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01.09.17

Links 9/1/2017: Civilization VI Coming to GNU/Linux, digiKam 5.4.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Game’s changed in 6 years: open source ecosystem thrives

    Chen Bo, a 37-year-old software developer with Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile, remembers clearly how isolated and closed China’s software environment was in 2010. That was a time when the mobile internet revolution was taking hold of the world’s most populous country.

    “Every app developer saw his or her software codes as the most precious assets and would never share them with others. You could say the scene was equivalent to people securing their family jewelry in plastic wraps and locking it in burglar-resistant safes,” Chen said.

    That was also a time when even employees were allowed access to only a part of the codes they were working on, to pre-empt information leaks to competitors.

    But the scene has changed over the last six years. China has blossomed into one of the world’s most dynamic hubs for software developers.

  • Open source server simplifies HTTPS, security certificates

    For administrators seeking an easier method to turn on HTTPS for their websites, there is Caddy, an open source web server that automatically sets up security certificates and serves sites over HTTPS by default.

    Built on Go 1.7.4, Caddy is a lightweight web server that supports HTTP/2 out of the box and automatically integrates with any ACME-enabled certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt. HTTP/2 is enabled by default when the site is served over HTTPS, and administrators using Caddy will never have to deal with expired TLS certificates for their websites, as Caddy handles the process of obtaining and deploying certificates.

  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Project by Joe Brockmeier, Red Hat
  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Software Project

    Healthy productive FOSS projects don’t just happen, but are built, and the secret ingredient is Community over code. Purpose and details are everything: If you build it will they come, and then how do you keep it going and growing? How do you set direction, attract and retain contributors, what do you do when there are conflicts, and especially conflicts with valuable contributors? Joe Brockmeier (Red Hat) shares a wealth of practical wisdom at LinuxCon North America.

  • Open technology for land rights documentation

    Technology is only one part of the solution, but at Cadasta we believe it is a key component. While many governments had modern technology systems put in place to manage land records, often these were expensive to maintain, required highly trained staff, were not transparent, and were otherwise too complicated. Many of these systems, created at great expense by donor governments, are already outdated and no longer accurately reflect existing land and property rights.

  • Web Browsers

    • Min Browser Muffles the Web’s Noise

      Min is a Web browser with a minimal design that provides speedy operation with simple features.

      When it comes to software design, “minimal” does not mean low functionality or undeveloped potential. If you like minimal distraction tools for your text editor and note-taking applications, that same comfort appeal is evident in the Min browser.

      I mostly use Google Chrome, Chromium and Firefox on my desktops and laptop computers. I am well invested in their add-on functionality, so I can access all the specialty services that get me through my long sessions in researching and working online.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

        Among their proposed goals for Servo in 2017 are finishing Stylo (Servo’s CSS style system into Gecko), extending WebRender as the GPU accelerated back-end, experimenting with initial layout integration in other products, exploring Flexbox, extending and better supporting embedding APIs, and implementing other high priority DOM APIs. Among the research proposed for this year is a magic DOM and JavaScript optimizations along with software transactional memory.

      • Mozilla Calls for “Responsible IoT”

        As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. In fact, all the way back in 2015, Philip DesAutels, the AllSeen Alliance’s leader, told us that: “In five years, I think all of this will be around us everywhere, in everything. The next phase is going to be the really transformational phase. “Systems around you will have a whole lot more information. They’ll be able to deliver a lot more value.”

        Now, Mozilla, which has been keeping track of the convergence of open source and the Internet of Things, is out with a new report calling for “responsible IoT.”

  • SaaS/Back End

    • What is DataOps?

      DataOps describes the creation & curation of a central data hub, repository and management zone designed to collect, collate and then onwardly distribute data such that data analytics can be more widely democratised across an entire organisation and, subsequently, more sophisticated layers of analytics can be brought to bear such as built-for-purpose analytics engines.

    • Essentials of OpenStack Administration Part 5: OpenStack Releases and Use Cases

      OpenStack has come a long way since 2010 when NASA approached Rackspace for a project. With 1,600 individual contributors to OpenStack and a six-month release cycle, there are a lot of changes and progress. This amount of change and progress is not without its drawbacks. In the Juno release, there were something like 10,000 bugs. In the next release, Kilo, there were 13,000 bugs. But as OpenStack is deployed in more environments, and more people are interested in it, the community grows both in users and developers.

    • How to find your first OpenStack job

      We’ve covered the growth of OpenStack jobs and how you can become involved in the community. Maybe that even inspired you to search for OpenStack jobs and explore the professional opportunities for Stackers. You probably have questions, so we’re here to answer the frequent questions about working on OpenStack professionally.

    • OpenStack becomes ‘de facto’ private cloud

      A mixed year for OpenStack with HPE and Cisco seeming to step away from the community.

    • OpenStack under the radar
    • Angel Diaz talks about OpenStack Interop

      At the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 16 vendors stood on stage and demonstrated interoperability. This was a major breakthrough for OpenStack. It marked a significant departure from just 18 months earlier when the OpenStack Foundation had chided vendors for creating lots of proprietary solutions. Enterprise Times sat down with Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President, Cloud Architecture and Technology to talk about this achievement.

    • How to take a leadership role in OpenStack

      On top of her job as a system architect at Nokia, Afek has taken an active role in the OpenStack community as the project team lead (PTL) of Vitrage and a voice in gender equality in the technology field with the Women of OpenStack. You may have also seen her taking center stage at the recent OpenStack Summit Barcelona, where she took part in a daredevil demo.

    • Landing a job, becoming the de facto private cloud, and more OpenStack news

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Top LibreOffice Alternatives

      More people than ever are enjoying the benefits of LibreOffice. It’s free to use and open source. But what about LibreOffice alternatives? Are there any good LibreOffice Alternative sand should you try them for yourself? This article is going to share some of the best LibreOffice alternatives and provide links where you can learn more about each of them.

    • Ubuntu Tablet – quick test LibreOffice

      Ubuntu Tablet – quick test Libre Office in desktop mode tablet Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition running Unity 8 bluetooth mouse + keyboard

  • CMS

    • WordPress, Silverstripe, TYPO3 & More: Keeping Up With Open Source CMS

      December is a traditionally quiet month across most industries, but the world of open source CMS never truly rests.

      Sure, open source vendors (and their contributing communities alike) cooled their jets a little as the new year approached — but there was still plenty going on.

      If you happened to miss any of it, here are the latest open source CMS headlines.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available

      Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-7 branch or use the netbsd-7-1-RC1 tag.

    • NetBSD 7.1 RC1 Released

      The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 7 Getting Closer To Release, But Running Behind On Regressions

      Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler.

      GCC 7 has been in “stage three” for a while now meaning only bug/general fixes landing, but they are planning to enter stage four on 19 January. When stage four begins, only wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes will be accepted.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open source tool for wave and tidal arrays

        Wave and tidal energy design tool DTOcean has been launched as an open source software package. The tool’s developers say it will assist project developers to design wave and tidal energy arrays by identifying optimal layouts, components and procedures.

        An active but growing user community is emerging around DTOcean, which industry and research communities are encouraged to join.

      • CES 2017: ARM gets an assist in Renault’s open-source electric vehicle, Twizy

        The open source movement has had a profound impact on the tech sector over the last two decades, and now those notions are moving beyond software and operating systems to form the basis for flexible yet standardized complete systems – including automobiles.

      • Open Source Reaches Processor Core

        Whether for budgetary, philosophical, or other reasons, an increasing number of embedded systems are being designed using open source elements. For the most part, these elements are software based, although there are some open source board designs in use as well. Now, the microcontroller that empowers a PCB design is available as an open source design.

      • 3D Printing Market to More Than Double by 2020

  • Programming/Development

    • How to get started as an open source programmer

      Looking out at the world of technology is exciting. It has a lot of moving parts, and it seems the further you dig into it, the deeper it gets, and then it’s turtles all the way down. For that very reason, technology is also overwhelming. Where do you start if you’re keen to join in and help shape the way the modern world functions? What’s the first step? What’s the twentieth step?

    • RcppCCTZ 0.2.0

      A new version, now at 0.2.0, of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN. And it brings a significant change: windows builds! Thanks to Dan Dillon who dug deep enough into the libc++ sources from LLVM to port the std::get_time() function that is missing from the 4.* series of g++. And with Rtools being fixed at g++-4.9.3 this was missing for us here. Now we can parse dates for use by RcppCCTZ on Windows as well. That is important not only for RcppCCTZ but also particularly for the one package (so far) depending on it: nanotime.

Leftovers

  • The Couple Who Saved China’s Ancient Architectural Treasures Before They Were Lost Forever

    Architectural preservation is rarely so thrilling as it was in 1930s China. As the country teetered on the edge of war and revolution, a handful of obsessive scholars were making adventurous expeditions into the country’s vast rural hinterland, searching for the forgotten treasures of ancient Chinese architecture. At the time, there were no official records of historic structures that survived in the provinces. The semi-feudal countryside had become a dangerous and unpredictable place: Travelers venturing only a few miles from major cities had to brave muddy roads, lice-infested inns, dubious food and the risk of meeting bandits, rebels and warlord armies. But although these intellectuals traveled by mule cart, rickshaw or even on foot, their rewards were great. Within the remotest valleys of China lay exquisitely carved temples staffed by shaven-headed monks much as they had been for centuries, their roofs filled with bats, their candlelit corridors lined with dust-covered masterpieces.

  • Photos: Some of the earliest color images of life around the world

    The fantastic ambitions of rich men should never be underestimated. Throw enough cash at something and even a failure can have staying power.

    When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Trump Has to Rescue Obamacare or Admit He’s a Liar

      It didn’t take long. During the first week of 2017, the new Republican Congress has begun efforts to dismantle America’s health-care system. Their long-standing goal, consistent with their right-wing ideology, is to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, privatize Medicare, make massive cuts to Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. At the same time, in the midst of grotesque and growing income and wealth inequality, they’re preparing to allow pharmaceutical companies to increase drug prices and to hand out obscene tax breaks for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

    • Forest Service OKs land swap for proposed PolyMet mine

      A proposed copper-nickel mine for northeastern Minnesota has passed another milestone.

      The U.S. Forest Service on Monday signed off on a proposed land swap with PolyMet Mining. The deal exchanges 6,650 acres of federal land in the Superior National Forest that PolyMet needs for about the same amount of privately owned land within the forest.

      • Now what? PolyMet applied to open its copper-nickel mine

      PolyMet CEO Jon Cherry calls it “a win for both parties,” giving Superior National Forest lands with better public access.

      But Executive Director Paul Danicic of the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness says no exchange of land “can undo the damage” that PolyMet would do to the area.

    • Expensive Medicines Increase The Pressure

      When Gilead brought its new antiviral medicine – Sovaldi – for the treatment of Hepatitis C to the US market for USD 84,000, it triggered a storm of protest. Demand for this revolutionary treatment was so high that the price (despite reductions) became an enormous burden on the American healthcare system. Although the product is cheaper in Switzerland at CHF 48 307, treatment is rationed for reasons of cost.

    • Could Amgen’s Patent Victory Be Bad For Medicine?

  • Security

    • Stolen NSA Windows hacking tools now for sale

      The Shadow Brokers, the hacker or hackers who stole and are now claiming to sell NSA surveillance software, are now selling the agency’s package of Windows hacking tools.

      Like all Shadow Brokers wares, the tools are at least three years old. But codes used to pass through security that were released by the Shadow Brokers in August worked when tested at that time, sparking concerns.

    • New CloudLinux 5 Kernel Released to Patch Important Use-After-Free Vulnerability

      CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is informing users of the CloudLinux 5 series of server-oriented operating systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 about the availability of a new kernel update that patches an important security vulnerability.

    • MongoDB Apocalypse Is Here as Ransom Attacks Hit 10,000 Servers [Ed: due to misconfiguration, not a flaw]
    • MongoDB Ransomware Impacts Over 10,000 Databases
    • How to secure MongoDB on Linux or Unix production server

      MongoDB is a free and open-source NoSQL document database server. It is used by web application for storing data on a public facing server. Securing MongoDB is critical. Crackers and hackers are accessing insecure MongoDB for stealing data and deleting data from unpatched or badly-configured databases. In this tutorial you will learn about how to secure a MongoDB instance or server running cloud server.

    • MongoDB Ransomware Attacks Grow in Number

      Last week when the news started hitting the net about ransomware attacks focusing on unprotected instances of MongoDB, it seemed to me to be a story that would have a short life. After all, the attacks weren’t leveraging some unpatched vulnerabilities in the database, but databases that were misconfigured in a way that left them reachable via the Internet, and with no controls — like a password other than the default — over who had privileges. All that was necessary to get this attack vector under control was for admins to be aware of the situation and to be ready and able to reconfigure and password protect.

    • FTC will pay you to build an IoT security checker

      The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants the public to take a crack at developing tools to improve security around Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

      Specifically, the FTC is hosting a competition challenging the public to create a technical solution that would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software. Contestants have the option of adding features, such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Security Advice: Bad, Terrible, or Awful

      As an industry, we suck at giving advice. I don’t mean this in some negative hateful way, it’s just the way it is. It’s human nature really. As a species most of us aren’t very good at giving or receiving advice. There’s always that vision of the wise old person dropping wisdom on the youth like it’s candy. But in reality they don’t like the young people much more than the young people like them. Ever notice the contempt the young and old have for each other? It’s just sort of how things work. If you find someone older and wiser than you who is willing to hand out good advice, stick close to that person. You won’t find many more like that.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • When Fear Comes

      When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution. Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.

      [...]

      This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the battlefield.

      “This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly,” he says.

      The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.

    • As Families In Charleston Share Stories and Pain, Dylann Roof Shows No Remorse

      Mrs. Pinckney was the first in a long line of witnesses called by federal prosecutors in the sentencing trial of Dylann Roof last week. The avowed white supremacist was convicted in December for gunning down Reverend Pinckney and eight parishioners during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015. The crime shook the country. President Obama gave a stirring eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s televised memorial service, singing Amazing Grace. The next day, in a brazen act of civil disobedience, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the state capitol to take down the Confederate flag; soon after, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed legislation to remove the flag from the statehouse, in dedication to the Emanuel Nine. Across the country, Americans marveled at the expressions of forgiveness shown by grieving relatives who spoke at a bond hearing for Roof within days of the crime. But in Charleston, others remained torn, overwhelmed by grief and anger. A year and a half later, many struggle to define what justice would mean.

    • Politicizing Victimhood: Human Rights as a Propaganda Weapon in Aleppo and Mosul

      Despite continued clashes between the government and rebel forces, the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia appears to have significantly reduced the violence in Syria. Following the fall of Aleppo to Assad’s forces, we should be reflecting upon what lessons can be drawn from Syria. I would offer a few. First, in wars that involve officially designated enemies of state, such as Syria and Russia, there is little reason to think that one will be exposed to reasoned, sensible discourse in the U.S. media. Similarly, on “the other side” – Russia in this case – one sees a similar effort to exonerate the government from responsibility for human rights violations. A second, broader lesson from Syria is that “human rights” inevitably serve as a rhetorical weapon, used on “both sides” by powerful societal actors, including officialdom and the press, to advance their own strategic interests.

    • On Whitewashing Russia: Power-worshippers Only See Black-and-White

      The trouble with this latest fairy tale is that the media has swallowed the state-sponsored story without demanding a scintilla of evidence, and has turned the entire factitious endeavor into a witch hunt aimed at alternative media. The binary constructs of the Bush era are being reanimated for another Halloween of imbecilic fearmongering. So those that apply the withering lens of the scientific method to this latest mythmaking program are quickly labeled as pro-Russian, anti-Democratic, or worse, traitors.

    • Those Diplomatic Expulsions

      There is a fascinating precedent for Putin’s refusal to retaliate for the expulsion of 32 Russian diplomats by Obama, an easy diplomatic win on the international stage. In 1985, my first year in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Margaret Thatcher expelled 25 Soviet diplomats identified as spies by a defector (from memory Gordievsky), and later a further six.

    • The Russians, Trump and the Deep State (Rising)

      People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.

      One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?

      When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.

    • Meryl Streep calls out Trump: Having Bully-in-Chief Coarsens whole Culture

      Michael Moore denounced the Iraq War.

      So we now have another such moment, as Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States.

    • Donald Trump calls Meryl Streep ‘overrated’ after Golden Globes speech

      US President-elect Donald Trump has hit back at Meryl Streep’s criticism of him as she received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.

      He tweeted: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.

      “She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” Mr Trump added of the three-time Oscar-winning actress.

      She said: “When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”

    • Hollywood Gets a Clue About Inclusion, Meryl Streep Gets Political at 2017 Golden Globes (Video)

      Remember last year’s hashtag-fueled protest—#OscarsSoWhite – decrying the lack of diversity at Hollywood’s most hyped awards event?

      On Sunday night, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association showed up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by rewarding a wider range of talent at the 2017 Golden Globes. Stories by and about African-Americans were recognized at the HFPA’s annual awards-fest, and the night’s biggest honor, the best drama statue, went to a coming-of-age film about a young gay black man growing up in Miami.

    • The Age of Great Expectations and the Great Void

      The third theme was all about rethinking the concept of personal freedom as commonly understood and pursued by most Americans. During the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily. Cold War-style patriotism seemingly prioritized the interests of the state at the expense of the individual. Yet even as thrillingly expressed by John F. Kennedy — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — this was never an easy sell, especially if it meant wading through rice paddies and getting shot at.

      Once the Cold War ended, however, the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated. Reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation. Emphasizing the removal of restraints and inhibitions, the shift made itself felt everywhere, from patterns of consumption and modes of cultural expression to sexuality and the definition of the family. Norms that had prevailed for decades if not generations — marriage as a union between a man and a woman, gender identity as fixed at birth — became passé. The concept of a transcendent common good, which during the Cold War had taken a backseat to national security, now took a backseat to maximizing individual choice and autonomy.

    • Trump must slay the ‘sacred cow’ of the budget: Defense spending

      The Pentagon is filled to the gills with cronies and crony capitalism. And Republicans have encouraged this “waste and abuse” – this is the kind way of saying it, and it is on a massive scale – for too long. Do the right thing for once Congress. CUT SPENDING especially on the military civilian bureaucracy which is a taxpayer funded gravy train if there ever was one.

    • The Real Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia

      The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.

      The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • China raises its low carbon ambitions in new 2020 targets

      China’s 13th Five-Year-Plan on Energy Development (Energy 13FYP) might be one of the most anticipated energy blueprints in the world for its far-reaching implications for the carbon trajectory of the planet’s largest emitter.

      On Jan 5, 2017, the National Energy Administration finally unveiled the plan to reporters, with a set of 2020 targets covering everything from total energy consumption to installed wind energy capacity. Before we delve into details of the plan, one thing is worth noting: with the Energy 13FYP, China might have once again raised ambitions for its low-carbon future, highlighting the urgency that this smog-ridden country attaches to moving away from fossil fuels.

    • A Sushi Boss Bought a Single Tuna for $632,000

      A single bluefin tuna sold for $632,000 on Thursday, the second highest amount ever paid for such a fish, according to a report.

      The sale of the 470-pound fish, reported by the Associated Press, was made to sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura.

    • Of Grizzly Bears and Bureaucrats: The Quest for Survival

      The last known grizzly in So Cal was shot in 1916 by Cornelius Birket Johnson, an industrious farmer living at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in north Los Angeles. The hungry bear trampled the man’s newly planted vineyard, chomping on his young grapes for three straight nights. Ol’ Johnson wasn’t about to let the pesky bear get away with such thievery and destruction, so one night he lured the grizzly with a slab of beef and snagged him in a trap, but like all feisty grizzlies, this young guy wouldn’t go down easy. Johnson later shot the bear dead after finding it gravely injured, exhausted, bloodied and suffering, having dragged the metal trap far from where it was originally set. Thus, at the hands of Johnson, the extinction of the So Cal grizzly was complete.

    • Radioactive Waste is Good for You, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rick Perry as Energy Secretary

      But Perry had a similar relationship with another Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons, owner of WCS. And in return, under Gov. Perry, WCS’s lucrative radioactive waste dumping activities underwent major expansion.

    • California floods, America burns, irony explodes

      The bloated orange president-elect is in love with dumb-thug Russians, tweets about himself in the third person and is readying his murder of conspiracy-minded billionaire-idiots to lead the nation into the darkest, most shamelessly corrupt period in our short history, all undertaken with a sexual predator’s shrug and an engraved gold pinky ring that spells out #-l-o-s-e-r.

      Meanwhile, the 7th-largest economy in the world just underwent truly biblical flooding – and not necessarily the helpful kind – following a half-decade of being parched to the bone, thanks to weather extremes wrought, unstoppably, of climate change.

      Cars are going driverless, homes are going Big Brother, women are being slammed back to 1950, immigrants are in mourning, Democrats are going underground and stunned Millennials are moving back in with their wary parents as the planet records yet another year as the hottest on human record, shuddering and sighing and girding for much – and with Trump, we do mean much – worse to come.

  • Finance

    • Pound hit by Brexit fears as FTSE 100 touches fresh record high – business live

      Brexit uncertainty hasn’t hit the UK housing market, according to new figures from the Halifax today.

      Halifax reports that house prices jumped by 1.7% in December, surprising economists who only forecast a 0.2% rise. On a annual basis, prices were 6.5% higher.

    • Trump’s Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals

      Professor Henry Giroux says Trump’s appointments signal a future of more war, violent military interventions, and an embrace of Islamophobia

    • Ohio communities, counties have nearly $1.2B less in aid for 2017 because of state cuts

      Cuts in local government funds and tax changes made at the state level will cost Ohio counties and communities nearly $1.2 billion in 2017, as compared to 2010, a new report shows.

      Chief among those cuts were elimination of the state’s estate tax, the halving of local government funds and accelerated phase-outs of local business taxes, a report from the liberal leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio found.

      But the report drew criticism from Gov. John Kasich’s administration, which argues that focusing solely on cuts tells only part of the story. Growth in income and sales tax revenues as Ohio’s economy recovers from the recession have helped offset the cuts, a spokeswoman said, citing alternative research.

    • Assuring EU citizens of right to stay ‘would lose UK negotiating capital’

      The UK would lose “negotiating capital” in Europe if it unilaterally granted EU citizens the right to remain after Brexit, the government has said.

      In a letter to a group of EU citizens from the office of the home secretary, Amber Rudd, the government said it “recognises that EU nationals make an invaluable contribution to our economy and society”.

      However, in an apparent hardening of the official position, the letter warned that the government cannot do anything to address their position after Brexit until it has assurances that British citizens in Europe will receive reciprocal protection in the country where they have settled.

      “Agreeing a unilateral position in advance of these negotiations would lose negotiating capital with respect to British citizens in EU member states and place the UK at an immediate disadvantage,” said the letter signed by Peter Grant, an official in the free movement policy team of the immigration and border policy directorate of the Home Office.

    • Politico Is Mistaken, It Would Be Fun and Easy for Donald Trump to Divest

      Politico badly misled readers this morning in an article that said Trump “can’t simply divest from his businesses.” The article cited a number of experts who explained how difficult and complicated it would be for Trump to sell off his various businesses, many of which have complex ownership arrangements, along with debts and other legal obligations.

      While selling Trump’s business enterprises in short order would be complicated, as I explained shortly after the election, this is not what is necessary for Donald Trump to avoid conflicts of interest. The key to the process I outline in that piece is that Trump arrange to get independent teams of auditors to provide assessments of the property. I suggested he go with the middle assessment provided by three teams of auditors. This would limit the likelihood of a major error in the assessment.

      Trump would then buy an insurance policy that would guarantee him the estimate from this middle audit. The enterprises would then be turned over to an executor who would run and offload the businesses with the goal of maximizing the value. When the businesses are sold off the proceeds would be placed in a blind trust. If the cumulative value from the sales exceeds the estimate, then the proceeds go to a charity of Trump’s choosing, but not under his control. If the proceeds from the sales are less than the value of the estimate he collects on the insurance policy.

    • A horrifying prospect for public schools

      Betsy DeVos has never gone to public schools. Her children have never attended public schools. She has never taught or served as an administrator in public schools. She has made a career out of funding schemes to cripple or destroy public schools. And now Donald Trump has a new way to put Betsy DeVos and public schools in the same sentence: Let Betsy DeVos help shape the future of public schools as head of the Education Department.

      Is it any wonder why a public school teacher like me — someone who knows the value of this institution both as educator and as student — finds this idea nothing short of horrifying?

    • Americans can’t afford to lose Richard Cordray or the CFPB

      At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, an estimated one out of every 54 homeowners lost their homes. Workers and seniors lost lifetimes’ worth of savings or retirement accounts, small businesses went under, and vulnerable consumers fell victim to toxic and manipulative financial products offered by Wall Street and the big banks.

      [...]

      At the helm of the bureau is Director Richard Cordray, who has proven to be a tireless and effective leader. Under his watch, the CFPB has cracked down on the tricks and traps of payday lenders, credit cards companies, debt collectors and bad actors in the industry from taking advantage of unsuspecting Americans.

      In its five years as an agency, the CFPB has recovered more than $11 billion for 27 million consumers harmed by illegal practices of financial institutions. The bureau has secured relief in more than 100 cases, directly putting money back in the pockets of American consumers who have been victimized by companies that refuse to follow the law.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Assange Criticizes U.S. Effort To Conflate WikiLeaks Publications With Russian Hacking

      Editor-in-chief Julian Assange called the report “embarrassing to the reputation” of U.S. intelligence services because it more resembled a “press release” than an actual intelligence report. “It is clearly designed for political effect,” which has happened in the past with the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War as well as intelligence reports claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

      “Critical question here is whether the allegation is that Russian intelligence services themselves or people under their direction hacked the Democratic National Party and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta with the intent of favoring Donald Trump,” Assange suggested.

      “Even if you accept that the Russian intelligence services hacked Democratic Party institutions, as it is normal for the major intelligence services to hack each others’ major political parties on a constant basis to obtain intelligence,” you have to ask, “what was the intent of those Russian hacks? And do they connect to our publications? Or is it simply incidental?”

      Assange accused U.S. intelligence agencies of deliberately obscuring the timeline. He said they do not know when the DNC was hacked.

    • The ‘Post-Truth’ Mainstream Media

      Once East Aleppo fell to government forces, it turned out that there were less than 90,000 people there, about what the Syrian government estimated but only a fraction of the much higher numbers confidently repeated ad nauseam by Western officials and media.

      Part of the reason for this misreporting was that Syrian rebels had publicly killed Western and independent journalists to secure a monopoly on information coming out of rebel-controlled areas. Given the West’s disdain for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and sympathy for his opponents, the mainstream Western media then became reliant on anti-government rebels and allied activists for what was going on in those parts of Syria.

    • Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama

      Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

      This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

      Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

    • Why Has Israeli Spy Shai Masot Not Been Expelled?

      There is no starker proof of the golden chains in which Israel has entangled the British political class, than the incredible fact that “diplomat” Shai Masot has not been expelled for secretly conspiring to influence British politics by attacking Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, suggesting that he might be brought down by “a little scandal”. It is incredible by any normal standards of diplomatic behaviour that immediate action was not taken against Masot for actions which when revealed any professional diplomat would normally expect to result in being “PNG’d” – declared persona non grata.

      Obama has just expelled 35 Russian diplomats for precisely the same offence, with the exception that in the Russian case there is absolutely zero hard evidence, whereas in the Masot case there is irrefutable evidence on which to act.

      [...]

      The two stories – Russian interference in US politics, Israeli interference in UK politics – also link because the New York Times claims that it was the British that first suggested to the Obama administration that Russian cyber activity was targeting Clinton. Director of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the British Cabinet Office is Matthew Gould, the UK’s former openly and strongly pro-Zionist Ambassador to Israel and friend of the current Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. While Private Secretary to David Miliband and William Hague, and then while Ambassador to Israel, Regev held eight secret meetings with Adam Werritty, on at least one occasion with Mossad present and on most occasions also with now minister Liam Fox. My Freedom of Information requests for minutes of these meetings brought the reply that they were not minuted, and my Freedom of Information request for the diary entries for these meetings brought me three pages each containing only the date, with everything else redacted.

    • Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election

      Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates.

      Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful.1 It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset.

    • The Left’s Challenge in Age of Trump

      Left activists plan to take on President Donald Trump from Day One, with tens of thousands of protesters promising to show up in Washington to protest his inauguration on Jan. 20 and a major women’s march scheduled the next day.

      But the challenge for the Left goes deeper than protesting Trump and some of his policies. The difficulty also involves how to build a progressive agenda that is not compromised by corporate Democrats at election time. I discussed these questions with Norman Solomon, media activist, author, former delegate for Bernie Sanders Delegate and Rootsaction co-founder.

      Dennis Bernstein: Norman Solomon, welcome back. […] Say a little bit about your background. I want people to know where you’re coming from and, if I’ve got it right, you sort of came in the activists door.

    • Thinking About Fascism

      The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power. I’ve known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people’s fears, could take control of the levers of power.

      I just read Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.

      His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.

    • Democrats Who Oppose Betsy DeVos Have Nothing To Lose

      In “an unprecedented break” from tradition, Democrats in the US Senate are expected to challenge as many as eight of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Betsy DeVos for US Secretary of Education, according to a report by the Washington Post.

      The opposition to DeVos, Politico reports, comes from “more than a dozen Democratic senators from all wings of the party” who “will portray DeVos’ views as being outside the education mainstream.”

    • Trump, the Banks and the Bomb

      When pro-nuclear disarmament organisations last October cheered the United Nations decision to start in 2017 negotiations on a global treaty banning these weapons, they probably did not expect that shortly after the US would elect Republican businessman Donald Trump as their 45th president. Much less that he would rush to advocate for increasing the US nuclear power.

      The United Nations on Oct. 27, 2016 adopted a resolution to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, putting an end to two decades of paralysis in world nuclear disarmament efforts.

      [...]

      The global ani-nuke movment, however, soon saw its joy being frustrated by the US president-elect Donald Trump, who in a tweet on Dec. 22, 2016, wrote:

      Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump : “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

      Trump’s announcement, if materialised, would imply one of the most insourmountable hardles facing the world anti-nuclear movement.

    • GOP Tries to ‘Jam’ Through Nominees Not Yet Vetted, Ethics Office Warns

      The head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) sent a letter to Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (NY) on Saturday expressing “great concern” over the fact that the hearings are set to begin on Tuesday and his office had not yet received financial disclosure reports for some of the scheduled nominees.

      “As OGE’s director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” wrote Walter Shaub, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013. wrote in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

      The current confirmation schedule, which has six nominees scheduled for the same days as well as a Trump press conference and a Senate ‘vote-o-rama,’ he wrote, “has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews.”

    • What The US Intelligence ‘Russia Hacked Our Election’ Report Could Have Said… But Didn’t

      By now it’s quite clear that many in the US intelligence community believe strongly that Russia tried to influence the US election, and part of that included hacks into the DNC’s computer systems, a spearphishing attack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails and some exploratory surveillance hacking into the computer systems of state election systems (but not into the voting machines themselves). The US intelligence services said it back in October. And they said it again last month. And, they said it again on Friday with the release of an unclassified “incident attribution” report.

      Because the debate over this issue has gotten quite silly in some places — and ridiculously political as well — let’s start with a few basic points: It is absolutely entirely possible that the Russians hacked into all these systems and that it was trying (and perhaps succeeding?) to influence the election. Nothing in what I’m saying here is suggesting that’s not true. What I am concerned about is the evidence that’s presented to support that claim — mainly because I think we should all be terrified when we escalate situations based on secret info where the government just tells us to “trust us, we know.” And, yes, governments (including the US) have done this going back throughout history. That doesn’t make it right.

    • Allegations Against Russia Less Credible Every Day

      The U.S. government has now generated numerous news stories and released multiple “reports” aimed at persuading us that Vladimir Putin is to blame for Donald Trump becoming president. U.S. media has dutifully informed us that the case has been made. What has been made is the case for writing your own news coverage. The “reports” from the “intelligence community” are no lengthier than the New York Times and Washington Post articles about them. Why not just read the reports and cut out the middle-person?

      The New York Times calls the latest report “damning and surprisingly detailed” before later admitting in the same “news” article that the report “contained no information about how the agencies had collected their data or had come to their conclusions.” A quick glance at the report itself would have made clear to you that it did not pretend to present a shred of evidence that Russia hacked emails or served as a source for WikiLeaks. Yet Congresswoman Barbara Lee declared the evidence in this evidence-free report “overwhelming.” What should progressives believe, the best Congresswoman we’ve got or our own lying eyes?

    • Europe’s Mixed Feelings About Trump

      European governments are nervous about a Trump presidency, but – for economic and other reasons – many on the Continent would welcome a friendlier approach toward Russia, reports Andrew Spannaus.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Congressman Appoints Himself Censor, Removes Painting Critical Of Cops From Congressional Halls

      Can’t get legislators off their asses to pass a budget in a timely manner or, I don’t know, step up to do anything about the DOJ’s Rule 41 changes, but you can count on them to apply long-dormant self-motivation to personal agendas.

      Rep. Hunter, offended on behalf of an entire nation unions offended on behalf of their members, saw to it that painting, which the police unions bitched at length about, was removed from the public eye. Not that there was any outrage shown by a majority of constituents, who most likely first heard about this painting after it was removed. Here’s the most offending part of the painting, as captured by the Independent Journal Review.

    • Freedom of expression and censorship

      “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These are the dramatic opening lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s immensely powerful treatise “The Social Contract.” Freedom is the most fundamental pillar of democracy: in its absence democracy turns into autocracy.

      The French Revolution of 1789 made Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the most sacrosanct values of humanity. Any ruler or government that ensnared man away to a life of bondage has always met with perdition eventually. Their lives and reigns have been written in blood in the annals of history for posterity to remember them with derision and disdain.

    • Milo Yiannopoulos peddles hate. It’s not censorship to refuse to publish it

      A coalition of free speech organisations rallied together last week to defend Simon & Schuster’s choice to publish professional irritant Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography, Dangerous, saying that boycotting the book, as so many people have called for, would have “a chilling effect” on free speech.

      I’m sure that having his book (which hit the No 1 spot on Amazon’s pre-sale charts the day after it was announced) pulled from shelves or dropped from S&S would catapult it to even greater success at another publisher, but never mind. It’s clear that this coalition of organisations are standing up for what they believe in, and feel it is important to defend Yiannopoulos’ well-rehearsed right to speak his mind.

      Defending free speech often means finding yourself in the difficult position of having to defend people who say disgusting things. People who make jokes about rape; Holocaust deniers; straight-up racists. Though we might not like what these people say, it’s important that they’re allowed to say it. You can’t go around censoring people just because you don’t agree with them. If we can’t all express what we think, then we can’t talk to each other about our ideas. We can’t have a discussion; we can’t improve; we can’t function as a society.

    • From graphic live-streams to breast bans: A look back at Facebook’s problematic relationship with censorship

      As calls come for Facebook to crackdown on how it moderates Live posts, The Drum looks back at some of the challenges the social network has faced over the past year when it comes to self-censorship.

      At the end of last week Facebook faced mounting pressure to impose stricter measures on its Live video feature after allowing a disturbing video depicting torture to resurface on the site.

      Just days after being removed for violating the platform’s community standards, the video showing the attack of a young man with disabilities in Chicago resurfaced again within Facebook’s walls having been repackaged and re-uploaded by right wing news site the Daily Caller, attracting millions of new viewers.

    • Censorship in America: NYC Removes Birth Index Books from the Public Library

      New York City. The Statue of Liberty glistens in its harbor. The ultimate symbol of what this country stands for. Ellis Island is just a stone’s throw away – the gateway to America. The Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building, the hustle and bustle of busy, free New Yorkers and visitors from around the world. It’s the last place you would expect censorship. But that’s just what we got this past year when the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) decided to pull its Birth Index Books that were on loan to the New York Public Library (NYPL) in order to keep the public from viewing their contents.

      Genealogists lost a valuable resource that day. Adoptees who were born in New York City lost even more. The Birth Index Books contain information that may be key to their identities, something that most people take for granted, but what many adoptees yearn for and live painfully without. When I found my given name listed in the 1971 book a few years ago, I felt a sense of joy. There it was – a record of my truth. Something most people take for granted.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Russia gets LinkedIn banned on Android and iOS

      THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT is continuing to make it difficult for locals to use LinkedIn and has now ensured that the application is not available through either the Apple or the Google app stores.

      This is bad news for anyone in the country that hasn’t decided that they do not want to sign up to LinkedIn yet, but must be reassuring to a government that likes to stop people from communicating at times, and is really not keen on the business social network with more leaks than a colander.

    • FBI Releases A Stack Of Redactions In Response To FOIA Request For Info On Its Purchased iPhone Hack

      As the result of an FOIA lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice, the FBI has finally released documents about the one-time iPhone exploit/hack it purchased from an unknown foreign vendor. Well, more accurately, the FBI released a bunch of paper with nearly nothing left unredacted, as USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out multiple times on Twitter.

    • Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

      This article adds two reasons to why I think a post-Brexit UK is very unlikely to offer an adequate level of protection in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

      One reason relates to recent comments made by Prime Minister Theresa May about human rights. The other relates to the non-compliance of the national security agencies with their existing data protection obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Riyadh, strike against non-payment of salaries: immigrants arrested and flogged

      A Saudi court has sentenced dozens of migrant workers to imprisonment and flogging, employees of the construction giant Binladin Group, for having gone on strike against non-payment of back wages.

      The Saudi press has not yet specified the nationality of the workers who were on strike over arrears in monthly salaries; the protests eventually escalated into street violence, which led to the arrests.

      The first to report the incident was Arab newspaper Al-Watan et Arab News, which, however, it did not clarify the nationality of migrant workers. Some diplomats contacted by AFP were unable (or unwilling) to clarify the affair, claiming to not know the details.

    • Work: it’s time for a new year’s revolution

      Feeling burned out in your work for peace and social justice? A new book provides essential guidance.

    • Young Black Men Still Predominant Victims of Police Violence

      Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.

      According to year-end figures published Sunday by the Guardian database The Counted, “[b]lack males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year,” and were “killed at four times the rate of young white men.”

      Overall, the number police killings fell slightly—1,091 last year, according to the Guardian tally, from 1,146 in 2015—but the pattern of brutality has remained consistent.

    • Future Crimes

      There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

    • Obama Pardons: How Many Has Obama Made In 2016 And Since Taking Office? Will Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning Be Next?

      With less than two weeks remaining in his eight-year administration, President Barack Obama will be under heavy pressure from public advocacy groups to grant high-profile pardon decisions. But Obama has not been shy about granting pardons and commuting prison sentences, particularly as a lame duck president.

      Obama pardoned 78 people and commuted the sentences of 153 others Dec. 19, further cementing his legacy as the most generous grantor of clemency in modern presidential history.

      The Department of Justice official website says Obama has granted 148 presidential pardons in his time in office, a number that exceeds the combined total of the last six presidents. In 2016, he pardoned 82 federal inmates, more than his seven previous years combined. Most of the pardons have been for drug offenders.

    • The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity

      Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.

      Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy — Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day.

    • National Police Union President Says Asset Forfeiture Abuse Is A ‘Fake Issue’ Generated By The Media

      Chuck Canterbury, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, has been given an editorial megaphone over at the Daily Caller. Canterbury’s using this platform to defend the pretty much indefensible: civil asset forfeiture.

      Colloquially known as “cops going shopping for things they want,” asset forfeiture supposedly is used to take funds and property away from criminal organizations. In reality, it’s become an easy way for law enforcement to take the property of others without having to put much effort into justifying the seizures. In most states, convictions are not required, meaning supposed criminal suspects are free to go… but their property isn’t.

    • Prosecutors Looking Into $2 Field Drug Tests After Investigation, Figure Defense Attorneys Should Do All The Work

      The fallout from cheap field drug tests continues. The lab that does actual testing of seized substances for the Las Vegas PD had previously expressed its doubts about the field tests’ reliability, but nothing changed. Officers continued to use the tests and defendants continued to enter into plea bargains based on questionable evidence.

      The Las Vegas PD knew the tests were highly fallible. After all, the department had signed off on a report saying as much and handed it into the DOJ in exchange for federal grant money. But cops still used them and prosecutors still relied on them when pursuing convictions.

    • Parliamentary report: immigrants ‘should be made to learn English’ before arriving in the UK

      Following last month’s controversial report by Dame Louise Casey warning of “worrying” levels of segregation in the UK, an interim report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration has gone further to say that all immigrants should have either learnt English before coming to the UK, or be required to sign up to classes when they arrive.

      The All Party group described speaking English as a “prerequisite for meaningful engagement with most British people”. Labour MP, and chair of the group, Chuka Umunna has defended the report arguing that integration is a “two-way” street. He said that whilst there is a role for migrants there is also an obligation on Britain to fund English language classes.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Hating, SOPA-Loving Marsha Blackburn Pegged To Chair Key Technology & Telecom Subcommittee

      If you were to sit down and consciously select a politician that best represents the stranglehold giant telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have over the legislative process, you probably couldn’t find a better candidate than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. From her endless assault on net neutrality, to her defense of awful state protectionist laws written by ISP lobbyists, there has never been a moment when Ms. Blackburn hasn’t prioritized the rights of giant incumbent duopolists over the public she professes to serve.

      Blackburn has been fairly awful on technology policy in general, from her breathless support of SOPA to her claim that fair use is just a “buzzword” obscuring our desperate need for tougher copyright laws. As such, there should be little surprise that Blackburn has been selected to head the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The subcommittee tackles most of the pressing internet-related issues, with Blackburn replacing Oregon Representative Greg Walden.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Links 9/1/2017: Dell’s Latest XPS 13, GPD Pocket With GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Mac’s share falls to five-year low

    Net Applications pegged Linux’s user share at 2.2% in December, slightly off the 2.3% peak of November.

  • A 2016 retrospective

    In 2012, your editor predicted that LibreOffice would leave OpenOffice (which had been recently dumped into the Apache Software Foundation) in the dust. That prediction was accounted as a failure at the end of the year. Four years later, though, it has become clear that that is exactly what has happened. Your editor happily takes credit for having been a bit ahead of his time, while pointing to something shiny to distract you all from the fact that he didn’t see the issue coming to a head in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package

      Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell’s extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a “just works” Linux experience to the company’s Ultrabooks.

      Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.

    • Meet the GPD Pocket, a 7-inch Ubuntu Laptop

      The GPD Pocket is a 7-inch laptop that’s small enough to fit in to a pocket — and it will apparently be available with Ubuntu!

      As reported on Liliputing, GPD (the company) is currently only showing off a few fancy renders right now, but as they have form for releasing other (similar) devices, like the GPD Win, and Android gaming portables, this is unlikely to be outright vapourware.

  • Kernel Space

    • SipHash Is Being Worked On For Further Security In The Linux Kernel

      Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel.

      Donenfeld is now up to his third version of patches for integrating the SipHash pseudorandom functions into the Linux kernel. For those wanting some background about SipHash, there is an explanation via Wikipedia while a lot more technical information can be found via this SipHash page.

    • Linux 4.10-rc3

      So after that very small rc2 due to the xmas break, we seem to be back
      to fairly normal. After a quiet period like that, I tend to expect a
      bigger chunk just because of pent up work, but I guess the short break
      there really was vacation for everybody, and so instead we’re just
      seeing normal rc behavior. It still feels a bit smaller than a usual
      rc3, but for the first real rc after the merge window (ie I’d compare
      it to a regular rc2), it’s fairly normal.

      The stats look textbook for the kernel: just under 2/3rds drivers,
      with almost half of the rest arch updates, and the rest being “misc”
      (mainly filesystems and networking).

      So nothing in particular stands out. You can get a flavor of the
      details from the appended shortlog, but even more importantly – you
      can go out and test.

      Thanks,

      Linus

    • Linux 4.10-rc3 Kernel Released

      Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces a Fairly Normal Third Linux 4.10 Release Candidate

      A few moments ago, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the general availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.

      According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to be back to their normal state, and it looks like Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 is a fairly normal development release that consists of two-thirds updated drivers, and half of the remaining patch are improvements to various hardware architectures. There are also some minor networking and filesystems fixes.

    • Linux Kernel 4.9 Gets Its First Point Released, Updates Drivers and Filesystems

      We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here! The first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman this past weekend, which means that most modern GNU/Linux distribution can finally start migrating to the series.

      Yes, we’re talking about Linux kernel 4.9.1, the first of many maintenance updates to the Linux 4.9 kernel branch, which is now officially declared stable and ready for production. It’s also a major release that changes a total of 103 files, with 813 insertions and 400 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.

    • Benchmarks

      • Open-Source Nouveau Linux 4.10 + NvBoost vs. NVIDIA Proprietary Linux Driver Performance

        Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the “boost” clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver’s performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.

      • 26-Way Intel/AMD CPU System Comparison With Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 Kernel

        In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.

      • Xeon HD Graphics P530 With OpenGL & Vulkan On Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.10

        It’s been quite a number of months since last trying out the HD Graphics P530 and thus while having a Xeon E3-1245 v5 running Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 for some fresh benchmarks after changing out the motherboard, I figured I would see how the graphics performance for this Xeon CPU compares to the Core IVB / HSW / BDW / SKL results from yesterday.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Latest Cinnamon Release Lands in Antergos, but Read This Before Updating Python

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krita 3.1.x Best Alternative To Photoshop for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

        Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

        Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital VFX industry. Krita is free software, licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2 or later.

      • KDE neon Now Available on Docker

        Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed. You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome. Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.

        So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.

      • KDE Neon Goes Docker, Lets People Test Drive the Latest KDE Software Releases

        Ex-Kubuntu maintainer and renowned KDE developer Jonathan Riddell was proud to announce the availability of the KDE Neon operating system on Docker, the open-source application container engine.

        KDE Neon is currently the only GNU/Linux distribution allowing users to enjoy the newest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as KDE Frameworks and Applications software suite as soon as they’re out. If you’re a bleeding-edge user and love KDE, then KDE Neon is the distro you need to use in 2017.

      • More focused Planet KDE posts

        My blog has been syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for a long time, but sometimes topics I want to write about are not really relevant to these aggregators, so I either refrain from writing, or write anyway and end up feeling a bit guilty for spamming.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

        Your editor, who is normally not overly worried about operating-system upgrades, approached the Fedora 25 transition on his laptop with a fair amount of trepidation. This is the release that switches to using Wayland by default, pushing aside the X.org server we have been using for decades. Such a transition is bound to bring surprises, but the biggest surprise this time around was just how little breakage there is. There is one exception, though, that brings back some old questions about how GNOME is developed.

        The problematic change is simple enough to understand. While X sessions are started by way of a login shell in Fedora (even though the user never sees that shell directly), Wayland sessions do not involve a shell at all. As a result, the user’s .bash_profile and .bashrc files (or whichever initialization files their shell uses) are not read. The place where this omission is most readily noticed is in the definition of environment variables. Many applications will change their behavior based on configuration stored in the environment; all of that configuration vanishes under Wayland. It also seems that some users (xterm holdouts, for example) still run applications that use the old X resources configuration mechanism. Resources are normally set by running xrdb at login time; once again, that doesn’t happen if no login shell is run.

  • Distributions

    • What’s the best Linux distro for you?

      When it comes to desktop operating systems, there are three main camps into which people fall: Windows, Mac and Linux. In the case of the latter camp things can be confusing because there are endless distros to choose from — but which is best?

      The beauty of Linux is that it can be tweaked and tailored in so many ways. This means that while the plethora of choice can seem overwhelming, it is also possible to find the perfect distro for just about any scenario. To help you make the right choice, here’s a helpful list of the best distros to look out for in 2017.

    • What’s New in BlankOn X Tambora

      BlankOn X operating system finally launched at January 1st 2017 as the 10th release codenamed “Tambora”. BlankOn is a GNU/Linux distribution from Indonesia, a low-resource operating system with ultimate aim for desktop end-users. In this Tambora release, BlankOn brings the latest Manokwari desktop with improvements, along with its own BlankOn system installer, and some other stuffs. This Tambora release is a continuation of the BlankOn 9 release in 2014 named Suroboyo. This article sums up what’s new for BlankOn in this Tambora version.

    • This Year In Solus (2016 Edition)

      2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations.

      When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.

    • Reviews

      • Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang – Aloha!

        Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang is a surprisingly and yet expectedly good Plasma system, using some of that Mint-like approach to home computing. It’s what Kubuntu should have been or should be, and it delivers a practical, out-of-the-box experience with a fine blend of software, fun and stability. That’s a very sensible approach.

        Not everything was perfect. Plasma has its bugs, the printer and the web cam issues need to be looked into, and on the aesthetics side, a few things can be polished and improved. The installer can benefit from having some extra safety mechanisms. But I guess that is the sum of my complaints. On the happy side, you get all the goodies from the start, the application collection is rich, the distro did not crash, and the performance is really decent for a Plasma beastling. A fine formula, and probably the best one we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so. Good news if you like KDE. And indeed, this is definitely one of the distros you should try. 9/10. I’m quite pleased. Have a maui day.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux receives update for new year.

        Manajro Linux recently released a new version of operating system but they also keep their package updated. So some time ago Manjaro team updated some packages and introduced new features to main distribution. According to official announcement new feature called Brisk-menu is introduced in MATE edition of Manajro which is actually developed by Solus team. Thunderbird received some security update, linux48 will soon upgrade to linux49. Broadcom-wl, calamares, fightgear and few Ruby packages are updated.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat releases latest version of CloudForms 4.2

        According to the vendor, the new Red Hat CloudForms will enable IT teams to increase service delivery while focusing on critical, business-impacting issues. The Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organisations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimise the costs of a given environment and system.

      • ​Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 beta out now

        Yes, Red Hat’s forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9 will come with stability and security improvements. That’s not the real news. The big story is it supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Kernel 4.8.7 & Realtek Wireless – Fedora report

          A handful of weeks and hundreds of GB down the road, my Lenovo G50 machine is in a much better shape when spinning the kernel 4.8.7 than anything else before, but there are still situations where the network might drop down. This means I will need to reserve my previous observation, from the original report. Good but not perfect. Part of that Nirvana has gone back to Valhalla. Fedora 25 is the salvation you seek, though.

          Under ordinary circumstances, most people will probably not hit the issue, unless they have hundreds of idle HTTP connections that are slowly being closed, causing the driver to get a little confused. This could happen if you download like mad from the Web and then go calm. That’s why I said ordinary users, then again, Fedora and Manjaro folks aren’t really the Riders of the Gaussian. Still, something to look forward to being fixed eventually. Now that we have this 99% fix, the rest should be easy. More to come.

        • Fedora/EPEL Mirrormanager problems in Asia Pacific countries.

          We have been getting a lot of reports of people unable to get updates for EPEL or Fedora at various times. What people are seeing is that they will do a ‘yum update’ and it will give a long list of failures and quit. At this moment we seem to have pinpointed that most of the people having this problem are in various Asia Pacific nations (primarily Australia and Japan). The problem for both of these seems to be a lack of cross connects between networks.

          In the US, if you are on Comcast in say New Mexico and going to a server on Time Warner in North Carolina, your route is usually pretty direct. You will go from one network to various third party providers who will then send the packets the quickest path to the eventual server. If you use a visual grapher of locations, you even find that the path usually follows a linear path. [You might end up going to say California or Seattle first but that is only when Texas and Colorado cross connects are full.] Similarly in most European countries you also see a similar routing algorithm.

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Activities in December 2016

        This month I marked 367 packages for accept and rejected 45 packages. This time I only sent 10 emails to maintainers asking questions.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The move to snap
          • TedPage: Snapping Unity8

            For the last little while we’ve been working to snap up Unity8. This is all part of the conversion from a system image based device to one that is entirely based on snaps. For the Ubuntu Phones we basically had a package layout with a system image and then Click packages on top of it.

          • We Never Said Ubuntu Phone Is Dead. Here’s What We Actually Wrote Line-by-Line

            I didn’t want to write this post but a lot of people are raging at us for writing an article we didn’t. So, join me as I go through we actually wrote, line-by-line.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Cinnamon 3.2.8 Desktop Out Now for Linux Mint 18.1 with Menu Applet Improvements

              Clement Lefebvre has published a new update of the beautiful, modern and responsive Cinnamon desktop environment, for the latest 3.2 stable series, of course, versioned 3.2.8.

              It’s been a little over two weeks since the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment received an update, and Cinnamon 3.2.8 is here to add many improvements to the Menu applet, which have all been contributed by Michael Webster. Among these, we can notice that the Menu applet is now capable of constructing only one context menu for recent files.

              Of course, this context menu can be re-used for other files as required, and we can’t help but notice that the Menu applet will no longer reconstruct recent files, just re-order, remove, or add them, if necessary. When refreshing the installed applications, the Menu applet won’t be very destructive.

            • Redesigning Bluetooth Settings

              At elementary, redesigns don’t necessarily happen purely as sketches or mockups and they may not even happen all at one time. Many times, we design iteratively in code, solving a single problem at a time. Recently we built out a new, native bluetooth settings pane to replace the one we inherited from GNOME. We took this time to review some of the problems we had with the design of this pane and see how we could do better. Pictured below is the bluetooth settings pane as available today in elementary OS Loki…

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Transpile And Run Python Code Into Go Program With Google’s Open Source ‘Grumpy’
  • Yelp Open-Sources Latest in Data Pipeline Project, Data Pipeline Client Library

    Services consume from the pipeline via the client library, and at Yelp feed into targets like Salesforce, RedShift and Marketo. The library reportedly handles Kafka topic names, encryption, and consumer partitioning. Centralizing service communications through a message broker while enforcing immutable schema versioning helps protect downstream consumers and is also a primary motivation behind the broader data pipeline initiative.

  • The importance of the press kit

    I’d like to share a few lessons I’ve learned about creating a press kit. This helped us spread the word about our recent FreeDOS 1.2 release, and it can help your open source software project to get more attention.

  • Events

    • Vault CFP deadline approaching

      The Vault Storage and Filesystems conference will be held March 22 and 23 in Cambridge, MA, USA, immediately after the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. The call for presentations expires on January 14, and the conference organizers would really like to get a few more proposals in before then. Developers interested in speaking at a technical Linux event are encourage to sign up.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox “Reader Mode” and NoScript

        A couple of days ago I blogged about using Firefox’s “Delete Node” to make web pages more readable. In a subsequent Twitter discussion someone pointed out that if the goal is to make a web page’s content clearer, Firefox’s relatively new “Reader Mode” might be a better way.

  • BSD

    • Get your name in the relayd book

      There’s a long tradition amongst science fiction writers of selling bit parts in books in exchange for charity donations. It’s called tuckerization.

      I see no reason why science fiction writers should have all the fun.

      I need a sample user for the forthcoming book on OpenBSD’s httpd and relayd. This user gets referred to in the user authentication sections as well as on having users manage web sites. They will also get randomly called out whenever it makes sense to me.

      That sample user could be you.

      All it would cost is a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Rcpp now used by 900 CRAN packages

      Today, Rcpp passed another milestone as 900 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time.

Leftovers

  • This Wand Remote makes couch surfing magical again

    I’ve seen the Kymera Magic Wand selling for as low as $60.00 on ebay and as much as $100.00 Amazon and I have to say it’s a treat every time I can avoid picking up my old remotes.

  • Science

    • The Death Of Expertise

      I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

      I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

      [...]

      Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Almost No One Likes the GOP’s ‘Repeal and Delay’ Plan for Obamacare

      Since June 2009—before the Affordable Care Act even became law—congressional Republicans have promised to be weeks away from proposing their own blueprint for health-care reform. More than seven years later, House Speaker Paul Ryan still seems confused about whether his party does or does not have a plan ready to replace the ACA. “We already know what we’re replacing with. We’ve been extremely clear with what replace looks like,” Ryan insisted in an interview on Wednesday. The following day found him pleading with a reporter for more time. “We’re just beginning to put this together,” Ryan admitted.

      Regardless, Republicans are moving quickly to gut the ACA. Repeal will be the “first order of business” for the new administration, vice president–elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday after speaking to GOP lawmakers on the hill. That same day Senate Republicans began laying the groundwork for a budget maneuver that would allow them to roll back parts of the law with a simple 51-vote majority, thus skirting a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Despite the fast pace, the plan is remarkably shaky—not just in detail but also for the lack of political support behind it. Almost no one outside Congress thinks the GOP’s current strategy is a good idea, and even a few Republican lawmakers are getting skittish.

    • The Three Big Reasons Republicans Can’t Replace Obamacare

      Republicans are preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and have promised to replace it with something that doesn’t leave more than 20 million Americans stranded without health insurance.

      But they still haven’t come up with a replacement. “We haven’t coalesced around a solution for six years,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton admitted last week. “Kicking the can down the road for a year or two years isn’t going to make it any easier to solve.“

      They won’t solve it. They can’t and won’t replace Obamacare, for three big reasons.

    • True British Values and the #NHScrisis

      The total amount thrown at the banks by the taxpayer to enable their casino banking scams and cocaine fuelled lifestyles to continue, was £1.16 trillion, courtesy of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. By one of life’s more meaningful coincidences, that is precisely ten times the annual budget of the NHS for the whole UK. Equally neatly, the latest contingency for quantitative easing announced by Mark Carney – money given directly to financial institutions by the central bank in exchange for junk – is £250 billion, which is precisely ten times the total hamstringing debts of the NHS.

    • A learning experience

      openDemocracy is a political discussion site so how could I end this contribution without some discussion of politics. Very shortly after I returned home I became involved in an interchange of emails with some American friends about the election of Trump and what has become known as Obama Care. Here is my response:

      When I discuss American politics and get to Obama care I often end up kind of dumbfounded like someone who has just been told that the moon is actually made of green cheese. I get the same feeling when watching Fox news on the same topic. Where do obviously intelligent people get such crazy ideas? And what do you say to them in reply? Well this is my reply now.

    • As more Southerners benefit from it, Medicaid expansion faces congressional death threats

      Date on which North Carolina’s newly sworn-in Gov. Roy Cooper (D) announced he’d take executive action to expand Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the poor, under the Affordable Care Act: 1/4/2017

      Year in which North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law barring the executive branch from expanding Medicaid under ACA, complicating Cooper’s efforts: 2013

      Number of North Carolinians who could benefit from expansion of Medicaid, which in that state is currently available only to children, people with small children, or those who are pregnant, disabled, or in a nursing home: up to 600,000

      Amount of investment Medicaid expansion would bring to North Carolina: $2 billion to $4 billion

    • NY Nuke Plant to be Shuttered, But Will Cuomo Turn to Dirty Gas Instead?

      New York’s “dangerously decrepit” Indian Point nuclear power plant will officially shut down by April 2021, according to an agreement reached this week between the state and Entergy utility company.

      A source “with direct knowledge of the deal” told the New York Times that one reactor will “cease operations by April 2020, while the other must be closed by April 2021,” the paper reported on Friday.

      In recent years, radioactive tritium-contaminated water had been leaking from the aging Westchester County facility, which sits on the bank of the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of New York City, spurring calls for its closure from activists and concerned residents.

      Recognizing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s history of supporting New York’s upstate nuclear facilities, including a $7.6 billion bailout this August for four other plants, anti-nuclear campaigners reacted to the news with caution.

  • Security

    • 6 ways to secure air-gapped computers from data breaches

      How do you avoid this? Depending upon the nature of the data contained within the air-gapped system, you should only allow certain staff members access to the machine. This might require the machine to be locked away in your data center or in a secured room on the premises. If you don’t have a data center or a dedicated room that can be locked, house the computer in the office of a high-ranking employee.

    • Possibly Smart, Possibly Stupid, Idea Regarding Tor & Linux Distributions

      I will admit that I have not fully thought this through yet, so I am
      writing this in the hope that other folk will follow up, share their
      experiences and thoughts.

      So: I have installed a bunch of Tor systems in the past few months -
      CentOS, Ubuntu, Raspbian, Debian, OSX-via-Homebrew – and my abiding
      impression of the process is one of “friction”.

      Before getting down to details, I hate to have to cite this but I have been
      a coder and paid Unix sysadmin on/off since 1988, and I have worked on
      machines with “five nines” SLAs, and occasionally on boxes with uptimes of
      more than three years; have also built datacentres for Telcos, ISPs and
      built/setup dynamic provisioning solutions for huge cluster computing. The
      reason I mention this is not to brag, but to forestall

    • [Older] Introducing rkt’s ability to automatically detect privilege escalation attacks on containers

      Intel’s Clear Containers technology allows admins to benefit from the ease of container-based deployment without giving up the security of virtualization. For more than a year, rkt’s KVM stage1 has supported VM-based container isolation, but we can build more advanced security features atop it. Using introspection technology, we can automatically detect a wide range of privilege escalation attacks on containers and provide appropriate remediation, making it significantly more difficult for attackers to make a single compromised container the beachhead for an infrastructure-wide assault.

    • Diving back into coreboot development

      Let me first introduce myself: I’m Youness Alaoui, mostly known as KaKaRoTo, and I’m a Free/Libre Software enthusiast and developer. I’ve been hired by Purism to work on porting coreboot to the Librem laptops, as well as to try and tackle the Intel ME issue afterwards.

      I know many of you are very excited about the prospect of having coreboot running on your Librem and finally dropping the proprietary AMI BIOS that came with it. That’s why I’ll be posting reports here about progress I’m making—what I’ve done so far, and what is left to be done.

    • Web databases hit in ransom attacks

      Gigabytes of medical, payroll and other data held in MongoDB databases have been taken by attackers, say security researchers.

    • Why HTTPS for Everything?

      HTTPS enables privacy and integrity by default. It is going to be next big thing. The internet’s standards bodies, web browsers, major tech companies, and the internet community of practice have all come to understand that HTTPS should be the baseline for all web traffic. Ultimately, the goal of the internet community is to establish encryption as the norm, and to phase out unencrypted connections. Investing in HTTPS makes it faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Those Times the NSA Hacked America’s Allies

      The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about the Russia Today cable channel, which proves nothing.

      My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This. But the head of the Republican Party in the early 1970s hired burglars to do the same thing– break into the Watergate building and get access to DNC documents in hopes of throwing an election. Dick Nixon even ordered a second break-in. And it took a long time for Republican members of Congress to come around to the idea that a crime had been committed; if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, Nixon might have served out his term.

    • Former CIA & NSA Officials Team Up To Debunk “Russian Hacking” Conspiracy Theory

      Two former high-ranking intelligence officers teamed in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that ripped apart the Obama administration’s unproven claim that The Russians interfered with the U.S. election by way of hacking systems of the Democratic establishment to lock in Donald Trump’s win.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • The Same Officials Who Pushed the Iraq War Are Now Stirring Up Anti-Russia Hysteria

      The main U.S. intelligence official pushing claims that Russia hacked the Democratic party is James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

    • Senate Hearing on Russian Election Mischief Again Fails to Prove Anything

      The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media, and among parts of the public — especially liberal Democrats — is becoming increasingly embarrassing.

      Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).

    • Truck ramming kills 4 in Jerusalem

      A truck rammed into a group of Israeli soldiers who were disembarking from a bus in Jerusalem Sunday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, Israeli police and rescue services said.

      Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the truck veered off course and rammed into the group. She said the attacker was shot dead.

      The attack comes amid a more than yearlong wave of Palestinian shooting, stabbing and vehicular attacks against Israelis that has slowed of late. Sunday’s incident marks the first Israeli casualties in three months.

    • The Declassified Report on Russia’s Election Hacking Says Nothing New

      If you were on the edge of your seat, waiting for the US government to drop its much-anticipated report on Russian hacking operations against American targets and particularly targeting the 2016 presidential election, I’m really sorry to say, you’ll be truly disappointed.

    • It’s official: US election systems designated as critical

      The designation came the same day that US intelligence officials published an unclassified version of a report concluding that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin directly ordered intelligence agencies to collect data from the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and other organizations. The agencies then oversaw an effort to discredit Clinton, the Democratic party, and the US democratic political process through “information operations,” according to the report, which was jointly written by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI.

    • Fear and Misunderstanding of Russia

      Much of America’s recent demonization of Russia relates to deep cultural and even religious differences between the two countries, requiring a deeper understanding of the other’s strengths and weaknesses, writes Paul Grenier.

    • Pushing for a Lucrative New Cold War

      The New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex, causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter for Truthdig.

      [...]

      When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops, he asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?”

    • Hillary Clinton and the Installation of Authoritarian Right-Wing Regimes in the Americas

      Seven years after the Hillary-backed Honduran coup, Mrs. Clinton and the capitalist-imperial U.S. Deep State she has long served helped place the thin-skinned megalomaniac and right-wing quasi-fascist Donald Trump atop the executive branch of the world’s most powerful state.

      [...]

      But what pre-existing “democracy” is Trump “taki[ng] control” of, exactly? It is well known and established that the United States’ political order is an abject corporate and financial plutocracy – an oligarchy of and for Wealthy Few. You don’t have to be a supposedly wild-eyed leftist radical to know this. Just ask the establishment liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern). Over the past three plus decades, these leading academic researchers have determined, the U.S. political system has functioned as “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.” Examining data from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of and against the will of the U.S. majority and irrespective of which major party holds the White House and/or Congress. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” Gilens and Page write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo two years ago, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” Such is the harsh reality of “really existing capitalist democracy” in the U.S., what Noam Chomsky has called “RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • UK at risk of Brexit ‘catastrophe’ warns Canadian trade expert

      Britain risks a “catastrophic” Brexit because the government is so dismissive of the concerns of trade experts, according to one of the figures behind the EU-Canada trade deal which took a decade to negotiate.

    • Koch Astroturf Army Cheers Union Busting in Kentucky

      On the first day that the Kentucky legislature got underway with a newly elected Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican governor, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group blew the whistle and legislators jumped to do their bidding.

      This week, the Speaker of the House Jeff Hoover rammed through the legislature three bills to break the back of unions and lower wages for highly-skilled construction workers.

      It was bare-knuckled partisan politics. “We can pretty much do whatever we want now!” crowed GOP Kentucky Rep. Jim DeCesare behind closed doors.

      You have only to look at Trump’s narrow victory in Rust Belt states to understand why the GOP is desperate to get rid of the Democratic Party’s boots on the ground.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks, D.N.C. Hacks and Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision

      At first blush, there’s a baffling, inside-out quality to Julian Assange’s latest star turn in our shambolic national story.

      He belongs in jail for “waging his war” against the United States by exposing its secrets, the conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has said of him. An “anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” Sarah Palin once called him.

      Yet last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.)

    • Federal Judge Doesn’t Let Debate Commission Off Easy

      The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. heard oral arguments today in the lawsuit filed by Level the Playing Field (LPF) challenging the nonprofit status of the Commission on Presidential Debates, just under two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office.

      LPF’s lead attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, provided extensive evidence, analysis, and historical background to support the plaintiffs’ claim that the Commission on Presidential Debates uses unfair criteria to keep competitive voices outside the two major parties out of presidential debates.

      Specifically, LPF takes issue with the 15% rule that requires candidates outside the Republican and Democratic Parties to poll at 15% in 5 national polls selected by the debate commission to gain entry into the debates.

      “The two parties have rigged the system… CPD board members are big funders to candidates and campaigns… and the 15% is an impossible threshold,” Shapiro said.

    • Trump mentioned Wikileaks 164 times in last month of election, now claims it didn’t impact one voter

      President-elect Trump says that information published by Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community says was hacked by Russia, had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” This was not the view of candidate Trump, who talked about Wikileaks and the content of the emails it released at least 164 times in last month of the campaign.

      ThinkProgress calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign.

      Trump talked extensively about Wikileaks in the final days of a campaign that was ultimately decided by just 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania combined.

    • How RT became the star of CIA, FBI & NSA’s anticlimactic ‘big reveal’

      The eagerly awaited Director Of National Intelligence’s (DNI) report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” didn’t need such a long winded title. They could have just called it: “We Really Don’t Like RT.”

      Almost every major western news outlet splashed this story. But it was probably the New York Times’ report which was the most amusing. America’s “paper of record” hailed the DNI’s homework as “damning and surprisingly detailed.” Then a few paragraphs later admitted the analysis contained no actual evidence.

    • CIA and NSA Veterans on Russia, Trump and Obama

      ABC reports: “Showdown at Trump Tower as President-Elect Set to Receive Intel Briefing.” Politico reports: “Pompeo’s confirmation hearing for CIA director set for Jan. 11.”

      [...]

      Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials from 1981-85.

    • Algorithm and Blues: Why Hillary’s Moneyball Strategy Failed

      When I wrote on election night that the Clinton campaign had forsaken class politics for “politics by algorithm,” I had no idea that they really had such an “app” or that they had named it after Lord Byron’s daughter, the brilliant Ada Lovelace, the real brains behind the first computer. (Ada would have run a better campaign.) Apparently, Clinton campaign gameboy Robbie Mook ran 500,000 simulations of the election on his Xbox. How many of them had 90,000 Michigan voters leaving their choice for president blank? How many results showed her losing the white women vote by 10 percent? How many showed the vote in union households split nearly 50-50?

      As we know from the Wikileaks dumps, Clintonian paranoia extended far beyond her decision to set up a private email server and began to infect the campaign itself. Nargiza Gafurova was an analytics specialist for one of the database companies doing contract work for the Clinton campaign. “Our company worked with her campaign on their data needs – they’ve been extremely secretive about the data and algorithms they use,” Gafurova told me. “Secrecy was so deep that we couldn’t help them effectively as they didn’t even tell us who they want to target.”

    • Barack Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump

      In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right presidency, Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have defeated Donald Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn’t prevent him from running for a third term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the president-elect.

      I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also like Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than Mrs. Clinton. Plus, he’s a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would have had some very sharp election strategists on his side.

    • Resisting the Congressional Watchdog

      Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.

    • The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’

      Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

      Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

      [...]

      Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

      Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

      Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

      Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper’s checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

    • US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’

      Repeating an accusation over and over again is not evidence that the accused is guilty, no matter how much “confidence” the accuser asserts about the conclusion. Nor is it evidence just to suggest that someone has a motive for doing something. Many conspiracy theories are built on the notion of “cui bono” – who benefits – without following up the supposed motive with facts.

    • The Trump Bubble

      Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger.

      Before the election candidate Trump blasted Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates too low for too long to keep the economy humming along while Obama was still in office. The president elect accused Yellen of being politically motivated suggesting that the Fed’s policies had put the country at risk of another stock market Crash like 2008.

      “If rates go up, you’re going to see something that’s not pretty,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in September. “It’s all a big bubble.”

      Yellen of course denied Trump’s claims saying, “We do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.”

      As we shall see later in this article, Yellen was lying about the political role the Fed plays in setting policy, in fact, last week’s FOMC statement clearly establishes the Fed as basically a political institution that implements an agenda that serves a very small group of powerful constituents, the 1 percent. If serving the interests of one group over all of the others is not politics, than what is it?

      [...]

      First of all, slashing taxes for the wealthy does not boost growth. We know that. It doesn’t work. Period.

      [...]

      Trump’s tax plan will increase inequality by making the rich richer. He wants to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33% which means that people “making $3.7 million or more in a year, would receive $1 million in annual tax savings.” (USA Today) The plan is bad for the economy, bad for the deficits and bad for working people who will see more aggressive attacks on Social Security to make up for the losses in revenue.

    • Beyond ‘post-truth’: confronting the new reality

      We are told we are living in a “post truth” world in which fake news proliferates and the established news media, once a bastion of civil society and a pillar of democracy, has lost its influence. As we should expect, alarmist statements such as these, have one foot in fact and the other resting on a shifting foundation of clicks, likes and shares. Alarming headlines work better on social media but they also reduce complex ideas to a series of half understood slogans.

      Much is changing in the way in which we find and share news stories but these changes are a product of many factors. Some rest in national media systems, others are a product of technical changes and all are influenced by, or have an influence upon, the shifting geopolitical situation. Fake news is not responsible for the rise of right wing populism in Europe and America but it has certainly fed the fire.

      The decline of trust in the mainstream media is genuine but it is not global. In the Northern European countries, where commercialisation has been tempered by firm statutory intervention and clear professional conventions, trust is still relatively high. In the rampantly commercial systems of the UK and the USA trust has plummeted. The UK press has the lowest level of public trust of any European country (with higher levels for TV) while the US media has low levels of trust for both TV news and the press (Aarts, Fladmoe, & Strömbäck 2012).

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Snowden: “Right and Wrong is a very different standard from Legal and Illegal”

      There are times when you have tons of historical research lined up for a column about legal structures making bad assumptions based on facts that are no longer true, and then something just comes along that makes you wipe your desk and say “no. scrap all of this work. This. I need to post this, and I need to post this now.”

      Right now is such a time. The topic of cost structures of publishing in the 1800s will wait for another day (it’s already waited for over 200 years, after all).

      In this interview (cut courtesy of Fight for the Future), Edward Snowden does one of the things he excels at – he summarizes very complex topics in such an accessible way that he practically turns long legal debates into one soundbite.

    • Interview 1240 – Rick Falkvinge on Rule 41 and the New Online Order

      Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original pirate party and head of privacy at PrivateInternetAccess.com, joins us to discuss his recent article, “Today, the FBI becomes the enemy of every computer user and every IT security professional worldwide.” We dissect the new “Rule 41” that gives American law enforcement unprecedented leeway to break into any computer in the world, the implications this has for a world in which privacy is increasingly a thing of the past, and what people can do to protect themselves from the New Online Order of global FBI operations.

    • FBI Releases Documents Related to San Bernardino iPhone

      The FBI on Friday released 100 pages of heavily censored documents related to its agreement with an unidentified vendor to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, but it did not identify whom it paid to perform the work or how much it cost.

      The records were provided in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the FBI by The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.

      The media organizations sued in September to learn how much the FBI paid and who it hired to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people at a holiday gathering of county workers in December 2015. The FBI for weeks had maintained that only Apple Inc. could access the information on its phone, which was protected by encryption, but ultimately broke or bypassed Apple’s digital locks with the help of an unnamed third party.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Alleged Crackas With Attitude associate Justin Liverman signs plea deal

      Computer science student Justin Liverman, who was arrested by the FBI in September on suspicion of involvement with Crackas with Attitude (CWA), has signed a plea agreement. CWA claimed to have accessed emails from the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan in late 2015, which were later published by WikiLeaks as the Brennan emails.

    • Malek Fahd: Islamic Council refuses to hand over land to school

      Australia’s peak administrative Islamic body is refusing to relinquish land being used by one of the state’s largest schools despite the potential for it to save the school from being shut down.

      The Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld the federal Department of Education’s decision to strip funding from the 2400 student school on Thursday after it found the school was operating for a profit through millions of dollars in inflated rent payments and loans made to the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.

    • Indigenous children at risk of forced religious conversion

      There is an alarming presence of forced religious conversion of indigenous children at the hands of radicals in Bandarban.

      Muslim fanatics seduce underprivileged families with scopes of a better education and lifestyle for their children, and forcefully convert the children in madrasas in Dhaka without their parents’ knowledge.

      Over the past seven years, police have rescued 72 children from this crime ring.

    • Trump and Sessions: Great for the Private Prison Industry, Terrible for Civil Rights

      Donald Trump’s victory has been nothing but good news for the private prison industry.

      The day after the election, shares of the two biggest private prison corporations — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — jumped 43 and 21 percent, respectively.

    • In Statehouses Won By Republicans, the First Move Is to Consolidate Power By Weakening Unions

      Republicans stormed to power in state elections across the country in November on a promise to take on the establishment and return government to the average citizen.

      But in state capitals where they gained control, they moved quickly to do something else entirely: They’ve consolidated their newfound power — and rewarded their corporate donors — by delivering death blows to a longtime enemy: organized labor.

      In Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire, three states that flipped to unified Republican control, legislators have prioritized passing Right to Work, a law that quickly diminishes union power by allowing workers in unionized workplaces to withhold fees used to organize and advocate on their behalf.

      That might seem odd to voters who heard promises to “drain the swamp,” but its what Republican partisans and business lobbyists have been demanding for years.

    • Donald Trump’s Pick for Spy Chief Took Hard Line on Snowden, Guantanamo, and Torture

      In 2013, just one week after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward as the source of documents revealing the global extent of the NSA’s mammoth surveillance regime, Coats penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal lambasting the disclosures and the ensuing media coverage.

      “Unfortunately, the Obama administration — especially of late — has fueled people’s distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden’s leak far worse,” he wrote, pleading with his colleagues in Congress to stop “mischaracterizing” the surveillance programs Snowden exposed.

      Coats said the NSA’s programs, including its bulk collection of American telephone records, were “legal, constitutional and used under the strict oversight of all three branches of government” — though courts later disagreed, and Congress amended the law to end the American records collection program, as Snowden pointed out on Twitter on Thursday.

    • Pain and torture: state violence in Egypt

      After the coup of 2013, the practice of torture in Egypt has taken a qualitative shift to the worse.

      The use of torture and violence by the police is nothing new to Egypt; to the contrary, Mubarak was regularly condemned by various international human rights organizations for the use of torture and violence against political opponents and regular citizens who were unlucky enough to be arrested for petty crimes.

      However, after the coup of 2013 and the inauguration of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, this practice has taken new forms. There has been a proliferation of sexual violence against detainees including children, as well as an alarming increase in forced disappearances and torture.

      Some of the kidnapped reappear after a few months, others meet an unknown fate. The most prominent, and international example was the murder of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student who was tortured to death and subjected to “animal like” violence for conducting research on the Egyptian labor movement. It is believed that the Egyptian security services were behind this heinous crime.

    • Alabama NAACP Not Backing Down After Jeff Sessions’ Office Lashes Out

      “We are trying to stop Jeff Sessions from becoming the Attorney General of the United States,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, told AlterNet over the phone. “We are not backing down at all.”

      Just days ago, Simelton was one of dozens who staged a sit-in at Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office, an action timed to coincide with the onset of the 115th Congress. Media attention and support from across the country poured in.

      [...]

      Sessions was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as a federal judge, but rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee—some of them Republicans—on the grounds that he was too racist to serve.

    • Some initial thoughts before a Trump presidency

      The youth in the United States don’t support Trump; people of color in in the US don’t support Trump; the majority of women don’t support Trump. Those, like Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who now hail Trump as “their” President whom they do not want to see fail, are normalizing a stolen election. They are abdicating their responsibility as stewards of representative democracy.

    • Faux Real: What’s in Your Worldview?

      We had to know this was coming. It was always here, but now it can be seen more clearly through the unvarnished lens of protofascism. Retrenchment and revanchism arrive with a new pitchman, selling rollbacks disguised as opportunities and promising to reclaim that which has been lost after decades of social progress and cultural liberalization. This isn’t a “new normal” but rather an old one reemerging, and the only sort of normality it represents is that which is perversely defined by a type of mass insanity.

      Things have been heading in this direction for a long time now, but the pace obviously has accelerated in the digital age. The lamentations about the demise of truth and the advent of bogus “news” are legion, as are the observations about the omnipresence of technology and the implications thereof. But all this hasn’t happened to us — it has veritably been demanded. Obscured by the handwringing and finger-pointing is the deeper reality of a culture obsessed with on-demand indulgences, no matter the cost.

      This is a manifestation of convenient compartmentalization, as if what happens in one realm has no bearing on another. Mass consumption of artificial foods, infotainment tidbits, contrived “reality” fare, and “brain candy” is seen as innocuous or just a guilty pleasure if it’s even thought about at all. Yet when politics are shown to be dominated by artifice, and when sensationalism trumps responsible journalism, suddenly there are waves of consternation and disbelief. How could this happen? Well, how could it not.

    • Obama’s Propaganda Gift to Trump

      On December 23, 2016 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a federal law that is passed every year. NDAA authorizes defense appropriations but it is also used as a Trojan horse to hide attacks on civil liberties. In 2011 the NDAA authorized indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorism suspect. Tucked inside this year’s NDAA was the passage of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which establishes the little known or discussed Global Engagement Center.

      The title seems benign enough until one reads its mission. “The purpose of the Center shall be to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

      In plain English, this act establishes an official propaganda arm of the United States government. Of course there has always been governmental coordination used to spread lies about American foreign policy. The government doesn’t even have to work very hard because the corporate media usually march in lock step and repeat their every claim uncritically. But these are dangerous times for the American hegemon. Its ability to continue exercising imperial control has been damaged by foreign governments successfully resisting its efforts and by the election of Donald Trump.

01.08.17

Update on Patent Trolls and Their Enablers: IAM, Fortress, Inventergy, Nokia, MOSAID/Conversant, Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, Faraday Future, A*STAR, GPNE, AlphaCap Ventures, and TC Heartland

Posted in America, Asia, Microsoft, Patents at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hiding behind fronts, attack dogs, and interest groups

Cat hide and seek

Summary: A potpourri of reports about some of the world’s worst patent trolls and their highly damaging enablers/facilitators, including Microsoft which claims that it “loves Linux” whilst attacking it with patents by proxy

THE ISSUE associated with patents as a ‘pure’ business model, or patent trolling, is widely understood. Imagine a world where people profit from making nothing at all, just demanding money from (if not blackmailing) companies that make actual sales and have a source of income/revenue, namely customers that buy products.

More patent trolls news came from the trolls-funded IAM the other day. “According to a December 29th release,” it quoted, ““Fortress will have the sole discretion to make any and all decisions relating to the company’s patents and patent monetisation activities.” Inventergy has around 740 patent assets acquired from Nokia, Huawei and Panasonic in a series of three separate deals in the first half of 2014.”

Here again we see Nokia as trolls’ ammunition, just like at MOSAID (now known as Conversant, which pays IAM’s publisher). Speaking of MOSAID, which Boris Teksler is involved in (hopping between Microsoft-connected trolls), see this new list from IAM. The Editor in Chief of IAM gives him (yet again!) some special honour, without noting that his employer paid IAM (under the new name, Conversant). So much publicity for an aggressive firm (actually a patent troll) from IAM… one might begin to think that it’s coverage that money simply buys. Conversant is such an evil patent troll (working for Microsoft’s interests now) that it had to change its name and now it’s trying to improve its reputation with some puff pieces? And from who, from IAM? Watch this latest IAM revisionism about Xiaomi (yet again!), maybe for the third time in the past month alone. We already explained that Microsoft was extorting Xiaomi with patents, but IAM tells a sanitised, face-saving PR story for Microsoft:

Xiaomi – Who says the IP deals market is flat? During 2016, Chinese mobile manufacturer Xiaomi – not yet 10 years old – seemed to be on a one company mission to prove that this is far from the case. In January it emerged that it had got its hands on a suite of Broadcom patents while a month later came the news that it had acquired a significant portfolio of US assets from Intel. Both deals, though, were eclipsed by the ground-breaking transaction with Microsoft announced at the end of May – a win-win for both that exemplified the way that IP is now forming the bedrock of much wider co-operative agreements between operating companies. While all this was happening. Xiaomi was also incorporating Zhigu Holdings into its internal operation – a move that saw the aggregator’s president and chief operating officer Paul Lin become Xiaomi’s VP of IP strategy. That could well prove to be a masterstroke, with Lin having gained a great deal of deal-making experience at both Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft while based in the US. Like many young Chinese technology businesses, Xiaomi is running a significant patent deficit; but unlike many of them it has recognised it needs to be aggressive in doing something about this. To expand, it will not only have to develop its own IP, but must continue to be active and creative in bringing it in form third parties. With Lin enjoying enlightened support from the very top of the company, Xiaomi is set to become an even bigger patent player in 2017.

Notice the connection between “Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft” (in the above text). It’s a strong and well established connection, which we have been covering for nearly a decade now. Microsoft uses the world’s largest patent troll, which it itself created/funded, to attack Linux. It’s a common tactic where the troll is mostly/only a proxy.

Similarly, as mentioned here the other day, Faraday Future throws its patents at some shell company and this new article from TechDirt looks deeper at the anatomy of it:

That’s all interesting… but what’s amazing is that in all of these discussions about how Faraday Future “doesn’t own its intellectual property” absolutely no one seems to point out the fact that the company that everyone compares it to, Tesla, famously dumped all its patents into the public domain and told anyone to go ahead and use them. That seems like a relevant point to make in articles about this upstart competitor and its “intellectual property.” Of course, it’s possible that the articles could mean something else when it says “intellectual property” — such as trademarks — but it seems unlikely that the trademarks for a flailing company that is unlikely to ever get anything on the market are that valuable.

The whole story, and the ignoring of Tesla’s stance on patents… is just strange. It is true that sometimes failing companies hang onto their patents as a sort of last ditch effort to extract some return for their investors in a patent fire sale. But if you’ve reached that point, things have already gone way too far south to really matter. Tesla has shown that it can build a pretty damn successful company without relying on “intellectual property.” It seems that people should stop freaking out that Faraday Future may have dumped its patents into some offshore company, and focus on the company’s real problems — like the fact that its execs are racing out the door as fast as possible.

Remember that Microsoft has its own patent “assertion” (trolling) department/entity (they call it “Licensing”) and several more large companies now do something similar. Sites like IAM just call that NPEs.

“For NPEs,” (i.e. trolls) Florian Müller explained the other day, “it’s often actually desirable to make litigation more, not less, expensive. Speed and injunctive relief attract them.”

Yes, this is a truthful statement and it helps demonstrate how to mitigate/tackle the trolling epidemic if there was sufficient desire, just like limiting trolls’ movement/travel. Currently, in the Eastern District of Texas, where defendants haven’t much confidence in winning (not cheaply anyway), trolls are making a killing.

East Asia is rapidly becoming the breeding ground for the trolling epidemic, as we noted here before. The above from IAM is just one example of it, as is the IAM article titled “The signs suggest that IP monetisation activity is on the rise in Southeast Asia, says A*STAR tech transfer chief” (“IP monetisation” is a euphemism for trolling). Another new article is titled “$130 million patent claim against Apple in Shenzhen shows NPEs in China increasingly strident”. It sure looks as if SIPO has turned China into a cesspool of patent trolls. Who benefits from this? A few parasites, not ordinary Chinese people. To quote IAM, “GPNE’s Chinese assertion appears to have begun back in 2013 in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. The court’s database shows four lawsuits against Apple and associated companies at the trial stage. According to a report in China’s National Business Daily, the most recent hearing was in late November 2016; the same article also states that Apple has made three separate attempts to invalidate the asserted patent at SIPO’s Patent Reexamination Board, with all of these complaints being dismissed on appeal.”

Poor patent quality at SIPO, just like at USPTO before it, emboldens patent trolls. IAM is siding with the trolls, as usual, also in the case of Nokia against Apple — a case which it belatedly covers (Nokia has become like a patent troll which merely licenses the brand).

Writing about patent trolls in general, Wolf Greenfield & Sacks PC bemoans what happens in the US. “Over the course of the last decade,” it says, “the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions making it more difficult for so-called non-practicing entities (NPEs)—companies that own and enforce patents but do not offer products or services covered by them—to extract value from their patents. The Court may now be ready to take a step in the other direction by removing the equitable defense of laches against patentees’ past damages claims—up to six years of damages in many cases. Oral arguments were heard in the landmark case of SCA Hygiene Products Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Products, LLC on November 1, 2016, and a decision is expected later this term.”

“Patent Value” for patent trolls (ignore euphemisms like “NPEs”) is also mentioned in this article. We can’t help but feel like patent law firms — not just sites like IAM (which trolls are paying) — take the side of trolls. They don’t care about innovation, just litigation. They profit from that.

United for Patent Reform, a group that battles against patent trolls, wrote the other day that “Crowdfunding company @gustly won its case over a #PatentTroll after 2 years in court.” Here is part of the statement:

The patent lawsuit filed by AlphaCap claimed ownership over “online equity financing”. As with most other patent lawsuits, the case was brought in the Eastern District of Texas. This court is known as a patent troll haven and has benefitted economically from an assumed bias in favor of trolls.

So here again we have an example where legitimate companies are hit hard by trolls that make nothing at all, just lawsuits. “Wearable device company Fitbit has moved for termination of its ITC patent complaint against Jawbone, which is unhappy at suggestions about its financial stability,” MIP wrote the other day (a move which we covered in this older post of ours). As before, Fitbit makes shameless excuses, trying to portray itself as merciful after it attacked a rival, only to realise that its case is going nowhere fast and is only wasting its own (Fitbit’s) financial resources.

Fitbit, like many other companies, must have realised that certainty of winning patent cases has gone down. Moreover, Jawbone sued Fitbit in retaliation, causing quite a big (and expensive) headache to Fitbit. As Fitbit is not a patent troll (it has actual products that it sells) it’s not hard to sue it as well, thereby compelling it to reach a ‘ceasefire’.

Meanwhile, as even IAM cares to admit, litigation numbers are down sharply and patent trolls suffer a lot:

Unified Patents and RPX have both released their early numbers on new US patent litigation cases in 2016, confirming what we have known for some time: district court cases fell dramatically, with Unified putting the total number of filings at 4,382 – a drop of 24.8% year-on-year. That is the lowest volume of new cases since 2011 when the America Invents Act (AIA) came into effect and a change in joinder rules led to an immediate increase in the number of suits. According to Unified, disputes at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw a slight drop down to 1,723 from 1,793, although last year was still the second busiest on record.

The question now is whether the 2016 litigation drop was a blip or part of a longer-term trend. The last few years have seen sharp fluctuations in the number of cases with 2013, the busiest year on record, leading into a marked fall in 2014 as plaintiffs were seemingly turned off by the Supreme Court’s Alice decision and by the prospect of patent reform. So if that is repeated, we might expect to see the number of new cases rise again this year.

MIP takes into consideration an upcoming SCOTUS case (alluded to above), but it barely bothers to mention that this case would affect trolls the most. To quote what is not behind a paywall:

Natalie Rahhal speaks to former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Michel and others to assess the potential impact of In re TC Heartland at the US Supreme Court. One outcome could be a sharp fall in filing in the Eastern District of Texas and an increase in a potentially under-resourced District of Delaware

In re TC Heartland is already shaping up to be one of the most important patent cases in the US this year. The Supreme Court on December 14 granted cert in the case, which will give the court an opportunity to revisit the case law and statute governing forum selection in patent infringement suits.

We look forward to the outcome of this case because the Justices, probably well before Trump introduces new ones, are expected to serve a blow to patent trolls. Today’s Justices tend to be sceptical on issues pertaining to patents maximalism. █

Mark Summerfield: “US Supreme Court Decision in Alice Looks to Have Eliminated About 75% of New Business Method Patents.”

Posted in America, Patents at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Stuff one can do with pen and paper is not an invention but a mental process

Business

Summary: Some of the patent microcosm, or those who profit from the bureaucracy associated with patents, responds to claims made by Techrights (that software patents are a dying breed in the US)

TECHRIGHTS is not a site that patent law firms like. We are fine with that, as we never intended to be pals of those who promote patent maximalism, or those whom some dubbed the “patent microcosm” (because patents are their only ‘products’).

Yesterday we noticed that a patent lawyer had gotten sanctioned for misbehaving again (recall Andrew Y. Schroeder), based on this new (rather short) blog post from Patently-O:

From what I can tell, the lawyer was sanctioned by the district court because he settled a case, but then consistently asserted that he hadn’t; he was sanctioned on appeal for making some unsupported arguments and falsely attacking opposing counsel, it seems.

Longtime readers of ours know that we don’t have much trust and faith in the patent profession — by which we mean people who make a living purely out of patents rather than research and/or development. We don’t mean examiners (those who attempt to ensure patent quality) but those who try to convince examiners to grant every applications that they send on behalf of clients. The financial motivation of patent law firms is very much like that of companies that sell weapons and thus prefer wars or at least tension (which motivates purchases of weapons, in the name of perceived “defense”).

Mark Summerfield, writing in his blog today (in Australia where time is many hours ahead), does not agree with us (as usual) that software patents as a whole are dead and instead says that “computer-implemented business methods, including ecommerce and finance applications” — however one defines them — are in somewhat of a limbo/trouble. We mentioned this before. To quote from his conclusions:

The data presented above demonstrates that in established fields of software technology, covered by associated Art Units in USPTO Technology Center 2100, neither US court decisions nor changes in management have resulted in any identifiable deviation in US patent grant rates, despite the consistent gleeful claims of opponents that ‘software patents are dead’.

Software patents are not dead. They are here, they have been here for many years, and they are here to stay.

Computer-implemented business methods, including ecommerce and finance applications, on the other hand, are a different matter. The data clearly shows that the USPTO under Kappos was more friendly to this subject matter than under his predecessor, although the CAFC decision in Bilski appears to have forced applicants to claim machine-implementation more explicitly. However, the US Supreme Court decision in Alice looks to have eliminated about 75% of new business method patents. This implies that a similar proportion of such patents issued at least since the start of the Kappos era are invalid, which accords with the impact we have seen at the CAFC since Alice.

Whether or not patents on software get granted does not matter as much as whether or not courts deem them eligible. As we have shown here time after time the higher a case goes (up the ladder all the way up to SCOTUS), the less likely to withstand the patent/s at the centre of the case will be. We stand by our assertion that patents on software are a waste of time and money, even if the USPTO continues to grant a lot of them. Certainty around software patents is very low in the United States and it takes courages to even have them tested in a court (no out-of-court settlement or shakedown). █

01.07.17

Eight Wireless Patents Have Just Been Invalidated Under Section 101 (Alice), But Don’t Expect the Patent Microcosm to Cover This News

Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 5:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Nostalgic and picky/selective (as always and forever) with ‘facts’, ignoring what’s inconvenient

Con de ReyaSummary: Firms that are profiting from patents (without actually producing or inventing anything) want us to obsess over and think about the rare and few cases (some very old) where judges deny Alice and honour patents on software

SOFTWARE patents are a dying breed and thus a dying business for patent law firms. They know it, hence they’re angry and vindicative. Some of them even attack judges (the messengers). These patents keep dying both inside and outside the courtroom (e.g. PTAB) in the US, in spite of some USPTO examiners granting them, probably in an effort to inflate some numbers.

According to this patent attorney, “VA Dist. Ct. Killed 8 Wireless Patents under Alice/101: http://assets.law360news.com/0878000/878025/https-ecf-vaed-uscourts-gov-doc1-18917727618.pdf” (deemed abstract and thus ineligible).

We have not seen a single article about this case. None!

What we are seeing, on the other hand, is patent law firms’ sites romanticising/bringing up old cases, like this quick mention of McRO behind a paywall. To quote:

The full Federal Circuit has denied a bid by Electronic Arts and other gaming companies to rehear its September decision that found McRO Inc. software patents for lip-sync animation technology patent-eligible under Alice, according to an order issued by the appeals court Friday.

In other words, nothing is changing. But again, this is one among perhaps four (just 4!) decisions in the whole year when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled not to invalidate a software patent. What about all the rest? What about all those patents (hundreds if not thousands) that PTAB and the courts invalidated? Shouldn’t the patent microcosm inform clients (and potential clients) of the reality?

Mishcon de Reya, the nasty and malicious firm that the EPO hired to spy on/silence Techrights, has just been quoted in relation to the same CAFC case, courtesy of a relatively new site:

Bandai Namco Games America has been denied an en banc rehearing in its cornerstone software patent case against McRO.

All regular active judges for the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard the petition and issued their response at the end of 2016.

Mark Raskin, partner at Mishcon de Reya, who is serving as trial counsel in the case, said: “We’re very excited that the entire Federal Circuit has recognised the technical innovations of our client’s inventions and the California cases will now proceed, hopefully expeditiously.”

The McRO case drew a lot of attention with its interpretation of the landmark Alice v CLS Bank decision.

As we noted before, Mishcon de Reya also works for Microsoft and the EPO. It’s hardly surprising that the firm advocates software patents. Another legal firm — one that the EPO hired to threaten Techrights — promotes the UPC.

There is another new article from a law firms’ platform, covering the Amdocs case (also at CAFC) as follows:

An interesting case came out of the Federal Circuit in Amdocs (Israel) Limited v. Openet Telecom, Inc., No. 2015-1180, 2016 WL 6440387 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 1, 2016) in which the Court reversed the district court’s granting of Openet’s motion for judgment on the pleadings on the basis that the patents were not directed to patent eligible subject matter under § 101. This is significant not for the result but for how the Court arrived at its conclusion. The majority and dissenting opinions offer several important insights: (1) the Court is struggling to find the proper “decisional mechanism” for deciding whether a software patent is directed to patent ineligible subject matter; (2) members of the Court continue to suggest borrowing from other sections of the Patent Act to analyze Section 101; and (3) claim construction can be very effective at staving off dismissal based on patent eligibility.

This ‘news’ is more than two months old. Why aren’t these legal firms covering some of the latest? Probably because it’s not convenient for them. It’s not good for their business. █

2017: Latest Year That the Unitary Patent (UPC) is Still Stuck in a Limbo

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The EPO‘s Battistelli has lost his main UPC ally in the UK, Lucy Neville-Rolfe

Summary: The issues associated with the UPC, especially in light of ongoing negotiations of Britain’s exit from the EU, remain too big a barrier to any implementation this year (and probably future years too)

THE UPC was a big topic, more so towards the end of last year, especially because of Lucy’s ludicrous statement about it and then her resignation/firing, culminating in yet more uncertainty and a limbo. SUEPO correctly (if not belatedly) took note of top posts in the patent microcosm’s sites. On IAM it wrote: “IAM blog’s top 20 most-read stories of 2016 (IAM Magazine, 22 December 2016). EPO info can be found at reference points 9, 11, 15 and 16.”

“A lot of the above articles are actually not about the EPO directly but about the UPC, which Battistelli keeps promoting.”On Kluwer Patent Blog (Team UPC) SUEPO wrote: “Brexit and EPO unrest in top ten of most popular posts Kluwer Patent Blog in 2016 (Kluwer Patent Blog, 01 January 2017). EPO info can be found at reference points 1, 3, 5, 7 and 10.”

As we noted here a couple of days ago, IP Watch too shared some statistics and noted that articles about the EPO topped their list. A lot of the above articles are actually not about the EPO directly but about the UPC, which Battistelli keeps promoting. Battistelli lies a lot about the UPC. According to what he told the media in 2015 (his so-called ‘media partners’ even printed these lies), the EPO was in great shape and UPC would have been a done deal and ready to roll last year. We recently wrote the following series which explains why, as long as the UK intends to leave the EU, the UPC is basically stuck or deadlocked. Brexit and UPC are inherently incompatible. Revisit the following:

Towards the end of this series we quoted Dr. Luke McDonagh (University of London’s Law School) quite a lot. He is a UPC sceptic in the sense that he does not believe it can happen and next month he will speak about it, debating with/against the patent microcosm. [via]

“Brexit and UPC are inherently incompatible.”McDonagh is not a patent attorney and he is definitely not part of the patent microcosm, so his input on this subject has been refreshing and valuable. We look forward to his talk and maybe even reports about it (probably not only to be covered by the patent microcosm’s sites). From the description of this event: “At this event Dr Luke McDonagh of The City Law School will launch his new book ‘European Patent Litigation in the Shadow of the Unified Patent Court’ (Edward Elgar, 2016) with a panel discussion on the impact of Brexit on patent litigation in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, with a particular focus on the forthcoming Unified Patent Court and future relations between the UK and EU.”

The book’s description can be found here (first chapter free, as mentioned here before) and to quote from the outline: “Making use of evidence from within the business and legal communities, this book highlights the key issues concerning the new system and examines what the impact of the reforms is likely to be on Europe’s patent litigation system in the near future.”

In its current form, the UPC is in impasse/deadlock. It won’t become a reality unless something quite radical happens. █

Links 7/1/2017: Linux 4.9.1, Wine 2.0 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2017 And The FUD Still Flows

    Well, here it is 2017 and folks are still trotting out the arguments against GNU/Linux they were using fifteen years ago.

  • Do People Really Use That? 15 Weird Linux Operating System Names

    When you see the word Windows capitalized, do you even think about the glass panes that let you see outside your house? How often does the “mac” in macOS make you think of burgers? Once a name gets popular enough, we all collectively disregard how peculiar it is.

    Linux isn’t that popular, so it doesn’t get this pass. For those of you unfamiliar with the open source operating system, you don’t install Linux itself — you install one of its many versions, which are known as distributions (“distros”). Many of these distros have odd names.

    I’ve put together a list of 15 distros with odd or comical names, in no particular order. Some of them are relatively popular in the Linux world. Others, even if they were mainstream, would still sound downright silly. Tell me if you agree.

  • These Linux myths need to die

    A Reddit user recently started a thread in which they asked which myths and misconceptions about Linux annoy users the most.

    The post spawned a lively discussion with points being raised for and against Linux.

    The prominent myths raised in the Reddit thread, along with several which have been doing the rounds for a while, are listed below.

  • Linux Marketshare Up To 3% According To One Popular Website

    According to one popular NSFW web-site, the 53rd most popular web-site in the world ranked by Alexa, their Linux traffic went up 14% in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • $89 Pinebook Linux Laptop Expected to Launch in February

      If you’ve heard the name Pine64 before, it’s most likely in relation to the Pine A64 single-board computer sold by the company as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi$40.99 at Amazon. However, Pine64 is branching out and will launch a couple of extremely cheap laptops next month.

      The so-called Pinebook laptop will ship in two forms, both offering the same internal components while one has an 11.6-inch screen and the other a larger 14-inch panel. Inside you’ll find a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor running at 1.2GHz coupled with 2GB DDR3 RAM. Graphics will be handled by the embedded dual-core Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and storage, as with most cheap laptops, is limited to a 16GB eMMC flash drive. According to OMG!Ubuntu!, power is provided by a 10,000mAh LiPo battery and there will be two USB 2.0 ports, a MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, and mini HDMI out.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.9.1

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.1 kernel.

      All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux 4.8.16
    • Linux 4.4.40
    • Heterogeneous Memory Management v15 For The Linux Kernel

      Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his first set of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) revisions for 2017.

      This long-in-development work for the Linux kernel to implement Heterogeneous Memory Management allows device memory to be used inside any process transparently and without modification. The HMM patches also allow mirring a process address space on a device. NVIDIA is one of the vendors working on support for their binary NVIDIA Linux driver and Nouveau open-source to make use of HMM with their latest GPUs.

    • VMware joins Open-O project targeting NFV, SDN orchestration

      The Linux Foundation-based open source group Open-O snares VMware as “premier” member joining the likes of China Mobile, Huawei.

      The Open-O Project recently welcomed new member VMware to the open source organization hosted by The Linux Foundation.

    • 10 years with util-linux project!

      Yes, we had util-linux before (and many thanks to Adrian Bunk and Andries E. Brouwer), but I believe that with git and close collaboration between Linux distributions and Linux kernel community it better now :-)

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Skylake With The Latest Linux/Mesa Open-Source Drivers

        I’m in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I’ve also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware.

        The integrated graphics tests are still early on and will have much more data when the weekend is through. But so far with numbers from an AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU compared to Skylake-based Core i5 6500 and Core i5 6600K, those numbers alone were interested so I figured I’d share those early numbers this morning.

      • How AMD Kaveri’s Graphics Performance Has Evolved Under Linux

        As mentioned earlier when posting some fresh AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Linux graphics benchmarks, I have some fresh AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU numbers with running the latest Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1-dev stack on many of my benchmarking systems in the basement server room. With having an A10-7850K Kaveri system running with the latest Linux open-source driver code, I figured I’d compare it to some of my older Kaveri results.

        [...]

        Following these initial results in this article are some more numbers going back further to then look at the Ubuntu 14.10 and fglrx 14.20/14.50 performance. All of these OpenGL benchmarks were done in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

      • AMD Developer Posts X.Org Modesetting “MS_ALL_IN_ONE” Patches
      • PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Now Use AMDGPU-PRO With Vulkan

        The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4.

      • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided On Linux With Latest RadeonSI – Up To 2~3x Faster

        With Marek’s latest set of RadeonSI Gallium3D patches, which are said to improve the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance by around 70%, having landed in Mesa Git, here are some fresh benchmarks with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury.

        The “before” results were from the Christmas-timed 31-Way NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL Comparison – End-Of-Year 2016 and then the “new” results are using Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of today. The RX 480 and R9 Fury were used for benchmarking.

      • There Are A Few More Performance Changes With RadeonSI From Mesa Git

        With Marek’s optimizations having landed in Mesa Git that targeted Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I ran benchmarks and found Deus Ex: MD is generally much faster and can be 2~3x faster, much more than the 70% originally thought by Marek. Now that more time has passed, I have carried out some more Linux gaming tests.

      • Polaris 12 Support Being Sent In To Linux 4.10 Kernel

        AMD is looking to land initial support for upcoming “Polaris 12″ graphics processors into the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel.

        AMD published initial Polaris 12 open-source Linux driver support back in December. This new revision of Polaris is expected to be for lower-end GPUs while waiting for Vega on the high-end. Details on Polaris 12 remain scarce. But in terms of the Linux driver support, it’s basically adding in the new PCI IDs and sharing the existing code-paths with Polaris 10/11.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Gets Its First Fix From A Valve Developer

        It appears Valve Linux developers are doing a bit more tinkering with the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 5.8.5 and Applications 16.12 by KDE now available in Chakra

        The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma and Applications series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other important package upgrades.

        Plasma 5.8.5 provides another round of bugfixes and translation to the 5.8 release, with changes found mostly in the plasma-desktop, plasma-workspace and kscreen packages.

        Applications 16.12.0 is the first release of a new series and comes with several changes. kdelibs has been updated to 4.14.27.

      • KaOS 2017.01 released as new year’s gift

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Weather updates with OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension

        If you have ever wanted weather updates on your Desktop, one of the easiest and neatest ways with the OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension. This nifty extension provides an always-visible display of the current weather status and temperature in the top bar of Fedora Workstation. If you open up the weather status monitor, it will also provide you with more details on the current weather, including a forcast for upcoming days, wind, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and sunrise & sunset times for the current location.

  • Distributions

    • The Best Linux Distros for 2017

      The new year is upon us, and it’s time to look toward what the next 365 days have in store. As we are wont to do, Linux.com looks at what might well be the best Linux distributions to be found from the ever-expanding crop of possibilities.

      Of course, we cannot just create a list of operating systems and say “these are the best,” not when so often Linux can be very task-oriented. To that end, I’m going to list which distros will rise to the top of their respective heaps…according to task.

      With that said, let’s get to the list!

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Release update: Soft freeze for stretch
      • Debian Stretch Enters Its Soft Freeze, Full Freeze In One Month

        The soft freeze is now upon us for Debian 9.0 “Stretch” while the full freeze will happen in February.

        The soft-freeze means that no new source packages will enter Stretch. The full freeze will then happen on 5 February, after which point all changes will require approval to land.

      • RFH: screen that hurts my eyes

        Two years ago, I bought myself a new fancy motherboard (a Asus B85M-G C2) with a new fancy Intel-based processor with built-in graphics (an Intel Core i7-4770) and memory to go with it. I installed it in the place of my old AMD-based motherboard, keeping everything else (my hoard of hard drives and such) excepted the graphics card, which was not needed anymore. I immediately noticed my eyes were aching when using the computer. I was quite surprised since I had been using the screen very heavily for almost 10 years before that, without any problems. I attributed that to Intel Graphics, so I tried putting back the old graphics card, but it did not help. The situation was very frustrating, since working on the computer for an hour or so was making my eyes hurt for several days. This problem was specific to this computer, I could keep on using my computer at work and my laptop without problems.

      • Getting to know diffoscope better

        Let me just say that I was a Debian user for years when I discovered it is taking part in Outreachy as one of organisations. Their Reproducible Builds effort has a noble goal and a bunch of great people behind it – I had no chances not to get excited by it. Looking for a place where my skills could be of any use, I discovered diffoscope – the tool for in-depth comparassion of files, archives etc. My mentor, Mattia Rizzolo, supported my decision to work on it, so now I am concentrating my efforts on improving diffoscope.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint 18.1 Xfce Nearing, Weird Names, Die Linux Myths

              Clement Lefebvre today announced a beta release of Mint 18.1 Xfce with updated software, refinements, and “many new features.” MakeUseOf chuckled at some of the crazy names folks pin on Linux distributions and Jan Vermeulen picked up on a Reddit conversation discussing Linux myths that “need to die.” Elsewhere in Linux news, Bruce Byfield compared and contrasted Debian and Ubuntu while Mark Shuttleworth discussed Snappy vs. Flatpak.

            • Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce – BETA Release

              This is the BETA release for Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce Edition.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • What is Open Source Software and How Can You Use it For Business?

    Small businesses are always looking for ways to save time and cut the operating costs of their business. One way to do this is by using open source software (OSS) to run their business.

  • AT&T now an open source believer

    Networked data traffic will only grow moving forward, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and making ECOMP open-source will allow the network to adjust.

    For many of those giants looking to modernize, open source has been the answer, as it allows for flexibility and a vast trove of material to draw from.

    Other legacy companies like GM and GE have also been working hard to reinvent themselves for the digital age, recognizing that they must evolve or face potential extinction. GE CEO Jeff Immelt wants to make GE a leading software company by 2020, while General Motors CEO Mary Barra is working to shift that company to become more of a tech innovator and incubator.

  • The impact of Open Source on operators, systems integrators and vendors

    Open source refers to the ability to access and modify source code, develop derived works, and sell or distribute software. Open source does not imply free of charge. In the context of telecom networks, open source builds on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). While open source refers traditionally to software, it can apply to hardware in which case a reference design is shared in an open community. The construct of open source leads to collaborative communities, and a product development philosophy that is based on a relatively fast iterative process. This contrasts with the relatively slow ‘waterfall’ process used in the development of telecom network equipment and services.

  • Hyperledger Blockchain Project Announces ‘Technical Working Group China’ Following Strong Interest

    The Hyperledger Project, a cross-industry collaborative effort to study, develop and implement open-source blockchain solutions and standards has set up a working group as an extended arm in China.

  • In the 2017 Tech Job Pool, Open Source Skills Rule

    Here it is: 2017. As the year gets going, the cloud computing and Big Data scenes are absolutely flooded with talk of shortages in people with deployment and management expertise. There just are not enough skilled workers to go around. The OpenStack Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and other organizations are now taking some important steps to address the situation.

    Here are some of the best ways to start the new year by getting certified for the open source cloud and Big Data tools that are makng a difference.

    As part of its efforts to grow the OpenStack talent pool and global community, the OpenStack Foundation has announced professional certification programs that are meant to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge and be accessible to OpenStack professionals around the world. Some of the first steps in advancing the program are taking place now, and Red Hat is also advancing OpenStack certification plans..

  • Ford, Toyota to challenge Apple CarPlay, Android Auto

    Wednesday’s announcement establishes the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, a non-profit group that will manage the open source software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford’s AppLink, a part of Ford Sync, is the underlying software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford deeded AppLink to the open source community in 2013. The idea is individual automakers can then build their own center stack display interfaces that look and feel different, while still retaining the voice and instrument panel controls already created by SDL. Right now, Apple CarPlay looks about the same on a $25,000 Chevrolet Cruze (image above) and a $60,000 Audi, to the annoyance of all automakers.

  • Riot: An open team collaboration tool for everyone

    How many times have you wished you had a quick access to a collaboration tool in the palm of your hands? And how many times have you wished that same tool could not only reach out to a team of your choosing, but to a community of similar users?

    Such is the way of Riot. This particular open source take on collaboration (available on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux) makes working with others on ideas and issues as easy as possible. Not only can you join the myriad available rooms, you can create your own rooms and make them either public or private. Riot even allows for room encryption, to ensure security.

  • CyanogenMod’s death and rebirth, new open source automotive group, and more news

    In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Cyanogen Inc. pulling the plug on CyanogenMod, Toyota and Ford forming the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, and more.

  • Haiku OS Gaining Ground On UEFI, FreeBSD Compatibility Layer, Remote Debugging

    For those interested in the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system, they have issued their latest monthly progress report to end out 2016.

  • Events

    • Crossing the AI chasm

      I recently presented those learnings at ApacheCon, and in this article I’ll share my top four lessons for overcoming both the technical and product chasms that stand in your path.

    • Call for Presentations at LinuxFest NorthWest, May 6-7, 2017

      Freedom, Friends, Features, First. The theme of this years LinuxFest NorthWest is ‘The Mechanics of Freedom’.

      Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are becoming even more integrated in the lives of regular citizens. Along with these changes comes concern over the trade-offs between convenience and privacy. For example: Privacy in the age of relentless online tracking, How bots can help you onboard new community members, Training driverless vehicles, How the Internet of Things took down DNS.

  • Web Browsers

    • 2016 sees Internet Explorer usage collapse, Chrome surge

      At the start of 2016, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was still the most commonly used browser on the Web; it finished 2015 being used by about 46 percent of Web users, with 32 percent preferring Chrome, and 12 percent using Firefox. But Explorer’s days have been numbered ever since Microsoft essentially ended its development. While the venerable browser is still supported and still gets security updates, its features and standard support have been frozen since 2015. Instead, Microsoft shifted active development to Edge, its new browser. While Edge is faster, more secure, and boasts much better support for Web standards, it’s only available for Windows 10, which greatly limits its audience.

  • CMS

    • Launching a Site or Blog? Open Source Creation Tools Give You Many Choices

      Late last year, Datamation came out with an extensive evaluation of which open source content management systems (CMS) really stand out, which is a topic near and dear to us here at OStatic. Our site runs on Drupal, which is an open source platform that powers many sites around the web, but there are key differences between CMS offerings, and if you’re looking for the right solution, we have some good resources for you.

      The Datamation story provides a nice overview of the open CMS space, but here are some of our newly updated, favorite ways to go about evaluating which is the right CMS for you.

      Marking a true renaissance for tools that can help anyone run a top-notch website or manage content in the cloud, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

  • Microsoft Cuts

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Officially Boots Libreboot

      FSF and GNU decide to grant Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe’s wishes. The project is no longer a part of GNU says RMS.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SiFive rolls out fully open source chip for IoT devices

        SiFive has also released an Arduino based software development board called HiFive1, along with the FE310 chip. In addition to that, the company has also released the RTL (register-transfer level) code for FE310 under an open source license that will allow chip designers to customize their own SoC on top of the base FE310.

        I talked with Jack Kang, VP of Product and Business Development at SiFive, to understand the chip’s impact on IoT world.

      • CES 2017 – Renault create world’s first open-source mass market vehicle

        The new vehicle POM, based on Renault’s popular Twizy, will be available to start-ups, independent laboratories, private customers and researchers, allowing them to customise the software and driving experience.

  • Programming/Development

    • Top 50 Developer Tools of 2016

      It took a bit of time to comb through the data, but there are some killer insights in here. To piece this list together, we aggregated usage from 40K+ tech stacks, over a million unique visits, and thousands of developer comments, reviews, and votes across all of 2016 (more on methodology below). Through it, we found some of the top tech trends coming into 2017 and what should be on your bucket list. Let’s get started!

    • Keynote: State of the Union: node.js by Rod Vagg, NodeSource

      During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • Node.js: The State of the Union

      By all metrics, it has been a good year for Node.js. During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • RcppTOML 0.1.0

      Big news: RcppTOML now works on Windows too!

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Finnish brain drain picks up speed, entire research groups now moving abroad

      Cuts to universities and state-funded research centres are contributing to growing brain drain from Finland and increasing unemployment among the highly educated, says Petri Koikkalainen, the head of the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers.

      The incidence of highly-educated people moving abroad has increased by one-third in the last few years, while the increase in the number of researchers leaving Finland behind is only slightly behind this percentage. According to Statistics Finland, 2,223 individuals with top academic degrees moved abroad in 2016.

      This brain drain has grown steadily since 2011, the researcher and teacher’s union president Koikkalainen said in a Radio Suomi interview on January 5.

      “The problem is not that people are moving abroad from Finland; the problem is that they never come back. We can’t attract highly-educated international experts to Finland, either,” Koikkalainen said.

      “There’s no use debating whether the shrinking university resources are contributing to the growing brain drain. At this point, we should just concede the obvious.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • China’s Airpocalypse Paves a Path for New Cancer Medicines

      The thick haze of pollution blanketing northern China this winter is a grim reminder of the nation’s new growth industry: lung cancer drugs.

      China logged more than 700,000 new cases of the disease in 2015, the product of a surge in air pollution, high smoking rates and unhealthy lifestyles as China has prospered in recent decades. Lung cancer is now the most common type of cancer in the country and its spread has spawned new listings as well as billion-dollar market values for Chinese companies like Betta Pharmaceuticals Co. and Hutchison China MediTech Ltd., which are attempting to build blockbuster treatments.

      Zhejiang, Hangzhou-based Betta Pharma, which sells just one lung cancer drug called Conmana, shot up to as much as $5.6 billion in market value late last year after raising about $110 million in a public offering on the Shenzhen exchange in November. Hutchison China MediTech, whose pipeline of experimental therapies is also heavily focused on lung cancer, also attracted $110 million in a new listing on the Nasdaq in March.

    • ‘Elephants are not the only victims’: the lament of China’s ivory lovers

      In a tiny workshop at his home in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong, 84-year-old Au Yue-Shung shows me an ivory carving he has been working on for months. Measuring just 5×10 inches, Nine Sages in Mount Xiang depicts the 9th-century poet Bai Juyi and eight of his peers in full creative flow in Henan province, far from the imperial court that Bai once served. The point of the story is that the sages tried to maintain their integrity by staying close to nature and art, and away from the ugly politics of the time. This is a piece that Au created for himself rather than a client. It is his statement about life after going through many ups and downs.

      Born during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, Au joined Guangzhou’s Daxin ivory carving factory at the age of 13 as an apprentice. With only one year’s formal education and with no one caring to teach him, he taught himself drawing and carving in his spare time. Unable to afford drawing paper, he drew on toilet paper. His gift was soon recognised and by the late 1960s he had become a key carving artist at Daxin. Later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he decided that he had had enough of the political and artistic repression.

    • State cannot shut people out when it comes to Flint water crisis

      How many more insults can the state lob at the city of Flint?

      The latest came this week when the state Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tried to sneak through an invitation-only town hall meeting on the condition of Flint water.

      In a city where no one can safely drink the water without a filter, the state apparently thought it was perfectly acceptable to hold a public session with a handpicked selection of people.

      A city spokeswoman said the state dropped the invite-only rule Tuesday, Jan. 3, at Flint Mayor Karen Weaver’s urging after city and state officials were asked about the program by MLive-The Flint Journal.

    • 2016 was the worst year in NHS history – we must fight for its survival

      The last 12 months have been the worst in the history of the NHS. Our health system is under pressure like never before. The moment of crisis many warned of has arrived, and it is not clear that the NHS can be retrieved from this state of affairs.

      We used to say that flailing A&Es represented an early warning sign that the health service was under pressure. And so that has proven to be. England’s major A&Es are under record strain with black alerts being regularly sounded, and in some instances wards turning patients away. Last year the A&E crisis spread to other sectors.

    • The Breakthrough: The $2 Drug Test

      We’re calling it The Breakthrough. We’re kicking things off today with two ProPublica reporters, Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders, talking about how they discovered police departments nationwide use a $2 test for detecting drugs that can send innocent people to jail.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • FBI dispute with DNC over hacked servers may fuel doubt on Russia role

      The FBI may have been forced into a misstep when investigating whether Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee — the agency never directly examined the DNC servers that were breached.

      Instead, the FBI had to rely on forensic evidence provided by third-party cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to mitigate the breach.

      “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed,” the agency said on Thursday in a statement.

      [...]

      CrowdStrike didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But it wasn’t the only private security firm to examine the breach. Fidelis Cybersecurity was brought in to look at the malware samples, and concluded that suspected elite Russian hackers were behind the intrusion.

      Nevertheless, the FBI should have conducted its own review of the hacked servers, Bambenek said. “This is a highly political case, and perception matters,” he said. “In this situation, they need to be building credibility.”

      Critics might now question if the FBI missed pieces of evidence in its investigation or if U.S. intelligence agencies rushed to blame Russia for the hack.

    • Fort Lauderdale shooting leaves ‘mutiple people’ dead, eight hospitalized: authorities

      As many as five people may have been killed and eight people wounded following a shooting by a reported lone gunman at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport on Friday afternoon, according to law enforcement authorities, social media, and local and national media reports.

      The suspected gunman, who has not been identified, is in custody, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. It confirmed via Twitter that “multiple people are dead” and that “eight people were injured and transported to an area hospital.”

      BSO officials said they received a call around 12:55 p.m. about shots fired at the airport. Airport officials tweeted that “there is an ongoing incident in Terminal 2, Baggage Claim,” but gave no other details.

    • The Ft. Lauderdale Airport Shooter And How TSA Dumbthink Makes Us Less Safe

      And then there’s the photo of him making that one-fingered salute that’s the sign of the tawhid — “the absolute unity of the godhead.”

      If we actually had real security — security that was meaningful in any way — the guy wouldn’t be running around with a gun…checking his gun in at the airport, no less.

      So, we have this expensive, huge bureaucracy, and people being put on the no-fly list because they have the same name as some terrorist, but nobody thinks to put any little notiepoo in the TSA files about a guy who’s reportedly hearing voices from ISIS?

      Think about that, the next time some repurposed mall food court worker is (screw probable cause!) batting at your balls or sticking her hand up your hoohoo.

    • Alleged Target of Drone Strike That Killed American Teenager Is Alive, According to State Department

      The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. The department announced that it has designated Ibrahim al Banna “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to al Banna’s killing or capture.

      Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. Awlaki’s family insists he was having dinner with his teenage cousin and some others in Shebwah, Yemen, when they were killed in the strike. The Obama administration has never explained why Awlaki was killed, other than anonymous officials implying he was with a terror target at the time or that it was a lethal mistake. Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. The elder Awlaki, who was also a U.S. citizen, was an enigmatic figure who supported George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign, spoke at the Pentagon shortly after 9-11, and went on to become an important propaganda figure for the growing radical Islamist movement after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks before his son was killed.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ‘Hannity’ Exclusive: Wikileaks’ Assange: Governments ‘Hate Transparency. They Loathe It’

      “We’re in the business of publishing information about power,” Assange said. “Why are we in the business of publishing information about power? Because people can do things with power, they can do very bad things with power. If they’re incompetent, they can do dangerous things. If they’re evil, they can do wicked things.”

    • WikiLeaks or US Intelligence?: CNBC journalist trolled for asking ‘who Americans believe’

      CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood, whose cosy relationship with the Clinton campaign was exposed in the Podesta Leaks, asked which source Americans believe regarding the hacking of the Democratic National Committee – WikiLeaks or US Intelligence.

      The Twitter poll comes as President-elect Donald Trump’s refusal to accept US Intelligence reports that claim Russia is behind the DNC hacking escalated tensions between the incoming and outgoing White House administrations.

    • Christmas tale from CIA, NSA and FBI: Elusive ‘Russian hacker’ is Putin
    • WikiLeaks Is What It Is Today Because Of U.S. Government And Media

      If a report from the United States intelligence community is to be believed and WikiLeaks knows the Kremlin used their organization to undermine a United States election, then the U.S. government and press bear some responsibility for the organization’s lack of concern about it.

      The U.S. government launched a grand jury investigation into the media organization and held the grand jury’s first session in 2011. According to a “Manhunting Timeline,” it encouraged Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries to file criminal charges against the organization’s editor-in-chief, Julian Assange.

      WikiLeaks’ most prominent and arguably important source in the organization’s history, Chelsea Manning, was abused by the Marines in pretrial confinement and zealously prosecuted by the U.S. military as if she were a spy, who aided al Qaida terrorists. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison for Espionage Act-related offenses. Her disclosures were motivated by whistleblowing and yet, as her legal team argues, she received “far and away the most severe sentence ever adjudged.”

      For the most part, U.S. establishment media outlets went along with the U.S. government’s commitment to criminalizing and isolating WikiLeaks. Even with the revelation of Google search warrants against WikiLeaks staff, editorial boards and journalists remained largely silent about an investigation that could have profound implications for freedom of the press, particularly now that someone like Trump will be president for the next four years.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

      London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

      By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3) more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

      Many other sites across the capital will go on to break the annual limit and Putney High Street exceeded the hourly limit over 1,200 times in 2016. Oxford Street, Kings Road in Chelsea and the Strand are other known pollution hotspots.

      NO2 pollution, which is produced largely by diesel vehicles, causes 9,500 early deaths every year in London. Most air quality zones across the country break legal limits and the crisis was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April. This week scientists said that one in 10 cases of Alzheimer’s in people living near busy roads could be linked to air pollution.

    • US energy analysis sees renewable electricity passing coal by 2030

      Yesterday, the US Energy Information Administration released its energy outlook for 2017. These annual reports provide projections of current energy trends out to 2040, and they provide policymakers with a sense of where the country could be decades from now, should things continue as they have been.

      Anyone who’s up on current trends wouldn’t be surprised by many of the EIA’s results. With coal’s continued decline, natural gas becomes the dominant source of energy in the US, followed by renewable generation. Most of the scenarios the report considers see the continued growth in US energy production far outstripping a sluggish growth in demand. This pattern will transform the country into a net exporter of energy by the 2030s.

      But EIA reports are notoriously conservative in their projections, and this can lead to completely unrealistic results. In the past, for example, the EIA’s projections didn’t foresee the radical drop in photovoltaic prices, and so the organization had solar playing little role in US energy markets. This year’s version is no exception, as it suggests installation of wind power in the US will essentially stop once tax incentives run out in the early 2020s.

    • Giant iceberg poised to break off from Antarctic shelf

      A thread of just 20km of ice is now preventing the 5,000 sq km mass from floating away, following the sudden expansion last month of a rift that has been steadily growing for more than a decade.

      The iceberg, which is positioned on the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica, known as Larsen C, is predicted to be one of the largest 10 break-offs ever recorded.

    • The Stuff You Buy Is Destroying Animals Around the World

      There are certain products that everyone knows are directly destructive to wildlife. As such, most people and countries around the world generally try to avoid them. Using ivory for trinkets causes elephant slaughter; eating shark fins—you guessed it—is not good for sharks. But those are easy to give up, because a.) we don’t need any of them, and b.) they very blatantly come from certain wild animals.

      Much of the things we use in daily life, however, from iPhones, to jeans, to Ikea furniture, also have negative impacts on endangered wildlife around the globe. But how can you tell? In an attempt to answer that question, scientists from Norway and Japan used a global trade model to trace consumer demands around the world to threats on endangered wildlife. They’ve created a series of maps based on their findings that show the threat “hotspots” around the world and what countries are endangering them. The rationale is that if you know where in the supply chain you’re doing the most damage, you can take steps to alleviate it. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

    • Warmer Winters
    • Another pipeline through Indian land – this time in Mexico

      The Yaqui community is less that pleased about the Agua Prieta pipeline’s projected route, which goes straight through their territory. Things went from bad to worse on October 21, when the pipeline’s supporters attacked a group of protesters, killing one, wounding eight, and causing substantial property damage.

      The Yaqui tribe, which has endured a long history of repression, has also a history of resistance. Like other indigenous communities in Mexico, several members of the Yaqui tribe have lost their lives fighting against invasive private companies and non-indigenous authorities. Just two years ago, before the conflict over the Agua Prieta pipeline, the Yaquis protested against a large-scale aqueduct that would have diverted what was left of their sacred river to the city of Hermosillo.

    • Exxon predicts 25% rise in energy demand

      The world’s biggest oil conglomerate says it expects global energy demand to increase by a quarter in the next 23 years.

      ExxonMobil is the largest of the world’s big oil companies, the supermajors. Up to the end of 2016, Rex Tillerson, who has been nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump as his Secretary of State, was Exxon’s chairman and CEO.

      In this year’s annual Outlook for Energy, a look-ahead to 2040, Exxon says: “Over the next 25 years, growing economies and an expanding middle class will mean better living standards for billions, through increased access to better education and health care as well as new homes, appliances and cars. This means the world will need more energy, even with significant efficiency gains.”

      With world population expected to grow by 1.8 billion people to a total of 9bn by 2040, the company believes global energy demand will increase by 25% – and that India and China together will account for 45% of that increase.

  • Finance

    • Farmers could ‘reap a post-Brexit bonus when Britain leaves the EU’

      Farmers will reap a post-Brexit bonus as Britain is liberated from “over-bureaucratic” European Union rules on agriculture, according to a new report.

      It argued that departure from the bloc will enable the government to better target financial help at the farmers who need it most.

      The report from the Centre for PolicyStudies (CPS) said that Theresa May has a “strong hand” to deploy in Brexit negotiations because of the UK’s £16.7bn annual deficit in food and drink with the EU.

    • Finland Will Give 2000 Unemployed People $590 Every Month, No Strings Attached, Even After They Get A Job

      As that indicates, this isn’t a universal basic wage, since it’s aimed at just a few of those receiving unemployment benefit, and the money will replace existing financial support. On the other hand, it isn’t just some kind of creative accounting, because they will continue to receive the monthly sum even if they find work. There are already plans to roll it out more widely.

      As the Guardian notes, other parts of the world, including Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland, are also looking to try out the idea. At a time when there are fears that automation may well reduce the total number of workers needed in industry, it’s great to see these experiments exploring an approach that could help to alleviate social problems arising from this shift.

    • Sir Ivan Rogers, UK’s ambassador to the EU quits

      Sir Ivan, the man who would play a main role in the negotiations with the EU during the UKs extraction has resigned, sending a 1400-word thank you letter to his staff setting out his problems with why he felt his position was untenable and the current Governments position with regards to leaving the EU.

    • Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

      Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.

      “It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

      “We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • NYT Makes the Case for Trump Via Racialized Rural Mythology

      Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi wrote a piece last month (12/9/16) reporting that “major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months.” Perhaps that explains why some of the Trump-sympathizing columns they do manage to turn up—like a piece that ran today in the Times (1/5/17)—leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.

      To be fair, the Times op-ed wasn’t written by a self-professed Trump fan, but by Robert Leonard, the news director for an Iowa country music station, who says, “I consider myself fairly liberal,” and confesses that he has “struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect—and at times admire—can think so differently from me.”

      [...]

      Voting for Trump, though, with the idea that he will do something about the hospitals-too-far-away problem would be childish. If op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, perhaps they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.

    • Speaker Paul Ryan, After Passing Regulatory Rollback, Parties With Lobbyists at Fundraiser

      Just hours after passing the very first bill of the new Congress on Wednesday — one designed to roll back a range of environmental and consumer regulations — House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., celebrated with a corporate lobbying firm at a fundraiser for his campaign committee.

      The vote on the Midnight Rules Relief Act of 2017 took place at 4:48 p.m. on Wednesday. The fundraiser, at the offices of the BGR Group, a major lobbying firm, started at 7 p.m.

      The bill would amend existing law to allow Congress to repeal en masse multiple regulations finalized since the end of May last year. The law is believed to be aimed at rolling back a rule designed to deter mining companies from polluting drinking water sources, rules designed to curb hazardous methane emissions from fracking sites, and a rule that extends the threshold for overtime pay to workers, among others.

    • Clinton quite effective at discrediting herself’ Ex-CIA analyst blasts hacking claims

      Larry C Johnson branded the newly declassified US intelligence report “as a farce and a charade”, adding Russian attempts to discredit the Democrat candidate Hilary Clinton were unnecessary because “she was quite effective at it herself”.

      On Friday, intelligence officials published their findings into alleged Russian hacking during November’s US election.

      The report claimed the Russian president personally ordered an online campaign to influence the outcome of the ballot in Trump’s favour.

      It said Mr Putin’s goal was to undermine the democratic process and denigrate Mrs Clinton, by using intermediaries such as DCLeaks.com, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks to publicly expose private emails acquired from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and top level Democrats.

    • Trump Already Demanding Leak Investigation and He’s Not Even President Yet

      President-elect Donald Trump isn’t waiting until his inauguration to push for investigations of leaks to the press — an indication that he’ll emulate and possibly surpass President Obama’s practice of criminalizing disclosures to the media.

    • Underwhelming Intel Report Shows Need for Congressional Investigation of DNC Hack

      After President Obama and Donald Trump were briefed on a classified report explaining the United States Intelligence Community’s belief that Russia hacked the Democratic Party, the public has received its own, declassified version. Unfortunately for us, it appears virtually anything new and interesting was removed in the redaction process, leaving us without the conclusive, technical evidence we were hoping for — and that the American people are owed. Failing a last minute change of heart, the next best (and perhaps last) hope for the government to show us its work would be a formal, bipartisan probe.

    • Conservatives Plot Their Course on the Rising ‘Sea of Red’ in State Capitals

      The American Legislative Exchange Council — a nonprofit better known as ALEC — briefed its members and allied groups on the bright future for its agenda now that Republicans will effectively control 68 of the nation’s 99 state legislative bodies, as well as 33 governor’s mansions. Among other things, group members said they would push bills to reduce corporate taxes, weaken unions, privatize schooling and influence the ideological debate on college campuses.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame “Everybody But Themselves” for Collapse of Their Party

      As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies at a Senate hearing on Russian cyberthreats ahead of a highly classified briefing today with President-elect Donald Trump, we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has faced an onslaught of criticism for questioning the premise of Russian hacking of the U.S. election. “Because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative,” Greenwald says. “And since I’ve been one of the people most vocally doing so, the smear campaign has been like none that I have ever encountered. I have been accused of being a member of the alt-right, of being an admirer of Breitbart, of being supportive of Donald Trump, of helping him get elected and, of course, of being a Kremlin operative.”

    • Facebook’s New Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, Has Deep Ties to Trump Nominee

      Facebook announced Friday that former CNN host and education reform activist Campbell Brown will be leading its news partnership team.

      Brown wrote in a statement on her Facebook page that she will “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook. I will be working directly with our partners to help them understand how Facebook can expand the reach of their journalism, and contribute value to their businesses.”

      Brown’s hiring should raise eyebrows given her close ties to Betsy DeVos, the president-elect’s nominee to lead the Education Department. DeVos is a Michigan-based billionaire heiress who has poured millions of dollars into organizations supporting school vouchers and charter schools.

    • Donald Trump Demonstrating How Much Of Our Political System Is Based On Tradition & Custom, Not Rules

      And… that’s really quite interesting, because of how little many people — especially policy experts — have really stopped to consider how much of the way we do things is based on custom, and not actual rules. There are two ways of looking at this. First, there absolutely are serious problems with “the way things have always been done.” So there’s potential value in having someone who doesn’t feel hamstrung by traditions and customs that might not make sense. But, the flip side of that is that there are often really good reasons for the way many of these things are done. And, so far, the customs and traditions that Trump has been indicating he’ll ignore, are ones that do seem to be based on solid reasoning, rather than just silly legacy reasons. Intelligence reports, secret service protection, and anti-nepotism rules make sense.

    • The Internet Archive is building up a Trump presidential library — of everything he’s ever said, on video

      The Internet Archive launched Thursday a huge Trump Archive dedicated to housing videos of everything Trump’s said on video: in everything from broadcast speeches, debates, interviews, and newscasts about the President-elect. The archive currently contains more than 700 videos — that’s more than 520 hours of Trump — compiled by way of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s broadcast tracking resource, and currently dates back to December 2009 (Trump formally announced his candidacy June of 2015).

    • Ignoring anti-Trumpers: Why we can expect media blackout of protests against Trump’s inauguration

      On Jan. 20 — 16 years ago — thousands of protesters lined the inauguration parade route of the incoming Republican president. “Not my president,” they chanted. But despite the enormity of the rally, it was largely ignored. Instead, pundits marveled over how George W. Bush “filled out the suit” and confirmed authority.

      “The inauguration of George W. Bush was certainly a spectacle on Inauguration Day,” marvels Robin Andersen, the director of Peace and Justice studies at Fordham University, in the 2001 short documentary “Not My President: Voices From the Counter Coup.”

      It’s nearly impossible not to anticipate the eerie parallels between George W. Bush’s inauguration and that of Donald Trump.

    • Drunk tweets? Foul-mouthed Vicente Fox challenges Trump, ‘I’m not paying for that f**kin’ wall’

      Fox tweeted: “I am not paying for that f*cken wall. Be clear with US taxpayers. They will pay for it.”

    • Betraying Campaign Promise, Trump Now Says US Taxpayers Will Pay for Wall

      Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), congressional liaison for the Trump transition team, doubled down on Trump’s position in comments to CNN: “When you understand that Mexico’s economy is dependent upon U.S. consumers, Donald Trump has all the cards he needs to play,” Collins said. “On the trade negotiation side, I don’t think it’s that difficult for Donald Trump to convince Mexico that it’s in their best interest to reimburse us for building the wall.”

      However, Mexico’s president has vociferously and repeatedly said that the country will not pay for Trump’s promised wall. “We’re not going to pay for that fucking wall,” former president Vicente Fox added last March, as Common Dreams reported.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • Poor People, Don’t You Know You Have Jobs?

      It’s not Trump you have to worry about. You’re thinking short-term.

      As people struggle to find third-parties to blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat (pick one or more: Putin, Bernie Bros, Comey, The Media, Electoral Collegians, the Racist/Misogynist Hordes), an amorphous group has emerged as a popular domestic target: stupid poor white people who do not understand how much better they have had it over the last eight years.

      These slack-jawed yokels just can’t seem to grasp that they have great jobs in a growing economy. The numbers prove it: the U.S stock market is at record highs and unemployment at its lowest level since the Great Recession.

    • Circus of Liars: How Trump & GOP are Twisted into Pretzels over Putin Hack

      The US NSA hacked the whole world for many years until Ed Snowden blew the whistle on them.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court Says 791 Days Of Warrantless Location Tracking ‘Unreasonable,” But Refuses To Toss Evidence

      A confusing and disturbing conclusion has been reached by a New York federal court. The court has decided that 791 days of location tracking with a GPS ankle bracelet is unreasonable, but somehow not worthy of evidence suppression. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Kemal Lambus — the defendant challenging the evidence — was granted parole, but with certain conditions. One of those was imposed a few months after his release: wearing an ankle bracelet to ensure he abided by his curfew. This was in addition to the normal amount of diminished privacy afforded parolees, which includes any number of warrantless searches by parole officers.

    • Michael Rogers: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

      Another reason that Rogers has drawn criticism is that he failed to prevent further security breaches in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

      In August 2016, for example, the FBI arrested an NSA contractor named Harold T. Martin III who they believed had stolen and disclosed 50 terabytes of data, according to The New York Times.

    • NSA seeks pay bump for its ‘high-end, exquisite civilian talent’ [Ed: due to brain drain]

      NSA Director Michael Rogers recently authorized the introduction of a specially tailored compensation package for the spy agency’s “high-end” cybersecurity workers.

    • Belgium Wants EU Nations To Collect And Store Personal Data Of Train, Bus And Boat Passengers

      It’s become pretty common for the authorities to collect personal information about passengers from airlines, supposedly to ensure security. It’s a sensitive area, though, as shown by the many years of fraught US-EU negotiations that were required in order to come up with a legal framework for transferring this data to the US when EU citizens were involved. However, not all EU countries are so concerned about that privacy thing. Belgium, for example, thinks that the current approach doesn’t go far enough, and that it should be extended to include all forms of mass transport. As this EurActiv article notes, the Belgian parliament has already voted to bring in a national system for trains, buses and boats by May 2018, and the country is calling for the rest of the EU to follow suit…

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FBI Dismisses Child Porn Prosecution After Refusing To Hand Over Details On Its Hacking Tool

      The FBI has decided to let one of its Playpen defendants walk rather than turn over information on its Network Investigative Technique. The NIT, deployed all over the world on the back of a single warrant obtained in Virginia, unmasked Tor users by dropping code on Playpen visitors’ computers that sent back IP addresses and other information about the user’s computer.

      The warrant itself has been ruled invalid by a number of judges presiding over Playpen prosecutions, although not all of them have determined that the evidence obtained by the NIT should be suppressed. The FBI not only sent malware to site visitors, but it also ran (and possibly improved) the child porn website for two weeks while pursuing its investigation.

      Michaud’s lawyer asked the court to force the FBI to hand over information on the NIT. The FBI countered, saying it wouldn’t turn over the information even if ordered to do so. Judge Bryan, after an in camera session with the agency, agreed with the government that there was a law enforcement need to keep the details of the tool secret. But he also made it clear the government couldn’t have both its secrecy and its evidence. He ordered all evidence suppressed.

    • Judge Tells DOJ It Can’t Un-Suppress Evidence By Starting The Indictment Process All Over Again

      Sure, we like the DOJ when it’s handing down scathing reviews of local law enforcement agencies and belatedly issuing warrant requirements for IMSI catchers, but we’re not nearly as thrilled when it argues against warrant requirements for cell phone searches, demands backdoors in phone encryption, or beats mild miscreants over the head with the CFAA.

      In fact, there’s very little to like about the DOJ outside of its civil rights division. Here’s yet another reason why the Department of Justice often seems like a misnomer. (h/t Brad Heath)

      A decision [PDF] has been handed down by a federal court in Puerto Rico, presumably with an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh.

      In 2014, Homeland Security agents searched Jose Silva-Rentas without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant. Silva happened to be next to somebody HSI agents did search with probable cause. Rentas moved to suppress the evidence and the court agreed that the government’s theory of probable cause osmosis wasn’t enough to salvage the search.

    • Jenna Jameson, newly Jewish, launches anti-Islam rant: ‘I don’t care about your false prophet’

      Jenna Jameson launched into an anti-Islam rant on Twitter this week, slamming the religion as one that “promotes child rape, female genital mutilation, butchering non believers and polygamy.”

      The former porn legend, who converted to Judaism last year ahead of her upcoming marriage to Israeli boyfriend Lior Bitton, spent the better part of the week defending her attacks against Islam and “spending all [her] free time” watching YouTube videos about the Quran by Christian apologist David Wood.

    • Briton ‘jailed for adultery in Bahrain’ released from prison

      A British woman jailed in Bahrain after being accused of adultery has been released amid a fundraising appeal by her mother to bring her home.

      Hannah James, said to originally be from Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, moved to the country with husband Jassim Alhaddar and their young son, but her mother, Shelley James, claims she was a victim of domestic abuse and wanted to leave Bahrain.

    • Six essays on media, technology and politics from Data & Society

      danah boyd writes, “Yesterday, a group of us at Data & Society put out six essays on ‘media, technology, politics.’ Taken together, these pieces address different facets of the current public conversation surrounding propaganda, hate speech, and the US election. Although we only allude to specifics, we have been witnessing mis/disinformation campaigns for quite some time as different networks seek to manipulate both old and new media, shape political discourse, and undermine trust in institutions and information intermediaries. In short, we are concerned about the rise of a new form of propaganda that is networked, decentralized, and internet-savvy. We are also concerned about the ongoing development of harassment techniques and gaslighting, the vulnerability of old and new media to propagate fear and disinformation, and the various ways in which well-intended interventions get misappropriated. We believe that we’re watching a systematic attack on democracy, equality, and freedom. There is no silver bullet to address the issues we’re seeing. Instead, a healthy response is going to require engagement by many different constituencies. We see our role in this as to help inform and ground the conversation. These essays are our first attempt to address the interwoven issues we’re seeing.

    • Obama Picks Up the Pace on Commutations, But Pardon Changes Still in Limbo

      Near the start of his second term, President Obama had granted clemency at a lower rate than any president in recent history. He had pardoned 39 people and denied 1,333 requests. He had used his power to commute a prisoner’s sentence just once.

      But as Obama enters the final days of his administration, he has dramatically picked up the pace. He’s now issued commutations to 1,176 people since entering office — more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan put together. In December, Obama commuted the sentences of 231 people in a single day.

      Much of Obama’s increased activity can be attributed to an initiative begun in 2014 to shorten sentences of non-violent offenders who would likely have received less time for their crimes under current law and who had already served at least 10 years of their prison sentences. Low-level drug offenders have received most of the commutations, part of a broader push by the administration to reform sentencing guidelines.

    • Alleged Chicago Assault Reignites Issue of Hate Crimes Against Whites

      The meaning and enforcement of the Illinois hate-crimes statute seems destined for intense scrutiny with the arrest this week of four young black adults in Chicago in connection with the assault of a mentally disabled white man. The arrests by the Chicago Police Department resulted in part from what appeared to a livestreamed video of the disabled man being abused while bound and gagged. The recording captures one or more of the attackers making references to Donald Trump and white people.

    • Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

      This week on CounterSpin: The “what could possibly go wrong?” meme might be overused, but it’s hard not to think it, watching the government create new tools and powers for countering “disinformation” that will be handed to a president-elect who calls journalists “the lowest form of life.” Donald Trump didn’t create the present terrain, however, and pretending that fearmongering and watchlists and looking the other way are all newly minted will not serve us. In fact, we can look to history to help us understand what’s happening, and what we can do to resist it.

    • Signs Look Grim for Media Picking the Side of Liberty and Dissent

      This is a kind of “which side are you on?” moment for journalists. Will they defend the rights and liberties of the many communities under threat—Muslims, women, those reliant on government assistance? Will they keep alive a space for dissent and critical questioning in the face of a White House that declares itself indifferent to rules about conflicts of interest, among many other things, and that threatens revenge on those it calls “enemies”?

      [...]

      USA Today solved the problem, we’re told, by getting Trump and Pence themselves to write for them. Maybe the New York Times will adopt that strategy, given its editor’s statement that his paper “could have done better.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Canadian Regulators Declare 50 Mbps To Be The New Broadband Standard

      A few years back, the FCC here in the States bumped the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream, to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. This was done in large part to highlight the lack of competition (two-thirds lack access to speeds of 25 Mbps from more than one provider) at faster speeds, largely thanks to telcos that no longer really want to be in the residential broadband business and are refusing to upgrade their networks at any scale. Needless to say, neither ISPs — nor the politicians paid to love them — were happy with the new standard.

      Recently the Canadian government took things further, announcing new rules that make 50 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream the new industry standard. In addition to declaring that this 50 Mbps option should be considered “basic telecom service” moving forward, the CRTC announced that it’s requiring that Canadian ISPs at least offer users the ability to purchase an uncapped, unlimited broadband connection.

    • Utterly Tone Deaf To Cord Cutting, Cable Contract Feuds And Blackouts Skyrocket

      We’ve noted for years that as broadcasters and cable companies bicker over new programming contracts, already-annoyed customers are left in a lurch. Usually these feuds go something like this: a broadcaster demands a huge rate increase for the exact same content. The cable company balks, and the content is usually pulled out of the cable lineup. Customers aren’t given any sort of refund for this missing content, they’re just inundated with PR pitches from both sides trying to get them pissed at the other guy. Ultimately a new, confidential contract is struck, and the rate hikes are then passed on to the consumer.

      In short, consumers are repeatedly punished with blackouts and petty PR bitching between companies incapable of responsibly signing new contracts, after which they get a lovely new price hike. It’s no wonder that 2016 was a record year for cord cutting.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Establishes Technology Bank For Least-Developed Countries, Including An IP Bank [Ed: poor countries don’t need “IP”]

      The United Nations has established a “technology bank” for least-developed countries that aims to strengthen the science, technology and innovation capacity of LDCs that includes better management of intellectual property rights.

    • Trademarks

      • Bushy’s Brewery, Isle Of Man Govt. Have Trademark Hissy Fit Over Two Letters: TT

        If there is one lesson you take away from writing about trademark law and disputes, it’s how simple it would be to avoid a massive percentage of the conflicts by holding trademark applications to a far higher standard then they often are. If the world’s many trademark offices kept in mind that the entire point of this form of intellectual property is supposed to be keeping the public confident in their ability to determine the source of a given product or service by its trademarked branding, then it would be obvious that approved trademarks should be unique and distinct.

        As a counterexample to that line of thinking, consider the current dispute going on between Bushy’s Brewery, located on the Isle of Man, and the Manx government, all over the government’s trademark for exactly two letters: TT.

    • Copyrights

      • FACT Lawyer Reveals Challenges of Kodi Box Seller Prosecutions

        A lawyer who has worked on piracy cases for the Federation Against Copyright Theft has revealed the challenges posed by Kodi and IPTV box prosecutions. Ari Alabhai says that copyright can be complicated for a jury to understand, so prosecutions under the Fraud Act may be preferred. Even that has its complications, however.

      • Pirates across Europe… What can we expect in 2017?

        There are good reasons to keep an eye on the performance of the Pirates across Europe – as we know from the Icelandic experiance, strong showings in other countries can help support the UK Pirate Party as it brings knowledge of Pirate Politics to new people. There are also opportunities to ‘Pirate’ each others ideas and bring the best of what works in campaigns to the UK.

      • Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government

        The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

        As befits a movement dedicated to reinventing democracy through new technology, it also aims to boost the youth vote by persuading the company developing Pokémon Go in Iceland to turn polling stations into Pokéstops.

        “It’s gradually dawning on us, what’s happening,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, leader of the Pirates’ parliamentary group, told the Guardian. “It’s strange and very exciting. But we are well prepared now. This is about change driven not by fear but by courage and hope. We are popular, not populist.”

        The election, likely to be held on 29 October, follows the resignation of Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major victim of the Panama Papers in April after the leaked legal documents revealed he had millions of pounds of family money offshore.

01.06.17

India Keeps Rejecting Software Patents in Spite of Pressure From Large Foreign Multinationals

Posted in Asia, Patents at 7:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Delhi Gate at night
Delhi Gate at night

Summary: India’s resilience in the face of incredible pressure to allow software patents is essential for the success of India’s growing software industry and more effort is needed to thwart corporate colonisation through patents in India itself

IT HAS BEEN a while since we last wrote about software patents in India. The subject is growingly important because a lot of the world’s software is nowadays being crafted in India, much in the same way that a lot of hardware is made in China.

According to today’s news, “India’s patent office has rejected an application by German telecom major T-Mobile International AG seeking a patent for an invention related to a method for optimising the operational times and cell exchange performances of mobile terminals.”

“Currently, India has a patent system that mostly helps foreign companies cement/impose their monopoly on a vast population.”“The rejection of T-Mobile’s patent is the latest in the growing number of software patents,” says the article. For nearly a decade now we have been showing how large multinational corporations such as BT, IBM, Microsoft and others have been pushing India (sometimes even shaming India) into the trap which is software patents. They are habitually helped by their patent lawyers in India, who gleefully join the lobbying efforts. These lawyers bamboozle fellow Indians on behalf of large corporations that pay their lawyers a lot of money. We urge Indians to reject and resist these terrible attempts to hobble India’s thriving software industry. Even some large Indian companies (such as Infosys) have already changed their mind.

Currently, India has a patent system that mostly helps foreign companies cement/impose their monopoly on a vast population. This has been accomplished in many disciplines except software and it would be wise for India to keep it that way. A further improvement would be to reassess patentability in other domains, such as those that impact generic medicine (India already done exceptionally well in this domain). Here is a new report from the Times of India that says “[a]round 80% of the more-than 43,000 domestic product and process patents have been secured by foreign entities – many of them global technology giants like Qualcomm, Samsung and Philips.”

“We urge Indians to reject and resist these terrible attempts to hobble India’s thriving software industry.”Notice Qualcomm in there. It is a highly abusive company whose patent practices are so cruel and notorious worldwide. Consider this new article from CCIA‘s Matt Levy. Read the second paragraph to see how Qualcomm — like Microsoft — is basically corrupting academia (showered with money in exchange for bias) in an effort to thwart saner patent policy:

If you’ve followed the patent reform debate, you’re probably familiar with Qualcomm. Qualcomm has literally spent millions opposing reform, including around $6 million lobbying in the first 3 quarters of 2016, millions on television and print ads, a lot of money given to law schools to fund sympathetic research, and on and on. It’s hard to blame the company, given that Qualcomm’s licensing segment netted about $6.5 billion in profit in fiscal year 2016. You can find that information, and more, in Qualcomm’s 10-K for 2016.

India would be wise to shape its patent law not based on what companies like Qualcomm and their patent law firms (can be Indian) are saying. India should listen to its engineers, programmers, etc. Too many times we find articles on the subject which are composed by lobbyists, large corporate executives, or law firm that strive to embellish their financial bottom line. Today in the Irish press there is this article about “start-ups” (i.e. small companies) which advises them — among other things — to pursue patents. It’s a waste of money; there are other things they should be doing with their money (limited budget) because unless a small company is merely a patent troll it will never manage to make much of these patents. They’re just worthless ‘trophies’, overshadowed by massive patent ‘warchests’/’arsenals’ like IBM’s or Microsoft’s. Counterattacks in the lawsuit sense mean that they’ll never become David in the David versus Goliath sense. They’ll go broke trying to become David. The article from the Irish Times mostly quotes “Fergal Brady [...] an examiner in the Irish Patents Office [who] says his role is to settle the issues of “What are you describing? Is it clear? Has it been done before?” when it comes to patent applications.”

“India would be wise to shape its patent law not based on what companies like Qualcomm and their patent law firms (can be Indian) are saying”Patent examiners are not the “bad guys” (or girls). They are just trying to make a living by scrutinising patent applications. However, at the EPO and at the USPTO, immense pressure has been put on examiners to make decisions too quickly, rendering them totally incapable of doing their job properly. To make matters worse, they are sometimes offered incentives to do their job leniently, either granting in error or rejecting applications in error, settling for low patent quality or diverting all the financial damage to courtrooms (externality). █

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