left hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced and continuing instability all over the region.
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Transparency Reporting
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The FBI must disclose its interviews with so-called “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the New York Times and reporter Scott Shane have told a federal judge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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From the Arabian Peninsula to northern India to California’s Central Valley, nearly a third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished, according to a recent study led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine. The aquifers are concentrated in food-producing regions that support up to two billion people.
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An application to start fracking at a site on the Fylde coast in Lancashire has been rejected by councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to extract shale gas at the Little Plumpton site between Preston and Blackpool.
Lancashire County Council rejected the bid on the grounds of “unacceptable noise impact” and the “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape”.
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Plans to frack for shale gas in Lancashire have been rejected by county councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to undertake exploratory drilling and fracking at a site between Preston and Blackpool.
Planning officials recommended approval of the operation subject to a number of conditions – but councillors rejected the advice and voted against.
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Justices invalidate new rules in move that could make Environmental Protection Agency more vulnerable to challenges to new regulations on carbon emissions
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Finance
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A man who ran a Bitcoin-based online poker site and then fled to Antigua after being raided earlier this year has pleaded guilty to a lesser gambling violation in Nevada as a way to stay a near-free man.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Bryan Micon accepted probation on Thursday and will also pay a $25,000 fine, surrender the computers, 3.0996 bitcoins ($750) and the $900 that were seized from him during the raid. Once complete, his charge will be reduced to a gross misdemeanor of operating an unlicensed interactive gaming system.
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The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.
The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of ‘basic income’ can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.
Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.
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Tsipras asks voters to reject austerity proposals offered by creditors as thousands of his supporters rally in Athens.
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Evidence pointing to international espionage, a plot to murder former Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and a 2012 plan for Greece’s exit from the euro code-named the “Silver Drachma” are just some of the sensational findings unveiled in a report by Greek Anti-Corruption Investigator Dimitris Foukas, released on Friday and sent to the Justices’ Council for consideration.
The report outlines the findings of three converging judicial investigations spanning several years, initiated after the notorious phone-tapping scandal in 2005 and revelations that the mobile phones of then Prime Minister Karamanlis and dozens of other prominent Greeks were under surveillance.
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Martina Roemmelt-Fella, who owns a small, family-run turbine manufacturer in Bavaria, should be a cheerleader for a trade deal between Europe and the United States that promises to ease the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic.
But instead she fears the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being hammered out between Brussels and Washington will give too much power to big multinationals at the expense of small companies like hers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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At some point, Will either noticed, or someone pointed out to him, that Roberts’ decision did the opposite of what Will’s column says it did: It did not defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the ACA, but instead produced its own definitive interpretation of the law. This makes most of Will’s criticism–starting with the first paragraph, which denounces “decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches”–irrelevant to the opinion Roberts actually wrote.
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Privacy
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Anyone who has been freaked out by the robots in Channel 4’s new hit drama Humans knows what life in the Uncanny Valley feels like. The same goes for those who have met or seen footage of Aiko Chihira, a realistic humanoid who has just started welcoming visitors to a department store in Japan. She’s creepy, in the extreme.
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Cisco revealed a security vulnerability in a number of the company’s network security virtual appliances that could give someone virtually unlimited access to them—default, pre-authorized keys for Secure Shell (SSH) sessions originally intended for “customer support” purposes. As Threatpost’s Dennis Fisher reported, Cisco has released software patches that correct the problem, but there’s no temporary workaround for systems that can’t immediately be patched.
Cisco released an advisory on the vulnerability on June 25. There are two separate SSH key vulnerabilities for the Cisco Web Security Virtual Appliance (WSAv), Cisco Email Security Virtual Appliance (ESAv), and Cisco Security Management Virtual Appliance (SMAv).
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Many Cisco security appliances contain default, authorized SSH keys that can allow an attacker to connect to an appliance and take almost any action he chooses. The company said that all of its Web Security Virtual Appliances, Email Security Virtual Appliances, and Content Security Management Virtual Appliances are affected by the vulnerability.
This bug is about as serious as they come for enterprises. An attacker who is able to discover the default SSH key would have virtually free reign on vulnerable boxes, which, given Cisco’s market share and presence in the enterprise worldwide, is likely a high number. The default key apparently was inserted into the software for support reasons.
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That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in the policy, the host of details that Hulu can gather about subscribers — names, birth dates, email addresses, videos watched, device locations and more — could be transferred to “one or more third parties as part of the transaction.” The policy does not promise to contact users if their data changes hands.
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While this project is separate from the ongoing developments in Nissan’s connected vehicle technology, Deacon said that there were “huge developments” ongoing in bringing customer service to the car dashboard and more automated systems.
Last year Renault also revealed a major overhaul of its internal and customer-facing interactions through a Europe-wide Salesforce rollout that would link its systems to its dealerships, allowing it to claw back valuable customer data.
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Clauses in privacy policies that enable online services to transfer or sell personal data about consumers as part of a merger, bankruptcy or other transaction are becoming common practice, an examination by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United States has found. The prevalence of these data-transfer clauses illustrates how little control people typically have over the dissemination of information about them. Details from privacy policies of five companies offer a sampling of the information that may be collected and how companies may handle the data in the event of a sale or bankruptcy. — Natasha Singer
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In 2013, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a once-clandestine warrantless surveillance program that gobbles up Americans’ electronic communications—a project secretly adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States. Congress legalized the surveillance in 2008 and again in 2012 after it was exposed by The New York Times.
Human-rights activists and journalists brought the Supreme Court challenge amid claims that the FISA Amendments Act was chilling their speech. But the Supreme Court tossed the case, telling the challengers’ lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to bring proof by real targets of the warrantless e-mail and phone surveillance. In a 5-4 ruling (PDF) by Justice Samuel Alito at the time, the court said the case was based on “assumptions” and that the plaintiffs “merely speculate” that they were being spied upon.
Fast forward to the present day: a US resident of Brooklyn, New York, accused of sending $1,000 to a Pakistani terror group has won the right to become the nation’s second defendant to challenge the surveillance at the appellate level. This could mean a Supreme Court bid is likely several months or more away.
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But the true nature and scope of the information required by the government and subsequently collected by the government on an employee is massive. Take a look at Standard Form 86. This is a 127-page form that usually takes a week or more to complete and requires the entry of the applicant’s Social Security number on each page. The data included on this form is not just enough for identity theft, but enough to allow a person to literally become another person. Each Standard Form 86 fully documents the life of the subject. The only thing missing is the name of your first crush, though that might be in there somewhere too.
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Facebook is to open a new office in Africa, a region with more than one billion people but only 120 million Facebook users.
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Civil Rights
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One thing I was obsessed with was campaign finance reform. I almost cut my throat when Citizens United was allowed to participate in financing political campaigns because corporations have the same rights as people. I believe that decision absolutely destroyed our so-called democracy. I also observed the Democrats that stood by and let that happen. What that showed me was how corrupt and devious our elected officials are. I stand with Bernie on this issue on overturning Citizens United.
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China’s State Council Information Office on Friday issued a list of human rights violations committed by the United States government. The annual report is intended to counter US allegations of human rights abuses in China.
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Amnesty International finds all 50 states and Washington, DC, fail to comply with international law and standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers
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The transition from Bush to Obama was much less dramatic than one imagined and the transition from Obama to someone else is likely to be more nuanced
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More than 100,000 migrants have entered Europe so far this year, with some 2,000 dead or missing during the perilous quest to reach the continent. Dozens of boats set off from lawless Libya each week, with Italy and Greece bearing the brunt of the surge.
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Australians who engaged in terrorism will be stripped of their citizenship, under new laws aimed at preventing militants fighting overseas from returning home.
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The prime minister announces an expansion of powers ‘to reflect modern conditions’ and says laws could be applied retrospectively; Julie Bishop can’t confirm deaths of two Australians reportedly killed in drone strikes; and the ABC is under attack for allowing a former terrorism suspect to appear on Q&A. As it happened
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The laws would also strip citizenship from dual nationals who engage in terrorism inside Australia.
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When are we going to have an honest conversation about guns in America? While I vigorously disagree with the Supreme Court’s most recent interpretation of the Second Amendment, I’ll concede that the right of individuals to bear arms is, for now, the law of the land.
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Operation Rescue has confirmed that the Routh Street Women’s Clinic in Dallas, Texas, halted abortions earlier this month, beginning what is expected to be a series of clinic closures in the wake of a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling upheld a 2013 law, HB2, that requires abortion clinics to meet minimum safety standards.
In addition, Planned Parenthood has apparently abandoned its efforts to open a larger clinic to replace its outdated facility located at 104 Babcock Road in San Antonio. Pro-life supporters with the Stop Planned Parenthood SA Coalition sued and successfully blocked a planned opening in January 2015, citing deception and zoning violations.
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David Cameron, echoed by the corporate media, calls upon the millions of law-abiding Muslims in the UK to denounce and distance themselves from a few terrorist nutters with whom 99.99% of British Muslims have no connection anyway. That apparently is acceptable. But to ask that the Zionist and Jewish organisations denounce the long term criminal activities of the man who actually led those organisations, is portrayed as unacceptable racism.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Charter yesterday promised that it won’t impose any data caps or overage charges on customers for at least three years if the Federal Communications Commission allows it to buy Time Warner Cable.
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The Council of the European Union is looking to remove all reference to Net Neutrality in the regulation of telecommunications. While the Council has always refused to take a step towards a compromise, it has been looking for several weeks to put the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations on the European Parliament. Thus, it is with bad faith that the Council is taking on this 4th trialogue today ; with their aim to make the Parliament to give in.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Supreme Court’s decision is bad news for developers targeting the U.S. market, who will now have to avoid any API not explicitly licensed as open
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A week after making the US LGBTQI community happy last week by ruling gay marriage legal across all the states, the US Supreme Court made the decision to not review the Google v. Oracle API Copyright decision made by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals last year. The Federal Circuit have been accused for misunderstanding both computer science and copyright law.
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Last week Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm lost his appeal against his hacking conviction in Denmark. With an August release potentially on the horizon but an unexpected situation still to be resolved in Sweden, Gottfrid is longing to get in front of a computer and back into the world of IT. But before then he wants to set the record straight.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Unveiling the cloak of secrecy from long-term surveillance by the European Patent Office (EPO) and a London-based mercenary it hired, bypassing the law
SEVERAL months ago, before the whole EPO surveillance scandal even began (it’s now standard practice at the EPO, signed off even by a bogus ‘data protection’ officer), we got an important headsup. Our sources informed us that the UK-based “independent global risk consultancy” (i.e. private security company) Control Risks had been “engaged by the EPO to carry out an investigation into EPO Staff Representatives.”
We previously wrote about Control Risks in the following important posts which add some background:
This had significant impact because it meant that the EPO was officially on a fishing expedition, trying to find sources and thus targeting reporters. It was always without doubt that we had been put on Control Risks’ “targets” list. If we were not, it would just mean that Control Risks may be utterly incompetent. These people don’t try to uphold the law but rather to protect those who break the law, by breaking the law themselves (privacy violations and cracking). At a later date we will provide additional details about the EPO’s shameful (and potentially illegal) practices.
Our claims, as above, are based not purely on hearsay. We found out about this before the press even talked about it and before EPO staff knew about it. At a later date we had a source tell us that Control Risks’ involvement “may also indicate that Control Risks will be involved in “investigating” Techrights (due to the fact that EPO managements is highly concerned about negative publicity from that channel).
“According to information, the EPO or its agents are involved in monitoring Techrights IRC channels and the logs of these channels to try and identify who is feeding information to Techrights.”
Look what the EPO has turned into. It’s something to be expected from an authoritarian regime. █
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06.29.15
Posted in Apple, Google, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
SCOTUS says no entry!
Summary: SCOTUS refuses to rule that APIs cannot be considered copyright-’protected’, despite common sense and despite Java (which the case is about) being Free/libre software
FOR anyone who has been paying attention, Oracle‘s hostility towards Android is not hard to understand. It is a CPTN member along with Microsoft and Apple and it has shown on numerous occasions over the years that it is eager to antagonise and badmouth Free software. Oracle killed many of the projects that it bought from Sun. Google, on the other hand, is at least trying to appease the Free software community and it has made Android (AOSP) an ‘open’ platform, even if most developers contribute just proprietary software to run on it.
Many of our readers have probably heard the big news by now. SCOTUS has aligned itself with foes of software development [1, 2, 3] (not just Free software development), reaffirming the ridiculous judgement from CAFC. Now that SCOTUS reaffirms the status of APIs as copyrightable, adding to mass surveillance with NDAs and software patents in the United States, why would software companies still choose to be there?
To give Google some credit, it did fight over this matter for nearly half a decade. After pressure from the clueless White House (exactly one month ago), however, reuse of APIs may be impossible and collaborative development with forking may soon be toxic. Today is a horrible day for software development in general and it’s not too clear to us what Google can do next. Some certain types of lawyers probably know Google’s next steps or options and knowing that this ‘legal’ system favours the deeper pockets, there is usually something someone can do given the correct fees (just see how long the SCO case goes on for).
“Google will hopefully continue to fight that case, whatever its options may be.”One reader of ours was disappointed with this article that FOSS Force published today, comparing Google to Microsoft. “Revisionism,” he said, “especially that closing sentence. People hate Microsoft not for the sake of hating Microsoft but because of how it (and its people) behaves and has behaved. It has held computing back at least 20 years and the damage spreads into all domains where desktop computers are used.
“It’s just that Microsoft pays for constant whine against Google. While Google has many shortcomings, it is not a problem like Microsoft has been and continues to be.”
“But on the topic of Google,” he continued, “here’s something fairly current with yet another ****up by SCOTUS” (he linked to the above news).
Google will hopefully continue to fight that case, whatever its options may be. As for Microsoft and Apple, they surely will keep trying to harm the market. They often work together these days (mostly true when it comes to patents, OOXML, DRM, and so on) and as this article by Galen Gruman reminds us:
If you thought Microsoft was finally treating the Mac as an equal citizen, you’ll be disappointed in the reality
Remember that Microsoft and Apple are both on Oracle’s anti-Android side (even publicly, on numerous occasions). These are all proprietary software giants, aspiring to control the entire market by patents, copyrights, litigation, and intimidation. Google simply does not fall under the same category. It deserves the public’s support in this particular case. █
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Posted in Patents at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A round-up of news about patent trolls in the United States, some of whom are are doing well and some of them not as well
Lawyers and other patent-centric parasites based in the unofficial home of patent trolls, the state of Texas, are very much upset with Alice — a case which essentially invalidates many of the patents they use for extortion. We covered this before and explained the reasons for it. Their livelihood is in jeopardy because they can’t quite prey on life savings of individuals and modest (at best) bank accounts of various startups around the US. “East Texas Federal Judge Sets Rules for Post-’Alice’ World,” says one article. We recently showed how patent practitioners in Texas were lobbying hard to keep the patent trolls going (antagonising patent reform), with their blackmail (as a ‘business’) flourishing. Using Lex Machina’s figures, Matt Levy very recently shared some statistics about Texas, and the Eastern District of Texas in particular. To quote: “The Eastern District of Texas had over 1,400 patent cases filed last year, and over 1,000 patent cases have been filed there in the first half of 2015. (Source: Lex Machina) Just last month (May), out of the 418 lawsuits filed, 295 were filed in Marshall, Texas, a town with a population of just under 24,000. For comparison, there were only 199 patent lawsuits filed in total in May 2014.”
“Apple sued the biggest Android distributor (Samsung) and Google’s/Android’s favourite child (Motorola), but then again so did Microsoft.”BlackBerry, which is rumoured to be exploring Android as the only route forward (not just one among several routes) was looking like an anti-Android troll in the making until not so long ago, but according to this analysis of “BlackBerry’s Licensing Revenue” (meaning patents): “There was little to no IP licensing done in the recent past.”
Perhaps BlackBerry is no longer a threat like Nokia, which Microsoft definitely turned into an anti-Android patent troll (of the bigger kind).
Speaking of trolls, Joe Mullin, a trolls expert, says that a “[p]atent troll wins $30M verdict against Sprint, has more trials on the way”. This story, for a change, didn’t develop in Texas. To quote Mullin, “Nebraska jury has ordered Sprint to pay $30 million to Prism Technologies, a patent-holding company that has sued the five largest cell phone carriers.
“Tuesday’s verdict (PDF) comes at a time when Congress is debating, for the second time in recent years, a bill to rein in companies like Prism, often referred to as “patent trolls.”
“Prism Technologies was founded as a successor to Prism Resources, an operating company that existed from 1991 to 2001 according to an online biography of co-founder Richard Gregg, who testified at trial. The company is now focused solely on licensing and litigation, and it has continued to get more patents.”
A week ago, citing this article from Ina Fried, BoingBoing asked, “Is patent trolling going out of style?”
That is indeed the case based on the booster of Microsoft and longtime promoter of Microsoft’s attacks (with patents) on GNU/Linux (Ina Fried did a lot of this while still at CNET/CBS). Fried writes: “For a while it seemed the mobile industry was deteriorating into a battle over who had the best patents — and the best patent lawyers.
“Apple was suing Samsung, Motorola was suing Microsoft and Google was in everyone’s cross hairs. And there were a lot more cases that weren’t making headlines.”
Apple sued the biggest Android distributor (Samsung) and Google’s/Android’s favourite child (Motorola), but then again so did Microsoft. The latter aggressor sued both companies and recently pressured the former to become a vassal of Microsoft in exchange for settlement. Microsoft has essentially itself become more like a patent troll, but since it refuses to let its own platform go (despite massive losses), it does not yet qualify, not as per the textbook definition of “patent troll”.
“Unified Patents,” said this one report from the other day, “works to deter nonpracticing entities from asserting weak patents” (whatever “weak” means).
When will Microsoft be recognised for what it really has become? When will European authorities react in lieu with their promise and stop Nokia from essentially becoming a European patent troll? Will BlackBerry ever sell its patents or itself become a patent troll? And in light of Apple‘s latest (over)hyped patent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], will more people care to realise that Apple is not an innovator but an aggressor (using patents for lawsuits and imtmidation, not highlight any significant breakthroughs)? Also mind Amazon‘s latest Orwellian patent, which hardly comes across as anything that a 5-year-old wouldn’t have managed to ‘invent’. █
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06.28.15
Posted in Site News at 9:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Knocking the site over intentionally
Summary: Information about some of the most recent DDOS attacks against this Web site and the steps to be taken next
THERE is a long history of DDOS attacks against Techrights, going back to 2008 or thereabouts. There were also press articles about DDOS attacks against the site (based on evidence provided to journalists upon request). Pinpointing who’s to blame for an attack is a lot harder than combating an attack (one way or another) and holding someone accountable is virtually impossible. People don’t just give themselves away so willing.
Over the past week there was a new pattern of DDOS attacks and they came from AWS servers, so I was able to file abuse reports and pursue this complaint (still work in progress). At this stage I am still hoping to see who or what group (or company) is behind it. This is clearly malicious.
Over the past few months I lost a lot of time (maybe hundreds of hours) due to DDOS attacks. It’s financially damaging and emotionally exhausting. I have been privately advised to file a report with the Dutch authorities over various DDOS attacks, which some told me might be connected to the EPO (or particular high-level staff at the EPO). Nonetheless, these efforts are usually a waste of time (I last tried around 8 years ago), so I did not bother. It’s a patience-draining experience that usually yields no results at all. It’s mostly symbolic. I did plan to write about this at some later stage and I even told one person that I might write more about intricate details of the attacks one day, maybe after the storm is settled at the EPO (giving too much information away usually helps the attacker). Today I would like to share some information about recent DDOS attacks and patterns that were noticed. This is information that won’t help the attacker; rather, it might discourage the attacker.
Referring to our DDOS complaints (IP addresses of the EPO hammering on our server quite heavily) and my recent “tweet”, one person told me that “The EPO IU is based in Munich but that doesn’t really tell you anything about what IP addresses are going to appear on traffic from the EPO.
“As far as [I'm] informed much of the EPO’s IT infrastructure is located in the Hague (Rijswijk) office. So even Internet traffic from Munich may be routed through a proxy in the Hague and appear with a Netherlands IP address. In any case the IU (in Munich) could presumably delegate tasks to an IT department (which could be based in the Hague).
“But the fact that you seem to be identifying IP addresses assigned to the EPO is in itself revealing.
“A lot of EPO addresses begin with 145.64 [...] You can find many of the address blocks in the db-ip.com database. For example: https://db-ip.com/all/145.64.0
“But it’s important to note that the geographical location nominally associated with the EPO IP address (e.g. Rijswijk/Hague) doesn’t really tell you where the user of the IP address is physically located (e.g. whether in Munich or the Hague).”
More technical information about the nature of the DDOS-induced strain can be published when the storm at the EPO is over. I can only speculate about who’s behind the attacks and weigh the probabilities. There is no ‘smoking gun’ just yet.
Some things, like the nature of attacks on this site, can be published upon key events, such as key facts about SIPO/Željko Topić corruption being published after a defamation trial reveals that allegations have merit and are most likely true. It would be safer for Techrights to limit sharing of information temporarily and to do so (against accusations or retaliatory tactics) only until perceived foes are powerless and widely scrutinised.
“You could try filing a criminal complaint with the Dutch authorities,” one person told me. “It seems that they have take action against DDOS attacks in the past.
“The EPO will probably try to hide behind its “immunity” but that should not protect it in this case as DDOS is not part of its official functions.”
DDOS attacks are very hard to analyse for original sources, speaking as a system administrator here. As far back as pre-2010 I have tried complaining to British authorities and it never led to the slightest of actions. They don’t even know what DDOS means, until or unless it attacks some major business or a governmental institution. Experience teaches that it’s a waste of time to even initiate action and I already have a big battle with BT (since March) and another one brewing with Amazon (over the latest DDOS against Techrights). Amazon will hopefully unmask (perhaps under increasing pressure) the identity of the account behind it all. This needs to happen soon, maybe this week.
“You may be right,” wrote to us another person with some background in this area. “It’s probably easier just to block the addresses.” Well, it’s not always possible, not with AWS anyway (far too many IP addresses).
Speaking again with one who is familiar with the EPO’s network, I begin to consider filing a complaint directly with the EPO. “As mentioned previously,” wrote to us one person, “as far as we can determine, most officially registered EPO addresses begin with 145.64.
“See here: http://bgp.he.net/AS28756#_prefixes
“Also here: https://ipinfo.io/AS28756
The E-mail addresses listed for the Network Administrators at the EPO under the second link above are rather clear.
ywoue@epo.org
and wherler@epo.org
(that’s Wolfgang Herler) will soon be contacted.
We found two further E-mail addresses here: jbielsa@epo.org
and nderuiter@epo.org
(that’s Niek de Ruiter).
There is also an “impersonal” E-mail address for Network Administration: admin_network@epo.org
Once I get to the bottom of the DDOS attacks from Amazon AWS I may also make time to file a detailed complaint to the above addresses, complete with a list of offending EPO IP addresses (which automatically got banned by our security software/defences, based on their erratic behaviour). █
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Posted in Patents at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Ensuring that rich people become even richer, resistant to challenge
Summary: A look at some recent patent stories and what can be deduced from them, based on statistics and trends
THE HUGE news (in our assessment) that no Free software and GNU/Linux sites ever talk about is the fast demise of software patents in the United States. The prospects of patent blackmail are greatly affected (vastly diminished) by this. It helps any unaffiliated (independent from corporations and thus autonomous) software project compete against big entities with patents — those that have been shutting down Free software projects for years, usually by means of intimidation alone. Indie Free software developers cannot afford days in court and the income they receive from Free software they develop tends to be zero or very little, so the incentive to go to court is reasonably low.
Not only software patents are affected but patents on business methods are too. As this one article put it a fortnight ago: “Each panelist had a very interesting perspective on the future of patents held by banking and financial services firms, where the majority of these patents are primarily business methods and software related.”
Debates about patent scope are important. Some wonder whether drugs should be patentable (ethical issues arise because of potentially mortal impact) and other wonder about patenting medical devices so as to price them out of reach, if not just monopolise them, thus making them more scarce (unavailable in poorer places or inaccessible to poor people).
“No matter who wins and who loses a case, patent lawyers will always profit from it.”Patents originally promised ‘protection’ for the little independent inventor, supposedly protecting him or her from much better funded corporations with copycats and mass production. In reality, as these new figures serve to show, patents are being hoarded or at least gathered mostly by large corporations, perhaps reminding us who is best served by today’s patent system. It’s getting worse — and fast! The past decade alone has been terrible amd the passage of power to large corporations accelerated, as evidenced by patents. As Patently-O puts it: “As with dependent claims, the average number of independent claims per patent has also dropped significantly over the past decade. (From around 3.2 to 2.5 independent claims per patent). As the histogram shows below, the decline comes primarily from a rise in the percentage of applications with three-or-fewer independent claims.”
Many thanks to Dennis Crouch for shattering a common myth about ‘protection’ for the little independent inventor. This myth is now dead. Crouch attributes this to costs and explains that “change is largely driven by PTO fees and the ongoing commodification of patent prosecution.”
The system is now just tilted in favour of large corporations. The Fitbit-Jawbone feud which we mentioned the other day is still in the news [1, 2] and it helps remind us who benefits the most from patent extravaganza (more so than corporations): patent lawyers. No matter who wins and who loses a case, patent lawyers will always profit from it. Patent litigation is a racket and a racket that needs to be ended, just like Major General Smedley Butler once explained in relation to the war industry. █
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