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05.13.16

Links 13/5/2016: ZFS in Debian, RBS Chooses Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • How Typography Can Save Your Life

    Since 1984 all cigarette packages have been required to include one of four specific health warnings, with the “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING” phrase set in capital letters. In 2009, President Obama signed a new law that would require larger labels with vivid graphics, but the tobacco industry put up a legal fight, and the new labels have been in limbo ever since.

    Companies can (and do) claim that they are trying to “emphasize” the important stuff by putting it in all caps. This is actually the reason so many legal documents and contracts have sections that seem to be shouting. You can blame U.S. law for this one (specifically, the Uniform Commercial Code) which requires that certain sections of a contract be “conspicuous.”

    Usually those guidelines apply to the parts of the contract that sound something like: “COMPANY X DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT WE’LL KEEP ANY OF OUR PROMISES AND EVERYTHING IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.” Makes sense that those sections should be hard to miss.

    Except that in this case, making text “conspicuous,” also makes it harder to read. And that’s because of a historical quirk.

  • Science

    • After Nine Years Of Censorship, Canada Finally Unmuzzles Its Scientists

      It’s important to remember that Canada is not alone in having these muzzling problems. The article notes that during the administration of President George W. Bush, US government scientists complained that inconvenient data was being altered or simply suppressed. More recently, the UK government unveiled plans to forbid its scientists from lobbying for changes in their own field. Although it has now introduced some exemptions from the controversial “gagging clause”, these seem half-hearted and possibly temporary. It obviously needs to pay more attention to Justin.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • UK Russian Embassy tweets screenshot from Command & Conquer Generals

      The Russian Embassy in London has tweeted a screenshot from PC real-time strategy game Command & Conquer: Generals.

      The image, of three green army trucks, was posted with the accompanying text: “Extremists near Aleppo received several truckloads of chemical ammo.”

    • Remembering Michael Ratner, Pioneering Lawyer Who Fought for Justice from Attica to Guantánamo
    • Michael Ratner, Champion of Human Rights and the Oppressed, Dies at 72
    • Michael Ratner Is Gone; You’re Still Here
    • Michael Ratner, Pioneering Civil and Constitutional Rights Lawyer, Dies at Age 72
    • From the Archives: Michael Ratner on American Imperialism
    • Web Exclusive: Reed Brody & Michael Smith Remember Michael Ratner (Part 2)

      The trailblazing human rights attorney Michael Ratner has died at the age of 72. For over four decades, he defended, investigated and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses across the world. In this web-only interview, Reed Brody and Michael Smith pay tribute to their close friend.

    • Michael Ratner, Lawyer Who Won Rights for Guantánamo Prisoners, Dies at 72

      Michael Ratner, a fearless civil liberties lawyer who successfully challenged the United States government’s detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 72.

      The cause was complications of cancer, said his brother, Bruce, a developer and an owner of the Brooklyn Nets.

      As head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner oversaw litigation that, in effect, voided New York City’s wholesale stop-and-frisk policing tactic. The center also accused the federal government of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects and argued against the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, the waging of war in Iraq without the consent of Congress, the encouragement of right-wing rebels in Nicaragua and the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war.

      “Under his leadership, the center grew from a small but scrappy civil rights organization into one of the leading human rights organizations in the world,” David Cole, a former colleague at the center and a professor at Georgetown Law School, said in an interview this week. “He sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful.”

      Mr. Ratner, who majored in medieval English at Brandeis University in the 1960s, was radicalized by the teachings of the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the preachings of a classmate, Angela Davis, who went on to become a leading counterculture activist and American Communist and continues to teach and speak publicly.

    • U.S. Officials Ask How ISIS Got So Many Toyota Trucks

      Is Wallace saying to ISIS they better “buy American?” Is Wallace in the tank for ISIS? I don’t know.

    • Donald Trump Calls Hillary Clinton “Trigger Happy” as She Courts Neocons

      Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.

      Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.

    • State Department Fails to Vet or Monitor Military Aid to Egypt

      The U.S isn’t sufficiently vetting the sale of weapons to the repressive government of Egypt, and doesn’t know enough about how those weapons are being used – including night vision goggles and riot control weapons.

    • Obama Should Heed Hiroshima’s Survivors

      The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a beautiful, haunting place. The most iconic landmark is the “A-bomb dome,” atop a large building that was not completely destroyed. As we left the memorial, Koji Hosokawa told us to stop. He looked us in the eye and told us not to forget the victims: “People lived here. They lived here.” President Obama should meet Koji Hosokawa and other hibakusha, and hear their stories.

    • Washington’s Military Addiction

      Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. It’s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked “solutions” and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.

    • Obama Broke Pledge To Demand Syrian Opposition’s Separation From Nusra Front

      The gradual erosion of the cease-fire in Syria over the past month is the result of multiple factors shaping the conflict, but one of the underlying reasons is the Obama administration’s failure to carry out its commitment to Russia to get US-supported opposition groups to separate themselves physically from the Nusra Front – the al-Qaeda organization in Syria.

    • A Need to Rethink Mideast Wars

      The request by a U.S. Army captain to a federal court for a declaratory judgment about his constitutional duties regarding going to war is the latest reminder of the unsatisfactory situation in which the United States is engaged in military operations in multiple overseas locales without any authorization other than a couple of outdated and obsolete Congressional resolutions whose relevance is questionable at best.

    • Army Chaplain Resigns over Drone Wars

      The U.S. government’s reliance on drones to sustain perpetual war in the Mideast is meeting resistance from some assigned to carry out and justify these tactics, including a U.S. Army chaplain who resigned in protest, writes Ann Wright.

    • George Zimmerman and the Long History of Selling “Souvenirs”

      Former neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman’s decision, one he has apparently reconsidered, to sell, as he describes, “the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin” is just an another link in the long chain of America’s historical obsession with selling and owning memorabilia connected with the murder of African Americans.

    • Baghdad gov’t paralysis made capital vulnerable to massive ISIL bombings

      Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) launched a series of suicide car and truck bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 and wounding nearly 200 persons. Baghdad security had improved over the past couple of years, but the Coalition United for Reform blamed political wrangling on sectarian and party bases for the security lapses that allowed the attacks to take place. The president’s spokesman suggested that Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi might need to fire some security officials responsible for the capital’s well-being for this major lapse.

    • Do British international relations scholars question British foreign policy enough?

      Recently I came across a 2006 article that Eric Herring published in the Journal of International Studies titled ‘Remaking the mainstream: the case for activist IR scholarship’. In the article Herring argues that “British IR [International Relations] academics… produce very little primarily empirical work which documents the record of the British state in creating human misery abroad”. In addition he goes onto note “British IR academics engage in very little research exposing the deceptions and self-deceptions deployed by the British state to deny its responsibility for that human misery”.

      A rare self-critical admission from an academic about his own work and that of his profession, Herring’s argument struck me as very important and deserving of a wider audience. Currently a Professor of World Politics and Research Director in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, I asked Herring about his 2006 article and whether anything had changed ten years later.

    • Drone warfare: the cost of progress

      Hambling argues that although most people think of armed-drones as being large pilotless aircraft such as the Reaper and Predator, their development is being paralleled by much smaller devices such as the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS). The latter is suitable for use by individual soldiers, each of whom would carry small but lethal explosives with a range of several miles.

    • Former 9/11 Commissioner: ’28 Pages’ Clearly Expose Saudi Support

      Revealing serious fractures within the 9/11 Commission, a former member of that panel has called for the immediate declassification of the so-called “28 pages” that detail Saudi ties to the 2001 terrorist attack, saying they expose evidence that Saudi government officials were involved in the hijackers’ support network.

      “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” Republican John Lehman said in an interview with the Guardian published Thursday. Referring to the commission’s final report, issued in 2004, Lehman stated: “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”

      He said recent claims made by the Commission’s former chairman and vice-chair—that only one Saudi government employee was “implicated” in supporting the hijackers, and that the Obama administration should be cautious about releasing the 28 pages because they contain “raw, unvetted material” but no “smoking gun”—was “a game of semantics.”

    • ‘Saudi Arabian government officials supported September 11 hijackers,’ former 9/11 Commission member claims

      A former member of the independent commission that investigated the September 11 terror attacks has claimed that Saudi government officials supported the hijackers.

      John F Lehman, who sat on the 9/11 Commission from 2003 to 2004, said there was an “awful lot of circumstantial evidence” implicating several employees in the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

      “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he told the Guardian.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Disobedience and the New “Public Trust” Laws of Nature

      This ancient idea, applied since Roman days, is pretty straightforward: The government has an affirmative duty to protect natural resources that are shared by everybody. In the past, the doctrine has been used to prevent the selling off of lakefront shorelines or the bulldozing of rare fossil beds. With the clock ticking on the climate crisis, many legal scholars and activists have begun asking whether it’s time to put the public trust to work on climate change.

    • West Virginia Democrats Just Nominated A Climate Denying Coal Baron Billionaire For Governor

      In November, West Virginians will have two choices. A a party-switching, self-funding, brash billionaire who denies climate change and loves coal, and a lawmaker who talks about bringing jobs back to the state.

      And that’s just the gubernatorial race.

      On Tuesday night, Jim Justice easily won the West Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary and will face off against Republican state Senate President Bill Cole in the general election.

    • Obama Just Cracked Down on Pollution From Fracking

      For the first time ever, the EPA will regulate methane emissions.

    • Coal made its best case against climate change, and lost

      Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company (now bankrupt), recently faced off against environmental groups in a Minnesota court case. The case was to determine whether the State of Minnesota should continue using its exceptionally low established estimates of the ‘social cost of carbon’, or whether it should adopt higher federal estimates.

      The social cost of carbon is an estimate of how much the damages from carbon pollution cost society via climate change damages. In theory, it represents how much the price of fossil fuels should increase to reflect their true costs.

      The coal company called forth witnesses that represented the fringe 2–3% of experts who reject the consensus that humans are the primary cause of global warming, including Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen, while their opposition invited witnesses like Andrew Dessler and John Abraham who represent the 97% expert consensus.

    • Brazil prepares to roll back green laws

      Taking advantage of Brazil’s present political turbulence, as the battle to impeach President Dilma Rousseff reaches its climax, reactionary politicians are quietly rolling back environmental and indigenous protection laws in defiance of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement.

      Environmentalists say that if the bill known as PEC 65/2012, now at the Senate committee stage, is approved, it means that major infrastructure projects will be able to go ahead regardless of their impacts on biodiversity, indigenous areas, traditional communities and conservation areas.

    • What Brazil’s New President Means For Its Environmental Laws

      As the suspension of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff Thursday triggers a political reshuffling, environmentalists in Latin America’s largest ailing economy worry that powers in the new administration favor infrastructure development and financial recovery over environmental laws.

      As it is now customary in multiple countries, Brazil requires environmental assessments prior to construction projects. But the Senate is now considering a bill that would give fast-track status to projects like roads, dams or ports deemed in the national interest by the president. That would allow developers to move forward simply by saying an environmental impact study is in the works, but bar agencies from halting the project once construction begins. Moreover, there is a proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate environmental licensing altogether. These proposals aren’t new, but their political backing could get a push within Brazil’s new interim government.

    • Dilma Rousseff suspended as senate votes to impeach Brazilian president

      Speaking after the vote, Rousseff remained defiant, denying that she had committed any crime, and accusing her opponents of mounting a “coup”.

    • Brazil Senate Votes for Impeachment Trial as Rousseff Vows to Fight ‘Coup’
    • We Can Stop Searching For The Clean Energy Miracle. It’s Already Here.

      Key climate solutions have been advancing considerably faster than anyone expected just a few years ago thanks to aggressive market-based deployment efforts around the globe. These solutions include such core enabling technologies for a low-carbon world as solar, wind, efficiency, electric cars, and battery storage.

    • Beyond Climate Confusion: Why Both Energy Innovation and Deployment Matter
    • How Anti-Coal Bernie Sanders Won Coal Country

      If you know about West Virginia’s attitude toward coal, and you also know about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) attitude toward coal, then Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential primary results might have come as a bit of a surprise.

      Sanders — a staunch environmentalist pushing for more pollution regulations and a nationwide carbon tax — easily won West Virginia over his opponent Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. His win, some environmentalists said, was proof that you don’t have to be pro-coal to win in coal country.

    • BREAKING: EPA Finalizes Methane Rule For New Oil And Gas Operations
    • Six States Join TransCanada To Sue Obama Over Rejection Of The Keystone XL Pipeline

      Six states have joined with TransCanada to sue the Obama administration over its rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline permit application.

      TransCanada filed the suit in a federal court in Houston in January, alleging that the president had overstepped his constitutionally granted powers. The right to regulate trans-border commerce is reserved for Congress, the suit says.

      But the president denied the permit based on national security grounds, which is well within his rights, Center for Biological Diversity attorney Bill Snape told ThinkProgress.

      “They are basically asking the court to second-guess the president on a national interest decision,” Snape said.

    • ‘We’ll Do What It Takes To Stop It’: Kinder Morgan Pipeline in Crosshairs

      This weekend, hundreds of activists will encircle a Kinder Morgan facility in British Columbia on the ground and on the water, while demanding that Canada break free from fossil fuels, listen to science, and transition to a 100 percent renewable energy.

    • ‘Wholly Inadequate’: Environmentalists Decry EPA’s New Methane Rules

      Following President Obama’s promise to cut toxic methane leaks at oil and gas facilities, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday announced the U.S. government’s “first-ever” set of standards to reduce such emissions—but the new regulations were decried by environmentalist critics as not far-reaching enough.

    • Old species have climate survival skills

      Study of more than 600 vertebrate species shows those that have faced extreme environmental pressures in the past are now best equipped to survive climate change.

    • Agriculture, A Huge Contributor To Climate Change, Is Starting To Clean Up Its Act
    • Bay Area Voters Will Decide Next Month If They Want To Pay To Adapt To Sea Level Rise

      California has long been a leader in tackling climate change. But in June, voters in the San Francisco Bay area will have the chance to take their state’s commitment to addressing the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation a step further.

    • Palm Oil Is Burning Indonesia to the Ground

      Fire is a tool in this part of the world, and every year Indonesian farmers burn down wild forest to make room for more pulpwood, rubber plantations and palm oil. But last year was different. The fires fed on peatland raged beyond control, consuming the timber that burns so easily in the country’s dry season. Indonesia became Hell on Earth, with satellites showing the length of the country swaddled in smoke. Borneo and western Sumatra, the worst-hit areas, glowed like embers. Acid haze poured over the borders and into Malaysia and Singapore and Thailand.

  • Finance

    • Illiberal Hollywood: Unchanged or Worse One Year Later

      Like Disney — two of its seven biggest films over the last decade were directed/written/led by women (Frozen, 2013), or led by a woman (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 2015). Yet its stock is languishing, and its lineup thin of women-directed/-written/-led. Maybe its board needs a shakeup and its stock needs to tank a little further before they wake up and realize an audience composed of +51% of the population shouldn’t be slighted by its hiring practices. Same goes for the rest of the entertainment industry: we expect better, and soon.

    • TTIP leaks highlight the dangers of regulatory cooperation

      TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) has sparked a public outcry in Europe. The recent leak of many parts of TTIP by Greenpeace, allowing us for the first time to read the negotiating position of the US, confirms the most serious concerns.

    • Kill TTIP Now

      The evil of American “democratic capitalism” is total and irredeemable. TTIP gives corporations unaccountable power over governments and peoples. The corporations must be slapped down hard, fiercely regulated, and forced by threat of long prison sentences to serve the public interest, and not the incomes of the executives and shareholders who comprise the One Percent.

    • How A Giant Restaurant Conglomerate Teamed Up With Banks To Stiff Its Workers

      Workers at Darden Restaurants chains are routinely told they must accept prepaid debit cards instead of paychecks, according to a new report from the worker organization Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United. A quarter of workers surveyed said they asked to be paid some other way and were told the cards are their only option.

    • As Wealthy Surge, U.S. Poor and Middle Class Incomes Have Gone Backward

      Middle- and low-income households in the U.S. made less money in 2014 than they did in 1999 as the middle class lost ground in almost 90 percent of the country’s metropolitan areas, a new analysis by the Pew Research Center released Wednesday has found.

      The report looked at 229 of the 381 federally designated “metropolitan statistical areas” in the U.S., from Seattle to Boston, which accounted for 76 percent of the nationwide population in 2014. It found that poorer households saw their income drop from a median of $26,373 in 1999 to $23,811 in 2014, while middle-class incomes fell from $77,898 to $72,919 in that same time period.

      The erosion of the middle class came as household incomes decreased, “a reminder that the economy has yet to fully recover from the effects of the Great Recession of 2007-09,” Pew said—but more than that, it is a reflection of rising income inequality.

    • Another Way the Rich Get Richer: Their Parents Give Them Obscene Amounts of Money Nearly Tax-Free

      It’d be great if we were all self-made men, like Citizen Trump.

      Of course, his self-making, like that of many wealthy people, is based in large part on a wealthy parent giving him a ton of money. Why work for a living when you can just hang around drinking single malt until daddy dies and leaves you his money?

      Trump’s papa left an estate valued at between $100 and $300 million in 1999. A nice start for a career in real estate for Don and his siblings.

    • The London Mayoral Election: a Victory for Whom?

      During his election campaign, Khan vowed to be “the most pro-business Mayor London has ever had”; stated his opposition to the “mansion tax”, the nationalisation of banks, and has pledged to work with the Tory government to defeat Corbyn’s push for a “Robin Hood Tax” – a fee on buying stocks, shares and derivatives publicly backed by the Labour leader last summer; and in recent weeks, Khan has described the fact that there are 140-plus billionaires and 400,000 millionaires in London as “a good thing” – echoing the haughty words of Labour’s true blue Tory Peter Mandelson,

    • London Summit: US Must End Tax ‘Hypocrisy’ or Corruption Will Prevail

      If the U.S. does not end its “hypocrisy” and hold itself to the same tax transparency standards as other nations, efforts to reform offshore secrecy will fail, leaders of the UK’s overseas territories warned at the global anti-corruption summit in London on Thursday.

      The comments—from leaders of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the Isle of Man—came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told those gathered at the summit, “Corruption, writ large, is as much of an enemy [as terrorism], because it destroys nation states, as some of the extremists we are fighting or the other challenges we face.”

      The summit follows a massive leak of documents known as the Panama Papers which exposed how the world’s elite use offshore tax havens to hide their wealth, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, who hosted the conference.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Following Censorship Scandals, Obama Commits to ‘Fight Against Corruption’

      This just in from the Obama administration: corruption is bad, m’kay?

      No, seriously.

      Apparently, President Obama’s commitment to fighting corruption is so important that Secretary of State John Kerry actually felt the need to fly to London to reaffirm the United States government isn’t full of dirty rotten scoundrels who are just up to no good.

    • Parliament will fight to protect the BBC

      Today the government will publish a white paper setting out its plans for the future of the BBC. At the BAFTA awards on Sunday the director Peter Kosminsky rightly received a standing ovation. He used his acceptance speech to voice his fear that the White Paper will compromise our precious, independent, world-renowned organisation. He cautioned that the BBC was on a path to evisceration that would leave the broadcasting landscape bereft – and the output of television and radio determined solely by what lines the pockets of shareholders.

    • The BBC White Paper is a recipe for long-term decline

      The government’s proposals would be a blow to both the BBC’s freedom from government interference, and its place at the heart of British popular culture.

    • Decoding the BBC White Paper

      Apocalyptic rumours followed by a row-back and relief. It’s an age-old strategy, but what’s the reality behind the government’s BBC proposals?

    • Laura Kuenssberg Meet Barbra Streisand

      I have cropped this to protect the identity of the sender, but I assure you it is perfectly real and not at all unusual. (This is actually sexist on my part as if it were a man I would not have cropped it. I can only ask you to forgive me, I am old). I am sure Kuenssberg, being vastly more famous, gets more abuse than I do. But the fact either of us receives abuse does not mean we are above criticism. The young woman tweeting above being unpleasant is not evidence I am right about anything. Still less does it mean criticism of me should be suppressed.

      To say that abusers “hijacked” the petition criticising Kuenssberg for her terrible biased journalism, is like saying your car is hijacked by an insect landing on it.

      But the extremely cheerful news is that the furore caused by 38 Degrees removing the petition has meant that tens of millions more people have heard of the petition, than if it had gone ahead. David Cameron standing up in the House of Commons saying Kuenssberg is not biased in itself will have made a million people realise that she is. Laura Kuenssberg, meet Barbra Streisand. The “Streisand Effect”, named after the actress’ attempt to suppress photos of her mansion, is the internet phenomenon whereby attempts to suppress information lead to far more people knowing it.

    • Donald Trump’s Unsurprising Surprise

      Donald Trump’s ascension to the Republican presidential nomination was predictable, paved by years of right-wing fear-mongering and dissemination of anti-knowledge, says former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren.

    • Will Trump’s ‘Man Card’ Play to Women?

      As the presidential election of 2016 unfolds, presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump seems bent on proving a simple aphorism: No one ever went broke overestimating the misogyny of the American people.

      Trump continues to spew rhetoric seemingly designed to alienate women voters, prompting pundits and analysts to search for the strategic significance of such utterances. “Donald Trump has been playing the man card,” Kelly Dittmar of the the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics told NPR’s Asma Khalid in an interview that aired on Tuesday.

      And lately, he seems to be micro-targeting the key domestic-violence constituency. At a campaign stop in Spokane over the weekend, Trump renewed his complaint against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for playing the so-called “woman’s card.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Anti-virus pioneer John McAfee: Your phone may be snooping on you

      Computer security pioneer John McAfee pulls out his cell phone to stare at a notification on the screen.

      “It says something changed in my account, please press next,” McAfee says. “I have the best (security) habits in the world and I cannot keep my phone secure.”

      McAfee, whose name became synonymous with antivirus protection, says he’s no longer as worried about computer security. Now, he says, the danger comes from the camera and microphones we carry everywhere in our pockets, attached to our smartphones. It’s a “trivial” matter, he says, for a hacker to remotely and secretly turn on a phone’s sensors.

    • Surveillance: Who owns you and your life?

      There are many dimensions to the concept of privacy.

      A fundamental question is: Who owns you and your life?

      If you are not the owner of your person – that will open up for abominations like slavery, organ farming, and some absurd utilitarian concepts.

      But if you are the owner of your person – this must include your body as well as your mind and your faculties.

      So… if you are the owner of your person – does anybody else (a private person or a collective of persons) have the right to look into your mind, your thoughts and your beliefs? Does anybody else have the right to look into your relations to other people, your quest for knowledge or your personal habits and preferences?

    • 45,000 People Ask Netflix to Stop VPN Crackdown

      A letter signed by nearly 45,000 people calls upon Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to reverse the company’s broad VPN ban. To enforce geographical restrictions Netflix started blocking VPN users more aggressively this year, but according to OpenMedia there are better alternatives that respect the privacy of users.

    • FBI Has Sights on Larger Battle Over Encryption After Apple Feud

      After buying a software tool to access a dead terrorist’s encrypted iPhone, the FBI is exploring how to make broader use of the hack while bracing for a larger battle involving encrypted text messages, e-mails and other data, Director James Comey said.

    • While It Is Reauthorizing FISA Amendments Act, Congress Should Reform Section 704

      If it’s not that, then you would think it’d have to be the wacky interpretation, the middle option. After all, Americans are at least as likely to use Gmail as foreigners are, so to get the Gmail of Americans overseas, the NSA would presumably ask Google for assistance, and therefore trigger 703, unless there were a wacky legal interpretation to bypass that. There are things that make it clear NSA has a great deal of redundancy in its collection, even with PRISM collection, which makes it clear they do double dip, obtaining even Gmail overseas and domestically (which is why they’d have GCHQ hack Google’s overseas fiber). It’s possible, though, that the NSA conducts so much bulk collection overseas it is actually easier (or legally more permissive) to just collect US person content from bulk collections obtained overseas, thereby bypassing any domestic provider and onerous legal notice. I suppose it’s also possible that NSA now uses 703 (my proof they don’t dates to 2012 or earlier), having had to resort to playing by the rules as more providers lock up their data better in the wake of the Snowden revelations. (Note, Mieke Eoyang has an interesting FAA suggestion that would require exclusivity when NSA accesses content from US providers, thereby preventing them from stealing Google data overseas.)

    • Your Conversation On The Bus Or Train May Be Recorded

      When you ride on buses or trains in many parts of the United States, what you say could be recorded. Get on a New Jersey Transit light rail train in Hoboken or Jersey City, for example, and you might notice an inconspicuous sign that says “video and audio systems in use.”

      A lot of riders are not happy about it.

      “Yeah I don’t like that,” says Michael Dolan of Bayonne, N.J. “I don’t want conversations being picked up because it’s too Orwellian for me. It reeks of Big Brother.”

    • FBI Doesn’t Want Privacy Laws To Apply To Its Biometric Database

      The FBI has been building a massive biometric database for the last eight years. The Next Generation Identification System (NGIS) starts with millions of photos of criminals (and non-criminals) and builds from there. Palm prints, fingerprints, iris scans, tattoos and biographies are all part of the mix.

      Despite having promised to deliver a Privacy Impact Assessment of the database back in 2012, the FBI’s system went live towards the end of 2014 without one. That’s a big problem, considering the database’s blend of guilty/innocent Americans, along with its troublesome error rate. The FBI obviously hopes the false positive rate will continue to decline as tech capabilities improve, but any qualms about bogus hits have been placed on the back burner while the agency dumps every piece of data it can find into the database.

      The FBI has shown little motivation to address Americans’ privacy concerns by providing an updated Impact Assessment (the one it does have dates back to the program’s inception in 2008), but has wasted no time in alerting legislators about its own privacy concerns.

    • Was NSA surveillance used on refuge occupiers labeled as ‘domestic terrorists,’ lawyer asks

      Oregon standoff defendants want a federal judge to order prosecutors to disclose whether law enforcement intercepted their emails, phone calls or other electronic communications using national security surveillance methods.

      “Defendants are entitled to know how the government monitored their communications and activities and then to test … whether the government’s evidence is derived from that surveillance,” defense lawyer Amy Baggio wrote in a court filing Wednesday afternoon.

    • What former NSA chief Michael Hayden said after watching the new Snowden trailer

      “You’re gonna make me do this?” Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA director, said to Business Insider before watching the “Snowden” trailer for the first time.

      After about 30 seconds, Hayden looked up from the iPad screen and said: “Could we be done?”

      Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” tells the story of NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden who infamously leaked classified information about the NSA’s surveillance activities to journalists in 2013. To Hayden, the portrayal is an “alternative universe.”

    • The NSA’s stunning 9/11 failure: How big-money contractors made us more vulnerable to attack

      On September 12, 2001, Bill Binney snuck back into work at the NSA dressed like cleaning staff so he could try to help understand who had attacked the United States. A top NSA mathematician, Binney had rolled out a sophisticated metadata analysis system called ThinThread, only to have it canceled less than a month before 9/11. Top executives at the agency had decided a clunky program called Trailblazer, contracted out to the intelligence contractor giant SAIC, would be NSA’s future, not the cheaper, more effective and privacy-protective ThinThread.

      While NSA Director General Michael Hayden had sent most NSA staffers home on 9/11 and the day after —hence Binney’s disguise — the contractors were hard at work. As Binney describes in “A Good American“ — a documentary about Binney due for wider release in September — some contractors working in his unit had gotten a warning. “While I was in there trying to look at the material on my computer, the president of the contracting group that I had working on ThinThread came over to me and said that he’d just been in a contractor meeting” with a former top SAIC official who moved back to NSA, supporting Trailblazer. The contractors, it turns out, were warned not to embarrass companies like SAIC, which (the implication is) had just failed to warn about the biggest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. “Do not embarrass large companies,” the former SAIC manager, according to Binney, said to the other contractor. “You do your part, you’ll get your share, there’s plenty for everybody.” Stay quiet about the failures that led to 9/11, and you’ll be financially rewarded.

    • FBI Won’t Say Whether It Bought These Gmail Password Stealing Boxes

      Ever heard of an “app interception system”?

      So-called app interception or cloud interception systems are small physical boxes that steal social media passwords, emails, Dropbox contents and more from smartphones of passers-by, all with no interaction from the target.

      Now, in response to Freedom of Information requests from Motherboard, the FBI has refused to neither confirm nor deny whether the agency has any contracts with two of the main companies selling such devices.

      “The mere acknowledgment of whether or not the FBI has any such records in and of itself would disclose techniques, procedures, and/or guidelines that could reasonably be expected to risk of circumvention of the law. Thus, the FBI neither confirms nor denies the existence of any records,” the responses to two requests read.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Prison Telecom Monopolies ‘Evolve,’ Now Rip Off Inmate Families With Shoddy Video Services, Too

      We’ve noted a few times how interstate inmate calling service (ICS) companies have a disturbingly cozy relationship with government, striking (technically buying) monopoly deals that let them charge inmate families $14 per minute. Worse, some ICS companies like Securus Technologies have been under fire for helping the government spy on privileged inmate attorney communications, information that was only revealed after Securus was hacked late last year. Given the apathy for prison inmates and their families (“Iff’n ya don’t like high prices, don’t go to prison son!”) reform on this front has been glacial at best.

      As such, ripping off inmate families and delivering sub-par services continues unabated. As many prisons eliminate personal visits, these ICS firms have expanded revenues by pretending to offer next-generation teleconferencing services. But while slightly more economical ($10 for 20 minutes), apparently companies like Securus with no competitors, a captive audience, and no repercussions for sloppy technology haven’t quite figured out how to make this whole video chat thing work yet.

    • Amos Yee arrested again for charges of hurting religious feelings

      Amos Yee, the teenager who was found guilty for hurting the feelings of Christians and posting an obscene image online last year, was arrested by the police on Wednesday and since released on bail.

    • Amos Yee arrested for two offences

      Teenage blogger Amos Yee has been arrested again for offences under two sections of the Penal Code – a year after he was convicted of wounding the feelings of Christians and uploading an obscene image.

    • Singaporean blogger Amos Yee arrested

      Police told the newspaper that Yee had violated sections of Singapore’s Penal Code after he published a YouTube video in November last year.

    • Blogger Amos Yee arrested again

      Teen blogger Amos Yee has been arrested again, a year after he was convicted of wounding the feelings of Christians and uploading an obscene image.

    • Amos Yee arrested on Wednesday

      Teenage blogger Amos Yee, whose online comments on religion prompted police reports to be lodged against him, has been arrested, his former lawyer Alfred Dodwell confirmed. Yee was arrested on Wednesday (May 11), said Mr Dodwell, who was contacted by Yee’s mother seeking help.

    • Court Denies Immunity To Law Enforcement Officer Who Arrested Crew Sent To Clean Out His Foreclosed House

      Lieutenant Timothy Filbeck of the Butts County Sheriff’s Department found himself in a not-at-all unusual situation: his home was being foreclosed upon. Like many others who have undergone this process, Filbeck was served with a variety of notices explaining the steps of the process and warning him of the consequences of not complying.

      Filbeck moved out of the doomed home and into a family member’s. This would apparently be the last rational thing he would do in response to the foreclosure. The insurance company for the bank inspected the home four times before coming to the conclusion it had been abandoned by Filbeck. The utilties had been turned off and “cobwebs extended from wall to wall in every room.”

      When the company began preparing the house for auction, things started to get interesting. Employees spent a day cleaning the house out and removing any abandoned property inside it. At some point, Filbeck apparently decided to drop by his old house and noticed the things he had left behind were missing. He could have contacted any of the companies involved in the foreclosure proceedings. He could have done nothing after realizing that leaving a foreclosed house abandoned tends to result in the removal of property also considered abandoned. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals notes that Lieutenant Filbeck chose “none of the above.”

    • BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and team expelled from North Korea

      BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team have been expelled from North Korea after being detained over their reporting.

      Our correspondent, producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were stopped by officials on Friday as they were about to leave North Korea.

    • Myth of the Ferguson Effect Is Hard to Kill

      The myth of the widely debunked “Ferguson effect” on policing is hard to kill. FBI Director James Comey once again raised the specter of the impact of protests against police brutality on police effectiveness yesterday, when he made comments suggesting that a spike in violent crime in some cities may be correlated to officers’ fear of doing their jobs because of community hostility and the growing popularity of cop watching.

    • What’s Missing From The Conversation About Education Reform? Student Voices.

      The education law that President Obama signed at the end of last year to replace No Child Left Behind, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, has garnered widespread bipartisan support. The legislation is particularly popular among states and teachers, who hope that ESSA will allow them to play a larger role in shaping the education system.

    • How Obama’s Efforts to Free Drug War Prisoners Are Being Stymied by His Own Bureaucrats

      With the sentence commutations announced last week, President Barack Obama has now cut more than 300 harsh drug war prison sentences, besting the previous six presidents combined. Thousands more could be eligible for commutations, but bureaucratic obstacles inside the Justice Department mean the clock is likely to run out before Obama gets a chance to free them.

    • Ferguson’s New Police Chief Slams Crooked Cops in First Speech

      The Ferguson police department has been in turmoil since the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown—but a newly appointed police chief hopes to correct the deep-seeded wrongs. It starts with clearing the department of crooked cops, which is the new police chief’s goal.

    • U.S. Government Agencies Probe Sexist Hiring Practices In Hollywood

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Comcast, Wireless Industry Using ‘Diversity’ Groups To Oppose Net Neutrality, Fight Cable Set Top Box Reform

      We’ve noted several times how one of the sleaziest lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of minority or “diversity” groups to support policies that actually hurt these groups’ constituents. Such theater benefits large telecom companies by presenting the illusion of broad support for what usually are extremely anti-consumer (or anti-small business and startup) policies. And it’s not just minority groups being used in such fashion; telecom lobbyists have long used “retired seniors,” hearing impaired groups and cattle rancher associations to push bad policy.

      This kind of disinformation is pervasive, incredibly destructive, and common practice in everything from the construction industry to patent reform.

      But telecom lobbyists have long been masters at this particular game. It works something like this: an ISP like Comcast (or some other telecom-affiliated lobbying group) will help fund a group’s new event center. In exchange, these groups parrot any policy Comcast puts forth, be it opposition to net neutrality or support for the latest merger. Quid pro quo obligations are never put in writing, letting these groups claim their positions only coincidentally mirror that of their donors.

    • Germany to Rescind Piracy Liability for Open Wifi Operators

      People operating open WiFi networks in Germany have long risked being held liable for the actions of those using them. However, to the relief of thousands of citizens that position will change later this year after the country’s coalition government decided to abolish the legislation which holds operators responsible for the file-sharing activities of others.

  • DRM

    • An Open Letter to Members of the W3C Advisory Committee

      Dear member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Advisory Committee,

      You may have heard that over the past year we’ve been trying to insert legal safeguards into the Encrypted Media Extensions project at the W3C, which standardizes streaming video DRM. We’ve previously been opposed to the W3C adopting EME, because of the legal issues around DRM, and because DRM requires user agents to obey third parties, rather than their owners.

      However, we think that there’s a compromise that both DRM advocates and opponents should be able to live with.

      I’m writing today to see if you will support us in an upcoming W3C vote on the charter of the Media Extensions Group, where we will be proposing this compromise.

      This letter briefly describes briefly the problem, our proposed solution, and what you can do to help.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • US President Signs New Trade Secrets Law

      US President Barack Obama yesterday signed into law a measure aimed at strengthening trade secret protection including by allowing federal courts to hear cases involving trade secret theft.

    • At The Behest Of Big Pharma, US Threatens Colombia Over Compulsory Licensing Of Swiss Drug

      As Techdirt readers well know, Big Pharma really hates compulsory licensing of its patented drugs, where a country steps in and allows an expensive drug to be made more cheaply in order to provide wider access for its people. Such massive pressure is applied to nations contemplating this move, that even global giants like India quail. A new story is unfolding that reveals just how far companies are prepared to go in order to prevent it from happening. It concerns Colombia’s possible use of a compulsory license for the drug imatinib, sold under the name Glivec, and used to treat leukemia. Despite the fact that the company holding patents on the drug, Novartis, is Swiss, the US has started to lean heavily on Colombia in order to persuade it not to go ahead with the move.

    • Trademarks

      • Remembering Andy Grove, and maybe just the most audacious trademark ever

        There are two slogans that will be ever-identified with Andy Grove. The first is “Intel Inside”, while the second is “Only the Paranoid Survive”, the title of his 1996 book in which he emphasizes the importance of a company to avoid complacency, if it hopes to stay ahead of its competitors. The Economist magazine, in its remembrance of Andy Grove, could have chosen either slogan as best capturing Grove’s legacy. It chose to entitle the piece– “The man who put Intel inside”.

    • Copyrights

      • New UK copyright enforcement strategy: “Track down” infringers, brainwash kids

        The Intellectual Property Office has outlined harsher approaches towards copyright, trademark, and patent enforcement in the UK over the next few years.

        Rather than the “notice and takedown” approach currently used for handling copyright infringement, the UK government is mulling the idea of advancing it to “notice and trackdown,” although the details are not yet clear.

        Beyond increased enforcement, it appears that the IPO also wants to educate consumers and users of “the benefits of respecting IP rights, and do so.” The IPO wants to get ‘em young, too, by encouraging “greater respect” for copyright among children and students.

        These new strategies are outlined in a new UK government paper called “Protecting creativity, supporting innovation: IP enforcement 2020.” The document sets out how it will make “effective, proportionate and accessible enforcement of IP rights a priority for the next four years.”

      • Gene Kelly’s Widow Claims Copyright In Interviews Done By Gene Kelly, Sues Over Academic Book

        Another day, another story of copyright being used for censorship, rather than as an incentive to create. Here’s the headline: Gene Kelly’s widow is suing to stop an academic book exploring various interviews that were done over the decades with the famed actor/dancer. And here’s the lawsuit, in which Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who was married to Gene Kelly for the last seven years of his life, claims that she holds the copyright on every interview that Kelly ever did.

      • Techdirt Reading List: Copyfight: The Global Politics Of Digital Copyright Reform
      • Copyright and consequences: Google’s Andy Rubin defends Android to jury

        During hours of unrelenting cross-examination today, Andy Rubin, Google’s former Android chief, was on the stand in the Oracle v. Google trial defending how he built the mobile OS.

        Rubin’s testimony began yesterday. He’s another one of the star witnesses in this second courtroom showdown between the two software giants in which Oracle has said it will seek up to $9 billion in damages for Google’s use of certain Java APIs in the Android operating system. Since an appeals court decided that APIs can be copyrighted, Google’s only remaining defense in this case is that its use of those APIs constitutes “fair use.”

      • Stakes Are High In Oracle v. Google, But The Public Has Already Lost Big

        Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “world-class attorneys,” as Judge William Alsup noted to the jury. And while each company would prefer to spend their money elsewhere, these are businesses that can afford to spend years and untold resources in the courtroom.

        Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the overwhelming majority of developers in the computer industry, whether they’re hobbyist free software creators or even large companies. Regardless of the outcome of this fair use case, the fact that it proceeded to this stage at all casts a long legal shadow over the entire world of software development.

      • The biggest problem for the Oracle v. Google retrial: Judge Alsup’s reality distortion field

        For purely emotional reasons, this retrial appears rigged to me. Various pretrial decisions didn’t seem evenhanded to me, with Google perhaps benefiting from Judge Alsup’s frustration with the fact that his highest-profile IP ruling was nullified by three higher judges than him. Judge Alsup would, of course, benefit from a final decision in Google’s favor in the sense that his 2012 non-copyrightability blunder would then be deemed inconsequential in retrospect.

      • Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz at trial: Java was free, Android had no licensing problem

        Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz took the stand today in the second Oracle v. Google trial, testifying about how the Java language and APIs were used while he was at Sun’s helm.

        After a brief overview of his career path, Schwartz launched into a discussion about Java, a software language that Sun created and popularized. It’s critical testimony in the Oracle v. Google lawsuit, in which Oracle claims that Google’s use of Java APIs, now owned by Oracle, violates copyright law. Oracle is seeking up to $9 billion in damages.

        Was the Java language, created by Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, “free and open to use,” Google lawyer Robert Van Nest asked?

05.12.16

Large Firms Which Are Becoming Troll-Like Threaten Linux, Try to Embargo Imports

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Patents at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Software patents strike again

“Belief is no substitute for arithmetic.”

–Henry Spencer

Summary: Legal battles which primarily involve Android (and by extension Linux) are noted by the media this week because there is a request for bans (injunction)

THERE is a growing trend in downturn economies because infinite growth is impossible and monopolists strive to make up for losses by overstepping new boundaries. Companies that once produced awesome products have nothing left but patents, so they resort to patent shakedowns and try to claw in other companies’ revenue. Watch how, amid massive layoffs, IBM is attacking legitimate companies using software patents these days, earning itself labels like "the World's Biggest Patent Troll". IBM’s victim said: “IBM, a relic of once-great 20th century technology firms, has now resorted to usurping the intellectual property of companies born this millennium.” Can anyone trust IBM with OIN anymore? IBM is not a credible ally, it’s a cornered animal afraid of not employing like half a million people anymore. ‘Poor’ IBM…

Not only companies which pretend to be all about Linux do this. One such company is Creative, which we wrote about the other day. As one new article put it, “Creative rises from the dead to try and destroy Android” and to quote:

Do you remember Creative? In the early 2000s, the company had a brief period of being cool, as its Zen MP3 players were the anti-establishment alternative to the iPod. These days, the Singapore-based company mostly makes gaming headsets and computer speakers — nothing to do with smartphones, in other words. But thanks to a complaint filed against every big Android phone manufacturer, Creative has quietly declared war on Android.

The complaint is filed against a who’s-who of Android smartphones: Samsung, LG, HTC, BlackBerry, Sony, ZTE, Lenovo and Motorola. The issue at hand is music players: all the phones have ’em, and Creative has a patent it thinks is being infringed on. Specifically, all the phones are capable of “playing stored media files selected by a user from a hierarchical display.”

Android Police wrote that “Creative Wants To Ban Most Android Phones From US Over Alleged Patent Infringement” and to quote some paragraphs:

Creative is not a name you hear as often in consumer electronics these days. The Singapore-based firm is known for making audio products, including the Zen line of media players. Creative has filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging that basically every maker of Android phones is infringing its Zen patents by displaying your music. It wants them all banned, but what it really wants is money.

The complaint targets ZTE, Sony, Samsung, LG, Lenovo, Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry. At issue is how everyone shows you songs and albums in a hierarchical menu system, which Creative says it invented. It went after Apple for the same thing a decade ago and eventually got a $100 million settlement. If the ITC agrees with Creative, it could lead to a ban on infringing devices, which would be a lot of phones.

Now, remember Microsoft, a partner of Creative? There is definitely no patent ceasefire as publicly claimed some months ago. Google’s stake in Motorola’s mobile business in mind, see this new report which shows that Microsoft is still attacking Linux/Android with software patents (while claiming to “love Linux). To quote Reuters (short report): “Microsoft Corp’s patent on a way to show that a web browser is still loading content is not invalid, a U.S. appeals court said on Tuesday in the face of a challenge by Motorola Mobility and Google Inc.

“A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found in favor of Microsoft and its Klarquist Sparkman attorneys, affirming a ruling by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that refused to cancel a key part of the patent. The panel did not give reasons for its decision, which came just two days after oral arguments in the case.”

So Microsoft is still going after Motorola Mobility and Google (i.e. Android) and it says it “loves Linux”. Makes sense, right? Injunctions were sought not only by Creative (resorting to the ITC as Microsoft did nearby a decade ago in order to block an east Asian rival); it’s probably just growing strategy in America, judging by these new articles authored by law firms from Canada and Brazil [1, 2] to be pinned at IAM earlier this week.

“ITC to investigate Samsung and Sony over patent claims” says another new headline. Who benefits from this? To quote:

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has said it will launch an investigation into smartphone makers including Sony, Samsung, ZTE and LG over alleged patent infringement.

In a statement on its website, the ITC said its investigation would centre on “portable electronic devices with the capability of playing stored media files”.

Lenovo, Motorola, HTC and BlackBerry will also be targeted in the investigation.

The section 337 investigation is based on a complaint filed by Singapore-based Creative Technology and Creative Labs, based in Milpitas, California, in March.

Creative used to be OK in the 1990s, but it’s now notorious for its poor treatment of Linux (there are Microsoft and Intel connections). In addition to this controversial move from Creative we have also just learned about Ericsson's own patent troll that is still active in the UK and will apparently stay in the UK Patents Court rather than the Competition Appeal Tribunal, based on yesterday’s report which says: “For anyone keeping tabs, the mammoth patent dispute in Unwired Planet v Huawei & Samsung continues to thunder along at pace. The latest decision from the Patents Court in the saga addressed the question as to whether the antitrust issues – arguably the juiciest part of the case – could be transferred to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT)? At the end of April, Mr Justice Birss answered that question, deciding that the issues should remain in the Chancery Division [2016] EWHC 958 (Pat).”

We remain committed to meticulous tracking of these threats to Free software, including Android, as software patents are inherently not compatible with Free software such as Linux. When such patents start to overstep the European border we just know that this disease keeps spreading rather than contained (e.g. owing to Alice in the US). There is so much at stake. █

Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) Statistics and New Chief Judge Who is Really a Scientist

Posted in America, Patents at 10:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

PTAB helps eliminate many software patents by properly reassessing them

David Ruschke
David Ruschke’s ‘official’ photo

Summary: The US board which has been responsible for the elimination of many software patents (patent lawyers dub it “patent death squad”) is to be boosted by Dr. David Ruschke, who is more than just a judge

NOWADAYS, more so than before, the EPO and USPTO both rush to approve applications under pressure from above. The examiners are forced into that; prior art search is increasingly just a ‘luxury’ (growing workload) and it shows. How about reviewing bogus patents upon request? Well, that would diminish the number of patents Battistelli et al can brag about, so such divisions (like the Boards of Appeal in Europe) are understaffed and marginalised, especially in recent years. At the EPO, based on some recent reports, the boards now suffer from a massive backlog and cannot eliminate bogus patents quickly enough (more on that another day, maybe tomorrow). It is also worth noting that the judge whom Battistelli suspended is very technical, unlike Battistelli himself (maybe a cause for envy).

“At the EPO, based on some recent reports, the boards now suffer from a massive backlog and cannot eliminate bogus patents quickly enough (more on that another day, maybe tomorrow).”Earlier this week we found a lot of coverage about PTAB, which is in some sense (not in the whole sense) similar to Europe’s boards in at least some of the undertaken functions. MIP wrote: “A new USPTO study reveals the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has granted 5% of the motions to amend that it has had a chance to review and is on track to have about 50 motions filed this year, consistent with the level filed in 2013 and 2015″ (PTAB is only a few years old itself).

IAM said: “One of the criticisms leveled at the post-issuance reviews procedures is that while the USPTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board has been only too happy to invalidate patents in a review, patent owners are given little opportunity to amend the claims under threat.”

WIPR put the figure (percentage) in the headline and said: “The US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has granted 5% of motions to amend claims since its inception nearly four years ago, new figures have revealed.

“In data published by the PTAB, the board said it has granted, or granted-in-part, six requests to amend claims in 118 trials.

“The figures, published yesterday, May 9, were in response to concerns about the lack of accepted motions to amend claims in all of the PTAB’s proceedings.”

Claim amendments typically help the applicant defend a controversial patent (or bogus patent), so the lower this ratio, the better the patent quality maintained by the board/s.

Patently-O pushed out an article by Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Associate Professor of Law at the Texas A&M University School of Law. Vishnubhakat wrote: “This action is itself a milestone, as the USPTO has designated only three other opinions as precedential over the last 22 months.”

“Claim amendments typically help the applicant defend a controversial patent (or bogus patent), so the lower this ratio, the better the patent quality maintained by the board/s.”Going back to MIP, it turns out there is a new PTAB chief judge. To quote: “The USPTO has announced a new chief judge of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, after 10 months of Nathan Kelley serving as acting chief judge” (just 10 months). Ruschke was mentioned by a controversial patents-centric site where it says he “holds a PhD in organometallic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in chemistry from the University of Minnesota.” Well, at least he’s a scientist, for a change. He has background in “medical devices” or something along those lines. Here is the press release about this appointment and other coverage (mostly covered by technical and lawyer’s news sites). █

Raising Barriers to UPC Cancellation and Withdrawal

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Self-fulfilling prophecies (or fantasies) and promises of jobs

Trojan horse
The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is an enemy of Europe and a friend of patent lawyers

Summary: The Unified Patent Court, the latest name of an old (repeatedly rejected) Trojan horse, legitimised or imposed upon Europe by promising to hire people (calling for job applications) before there is any approval at all for the scheme

THE EPO‘s shameless promotion of the UPC aside, some months ago we complained about a microcosm of lawyers (especially in the UK) working to create UPC venues before it’s even authorised. They try to elevate exit barriers, putting the carriage before the horses basically.

Bristows with its relentless UPC advocacy is at again in three different platforms [1, 2, 3], not just its own. This whole debate might prove to be irrelevant after British/EU referendum (Brexit) which can bin the whole thing, but the UPC ‘conspiracy’ is recruiting for something which does not even exist yet and was not authorised! (or ratified)

These people make a joke and a mockery of democracy. They decided they know what’s good for Europe (actually, for themselves) and they try to ram this Trojan horse through the gates of the EU authorities without any public debate whatsoever. They also pretend to speak on behalf of SMEs, in effect stealing their voices to misrepresent them and advance the agenda of large corporations (often not European at all). “Applications must be submitted by 4 July 2016,” says the announcement. These are job applications. But wait, there’s not even a UPC yet! There’s no approval at all and already they pretend they can recruit people? What a charade!

Bristows LLP (or “Bristows UPC” as it calls itself for marketing purposes in its blog) doesn’t care about the rule of law and tries to bypass democracy along with other law firms. We need to tell them to stop this. Not only Bristows is doing this, but it’s Bristows that keeps promoting it more than any other firm, both in its blog and in IP Kat. Yesterday’s IP Kat roundup said: “Merpel spots an important letter from the President of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE). The letter encourages the UPC Preparatory Committee to take its time to ensure that the UPC Code of Conduct is “fully fit for purpose”. Merpel hopes that the issues raised are dealt with before UPC opens its doors.”

But again, why are they talking about the UPC as though it’s already here and definitely unstoppable? We were told the same thing about ACTA, the TPP, TTIP and so on. Right here is an infamous symptom of the rogue elements in EU bureaucracy, where people exploit unity and transition to interject their self-serving agenda without public consultation in even a single member state. █

Italian Television to Cover EPO Abuses, Bringing the Outrage to the Mainstream in Another Country

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The above clip (click to play) is a teaser of a programme which will air shortly, criticising abuses and unaccountability at the EPO

THE EPO is experiencing unprecedented unrest and “Upcoming coverage,” said one person the other day (addressing several people including myself), shall be about “unaccountable EPO and patents on Italian TV. Next Sunday.” This coverage will be in Italian, but hopefully some time thereafter there will be translations, such as subtitled versions, added days or weeks later (there are usually people out there willing to produce these).

As the clip above shows, Battistelli will be among the parties criticised. Abuses will be covered and speaking of which, this new document [PDF] (perhaps work in progress) turned up online (as PDF, not as HTML, which we have produced a version of) and Merpel gave some context as follows:

Investigation Unit

One of the most controversial aspects of the current functioning of the EPO is the “Investigation Unit” which conducts internal investigations (sometimes also using external investigation companies such as Control Risks) into staff conduct under “Circular 342″, which came into effect in January 2013. During such investigations, failure to cooperate is itself a disciplinary offence (so no right to silence), and no legal representation is permitted. Here at least there is some progress – the President has started a review of the functioning of the Investigation Unit, and SUEPO has provided its comments. Merpel will cast her last piece of hope that this review may lead to a disciplinary procedure that does not offend basic principles of due process.

“In its communique of its meeting in October 2015, the Administrative Council saw no reason to doubt that the general principles of law were correctly applied throughout the investigative and disciplinary procedure against a member of the Boards of Appeal.”
      –Anonymous“SUEPO’s document on the Investigation Guidelines,” wrote one commenter, “illustrates the pressure exercised on EPO staff including members of the Boards of Appeal. However, there seems to be little hope that the Administrative Council is willing to change the situation. In its communique of its meeting in October 2015, the Administrative Council saw no reason to doubt that the general principles of law were correctly applied throughout the investigative and disciplinary procedure against a member of the Boards of Appeal. In its March meeting, the Council could not agree on a resolution insisting on an external review of the actions taken against staff representatives based on the results of the Investigation Guidelines and exceeding even the proposals of the Disciplinary Committee. Instead, the Council eroded the personal independence of Board members by allowing suspension as a preliminary measure for a period of 2 years and even longer, i.e. for an essential part of the appointment period. This amounts to a temporary removal from office which makes Article 23 of the Convention meaningless, ignoring the exclusive competence of the Enlarged Board of Appeal to propose removal from office.”

We are still eager to receive and publish material regarding yesterday’s protest, which has so far yielded no press coverage that we can find (in English at least). Press coverage can expand the scope of concern; in Bavarian, for instance, this led to parliamentarian interventions last month. █

Links 12/5/2016: Qt Creator 4.0.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Apple’s actual role in podcasting: be careful what you wish for

    This New York Times article gets a lot wrong, and both podcast listeners and podcast producers should be clear on Apple’s actual role in podcasting today and what, exactly, big producers are asking for.

    Podcasts work nothing like the App Store, and we’re all better off making sure they never head down that road.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Russians Remember Their WWII Vets

      The West’s propaganda war against Russia filters events there through a prism of cynicism and contempt, but that misses the human component of a country still remembering the deep personal scars of World War II, as Gilbert Doctorow reflects.

    • Amid Embrace of Endless War, Report Shows Epic US Failure to Assist Refugees

      The U.S. is failing to fulfill its “modest pledge” to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees by September 2016, according to the most recent government figures and a damning new report (pdf) from Human Rights First, prompting sharp critique from observers.

    • Al-Zawahiri Supports Syrian al-Qaeda, calls for more global Volunteers

      Some American analysts, partisans of the hard line fundamentalist factions in Syria, saw al-Zawahiri’s instruction to al-Qaeda to let the people choose their leader as a positive. Why haven’t they learned yet that these seedy terrorist organizations play mind games with people, including being passive aggressive? The Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria already holds territory, and it has forcibly converted and stolen from members of religious minorities such as the Druze. Al-Zawahiri’s speech is dishonest tradecraft, not a sign of a mellower al-Qaeda. The Nusra Front controls vast swathes of Syrian territory. My guess is that they won’t relinquish an inch of it as a result of al-Zawahiri’s speech.

    • Ten Ways Israel is Just Like Saudi Arabia

      Israel and Saudi Arabia have been supporting extremist groups in Syria like Al Nusra, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate, as they both are more concerned with overthrowing Assad (who is aligned with Iran) than defeating the Islamic State. The Saudis have sent weapons and money to Al Nusra; Israel has been treating wounded Al Nusra fighters in Israeli hospitals and then sending them back to battle the Syrian army. Israel also killed Lebanese-Iranian advisers who were assisting Assad’s government in fighting against Al Nusra.

    • White House Hiroshima Visit Puts Spotlight on Nuclear Hypocrisy

      Thompson wrote:

      President Obama will end his Presidency pretty much the same way he began it: with a call to the world to rid itself of nuclear arms—this time at Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic weapon used in war.

      Too bad he did so little to reach that goal during the intervening seven years. Instead of bequeathing a smarter nuclear arsenal to his successor, he has launched the most-costly upgrade to the U.S. nuclear arsenal ever.

      [...]

      Kevin Martin, the president of Peace Action, added, “At this point, it’s not enough to repeat the words Obama has said several times since his historic Prague speech calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. Obama must announce actions he will take in the his remaining months as president that will actually bring the world closer to being free of nuclear weapons.”

    • ‘Allahu Akbar’ cry at terror drill was scripted, police admit

      Greater Manchester police say phrase was not introduced by person playing role of terrorist at Trafford Centre

    • To the Next U.S. President, the Unlimited Power to Spy, Imprison and Kill

      Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive and presidents were obliged to go to Congress, tell lies and ask permission to wage wars? Remember when torture, spying and indefinite imprisonment were illicit, when issuing signing statements to rewrite laws was rare, and when yelling “state secrets” to shut down legal cases was considered abusive?

      For over two centuries, it would have been an outrage for the president to hold a meeting every Tuesday for the sole purpose of going through a list of names and picking out which men, women and children should be killed.

      Those times are gone. By mutual consent of those in power in Washington, D.C., all such resistance and outrage is now firmly in the past. It would now be unfair and violate established bipartisan precedent to deny the powers of unlimited spying, imprisonment and killing to the next president of the United States.

      The fact that this new reality is so little-known is largely a symptom of partisanship, as most Democrats still haven’t allowed themselves to hear about the kill list. But the widespread ignorance is also a function of media, of what’s reported, what’s editorialized, what’s asked about in campaign debates and what isn’t.

    • Obama Should Heed Hiroshima’s Survivors

      The White House announced this week that President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic-bomb attack. He will be the first sitting president to go there, and only the second president ever, after former President Jimmy Carter visited in 1984. Obama’s pilgrimage to Hiroshima, where 140,000 people were killed and another 100,000 seriously injured on Aug. 6, 1945, will not be accompanied by a formal apology. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the trip was to highlight Obama’s “continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet the Obama administration also recently revealed its 30-year, $1 trillion plan to modernize the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal.

    • Human Rights Watch Claims Turkish Border Guards Are Killing Syrian Refugees

      Syrian refugees, seeking asylum in Turkey, are being killed and or wounded by border guards, according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch.

      “During March and April 2016, Turkish border guards used violence against Syrian asylum seekers and smugglers, killing five people, including a child, and seriously injuring 14 others, according to victims, witnesses, and Syrian locals interviewed by Human Rights Watch,” the report reads. “Turkey’s Foreign Affairs Ministry maintains the country has an “open-door policy” for Syrian refugees, despite building a new border wall.”

    • Engaged In Good Causes: Longtime War Criminal Inexplicably, Unconscionably Gets Not Jail Sentence But Award (WTF?)

      Having blithely orchestrated several genocides and the deaths of millions of brown-skinned innocents in the specious, imperial name of the right to bomb neutral countries in order to save them and maybe us – a right that America, despite our ongoing carnage, still claims – Henry Kissinger, our best and brightest war criminal, on Monday won the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Defense Department’s highest honor for private citizens. In a stomach-roiling spectacle at the Pentagon wherein one discordantly unfit Nobel Peace Prize winner honors another, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called the former Secretary of State’s murderous service “unique in the annals of American diplomacy.” Kissinger, Carter said, “demonstrated how serious thinking and perspective can deliver solutions to seemingly intractable problems.”

    • Taking Responsibility for War

      On May 10, 92-year-old Henry Kissinger was given the Distinguished Public Service Award by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. It does little good to be outraged by this news, in that Kissinger may have the blood of (at least) hundreds of thousands of dead people on his hands, but that seems to bother very few people. Let us at least not take the time to bother being surprised.

      Sure, we can mention former Secretary of State Kissinger, we can seriously debate how many Cambodians, Chileans, and East Timorese he is responsible for killing. But at the end of it all, Kissinger is an old man with a funny accent and even seemingly bold and political (at least when going up against George W. Bush) people such as comedian Stephen Colbert feel comfortable palling around with him. If the man who so memorably trashed a sitting president to his face finds it okay to make cute with Kissinger, yeah, let’s give the man the finest civilian honor (and, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize. But jokes about that have been exhausted for decades).

    • Obama Broke Pledge to Demand Syrian Opposition’s Separation From Nusra Front

      The gradual erosion of the cease-fire in Syria over the past month is the result of multiple factors shaping the conflict, but one of the underlying reasons is the Obama administration’s failure to carry out its commitment to Russia to get US-supported opposition groups to separate themselves physically from the Nusra Front — the al-Qaeda organization in Syria.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Chelsea Manning honored with award, cash prize for WikiLeaks disclosures

      Chelsea Manning, the former Army soldier convicted of the biggest leak of classified documents in U.S. history, was honored in absentia Monday at a London ceremony for her role in providing Wikileaks with secret documents concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      Manning, 35, was named the winner of this year’s Blueprint Enduring Impact Whistleblowing Prize during an event hosted by Blueprint for Free Speech, a Melbourne-based nonprofit, at the London offices of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

    • US Court System Just Another Extension Of The Government’s Ongoing Opacity Project

      The same law that gives the government warrantless access to citizens’ electronic communications — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — also gives the government the privilege of preventing service providers from disclosing any information about these requests to targeted users. This blanket opacity is a problem for several reasons (First and Fourth Amendment concerns), not the least of which is no one — not even Congressional oversight — can provide an accurate accounting of these requests and their accompanying gag orders.

    • A Perfect Storm

      As if all this wasn’t enough bad news for Mrs. Clinton in one week, the FBI learned last week from the convicted international hacker, who calls himself Guccifer, that he knows how the Russians came to possess Mrs. Clinton’s emails; and it is because she stored, received and sent them from her personal, secret, non-secure server.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • It’s not just Alberta: Warming-fueled fires are increasing

      Alberta’s unusually early and large fire is just the latest of many gargantuan fires on an Earth that’s grown hotter with more extreme weather.

      Earlier this year, large wildfires hit spots on opposite ends of the world — Tasmania and Oklahoma-Kansas. Last year, Alaska and California pushed the U.S. to a record 10 million acres burned. Massive fires hit Siberia, Mongolia and China last year and Brazil’s fire season has increased by a month over the past three decades.

    • Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity

      On Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country’s solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%.

    • Renewable Windfall as Germany’s Green Energy Meets 90 Percent of Demand

      Germany, the fourth-largest economy in the world and a leader in renewable energy, produced so much energy this weekend from its solar, wind, hydro, and biomass plants that power prices went into negative territory for several hours. Consumers were being paid to use energy.

      According to Quartz, around 1 pm on Sunday, May 8—a particularly “sunny and windy day”—the plants supplied a combined 55 gigawatts, or 87 percent, of the 63 gigawatts being consumed.

    • The Plan To Revive Big Coal’s Fortunes Isn’t Panning Out

      Six years ago, coal companies like Arch Coal, Ambre Energy, and Peabody Energy had an idea. Domestic demand for coal was slumping, but they saw lifelines between the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, where coal was plentiful and relatively cheap to mine, and Asian markets, where economic growth was expected to drive a 40 percent increase in global coal consumption was by 2030.

      “Coal’s best days are ahead,” Peabody Energy said in 2010. China’s transition from a net-exporter to a net-importer of coal had recently sent prices rocketing, and energy companies were eager to turn profits in a rapidly expanding overseas market. Two years earlier, just 1 percent of the Powder River Basin’s coal production was exported. But if a network of railroads could carry more coal from Montana and Wyoming to the deep water ports of the Pacific Northwest — the cheapest, most direct line to Asia — coal companies could ship the coal to ballooning markets elsewhere.

    • Searing heat may spark climate exodus

      New research predicts that, by mid-century, summer temperatures will stay above 30°C at night and could rise to 46°C during the day. By the end of the century, maximum temperatures could reach 50°C, and this could happen more often. Instead of 16 days of extreme heat, there could be 80 days.

    • 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead

      T. Boone Pickens, the prominent billionaire investor who made his fortune on fossil fuels…

    • Scientists Just Pinpointed Another Example Of Fracking’s Environmental Impact

      A dumping site for fracking fluids long suspected to be leaching into Wolf Creek, a West Virginia waterway with ties to a county’s water supply, has indeed contaminated the creek with multiple chemicals, a new U.S. Geological Survey study has found.

      The “study demonstrates definitively that the stream is being impacted by [unconventional oil and gas extraction] wastewaters,” Denise Akob, USGS scientist and lead author of the study, told ThinkProgress. Unconventional oil and gas extraction refers to the many processes that involve hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.

      For this study, scientists in 2014 collected water and sediment samples upstream and downstream from Danny E. Webb Construction Inc.’s disposal site, which is still operational. Samples were then analyzed for a series of chemical markers that are known to be associated with fracking. “We were able to see some elements that are known to be associated with [unconventional oil and gas] wastewaters, including barium, bromide, calcium, chloride, sodium, lithium, and strontium,” Akob said.

    • Naomi Klein: Radical Solutions Only Proper Response to ‘Unyielding Science-Based Deadline’

      Climate crisis, argues author and activist, ‘might just be the catalyst we need to knit together the great many powerful movements bound together by the inherent worth and value of all people.’

    • ‘Death sentence’: Climate crisis driving global conflict, poverty & racism – Naomi Klein

      Climate change is driving inequality, conflict and racism as self-serving individuals and actors undercut the potential for a collective response to the crisis, journalist and author Naomi Klein has said.

      The Canadian, who is an avid environmental and political campaigner, made the observation at a memorial lecture dedicated to the late Palestinian political activist and academic Edward Said.

    • The Fort McMurray Fire: ‘Absolutely a Harbinger of Things to Come’

      The devastating wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada appears to be losing its intensity, as weather conditions improve for firefighters and initial assessments of staggering damage trickle in.

      Meanwhile, awareness of the massive fire’s significance in the context of climate change continues to spread.

      “Alberta’s unusually early and large fire is just the latest of many gargantuan fires on an Earth that’s grown hotter with more extreme weather,” the Associated Press wrote on Wednesday.

  • Finance

    • Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow Today as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal is Installed

      In 2002, Brazil’s left-of-center Workers Party (PT) ascended to the presidency when Lula da Silva won in a landslide over the candidate of the center-right party PSDB (throughout 2002, “markets” were indignant at the mere prospect of PT’s victory). The PT remained in power when Lula, in 2006, was re-elected in another landslide against a different PSDB candidate. PT’s enemies thought they had their chance to get rid of PT in 2010, when Lula was barred by term limits from running again, but their hopes were crushed when Lula’s handpicked successor, the previously unknown Dilma Rousseff, won by 12 points over the same PSDB candidate who lost to Lula in 2002. In 2014, PT’s enemies poured huge amounts of money and resources into defeating her, believing she was vulnerable and that they had finally found a star PSDB candidate, but they lost again, this time narrowly, as Dilma was re-elected with 54 million votes.

      In sum, PT has won four straight national elections – the last one occurring just 18 months ago. Its opponents have vigorously tried – and failed – to defeat them at the ballot box, largely due to PT’s support among Brazil’s poor and working classes.

      So if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation’s largest and most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with democracy altogether – after all, it keeps empowering candidates and policies you dislike – by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own, yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.

    • The Hypocrisy Of Trump’s Refusal To Release His Tax Returns

      In an interview with the Associated Press, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump revealed that he will not release any of his tax returns before election day.

      Previously, Trump blamed an ongoing audit for his failure to release returns, an excuse that was questioned by tax experts. As recently as Sunday, Trump pledged to release the returns “as fast as the auditors finish.” Last October, Trump said he would release his tax returns once Hillary Clinton released her emails. Now, Trump adds that he’s not planning to release them because “there’s nothing to learn from them” and voters aren’t interested in the information.

    • Top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn in 2015 – more than some nations

      Top earners, Kenneth Griffin and James Simons, made $1.7bn each despite ‘hedge fund killing field’ on Wall Street where many companies lost billions or closed

    • Hedge Fund Managers Are Winning: 2015 Another Year of ‘Outrageous Compensation’

      2015 was a “another year of outrageous hedge fund compensation,” said Robert Weissman, president of advocacy organization Public Citizen.

      Sparking his statement is the latest Rich List published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which reveals that the industry’s top 25 managers made an average of $517.6 million, and had combined earnings of $12.94 billion.

      The men at the top five spots all earned over $1 billion.

    • BinC Watch: Donald Trump Has Now Changed His Mind on the Minimum Wage Three Times In Three Days

      So what does Trump really think about the minimum wage? There’s no telling. Maybe he really has changed his mind over and over. Maybe he didn’t realize there were separate state and federal minimum wages until someone clued him in on May 8. But his tweet today sure makes it clear that he wants an increase in the federal minimum wage. He even capitalized it to make sure we got the point. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before he claims he never said this and he really wants the states to decide after all?

    • Elizabeth Warren Mocks Trump on Twitter, and Goads Him Into Striking Back

      Warren also called out Trump University, the real estate magnate’s eponymous “university” that is currently under investigation for allegedly scamming its students, along with his position on Wall Street regulation.

    • Sanders, Sweden and Socialism

      As the 21st century moves forward facing ever increasingly disastrous economic, ecological and military crises, the momentum will increase toward a truly global movement that will permit the billions of working class people to move together in a coordinated fashion. The ruling classes might have the money but we have the numbers. Don’t ever forget that.

    • Why on earth would socialists support the neoliberal, undemocratic EU?

      The EU is a deeply undemocratic institution enforcing austerity and privatisation on its member states. In what strange world is this a progressive institution?

    • The vicious spiral of economic inequality and financial crises

      There is compelling evidence that economic inequality is both a result of, and contributor to, economic crises. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate on economic inequality.

    • Trump Is Already Working On A Rewrite Of His Tax Plan

      And while Trump’s original plan included massive giveaways to the rich and not a whole lot for everyone else, the rewrite looks like it will keep most relief for the wealthy while reducing it for the poor.

    • The capitalism tribunal

      On the aftermath of the leaks related to the Panama Papers and the secretive TTIP negotiations, an important dialogue is maturing in Europe, with respect to the past, the present and the future economy.

      Many voices are now openly challenge the Union’s neoliberal model, as they witness capitalism’s great unkept promise to make life better for everyone. The current political dynamic is fuelled by a sense that activities stemming of the current mainstream economic system, pose a direct threat to the survival of our and other species.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • A columnist’s work is never done

      For decades, columnists helped form new communities through their journalism. But now, they’re dying out.

    • Trump Picks White Supremacist Leader as California Delegate, Then Blames Selection on Database Error

      Donald Trump’s campaign is facing criticism after it named a prominent white supremacist leader to its list of delegates in California. William Johnson is the head of the American Freedom Party, which has openly backed the creation of “a separate white ethnostate” and the deportation of almost all nonwhite citizens from the United States. Johnson’s name appeared on a list of delegates published by California’s secretary of state on Monday. After Mother Jones broke the story on Tuesday, the Trump campaign blamed Johnson’s selection on a “database error.” But correspondence published by Mother Jones shows the Trump campaign was in touch with Johnson as recently as Monday.

    • To Counter Trump and Far-Right, Labor Leaders call for ‘Global New Deal’

      Notably, Tuesday’s panel placed “a sizable share of the blame” on center-left parties’ embrace of neo-liberalism, HuffPo reports, which has “diminished the public’s faith in the ability of labor unions and progressive politics to deliver for them—paving the way for far-right populism.”

    • Donald Trump’s Scary, 12-Point Legal Agenda

      Whatever additional consequences the upcoming presidential election may have, the vote will determine the future of the Supreme Court. You probably heard this admonition in 2008 and again in 2012, but this time you really should pay attention.

      In fact, with the death of Antonin Scalia in February and the continuing stalemate in the Senate over the nomination of Merrick Garland—a centrist appellate judge—to succeed him, the court’s future is already up for grabs. Assuming that Garland’s nomination dies on the vine, the next president may get to appoint no less than four members of the nation’s most powerful judicial body.

      Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steven Breyer and Anthony Kennedy will all be 78 or older by August. Ginsburg, the eldest of the trio, will turn 84 next March.

    • John McCain: Arizona’s sellout senator is the godfather of dark money

      U.S. Sen. John McCain wrote the rules on dark money when he sponsored campaign finance reform, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act. Now he’s using millions of dollars in dark money in a bid to hold on to his tightly contested Arizona seat.

      An investigation into the various PACs supporting McCain brought to light some stunning conclusions.

      First, the vast majority of McCain campaign donations are not from the Arizonans he represents but from people and corporations outside of Arizona with a vested interest in McCain’s continued support and votes for their interests.

    • FACT CHECK: Did Kelli Ward want to ban the NSA from operating in Arizona?

      Several attack ads have surfaced in the three-way race for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s seat ahead of the Aug. 30 primary.

    • Raining Rockets

      Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. said on CNN, “We have thousands of rockets raining down on our citizens.” In fact, we hear over and over again, “rockets are raining” down on Israel. It makes a strong impression.

      [...]

      Not the image of “rockets raining” that Israel wants. An average of four drops per month hardly qualifies as a rain. When I look out on my front drive and see four drops, I hardly expect to read in the paper that we had a rainy day. If there are not enough drops to wet the street or water my hedges, I don’t expect my neighbor to say, “Wow! What a rainy day.”

    • Democratic Convention Hosted by Republican Donors, Anti-Obamacare Lobbyists

      The Democratic Party’s 2012 platform pledged to “curb the influence of lobbyists and special interests.” But the 2016 convention in Philadelphia will be officially hosted by lobbyists and corporate executives, a number of whom are actively working to undermine progressive policies achieved by President Barack Obama, including health care reform and net neutrality.

      Some of the members of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Host Committee, whose job is to organize the logistics and events for the convention, are hardly even Democratic Party stalwarts, given that many have donated and raised thousands of dollars for Republican presidential and congressional candidates this cycle.

    • Sanders Wins West Virginia, Keeping the Pressure on Clinton

      Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia Democratic primary on Tuesday, once again demonstrating that his campaign retains ardent support despite Hillary Clinton’s significant lead in the delegate count.

    • Bernie Takes West Virginia

      West Virginia really likes Bernie Sanders. He swept the Democratic primary yesterday, winning 51.4 percent to Clinton’s 36 percent, even in the face of the mainstream media essentially declaring the race over.

      Speaking in Salem, Ore., Sanders described the key to his victory: “West Virginia is a working-class state, and like many other states in this country, including Oregon, working people are hurting. And what the people of West Virginia said tonight, and I believe the people of Oregon will say next week, is that we need an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”

    • Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill

      Hillary Clinton wants the American voters to be very afraid of Donald Trump, but there is reason to fear as well what a neoconservative/neoliberal Clinton presidency would mean for the world, writes Robert Parry.

    • WaPo Columnist Urges Paul Ryan to Boast of Positions He Doesn’t Hold

      Marcus used her Washington Post column today (5/11/16) to present the speech that House Speaker Paul Ryan should give to Republicans in order to disassociate himself from Donald Trump. She has Paul Ryan being somewhat less than honest.

    • Washington Post Squeezes Four Anti-Sanders Stories Out of One Tax Study Over Seven Hours

      It’s not news that the Washington Post’s editorial board has been lobbying against Sen. Bernie Sanders since the beginning of his improbable presidential campaign. Sometimes this editorial ethos seems to extend to other parts of the paper, as it did in March, when the Post managed to run 16 negative stories about Sanders in 16 hours (FAIR.org, 3/8/16).

    • ‘Terrifying’ New National Poll Shows Trump and Clinton Statistically Tied

      The Reuters/Ipsos poll did not present a match-up between Bernie Sanders and Trump, but recent surveys, including two released Tuesday, show the Vermont senator holding a more secure national lead against the former reality TV star and real estate mogul, and also doing better than Clinton against Trump in major swing states.

    • True Life Adventures Of A Democratic Superdelegate

      In every election since 1984, the Democratic Party has used a semi-private, semi-public system to choose its presidential nominee — electing more than three-quarters of delegates through open state conventions, but giving a few hundred Democratic elected officials, Democratic National Committee members, and party elites an automatic vote. Unlike the pledged delegates, who must cast their vote for whichever candidate won their state or district, these so-called superdelegates can back whomever they choose.

    • Sanders, Clinton, and the Not-So-Simple Case of West Virginia

      Sanders’s broader message has to do with what he calls the corruption of the political system.

    • Bernie Sanders Could Still Win the Democratic Nomination — No, Seriously

      Last night on CNN, while discussing Bernie Sanders’ landslide victory over Hillary Clinton in West Virginia — which followed a 5-point Sanders win in Indiana last week — Michael Smerconish said that “Democratic super-delegates might have to rethink” their support of Hillary Clinton given how dramatically better Sanders fares in head-to-head match-ups against Donald Trump.

      After Clinton’s Indiana loss, John King had told CNN viewers that “if Sanders were to win nine out of ten of the remaining contests, there’s no doubt that some of the super-delegates would panic. There’s no doubt some of them would switch to Sanders. What he has to do is win the bulk of the remaining contests. Would that send jitters, if not panic, through the Democratic Party? Yes. Yes it would.”

    • What’s the Best Move Bernie Sanders Can Make Right Now to Strengthen the Progressive Movement?

      What should Bernie do? That seems to be the question of the month. Permit me to weigh in.

      Here’s what we know at this point in the campaign. For Sanders to have any chance of winning the support of superdelegates, he must arrive at the convention with more elected delegates than Hillary. To do that, he needs to win about 65 percent of all elected delegates in the remaining electoral contests.

      On March 26, Bernie won three states—Washington, Alaska and Hawaii—by huge margins. They were all caucus states. He has never won a primary in a state where only Democrats are allowed to vote. Five of the remaining 10 are in states with closed primaries. So his chances are infinitesimal. Is this an argument for him to drop out? No.

    • Networks, Major Papers Skip State Department Censorship of Fox News Q&A Video [Ed: right wing site]

      The same only-Fox-cares pattern happened after Fox diplomatic correspondent James Rosen reported that the State Department edited out an on-camera admission by Psaki in 2013 that it was necessary for the Obama administration to lie to reporters about negotating with Iran, since “diplomacy requires privacy to progress.”

    • Questionable Assumptions Behind Critiques of Sanders’ Economic Plan

      It’s “Neoliberals Gang Up on Bernie Sanders Week” along the corridor of Washington establishment think-tanks that include the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute and a Brookings offspring, the Tax Policy Center. Out of this corridor came not one, but two reports this week that give negative reviews to Sanders’ health care and tax plans.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Turkish President Erdogan Now Demands Injunction Against German Media Boss For Saying He Laughed At Anti-Erdogan Poem

      Every time you think that the thin-skinned, insecure freakouts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can’t get any more crazy, they do. If you don’t recall, Erdogan has a notrious thin skin, and a long history of censorship of views he doesn’t like. But since becoming President, this has gone into overdrive, with him filing over 1800 cases against people in Turkey for insulting him — including the famous case in which someone passed around an internet meme comparing Erdogan to Gollum.

      That kind of nuttiness jumped international boundaries recently, when Erdogan’s lawyers discovered a long-forgotten German law that made it illegal to insult the head of a foreign country, and demanded that the law be used against a satirical German comedian, Jan Bohmermann, who purposefully read an insulting poem about Erdogan, in order to mock his thin skin. Some might find suing over that poem to be… well… a bit on the nose in making the point the poem was intended to make. But, to Erdogan, it appears that suing over insults is just something he can’t stop doing. More recently, Erdogan discovered that Switzerland has a similar law and went after people there too (while also getting a Dutch reporter arrested).

    • Proof Positive that David Cameron, the BBC, Guardian, New Statesman and Entire Establishment are Peddling Blatant Untruths in the Kuenssberg Affair

      Here are all the comments on the scrapped Kuenssberg petition. You know, the petition David Cameron condemned in the House of Commons today because it was accompanied by a storm of sexist abuse? Well, here are the comments in their entirety and out of 35,000 people who signed, there is virtually nobody whose comment can be seen as remotely sexist. See for yourselves. Can you spot the one sexist comment I found?

      The comments show the petition was overwhelmingly signed by decent, concerned people who were sometimes quite eloquent. Also that the petition supporters are gender balanced and several specifically identify as feminists, and as supporters of the BBC. But neither Cameron, the Guardian and mainstream media nor 38 Degrees itself has any qualm about writing off all these decent citizens as a misogynist rabble.

      [...]

      Now the lies have been thoroughly exploded. Of course the fact Cameron has been involved in peddling the lie may now be leading to some creative design, backdating and history creation in assorted Government establishments.

    • 38 Degrees Refuse to Release Evidence of “Sexist Abuse” of Laura Kuenssberg

      This is the transcript of my conversation with the 38 Degrees Press Spokesman today about the scrapping of the Laura Kuenssberg petition, for which 38 Degrees were praised by David Cameron in the Commons today.

      [...]

      I do not claim the 38 Degrees do not have any evidence to show to “justify” removing this petition. But if they do, I find their attitude absolutely astonishing. It seems to me most probable they did so under establishment pressure with no serious consideration of evidence, and zero concern for the 35,000 people – about half of them female – they have now stigmatised as misogynists.

    • Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech

      Our current controversies over free speech on campus actually represent the second set of battles in a culture war that erupted in the U.S. during the late 1980s and that subsided by the mid-1990s — its cessation probably due to the emergence of the World Wide Web as a vast, new forum for dissenting ideas. The openness of the web scattered and partly dissipated the hostile energies that had been building and raging in the mainstream media about political correctness for nearly a decade. However, those problems have stubbornly returned, because they were never fully or honestly addressed by university administrations or faculty the first time around. Now a new generation of college students, born in the 1990s and never exposed to open public debate over free speech, has brought its own assumptions and expectations to the conflict.

    • The way out of the Labour Party’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ requires a politics of solidarity

      In recent weeks, the British Labour Party has been accused of suffering from a crisis of anti-Semitism. But the claim only makes sense if anti-Semitism is redefined to include anti-Zionism. To do so obscures the party’s actual history of anti-Semitism, which is rooted in its support for empire and nationalism, not in anti-Zionism.

    • Hillary Clinton Denounces BDS Again in Letter to Jewish Leaders Before Methodist Conference
    • Zionist Israel Hides Its Crimes Behind Its Smears of Truth-Tellers

      “Anti-semite” has lost its sting, because every justified criticism of the Zionist Israeli government is declared to be anti-semitism. The word is so overused and misapplied as to be useless. Indeed, to be declared “anti-semite” by the Israel Lobby is to be declared a person of high moral conscience.

    • Guy Who Didn’t Invent Email Sues Gawker For Pointing Out He Didn’t Invent Email

      Oh boy. Remember Shiva Ayyadurai? The guy who has gone to great lengths to claim that he “invented email,” when the reality is that he appears to have (likely independently) written an early implementation of email long after others had actually “invented email.” In the past we’ve called out examples where gullible press have fallen for his easily debunked claims, but he keeps popping back up. He somehow got an entire series into the Huffington Post, which was clearly crafted as a PR exercise in trying to rewrite history. The mainstream press repeated his bogus claims about inventing email after he married a TV star. And, most recently, he decided to scream at the press for memorializing Ray Tomlinson — someone who actually did have a hand in creating email — upon his death.

      [...]

      For what it’s worth, some have disputed the idea that he even added any features not existing in previous discussions. Nevertheless, he’s not the “inventor” of email, no matter how many times he claims he is.

      We, of course, have not been alone in debunking his claims. Back in 2012, a few weeks after we first debunked them, Gawker’s Sam Biddle did a long and thorough takedown of Ayyadurai’s claims. Apparently that story really angers Ayyadurai, and I’m guessing that seeing Hulk Hogan win his crazy lawsuit against Gawker helped Ayyadurai to decide to sue Gawker as well.

      And, in keeping with my belief that this is all one giant PR stunt, the lawsuit filing was accompanied by a press release that repeats the same debunked claims, and selectively quotes the very media he fooled as evidence that he really invented email. The actual lawsuit is a joke. As in the Hogan case, Ayyadurai is suing not just Gawker, but also the company’s founder Nick Denton, along with the author of the articles (in this case, Sam Biddle).

    • Game Of Thrones’ Season 6 Spoilers Restored Online After Failed HBO Censorship Attempt
    • HBO Accused of YouTube Censorship on Game of Thrones Spoilers
    • HBO Abuses The DMCA Process In The Name Of Game Of Thrones Spoilers

      We’ve talked in the past about how HBO has jealously protected its Game of Thrones property. The show, wildly popular to the point of being proclaimed as the most pirated show over certain time spans, has enjoyed success due in part to that piracy, according to the show’s director, who made sure to add how much he hated that piracy that helps his show. Add to that HBO’s insisting that certain fan gatherings and events centered around the show be shut down and we have a picture of a company and property very much at odds with anyone looking to share it in a way outside of their control.

      As a parallel, the topic of spoilers often centers on this show. I happen to hate this topic with the fire of a thousand suns, but there is no doubt that some folks out there see unbidden spoilers as the great scourge of our generation. And perhaps that made some people pause when it came out that HBO had issued a DMCA takedown on a YouTube video that discussed such spoilers.

    • Facebook Censorship: Which Images Passed (And Failed) The Nudity Test?
    • Conservative blogger files legal motion against Facebook

      On Tuesday, conservative blogger Steven Crowder announced that he had filed a legal motion against Facebook. According to the document posted by Crowder, “a petition for pre-suit discovery has been filed in Dallas County, Texas seeking discovery from Facebook regarding the actions of its News Feed curators as well as its billing department.”

      According to Crowder, the petition for information has been in the works for some time. Recent revelations regarding Facebook’s Trending Topics section, however, caused him to accelerate his timeline. As we reported Tuesday, Crowder’s site was one of those allegedly censored and blacklisted by Facebook’s news curators.

      Although allegations of censorship prompted him to act more quickly, Crowder said that “this is an issue regarding transparency and the trust of business clients (as well as users), NOT merely ‘censorship’ which Facebook has the right to do.”

    • Lawmakers Are Right To Demand Answers About Facebook Censorship
    • Facebook Censorship: Why a Federal Fix Could Hurt Free Speech
    • Outcry After Censorship Allegations by Facebook Trends
    • Angry about Facebook censorship? Wait until you hear about the news feed
    • US senator demands answers from Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s alleged news censorship

      “Social networks such as Facebook are an increasingly important source of news for many Americans and people around the world,” wrote Thume, adding: “Indeed, with over a billion daily active users on average, Facebook has enormous influence on users’ perceptions of current events including political perspective.”

    • Congress Questions Facebook About Something It Probably Didn’t Do With A Feature That Barely Matters
    • If Facebook Hides Conservative News, a Senate Inquiry is a Bad Idea
    • Ethereum Based Censorship-Immune Social Media Network “Akasha” Unveiled
    • Google Just Gave Payday Lenders The Boot From Its Massive Advertising Network
    • Google bans ads for payday loans

      As of July, Google will no longer allow ads for payday loans, TechCrunch reports. The banned ads are those that have to be repaid within 60 days, and, in the U.S., those that charge more than 36% annual interest, wrote David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, in a blog post on the change.

      “When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that,” Graff wrote.

    • No more Google ads for payday loans: consumer protection or censorship?
    • Google to Ban Payday Loans From Its Advertising Systems
    • Google Pulls Plug on Predatory Payday Loan Ads, Huzzah!

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • DOJ Tells Ron Wyden, ACLU, Court That It’s Under No Legal Obligation To Reveal Contents Of Secret Legal Memo

      There’s another secret legal memo that’s been floating around the nation’s intelligence offices for more than a decade that the DOJ won’t let the American public see. The memo’s contents have been hinted at repeatedly by Senator Ron Wyden, who dropped the heaviest hint of all roughly a year ago, during the runup to the passage of the cybersecurity bill. This lends some credence to the assumption that the secret Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo is somehow related to government demands for information and data from tech companies.

    • GCHQ get involved as a programme of Scottish cyber security career initiatives is launched [Ed: puff pieces reach Scotland]
    • Former NSA Chief, EFF Debate Privacy vs. Security
    • Ex-NSA Chief Michael Hayden: ‘Every Foreign Intelligence Service In The World Was Thumbing Through Hillary’s Email Server’
    • Ex-NSA Director Says Clinton’s Email Problems Were Caused by ‘Laziness’
    • Legal Action against the French Surveillance Law

      The Exégètes amateurs, the legal team of La Quadrature du Net, FDN and FFDN, has submitted new legal briefs in its legal challenge before the French Council of State against the 2015 Intelligence Act and its implementation decrees. The briefs detail all the arguments developed against this dangerous law. For the most part, the strategy consists in mobilizing the case law of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ). A very worrying provision completely overlooked during the parliamentary debate last year is also targeted with a constitutional challenge (so called QPC procedure))

    • FBI director warns that feds will bring more encryption-related cases

      The head of the FBI said Wednesday that the government will bring more legal cases over encryption issues in the near future, according to Reuters.

      Speaking with reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington, FBI Director James Comey specifically said that end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp is affecting the agency’s work in “huge ways.” However, he noted the FBI has no plans to sue Facebook, the app’s parent company.

      He also said that since October 2015, the FBI has examined “about 4,000 digital devices” and was unable to unlock “approximately 500.”

    • James Clapper’s Latest Effort To Fearmonger about Snowden’s Damage

      Clapper provides two pieces of evidence for damage:

      1. Snowden disclosures have made terrorist groups “very security-conscious”

      2. Snowden disclosures have “speeded the move” [by whom, it’s not entirely clear] to unbreakable encryption

      That’s a bit funny, because what we saw from the terrorist cell that ravaged Paris and Belgium was — as The Grugq describes it — “drug dealer tradecraft writ large.” Stuff that they could have learned from watching the Wire a decade ago, with a good deal of sloppiness added in. With almost no hints of the use of encryption.

      If the most dangerous terrorists today are using operational security that they could have learned years before Snowden, then his damage is not all that great.

      Unless Clapper means, when he discusses the use of unbreakable encryption, us? Terrorists were already using encryption, but journalists and lawyers and US-based activists might not have been (activists in more dangerous places might have been using encryption that the State Department made available).

      Neither of those developments should be that horrible. Which may be why Clapper says, “We’ve been very conservative in the damage assessment” even while insisting there’s a lot. Because this is not all that impressive, unless as Chief Spook you think you should have access to the communications of journalists and lawyers and activists.

    • Twitter ‘Blocks’ Intel Agencies From Tweet-Mining Service

      Twitter claims it does not want intelligence agencies using a Tweet-mining service for surveillance purposes. The company recently restated its “longstanding” policy of preventing a company called Dataminr from selling information to intelligence agencies that want to monitor Tweets.

    • Is It Really That Big A Deal That Twitter Blocked US Intelligence Agencies From Mining Public Tweets?

      Over the weekend, some news broke about how Twitter was blocking Dataminr, a (you guessed it) social media data mining firm, from providing its analytics of real-time tweets to US intelligence agencies. Dataminr — which, everyone makes clear to state, has investments from both Twitter and the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel — has access to Twitter’s famed “firehose” API of basically every public tweet. The company already has relationships with financial firms, big companies and other parts of the US government, including the Department of Homeland Security, which has been known to snoop around on Twitter for quite some time.

      Apparently, the details suggest, some (unnamed) intelligence agencies within the US government had signed up for a free pilot program, and it was as this program was ending that Twitter reminded Dataminr that part of the terms of their agreement in providing access to the firehose was that it not then be used for government surveillance. Twitter insists that this isn’t a change, it’s just it enforcing existing policies.

    • Former NSA chief tells former colleagues frustrated about increasing encryption: “Get over it!”

      Michael Hayden, who headed the CIA and the NSA during the Bush administration, is refreshingly blunt about the limits of government efforts to rein in encryption.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The Secret NSA Diary of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator

      After working as an interrogator for a U.S. military contractor in Iraq, Eric Fair took a job as an analyst for the National Security Agency. When he went to the NSA, Fair was reckoning with the torture of Iraqi prisoners, torture he had witnessed and in which he had participated.

      Fair would go on to write a memoir detailing his experiences in Iraq; the book, Consequence, was published last month to strong notices, including not one but two positive reviews in the New York Times. But Fair actually wrote about his time as an interrogator more than a decade earlier in an internal NSA publication.

    • Book Notes: ‘Consequence’ an odd mix of warrior, worshipper

      When the New York Times editor of the Sunday Book Review mentioned, during a recent panel discussion at The Times, that Eric Fair regretted publishing his memoir “Consequence,” I thought I could understand why. The book about torture he had seen and inflicted in Iraq had to have been hard to write and harder still to live with, despite the many essays Fair had already published on the subject.

    • Abu Ghraib prisoners deserve, finally, their day in court

      Twelve years ago American citizens and the rest of the world were rocked by the graphic photographs of the sexual and physical torture at Abu Ghraib. Once seen, the images are impossible to forget: the terrified prisoners, wide-eyed, mostly naked; the pyramids of bodies; the dog-collared man on all fours led on a leash; the hooded man standing on a box, arms spread as if crucified, electrical wires dangling from his fingertips. And, in almost every picture, the guards, looking on with a smirk.

    • Will These 2 Court Cases Finally Hold Our Torturers Accountable?

      They may confirm that since torture is a war crime, it can never be a policy option.

    • Alleged 9/11 plotter’s lawyers ask prosecutor, judge to quit trial over destruction of evidence

      Lawyers for the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, are asking the Pentagon prosecution team and the trial judge to step down, saying they were involved in the secret destruction of evidence in the death-penalty case.

      Attorney David Nevin said by telephone Wednesday that under the rules of war court secrecy he cannot describe the evidence that was allegedly destroyed. He added that a court filing on Tuesday seeking the recusal of the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, and the prosecution team led by Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, does not describe it.

      “It was destroyed under circumstances where we were left with the impression, based on a ruling of the military judge, that the evidence would not be destroyed,” said Nevin.

    • Poor People Don’t Stand A Chance In Court

      Your landlord has decided to evict you and your family has nowhere to go. Or you’re in an abusive relationship and need a restraining order and probably a divorce and custody order for your children. Or you’re a homeless veteran trying to get VA benefits and navigate the complicated claims process. Or you’re being hounded by a collector for a debt you can’t pay who’s threatening to take away all of your income.

    • RIP Michael Ratner, Radical Attorney & Human Rights Crusader

      Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, died today in New York City. For the past four decades he has been a leading champion of human and civil rights, from leading the fight to close Guantánamo to representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to holding torturers accountable, at home and abroad.

    • Michael Ratner, RIP (Rest in Power)

      Michael Ratner, a friend of EFF who dedicated his life as a human rights attorney to fighting for justice, passed away earlier today.

      Michael was a staunch defender of civil liberties, forging new pathways for using the court systems and advocacy to fight for justice. As the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a formidable social justice attorney, Michael crossed paths with EFF around Wikileaks and related whistleblower cases, among others. CCR was our co-counsel in the early NSA spying cases. But more importantly, Michael was one of our legal heroes, unafraid to use law and lawsuits to try to address human rights problems in the U.S. and around the world. We have modeled our EFF litigation approach, in part, on the strong work he did. Michael’s many-decades career was colored by his commitment to human dignity, and he fought to ensure that we had a government accountable to the people—and that those who opposed government overreach would be protected and defended.

    • ‘This is History’: Police Officer Indicted on Federal Charges in Walter Scott Killing

      A federal grand jury has indicted former South Carolina police officer Michael Slager for the fatal shooting of Walter Scott.

      The April 4, 2015 shooting was captured on film by a bystander who later said, “I knew the cop didn’t do the right thing.”

      A statement issued Wednesday from the Department of Justice says that the three-count indictment includes charges for a federal civil rights offense for the shooting, excessive force without legal justification, and obstruction of justice for making false statements to South Carolina Law Enforcement Division investigators.

      Slager, who is white, initially pulled over Scott, who is black, for having a broken tail light on his car. As Scott attempted to run away, the North Charleston officer shot the unarmed 50-year-old Navy veteran and father of four five times from behind.

    • Majorities of Muslim Arabs in N. Africa want a Separation of Religion and State

      It turns out a lot of Muslims want a separation of religion and state, according to a new poll by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Arab Observatory. They polled people in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

    • Your Tax Dollars At Work: Cops Use Stingray To ALMOST Track Down Suspected Fast Food Thief

      According to the Capital News Service investigation, in the seven counties closest to Baltimore and Washington DC, agencies have spent nearly $3 million on Stingray equipment. While the word “terrorism” often appears on applications for funding grants, there’s no evidence the devices have ever been deployed in terrorism investigations. Instead, the most popular use for the devices is to fight the drug war.

      Law enforcement spokespeople will often point to the handful of homicide or kidnapping investigations successfully closed with the assistance of cell site simulators, but they’ll gloss over the hundreds of mundane deployments performed by officers who will use anything that makes their job easier — even if it’s a tool that’s Constitutionally dubious.

      Don’t forget, when a cell site simulator is deployed, it gathers cell phone info from everyone in the surrounding area, including those whose chicken wings have been lawfully purchased. And all of this data goes… somewhere and is held onto for as long as the agency feels like it, because most agencies don’t seem to have Stingray data retention policies in place until after they’ve been FOIA’ed/questioned by curious legislators.

    • Even non-police agencies are misusing the Police National Computer

      The Police National Computer (PNC) and access to the information held on it has always been a hotly debated topic. The PNC stores data on individuals who have been subject to a conviction, caution, reprimand, warning or arrest.

      Over the years countless stories have shown that the database has been misused time and again by some police officers and that thousands of entries are incorrect; leading to mistakes or miscarriages of justice.

    • Sadiq Khan and the End of Islamophobia

      To win the election, Goldsmith could have focused on all the work he’d done on the environment, as a journalist and former editor of the magazine The Ecologist. To further woo liberals, he could have highlighted his considerable international experience and his support of the rights of indigenous peoples. Conversely, he could have cemented his popularity among conservative populists by emphasizing his skeptical attitude toward the European Union. If he’d played it safe, Goldsmith could have translated an early lead in the polls into a victory at the ballot box.

      Instead, the Goldsmith team prompted a huge backlash by suggesting that his opponent, the Labor Party’s Sadiq Khan, was a Muslim extremist because of his associations and his political bedfellows. The rhetoric from the Conservative camp was nothing so blatant or ugly as some of the proposals in the Republican presidential primary, such as prohibiting Muslims candidates from entering the Oval Office (Ben Carson) or prohibiting Muslims immigrant from entering the country (Donald Trump).

    • Facing the facts: a progressive strategy for 2020

      Labour has never secured a convincing majority from opposition and implemented a progressive programme. To believe it can this time is absurd. It’s time for a different approach.

    • Arkansas Judge Resigns After Thousands Of Pictures Of Nude Defendants Found On His Computer

      An Arkansas judge resigned from his seat this week when thousands of photos of naked male defendants were found in his possession.

      The state’s Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission (JDDC) discovered approximately 4,500 photos on Judge Joseph Boeckmann’s computer, amid allegations that he coerced multiple defendants into performing sex acts for court favors. An investigation of the Cross County judge was launched when several men came forward with stories that Boeckmann offered them “community service” options to get their charges and fines reduced, as well as time extensions to pay off those fines.

    • FBI Is Manufacturing Terror Plots Against Jewish-Americans, Driving Divisions Between Jews and Muslims

      Since 9/11, the FBI and NYPD have solved dozens of terror plots that its own agents and assets manufactured, including some against synagogues. Even if the plots were less than real, the foiled “attacks” have greatly impacted both the defendants and their alleged victims, spreading fear among Jewish-Americans and triggering panicked reports about heightened threat against Jews.

      The arrest this April of James Medina, a recent convert to Islam with an extensive criminal history, may be the latest evidence of the disturbing practice. An FBI affidavit showed an FBI source suggesting that Medina bomb the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in Hollywood, Florida on a Jewish holiday.

      The source even encouraged Medina to claim the attack in the name of ISIS—a group he had no affiliation to. “Yeah, we can print up… something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America,” Medina said, one of a series of statements evincing an erratic mental state.

      “Aventura, watch your back,” he continued. “ISIS is in the house.”

      The FBI ultimately gave Medina a fake bomb and arrested him. He is now on trial for planning to commit an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction, a charge that could land the 40-year-old in prison for life.

    • Tortured, Killed & Driven to Suicide: Whistleblower Exposes Abuse of Mentally Ill in Florida Prison

      A shocking new exposé in The New Yorker magazine documents how prison guards at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida have subjected mentally ill prisoners to vicious beatings, scalding showers and severe food deprivation. Journalist Eyal Press notes the guards act with near impunity since prison staff, including mental health workers, often fear reprisals for speaking out. He writes that prisons have become America’s dominant mental health institutions. The situation is particularly extreme in Florida, which spends less money per capita on mental health than any state with the exception of Idaho. We speak with Eyal Press and one of his sources, George Mallinckrodt, a psychotherapist and whistleblower who lost his job after reporting on abuse of his patients in the Dade Correctional Institution’s Transitional Care Unit in 2011.

    • Slowly Abolishing Solitary Confinement for Children

      Children are still being held in isolation in detention and correctional facilities across the United States. Children can be found curled up on cement floors in bare cells for 22 hours a day, and for days at a time. In order to use bathroom facilities in Los Angeles County Jail, young people must bang on their cell door and hope that someone comes to escort them to a bathroom.

    • American Sheriff

      Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s podcast, The People’s Sheriff, begins with a slide-guitar and a boot-stomp beat before segueing into the rich baritone of the sheriff himself. Over the next 40 minutes, Clarke holds forth on the topics of the day: Planned Parenthood is “what I call ‘Planned Genocide.’” Public schools are so dangerous “there should be a body camera on every teacher.” Higher education has become “a racketeering ring.” The sheriff is also a big fan of presidential candidate Donald Trump: “He gets us. He understands us.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Germany: open WiFi after all?

      Following the opinion of Attorney General Szpunar in the pending McFadden case (C-484/14, IPKat post), the German coalition government has decided to abandon the “Störerhaftung” of providers of open WiFi Networks for illegal use of the Internet access by users of the hot spot.

    • Germany to abolish provider liability law, open path to more free WiFi

      The German government has cleared the way for open and private WiFi hotspots. A provider liability law that makes hotspot providers responsible for users’ activity has long limited public WiFi and is set to be scrapped.

  • DRM

    • Save Firefox!

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), once the force for open standards that kept browsers from locking publishers to their proprietary capabilities, has changed its mission. Since 2013, the organization has provided a forum where today’s dominant browser companies and the dominant entertainment companies can collaborate on a system to let our browsers control our behavior, rather than the other way.

      This system, “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a “Content Decryption Module.” For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard — which major studios and cable operators are pushing for — it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the “open” Web would not display in their new browser.

      This is the opposite of every W3C standard to date: once, all you needed to do to render content sent by a server was follow the standard, not get permission. If browsers had needed permission to render a page at the launch of Mozilla, the publishers would have frozen out this new, pop-up-blocking upstart. Kiss Firefox goodbye, in other words.

      The W3C didn’t have to do this. No copyright law says that making a video gives you the right to tell people who legally watch it how they must configure their equipment. But because of the design of EME, copyright holders will be able to use the law to shut down any new browser that tries to render the video without their permission.

      That’s because EME is designed to trigger liability under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which says that removing a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work without permission is an offense, even if the person removing the lock has the right to the content it restricts. In other words, once a video is sent with EME, a new company that unlocks it for its users can be sued, even if the users do nothing illegal with that video.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016: Markup and Commentary

      President Obama has signed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) into law. The new law creates a private cause of action for trade secret misappropriation that can be brought in Federal Courts and with international implications.

      I have created a mark-up (with commentary) of the new law that shows how the DTSA’s amendments to the Economic Espionage Act (EEA).

    • India’s Proposed ‘Geospatial Information Regulation Bill’ Would Shut Down Most Map-Based Services There

      It’s obvious that technology changes our lives, but alongside the expected developments, there are some strange and unexpected ones, too. For example, half a century ago, who would have predicted that boring old copyright would have such a massive impact on everyday life, even to the extent of redefining what ownership means? Similarly, when mobile phones first appeared, few realized later iterations that included powerful computers would elevate another dry and dusty area — cartography — into a key aspect of modern technology.

    • Trademarks

      • Facebook Wins Trademark Case In China Over Chinese Beverage Company

        You should be aware by now that Facebook has taken a rather extreme stance when it comes to protecting its trademark. This stance has essentially evolved to consist of this: it will dispute pretty much anything else on the internet that has the word “book” in it. Examples include Designbook, Lamebook, and Teachbook. And, because trademark bullying isn’t something that should be done half-way, the company also disputed the name of Faceporn, because why the hell not?

        This has continued to this day, which is not news worthy. But what is news worthy is when Facebook gets one of these wins in a trademark dispute in China, where trademark disputes haven’t typically gone the way American companies would wish.

      • Merpel visits the EU IPO

        The first problem came with the new OHIM website in December 2013. Setting aside some issues of poor quality content, there was a catastrophic failure of the online filing search functions (see IPKat posts here and here). Users reported regular problems with online filing of designs thereafter, sometimes the system working perfectly well, and other times crashing irretrievably (a bit of a problem when you have just uploaded the representations for 50 designs). OHIM’s technical assistance frequently concluded that there was no issue at their end, so the problem must be with the user.

    • Copyrights

      • On the stand, Google’s Eric Schmidt says Sun had no problems with Android

        Alphabet Chairman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt testified in a federal court here today, hoping to overcome a lawsuit from Oracle accusing his company of violating copyright law.

        During an hour of questioning by Google lawyer Robert Van Nest, Schmidt discussed his early days at Google and the beginnings of Android. Everything was done by the book, Schmidt told jurors, emphasizing his positive relationship with Sun Microsystems and its then-CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

        Schmidt himself used to work at Sun Microsystems after getting his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1982. Schmidt was at Sun while the Java language was developed.

        “Was the Java language released for anyone to use?” asked Van Nest.

      • Stakes Are High in Oracle v. Google, But the Public Has Already Lost Big

        Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “world-class attorneys,” as Judge William Alsup noted to the jury. And while each company would prefer to spend their money elsewhere, these are businesses that can afford to spend years and untold resources in the courtroom.

      • YouTube’s Copyright Robots Help Sony Shake Down Bluegrass Educators

        The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors protect websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and many others against runaway copyright lawsuits. They also protect people’s fair use rights when they post their own creations online, by ensuring that online platforms don’t have to assume the risk of a user’s fair use case going the wrong way. But automated filtering and takedown systems on platforms like YouTube—systems that the DMCA doesn’t require—flag obvious fair uses as potential infringement, including educational work around the history of music itself. That’s why it’s alarming that major entertainment companies want Congress to scrap the DMCA’s safe harbor and make automatic filtering the law.

      • Fake Copyright Arguments at the FCC on Set-Top Boxes

        As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues working on breaking up the TV set-top box monopoly, the onslaught by large companies who have zero interest in promoting a competitive open technology environment has been fierce. Cable companies, the movie industry, the recording industry, and their parakeet allies are regularly misrepresenting the bounds of copyright law to Congress and the FCC in an attempt to secure powers that copyright law does not provide them.

      • Google took our property—and our opportunity, Oracle tells jury

        Oracle is making its case to a jury that Google should be forced to pay massive copyright damages, due to the search company’s use of 37 Java APIs in its Android operating system. It’s the second courtroom face-off for the two software giants. Google argued that APIs shouldn’t be copyrighted at all, but lost on appeal. Now Google’s only hope is that the jury finds that its use of the APIs was a “fair use.”

      • At WIPO, Music Industry Points Fingers At YouTube For Hiding Behind Safe Harbour

05.11.16

Links 11/5/2016: Docker Security, Cinnamon 3.0.2

Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Milestones in Free and Open Source Software History, 1969-2015

    In the fall of 1983 Richard Stallman, a veteran of MIT’s AI Lab who was unhappy with the increasingly closed nature of software source code, announced the GNU project. His goal was to build a clone of Unix using only code that could be freely shared and would always be publicly available. Many parts of the GNU operating system, which Stallman began building in early 1984, remain central to the free and open source software ecosystem today.

  • I am your user. Why do you hate me?

    Leslie is a developer engagement strategist who works at Red Hat and sits on several key nonprofit boards. In addition to running her own company, Donna also sits on many boards and does much of the thankless work to put on excellent open source events in Australia. They each bring over a decade of experience with open source to their work, and their upcoming talk at OSCON titled, I am your user—why do you hate me?

  • DIY : Open Source Software for your very own IoT
  • Nominations for the 2016 New Zealand Open Source Awards open

    Nominations for the 2016 New Zealand Open Source Awards are now open.

  • Four Ways for Developers To Open Source Their Next Big Idea

    The open source movement is transforming technology in many respects, and its fundamental stance toward collaboration can be used to transform the inspiration process for developers as well.

  • Amazon open-sources its own deep learning software, DSSTNE

    Amazon has suddenly made a remarkable entrance into the world of open-source software for deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence. Yesterday the e-commerce company unceremoniously released a library called DSSTNE on GitHub under an open-source Apache license.

    Deep learning involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data. Several technology companies are doing it — heck, it even got some air time recently in “Silicon Valley.” And there are already several other deep learning frameworks to choose from, including Google’s TensorFlow.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • You Can Help Build the Future of Firefox with the New Test Pilot Program

        When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right. To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program. Test Pilot is a way for you to try out experimental features and let us know what you think. You can turn them on and off at any time, and you’ll always know what information you’re sharing to help us understand how these features are used. Of course, you can also use Test Pilot to provide feedback and suggestions to the teams behind each new feature.

        As you’re experimenting with new features, you might experience some bugs or lose some of the polish from the general Firefox release, so Test Pilot allows you to easily enable or disable features at any time.

        Feedback and data from Test Pilot will help determine which features ultimately end up in a Firefox release for all to enjoy.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • On the Multi-Cloud Future

      Do you run multiple operating systems? It’s not uncommon for the answer to that question to be yes. You may run Linux on a laptop and Android on a phone, for example. In the same fashion, many experts surveying the cloud computing scene predict that the growing trend toward hybrid cloud deployments will make it extremely popular for enterprises to run many cloud platforms and tools concurrently.

    • The Open Cloud, Demystified

      In this post, you’ll find several of the best free guides to popular cloud-centric tools, ranging from ownCloud to OpenStack, that can help boost your efficiency. We have updated this collection of documentation with a valuable overall guide to the open cloud platforms that you can choose from, and some brand new guides.

    • Bexar, Mitaka, Newton: Behind OpenStack release names

      Mitaka is not only the latest release of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure service, it’s also a city in Japan.

    • OpenStack Mitaka aims to make open source easy-peasy

      The newest release of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure is designed to be easier to install, easier to use and easier to manage.

      That could be big news for CIOs. The cloud platform is delivering flexibility and processing power at lower cost to big-name companies such as AT&T and eBay. But calling for lots of installation, maintenance and development support, OpenStack has come to be known almost as much for its DIY-style complexity as it has for its innovative potential.

    • OpenStack, SDN, and Container Networking Power Enterprise Cloud at PayPal

      This architecture has four layers. The Infrastructure & Operations layer at the bottom provides computer, storage, and network and is powered by OpenStack. On top of that is the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer — the core technology and analytics platform that provides services like messaging, logging, monitoring, analytics, etc. to be leveraged across all PayPal applications. On top of that is the Payments Operating System (POS), which is the foundation for all payments-related microservices and which serves all customer-facing experience through mobile and web apps. Finally, the top layer comprises customer-facing applications.

    • Lenovo’s Highly-Available OpenStack Enterprise Cloud Platform Practice with EasyStack

      In 2015, the Chinese IT superpower Lenovo chose EasyStack to build an OpenStack-based enterprise cloud platform to carry out their “Internet Strategy”. In six months, this platform has evolved into an enterprise-level OpenStack production environment of over 3000 cores with data growth peaking at 10TB/day. It is expected that by the end of 2016, 20% of the IT system will be migrated onto the Cloud.

    • SDN, NFV Can Make You Money
    • NEC/NetCracker’s NFV Platform Dives Into DevOps

      In a world of plentiful OpenStack offerings and NFV orchestrators, NEC/Netcracker looks to differentiate by “filling the gaps” in NFV, for example by providing integration with operations support systems (OSSs) and business support systems (BSSs). The platform also promises to deliver tools that enable technology vendors and service providers to collaborate on application and service design using a DevOps model.

    • Intel Debuts CIAO for OpenStack Cloud Orchestration [VIDEO]

      The new Go based project is s called CIAO, Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator and is a potential replacement or optional component for existing orchestration in OpenStack

    • Tech spending priorities to shift with DevOps transition

      IT organizations should get ready to cede some budgetary control to business units, as software — and software developers — become key agents of commerce.

    • On the Rise: Six Unsung Apache Big Data Projects

      Countless organizations around the world are now working with data sets so large and complex that traditional data processing applications can no longer drive optimized analytics and insights. That’s the problem that the new wave of Big Data applications aims to solve, and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently graduated a slew of interesting open source Big Data projects to Top-Level status. That means that they will get active development and strong community support.

    • An introduction to data processing with Cassandra and Spark

      So, what is Apache Cassandra? A distributed OLTP database built for high availability and linear scalability. When people ask what Cassandra is used for, think about the type of system you want close to the customer. This is ultimately the system that our users interact with. Applications that must always be available: product catalogs, IoT, medical systems, and mobile applications. In these categories downtime can mean loss of revenue or even more dire outcomes depending on your specific use case. Netflix was one of the earliest adopters of this project, which was open sourced in 2008, and their contributions, along with successes, put it on the radar of the masses.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • How BSD was built, and how it lost the lead to Linux

      BSD has been eclipsed by the popularity of Linux over the years. But how did BSD get started? And why did Linux overtake and surpass it? Salon has a detailed article that charts the creation of BSD, and why it eventually lost out to Linux.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Estonian finance ministry seeks OSS service provider

      The Estonian Ministry of Finance is looking for a service provider to host, maintain and support its open-source-based portal infrastructure. The framework contract runs for three years and has an estimated value of 300,000 Euro.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Happiness and children

      Depression and anxiety are rising rapidly among young people: what’s going on?

    • All Angles Covered: Is the EU Completely in the Pocket of the Biotech Industry?

      On 9 May, Corporate Europe Observatory posted an article on its website that described how Genius, a lobby consultancy firm based in Germany, has been employed to distort the debate on glyphosate in favour the biotech industry.

      Research linking the use of glyphosate to various diseases is well documented, and the World Health Organisation has declared the substance as “probably causing cancer to humans.” Despite this, the European Commission is seeking to grant glyphosate re-approval for another ten years. The re-authorisation is being sought by the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), an industry platform uniting producers of glyphosate-based herbicides, whose members include Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Barclay Chemicals. Genius was used to run its website.

    • The EPA’s Ties to Monsanto Could Be Disastrous for the US

      Conservative politicians love to talk about how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only issues “job-killing regulations,” especially if they’re taking campaign contributions from fossil fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers or from agrochemical giants like Monsanto.

      Republican Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Lamar Smith, for example, has spent years trying to stop the EPA from conducting any real research about climate change or passing any real regulations in general. But apparently it’s true that every once in a while, even a blind mouse finds cheese; it seems like Lamar Smith might actually have a legitimate complaint about an EPA report.

    • Doctors Agree With Sanders on Universal Health Care

      Sen. Bernie Sanders thinks it should be replaced with a single-payer health plan of the kind Europe and Canada have. This federally administered universal health care program would eliminate copays and deductibles. There’s currently a move afoot in Colorado to have such a plan.

    • Targeting Big Pharma Price Gouging, Sanders Backs California Ballot Fight

      Backing a citizen-led initiative to combat soaring drugs prices in California, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Tuesday endorsed a ballot proposal designed to curb what he described as a corporate “rip-off” of the state’s sick and vulnerable.

  • Security

    • IE and Graphics head Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday critical list

      There’s 15 flaw fixes covering 36 vulnerabilities in this month’s patch bundle from Microsoft.

      Microsoft’s browsers need a lot of work – Internet Explorer gets five fixes and the new Edge code has four. Both applications’ patches have been named as critical by Redmond. There’s also a five-fix bundle for Microsoft’s graphics component and seven flaws found in Windows kernel drivers, mainly for 32-bit versions of the operating system.

    • Exploits gone wild: Hackers target critical image-processing bug
    • ImageMagick’s ImageTragick: Exploits Not Yet Widespread

      Part of the reason for this may well be because of the nature of the vulnerability, which requires upload permissions. “These are generally restricted to subscribers and administrators,” Cid notes, “which by design negatively impacts the ability to perform a mass exploit across the web. Additionally, there aren’t that many open-source and public Content Management Systems (CMS) that use ImageMagick by default, which drastically reduces the potential attack surface – something required to see mass attacks.”

    • GnuTLS 3.5.0

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The (Il)legality of UK Drone Strikes

      It was reported in The Guardian newspaper today that the UK parliamentary joint committee on human rights was questioning the legal framework underpinning the use of British drone strikes against terrorist suspects.

    • CIA-NSA Supported Brazilian Coup Back On, Rousseff Ousted Wednesday?

      One day after the Brazilian people breathed a sigh of relief after the lower house impeachment vote was annulled, that decision was unheroically walked back, creating what may become a gory constitutional crisis.

    • Brazilian Senate set to launch Rousseff impeachment

      Brasilia: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was only hours from possibly being suspended at the start of an impeachment trial Wednesday in a political crisis paralysing Latin America’s largest country.

    • Brazil Impeachment: Rousseff Appeals To Supreme Court

      Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, has made a last-ditch appeal to stop the impeachment process against her by asking the supreme court to block the proceedings, hours before a crucial Senate vote.

      Ms Rousseff’s lawyers alleged the process is fraught with bias and irregularities but similar attempts have been rejected by the court.

      Ms Rousseff could be suspended for up to 180 days if the Senators vote for a full trial today.

      [...]

      The President is accused of illegally manipulating finances to hide a growing public deficit ahead of her re-election in 2014.
      She denies all the charges.

    • Daniel Berrigan’s Enduring Fight for Peace

      As Campaign 2016 almost ignores the vital issues of war and peace – despite the reality of perpetual war – Daniel Berrigan, one of America’s great voices for peace, has gone silent, writes Michael Winship.

    • President Obama Should Meet A-Bomb Survivors, and Heed Their Call To Ban the Bomb

      President Obama is considering a visit to Hiroshima during the G-7 economic summit in Japan later this month. Hiroshima is an impressively rebuilt, thriving city of a million people. The city was obliterated by the first atomic bomb, dropped by the United States on August 6, 1945, followed by the second bomb that devastated Nagasaki three days later, killing a total of more than 200,000 people.

      Remarkably, many Hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, are still alive today, though they often suffer from various radiation-caused illnesses or other physical ailments 71 years after the bombs were dropped.

    • Masters of Mankind: the Costs of Violence

      Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us — an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.

    • Exploiting Global Warming for Geo-Politics

      When a severe drought hit Syria a decade ago, the U.S. government chose not to help but rather exploit the environmental crisis to force a “regime change,” a decision that contributed to a humanitarian crisis, writes Jonathan Marshall.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • After Only Nine Months On The Job, Administration’s New FOIA Boss Calls It Quits

      Depending on where you sit, Holzer was either the perfect pick for FOIA work or the worst.

      For FOIA requesters, Holzer was anything but. His former (and now current) agency has a terrible FOIA track record. That this background would somehow result in his promotion to a position meant to facilitate FOIA requests was inexplicable.

      Unless you’re the White House, in which case, he was the best man for the job.

      This administration doesn’t care much for transparency. Elevating someone from an agency with a history of ineptness and recalcitrance only makes sense — if what you want is for “facilitation” to mean little more than looking busy while status remains quo.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Dangerous New Normal as 400 ppm Carbon Baseline Expected Within Days

      Australian Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said the landmark ‘should act as a global wake-up call’

    • The Oil Industry Just Backed Out Of A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment

      ConocoPhillips, ENI, and Iona have relinquished all their leases in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska, according to new documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request filed by advocacy group Oceana.

    • Network Newscasts Ignore Global Warming’s Role in Canada’s Wildfires

      As fast and furious as trailers for a Hollywood disaster movie, network news coverage of the massive fires ripping through Canada’s tar sands hub has missed opportunities to provide real information about the heavily polluting tar sands industry and global warming’s role in adding fuel to the flames.

    • GPS Tracking Devices Catch Major U.S. Recyclers Exporting Toxic E-Waste

      A two year investigation of electronics recycling using GPS tracking devices has revealed that policies aimed at curtailing the trade in toxic e-waste have been unsuccessful, with nearly one third of the devices being exported to developing countries, where equipment is often dismantled in low-tech workshops — often by children — endangering workers, their families, and contaminating the surrounding environment.

    • Almost Everything You Know About Climate Change Solutions Is Outdated, Part 1

      Almost everything you know about climate change solutions is outdated, for several reasons.

      First, climate science and climate politics have been moving unexpectedly quickly toward a broad consensus that we need to keep total human-caused global warming as far as possible below 2°C (3.6°F) — and ideally to no more than 1.5°C. This has truly revolutionary implications for climate solutions policy.

    • Nigeria Oil Well Protest Spotlights ‘Destroyed Livelihoods and Betrayed Hopes’

      Activists in Nigeria gathered at the site of the country’s first oil well on Tuesday as part of the global Break Free movement, to show what happens “when the oil goes dry, and the community is left with the pollution and none of the wealth.”

      Black gold, or oil, was discovered in Oloibiri in 1956 by what was then known as the Shell Darcy corporation—Nigeria’s first commercial oil discovery. The site has since been declared a national monument.

    • The U.S. Can’t Afford To Keep Losing Honeybees Like This

      On Tuesday, the Bee Informed Partnership released its annual report on total losses of managed honeybees — those kept by beekeepers — across the country. The survey, which asked beekeepers about bee losses between April 2015 and April 2016, showed that U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies in that timeframe. That means that total losses worsened compared to last year’s survey, which reported losses of 42.1 percent.

    • First Nation Wins Historic Victory Over Mammoth Coal Export Terminal

      In a move being hailed as a landmark victory for the climate movement, Pacific Northwest communities, and tribal members alike, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday denied federal permits for the largest proposed coal export terminal in North America.

      “This is big—for our climate, for clean air and water, for our future,” declared Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

    • Army Corps Denies Permits for Biggest Proposed Coal Export Terminal in North America

      This is big—for our climate, for clean air and water, for our future. It’s also big because the U.S. government is honoring its treaty obligations. After a five-year struggle that engaged hundreds of thousands of people, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a landmark decision Monday to deny federal permits for the biggest proposed coal export terminal in North America—the SSA Marine’s proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal, a coal export facility at Xwe’chi’eXen (also known as Cherry Point), Washington.

    • National Parks to Seek Out, Recognize Corporate Funding Under New Plan

      The National Park Service (NPS) is proposing a relaxation on rules governing corporate partnerships in a move that could see parks increasingly commercialized and dependent on the whims of private donors.

      Some park superintendents will be asked to help raise up to $5 million in individual gifts, according to the NPS proposal.

  • Finance

    • Panama Papers Source Offers Documents To Governments, Hints At More To Come

      The anonymous whistleblower behind the Panama Papers has conditionally offered to make the documents available to government authorities.

      In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called “John Doe” behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.

      Titled “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that “income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time” and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.

      Süddeutsche Zeitung has authenticated that the statement came from the Panama Papers source.

    • ‘The Revolution Will Be Digitized’: Panama Papers Leaker Speaks Out

      No surprise, then, that the Panama Papers whistleblower would really like more legal protection for those who leak information in the public interest. What is more surprising is the anger that permeates this statement, and how well it is articulated. A striking recent development in the world of whistleblowing is the way in which Edward Snowden has become one of the most acute commentators on the digital sphere, as his extended essay “Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance” underlines. What’s most remarkable — and encouraging — about the Panama Papers whistleblower’s essay is that it indicates we may be about to gain another valuable voice in the same way.

    • Clinton Commits: No TPP, Fundamentally Rethink Trade Policies

      As reported in The Hill, in “Clinton opposes TPP vote in the lame-duck session,” Clinton replied to a questionnaire from the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, which consists of more than 25 labor, environmental and human rights organizations. When asked, “If elected President, would you oppose holding a vote on the TPP during the ‘lame duck’ session before you take office?” she replied, “I have said I oppose the TPP agreement — and that means before and after the election.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Government called to answer urgent question on the future of the BBC

      Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs and George Osborne’s evidence to the Treasury committee about the EU referendum

    • Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions

      Faced with that demoralizing prospect, some Sanders supporters are recycling failed old strategies in an attempt to salvage Sanders’ “political revolution” without opposing the Democratic Party.

    • The Establishment Rallies Around Kuenssberg

      The petition to sack Tory propagandist Laura Kuenssberg from her role as BBC Political Editor has been scrapped by 38 Degrees after it gained over 35,000 signatures. The reason given is sexist comments and tweets.

    • Member of BBC Election Night Team Writes Crude Anti-Sturgeon Slogan

      “Professor” Rob Ford of the University of Manchester was a member of Professor John Curtice’s election night results team at the BBC. But he is also a very active anti-Corbyn and anti-SNP propagandist.

      Indeed just the day before the election, which he was covering for the BBC as a “neutral and independent psephological expert”, Ford posted this nasty attack on Nicola Sturgeon. Please note that this is not a retweet – the slogan “All Hail Supreme Dear Leader, Daughter of Great Helmsman Sal-Mon” is all Ford’s own brilliant witticism.

    • Trump Gave $150,000 To Charity That CNN Head’s Wife Helped Lead

      The donations were for the private school that Trump’s son attends. The candidate and the media mogul have not publicly disclosed the connection.

    • Sanders Wins West Virginia Primary (And No, It’s Not Inconsequential)

      ‘Regardless of what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these victories matter.’

      [...]

      Though the mainstream and corporate media continue to push a narrative suggesting the race for Democratic nomination is essentially over, polling released in the last twenty-four hours shows that Sanders continues to do better nationally in a hypothetical general-election matchup against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

      Karli Wallace Thompson, a campaign manager for Democracy for America, an advocacy group backing Sanders’ campaign, said Tuesday’s win in West Virginia should not be downplayed.

      “Regardless of what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these victories matter,” said Thompson, “and not just because each win gets us closer to overtaking Hillary Clinton in the delegate count.”

      Sanders’ latest victories matter, argues Thompson, “because they send a clear message to the Democratic Party that we refuse to give up on our values. Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, some pro-corporate Democrats are sensing an opportunity to move the party even further to the right in order to win the votes of ‘Never Trump’ voters. They’re ignoring the fact that modern presidential elections are always won by candidates who motivate their base and speak to their values.”

    • Ralph Nader: Sanders Should Stay in Democratic Race, Is Only Losing Due to Anti-Democratic System

      Polls have opened in West Virginia, where Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are vying for the 29 delegates up for grabs. Eight years ago, Clinton won West Virginia in a landslide, beating Barack Obama by 40 percentage points—but many polls project Sanders will win today. We speak to longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who argues that Sanders would be winning the primary race if every state had open primaries.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hackers Attempt to Hold Capitol Hill Data for Ransom

      The House is under attack by hackers hoping to infiltrate congressional computers, encrypt their contents, and then force users to pay a ransom to get their access back.

      “In the past 48 hours, the House Information Security Office has seen an increase of attacks on the House Network using third party, web-based mail applications such as YahooMail, Gmail,” the House’s Technology Service Desk wrote in an email to House staffers on April 30.

      According to the email obtained by The Intercept, the hacked emails impersonate familiar people and invite staffers to download an attachment laced with malware—what’s known as a “phishing” attack.

    • Lauri Love and the potential civil law “backdoor” for obtaining encryption keys

      Today’s decision: Today the presiding judge District Judge Tempia will make a decision on whether Lauri Love be “directed” at this stage to provide an encryption key as part of the civil claim, and before the trial.

      This is because the National Crime Agency, the “defendant” in this claim, is insisting that the key be handed over before the application be tried and a decision made to return the equipment.

    • British Hacker Wins Court Battle Over Encryption Keys

      A British court on Tuesday rejected an attempt by security agents to force an alleged hacker to hand over his encryption keys.

      Thirty-one-year-old Lauri Love has been accused by U.S. authorities of hacking into U.S. government networks between 2012 and 2013, including those of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

    • The US Person Back Door Search Number DOJ Could Publish Immediately

      The Senate Judiciary Committee had a first public hearing on Section 702 today, about which I’ll have several posts.

      One piece of good news, however, is that both some of the witnesses (Liza Goitein and David Medine; Ken Wainstein, Matt Olsen, and Rachel Brand were the other witnesses) and some of the Senators supported more transparency, including requiring the FBI to provide a count of how many US person queries of 702-collected data it does, as well as a count of how many US persons get sucked up by Section 702 more generally.

    • Next NSA Fight Begins With Semantics: ‘Backdoor Search’ or ‘U.S. Person Query’?

      The practice is on the chopping block as lawmakers consider reauthorization of a pre-Snowden surveillance law.

    • The Next Big Surveillance Debate Has Arrived
    • Madison at Fort Meade: Checks, Balances, and the NSA
    • Privacy Advocate Tells Lawmakers Surveillance of Americans ‘Has Exploded’ Under Expiring FISA Law

      Lawmakers, privacy advocates and members of the intelligence community convened on Capitol Hill Tuesday to debate the renewal of the most divisive surveillance authority since the National Security Agency’s phone metadata program, potentially capable of sweeping up the communications of millions of Americans.

    • Edward Snowden says this one thing would save more lives than any NSA surveillance program

      On May 10, experts are gathering before the US Senate to debate a few of the NSA’s most robust internet surveillance programs.

    • Snowden: I had a ‘minor’ role in the NSA leak

      Edward Snowden said he is “staggered” by the reaction to his 2013 leak of National Security Agency documents detailing the extent of American government surveillance, and sees himself as having played a minor role in the revelation which shocked the defense community and continues to reverberate in Washington.

      “I’m really optimistic about how things have gone, and I’m staggered by how much more impact there’s been as a result of these revelations than I initially presumed,” Snowden told the Columbia Journalism Review. “I’m famous for telling [former Guardian editor-in-chief] Alan Rusbridger that it would be a three-day story. You’re sort of alluding to this idea that people don’t really care, or that nothing has really changed. We’ve heard this in a number of different ways, but I think it actually has changed in a substantial way.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Security researcher arrested for disclosing US election website vulnerabilities

      David Levin was later released on a $15,000 bond after reporting the SQL vulnerabilities.

    • David Cameron Is Absolutely Right!

      Of course when the Tories describe somewhere as “fantastically corrupt”, they mean “brilliant personal enrichment opportunity for me.” And not just the Tories. Tony Blair will be in there like a shot.

    • Airline Pilots Should Not Have to Choose Between Their Jobs and Breastfeeding Their Babies

      I’m a commercial airline pilot, and I love my job. As a kid, I was obsessed with airplanes. My parents encouraged my passion for flying, and in spite of the odds — women currently make up only six percent of commercial pilots — I became a pilot.

    • Striking Prisoners in Alabama Accuse Officials of Using Food as Weapon

      Alabama prisoners who have been on strike for 10 days over unpaid labor and prison conditions are accusing officials of retaliating against their protest by starving them. The coordinated strike started on May 1, International Workers’ Day, when prisoners at the Holman and Elmore facilities refused to report to their prison jobs and has since expanded to Staton, St. Clair, and Donaldson’s facilities, according to organizers with the Free Alabama Movement, a network of prison activists.

    • From a non-Jewish Left-Zionist: an open letter to Ken Livingstone

      It is, also, intellectually offensive to suggest that because they advocated transfer before ‘going mad’ and opting instead for genocide, the Nazis were Zionists. Peter Beaumont has already amply illustrated the crassness of this fallacious equation of agency and intention so I will let the case rest with him. Suffice it to say that a more ludicrous reading of Nazi anti-Semitism it is hard to imagine. But then, your piece of radio sophistry was not meant to illuminate history, rather to damn Zionism by innuendo.

    • Farm Workers Sue Over Labor Rights in Landmark Case for ‘Dignity and Humanity’

      Farm workers have sued New York for the right to organize in a groundbreaking lawsuit that demands they receive the same rights as “virtually every other worker,” the New York chapter of the ACLU said on Tuesday.

      The lawsuit claims that laborers are being forced to work in “life-threatening, sweatshop-like conditions” and are prevented from organizing under threat of retaliation.

      It also charges that the State Employment Relations Act is part of a Depression-era measure meant to enact protections for workers but which excluded farm workers, who were majority black at the time, to accommodate segregationist policies of racist Congress members. That exclusion has held, impacting laborers who are now largely Central American and Mexican immigrants, the lawsuit states.

    • ‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, Israeli Peace Activist Miko Peled Discuss the Devolution of Israel

      On this week’s episode of “Days of Revolt,” Truthdig’s own Chris Hedges sits down with Miko Peled, a Israeli peace activist and author of “The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” The two discuss current events in Israel and Palestine, looking back on decades of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

      Peled, who was born in Jerusalem, notes that while past generations of Israeli politicians presented a civil facade while committing atrocities, current figures like Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett “don’t understand why they have to pretend, because they’re getting all the money and all the support they need from America and from the Europeans.”

    • Detroit Teachers Are Determined To Stop This Legislation. Here’s Why.

      Detroit teachers are organizing to prevent a bill from passing the state legislature that they say would underfund schools and limit teachers’ rights.

      There are two competing bills in the legislature aimed at resolving Detroit Public Schools’ current financial mess. The school system was at risk of going bankrupt because school officials said the district was “running out of money” in April, but the state provided $48.7 million in emergency funding to keep the district running. Now, as the end of the school year approaches, there are questions about long-term solutions.

    • Why Teachers Matter in Dark Times

      Americans live in a historical moment that annihilates thought. Ignorance now provides a sense of community; the brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle; the only discourse that matters is about business; poverty is now viewed as a technical problem; thought chases after an emotion that can obliterate it. The presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Donald Trump, declares he likes “the uneducated” — implying that it is better that they stay ignorant than be critically engaged agents — and boasts that he doesn’t read books. Fox News offers no apologies for suggesting that thinking is an act of stupidity.

    • Louisiana is Number One… in Incarceration

      Louisiana first became number 1 in the nation in 2005 when it was imprisoning 36,083 people. Louisiana remained number 1, in 2010 with 35,207 in prison, an incarceration rate of 867 per 100,000 people, over 200 points head of the next highest state Mississippi.

    • Interview: Singapore blogger Amos Yee on press freedom, feminism, and protest

      If he arrests me, the entire world, the press and all that [would] know, it’ll highlight a lot of flaws like what happened with the Lee Kuan Yew video. If they don’t arrest me, then I make even more videos that criticise them and break even more laws. It’s a pretty good position I’m in.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Budweiser Is Making a Truly Ridiculous Name Change

        According to AdAge, which has confirmed with company officials, 12-ounce cans and bottles of Budweiser—owned by a company based in Belgium—will now bear the brand name America. You can look for the change as of May 23, and expect it to last straight through summer, aka “the high beer season.” But it won’t end there! The new look will stretch onward through the election season, because why not make your rebranding as ridiculous as our presidential campaign has been.

      • ‘Make Amerikkka Great Again’ trademark application filed

        A trademark application has been filed for the term ‘Make Amerikkka Great Again’, in what appears to be a dig at US presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.

        The trademark was applied for on March 30 at the US Patent and Trademark Office by a company based in Los Angeles called 47 / 72 Inc.

        The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ has been used in Trump’s campaign. The term is also a registered trademark owned by Trump and covers political campaigns as well as hats and t-shirts.

      • Facebook wins trademark dispute in China

        A Chinese court has ruled in favour of Facebook in a trademark dispute centring on the transliteration of the term ‘face book’.

        The Beijing Higher People’s Court backed the social media website in its dispute with Zhujiang Beverage, based in Zhongshan.

        Zhujiang sells products including milk-flavoured drinks and porridge.

      • Minnesota’s Broad Publicity Rights Law, The PRINCE Act, So Broad That It May Violate Itself

        We’ve written many posts on the area of so-called “publicity rights” laws. These are state laws that try to create a newish form of intellectual property around someone’s “likeness” or other identifying features. A few years ago, Eriq Gardner wrote the definitive piece detailing the rise of publicity rights as a new way to try to lock down “protections” for things that don’t really need to be protected. The initial intent behind many of these laws was to avoid a situation where there was a false endorsement — basically to stop someone from putting an image or likeness of a famous person in an ad to imply support. But the law has (not surprisingly) expanded over time, and there have been many, many crazy battles over publicity rights — including ones concerning Marilyn Monroe, Manuel Noriega, Katherine Heigl, Lindsay Lohan, Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay Lohan.

      • Minnesota Legislators Go Crazy, Pushing Dangerous PRINCE Act

        Just a few weeks after his death, some Minnesota legislators are using Prince’s name to ram through a dangerous publicity rights law that will give his heirs – and the heirs of any other Minnesotan – broad and indefinite rights to shut down all kind of legitimate speech and activities in perpetuity.

    • Copyrights

      • EFF at Copyright Office Roundtable Thursday and Friday in San Francisco

        On Thursday and Friday, May 12-13, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legal Director Corynne McSherry will participate in public roundtable discussions about the effectiveness of safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) at the United States Ninth Circuit James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco. The discussions are hosted by the U.S. Copyright Office, which is studying how the provisions impact copyright owners, internet service providers (ISPs) and users—including the ongoing problem of takedown abuse.

      • Judge Says Copyright Case Against Star Trek Fan Film Can ‘Live Long’ And Possibly ‘Prosper’

        Just yesterday we filled you in on the latest in the copyright fight over a professional-level “fan film” in the Star Trek universe, dubbed “Axanar” (along with a short film “Prelude to Axanar.”) The makers of that film tried to get the case dismissed, arguing that Paramount Pictures and CBS failed to state an actual claim of copyright infringement. Specifically, they were arguing that Paramount/CBS highlighted a bunch of things related to Star Trek, some of which they may hold a joint copyright over, but failed to state what specific copyright-covered work the Axanar productions were infringing. And, of course, there was a side note in all of this that one of the many things that Paramount and CBS tossed against the wall claiming copyright was the Klingon language itself.

        This morning, the court released two short rulings, with the first one dumping the amicus filing over whether or not there was a copyright in the Klingon language. That one was short and sweet and just said that at this stage of the game the court has no reason to explore whether or not languages can be covered by copyright and “therefore, none of the information provided by Amicus is necessary to dispose of the Motion to dismiss.”

[ES] La UPC: Una Sopa de Mentiras Cortesía de la EPO, Abogados de Patentes, y Grandes Clientes (Como Corporaciónes Multinaciónales)

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Article as ODF

Publicado en Deception, Europe, Patents at 2:36 pm por Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ellos quieren que todos crean que nada puede detener a la antidemocrática UPC

UPC impact

Sumario: El gólpe de estado de la Patente Unitaria, o el esfuérzo de impulsar la UPC a Europa (usándo toda suerte de nombres y falsos reclamos), está progresando bien si sus profecíás de autocumplimiénto son para creerse

Cada vez que escribimos sobre problemas técnicos de la EPO prevemos que su adopción de los bajos niveles de la USPTO (en términos de examen), también pueden significar las patentes de software en Europa. Una táctica emergente para lograr las patentes de software es FRAND, que fue mencionado en el post anterior. Otra es la UPC, que al igual que la TPP amenaza con traer las patentes de software en Europa (los aspectos técnicos de este proceso fueron explicados aquí muchas veces antes, incluso ayer).

El Mirage de recursos y/u oposiciones (para los ricos)

Uno de los problemas que tenemos es la falta de información acerca de la UPC. Como lo ponemos a principios de este año, “los medios aún saturados acerca de la falta de información acerca de la (UPC)” y esto es todavía el caso. No debería sorpréndernos, dada la moda en el que los funcionarios de EPO y abogados de patentes europeas propagan habitualmente afirmaciones engañosas. La NLO repite/gira propaganda con respecto a los llamados “resultados” [1, 2, 3] o de otro tipo de estadísticas que no son completos. Para citar: “La oposición ante la Oficina Europea de Patentes (EPO) es una herramienta de gran alcance para impugnar la validez de una patente europea concedida. Es una manera de obtener una decisión central de un tablero de vista técnico cualificado que se aplica en todos los países en los que la patente es válida, con el consiguiente ahorro en los costos de litigio ante los tribunales nacionales individuales. las tasas de éxito de la oposición son altos. En su informe anual más reciente (2015), la EPO puso de manifiesto las posibilidades de tener una patente revocada (31%), mantiene en su forma modificada (38%) o se mantiene según lo concedido (31%); 69% de oposiciones dio lugar a una modificación en el alcance de la protección de la patente impugnada.”

Esto es similar a PTAB en los EE.UU. (revisión interpartes), pero esto pasa por alto el hecho de que este proceso es costoso y laborioso. desarrolladores de patentes pequeñas, por ejemplo, no tienen ni el tiempo/dinero, ni la motivación para perseguir un proceso de este tipo. Esto significa que este status quo sigue siendo muy sesgada y completamente inclinada en contra de las PYMES. Además, tenga en cuenta el impacto probable de la UPC en las juntas; pronto podrían ser obsoletos.

Pretensión (o Profecía de Autocumplimiénto) de la Retificación Italiána de la UPC

Ahora, consideren lo que escribimos ayer acerca los rumores Italianos acerca de la UPC. La EPO, basada en mercadeo de hoy, Quiere que todo el mundo crea que la UPC es buena. NO lo es. Escribimos acerca de la UPC a principios de este mes con el fin de arrojar luz sobre la escalada de este tipo de tácticas de propaganda y ahora que vemos que incluso WIPR basado en rumores, un artículo sobre los abogados de patentes que tienen una agenda y por tanto no son exactamente un fuente objetiva para ello , como hemos explicado, el otro día. “Según el abogado Trevisan y Cuonzo Valerio Meucci,” escribió el autor a una gran audiencia, “el ministro de asuntos exteriores y de cooperación internacional, Paolo Gentiloni, propuso la aprobación del proyecto de ley, que el gobierno aceptó.”

Esto es un gran error (si fuese verdad). Italia se opuso a ello por más de un lustro, y hubiéron buenas razones para ello. Algunas personas pro-patentes ahora están esparciéndo este rumor (ellos niegan -cínicos – su parciálismoaunque describan su cuenta Twitter como “Sigánnos por las últimas noticias y desarrollos en la ley Europea de Patentes y sus pasos claves en la ruta a la Corte Unificada de Patentes”) y una persona escribió: “#Italia toma un paso para ratificar #unifiedpatentcourt agreement http://bit.ly/1WUZG3a #upc #ratification”

Basado en ciértos artículos [1, 2], ahora hay un comunicado de prensa. Para citar a la cuenta de un autor de la misma: “De acuerdo con el comunicado de prensa oficial, la ratificación del Acuerdo Tribunal Unificado de Patentes de Italia ayudará a luchar contra la entrada en la Unión Europea de productos falsificados.”

Pero esto en realidad no implica la ratificación y el comunicado de prensa dice una mentira, como fue el caso con el TPP y TTIP. Esto refleja la tendencia reciente de las llamadas ofertas comerciales ”, que se mantiene en secreto y se benefician de la cobertura de prensa engañosa (o ninguna en absoluto).

UPC Mala para las PYMEs

La UPC iría en contra de las PYME, incluso sobre la base de una encuesta realizada por los sitios que se dirigen a abogados de patentes y otras maximalistas. Para citar Nórdic Patent (conectados a Kongstad): “Las encuestas se encuentran, la mayoría de los seguidores @ManagingIP creo que el #UPC y #UnitaryPatent son malos para las #PYMEs europeas.”

Esto es lo que Managing IP (MIP) escribió: “En efecto: el 56% dice #UPC #UnitaryPatent es mala para las PYME en Europa. Haremos un estudio más amplio a finales de este año “.

“Lo que se necesita no es” un estudio más amplio “, pero una encuesta que no pide el coro MIP,” les dije, a la que respondió con: “El coro MIP tiene un muy amplio abanico de voces, como es el caso!”

Nosotros no realmente pensamos que es así, pero, sin embargo, seguro que parece que incluso los lectores MIP admiten que las afirmaciones de la EPO sobre la UPC ser bueno para las PYME son mentiras.

Más Profecías Auto-Cumplibles y Esperanzas de los Colonizadores de los EE.UU

Basado en este tweet, La UPC ya está aqu i. Pero no es así. Para citar: “enseñánsas técnicas para los #jueces de patentes. Las opiniónes de los #¿jueces técnicos de la UPC tendrán mucho peso?”

“Será”? Tal vez significa que lo haría. La UPC incluso no esta aquí. Para citar lo que en esto se basa: “¿Le resulta un poco como lo que esperamos del tribunal de patentes unificado esperada de largo? La UPC empleará cerca de 50 jueces técnicos junto a un número similar de jueces de formación jurídica.”

“La UPC empleará” es erróneo. La UPC, si es que alguna vez se hace realidad en absoluto, haríá todo tipo de cosas, pero dada la atmósfera de la propaganda (ver la propaganda SME arriba), no se debe creer nada en absoluto. Vean cómo los abogados de patentes de los Estados Unidos hiciéron un evento acerca de la UPC en los EE.UU.. Saben que la UPC es para ellos y no para los europeos. Las PYMEs de Europa no va a volar a los EE.UU. para asistir a una conferencia de este tipo, una de varias de esas conferencias en los Estados Unidos patrocinados por la firma de relaciones públicas de la EPO (que sólo ‘es’ na empresa con sede en los Estados Unidos).

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