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07.18.15

Links 18/7/2015: Android PC, Chromixium 1.5

Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 7 big reasons to contribute to Opensource.com

    Opensource.com runs like other open source projects. The content collected and shared with you on this site is the result of the time, energy, and contributions from people all over the world. The writers you see published here, the community you see engaged with us on social media, and our readers keep Opensource.com going.

  • Visualizing flux: Time travel, torque, and temporal maps

    Open source is so important to our mission to make maps more accessible, and it’s been essential for our stack development as we progressively learn from community requests and contributions. Our software is engineered for ease-of-use, and our GUI Editor interface is an effort to make mapping projects more accessible to non-GIS experts. Everyone should be able to map found, open, and personal data, easily. At the same time, we have almost all of the functionality accessibility in our editor, available via our open source libraries and APIs. We have Carto.js for making maps, Torque.js for time-series data mapping, Odyssey.js for building chapterized narratives on maps, Vecnik.js for vector rendering, as well as our Import, Map, and SQL APIs to facilitate easy and open map-building in code.

  • What’s next for open source question answering technologies

    Grant Ingersoll is CTO at Lucidworks, provider of Fusion, but his claim to the open source community are his contributions to Apache Lucene, Solr, and Mahout. (He co-founded Apache Mahout in 2008 with the goal to build an environment for quickly creating scalable machine learning applications.) This year, Grant will be speaking at OSCON 2015 about building a next generation QA system with open source tools and about how to use Apache Solr for data science.

  • Bright Future & Strong Growth for Open Source Web Development According to Opace

    “Open source software is the way forward and has been since day one for us here at Opace” says David Bryan, Managing Director at Birmingham-based digital agency, Opace. The company, which specialises in web design and eCommerce development, proudly bases their entire business model and delivery around open source, believing it offers the best opportunities for both innovation and ground breaking developments. With 78% of companies now running some kind of open source software (according to the 2015 Future of Open Source survey), it’s looking like they could be onto something great.

  • Follow the Open Source Road

    This spring, I attended my first OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. As usual, there was a room reserved for media and analysts to hold meetings, but this one had only a curtain to separate two seating areas. I thought that it was strange, since it offered no privacy, and indeed, one company I met with was quite unhappy about it.

    A few weeks later, I recounted this story to my colleague, Caroline Chappell, who thought the setup was, in fact, perfectly appropriate for an open source conference. We talked about how a “curtain test” could be used to gauge a company’s true seriousness about openness — the theory being that there should be no secrets when it comes to open source, so who cares if there’s only a curtain for separation?

  • Google

  • Web Browsers

    • The New Metasploit Browser Autopwn: Strikes Faster and Smarter – Part 1

      Today, I’d like to debut a completely rewritten new cool toy for Metasploit: Browser Autopwn 2. Browser Autopwn is the easiest and quickest way to explicitly test browser vulnerabilities without having the user to painfully learn everything there is about each exploit and the remote target before deployment. In this blog post, I will provide an introduction on the tool. And then in my next one, I will explain how you can take advantage of it to maximize your vuln validation or penetration testing results.

    • Mozilla

      • Time for a brutal TELLY-OFF: Android TV versus Firefox OS

        Breaking Fad The battle for Smart TV dominance continues to ratchet up, with Google and Firefox now both wading into the same connected space. The former has reignited its living room ambitions via Android TV, while open source rival Firefox has partnered with Panasonic.

      • Firefox OS fork “H5OS” gets a $100 million boost

        Acadine, founded by former Mozilla execs, has received a $100 million investment from China’s Tsinghua Unigroup, to launch a Firefox OS fork called “H5OS.”

        In March, former Mozilla president Li Gong left to form a startup code-named Gone Fishing, with a mission to build a web-oriented mobile OS partially based on Firefox OS. The company is now called Acadine Technologies, and the OS is dubbed H5OS, according to a report from CNET. Acadine has received $100 million in funding from a Hong Kong-based Chinese state-controlled company called Tsinghua Unigroup International, says the story.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Mitaka will Rise in the Land of the Rising Sun after Liberty

      Ok, so the OpenStack Foundation stumbled a little with its first attempt at an ‘M’ name for the first OpenStack release of 2016. Originally chosen to be ‘Meiji’ that name turned out to be a political hot potato and so the Foundation went back to the polls and chose – Mitaka.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice GTK3 On Wayland Starts To Work

      The recent efforts of the LibreOffice GTK3 port is starting to pay off with this open-source office suite beginning to run on Wayland.

      Caolán McNamara who has been hacking on the GTK3 VCL plug for LibreOffice shared todayt that it can now launch on Wayland, displays the interface, and the interaction is mostly all functionality. However, there isn’t yet window resizing support and there are some other issues to still work through.

    • LibreOffice on wayland

      Hacked LibreOffice a bit more today towards wayland support via the gtk3 vclplug. Good news is that it launches, displays and you can interact with it mostly as expected.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Not Impossible Labs Creates Open-Source Technology for Transformational Good
    • Linux on supercomputers, Google’s Eddystone, and more news

    • Open Data

    • Open Hardware

      • New generation of robotics are industry-agnostic, open-source

        In 1961, a robotic arm nicknamed Unimate joined the General Motors assembly line to perform basic welding tasks that were unpleasant and particularly dangerous for humans. The 4000-pound, six-axis robot ran off of magnetic tape.

        [...]

        Fetch Robotics, founded in 2014, represents a generation of companies developing adaptable platforms that are designed for use beyond the specific industries for which they were initially conceived. Not surprisingly, the company’s approach has largely been informed by the impressive open-source robotics pedigree of Wise, who got her start at Willow Garage, developer of the now-ubiquitous open-source Robotic Operating System (ROS).

        The Fetch system comprises a self-guiding robotic picker that can navigate a warehouse floor, identify products, and pick them off a shelf. Used in conjunction with Fetch’s autonomous cart, nicknamed “Freight,” the system can automate pick and place processes in fulfillment warehouses without requiring costly reconfiguration or setup.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC

      The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC. ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • NSA document: Israeli special forces assassinated top Syrian military official

      Evidence has emerged from leaked US signals intelligence intercepts that Israeli special forces were responsible for assassinating a senior Syrian military official who was a close adviser to President Bashar al-Assad.

    • NSA leak: Israeli commandos killed Syrian general attending dinner party

      According to a National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked by American whistleblower Edward Snowden, Israeli naval commandos killed a top Syrian General during a dinner party at his beach house in 2008.

      According to the document, an Israeli special forces unit known as Shayetet 13 landed near the northern Syrian port of Tartus, located General Muhammad Suleiman and shot him in the head and neck.

    • Israeli commandos ‘assassinated Syrian general in 2008’ – NSA leaks

      Israel’s naval commando unit shot and killed Muhammad Suleiman, a top military advisor to the Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2008, according to a leaked National Security Agency file, published by The Intercept.

    • Greece Deal, James Bamford on NSA, Honduras Coup 6 Years Later — 07/14/15

      Plus, 6 years after the US-backed coup in Honduras, we’ll examine how democracy has been subverted and the ways in which people are fighting back.

    • Retired General: Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill, Iraq War Helped Create ISIS

      Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview on Al Jazeera English that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State and that U.S. soldiers involved in torturing detainees need to be held legally accountable for their actions.

      Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, calling for a more hawkish approach to the Islamic State and Iran.

    • Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI

      U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns.

      ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.”

      But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

      The big twist in this story: Local media in Massachusetts are saying Ciccolo was turned in by his father, a Boston Police captain. The FBI affidavit says the investigation was launched after a “close acquaintance … stated that Ciccolo had a long history of mental illness and in the last 18 months had become obsessed with Islam.”

    • Misunderstood word may have led to catastrophic outcome

      In August 1945 the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan’s Hiroshima followed by another on Nagasaki, resulting in the death of more than 135,000 people.

    • German Missile Hack

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Elizabeth Warren Pushes To Slow Revolving Door Between Business and Government

      A new bill that would ban private-sector bonuses to executives entering public service got a rousing endorsement on Friday from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, as she delivered a much-anticipated keynote address to the annual Netroots Nation convention.

      Warren not only praised the bill – “No more paying people off to remember their Wall Street friends while they run our government,” she said – she also issued what was widely seen as a challenge to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

      “It’s a bill any presidential candidate should be able to cheer for,” Warren told the gathering of progressives in Phoenix.

    • Prof. Wolff discusses Greece and European Union on CPR

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Five Things to Know About the Scott Walker John Doe Ruling

      The Wisconsin Supreme Court has single-handedly rewritten the state’s limits on money in politics, rendering the state’s disclosure laws and contribution limits meaningless, and opening the door to unlimited funds directly from corporations and foreign firms.

      In a 4-2 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Court’s conservative majority ended the John Doe probe into whether Governor Scott Walker illegally coordinated with supposedly “independent” dark money groups during the recall elections. The Court declared that any coordination that did occur didn’t violate the law, since it only involved so-called “issue ads” that stopped short of expressly saying “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate.

    • Hannity Apologizes For Wrongly Attributing Chattanooga Shooting To ISIS Tweet

  • Censorship

    • Press Explains First Amendment To Florida Judge, Who Rescinds Questionable Photography Ban

      About a week ago, we wrote about Judge Mark Mahon in Florida who originally issued an order barring people from protesting outside of the courthouse if they were “questioning the integrity of the court.” After it started making national news, Judge Mahon rescinded part of the order, but kept part that banned photography around the courthouse — which was interesting given that the issue in particular had to do with a reporter for PINAC: Photography Is Not A Crime (who is now suing).

    • Cameron opens new front in war on porn
    • Vodafone outlines government efforts to censor telecoms networks

      Governments regularly block content, engage in censorship on telecoms networks and restrict freedom of expression, according to a report by Vodafone that details the number of lawful interception and communications demands the company received in 28 countries.

      The telecoms group said that governments used a number of justifications to block internet services, including national security or emergencies. In such situations, some forms of internet content infringed on a country’s laws or a government wanted to restrict access to information that they considered harmful to social order.

    • SA bookstore raided for selling novel

      CENSORSHIP has proved to be alive and well after an Adelaide bookstore was raided by police for selling unwrapped copies of the cult novel American Psycho.

    • Censorship in Adelaide

      The more things change, the more they stay the same in all their decaying tedium. And so, the censors in Australia have been busying themselves through the not so intelligent arm of the law by insisting that copies of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the Wall Street, psycho dramatic examination of 1980s “Gecko” culture that can only be damned for its disservices to art rather than censorship, be placed under plastic wraps.

    • Former Reddit CEO explains “what the racist-sexist neckbeards don’t understand”

      Reddit’s users thought they’d won victory for their values of free speech absolutism and resistance against the political correctness culture of oppression.

    • Former Reddit chief accuses founders of pressuring Ellen Pao into censorship

      The former chief executive of Reddit has accused the online community’s co-founders of pressuring recently-departed chief Ellen Pao into censoring the website.

      Yishan Wong, who left Reddit last year and was replaced by Pao before her departure last week, said that his successor had defended the site’s free speech credentials against the company’s board.

    • What is Voat, the anti-censorship alternative to Reddit that trolls have flocked to?

      Thousands of Reddit users are now migrating to Voat, a Swiss-hosted clone with a layout that is almost identical to Reddit, which is slowly rising in popularity.

    • Conflict erupts in Green Party after censorship of Sanders supporters
    • Uber censorship on Chinese social media a system ‘blip’

      A technical ‘malfunction’ has caused a block on Uber-related searches and posts on Chinese mobile messaging platform WeChat, according to a spokesperson [Chinese] for the Tencent-owned company on Thursday.

    • WeChat blocks the word “Uber”, claims it’s a technical glitch

      On Thursday afternoon, Chinese WeChat users discovered something weird: searches for the word “Uber” on WeChat wouldn’t turn up any posts related to or mentioning the company in their circles. Searches for any other term seemed to work fine. Moreover, anyone who shared an Uber-related post could still see the article in their own feed – meaning they were unaware of the censorship – but if anyone else looked, the Uber articles wouldn’t be there.

    • Abbott’s desire to impose guidelines on Q&A is censorship, says Labor MP

      Joel Fitzgibbon describes prime minister’s letter to the ABC chairman as the ‘greatest attack on the independence of the public broadcaster in its history’

    • “Whose side are you on?” Public broadcasters and counter-terrorism

      On June 22, Zaky Mallah appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC’s) program “Q&A” – a show following the same (often wooden and tired) format as the BBC’s “Question Time.” Sitting among the audience, Mallah posed a question to Steven Ciobo, MP, of the ruling conservative Coalition:

    • Internet censorship reaching dangerous levels in Turkey

      internet censorship is reaching dangerous levels in limiting freedom of expression, especially concerning critical matters in Turkey, information technology legal expert and lawyer Burçak Ünsal states in his article published in the European Magazine Media Association’s (EMMA) 2014-2015 issue.

    • Censorship doesn’t keep Vietnam’s rappers from speaking their piece

      Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party continues to suppress sensitive information and tightly control freedom of assembly. It also cracks down on Internet users who disagree with the government or peddle sexually explicit or violent content.

    • EU “Police” Will Censor Internet to Fight “Extremism”

      Under the guise of battling the Islamic State (ISIS) and jihadists on the Internet, the European Union’s self-styled “police” force, dubbed “Europol,” is launching a new bureaucracy to supposedly combat “online propaganda” and “extremism” with censorship. The so-called EU “Internet Referral Unit” (IRU) will be charged with monitoring the World Wide Web, taking down and flagging “extremist” material, providing information and analysis to EU member governments, and looking forward to the future. While details of the unit remain hazy, critics are expressing concerns — both about the EU usurpation of the awesome power to unilaterally censor the Internet, and with the constantly changing definition of “extremism” to cover increasingly broad swaths of the population.

    • UK freezes bank account of Russian news agency, gives no reason
    • Russia Considers Rossiya Segodnya Bank Accounts Closure in UK ‘Censorship’
    • Russian news agency furious as Barclays closes its account
    • Barclays Bank Freezes Russian News Agency Rossiya Segodnya’s Account
    • Russian Social Networks Start Courting Russian Users Sick of Censorship on Facebook

      In the latest episode of Facebook’s drama with users in Russia and Ukraine, the network suspended accounts and deleted several posts belonging to a handful of prominent pro-Kremlin bloggers, as well as a high-ranking Russian state official. After a wave of complaints from Russian liberal oppositionists and Ukrainian users (including an appeal from Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko himself), it’s now the other side’s turn to protest Facebook’s apparent political bias.

    • Bahraini king pardons rights campaigner Nabeel Rajab

      Index welcomes King Hamad’s pardoning of human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, but calls for the release of all political prisoners in Bahrain

    • Action against MRT bully? What about man who threatened Amos Yee?

      On Tuesday, Law Minister K Shanmugam posted on his Facebook page about the incident involving a Caucasian on the MRT train who was verbally abusing a younger man for wearing a t-shirt the former somehow disagreed with.

      The bully had also made threats against the youth, threatening to “throw you off” the train when it pulled into Ang Mo Kio station.

      Later, a Malay man, now known as Elfy, stepped forth to defend the youth from the abuse.

      The police were called in and both men (the Caucasian and Elfy) got off the train.

    • The shame of how Singapore treated Amos Yee

      The clip making its rounds online is heart-breaking. Sixteen-year-old Amos Yee is exiting court, clutching a plastic bag, his mother by his elbow, his father clearing the way cluttered by pushy cameramen and this boy — he is shaking.

      He is free — the judge having sentenced him to four weeks in jail for “obscenity” and “wounding religious feelings” ordered him released on account of his already having spent over a month in prison — but he looks trapped.

      I’ve since read sensational summaries of his 55 days in remand which allege he was shackled to his bed and denied access to a toilet.

      For 23 hours a day, he was kept in a cell with closed-circuit security cameras and with the lights always on. He usually spent the one hour each day he was allowed to leave his cell undergoing psychiatric assessment, reports Amnesty International.

  • Privacy

    • MPs win legal challenge as rushed UK surveillance powers ruled as “unlawful”
    • High Court rules that DRIPA is unlawful

      Open Rights Group welcomes today’s High Court Judgment that the key parts of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) are inconsistent with European Union law.

    • Snooping Law Found Illegal

      DRIPA was in response to the Court of Justice of the EU ruling that the directive on data retention interfered with an individual’s right to privacy. The then coalition government rushed through DRIPA claiming an “emergency”. DRIPA allows the Home Secretary to order communications data be stored by a company for up to a year.

    • New German law to protect critical infrastructure, but has privacy caveats

      Certain sectors will have additional tasks, with telecommunications providers required to warn customers when their connection has been abused. More controversially, they will also be required to store traffic data for up to six months for investigatory purposes. This is only slightly shortened on the expectations of the proposed Draft Data Communications Bill in the UK – or ‘Snooper’s Charter’ as named by privacy advocates.

    • ‘Encryption fears’ over UK security

      Britain’s security services are “increasingly concerned” that they could be locked out from the communications of potentially dangerous suspects because of sophisticated encryption techniques, a major report has disclosed.

    • Another Reason Adopting ‘Collect It All’ Was A Bad Idea: China May Now Be Applying It To US Citizens’ Personal Data

      At the start of the year, we wrote about an important point made by Bruce Schneier and Edward Snowden concerning information asymmetry in the world of spying — the fact that the US and the West in general have far more to lose by undermining security in an attempt to gain as much information as possible about other countries, than they have to gain. A fascinating analysis from Bloomberg indicates that this also applies to the “collect it all” mentality. The article raises the troubling possibility that both the huge OPM data breaches were not only the work of Chinese state actors, but part of a much larger plan:

    • How IT can spy on your smartphone

      I recently applauded MobileIron for providing a tool in its mobile device management (MDM) client app that lets users see what IT is monitoring on their iOS and Android devices. User privacy is as important as corporate security, and the spy culture epitomized by the NSA, GCHQ, China, Google, Facebook, and so on has gotten way out of hand.

    • Senator uses clever response to bash the NSA using emojis

      On Friday, the National Security Agency posted a tweet highlighting its role surveilling the internet for signs of foreign threats.

    • A font that automatically censors NSA “spook” words as they are written
    • New Font Automatically Censors ‘Spook Words’ Monitored by the NSA
    • This spooky typeface automatically redacts NSA trigger words
    • A man created a font that tells you if the NSA might think you’re a terrorist
    • NSA sponsors cybersecurity camp at SCSU [Ed: recruitment. Get 'em while they're young!]
    • N.S.A. Summer Camp: More Hacking Than Hiking

      The dozen or so teenagers staring at computers in a Marymount University classroom here on a recent day were learning — thanks to a new National Security Agency cybersecurity program that reaches down into the ranks of American high school and middle school students — the entry-level art of cracking encrypted passwords.

    • Students study online hacking defenses
    • NSA funds FSU STARTALK initiative

      The National Security Agency (NSA) has provided FSU’s Dr. Wenxia Wang, assistant professor of Foreign and Second Language Education, with just under 90,000 dollars to initiate a STARTALK program here at FSU. The STARTALK initiative seeks to expand and improve the teaching and learning of strategically important world languages that are not widely taught in the US.

    • NSA holding cybersecurity seminars for area teachers
    • Artists Blow the Whistle on Their NSA Whistleblower Project

      On Friday artists Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider walked away from We Are Always Listening (WAAL), a National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, DIY surveillance program, satirical prank, or new media art project, depending on your interpretation. The artists, who anonymously scored a viral hit earlier this year when they clandestinely installed their sculpture bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park, secretly taped the conversations of strangers in New York and Berlin and posted the audio files online.

    • Latest Snowden Leak Devastating To Defenders Of NSA

      The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.

    • Court asked to kill off NSA’s ‘zombie dragnet’ of Americans’ bulk phone data

      The leading civil liberties group in the United States has requested a federal court to stop the National Security Agency from collecting Americans’ phone data in bulk through the end of the year.

      While the surveillance dragnet was phased out by Congress and Barack Obama last month, an American Civil Liberties Union suit seeks to end a twilight, zombie period of the same US phone records collection, slated under the new law to last six months.

    • ACLU asks 2nd Circuit appeals court to stop NSA collection of Americans’ phone records
    • ACLU challenges NSA phone surveillance program

      The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [official website] on Tuesday brought a lawsuit [press release] asking a federal appeals court to review a National Security Agency (NSA) [official website] phone data surveillance program. The motion filed by the ACLU state stated that “today the government is continuing – after a brief suspension – to collect Americans’ call records in bulk on the purported authority of precisely the same statutory language this court has already concluded does not permit it.” The ACLU’s major argument in support of the requested injunction is that although the Freedom Act [backgrounder] is in the middle of a transition period, the underlying law allowing for bulk surveillance includes the same Patriot Act [text, PDF] provisions that the second circuit held do not warrant the NSA’s phone-records collection activities. The same activities that Edward Snowden [BBC profile] had exposed. The ACLU goes on to say that “there is no sound reason to accord this language a different meaning now than the court accorded it in May. [The Patriot Act] did not authorize bulk collection in May, and it does not authorize it now.”

    • ACLU asks court to shut down NSA surveillance ‘for good’
    • ACLU sues to block extension of NSA dragnet program
    • ACLU wants to end NSA mass spying forever – good luck with that
    • ACLU asks court to immediately kill NSA phone snooping
    • ACLU asks appeals court to bar NSA bulk collection of data
    • ACLU to appellate court: Please halt NSA’s resumed bulk data collection
    • A.C.L.U. Asks Court to Stop Part of N.S.A.’s Bulk Phone Data Collection
    • ACLU Asks Appeals Court to Halt NSA Phone Record Collection
    • NSA Data Collection ‘Grace Period’ Violates Constitution – ACLU Attorney
    • ACLU Moves to Shut Down NSA’s Ongoing Bulk Phone Data Collection
    • ACLU Demands End to NSA Mass Surveillance
    • Civil liberties groups push to end NSA bulk collection of phone records
    • Civil Liberties Groups Call On Court To Stop NSA Phone Record Collection
    • ACLU Sues National Security Agency to End Bulk Phone Spying
    • NSA Dragnet Fight Will Return to Second Circuit
    • ACLU Sues to Stop Bulk Phone-Data Collection, Even if it’s Only Temporary
    • NYCLU Asks Court To Halt NSA Call Record Collection
    • Activists ask US court to stop phone record collections by government – report
    • The world’s first hack: the telegraph and the invention of privacy

      John Tawell had money worries. The £1 weekly child allowance he had to give his mistress Sarah Hart was the last straw, and on New Year’s Day 1845 he travelled to her house in Slough, poisoning her beer with a potion for varicose veins that contained prussic acid.

      After the murder, Tawell made his escape on a train headed to London’s Paddington station. He wasn’t known in Slough and expected to slip through the hands of the law. But he was travelling along one of the only stretches of railway in the world to have telegraph wires running beside the railway lines.

      Tawell was a Quaker and had been dressed in a distinctive dark coat. A witness, Reverend ET Champnes, had seen Tawell leaving the crime scene and followed him to Slough station, but not in time to stop the train. Champnes found the stationmaster and together they sent a message to the police in Paddington. Pre-dating morse code, only 20 letters could be covered by the early telegraph system, and Q wasn’t one of them.

    • CIA documents raise questions about spy agency’s domestic data collection

      …CIA is hoovering up mass amounts of data on Americans as it conducts foreign surveillance operations.

    • Assange Offers to Release Unredacted List of German NSA Spy Targets

      WikiLeaks posted a trove of redacted NSA spying lists; Assange claims he has full copies of these lists and would share them with German lawmakers.

    • Wikileaks Revelations Expose US NSA Tentacles Reaching into Allied Governments Around the World

      CCR’s Michael Ratner breaks down how documents expose United States economic and political spying as CCR calls on UN to protect publishers as well as whistleblowers

    • NSA Surveillance of Schroeder Confirms Spying Assets Used for Business

      Experts claim that NSA surveillance of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after he left office confirms electronic intelligence assets are being used to gain economic advantage.

    • Schroeder, Gazprom Case Reveals Business Motives Behind US Spying

      US experts claim that NSA continued to spy on former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because it was interested in tracking the business deals of the Russian energy giant Gazprom for economic gain.

    • NSA spied on former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder: Media

      The US National Security Agency spied on former German Chancellor and Kremlin-ally Gerhard Schröder, after he left his post in 2005. That’s according to reports published on Sunday by German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

    • Kremlin Aware of NSA Spying on Gerhard Schroeder Over Friendship With Putin

      Russian leadership knew that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because of his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

    • Report: Evidence of 2011 US cyberattack on defense giant EADS in Germany

      According to German newspaper “Bild am Sonntag,” evidence linking an attack on European defense group EADS from American soil has surfaced. The news outlet claims it is the first of its kind.

    • Germany’s YouTube star LeFloid takes on Merkel

      From here LeFloid had very few hits against the Chancellor – getting the usual appeasing lines regarding the NSA scandal and a categorical “no” to the legislation of cannabis. Publicist and viewer Gunnar surmised the general public sentiment by expressing frustration at the unusual lack of aggressiveness from LeFloid.

    • WikiLeaks says NSA spied on French business

      According to the WikiLeaks report, “NSA has been tasked with obtaining intelligence on all aspects of the French economy, from government policy, diplomacy, banking and participation in worldwide bodies to infrastructural development, business practices and trade activities”.

    • 20-plus security vendors that NSA targeted
    • It’s Still 2+2=4 for NSA and ISIS

      L. Gordon Crovitz is puzzled that Silicon Valley can’t stop terrorists from using strong encryption (“Why Terrorists Love Silicon Valley,” Information Age, July 6). The reason is simple. Encryption methods are nothing more than mathematics. Silicon Valley companies cannot make mathematics work differently for terrorists.

    • Publicly Shaming the US’s Top Surveillance Officials with Street Art

      Ever since Edward Snowden leaked top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents that revealed the extent of the US government’s surveillance program, the response from the art world has been vast and varied. In the past year alone a large statue of the whistleblower was erected in Manhattan and a controversial bust of Snowden — crafted by the same artists who recently revealed themselves as the masterminds behind We Are Always Listening — was featured in a surveillance-themed art fair. In another recent and ongoing project, New York-based artist Paolo Cirio is chastening key NSA, CIA, and FBI officials involved in the agencies’ surveillance programs by finding and disseminating across the world snapshots of them in informal or intimate contexts.

    • Former girlfriend of undercover spy sues corporate security firm

      An environmental campaigner who had an intimate relationship with an undercover spy is suing a corporate security firm in what is believed to be the first legal action of its kind.

      The woman is taking legal action against Global Open, a commercial firm hired by companies to monitor protesters. She alleges in the high court case that Mark Kennedy pursued her to start the relationship, while, she says, he worked undercover for Global Open.

      Kennedy had previously worked for the police as an undercover officer and used a false identity to infiltrate environmental groups for seven years. He maintained his fake persona after he left the police.

    • Glenn Greenwald’s Latest Has Us Wondering Who Watches the Watchers?

      Of course, Snowden’s story is far from over. However, as Greenwald details in his latest work, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, this story isn’t meant to be about the leaker, it’s about the leak itself. Snowden is emphatic that the focus remain on the information he revealed to Greenwald and other journalists. And this has been somewhat successful, given the whistleblower’s evasion of interview or comment.

    • Privacy advocate Caspar Bowden dies after cancer battle

      Caspar Bowden, the privacy advocate who was warning about the activities of the NSA before Edward Snowden, has died. The co-founder of the Foundation for Information Policy Research lost his battle with cancer, and tributes have been paid by the world of technology.

    • Trust in UK politics at all time low as half of citizens believe they’re spied on

      Trust in politics is at an “all time low” with 56% of UK citizens believing that their government is spying on them.

      That’s according to new research from secure server provider Artmotion, which questioned more than 2200 people on their levels of trust in politics following the recent NSA and GCHQ privacy scandals.

      According to the findings of this research, concerns over government snooping are highest amongst young voters, with 62% of 18-24 year olds believing that the UK government is spying on their activities.

      Interestingly, despite the furore around the NSA’s involvement in mass surveillance, trust in politicians is even lower in the UK than it is in the US. According to additional research from Artmotion, 52% of US citizens believe that their government is spying on them – 4% less than within the UK.

    • Richard Nixon’s Blueprint for the 21st Century US

      Still, think about the illegal break-in (or black-bag job) at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist committed by a group of Nixon White House operatives dubbed “the Plumbers”; the breaking into and bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex; the bugging, using warrantless wiretaps, of the phones of administration aides and prominent media figures distrusted by the president and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger; the slush funds Nixon and his cronies created for his reelection campaign; the favors, including ambassadorships, they sold for “donations” to secure a second term in office; the privatized crew of contractors they hired to do their dirty work; the endemic lying, deceit, and ever more elaborate cover-ups of illegalities at home and of extra-constitutional acts in other countries, including secret bombing campaigns, as well as an attempt to use the CIA to quash an FBI investigation of White House activities on “national security grounds.” Put it all together and you have something like a White House-centered, first-draft version of the way the national security state works quite “legally” in the twenty-first century.

    • US spy agency targeted top Brazilian officials

      The list of those selected for intensive interception includes not only President Dilma Rousseff but also her assistant, her secretary, her chief of staff, her Palace office and even the phone in her presidential jet.

    • Snowden is a Russian, or Chinese spy?

      Such a paranoia generated by the US fevered imagination suggests that there may be a secret ‘driving force’, as a common employee could hardly get access to such a quantity of secret documents.

    • US Might Let Snowden Come Home, If He Pleads Guilty To A Felony & Serves Time

      Recent interviews with Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, have spurred rumors that the U.S. government might offer Edward Snowden, the exiled NSA whistleblower, a plea bargain. Yet there’s little evidence such a deal actually exists and even less indication that Snowden would be interested if it did.

    • Senate, Once Again, Looks To Bring Back CISA: Surveillance Expansion Bill Pretending It’s A Cybersecurity Bill

      We’ve discussed the “cybersecurity” bill, CISA, that’s been making its way through Congress a few times, noting that it is nothing more than a surveillance expansion bill hidden in “cybersecurity” clothing. As recent revelations concerning NSA’s surveillance authorities have made quite clear, CISA would really serve to massively expand the ability of the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) to do “backdoor searches” on its “upstream” collection. In short, rather than protecting any sort of security threat, this bill would actually serve to give the NSA more details on the kind of “cyber signatures” it wants to sniff through pretty much all internet traffic (that it taps into at the backbone) to collect anything it deems suspicious. It then keeps the results of this, considering it “incidental” collections of information.

      In an incredibly cynical move, supporters of the surveillance state have seen OPM hacks as a ridiculous excuse to push to pass this bill. Senator Mitch McConnell tried to include it in the defense appropriations bill by pointing to the OPM hack. That gambit, thankfully, failed.

    • ‘Not only can the state intercept your communication, it does’

      In June 2013, the biggest act of mass surveillance in the Internet age was exposed by Edward Snowden, a security analyst; Glenn Greenwald, a legal blogger; and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker. They collaborated to release the National Security Agency (NSA) files in The Guardian. The revelations raised a huge public debate, both about the ethics of the surveillance as well as the ethics of publishing the story. Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, spoke to Hari Narayan about one of the most important journalistic projects undertaken by the publication. Excerpts:

      It’s been a little more than two years since the Snowden revelations. Has there been enough debate since then? The USA Freedom Act has done away with some provisions of the Patriot Act. But have the laws gone far enough?

      Well, I think the penny has dropped that this is a very complex thing; that this is not just about decisions made by security chiefs without anybody else having a say. Has there been enough debate? No, not enough, but at least there has been some debate. We’ve moved from a world in which the security services didn’t want any of this discussed to one in which they say, ‘We feel we can discuss it’.

      Is the Freedom Act enough? Well, I think it is up to each country to decide what its rules are. America has moved from a position of ‘The state will collect all this information’ to ‘It is not alright for the state to hold all the information. The telecom companies can hold it. We can establish a procedure by which we can ask for information’. That, to me, is an improvement. Whether that answers all the questions that Edward Snowden has raised… I doubt it. And technology is moving so fast that it is quite hard for the laws to keep up.

    • Why government-mandated encryption backdoors are bad for US businesses

      Cybersecurity experts once again issue a stern warning about repercussions of adding US government-accessible backdoors.

  • Civil Rights

    • Torture, Impunity and the American Psychological Association

      It has been almost a year since President Barack Obama admitted, “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. … we tortured some folks.” The administration of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, carefully crafted a legal rationale enabling what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which is no more than a euphemism for torture. From the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay to the dungeons of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram air base in Afghanistan, countless hundreds, if not thousands, of people were subjected to torture, all in the name of the “Global War on Terror.” With the exception of a few low-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib, not one person has been held accountable. The only high-level person sent to prison over torture was John Kiriakou—not for conducting torture, but for exposing it, as a whistleblower.

    • How the CIA Really Won Hearts and Minds

      One night, shortly after she moved there, Paget met two men who informed her they were working for the CIA. And, it turned out, so too was her husband, because the agency entirely funded the NSA’s international program.

      This meant the CIA was paying for the apartment where Paget was living. And the money coming into her joint bank account? Well, that was secretly deposited by the organization, too. So, technically, Paget was on the CIA’s payroll.

      Then a naïve 20-year-old, she was promptly told to sign a document swearing complete secrecy about the information to which she had just been exposed. She willingly put pen to paper. But before the ink was even dry, Paget realized she was part of a security oath that was covered under the Espionage Act. This meant she could face up to 20 years in prison if she spoke out.

    • Royals told: open archives on family ties to Nazi regime

      Buckingham Palace has been urged to disclose documents that would finally reveal the truth about the relationship between the royal family and the Nazi regime of the 1930s.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Public Revolts Against Plan to Kill Domain Name Privacy

        A new ICANN proposal currently under review suggests various changes to how WHOIS protection services should operate.

        The changes are welcomed by copyright holders, as they will make it easier to identify the operators of pirate sites, who can then be held responsible.

      • Reddit’s Unenforceable “No Copyrighted Material” Rule

        Following an extended period of controversy, Reddit has just rolled out a list of rules for the site. One of those rules bans the posting of illegal content such as copyrighted material. While the posting of such content has never been explicitly permitted, it’s going to prove impossible to stop moving forward.

      • Ripping CDs and movies for personal use is once again illegal in UK

        Making copies of copyrighted music and videos for personal use is again illegal in the UK because of a ruling by the High Court issued today.

        Today’s ruling quashes the 2014 regulation that made it legal to make personal copies of performances for private use as long as the person doing so has lawfully acquired the content and doesn’t distribute it to anyone else. That regulation allowed people to make backups or play songs or movies in different formats but didn’t allow selling copies or sharing them with family and friends.

07.17.15

Microsoft’s Ally in India Resorts to Patent Armament

Posted in Asia, Microsoft, Patents at 6:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Wipro logo

Summary: Wipro cements its obsession with a proprietary mindset by putting patents — not sharing — at the centre of its strategy

IT HAS been quite a while since we last wrote about Wipro (see some posts from 2010, 2009, and 2008), but we have little reason to believe that the company changed its ways, despite using the term “Open Source” every now and then in the media (because the Indian government starts to require it and Microsoft must therefore pretend or lobby, even by proxy sometimes).

Based on numerous news articles [1, 2, 3, 4], patents hype and glamourisation is on the agenda at Wipro, so we seriously doubt Wipro will ever change. To quote one article: “Country’s third largest software services firm Wipro aims to significantly increase its rate of patent filing over the next three years.”

“Wipro must seriously think whether it wants to go down with Microsoft (as Nokia did) or join the future with Free software, meaning that patents should not be a priority at all.”I spoke to Simon Phipps, who now works for Wipro (they have hired him to boost some “Open Source” perception or change their actual strategy). I asked him about this in Twitter. He referred me to another department which did quite poorly at convincing me that this is benign. We already know what the likes of Wipro are doing to promote software patents in India and lobby the Indian government.

Wipro must quickly evolve in preparation for a post-Microsoft world where sharing, not patent monopolies, is paramount. Microsoft layoffs, which culminated earlier this month, show that Microsoft cannot be an eternal ‘partner’ to Indian IT firms. Redmonk’s take on this concluded that: “There’s the human cost of telling almost eight thousand people that they need to seek employment elsewhere, and there’s the public relations cost of telling the market the company you lead had effectively made a $7 billion dollar mistake.”

Wipro must seriously think whether it wants to go down with Microsoft (as Nokia did) or join the future with Free software, meaning that patents should not be a priority at all.

Here in the Indian corporate media we now see the World Bank’s propaganda being used to pretend that India needs more patents. What an utterly shameful lie. To quote this plutocratic piece: “Even official records of the Indian Patent Office cast a gloomy picture—while patent grants for foreign inventions increased by almost 300%, grants to Indian inventions grew by a mere 45%. In 2013-14, while as many as 42,951 patent applications were made, only 10,941 were made by Indian applicants. The Indian government spends less than five times of what China spends on R&D and the country attracts a mere 2.7% of the global R&D spend (China attracts 17.5%). India scores poorly in commercialising R&D from its universities, and its regulators often create antitrust and taxation hurdles in the effective exploitation of foreign-owned patents on Indian soil.”

They are basically trying to shame India based on some nonsense like patents. India is known worldwide for standing up against unethical patents, such as those that seriously harm life (medicine for example). It’s obvious why all sorts of oligarchs would want to disrupt India’s patent policy. In other news, published by the Washington Post three days ago, “Patents are a terrible way to measure innovation” (this is the headline).

“On the surface,” says the author, “patents provide an easy way to measure innovation. After all, patent statistics are readily available, they are objective and they are quantifiable, so you can quickly tally up the number of patents by company, city or nation, and immediately have a sense of how innovation varies by geography, industry or even time period. It’s no wonder patent data is often used as a leading indicator of innovation.”

It’s an indicator of how rich a country is, or how much time and money a country can spend on paperwork rather than real innovation. India shouldn’t be distracted by collection of patents — a practice which has become akin to amassing trophies in some Western (non-BRICS) nations. Wipro too would be wise to withdraw from these dumb statements which it made to the media the other day. Patents are not what Wipro needs. █

Rackspace Joins Hands With NSA’s PRISM Pioneer, Cannot be Trusted for Security Anymore

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security, Servers at 5:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Not the Rackspace we once knew…

Rackspace

Summary: Rackspace adds proprietary spyware to its premises, hence reducing confidence in its ability to secure whatever is on the racks (security or perceived security severely compromised)

OVER the past few months I have confronted Rackspace on numerous occasions because they were promoting (even by mass-mailing without consent) proprietary software. This was done repeatedly, even after I had asked them to stop and they said they took action. That’s really quite a shame because Rackspace’s patent policy is commendable and their support team is quite technically-competent. The PATRIOT Act was always quite a problem (they’re subjected to secret warrants and cannot notify customers), but nevertheless, they had a good track record. They throw it all away now.

According to this article, Rackspace, which was traditionally about GNU/Linux, has climbed up Microsoft’s bed. Rackspace says: “We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure”. The company is based in 1 Fanatical Place, which probably explains the name. Reading further down the article we learn about “Rackspace’s Private Cloud that will be powered by Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure.” They must be out of their minds!

Rackspace makes a laughing stock of itself. What a dumb move.

Rackspace ought to know better, for no deployment on Windows in its datacentre can ever do any good. It is a threat to other guests and hyper-visors, even down to hardware. UEFI, promoted by the NSA’s leading partner, is targeted by Hacking Team and Microsoft Windows too is a target. To make matters worse, Microsoft is now leaving almost 200 million useds [sic] exposed. As The Register has just put it, “Windows XP holdouts are even more danger than ever after Microsoft abandoned anti-malware support for the ancient platform.

“Redmond overnight stopped providing XP support for new and existing installs of its Security Essentials package.”

“Rackspace’s business has back doors in it.”NSA surveillance of Windows is ever more trivial, not just because Microsoft constantly tells the NSA how to crack Windows (before patching flaws). The threat of Windows is contagious because it can spread to other platforms that share the same datacentre, network, and hardware. The weakest links are being targeted ti gain entry. Recall Pedro Hernandez with his Azure marketing (trying to convince GNU/Linux users to host with Microsoft) — shameless marketing which was soon followed by other sites (promoted by Microsoft-centric sites, some of which receive money from Microsoft, but alas, this was also noted by pro-Linux writers at Softpedia News). Any datacentre which gets ‘contaminated’ with Windows is no longer trustworthy; it should be deemed insecure because Microsoft deliberately adds flaws (back doors) to Windows. There are numerous technical reasons for this and we have covered them before. UKFast, for example, a large UK-based host, once told me (I spoke to the CTO) that they use Hyper-V (proprietary and Windows) to host GNU/Linux. This right there is a back door and I have confronted them over this. They never came up with a response that inspired any confidence.

Microsoft is now trying to make Apache software Windows- and Azure-tied, as British media now serves to remind us, and there is new additional bait to attract gullible people.

Don’t ever think that Windows can be contained or compartmentalised ‘away’ from Free software. Once a company starts to mix proprietary software with GNU/Linux (e.g. Hyper-V or VMware, which is connected to RSA) security is evidently lost. Security audits are impossible. Novell made some initial steps in this direction back in 2006 and now we have Rackspace. The company cannot be trusted anymore. Rackspace’s business has back doors in it. █

Links 17/7/2015: Linux Mint 17.2 RC, Google Joins OpenStack

Posted in News Roundup at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Facebook and Twitter on the rise as sources of news in the US

    Pew Research Center study finds that 63% of each social network’s American users are getting their news from these services

  • Why Epic’s market dominance could stifle EHR and health IT innovation

    “As a country we get nervous when any company in any sector has a market share in the range of 40% because we know that companies will use their market dominance to limit consumer options and hold back technological advancement,” wrote Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on his “Not Running a Hospital” blog.

  • Security

    • And finally, Adobe’s afterthought

      Adobe must think Linux users are a bunch of retards.

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • Once-theoretical crypto attack against HTTPS now verges on practicality

      Almost a third of the world’s encrypted Web connections can be cracked using an exploit that’s growing increasingly practical, computer scientists warned Wednesday. They said the attack technique on a cryptographic cipher known as RC4 can also be used to break into wireless networks protected by the Wi-Fi Protected Access Temporal Key Integrity Protocol.

    • Estonia to host first international cyber summer school

      The first international cyber security summer school will be held in Estonia next week.

      IT experts from the US, the UK and Estonia will investigate information security, and discuss, among other topics, how to keep data safe, how to safely share it and anonymize it.

      Speakers will come from Oxford University, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, the University of Tartu and the Tallinn-based NATO Cyber Defense Center of Excellence.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • We’ve created an open source database of every company flying drones in the US

      Last week we published a story about the first 500 companies given permission by the FAA to fly drones for commercial purposes over the US. The number of exemptions granted by the FAA has been growing quickly. Today we added all the data from the month of June, increasing the grand total by nearly 50 percent to 711. We also added this data set to the newly created collection of open-source projects from Vox Media, meaning you can dig into these numbers and use them to create stories, charts, or apps of your own.

    • Sadegh Zibakalam: Anti-Americanism at a ‘dead end’ in Iran

      Sadegh Zibakalam is a professor of political science at the University of Tehran, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals and political analysts in the country. He is the author of a number of bestsellers in Persian, including How Did We Become What We Are, Hashemi without Polish, Tradition and Modernity, and An Introduction to the Islamic Revolution. In a telephone interview, he discusses how the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers will change the dynamics in the country – at least in the long run.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Government makes ‘outrageous’ U-turn over fracking in precious wildlife sites

      The government has made a U-turn on its promise to exclude fracking from Britain’s most important nature sites, arguing that the shale gas industry would be held back if it was excluded from them.

      Campaigners accused ministers of putting wildlife at risk and reneging on their pledge earlier this year to ban fracking in sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), which cover about 8% of England and similar proportions of Wales and Scotland.

    • For Tony Abbott, it’s full steam ahead on coal, ‘the foundation of prosperity’

      If, as the environment movement contends, fossil fuels are the new tobacco, then Australia has cast itself as a sort of swaggering Marlboro man, puffing away contentedly as the rest of the world looks on quizzically.

    • Climate change seen as greatest threat by global population

      Climate change is what the world’s population perceives as the top global threat, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center, with countries in Latin America and Africa particularly concerned about the issue.

  • Finance

    • The Minimum Wage–and Other Left Ideas Washington Post Might Find ‘Lame’

      There are a few points worth noting here. First, “the left” has many ideas for helping workers other than just the minimum wage. For example, many on the left have pushed for a full-employment policy, which would mean having a Federal Reserve Board policy that allows the unemployment rate to continue to fall until there is clear evidence of inflation, rather than preemptively raising interest rates to slow growth.

      It would also mean having trade policies designed to reduce the trade deficit (i.e., a lower-valued dollar), which would provide a strong boost to jobs. It would also mean spending on infrastructure and education, which would also help to create jobs and have long-term growth benefits.

      The left also favors policies that allow workers who want to be represented by unions to organize. This has a well-known impact on wages, especially for less educated workers.

    • Blame the Banks

      One of the first lessons I was taught on Wall Street was, “Know who the fool is.” That was the gist of it. The more detailed description, yelled at me repeatedly was, “Know who the fucking idiot with the money is and cram as much toxic shit down their throat as they can take. But be nice to them first.”

      When I joined in Salomon Brothers in ‘93, Japanese customers (mostly smaller banks and large industrial companies) were considered the fool. My first five years were spent constructing complex financial products, ones with huge profit margins for us—“toxic waste” in Wall Street lingo—to sell to them. By the turn of the century many of those customers had collapsed, partly from the toxic waste we sold them, partly from all the other crazy things they were buying.

      The launch of the common European currency, the euro, ushered in a period of European financial confidence, and we on Wall Street started to take advantage of another willing fool: European banks. More precisely northern European banks.

      From ‘02 until the financial crisis in ‘08, Wall Street shoved as much toxic waste down those banks’ throats as they could handle. It wasn’t hard. Like the Japanese customers before them, the European banks were hell bent on indiscriminately buying assets from all over the globe.

      They were so willing, and had such an appetite, that Wall Street helped hedge funds construct specially engineered products to sell to them, made of the most broken and risky subprime mortgages. These products—the banks called them “monstrosities” and later the media dubbed them as “rigged to fail”—only would have been created if they had reckless buyers, and the European banks were often those buyers.

      When a bank buys an asset it is lending money; the seller is the borrower.In buying various assets European banks were doing what banks are supposed to do: lending. But by doing so without caution they were doing exactly what banks are not supposed to do: lending recklessly.

    • European Court of Justice Official Proposes Bitcoin VAT Exemption

      Bitcoin operations should be exempt from Value Added Tax (VAT), the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice said in an opinion document published today.

    • European Commission opens antitrust investigations against Qualcomm—again

      The European Commission has opened two formal antitrust investigations against the US company Qualcomm concerning possible “abusive behaviour” in the field of baseband chipsets used in consumer electronic devices. The first investigation will examine whether the company abused its dominant market position by offering financial incentives to customers on the condition that they buy baseband chipsets exclusively, or almost exclusively, from Qualcomm. The second will explore whether it used “predatory pricing”—that is, charged prices below costs in order to drive competitors from the market.

  • Censorship

    • Shocking: Software Used To Monitor UK Students Against Radicalization Found To Be Exploitable

      Well, that didn’t take long. It was only a month or so ago that we brought to you the delightful news that software for monitoring the UK youth in classrooms was being recommended to comply with the UK’s insane policy that conscripts teachers to watch out for scary future-Muslim-terrorists. The idea was that the software, from American company Impero Software, would report back to teachers should the children under their watchful gaze search around for terms deemed to be terrorist related. The teachers were then supposed to involve school admins, law enforcement, or parents as deemed necessary. Because, see, possible-might-be-future-terrorists sprouting up from our own children is a very scary, albeit not-yet-existing threat to something something.

    • Security flaw found in school internet monitoring software

      Firm releases temporary fix to Impero Education Pro after researcher says fault could leave pupils’ information exposed to hackers

    • Roya Nobakht: British woman imprisoned in Iran over anti-government Facebook comments is ‘being physically tortured’, say campaigners

      A British woman who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2013 for posting derogatory comments about the country’s government on Facebook has been subjected to “physical and psychological torture” in jail, according to campaigners working for her release.

      Roya Nobakht, 48, was arrested while visiting family in Iran and accused of “insulting Islamic sanctities” through comments posted on a Facebook group. She was put on trial alongside seven other people without legal representation and sentenced to 20 years in jail.

      She has since been given a retrial at which she was allowed to speak in her defence for the first time. She was later told that her sentence had been reduced to seven years, but she was given no legal papers to confirm this and her family remain deeply concerned about her welfare.

    • Researcher Receives Copyright Threat After Exposing Security Hole

      A researcher who exposed security flaws in tools used to monitor the Internet usage of UK students has been hit with a copyright complaint. ‘Slipstream’ discovered flaws in Impero Education Pro which could reveal the personal details of thousands of pupils but in response Impero has sent in its legal team.

    • Canadian Court Ponders If A Disagreement On Twitter Constitutes Criminal Harassment

      ree speech debates can often get tiresome online (for fairly obvious reasons), but it continues to astound me how people seem to think that there should be some sort of obvious exception to free speech rights for speech they don’t like — and that there won’t be any unintended or dangerous consequences from simply outlawing the speech that they dislike. To me, that belief is dangerous, though obviously people should be allowed to make their arguments for it. Up in Canada — where they don’t have a First Amendment like we do here in the states — there’s a fascinating and very troubling case happening that shows the dangerous path that you go down when you start saying things like “offensive speech” should be illegal. The determination of “offensive” is incredibly subjective.

      The case here appears to be over a Twitter spat between a few individuals, who clearly don’t much like each other. That said, the spat appears to be not dissimilar from the many, many Twitter spats that happen each and every day. I’m pretty sure I’ve had Twitter debates as bad, if not worse, than what happened here, and the idea that such a debate could lead to possible criminal charges and jail time is fundamentally crazy.

    • Underage pornography measures backed by new poll [Ed: A Christian Action Research and Education ‘poll’ on decency/nudity is like liberal ‘poll’ on torture]

      A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted earlier this month for Christian Action Research and Education (CARE), the social policy charity, found overwhelming support for strict regulation.

  • Privacy

    • UK Confuses Gullible Reporter Into Believing It Changed Its Position On Encryption

      We’ve talked a few times about how UK Prime Minister David Cameron has made it abundantly clear that he wants to backdoor encryption to make sure law enforcement and intelligence agencies can read private communications. Back in January, he made it clear that the UK “must not” allow there to be any “means of communication [that] isn’t possible to read [by the government].” Just a few weeks ago, he once again made it clear that there should be no “safe space” where anyone can communicate without the government being able to spy on you (that there already is the ability for two people to converse in person without being spied upon is left ignored).

    • Public bodies are releasing confidential personal data by accident, activists say

      Public bodies are unintentionally releasing confidential personal information on a regular basis, research reveals.

      Freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which automates FOI requests and publishes responses, says it has recorded 154 accidental data leaks made by councils, government departments, police, the NHS and other public bodies since 2009. This amounts to confidential data being wrongly released on average once every fortnight.

    • Cryptology research potentially a criminal activity

      Australia’s obsession with national security continues to have unintended consequences, with the academic exchange of information about cryptography now in danger.

      Internet freedom group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has supported a call by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) for amendments to Australia’s Defence Trade Controls Act to include exemptions for scientific research and for education.

    • High court rules data retention and surveillance legislation unlawful

      A judicial challenge by the Labour MP Tom Watson and the Conservative MP David Davis has overturned the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) 2014. The judges ruled that data retention powers in the legislation were inconsistent with EU laws.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality: Improvements Are Still Possible

      European Parliament’s ITRE commission endorses the compromise adopted during the trialogue on 30 June regarding the regulation on telecommunications. Despite the improvements brought to the text compared to the Council’s version, the regulation still contains loopholes and inaccuracies that could violate people’s and SME’s rights.

    • Breaking up BT should only be the end of the line

      Sky and TalkTalk want Ofcom to force BT to split off the infrastructure division Openreach but the case for such radical action is weak and it might do nothing

  • DRM

    • JPEG Looking To Add DRM To Images… Supposedly To Protect Images From Gov’t Surveillance

      You may recall the mess a few years ago when, under pressure from the movie studios, along with Netflix and Microsoft, the W3C agreed to add DRM to HTML5. This resulted in lots of debates and reasonable anger from people who found that the idea of building DRM into HTML5 went against the idea of an open internet. And, now it appears that the organization behind the JPEG standard for images is heading down a similar path.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Sinead O’Connor declares ‘music is dead’ after Rolling Stone puts Kim Kardashian on cover

        Music has officially died, according to Sinead O’Connor.

        The outspoken musician has called for a boycott on Rolling Stone magazine after it placed Kim Kardashian on its front cover.

        O’Connor wrote on her Facebook page: “What is this c*** doing on the cover of Rolling Stone? Music has officially died. Who knew it would be Rolling Stone that murdered it?

      • Kim Dotcom’s Seized Data Could Soon Be in U.S. Hands

        Kim Dotcom’s battle to stop more of his seized data being sent to the U.S. has suffered a setback. Three Court of Appeal judges today set aside earlier High Court rulings meaning that the Attorney-General can now issue new directions to police enabling the devices to be shipped to the United States.

      • Reda Report: Watch out for last minute amendments!

        On Thursday 9 July, the European Parliament will vote on its own-initiative report on copyright reform, proposed by MEP Julia Reda. The report has been widely picked apart due to pressure from industry lobbies and right-holders, but is set to go forward without any major change. La Quadrature du Net calls on MEPs to be on their guard concerning certain points that could be raised during the vote, especially the right to hyperlink, the right of panorama, or public domain.

07.16.15

In the Media and in Politics, Everyone Talks About Patent Trolls, Not Patent Scope

Posted in Patents at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Trolls

Summary: A long critique of media coverage on patents over this past week

TECHRIGHTS has for many years complained about bias in the media (especially the corporate media) where the views of corporations about patents outweigh or completely marginalise the views of people. To large corporations, especially those which are based in the United States, patent trolls have become a major source of nuisance and a cause for financial damage. This, in our view (for which we provided very extensive evidence), is why the world’s biggest media outlets — and with them politicians who follow the ‘mainstream’ media — target “patent trolls” like nothing else. The lobbying has basically expanded to the press, as is the case in many other areas, not just patents.

“Software patents are hardly a speakable subject and patent scope in general is relegated to ‘specialist’ sites.”Today we wish to cover rather than ignore the zeitgeist/news cycle which relates to patents. It’s all just trolls, trolls, trolls. Software patents are hardly a speakable subject and patent scope in general is relegated to ‘specialist’ sites. It’s truly a shame, but that’s where we’re at. We can only hope to change that.

Lex Machina has just shown a massive growth in patent litigation, having previously shown a massive decline that was widely reported on (we too covered it at the time). Here is the accompanying Lex Machina press release. There was also a report from (self-described) defensive patent aggregator Unified Patents, which came out at around the same time, leading to a lot of coverage and calls to take on patent trolls. To quote some headlines that dominate the press right now:

A lot of the above (not all) speaks about “patent trolls”, but is that really the debate we should be having? Should we not take a closer look at what type of patents they are using? It is almost always on software/algorithms/computer-implemented/”over the Internet”/other. These patents would not even be granted (as they are patent-ineligible) in the vast majority of the world.

Well, so much for ‘innovation’. The figures above are meaningful, but framing the problem as one pertaining to trolls (except big “trolls” like Microsoft and Apple) is misleading and commercially-motivated. In turn, since commercial entities control politics in the US, this become politically-motivated.

“After a Dip,” says Corporate Counsel, “Patent Litigation Is on the Rise,” but a lot of other headlines focus purely on patent trolls. Patent maximalists such as IAM (essentially patent lawyers) refrain from using the word trolls. This patent lawyers’ site makes it sound like good news (“US patent litigation is on the way up again”) and Dennis Crouch, another patent maximalist, says in Twitter that “US Legislative Patent Reform appears to be delayed until after the “Summer Recess.” Let the lobbying continue.”

“It is safe to state that there is strong bias there. It relates to how these parasites make a living.”Yup. “Let the lobbying continue.” IAM went as far as openly opposing reform against trolls and pretending it faces “the tough road”. Another patent maximalist (usually meaning patent lawyer who makes money from all this mess) wrote: “Fee shifting provisions are again front in center in both the Innovation Act in the House of Representatives and the PATENT Act in the Senate. With this in mind I thought it would be interesting to speak with Telscher on the record. He obliged. In part one of my interview with Telscher we discussed the back story of the case, how Octane Fitness was the little guy getting pushed around by the larger corporation. We discussed the problem of patent trolls, and started discussing litigating in the Eastern District of Texas.”

It is safe to state that there is strong bias there. It relates to how these parasites make a living. All these patent lawyers’ sites are still full of self-serving propaganda about patent reform, not just the status quo of software patents. Here is a patent lawyers’ site publishing the article “Lessons learnt from top entrepreneurial inventors” (as if patents are the same as entrepreneurship and innovation) and here is another patent lawyers’ site on “Possibility of More Reform Spurs Increase in Patent Case Filings” (i.e. more business from them, the lawyers).

We were a little struck by the lobbying done so openly in the media (see for example “Patent reform opponents make late pitch”, “A Measured Approach to Patent Reform Legislation”, and “Commentary: Federal “Innovation Act” trolls Florida businesses”). Some in the corporate media call “trolls” just “patent owners” and claim that: “While curbing abusive lawsuits is a noble goal, opponents worry a congressional push could stifle innovation and punish the wrong people.”

This article was originally published by Susan Decker from Wall Street media and it helps show who’s really against reform. Watch the lobbyists’ favourite outlet framing this as a budget issue. To quote: “A House bill to rein in abusive litigation tactics of so-called patent trolls will have an insignificant effect on the government’s budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office.”

Budget is not really at stake here. This is a sort of misdirection. “Patent trolls are infesting small hotels” is the title of another article, but the real pushers for reform are actually big businesses that don’t like to get bitten. They want exclusivity on patent aggression. It’s large corporations that pursue reform of this kind and have already watered it down accordingly, as we noted before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

One of the best articles on this topic was composed by Mike Masnick (as is often the case because he has no stake in the outcome). “The good folks over at Unified Patent,” he wrote, “have a report out on the latest numbers, which suggest the decline in patent troll activities last year was merely a brief disturbance and that patent trolling has bounced back significantly.”

As we pointed out last week, politicians such as Jerry Ortiz have begun weighing in [1, 2] and their concern seem to often be large corporations as the “victims”. They are trying to shape this ‘reform’ according to the whims and goals of large corporations. Here is the lobbying from 3M’s “vice president and chief intellectual property counsel” who “chairs the Steering Committee of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform.”

Why are these people steering policy in the first place? Their voices represent not the will of ordinary people.

Graphs showing where patent efforts are diverted to have even been published by Free/libre software-oriented sites in recent days (this is rare), stating that “numbers really get interesting when we compare the number of cases brought by NPEs with those brought by companies that actually make products covered by their patents. In the first half of this year, NPEs initiated 2,075 cases in District Court, compared with 975 initiated by non-NPEs. While the cases being brought by non-NPEs remains relatively steady — with 949 and 963 cases being brought respectively in the two halves of 2014 — the numbers for NPEs is on the rise: They only initiated 1,797 cases in the first half of last year and 1293 in the second — much fewer than this year.” Gary Shapiro wrote: “Patent trolls filed a damaging 2,791 new suits in 2014.”

This is why large corporations are worried. It is often them who are the targets and they wish to make it a one-way street where only large corporations exercise control (or domination) through patents. That’s why they worry so much about “trolls” (entities similar to them but much smaller and often non-practising). This new comic from a front of large corporations (CCIA) is hoping to shift all attention towards trolls, not the effect of software patents on Free software, for instance.

The large corporations are themselves often the backers of patent trolls. Petter Reinholdtsen confronts the Microsoft- and Apple-connected patent troll MPEG-LA, showing how they deal with video:

After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) why they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with the MPEG LA, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it does not.

[...]

As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because the patents are not valid in Norway?

According to TechDirt, patent trolls are now being dressed up as “Venture Capital” (Steph’s blog said that “Trolls Are A Nightmare Dressed Like A…Nightmare”). To quote what TechDirt has found: “The venture capitalists who are members of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) may want to reconsider why they support an organization that is actively working against the interests of venture capitalists and innovation. It has long been known that most venture investors in the tech world know damn well that patents get in the way of innovation, rather than help it. For years, we’ve written about some of the most high-profile venture capitalists — the ones that entrepreneurs would die to have invest in them — arguing about the need for patent reform and how patents often act as a tax on innovation, rather than an incentive for innovation.

“So… it seemed really, really odd earlier this year, when a guy hired by the NVCA to appear at a Congressional hearing on patent reform argued against patent reform and suggested, if anything, that patent protections needed to be ratcheted up. The guy in question, Robert Taylor, seemed like an odd choice. He was not a venture capitalist, but rather a consultant who focused on patent strategies for startups — in other words, someone who would directly profit from a bigger patent mess.”

There are many turf wars going on and it involves not only trolls but also patent lawyers, large corporations, and front groups of these three groups. Software developers are left almost entirely out of this picture and one front group of large corporations makes it sound as though the source of all problems is the US capital of patent trolls (“Why the Innovation Act Needs To Freeze Out the Eastern District of Texas”).

“Of high-tech patent suits,” said Ars Technica, “90 percent are filed by “non-practicing entities.”” But how many large companies such as Microsoft coerce smaller companies into patent deals without taking public action? How many of those “non-practicing entities” (such as MPEG-LA) are actively supported by Microsoft and fellow monopolisers? Using through shell companies or trolls is very convenient because it shields the initiator of action from counter lawsuit/s.

The corporate media, suffice to say, will carry on claiming that it’s about patent trolls, leading Congress down the same path. “Patent trolls,” said the lobbyists’ favourite outlet, “are sweating. Patent litigation bills are advancing in both the House and the Senate, and President Obama has vowed to sign reform legislation before leaving office. If the reformers win, the patent trolls will have to scavenge elsewhere, and a broken system that has encouraged litigation rather innovation will finally get fixed.”

But that would not fix the underlying issue. It would just morph again.

Ars Technica (Condé Nast-owned, i.e. large corporations) has been focusing a great deal on patent trolls, framing large corporations as the victims. Here is the latest on Newegg: “Online retailer Newegg has developed a reputation for fighting hard against the kind of non-practicing patent holders often called “patent trolls.” Now a long fight against one such entity, called SFA Systems, has reached a conclusion, and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied (PDF) Newegg’s request to have its legal fees paid.”

FOSS Force then followed with: “Back in November, 2013, a jury in Marshall, Texas found that online retailer Newegg infringed on a patent held by TQP Development because it mixed the use of SSL and RC4 on its websites. The jury awarded $2.3 million, less than half of the $5.1 million that TQP’s damage expert had said would be fair. At the time, TQP had sued more than 120 companies over the same patent, collecting $45 million in settlements.

“Immediately after the verdict, Newegg, which has made it a policy to duke it out in court rather than settle patent claims it thinks are unfounded, vowed to appeal. Trouble is, they can’t. Not until U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who conducted the trial, enters a final judgement, which he hasn’t done. He also hasn’t indicated when, if ever, that’s likely to happen.”

Why is it that patent news becomes big only when there is a big company such as Newegg? What about all the Free software projects that have been shut down using patents (without an actual lawsuit being filed)? We have covered many such stories over the years. The media always ignores such stories.

Why is it that there are hundreds of articles like this one when Apple is the defendant? It’s everywhere in the media (e.g. [1, 2]) and the pro-Microsoft ‘media’ frames is like this: “Patent trolls increasingly targeting tech: Apple, Amazon among most frequently sued”. But that’s because they’re big, not because they’re the sole victims. The corporate press only weeps for the corporations that own it, including Amazon (its CEO now owns the trend-setting media in Washington, the Washington Post).

“Money buys law and also buys changes to the law.”There are many articles such as “Patent trolls increasingly targeting tech: Apple, Amazon among most frequently” or “Apple Remains the Number One Target of Patent Trolls in 2015″. The pro-Apple circles really exploit this even though Apple itself is actually a huge patent aggressor (just see all the cases against Android companies).

It would be fair to point out that Google itself turned to the dark side of patents, patenting more and more software (even in my own doctoral-level field of research, computer vision [1, 2, 3]) and other Android actors do the same [1, 2], even though they rarely (if ever) resort to patent lawsuits.

The bottom line is, don’t expect objective assessment in the corporate media and do not accept this media’s narrative on “trolls”. The big issue is not patent trolls (as in small plaintiffs) but the patents themselves. There is a misleading (double standard) narrative here, akin to how media deals with terrorism versus state terrorism. It is a conundrum of scale and power, not necessarily an objective assessment. The sooner people realise it, the sooner this whole patent mess will end. A lot of people in academia already know this (I often speak with my friends who are professors about this), but it is companies, not universities, which steer policy. Money buys law and also buys changes to the law. █

Openwashing Visual Studio and Oracle’s Worrisome Embrace of Mono Rather Than Java

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Java, Mono, Oracle, Patents at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The efforts to empower Microsoft’s APIs, even if by lies and strongarming

THE MEDIA, including Microsoft-connected sites, is openwashing Visual Studio right now [1, 2]. A mixture of misleading headlines and half-truths are the means. We recently showed a lot of Visual Studio openwashing [1, 2, 3]. This in itself is disturbing and it is part of a trend to watch out for.

Will Hill points out that “Something odd is happening between Oracle and Xamarin. Oracle is strong arming customers into “the cloud” with license audit threats. What’s really weird is psycho babble about Xamarin being some sort of force in mobile and that silly cloud stuff with millions of developers. As far as I remembered Xamarin was a nasty little Microsoft shell designed to keep Mono around after Novell collapsed (2).

“I’ve asked Christine Hall on G+ what she knows about Xamarin and Oracle. Oracle pushing their customers onto Mono sounds like a suicide pact to me.

“Maybe they were dumb enough to push C# tools onto their database used [sic].”
      –Will HillRemember that Xamarin has been one of Microsoft’s tools for openwashing both .NET and Visual Studio.

“No response from Christine Hall yet,” Hill added today. “The name Xamarin left an unpleasant buzz in my head, so I did a Techrights search and remembered who they were. I thought, “that can’t be those Mono monkeys, they don’t do that.” Then I dug to the stock fraud site and, yep, that’s who they are talking about. There’s still room for it to be a typo, but I’d laugh and laugh if Oracle were to saddle their “cloud” with C# or Mono via Xamarin.

“Maybe they were dumb enough to push C# tools onto their database used [sic]. I’ve seen it in medical software because one of the vendors is a terminal Microsoft used.” [sic]

We shall update this post with any additional information or clarification. █

Hosting With Microsoft Software a Terrible Idea, as United Airlines Serves to Show

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

United Airlines

Summary: The United Airlines Web site, which uses Microsoft software, gets cracked, but the corporate media ignores the role of the underlying platform

“United hackers given million free flight miles,” says the BBC right now. Go to the United Airlines Web site and you will immediately see that they use Windows (ASPX is exposed at the URL of the front page, which is bad security practice in its own right). The United Airlines site is hiding behind Akamai (i.e. GNU/Linux), but it still shows a lot about the back end, which suggests that Microsoft frameworks are largely to blame (maybe poor programming, too).

This comes at an interesting time because, to quote other British media, “Microsoft Ends Windows Server 2003 Support But What Now?”

“The bottom line is, nobody should ever trust Microsoft for hosting of any kind of site.”Well, any company that still chooses Microsoft for public-facing site hosting would have to be dumb or seriously irresponsible. Microsoft is now hoping to also become the host of GNU/Linux sites. Microsoft’s booster Pedro Hernandez re-announces Microsoft propaganda right now (“Microsoft Rolls Out Linux Support Services on Azure”) even though it is not new, it is merely entrapment by Microsoft. Microsoft’s propaganda network “1105 Media”, featuring Microsoft’s booster Kurt Mackie, adds to it [1, 2] and promotes hosting by Microsoft. The latest Microsoft Channel 9 propaganda (we saw quite a bit of that recently), goes as far as openwashing Azure.

The bottom line is, nobody should ever trust Microsoft for hosting of any kind of site. The company is incompetent and it puts the NSA’s interests (e.g. back doors) first. █

SUEPO Post Vanishes: Belated Self-Censorship or Threats From EPO Management?

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Benoit Battistelli

Summary: SUEPO (staff union of EPO) has just removed a post about Battistelli and his inner circle; we try to find out if union members or staff got threatened

LAST week SUEPO published some text and uploaded this PDF, which led us to writing this post.

Days later the PDF and the text both disappeared (it’s still not being reinstated and the PDF needed to be manually removed), so we have spent some time trying to find out what had happened. It’s almost certainly not accidental given the circumstances. One person told us that “the decision what is flagged public and what not is taken mostly by admins, and these are not members of the (political) SUEPO core team.”

Remember that SUEPO represents a great proportion of the EPO staff and also that the EPO engaged in censorship against SUEPO. There’s substantiate ground for fear. Battistelli’s inner circle is not speculative; this is just a list of names, their positions, and their family or professional ties. No defamation there, that’s for sure. No privacy violations, either.

We were not alone in wondering what had happened; there are already discussions about this online and offline (we may elaborate on this another day because some of the discussion is encrypted). Nobody seems to know for sure what is going on.

“No defamation there, that’s for sure. No privacy violations, either.”Does the EPO now induce self-censorship? First the EPO censored (deleted) E-mails, now it's censoring (blocking) entire Web sites such as Techrights. The People’s Republic of EPO might be a suitable new title for EPOnia, which views itself as independent from any country’s laws. Here is a new article about the EPO’s practice of censorship, composed and published yesterday morning. “EPO staff can still read TechRights at home or on mobile devices,” of course, “a fact that makes this attempt at censorship absolutely ridiculous. But it should also have access from its desktop computers at work just in case anyone finds links to prior art there.

“The EPO leadership has just scored an own goal: by blocking access to TechRights, it has now raised the profile of that blog.”

Dr. Glyn Moody, a journalist who covers issues including patents, calls it EPO “meltdown” (he wrote that 3 times over the past 24 hours). SUEPO, in the mean time, publishes another PDF, this time regarding the “120th Session of the ILO-AT” (it is a long 12-page paper).

As a side note, and it would be irresponsible to suggest that it is connected to the EPO’s actions (we have no such evidence except circumstantial), almost exactly on the same day (or the day after) the censorship was reported we got strongarmed by ICANN/ENOM to update records for the domain, as if someone complained that it was out of date. I received an authentic E-mail titled “IMPORTANT: Immediate Response Required – whois problem report: : techrights.org” on the same morning I wrote about the EPO’s censorship of techrights.org. ICANN/ENOM complaints are one way (among others) to induce domain-wide/universal blocking or expose one’s home address. I have been wrestling with this for 3 days now. It’s not as stressful as dealing with DDOS attacks, but it sure is a nuisance. █

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