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11.27.16

Director Lee’s USPTO Managed to Drain the Swamp Filled by David Kappos and His Colleagues, But Trump Will Likely Dismiss Her Soon

Posted in America, Patents at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Progress can be halted and regression soon follow for oligarchy’s sake

David Kappos as lobbyist
Source: David Kappos interview with Intellectual Property Magazine (2010), modified by us

Summary: Just as the USPTO begins to get its act together and limit patent scope based on reasonably liberal SCOTUS Justices there are many reports suggesting that the Director of the USPTO will be driven out, courtesy of the Trump presidency that will also perturb SCTOUS

THE USPTO has a longstanding patent quality problem, albeit with Alice and few other top-level decisions (Mayo for instance) things are improving somewhat.

The other day we found Jaguar Land Rover pursuing patents on facial recognition, which basically means software patents. I have peer-reviewed papers for international journals about this subject; no doubt this is about software patents — possibly a thing that UK-IPO would reject outright. Here is what Britain’s worst paper wrote about it:

Motorists could soon unlock the doors of their car simply by walking up to it and taking a selfie.

Jaguar Land Rover is developing technology that uses facial recognition and gait analysis to detect when owners of its vehicles approach, to open the doors for them.

Details have been revealed in a recently published patent application by Jaguar Land Rover, but it is unclear when the technology might become available.

Nothing innovative here and also it’s about software. Shouldn’t the post-Alice guidelines* at the USPTO disqualify this? How about this other new patent application? It’s one which TechDirt introduced the other day with the headline “Sony Wants To Patent A System For Scoring Journalists’ ‘Veracity’,” noting that it’s too obvious for a patent. To quote directly: “Like anyone wouldn’t have come up with such a system if there wasn’t patent protections?”

“Nothing innovative here and also it’s about software.”Let’s face it, David Kappos has made more of a farce out of this system, having worked for IBM, a big proponent of software patents. Is the leadership of the USPTO ‘on loan’ (to large corporations)? Kappos now works as a software patents lobbyist and IBM is one of his clients. It disgraces the whole patent office on ethical grounds and nobody seems to mind.

Looking at some scholarly figures from Patently-O (published this past week, probably for some paper of his), it seems evident that Kappos did a lot of damage to patent quality. As Patently-O put it: “You’ll note the discontinuous nature of the average-PTA chart. The break-point in early 2010 shows the impact of the Federal Circuit’s Wyeth decision holding that the PTO had been under-calculating the adjustment.”

That’s also the Kappos impact. Here is another new graph. This graph, in our assessment, may simply mean that patent law firms broaden their applications’ “template” (notably with citations) in order to patent some more junk and make it seem credible, well-researched. To quote: “The number of references cited per patent continues to rise, albeit more slowly in recent years. For patents issued in 2016, the average patent includes more than 50 cited references. In my view – this is great, although it would certainly help if the examiner was given some clue as to why the reference is deemed relevant or what portion of the reference is relevant. (If an examiner has a question, they can ask the applicant). A not-surprising facet of the growth in references-cited is that almost all of the growth is in applicant-cited. Compared with 10 years ago, applicants cite 26 more references per patent (on average) while examiners cite only 1.5 more per patent. As you might also note from the difference between median and average – the citation distribution is highly skewed. Example: If we take the top-5% of patents from 2016 (those with the most references cited) – they include 35% of all of the cited references. My experience with this skew is that patent applicants considered more valuable by their owners are more likely to submit more prior art references.”

“Let’s face it, David Kappos has made more of a farce out of this system, having worked for IBM, a big proponent of software patents.”There is another new graph at Patently-O and the way we interpret it is quite simple: Quality of patents at the USPTO (or complexity of patents) is declining. Patent examiners don’t seem to mind. The more, the merrier.

One last post from Patently-O alludes to Donald Trump and notes that the majority of patents in the US are not even from the US. The part about ITC (where the I should stand for US, not “international”) says: “In an email, Prof. Mark Lemley suggests that we should look for “a rise in the importance of the ITC as we focus on blocking imports.” The ITC’s primary goal is to protect U.S. industries against unfair international trade. Lemley writes: “One interesting question is whether Trump will move the ITC’s jurisdiction back to its roots by insisting on a real domestic industry requirement.” Additional ITC movement could push-back against U.S. patents that are owned by foreign nations or unduly subsidized by a foreign nation.”

“He’ll turn the USPTO into a Great Swamp Again.”We criticised the ITC many times. It’s just an apparatus of US protectionism, so the I in the acronym is not suitable, like the W in WTO. Another article about Trump’s impact, this time from MIP, says: “A panel on the US election at the IP Dealmakers Forum speculated that the Trump administration may take a long time to appoint a USPTO director and the Republican leadership that worked on patent bills in the previous Congress will again push for reform” (we already noted that USPTO Director Lee may be on her way out).

We expect Trump to make the US patent system even worse, as corporate interests tend to be prioritised over people, based on his recent appointments. He’ll turn the USPTO into a Great Swamp Again. As for SCOTUS, expect more Conservative Justices there (not just a Scalia replacement), complete with preference for large corporations like Trump’s. █
__________
* According to this new placement in IAM, the “USPTO seeks public comment regarding subject-matter eligibility” (covered here before). To quote: “On October 17 2016 the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that two roundtables will be held in the coming months to discuss patentable subject matter eligibility under 35 USC § 101. The roundtables have been set up to facilitate public comment and discussion regarding the USPTO’s current guidance on subject-matter eligibility as well as case law arising from interpretation of the requirements under 35 USC § 101.”

Danger of Letting a Bunch of Patent Law Firms Attempt to Hijack the European Patent System With UPC

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli digs his own UPC grave

Summary: Team UPC, a collective of self-serving patent lawyers who produce nothing of substance, hopes that some time tomorrow the UPC will miraculously be revived in Britain even though it’s extremely unlikely

THE Unitary Patent (or UPC) will quite likely have its death reaffirmed tomorrow. Don’t expect Team UPC to admit this though. The UPC-centric bloggers from Bristows will carry on (now there’s “EQE roundup”) and so will the bloggers at Kluwer Patent Blog. We kindly remind readers that these people have a track record of even advertising false jobs, so don’t believe Team UPC and the EPO (chronic liars). It’s their wallet/agenda that speaks.

Thankfully for us, Battistelli cannot quite ‘buy’ the vote (or bribe) the UK for UPC ratification (it would require too big a gift), so the UPC is going nowhere here. Kluwer Patent Blog, a huge proponent of the UPC, cited Bristows (an integral British part of Team UPC) to come up with a bizarre headline that says “Announcement expected about participation UK in Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court” (as if they already know in advance what will happen). To quote:

According to a Bristows report, ‘the UK Minister of State for Energy and Intellectual Property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, will state how the UK intends to proceed regarding its participation (or not) in the system’.

Since the Brexit vote, the future of the UP system has been clouded in uncertainty. Ratification by the UK of the UPC Agreement is mandatory for the launch of the system, but after the Brexit vote it seemed this requirement could kill the UP, as it wasn’t sure at all the UK would still be prepared to remain in the new patent system.

There are no signs that Lucy Neville-Rolfe will override British democracy, so we don’t expect much to happen. As for Kluwer Patent Blog, watch the headline it produced two days earlier (merely a quote), seemingly giving instructions from self-serving firms in Italy so as to save the UPC.

Truth be said, the UPC is in a limbo or in a death spiral/crawl. As we saw in TTIP and TPP, nobody in the “inner circles” wants to admit the death until it’s finalised and truly irreversible. Unless it’s redesigned completely, it has no chance. “EU Software Patents future will be decided tomorrow,” Benjamin Henrion wrote, “in the EU Council with the fate of the Unitary Patent,” but nothing will change. The UPC (as we know it, after several other names) is dead and endless lobbying by Team UPC has changed nothing at all, it just exposed Team UPC’s crudeness and disdain for democracy.

“More Brexit foot shooting,” one person wrote, “as UK now excludes itself from EU wide patent court due to start work in London. Bad news for patent lawyers…”

Henrion asked, “any link to an official source?”

This seems to contradict the optimism from Bristows, who have spread falsehoods (attempting to spread self-fulfilling prophecies) for at least a year. “A big day for the European patent systems,” wrote an anonymous EPO observer, but as we wrote over the weekend, we expect nothing substantial to change. The “UK [is] set to announce its UPC position tomorrow,” IAM (presumably Joff Wild) wrote. “We have worked through a few scenarios…”

“It seems that the future of the #upc #unitarypatent will be decided on Monday,” another person wrote, but IAM responded with: “This is most likely, but don’t rule out a delayed ratification after safeguards are established for UK’s post-Brexit position.”

Don’t trust IAM so much. Remember it organised pro-UPC propaganda events (even abroad) with support from the EPO and funding from the EPO's PR firm. Also, IAM is still not good at disclosures* and there is another such event coming soon.

Shooting down the UPC is not “foot shooting” as the above put it, unless of course the British economy boils down to just a handful of greedy patent lawyers seeking to maximise profit by patent battles. Right now, as before, some patent law firms in Italy hope to snatch this business and according to this, “A. M. Pizzoli [was] talking about #UnitaryPatent at #FICPI Sweden meeting: Swedes still optimistic in spite of Brexit-related issues” (by “Swedes” he means some Swedish patent lawyers, not Swedes at large).

The UPC would obviously sacrifice patent quality, bring patent trolls from the US patent system, and probably serve as a weapon against the EPO‘s Boards of Appeal, especially judges. No doubt they're essential, but they are crushed by Battistelli. There were a couple of articles from patent law firms in the media this past week, both of which spoke about the Boards of Appeal of the EPO. Here they are:

1. Exceptions to reformatio in peius at the EPO

In T 2129/14, the EPO Boards of Appeal applied the exception to the prohibition of reformatio in peius established in G 1/99 to allow the patentee, as respondent, to make an amendment which extended the scope of protection of the patent in question compared to the scope of protection maintained by the Opposition Division.

The prohibition of reformatio in peius set out in G 9/92 is the principle that in appeal proceedings a decision must not be reached which puts a sole appellant in a worse position than if they had not appealed. Thus, where a patent is maintained in amended form by an Opposition Division and only the opponent appeals the decision, the patentee, as respondent, cannot amend the claims such that the scope of the patent after appeal proceedings is broader than after opposition proceedings.

2. Admissibility at the EPO’s Boards of Appeal – a change in practice?

The practice of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) in recent years (following decision T 1067/08 (High-activity phytase/BASF); and discussed in detail in the Case Law of the Boards of Appeal, 7th Edition IV.C.1.3.3) has been not to review discretionary decisions made during first-instance proceedings. By way of example, if an Opposition Division has taken a decision not to admit a document (eg new evidence or a new claim request), the Board of Appeal will generally not overrule that decision if it concludes that the Opposition Division had the right to exercise its discretion.

The following too got published: EPO Practice Infringement of Second Medical Use Claims in Europe

It is possible to obtain a patent from the European Patent Office (EPO) based on a new medical use of a known drug. The claim can be directed to using the drug to treat a different disease, or using the drug in a new method of treatment, such as a new route of administration or a new dosage. The EPO has wellestablished requirements for the patentability of these so-called “second medical use” claims, but it does not consider issues of patent infringement. Infringement in Europe is currently assessed on a country-bycountry basis by individual national courts.

Although these second medical use claims have been available in Europe since the 1980s, until recently it has been unclear how the manufacture and sale of a drug for a patented use can be distinguished in practice from the manufacture and sale of the same drug for a non-patented use. The English Court of Appeal has now clarified how infringement of such second medical use claims should be assessed in the United Kingdom.

Our main concern, as we noted here very recently, is that patent scope and thus patent quality at the EPO is compromised for the sake of patent maximalism — the same kind of thing that Team UPC strives to introduce. One might even dub it patent radicalism, not maximalism. █
_____________
* To give one new example of missing disclosures from IAM, watch what it said about patent troll MOSAID, a.k.a. “Conversant” (after the rename that helped dodge negative publicity), just a few days ago. Nowhere does the article mention that Conversant paid IAM. Instead it’s all just promotional language, e.g.: “Conversant IP Management has acquired a patent portfolio from Panasonic, according to an assignment recorded with the USPTO earlier this week. The transfer represents a new foray into the Japanese patent marketplace for the Canadian NPE after its role in managing the Elpida portfolio ceased earlier this year.”

Links 27/11/2016: Linux 4.8.11, Linux 4.4.35, and Distrowatch Rankings

Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat securely!

    End-to-end encryption gives users true privacy, preventing anyone else from eavesdropping on conversations — even the very communications services they’re using. This is incredibly important for a decentralised ecosystem like Matrix on which Riot is built, where data can span across many different servers, and users should not have to trust any of those servers.

    End-to-end encryption is also a real differentiating feature from most other popular collaboration apps whose business models fundamentally rely on being able to read, analyse and profile your conversations.

  • Progress update for AtCore.

    A few days ago we hit a milestone in our development of AtCore. We are now able to properly install the libary for general use. Not only is installing a necessary for a libary that you plan to use within other stuff it also means that we can now focus our attention mostly on Atelier. We have now entered that magical time in development when the real world usage begins to drive its development. Thanks to everyone efforts we are almost ready for the next stage. Patrick has been doing reviews on every pull request. While he has been unable to help with as many commits as he would have liked to. His advice and direction in his reviews has been really helpful and has kept our style and code quality at a high level. Tomaz has been busy fixing up AtCore to be a proper KF5 libary with all the cmake deployment parts to go along with it. Most all of the cmake stuff has been written by Tomaz. Lays has been working on Atelier setup and getting all the non AtCore parts working. Thanks to her effort we are now able to use Atcore from Atelier!

    As for me i have been adding stuff to AtCore. Since our last progress update a few new things have been added. Emergency Stop this simply allows you to stop the printer using the emergency stop code.It also cleans up any the command queue. Pause/Resume when paused we store the current location of the head that that way after resume you can move your print head out of the way to access the model.Pause supports a comma seperated string of commands to be sent after pause. For my printer i use “G91,G0 Z1,G90,G1 X0 Y195″ when pause this move my head up 1 mm and then pushes my model out toward the front fo the machine. This is useful if you want to maybe put a nut into printed part or change filament durring print and even to corrrect print defects while printing. We have also started to do lay ground work for more status info being picked out from the serial chatter. Setting of the firmware plugin can be done durring connect to force a specific plugin. A progress bar for printing progress. Some cleanup for autodetection of the plugin. There is still things to add to AtCore but it should provide enough for most use cases already!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • NoScript is multi-process compatible now

        NoScript, the one must have add-on for Firefox if you ask me, has received an update recently that introduces full multi-process compatibility (e10s).

      • Firefox will only support WebExtensions by the end of 2017

        Mozilla announced a far reaching change coming to the organization’s Firefox web browser in late 2017.

        The organization plans to cut support of all extension technologies but the rather new WebExtensions when Firefox 57 Stable is released.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Funding

    • Money in Open Source, and How Needle & Thread Will Be Profitable

      Money is one of the most difficult subjects to talk about when it comes to open source projects. It’s a basic fundamental truth that all open source projects need money to operate, and while open source software provides a plethora of benefits, I don’t think any reasonable person would tell you that a steady stream of income is one of them. Lots of people and organizations have presented different ideas and undertaken different experiments to try and maximize the amount of money coming in, while at the same time remaining open, fair, and accessible.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Works On EFI Runtime ABI Support, But Still Experimental

      The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support.

      DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed EFI runtime ABI support that was ported over from the FreeBSD code-base.

      This EFI runtime ABI support allows for querying and setting the time, scanning EFI BIOS variables, and more. This code was ported from FreeBSD but with various changes for DragonFlyBSD’s different kernel interfaces.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Tear the wrapping paper off the 2016 Ethical Tech Giving Guide

      Electronics are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. From surveillance to harsh rules about copying and sharing, some gifts take more than they give.

      The good news is that there are ethical companies making better devices that your loved ones can enjoy with freedom and privacy. Today, we’re launching the 2016 Giving Guide, your key to smarter and more ethical tech gifts.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • [Older] Samsung Joins the Eclipse Foundation

      We are proud to announce that Samsung has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation is the leading open source organization whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. In tandem with Eclipse’s mission, Samsung provides an open and interoperable platform for IoT development through the Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT Platform.

    • How To Start Learning A Programming Language

      Have you ever wonder how everything works? From Smartphones Operating Systems to even each and every Linux Distro and every Operating System created by Microsoft and Apple. How does it play my favorite music? How does it save my files to the cloud? How does actually everything works? All this questions are answered with one big bolded and all capital “PROGRAMMING”.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior

      rozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.

      Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.

      At the latitude of this deposit — about halfway from the equator to the pole — water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet’s thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick.

      “This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet’s axis was more tilted than it is today,” said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

  • Hardware

    • AMD may launch next-generation Zen processors on January 17

      The latest rumor surrounding AMD’s upcoming and much-hyped Zen architecture has it slated for a launch on January 17. Purportedly the first chips to be released will be high-end desktop components, with their initial unveiling coming a week earlier at the CES event in Las Vegas.

  • Security

    • Azure bug bounty Pwning Red Hat Enterprise Linux

      Acquired administrator level access to all of the Microsoft Azure managed Red Hat Update Infrastructure that supplies all the packages for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances booted from the Azure marketplace.

    • pledge(2) … or, how I learned to love web application sandboxing

      I use application-level sandboxing a lot because I make mistakes a lot; and when writing web applications, the price of making mistakes is very dear. In the early 2000s, that meant using systrace(4) on OpenBSD and NetBSD. Then it was seccomp(2) (followed by libseccomp(3)) on Linux. Then there was capsicum(4) on FreeBSD and sandbox_init(3) on Mac OS X.

    • [Older] Why is Apache Vulnerable by Default?

      Apache is the most popular web server on Earth, with a market share of 46.4% — well above Nginx (21.8%) and Microsoft IIS (9.8%). Thanks to Linux package managers like Yum and APT you can install and get it up and running in minutes. The core installation even features powerful modules for URL rewriting, user authentication, and more.

    • [Re]discovering/correcting a ThinkPad supervisor password crack

      Don’t believe it? I didn’t either; it never worked for me. It turns out that’s only because the contemporary instructions for how to do it are wrong, or rather, they’ve mutated into a form that only works on some machines. As originally discovered, the hack reliably unlocks any* ThinkPad up to and including the Ivy Bridge models.

  • Finance

11.26.16

Caught in a Lie Again: EPO Management Just Cannot Stop Lying, Even About People Whom It Gags Using Threats (to Cover Up Battistelli’s Abuses)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The Liar in Chief

Benoît Battistelli
“A fish rots from the head down”

Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s decision to dismiss staff representatives (in complete violation of what the Administrative Council demanded) is accompanied by yet more face-saving lies (clearly a sackable offense in a public institution which is functional and not a global laughing stock)

NOTHING that we see at the EPO surprises us anymore. In fact, we’ve become accustomed to assuming (and safely so, based on recent experiences) that everything EPO management says is a lie. It’s no exaggeration to say that the EPO is now in “Blatter mode” as the epic scandal continues to deepen.

Laurent Prunier responds to the EPO’s claims in a followup article from WIPR. Here is a portion:

Laurent Prunier, former elected member of the central staff committee and secretary of the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) in The Hague, has responded to statements made by the European Patent Office (EPO).

Earlier this month, Prunier was dismissed. He had been accused of harassment and defamation, but denied the claims.

Yesterday, November 24, WIPR reported staff members were holding a demonstration to show solidarity with “dismissed, downgraded and targeted staff representatives and SUEPO officials”.

Now Prunier has responded to a number of assertions made by a spokesperson for the EPO, stating that they presented a number of “incorrect facts”.

According to Prunier, the EPO’s spokesperson has no access to the investigation reports and to the disciplinary files, as they are confidential, meaning that they are in no position to certify that “all the rules were followed”.

The EPO got caught lying again, as its nasty PR department (with that TI conflict of interests) prefers to just say what sounds good rather than what’s true; it lies all the time and it gets caught even in circular lies or chaining of lies (one lie that helps cover up another). What a total mess!

Here is how one comment put it the other day:

WIPR published yesterday an article article about the dismissal of Prunier, and cited the statement of the Office that “The procedures were conducted according to our rules, which compare favourably to other international organisations [...]” etc. etc.

Today, they published the response of Prunier, who notices that “the EPO’s spokesperson has no access to the investigation reports and to the disciplinary files, as they are confidential, meaning that they are in no position to certify that “all the rules were followed” and further challenges every statement of the EPO spokeperson.

The EPO declined to further comment.

It’s worth reading.

Here is what another person said, regarding leaks that we openly called for (leaks related to this case):

Some honest and brave AC members who understand what is going on here should ask BB for the investigation reports of Prunier and for an overview in detail of which rules were followed. BB will never give the reports and that overview. It is clear why. Be honest, should you put your head in a guillotine? Leaking of that information is urgently desired. The EPO should further urgently sign the European Convention on Human Rights.

If anyone other than Prunier leaks these documents to us, Prunier himself cannot be punished as the leaks are not within his control or his own fault. We welcome any information readers may have on this case. The world deserves to know what goes on before Battistelli proceeds to dismissals of more staff representatives at The Hague (disciplinary procedures have already been initiated against more of them and they are not allowed to speak about that). It’s a reign of terror.

As Prunier made abundantly clear, these procedures against him were initiated not by ordinary staff but by a close associate of Battistelli, possibly Bergot (it’s hard to know without leaked documents).

Here is one quoteworthy comment from today. It makes a good case for the dismissal of Battistelli and reinstatement/compensation to those whom he attacked for attempting to save the EPO:

In March the Council requested the President:
1)to ensure that disciplinary sanctions and proceedings are not only fair but also seen to be so, and to consider the possibility of involvement of an external reviewer or of arbitration or mediation
2)pending the outcome of this process and before further decisions in disciplinary cases are taken, to inform the AC in appropriate detail and make proposals that enhance confidence in fair and reasonable proceedings and sanctions;
3)to submit to the AC a draft revision of the Staff Regulations which incorporates investigation guidelines (including the investigation unit) and disciplinary procedures which have been reviewed and amended;
4)to achieve, within the framework of the tripartite negotiations, an MOU simultaneously with both trade unions, which would have no pre-conditions or exclude any topics from future discussions;
5)to submit proposals to the AC at its June 2016 meeting, after discussion in B28, for immediate implementation of the structural reform of the BOA, on the lines of the 5 points agreed by the AC at its December 2015 meeting and of the legal advice given by Prof. Sarooshi, and taking into account comments from the Presidium of the BOA;
6)to submit proposals to the AC at its June 2016 meeting, after discussion in B28, for reinforcement of the AC secretariat and a clarification of its position in terms of governance.

Nine months afterwards he managed point 5 only with great help from the Council and with a widely criticized text, which the Council accepted only because they desperately needed some kind of reform.

In points 1,2,3,4,6 he completely failed.

Is it time to look for a President with the skills and will to carry out his mandate?

We welcome leaks related to the case. Surely there are at least a handful of people who have access to the documents and can send portions anonymously to us. Remember that in over 10 years we never compromised a source. █

Benoît Battistelli’s Affinity for Tiny Countries Exploits the Ease of ‘Buying’ Their Votes

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Good “bang for the buck” when cooperation money (or something along those lines) is granted (‘gifted’) to countries with low overall capital

Nice gift

Summary: The tyrannical boss of the EPO keeps his job by ensuring that small nations with a vote of equal weight to that of nations like France or Germany simply behave like “yes men” or at worst abstain from voting

LIKE the American patent system, the EPO has a big budget, but it’s often misused in favour of large corporations (or rich investors) rather than actual inventors.

What’s more, in the EPO at least, President Battistelli is said to be buying votes where he can. Tiny countries like Monaco get visited (new epo.org link to a new puff piece) for photo ops and as someone told us in the comments, it’s a country that got filed just FOUR (yes, 4!) EPO patents, so its relevance to the EPO is close to zero. But it’s only the country’s vote that Battistelli must be after. We wrote about this as recently as a week ago in relation to Lithuania. Battistelli — being the extremely unpopular chief of the EPO — likes small, tiny, corruptible countries because their votes count as much as big countries’ votes. This is the only way he can survive in his job. Watch this obscure blog that’s being promoted by the EPO (yesterday). It’s called “Monaco Life” and it’s a useless puff piece which says: “On the sidelines of the second meeting of the European Patent Office online users’ days, being held in Monaco from November 24 to 25, the Principality, represented by Jean Castellini, Minister of Finance and Economy, and the European Patent Organisation, represented by the President of the European Patent Office, Benoît Battistelli, have signed a working agreement that will bring the two sides closer.”

“People at the EPO are rightly concerned about their employer becoming a banana republic.”Yes, for 4 patents!

People at the EPO are rightly concerned about their employer becoming a banana republic. It does, after all, put their job and their whole career in jeopardy. It’s no longer much of a badge of honour to say you work (or worked) for the EPO and this new comment takes stock of the lies about the staff, courtesy of PwC. To quote: “Maybe there is a Triumvirate in the making with 3 President’s, e.g. BB for protocol matters, a new one for the executive EPO part and one for the BoA. The advantages would be that its suits BB’s royal ambitions and he can focus on his visits to Monaco, etc and high state visits according to protocol. Furthermore the AC can appoint somebody that really knows how an organisation with social partners works. Finally the story with BoA we all know. (Remark: to whom it may concern there is also a HR make-over in the pipe line, basically masking the social mess with a perfume of new PwC business clichés)…”

Speaking of small countries, a second article about the EPO came from Luxembourg this past week (not the first this year), in spite of being a very small nation. The German media is conspicuously quiet, but this article is in German yet not from Germany. Can anyone from Luxembourg or Germany translate this for us? SUEPO seems to have taken note of this second article, so perhaps they too intend to produce a translation. Here is the first article, which we have already mentioned the other day (SUEPO has already taken note of both articles). █

Related article: Benoît Battistelli: “An Earthquake Would be Needed for the Administrative Council… Not to Support My Major Proposals.”

The Sad State of German Anti-Corruption Authorities and Investigative Journalism, as Demonstrated by the EPO

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The EPO in Munich enjoys apathy and toothlessness that prevails in media and watchdogs around it

Reichstag

Summary: A personal view on why the EPO manages to get away with so many abuses while the media and watchdogs like Transparency International (TI) play along by doing nothing at all about it

THE EPO is very difficult to trust nowadays because the management routinely lies and the liars are sometimes former staff of the growingly-defunct Transparency International (TI), which was supposed to combat corruption but is increasingly participating in it (or helping to cover it up).

One reader told us, “referring to your article [the above] there’s another interference with TI by the person of Hedda van Wedel. The wikipedia article about CORRECTIV names her as member of the supervisory board. If you follow the link to the German wiki about Hedda [see Hedda_von_Wedel] it is noted that she was elected vice president of TI Germany in 2007…”

One has to wonder then who is left to expose the abuses at the EPO, as the government of Germany seems entirely disinterested and the media does a terrible job. The EPO and EUIPO are promoting a big lie, still in pursuit of ‘cheap’ (no fact-checking) press coverage (sometimes they get it), yet almost nobody in the German media speaks about the latest scandals. There was a long discussion about who’s a good journalist to contact about this and one person wrote:

for investigative journalism one golden rule : follow the money.

EPO has plenty (2.000.000.000 EUR / year budget and ZERO decent check-and-balances comparable to what can be found at UNO or EU)

They are currently building expensive in NL aren’t they ;o)

Be seeing you

Remember that the EPO effectively bribes/attacks media. It’s basically operating in a very corrupt and aggressive manner (like shipping/dishing libel through journalists while threatening others with libel lawsuits) and today someone posted this good point about why EPO scandals’ media coverage is so scarce. It’s “giving aid and comfort to “…exiteers”,” the person said. Here is the full comment:

Indeed it is difficult, for the reasons given by Sam McClure, to interest investigative journalists. I know, I’ve tried and so have others to my knowledge. There is an additional barrier he did not mention: anything “European” is considered by the media in many countries, even those with a “free” press, to be a sacred cow that cannot be criticized for fear of giving aid and comfort to “..exiteers”. Even if one could find a keen journalist, what mainstream media would touch this story?

Probably just about no “mainstream media” (corporate media), which is why many people still rely on Techrights for information and our Wiki page about the EPO is approaching half a million page views. █

China Creates a Patent Bubble That Contributes to Patent Inflation

Posted in Asia, Patents at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Worth of patents is declining as quality goes down and quantity goes up

Hyperinflation
Reference: Hyperinflation

Summary: China’s obsession with patent quantity rather than quality (a disease that has infected the current boss of the EPO) is a cause for concern, except perhaps to patent lawyers who in the short term enjoy the temporary inflation (before hyper-inflation and implosion)

IN GERMANY at the end of the week we found this new article from Stefan Krempl (who often covers EPO scandals) — an article which deals with the subject we wrote about 2 days ago. IAM wrote about it as well and it was rather refreshing because, for a change, IAM actually explained that patents are a terrible measure of “innovation” — however one defines it. To quote IAM:

This blog has said it before.; but it is worth saying again: patent filing statistics are not a measure of innovation. They may be indicative of a country’s capacity for invention and innovation, they may tell us something about efforts to transition to a more ‘knowledge-based’ economy; but, then again, they may not. In fact, all they can really tell us with certainty is how many patent applications are being filed. Innovation is something of a qualitative, subjective concept. Patent filings, on the other hand, are a simple and objective matter of whole numbers. The latter is at best an inadequate metric for understanding the former.

Meanwhile, in another German site/blog called FOSS Patents, this time (for the first time as far as we’re aware) not composed by Florian Müller, “more rationality and a shift to China” was covered. Actually, as we noted here the other day, China shoots itself in the foot with patents and it will pay for that in the long run. China has adopted patent maximalism to the point where almost every crappy application becomes a granted patent and lends to a global inflation (if not hyper inflation) that will devalue all patents. Wait and watch what happens in the coming years/decade. China is already fast becoming a hotbed of patent trolls. █

Links 26/11/2016: VLC 360, Wine 1.9.23

Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Microsoft & Linux & Patents & Tweets [Ed: Microsoft Loves Linux Patent Tax]

    Fact-checking some tweets about Linux Foundation’s newest member and their harvesting of other members’ money.

    [...]

    The revenue Microsoft gains comes a range of targets than can be colloquially called “Linux” with varying qualification. That includes embedded Linux and things that use it such as Android and shared SMB filesystems as well as Linux as a server and things that use it. Again, identifying the ratio of income per usage is impossible for anyone outside Microsoft (and probably for most people inside).

    Certainly the range of patents Microsoft is known to be attempting to monetise includes a broad range of functions. The best list I have found appears to have been inadvertently published by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce in 2014. But licensing activity is certainly not limited to Android; Microsoft also targets ChromeOS, Linux servers, Linux in consumer devices (each of those is a sample; there are plenty of other press releases) and much of the Android licensing actually appears to related to xFAT filesystem interoperability as in the Tom Tom case.

  • Desktop

    • Meet Pinebook, A Low Cost Linux Laptop That Looks Like A MacBook

      PineBook is a budget laptop running an Allwinner quad-core 64-bit processor. The device comes in two screen sizes both of them having 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC storage along various ports and connectivity options. PineBook supports a number of Linux distros and Android versions.

    • Meet the Pinebook, a $89 ARM Laptop That Runs Ubuntu

      The Pine64 Pinebook is an ARM laptop priced from $89. It can run Android, ChromiumOS and various flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu.

    • Light and Thin 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook
    • The 12 Most Ridiculous Windows Errors of All Time

      Computers and humans are so different. While computers are infinitely faster at processing information, they run into trouble if they try to stray from their course. These “fast idiots” contrast to people, who can’t think as fast as machines but can adapt much more easily.

      These relations have produced some hilarious situations where novice users failed to grasp the basics of using Windows. On the other side of this are error messages. When a computer runs into an unexpected scenario, it usually throws up a message box for the user to review.

  • Server

    • Japan plans 130-petaflops China-beating number-crunching supercomputer

      Like 498 out of the top 500 systems, Japan’s 27 supercomputers in the Top 500 list all run Linux, and it is highly likely the new system will do so as well. It is not yet known who will construct the system for the Japanese government—bidding for the project is open until December 8.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • RadeonSI’s Gallium3D Driver Performance Has Improved Massively In The Past Year

        As some more exciting benchmarks to carry out this US holiday week, here are benchmarks of all major Mesa releases from Mesa 11.0 from mid 2015 through the latest Mesa 13.1-dev code as of this week. Additionally, the latest AMDGPU-PRO numbers are provided too for easy comparison of how the open-source AMD GCN 3D driver performance has evolved over the past year. It’s a huge difference!

      • LLVM 4.0 Causes Slow Performance For RadeonSI?

        Several times in the past few weeks I’ve heard Phoronix readers claim the LLVM 4.0 SVN code causes “slow performance” or has rendering issues. Yet it’s gone on for weeks and I haven’t seen such myself, so I decided to run some definitive tests at least for the OpenGL games most relevant to our benchmarking here.

      • It Looks Like We’ll Still See A GUI Control Panel For AMD Linux

        Earlier this year I exclusively reported on the “Radeon Settings” GUI control panel may be open-sourced for AMD Linux users but since then I hadn’t heard anything publicly or privately about getting this graphics driver control panel on Linux for AMDGPU-PRO and the fully-open AMDGPU stack. But it looks like that it’s still being worked on internally at AMD.

      • Yet More AMDGPU DAL Patches This Week For Testing

        It had been a few weeks since last seeing any new enablement patches for AMD’s DAL display abstraction layer code, which is a big requirement for HDMI/DP audio, HDMI 2.0, potential FreeSync support, and also needed for next-generation GPUs. The lack of fresh DAL patches changed though this week when new patches were sent out and already another round of revising to this display code has now been mailed out for review.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • An Everyday Linux User Review Of Q4OS 1.8

        Q4OS is fairly straight forward to get to grips with and it runs like a dream.

        When I tried it last year it was on a much older machine and really worked well. On this machine it performs magnificently.

        The Windows look and feel might not be to everybody’s taste especially the use of “My Documents” and “My Pictures” etc but you can easily rename them.

        The desktop environment is Trinity and it lacks certain features such as window snapping.

        I haven’t tried Q4OS out with my NAS drive or printer and other hardware yet but I did last time around and it had no issues so I suspect it will be the same this time. I will update you in the next blog post about this. I will also update you as to whether Steam works or not.

        As with last time around I can’t really fault Q4OS on anything. Well I suppoes there are a couple of things that could be improved such as dual booting and the network manager should be installed by default as the one that comes with Q4OS is a bit inconsistent.

        After just a couple of hours effort I had Q4OS installed with every application I need including PyCharm. I am now able to listen to music, watch films, surf the web, write software, edit documents, read and send mail, use DropBox, use Skype and play games.

        Q4OS also comes with WINE which is useful for running Windows software.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 5 Support Extension and General Update

        With the delays to Mageia 6 and the approaching initial end of life (EOL) for Mageia 5 (initially planned for early December), we felt that it would be good to give an update on where things were with both Mageia 5 and 6.

        Firstly, every release so far has been supported until 3 months after the next release, and Mageia 5 will be no different. Since Mageia 6 is being delayed, Mageia 5’s support is automatically extended in order to give users 3 months to upgrade before Mageia 5 stops receiving security updates.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Korora 25 Upgrades, Mageia 6 Delays, Gift Ideas

          The Korora project announced a bit of good news for user waiting for the latest release while Mageia users will have to continue to wait. opensource.com published a gift buying guide for Open Source fans and it looks like the netbook is back is back. Gary Newell reviewed Q4OS 1.8 and makeuseof.com today reminded us of why we use Linux.

        • Impatient for Korora 25?

          We are busy preparing Korora 25 ‘Gurgle’ for release but those who already have Korora 64 bit 24 or 23 installations don’t have to wait.

        • Running Fedora 25 Design Suite on ASUS X550ZE laptop
        • Summary report on FUDCon APAC, Phnom Penh

          This year FUDCon APAC happened in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for two days 5th and 6th of November. This FUDCon happened as part of bigger conference called as BarCamp, ASEAN 2016. This BarCamp happened at Norton university from 4th to 6th November.

          On the first day of this BarCamp/FUDCon when we reach to the venue, we found it to be very nice place, full of people like students, volunteers, banners of BarCamp everywhere. It was a five floor building and the inauguration talk happened at the top 5th floor where all the honourable guests including Brian Exelbierd, Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator talked about FOSS.

        • Upgraded to Fedora 25

          Generally I used to upgrade after the Alpha releases, but this time I decided to wait till the final release. Reason: just being lazy. The other point is of course the nightly cloud images, which I am using for a long time.

          Before I upgraded my laptop, the first step was to sync the gold release of Everything repo, and then the updates repo for x86_84. The Everything repo is around 55GB, and the updates was 14GB+ when I synced. After I managed to get the local mirror at home fully synced, I upgraded using dnf system-upgrade.

    • Debian Family

      • Starting the faster, more secure APT 1.4 series

        We just released the first beta of APT 1.4 to Debian unstable (beta here means that we don’t know any other big stuff to add to it, but are still open to further extensions). This is the release series that will be released with Debian stretch, Ubuntu zesty, and possibly Ubuntu zesty+1 (if the Debian freeze takes a very long time, even zesty+2 is possible). It should reach the master archive in a few hours, and your mirrors shortly after that.

      • Debian package build tools

        When I was first introduced to Debian packaging, people recommended I use pbuilder. Given how complex the toolchain is in the pbuilder case, I don’t understand why that is (was?) a common recommendation.

      • vmdebootstrap Sprint Report

        This is now a little overdue, but here it is. On the 10th and 11th of November, the second vmdebootstrap sprint took place. Lars Wirzenius (liw), Ana Custura (ana_c) and myself were present. liw focussed on the core of vmdebootstrap, where he sketched out what the future of vmdebootstrap may look like. He documented this in a mailing list post and also presented (video).

        Ana and myself worked on live-wrapper, which uses vmdebootstrap internally for the squashfs generation. I worked on improving logging, using a better method for getting paths within the image, enabling generation of Packages and Release files for the image archive and also made the images installable (live-wrapper 0.5 onwards will include an installer by default).

      • Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata

        Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian installation system, observing how using eatmydata could speed up the installation quite a bit. My testing measured speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around 1000 packages from within the installer. The eatmydata package provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing. This is a bit risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a machine crashes at an inconvenient time. But for an installation, if the machine crashes during installation the process is normally restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed up the process make perfect sense.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Deepstream: an Open-source Server for Building Realtime Apps

    Realtime apps are getting really popular, but they’re also hard to build. Wolfram Hempel introduces deepstream, an open-source server he co-founded to make data-sync, request-response and publish-subscribe a whole lot easier.

  • Open Source Email Marketing with phpList

    Email marketing has been exploding in popularity. You might have heard of the likes of MailChimp and Emma advertising the use of their services to send a whole bunch of messages for prospects and profit. The number of ways to promote goods online is forever growing, and research shows emails are still the most effective. I like to compare it with the “desktop is dead” myth; while mobile is on the rise, desktop is here to stay. I believe the same about email.

    Having said that, it’s no surprise that the number of services competing in the field have mushroomed in recent years, capitalising on demand from firms of all sizes to get access to that most personal of places, the email inbox.

    While big brand proprietary platforms and their sponsorship deals have been busy establishing themselves, an Open Source alternative has been minding its own business, making regular releases and accumulating a committed base of users since the year 2000. Enter phpList, the email marketing app you can run yourself without paying for messages, subscribers, or additional features.

  • 3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

    And many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump’s pick for CIA director calls for Snowden’s execution. For, what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

  • Mickey Mouse Open Source, Close Call at WordPress, and More…

    These days we’re seeing a lot of companies that aren’t officially in the software business releasing code developed in-house for internal use under open source licenses. You can now add Disney to that list, which includes Capital One, Walmart and others.

    This was pointed out on Wednesday by InfoWorld’s Paul Krill, who notes that in addition to Mickey Mouse, Pinocchio and Nemo, the company has given us advanced image projects such as OpenEXR, as well as DevOps tools for the Mac, such as Munki. More information on Disney’s open source projects can be found on its GitHub page.

  • Plans Unveiled for R3s Corda to Move to Open Source

    Head over to corda.net on November 30 for links to the codebase, simple sample applications and a tutorial to get started writing your own CorDapps.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • How to Get Certified for Top Open Source Platforms and Applications

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

      As 2017 approaches, here are some of the best ways to get certified for the open source cloud and Big Data tools that are makng a difference.

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

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • More Offloading Code Hits GCC Mainline For Both HSA & NVPTX

      For those following GCC’s offloading capabilities to devices like GPUs, more work continued being mainline this week. We are onto stage 3 development of GCC 7 but items that were still being reviewed at that time are still being allowed to land. It looks like in 2017 we may finally see more GCC support come to reality when it comes to AMD HSA support and OpenMP / OpenACC offloading to NVIDIA GPUs.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Dutch Drecht cities published first batch of open datasets

        The Drecht cities (Drechtsteden), a collaboration of six municipalities in the delta region of the Netherlands, have published a first batch of open datasets. The data has been made available on several public open government data platforms. It includes information on complaints, monumental trees, groundwater levels, monuments, playgrounds, dumpsters, and real estate values. More datasets will follow in the near future.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Sweden publishes report on ‘The Social Contract in Digital Times’

      Last month, the Swedish Digitalisation Commission (Digitaliseringskommissionen) published a theme report on ‘The Social Contract in Digital Times’. The report comprises a collection of articles contributed by a dozen authors working in academia, science and innovation.

      The report highlights social issues such as the meaning of equality for the individual.
      Welfare, healthcare and education, for example, can be provided in new, more personalised ways. What can and should be the State’s commitment in this setting, and what rights and obligations should the individual have?

    • Two new planets for neuroscientists

      Those that have been around the free and open source community will already know what planets are. They’re web pages that aggregate feeds from various sources – usually community members’ blogs. There are quite a few around and I follow a few myself – Planet Fedora, Planet GNOME, and Planet Mozilla, for example. They’re extremely useful to keep onesself up to date with the happenings in the communities.

      So, I’ve gone ahead and set up two new planet instances to aggregate information from a myriad of neuroscience sources. The first is Planet neuroscience. The feeds this one aggregates are all from peer reviewed journals. So, pure research on this one. It’s one long list of new publications.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tens of thousands of children at risk of starvation in Nigeria crisis

      More than 120,000 people, most of them children, are at risk of starving to death next year in areas of Nigeria affected by the Boko Haram insurgency, the United Nations is warning.

      Intense fighting in parts of Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon has left more than 2 million people displaced, farmers unable to harvest their crops and aid groups unable to reach isolated communities. One small state in Nigeria has more displaced people than the entire refugee influx that arrived in Europe last year.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Linux hardening: a 15-step checklist for a secure Linux server [Ed: paywall]

      Most people assume Linux is secure, and that’s a false assumption. Imagine your laptop is stolen without first being hardened. A thief would probably assume your username is “root” and your password is “toor” since that’s the default password on Kali and most people continue to use it. Do you? I hope not.

    • Homeland Security Issues ‘Strategic Principles’ For Securing The Internet Of Broken Things

      For much of the last year, we’ve noted how the rush to connect everything from toasters to refrigerators to the internet — without adequate (ok, any) security safeguards — has resulted in a security, privacy and public safety crisis. At first, the fact that everything from Barbies to tea kettles were now hackable was kind of funny. But in the wake of the realization that these hacked devices are contributing to massive new DDoS botnet attacks (on top of just leaking your data or exposing you to hacks) the conversation has quickly turned serious.

      Security researchers have been noting for a while that it’s only a matter of time before the internet-of-not-so-smart-things contributes to human fatalities, potentially on a significant scale if necessary infrastructure is attacked. As such, the Department of Homeland Security recently released what they called “strategic principles” for securing the Internet of Things; an apparent attempt to get the conversation started with industry on how best to avoid a dumb device cyber apocalypse.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Analysis: Why Sweden is giving an award to the ‘White Helmets’?

      Sweden did not succeed in getting Bob Dylan to come to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nevertheless as a consolation the “White Helmets” did arrive to get the Right Livelihood Award.

      This article examines a likely geopolitical rationale that the Swedish elites had for selecting that organization. Also, facts suggest a congruence between the stances of those elites on Syria and the declared political aims of the organization White Helmets. The reviewing of the institutions involved in the award-decision and process can also result relevant in pondering the reason for the event. Finally, to inquire into the role of Carl Bildt, as member of the board of directors in the institution ultimately deciding, is interesting against the backdrop of his opposition regarding the participation of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in previous international events organized by the same institutions –all of them under the umbrella of the Swedish Foreign Office.

    • Obama administration expands elite military unit’s powers to hunt foreign fighters globally

      The Obama administration is giving the elite Joint Special Operations Command — the same organization that helped kill Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs — expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said.

      The missions could occur well beyond the battlefields of places like Iraq, Syria and Libya where Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has carried out clandestine operations in the past. When finalized, it will elevate JSOC from being a highly-valued strike tool used by regional military commands to leading a new multiagency intelligence and action force. Known as the “Counter-External Operations Task Force,” the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model — honed over the last 15 years of conflict — and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.

    • How Donald Trump responded to Fidel Castro’s death

      Trump came under intense scrutiny in September following allegations that he knowingly violated the U.S. Cuban embargo in the 1990s, news that threatened to sour Cuban-Americans’ opinion of him.

      A Newsweek story said the now-president elect spent $68,000 to send business consultants to Cuba despite the embargo. Trump Hotels reimbursed Seven Arrows Investment & Development Corp. shortly after Trump launched his bid for the White House.

    • Fidel Castro dies at 90

      Cuban leader Fidel Castro has died at age 90, his brother Raul announced on state television in the early morning hours Saturday.

      Raul Castro made a brief TV statement around 12:30 a.m. Eastern.

      “It is with great pain I come to inform our country, friends of our America, and the world that today, Nov. 25, 2016 at 10:29 p.m., the commander in chief of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died,” he said.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Setting the World to Rights

      Julian is very aware of the persistent rumours about his position or health. He is fine apart from a cold, and buoyed by recent events.

    • Readers choose Assange over Trump as Time’s Person of the Year

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has overtaken President-elect Donald Trump for the lead in the online poll that allowed Time magazine readers to choose who the next person of the year should be.

      As of 1:00 pm (eastern time) on Monday, Assange and Trump were deadlocked with 9 per cent of all the “yes” votes cast by participants, but Assange pulled ahead to 10 per cent shortly after noon, Time reported.

      Wikileaks made headlines regularly during 2016 presidential election by releasing information, including leaked internal Democratic National Committee correspondence and messages from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level

      Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe.

      The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level.

    • Despite tough talk, Indonesia’s government is struggling to stem deforestation

      TEGUH, chief of the village of Henda, in the Indonesian portion of Borneo, enters his office brimming with apologies for being late. The acrid scent of smoke wafts from his clothes. He explains that he was guiding police and firefighters to a fire just outside the village. A farmer had decided to clear his land by burning it. Henda sits amid Borneo’s vast peatlands; the fire had set the fertile soil smouldering for nearly 24 hours. It was a small fire, he says—perhaps a couple of hectares—but Mr Teguh still struggled to contain his exasperation, given the destruction wrought by fires set for land-clearance just a year ago.

      Last year, in the autumn for the most part, at least 2.6m hectares of Indonesia’s forests burned—an area the size of Sicily. The fires blanketed much of South-East Asia in a noxious haze and released a vast plume of greenhouse gases. Much of the island’s interior was reduced to sickly scrub; along its roads stand skeletal trees, reproachful witnesses to the ravages they endured. Indonesia’s forest fires alone emitted more greenhouse gases in just three weeks last year than Germany did over the whole year. The World Bank estimates that they cost Indonesia $16bn in losses to forestry, agriculture, tourism and other industries. The haze sickened hundreds of thousands across the region, and according to one study, hastened over 100,000 deaths.

    • Scientists Across the World Are Nervous About Trump, Survey Says

      With Donald Trump set to step into the Oval Office this January, we’ve reported before that scientists are concerned his policies could mean an attack on America’s scientific prowess and integrity.

      In fact, 72 percent of scientists surveyed in a recent worldwide poll said the results of the election would have a negative impact on research and science in the US. The survey was conducted by the Science Advisory Board, a panel of over 75,000 doctors, researchers, and scientific experts. It polled 3,289 scientists from every continent, except Antarctica. Of the American scientists, 85 percent said they voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and about 10 percent said they voted for Trump.

    • Health Canada proposes ban on pesticide linked to bee deaths

      Canada’s health regulator is planning to ban a controversial neonicotinoid pesticide, which it says has contaminated waterways and killed important aquatic insects.

    • Feds move to ban common neonicotinoid insecticide, say use ‘not sustainable’

      The federal government is moving to phase out a common neonicotinoid insecticide after finding that it accumulates in waterways and harms aquatic insects.

      Health Canada has announced a 90-day public consultation period on imidacloprid, which is used on everything from cereals, grains, pulses and oilseeds to forestry woodlots and flea infestations on pets.

      Neonicotinoids as a class of pesticides have come under heavy scrutiny in recent years for their potential impact on bee populations.

  • Finance

    • TiSA-Leaks: Fundamental rights shall be levered out for free trade – also in the internet

      Today we publish new TiSA documents in cooperation with Greenpeace which have been kept secret until now. The „Trade in Services Agreement“ is a proposed trade treaty for services between 23 Parties, including the EU and the United States.

      The new leaks include the Annexes about Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications Services. Those will have a noticeable impact on net politics in the EU. They point to negative effects on data protection, net neutrality, freedom of speech and IT security.

      If the EU does not manage to defend its positions and grovels to the interests of industry lobbyists it will become unreliable and show that it prefers trade to fundamental rights.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Wisconsin is preparing to recount election votes after receiving petition from Jill Stein

      True to her word, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed for an election recount in the state of Wisconsin this afternoon, just 90 minutes before the deadline to file, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The move comes after Stein raised over $5 million through a fundraising effort to cover the cost of recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three key battleground states that helped Donald Trump gain the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the election. Trump won Wisconsin by a margin of just over 25,000 votes.

    • Trump election: Wisconsin prepares for vote recount

      Officials in Wisconsin are preparing to conduct a full recount of the votes from the US election in the state, which was narrowly won by Donald Trump.

      A formal request for the recount was filed by the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

      Dr Stein, the Green Party’s candidate, has also pledged to file for recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

      The result would need to be overturned in all three states to change the outcome of the election, something analysts say is highly unlikely.

      Dr Jill Stein reportedly wants to make sure computer hackers did not skew the poll in favour of Mr Trump.

    • Wisconsin to recount presidential votes

      Wisconsin will undertake a recount of its presidential election votes after two requests from third-party candidates.

      Green Party nominee Jill Stein filed her request just before the deadline Friday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Commission announced. Reform Party candidate Rocky De La Fuente also filed for a recount.

      “We are standing up for an election system that we can trust; for voting systems that respect and encourage our vote, and make it possible for all of us to exercise our constitutional right to vote,” Stein said in a statement.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Now Reddit is ‘censoring the alt-right’ after founder got fed up of being called a PAEDO

      THE CHIEF executive of Reddit has admitted to anonymously editing posts that were critical of him – changing them to refer to president-elect Donald Trump instead.

      Steve Huffman, posting under his username Spez on the discussion forum, told users that he was sick of being constantly called a paedophile in their discussions on the site.

    • Internet, a Double-Edged Sword Stained With Fake News and Censorship [Ed: The problem isn’t “fake news” but people not knowing how to validate news based on reputation of sources]

      By AsiaToday reporter Kim Eun-young – The Internet has created a new landscape of social change as an outlet for open communication. However, it also threatens Millennials with false information and censorship.

      Both Google and Facebook announced on Nov. 15 that they will ban fake news sites from using their ad networks to prevent the spread of false information, AFP reported. The shift comes as they face a backlash over the role they played in the U.S. presidential election by allowing the spread of false information supporting a particular candidate that might have contributed to the outcome of the election.

    • China Uses US Concern Over Fake News To Push For More Control Of The Internet

      In the context of this sentence, “reward” and “punish” both sound like they have the same definition. Unless the government official is hinting that those spreading fake news stories more aligned with the government’s aims will be given… something for their assistance in pushing the party line.

      The United States has long been looked to as a free speech ideal, something other countries can strive for in their own governance. But countries opposed to those ideals are watching much more closely, looking for anything that belies the ideals the US government claims to hold dear. So, when President Obama suggests fake news is an actual threat to democracy, countries like China are going to use this to justify further control of citizens’ communications and stricter regulation of news sources — for the “good of the nation.”

    • Election Prompts More Aggressive Twitter Censorship

      And according to some conservatives whose accounts have been suspended, Twitter has looked the other way when it comes to those on the Left who have bullied conservatives. An example discovered by USA Today was a California college student, Ariana Rowlands, who said she received personal attacks and death threats after Tweeting about her pride in her Hispanic heritage and her support for Trump. She said she reported the posts, but Twitter did nothing about the abusive account holders.

    • Gambia: Ahead of polls, digital media skirt censorship

      While state media in Gambia is government controlled and the private media practices self-censorship, political opponents of the small West African country’s strongman President Yahya Jammeh are using digital media to bypass the hurdles they face in reaching audiences.

      Gambians are heading to presidential polls next week, on Dec. 1, and campaigns are already in motion, with the incumbent facing his former ally and a coalition of seven opposition parties.

    • Major Journalism Trade Unions Stand with Sputnik Against Censorship

      Sputnik News Agency and Radio Broadcaster has received the support of both the International Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) following the passing of a controversial resolution by the European Parliament.

    • Nataliya Rostova: In Russia’s media, censorship is silent

      The idea of conducting a survey of Russian journalists came to me after seeing something similar in New York magazine, which earlier this year polled 113 people working in the US media on the problems and challenges they face. I thought it’d be interesting to compare the responses of journalists working on opposite sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, you have the experience of a country where every schoolchild feels pride in the First Amendment, which forbids Congress to pass any legislation limiting freedom of speech and the press, and, on the other, experience from a country where censorship was officially banned only 26 years ago.

    • Will new censorship kill Chinese filmmaking?

      China’s new film censorship laws would, at first blush, be enough to make a director cry.

      Movies must not promote gambling, superstition, drug abuse, violence nor teach criminal methods. What’s more they should “serve the people and socialism”. The horror!

      So will this mean the end of great Chinese cinema and the drowning of dwindling audiences in sea of dull, paternalistic fare?

      Not necessarily.

    • Dodgy Age Verification And Censorship Are Not The Answer

      Open Rights Group has got to know a disastrous policy when it sees it. Back in 2010, during the last Digital Economy Bill, music companies demanded that people be cut off the Internet after “three strikes” if they were accused of file sharing.

      Even then, it was clear that this was a disproportionate response that wouldn’t bring any of the supposed benefits.

      “Three strikes” and disconnection was never put into action. It crashed and burned, and everyone does their best to forget it.

      Now, I am experiencing a strong sense of déja vu. The new incarnation of the Digital Economy Bill starts with a real concern, that children can access pornography online, and puts forward a ‘modest proposal”. This is a deserving group whose interests are indisputably important.

    • Brazilian Activists Outsmart Facebook’s Censorship of the Female Nipple

      Gradually this has been challenged in Brazil, with many feminist movements doing marches attended by many women who, in protest against hypersexualization and shaming of women’s bodies, bare their chests in public. This has been accompanied by increased frustration with Facebook and Instagram’s Community Standards, which allow specific non-sexual images of women’s nipples (they make exceptions for breast feeding and post-mastectomy photos), but not others. They also allow some images of graphic violence, such as photos of people who have been tortured. Hypersexualized images of female breasts are also considered appropriate (as long as the nipple is not clearly visible), while photos including women’s nipples ranging from indigenous ceremonies in Australia to campaigns against breast cancer are prohibited.

    • Facebook doesn’t need to ban fake news to fight it

      Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site doesn’t have to become a censor to help tackle false stories. It can do a lot by helping its own users with context

    • On Blacklists and Russia ‘Hacking’ American Democracy
    • MacWorld, PCWorld Kill Site Comments Because They ‘Value And Welcome Feedback’

      For a while now the trend du jour in online media is to not only block your readers from making news story comments, but to insult their intelligence by claiming this muzzling is driven by a deep-rooted love of community and conversation. NPR, for example, muted its entire readership because, it claimed, it “adored reader relationships.” Reuters and Recode, in contrast, prevented their own users from speaking on site thanks to a never-ending dedication to “conversation.” Motherboard similarly banned all on-site reader feedback because it greatly “values discussion.”

      There’s a number of reasons to ban comments, but few if any have anything to do with giving a damn about your community. Most websites, writers and editors simply don’t want to spend the time or money to moderate trolls or cultivate local community because it takes a little effort, and quality human discourse can’t be monetized on a pie chart. Instead, it’s easier and cheaper to simply outsource all public human interactivity to Facebook. In addition to being simpler, it avoids the added pitfalls of a public comment section where corrections to your story errors are posted a little too visibly.

    • Will Facebook’s China Censorship Tool Work?
    • Facebook ‘quietly developing censorship tool’ for China
    • Facebook is ready to censor posts in China — should users around the world be worried?
    • Court (Again) Tosses Lawsuit Seeking To Hold Twitter Accountable For ISIS Terrorism
    • The 5 Worst Places To Be An Internet User In Southeast Asia
    • Top 10 Countries With Highest Internet Censorship in 2016
    • ‘It’s like they were selling heroin to schoolkids’: censorship hits booksellers at Kuwait book fair

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Microsoft gives third-parties access to Windows 10 Telemetry data

      Microsoft struck a deal with security company FireEye recently according to a report on Australian news magazin Arn which gives FireEye access to all Windows 10 Telemetry data.

    • European Union wants to regulate cryptography?

      Regulating cryptography is of course a bad idea. It’s true that cryptography can be an obstacle for collecting digital evidence. Generally, that’s one of the aims of cryptographic methods: make it difficult to obtain plain-text data. It can be used for the good, as well as for the bad, as with many other tools or technologies. But it’s unclear if policy makers can achieve reasonable regulatory frameworks. And the stakes are high. Weakening cryptography would ultimately lead to far reaching negative impact on digital markets, society, trust, cybersecurity and privacy.
      Intentional weakening of cryptography and security solutions – whether by requiring weaker algorithms or key sizes, or introducing backdoors – in order to make life easier for local law enforcement agencies means that criminals and foreign powers will also benefit from those measures.
      Good cryptography is strong cryptography.

    • Edward Snowden’s extradition lawsuit is rejected by Norway’s Supreme Court

      Norway’s Supreme Court has rejected Edward Snowden’s attempt to win free passage to visit the country and receive an award for free speech.

      Mr Snowden, who currently resides in Russia, copied and leaked thousands of classified NSA documents in 2013, revealing the scale of US government surveillance after the 9/11 attacks.

      In April, the 33-year-old took Norway to court in an attempt secure free passage, through Oslo’s District Court, an appeals court and finally the country’s Supreme Court.

    • Edward Snowden loses Norway safe passage case

      Edward Snowden’s bid to guarantee that he would not be extradited to the US if he visited Norway has been rejected by the Norwegian supreme court.

      The former National Security Agency contractor filed the lawsuit in April, attempting to secure safe passage to Norway to pick up a free speech award.

      It had already been rejected by Oslo District court and an appeals court.

      Mr Snowden is a former NSA analyst who leaked secret US surveillance details three years ago.

      As a result, he is facing charges in the US which could put him in prison for up to 30 years.

    • Twitter Says Its API Can’t Be Used For Surveillance, But What Does It Think The FBI’s Going To Do With It?

      Dataminr, the company whose Twitter firehose access has become somewhat of cause celebre on both sides of the privacy fence, is back in the news. After being told it couldn’t sell this access to government agencies for surveillance purposes, Dataminr had to disconnect the CIA from its 500 million tweets-per-day faucet.

      Twitter was pretty specific about what this buffed-up API could and could not be used for. The CIA’s surveillance efforts were on the “Don’t” list. This rejection of the CIA’s access was linked to existing Twitter policies — policies often enforced inconsistently or belatedly. What the CIA had access to was public tweets from public accounts — something accessible to anyone on the web, albeit with a better front-end for managing the flow and an API roughly 100x more robust than those made available to the general public.

    • Here’s how to delete yourself from the internet – at the click of a button

      In our smartphone-obsessed digital age, we effectively live our entire lives online, which makes us increasingly vulnerable to unseen threats.

      Cyber crime, fraud and identity theft are exponentially growing concerns. Our personal lives, locations, and increasingly our passwords are made public online for anyone to find.

      If the highly invasive Investigatory Powers Bill (AKA the Snooper’s Charter) isn’t blocked, then every single digital move you make will be recorded for up to 12 months.

    • Germany planning to ‘massively’ limit privacy rights

      A draft law released by the German union for data protection (DVD) this week revealed that the interior ministry was proposing to drastically limit the powers of Germany’s data protection authorities, banning them from investigating suspected breaches of people’s medical and legal records.

      As well as expanding video surveillance with facial recognition software, the bill would limit the government’s own data protection commissioners to checking that the technical prerequisites are in place to ensure that doctors’ and lawyers’ files are secure, but it stops them from following up when citizens report concerns that their data has been leaked.

      The bill would also shut down citizens’ right to know what data is being collected about them – even by private firms, if releasing that information would “seriously endanger” a company’s “business purposes,” the SZ quoted the draft as saying. Thilo Weichert, former data protection commissioner for the state of Schleswig-Holstein and now DVD board member, condemned de Maiziere’s plans as a “massive” erosion of privacy in Germany.

    • Donald Trump’s national security chief ‘took money from Putin and Erdogan’, says former NSA employee

      A former NSA employee has accused Donald Trump’s selection for National Security Advisor of taking money from both Russia and Turkey and of breaching information security regulations.

      John Schindler said Michael Flynn, who Mr Trump has nominated for the senior post, had taken money from the governments of Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan. Mr Schindler claimed on Twitter that Mr Trump would be a “hypocrite” if he stood by his nomination of the former general given his promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington.

      “Flynn took money from Putin & Erdoğan AND he broke important INFOSEC laws+regs,” he said. “If Trump stands by him now, he is a monstrous hypocrite.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Bill Introduced To Push Back Approval Of DOJ’s Proposed Rule 41 Changes

      In addition, the DOJ wants permission to break into “compromised” computers and poke around inside them without the permission or knowledge of the owners of these computers. It also wants to treat anything that anonymizes internet users or hides their locations to be presumed acts of a guilty mind. The stripping of jurisdictional limits not only grants the FBI worldwide access for digital seizures and searches, but also encourages it to go venue shopping for judicial rubber stamps.

    • Jakarta’s violent identity crisis: behind the vilification of Chinese-Indonesians

      Before Jakarta, there was Batavia, the 17th-century capital city of the Dutch East Indies, built with the skill of just a few hundred ethnic Chinese artisans who had settled as traders along the shore.

      How little has changed.

      Many big projects in modern day Jakarta, a city of more than 10 million, have been built by developers from the minority group, the descendants of the original merchants and other Chinese who have arrived since.

      Chinese-Indonesians – estimated to make up 1% to 4% of the country’s 250 million people – have had an impact on Jakarta which is vastly disproportionate to their physical numbers. The economic success of the group’s small elite has led to repeated bouts of resentment, discrimination and even violent assaults.

    • Dozens injured, hundreds arrested in riot at Bulgaria refugee camp

      Around 1,500 migrants have rioted in Bulgaria’s largest refugee camp, triggering clashes that left two dozen police injured and prompted the arrest of hundreds of protesters, officials said.

      “Around 300 migrants, six of them considered a threat to national security, have been arrested,” Prime Minister Boyko Borissov told BNR public radio after visiting the camp in early hours of Friday.

      He added that 24 police officers and two migrants had been injured and that the situation had been brought under control.

    • Migrants Clash With Police in Bulgaria; 200 Detained

      Police detained 200 migrants after they clashed with police at a refugee camp in southern Bulgaria on Thursday, injuring several officers.

    • President Erdogan: I will open gates for migrants to enter Europe if EU blocks membership talks

      President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned Turkey could open its border for refugees to stream into Europe after EU MEPs voted for a temporary halt to membership talks.

      Speaking at a congress on womens’ justice in Istanbul, the president warned: “If you go any further, these border gates will be opened. Neither me nor my people will be affected by these dry threats. It wouldn’t matter if all of you approved the vote”.

      He said the EU had “wailed” for help controlling the flow of refugees and migrants in 2015 and the bloc worried what would happen if Turkey opened its borders. Mr Erdogan made specific reference to Turkey’s main border crossing with EU member Bulgaria.

    • North Dakota Pipeline camp prepares for winter with donations
    • Islamic banking is the another name of destruction of civilization through Economic Jihad.

      Islamic banking traces its roots to the 1920s, but did not start until the late 1970s, and owes much of its foundation to the Islamist doctrine of two people: Indian-born Abul Ala Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. While these two pillars of the Pan-Islamist movement propagated jihad and war against the West, they also recognised the role international financial institutions could play in carrying out their political objectives.

    • Hacker who helped expose Ohio rape case pleads guilty, faces more prison time than rapists

      Earlier this week, Deric Lostutter, 29, known online as “KYAnonymous,” pleaded guilty in federal court in Kentucky to one count of conspiracy and one count of making false statements to law enforcement agents for his hack of the Steubenville (Ohio) High School football fan website Roll Red Roll in December 2012.

      Lostutter has said he hacked into the site to expose information about the gang rape of an unconscious teenage girl from West Virginia by members of the football team. Two of those team members, Trent Mays and Malik Richmond, were eventually sentenced to serve time — two years and one year, respectively — in a juvenile detention center for rape and kidnap.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Amended TRIPS Agreement Close To Ratification, Says WTO’s Azevêdo

      For Roberto Azevêdo, director general of the World Trade Organization, an amendment to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement that affects access to pharmaceuticals for developing countries remains a priority of the WTO.

      It was witnessed this week by Benin, which signed up to an amendment to the agreement this week in Geneva, joining several other nations that have signed in 2016.

    • Copyrights

      • Court Freezes Megaupload’s MPAA and RIAA Lawsuits

        A federal court in Virginia has granted Megaupload’s request to place the cases filed by the music and movie companies on hold until April next year, while the criminal case remains pending. Meanwhile, Megaupload is working hard to ensure that critical evidence on decaying hard drives is preserved.

      • $1bn Getty Images Public Domain Photograph Dispute is Over

        Earlier this year, photographer Carol Highsmith received a $120 settlement demand from Getty Images after she used one of her own public domain images on her website. Highsmith responded with a $1bn lawsuit but after a few short months the case is all over, with neither side a clear winner.

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