05.13.16
Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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From time to time we read that governments don’t whole-heartedly move to GNU/Linux. India is different. Even their courts, full of serious conservative people are sending everyone to school for a day or two with their laptops to practise using Ubuntu GNU/Linux for desktop work and a Court Information System.
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Desktop
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Many years ago, I was in a similar situation. I was dual-booting between Windows XP and one of the popular distros of that time. In my case, it was worth it to me to simply walk away from Outlook and start over. I did this by using one of those programs for Windows you mentioned, that convert PST files into mbox. The mbox file type is compatible with just about any email client, so I was able to get everything moved into Thunderbird without much trouble.
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Gone, however, is automatic Wi-Fi sharing with contacts, with Microsoft citing low uptake over cost of development.
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Kernel Space
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Today, May 13, 2016, we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles with a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel.
In the 30-minute video keynote/interview attached below, courtesy of The Linux Foundation, which was recorded during the Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2016 that took place last month between April 4 and April 6 in San Diego, California, USA, Linus Torvalds talks with Dirk Hohndel about everything Linux.
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Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative open source project within the Linux Foundation working on a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car and it’s secured the backing of some serious partners, according to an announcement this week. Movimento, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Texas Instruments, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have joined AGL, and that’s a huge endorsement for the open-source movement in connected car, an industry that’s been locked up in proprietary software for most of its life, largely because of security concerns.
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Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.5.4, Linux kernel 4.4.10 LTS, Linux kernel 3.18.33 LTS, and Linux kernel 4.1.24 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the release of Linux kernel 3.14.69 LTS.
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Sasha Levin announced the availability of Linux kernel 3.18.33 LTS, which comes right after the release of Linux 4.5.4, Linux 4.4.10 LTS, and Linux 4.1.24 LTS kernels.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman is second in command in the Linux kernel community. In addition to doing great work on device drivers, he also maintains the stable tree of the Linux kernel.
In his keynote presentation at CoreOS Fest in Berlin this week, Kroah-Hartman offered some inside perspective on just how massive the Linux kernel project is. And I also had a chance to sit down with him to talk about the kernel and security.
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Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Movimento, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Texas Instruments, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have joined Automotive Grade Linux. Additionally, it was announced that Movimento, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have also joined The Linux Foundation.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest open-source fruits of AMD’s GPUOpen project is the Compressonator.
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It’s been over one month since NVIDIA presented their proposed Weston patches for supporting Wayland with NVIDIA’s Linux binary driver but the discussion over their proposed approach remains heated.
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There are new Mesa happenings in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) space.
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Yet another feature landing in Mesa Git ahead of the upcoming Mesa 11.3/12.0 branching for release next month is lossless compression in the Intel Mesa DRI driver.
A series of commits today added support for lossless compression when using Intel Skylake graphics hardware.
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When working on the story this week about Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver, I found out another bit of information worth relaying: a longtime contributor to the Intel Linux graphics driver stack has left the company to focus on a new venture.
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Martin Peres, the organizer of this year’s annual X.Org Developers’ Conference, has issued a call for papers (CFP) for those wishing to present at this conference.
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Going back six years has been work on bringing threaded input to the X.Org Server whereby the input event code would run on its own CPU thread. The work has yet to be merged in full, but Keith Packard has now revised the patches.
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Applications
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The Qt Company, through Eike Ziller, announced the final release of Qt Creator 4.0, the open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) designed for the needs of Qt developers.
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Even after all these years, no one has yet dethroned Microsoft Word from its kingly position. Sure, a few alternatives have been playing a great game of catch-up and innovation, but there’s no doubt about it — Word is still the best.
But unless you use some kind of emulation or virtualization software, there’s no way to run Word on a regular Linux setup. Which leaves us with a tough question: what’s the best word processor to use on Linux?
There are a handful of worthy options out there. Let’s take a brief but thorough look at them to see all of their pros and cons. By the end, it’ll be up to you to pick the one that works best for your needs.
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Michael Roth has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of QEMU 2.6, the latest and most advanced version of the widely-used and highly customizable virtualization software for GNU/Linux operating systems.
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The developers behind the QEMU open-source processor emulator have announced their v2.6.0 release.
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GitHub has just released the version 1.0 of Electron, its free and open source application building platform. After two years of development, Electron 1.0 is here with new features and a Chrome extension Devtron to debug applications and make them better.
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Proprietary
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The folks behind the free but proprietary Opera browser announced today that the latest developer build includes Power Saving Mode, a new feature that the company claims can extend battery life by up to 50 percent. If true, this could be a serious game changer. Free and open source software advocates should hope that the developers at Mozilla are paying attention.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dungeons & Robots is an interesting looking Early Access action RPG that looks very promising and the developers have confirmed it’s coming to Linux soon.
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Atriage is one title I missed due to Steam’s failure to show games that produce a Linux version after the Windows release in the Linux newly released section. I do wish Valve would fix that.
Looks a bit unusual and I like developers who try something a little different. I love the style of it and I love games that emulate board games, so it could be fun.
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Doing my usual perusing through changelogs, game updates and so on I come across new ports. This time Wailing Heights caught my interest. A body-hopping, musical adventure game, set in a horrific hamlet of monsters.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasma has always been the talk of the town for its sleek and cutting edge look. KDE Plasma among all other Linux Desktop Environments have always stood out for its continuous development. The latest release of KDE Plasma is 5.6 which includes some new features, tweaks and fixes. Plasma desktop is also highly customizable so that you can customize it the way you need it to be.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Today, May 12, 2016, Frederic Peters has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the last maintenance release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.
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Hello all,
The latest release of GNOME is here: GNOME 3.20.2.
This is the second and final release for the 3.20 branch; this update
brings many bug fixes and improvements as well as documentation and
translation updates.
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I liked earlier versions of Simplicity Linux. They remain very usable computing options. The X and Mini versions are equally capable but offer a different look and feel.
The LXDE desktop consumes little system resources. It loads into system memory when possible to run fast and furious without having to read from the CD/DVD or USB storage.
Simplicity Linux is generally easy to use, but the Puppy Linux-centric software requires a bit of a learning curve for users used to Debian Linux derivatives.
If you are looking for a solid computing experience other than the X and the Mini editions in the 16.04 betas releases, check out previous Simplicity Linux releases. They offer the Puppy Linux base but include other changes, such as Google Chrome as the default browser.
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New Releases
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Slackel KDE 4.14.18 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Softpedia has been informed by the OpenMandriva Team that the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx3 GNU/Linux operating system will use the LLVM Clang compiler by default.
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The next OpenMandriva is one step closer to becoming a release this week as the cooker developmental branch was forked off to stabilize Lx3. Petter Reinholdtsen today announced that ZFS has been accepted into Debian “after many years of hard work” and Christian Schaller blogged H264 support is now available to Fedora users. In other news, LibreOffice 5.1.3 was released and Jack Germain reviewed Simplicity Linux.
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GitHub has been forked to Lx3 and the repos will be cloned after the creation of 12 new packages and their dependencies for KDEapps. The problem of migrating from the 2014 to the Lx3 release was discussed and an action raised for the creation of a script to allow this upgrade path.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Enterprise Linux firm Suse is making it more convenient for SAP users to operate the enterprise software by making its Linux server optimised for SAP available for on-demand deployment via Amazon’s cloud-based AWS Marketplace.
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Red Hat Family
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RBS has built a new Open Experience centre using Red Hat’s mobile and web-scale container application platforms to help grow innovation in the firm.
The Open Experience centre, based in Edinburgh, allows the bank to build new applications and services for both its internal teams and its customers, helping the company foster a more collaborative environment between staff, businesses and its customers.
Using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform allows developers create, host and scale applications faster than before, meaning they can be pushed through to testing quicker.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Today in Linux news Mageia 6 is falling a bit behind schedule having missed a stabilization release and now delaying versions freeze. openSUSE Tumbleweed received an update to Plasma 5.6.3 and Red Hat announced their latest coup. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield wondered how long desktop Linux can last considering the world’s obsession with portables and Eric Nicholls wondered if Ubuntu can retain their “title of best desktop OS.”
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John Dulaney starting expermenting with Linux when he was thirteen years old and made the switch to using Linux full time with Fedora Core 1. Dulaney said, “I had meant to set it up to dual boot with Windows, and accidentally overwrote the wrong partition, leaving me with just Fedora.” John has an eclectic set of childhood heroes that include Einstein, astronauts, Gumby and his father. His favorite movies are Stargate and Star Trek VI. Dulaney is a fan of Eastern North Carolina style pork barbecue who enjoys fencing, model railroading and playing the banjo.
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It’s now easier having basic H.264 support on Fedora Linux with there now being an official way thanks to cooperation with Cisco.
can now enable the fedora-cisco-openh264 repository and then simply install the mozilla-openh264 and gstreamr1-plugin-openh264 packages for having OpenH264 easily installed on the system.
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Dennis Gilmore posted a nice blog entry explaining how you can install OpenH264 in Fedora 24.
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Debian Family
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Today, after many years of hard work from many people, ZFS for Linux finally entered Debian. The package status can be seen on the package tracker for zfs-linux. and the team status page. If you want to help out, please join us. The source code is available via git on Alioth. It would also be great if you could help out with the dkms package, as it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 16.04 was released in April, and it’s a great release. Ubuntu is generally known as an extremely user-friendly distribution, so it’s easy to get up and running quickly. That said, there are a few things to do — depending on your needs — to get most out of your system.
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The past few weeks have been good ones for the open source ecosystem. Three major Linux-based operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu — have debuted in final or beta form. Here’s a look at what’s new in all of them.
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While working at Dell Inc. in the 2011 I met some Linux enthusiasts that introduced me to Ubuntu. I have heard about SUSE, Debian and Red Hat before but they were never promoted as real alternatives to Windows and OS X. But Ubuntu changed my mindset toward Linux so I decided to give it a try. At the beginning I felt it was too hard to understand so I went back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows until I got used to Ubuntu. My first barrier was the fact that on Windows everything was fixed by installing a software that will do everything for you and on Linux it was all about the Terminal. But once you realize that you don’t need to deal with malware and slow performance anymore you simply don’t look back at Windows.
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Canonical announced on May 12, 2016, that they’ve updated the Photos Scope for Ubuntu Phone users with support for viewing camera uploads from their Dropbox accounts.
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Weighing in at just over a pound, the Aquaris M10 isn’t an unwieldy tablet, but it doesn’t strike us as lightweight either. It’s definitely a two-hand device, considering the acreage of its 10.1-inch display. Trying to use it with one hand is a sure way to induce wrist cramps and other discomfort.
The Aquaris M10 has a glossy display, while the rear of the device bears a matte finish, allowing for both an improved grip and a more flattering appearance. The device is painted black for the full HD version, while the standard HD version has a bleach white finish. If you were hoping for a higher resolution and the snow-coated exterior, you’ll be hopelessly out of luck.
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Canonical’s Zygmunt Krynicki announced just a few moments ago, May 13, 2016, that a new version of the snapd tool has been pushed to the stable repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
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The BQ Aquaris M10 is the first tablet running Ubuntu. It’s also the first device in which Ubuntu delivers on the vision of convergence that started with the Ubuntu Edge campaign. Ubuntu fans will be thrilled to finally get their hands on this unique device, but Ubuntu’s developers clearly have much more work to do.
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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Codenamed “Xenial Xerus” has arrived. After Six month developments, Canonical officially releases the new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on April 21, 2016. It now available to download and install on PCs, laptops and netbooks.
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For those currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and thinking about trying out the Padoka PPA for easily deploying the latest Mesa code on your desktop rather than using Xenial’s stock Mesa 11.2, here are some fresh reference benchmarks.
In a few days is the main tests I’m working on of looking at the Linux 4.6 vs. DRM-Next-4.7 for Radeon/AMDGPU. But in the process of doing a clean system install and then wanting to be on Mesa Git for when doing those DRM tests, I decided to do a quick Mesa 11.2 vs. 11.3-devel comparison along the way for one of the test graphics cards: the AMD Radeon R9 290.
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Another Ubuntu Hackathon, with a blend of #convergence [Ed: Microsoft is now grooming Canonical and Ubuntu like it did Novell and Mono (or Ximian and Xamarin beforehand)]
As we continue our hackathon journey around China, we are back in Beijing! Since the last time we were here in Beijing, Ubuntu’s first tablet, the BQ M10 Ubuntu Edition became available worldwide. It’s more than just another tablet, it’s the first device that brings the true convergent experience to life. For those of you who are not familiar with the term convergence, it means you can turn your tablet into a fully functioning Ubuntu desktop with a set of bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And for developers you only need to write one set of code, which will run across all Ubuntu form factors – you can find out more information on the convergence feature here and here.
[...]
A big thanks to our location sponsor Microsoft China Headquarter for providing the awesome coding space for our developers and all the local communities and friends that made this happen.
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Flavours and Variants
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Today, May 12, 2016, GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us about the release and immediate availability of a new build of his Exton|OS Linux kernel-based computer operating system.
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A tiny open source “MiQi” SBC that runs Linux or Android on a Rockchip RK3288, with HDMI, GbE, four USB ports, and expansion headers has launched on Indiegogo.
A Shenzhen startup led by Benn Huang called MQMaker launched an Indiegogo campaign for a MiQi hacker board. The MiQi is available in packages starting at $35 (1GB RAM, 8GB eMMC) and $69 (2GB RAM, 32GB eMMC). Last September, the company successfully launched an open spec, OpenWrt Linux-based WiTi router board, now available for $69.
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Arduino LLC released a shield version of its Arduino Yún SBC, letting you add a WiFi and Linux to Arduino boards, along with Ethernet and USB ports.
The Arduino and Genuino Yún Shield peels off the OpenWrt-driven WiFi subsystem of the Arduino Yún SBC as a shield add-on, letting you add Internet access to other Arduino boards. The Arduino and Genuino Yún Shield is equipped with the same MIPS-based, 400MHz Atheros AR9331 WiFi SoC as the Arduino Yún and Arduino Yún Mini, the first Arduino SBCs to run Linux.
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Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Simon Long today announced that a major update is available for the main Linux kernel-based operating system for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.
As many of you might know already, Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled their newest and most advanced SBC, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, on February 29, 2016, finally implementing a 64-bit processor, along with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.
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Tibbo has his week unveiled a new Linux-based system they have created which is based on the based on the powerful 1GHz Cortex-A8 Sitara CPU from Texas Instruments and is a great with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash memory.
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Phones
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Android
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The open source ecosystem grows every day, and with the proliferation of mobile devices around the globe, perhaps never has it been more important than now to make sure that phone and tablet users get access to the same high-quality open source software options that desktop users have long enjoyed.
I want to take you through some of the many open source options for mobile apps that you have available to you on Android devices, and today, we start with open source apps for drawing. For those of you on an iOS device, you may be able to find an equivalent for your device as well, but the Apple ecosystem does not lend itself to applications outside of its walled garden, so your luck may vary.
Whether you’re a serious artist, a doodler, or simply someone who wants to provide a few apps to entertain your kids, we hope you’ll appreciate these entertaining picks. They’re not the GIMP or Inkscape (although you can find those packaged for Android as well), but they all make use of touch input in creative ways.
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Generally my earbuds are plugged into my Android phone, and on that, I have graduated from the non-open-source, pre-installed app to Vanilla Music, which claims to be open source and ad-free. I confess I haven’t tried a git pull on it yet, but otherwise, so far I am liking it. The app provides simple tab structure offering artists, albums, songs, playlists, genres, and files. Vanilla Music is simple and responsive and has all the basic features I need for my modest on-phone music collection. But I’m going to try other open source applications, so if you have suggestions, let me know in the comments.
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Hardcore Android fans already know what Jide is. It’s the company behind Remix OS, the Windows-style Android operating system that can be installed on any computer, regardless what OS it runs. In addition to offering its desktop Android reboot free of charge to anyone looking for Android on their computer, the company has introduced Remix OS devices of its own in the past. Now, Jide has partnered with AOC to launch a standalone all-in-one PC that runs Android out of the box.
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Jide, the company behind desktop-orientated Android fork Remix OS, has put its software in an all-in-one PC for the first time. The firm partnered with Chinese manufacturer AOC to create a Remix OS-powered desktop device that’s aimed at China’s enterprise market. This isn’t a powerful computer by any stretch of the imagination (nor is it the first all-in-one device to run Android, or a variant thereof), but it’s still interesting to see what Jide is doing with its software.
Remix OS is still in beta, but it essentially turns Google’s mobile OS into a desktop operating system. The software adds floating windows, keyboard and mouse support, a Start menu lookalike, and file manager. The software is available to download for free, and we were impressed with its capabilities when we tried it out at MWC earlier this year.
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And we’re back! Google has released the latest Android security update and, as you might expect, there’s plenty to be had. This time around, Google patched 40 vulnerabilities. Twelve of these 40 issues were marked as critical, with two of those identified as remote code execution vulnerabilities (aka, the worst kind). Unfortunately, the two remote code execution (RCE) issues are found in Android’s mediaserver. This is the same subsystem that has been plagued with issues in the past few months. Those two RCE issues aren’t the only ones to haunt the mediaserver.
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Open source developers have built a burgeoning ecosystem of data analytics and storage solutions to address the data deluge over the past several years. Here’s a look at several of the most popular open source tools for big data storage and analytics.
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The march toward open source is rapidly turning into an all-out race, with research projects and applications extending to new industry sectors, including communication providers. What started out in the software realm has moved into the hardware space, bringing with it significant changes for providers and vendors alike. Most recently, the Open Compute Project (OCP) and its spin-offs, including the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have not only reinforced this shift toward open source, but have accelerated the trend.
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Open source software rarely receives the kind of attention that the press lavishes on the latest hot new thing blessed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Yet these projects are the foundations of the web world.
Without open source there would be no Slack, no Medium, no Github. Nor would there be Google, Facebook, or much of anything else.
Without open source projects like Apache, Nginx, OpenSSL, OpenSSH and others (to say nothing of GNU/Linux, which does get some attention), the latest hot new thing would likely not exist. More fundamentally, the web as we know it would not exist.
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The focus of Node.js over the last year has been to increase the number of contributors working on the project. Node.js has seen sustained 100% year-over-year user growth for several years, but the number of contributors was, at one point, actually on the decline.
After a year+ of community building and iteration we’re now healthier than ever. The project has reorganized itself divided into many components and sits at 400 members. Across most repos, which now make up the project as a whole, we’re seeing that ~50% of the contributors in a given month are new to that repository. That means our conversion of users into contributors is six times higher than the growth of our user community. Contributors are essential to the health and longevity of an open source project.
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As an FSF intern during the winter and spring of 2016, I had the opportunity to be around FSF’s tech team during LibrePlanet preparation, and we spent a lot of time making the streaming and recording work as well as possible so that people who were not in each talk could still watch it (all the recordings are already up on media.libreplanet.org).
Each room at the LibrePlanet conference has a streaming set-up staffed by a volunteer. There are many skilled volunteers, but we need to minimize the risk of failed recordings due to over-complex or error-prone software systems. So, in order to improve streaming we decided to quickly develop a GPLv3 program to provide a seamless interface for an audio and/or video streaming console.
As a newcomer to the free software community, I have been looking for ways to contribute by coding. The huge amount of projects in progress have overwhelmed me a bit. So, when it was proposed to create a piece of software to be used directly by the community at the conference, I was full of joy about beginning a project.
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The third “black box” was the network operating system (NOS). Once proprietary systems that were supplied only by the big networking vendors, these NOS products are now offered by software vendors like Big Switch, Cumulus, and Pica8. The NOS must comply with three key component areas within the device: the CPU and the motherboard (or the BSP), “U-Boot” (or universal boot loader), and the ASIC’s APIs. All three collectively need to be matched to the network OS in order to port a NOS onto that same piece of metal. This is why so-called white-box SDN vendors either sell the complete switch and OS solution or provide a list of pre-qualified switches so you can directly buy the hardware.
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Today, the California Independent System Operator announced it is using Dispersive Technologies for software defined networking (SDN) to control the flow of electricity on its power grid.
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Some people prefer open source software because they see it to be more secure in terms of virus attacks and stable as a support platform for other software. Others may prefer open source because they genuinely cannot afford to buy proprietary software. But as you explore any form of software, please remember they are all vulnerable in their own ways and need protection from attacks. Good Luck!
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The rapid success of the party lies in the sharing and collaborative approach used by open source computer software.
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Embracing open source has seen Comcast transform from a cable company to a networking company and now to a software company, highlighted Nagesh Nandiraju, Director of Next Gen Network Architecture, Comcast in his plenary talk at Open Networking Summit 2016.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The maker of the Firefox browser is wading into an increasingly contentious court battle over an undisclosed security vulnerability the FBI used to track down anonymous users of a child-porn site.
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Recently, Mozilla filed a brief with the court, urging the FBI to reveal the technique used to hack 1000+ computers of pedophile TOR users. The open source supporter said that TOR software suite is based on Firefox and any known flaw can compromise the security of the end users.
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There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.
Project leaders behind Tor have continuously improved its security features, but now Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, in the interest of Firefox users, to disclose any findings of vulnerability in Tor to it first, before any other party learns of the vulnerability. Here is the thought behind this.
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With the Tor browser being built on the Firefox framework, any exploit of Tor could affect vanilla Firefox users. Not only that, but the FBI is apparently sitting on another Firefox vulnerability it used in a previous investigation to unmask Tor users. (This refers to the FBI’s 2012 child porn sting, which also used a NIT to obtain information about visitors to a seized website.) The filing notes the FBI has been less than helpful when approached for info about this Firefox/Tor-exploiting NIT.
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SaaS/Back End
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While the CLI meets the needs of managing one container on one host, it falls short when it comes to managing multiple containers deployed on multiple hosts. To go beyond the management of individual containers, we must turn to orchestration tools.
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Connectors make all our lives easier. In the case of the Spark-Cloudant connector, using Spark analytics on data stored in Cloudant is simplified with the easy-to-use syntax of the connector. With the large Spark ecosystem, one can now conduct federated analytics across Cloudant and other disparate data sources. And we all know that the days of analyzing just your own company data are long gone. Piping in more data is essential these days.
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When you’re talking big data analysis, you’re almost always talking open source. Apache Hadoop is what often comes to mind as a valuable big data analysis tool. But do you know the advantages that Apache Spark has to offer? This May 5 presentation from IBM’s Government Analytics Forum in Washington, DC does a nice job of explaining the advantages.
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RightScale came out with its 2016 State of the Cloud Report recently, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing. The findings showed that hybrid clouds are growing briskly, enterprise cloud workloads are on the upswing, and private cloud adoption is growing across all providers. Now, the company has announced the results of the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey: DevOps Trends.
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Databases
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PostgreSQL 9.6 is now up to its beta stage with a number of new features.
Recently I provided an early look at PostgreSQL 9.6 features. PostgreSQL 9.6 brings parallel query support, synchronous replication now supports multiple standby servers, full-text search for phrases, support for remote joins/sorts/updates, “substantial” performance improvements (especially for many-core servers), no more repetitive scans of old data by auto vacuum, and much more.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice has become the top alternative to Microsoft Office on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, so whenever a new version comes out, users rush to download it and benefit from the latest improvements made to built-in apps.
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The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, supporting Google Drive remote connectivity on GNU/Linux and MacOS X.
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Google’s Nest
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Google’s New Parser
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Funding
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The new funding will help Weaveworks build out its container networking platform as competition heats up in this emerging market.
Container networking vendor Weaveworks revealed on May 11 that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding, led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and including the participation of Accel.
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BSD
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While for years developers working on FreeBSD have been porting DRM/KMS driver changes from the Linux kernel over to their kernel, they have trailed greatly behind the mainline Linux kernel driver state due to the amount of changes they have been making to the driver when re-basing it against a new Linux kernel release. Now they are pursuing a new approach of using a compatibility layer where they hope to be able to more closely follow the upstream Linux DRM/KMS drivers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The White House open source software policy quickly grabbed headlines when officials from various agencies voiced conflicting opinions. While parties appear to be on the same page now, open source software has undoubtedly been thrust into the spotlight.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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With the contribution of scientists, engineers and programmers, UPSat is developed to participate in the QB50 international thermosphere research mission. UPSat is also the first satellite that its mechanical designs, software, and the vast majority of its components are freely available under open hardware and open software licenses.
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Smart cities may look towards open wireless standards to save billions in Internet of Things (IoT) deployment costs. Choosing open standards could cut costs by 30 percent and promote more cities to utilize IoT, according to Machina Research.
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Open Access/Content
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While scientific publication is slowly moving to an open access model, patents have been there since well before the internet revolution. It would be interesting to apply their model to the patent system retrospectively and consider
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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.
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Science
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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.
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Health/Nutrition
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Public health advocates last week told World Health Organization delegates they must act quickly to save the lives of poor populations suffering from less common diseases for which there is no research and development funding. Nongovernmental organisations showed up to a WHO meeting on the issue to urge on delegates, even holding a public demonstration in front of the UN, but there was concern afterward at the little progress made.
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Republicans ‘have tried time and time again to take health care away from the 20 million newly insured Americans,’ said Bernie Sanders.
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Since January 2014, the Hudson facility has received medical grievances from 121 individuals detained under custody of ICE. But the complaint noted that the facility “only took corrective action in 2.48 [percent] of these complaints, begging the question what role did ICE play to ensure that these complaints were fully addressed.” The complaint noted that 560 individuals were also taken to outside hospital treatments, 184 of whom were hospitalized because of medical emergencies.
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German chemical giants Bayer AG and BASF SE are both considering takeovers of U.S. seed behemoth Monsanto, according to news reports on Thursday.
Of the potential Bayer takeover of Monsanto, valued at roughly $40 billion, Bloomberg noted that it “would create the world’s largest supplier of seeds and farm chemicals.”
As USA Today reported, “A bid for Monsanto would be just the most recent in a wave of chemical and agribusiness consolidation.”
Indeed, in February China National Chemical Corp. (ChemChina) announced it would acquire Swiss pesticide company Syngenta for $43 billion, while DuPont and Dow Chemical announced their merger last year.
According to advocacy group Food & Water Watch, such consolidation has far-reaching impacts, and is bad news for farmers and communities.
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Security
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Obviously, it’s worth being careful and concerned about this kind of thing. Those encrypted ransomware attacks have become quite popular lately, and you can imagine why some would think it would be fun to target Congress specifically. Still, blocking all of YahooMail seems… like overkill? Yes, obviously, warn everyone to be careful, and highlight the details and what to watch out for. Perhaps institute some other kinds of protections. But a blanket ban on YahooMail just seems odd.
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Among the most disruptive changes in Linux over the last decade has been in the introduction and broad integration of the systemd init system into Linux.
In a keynote session at the CoreOS Fest in Berlin this week, Lennart Poettering, one of the lead developers of systemd, delivered a detailed technical keynote on some of the key parameters in systemd and how they can be used to secure Linux servers.
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This movement is fairly new. Concepts like automate testing or continuous testing, in the context of continuous delivery, still do not have 10 years of history. We need to be careful with trends. The topic is so hot these days that the association between automated testing and quality is becoming the norm, also in Open Source.
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Some of the world’s biggest security and software vendors will be rushing to patch holes in implementations of the popular 7-zip compression tool to stop attackers gaining full control of customer machines.
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EFF is proud to introduce Certbot, a powerful tool to help websites encrypt their traffic. Certbot is the next iteration of the Let’s Encrypt Client; it obtains TLS/SSL certificates and can automatically configure HTTPS encryption on your server. It’s still in beta for now, but we plan to release Certbot 1.0 later this year.
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Defence/Aggression
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Is Wallace saying to ISIS they better “buy American?” Is Wallace in the tank for ISIS? I don’t know.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden weighed in on the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s alleged sharing of classified information on her private server, saying that there is no coming back for the Democratic front-runner once she committed the “original sin.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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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.
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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.
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For the first time ever, the EPA will regulate methane emissions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Speaking after the vote, Rousseff remained defiant, denying that she had committed any crime, and accusing her opponents of mounting a “coup”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Companies like Facebook and Twitter aren’t obliged to host users’ posts, but their efforts to filter our feeds nonetheless seem at odds with the values of free expression
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The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said.
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When does video game localization become ‘censorship’? And how often are localization decisions just made for business reasons?
Today on Kotaku Splitscreen, former XSEED editor Jessica Chavez joins the show to talk about her experiences bringing games from Japan to U.S. shores. She’s got plenty of stories from the trenches of localization, which is far more complex than most people realize. (As it turns out, the localization decisions that some people complain about are usually made in tandem with the developers themselves.) We also talk Trails and geek out about Suikoden II because of course we do.
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On Wednesday, May 11, in the midst of final exams, over 70 Brown University students in the Brown/RISD Hillel community gathered in the Hillel building to watch three short films about the Palestinian Nakba, produced by the Israeli NGO, Zochrot. As members of the Hillel community, we came together to watch these films on the eve of Yom HaAtzmaut, eager to make a space for Jewish students to learn about a history often excluded from mainstream Jewish discourse. In the post-screening discussion, students from diverse political backgrounds reflected on the thought-provoking films and unpacked their relationship to the Nakba as American Jews.
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Ramírez has since apologized for the comment, saying that he was sorry to the “Jewish people if they were offended by the remarks,” but added that Israel had made a “disproportionate response” to his comments.
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Despite having lived in Israel for 22 years with no criminal record of any kind, Omar Barghouti (above) was this week denied the right to travel outside the country. As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government’s refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the world leaders who traveled last year to Paris to participate in that city’s “free speech rally.”
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Jensen added, “When Facebook and other tech companies claim to be neutral because they’re running these algorithms and they’ve taken human judgment out of it, that’s no more of a coherent claim than when The New York Times claims to be neutral.”
It is difficult to convince ourselves that Facebook is on a par with traditional corporate media, simply because most of what we consume on the site is content that our friends generate. But in reality, Facebook’s goal, like all profit-based corporations, is to make as much money as possible. To that end, it is crucial that the company sell as many eyeballs to advertisers as possible, just like traditional corporate media. Whether the alleged manipulation of news feeds was geared toward that end is as yet unknown. Still, it is worth reminding ourselves that what we are exposed to when we use the website may be slanted.
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Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization
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Privacy/Surveillance
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Police told the newspaper that Yee had violated sections of Singapore’s Penal Code after he published a YouTube video in November last year.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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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.
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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.
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DRM
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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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.
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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.
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Trademarks
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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”.
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Copyrights
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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?
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05.12.16
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. █
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Posted in America, Patents at 10:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
PTAB helps eliminate many software patents by properly reassessing them
![David Ruschke](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Ruschke-e1458764249305-300x320.jpg)
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). █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Self-fulfilling prophecies (or fantasies) and promises of jobs
![Trojan horse](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/epo-upc-Trojan-horse.jpg)
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. █
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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. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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I’ve been a desktop Linux user for seventeen years. For eight of those years, I haven’t had a copy of Windows installed on any machine in the house.
Under the circumstances, I can easily drift into thinking that Linux and free software represent the whole of computing, and possibly its future as well. Increasingly, though, I find myself wondering how long desktop Linux will last, especially when I consider the growing popularity of mobile devices.
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Server
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With this in mind, two open source projects, CoreOS’ Flannel virtual networking technology, and the Project Calico, another network overlay technology with strong security controls, have joined forces to offer a single package, called Canal, that will offer policy-based secure networking for the container and microservices era.
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With so many new cloud computing technologies, tools, and techniques to keep track of, it can be hard to know where to start learning new skills. This series on next-gen cloud technologies aims to help you get up to speed on the important projects and products in emerging and rapidly changing areas such as software-defined networking (SDN) , containers, and the space where they coincide: container networking.
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Kernel Space
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After Greg Kroah-Hartman’s announcement for the release of Linux kernel 4.5.4, kernel developer Sasha Levin published details about the twenty-fourth maintenance version of the long-term support Linux 4.1 kernel series.
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After the release of Linux kernel 4.5.4 and Linux kernel 4.1.24 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the general availability of the tenth update of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
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Today, May 11, 2016, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the fourth maintenance build in the latest stable and most advanced Linux 4.5 kernel branch.
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Graphics Stack
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More AMDGPU DRM driver changes have been queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window that’s expected to open next week.
Last week was when AMD’s Alex Deucher aligned the first PR of Radeon/AMDGPU updates for Linux 4.7. That pull request from last week has yet to be honored in DRM-Next, but will represent one of the biggest deltas of all the kernel driver updates for Linux 4.7. That pull request adds in around 60,000 lines of code and it still doesn’t add the big DAL display abstraction layer.
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Intel’s Daniel Vetter has put out a concise overview of their DRM graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel.
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There’s a follow-up to yesterday’s story about AMD To Enable DRI3 By Default On Latest X.Org Servers.
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With perfect timing now that the Radeon DDX enables DRI3 by default, Leo Liu of AMD has posted patches for implementing DRI3 support within the VA-API and VDPAU Gallium3D components.
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Patches have emerged for being able to take advantage of Intel’s low-power/high-performance H.264 encoder on Linux via VA-API.
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In preparing to hopefully test the GeForce GTX 1070/1080 “Pascal” graphics cards under Linux in the days ahead, I’ve been re-testing my collection of available NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards going back to the GeForce 9800GTX up through the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 Ti and GTX TITAN X. Besides looking at the OpenGL performance at 1080p and 4K, I’ve also been recording the power metrics and performance-per-Watt data.
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From the information I’ve received, their DRM kernel driver will largely be unaffected but this is a shake-up particularly around their Mesa/user-space driver code.
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Applications
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NetworkManager maintainer Lubomir Rintel today announced the release of the second maintenance version of the latest stable and most advanced NetworkManager 1.2 series.
NetworkManager 1.2.2 arrives on May 11, 2016, as a small point release for stable GNU/Linux operating systems that use this popular open-source network connection manager by default.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Application servers are dead. At least, that seems to be the message being pushed by most evangelists and even a few enterprise software providers. In their place will rise self-contained microservices, running much the same kind of technology, but now deployed in containers or stand alone applications.
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I realise that this post is quite specific to probably just a few people but hopefully it will save somebody some time.
Needless to say that in order to download the files you will need to have an internet connection which leaves you in a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
You will need to use an ethernet (wired) connection to connect to the internet until the wireless issue is resolved.
If you are using mobile broadband and have no access to an ethernet connection you can get a device which enables you to convert WIFI into Ethernet as shown below.
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Games
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Moebius: Empire Rising is the adventure game with a story written by Jane Jensen (Gabriel Knight, Gray Matter) and it’s supposed to be releasing for Linux soon.
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I would have written this up much sooner, but the PR email from 2K stated only “PC” as the platform. 2K PR just replied to my email to also confirm Linux will be supported.
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The trailer to Civilization VI was made public today as the successor to 2014′s Civilization V: Beyond Earth.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the areas I’m currently working on is improving our support for input devices in KWin. While general usage is already quite good in Plasma 5.6, we are not yet able to configure the input devices. This is something I’m working on to improve for Plasma 5.7.
Input devices are provided by libinput and KWin integrates with that for quite some time. What it didn’t do yet is to configure them and keep track of them.
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Martin Gräßlin’s latest focus on KDE development has been improving the input device support under KWin, particularly for when it’s acting as a Wayland compositor.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.0.0. Starting with this release, we are making the Clang static analyzer integration, extended QML profiler features and auto test integration (experimental) available under open source. The previously commercial-only connection editor and path editor of Qt Quick Designer were already open sourced with Qt Creator 3.6.0. Qt Creator is now available under commercial license and GPLv3 (with exceptions). The exceptions ensure that there are no license restrictions on generated code, and that bridging to 3rd party code is still possible. You can read more about this change in the blog post announcing it.
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The cross-platform application and UI framework Qt announced the release of Qt Creator 4.0.0 today, which comes only a few months after its beta release in March. With this release, several features and integrations are available as open source, including code for the Clang Static Analyzer integration.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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Today, May 11, 2016, Manjaro Linux creator Philip Müller teased the community with the fact that the entire infrastructure of the Manjaro project will get a much-needed overhaul.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio today, May 11, 2016, informed the openSUSE Tumbleweed community about the latest GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the rolling release operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Quick Emulator (aka QEMU) is an open source systems emulator. It emulates various processors and their accompanying hardware peripherals like disc, serial ports, NIC et al. A serious vulnerability of out-of-bounds r/w access through the Video Graphics Array (VGA) emulator was discovered and reported by Mr Wei Xiao and Qinghao Tang of Marvel Team at 360.cn Inc. This vulnerability is formally known as Dark Portal. In this post we’ll see how Dark Portal works and its mitigation.
VGA is a hardware component primarily responsible for drawing content on a display device. This content could be text or images at various resolutions. The VGA controller comes with its own processor (GPU) and its own RAM. Size of this RAM varies from device to device. The VGA emulator in QEMU comes with the default memory of 16 MB. The systems’ CPU maps this memory, or parts of it, to supply graphical data to the GPU.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Royal Bank of Scotland is powering its new Open Experience center with Red Hat technologies, including the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s web-scale container application platform.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Often we get bugs reported against the Fedora kernel for issues involving third party drivers. Sometimes those are virtualbox, sometimes VMWare guest tools, but most often it is the nvidia driver. We had another reported today. I’ll pause to let you read it. Go ahead, read the whole thing. I’ll wait.
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Fedora 24 Beta release is out for testing with the latest features. This latest build is powered by the newest Linux 4.5.2 kernel and comes with many bug fixes. However, if you want to wait for the final release, you’ll have to wait for June 14, 2016.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The development cycle of the next major OTA update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices continues at a slow pace, as the Ubuntu Touch devs have just announced that it is not even ready for an RC image.
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Canonical released an update for the OpenSSH packages in the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating systems.
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The “Pigeon RB100” is a rugged automation controller that runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module and offers optoisolated inputs, CAN, 1-wire, and more.
Polish startup Pigeon Computers has launched the Pigeon RB100, which uses the Raspberry Pi Compute Module as the core of a rugged, automation controller. The company is also prepping a more advanced RB300 system built around the same computer-on-module version of the Raspberry Pi (see farther below).
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s mobile OS saw its smartphone market share rise in the first quarter in virtually all of the regions tracked by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the research firm said Wednesday.
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With Google I/O starting next week, veteran tech journalist Peter Rojas has tweeted that Android VR will launch as a dedicated, standalone headset. This corroborates earlier reports and the mention of “AndroidVR” we saw yesterday in the latest Unreal Engine preview.
Back in February, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was working on a standalone headset that would not require a smartphone. Rojas says that this headset will be “less powerful than the Vive or Rift.” But according to his multiple sources, it will be a better experience than the current Gear VR from Samsung and Oculus.
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Allwinner, a Chinese system-on-a-chip company that makes the processor used in many low-cost Android tablets, set-top boxes, ARM-based PCs, and other devices, apparently shipped a version of its Linux kernel with a ridiculously easy-to-use backdoor built in. All any code needs to do to gain root access is send the text “rootmydevice” to an undocumented debugging process.
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Wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to purchase a brand new $13 Android smartphone? Sure, but is it realistic — especially if you live by the adage “You get what you pay for,” or “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
An Indian company, Docoss Multimedia Private, is nevertheless promising to introduce an unbelievably cheap 3G Android smartphone — the world’s second cheapest smartphone priced at just 888 Indian rupees (that’s $13.30 in the U.S.).
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Open source is becoming one of the most important sectors in IT. Not only does it underpin some of the most successful technology on the planet, it’s increasingly bleeding into other areas of the enterprise, both in and out of the IT department.
GitHub’s contribution to the rise of the open source revolution is in providing a platform for people to upload code for others to share and adapt freely. Its vice-president of product management, Kakul Srivastava, spoke to IT Pro to find out more about how open source is finding a home in the enterprise.
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Topping off a lot of Google code landing in Coreboot in recent days for Chromebooks is support for another Google device and as part of that support for a Qualcomm SoC.
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Chez Scheme is compiled using a nanopass compiler, which strives to reduce the number of transformations and optimizations that are done in a single pass to just one. This approach is claimed to make a compiler easier to understand and maintain, while also simplifying development, testing, and debugging. As an additional consequence of this, Chez Scheme should be particularly interesting for studying purposes.
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Hiring talented developers can be a challenge given the current demand for OpenStack, CloudStack and other related cloud technologies skills. Some 87 per cent of the hiring managers find it difficult to find open source talent and have increased incentives to keep hold of the ones they have.
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Open sources features heavily as the company boosts its software and services efforts
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One occasionally runs into a company trying to build an open source project out of an existing product. This is a nuanced problem. This is not a company that owns a project published under an open source license trying to also ship a product of the same name (e.g. Docker, MySQL), but the situation shares many of the same problems. Neither is this a company building products out of open source projects to which they contribute but don’t control (e.g. Red Hat’s RHEL). This is a company with an existing product revenue stream trying to create a project out of the product.
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HPE looks to make it easier for enterprises and service providers to connect and manage Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the debut of its IoT Platform 1.2. The platform is aligned with the oneM2M ETSI industry standard and will also support long-range, low-power networks such as LoRa and SigFox.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, May 11, 2016, Mozilla quietly pushed the first maintenance version of the Mozilla Thunderbird 45 email, news, and calendar client to users of Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems.
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On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.
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Last year, we launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. The first track within MOSS (“Foundational Technology”) provides support for open source and free software projects that Mozilla uses or relies on. We are now adding a second track. “Mission Partners” is open to any open source project in the world which is undertaking an activity that meaningfully furthers Mozilla’s mission.
Our mission, as embodied in our Manifesto, is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. We know that many other software projects around the world share these goals with us, and we want to use our resources to help and encourage others to work towards them.
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User security is paramount. Vulnerabilities can weaken security and ultimately harm users. We want people who identify security vulnerabilities in our products to disclose them to us so we can fix them as soon as possible. That’s why we were one of the first companies to create a bug bounty program and that’s why we are taking action again – to get information that would allow us to fix a potential vulnerability before it is more widely disclosed.
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I’ve not tried to write a conclusive list of problems or differences, just a bunch of things I’ve fallen over recently. A “URL” given in one place is certainly not certain to be accepted or understood as a “URL” in another place.
Not even curl follows any published spec very closely these days, as we’re slowly digressing for the sake of “web compatibility”.
There’s no unified URL standard and there’s no work in progress towards that. I don’t count WHATWG’s spec as a real effort either, as it is written by a closed group with no real attempts to get the wider community involved.
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SaaS/Back End
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Open source software is fundamental to big data, says Roman Shaposhnik, who runs the Apache Incubator project for the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the main sponsor of this event. “In a way, open source has won in the enterprise,” says Shaposhnik, whose day job is director of open source at Pivotal. “It’s next to impossible to have a proprietary sale in the enterprise these days, unless it’s a value-add component on something that’s essentially an open source platform.”
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The folks at the Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi) have heard the concerns and the criticisms of the Hadoop community, and today John Mertic, the standards organization’s Director of Program Management, took to Apache Big Data in Vancouver to clear the air.
Contrary to the Hadoop community’s concerns, ODPi does not want to take over the development of Hadoop, it does not want to fork Hadoop, Mertic said.
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This report follows Technavio’s study predicting the global Hadoop market to grow at a CAGR at more than 50% over the next four years. Meanwhile, Allied Market Research has forecasted that the global market for Hadoop along with related hardware, software, and services will reach $50.2 billion by 2020. Still, though some organizations are struggling with Hadoop’s complexity.
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Databases
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NoSQL databases can help enterprises handle so-called Fast Data. MongoDB, DataStax and Redis are three NoSQL databases worth checking out.
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CMS
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Developers and site owners alike are often impressed by the immense freedom they have on open source, custom platforms such as Magento. They laud the flexibility it gives them to create a site that fits their exact needs and wishes. However, although the unstructured open source format does provide great opportunities for an experienced team, it oftentimes opens the door to many unforeseen issues and complications –– especially for the typical ecommerce retailer.
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DrupalCon is underway in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it kicked off with the always energetic keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert. While these regular keynotes, known as “DriesNotes” in the Drupal Community, tend to focus on the state of the Drupal project, with updates on the development cycle and community interests, there is frequently also a particularly inspiring look toward the future. This year, Dries wowed the audience with a quick demo of a Drupal site communicating with an Amazon Echo to provide a personalized shopping experience via Echo’s conversational interface. And perhaps most interesting was Buytaert’s take on conversational interfaces as the next big shake-up for developers and content creators, much like mobile interfaces changed the way we approach web development in the recent past.
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Nest/OpenThread
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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…can be installed on commodity hardware running Linux or directly on a cloud instance.
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Zuck Squad thinks it can do SDN for the entire internet with decentralised smarts
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Funding
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Container management platform vendor Rancher Labs raised new capital to help fund the company’s engineering, sales and marketing efforts.
Rancher Labs announced a $20 million Series B round of funding, bringing total financing to date to $30 million. The funding round was led by GRC SinoGreen and included the participation of Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners
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BSD
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In a recent email, Theo de Raadt explains the SROP mitigation technique, a recent team effort.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In April, the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project announced evaluations of several major repository-hosting services. These services are the bedrock infrastructure that our community uses to collaborate and communicate while building software, and therefore a big part of what we put into the construction process that creates free software. Using the GNU Ethical Criteria for Code Repositories, the evaluations judge code-hosting services for their commitment to user privacy and freedom. Now we are asking you to help support sites that meet the criteria and improve those that do not.
Currently, Savannah and GitLab meet or surpass the baseline standards of the criteria. You can explore the completed evaluations on the evaluation page. The criteria page offers more information on the evaluation process, as well as the criteria themselves.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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The Irish Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, has qualified open data as a basic resource of 21st century. Making government data publicly available for re-use brings economic, social and democratic benefits. That’s why last year the country decided to set up a national data infrastructure. So told Eoin MacCuirc, Databank and Dissemination Manager at the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO), his audience two months ago at the Open for Business v.2.0 conference in Dublin.
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Programming/Development
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Then there’s hacking: DISA logs 800 billion security events per day. Though many are innocuous, the Defense Department detects about 14 phishing attacks per day and rejects 85 percent of incoming email, Zabel said. Everyone from teen-age hackers to nation-states is targeting the network.
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In 2008, Patrick Debois laid the foundations for DevOps at an Agile conference in Toronto. He was trying to come up with a solution for the inherent conflicts between developers and system admins. Both disciplines seemed to be at odds: developers wanted to release software more frequently, but system admins wanted to ensure stability, performance, and scalability. While this conflict isn’t necessarily black and white, it highlighted the need for developers and system admins to no longer consider themselves as mutually exclusive roles, but rather as cross-functional partners.
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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.
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Health/Nutrition
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Simply put, Zika infection is more dangerous, and Brazil’s outbreak more extensive, than scientists reckoned a short time ago. Which leads to a bitter truth: the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games must be postponed, moved, or both, as a precautionary concession. There are five reasons.
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Some food companies are also unhappy with the current labeling standards. KIND LLC, makers of fruit-and-nut bars, started a campaign last year to get the FDA to update its labeling to reflect the evolution of food science. The citizens petition was sparked by the FDA’s warning that KIND shouldn’t market its products as healthy because they contain a high amount of saturated fat. KIND pushed back, noting that the saturated fat in its bars comes from nuts.
On Tuesday, the FDA said it will allow KIND to continue to use the word “healthy” on their packaging under the current regulations — as long as it doesn’t constitute a nutrition claim.
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Security
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Allwinner is a Chinese company that makes processors for low-cost devices like tablets, ARM-based PCs, set-top boxes etc. It looks like the company has recently shipped a Linux Kernel version with a very simple built-in root backdoor.
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A bored hacker has been playing around with several subreddits for almost a week and there is nothing that Reddit could do. There was no purpose behind the hacking as said by the hacker. He says, just because he got bored, he decided to have some serious fun.
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Defence/Aggression
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Greater Manchester police say phrase was not introduced by person playing role of terrorist at Trafford Centre
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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).
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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.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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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.
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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%.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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T. Boone Pickens, the prominent billionaire investor who made his fortune on fossil fuels…
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The EU is a deeply undemocratic institution enforcing austerity and privatisation on its member states. In what strange world is this a progressive institution?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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For decades, columnists helped form new communities through their journalism. But now, they’re dying out.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Several attack ads have surfaced in the three-way race for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s seat ahead of the Aug. 30 primary.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Sanders’s broader message has to do with what he calls the corruption of the political system.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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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.
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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))
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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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.
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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.
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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.
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They may confirm that since torture is a war crime, it can never be a policy option.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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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.
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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.
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DRM
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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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).
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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.
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Trademarks
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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.
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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.
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Copyrights
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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05.11.16
Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel is a fast moving project, and it’s important for both users and developers to quickly update to new releases to remain up-to-date and secure. That was the keynote message Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the stable Linux kernel, delivered at CoreOS Fest on May 9 here.
Kroah-Hartman is a luminary in the Linux community and is employed by the Linux Foundation, publishing on average a new Linux stable kernel update every week. In recent years, he has also taken upon himself the task of helping to author the “Who Writes Linux” report that details the latest statistics on kernel development. He noted that, from April 2015 to March 2016, there were 10,800 new lines of code added, 5,300 lines removed and 1,875 lines modified in Linux every day.
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Let’s first look at the epic saga called atomic support. In 4.7 the atomic watermark update support for Ironlake through Broadwell from Matt Roper, Ville Syrjälä and others finally landed. This took about 3 attempts to get merged because there’s lots of small little corner cases that caused regressions each time around, but it’s finally done. And it’s an absolutely key piece for atomic support, since Intel hardware does not support atomic updates of the watermark settings for the display fetch fifos. And if those values are wrong tearings and other ugly things will result. We still need corresponding support for other platforms, but this is a really big step. But that’s not the only atomic work: Maarten Lankhorst made the hardware state checker atomic, and there’s been tons of smaller things all over to move the driver towards the shiny new.
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The new CPUFreq governor for Linux 4.7 is the Schedutil governor that we’ve previously talked about on Phoronix. With Linux 4.6 was an important power management redesign by changing the way CPU frequency updates are triggered to support using callbacks invoked by the scheduler rather than deferrable timers.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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I’ve released man-pages-4.06. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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An action platformer MMO isn’t something you see very often, but StarBreak hopes to pull it off. It’s free to play too, so you have nothing to lose by trying it out.
It seems to have microtransactions where you’re able to buy in-game “UC” for real money. I imagine that will put people off depending on what you’re able to buy with it. If it’s only cosmetics, that’s fine, but if it allows you to buy weapons it will be ruined by pay to win junk.
The game features permadeath too, so even though it’s an MMO you will lose your progress when you die. Also, considering it’s an MMO the lack of a friend feature makes me dislike it. I play MMO games to hook up with friends a lot of the time and I imagine I am not alone in this.
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It seems for the most part the new update runs pretty well on Linux, performance seems to be much better than it was last time I tried that’s for sure.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Today, May 10, 2016, Clement Lefebvre and his team of developers have released the second maintenance build for the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop environment, further polishing several of its components.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The SparkyLinux devs have just announced today, May 10, 2016, the availability of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) graphical desktop interface for the latest SparkyLinux operating system.
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Since the last update, openSUSE Tumbleweed had two snapshots.
Snapshot 20160505 and 20160508 brought quite a few goodies for Tumbleweed users.
Firefox 46 and GNOME 3.20.2 were in the 20160505 snapshot along with some other packages like git 2.8.2, glib-networking 2.48.1 and a huge update to ostree in version 2016.5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Project is preparing to unleash the second and last planned maintenance update of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, version 3.20.2, due for release later today, May 11, 2016.
As with any new point release of the GNOME desktop environment, many of the core components and applications are being updated to fix bugs and annoyances reported by users since the previous milestones, as well as to add various improvements. The GTK+ open-source GUI toolkit is one of those components, and it has been updated to version 3.20.4.
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It’s spring time and that means it’s time for GNOME.Asia Summit! This year’s edition took place in New Delhi, India. This years makes five years after the initial GNOME 3.0 release. In fact, an important releases planning hackfest happened five years ago in India, so it’s been a somewhat remarkable date.
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Looks like we won’t be running out of Material design themes anytime soon. Just recently, I covered 6 Material inspired themes for your Linux desktop.
nana-4/Flat-Plat is another material design like GTK 2/3 theme that is well suited for desktops using the GNOME shell.
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At the beginning of the month, we informed you about the general availability of an updated ISO image for the Arch Linux-based BlackArch Linux operating system, which gave users access to over 1,400 penetration testing tools.
BlackArch Linux 2016.04.28 was, as its version number suggests, baked and cooked at the end of April, and it introduced 80 new security-oriented utilities to the ever growing collection of tools that are available in the software repositories of this GNU/Linux operating system.
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New Releases
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The Tiny Core devs recently announced that the Tiny Core Linux 7.1 operating system is now in development, with a first RC (Release Candidate) build seeded to public testers.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced the general availability of the eighth maintenance release of the long-term supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 arrives today for existing customers with an active Red Hat subscription, bringing dozens of improvements, bug fixes, and many exciting new capabilities (see below for a detailed list), all in order to keep the highly acclaimed and widely used GNU/Linux operating system stable and reliable at all times, as a trusted platform for any critical IT infrastructure.
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Buried within the notes for today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 release are a few interesting notes.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Fedora Project, proudly announced the release and general availability of Fedora 24 Beta on May 10, 2016 after the release was delayed for various reasons for three times. In addition to tradition 32-bit and 64-bit architecture, Fedora 24 Beta server can now be downloaded and installed on machines having architecture PPC64, PPC64el and ARM64. Also, you can download and test Cloud and Docker images of this Beta Release.
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Peter Robinson of Fedora Project announced the release and general availability of the Fedora 24 Beta operating system for AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) and POWER instruction set architectures.
The announcement for the release of Fedora 24 Beta for the AArch64 and POWER architectures comes hot on the heels of Fedora Project’s initial story on the availability of the Fedora 24 Beta operating system, unveiled to users on May 10, 2016, after being delayed three times for various reasons.
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Topping the Linux news today was the release of Fedora 24 Beta built with GCC 6 and glibc 2.23 and features GNOME 3.20. Parent company Red Hat announced an update to version 6 bringing “new capabilities and a stable and trusted platform.” On the other side of town, Scott Gilbertson posted a detailed review of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu’s Michael Hall shared his experiences using Unity 8 exclusively.
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If you want to really take Linux to the edge of what’s possible, you run Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora. And, for those who like to live dangerously, you can always run Fedora betas. The latest, Fedora 24 Beta, is out now.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Maren Abatielos of Univention GmbH informs us today, May 10, 2016, about the release of the second maintenance build of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Below I will discuss all of the steps that I went through to get it working to my needs. They are not the “official” way of doing it (there isn’t an official way to do all this yet) and they won’t cover every usage scenario, just the ones I faced. If you want to try this challenge yourself they will help you get started. If at any time you get stuck, you can find help in the #ubuntu-unity channel on Freenode, where the developers behind all of these components are very friendly and helpful.
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For those not familiar or who need a refresh, Ubuntu is an open source Linux distribution with the company behind it called Canonical. The Ubuntu software is a Debian based Linux distribution with Unity (user interface). Ubuntu is available across different platform architecture from industry standard Intel and AMD x86 32bit and 64bit to ARM processors and even the venerable IBM zSeriues (aka zed) mainframe as part of LinuxOne.
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In his keynote address at the Embedded Linux Conference’s OpenIoT Summit, Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) Executive Director Mike Richmond discussed the potential for interoperability — and a possible merger — between the two major open source IoT frameworks: the OCF’s IoTivity and the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn spec. “We’ve committed to interoperability between the two,” said Richmond, who went on to explain how much the two Linux Foundation hosted specs had in common.
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The smartphone is the new PC and most of them run */Linux.
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Quite a lot has happened in the Raspberry Pi world since my last article. From new hardware to Picademy, the past couple of weeks have been great, filled with news story after great news story. The month of April ended on a high note, with the release of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for the Pi, and the month of May looks to keep carrying that trend. I realize how hard it is to keep up with the all the Raspberry Pi news, so here are what I consider to be some of the high points.
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Phones
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Android
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As if Apple wasn’t facing enough headwind this year, now comes word that Android smartphones are making big market share gains around the world.
According to the latest market share numbers for the first quarter of 2016 from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android grew significantly in the U.S., Europe, and China, while Apple’s iOS lost ground.
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Logitech has announced a new pair of hands-free car mounts that work in concert with a voice-controlled app to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.
ZeroTouch is available either as a vent mount ($59.99) or a dash mount ($79.99). The free app then connects with the the mount via a small metal plate or a disk hidden underneath a case, triggering a Bluetooth LE connection. When you remove the phone from the mount, the ZeroTouch app shuts down, so you only have to use the voice commands when you want.
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When LG announced the modular G5 at MWC in 2016, we were all taken a bit aback. Admittedly, there was plenty of reason to hold judgment – it seemed possible that LG had actually done something interesting and innovative with a smartphone that hadn’t quite been tried before, and gadget-lust is an easy feeling to succumb to in the face of something new and weird. It turns out that the G5′s “friends” were basically DOA as a concept, though, and there has been little indication that consumer response to the idea is even existent, let alone positive.
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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.
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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?
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Nominations for the 2016 New Zealand Open Source Awards are now open.
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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.
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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.
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Events
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Ongaro explained that Runway is a new tool for distributed systems design. He noted that distributed systems are hard, they are hard to understand and hard to communicate about.
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ApacheCon is the annual conference of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache and open source community will gather May 11-13 to learn about and collaborate on the technologies and projects driving the future of open source, web technologies and cloud computing.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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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.
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SaaS/Back End
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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.
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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.
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Mitaka is not only the latest release of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure service, it’s also a city in Japan.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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IT organizations should get ready to cede some budgetary control to business units, as software — and software developers — become key agents of commerce.
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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.
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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.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Following on last year’s bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy’s Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Facebook has open sourced its hacking game platform Facebook Capture the Flag (CTF). Students and schools can take advantage of this platform and host Jeopardy and “King of the Hill” style Capture the Flag competitions. The Facebook CTF platform also takes advantages of Facebook’s other open source initiatives like Flow and HHVM.
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Microsoft will deliver open source .Net Core in June [Ed: .NET is not “Open Source” (like that Microsoft employee de Icaza might say), not even “Open Core” yet]
In an effort to woo non-Windows developers, Microsoft is moving .Net Core, the open source, cross-platform implementation of its .Net programming platform, closer to availability.
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BSD
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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.
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Public Services/Government
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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.
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Programming/Development
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No matter if you’re GSoC student in openSUSE, KDE, ownCloud or anywhere else, you’re community bonding period has started. This is not an easy time because starting something new is always hard and this is, in a sense, a new job.
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How immersing yourself in open source projects can help you improve code quality in your own projects and at work.
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BitKeeper, the inspiration behind Git and Mercurial, has been released under the Apache 2.0 License.
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Over one decade after the Linux kernel abandoned BitKeeper as their source version control system and years after Git’s continued widespread adoption, BitKeeper has finally been made open-source.
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Health/Nutrition
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Depression and anxiety are rising rapidly among young people: what’s going on?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Security
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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.
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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.”
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Defence/Aggression
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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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.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Australian Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said the landmark ‘should act as a global wake-up call’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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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
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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The donations were for the private school that Trump’s son attends. The candidate and the media mogul have not publicly disclosed the connection.
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‘Regardless of what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these victories matter.’
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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.”
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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.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Facebook’s denials that it routinely suppressed trending conservative news stories and reports from right-leaning media, as reported by Gizmodo, are lame, as are its supposed “rigorous guidelines” the company insists “do not permit the suppression of political perspectives.”
What’s more, the social-media giant doesn’t seem to understand just how serious a threat it poses to the political process.
To recap: After interviewing several former so-called “news curators,” responsible for Facebook’s trending news section, Gizmodo says that the social-media platform decided to ignore some stories about conservative topics that had actually generated a lot of discussion among users.
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Revelations that Facebook regularly suppresses conservative news websites from its trending section is just the latest example of a pattern of censorship by the social media behemoth, according Dr. Jerry A. Johnson, President & CEO of National Religious Broadcasters.
“It’s time for Facebook to face the facts,” Johnson said in response to a May 9 report that former Facebook staff said the company regularly suppresses conservative news sources. “Social media users expect a level playing field and are tired of Facebook’s one-sided neutrality. For some time, Facebook has shut down conservative pages or censored their comments. Now Facebook is caught burying conservative news stories and puffing liberal ones. Facebook must change if they want our trust and our participation on their platform.”
Gizmodo, a technology blog, quoted anonymously several former Facebook employees — “news curators” — that the social media company manipulated the use of its algorithm. Employees both “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers,” according to one of its former journalists, and were instructed to artificially “inject” stories that were favored by Facebook management, known for its liberal positions on cultural issues.
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A top Senate Republican is calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain how the social media site curates its “Trending” news topics after a news story suggested the site routinely suppressed conservative stories or outlets.
In the letter, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, said Facebook must answer questions about the ways in which it handles news content.
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Meanwhile, in a ‘clearly political’ escalation, Israel on Tuesday refused to issue a travel permit to BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti
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The Movie Censorship Agency ( LSF ) has admitted to being confused about censoring content on US-based streaming movie provider Netflix, because of a legal basis of obsolete regulations.
The 2009 Law on Film Censorship only mentions imported movies as an object of censorship policy. Netflix is at ambiguous case, as it does not run a movie importing business, said LSF chairman Ahmad Yani Basuki.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The practice is on the chopping block as lawmakers consider reauthorization of a pre-Snowden surveillance law.
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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.
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On May 10, experts are gathering before the US Senate to debate a few of the NSA’s most robust internet surveillance programs.
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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.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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David Levin was later released on a $15,000 bond after reporting the SQL vulnerabilities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Copyrights
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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.
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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.”
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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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
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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