11.16.16
Posted in Asia, Europe, Patents at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The future of the EPO is like that of a pipeline/production line, totally drunk on “production” (quantity, not quality)
Summary: The EPO under Battistelli is increasingly just a pipeline of bogus/low-quality patents which fuel patent trolling all around the world and also in Europe (harming the European economy)
THE EPO under Battistelli’s awful leadership gradually becomes more software patents-friendly, whereas the USPTO is moving away from such patents. Such is the nature of the Office under Battistelli, the man who will be remembered as the person who brought down the whole Organisation, severely punishing staff that dared warn about it.
Software patents at the EPO should not be allowed, yet in two counties/continents that forbid these (India also) the EPO keeps promoting these. We have mentioned this many times before, especially last month. Today the EPO did it again and also today an article was published by Tufty The Cat (quite well known in patent circles). “The EPO issues invalid patents too,” said the headline and here is what the body said:
The sole drawing of the patent is shown here on the right. Basically, the patent claims a hairdressing salon in a shipping container (or some other kind of mobile structure) with a window cut into it. This is not, however, even the broadest claim. Claim 9 defines “A mobile structure for a hairdressing salon according to one of claims 1 to 7″. According to the usual EPO interpretation of the word “for”, this would cover any shipping container.
How this application got through the EPO system is at the moment quite beyond me. From a quick review of the prosecution file though, it seems that the examiner was persuaded that adding a window made the invention allowable over US 2006/137188 A1. Just in case anyone has any doubt about whether the invention is novel, let alone inventive, there is prior art in the form of shipping containers repurposed as hair salons such as this article from 11 June 2011 (before the 23 August 2012 priority date of the patent). For further avoidance of doubt, the internet archive wayback machine (which is normally accepted by the EPO as evidence of publication date) confirms that the article was available on 16 June 2011. One of the photographs in the article, shown below, seems to have everything required according to claim 1. Incidentally, the search that led me to this took about five minutes.
The subject of awful patent scope and EPO disregarding the instructions from politicians was discussed in Dutch Parliament yesterday. We have received more information since then and also engaged in a short discussion on the subject with the politician in question. One EPO insider said to us that a “similar debate should simultaneously take place in Germany, Austria and Belgium.”
Speaking of the EPO pushing software patents not only into Europe but potentially India too, see this new article from Jack Ellis at IAM. One patent maximalist said that “Dolby Selects India for Asserting Patents Against Chinese Companies,” but the actual headline is “Dolby is the latest foreign patent owner to select India for asserting against Chinese companies” and it shows a Western company playing a proxy game with patent predators in India (also see IAM’s remarks on this Harman acquisition):
Dolby has reportedly sued Oppo and Vivo in the Delhi High Court, accusing the two Chinese electronics and smartphone manufacturers of failing to pay appropriate royalties for use of its patented technologies. Dolby follows Ericsson in seeking to assert its rights in India, something that may indicate that the jurisdiction is growing in importance from an IP strategy perspective.
BGR India reported on Friday that the Delhi High Court had issued an order relating to cases that the audio technology company had filed against a number of defendants, including Oppo, Vivo and their parent firm BBK Electronics, as well as a number of affiliated local entities. IAM contacted Dolby on this matter, but the company declined to comment.
“Dolby follows Ericsson,” says the above and as we noted last year, Ericsson, a European company, officially brought patent trolls to Europe (to London in fact). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Linux has been around for quite a long time now, and there are always new folks finding their way to it. One Linux redditor recently asked how his fellow users got into Linux, and some of their answers are quite interesting.
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Server
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Sumo Logic’s report, entitled “The State of the Modern App in AWS,” uses statistics gathered from the company’s base of 1,200 customers to get an idea of how their apps are created and what they run on.
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It’s clear that in the service provider space, using a standard cloud platform to deliver carrier-class applications may not be sufficient. Service provider applications such as virtual private networks (VPNs), VoIP, and other virtual network functions (VNFs) can’t always be delivered by a best-effort cloud approach.
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Kernel Space
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I have known Jennifer Cloer from the very early days, even before the Linux Foundation was formed. She is among the most influential women in the tech world, especially in the open source world. I have been planning to start a series of interviews of those women who made it into CIO’s most influential women in Tech list. When I approached Jennifer, I learned about a development in her career that made this story even more interesting. Cloer is moving out of the Linux Foundation and venturing into a new world of her own.
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While Linux 4.9 will be released in just a few weeks, the remaining Reiser4 file-system developers have just updated their code to support the Linux 4.8 stable kernel.
Reiser4 for Linux 4.8.0 is now available for those wanting to run this out-of-tree file-system on the current stable kernel. The Reiser4 kernel is now compatible with 4.8 and there is also a kernel oops fix when mounting forward-incompatible volumes, unneeded assertions were removed, some VFS changes were made, and there is now rename2 support.
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After announcing earlier the release of Linux kernel 4.8.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the immediate availability of the thirty-second maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
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Today, November 15, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the eighth maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series.
On November 10, we reported on the availability of the Linux 4.8.7 kernel, which brought updates to the Radeon open-source graphics drivers and many other improvements, and it now looks like Linux kernel 4.8.8 is already out not even a week from the previous update. It’s not a major release tough, as it only changes a total of 49 files, with 368 insertions and 217 deletions.
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Graphics Stack
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On November 15, 2016, X Window System developer Keith Packard was pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the X.Org Server 1.19.0 display server for GNU/Linux distributions.
At the end of July 2016, the X.Org Server 1.18.4 maintenance update marked the end of life for the 1.18 series, which was unveiled approximately one year ago, on the 11th of November 2015. The 1.19 series of the X.Org Server display server entered development after that, and a first snapshot was ready for public testing on mid-September 2016.
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It’s been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.18 was released and several weeks past the planned release of X.Org Server 1.19, but nevertheless it’s out there today under the “Cioppino” codename.
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Applications
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For faster Linux file search, with instant results as you type, take a look at the (superbly) named ANGRYsearch.
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Remember Fsearch? It’s a pretty nifty file search tool for Linux inspired by the Windows Everything Search Engine app.
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It’s not even been a week since Ubuntu Budgie was made an official flavor, but we’re already starting to see hints about what we could see its first release ship with.
The Budgie desktop environment that Ubuntu Budgie is based around is maintained and developed by the Solus Project, and forms the basis of the Solus Linux distribution.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A Linux user comes across sudo and su in terminal very often. If you are a new Linux user, you might be fascinated by the things you can do with sudo and su. Last week, I also told you about a Windows command that you can use to get sudo-like functionality. Sudo and su provide root privileges in two different ways. But, how are they different? Here, I’ll try to answer this query.
Before telling you the difference, let me tell you the meaning of a root user. The root user in a Linux system has the maximum permissions and he/she can do anything to the systems. Apart from letting a normal user install/delete some package, root user permissions also act as an extra security layer.
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Games
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Feral Interactive, the specialist Linux and Mac publisher who make their livelihood out of porting games for those undervalued platforms, have today announced the Total War: Warhammer Linux release date.
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The hand-painted puzzle adventure game by Teku Studios was crowdfunded on Kickstarter three years ago, and was recently released for Linux and other PC platforms on GOG and Steam.
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On November 15, 2016, Epic Games, through Alexander Paschall, was pleased to announce the general availability of Unreal Engine 4.14 for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS.
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It previously released to other stores, but it’s now made its way onto Steam as well.
While I’m not a massive fan of retro-looking games anymore, I have to admit they have done fantastic work on the style of it. They have the retro vibe completely nailed down to the point of tempting me to give it a go sometime.
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The developer told me they are excited to bring Jupiter Hell to Linux, as apparently DoomRL has been popular with the Linux community. Linux support for Jupiter Hell is included from the beginning, so that’s fantastic to hear.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Ibar has been Enlightenment’s primary launcher for at least a decade. What it lacked in features it gained in simplicity. However, as Enlightenment has grown, ibar has seemingly stayed stagnant. I wasn’t surprised when Mike Blumenkrantz informed me this would be one of the focuses of my internship. From the depths of Enlightenment’s growling, starving stomach, Luncher was born.
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Stephen Houston, an intern at Samsung’s Open-Source Group, wrote Luncher under the direction of Mike Blumenkrantz to replace the 10+ years old “Ibar” launcher.
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Reviews
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If you ask old Linux users which system is most trusted, stable, solid and supported, Debian of course will be among the leaders of the list.
Linux notes from DarkDuck reviewed Debian Squeeze back in 2011-2012: Xfce, GNOME, KDE and even LXDE versions. But these were Live versions of Debian 6 Squeeze.
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New Releases
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Today, November 15, 2016, the stable repositories of the Solus Linux-based operating system have been flooded with a lot of updated and new packages, bringing users the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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After entring Beta staged of development three weeks ago, Red Hat’s commercial Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 6 suites are now generally available and ready for deployment in production environments.
Prominent new features included in the Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 suite are the latest MySQL 5.7 and Redis 3.2 open-source databases, PHP 7.0 and Perl 5.24 dynamic open-source programming languages, along with the Git 2.9 open-source project management tool, Thermostat 1.6 Java virtual machine (JVM) monitoring utility, and Eclipse Neon 4.6.1 integrated development environment (IDE).
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Fedora
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One of the planned features of Fedora Hubs that I am most excited about is chat integration with Fedora development chat rooms. As a mentor and onboarder of designers and other creatives into the Fedora project, I’ve witnessed IRC causing a lot of unnecessary pain and delay in the onboarding experience. The idea we have for Hubs is to integrate Fedora’s IRC channels into the Hubs web UI, requiring no IRC client installation and configuration on the part of users in order to be able to participate. The model is meant to be something like this:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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After a small delay, the Debian-based Tails amnesic incognito live system has been updated today, November 15, 2016, to version 2.7, bringing us all the latest tools and technologies for surfing the Web anonymously.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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October’s release of Ubuntu 16.10 gave us our first real look at Unity 8 in its formative desktop guise.
But as we noted in our hands-on article at that time, Unity 8 on the desktop, while somewhat functional, offers a somewhat basic user experience.
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Another day, another vulnerability; The Register today reported that a new local vulnerability that can allow someone root access. Hack A Day also reported on a bug, this one sounded so fun the way they explained it. Elsewhere, OMG!Ubuntu! and Phoronix previewed Unity coming attractions sourced from Ubuntu 17.04 UOS summit notes and DarkDuck gave Debian 8 a quick run-through.
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The last look at Unity 8 gave users a bit of pause, but upcoming releases promise to be much improved. While focusing on a “full desktop experience,” convergence is still the key word of the day. They plan to make Snaps more important and rely less on .debs (eventually removing them altogether), they want to move the apps scope and dash into an “app drawer.” They hope to add multi-monitor support and implement full window management (app windows, dialog boxes, context menus, tool tips, and the like). OMG!Ubuntu! and Phoronix have more on that.
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Today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 17.04 was a convergence Q/A talk where Unity 8 and delivering a all-Snaps image (no Debian packages) were talked about for nearly one hour.
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Notwithstanding the antenna connectors themselves, the hardware is nice. I ordered the black metal case, and I must admit I love the many LED lights in the front. It is especially useful to have color changes in the reset procedure: no more guessing what state the device is in or if I pressed the reset button long enough. The LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce the glare that our electronic devices produce.
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Siemens’s first IoT gateway runs Linux on an Intel Quark and offers Arduino shield compatibility and connectivity to the company’s MindSphere cloud.
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Axiomtek’s latest, ruggedized eBox offers 6th Gen Core CPUs, 4x GbE, 2x mini-PCIe, SATA and mSATA, I/O expansion options, and up to 32GB DDR4.
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Phones
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Android
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So I have this cool Samsung Galaxy Android tablet which I only need to use as a camera. Guess what I did while setting it up. Yep, you guessed right – disabled WiFi. By the way, that’s disabling WiFi forever. So until I retire it or give it out to somebody else, that Android tablet will never, ever access the Internet.
The only “network” communication it will ever experience is with my desktop or laptop computer (when uploading or downloading files to/from it). And I don’t think I’ll ever use Wifi Direct. It’s a solution that works well for me, knowing that I’ll never have to deal with whatever privacy-breaching tricks Google or Samsung come with next. Unless they have a way of making the device call home without Internet access. Have they?
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Since I began using a Chromebook 5 years ago, the one thing I’d conceded was the idea of playing games for any reasonable amount of time on a Chrome OS device. Sure, web games are fun for a few minutes, but any real games (as real as they get for me at my age, anyway) were far out of the realm of reality.
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Navigating your way around a new Android device will get a lot easier once you’ve mastered a few handy touchscreen gestures.
For example, you can switch between Chrome tabs with a single swipe, while a two-finger swipe will add a whole new perspective to Google Maps. No sign of the virtual Home button? There’s a gesture that’ll bring it back. Read on for all that and more.
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ONEPLUS has refreshed its flagship OnePlus 3 smartphone – a mere five months after it was first announced. Dubbed OnePlus 3T, the new phone sports an upgraded SnapDragon 821 processor, better battery life, and improved 16MP front-facing camera.
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If you know startup phone maker OnePlus, you know all about how it doesn’t follow the rulebook.
From the company’s invite-to-buy OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 to this year’s premium OnePlus 3 to the company’s VR “launches,” the company walks to the beat of its own drum, not the industry’s.
Which is why the company’s doing something it’s never done before: replacing its flagship OnePlus 3 barely half a year later with the even better OnePlus 3T.
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There is no such thing as a perfect phone, regardless of how much we argue amongst ourselves. But there are definitely phones that are better than others. The OnePlus 3 is one of those. The compromises and cut corners are not as noticeable as in years past or when compared to other devices in this price bracket. Without a doubt, OnePlus struck a fantastic balance this year.
Whether we are talking hardware, software, or camera, it can hold its own with the big boys. Some might argue that it runs neck and neck with the ZTE Axon 7, and I don’t disagree. At $399, it is very difficult to beat this phone, even this late into 2016. Since Nougat is promised by the end of the year on the stable channel, I have no qualms with giving this phone a high recommendation, even in late 2016. If you are on a tighter budget and want great bang for your buck, this is a phone you should consider… at least right now. You never know when a better phone will suddenly appear.
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That little green Android elf is everywhere this Black Friday 2016 shopping season to help retailers slash the price of tablets, phones and more running Google’s mobile operating system based on the Linux kernel.
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Stream processing and real-time analytics are becoming “must-have” technologies for data-intensive companies.
These 10 open source stream processing projects under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation aim to solve the challenges associated with ingesting and processing high volumes of data at scale.
Yes, there’s overlap, and it can be difficult to determine the best one to use, but there is something for most every stream processing use case among these choices.
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Open source is often pitched as the only way to sell software to the enterprise of today. But what should you consider to build a business around a highly popular open source project?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Today, November 15, 2016, Mozilla unveiled the final release of the Firefox 50.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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The newest versions of Firefox for desktop and Android are available today. For information on what’s new with today’s release, check out the release notes. Also, keep an eye on this blog, as we have exciting Mozilla and Firefox news to share in the coming weeks.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is finishing up the removal of Java / GCJ support ahead of next year’s GCC 7 release.
At Phoronix we have previously reported on the dropping of GCC Java support for GCC 7 and with feature development ending, the rest of the GCJ / GCC Java support is being stripped out.
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Today we have achieved that goal. With the advice of counsel, we can begin accepting scanned copies of assignments from all contributors, regardless of where they reside. With a small update to our assignment contract, we can finally make it possible for all contributors to avoid having to send their forms via the post.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Hardware/Modding
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As part of its 2-year-old Open Source Car Control project, the autonomous driving software company said today at the Los Angeles auto show that it is making available a hardware development kit that can be retrofitted to Kia Souls from 2014 model year and later for self-driving technology research. The designs for the kit can be accessed for free, or an assembled kit can be bought from PolySync.
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Health/Nutrition
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In Nigeria, 75,000 children risk dying in “a few months” as hunger grips the country’s ravaged north-east in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
Boko Haram jihadists have laid waste to the impoverished region since taking up arms against the government in 2009, displacing millions and disrupting farming and trade.
Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has reclaimed territory from the Islamists but the insurgency has taken a brutal toll, with more than 20,000 people dead, 2.6 million displaced, and famine taking root.
UN humanitarian coordinator Peter Lundberg said the crisis was unfolding at “high speed”.
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Security
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A 17-YEAR OLD has appeared in court today and admitted seven offences in relation to last October’s TalkTalk hack.
The teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested in Norwich in November 2015 and charged with breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
The attacks on TalkTalk resulted in the personal data of almost 160,000 people, and the banking details of 15,656 people, being accessed.
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Trump campaigned as the “law and order” candidate, so I expect law enforcement to be better funded and sentences for breaking the law to be intensified. Law enforcement will probably be enabled with more ways to catch and identify hackers and those able to be brought to American justice will likely face longer and more severe sentences.
I, of course, support these measures. Unfortunately, all administrations learn how hard it is to catch and prosecute hackers, especially when they are located in unreachable areas. On a related note, I don’t think the new administration will be any more successful in trying to put down all the Russian ransomware campaigns.
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According to a recent security advisory published by Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll as CVE-2016-4484 and entitled “Cryptsetup Initrd root Shell,” it would appear that there’s a major vulnerability in Cryptsetup affecting many GNU/Linux systems.
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An error in the implementation of the Cryptsetup utility used for encrypting hard drives allows an attacker to bypass the authentication procedures on some Linux systems just by pressing the Enter key for around 70 seconds. This results in the attacked system opening a shell with root privileges.
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At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.
The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages — known as ping floods — use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.
BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.
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Defence/Aggression
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My new book, The Drone Memos, will be published by The New Press today. The Guardian is running a 4000-word slice of the 20,000-word introduction on its website this morning. The introduction is unsparing in its criticism of the Obama administration. I argue that the administration claimed too much power, and that its efforts to shield that power from congressional, judicial, and public review were irresponsible and short-sighted. I blame the administration for normalizing extrajudicial killing and for turning over to the next administration authorities that are breathtakingly broad and not subject to any meaningful constraint that can’t be lifted by a stroke of the next president’s pen.
I began writing the introduction a year ago and finished it several months ago, when the world looked very different than it does today. I have complicated feelings about the release of the book at this particular historical moment. Obama has been a great president in many ways, and the United States is a stronger, more humane, and more just country now than it was when he took office. If Donald Trump tries to fulfill even a small fraction of his campaign pledges, the next four years will be a true test of our democratic institutions, and I’m sure I’ll look back on the Obama years nostalgically.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Donald Trump’s stunning victory has left millions in dread and moved thousands into the streets. Fear has spread among immigrants and Muslims. The 20 million who have received health insurance under Obamacare worry about Trump’s vow to repeal it. The media speculate about what he might do: Will he really tear up the Iran nuclear deal or order the CIA to start torturing people again? But it is Trump’s denial of catastrophic climate change—he has repeatedly said he considers it a “hoax”—and his vow to reverse all of the progress made under President Obama to address it that pose some of the most chilling and potentially irreversible threats.
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The renowned American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has warned the US Republican party is now “the most dangerous organisation in world history” because of the denial of climate change by President-elect Donald Trump and other leading figures.
Following the US elections, Professor Chomsky said it appeared humans planned to answer what he called “the most important question in their history … by accelerating the race to disaster”.
Mr Trump has already appointed a prominent climate change denier to run his transition team covering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other advisers include people with close links to the fossil fuel industry.
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Finance
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Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and leading Brexit campaigner, has pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process.
The ex-justice secretary, who led the Vote Leave campaign with Boris Johnson, questioned why the UK cannot just leave the EU without having settled its future relationship with the bloc after having sorted out “housekeeping” related to outstanding payments.
Speaking at the newly formed Commons Brexit committee, he said there was a tendency for civil servants to think any problem requires more civil servants and suggested “Occam’s razor” should be applied, implying the simplest solution is the best one.
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There is no chance of completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) under US president-elect Donald Trump, a senior German official has said.
“We don’t harbour any hopes of a transatlantic trade deal,” the unnamed official told the Guardian, adding: “That’s not realistic.”
Along with the UK, Germany has been the main supporter of TTIP in Europe. Now that the UK is set to leave the European Union after June’s Brexit vote, the admission by Germany that TTIP is not going to happen is effectively the death-knell for the deal.
But the comments are hardly surprising in the wake of the earlier news, reported by Ars, that the US would abandon the similar Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). However, Germany’s acknowledgement represents a huge setback for the European Commission, which was still trying to persuade Trump to proceed with TTIP last week.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.
Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.
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A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint with federal election officials that alleges Stephen Bannon—recently named one of Donald Trump’s top White House advisers—may have gotten paid illegally during Trump’s campaign by pro-Trump billionaires.
And now, a new set of Federal Election Commission filings that haven’t yet been reported on may give the group’s case some additional heft.
At issue are payments of nearly $200,000 that a super PAC called Make America Number 1 made to a company tied to Bannon. On Aug. 17, Bannon left his post as chairman of Breitbart News and became the Trump campaign’s CEO. Available FEC filings show the campaign didn’t pay Bannon a salary. Larry Noble, General Counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said he believes the super PAC covertly paid Bannon for his campaign work through his moviemaking company. Neither the super PAC nor Bannon provided a response to Noble’s comment.
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Some Republicans acknowledged there had been a sea change since Trump surprised Democrats and some in his own party by defeating Hillary Clinton.
Republicans on Capitol Hill “are so excited. People are coming up to me, telling me they’ve been with Trump since day one,” Collins explained to reporters.
“And I kind of look and say, ‘Well, OK, if you say so.’
“Donald Trump has accomplished for us something no one thought possible. … Everything is red, and we’ve got four solid years to get this right.”
After winning the GOP nomination to be Speaker for the next two years, Ryan gave yet another shout-out to Trump — the second of the day.
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Soon after terrorist attacks killed 130 people in Paris last year, Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for saying the United States had “no choice” but to close down some mosques.
Two days later, Trump called in to a radio show run by a friendly political operative who offered a suggestion.
Was it possible, asked the host, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trump hadn’t really meant that mosques should be closed?
“Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants?” Bannon asked. He continued: “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within . . . to try to tear down this country?”
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Last week I wrote a bit about the ridiculous and misguided backlash against Facebook over the election results. The basis of the claim was that there were a bunch of fake or extremely misleading stories shared on the site by Trump supporters, and some felt that helped swing the election (and, yes, there were also fake stories shared by Clinton supporters — but apparently sharing fake news was nearly twice as common among Trump supporters than Clinton supporters). I still think this analysis blaming Facebook is wrong. There was confirmation bias, absolutely, but it’s not as if a lack of fake news would have changed people’s minds. Many were just passing along the fake news because it fit the worldview they already have.
In response to that last post, someone complained that I was arguing that “facts don’t matter” and worried that this would just lead to more and more lies and fake news from all sides. I hope that’s not the case, but as I said in my reply, it’s somewhat more complicated. Some folks liked that reply a lot so I’m expanding on it a bit in this post. And the key point is to discuss why “fact checking” doesn’t really work in convincing people whom to vote for. This doesn’t mean I’m against fact checking, or think that facts don’t matter. Quite the reverse. I think more facts are really important, and I’ve spent lots of time over the years calling out bogus news stories based on factual errors.
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For the people now protesting, good for you to make your views known. It is important.
May I also suggest you use the remaining time to protest Obama’s refusal to prosecute torture, curtail the NSA, fail to close Gitmo, his jailing of whistleblowers, his decision not to use his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute police killers of young Black men under existing civil rights laws, his claiming of the power to assassinate Americans with drones, and his war on journalists via gutting of FOIA?
Because silence on those issues means Trump inherits all of that power.
May I also suggest volunteering for some of: homeless shelters, LGBTQ and vet’s crisis lines, Planned Parenthood, Congresspeople who will work for these causes, ACLU, Occupy (who addresses the economic inequality that drove many Trump voters) and the like?
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The challenge of fake and misleading news has come to the fore in the wake of the US presidential election. Facebook has bore the brunt of the criticism that it allowed misinformation to spread unfettered on its network, skewing people’s perceptions and possibly the outcome of the election – something CEO Mark Zuckerberg vehemently denies.
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We spoke at length about who is really behind the meeting’s anti-tobacco agenda.
The Rebel was the only news outlet that reported on the ban on journalists, or the arrest of peaceful farmers who were protesting outside.
Those are just two of the stories the Rebel covered, thanks to your generous donations to our crowdfudning campaign.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The FBI has a new view into what’s happening on Twitter. Last week, the bureau hired Dataminr, a Twitter-linked analytics firm, to provide an “advanced alerting tool” to over 200 users. Twitter owns a 5 percent stake in Dataminr and provides it with exclusive access to the full “firehose” of live tweets, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking for illegal activity on the service.
“Twitter is used extensively by terrorist organizations and other criminals to communicate, recruit, and raise funds for illegal activity,” the FBI wrote in a contracting document. “With increased use of Twitter by subjects of FBI investigations, it is critical to obtain a service which will allow the FBI to identify relevant information from Twitter in a timely fashion.”
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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has turned to two of the country’s top media outlets to make their case for new surveillance capabilities in what critics say is a PR play orchestrated to sow public worry about privacy-boosting technology.
Police in Canada have long pushed for broadened surveillance powers that would force people to unlock their phones, for example, or force telecommunication companies to provide real-time access to subscriber information. No such laws currently exist, but to show why the police believe they need them to do their jobs, the country’s federal force worked with two of Canada’s most respected media entities.
The RCMP gave the CBC’s David Seglins and the Toronto Star’s Robert Cribb security clearance to review the details of 10 “high priority” investigations—some of which are ongoing—that show how the police is running into investigative roadblocks on everything from locked devices to encrypted chat rooms to long waits for information. The Toronto Star’s headline describes the documents as “top-secret RCMP files.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has signed an order for Lauri Love to be extradited to America where he’s accused of hacking into US government computer networks.
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The legal team for Chelsea Manning, imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower, has petitioned US President Barack Obama to reduce her prison sentence to time served. Chelsea has already spent six years in confinement, longer than any other US leaker in history. In 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted on several counts under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”
It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk. But if the Trump administration follows through on such ideas, it will find some assistance in a surprising source: President Obama’s have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.
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The long-awaited decision – expected to cause enormous disappointment – follows more than 40 years of campaigning, court cases and calls for the UK to right a wrong committed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Hundreds of Chagos islanders living in the UK and Mauritius have been waiting for an announcement for more than two years. But cost, economic viability and objections from the US military have been significant obstacles.
It is expected that the British government will provide a further package of compensation to the islanders and that the announcement will be accompanied by an official apology for the forced movement of 1,500 people. Half of the exiles have since died.
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The government is expected to make an announcement about the resettlement of Chagos Islanders who were expelled 40 years ago to make way for a US air base.
Chagossians were forced to leave the territory in the central Indian Ocean by 1973 to make way for a major US air base on Diego Garcia.
The expulsions are regarded as one of the most shameful parts of Britain’s modern colonial history and a lengthy campaign has taken place to give Chagossians the right to resettle in the British territory.
In June, former residents of the islands lost their legal challenge at the Supreme Court.
But the Foreign Office is now understood to be preparing to make an announcement on the Chagos Islands, also referred to as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Trademark, copyright, and patent law are three segments of the same basic concept: protecting businesses from unlawful use of their property. Unfortunately, a system that arose during Roman times has not been satisfactorily updated for the digital age. Particularly with issues regarding patent and trademark law, updates will be necessary to make sure that laws remain enforceable and do their work of protecting businesses.
[...]
In the United States, patent laws date back to Colonial times and the United States Constitution. Patents have been viewed favorably and unfavorably at different times in American History. In general, during healthy economic times, patents are viewed as driving investment, innovation, and economic growth. During depressions, patents are viewed as economically unhealthy, and geared towards creating monopolies.
While patent law has worked to prevent inventors for many years, in 2011, This American Life did an episode of their show on a particular Silicon Valley phenomenon called “patent trolls.” Patent trolls are companies which do not conduct any kind of business of their own, but simply buy patents from inventors, and then threaten companies which are using those patents with lawsuits. Since American courts have been very pro-patent since the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, companies generally have no choice but to pay the patent trolls fees, or stop using patented technology.
According to Perry Clegg, founder of Trademark Access, patents are actually hurting innovation and harming economic growth. “Because so many technological developments piggyback on each other, it is sometimes impossible to create the next big innovation without incorporating previously patented technology.” When big innovations were decades apart, this might not have made as much difference. At the rapid pace of modern technological development, patent trolling can discourage companies from innovating, if they feel it likely that they will have to pay exorbitant fees to companies who exist only to prosecute based on perceived infringement.
[...]
Trademark and patent laws must be updated
A generation ago, it was mostly big businesses that were concerned about protecting patents and trademarks. Now, as many more small companies are entering the technological fray, it is necessary for patent, trademark, and copyright laws to be updated to keep up with the digital times.
Especially as we move towards the age of the Internet of Things, these changes will only continue to accelerate. If government officials are not careful, outdated laws run the risk of stifling growth and harming innovation.
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Copyrights
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The reason is soon explained: this reference for a preliminary ruling from the French Conseil d’État is not just a case concerning the compatibility with EU law of the French loi (Law No 2012-287 of 1 March 2012) to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books, but – more generally – a case that questions the actual freedom of Member States to legislate independently on copyright issues.
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A broad range of industry associations, academic institutions, libraries and digital rights groups have submitted their opinions on the landmark piracy case between Cox Communications and BMG. They all warn the court that the district court’s decision to hold the ISP available for pirating subscribers can have disastrous implications.
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11.15.16
Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made it clear he’s no longer a fan of the “new” Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella.
Speaking at the Code Conference on Monday, Benioff talked about the short-lived bromance between the two companies and how it all ended up falling apart in just two years.
In particular, Benioff pointed to a meeting that took place between him and Microsoft’s cloud boss, Scott Guthrie, that really killed the trust he had placed in the company.
The story goes that Benioff took a meeting with Guthrie after Microsoft chairman John Thompson, a friend of his, connected the two last year. He believed the meeting was intended to share more about Salesforce’s business in hopes of possibly becoming an Azure cloud customer one day. But that wasn’t Microsoft’s real goal, according to Benioff.
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Desktop
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I am shocked — shocked — that Accenture thinks Windows 10 would be the better choice.
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While many hardware enthusiasts get excited by the announcement and release of shiny new hardware products, those who are dedicated desktop Linux users have learned to temper their excitement with the reality that when devices lack proper drivers and adequate documentation, it’ll take a while before they are made useful. The 2016 MacBook Pro seems to be no different. An early adopter reported that several devices: the built-in keyboard and mouse, as well as the SSD, don’t work at all right now for him under Linux. While support may eventually come, it won’t be immediate.
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There is a subset of the Linux community that likes running Linux on Apple hardware. Strange as it may sound, these users enjoy the virtues of Linux and the elegance of Apple’s computers. Unfortunately, it looks like the 2016 MacBook Pro is not currently compatible with Linux.
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Server
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The TOP500 List shows 498 out of 500 of the speediest computers on the planet are running Linux. Linux has long-dominated the supercomputer ratings, but now it’s getting close to knocking out all its competition.
Other than systems running Linux, there are two Chinese supercomputers running IBM AIX, a Unix variant. This pair, tied at 386 and 387, may not be long for the list. That’s because supercomputers are growing ever faster.
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Linux first appeared on the TOP500 supercomputer list in 1998, which was populated mostly by Unix. Today Linux runs 498 of those top 500 supercomputers, proving once again that Linux is dominating the world. Elsewhere, Clement Lefebvre said the Mint 18 update will probably be pushed into December due to continuing work on Cinnamon 3.2. Turns out there was a bit more intrigue behind the Munich Linux desktop dump and Jonathon Riddell has issued a user upgrade advisory for KDE neon users.
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Kernel Space
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Getting live-patching capabilities into the mainline kernel has been a multi-year process. Basic patching support was merged for the 4.0 release, but further work has been stalled over disagreements on how the consistency model — the code ensuring that a patch is safe to apply to a running kernel — should work. The addition of kernel stack validation has addressed the biggest of the objections, so, arguably, it is time to move forward. At the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference, developers working on live patching got together to discuss current challenges and future directions.
This article is not an attempt at a comprehensive summary for a half-day of fast-moving discussion; instead, the goal is to cover some of the more interesting topics as a way of showing that challenges that the live-patching developers must overcome and how they plan to get there.
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I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.8 kernel.
All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
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This is a bit of an interesting corner case of a rant. I have not written this when I came up with it, because I came up with it many years ago when I actively worked on multimedia software, but I have only given it in person to a few people before, because at the time it would have gained too much unwanted attention by random people, the same kind of people who might have threatened me for removing XMMS out of Gentoo so many years ago. I have, though, spoken about this with at least one of the people working on PulseAudio at the time, and I have repeated this at the office a few times, while the topic came up.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel’s SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes.
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Benchmarks
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After running my initial Intel Kaby Lake Linux tests last week using a Core i5 MSI Cubi 2 with new “KBL” processor, which was done under Ubuntu 16.10, I turned my focus to testing a few other distributions with this newest-generation Intel processor.
The MSI Cubi 2 with Core i5 7200U was tested also with the Fedora 25 latest release candidate, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. On all of these latest Linux distributions, the MSI Cubi 2 / Intel Kaby Lake didn’t run into any issues to speak of! Great to see KabyLake support in good shape already on Linux for these mobile processors, so with the desktop launch ahead hopefully there won’t be any issues. The main concern always with Intel CPU Linux support comes to the open-source graphics stack and there everything appears to be nailed down.
Read more
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The second development milestone/test release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs.
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Applications
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It appears that the powerful, open-source, free and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor is about to get to the next level and enhance your photography experience on GNU/Linux and Mac platforms.
darktable 2.2.0 is currently in heavy development, with an initial Release Candidate version out the door, and it looks like it will be a major release sporting exciting new features and tools, including a brand new automatic perspective correction module, new raw overexposure indication, as well as Undo and Redo support.
The upcoming darktable 2.2 release also promises a new tool called darktable-chart, which allows for the creation of styles for the CLUT (Color Look Up Table) module used for changing colors in an image, a new Liquify tool, and a revamped LCh reconstruction mode in the Highlight reconstruction module.
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If you’re a regular screen caster or YouTube how-to maker, you’ll know how difficult it can be to relay the keys you’re pressing on your screen.
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Go For It! — it sounds like the name of an overly enthusiastic mobile workout app that you download with good intentions only to never actually use it. But thankfully (for our collective laziness) it’s not. Go For It! is, instead, a “stylish to-do list with built-in productivity timer“.
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Proprietary
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Today, November 14, 2016, Vivaldi developer Pål Andreas Franksson was pleased to announce the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.5 web browser.
Vivaldi 1.5 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than fifteen snapshots that brought numerous improvements and fixes, including better Linux clipboard support, enhancements to tab dragging and inline title editing, inline editing of bookmarks and notes, as well as advanced tab dragging.
With today’s Release Candidate build, Vivaldi 1.5 is one step closer to the final release, which should land by the end of the year with Chromecast support, enhancements to Reader View, the ability to drag tabs between windows, address bar improvements, performance improvements, and an engine upgrade based on Chromium 54.0.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Epic Games announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.14 today as the newest version of this incredibly powerful, cross-platform game engine.
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Yeah, I’m far too much of a sucker when it comes to adventure and horror games with a future space sci-fi story. Tether [Official Site] now has a new trailer and it has sucked me in even more.
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Valve’s OpenVR based project, which goes by the obvious moniker of SteamVR, has been shown powering an HTC Vive, using Vulcan on an unspecified Linux distro. This proof of concept is to back up their claims that SteamVR should be available to consumers very soon. At the moment their are few VR games using either OpenGL or Vulkan so your software choices will be limited. At the same time, you may also be limited in the headset you can choose as Oculus developers have stated that all Mac OS support projects are currently on hold. Road to VR has the full presentation from Valve’s Joe Ludwig embedded in their post here.
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The Linux version has been absolutely spot on. The only issue I really have with the game is that the load times between sections sometimes drags on on a bit. It was especially annoying when I had around 30 seconds loading for a tiny cutscene and another loading screen right after.
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The developer of mech combat game ‘Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps’ [Steam, Official Site] has tweeted out that they are testing a Linux version, and it’s looking good.
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Feral Interactive, through Rajitha Ratnam, informs Softpedia today, November 15, 2016, about the fact that the UK-based video game publisher will launch the Linux port of Total War: WARHAMMER on Steam, on November 22, 2016.
Developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega, Total War: WARHAMMER is a TBS (turn-based strategy) game that features real-time battles and tactics. The game is set in a world of legendary heroes, flying creatures, and giant monsters, and promises to offer users the same gameplay as in the rest of the Total War series.
“A fantasy strategy game of titanic proportions, Total War: WARHAMMER combines an addictive turn-based campaign of skillful empire building with colossal real-time battles as players strive to conquer all at the head of one of four mythic Races,” said Rajitha Ratnam in the press announcement received by Softpedia.
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Feral Interactive announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that they will be releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux on 22 November.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
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Kitware released CMake version 3.7 on Friday night. There is one feature mentioned at the very bottom of the feature list that makes this a really exciting release for people writing tools that integrate with CMake: The server-mode.
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With last week’s CMake 3.7 release one of the less-advertised features is the build system’s server-mode functionality, which is sure to excited integrated development environments (IDEs).
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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On November 14, 2016, Emmanuele Bassi reports on the latest work of various GTK+ developers for the cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, the core of the GNOME desktop environment.
Last week, we told you that GTK+ 3.22.3 stable release landed on the official channels and it’s ready for integration in various GNU/Linux distributions that are already shipping with the newest GNOME 3.22 packages. Out report stated that GTK+ 3.22.3 brought many GL improvements and HiDPI support for the Windows platform.
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The screenshot above …It shows madness incarnate. Okay, it doesn’t — but it is close! You’re looking at GNOME Web — the open-source web-browser formerly known as Epiphany — running on Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka Bash on Ubuntu on Windows).
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It’s good to dive into our shared history every now and again to learn something new. We want to build a customized shortcut engine for Builder and that means we need to have a solid understanding of all the ways to activate shortcuts in GTK+. So the following is a list of what I’ve found, as of GTK+ 3.22. I’ve included some pros and cons of each based on my experience using them in particularly large applications.
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Last Friday, both a GNOME bug day and a bank holiday, a few of us got together to squash some bugs, and discuss GNOME and GNOME technologies.
Guillaume, a new comer in our group, tested the captive portal support for NetworkManager and GNOME in Gentoo, and added instructions on how to enable it to their Wiki. He also tested a gateway related configuration problem, the patch for which I merged after a code review. Near the end of the session, he also rebuilt WebKitGTK+ to test why Google Docs was not working for him anymore in Web. And nobody believed that he could build it that quickly. Looks like opinions based on past experiences are quite hard to change.
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Reviews
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Between Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE, you have a choice of well-supported distributions with lots of up-to-date software and commercial backing, as well as a choice of almost any desktop environment like GNOME, Unity or KDE.
There are many others, however. Linux Mint brings the stability of Ubuntu with a more familiar desktop for ex-Windows users, while Elementary OS gives a more simplified, streamlined desktop which may fare well with ex-Mac users.
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New Releases
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After two Betas and three RC (Release Candidate) versions, the final release of the Salix Live Xfce 14.2 edition is now available for download, allowing users to take the Slackware-based OS for a test drive before installing it.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 6, which provide a curated set of the latest, stable and open developer tools, languages and related technologies.
Available on a separate lifecycle from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset help bridge developer agility with production stability, powering modern application development without jeopardizing mission-critical systems.
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Rackspace today announced support for Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, expanding its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat porftfolio of services. This new version from Red Hat is based on the 10.2 Jewel community version release of Ceph and addresses key stability requirements for enterprise customers.
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Open source solutions provider Red Hat Inc. announced Oct. 26 that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ for an unmodified commercial operating system under the Operating System Protection Profile. This marks the first time an operating system has been Common Criteria-certified with Linux Container Framework Support.
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Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3, Red Hat’s newest set of open source web development tools, dynamic languages, and databases. Red Hat Software Collections are delivered on a more frequent release cadence than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are designed to bridge developer agility and production stability. This helps to accelerate the creation of modern applications that can then be more confidently deployed into production.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Libvirt has long supported use of TLS for its remote API service, using the gnutls library as its backend. When negotiating a TLS session, there are a huge number of possible algorithms that could be used and the client & server need to decide on the best one, where “best” is commonly some notion of “most secure”. The preference for negotiation is expressed by simply having an list of possible algorithms, sorted best to worst, and the client & server choose the first matching entry in their respective lists. Historically libvirt has not expressed any interest in the handshake priority configuration, simply delegating the decision to the gnutls library on that basis that its developers knew better than libvirt developers which are best. In gnutls terminology, this means that libvirt has historically used the “DEFAULT” priority string.
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Modularity (formerly, Modularization) is an ongoing initiative in Fedora to resolve the issue of divergent, occasionally conflicting lifecycles of different components. A module provides functionality (such as a web server) and includes well-integrated and well-tested components (such as Apache httpd and the libraries on which it depends). It can be deployed into production in various ways: as “classic” RPM packages or a container image, and is updated as a whole. Different modules can emphasize new features, stability, security, etc. differently.
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Debian Family
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openSUSE distributions’ build system is based on a generic framework named Open Build Service (OBS), I have been using these tools in my work environment, and I have to say, as Debian developer, that it is a great tool. In the current blog post I plan for you to learn the very basics of such tool and provide you with a tutorial to get, at least, a Debian package building.
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Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The one thing that made me not try to blowtorch my laptop in anger after I was done reviewing the terrible Yakkety Yak was the inclusion of the Unity 8 desktop environment in the distro, allowing for some fresh testing. The word desktop is probably not the best vocabulary choice here, as this hybrid-like environment already blithely powers touch devices like the Ubuntu Phone and the M10 tablet. But we’re on a laptop, so.
Anyhow, I wanted to explore Unity 8 some more, but I did not want to do it as part of the distro review. This is why we have this article here, to explore the merits and failings of Unity 8, and see whether we should be really afraid this may become the default and only choice for our desktops one day. Which it might. So read carefully.
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Today and tomorrow is a very basic Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) where the developers are plotting their work for Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus.
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Today, November 15, 2016, is the first day of the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event put together by Canonical for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Linux-based operating system.
It’s not the first time we inform our readers about Ubuntu Online Summit taking place between November 15-16, 2016, but today is the big day, so we had to write another story just to make sure we’ve got your attention. The event welcomes all members of the community, as well as Ubuntu developers, and takes place online, so it’s free.
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Flavours and Variants
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Arne Exton, the developer of many GNU/Linux distributions and Android-x86 flavors, announced today, November 16, 2016, the release of a new version of his Linux For All (LFA) Live DVD.
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I found the wattOS to be a reliable and useful alternative to other lightweight Linux choices available. It is much less bothersome to configure compared to Puppy Linux and the many variants in PuppyLand, for instance.
It’s chief advantage is an ability to run on older hardware with a clean and familiar user experience. It might fall short of expectations, however, when you push it to the limit beyond basic computing functions like Web surfing, word processing, email and playing music. Its performance will be spotty for heavy video viewing and editing.
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The latest XApps and the new MATE 1.16 desktop environment were pushed towards the Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” and LMDE 2 “Betsy” repositories.
We just finished addressing some issues with MDM, and we’re currently working on a few compatibility issues which affect the Cinnamon screensaver in LMDE and in Slackware before announcing the official release of Cinnamon 3.2.
We were expecting Cinnamon 3.2 to be out at the end of October and this probably will push the release of Linux Mint 18.1 into the month of December.
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Seco announced a “SYS-A62-GW” IoT gateway that runs Linux on an i.MX6 Solo, and features WiFi, GbE, and two serial expansion board options.
Seco’s SYS-A62-GW is a low-end Internet of Things gateway that runs a Yocto Linux based distribution on NXP’s single-core, 1GHz i.MX6 Solo. We have seen several i.MX6 based gateways, including VIA’s Artigo A830. The SYS-A62-GW can “integrate with the most common industrial protocols for data aggregation, real time analysis, on-board processing, encryption and data transfer to the cloud on Linux,” says Seco.
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Despite its rarity, more because of shortage of supplies than being a limited edition, the NES Classic is just begging to be torn down, hacked, and even repurposed. The first has already happened, though not yet on iFixit. The third depends on the second, which is already on its way, albeit rather slowly. A couple of Japanese hackers have revealed how they were able to compile their own version of Linux on the Japanese Famicom Mini, though with little practical application.
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There is no question that Nintendo’s move to supply retailers with a millimeter-thin blanket of NES Classic Edition consoles on Friday caused a little backlash over the weekend. We’ve seen reports that one or two customers would walk into participating retailers only to purchase the store’s entire stock in one fell swoop — likely to resell them on eBay for a higher price. Those that did manage to get the currently rare console seemingly snagged an awesome deal and are now enjoying the refreshed 8-bit goodness while other fans now look toward Black Friday.
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A lucky few were able to secure and purchase the new NES Classic Edition when it launched on Friday, but not every buyer is playing games on it. The hacking community has pounced upon the device to see what the little box can do, and you know what that means: installing Linux.
Or, at least, your own Linux kernel. The NES Classic Edition already runs on Linux, and Nintendo has complied with open source license rules by offering downloads of the tiny hardware’s Linux source files. While a few enterprising hackers have posted about connecting a serial cable to the motherboard and trying to install their own kernels, one Japanese hacker pulled it off—and posted a guide explaining how he did so. (If you really care, he also posted the entire bootlog from his first successful boot.)
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If you are searching for an open source smartwatch you might be interested to know that a version of the CulBox Arduino smartwatch has now been launched via Kickstarter thanks to serial Kickstarter campaigner Masih Vahida.
The Arduino smartwatch comes in the form of an open source DIY kit which is powered by a 32 bit Arm Cortex processor and comes complete with integrated Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity as well as 6 axis I2C Gyro and Accelerometer sensor.
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While it may have seemed as if nobody was able to purchase an NES Classic Edition last Friday, the reality is that some shoppers did walk away with one of the hottest gifts this holiday season. Of course, not everybody that scored on launch day did so with the intention of reliving their past (at least, not right away).
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AS MOST of the world continues to wait desperately for new stock of the Nintendo NES Classic Edition, you just know that somewhere, someone’s been there, done that, hacked it.
The console runs on Linux, and an enterprising member of our ‘running things on things they’re not supposed to run on’ club has managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on his machine.
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Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian Debian-based Linux distribution had been using xcompmgr as its compositing window manager on the desktop, but now they will likely be switching to the Compton fork for better performance.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Last month was a very busy month for the Tizen store as lots more games / apps have started being released on the Tizen platform. A recent boost to the ecosystem has been the launch of the world’s first 4G Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z2, which has helped drive more Tizen apps to the store.
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Taking the role of a Coast Guard Ship, you will fight the Chinese, protecting South East Asia Sea. They will send various ships and you will need to be precise because of the winds, strong or light, you will need to aim correctly with the right amount of power.
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Android
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The $400 Android phone is having a moment.
Vendors like Huawei, OnePlus, and Alcatel are stuffing high-end tech specs into smartphones that cost hundreds of dollars less than flagships from Samsung and Google. And with the demise of smartphone subsidies in the U.S., you can save a lot of money by purchasing one of these devices unlocked and bringing it to your wireless carrier of choice.
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Software installed on some Android phones secretly monitored users, and even sent keyword-searchable, full text message archives to a Chinese server every 72 hours, according to research from security firm Kryptowire.
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Android is in a weird place. The latest version, 7.0 Nougat, is on very few devices, which highlights the operating system’s biggest issue — fragmentation. True, most apps will work fine on slightly older versions of the OS, but the true problem is security — not compatibility. Once a manufacturer stops supporting a smartphone or tablet, the user is at risk of future vulnerabilities.
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The Google Pixel phone combines a great design, amazing camera and uncluttered software which takes the Android experience to the next level.
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In 2007, we launched Android, a free and open-source operating system. Smartphones back then were an expensive rarity. We wanted to change that — to stimulate innovation and increase choice for consumers — and it worked.
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ARK Crew, developers of the new ARK cryptocurrency ecosystem, has announced the release of its open source code on GitHub. The source code launch was set to coincide with the platform’s first developer-focused bounty program, designed to encourage others to participate in the review and provide feedback on the project.
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The same goes for the large amount of open source JavaScript projects available to us developers. Whether they are intended to help you build amazing apps, or as a learning resource to help you level up your skills, these are all projects, supported and maintained by the community. Thanks to the collaborative nature of open source, you’re free to download and modify any of them and, most importantly, to contribute any changes you make back to the project itself.
I love open source and I’m thankful for it. It’s an integral part of working on the internet, but one which it is all to easy to overlook. That’s why I’m happy that we’re dedicating a whole week’s worth of articles to the subject. Talking of which, let’s look at what we have in store…
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Huawei demonstrated the OPEN-O Sun, said to be the world’s first Open Source SDN and NFV Orchestrator, at the Operations Transformation Forum 2016 in Wuzhen, China.
The forum brought together industry leaders from around the world to discuss the transformation of digital operations and share best practices. Helen Chen, leader of the OPEN-O Integration Project noted that the OPEN-O Orchestrator will soon be commercially available.
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For advice on addressing this problem, Jonathan suggests we look to ecosystem management, “an industry in itself, with its attendant experts, who write books and speak at conferences.” I recently read one of the seminal books in this area, Governing the Commons, by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and I’d like to offer some initial thoughts on how it might apply to open organizations and open source sustainability.
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Free-riding in open source communities leads to overworked and underpaid individuals, and eventually to burnout. It’s bad for people, and it’s bad for projects. It’s a problem we need to address. Ostrom shows us how to tackle the problem with a methodical approach to institutional design and analysis. Open organizations that steward open source software projects have much to learn from her, while recognizing that we will need to adapt her recommendations to fit our situation.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The latest Chromium open-source browser development code adds support for motion sensors under Chrome OS and Linux.
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Mozilla
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Just a few moments ago, Mozilla started seeding the binary and source packages of the final release of the Firefox 50.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
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Firefox 50 comes bundled with an Emoji One font, enabling Linux users to see full colour emoji on the web.
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SaaS/Back End
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Over the past several months, we’ve taken note of the many open source projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to data-centric and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves these projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support.
Apache also incubates a number of interesting cloud-centric projects. Now, it has announced the availability of Apache jclouds v2.0, which is a Java multi-cloud toolkit.
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Databases
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 7 feature development is officially over with the development phase entering stage three now where the focus is on bug-fixing.
While GCC 7 feature development has ended, Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek wrote in this latest GCC status report, “Patches posted early enough during Stage 1 and not yet fully reviewed may still get in early in Stage 3. Please make sure to ping them soon enough.”
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Public Services/Government
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The Parliament of Navarre, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants the region to switch to free and open source software. A resolution urging the government to draft a migration plan was adopted by the Parliament on 27 October.
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The United States government has made good on its policy of requiring agencies to release 20 per cent of their bespoke code as open source by making code.gov live, complete with lots of code.
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Hungary’s central government wants to reduce its dependency on a handful of IT vendorsm. To begin with, a decision taken last week aims to reduce the use of a proprietary office productivity suite by 60 % in 2020. The government also wants to improve its procurement of IT solutions in order to to create business opportunities for small and medium-sized companies.
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The draft, approved by the Russian Federation’s Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.
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Legislators have drafted a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation’s public sector.
The draft, approved by the Russian Federation’s Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.
The text enforces prioritising Free Software over proprietary alternatives by requiring public administrations to formally justify any purchase of proprietary software. The purchase will be considered unjustified if a Free Software solution exists that satisfies the list of technical specifications and standards. In addition, all IT purchase agreements in the public sphere must be registered in a dedicated registrar and detail the overall quantity and price of both purchased proprietary and Free Software.
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Licensing/Legal
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One can easily see examples of software as a shared resource, whether shared by a few people or a few million people. Of course, these shared resources are not always as fully appreciated as they should be. They can pass underappreciated until drama such as a security vulnerability draws attention and illuminates the importance of what is being shared.
But a license? A shared resource?
Yes, open source licenses are shared resources. And, they, too, may be underappreciated until a vulnerability is exploited. Legal documents (contracts, licenses, whatever they may be called) are typically unique to each commercial enterprise. Certainly, there is some commonality. Lawyers adapt from what others have done. Patterns are followed. Text is reused.
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It was only a few years ago when Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so.
As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.For these reasons and other ones, it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators. Here is our newly updated ollection of resources to help you navigate the world of open source laws and licenses.
We’ve rounded up some resources on open source, licenes and the law, as seen in this post, but the topic remains a moving target. Did you know that there is an official, free journal dedicated to open source law? It’s the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, and it’s worth looking into.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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In a proprietary, license-based model, users might need to pay more to scale up their operations. For some, the extra costs might mean going through a procurement cycle, which takes time and resources.
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About two months ago, I started rewriting the entire Makemypattern.com codebase. I am using this opportunity to implement some improvements and features that were difficult to implement in the existing backend. But my main reason is that I am going to make all of my code available as open source. And for that, I need to make it easy for others to extend and adapt the code.
With a mission that is not merely about making patterns anymore, I also feel like a name change was needed. So when I finish my rewrite, I will relocate to Freesewing.org, which is free as in beer and free as in speech.
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Programming/Development
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zeromq2 and zeromq3 were additional/compat packages that made it possible to ship multiple versions of zeromq (namely the old versions 2 and 3). These days, they don’t get any bugfixes anymore and the version 4 should be used were possible. There should have been enough time to port all dependant packages to zeromq-4 and I like to retire these packages.
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Alphabet Inc’s Google is ready to spend billions to get millions of Indians online– through a slew of India-specific products and initiatives – to stay relevant in the world’s fastest-growing internet economy.
With 350-million internet users, India has already surpassed the US, and the number is expected to double by 2020. Around 15,000 new Indians log onto the internet every day, fitting perfectly in Google’s scheme of the “next billion internet users” gambit to acquire new customers.
But this wasn’t the case three years ago, not until smartphones burgeoned and a large number of people started accessing the Net through their phones.
All that makes India more important for Google, especially after China, which has the maximum number of internet users globally, closed its doors the American internet firm.
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Science
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One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.
For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.
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Health/Nutrition
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Mayor Karen Weaver has asked for a renewal of the state emergency it was declared nearly one year ago over Flint’s water crisis.
A resolution is on the agenda for Flint City Council members to approve or deny the request at Monday evening’s meeting as the declaration is due to expire Nov. 14.
“Mayor Karen W. Weaver has stated that it imperative that Flint’s state of emergency remain in place until the city of Flint’s drinking water is deemed safe to drink without a filter,” states the resolution.
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Michigan’s senior U.S. Senator says there are some things that Congress has to address when it returns to work this week.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow says her top priority during Congress’ lame duck session will be lining up federal money for Flint.
“We have a promise that was made to me by the Speaker of the House and the Republican Majority Leader that before the end of this year we would pass the money that’s critical to fixing the pipes in Flint,” says Stabenow.
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Last week, a German newspaper reported that Audi was hiding emissions-cheating software in its automatic transmissions. I don’t know why it took a whole week, but Volkswagen finally came around to admitting as much.
“Adaptive shift programs can lead to incorrect and non-reproducible results” in emissions tests, Volkswagen told Reuters on Sunday. Software in the AL 551 automatic transmission may detect testing conditions and shift in a way that minimizes emissions, only to act “normally” out on the road. Much like Dieselgate’s defeat device, that leads to higher-than-imagined pollution, which could be in excess of legal limits.
Audi’s AL 551 can be found in both gas and diesel vehicles, including the A6, A8 and Q5.
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A range of practitioners and representatives in the manufacture of medicines, intergovernmental officials, academics and civil society representatives last week gave diverse views on the effectiveness of a waiver to international trade rules intended to ease shipments of affordable medicines to low-income countries.
Alongside the first day of the 8-9 November World Trade Organization Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the intergovernmental South Centre held a side event to discuss experiences in the implementation and the effective functioning of the system.
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Thousands of children have died of starvation and disease in Boko Haram-ravaged northeastern Nigeria, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday quoting a new survey that is forcing Nigerian officials to stop denying the crisis.
The Paris-based organization hopes that official recognition of the calamity in which “thousands are dying” will help bring urgent aid before older children also start dying, Natalie Roberts, emergency program manager for northeast Nigeria, told The Associated Press.
A survey of two refugee camps in the northeastern city of Maiduguri shows a quarter of the expected population of under-5 children is missing, assumed dead, according to the organization. Under-5 mortality rates in the camps are more than double the threshold for declaring an emergency, Roberts said in a phone interview from Paris.
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Security
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In 2016, keeping your Ubuntu network secure is more important than ever. Despite what some people might think, there’s much more to this than merely putting up a router to protect a network. You must also configure each of your PCs properly to ensure you’re operating within a secure Ubuntu network. This article will show you how.
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Building software securely requires a verifiable method of reproduction and that is why the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is supporting the Reproducible Builds Project.
In an effort to help open-source software developers build more secure software, the Linux Foundation is doubling down on its efforts to help the reproducible builds project. Among the most basic and often most difficult aspects of software development is making sure that the software end-users get is the same software that developers actually built.
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A 17-year-old boy has admitted hacking offences linked to a data breach at the communications firm TalkTalk.
Norwich Youth Court was told he had used hacking tool software to identify vulnerabilities on target websites.
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Last month we moved the neon archive to a new server so packages got built on our existing server then uploaded to the new server. Checking the config it seemed I’d made the nasty error of leaving it open to the world rather than requiring an ssh gateway to access the apt repository, so anyone scanning around could have uploaded packages. There’s no reason to think that happened but the default in security is to be paranoid for any possibility.
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The Security B-Sides DC conference is part of the B-Sides movement, which was created to provide a community framework to build events for and by information security practitioners. Alex Norman, the co-director of Security B-Sides DC, tells us how he wants to expand information security beyond security professionals, and to involve a larger, more diverse community.
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An old Linux security ‘feature’ script, which activates LUKS disk encryption, has been hiding a major security hole in plain sight.
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With ubiquitous desktop computing now several decades old, anyone creating an operating system distribution now faces a backwards compatibility problem. Each upgrade brings its own set of new features, but it must maintain compatibility with the features of the previous versions or risk alienating users. If you are a critic of Microsoft products for their bloat, this is one of the factors behind that particular issue.
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CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard’s enter key.
This Cryptsetup vulnerability is widespread and easy to exploit, simply requiring a lot of invalid passwords before being dropped down a root shell. The data on the LUKS-encrypted volume is still protected, but you have root shell access. The CVE reads, “This vulnerability allows to obtain a root initramfs shell on affected systems. The vulnerability is very reliable because it doesn’t depend on specific systems or configurations. Attackers can copy, modify or destroy the hard disc as well as set up the network to exflitrate data. This vulnerability is specially serious in environments like libraries, ATMs, airport machines, labs, etc, where the whole boot process is protect (password in BIOS and GRUB) and we only have a keyboard or/and a mouse.”
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Defence/Aggression
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I think people are very determined to believe that Islam is just like any other religion, denying what it actually calls for — the death or conversion of non-Muslims, the totalitarian rule of Islam around the globe, and the death of gays, apostates and rape victims who do not have four Muslim men as witnesses to swear they were raped rather than just having some fun.
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One of the survivors of last year’s deadly attacks at the Bataclan theatre has described the moment a terrorist posed as a member of the French security forces to get in the dressing room she was hiding in.
Three heavily armed Isis fighters launched an attack on the 1,500-seat Bataclan theatre on 13 November. In less than three hours, the men were dead, having killed 89 people at the concert hall and critically injuring dozens.
Kelly Le Guen, a music reporter for RockUrLife and Webzine, was among a group of 30 people trapped in what she described as a “suffocating” room for more than two hours before security forces stormed the hall.
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Four men allegedly set a 12-year-old boy alight after failing to sexually assault and rape him, according to the boy’s father.
Hafiz Sulaiman told police that his son was playing outside his house in Pakistan when the gang abducted him and took him to their house, reports the Express Tribune.
When his son started shouting they alleged poured petrol over him, set him on fire and fled the scene.
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President-elect of the USA, Donald Trump, said during his campaign that other NATO members should pay a fair contribution and not rely on the USA to always bail them out.
On 13th November the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, defended his organisation in UK newspaper The Observer.
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A taboo-busting reminder of Adolf Hitler’s life has popped up in Germany’s capital with the opening of a new exhibit — a replica of the Nazi dictator’s bunker.
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Four Cabinet Ministers, including Boris Johnson, have vowed to continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia in defiance of two parliamentary committees who called for Britain to cease military support for the country.
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Saudi prosecutors filed criminal charges against two activists in late October 2016, for “forming an unlicensed organization” and other vague charges relating to a short-lived human rights organization they set up in 2013, Human Rights Watch said today. None of the alleged “crimes” listed in the charge sheet resemble recognizable criminal behavior, and none of them took place after October 2013.
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The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole superpower,” when it was putting more money into its military than the next 10 nations combined: It’s been an empire of chaos.
Back in September 2002, Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League, offered a warning I’ve never forgotten. The Bush administration’s intention to invade Iraq and topple its ruler, Saddam Hussein, was already obvious. Were they to take such a step, Moussa insisted, it would “open the gates of hell.” His prediction turned out to be anything but hyperbole — and those gates have never again closed.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Six years after the Swedish authorities opened an investigation into a rape accusation made against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he was questioned about the matter on Monday.
The questions were prepared by prosecutors in Sweden, where an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange was issued in 2010, but were posed by a prosecutor from Ecuador under an agreement the two countries made in August. Ecuador granted Mr. Assange political asylum in 2012, and the interview occurred at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Mr. Assange has lived in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over the rape accusation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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There’s no denying who the king of technology in the 20th century was: America. But the 21st century poses new challenges that must be met by the rise of the green technology and green energy sectors across the globe. And whatever country is producing the best green tech solutions is in the pole position to spring to the top of the 21st century technological heap.
America’s election of Donald Trump virtually guarantees that country will be China.
To be fair, China was already ahead of the US on this front. It began investing big in green tech more than a decade ago, and it is now the world’s leading investor in green energy. Last year alone, China invested more than US$100 billion in green energy – that’s more than double what the US invested – and that number is expected to grow. Trump or no, there’s a good chance China would have won this race. But the US, the second-biggest global investor, was in a better position than any other single nation to challenge China on this front.
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Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump’s signature piece of property in the South, is just 70-miles north of Miami in Palm Beach, a mostly upscale barrier island. But the residence and private club is likely to be affected by the rising tides and increasingly powerful hurricanes that now regularly batter the coast of Florida.
Miami and nearby coastal towns in Florida are, and will be, impacted by changes in our climate—the sea levels in just the past decade rose at double the rate of the entire century before, according to the World Resource Institute. But in the end, Floridians chose noted climate change-skeptic Donald Trump as their future leader.
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Finance
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A European plan under which Britons will face a £10 charge to travel to the EU after Brexit is to be discussed by interior ministers this week.
The plan for a European version of the US visa waiver programme has already won the backing of the British diplomat now in charge of European security.
Sir Julian King, the European commissioner for the security union is to give evidence to peers on Tuesday. He has described the plan as “a valuable additional piece of the jigsaw” in the war against international terrorism.
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On 8 November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave only four hours’ notice that virtually all the cash in the world’s seventh-largest economy would be effectively worthless.
The Indian government likes to use the technical term “demonetisation” to describe the move, which makes it sound rather dull. It isn’t. This is the economic equivalent of “shock and awe”.
[...]
These may be the largest denomination Indian notes but they are not high value by international standards – 1,000 rupees is only £12. But together the two notes represent 86% of the currency in circulation.
Think of that, at a stroke 86% of the cash in India now cannot be used.
What is more, India is overwhelmingly a cash economy, with 90% of all transactions taking place that way.
And that is the target of Mr Modi’s dramatic move. Because so much business is done in cash, very few people pay tax on the money they earn.
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Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the US presidential election wiped more than $1 trillion (£800bn) off the value of global bond markets in two days.
President-elect Trump has pledged to massively increase infrastructure spending, which has caused a big shift away from the safety of government debt and into the shares of companies who may cash in on any spending bonanza. The wider stock market has also risen on the back of investors’ predictions of increased growth.
Turning on the government spending taps would push up inflation, meaning that the already meagre returns on US bonds would head into negative territory, adding more reasons to sell and move into riskier assets.
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There’s a righteous, almost smug satisfaction to buying something cheap. It feels like we’re sticking it to the big companies by denying them those extra ten cents per unit on a box of Kit Kats. However, no one loves a bargain more than the businesses themselves. That usually takes the form of tax evasion and poor wages, but sometimes they like to get … creative.
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A baby died when a hospital in India refused to accept a deposit paid in banknotes which were withdrawn from circulation the day before.
Police said they are investigating a doctor in a Mumbai suburb who allegedly turned away a couple with a premature baby because they did not have the correct currency.
Kiran Sharma gave birth to a boy around one month early on 9 November and was rushed to Jeevan Jyot Hospital in Govandi to the east of the city, reported The New Indian Express.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The circumstances are different, but the general principle is the same — and there’s a really important issue at stake when it comes to FOIA and public records issues. The background is fairly convoluted, but here’s a quick summary. After President Obama announced a plan to defer enforcement of certain immigration laws for certain individuals, a few states were upset about it, and Texas and Indiana (where Pence is governor) sued the President. Pence hired an outside law firm to handle the case, and a local lawyer thought this was a waste of taxpayer funds. The lawyer filed public records requests to get access to emails about the decision to hire the law firm and to find out the costs to taxpayers.
Pence’s office released some emails, but they were apparently redacted in places — and in one case an email referred to an attached white paper that was not included. The lawyer who filed the request, William Groth, went to court to demand that the Pence administration reveal the full email with the attached white paper. The Pence administration has argued that it’s not subject to public records requests as “attorney-client” work material — but also that the courts are not allowed to question what the government chooses to release or redact under public records laws. A lower court agreed — following an Indiana Supreme Court ruling saying that the courts cannot “meddle” in public records decisions by the legislative or executive branch due to “separation of powers.” That’s a bizarre reading of the law that seems to actually turn the concept of separation of powers on its head, as it kind of destroys a key part of that separation: the checks and balances of the three branches of government.
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A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.
The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.
Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.
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If the Democrats continue to front establishment candidates while the establishment’s cherished beliefs continue to crumble, they will continue to lose.
American politics now: the anti-establishment, white-nationalism troll party and the pro-establishment party that thinks you’ll vote for them because you fear white supremacists more than you hate the trolls.
American politics tomorrow, if we address ourselves to the work at hand: the terrified troll white-nationalist party versus the party of hope, change and rebuilding: “dismissing a major indicator of popularity like polling—a key tool of campaign journalism in virtually all other contexts—due to vague, handwaving claims of unvettedness comes across as far more a convenient talking point than an earnestly arrived-at conclusion.”
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When the liberal class heard news media report Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, numerous people experienced meltdowns that involved blaming anyone and everyone but Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In particular, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was one of the targets, even though the math did not point to Stein as a culprit for the outcome.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wailed, “If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president.” It not only displayed the prejudice many liberals have against allowing more choices and more voices in presidential elections, but it also exemplified a denial among liberal pundits. They reflexively lashed out at Stein or Bernie Sanders in order to ignore their failure to recognize how Trump had a strong chance all along to win because voters were fed up with the neoliberal economic policies of Democrats.
For this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure,” the show returns with an interview with Jill Stein. She highlights what her campaign managed to accomplish. She looks back on smears she faced, such as the idea that she was anti-vaccine and says she views it as a “sign of the media’s weakness and also their fear and our strength.” Then, she shares how she was never confident Clinton would win the election and addresses the denial among Democrats, who do not want to confront the reality of what happened. She also lists off a number of initiatives and efforts she plans to help support in the aftermath of the election.
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I sit in the tiny conference room adjoined to Julian Assange’s tiny living space in Ecuador embassy. I always feel a bit restless and nervous waiting for him. I worry how he’s coping. I realize how difficult it must be, to be here for years every day looking at these same walls, not feeling the sunshine.
Just then the cat pops in, making me feel more at ease. He has full reign. He is on the table sniffing the muffins and rubbing up against me purring and maybe a little disappointed that everything I’ve brought is vegan.
Next, the big man walks in, wearing a Sea Shepherd tshirt and jeans, a bit disheveled. It’s early but he manages a smile. He’s got a long day ahead.
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The online group was grilled by users of Reddit in a questions and answer session on the online debating forum.
WikiLeaks became a focal point during the election campaign.
It published thousands of internal Democrat National Council emails, and more recently thousands more from the hacked email account of the Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
Some Reddit users appeared suspicious Wikileaks had an agenda to get Donald Trump elected.
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The Lawyer of Chelsea Manning, a former US soldier who is currently serving a prison sentence for disclosing secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has put forth a petition requesting President Barack Obama to grant clemency and reduce the rest of her 35-year sentence to the more than six years she has already served.
Manning’s punishment is the longest period of incarceration awarded to any leaker in American history.
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A synagogue in Montana wants police protection after Nazi fliers were delivered nearby following Donald Trump’s election win. Anxiety is now growing among American Jews after Trump appointed an alleged anti-Semite as one of his closest advisors on Sunday as the number of hate incidents continues to rise across the US.
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The only thing that will save us from a populist racist oligarch demagogue is a populist anti-racist anti-neoliberal progressive with a mobilized movement behind them and serious contenders up and down the ticket.
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Amid the growing post-election call for a “reckoning” within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.
“Liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul of the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” the Washington Post reported late Thursday, with the first step being a replacement for the embattled interim chair Donna Brazile.
The progressive flank of the party has largely placed the blame for the stunning election loss on the DNC and its elitist leadership, which they say is out of touch with the Left’s grassroots base, which wants to see a renunciation of corporate influence.
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Amid a national vote that rocked the political world Tuesday, voters in Maine narrowly approved a measure that supporters say will be respectively disruptive to the state’s political status quo.
With 98 percent of the vote reporting in the state, 52 percent of voters approved a ballot question making Maine the first state to implement ranked choice voting, a fundamental reform of how voters literally fill out their ballot.
In a ranked choice vote system, rather than simply voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidates by preference—first, second, third, and so on.
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Maine residents have approved a ballot question that will allow voters to rank their choice of candidates.
Under the election overhaul, ballots are counted at the state level in multiple rounds. Last-place candidates are eliminated until a candidate wins by a majority.
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Donald Trump has named Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff, rewarding a loyalist to his party and its long-serving chairman by making him his top aide in the Oval Office. But he also named Steve Bannon, the head of his campaign and of the far-right website Breitbart, as his “chief strategist and senior counselor”.
The statement announcing Trump’s decision named Bannon first, despite the vague title of his role. It said he and Priebus would work as “equal partners”.
“Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory,” Trump said. “Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”
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“I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” Trump said in a statement.
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If the world’s governments don’t prevent the planet’s surface temperature from increasing more than 2°C, then life on Earth will become a difficult proposition for many humans, animals and plants. Glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, crops will fail, water availability will decrease, and diseases will proliferate. Some areas will experience more wildfires and extreme heat; in others, more hurricanes and extreme storms. Coastal cities and possibly entire nations will be swallowed by the sea. There will be widespread social and economic instability, leading to regional conflicts.
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President-elect Donald Trump is seeking top-secret security clearances for his adult children, CBS News reported Monday.
CBS News said the real estate mogul has asked the White House if he can obtain such clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
But a transition team official told the presidential pool reporter Monday night that the president-elect did not request such a step and said the Trump children have not started filling out paperwork for such clearances.
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Donald Trump will run policy proposals affecting the UK past Nigel Farage before consulting Theresa May, a Ukip donor has claimed.
Mr Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon will “run ideas” past interim Ukip leader Mr Farage, prominent Ukip donor Aaron Banks told the Daily Telegraph.
“There is no doubt about it that Steve Bannon will talk to Nigel Farage before any other British politician and run stuff by them,” Mr Banks said.
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Well, I was optimistic. The tea party radicals have gone nuclear, but I wasn’t counting on a neo-Nazi running the White House, or on the Kremlin stepping in …
Let me explain.
A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled “Why Japan lost the Second World War”. (Sorry, I can’t find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren’t even aware of the true size of the battleground.
I’d like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that’s where we’re standing today. We think we’re fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they’re local fronts in a global war. And we’re losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is.
(NB: By “we”, I mean folks who think that the Age of Enlightenment, the end of monarchism, and the evolution of Liberalism are good things. If you disagree with this, then kindly hold your breath until your head explodes. (And don’t bother commenting below: I’ll delete and ban you on sight.))
The logjam created by the Beige Dictatorship was global, throughout the western democracies; and now it has broken. But it didn’t break by accident, and the consequences could be very bad indeed.
What happened last week is not just about America. It was one move—a very significant one, bishop-takes-queen maybe—in a long-drawn-out geopolitical chess game. It’s being fought around the world: Brexit was one move, the election and massacres of Dutarte in the Philippines were another, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey is a third. The possible election of Marine Le Pen (a no-shit out-of-the-closet fascist) as President of France next year is more of this stuff. The eldritch knot of connections between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Da’esh in the wreckage of Syria is icing on top. It’s happening all over and I no longer think this is a coincidence.
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As news of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss sinks in, many Clinton supporters looking for someone to blame are pointing fingers at a familiar scapegoat: people who voted outside the two-party system.
Pundits are already trying to blame Libertarian Gary Johnson and me, the Green party candidate, for Trump’s win. For example, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow concocted a scenario in which by taking every Stein vote and half of Johnson’s votes, Clinton could have grabbed enough states from Trump to eke out an electoral college win, a story repeated by CNN. Unwilling to accept that Clinton didn’t motivate enough voters to win the presidency, and explore the reasons why, many pundits are instead looking to put responsibility for the loss onto others.
First the facts: if every single Stein voter had voted for Clinton, Clinton still lost.
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The Green Party’s showing in this year’s election was strong but not significant enough to reach the desired 5%. It was more like 1%. Still, the Stein Baraka ticket garnered more than 1.2 million votes nationwide. That’s a big bump from the last Green Party presidential ticket in 2012 which won less than half a million votes.
Already some liberal pundits, shocked by the election of Donald Trump have begun blaming the Green Party for Clinton’s loss. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman tweeted on election night, “Jill Stein managed to play Ralph Nader. Without her Florida might have been saved.”
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We know this because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange came into possession of it along with tens of thousands of other emails to and from Clinton’s strategist Podesta, and spread them across the internet.
Huma Abedin’s email revealed no high drama or internal backbiting, and so it did not grab headlines during the campaign. It simply noted that she had met with Smith, a San Francisco political consultant, and she attached a memo, titled thoughts.doc. Written by Smith, it maps out a strategy, though not one followed by Hillary Clinton.
Smith and his firm, SCN Strategies, are among the most successful Democratic campaign firms in the state and country. In 2008, he ran Clinton’s 2008 winning primary campaigns in California and Texas. And in 2014, he was making a pitch for a position in Clinton’s 2016 campaign; he didn’t get it.
“Today, you are a fully known quantity and a second-time candidate for President of the United States,” Smith wrote, setting forth how Clinton might announce her candidacy and frame her campaign. “As such you will be expected to have a clear and deep rationale for your candidacy from the first day of the campaign.”
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Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and former CNN contributor, went after her former employer at an event at a women’s college in Virginia Monday, blaming them for “ripping me a new one” instead of allowing her to defend herself after it appeared she tipped off Hillary Clinton’s campaign to town hall questions.
Brazile, who had been a contributor and commentator at CNN for 14, resigned from the network earlier this year after WikiLeaks published hacked emails that showed Brazile tipping off Clinton’s campaign in advance to at least two questions the Democratic presidential nominee could be asked at upcoming town hall events.
“CNN never gave me a question,” Brazile said at a talk held at Hollins University, according to The Roanoke Times. “I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.”
Brazile did not deny the allegations that she had emailed two questions in advance, but she said she “never got on Clinton’s campaign airplane or prepped the candidate for any of the debates,” according to the Roanoke Times. When the network cut ties with Brazile permanently, it said the company was “completely uncomfortable” with the revelations and asserted that it had not provided questions to Brazile in advance.
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Rep. Keith Ellison formally announced his candidacy Monday to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a race that has taken on unusual importance as the party looks for someone to lead its efforts to rebuild after last week’s devastating loss to Donald Trump.
Ellison, a progressive who backed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, enters the potentially crowded race as the clear favorite thanks to early backing from a number of leading Democrats.
“It is not enough for Democrats to ask for voters’ support every two years. We must be with them through every lost paycheck, every tuition hike, and every time they are the victim of a hate crime,” Ellison said in a statement announcing his bid. “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation. To do that, we must begin the rebuilding process now.”
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More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote, according to state election records.
At least seventy demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote.
KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.
Records show 35 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote.
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A day after hundreds of students staged a peaceful protest at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, another large protest is taking place in the District.
Hundreds of students walked out of school at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, in the Tenleytown neighborhood, Tuesday morning in protest of President Elect Donald Trump.
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There are 67 days until Donald Trump’s inauguration, a fact that seems to have surprised the president-elect – who reportedly never thought he’d remain in the race past October 2015 – as much as anyone. According to the Wall Street Journal, not only was Trump “surprised by the scope” of the president’s duties when President Obama explained them to him in private last week, but his aides were unaware they would need to hire an entirely new White House staff.
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On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here’s a sample of the list
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TV chef Anders Vendel said in a Facebook post that he was beaten up by three men, two of whom bound his arms behind his back, while the third beat him in the face. He estimated that he was punched twenty times in the face, which took place at 4am in central Malmö on Saturday.
The attack left him with a broken nose and extensive bruising around his right eye, mouth and jaw.
In the Facebook post, which has since been deleted but has been widely cited by populist media including Russian state propaganda channel RT, Vendel had said the men thought he resembled the US President-elect. He also said they were Muslim.
But in a comment to The Local on Monday, the chef said the way his case was being used abroad was “scary.”
Headlines in RT, the Daily Mail and various other global media emphasised the attackers’ supposed religion. None of them had spoken to the chef.
“I was angry, hurt and humiliated when I wrote what I was thinking at the time,” Vendel said.
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The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time suppressing Western labour’s share of income and prospects.
Trump’s success comes as that dynamic fails. His presidency represents a defeat for liberal democrats everywhere, but it holds important lessons – as well as hope – for progressives.
From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium. It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China, providing the world’s most efficient factories with the requisite demand. How was this growing trade deficit paid for? By the return of around 70 per cent of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America’s financial markets.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo sent a push notification to countless smartphones in China on Monday, advertising a post that claimed that anti-Trump demonstrators in the United States were responsible for a surge of hatred against Chinese-Americans.
Weibo is the Chinese language equivalent of Twitter. Although Chinese speakers do use Twitter, the US-based service is blocked in mainland China. Weibo is not, and subsequently enjoys massive popularity on the mainland.
Like Twitter, Weibo features trending topics, and sometimes sends push notifications to your smartphone about a current popular trend if you have the app installed. A key difference is that hashtags on Weibo have their own pages, one that is controlled by a “host” that started the hashtag, or paid for it. That host can pin a post to the top of the page.
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The Raleigh, N.C. affiliate of NBC censored “Saturday Night Live” in nine different parts of last night’s broadcast, citing language used by comedian and host Dave Chappelle and raising concerns on social media of whether broadcasters could become more wary of edgy content under an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump.
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In this year’s election, the most powerful news source was Facebook. More than 40 percent of US adults—that’s more than watch any single TV channel—get their news from Facebook, according to Pew, and as plenty of journalists have recounted, the platform is flooded with hyperpartisan fake news.
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A California history teacher has been placed on paid leave after comparing US president-elect Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler during one of his lessons.
Holocaust scholar Frank Navarro, who has taught at Mountain View High School for 40 years, said the school’s principal and district superintendent asked him to leave on Thursday, after a parent sent an email to school officials expressing concerns about a lesson plan for Mr Navarro’s world studies class which drew parallels between Mr Trump and the Nazi leader.
“This parent said that I had said Donald Trump was Hitler, but I would never say that,” Mr Navarro told the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday. “That’s sloppy historical thinking.”
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Across the landscape of the Internet, a handful of websites have grown to become synonymous with the medium to which they operate within. To “Google” something, for example, is a term that is now rooted in our collective lexicon. When one says he or she is going to “Wikipedia” a topic, everyone present knows exactly what that person means. YouTube is the same way. 4.95 billion videos are viewed every day on the website, while 300 hours are viewed per minute. With those numbers, Google has an incredibly daunting task of trying to retain some level of control when it comes to the content that is allowed on the website. The survival of the website is contingent on keeping advertisers happy. One can only imagine how difficult a task it must be to try to guarantee advertisers that the videos on the platform reflect the right kind of image to viewers. There have been a series of attempts in the past to try to censor the content that deserves to be removed from the site. It used to be that a viewer could flag a video for violating the website’s terms of service, and upon review of that claim the video would be removed and a strike would be placed on the channel. Once a channel was issued its third and final strike, it would be terminated from the website. Granted, if the uploader felt as though his or her video was unfairly flagged, that person had the power to dispute the claim, but for the duration of dispute process, monetization was shut off. A new program, “YouTube Heroes” is the latest in these efforts.
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A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit from anti-Muslim groups that tried to blame the U.S. attorney general for the online censorship of their social-media posts.
The groups, American Freedom Defense Initiative and Jihad Watch, claimed in a lawsuit this past July that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were censoring their posts critical of Islam. Rather than suing the companies directly, however, the groups took aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
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Earlier this month, Indian news broadcaster NDTV received a blackout order from the government. Their coverage of the Pathankot terror attacks in January 2016 was identified as flouting the guidelines issued after the panic caused by the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks and their media coverage. An inter-ministerial committee of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry decided to take NDTV off air for a day, on November 9, 2016, as a penalty for disclosing so-called strategically sensitive information during the broadcast of the attacks.
Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu has defended this decision on grounds of national security and alleged that the coverage violated India’s national interest, calling its opponents politically inspired. Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar has said that this is not to be regarded as a ban so much as broadcasting operations temporarily put off. He alleged that the display of aerial assets and the ammunition dumps at Pathankot during the broadcast constituted a threat to not just national security, but also the lives of serving personnel. He also declared that the previous UPA regime led by the Congress had issued nearly 21 times the number of guidelines to the media, arguing thus that the BJP-led regime was not out of line.
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Are music bans in India and Pakistan an appropriation of art and performances by nationalist imperatives?
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Liu Yunshan, the No 5 in the Politburo Standing Committee and in charge of ideological control, doesn’t look like an internet guru or a man who can influence the future of one of humanity’s great inventions.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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On September 4, a group of young activists planned to attend a demonstration against Interim President Michel Temer in the city center of São Paulo. They never made it. Their group had been infiltrated by an Army Captain Willian Pina Botelho—via Tinder.
Surveillance and infiltration are not new tactics, but the ACLU revelation last month that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook had been sharing data with surveillance service Geofeedia reminds us that the internet is bringing it to whole new levels. The story of the “Tinder infiltrator” serves as a reminder for a generation of young activists who are organizing online: don’t stop organizing, but be vigilant.
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FBI Director James Comey believes encryption is perhaps the biggest threat to public safety yet. So big, in fact, that he can only engage in hyperbole about it. There’s been very little done to quantify the problem, even by the agency that seems to fear it most.
In 2015, Comey told senators that a “vast majority” of devices seized by US law enforcement “may no longer be accessible” due to encryption. Comey has a very strange definition of “vast majority,” as Marcy Wheeler points out.
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The German constitutional court has rebuffed a second complaint seeking to allow oversight bodies to see the US National Security Administration (NSA) selector list.
The list was pushed by the NSA to its German sister organisation BND to crawl through data traffic intercepted at the DeCIX, an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and traffic-wise the largest peering platform worldwide.
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The list of so-called “selectors” – telephone numbers, email and IP addresses – was handed to Germany‘s foreign intelligence agency BND by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the aim of spying on German and European targets.
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A federal judge has ordered the CIA and the National Security Agency to disclose to him whether they were involved in spying on Occupy Philadelphia protesters during their monthlong demonstration at what is now Dilworth Park five years ago.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a lawyer for the demonstrators, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller gave the agencies until early next year to submit a list of any records detailing the agencies’ potential surveillance activities, along with a justification of why those documents should be withheld from public disclosure.
Schiller said he would rely upon that list to determine whether to release such documents or whether he would need to examine such records in person before making his decision.
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On January 20, Donald Trump will gain control over the most powerful surveillance system in history. Worried? Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself.
The U.S. government has a long history of targeting activists. Agents spied on Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his hotel rooms in an attempt to find out personal information which could be used to discredit him. More recently, the FBI spied on Black Lives Matter activists.
U.S. intelligence agencies have unprecedented power to gather information on millions of American citizens. This information includes our communications, banking info, and web browsing data. We know that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on who you talk to, when, and where you call from.
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The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.
It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights.
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What’s that song? On your cellphone, the popular app Shazam is able to answer that question by listening for just a few seconds, as if it were magic. On Apple’s computers, Shazam never turns the microphone off, even if you tell it to.
When a user of Shazam’s Mac app turns the app “OFF,” the app actually keeps the microphone on in the background. For the security researcher who discovered that the mic is always on, it’s a bug that users should know about. For Shazam, it’s just a feature that makes the app work better.
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The next time someone asks you for your cellphone number, you may want to think twice about giving it.
The cellphone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television.
It has become “kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you,” said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator.
Yet the cellphone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep private. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don’t hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Saudi education ministry has warned international schools from marking non-Islamic occasions, such as Christmas and New Year, the media reported on Monday.
The ban includes forbidding those schools from providing holidays on such occasions or changing the dates of exams to suit them, Xinhua news agency reported.
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This is a time where “solidarity” is no longer an act of defending revolutionaries but fascists; where there is always support for Islamist projects like Sharia courts, the burqa, gender segregation, apostasy and blasphemy laws – whether de jure or de facto – but never for those who refuse to be silenced, erased and “disappeared”.
It’s a time when “progressive” all too often means protecting regressive identity politics, which homogenises entire communities and societies, and deems theocrats as the sole legitimate arbiters and gatekeepers of “community” values.
It’s a politics of betrayal – devoid of class struggle and political ideals – which sees any dissent through Islamist eyes and immediately labels it “Islamophobic” and blasphemous.
We are called “aggressive apostates”, “fundamentalist secularists”, “native informants”, “inflammatory”. We are accused of violating the “safe spaces” of Islamists on universities and even “inciting hatred”.
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Pastor Mike Agbahime, husband of Bridget Agbahime who was killed by an irate mob in Kano for alleged blasphemy has finally spoken up on the events that lead to his wife’s death.
Agbahime in an interview with The Punch blamed Kano Governor Umar Ganduje for paving the way for the release of the arrested suspects.
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Muslim clerics in Mauritania on Sunday urged the authorities to execute a blogger who was sentenced to death in 2014 for apostasy after writing a blog post on Islam and racial discrimination.
Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir’s article touched a nerve in Mauritania, a West African country with deep social and racial divisions. He was tried for apostasy and received the death penalty despite having repented and saying his article was misunderstood.
According to the U.S.-based Freedom Now rights group who provide Mkhaitir with legal counsel, the blog post appears to have been the first he published. Prior to his arrest he worked as an engineer for a mining company and was not an activist, Freedom Now said on its website.
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Police have raided a baby factory and arrested at least six pregnant women who are allegedly planning to sell their newborn babies after delivery in Delta State.
The police said the arrest was made in Okwe community, Oshimili South Local Government Area of the state in Nigeria’s South-South region.
They revealed that a victim, Blessing Aondoseer, had reported that her husband allegedly connived with some people to take away her two weeks old baby.
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INDEPENDENT WATCHDOG Freedom House has issued its 2016 report along with a chilling warning that internet privacy is becoming something of an oxymoron.
Freedom House is based in Washington and deals with how countries handle and provide the internet and technology to citizens. We imagine that it is currently hiring. The Freedom On The Net report said that freedom has declined for the sixth year in a row.
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The stunning upset election of Donald Trump has left many Americans wondering what has become of their country, their party, their government, even their sense of the world. Purple prose has been unleashed on the problem; comparisons to fascism and totalitarianism abound. Commentators claim that Trump’s election reflects a racist, sexist, xenophobic America. But we should resist the temptation to draw broad-brush generalizations about American character from last Tuesday’s outcome. The result was far more equivocal than that; a majority of the voters rejected Trump, after all. There is no question that President Trump will be a disaster—if we let him. But the more important point is that—as the fate of American democracy in the years after 9/11 has taught us—we can and must stop him.
The risks are almost certainly greater than those posed by any prior American president. Trump, who has no government experience, a notoriously unreliable temperament, and a record of demagoguery and lies, will come to office with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and, once he fills the late Antonin Scalia’s seat, on the Supreme Court as well. His shortlist of Cabinet appointees offers little hope that voices of moderation will be heard. Who, then, is going to stop him? Will he be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalizing abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture?
Whether Trump will actually try to implement these promises, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his. If Americans let him, Trump may well do all that he promised—and more. Imagine, for example, what a Trump administration might do if there is another serious terrorist attack on US soil. What little he has said about national security suggests that he will make us nostalgic for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
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When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.
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The Louisiana legislature decided to help out its most underprivileged constituents — law enforcement officers — by making it a felony to “attack” them using nothing more than words.
When New Orleans police officers arrived at the scene of a disturbance to arrest an intoxicated man for banging on a hotel’s windows and harassing the employees, the situation devolved into the totally expected.
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In 2015, the authorities in California documented 837 hate-crime incidents, charting a surge in offenses motivated by religious intolerance toward Muslims and Jews, while crimes against Latinos grew by 35 percent.
Last week, shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected the country’s next president, the Southern Poverty Law Center put up a form on its website encouraging people to share details about potential hate crimes. By the next day, they’d received about 250 reports – more than they’re used to seeing in six months.
Then on Monday, the FBI released its latest national tabulation of hate crimes, data that showed an overall uptick of 6.8 percent from 2014 to 2015. The accounting, drawn from information passed on to the bureau by state and local law enforcement agencies, charted a 67-percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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In the horrific footage from Vienna, Austria, the youngster is seen being violently attacked by a group of girls and a boy in what is believed to be a “Sharia patrol”.
In this clip, she keeps her hands in her pocket and takes the savage beating, despite breaking her jaw in two places and blood dripping from her face.
The group is reported to have said in the video: “She has pulled the headscarf down, demolish her!”
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Love’s family plan to appeal against the decision. The 31-year-old—who has Asperger’s syndrome—faces up to 99 years in prison and fears for his own life, his lawyers have said.
A home office spokesperson told Ars: “On Monday 14 November, the secretary of state, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. Mr Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting US military and federal government agencies.”
Rudd considered four so-called legal tests of the Extradition Act 2003: whether Love is at risk of the death penalty; whether specialty arrangements are in place; whether Love has previously been extradited from another country to the UK, thereby requiring consent from that country; and whether Love was previously transferred to the UK by the International Criminal Court.
However, the home secretary concluded that none of these issues applied to Love.
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Brazil has been plunged into a fresh bout of political uncertainty after lawyers for former president Dilma Rousseff presented evidence suggesting her successor, Michel Temer, accepted bribes from a construction company.
If accepted the documents filed with the supreme electoral court raise the possibility of the 2014 presidential election being declared invalid due to campaign funding violations, which could force Temer from office.
The two politicians were running mates in 2014 but have since become bitter enemies. Rousseff, of the Workers party, was impeached and removed from the presidency in September on charges of window-dressing government accounts. She has levelled accusations of treachery at her replacement, Temer, of the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement party.
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Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, ‘We saw a spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide beginning toward the end of 2015. That spike has continued until today and even accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump’
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Even outside of fear of drawing an Islamist attack, avoiding conflict with Muslim employees affects both the company’s ‘inclusive’ image, and its liability to lawsuits by activist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). When special interest activist groups put pressure on businesses to give into their demands businesses often (depending on the issue/s) concede rather than face bad publicity. Businesses placating to Muslim demands is one of the objectives of the Hamas-affiliated CAIR. Masquerading as a civil liberties organization for Muslims, CAIR, as mentioned in the video, pressures businesses into accommodating the most trivial of Muslim practices advocated for in sharia law.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Decentralized and distributed networks are, quite simply, fundamental; everyone is affected in many ways by the degree of distribution — not least one’s personal agency, the development of our societal structures, and our impact on this planet’s living systems.
As we instrument the planet, as we build out a pervasive computing environment, as increasingly little ‘undigital’ remains, ensuring the decentralized and distributed nature of that digital infrastructure is nothing short of mission critical. We must resist the easy short-term temptations of centralization to avoid its longer-term miseries.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The intergovernmental South Centre and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation have signed a five-year agreement to help the global south fight malnutrition, reduce poverty, and address climate change consequences. The memorandum of understanding was signed on the margins of the recent climate change discussion held in Marrakesh.
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Global Consultation on Farmers’ Rights took place in Bali, Indonesia from 27-30 September and was co-organised by the governments of Indonesia and Norway. The secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) engaged in the preparatory process, according to the treaty’s website.
The consultation was attended by 95 participants from 37 countries, from all the seven regions of the FAO, according to a source. Participants came from governments, academia, international organisations (such as the ITPGRFA, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants [UPOV], and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), non-governmental organisations (such as Oxfam, the Development Fund, and SEARICE), and farmers and farmers’ organisation (such as la Via Campesina), the source said.
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Copyrights
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Long-time readers may remember our coverage of a slow-moving copyright case over public domain images from The Wizard of Oz and other movies. In brief: back in 2006, Warner Bros. sued vintage/nostalgia merchandise company AVELA, which had obtained restored images from old promotional posters for the films and was selling them for T-shirts and other products. Nobody disputed that these specific images were in the public domain, because the promo materials had not been registered for copyright even though the films were — but Warner claimed that the images nevertheless infringed on the copyright in the characters established by the film. The court originally sided with Warner in full, but on appeal found that the exact two-dimensional reproductions of the images on T-shirts and the like were not infringing, but instances where they were combined with text and other images or used to create three-dimensional models were, and awarded some pretty huge damages. To complicate matters, there’s also a trademark claim wrapped up in all this. There was another appeal, and now a court has upheld the ruling and the damages, giving movie studios another weapon in their war on the public domain (here’s a PDF of the full ruling).
Now, there are a lot of layers here, and I’m going to focus on The Wizard Of Oz, since it provides the most interesting example. The 1900 book is in the public domain. The 1939 movie is still under copyright held by Warner. The associated 1939 promo materials were not registered (a requirement at the time) and are in the public domain. And many characters and other elements of the movie are also covered by trademark, also owned by Warner. Absolutely none of these facts are in dispute — but put them all together and you have a giant mess that illustrates the flimsiness of the idea/expression dichotomy, and how something can supposedly remain in the public domain while being gutted of all its usefulness to the public.
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A YouTube parody which hoped to provide a satirical take on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has ended in a lawsuit. Hugh Atkin portrayed elements of Trump’s efforts in the style of and alongside images from A Clockwork Orange. Now the Australian is getting sued in the United States for copyright infringement.
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The U.S. Government’s Copyright Office has launched a new consultation seeking guidance on the future of the DMCA’s takedown process and safe harbor. Through a set of concrete questions, they hope to find a balance between the interests of copyright holders, Internet services and the public at large.
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Posted in Europe, Fraud, Patents at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Very convenient a guise
![Elmer news](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/elmer-news.jpg)
Whistleblower ist weder Datendieb noch Erpresser
Summary: Whistleblowers at the EPO cannot speak and surveillance reaches extraordinary levels, the excuse being security, stability, justice and so on (surveillance classics)
EARLIER this year we wrote about rumours of fraud at the EPO and not too long ago we became witnesses to the pretext of “fraud” as as exploited to spy on staff and grossly violate their privacy or data security (in a way that no member state would tolerate). The members of the GCC who are members of the CSC wrote the following text: “We obviously do not support fraud and so consider it perfectly legitimate that some controls (checks and balances) are introduced in order to detect and/or prevent fraud also in the field of the healthcare insurance. However, this raises an additional big concern linked to the new contract and its external administrator: fraud control measures and the possible involvement of the EPO’s Investigation Unit. We are completely kept in the dark as to how the EPO intends to put in practice these controls. What will be the role of Cigna who are obviously best positioned (access to the data) to detect fraud)? Are they bound to respect national laws? What will be the role of the Investigative Unit? How will the different parties cooperate? How will medical secrecy be preserved? Which laws will apply at which steps? Why does the Office not collaborate with (local) national prosecutors since this would be compatible with Article 20, EPC? Not only have none of these questions been answered, we have not heard about any safeguards. We fear that this is an area that may raise serious problems in the future with possible damage to the EPO’s reputation. Although we have not been required to give an opinion despite the blatant impact that this new contract will have on staff employment conditions, we nevertheless recommend that the President should not implement the planned modifications as long as a joint Committee has not been established.”
“The way things work at the moment is a recipe for disaster because the Office already fails to attract top talent — the very kind of talent which it takes to deliver a good service and justify the high fees associated with EPs (grant, renewal, search etc.).”We often wonder how many violations it would take for Eponia to finally come under proper scrutiny from member states (beyond a slap on the wrist, at the very least a fine). The way things work at the moment is a recipe for disaster because the Office already fails to attract top talent — the very kind of talent which it takes to deliver a good service and justify the high fees associated with EPs (grant, renewal, search etc.). To make matters worse, a lot of key staff has been leaving and continues to leave the Office (the growing numbers of departures that we see are irrefutable). A new comment in IP Kat asked: “What would the European Patent system look like in, say, 2 to 4 years?” Here is the full comment:
“Anonymous” from Saturday, 12 November 2016 is trying to change the subject, isn’t he/she? The facts are quite simple: Battistelli got instructions from the Council not to fire staff members before new regulations are passed and did just the opposite.
That is the real problem here.
Battistelli is not doing what the Council wants. I asked what the Council can do and apparently the Council cannot do much because of the 3/4 of the votes clause. I said Battistelli just needs 10 countries to stay forever and follow his plans and nobody raised a credible objection. I don’t see how a ministerial conference could solve that problem.
So let us imagine that Battistelli stays another few years to continue his plans. The Council cannot do much because of this blocking minority. What would the effect be? What would the European Patent system look like in, say, 2 to 4 years?
It will be morally — maybe also fiscally — bankrupt (it’s said to be operating at a loss), more so assuming Battistelli continues along the same trajectory which renders examiners redundant in just two years. Will it be folded onto EUIPO? Serious intervention is needed to ensure that the EPO doesn’t just become a relic or a fossil from the past. The way things stand, based on what we are hearing from insiders, there is no promising future for the EPO (if any future at all). █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Party for Animals in the Netherlands expresses concerns about the European Patent Office under Battistelli and requests a parliamentary debate
ALTHOUGH we have not seen footage of it (nor is there an article about it), Petra Kramer, who habitually translates Dutch-only EPO articles for us, said a short moment ago that “Dutch Parliament just demanded a debate about ending the immunity of EPO and the tyranny of Battistelli [...] There is no link to an article, I’m watching the livestream of Parliament.”
“Esther Ouwehand wants to know how the immunity (and tyranny it enables) of EPO can be ended.”
–Petra KramerApparently, Esther Ouwehand (contact Esther Ouwehand in Twitter) is the initiator of this.
To quote Kramer [1, 2, 3]: “Esther Ouwehand of the Party for Animals requested the debate because EPO patents life against the wishes of the EU. And because Esther Ouwehand wants to know how the immunity (and tyranny it enables) of EPO can be ended. I missed which parties support the request but Esther Ouwehand probably can tell you who did.”
We’ll keep readers updated as updates — if any — arrive. █
Credit/licence: The copyright holder of the above photograph “allows anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification.”
Update: Kramer has just translated Ouwehand’s request:
Esther Ouwehand (Party for Animals): “We have major concerns about the European Patent Office. Not only do they grant patents on plants and animals while the democratic institutions said no to that. They also enjoy legal immunity which according to the Cabinet makes it impossible to intervene. I would like to receive a letter prior to the debate in which the Cabinet clarifies how this institute can be brought under democratic control.”
Video:
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at a letter sent prior to a previous meeting of the Administrative Council of the EPO, highlighting the role played by FFPE-EPO in the crushing of SUEPO at the hands of Team Battistelli
It has been absolutely no secret that Battistelli uses a classic union-busting tactic (“good union, bad union”) in an effort to crush the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO). We wrote about this many times before, including in the following articles:
- In the EPO’s Official Photo Op, “Only One of the Faces is Actually FFPE-EPO”
- Further Evidence Suggests and Shows Stronger Evidence That Team Battistelli Uses FFPE-EPO as ‘Yellow Union’ Against SUEPO
- “FFPE-EPO Was Set up About 9 Years Ago With Management Encouragement”
- Fallout of the FFPE EPO MoU With Battistelli’s Circle
- The EPO’s Media Strategy at Work: Union Feuds and Group Fracturing
- Caricature of the Day: Recognising FFPE EPO
- Union Syndicale Federale Slams FFPE-EPO for Helping Abusive EPO Management by Signing a Malicious, Divisive Document
- FFPE-EPO Says MoU With Battistelli Will “Defend Employment Conditions” (Updated)
- Their Masters’ Voice (Who Block Techrights): FFPE-EPO Openly Discourages Members From Reading Techrights
- Letter Says EPO MoU “Raises Questions About FFPE’s Credibility as a Federation of Genuine Staff Unions”
- On Day of Strike FFPE-EPO Reaffirms Status as Yellow (Fake/Management-Leaning) Union, Receives ‘Gifts’
- Needed Urgently: Information About the Secret Meeting of Board 28 and Battistelli’s Yellow Union, FFPE-EPO
- In Battistelli’s Mini Union (Minion) It Takes Less Than 10 Votes to ‘Win’ an Election
- FFPE-EPO Going Ad Hominem Against FICSA, Brings Nationality Into It
- High on EPO: Battistelli’s ‘Social Conference’ Nonsense is Intended to Help Suppress Debate About His Abuses Against Staff and Union-Busting Activities
This makes one wonder who’s poking fun (or flinging hearsay) at Mr. Prunier — and by extension at SUEPO — right now. Who has something to gain from it, under the pretenses that SUEPO is a ‘naughty’ union that even harms the CSC? This morning we wrote about what actually happened because there are some evil tongues which engage in union-shaming (shaming SUEPO anonymously) and it’s hard to view those as innocent. As one comment put it today:
You may indeed be correct about the correctness of the result of the disciplinary procedure. Or you may not. We cannot know and, according to the rules, shouldn’t know in order to protect, in particular, the perceived victim. That is, however, not the issue. As the delegations to the AC have already pointed out, justice must be seen to be done. Procedural violations and/or lack of due process cannot be written off because the final decision was ‘right’ (if it was…).
In the current case the guilty man still cannot reveal his crime or his defence because the system won’t allow it. Meanwhile the judge can make statements about it which cannot be challenged publicly by the guilty party. A man loses his employment and future employment must be significantly limited given his dismissal. And yet he is not allowed to publicly defend himself??
I would be interested to hear whether you think the procedure and system in place is suitable. That is the question being raised here. The judgement on Laurent must wait for a fair system.
I note in passing that you are revealing facts of the case, whether known to you privately or based on the president’s communication to staff. In either case, you appear to be stating more than Laurent can. Doesn’t it worry you that tomorrow there may be a knock on your door from the investigation unit?
Here is a familiar, legitimate point about the demand for harassment of staff, especially now that Battistelli made it a standard unit like a private police of his:
This year again approx. 50 warning letters will be issued in DG1, making sure the HR Conflict Resolution department has enough clientele for the coming year. A “Danse Obscure” all over again summoning all Staff Representatives to dance along into EPO’s obscure misery, affecting the AC, BoA, President, Management and staff. Strangely enough it unites us all!
Another person correctly points out that “SUEPO represents more than half of the EPO workstaff.” Here is the full comment:
SUEPO represents more than half of the EPO workstaff. Staff Representatives are therefore representing a majority.
Also, the union cannot send mails to all staff members anymore. That actually was the best thing anyone in the EPO ever did for the union, as man union-template appeals have been filed by jon-members, who do jot have access to the appeal-templates anymore, and therefore finally joined the EPI….
Also, I’ve never heard of non-SUEPO members having been turned down by Staff Representatives.
Just like Anon E. Mouse I do not even know anybody having been asked if they’re members of SUEPO when seeking help from Staff Representatives.
Last thing to comment on your post: the “staff representatives” in the Disciplinary Committee (non capital letters hee, as SR does not appoint Staff Representatives to the disciplinary committe anymore, but BB appoints “staff representatives” the administration “selects”). The SR ones resigned after ALL of them have been downgraded and/or warned for not having proposed harsh sanctions in previous procedures.
The new “staff representatives” have even less protection than elected Staff Representatives (less visibility), and are therefore under immense pressure by the head of personal department. ILOAT already was negative about the constitution of the Disciplinary Committee…. Also, do not trust them to be “your” “staff representatives”.
Please read the communique again, more carefully. There is a lot between the lines which looks absolutely bad to anyone above “director level”.
Alas, I see the management style trickling down to directors already, destroying the atmosphere.
Now the EPO administration pushes for the possibilities that the first or chair can sign for the second member…. Which DG3 (now BoA) considers to be a procedural violation. Fun times.
(Q: the EPC (Article 10(3) EPC) provides that the president shall be assisted by a number of Vice-Presidents. How does a “President of the Boards of Appeal” fit this paragraph of Article 10 EPC?)
ILOAT is mentioned above and this is both noteworthy and timely. “Four judgments will be announced in public on Wednesday, 30 November 2016 at 3pm at the ILO,” ILO has just said. We’ll keep an eye on those and report when they come out.
When I first saw the union-shaming comment I jokingly said (in social media sites) that maybe it was FFPE-EPO that’s behind it. My guess might actually have some merit to it, despite being a joke.
“The following letter,” it’s explained, “has been sent to the delegations of the Administrative Council on 9 June 2016 in order to assist them with the preparation of the Council meeting in June.” A copy was sent to Battistelli as well (see last page, page 7), so this wasn’t done behind his back, so to speak.
The full letter [PDF]
says that “the President continues to deal exclusively with FFPE-EPO, a tiny union that counts 76 members in The Hague and no section in other places of employment. In their recent elections, 31 members voted. The new Chairman has received 9 (nine) votes. FFPE-EPO is systematically called to participate in working groups, including matters affecting places of employment where they have no section. The Office is misleadingly presenting this as a major success in “social dialogue”.”
We must remember that Battistelli uses these nefarious tactics to pretend that there is “social” something (dialogue, study, conference, workshop etc.) while in reality he’s 100% antisocial and he attacks the real staff representatives — not those who are his yes men and chinchillas.
Is the Board (or the Council) wise enough to figure out the tricks Battistelli tries to pull on them?
Posted today in a separate (much older) thread is the following comment:
Board 28 meets this week. Any agenda?
Boards of Appeal Committee meets for the first time on 28.11? Anyone know if they are discussing Haar? Or the disciplinary case?? Is the first a fait accompli and the second perhaps another chance to re-open matters?
Leaked material (like the agenda) would be very much helpful to us. Anyone with access to it, please consider getting in touch with us. It's safe (we have a perfect record guarding sources). █
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Posted in America, Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Those who profit from war aspire to see more of it (the more, the merrier) and the same goes for patenting
![War is a racket](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/war-racket.png)
Reference: War Is A Racket
Summary: Patent profiteers continue to mislead the public, even small and cash-strapped businesses, about patents, in an effort to get more and more patents out there, yielding wars (litigation), saturation of weapons (too many patents to keep track of without some dedicated attorneys), and a generally terrible system which rewards aggressors, not innovators that are genuinely productive (construction as opposed to destruction of perceived rivals)
This morning we spotted a very misleading headline, courtesy of Luciano Ricondo from Ladas & Parry LLP. Software patents are not patent-eligible anymore (or hardly so, even if the USPTO accepts them before they reach a high enough court that tosses them out), but this article is just the typical listing of very exceptional cases where CAFC somehow accepted a software patent or two (an appeal can still have these invalidated). Why are we still seeing such articles? Just look who the authors are, they try to sell their services.
A corporate partner at Kemp Little currently sells snake oil, including patents, to cash-limited SMEs that ought to focus on producing and selling products, not reading and producing paperwork. Andy Moseby called this “legal advice for small businesses”, but it seems more like shameless self-promotion that would have small businesses pay a lot of money for lawyers (to receive bad advice that then necessitates more of these lawyers).
“In reality, especially when it comes to code (software), copyrights provide sufficient protection and there is virtually no need for software patents (these are harder to get and a lot harder actually enforce anyway).”Secrecy rather than patents may work better sometimes and considering the breadth of patents out there, it’s more likely that a small company will get sued (or extorted by a patent troll) than be in a position to sue some other company using a patent or two. It’s just expensive and risky. In fact, this new article from Asterion Inc (US) stresses “the advantages of trade secret litigation,” highlighting it as a better option than patent litigation. In reality, especially when it comes to code (software), copyrights provide sufficient protection and there is virtually no need for software patents (these are harder to get and a lot harder actually enforce anyway).
The discussion about software patents in New Zealand, a common ground for lobbyists of firms like IBM and Microsoft, seems to be back with this report about “[p]ossible changes to NZ divisional patent practice”. We haven’t quite heard of it elsewhere, but thankfully, as far as are aware, the country has no software patents or a trolls epidemic — something which there’s a growing number of instances of in Europe (thanks, EPO!) and fewer in the US, owing to much-needed changes at the USPTO.
“The bottom line is, the patent system should restrict patent grants to few ideas that are actually novel and ground-breaking, not become enslaved by the mirage of quantity of patents as surrogate/function of innovation.”A subject which we mentioned not too long ago was the use of machines not only to examine patents but also generate and file patents. A bunch of computers generating patents to be examined by other computers would result in billions of crappy patents that only computers can process (and make no sense of anyway). A Web site called Futurism has just published an article about that (“When an AI Invents Something, It Should be Credited as the Inventor“). Well, patents are a dime a dozen now (low quality), with about 10 million of them in the US alone, so machines are already needed to deal with the chaos/maze, based on this new article from Innography Inc (US). We need stop patent maximalism because it renders the whole patent system too chaotic for people to keep abreast of (even just in their own field/domain) and it leads to a lot of litigation, patent thickets, etc. Maybe one day there will be a proportion of patents that is computer-generated and people won’t be able to distinguish these from ‘real’ patents crafted by actual humans. Then, other issues may crop up, for instance the existence (or inexistence) of an actual investor. Today there’s this new article which says: “Normally, if Client A and Lawyer A have a confidential communication, disclosure of it to a third party waives any privilege. However, if Client A and the third party have a “common interest,” there is no waiver. So, for example, if a licensor communicates with patent prosecution counsel for the licensee about prosecution of a foreign counterpart of the licensed patent, there might be a privilege.”
A system wherein there’s just a bunch of machines talking to one another would completely distort the very notion of innovation. What would be the point of such a system?
The bottom line is, the patent system should restrict patent grants to few ideas that are actually novel and ground-breaking, not become enslaved by the mirage of quantity of patents as surrogate/function of innovation. Only a clueless, antiscientific, deranged individual like Battistelli would make quantity rather than quality the primary goal, while at the same time pondering (allegedly) replacing examiners with machines or giving up examination altogether (so any machine can automatically generate as many patents as it’s capable, even if it’s all gobbledygook). █
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Posted in Patents at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Most of them were relying on software patents all along
Summary: Even the loudest proponent of patent trolls is willing to admit that they suffer
One thing we have lost sight of amid coverage of EPO scandals and software patents at the USPTO is patent trolls. They just don’t make the headlines anymore (or barely get mentioned). One might expect Vringo to step away into the darkness by now, but no… it actually composes articles. Advice from patent troll Vringo, a nasty, malicious firm that is also Microsoft-connected, as we noted here before? Its new article (“Devising international patent litigation strategies”) comes at an interesting time.
“It’s not often that we see IAM saying the truth about this subject.”Today, IAM posts a sort of sob story for this patent troll and bemoans the demise of patent trolls in general (referring to these as “NPEs”, as usual). “We have become accustomed to NPEs looking to diversify their offerings as the climate in licensing has worsened,” IAM wrote.
It’s not often that we see IAM saying the truth about this subject. Last month we even saw it using the “T” word (troll) at least once and the editor criticised the President of the EPO. We welcome this growing level of honesty. █
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