06.01.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Article as ODF
Publicado en Europa, Patentes at 10:00 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Que bonito niño en su bicicleta!
Sumario: Los últimos ‘rumores’ de la bicicleta y como está siéndo usada basado en expectaciónes de los empleados de la EPO, para introducir más ataques en los derechos humanos y del trabajador
EL Vice-Presidente (uno de varios) de la EPO es por muy lejos una persona confíable, pero algunos en los medios repiten como loros sus dudosas afirmaciónes sin escepticismo. Ayer WIPR publicó el “A el Presidente de la EPO le ‘cortaron’ los frenos de su bicicleta”, atribuyendo esto a un correo electrónico en vez de a un mensaje interno (intranet) los cuáles fuímos los primeros (y probablemente el único) sitio que los publicó. Hubieron otros errores en los artículos, pero algunos han sido corrégidos. Para citar las palabras concluyentes:
La tensión entre el personal y la administración de EPO ha aumentado en el último par de años como Battistelli ha introducido políticas que los trabajadores han sido descontentos con. Ha habido numerosas manifestaciones y huelgas en la oficina.
WIPR en contacto con la EPO por teléfono para solicitar un comentario, pero el departamento de comunicación dijo que no podía hacer comentarios sobre el asunto hasta mañana porque hoy es un día de “puente”.
No hay respuésta por parte de ellos basados en los hechos de que no vemos actualizaciónes substantivase. Bueno, excepto “UPDATE at 3.22pm: Una fuente de WIPR en la oficina confirmó que el mensaje fué envíádo por Topic.” Esto añade nada nuevo. Similar a lo que pasó cuando indagamos acerca del matoneo legal del sinceramente suyo.
Mientras tanto, aludiéndo a las mayores protestas en Francia, hay una nueva línea de comentarios no sólo en The Register pero también en IP Kat. Para citar algunos:
Tal vez no debemos olvidar que Battistelli es Francés. Como es probable que haya escuchado en las noticias, Francia está en huelga general debido a las nuevas leyes de trabajo. Si he entendido bien, la nueva ley hará que sea más fácil despedir a los empleados. Hace unos meses, un ministro también dijo que no veía razones por las que los funcionarios públicos deben tener un contrato permanente. Y al igual que Battistelli salario es un escándalo, los sueldos de los gerentes es actualmente un escándalo en la prensa francesa.
Tal vez este es también el futuro de la Oficina: examinadores en 2 contratos años, disparados automáticamente al final del período y son impedidos a trabajar después. Después de un año de paro sin prestaciones, que estarían encantados de firmar por otros dos años de período fijo, con un salario reducido. Parece una situación de ganar-ganar para Battistelli.
En el contexto de esta hipótesis, no veo ninguna razón por la cual los abogados de patentes europeas disfrutar de una licencia de por vida, por cierto. Tal vez ellos también tendrán que volver a aplicar como representante cada dos años también.
A lo cual la respuesta fue:
“Es probable que ya los haya escuchado en las noticias, Francia está en huelga general debido a las nuevas leyes de trabajo.”
Eso nunca habría sucedido si Hollande había seguido el ejemplo de “Presidente” Battistelli y promulgado nuevas leyes de huelga.
Hey mi bicicleta!
(Pero asegúrese de comprobar los frenos de primera …)
Finalmente:
Un artículo publicado en el Register de la “bici Affair” en la OEP:
línea de corte del freno de la Oficina de Patentes de euros prez – aka cómo decir que no eres popular
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/26/epo_battistelli_very_unpopular/
Hubo una docena de comentarios (en el The Register). La gente generalmente ve este “Asunto de la Bicicleta” más como un chiste que una causa de preocupación. Esto ha atraído más publicidad negativa que haber generado simpatíá. Donde sea que gente como Battistelli y su chacal a la mano derecha son menciónados en los medios, esta garantizado generar simpatía y simplemente aumentar el resentimiénto contra los empleados de la EPO. Ahora que las cosas se complican para el chacal de Battistelli surge la esperanza de una acción concreta contra él. ¿Será despedido Battistelli en las próximas semanas? He aquí el porque de que sí debería serlo, a no ser de que ya haya ‘comprado’ apoyo suficiénte (como alegadamente ha sucedido). La EPO es un catástrofe de mi… en estos días y a menos que se hagan cambios en la cabeza, ciertamente todo empeórara — y rápidamente! Hay gran protesta a venir en todas las sedes de la EPO. ¿Qué tomará a la Gerencia y el Consejo para ver como terminar esta “crisis” (como ellos la llaman)? Los Seis Guardias Pretoriános de Battistelli están costando una fortuna y dándoles unos millónes para retirárse temprano (como el Manchester United acaba de hacer con Van Gaal) definitivamente valdríá la pena.
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05.31.16
Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Some new GNU/Linux users understand right away that Linux isn’t Windows. Others never quite get it. The best distro designers strive to keep both in mind.
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Here’s one more really odd thing that you might consider doing when you’re finished setting up your 100+ new servers and troubleshooting problems that have stumped all the techies in the nearby vicinity – displaying text messages upside down. And if sheer entertainment is not enough of a reason, consider that the exercise might motivate you to think more deeply about the mysterious nature of character encoding systems. Yes, we’re going to turn phrases upside down — not by flipping our monitors — but by exchanging the usual characters that we see with their closest upside down equivalents – and then by presenting them on the screen in the reverse order.
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Desktop
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According to industry sources, Linux-based operation systems of Tmax OS and InfraWare are gaining much attention as alternatives to the Microsoft Windows. The latest version of the Linux has been significantly improved in terms of installation and use, providing a user interface similar to that of the Windows and coming with various software tools for documentation, multimedia utilization, etc.
In addition, constraints on the Linux in the financial and public sectors are being removed one after another with Internet environments adopting Web standards. Under the circumstances, the software industry is expecting that the utilization of open-source operating systems will spread to the general consumer market as well as the enterprise market.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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With the main Mesa drivers (Intel, RadeonSI, NVC0) jumping ahead to OpenGL 4.3 and mostly done with OpenGL 4.4/4.5, plus Intel adding their Vulkan driver, and many other improvements over the past three months, the next stable release of Mesa is going to be massive.
This next version of Mesa is still referred to as Mesa 11.3-dev in Git, with no patches yet proposed for bumping it to Mesa 12.0 considering the new OGL milestones. Anyhow, with the crazy amount of new features I was interested in running some statistics on the code-base to see how its size and evolution compares to earlier Mesa releases. This article provides those numbers.
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With Mesa 12 now having been branched with plans to release next month, the code is under a feature freeze as developers turn to fixing bugs ahead of this stable release.
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Today, May 30, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced that the major Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library software is open for development, and a first RC (Release Candidate) build is now available for testing.
According to the official release schedule published by Mr. Velikov a month ago, this first Release Candidate of Mesa 3D 12.0.0 was expected to arrive sometime around the date of May 20, followed one week later by the second RC build, on May 27. But it looks like the development cycle was pushed back for a week due to various facts.
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Benchmarks
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In prepping for our forthcoming GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Linux benchmarking, I’ve been running fresh rounds of benchmarks on my large assortment of GPUs, beginning with the GeForce hardware supported by the NVIDIA 367.18 beta driver. Here are the first of those benchmarks with the ten Maxwell/Kepler GPUs I’ve tested thus far.
Earlier this month I posted the With Pascal Ahead, A 16-Way Recap From NVIDIA’s 9800 GTX To Maxwell but in still waiting for my GTX 1070/1080 samples to arrive, I’ve restarted all of those tests now using the newer 367.18 driver as well as incorporating some extra tests like the recently released F1 2015 for Linux, not having done any SHOC OpenCL tests in a while, etc.
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Quite recently there have been quite a few advancements on the open source side of GPU drivers so I figured it would be the perfect time to talk about these changes and run some updated benchmarks.
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Applications
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TOR Browser 6.0 has been released with multiple changes and improvements.
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A Screen cast software(screen recorder) is the recording of computer screen, also known as a screen capture with audio. we can also hear a regular word screenshot, the difference between screenshot and screen cast is the screenshot generates a single picture of a computer screen but, where as screen cast records all the user activities on screen with audio narration like movie it would be saved as in video format. the video is in sevaral formats like flv,mp4,avi etc..
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Today, May 30, 2016, the development team behind Calamares, the next-generation, distribution-independent graphical installer framework announced the release of Calamares 2.2.3.
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The most encouraging part about getting followup e-mail messages from readers about their backup solutions is to hear that lots of folks actually have backup solutions! Regardless of the complexity of your backup process or the level of automation you deem appropriate for your data, apart from creating the memories in the first place, few things are as important as backing them up!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Oh yes! I have been really looking forward to doing some exploring in RymdResa and now it’s available for Linux & SteamOS with a nice discount.
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Seems like sales of Avalon Lords: Dawn Rises haven’t been what they expected, as the developers have announcing it’s going free to play on June 2nd. This is usually a last ditch attempt by developers left with no choice.
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Legends of Eisenwald an adventure game with tactical battles, RPG and strategy elements is finally coming to Linux thanks to help from Codeweavers and Wine.
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A little later than I had hoped, but Feral Interactive have released the Alien Hunters DLC for XCOM 2 along with a patch to bring it up to the same level as Windows.
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Kickbomb Entertainment will launch its debut shoot ‘em up Legacy of the Elder Star on Steam on June 7, 2016 for PC, Mac, and Linux.
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Robotality’s upcoming game mixes in elements of 1930s pulp adventure with a tactical combat. Players can hope to explore the unknown sometime in 2017.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Discover‘s future is Kirigami. We have already some work lined up (see the kirigami branch), we are pending some design work so that it shines, but the approach is already quite promising!
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Today the Krita team releases Krita 3.0, the Animation Release. Wrapping up a year of work, this is a really big release: animation support integrated into Krita’s core, Instant Preview for better performance painting and drawing with big brushes on big canvases, ported to the latest version of the Qt platform and too many bigger and smaller new features and improvements to mention!
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It feels like it took an eternity in retrospect, but the Krita 3.0 release of this KDE sketching and digital painting program is now available.
Krita 3.0 is the release that’s ported to KF5/Qt5, offers initial support for animation, instant preview support, and dozens of other features were added.
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Today, May 31, 2016, the Krita Foundation has had the great pleasure of announcing the final release of the powerful, open-source, free, and cross-platform Krita 3.0 digital painting software.
After being in development for the past six months, Krita 3.0 is finally here, fully ported to the next-generation Qt 5 technologies. Prominent features of Krita 3.0 include built-in animation support, as well as the ability to work with big canvases and brushes, thanks to the Instant Preview functionality.
“Many of the new features were funded by the 2015 Kickstarter campaign. A big thank-you to all our backers,” said Krita Foundation in today’s announcement. “The remaining stretch goals will be released with Krita 3.1, later this year. And don’t forget that we’ve still got seven days in the current kickstarter campaign.”
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While for many people, multiscreen support in Plasma works nicely, for some of our users, it doesn’t. There are problems with restoring previously set up configuration, and around the primary display mechanism. We’re really unhappy about that, and we’re working on fixing it for all of our users. These kind of bug are the stuff nightmares are made of, so there’s not a silver bullet to fix everything of it, once and for all right away. Multiscreen support requires many different components to play in tune with each other, and they’re usually divided into separate processes communicating via different channels with each other. There’s X11 involved, XCB, Qt, libkscreen and of course the Plasma shell. I can easily at least three different protocols in this game, Wayland being a fourth (but likely not used at the same time as X11). The complexity involved here is not just, and the components involved are actually doing their job quite well and have their specific purposes. Let me give an overview.
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When I review a distribution I always begin by performing a fresh installation of the operating system. This gives the latest version of the project a chance to stand on its own without complications. However, many of us do not perform fresh installations on our operating systems each time we want to upgrade to the latest release. Some of us, in order to preserve settings or installed packages, prefer to upgrade our existing operating system without starting over from scratch. This week I decided to take five open source operating systems through an upgrade process from their penultimate release to their latest version.
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New Releases
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Linux Lite 3.0 Final is now available for download. A lot has changed since Series 2. We have a new Login Manager, new Boot Theme, Lite Software has had an overhaul, new System Theme (Arc), we’ve added Share Hardware Configuration (Lite Info), Folder access from the Menu and Upgrades are now automated and seamless in Series 3. In addition, there has been a lot of bug fixes and adjustments since the Beta release, thanks again for your feedback.
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We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.4.0, the first release in v3.4 stable series.
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The Manjaro community proudly presents a new release of our Bspwm edition.
The Bspwm edition is one of our lightest, aiming to minimize ram and cpu usage, maximizing performance. It is especially suitable for developers and programmers due to its distraction free enviroment, syntax highlighting and many helpful command line utilities. It is easily usable with both command line and graphical interface, with keyboard and mouse and is extremely efficient for both system and user.
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Porteus Solutions’ Tomasz Jokiel announced on May 30, 2016, the release of the final Porteus Kiosk 4.0.0 Web Kiosk operating system based on the latest GNU/Linux technologies and open-source software.
Porteus Kiosk 4.0.0 comes three months after the release of the last maintenance build in the Porteus Kiosk 3.x series, introducing numerous new features and improvements. But first, let’s take a quick look under the hood, as the OS is now powered by Linux kernel 4.4.11 LTS (Long Term Support), and it’s based on the Mozilla Firefox 45.1.1 ESR and Google Chrome 50.0.2661.102 web browsers.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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The team over at ArchAssault, a GNU/Linux operating system based on the famous Arch Linux distro and designed for ethical hackers, announced a few minutes ago on their Twitter account that they are changing the OS’ name to ArchStrike.
Designed from the ground up as a security layer to Arch Linux, the ArchAssault project provides security researchers and hackers with one of the most powerful open source and totally free Linux kernel-based operating system for penetration testing and security auditing operations.
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It’s time to meet Manjaro Linux Gaming, an Arch Linux-based operating system that’s designed for gaming. This Linux distro comes with many open source software and emulators to assist you in gaming. The overall settings of the OS have been adjusted to suit the needs of gamers.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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There were a wide range of organizations participating in the GSoC (Google Summer of Code) program and there were some projects that appealed me. Although I wasn’t as familiar with openSUSE as I was with other organizations, there were weighty reasons to choose applying to work with openSUSE at OSEM:
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Slackware Family
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I am in the process of uploading new ISO images for Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak 1.0.1 scripts and using Slackware-current dated “Fri May 27 23:08:17 UTC 2016”. This version of Slackware-current has several significant changes and fixes, compared to the snapshot I used for the liveslak-1.0.0 based ISO images.
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Red Hat Family
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systemd, the init system that wants to control it all, was updated recently and one of its changes kills off all background processes upon logout. In other news Bodhi Linux now offers mechandise at the SpreadShirt Store and Jesse Smith compared the upgrade process of popular distributions. Also today, Christine Hall reviewed Arch-based Antergos 2016.4.2 and AlienBob released an updated version of Slackware Live.
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A change in the most recent version of systemd, the init system that has been recently adopted by many GNU/Linux distributions, has users up in arms.
The change, announced a few days ago, kills background processes by default when a user logs out, the opposite of the behaviour that was exhibited earlier.
This would cause problems for users, for example, of terminal multiplexers like screen and tmux as they would be unable to return to a process once they have logged out.
If a server admin had a bunch of scripts that logged into a server, then started a process using screen and logged out, the process would be killed. This is a fairly common thing that many admins do.
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NethServer Community Manager Alessio Fattorini informs Softpedia today about the general availability of the first Beta release of the NethServer 6.8 server-oriented GNU/Linux operating system.
Based on the recently released CentOS 6.8 operating system, which in turn builds on the freely distributed sources of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 distro, NethServer 6.8 is now in development as the newest long-term support release.
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Today, May 30, 2016, the Koozali SME Server development team, through Terry Fage, proudly announced that the Koozali SME Server 10 operating system is now open for development, and a first Alpha build is now ready for testing.
For those not in the known, SME Server is the leading GNU/Linux distribution designed to be deployed in various small and medium-sized enterprises. The OS is created by Koozali Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing legal and marketing support for the server-oriented operating system.
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We’re in the midst of a new economic and technological era, something people often refer to as “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”—or “Industry 4.0″ for short. Smart, connected, and responsive technologies are merging with environments that are becoming more data-rich, and, as a result, digital disruption to more traditional business models is becoming the norm, not the exception.
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A decade ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that open source tools and platforms would become pervasive in IT. Fast-forward to today, and that prediction has come true, with profound implications for the employment market.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical today released the Snapcraft 2.9 update of the tool used for creating Snappy package (also known as Snaps) for the Snappy Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Desktop, and Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS operating systems.
Snapcraft 2.9 is an important milestone because it’s the first release since the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) on April 21, 2016, bringing brand-new features like support for the “confinement” YAML property, allowing users to choose if their Snap package should be installed with the devmode option in confined mode or functional.
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We promised to keep you guys informed about the development progress of the Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 software for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, and today we have some great news.
Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak is back from a long weekend away to let us know that everything looks good for the OTA-11 update, and the Ubuntu Touch release team should push it to supported Ubuntu Phone and Tablet devices in the next couple of days as a phased upgrade during a 24-hour period.
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One distribution that comes to mind is Ubuntu. Built from a solid Debian base, Ubuntu has not only become an incredibly popular Linux distro, it’s also made countless other distributions such as Linux Mint a reality. In this article, I’ll explore why I believe Ubuntu wins the Linux distribution wars and how it’s influenced Linux on the desktop as a whole.
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QNAP Systems, Inc. has announced today a partnership with Canonical. The partnership will provide an advanced platform for the development of services and applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) using both Ubuntu and QTS operating systems. Canonical and QNAP will cooperate to provide, promote, and enable the creation of an ecosystem of IoT applications across home, SMB, and enterprises.
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Flavours and Variants
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ExTiX developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia today, May 30, 2016, about the immediate availability for download of the ExTiX 16.3 LXQt Edition computer operating system.
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Today I am happy to announce that we now have an official source for getting Bodhi Linux logos on a variety of things including T-Shirts, Water Bottles, and more via our new SpreadShirt Store:
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The Raspberry Pi Blog announced a new camera module (v2) in April. The primary reason for this was the simple fact that the sensor used in the original camera module had been end-of-lifed at the end of 2014. Raspberry Pi has been producing camera modules since then from stock it built up in advance, but as that was running out, a new camera module (based on a new sensor) was required.
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A new open source development board has been created by Swedish electric car start-up Uniti which offers an Arduino compatible board which has been specifically designed for controlling three-phase motors.
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On the other hand, Raspberry Pi finds its use in complex applications where you feel the need to use a computer. Consider using Raspberry Pi if you are making a complicated robot, looking to learn to hack, dealing with intricate calculations, needing more processing power etc.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Wearable fitness tech is a bit of a hot topic at the moment and Samsung are making no secret of the fact they want to be a key player in this arena. The first Gear Fit fitness tracker was launched in 2014, and now its time that it gets a well deserved refresh.
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Over at the Tizen forum today, a public poll was created to see if users were interested on a multi profile mode for their Samsung Z1 and Z3 smartphones. This is however not to be confused with user-login profile modes wherein multiple users will be able to use the same device with their preferred settings. What Samsung have in mind with this feature is to give a choice to the users on how they would like to envision the User Interface of their handsets.
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Android
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As the latest Android phones cram more camera tricks up their unibody sleeves, what about your current smartphone that’s barely a year old? Well that might be where the Eye-Plug comes in. Hidden inside a humble stand deep within Computex here in Taipei, the USB-C accessory plugs into your (currently Android-only) smartphone, adding another camera sensor to your phone for front- and rear-facing dual camera frivolity. (That’s where you need that handy reversible connection.) I tested out the prototype accessory, with full production scheduled for later this year. 3D selfie videos could be a horrifying reality.
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When Google announced its Home speaker to take on the Amazon Echo, I made a big assumption: it was essentially a super-powered Chromecast device at its tiny little heart. Making assumptions is a stupid thing for a tech reporter to do, but turns out this one was accurate. Amir Efrati at The Information has confirmed from “a person with direct knowledge of the plan” that Google Home will be based on the Chromecast.
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The new ZenFone 3, ZenFone 3 Deluxe, and ZenFone 3 Ultra bring beautiful designs and attractive features, without breaking the bank. Starting prices range from $249 to $499, and considering what these phones bring to the table, we’re inclined to bet on their success in the market.
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There’s no question about it, Samsung’s Galaxy S7 is one of the best Android phones money can buy this year. But Asus has come up with a phone that’s not only cheaper than Samsung’s newest flagship, it also packs crazy hardware and specs that should offer an amazing performance. The new Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe has specs so impressive that it could easily power up an ultraportable laptop. We’re looking at 6GB of RAM and up to 256GB of built-in storage – and before you ask, yes, it’s the same kind of speedy flash memory that’s found inside Samsung’s Galaxy S7. And yes, you can further expand it via microSD storage.
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Nokia is back, announcing that it’s going to be embracing Android and producing a number of smartphones and tablets over the coming years.
Nokia’s story has more twists and turns than a mountain pass, with an equal number of ups and downs. The announcement that we’ll be seeing Nokia branded phones once again is certainly exciting.
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Smartwatches that don’t actually need a smartphone to function seem poised to be the next hot thing in wearables. Samsung’s already attempted this with a couple of its Gear watches — most recently with the Gear S2 3G — and Google just announced a revamped version of Android Wear that promises to make the smartwatch more independent from the smartphone.
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How much do you value your privacy? Sirin Labs is a new company making its debut in London today that stakes its future on very wealthy people believing their privacy and security to be priceless. Its launch product is the Solarin, a 5.5-inch Android smartphone accompanied by a series of bombastic claims about being the very best. It should be the very best, given that it costs £9,500 before taxes, but in my time trying it out today, I was left with the unhappy impression of an expensive imposter.
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Following the release early, release often philosophy when working on ownCloud Mail, we do releases quite often. The most important enhancement of this release is our first step towards tight integration with more community apps. Additionally, it marks the beginning of Tahaa’s GSOC coding period.
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Markus Rex of ownCloud announced this morning, “Today we announced the creation of the ownCloud Foundation which will guarantee the viability and availability of free ownCloud now and in the future. We have made a commitment to open development in a blog recently and want to extend that further to ensure that the community is providing the direction, planning and atmosphere that is best for the project. The ownCloud community has matured a lot over the last few years and is certainly to play a bigger part in its own destiny.”
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Modern data centers have increased significantly in scale and complexity as compute and storage resources become highly virtualized. The rise of the DevOps style of application deployment means that data center resources must be agile and respond rapidly to changing workload requirements. Data center network technologies have been challenged to keep up with these rapidly evolving application requirements.
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As we’ve been reporting, The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has been elevating a lot of interesting new tools to Top-Level Status recently. The foundation has also made clear that you can expect more on this front, as graduating projects to Top-Level Status helps them get both advanced stewardship and certainly far more contributions.
Only a few days ago, the foundation announced that a project called TinkerPop has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). TinkerPop is a graph computing framework that provides developers the tools required to build modern graph applications in any application domain and at any scale. Now, it has announced that Apache Zeppelin has graduated as well. Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics.
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Whether you are small to large enterprises, IoT is one of the useful technology that can help you to be connected on-the-go.
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The world of architecture doesn’t change as quickly as software, but architects are still finding new ways to share innovative designs and ideas.
The open source architecture movement aims to make architectural designs, drawings, 3D renderings, and documentation freely available for integration into other projects under open source licenses. It owes much of its growth to the growing popularity of the maker movement, DIY culture, 3D printing, and CNC machines, as well as support from architects like Alejandro Aravana.
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Online dictionary for yoruba names, YorubaName, has now made its backlog accessible to the public. In a post on their blog, the guys at YorubaName announced that the website codebase is now on GitHub.
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Events
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Tuesday, May 31, 2016 – The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announces that recordings and slides from its LibrePlanet 2016 free software conference are now available online.
LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System was held in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center on March 19 and 20, 2016. Video for the opening keynote with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and dozens more sessions from the conference – over 25 hours of free software ideas – are available on the FSF’s instance of GNU MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing platform that is a decentralized replacement to sites like YouTube and Flickr.
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In an illustration of the value of diversity, four out of five of the recipients presented with O’Reilly Open Source Awards at this year’s OSCON were women.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Version 1.9 of the Rust programming language has been released. Rust is a new language with a small but enthusiastic community of developers.
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SaaS/Back End
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OpenStack is one of the biggest open source movements. It is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The software platform consists of interrelated components that control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre.
According to the official website, hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem globally.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Microsoft’s open source fork of the .NET platform, called .NET Core, will be modified for better compatibility with existing applications, says Program Manager Immo Landwerth in a recent post.
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BSD
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The latest FreeBSD development code has integrated the zfsd daemon.
ZFSD is the ZFS Fault Management Daemon. ZFSD deals with situations like drive faults in ZFS pools with hot-spares and replacements. This comes as the ZFS file-system support in FreeBSD continues to mature and is in quite a good state for ZFS outside of Oracle.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The first public release of the GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro, version 0.1) tarball is now available for download, see below for more details. Gnuastro is an official GNU package consisting of a set of utilities, or executable programs (listed below), for astronomical data manipulation and analysis directly from the command-line (no mini-environment) and satisfying the GNU Coding Standards.
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Gnuastro is the latest GNU Project.
Gnuastro v0.1 was released today as the first public release of this package, which stands for the GNU Astronomy Utilities. Gnuastro contains utilities for astronomical data manipulation and analysis via the command-line.
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Licensing/Legal
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All the way back in 2010, when Oracle filed a complaint for patent and copyright infringement against Google regarding parts of the Java code found in Google’s Android mobile OS, I wrote a post calling the move “the anti-open move of the year.” Fast-forward to today, and in the Oracle v. Google trial that just concluded, a jury returned a verdict in Google’s favor. It basically concluded that Oracle’s suit against Google, claiming that the use of Java APIs in Android violated copyright law, was bunk.
Now, in an op-ed piece for Ars Technica, Annette Hurst, an attorney who represented Oracle, equates the jury’s decision with the death of open source.
[...]
Hurst makes a good point that dual licensing models are increasing, with many open source projects available for free, while commercial versions, often including support, come at a cost. But the Oracle suit originated because Oracle essentially perceived itself as owning a moat around Java that didn’t really exist.
[...]
Indeed, one of the lasting images of this long running legal skirmish is going to be Oracle behaving in a decidedly anti-open fashion. It may have been wiser for Oracle to simply let this one go.
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The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.
According to the Initiative, the API will allow third parties to ‘become license-aware’, giving businesses everywhere means to determine if a license is Open Source or not.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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The survey, which covered 54 cities in Spain (including Málaga, Saragossa, La Corogne, Alicante, Lleida, Cantabria and Castilla la Mancha), analysed the website of city councils to see if essential data had been published, as required by the law. Those data include the remuneration of senior officials, the declaration of assets of the municipal councillor, budgets, inventory, property, contracts, agreements and grants.
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Last Saturday, Malta’s Information Technology Agency (MITA) reached out to the country’s youth and non-governmental organisations. The agency organised a public workshop, demonstrating eGovernment services, to show how these can ‘revolutionise government interaction’.
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Citizens have strong ties with municipal administrations, the Bürgerzentriertes eGovernment (BUEGO) working group writes. They consult their administration’s websites expecting immediate answers to a range of questions, such as time tables for waste collection, and information about medical care. According to the working group, the way in which Austria’s municipalities offer this information is neither systematic nor universal.
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Open Data
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The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg officially launched its national open data portal data.public.lu on April 8th. This portal, supported by Digital Luxembourg, the government agency in charge of digital affairs in the country, was presented during the Game of Code hackathon.
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Open standards
The existing shared solutions are to be adopted by all authorities and public sector institutions where relevant, according to a presentation in English. “Shared solutions need to be stable, secure and user-friendly, they will also be easy to implement because the infrastructure is based on open standards.”
The strategy, an agreement involving the government, regions and municipalities, was announced on 12 May. It includes 33 initiatives, which among other things deal with ease of use, reuse of data, IT architecture, growth, security and digital skills, DIGST says.
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Programming/Development
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The role of the network engineer is changing. This is not a result of DevOps, although some would claim it is. As DevOps takes center stage in organizations, it can seem like network engineers are being asked to become developers.
There have been a number of talks discussing this, some of which have surfaced at Interop Las Vegas. The shift has been Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which was fundamental to the start of the DevOps movement. So maybe you could say this is caused by DevOps.
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While this project is in the alpha stage of development, the intent is that Jenkins users can install Blue Ocean side-by-side with the Jenkins Classic UI via a plugin.
Not all the features listed on this blog are complete but we will be hard at work over the next few months preparing Blue Ocean for general use. We intend to provide regular updates on this blog as progress is made.
Blue Ocean is open source today and we invite you to give us feedback and to contribute to the project.
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Samsung is advising customers against succumbing to Microsoft’s nagging and installing Windows 10.
The consumer electronics giant’s support staff have admitted drivers for its PCs still don’t work with Microsoft’s newest operating system and told customers they should simply not make the upgrade.
That’s nearly a year after Microsoft released Windows 10 and with a month to go until its successor – Windows 10 Anniversary Update – lands.
Samsung’s customers have complained repeatedly during the last 12 months of being either unable to install Microsoft’s operating system on their machines or Windows 10 not working properly with components if they do succeed.
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Hardware
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ARM announced a 10nm Cortex-A73 architecture with 30 percent better sustained performance and efficiency than the Cortex-A72, plus a 32-shader Mali-G71 GPU.
ARM unveiled a follow-on to the high-end Cortex-A72 mobile architecture, which was announced in Feb. 2015, and also unveiled a high-end Mali-G71 GPU to work with it (see farther below). The Cortex-A73 supports a 10nm FinFET process, compared to 16nm FinFET+ for the Cortex-A72. Using this process, Cortex-A73 cores would measure 0.65 x 0.65mm, making it the “smallest and most efficient ‘big’ ARMv8-A core” to date, according to ARM.
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Health/Nutrition
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Public interest groups urged the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to block the mega-merger of chemical corporations Dow and DuPont, which the organizations argue is part of a larger effort to put a “corporate cabal” in charge of the nation’s food system.
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“Tobacco-related illness is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced,” according to the World Health Organization, and plain packaging of tobacco products can save lives, it said. The theme of this year’s no-tobacco day, today, is: Get ready for plain packaging, as the WHO is calling for countries to introduce plain packaging in their territories.
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In response, people are fighting back and resisting. From Ghana to India and from Europe to beyond, food sovereignty movements are demonstrating a deep-rooted resistance against neoliberal doctrine and its negative impacts on agriculture, health, communities and the environment. And they are armed with realistic alternatives to corporate dominated agriculture and the policies and framework which allows it to prosper at the expense of both people and the environment.
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Federal troops are spraying for mosquitoes, and neighborhood health inspectors have been tasked with eliminating standing bodies of water where they are known to breed, says the government. Do you really believe that the Brazilian government is capable of eradicating mosquitoes in Rio even temporarily?, asks anyone who has ever had contact with Brazilian bureaucracy. So the argument goes, back and forth, and it’s getting ugly.
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Liz Luras carried three American flags over her shoulder in a Memorial Day march this weekend. Each represented a veteran who committed suicide after leaving the military. To Luras, this honor is especially meaningful, since she knows it could easily be her flag waving beside theirs.
Luras is one of the many soldiers featured in a new Human Rights Watch report who were “honorably discharged” from the military after being the victim of rape or other sexual assault.
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To make a long story short (although you really should read the whole post), Ulrich and her friends next told the woman’s server and the Fig’s manager what they’d seen. After 40 cringe-inducing minutes of the attempted rapist subtly trying to get her to drink by “chinking his glass to hers,” the two finished their dinner, the Fig staff checked security cameras to confirm that the man had, indeed, poured an unknown substance into the woman’s wine, and the Santa Monica police arrived.
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It’s easy to hate Nestle’s bottled water business.
The multinational behemoth recently fought a case at the Maine Supreme Court to continue filling Poland Spring bottles — at the same rate the locals pay for tap water. Environmental groups and locals had challenged whether the water company had the authority to sign a 25-year, 603,000 gallon/day contract for public water. The groups lost.
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“Typically 20 percent of every shower, the duration, is essentially lost,” said Jonah Schein, technical coordinator for homes and buildings for the EPA’s WaterSense program. “The average shower is a little over eight minutes long, so that’s a good chunk of the shower that we’re not actually being able to utilize.”
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Security
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Ultimately, we would like to introduce a multiple-signature scheme, in which several developers (from different countries, social circles, etc.) can sign Qubes-produced binaries and ISOs. Then, an adversary would have to compromise all the build locations in order to get backdoored versions signed. For this to happen, we need to make the build process deterministic (i.e. reproducible). Yet, this task still seems to be years ahead of us. Ideally, we would also somehow combine this with Intel SGX, but this might be trickier than it sounds.
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Notably, with 90 million followers, Katy Perry is the most followed person on the platform.
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Defence/Aggression
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During a seminar on “home defense concepts” at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Louisville, an instructor encouraged gun owners to store firearms in their children’s bedrooms.
Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training, paced across a conference room stage as he repeatedly warned against the threat of violent home invasions. After establishing that filling one’s home with weapons is the only solution, he then recommended that gun owners store firearms in their kids’ rooms for easy access.
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These points should be obvious, but please observe the following basic conventions in your reporting.
* Always refer to U.S. soldiers using the possessive pronoun “our.”
* Always refer to all of our U.S. troops as “heroes.”
* Always refer to their actions in war as “service.”
* Always refer to their actions in war as “sacrifice” and their deaths in war the “ultimate sacrifice.”
* Always refer to their actions anywhere as “defending our country (or Homeland)” and fighting for “us.” Acknowledge our “debt” to them.
* Always, no matter what the cause or war theater, aver that the soldiers are always “defending our freedoms.”
*Always express gratitude and appreciation; always thank U.S. soldiers from commanders on down for their “service,” whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.
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This weekend, America will pause to honor the thousands of men and women who fought and died to preserve ExxonMobil’s First Amendment rights, and protect it from the tyranny of justice.
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On Memorial Day, it is as well to remember that US troops are still at war. Afghanistan is our nation’s longest such military engagement.
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BBC Monitoring surveyed the Arabic press on 27 May for the issue of the Iranian role in the Iraq government campaign to take Fallujah from Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Although Saudi and other newspapers say they want to see Daesh defeated, they are deeply critical of the Shiite militias or Popular Mobilization Forces, alleging that they use indiscriminate fire and create high numbers of civilian casualties when operating in Sunni Arab areas.
Fallujah is a storied Iraqi Sunni stronghold of several hundreds of thousands of residents, the “city of minarets.” It fell to Daesh in January of 2014, and I think it is fair to say that there is much more angst in the Sunni Arab world about its liberation at the hands of Iran-backed Shiites than there has been about Daesh’s brutal occupation of the city.
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Ever since Neocons de facto took over American foreign policy, after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, rejecting the ‘Peace Dividend’ that many had expected, the cry in Washington D.C. has been to impose an America-centered New World Order by military means.
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Nearly 20 years ago, as I left the War Resisters League, or WRL, offices in lower Manhattan for the first time, I noticed that my fingertips were covered in black soot and ink. My hands were full of tracts and leaflets, and I had been looking through nonviolence training materials for the last hour. I tried to rub the dirt off onto my jeans, but it wouldn’t budge and later even soap and water had to work really hard.
A few weeks ago, I went back to 339 Lafayette Street to say goodbye to the appropriately nicknamed Peace Pentagon. The visit reminded me of that sooty, inky afternoon, when the late great and gentle Karl Bissinger gave me a tour of the WRL workroom — teeter-towered floor to ceiling with books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters and signs from every demonstration of the last half century (almost).
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In the U.S. political culture, Memorial Day has become one more chance to glorify American wars and to exploit U.S. soldiers’ deaths to generate sentiment for more wars, a troubling tactic addressed by Gary G. Kohls and S. Brian Willson.
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For 31 years, Veterans For Peace has been the only veterans organization that has rejected war, violence, nuclear weapons, the destruction of the environment created by war, the steady erosion of our civil liberties, the corporate greed that drives our wars and the systemic injustice it produces, here at home and abroad, all in the name of advancing the American empire.
As veterans, we refuse to accept the notion that, in order to protect the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, the Constitution that we swore to support and defend can be ignored, shredded and cast aside as an inconvenient nuisance standing in the way of American hegemony.
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Some 20,000 Iraqi soldiers, special forces, federal police and Shia paramilitaries are advancing on Fallujah, a Sunni Arab city held by Isis since early 2014. They are backed by the destructive might of the US-led coalition of air forces that have carried out 8,503 air strikes in Iraq and 3,450 in Syria over the last two years. Without such close air support, the anti-Isis forces in Iraq and Syria would not have had their recent successes.
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The rifle is a story in itself. It was a relic of the French war in Vietnam, the one we failed to learn from. When my father got the call to the “freedom bird” in 1970, he barely had time to pack his duffel and grab the rifle his friend had gifted him. He stepped off the plane to greet my mother at Dulles in his field greens, with the muddy tan and the mustache and the dirt of the war still stuck in the waffle of his boot. When they got to the baggage conveyor, down came the rifle, unboxed, the hard truth of the war right there in broad daylight.
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On Memorial Day, politicians will speak at ceremonies all over the country and repeat their favorite mantra: “Support the troops.”
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It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu’s hardships at the hands of the United States to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more Americans will feel remorse as a result. But who will come forward to take responsibility for all this suffering? And who will give Pham Van Chap a new leg?
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In June 1942, a pair of German university students formed The White Rose, a German resistance movement that used a series of leaflets to decry Nazi militarism and call for an end to the war. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote the first four leaflets between the end of June and beginning of July. In the fall, Hans’ sister, Sophie Scholl, discovered that her brother was one of the authors of the pamphlets, and joined the group. Shortly after, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and Kurt Huber became members.
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On this 2016 Memorial Day, much like all Memorial Day commemorations since 1968, no official recognition or memorial services will be held to honor the 34 dead and the 167 wounded US Navy Men.
In what has to be one of the most cowardly and expedient political decisions made by a Commander in Chief, politicians, and top brass to uphold the constitution of the United States and to defend American citizens, Lyndon Johnson and his underlings orchestrated a cover up of epic proportions.
Today no one will hear about the Israeli June 8, 1967 assault on the USS Liberty, an attack so cowardly and so heinous that it exposes Israel’s penchant for manufacturing facts and its ability to manipulate American leadership and the media to gloss over its dastardly deeds.
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Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff devote the hour to a conversation with author Peter Dale Scott about his latest book, “The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy.” This wide-ranging discussion examines the “deep state,” an evolving level of secret government separate from the elected government.
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Of course, primary among those mindlessly calling for carnage he has never seen is Drumpf, “the bog monster of the American id, rising out of the masturbatory muck of our military fantasies in which the manly man slays his enemies.” In a claim that would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifying, he says he “will be so good at the military, your head will spin.” It already is. Perhaps he should read Ambrose Bierce on finding the grotesque bodies of the dead during the Civil War: “How repulsive they looked with their blood-smears, their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by contraction of the lips! The frost had begun already to whiten their deranged clothing. We were as patriotic as ever, but we did not wish to be that way.”
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Since World War II, the US military has been used for imperial policing, not defending the country as the Constitution stipulates. Unfortunately, many of the recent military deaths that we are mourning have been unnecessary and even counterproductive – as new more radical groups are spawned from the ones US intervention helped create in the first place – al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. Some would say that not running an activist foreign policy is naïve and dangerous. What is naïve is that many Americans seem to think that the 9/11 and other terror attacks just arise out of thin air, with no cause except perhaps pure evil in the perpetrators’ hearts. Terrorists are evil, but the ones that threaten the United States (and the ones that don’t should be left alone) are doing so for reasons that the American people and their politicians and media don’t care to examine – at their own peril.
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Long-awaited assault backed by US-led coalition forces comes with fears militants might use civilians as human shields
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Here’s what he could have said to try to do so:
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, an American warplane unleashed the most horrific and inhuman weapon ever invented, immediately imperiling the survival of the entire human species. This act of terrorism was the ultimate crime: a crime of mass murder, a crime of war, and a crime against humanity.
The victims, those who died incinerated in a flash, and those who died slowly and painfully over years from chemical poisoning, were never able to see justice served. Sadly, there is no way the criminals who carried out this heinous and barbaric act will ever face justice for their crimes.
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Former senior national security leaders from across the political spectrum have said they would “fear for the Republic” in a Trump presidency, that he is “crazy,” “a gamble for the future,” and would have “dangerous consequences for the United States.” The U.S. military is the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known and has hundreds of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched in a matter of minutes.
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With rare exception, the question of whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two is debated only deep within the safety of academic circles: could a land invasion have been otherwise avoided? Would more diplomacy have achieved the same ends without the destruction of two cities? Could an atomic test on a deserted island have convinced the Japanese? Was the surrender instead driven primarily by the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific War, which, by historical accident, took place two days after Hiroshima—and the day before Nagasaki was immolated?
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Toward victory? Peace? Reconciliation? At the very least, toward the prospect of the violence abating? Merely posing the question is to imply that U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world serve some larger purpose.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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All eyes this morning will be on the half-yearly OPEC meeting in Vienna.
Although pundits are not expecting a production freeze, the oil price is creeping towards $50, up 80 per cent since its slump of $30 in January.
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Flush with tens of millions of our tax dollars for “security assistance,” the Honduran army and national police have acted with impunity since U.S.-trained generals overthrew Manuel Zelaya, the elected president of Honduras, seven years ago. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton toed the White House line that this wasn’t really a “military coup” worthy of near unanimous condemnation by the Organization of American States. The United States was more concerned about maintaining its own military presence in Honduras than objecting to local human rights abuses that have increased ever since.
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Despite extremes of heat, extended drought and greater hazards from human carelessness, wildfire is not on the increase.
Two separate studies, in two journals, using different ways to assess the evidence, conclude that the area of scrub, forest or grassland burned to cinders every year is more or less the same, or may even be getting smaller.
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Malaysia has just established the biggest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the country. The Tun Mustapha Park (TMP) occupies 1m hectares (2.47m acres) of seascape off the northern tip of Sabah province in Borneo, a region containing the second largest concentration of coral reefs in Malaysia as well as other important habitats like mangroves, sea grass beds and productive fishing grounds.
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Ninety climate change experts from around the world urged Canadian government officials to “take urgent action” and reject a proposed, “unjustified” liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal to be built on the British Columbia coast, joining with fierce local Indigenous opposition to the controversial project.
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Renewed attempts by top lawmakers to remove environmental licensing requirements for “strategic” development projects in Brazil have been stalled.
The latest twist comes amidst rising concerns amongst environmentalists that that the new government in Brazil will move undermine environmental protections and may support the licensing move.
Under a long-proposed constitutional amendment, PEC65/2012, environmental licensing would be “auto-approved” once an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been submitted.
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To the applause of the chemical industry lobby, Congress is sending a new Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) bill to President Obama. Anyone familiar with this law knows that it is the weakest of all U.S. environmental statutes, leaving the majority of the 85,000 chemicals in our toys, clothes, homes, schools, and workplaces unregulated and untested for their health effects.
And if Congress and the chemical lobby have their way, none of that will change.
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On Thursday, Donald Trump declared that if elected President, he would wage an all-out war against national and global climate action. On Friday, he went so far as to to deny the reality of California’s devastating drought.
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With spring now in full gear throughout most of the United States, it’s a good bet that Memorial Day Weekend will again be the busiest of the whole year at many national parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Utah’s Mount Zion. Last year, 305 million people visited National Park Service-administered sites, signifying the parks’ appeal to millions of Americans and world tourists.
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Since taking office, President Obama has protected more land and water — over 265 million acres — than any President before him. But his conservation efforts have extended far beyond our natural landscape. In addition to protecting some of our nation’s most iconic and special places, President Obama’s conservation efforts have included wildlife from all across the country.
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As part of a final-year push to tackle major environmental challenges, the Obama Administration appears to be doubling down on its efforts to slow and reverse the declines in American wildlife populations.
Though the United States has enacted and implemented some of the world’s most effective wildlife conservation laws, one in five animal and plant species in the United States — nearly 1,300 total species — is at risk of extinction.
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A single relatively wet winter has led California officials to relax in a way some water experts fear is reckless.
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“I’ll tell you something I did not know before I came here,” Bernie Sanders told the crowd at a rally on Sunday in San Joaquin Valley, Calif.
“I was in Flint, Michigan a few months ago and as all of you know, the children in Flint, Michigan were poisoned by the lead in the water they drank. And in Flint, Michigan, people cannot turn on their taps and use the water in their homes. Now, I thought that was Flint, Michigan. I did not know that there were thousands of homes right around here [in the same situation]. That is unbelievable … that people have got to go out and buy bottled water… is that the case?” Sanders asked incredulously. San Joaquin Valley’s water system is contaminated with nitrates from agriculture, and has been linked in studies to spina bifida, cleft palate and missing limbs.
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When Meraldo Umiña moved to the Madre De Dios region of Peru in 1983, the toxic gold rush that’s destroyed swaths of Amazon rainforest there was in its infancy. There were no laws regulating informal or illegal mining, and artisanal miners like him were few.
“Gold was cheap,” Umiña, 59, told ThinkProgress in Spanish — “a gram was about $12.” Using simple but still harmful chemical methods, miners worked just by the rivers then, and the gold was easy to get, he said. There was no need to encroach on the jungle, and no financial incentive to use machine-intensive techniques of extraction.
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Finance
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Wall Street’s big banks remain too big to fail and its bankers apparently too big to jail. If Wall Street is ever once more to serve Main Street rather than sabotage it, citizens will have to do the heavy lifting. Last week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned a verdict against Bank of America for falsely peddling lousy mortgage loans, showing yet again that the Justice Department and courts have offered no remedy for what the FBI once warned was an “epidemic of fraud.” At the same time, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called out Wall Street lobbyists who were “swarming this place,” pressing Congress to slip bank-friendly riders into must-pass legislation.
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In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders had harsh words for media more interested in stoking candidates’ antagonism toward each other instead of focusing “on the real issues” of a shrinking middle class and rising wealth inequality in America.
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Members of Congress are weighing in against the U.S. government’s use of “gunboat diplomacy”-style intimidation of Colombia against that country allowing a generic version of an ultraexpensive cancer drug named Gleevec in order to protect the public’s health.
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Capitalism is not a form of government. It is a system of wealth management. It does not create wealth, but only allocates it. It is indifferent to the welfare of people. It has no social purpose. Private profit is everything.
Over several decades, as millions in Asia and elsewhere have seen living standards rise, tens of millions of Americans have seen theirs fall dramatically – low wages, and lost jobs – in a massive re-allocation of wealth abroad from the once large and prosperous American middle class.
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In Michigan, people who continue begging for money from the same person after receiving a “no” could face up to $100 in fines—money they often simply don’t have. This week the Michigan House Criminal Justice Committee approved House Bill 5103, the “Aggressive Solicitation Prohibition Act.”
The bill would forbid a variety of behaviors when people panhandle, such as making physical contact, blocking the path of the person they are soliciting, and “approaching or following a person in a manner intended to cause bodily harm.”
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If you want to see “privilege,” look to the CEO making $20 million a year as they turn in a mediocre performance managing a major corporation. Or talk to a cardiologist, an occupation with a median annual salary of more than $420,000 a year.
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openDemocracy founder Anthony Barnett discusses DiEM25, Brexit and European democracy with Yanis Varoufakis. Recorded at the Another Europe is Possible event in London, 28 May 2016.
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A substantial number of Americans are interested in redistributing wealth and making government work for the 99 percent
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Mises had long struggled to intellectually combat the Marxist class warriors who sought to introduce Bolshevism to Austria. For example, his 1920 explication of the socialist calculation problem demonstrated the fatal flaw in Soviet-style planning. Soon Mises found himself also hounded by race warriors. As a Jewish liberal, he was compelled to flee the rise of the Nazis: first to Switzerland, and then to America.
The events of World War II proved to Mises that warfare sociology had won the hearts and minds of the west.
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But if you’re like me, you want to make the economy work in the service of the things that we care about, like human and planetary well-being. That’s tough if we imagine that people in their economic lives are solely self-interested and motivated by monetary rewards. It’s also problematic if people think that men, if they want to be caring, have to compromise their masculine gender identity.
If you try to combine ‘economy’ and ‘care’ using images found on Google, no cogent narrative emerges. A man in a suit sitting on a pile of money…while holding a baby? A woman in nursing scrubs sitting with an elderly person…while engaged in a power handshake? Those images don’t work.
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The 18th round of negotiations on a secret deal to limit public oversight over the services economy starts this week at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, and negotiators will have a new item on their agenda: how to deal with the onslaught of leaks of proposals that were supposed to remain locked away in secret until five years after the deal was concluded or abandoned.
That’s because WikiLeaks released draft texts on three previously unpublished cross-cutting annexes of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) yesterday: disciplines on the way governments can regulate State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs); Professional Services, and New Provisions Applicable to All Services.
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Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media was about more than Hogan’s payout from the beginning.
Now, reporting from Forbes alleges that Silicon valley billionaire and pledged Trump delegate Peter Thiel — who has referred to Gawker writers as “terrorists” — has been secretly backing the suit. The New York Times also reports that Thiel is bankrolling the case. The revelation adds a twist to a case already tied up in questions over freedom of speech, and has big implications for how critical press functions in an age of billionaires.
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Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008 and millions of Americans lost their homes, Donald Trump said he was hoping for a crash.
“I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said in a 2006 audiobook from Trump University, answering a question about “gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.”
The U.S. housing bubble burst two years later, triggering the stock market crash of 2008 that plunged the U.S. economy into a deep recession, leaving millions of Americans unemployed.
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In a 2006 Trump University audiobook, Trump was asked about “gloomy predictions that the real estate market is heading for a spectacular crash.” He responded by saying the prospect was actually something he was looking forward to.
“I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said. “If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know you can make a lot of money… If you’re in a good cash position — which I’m in a good cash position today — then people like me would go in and buy like crazy.”
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Conservatives who want to weaken anti-poverty programs are a lot like black civil rights protesters who put their lives and freedom on the line to defeat Jim Crow laws in the heart of Ku Klux Klan country, according to Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL).
Roskam made the comparison at a Ways and Means Committee hearing on Tuesday, moments after Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) had spoken of his own impoverished upbringing on farmland in rural Alabama.
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Close to 46 million men, women, and children are enslaved across the world, according to a harrowing new report from the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.
Many of them, the analysis notes, are in fact ensnared providing “the low-cost labor that produces consumer goods for markets in Western Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia.”
The organization’s 2016 Global Slavery Index—based on 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages, covering 44 percent of global population—found there to be 28 percent more “modern slaves” than previously estimated.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The survey, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and published Tuesday, reported that a full 90 percent of voters lack confidence in the country’s political system while 40 percent went so far as to say that the two-party structure is “seriously broken.”
Seventy percent of voters, including equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans, said they feel frustrated about the 2016 presidential election and 55 percent reported feeling “helpless.”
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Please don’t commit suicide by nominating Hillary Clinton. Allow me to explain. I have been a Democrat since birth. My first political memory was Robert Kennedy’s assassination. I remember thinking that perhaps the best politician that ever was had died and being terribly sad from that thought.
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The repeated indicators of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies bring to mind that Erdogan once said, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”
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As Bernie Sanders launched a campaign blitz in California on Monday ahead of the state’s June 7 primary, his presidential rival Hillary Clinton found herself cancelling appearances in New Jersey to catch up with him.
Clinton skipped out on plans to campaign in the Garden State on Wednesday and Thursday in favor of a five-day tour through California, where some recent polls have seen her lead on Sanders shrink to a dead heat—though others have put her a few points ahead.
California will be the nation’s biggest primary, where 475 delegates are at stake.
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In the 1964 film classic, Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickens is seen riding a nuclear bomb down to his certain death – and perhaps to the end of us all – while he calmly inventories his survival equipment.
The Democratic Party Establishment’s commitment to Hillary Clinton is a lot like that.
As Hillary falls behind Trump, the Establishment is doing all it can to to continue to discredit Sanders — who beats Trump handily — and chase him out of the race. Meanwhile, they comfort themselves with self-deluding lies to justify backing the only candidate Trump could beat.
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I don’t know Robert Reich personally, but I greatly respect and appreciate his work; his voice is an important one in the fight against inequality.
He has, however, repeatedly come down on the wrong side of one crucial issue, an issue that has serious implications for the future of American politics broadly, and for the future of the American left in particular.
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The Baltic States are now seen as the next frontline in Russia’s hybrid war. But the political preferences of ethnic Russian communities are more complicated than meets the eye.
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In a rare move, both remaining contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination will pick some of the party’s platform drafting committee members, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, will choose the rest.
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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump not only surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists, he has spent years pushing conspiracy theories himself, much to the delight of his supporters.
At times, Trump tries to remain evasive about whether he actually believes these conspiracy theories, insisting that he simply “heard” or “read” them somewhere or is just asking a question.
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Unlike Nixon’s famous “silent majority,” Trump’s backers are loud—and growing in volume.
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One big reason, undoubtedly, is that Clinton is a weak candidate, damaged by her insider status, history of scandal (the email controversy is only the latest in a long line) and the public’s grave doubts about her honesty.
Her unfavorability ratings—along with those of Donald Trump, her front-running GOP counterpart—sit at historic highs.
But Clinton’s deficits are only part of the overall picture.
Another reason Sanders remains in the fight is that the Red-baiting tactics directed against him largely have failed. Those tactics—which have been deployed in both overt, traditional forms and in coded, latter-day garb—have been continuous and unrelenting. They have come from Democrats and Republicans as well as from the mainstream media.
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In perhaps the most interesting praise of Donald Trump yet, North Korean state media has described the likely Republican presidential nominee as a “far-sighted” and “wise politician.”
According to NK News, on Tuesday, an editorial in the state outlet DPRK Today noted that “there are many positive aspects to the Trump’s ‘inflammatory policies,’” like his proposal to stay out of the conflict between North and South Korea.
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North Korean state media has praised US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, describing him as a “wise politician” and “far-sighted candidate” who could help unify the Korean peninsula.
An editorial in DPRK Today, an official media outlet, welcomed the Republican presidential candidate’s proposal to hold direct talks with Kim Jong-un, saying he could help bring about Pyongyang’s “Yankee go home” policy.
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The mainstream U.S. media rightly criticizes Donald Trump for his bigoted remarks about Mexicans and Muslims – and his know-nothing-ism on global warming – but wrongly ignores Hillary Clinton’s role in futile and bloody wars, Gilbert Doctorow notes.
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More and more the word is getting out that President Obama, along with the giant multinational corporations and Wall Street, will launch a push in Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the “lame duck” legislative session following the election.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Search for stories about Apple’s App Store in the Techdirt archives and you will quickly notice a theme. That theme is that Apple routinely appoints itself as the arbiter of artistic quality and morality when it comes to content within the app store, particularly gaming content, and that its application of these standards swings like some kind of absurd pendulum. Ban a game over here for telling a bible story that includes violence against children, but allow the actual bible to be sold as well. React to the South Carolina massacre by pulling down games about the Civil War because they include images of the Confederate flag. Reject a wargaming simulation, then approve it, and nobody knows how the company might decide to react tomorrow. You often hear that stability breeds a good ground for business, whereas Apple runs its App Store like some kind of experiment in chaos.
And in order to apply its standards in a way that apparently makes the folks at Apple feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it occasionally has to truly lower its explanations to absurd levels of outright lying. For instance, Apple recently disallowed a game about surviving on the Gaza Strip in its store, claiming it wasn’t a game at all, but a news publication, even though the briefest review of the app reveals that it’s obviously a game.
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Last week, we covered a multinational corporation’s attempt to force MuckRock to take down documents supplied by the city of Seattle to Phil Mocek. Landis+Gyr, which was awarded the contract to supply the city with “smart meters” in conjunction with the publicly-owned utility, claimed the documents released — along with documents the city was planning to release — would be a boon to competitors and terrorists, although it didn’t specify which of these it was more worried about.
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Pakistan’s Daily Times, an English-language newspaper, changed online commenters’ posts to make a point on press freedom, Ad Week reported.
The newspaper and ad agency Grey Singapore created a “Free My Voice” campaign that included “an algorithm that automatically flipped the meaning of commenters’ posts, and applied it to comments beneath a controversial article about the Islamic country’s blasphemy law,” according to Ad Week.
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Something weird is happening in higher education. Although liberal ideology has controlled the campuses for generations, some liberals seem to be suffering a crisis of faith. In the New York Times (May 7), columnist Nicholas Kristoff, for instance, wonders about the campus’ rather peculiar view of diversity: “We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table – er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us as long as they think like us.”
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Unfortunately the organizers have been pressured to censor discussion and debate. A campaign was launched to disinvite keynote speaker Dr. Tim Anderson (University of Sydney). His book “The Dirty War on Syria” exposes the role of the USA and its allies in destabilizing Syria, funding and promoting the conflict that has led to the current refugee crisis. As they have in the past, some groups and individuals who support the armed opposition in Syria are trying to prevent a broader discussion.
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The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.
The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.
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Russia has its famed “troll factories” – shadowy organizations quietly supported by the Kremlin to flood Internet comment sections with vitriolic anti-U.S. posts intended to provoke the worst sorts of responses.
Iran may boast of its “halal Internet,” a giant nationwide web only for those inside Iran supposedly being built to keep out “unclean” or anti-Islamic content, as well as critical comments about the government.
But when it comes to altering or censoring the web, the worldwide leader by far is China. For decades, Beijing has celebrated what it calls the Golden Shield, what the rest of the world has come to know as the “Great Firewall of China.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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On today’s episode we are joined for the full hour by NSA whistleblower William Binney who examines the inner workings of the US police state in the light of the latest revelations that a senior official in the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office was forced out of his job because he opposed the Pentagon and FBI’s war against whistleblowers.
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But nobody in the Obama administration still in office ever said that Snowden did a public service. He certainly did, since the NSA and other intelligence organizations had gone rogue. In essence, they unilaterally abrogated the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. PBS Frontline alleged that the NSA did not even read Obama into their warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans until 2010! In a system like that, the president isn’t really the president– the Deep State does as it pleases.
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As you may have heard, over the weekend, former Attorney General Eric Holder appeared on a podcast with his former administration colleague David Axelrod for a podcast. The ~1 hour discussion is pretty wide-ranging, but right towards the end Axelrod brings up questions about surveillance and how the adminstration handled the NSA, leading Holder to make an offhand comment that is now making headlines, noting that he believed Ed Snowden had done “a public service” in revealing various NSA files to journalists. Of course, he immediately then focuses on why Snowden should go to jail. The statement is interesting because it’s been like pulling teeth to get anyone associated with the administration in any way to acknowledge that maybe what Snowden did was a good thing. That said, almost everything else that Holder says is either wrong, misleading or questionable regarding Snowden and surveillance.
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But, as Miracle Max pointed out, “mostly dead” is still “slightly alive.” There are caveats hidden in Reuters’ eulogy. Taking the bill out of the running for “this year” doesn’t necessarily mean Burr/Feinstein won’t take it out of cold storage after the regime change. It also doesn’t rule out revived interest in backdooring encryption should an exploitable tragedy occur in the coming months. Never bet against the House/Senate. Bad ideas — along with ECPA/FOIA reform attempts — are perennial, but only the former draw strength from the deaths of US citizens. And you can never count out the undying support of law enforcement agencies, which have quite a bit of pull in national and state legislatures.
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Though he acknowledged that Edward Snowden did indeed perform a “public service” by starting a national conversation about government surveillance, former Attorney General Eric Holder still insists that the NSA whistleblower should be prosecuted for supposedly “harming American interests.”
“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod in an interview on CNN’s “The Axe Files,” which was published on Monday.
Nonetheless, Holder, who oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013 when Snowden’s revelations were first made public, said that leaking government surveillance practices to media outlets was “inappropriate and illegal” and claimed that as a result “agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Describing a heartbreaking and horrific scene of hundreds of bodies floating on the surface of the Mediterranean, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) confirmed Sunday that more than 700 asylum seekers drowned last week, capping off the deadliest period for those fleeing war and violence in over a year.
“The casualties happened in three separate incidents on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after more than 13,000 people set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period,” the Guardian reported.
UNHCR spokeswoman Carlotta Sami said that with 700 dead, last week was the deadliest since April 2015, when roughly 1,300 refugees were killed in two fatal shipwrecks off the coast of Libya. Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) Sea, the Doctors without Borders’ Mediterranean migration team, estimated that as many as 900 might have drowned.
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More than 700 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean last week, the deadliest seven days for Europe-bound asylum seekers in more than a year.
The casualties happened in three separate incidents on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after more than 13,000 people set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period.
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Workers cannot be prohibited from bringing class-action lawsuits against their employers, an appeals court panel ruled Thursday, even if the boss makes them sign away that right in order to keep their job.
The case involves Epic Systems, one of the largest medical software companies in America. Founded in the late 1970s, the billion-dollar business only recently began making workers agree to so-called “forced arbitration” clauses in which they forswear their rights to go to court either individually or collectively.
By doing so, the judges found, Epic violated its workers’ federal labor rights to take collective action, making the clauses unenforceable.
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An inquiry into child abuse across a range of institutions in Northern Ireland will focus on Tuesday on the Kincora boys home scandal including allegations that MI5 blackmailed a paedophile ring which operated there in the 1970s.
The historical institutional abuse inquiry will hear evidence from men who were abused at Kincora when they were children and their allegations that the perpetrators were protected because they were state agents spying on fellow Ulster loyalists.
A number of Kincora abuse victims have tried through the courts to force the scandal to be included in the national investigation into allegations of establishment paedophile rings operating in Westminster.
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That does not explain Lieberman, whose party consists of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, about a million and a half, generally called “Russians”. Why are so many of them extreme rightists, racists and Arab-haters?
A class by themselves are young leftists, who refuse to support any party. Instead, they turn towards non-party activism, regularly founding new groups for civil rights and peace. They support the Palestinians in the occupied territories, fight for the “purity of our arms” in the army, and do wonderful work for similar causes.
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Senate Republicans put forward a bill Wednesday that would send ISIS fighters to prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The legislation, presented by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Steve Daines (R-MT), is the latest attempt by Republicans to derail President Obama’s attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to close the notorious prison.
“Instead of closing the prison, the Administration should transfer detained ISIS fighters to Guantánamo Bay,” the senators said in a statement.
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Time to repeal the Stupid Second Amendment so the citizens of the US can slowly lose their lethal firearms and police will not have as much justification for packing guns everywhere they go, shooting everyone who might make them twitch.
Time to retrain police to resolve conflict without violence.
Time to begin to disarm more and more officers.
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In 2014, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter to the U.S. Sentencing Commission asking them to study racial bias in risk scores. It never did the study. So ProPublica did. The team of reporters, led by Julia Angwin, found that an algorithm being used across the country to predict future criminals is biased against black defendants. And what’s more, the algorithm is not very good. Only 20 percent of the people predicted to commit violent crimes actually have actually been found to have done so. I spoke with Julia about the investigation and how her team is uncovering machine bias.
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An advocacy group says ProPublica and Frontline’s reporting on the murders of Vietnamese-American reporters requires a renewed probe by the FBI.
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That changed in 1994, when President Bill Clinton’s Federal Death Penalty Act greatly expanded the list of offenses for which federal defendants can face the death penalty. There are currently 54 people on federal death row, sentenced after Clinton’s expansive crime bill. Roof would bring that number up to 55 if convicted.
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The legislation focuses on treating addiction and does nothing to limit the role of pharmaceutical companies in fueling the opioid crisis. In fact, it instructs the federal government to review and potentially undo sweeping new guidelines that recommend less prescribing of highly addictive opioid painkillers such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin.
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The Pharma-driven opioid epidemic may be as big a con as the mortgage housing bubble collapse.
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Even though it now looks like Americans will be deprived the drama of a contested Republican convention, the gathering in Cleveland could hold at least one surprise.
The Republicans are set to vote on an RNC resolution to reduce mass incarceration. The measure asks for “reforms for nonviolent offenders at the state and federal level” and urges “state legislators and Congress to…provide substance abuse treatment to addicts, emphasize work and education, and implement policies that cut costs while obtaining better outcomes.”
Finally, Democrats may say, Republicans have woken up to mass incarceration as a 21st-century civil-rights struggle, joining what has for years been a progressive fight.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Today, on 31 May, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Access Now delivered a joint statement on the EU Commission’s “EU Internet Forum”, announcing our decision not to take part in future discussions and confirming that we do not have confidence in the ill considered “code of conduct” that was agreed.
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The government of Bulgaria aims to finalise its plans to connect its broadband networks to those in neighbouring Romania and Serbia. A meeting is set for June, and will involve experts from the three countries, the European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the European Commission, announced Bulgaria’s Ministry for ICT.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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With that in mind, a new Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) lawsuit has been filed by the patent attorney Zurvan (Van) Mahamedi against his former partner William (Trip) Paradice. The Mahamedi-Paradice firm split in April 2016 and both lawyers reached-out to firm clients (including Qualcomm) claiming to be the successor firm.
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Copyrights
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In 1997, German music producer Moses Pelham took a two second sample from Kraftwerk’s 1977 song “Metall auf Metall” and used it as a continuous loop for the song “Nur mir” performed by Sabrina Setlur. In 2004, Kraftwerk sued Pelham for violation of their phonogram producers’ rights and obtained an injunction against the distribution of “Nur mir”. The case went all the way to the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which held in 2008 that even sampling the “tiniest sliver” (“kleinste Tonfetzen”) of a record infringed the record producer’s right (§ 85(1) German Copyright Act). The defence of Article 24 Copyright Act (Freie Benutzung) was in principle applicable, but required that it was not possible to recreate the sampled sound without copying from the original recording. The BGH sent the case back to the lower court for the factual determination whether it was possible to recreate the sampled sound in the specific case.
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On 23 March, the European Commission launched a consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’. While this consultation reflects the will of the Commission to tackle possible exemptions to copyright, it is far less progressive than the recommendations made by the European Parliament through the Reda report. Even worse, the questionnaire is directed towards creating a new kind of “editor’s right”, at the expense of authors and users, a path that the Parliament rejected at the time.
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Justin Bieber and Skrillex have been accused of copyright infringement by artist Casey Dienel, aka White Hinterland. The suit probably does not come as a complete surprise to the duo as Dienel claimed that she contacted Bieber’s lawyers when “Sorry” was initially released, but did not receive a response.
Dienel alleged that Bieber and Skrillex, whose 2015 hit single ‘Sorry’ has received 1.4 billion hits on YouTube, copied her vocal loop from her 2014 song ‘Ring the Bell’. The allegedly copied segment can be heard in the first five seconds of each song. Skrillex and Bieber have both denied the claims on their Twitter accounts.
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Late last week, the press had a bit of a frenzy with the news that indie musician Casey Dienel, who releases music as White Hinterland, had sued Justin Bieber and Skrillex (along with some others) for copyright infringement, claiming that the pair used a sample from her song “Ring the Bell” that was released in 2014. The accusation is that Bieber’s 2015 hit “Sorry” uses the same sample of a female musical riff. You can read the lawsuit here, which might be useful since most of the rest of the media didn’t link to it.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: LinkedIn, one of several giants that spy on people to determine what’s on their mind and what’s similar to them, has yielded the above (for EPO)
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Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the Singaporean, US, and Chinese patent systems, which are all becoming more aggressive and more disconnected from public interests, in favour of large multinational corporations
THE following article is an outline of various bits of patent news that are too short to merit an article of their own.
Singapore as Hub for Patent Trolls
We recently wrote about Creative (what’s left of it) staging a patent war against Android and by extension against Linux [1, 2]. What was interesting about it might be the role of Singapore, not Texas. Singapore is increasingly becoming a venue of patent trolls, not just notorious tyrants, tax evaders, and exploited labour from south Asia (I know about this having studied the country for about 4 years and visited the country as well). Based on IAM, a proponent of patent trolls, Singapore’s role as a litigation and/or trolling hub is on the rise. Here is the part about Creative:
There are, though, exceptions to this broad trend. Creative Technology is one clear example. The company was a pathfinder in the field of MP3 and audio products, and as its device business has declined, it has turned to its patent portfolio to shore up its balance sheet. In March it launched US patent litigation against Samsung, LG, Lenovo and others over an MP3 player patent that has previously yielded a $100 million settlement with Apple. Nevertheless, the amount of legal and transactional IP expertise in Singapore probably exceeds the ability of local companies to put it to use.
Appeals
Putting aside various pieces that are less relevant to us, Lexology published “Pending Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) Final Written Decision Does Not Require Stay and Does Not Justify Rule 60 Relief: WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp.”
“This is basically about tilting the system against defendants/challengers and in favour of patenters (as usual), by giving them an opportunity to change their patent (or application) after it had been granted.”PTAB increasingly creeps in or enters the debate because it helps demolish software patents, albeit not at a pace high enough to undo the USPTO's terrible work (not doing quality assessment or prior art search, just granting almost everything that arrives as an application, sooner or later).
Writing about Inter Partes Reviews at PTAB, Patently-O recently noted that: “In a short opinion, the Federal Circuit has reaffirmed the USPTO’s tightly restrictive approach to amendment practice in Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings. Under the rules, a patentee has one opportunity to propose amendments or substitute claims. However, the motion to amend will only be granted if the patentee also demonstrates in the motion that the proposed amendments would make the claims patentable over the known prior art. See Idle Free Sys., Inc. v. Bergstrom, Inc., IPR2012–00027, 2013 WL 5947697 (PTAB June 11, 2013).”
This is basically about tilting the system against defendants/challengers and in favour of patenters (as usual), by giving them an opportunity to change their patent (or application) after it had been granted. Are any rules at all capable of passing which seek to restore sanity and fix this system, except when Congress or the Supreme Court get involved (the former gave us PTAB and the latter gave us Alice)? Shearman & Sterling LLP writes in favour of secrecy in “The Patent Agent Privilege” (more on secrecy later) and judging by some of the upcoming major patent cases, claim construction at the PTAB may be under attack already (as part of Cuozzo Speed v Lee, which we wrote about before).
“When will patent applications not be presumed eligible by default, even when challenged by PTAB (whereupon the patenter gets a rather bizarre right to alter the patent)?”Speaking of Congress, remember that PTAB only came after the America Invents Act (AIA) and some patent lawyers treat it as an obstacle which they want to get rid of rather than respect or honour (the same goes for Alice). A guest post in Patently-O, composed by a person who “received a (gratis) copy of this text” to write a review about it, isn’t particularly positive about it. Jason Rantanen says about this book, “Patents After the AIA,” that “the authors were under significant time pressure in getting this project out the door” and he points out many problems with the book. Well, this is what one ought to expect from political and self-serving ‘books’.
How far will this terrible system go? When will patent applications not be presumed eligible by default, even when challenged by PTAB (whereupon the patenter gets a rather bizarre right to alter the patent)?
First They Went After Your Software (Abstract), Now After Your Life
Any patents on life at the USPTO should be seriously considered the pinnacle of institutional failure. Some companies now claim to ‘own’ the food chain (usually through GMO monopolies) and some claim to ‘own’ health treatment, DNA/genome, etc. Such privatisation or looting of the Commons is turning what’s public (and abundant in nature) into private property of few who are extremely affluent.
“Such privatisation or looting of the Commons is turning what’s public (and abundant in nature) into private property of few who are extremely affluent.”Nevertheless, ethics thrown aside, patent lawyers love these; the more, the merrier (more income). “Elena S. Polovnikova is an attorney with Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP,” says her biography, and here she is promoting patents on life at the site which is most notorious for software patents advocacy. Patents on life now exist at EPO (most controversial such patents) and at the USPTO. Companies like Monsanto want to own everything in nature using patents, which they themselves ‘interject’ into fields by what many call GMO ‘contamination’. Watch IAM ([1] below) playing a role in pressuring India, a large victim of Monsanto (where many farmers commit suicide due to it), into this massive scam which is patents on life/biology. Watch IAM running sponsored ‘analyses’ (paid-for ads) [1, 2] to that effect. Shame on IAM. There’s an evil aspect to it and it is now a wholly parasitic business (associated with bureaucracy around this). No wonder groups march to the EPO sites to protest such patents. It’s just about as unethical as it can get, probably even worse than software patents.
Openwashing the USPTO
Speaking of IAM with its endless propaganda, watch it serving as the USPTO’s megaphone (de facto marketing) while the USPTO itself is openwashing (with “Open Data”) the whole operation (“Patent and Trademark Office Uses Open Data to Bring Patent Info to the Masses”).
“When will sanity be restored and when will the USPTO recognise that its role should be to promote innovation, not grant and promote monopolies?”Bringing monopolies to “the masses” is more like inducing willful patent infringement, thereby making “the masses” more legally liable and thus indebted. When will sanity be restored and when will the USPTO recognise that its role should be to promote innovation, not grant and promote monopolies?
China and SEPs
The USPTO, as we explained earlier this month, had amended its guidelines in lieu with a pro-software patents decision (involving Microsoft, which seems rather happy about it). The SIPO in China did something similar before that. The USITO woke up to it a long time later and wrote:
The guidelines for infringement have two major changes:
1) It deleted the clause about standard-essential patents (SEPs)
2) It deleted the clause about joint infringement
These “standard-essential patents” are basically a weapon against FOSS, very much like FRAND. These are patent thickets which deny entrance by FOSS contenders — the same sorts of thickets which IAM keeps promoting (it's all about patent conglomerates that use patents to perpetuate and guard their dominance).
Secrecy in the Eastern District of Texas
In other news of interest, the EFF recently managed, after a huge endevaour and some repeated failures, to unseal details of a patent case. Watch how Blue Spike, a parasite which we covered here before [1, 2] (it had won the EFF's Stupid Patent Of The Month award two years ago), sought to keep itself immune/safe from criticism:
In a victory for the First Amendment and public access to court proceedings, a magistrate judge ruled in favor of EFF’s motion to unseal documents in a patent case in the Eastern District of Texas. This means that the patent owner in that case, Blue Spike, will no longer be able to shield from the public its arguments about how the defendant infringes its patents. Also, the court has indicated that it will publish public versions of important rulings that, until now, had been completely hidden from the public.
[...]
In its response, Blue Spike did not dispute that the First Amendment applied. Instead, it argued that because EFF wanted to write more blog posts about Blue Spike—posts Blue Spike felt were disparaging—the public should not be allowed to examine Blue Spike’s claims of infringement. In other words, because Blue Spike does not agree with EFF’s commentary about its litigation, it contends that we (and the public at large) should not see the relevant court records at all.
We are not hoping to abolish the patent system but to see a system which actually promotes innovation, transparency, sharing of information and so on, not extortion, secrecy, protectionism, and deception. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The battle over the Indian patent sought by Gilead Sciences for its Hepatitis C drug Sofosbuvir (branded Sovaldi) seemingly came to a conclusion last week when the country’s patent office reversed course to grant the US drug maker protection for the compound. It’s another reminder that while India is well-known to be a difficult jurisdiction for pharmaceutical innovators, things don’t always play out according to that script. But last week also saw the public airing of troubling accusations of political pressure brought to bear on patent examiners in this high profile case. As the country mulls reforms to its IP system, it’s important that these questions be addressed.
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
While Shelston IP continues to lie and grossly misrepresent for software patents
Steve Ballmer’s people are still doing Ballmer’s dirty work
Summary: Microsoft, which is renowned (or notorious) for patent extortion against Linux, is still a big contributor to software patenting policy and Shelston IP — much like Microsoft’s front groups — pretends to speak for small businesses in an effort to spread software patents outside the US (in spite of Alice)
EVER since the Enfish v Microsoft decision we have written nearly half a dozen posts to demonstrate how patent lawyers and other self-serving proponents of software patents came out of the woodwork to mislead the public about Alice even though as of days ago [1, 2] “US Pat 8,336,772, Data storage; Smartflash; Claims 1,5,8,10 killed @ PTAB w/101/ Alice [...] Four claims of ’772 Smartflash Patent Asserted Against Apple Killed at the PTAB w/ Alice 101: https://dlbjbjzgnk95t.cloudfront.net/0801000/801293/cbm2015-00031_final_decision_45.pdf …” (in other words, Alice continues to crush patents).
Joff Wild, a proponent of software patents, spoke to Microsoft’s former ‘patent Mafia’ chief (remember that Microsoft still engages in software patents-based extortion against Linux) and much as we hypothesised at first (and wrote about it), it was a happy loss for Microsoft because software patents gained from it. Watch him celebrating a legal loss for Microsoft because it’s a win for software patents that patent lawyers and the USPTO exploited to open the door to new propaganda. To quote Wild (who misspelled Enfish everywhere including the headline): “The US Court of Appeals recently handed down its decision in Entfish [sic] v Microsoft, a case which concerned issues connected to the patentability of software. Unlike many other post-Alice judgments CAFC and lower courts have issued, the Entfish [sic] decision looked to be good news for software patent owners. But the extent of that goods news was less clear. In a recent IAM blog, the opinion was mixed. However, Bart Eppenauer – managing partner of the Seattle office of Shook Hardy & Bacon and the former chief patent counsel at Microsoft – is in no doubt.”
“Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P. is not exactly an objective observer and it is worth noting that Bart Eppenauer came from a company that ran front groups which pretended to speak for small businesses (i.e. hijacked their voices) to promote software patents all around the world.”It’s rather interesting how to see just how often Wild speaks to people from Microsoft (past and present). Both are leading proponents of software patents, so this probably makes sense. Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P. is not exactly an objective observer and it is worth noting that Bart Eppenauer came from a company that ran front groups which pretended to speak for small businesses (i.e. hijacked their voices) to promote software patents all around the world.
In other news, having mentioned how Shelston IP lobbies for software patents in Australia and asks other firms to do the same thing (while falsely pretending to be spokespeople for innovation), we now find another such call from Shelston IP, this time titled “A call to action: save software patents from regulatory obliteration!”
“Shelston IP pretends that it speaks for startups and SMEs — those who actually get harmed the most from software patents.”To quote the outline: “The Productivity Commission has recently released a draft report recommending software and business methods be specifically excluded from being patented. Shelston IP believes that such action would be harmful to Australia’s technology start-up sector, in particular to SMEs whose competitive advantage resides in innovative software interfaces and processes.”
That’s a lie. Shelston IP are terrible liars. Shelston IP pretends that it speaks for startups and SMEs — those who actually get harmed the most from software patents. In reality, those who pursue software patents in Australia are companies like Microsoft and IBM. But nice lobbying effort, Shelston IP; thanks for reaffirming the view that many lawyers are liars.
For a change (not propaganda), a new article by Ante Wessels (FFII) warns about CETA, one of those atrocious deals that threaten to introduce software patents in more and more places. Wessels explains the similarities w.r.t. ACTA:
But, I do not see what was footnote 2 in ACTA, and is footnote 33 in the EU – Singapore agreement, the right to exclude patents from the scope of the civil enforcement section.
All the strong enforcement measures (damages, injunctions, provisional measures) will be available for software patent trolls.
The strong enforcement measures further create problems for access to knowledge and taking part in culture, for remix artists, and for inventors involved in sequential invention – like software developers.
This is reminiscent of some of the effects the UPC would have. It’s all about empowering large corporations and trolls (not even European ones) at the expense of small European businesses. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet another dodgy contract between Battistelli’s EPO and private contractors overseas, this time in an effort to whitewash or cleanse the image of the EPO’s current regime
“The dude behind the OHSRA [Occupational Health Survey],” explains to us a reader, is someone that’s now the subject of gossip and rumours.
“Although the EPO systematically brushed aside all risks’ warnings issued by SUEPO/staff reps for the past years,” this reader continues, “5 suicides later something had to be done ASAP: the EPO is currently organising a white-washing exercise to story-tell the public that it cares for its staff whereas the production pressure has never ever been so high and the level of psychological stress explodes, according to some insider information.
“Whilst on the one hand the EPO shoots big time at messengers (e.g. SUEPO officials alerting staff and reporting that the HR policies implemented by “Mrs-spouse-from-Battistelli’s-right-arm” are known to be dangerous) on the other hand the EPO hired a weird very structure (see below) to perform an Occupational Health Survey office-wide (as you may expect with no genuine involvement of staff representation and after a non-public selection procedure whilst pretending otherwise.
“Here the information about this “serious provider”.
First company:
WELLKOM LIMITED
Check filing history and the first PDFs.
The company is registered in a private house, has two owners (Mr Phillips and his presumed wife, 2nd PDF), had massive assets: GBP 2 (just over 2 euros).
It looks like an empty shell.
Second company:
WELLKOM CORPORATE SERVICES LIMITED
Check the first PDF:
Same postal address as above. In 2014, went from GBP 87,000 assets… to GBP 190,000 debts.
“…the EPO is currently organising a white-washing exercise to story-tell the public that it cares for its staff whereas the production pressure has never ever been so high and the level of psychological stress explodes, according to some insider information.”
–Anonymous“But no worries,” our reader said, “now the EPO is here to help.” This isn’t the only such ongoing ‘study’ or ‘survey’ whose so-called ‘findings’, based on information we have received, were more or less decided in advance. We gave examples of these before. If there’s no open tender or procurement process, then there’s lots of room for folly, e.g. staff getting an old friend (or worse — family) a fat contract. Recall the story about Questel's deal with the EPO and its relation to Jacques Michel, who now receives sensitive data from the EPO, under the umbrella of Europatis [1, 2, 3, 4]. As people here in Britain say, “it’s as dodgy as f%$#.”
As we pointed out several weeks ago, Battistelli made such private contracts virtually invisible to anyone (so much for “transparency”!), unless they get leaked.
We now know that the EPO (not a private entity) is paying a fortune for six bodyguards to march around Battistelli, paying a fortune (almost a million dollars) to a PR company based in the US, and paying for military-connected Control Risks (we don’t know the amount paid, as no leaks relating to this ever reached us). The EPO is so rotten in fact that even the police is now disregarded and the premises are policed by a Croatian thug who faces many criminal charges in his home country. To quote a comment from yesterday:
If there ever was any foul play (something which I mightily doubt) then the President ought to call in the police to conduct a proper investigation at the EPO, and not take matters in his own hands, or trust one of his creatures to spin some conspiracy theory.
IIRC, there are precedents where the national police was allowed to enter the EPO offices for cases of petty theft. But on the other hand, from my own experience, it is nearly impossible to get a German policeman to lift his derrière from his chair for a case of theft or vandalism involving a mere bicycle.
What does the President have to fear, if his allegations are true? He could hardly invoke his personal impunity, sorry, the EPOrg’s immunity, to justify his barricading.
A version of this sordid affair could become in a few years the canvas for an episode of the dreadful “Tatort” series…
How many dodgy dealings does the EPO need to be involved in (never mind many suicides and human rights abuses) before the German authorities send independent investigators on-site? It cannot go on like this. As a reminder, tomorrow in the afternoon this subject will be discussed in the Bavarian Parliament (covering Munich), and not for the first time either. Based on a recent program from Bavarian television, at least some of the suicides at the EPO were the fault of the management (we had to remove copies of this program). Wellkom’s job is apparently to lie about it or make up a false narrative with which Team Battistelli can lobby or alter the record.
As a side note, over the past 2 years we have received alarming messages about panicky doctors who are extremely concerned about suicidal tendencies among EPO staff, caused directly because of the workplace (expectations, intimidation, workload and so on). We were kindly asked not to quote these directly (as these messages can reveal identities), but such relatively old messages sure help substantiate what was said above. To pretend otherwise is to mislead, or to produce propaganda for personal gain. Is Wellkom that desperate? Given its grim financial situation, it might be. █
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05.30.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Topićanda style
Summary: EPO promotion disguised as reporting or journalism, as seen in the media partners of the EPO well before these partnerships even begin
THE EPO‘s technical department seems to be infatuated with Microsoft and it’s not going to do the EPO any favours. Has the brain drain taken its toll? Maybe that’s why there’s so much outside help for media, security, investigation etc. Neoliberalism and privatisation using secret contracts.
Meanwhile, looking at the daily nonsense from the EPO over at Twitter, the PR people are ever more desperate to create a distraction from the EPO’s horrible track record. They ask: “Which of this year’s finalists deserves the Popular Prize?”
“Has the brain drain taken its toll?”“You have until tomorrow to decide,” they say, but don’t forget the tactics (like multiple vote castings per person and spammy promotion [1, 2]) employed by them over the past month.
Earlier today the EPO promoted this link to a new puff piece from the French media about this event. The EPO’s “media partner”, Les Echos (which censored itself for Battistelli and his goons), already does puff pieces, even before the propagandistic event took place. What’s next? How much does this whole charade cost? It’s a secret as usual; that’s the Battistelli tradition. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The pattern of Microsoft bed-sharing continues at the EPO
Summary: The EPO just can’t help providing special treatment to Microsoft, not only when it comes to patent applications but also when it comes to rejecting stakeholders/applicants who dare not become Microsoft customers
THE EPO just doesn’t seem capable of shaking off the impression that it is in bed with Microsoft — an impression that led the EPO to repeatedly make threats against me (it was always about Microsoft and the leak which got them upset made it into Italian television earlier this month). We previously gave examples in articles such as:
“Unitary Patent court filing software will be for Microsoft customers only,” noted Benjamin Henrion (FFII) this afternoon, as the “EPO is spreading good old .exe [in] http://www.epo.org/applying/online-services/online-filing/download.html#more”
Is anybody surprised by this? The above 4 examples are some among many. The EPO doesn’t seem to care about people who avoid back doors and choose a brand other than Microsoft. █
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