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10.13.16

Links 13/10/2016: Major Ubuntu and OpenSUSE Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 7:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • They Said Nobody in Jordan Knew About Linux but They Were Wrong

    In this story, “Roblimo” takes us back to 2002, to an open source conference in a country where the common belief was that “nobody knew anything about Linux.” Boy, were they in for a surprise.

    In December, 2002, I gave the keynote speech at an open source conference in Amman, Jordan. It was a tense time in that part of the world. Not long before I was there, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAISD) chief in Amman was assassinated. Anti-U.S. demonstrations had been shut down by Jordan’s armed forces earlier in the year. King Abdullah II was still new in the job and did not yet have as certain a hand on the helm as his father, Hussein (amateur radio call JY1) did during previous decades. To make things even more fun, the country was flooded with refugees from Iraq, and rumors were rife that the U.S. would soon go to war with Saddam Hussein over 9/11. Or something. Of course, the war rumors turned out to be true.

  • 7 Mistakes New Linux Users Make

    Changing operating systems is a big step for anybody — all the more so because many users are uncertain about exactly what an operating system is.

    However, switching from Windows to Linux is especially hard. The two operating systems have different assumptions and priorities, as well as different ways of doing things. As a result, it is easy for new Linux users to wind up confused because the expectations they have developed using Windows no longer apply.

  • Distribute And Win

    There are many instances, both in nature and business, of the virtues of distributed systems as compared to monolithic systems. One of the most obvious is the rise of open-source software, as argued persuasively by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (available online).

    He argues that “cathedrals” (hierarchical, well-organised companies which are the western norm, e.g., IBM, Microsoft) will in the long run be defeated by “bazaars” (loosely federated groups of workers).

    In the context of operating systems (the software that controls devices), and specifically of the UNIX and Linux systems (which is what Eric was focusing on), this prophecy has largely come true. Microsoft, so dominant in the last century, has now lost its monopoly.

  • Linux And Its Impact On Modern IT Infrastructure

    Linux came into existence 25 years ago, but since then, it has been on the path of evolution, and has crept into the modern IT infrastructure like little else. What started as a rebellion movement of sorts, has now become the backbone of enterprise grade computing for sometime now, and been behind the success stories of more than a few enterprises.

    To gauge the historical link of Linux with enterprise servers, Senior Solutions Architect at Red Hat Martin Percival’s words come to mind, who said “Linux was regarded as an alternative to proprietary Unix. But RHEL switched it to becoming an alternative to Windows Server.” However, when the 90’s came around, computing was to be turned on it’s head, when the consumer segment, more so with PCs, began to take off, even with the famous separation of Microsoft and IBM. While Windows 3.x became a sort of industry standard, IBM’s own OS/OS 2 didn’t create so much of an impression.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Carriers Embrace Trial & Error Approach as NFV Becomes Real

      Telcos kicked off the SDN World Congress here with boasts about how un-telco-like they’ve become, influenced by software-defined infrastructure and the world of virtualization.

      Specifically, they’re starting to adopt software’s “agile” philosophy by being willing to proceed in small steps, rather than waiting for technology to be fully baked.

    • How to stay relevant in the DevOps era: A SysAdmin’s survival guide [Ed: How to stay relevant in the [stupid buzzword] era: rewrite the CV with silly buzzwords like DevOps]

      The merging of development and operations to speed product delivery, or DevOps, is all about agility, automation and information sharing. In DevOps, servers are often treated like cattle”that can be easily replaced, rather than individual pets”to be nurtured.

    • Fear Makes The Wolf Look Bigger

      DevOps is based on 3 key pillars: People, Process and Automation. I believe their importance to a business should be considered in that order.

    • TNS Guide to Serverless Technologies: The Best of FaaS and BaaS

      Like the terms “microservices” and “containers” before it, “serverless” is a loaded word. Countless blogs have argued about the meaning or importance.

      The first, obvious statement everyone makes is that, yes, there are servers or hardware of some sort somewhere in the system. But the point of “serverless” is not that servers aren’t used; it’s just that developers and administrators do not have to think about them.

      Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party services. “Such architectures remove the need for the traditional ‘always on’ server system sitting behind an application,” said software developer Mike Roberts, in an article on Martin Fowler’s site. Inserting serverless technologies into systems can reduce the complexity that needs to be managed, and could also potentially save money.

    • One Day Is a Lifetime in Container Years

      The average life span of a container is short and getting shorter. While some organizations use containers as replacements for virtual machines, many are using them increasingly for elastic compute resources, with life spans measured in hours or even minutes. Containers allow an organization to treat the individual servers providing a service as disposable units, to be shut down or spun up on a whim when traffic or behavior dictates.

      Since the value of an individual container is low, and startup time is short, a company can be far more aggressive about its scaling policies, allowing the container service to scale both up and down faster. Since new containers can be spun up on the order of seconds or sub seconds instead of minutes, they also allow an organization to scale down further than would previously have provided sufficient available overhead to manage traffic spikes. Finally, if a service is advanced enough to have automated monitoring and self-healing, a minuscule perturbation in container behavior might be sufficient to cause the misbehaving instance to be destroyed and a new container started in its place.

      At container speeds, behavior and traffic monitoring happens too quickly for humans to process and react. By the time an event is triaged, assigned, and investigated, the container will be gone. Security and retention policies need to be set correctly from the time the container is spawned. Is this workload allowed to run in this location? Are rules set up to manage the arbitration between security policies and SLAs?

  • Kernel Space

    • The Open Source SDN Distro That Keeps Microsoft’s WiFi Secure

      Dr. Bithika Khargharia, a principal solutions architect at Extreme Networks and director of product and community management at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), then elaborated on the new approach by discussing a project called Atrium Enterprise. Atrium Enterprise is an open source SDN distribution that’s ODL-based and has an integrated unified communications and collaboration application. It runs on Atrium partner hardware according to Khargharia.

    • Blockchain Adoption Faster Than Expected

      A study released last week by IBM indicates that blockchain adoption by financial institutions is on the rise and beating expectations. This is good news for IBM, which is betting big on the database technology that was brought to prominence by Bitcoin. Yesterday, Big Blue announced that it has made its Watson-powered blockchain service available to enterprise customers.

      For its study, IBM’s Institute for Business Value teamed with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey 200 banks spread through 16 countries about “their experience and expectations with blockchains.” The study found that 15 percent of the banks surveyed plan to implement commercial blockchain solutions in 2017.

    • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds OpenTracing Project

      The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today officially announced that the open-source OpenTracing project has been accepted as a hosted project.

    • System calls again

      And speaking of searching — there is filter box now. You can type syscall name (or part of it) there and have table filtered. Same can be done with system call number as well. You used Valgrind and it said that has no idea how to handle syscall 145? Just enter number and you see that it is getresuid(), nfsservctl(), readv(), sched_getscheduler(), setreuid() or setrlimit() — depends which architecture you are testing.

    • UBIFS Supports OverlayFS In Linux 4.9, Readying UBI For MLC Support

      The UBI/UBIFS pull request for the Linux 4.9 kernel for those interested in the Unsorted Block Image tech on Linux.

      First up, for those running UBIFS on raw flash memory, there is now OverlayFS support. OverlayFS, as a reminder, provides a union mount for other file-systems. O_TMPFILE, RENAME_WHITEOUT/EXCHANGE are now supported by UBIFS for handling OverlayFS.

    • KThread Improvements Coming To Linux 4.9

      Andrew Morton’s pull request for Linux 4.9 has landed some improvements for kernel threads.

      For the kthread code in Linux 4.9 there is an API cleanup, a new kthread_create_worker() call (and kthread_create_worker_on_cpu()) to hide implementation details, kthread_destroy_worker() as an easier way to end a worker, support for delayed kthreads, better support for freezable kthread workers, and related kthread work.

    • Linus Torvalds: “Linux Kernel 5.0 Will Be Released When We Hit 6 Million Git Objects”

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has shared the news that we are half-way between Linux 4.0 and 5.0 as the Git object database has crossed the 5 million object mark. Some of you might be knowing that major version transition happens at every two million objects in the database. So, after 1 more million Git objects, we can expect the release of Linux kernel 5.0 in 2017.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • How to make animated videos with Krita

        There are lots of different kinds of animation: hand-drawn, stop motion, cut-out, 3D, rotoscoping, pixilation, machinima, ASCII, and probably more. Animation isn’t easy, by any means; it’s a complex process requiring patience and dedication, but the good news is open source supplies plenty of high-quality animation tools.

        Over the next three months I’ll highlight three open source applications that are reliable, stable, and efficient in enabling users to create animated movies of their own. I’ll concentrate on three of the most essential disciplines in animation: hand-drawn cel animation, digitally tweened animation, and stop motion. Although the tools are fairly specific to the task, these principles apply to other styles of animation as well.

        You can read about some of the more technical details about animation in Animation Basics by Nikhil Sukul.

      • Kdenlive 16.08.2 Open-Source Video Editor Released with Over 35 Improvements

        Today, October 13, 2016, Kdenlive developer Farid Abdelnour announced the release and immediate availability of the second maintenance update to the Kdenlive 16.08 open-source video editor software project.

        Distributed as part of the soon-to-be-released KDE Applications 16.08.2 software suite for the latest KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, Kdenlive 16.08.2 is here five weeks after the release of the previous maintenance version with no less than 36 improvements and bug fixes, addressing keyframe, UI, workflow, compilation, and proxy clip rendering related issues reported by users.

      • Qt 5.6.2 Toolkit Officially Released with Almost 900 Improvements and Bug Fixes

        Today, October 12, 2016, the Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, announced the general availability of the second maintenance release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6 open-source and cross-platform GUI toolkit.

        Qt 5.6.2 is here four months after the release of the first maintenance version, Qt 5.6.1, bringing approximately 900 improvements and bug fixes to keep Qt 5.6 a stable and reliable release for Qt application developers on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

        “This is the second patch release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6, and there will still be more patch releases to come. While a patch release does not bring new features, it contains security fixes, error corrections and general improvements,” says Tuukka Turunen in today’s announcement.

      • KDE Applications 16.08.2 Released for KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS with over 30 Bug Fixes

        As expected, KDE announced today, October 13, 2016, the general availability of the second point release of their KDE Applications 16.08 software suite for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

        That’s right, we’re talking about KDE Applications 16.08.2, which comes five weeks after the first maintenance update, promising to address over 30 issues and annoyances that have been reported by users since KDE Applications 16.08.1, which launched last month on the 8th of September.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3.22 Desktop Environment Gets Its First Point Release, Brings Improvements

        As expected, today, October 12, 2016, GNOME 3.22.1 has been announced by GNOME developer Frederic Peters as the first point release of the stable GNOME 3.22 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

      • GNOME 3.22.1 Released

        For those on rolling-release distributions that tend to wait until the first point release before upgrading your desktop environment, GNOME 3.22.1 is now available as the first update since last month’s GNOME 3.22 debut.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Open-spec COM version of Chip SBC sells for $16

      The Next Thing unveiled a $16 COM version of the Chip SBC called the Chip Pro, plus a dev kit and a $6 SiP version of the Allwinner R8 SoC called the GR8.

      The Next Thing, which gave us the $9-and-up Chip SBC and Chip-based PocketChip handheld computer, has unveiled a $16, open-spec computer-on-module version of the Chip called the Chip Pro. The Chip Pro measures 45 x 30mm compared to 60 x 40mm for the Chip. The Pro has half the RAM of the Chip with 256MB DDR3, and only 512MB NAND flash instead of 4GB NAND, but it retains the onboard WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2.

    • Linux-based smart home hubs advance into AI
    • Smart Linux Home Hubs Mix IoT with AI

      Industrial, rather than home, applications will likely dominate the Internet of Things (IoT) market in the years to come. Yet, in the early going, the home automation market has had the greatest visibility. And it hasn’t always been pretty.

      Despite steady growth, retail sales have yet to achieve inflated expectations. Too many companies promised and failed to deliver interoperability with a growing catalog of often buggy smart home products. The lack of essential applications, complex installation, and in many cases, high prices, have also conspired against the segment.

      Yet the smart home segment appears to be rebounding with the help of maturing technology and IoT interoperability standards. There is particular interest in connecting voice-enabled AI assistants with the smart home in products such as Amazon’s Echo. Google recently announced Google Home, a major competitor to Alexa. These are being joined by open source Linux smart home voice agents like Mycroft, Silk, and ZOE (see below).

    • COM Express Type 7 module has dual 10GbE and 32 PCIe lanes

      Congatec unveiled the “Conga-B7XD,” one of the first COM Express Type 7 modules, featuring Intel “Broadwell” CPUs, 2x 10GbE Ethernet, and 32x PCI lanes.

    • Pixel Takes Raspbian to the Next Level

      A couple of weeks ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they had tuned up the look and feel of Raspbian. The new buzzword created to help bring about the message that the UI had changed was dubbed “Pixel,” which stands for “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight.” While I’m not completely sold on trying to make Pixel stand for something, what I am completely sold on is what it has brought to the table for the Raspberry Pi. With Pixel, Raspbian has the look and feel of an elegant OS and I’m beyond happy that they have put this together for the Raspberry Pi community. I’ve tried out Pixel for the past week and here’s my take to date.

    • Build a Spooky Halloween Music-Light Show with Raspberry Pi and Linux

      My son just turned 4, and he is super-excited about Halloween and zombies. So I planned to create a haunted house-like experience for him. The biggest challenge was to get audio-visual effects. I wanted spooky music synchronized with well-placed lighting.

      Instead of buying some expensive Halloween decorations, I wanted to build them myself. I also wanted to be able to control the lights over the network. I looked around and didn’t find the perfect solution, so I did what DIY people do best: I picked and chose different pieces to create what I needed.

      In this tutorial, I am going to share how you can build a board with Raspberry Pi and open source software that synchronizes music with lights for less than $20. You can place this board inside a plastic pumpkin decoration, for example, or attach LEDs to props and create spooky displays for Halloween. Be creative!

    • PocketCHIP Shipping In Mass Next Month – Makes Fun $69 Debian Linux Handheld

      It’s been a few months since Next Thing Co’s C.H.I.P. computer was successfully funded on Kickstarter as “the world’s first $9 computer” along with the PocketCHIP, a C.H.I.P. powered, battery-backed handheld with physical keyboard. Next Thing Co shipped to their backers over the summer whole in November they expects to begin shipping mass production orders on the CHIP and PocketCHIP. Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with these low-cost ARM devices.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Huawei Teases Honor S1 smartwatch, No mention of Android Wear

          Huawei is currently teasing their new smartwatch which is to be released under the Honor brand named as the Honor S1. The Chinese manufacturer has an event scheduled for October 18 at which we expect the S1 to be unveiled. But could it be running Tizen ? Huawei are already known as stating they will not release anymore Android wear smartwatches for the remainder of this year, so this leaves either Tizen or some other proprietary OS. According to a report in the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper Huawei are currently working with Samsung to deploy the Tizen operating system in its next smartwatches.

        • Game: Gully Cricket 2016 for all Tizen Smartphones

          Hey cricket fans, Games2win brings the popular Indian gully Cricket game on mobiles for the first time and now it is on the Tizen Store. Play 85 different matches in real Indian gullies (name for an alleyway). Break neighbor’s window panes and car windshields, hit passing auto rickshaws and knock down the milkman in order to get an extra reward. Select your favorite team combination in order for you to win all matches. 3 game modes are available: Arcade Mode, Tournament Mode and Gully Ka Raja mode.

        • Game: Bubble Bash Bubble Struggle is available in Tizen Store

          The DadStudio team have added their best bubble shooting game, named “Bubble Bash Bubble Struggle”, to the Tizen store. The game promises to be one of the best bubble shooter games that has spectacular graphics and great music that is simple to operate.

        • Samsung’s 14nm wearable SoC debuts on Gear 3 watch

          Samsung unveiled a 14nm, dual Cortex-A53 “Exynos 7 Dual 7270” SoC with built-in LTE, which runs Tizen Linux on its new Gear S3 watch.

          Samsung may be suffering through one of the worst months in its history, culminating with this week’s recall of the exploding Galaxy Note 7, but the company is so diverse it can also produce some feel-good news at the same time. This week, Samsung Electronics announced the beginning of mass production of a new wearables system-on-chip called the Exynos 7 Dual 7270. Billed as the first wearables-oriented SoC fabricated with a 14-nanometer (nm) FinFET process, the Exynos 7 Dual 7270 will first appear later this year in its Gear 3 smartwatches (see farther below).

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • StormCrawler: An Open Source SDK for Building Web Crawlers with ApacheStorm

    StormCrawler (SC) is an open source SDK for building distributed web crawlers with Apache Storm. The project is under Apache license v2 and consists of a collection of reusable resources and components, written mostly in Java. It is used for scraping data from web pages, indexing with search engines or archiving, and can run on a single machine or an entire Storm cluster with exactly the same code and a minimal number of resources to implement.

  • Study: ‘Open source coders more aware of security’

    Developers of open source software are generally more aware of code security issues than developers working for the European institutions, according to a study for the European Commission and European Parliament. Developers working for the European institutions have more tools available for management and testing of code security, but using them is not yet a standard practice.

  • Begin Broadcasting with a Powerful Open Source Media Platform

    But what a lot of people don’t realize is that that it’s definitely not just a media player. You can use it to stream and broadcast video, podcasts and other media content, and that includes streaming content to mobile devices of all kinds. Some organizations are integrating these streaming features with their networks and cloud deployments, embracing shared multimedia content. Here is our collection of guides for streaming with VLC, including guides for integrating it with your organization’s publishing strategy. This newly updated collection has been expanded to include some very valuable new, free documentation.

  • AT&T (T) to Unveil ECOMP in Open Source Industry in 1Q17

    U.S. telecom giant AT&T Inc. T is moving ahead with plans to introduce its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) virtualization platform in the open source industry in the first quarter of 2017. In relation to this, the company announced that it will release all 8.5 million lines of code for ECOMP. AT&T further claims that it has plans to standardize ECOMP as one of the best automated platforms for managing virtual network functions and other software-centric network operations in the telecom industry.

    Earlier in Sep 2016, AT&T and French telecom Orange S.A. ORAN had teamed up on open source initiatives in order to accelerate the standardization of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). In relation to this, AT&T declared Orange as its first telecom partner to test its open-source Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

  • SaaS/Back End

    • OpenStack Newton promises better resiliency, scalability and security

      OpenStack has released the latest edition of its popular open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud: Newton. With broad industry support from more than 200 vendors — including Cisco, Dell, HP Enterprise, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware — this version should quickly see wide deployment.

      This release features numerous new features. Perhaps the most important is simply making OpenStack easier to use. OpenStack is powerful, but it’s notoriously hard to master. While OpenStack classes are becoming more common, even with help, mastering OpenStack isn’t easy.

    • Lessons learned as an OpenStack Day organizer
    • Recognizing OpenStack Cloud Contributors–Including Those Who Don’t Code

      Although it is still a very young cloud computing platform, each week there is more evidence of how entrenched OpenStack has become in enterprises and even in smaller companies. In fact, just this week, we reported on findings that show OpenStack adoption in the telecom industry to be widespread.

      Contributors are a big part of what has driven OpenStack’s success, and as the OpenStack Summit approaches, there are several new initiatives being put in place to serve up recognition for meaningful contributors. Notably, the recognition is going to partially go to those who actually contribute code, but there will also be recognition of other forms of giving to OpenStack.

    • Veritas to Showcase Software-Defined Storage at OpenStack Summit

      With the OpenStack Summit event in Barcelona rapidly approaching, news is already arriving on some important new technologies in the OpenStack ecosystem. Veritas Technologies announced that it will showcase two of its software-defined storage solutions—HyperScale for OpenStack and Veritas Access—at the summit.

      With OpenStack quickly gaining traction as an open source software platform of choice for public and private clouds, storage management and support for enterprise production workloads is becoming critical for many enterprises.

  • Funding

    • How to Find Funding for an Open Source Project

      Ask people how to find funding for a technology project, and many of them will point to crowdsourcing sites. After all, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, the Pebble smartwatch, and even the low-cost Raspberry Pi computer were launched after their inventors collectively raised millions of dollars from contributors. If you happen to have an open source project that you want to get funded, what are some of your options?

  • BSD

    • vmm enabled

      With a small commit, OpenBSD now has a hypervisor and virtualization in-tree. This has been a lot of hard work by Mike Larkin, Reyk Flöter, and many others.

      VMM requires certain hardware features (Intel Nehalem or later, and virtualization enabled in the BIOS) in order to provide VM services, and currently only supports OpenBSD guests.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Guile 2.0.13 released [security fixes]

      We’ve just released a new version of GNU Guile, version 2.0.13, which is a security release for Guile (see the original announcement).

      This handles a significant security vulnerability affecting the live REPL, CVE-2016-8606. Due to the nature of this bug, Guile applications themselves in general aren’t vulnerable, but Guile developers are. Arbitrary Scheme code may be used to attack your system in this scenario. (A more minor security issue is also addressed, CVE-2016-8605.)

      There is also a lesson here that applies beyond Guile: the presumption that “localhost” is only accessible by local users can’t be guaranteed by modern operating system environments. If you are looking to provide local-execution-only, we recommend using Unix domain sockets or named pipes. Don’t rely on localhost plus some port.

    • Free Software Directory meeting recap for October 7th, 2016
    • The Free Software Foundation seeks nominations for the 19th annual Free Software Awards

      This award is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

      Individuals who describe their projects as “open” instead of “free” are eligible nonetheless, provided the software is in fact free/libre.

      Last year, Werner Koch was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his work on GnuPG, the de facto tool for encrypted communication. Koch joined a prestigious list of previous winners including Sébastien Jodogne, Matthew Garrett, Dr. Fernando Perez, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Rob Savoye, John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts’o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall.

  • Public Services/Government

    • NL Parliament makes open standards mandatory

      The use of open standards will be made mandatory for public administrations. A law proposal by MP Astrid Oosenbrug was adopted by the Parliament’s lower house yesterday. According to the MP, the open standards requirement will be one of several changes to the country’s administrative law, introduced next year. “The minister has earlier agreed to make open standards mandatory”, she said. “The parliament is making sure this actually happens.”

      The first public administration that should improve its use of open standards, is the Parliament’s lower house itself, MP Oosenbrug said. “Ironically, lower house published the adopted law on its website by providing a download link to a document in a proprietary format.”

    • France adds source code to list of documents covered by freedom of information laws

      French freedom of information law now treats source code as disclosable in the same way as other government records.

      The new “Digital Republic” law took effect Saturday, with its publication in France’s Official Journal.

      It adds source code to the long list of government document types that must be released in certain circumstances: dossiers, reports, studies, minutes, transcripts, statistics, instructions, memoranda, ministerial replies, correspondence, opinions, forecasts and decisions.

      But it also adds a new exception to existing rules on access to administrative documents and reuse of public information, giving officials plenty of reasons to refuse to release code on demand.

      These rules already allow officials to block the publication of documents they believe threaten national security, foreign policy, personal safety, or matters before court or under police investigation, among things.

      Now they can oppose publication if they believe it threatens the security of government information systems.

    • Midi-Pyrenees French Region remains committed to Free Software

      “Free software is one of three pillars of our digital strategy”, has confirmed Nadia Pellefigue, the vice-president of the regional council of the Midi-Pyrenees (South-West of France).

      “Free software and open source will help the regional industry and employment, because it can mobilise people”, Nadia Pellefigue said. “Public procurement has been spurred but there is still room for improvements”, she added. Cost savings, meaningful local jobs and lower dependencies on foreign firms are the three advantages of free software she listed.

      Ms Pellefigue was one of the officials at the Rencontres Régionales du Logiciel Libre (RRLL), which took place in Toulouse in October.

      Read more

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • CMPD launches ‘Open Source Data’ page to share police info with public

        Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police announced Wednesday the launch of its “Open Source Data” page on the department’s website.

        Police say the information source is a step forward in how they share information with the public and is an “opportunity for even greater accountability and transparency” with the Charlotte community. The department faced criticism in the wake of the Keith Scott shooting as protesters said CMPD should have been more transparent during their investigation of the incident.

  • Programming/Development

    • 50 tips for improving your software development game

      How do you keep improving as a software engineer? Some pieces of advice are valid no matter your experience level, but often the advice will depend on where you are in your career.

      If you’re a beginner, the best advice is to simply learn your language, frameworks, and tools top to bottom and gain more experience with a variety of different projects.

      If you’re an experienced software developer, you should constantly try to find new ways to optimize your code for readability, performance, and maintainability, and then practice making well-reasoned decisions about where to focus time and resources in your code—whether it’s testing, performance optimization, or other technical debt.

Leftovers

  • poll on mac 10.12 is broken

    When Mac OS X first launched they did so without an existing poll function. They later added poll() in Mac OS X 10.3, but we quickly discovered that it was broken (it returned a non-zero value when asked to wait for nothing) so in the curl project we added a check in configure for that and subsequently avoided using poll() in all OS X versions to and including Mac OS 10.8 (Darwin 12). The code would instead switch to the alternative solution based on select() for these platforms.

    With the release of Mac OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” in October 2013, Apple had fixed their poll() implementation and we’ve built libcurl to use it since with no issues at all. The configure script picks the correct underlying function to use.

  • How to ask why at work without upsetting anyone

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Gorilla escapes from enclosure at London Zoo

      According to the zoo’s website there are at least seven gorillas living in its Gorilla Kingdom.

      Among them is Kumbuka, a western lowland silverback, who arrived at ZSL London Zoo in early 2013 from Paignton Zoo in Devon.

      Others include Zaire, who came to London Zoo in 1984 after being born in Jersey Zoo, Mjukuu and her daughter Alika, “teenager” Effie, and Gernot, the latest addition who was born in November last year to Effie and Kumbuka.

    • ‘A famine unlike any we have ever seen’

      They survived Boko Haram. Now many of them are on the brink of starvation.

      Across the northeastern corner of this country, more than 3 million people displaced and isolated by the militants are facing one of the world’s biggest humanitarian disasters. Every day, more children are dying because there isn’t enough food. Curable illnesses are killing others. Even polio has returned.

      About a million and a half of the victims have fled the Islamist extremists and are living in makeshift camps, bombed-out buildings and host communities, receiving minimal supplies from international organizations. An additional 2 million people, according to the United Nations, are still inaccessible because of the Boko Haram fighters, who control their villages or patrol the surrounding areas.

    • Flint resident seeks grand jury probe of Gov. Snyder

      A Flint resident is requesting a one-person grand jury to investigate whether Gov. Rick Snyder committed criminal misconduct in office by using public funds to hire private attorneys representing him in criminal probes of the city’s water contamination crisis.

      Attorney Mark Brewer, former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, filed a complaint late Tuesday in Ingham County Circuit Court on behalf of Keri Webber, who said members of her family have suffered health complications from lead exposure and Legionnaires’ disease.

      Webber told The Detroit News she is “appalled” that taxpayers are being forced to fund the governor’s legal team while Flint residents pay medical bills and still cannot drink their municipal water without a filter. She personally uses only bottled water.

    • Big soda is buying off big health orgs to keep profits and Americans fat

      Under the guise of sweet charitable giving, soda makers are handing out millions to big name health organizations so that the groups stay quiet about health issues that threaten to slim down drink profits—not to mention Americans themselves—a new study suggests.

      Between 2011 and 2015, Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo sponsored 96 national health organizations, including the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Society for Nutrition, researchers report in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Meanwhile, lobbyists for the beverage makers successfully campaigned against nearly 20 proposed state and federal regulations aimed at protecting public health, such as improvements to nutrition labeling and soda taxes.

      The pop makers’ efforts to defeat public health policies casts doubt on the sincerity of their charitable giving to health groups. But the sponsorships alone are concerning, according to the study authors, Daniel Aaron and Michael Siegel of Boston University. Earlier studies have found that “sponsorships of health organizations can have a nefarious impact on public health,” they wrote, noting the efforts of Big Tobacco decades ago. Sponsors may directly or indirectly—through feelings of indebtedness—get an organization to take on their interests. As such, the Federal Trade Commission considers sponsorships a marketing tool. All in all, Aaron and Siegel conclude that the soda sponsorships “are likely to serve marketing functions, such as to dampen health groups’ support of legislation that would reduce soda consumption and improve soda companies’ public image,” they wrote.

    • DEA reverses decision on kratom; drug stays legal for now

      The Drug Enforcement Administration is withdrawing its plan to ban the opioid-like herbal drug kratom—at least for now—according to a preliminary withdrawal notice posted today.

      The notice, which will appear in the Federal Registry Thursday, nixes the agency’s emergency decision in late August to list kratom as a Schedule I Controlled Substance, the most restrictive category that also includes heroin and LSD. The DEA deemed the plant’s use an urgent threat to public health—based on concern that it could be abused and addictive—and set the date for a ban as early as September 30. But the abrupt plan drew intense backlash from public health experts, lawmakers, and thousands of devoted users, who argue that the currently unregulated herbal supplement treats chronic pain and prevents deadly opioid addictions.

      After the initial notice, kratom advocates swiftly organized protests, collected more than 140,000 petition signatures, and convinced more than 50 Congress members to sign letters urging the DEA to reverse course. One of the letters highlighted the ongoing, federally funded research looking at using kratom for opioid withdrawal. That research would likely be shut down by a Schedule I listing.

    • Netherlands may extend assisted dying to those who feel ‘life is complete’

      The Dutch government intends to draft a law that would legalise assisted suicide for people who feel they have “completed life” but are not necessarily terminally ill.

      The Netherlands was the first country to legalise euthanasia, in 2002, but only for patients who were considered to be suffering unbearable pain with no hope of a cure.

      But in a letter to parliament on Wednesday, the health and justice ministers said that people who “have a well-considered opinion that their life is complete, must, under strict and careful criteria, be allowed to finish that life in a manner dignified for them”.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Just Too Much Administration – Breaking JEA, PowerShell’s New Security Barrier

      Just Enough Administration (JEA) is a new Windows 10/Server 2016 feature to create granular least privilege policies by granting specific administrative privileges to users, defined by built-in and script-defined PowerShell cmdlets. Microsoft’s documentation claimed JEA was a security boundary so effective you did not need to worry about an attacker stealing and misusing the credentials of a JEA user.

      But every JEA role capability example I found Microsoft had published had vulnerabilities that could be exploited to obtain complete system administrative rights, most of them immediately, reliably, and without requiring any special configuration. I find it hard to believe most custom role capabilities created by system administrators in the wild are going to be more secure than these, given the track record of the functionally similar features in Linux, the non-obvious nature of vulnerabilities, and the importance of dangerous cmdlets to routine system troubleshooting and maintenance.

      I recommended Microsoft invert what their JEA articles and documentation said about security. Instead of leading with statements that JEA was a security barrier, users with JEA rights should not be considered administrators, and their credentials do not need to be protected like real administrators with a note that this may not be the case if you are not careful; Microsoft’s JEA documentation should lead with statements that JEA should not be treated like a security barrier and users with JEA rights and their credentials should be tightly controlled exactly like normal administrators unless the role capabilities have been strictly audited by security professionals. Additionally, the README files and comments of their example role capabilities should start with stern reminders of this.

    • Thousands of internet-connected devices are a security disaster in the making

      The first problem: many IoT devices, like those cameras, are consumer-oriented, which means their owners don’t have a security-conscious IT department. “Individuals do not have the purchasing power of a large corporation,” says John Dickson, principal of Denim Group, “so they cannot demand security features or privacy protections that a large corporation can of an a product or software vendor.”

      PC Pitstop Vice President of Cyber Security Dodi Glenn points out that many IoT purchasers neglect basic security measures, failing to change passwords from obvious defaults. And even if they did want to secure their devices, there are limits to what they can do: “You can’t secure these devices with antivirus applications.”

    • A SSHowDowN in security: IoT devices enslaved through 12 year old flaw

      In what researchers call the “Internet of Unpatchable Things,” a 12-year-old security flaw is being exploited by attackers in a recent spate of SSHowDowN Proxy attacks.

      The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging market full of Wi-Fi and networked devices including routers, home security systems, and lighting products. While the idea of making your home more efficient and automating processes is an appealing one, unfortunately, vendors en masse are considering security as an afterthought for thousands of devices now in our homes, leaving our data vulnerable.

    • Microsoft was unable to meaningfully improve the software

      Documents in a class-action lawsuit against Ford and its original MyFord Touch in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system reveal that the company’s engineers and even its top executive were frustrated with the problematic technology.

      The documents from the 2013 lawsuit show Ford engineers believed the IVI, which was powered by the SYNC operating system launched in 2010, might be “unsaleable” and even described a later upgrade as a “polished turd,” according to a report in the Detroit News, which was confirmed by Computerworld.

      The SYNC OS was originally powered by Microsoft software. Microsoft continued releasing software revisions it knew were defective, according to the lawsuit.

      “In the spring of 2011, Ford hired Microsoft to oversee revisions, and hopefully the improvement, of the [software]. But … Microsoft was unable to meaningfully improve the software, and Ford continued releasing revised software that it knew was still defective,” the lawsuit states.

      Last week, a U.S. District Court judge certified the case as a class action.

    • Senator wants nationwide, all-mail voting to counter election hacks

      “It’s not a question of if you’re going to get hacked—it’s when you’re going to get hacked.”

      Those were the words of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam as he sought to assure investors last week that the company is still interested in purchasing Yahoo despite the massive data breach of Yahoo consumer accounts.

      Whether McAdam’s words ring true for the hodgepodge of election systems across the US is anybody’s guess. But in the wake of the Obama administration’s announcement that the Russian government directed hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other institutions to influence US elections, a senator from Oregon says the nation should conduct its elections like his home state does: all-mail voting.

    • SourceClear Adds Atlassian Stack to Its Open Source Security Platform

      Open source security company SourceClear said it is integrating Atlassian’s suite of developer tools including Bitbucket Pipelines, JIRA Server, JIRA Cloud, and Bamboo into the company’s open source platform. The integration will result in automated security checks being a part of the developer workflow before they ship code.

    • Why You Should Seriously Care About SSH User Keys

      A recent film chronicled the downfall of the US subprime home loan market, and its parallels to the current state of Secure Shell (SSH) protocol and SSH user keys were astonishing.

    • 5900 online stores found skimming [analysis]

      Online card skimming is up 69% since Nov 2015

      [...]

      In short: hackers gain access to a store’s source code using various unpatched software flaws. Once a store is under control of a perpetrator, a (Javascript) wiretap is installed that funnels live payment data to an off-shore collection server (mostly in Russia). This wiretap operates transparently for customers and the merchant. Skimmed credit cards are then sold on the dark web for the going rate of $30 per card .

  • Defence/Aggression

    • U.S. Spent $14.6 Million Taxpayer Dollars on Failed Hospital in Afghanistan

      The war in Afghanistan is ready to enter its 16th year (if it was a kid it’s be ready to start driving) and by most definitions is pretty much a bust.

      Despite that, both mainstream candidates have made it clear in public statements they intend to continue pouring money — and lives — into that suppurating sore of American foreign policy. Despite that, there has been no mention of the war in two debates.

      Anyway, while we worry a lot about who call who naughty names in the final presidential debate, can you check around where you live and let me know if your town could use a new hospital, all paid for by someone else’s tax dollars, you know, free to you? ‘Cause that’s the deal Afghanistan got from the USG, only even that turned into a clusterfutz when no one paid much attention to how the facility was thrown together.

    • 5 Shady Things The USSR Did That You Can’t Even Exaggerate

      Can you believe that both poor people and petty criminals had the unbelievable gall to exist in 1930s Russia? If people were to see all those undesirables, why, they might think that communism wasn’t actually a perfect utopia. Something had to be done, and seeing as Soylent Green hadn’t yet been invented, Stalin decided on the next best thing: Cannibal Island.

      Anyone who tried to escape was hunted for sport by the soldiers. There were no shelters or animals on the island, little vegetation, and absolutely no food. It didn’t take long for the prisoners to start eating the dead, and then helping the living become the dead a bit faster so they could eat them too. Here’s a detailed account of a girl stranded on the island who suffered this very fate, but you shouldn’t read it without first looking at pictures of kittens for an hour.

    • Yemen war: ‘My children are starving to death’

      In a shantytown in a deserted area of Yemen’s al-Tohaita district, six-year-old Ahmed Abdullah Ali and his 13 siblings often go to sleep hungry.

      The effects of malnutrition have been the most dramatic on young Ahmed, whose small, frail body looks much younger than his age.

      “I get 500 Yemeni rials [$2] per day, and I have 14 children, so I can hardly provide them with bread, tea and goat’s milk to drink,” the boy’s father, Abdullah Ali, told Al Jazeera.

      “They are suffering from malnutrition. Always, they need food.”

      Many residents of this sparsely populated area, located in the western Hodeidah province, earn some income by breeding animals, but it is not enough to make a living.

    • Obama Promises ‘Proportional’ Response To Russian Hacking, Ignores That We Started The Fight

      Again though, the very idea that the United States would be “responding” is fundamentally incorrect. We’ve been engaged in nation state hacking and election fiddling for decades, happily hacking the planet for almost as long as the internet has existed. We use submarines as underwater hacking platforms, the U.S. government and its laundry list of contractors routinely hacking and fiddling with international elections and destroying reputations when and if it’s convenient to our global business interests. Our behavior in 1970s South America giving tech support to Operation Condor is the dictionary definition of villainy.

      Yet somehow, once countries began hacking us back, we responded with indignant and hypocritical pouting and hand-wringing. But the reality is we are not some unique, special snowflake on the moral high ground in this equation: we’ve historically been the bully, and nationalism all too often blinds us to this fact. Long a nation driven to war by the weakest of supporting evidence, hacking presents those in power with a wonderful, nebulous new enemy, useful in justifying awful legislation, increased domestic surveillance authority, and any other bad idea that can be shoe-horned into the “because… cybersecurity” narrative.

      And as we’re witnessing in great detail, hacking has played a starring role in this nightmarish election, with Donald Trump giving every indication he intends to only ramp up nation state hacking as a core tenet of his idiocracy, and Hillary Clinton lumping Russia, hackers, and WikiLeaks into one giant, amorphous and villainous amoeba to help distract us from what leaked information might actually say about the sorry state of the republic.

    • The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere

      One of the more alarming narratives of the 2016 U.S. election campaign is that of the Kremlin’s apparent meddling. Last week, the United States formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the individual accounts of prominent Washington insiders.

      The hacks, in part leaked by WikiLeaks, have led to loud declarations that Moscow is eager for the victory of Republican nominee Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has unsettled Washington’s traditional European allies and even thrown the future of NATO — Russia’s bête noire — into doubt.

      Leading Russian officials have balked at the Obama administration’s claim. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the suggestion of interference as “ridiculous,” though he said it was “flattering” that Washington would point the finger at Moscow. At a time of pronounced regional tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere, there’s no love lost between Kremlin officials and their American counterparts.

      To be sure, there’s a much larger context behind today’s bluster. As my colleague Andrew Roth notes, whatever their government’s alleged actions in 2016, Russia’s leaders enjoy casting aspersions on the American democratic process. And, in recent years, they have also bristled at perceived U.S. meddling in the politics of countries on Russia’s borders, most notably in Ukraine.

    • Hillary Clinton Acknowledges Saudi Terror Financing in Hacked Email, Hinting at Tougher Approach

      Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have maintained their alliance for seven decades despite disagreements over oil prices, Israel, and, more recently, the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Iran.

      Judging by a 2014 email purportedly written by Hillary Clinton to John Podesta, her current campaign chairman, and published by WikiLeaks, there have been serious tensions over Saudi Arabia’s role in the Syria conflict as well. In the midst of a nine-point overview of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, Clinton wrote:

      “… we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

      Clinton’s private comments differ from the public line taken by members of the Obama administration. Speaking at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, recently called the Saudis “among our very best counterterrorism partners globally.” Last month, Obama, who long ago referred to Saudi Arabia as a “so-called” ally, acted to protect the Saudi government from litigation by vetoing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for damages in U.S. federal court. Congress overturned Obama’s veto, leaving the door open for Saudi Arabia to be named as a defendant in future lawsuits.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Questioning of Julian Assange by Swedish authorities postponed

      The questioning of Julian Assange by Swedish prosecutors at the Ecuadorean embassy in London has been postponed until mid-November.

      Ecuador’s attorney general said on Wednesday that the long-awaited interview, due to take place on Monday, would be delayed until 14 November to ensure that Assange’s legal team could attend.

      Assange has been confined to the embassy since June 2012, when he sought and was granted asylum by Ecuador. He is wanted for questioning by Sweden over an allegation of rape in August 2010, which he denies. The Australian WikiLeaks founder has said he fears he could be transferred to the US to face potential espionage charges arising from WikiLeaks’ publishing activities.

    • The State Department Has Taken Over Three Years On A FOIA Request About How Long It Takes To Process FOIA Requests

      Back in 2013, a young Shawn Musgrave filed a FOIA request with the State Department for its cables regarding former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. To his surprise, he was given an estimated completion date (ECD) of December 2015 — a full 18 months of processing time.

      Curious about where the agency got that oddly specific number from — and with plenty of time on his hands — Shawn filed a follow-up request for any documentation outlining State’s methodology for estimating FOIA completion dates. This is on August 5th, 2013, and he gets an acknowledgement back August 8th, just three days later.

    • On WikiLeaks, Journalism, and Privacy: Reporting on the Podesta Archive is an Easy Call

      For years, WikiLeaks has been publishing massive troves of documents online – usually taken without authorization from powerful institutions and then given to the group to publish – while news outlets report on their relevant content. In some instances, these news outlets work in direct partnership with WikiLeaks – as the New York Times and the Guardian, among others, did when jointly publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and U.S. diplomatic cables – while other times media outlets simply review the archives published by WikiLeaks and then report on what they deem newsworthy.

      WikiLeaks has always been somewhat controversial but reaction has greatly intensified this year because many of their most significant leaks have had an impact on the U.S. presidential election and, in particular, have focused on Democrats. As a result, Republicans who long vilified them as a grave national security threat have become their biggest fans (“I love WikiLeaks,” Donald Trump gushed last night, even though he previously called for Edward Snowden to be executed), while Democrats who cheered them for their mass leaks about Bush-era war crimes now scorn them as an evil espionage tool of the Kremlin.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • A Mega-Drought Is Coming to America’s Southwest

      Between 1545 and 1548, an epidemic swept through the indigenous people of Mexico that is unlike anything else described in the medical literature. People bled from their face while suffering high fevers, black tongue, vertigo, and severe abdominal pain. Large nodules sometimes appeared behind their ears, which then spread to cover the rest of their face. After several days of hemorrhage, most who had been infected died.

      The disease was named cocoliztli, after the Nahautl word for “pest.” By contemporary population estimates, cocoliztli killed 15 million people in the 1540s alone—about 80 percent of the local population. On a demographic basis, it was worse than either the Black Death or the Plague of Justinian. For several centuries, its origin remained a mystery.

    • What if nature, like corporations, had the rights of a person?

      In recent years, the US supreme court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. Following rulings in such cases as Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, US law has established that companies are, like people, entitled to certain rights and protections.

      But that’s not the only instance of extending legal rights to nonhuman entities. New Zealand took a radically different approach in 2014 with the Te Urewera Act which granted an 821-square-mile forest the legal status of a person. The forest is sacred to the Tūhoe people, an indigenous group of the Maori. For them Te Urewera is an ancient and ancestral homeland that breathes life into their culture. The forest is also a living ancestor. The Te Urewera Act concludes that “Te Urewera has an identity in and of itself” and thus must be its own entity with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person”. Te Urewera holds title to itself.

      Although this legal approach is unique to New Zealand, the underlying reason for it is not. Over the last 15 years I have documented similar cultural expressions by Native Americans about their traditional, sacred places. As an anthropologist, this research has often pushed me to search for an answer to the profound question: What does it mean for nature to be a person?

      A majestic mountain sits not far north-west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like a low triangle, with long gentle slopes, Mount Taylor is clothed in rich forests that appear a velvety charcoal-blue from the distance. Its bald summit, more than 11,000 feet high, is often blanketed in snow – a reminder of the blessing of water, when seen from the blazing desert below.

  • Finance

    • Outsourced IT workers ask Feinstein for help, get form letter in return

      A University of California IT employee whose job is being outsourced to India recently wrote Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for help.

      Feinstein’s office sent back a letter addressing manufacturing job losses, not IT, and offered the worker no assistance.

      The employee is part of a group of 50 IT workers and another 30 contractors facing layoffs after the university hired an offshore outsourcing firm. The firm, India-based HCL, won a contract to manage infrastructure services.

      That contract is worth about $50 million over five years and can be leveraged by other university campuses — meaning they could also bring in HCL if they so choose.

      The affected IT employees, who work at the school’s San Francisco (UCSF) campus, are slated to lose their jobs in February and say they will be training foreign replacements.

    • What Wells Fargo knew

      A Wells Fargo bank manager tried to warn the head of the company’s regional banking unit of an improperly created customer account in January 2006, five years earlier than the bank has said its board first learned of abuses at its branches.

      In recent months, the discovery of as many as 2 million improperly created accounts has widened into a public scandal for Wells Fargo, one of the country’s largest banks by assets. Some lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Roger Williams of Texas, have called for CEO John Stumpf to step down. A letter written in 2005 and obtained by VICE News details unethical practices that occurred at Washington state branches of the bank, suggesting the conduct began years before previously understood.

    • Ex-Wells Fargo worker: Intimidation included no bathroom breaks

      Harassment, intimidation, even bathroom breaks denied. That’s some of the “unconscionable behavior” a former Wells Fargo worker drove five hours to confront a bank executive about.

      Nathan Todd Davis said at a California State Assembly hearing on the Wells Fargo (WFC) fake account scandal that he filed 50 ethics complaints during his decade of working at Wells Fargo — but nothing was ever done.

      “I’ve been harassed, intimidated, written up and denied bathroom breaks,” said Davis, who drove 350 miles from his home in Lodi, California, to speak at the hearing.

    • Ericsson shares in free fall on stock market

      Ericsson shares, which have lost more than half their value in the last 18 months, plunged around 16-18 percent shortly after trading opened in Stockholm, as the company’s warning that its third-quarter profits would significicantly miss target sent shockwaves through the Swedish business community.

      “The forecasts and expectations on Ericsson ahead of the report were low, really low. That they would surprise on the negative side, that comes as a big surprise to me. Especially that it is by so much,” Joakim Bornold, savings economist at Nordnet, told the TT newswire.

      Sales sunk 14 percent between July and September compared to the same period a year earlier, to 51.1 billion kronor ($5.8 billion), Ericsson said in a statement on Wednesday morning.

      Operating income is expected to be 300 million kronor for the third quarter, compared to 5.1 billion in the third quarter of 2015, it said, citing poor demand in developing markets.

    • Facebook tells IRS it won’t pay billions over Irish tax maneuver

      Apple isn’t alone in taking advantage of the US tax system. Facebook also established an overseas subsidiary in Ireland largely for tax purposes—using what is known as the “Double Irish” technique—and named Dublin its base for business outside North America. But the Internal Revenue Service claims Facebook undervalued the move, and the IRS wants the California company to pay $1.7 million in taxes, plus interest, for the year 2010 and possibly subsequent years—an amount that Facebook says could reach billions.

      Facebook, however, told the IRS late Tuesday in a court filing that it shouldn’t have to pay. It’s a tax fight likely to fuel the debate over tax loopholes, which have become a hot-button topic in the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

      The social-networking site asked a US Tax Court to reverse the IRS’ conclusion that Facebook undervalued property when it was transferred to Facebook Ireland Holdings Ltd. Not including intellectual property, Facebook assumed a value of roughly $5.8 billion; the IRS claimed nearly $14 billion.

    • The four tensions of Brexit

      The story of Brexit can be set out as four tensions.

      How these tensions are resolved (or not resolved) will determine how (and if) Brexit plays out.

    • German trade bodies back Angela Merkel’s tough stance over Brexit

      Two of the largest German trade associations have come out in support of Angela Merkel taking a firm stance during negotiations over Britain’s exit from the EU, even if it comes at a short-term cost.

      Speaking at a briefing in Brussels, the presidents of the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) and the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts (ZDH) said that granting Britain an opt-out from the four freedoms – free movement of goods, services, capital and persons – could amount to the “beginning of the end” of the single market.

      “You cannot say: ‘I take part on three counts but not on the fourth,’” said the DIHK’s Eric Schweitzer. Untangling the unity of the four freedoms, he argued, “creates the risk that the whole of Europe would fall apart”.

      “The economic consequences would be dramatic. The single market has played an important part in us having growth and prosperity in Europe.”

      Hans Peter Wollseifer, the president of the ZDH, said he agreed with his counterpart from an economic point of view, but warned that the rest of Europe should not let the UK “drift off too far”. The EU had to learn from Brexit, Wollseifer said, and “maybe be a bit more restrained in passing laws and regulations that affect even the smallest business”.

    • Why the Article 50 case may be the most important constitutional case for a generation

      13th October 2016

      Today at the High Court in London the hearing begins of the challenge to the government about whether it can trigger Article 50 instead of Parliament.

      The case is not about whether Article 50 is triggered or not. The case is instead about who makes the decision. Is the decision to be made by the government or by Parliament?

      As a matter of law, the answer is not clear.

      There are outstanding lawyers who in good faith disagree.

      Because there is no exact precedent, the arguments on both sides draw on first principles.

      Nobody can predict with certainty which way the court will go.

      And whichever way the court goes, there will (no doubt) be a “leap-frog” appeal to the Supreme Court, where the case will probably be joined to the similar Northern Irish case (which also covers the Good Friday Agreement). I understand the Scottish government may also intervene at the appeal stage.

      The Supreme Court hearing may take place as early as December, and so this may be over by Christmas. We may know before the end of the year whether, as a matter of domestic law, it is for the government or Parliament to decide.

    • Hacked Emails Show Hillary Clinton Repeatedly Praised Wal-Mart in Paid Speeches

      When a group of labor activists demanded in 2014 that Hillary Clinton use her influence with Wal-Mart — where she sat on the board of directors for six years — to raise workers’ wages, Clinton’s top aides turned to Wal-Mart’s former top lobbyist for advice on how to respond.

      And in a series of highly paid appearances after leaving the State Department, Clinton praised the company’s practices and spoke fondly of its founder in speeches that were kept secret from the public.

      Wal-Mart, America’s largest private employer, has become a top target of progressives because of its aggressive union-busting and notoriously low wages and lack of benefits. But emails documenting a continued warm relationship between Clinton and the massive retailer are among thousands posted by Wikileaks over the past week from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s gmail account.

      One emailed document is an 80-page list prepared by Clinton’s own research department, detailing the most potentially damaging quotes from the secret speeches. The last four pages are devoted to Wal-Mart.

    • German High Court Paves Way For Government To Sign CETA, Hands Down Conditions

      The German Constitutional Court in a fast-track decision today rejected the granting of emergency injunctions against a German signature of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) of Europe with Canada.

      Four groups with a total of close to 200,000 people (2 BvR 1368/16, 2 BvR 1444/16, 2 BvR 1823/16, 2 BvR 1482/16, 2 BvE 3/16) (English version here) had appealed to the highest German court to stop their government from signing the free trade deal with Canada at a meeting of the European Council of trade ministers on 18 October.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Physically Attacked by Donald Trump – a PEOPLE Writer’s Own Harrowing Story

      In December 2005, PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald and Melania Trump. What she says happened next left her badly shaken. Reached for comment, a spokeswoman for Trump said, “This never happened. There is no merit or veracity to this fabricated story.” What follows is Stoynoff’s account.

      “Just for the record,” Anderson Cooper asked Donald Trump, during the presidential debate last Sunday, “are you saying … that you did not actually kiss women without (their) consent?”

      “I have not,” Trump insisted.

      I remember it differently.

      In the early 2000s, I was assigned the Trump beat for PEOPLE magazine. For years I reported on all things Donald.

      I tracked his hit show The Apprentice, attended his wedding to Melania Knauss and roamed the halls of his lavish Trump Tower abode. Melania was kind and sweet during our many chats, and Donald was as bombastic and entertaining as you would expect. We had a very friendly, professional relationship.

      Then, in December 2005, around the time Trump had his now infamous conversation with Billy Bush, I traveled to Mar-a-Lago to interview the couple for a first-wedding-anniversary feature story.

    • Official Who Developed Superdelegate System Offered Clinton Campaign Plan To Dupe Sanders Supporters

      Mark Siegel, a former Democratic Party official, played a key role in drafting the superdelegate provisions, which the party adopted in response to what happened with George McGovern at the 1972 convention. In a Clinton campaign email released by WikiLeaks, he offers the campaign a plan to dupe Bernie Sanders supporters into feeling like they “won” a major superdelegate “reform” at the Democratic National Convention.

      As Siegel highlights, the Democratic Party establishment went against the liberal wing of the party and added party officials. The Democratic National Committee voted on delegate selection rules and made themselves “automatic delegates.”

      “Bernie and his people have been bitching about super delegates and the huge percentage that have come out for Hillary,” Siegel writes. “Since the original idea was to bring our elected officials to the convention ex-officio, because of the offices and the constituencies they represent, why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not state chairs or vice-chairs?”

    • Clinton answers written questions under penalty of perjury in email lawsuit

      Hillary Clinton submitted formal answers under penalty of perjury on Thursday about her use of a private email server, saying 20 times that she did not recall the requested information or related discussions, while also asserting that no one ever warned her that the practice could run afoul of laws on preserving federal records.

      “Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall being advised, cautioned, or warned, she does not recall that it was ever suggested to her, and she does not recall participating in any communication, conversation, or meeting in which it was discussed that her use of a clintonemail.com e-mail account to conduct official State Department business conflicted with or violated federal recordkeeping laws,” lawyers for Clinton wrote.

    • If Trump leaks are OK and Clinton leaks aren’t, there’s a problem

      The 2016 presidential campaign isn’t turning out to be the Facebook election, as some people have dubbed it. More than anything else, it’s now the Election Dominated By Leaks.

      In the final month of the race, the Clinton and Trump campaigns’ main attack points now revolve around several major leaks that have put their opposing candidate on the defensive. Both campaigns or their supporters have been actively encouraging leaks about the other side, while claiming leaks involving them are either illegitimate or illegal.

      Either way, it’s yet another example of why leaks are very much in the public interest when they can expose how presidential candidates act behind closed doors – and the motivations of the leakers shouldn’t prevent news organizations from reporting on them.

    • What the WikiLeaks Emails Say About Clinton

      “There is no other Donald Trump,” Hillary Clinton likes to say about her opponent. “This is it.”

      The events of the last two weeks—Trump’s two debate performances, the release of his bawdy comments about women in a 2005 video clip, his lashing out against Republicans who are deserting him—have proven Clinton correct on that count.

      But the leak of thousands of hacked email exchanges among Clinton’s top advisers suggest the same can be said about her—at least in her role as a public figure. They capture a candidate, and a campaign, that seems in private exactly as cautious, calculating, and politically flexible as they appeared to be in public. The Clinton campaign underestimated and then fretted about rival candidate Bernie Sanders, worried about Joe Biden entering the primary race and Elizabeth Warren endorsing her opponent, plotted endlessly about managing Clinton’s image in the press, took advantage of its close ties to the Obama administration and the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, and took public positions to the left of comments Clinton herself made during private paid speeches to Wall Street firms.

    • Before Campaign Ever Launched, Clinton Planned To Support TPP If Elected

      An email published by WikiLeaks from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign shows staff carefully tailored her remarks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and fast-track negotiating authority for the trade deal so she could eventually support them if elected president.

      The email comes from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account, which he says was hacked.

      In March 2015, before she officially launched her campaign, Dan Schwerin, who is a director of speechwriting, sent out a draft letter of planned remarks on trade.

      “The idea here is to use this to lay out her thinking on TPA & TPP ahead of action on the Hill and a joint letter by all the former secretaries of state and defense,” Schwerin stated. “This draft assumes that she’s ultimately going to support both TPA and TPP.”

      “It focuses on what needs to happen to produce a positive result with TPP, and casts support for TPA [fast-track] as one of those steps. It also says that we should walk away if the final agreement doesn’t meet the test of creating more jobs than it displaces, helping the middle class, and strengthening our national security,” Schwerin added.

      Schwerin maintained the remarks spoke directly to “prominent concerns” of labor and Democrats on Capitol Hill, including concerns expressed by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

    • Donald Trump was accused of sexual harassment, assault, or inappropriate behavior 11 times in the past 24 hours

      It was a long Wednesday for Donald Trump. Oct. 12 started off with a revelation from a former Miss Teen USA that Donald Trump would walk in on the show’s teenage contestants while they were changing (something he had actually bragged about doing to Howard Stern), included a series of sexual assault accusations from several different women, and ended with a cringe-worthy video of him joking about dating a young girl.

      These are not the first times Trump has been accused of sexual harassment, assault, or inappropriate behavior.

    • More allegations, questionable Trump comments on women surface

      As Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign tries to move past a recently released 2005 tape of his lewd remarks about women, more video of similar comments made by Trump is surfacing.

      In an “Entertainment Tonight” Christmas feature in 1992, Trump looked at a group of young girls and said he would be dating one of them in ten years. At the time, Trump would have been 46 years old.

    • FBI Source: Majority Of Staff On Clinton Case Wanted Her Prosecuted

      The decision at the FBI to not prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information was solely from the top down, a source told Fox News.

      “No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute — it was a top-down decision,” said the source who is described as an official close to the Clinton case.

    • “High agitated” Trump shouts at NYT reporter asking him about sex assault claims: “You are a disgusting human being”

      Jessica Leeds, 74, a retired businesswoman, says Trump sexually assaulted her on a plane flight in the early 1980s, forcing her to change seats: “He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”

      Rachel Crooks, then a 22-year-old receptionist working in Trump Tower, says he forced a kiss on her in 2005: “It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”

    • Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately

      Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.

      “No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”

      At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.

      More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

      About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.

    • Democrats Say WikiLeaks Is a Russian Front, U.S. Intelligence Isn’t So Sure

      The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee are publicly accusing WikiLeaks of being a front for the Russian government and an ally in efforts to help elect Donald Trump, but U.S. intelligence officials aren’t so sure.

      On Monday, Clinton’s spokesman called WikiLeaks “a propaganda arm” of the Kremlin and accused the site’s founder, Julian Assange, of “colluding with [the] Russian government to help Trump” by leaking embarrassing emails taken from the Democratic National Committee and from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. That statement went further than an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Homeland Security Department last week that stopped short of explicitly naming WikiLeaks as a Russian agent. (It also made no mention of Trump or his campaign.)

      Then, on Tuesday, the interim chair of the DNC tied WikiLeaks to an ongoing campaign to meddle with the U.S. elections. “Our Intelligence Community has made it clear that the Russian government is responsible for the cyberattacks aimed at interfering with our election, and that WikiLeaks is part of that effort,” Donna Brazile said in a statement.

    • WikiLeaks pumps out Clinton emails

      WikiLeaks is trying to take an active role in the presidential election, even as federal intelligence officials are openly speculating that the group has become a mouthpiece for the Russian government.

      The anti-secrecy organization on Tuesday released its third cache of material allegedly stolen from the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

    • Clinton campaign dubs WikiLeaks ‘Russian propaganda’ after latest hack

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign fired back on Tuesday as WikiLeaks released a new tranche of hacked emails from the account of its chairman, John Podesta, dubbing the website a “propaganda arm of the Russian government” seeking to help elect the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

      The latest batch of more than 2,000 emails, disclosed on Monday, offered a glimpse into the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. They included insights on multiple fronts, such as a lack of preparedness for Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign, concerns raised by Chelsea Clinton over potential conflicts of interest for the family’s foundation, and efforts by aides on how to best frame the former secretary of state’s second bid for the White House.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Upload Filtering Mandate Would Shred European Copyright Safe Harbor
    • The Weird Facebook Politics of Dakota Pipeline Protests

      Yesterday, on Indigenous People’s Day, a group of 27 protesters was arrested at a Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) site in North Dakota. One of these people was actress Shailene Woodley, who is known for her role in Divergent, as well as for being a general celebrity.

      Protesters and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe have been peacefully opposing the pipeline over land and water risks, as well as its disturbance of sacred sites. Last month, a federal judge overturned the tribe’s request for an injunction to halt the crude oil pipeline’s construction.

    • Facebook deactivates mother’s account after she posts photo of her breastfeeding stranger’s child

      Facebook disabled a mother’s account after she posted a photo of her breastfeeding a stranger’s child with her own.

      Rebecca Wanosik, from Missouri, uploaded the picture online showing how she helped a mother she had never met after recieving a text message from a friend.

      The baby in question had only ever been breast fed and was refusing a bottle after her mother had been hospitalised.

    • Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors

      The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.

      As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.

      “I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. “It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.” (The team member, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, spoke on the condition of anonymity.)

    • Facebook still has a nipple problem

      Facebook has come under criticism for censoring a news article on mammograms due to an image of a woman’s exposed breast. The company apologized for removing the post and restored it late Tuesday, though the incident adds to an ongoing controversy over a moderation policy that some have described as sexist.

      The article, published Tuesday by Les Décodeurs, a data-focused website run by the French newspaper Le Monde, reported on a recent government initiative to overhaul mammogram screening in France. Its lead image showed a woman undergoing a mammogram, with one of her nipples exposed. Facebook removed the article shortly after it was posted to Les Décodeurs’ page, apparently because the image of a nipple violated the company’s community standards.

    • We must have the freedom to mock Islam

      How did mocking Islam become the great speechcrime of our times? Louis Smith, the gymnast, is the latest to fall foul of the weird new rule against ridiculing Islam. A leaked video shows Smith laughing as his fellow gymnast, Luke Carson, pretends to pray and chants ‘Allahu Akbar’. Smith says something derogatory about the belief in ‘60 virgins’ (he means 72 virgins). Following a firestorm online, and the launch of an investigation by British Gymnastics, Smith has engaged in some pretty tragic contrition. He says he is ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘deep offence’ he caused. He’s now basically on his knees for real, praying for pity, begging for forgiveness from the guardians of what may be thought and said.

      The response to Smith’s silly video has been so mad you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d been caught snorting coke or hanging with prostitutes. But all he did was have an innocent laugh at the expense of a global religion. He made light fun of a faith system. That’s not allowed anymore? This was a ‘shock video’, yells the press, as if it were a sex tape. Angry tweeters want Adidas and Kellogg’s to stop using Smith in their ads, as if he’d been exposed as a violent criminal. In truth, he has simply been revealed as having an opinion — a jokey opinion, he insists — about a religion. He faces public ridicule and potential punishment for taking the mick out of a belief system. Whatever happened to the right to blaspheme?

      Smith’s travails confirm the authoritarian impulse behind the desire to stamp out Islamophobia. Campaigners against Islamophobia insist they simply want to protect Muslims from harassment, which is a noble goal. But in truth they often seem concerned with protecting Islam from ridicule. Indeed, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation, says Smith must ‘apologise immediately’ (he did) because ‘our faith is not to be mocked, our faith is to be celebrated’. Excuse me? Mr Shafiq, and a great many other people, should acquaint themselves with the principle of freedom of speech, which absolutely includes the right to mock faiths. Including Islam.

    • Why RedHack challenges Turkey’s political establishment

      In their 20 years of operation, the hacktivist group RedHack has pulled off many high-profile breaches, such as leaking documents from Turkish National Police, penetrating the Turkish army’s Commando Brigade, wiping out electricity bills in protest of a power plant, and defacing milk companies that delivered tainted milk in primary schools.

      But most of their activities go unreported in Turkey’s censored media, which aims to hide the government corruption and incapacity RedHack often reveals.

      The news about their latest leak, a 17GB email archive from Turkey’s Energy Minister and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, is sharing the same fate—this time with the Turkish government’s expanded online censorship powers.

    • Facebook is under fire for censorship again, this time for blocking an image of a mammogram

      Facebook just can’t help itself.

      Less than a month after facing backlash over its censorship of the Vietnam War’s iconic “Napalm Girl” image, the social media giant is now under fire for removing an article published by Les Décodeurs, a data-focused website affiliated with French newspaper Le Monde. The story, about the French government’s efforts to overhaul mammogram-screening in the country, included a lead image of an exposed female breast. The nipple in the photograph apparently violated Facebook’s nudity policy.

    • Europe’s Brilliant Strategy to Defeat ISIS Is…Censorship?

      Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that social media and the internet mean that newspapers trying to control the flow of information on such a topic is utterly futile. Such suggestions are gross insults to ordinary people and demonstrate a remarkable arrogance. They assume that the regular man or woman on the street cannot be trusted with reality; that they are incapable of reading the newspaper (even one as sober as Le Monde) without being whipped up into a frenzy of xenophobia and anti-Muslim feeling.

    • Grabbing Tr**p by the Pussy: Censorship in the Media

      Since the video of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women was released, news organizations have been questioning whether they should publish exactly what he said word for word, obscenity for obscenity. Ultimately, the words he used and how he used them were newsworthy and news organizations should not water down what he said to avoid publishing profanity.

      Organizations like the New York Times, CNN, Politico, Reuters and NBC News all decided against censoring “pussy,” “bitch,” “tits,” or “fuck.” Other organizations, like the LA Times, decided to use substitute words like “crotch” or “genitals” instead. Some organizations decided to put a dashes in place of most letters of the word. The Washington Post, who broke the story, decided to use the hyphen method. The New York Times who, although it did not initially censor the story, is now using the hyphen too.

    • PINAC’s Executive Director Sues Miami Beach Mayor over Social Media Censorship

      Like most politicians, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine campaigned on a platform of promising better transparency to his constituents.

      And like most politicians, he proved to be a liar.

      But unlike most politicians, he is being sued over his broken promise.

    • Australia Senate lifts media censorship rules after 25 years

      The Australian Senate on Thursday lifted tough censorship rules on media coverage of its sessions at the urging of a senator who himself was recently snapped snoozing in the chamber.

      Independent lawmaker Derryn Hinch, who is a former journalist, was caught napping by a photographer in the Senate in August when it sat for the first time after July elections.

      The extraordinary restrictions on press photographers working in the Senate have banned such candid and unflattering pictures for the past 25 years. Senators can be snapped only when they stand to speak.

    • Photography censorship in the Senate lifted after 25-year battle
    • Senate scraps archaic photography ban following 25-year fight for transparency
    • Guantánamo judge approves retroactive censorship of open-court hearings
    • Still A Bad Idea: Gawker Exploring Lawsuit Against Peter Thiel
    • Gawker Looking Into Lawsuit Against Peter Thiel

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bangladesh Introduces ‘Smart’ National Identity Cards

      The NID cards replace existing laminated cards used by the Election Commission, but they have many other functions. Banking, passport details, driving licenses, trade licenses, tax payments, and share trading are among the 22 other services that can be accessed through the cards, with more to follow. The cards will also be associated with an individual’s mobile phone SIM card.

    • Bangladesh Brings In Nationwide Digital Identity Cards Linking Biometrics To Mobile Phone Numbers

      Sadly, it seems that governments in India and Bangladesh are too excited by the prospect of the “efficiencies” such a digital identity framework could in theory offer — to say nothing of the unmatched surveillance possibilities — to worry much about tiresome practical details like the system not working properly for vast swathes of their people.

    • Step aside, Snowden: new theft on the rise
    • What can government contractors do to stop insider threats?
    • NSA contractor thought to have taken classified material the old-fashioned way
    • NSA Contractor Busted In Alleged Theft of Secret Documents
    • What are U.S. officials saying about a potential NSA-CYBERCOM split?

      A number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are vehemently opposed to severing the dual-hat position between the director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command.

      What are the prospects that the NSA and CYBERCOM will split in the final months of President Barack Obama’s final term?

    • Google and Facebook are building the fastest trans-Pacific cable yet

      Google and Facebook are teaming up to build a 120 Terabits per second (Tbps) submarine cable that will connect Los Angeles with Hong Kong. The two companies are working with Pacific Light Data Communication — a wholly owned subsidiary of China Soft Power Technology that’s relatively new to the sub-sea cable game.

      Once the new 12,800 km cable is at full capacity, it’ll be the highest-capacity trans-Pacific cable yet. Until now, that record was held by the FASTER cable, which Google also has a stake in.

    • Examining Yahoo’s nightmare vision of ‘smart’ billboards

      On October 6th, when the company frankly had bigger PR problems to worry about, Yahoo filed a patent application for a smart billboard – a poster hoarding which proposes using an array of privacy-invading tools to deliver targeted ads to passers-by or motorists.

      Anyone who has seen the 2002 SF epic Minority Report will find the concept familiar, and perhaps rather chilling – in it we see the central protagonist trying to blend into a shopping mall while ‘smart’ advertisements call out to him by name, in a public context where no anonymity is available.

      The billboard proposed is very smart indeed – a real-world analogue of the very personalised ad-targeting which has become so controversial in the past couple of years, yet with no analogous technological remedy, such as adblocking software provides online. The systems envisaged would use an array of data-exploiting techniques and technologies to personalise the ambient advertising experience, including cell-tower location data, facial recognition, and vehicle and license-plate recognition. The scheme proposes many sensors, including drone-based cameras, to facilitate this level of targeting.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Iranian child bride to be executed within days after ‘grossly unfair trial’

      Amnesty International has urged the Iranian authorities to halt the execution of a 22-year-old woman accused of murdering her husband at the age of 17.

      Zeinab Sekaanvand is due to be executed by hanging as soon as Thursday 13 October, after what Amnesty International has described as a “grossly unfair trial”.

      Ms Sekaanvand was arrested on February 2012 for the murder of her husband, whom she married at the age of 15.

    • European jails are ‘breeding ground’ for militants warns report

      Europe’s prisons have become a “breeding ground” for Islamic State and Al-Qaeda militants, with a report finding almost two thirds of European “jihadists” were previously involved in violent crime.

      The report, released by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at London’s King’s College, warned of the development of a “new crime-terror nexus” in which criminal networks in prisons and in communities gave way to recruitment into militant groups. Prisons, in particular, are a major hub for such groups.

      “Prison is becoming important as a place where a lot of networking happens,” said Peter Neumann, director of the ICSR and co-author of the report.

      “Given the recent surge in terrorism-related arrests and convictions… we are convinced that prisons will become more – rather than less – significant as breeding grounds for the jihadist movement.”

      The generation who have gone to join IS is, in contrast to previous generations, heavily drawn in Europe from criminal backgrounds. The report, which is drawn from profiles of 79 recent European militants found that 57 percent of them had previously been incarcerated and that 65 percent had been involved in violent crime.

      This contrasts with previous generations of Islamic militants who were recruited from religious establishments or universities and often came from relatively well-established middle-class families.

    • Self-Driving Mercedes Will Prioritize Occupant Safety Over Pedestrians

      The technology is new, but the moral conundrum isn’t: A self-driving car identifies a group of children running into the road. There is no time to stop. To swerve around them would drive the car into a speeding truck on one side or over a cliff on the other, bringing certain death to anybody inside.

      To anyone pushing for a future for autonomous cars, this question has become the elephant in the room, argued over incessantly by lawyers, regulators, and ethicists; it has even been at the center of a human study by Science. Happy to have their names kept in the background of the life-or-death drama, most carmakers have let Google take the lead while making passing reference to ongoing research, investigations, or discussions.

    • After A Sensitive Story, A Pakistani Journalist Is Barred From Leaving

      Cyril Almeida has a reputation for being one of Pakistan’s most astute political observers. His columns for the venerable English-language Dawn newspaper are widely read by South Asia-watchers. More than 100,000 people follow him on Twitter.

      So it was inevitable that the decision by the Pakistani government to ban him from leaving the country would be met with widespread indignation.

    • Finalists named for EU’s Sakharov Prize

      Last year’s winner was Saudi blogger Raif Badawi.

    • University Of Michigan Gets Lost In The Tall SJW Weeds

      The University of Michigan, my alma mater, will spend $85 million on “diversity” efforts over the next five years, including a disturbing cultural sensitivity program that will monitor students’ progress in being indoctrinated.

    • Asia Bibi blasphemy case to be heard by Pakistan supreme court

      The most notorious cases involving Pakistan’s blasphemy laws will be heard by the country’s supreme court on Thursday in a legal showdown that lawyers hope will spare the life of a poor Christian woman and curb future convictions.

      Asia Bibi was sentenced to death in 2010 for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad following a bad-tempered argument with Muslim women in Itanwali, the small village in Punjab where she used to live.

      She became a touchstone for liberals and Islamists alike after her case was linked to the assassination in January 2011 of Salmaan Taseer, then governor of Punjab.

    • The Social Media Revolution to Save Asia Bibi – Abolish Blasphemy Laws

      72 hours remain until Asia Bibi’s final appeal to overcome her death sentence for blasphemy in Pakistan. It is imperative that people act now! You can help save this innocent woman by simply posting on social media. I know that for many this assertion sounds far-fetched, but it is a fact. A 2012 study published in the journal Nature, “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” tested the idea that voting behaviour can be significantly influenced by messages on Facebook. Further, The Centre for European Studies released a publication entitled, ‘Social Media – The New Power of Political Influence’, in which the authors demonstrated the power of social media on global politics, evincing the dramatic impact of social media on the 2008 US presidential election, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, among various other global events. Social media’s power to influence governmental decision making may also be implied by the efforts of certain governments to limit its citizens access to it. During Obama’s visit to Vietnam in May of this year (2016), the Vietnamese government blocked its citizen’s access to Facebook in a bid to silence human rights activists who might have embarrassed the government. It should come as no surprise that Pakistan was ranked the 10th worst country for internet censorship in 2014 by Freedom House. In their report they stated:

    • Iranian vice president faces calls to resign over claims she shook hands with male politician

      Iranians have called for their vice president to stand down after it was wrongly claimed she had shaken hands with a male politician.

      State broadcasters indicated Masoumeh Ebtekar had shaken hands with a male minister at a meeting, triggering a furore.

      Instead, she met German female environment minister, Barbara Hendriks, who was wearing a suit and had short hair.

    • Pigs can’t fly – Qantas bans pork on in-flight menu to respect Islam

      QANTAS has removed pork from its in-flight menu on flights to and from Europe as a result of its partnership with Middle Eastern airline Emirates.

      No food containing pork or pork products will be served on those flights – which now has a stopover in Dubai – because it is strictly forbidden in Islam and is considered “unholy”.

      All meals offered on the route in first, business and economy classes will also be prepared without alcohol in keeping with the Islamic religion. A note on the Qantas menus on flights in and out of Dubai states that the meals do not contain pork products or alcohol. The airline has also introduced a mezze plate offering traditional Middle Eastern fare in its upper classes and has Arabic translations after in-flight announcements.

    • Attorney, family rebuke DA’s decision in tasing death

      The attorneys representing the family of Chase Sherman criticized the Coweta district attorney’s decision not to press charges in Sherman’s death at a press conference held Wednesday.

      Attorney Chris Stewart called it “one of the most horrible decisions” he had ever seen a district attorney make.

    • Car Attacks in Denmark Spread ‘Like an Infection’

      The arsonists appear to operate with little deference to class, equally at ease scorching a shiny new BMW or Mercedes as they are setting a battered old van ablaze.

      And they almost always follow a pattern — smashing a window and dousing the interior of the vehicle with gasoline before setting it on fire.

      At least 185 cars have been set ablaze in Copenhagen, the Danish capital, so far this year, the police say, with a sudden and mysterious increase over the past two months or so, when about 80 automobiles were burned.

      [...]

      Even after the Danish police arrested a 21-year-old man in August in relation to the arson, cars continued to burn. Mr. Moller Jensen said that both of the men who were arrested came from a working-class neighborhood in Amager, a Danish island. Playing down the idea that the burnings could be related to immigration, he said that one suspect was an ethnic Dane, while the other was not.

      Mr. Moller Jensen said the car burning may have spread from neighboring Sweden, where more than 70 cars have been burned in the city of Malmo since early July. Dozens of cars have also been set on fire in Stockholm, and Goteborg, on the west coast of the country. Car burning has become such a scourge there that the Swedish authorities have turned to drones to try to catch the arsonists.

    • “Do Not Resist”: The Police Militarization Documentary Everyone Should See

      On a sunny afternoon last summer, Craig Atkinson, a New York City-based filmmaker, stood in a front yard in South Carolina surrounded by several heavily armed police officers.

      The officers, members of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department tactical team, were descending on a modest one-story house looking for drugs and guns. The team smashed through the windows of the home with iron pikes, then stormed the front door with rifles raised.

      Inside, they found a terrified family of four, including an infant. As the family members were pulled outside, Atkinson’s camera captured a scene that plays out with startling regularity in cities and towns across the country, one of many included in his new documentary, “Do Not Resist,” an examination of police militarization in the United States.

    • Turkish Prisons Are Filled With Professors — Like My Father

      A Turkish professor who was my father’s colleague and frequently visited our house is now incapable of counting right amount of money to pay for a bottle of water at a prison canteen. He is traumatized as a result of days of harsh treatment during the interrogation. He is sharing a prison cell with my father, longtime friends, in western Turkey.

      My father, a professor at Sakarya University for 16 years, is among nearly 2,500 academics who were dismissed and arrested in connection to the failed coup attempt on July 15. He would have never imagined that police would storm our house, just several days after the failed plot, and take him into custody. He was asked endless questions in 10 days under detention, for hours every day — questions that he has no answers for. He was rounded up just four days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a state of emergency rule that allows anyone to be detained up to 30 days without any charges. Turkey suspended European Convention on Human Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and there is no due process in a country that is still seeking to become a member of the European Union.

    • Hate crimes soared after EU referendum, Home Office figures confirm

      The number of hate crimes leaped by 41% in the month after the vote to leave the European Union, new Home Office statistics confirm.

      A daily breakdown of the hate crime offences reported to the police showed the number of incidents doubled in the days after the referendum. The level peaked at 207 incidents on 1 July, twice as many as before the vote, when the level was already unusually high.

      In July, there were 5,468 hate crimes – 41% higher than July 2015. A Home Office report on the data noted that the “sharp increase” in hate crime was not replicated in equivalent offences at the time.

    • After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

      At first, the Americans seemed confused about Suleiman Abdullah Salim. They apparently had been expecting a light-skinned Arab, and instead at a small airport outside Mogadishu that day in March 2003, they had been handed a dark-skinned African.

      “They said, ‘You changed your face,’” Mr. Salim, a Tanzanian, recalled the American men telling him when he arrived. “They said: ‘You are Yemeni. You changed your face.’”

      That was the beginning of Mr. Salim’s strange ordeal in United States custody. It has been 13 years since he was tortured in a secret prison in Afghanistan run by the Central Intelligence Agency, a place he calls “The Darkness.” It has been eight years since he was released — no charges, no explanations — back into the world.

      Even after so much time, Mr. Salim, 45, is struggling to move on. Suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress, according to a medical assessment, he is withdrawn and wary. He cannot talk about his experiences with his wife, who he says worries that the Americans will come back to snatch him. He is fearful of drawing too much attention at home in Stone Town in Zanzibar, Tanzania, concerned that his neighbors will think he is an American spy.

    • Ethiopia has finally admitted to the deaths of more than 500 anti-government protestors

      After almost a year of anti-government protests, Ethiopia on Tuesday (Oct. 11) admitted that the death toll from police crackdowns and deadly stampedes could exceed more than 500 people. The admission came a few days after the government declared a country-wide six-month state of emergency, and blamed external forces for trying to break up the nation of over 100 million people.

      Hailemariam Desalegn, the country’s prime minister, said that the death toll in Oromia region had been at least 170, while another 120 died in Amhara since the demonstrations began. But “when you add it up it could be more than 500,” he said. Activists and opposition groups have disputed these numbers in the past, arguing that more people died when security officers dispersed demonstrations.

    • Study Says Body Cameras Can Reduce Force Usage… But Only If Officers Turn Them On

      A couple of months ago, a study was released claiming to show a link between body camera use and a rise in shootings by officers. The small increase in shootings in 2015 — an increase that wasn’t shown in 2013 and 2014 — could be nothing more than a normal deviation, but it was portrayed by the authors as something a bit more sinister.

      [...]

      Accountability tools are only as good as the departments deploying them. Very few officers are punished for treating their cameras as optional — something that only needs to be activated when capturing interactions that are innocuous or show the officers in their best light.

      It’s a persistent problem that predates body cameras. Dash cams and body mics are still routinely disabled by officers even though these two recording methods have been in use for dozens of years. Officers who haven’t been punished for thwarting these accountability tools aren’t going to change their ways just because the camera is now on their body. And more recent additions to the workforce aren’t going to need much time on the job to figure out that failing to capture footage of use of force incidents will have almost zero effect on their careers.

      Obviously, it would be impossible to remove all control from officers wearing cameras. But there are steps that can be taken to reduce the number of times use of force incidents occur without anyone “seeing” them. In edge cases, the lack of footage — especially if everything else that day was captured without difficulty — should weigh heavily against officers when investigating use of force incidents. If an officer has the capability to capture footage of a disputed incident but doesn’t, the burden of proof should shift to the officer, rather than the person making the complaint.

      If police departments don’t want to see themselves targeted with more possibly frivolous complaints and lawsuits, they need to ensure officers whose cameras routinely “malfunction” or aren’t activated are held accountable for their refusal to maintain a record of their interactions with citizens. Law enforcement’s history with older forms of recording technology is exactly spotless. Granting officers the benefit of a doubt with body cams is nothing more than the extension of unearned trust — a gift law enforcement agencies seem to give themselves repeatedly.

    • Court Says Deleting Browser History To ‘Avoid Embarrassment’ Isn’t Destruction Of Evidence

      The court found that the documents central to the lawsuit were not affected by Moyse’s actions. They were available through Dropbox accounts and forensic examiners found no evidence Moyse had ever transferred the documents to his personal Dropbox account. In addition, they found the last time he accessed his account predated his work on the disputed documents.

      As for Moyse, his attempt to keep his access of porn sites under wraps backfired. He may have been cleared of evidence spoliation accusations, but his personal web browsing habits still made it into the public record — albeit without the excruciating level of detail that would have been present if he hadn’t thought to scrub his browsing history before turning over the computer.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

      Recently, Google launched a video calling tool (yes, another one). Google Hangouts has been sidelined to Enterprise, and Google Duo is supposed to be the next big thing in video calling.

      So now we have Skype from Microsoft, Facetime from Apple, and Google with Duo. Each big company has its own equivalent service, each stuck in its own bubble. These services may be great, but they aren’t exactly what we imagined during the dream years when the internet was being built.

      The original purpose of the web and internet, if you recall, was to build a common neutral network which everyone can participate in equally for the betterment of humanity. Fortunately, there is an emerging movement to bring the web back to this vision and it even involves some of the key figures from the birth of the web. It’s called the Decentralised Web or Web 3.0, and it describes an emerging trend to build services on the internet which do not depend on any single “central” organisation to function.

    • Facebook Wants To Bring Controversial Zero Rated ‘Free Basics’ Service To The States

      Last year the Indian government forged new net neutrality rules that shut down Facebook’s “Free Basics” service, which provided a Facebook-curated “light” version of the internet — for free. And while Facebook consistently claimed its program was simply altruistic, critics (including Facebook content partners) consistently claimed that Facebook’s concept gave the company too much power, potentially harmed free speech, undermined the open nature of the Internet, and provided a new, centralized repository of user data for hackers, governments and intelligence agencies.

      In short, India joined Japan, The Netherlands, Chile, Norway, and Slovenia in banning zero rating entirely, based on the idea that cap exemption gives some companies and content a leg up, and unfairly distorts the inherently level internet playing field. It doesn’t really matter if you’re actually altruistic or just pretending to be altruistic (to oh, say, lay a branding foundation to corner the content market in developing countries in 30 years); the practice dramatically shifts access to the internet in a potentially devastating fashion that provides preferential treatment to the biggest carriers and companies.

    • Facebook is talking to the White House about giving you ‘free’ Internet. Here’s why that may be controversial.

      Facebook has been in talks for months with U.S. government officials and wireless carriers with an eye toward unveiling an American version of an app that has caused controversy abroad, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

      The social media giant is trying to determine how to roll out its program, known as Free Basics, in the United States without triggering the regulatory scrutiny that effectively killed a version of the app in India earlier this year. If Facebook succeeds with its U.S. agenda for Free Basics — which has not been previously reported — it would mark a major victory for the company as it seeks to connect millions more to the Web, and to its own platform.

  • DRM

    • Netflix Now Only Has 31 Movies from IMDB’s Top 250 List

      My wife and I popped a bottle of wine on a Friday night last month. It was movie night in our house, which typically means surfing the iTunes movie catalog on our Apple TV until we find something that’s rent-worthy.

      There was plenty to pick from, but nothing that grabbed our attention. Maybe next month. Our next stop? The Netflix app.

      But we noticed Netflix’s movie selection is rather… bare? Uninteresting? My wife actually said, “I haven’t heard of any of these movies. Aren’t there any good movies on here?”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Appeal dismissed in pregabalin patent case

      The England & Wales Court of Appeal has upheld Mr Justice Arnold’s finding that key claims of Warner-Lambert’s patent for Lyrica are invalid for insufficiency. The judgment also reiginites the debate over the scope of second medical use patents

    • Copyrights

      • Backup copies of software can’t be re-sold, rules top EU court

        The initial buyer of software that comes with an unlimited user licence may resell that copy and the licence, Europe’s top court has ruled—however, where the original physical medium has been damaged, destroyed, or lost, a tangible backup copy mustn’t be sold in its place.

        The case considered by the the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concerned two Latvian nationals, who were alleged to have sold thousands of copies of Microsoft products in an online marketplace in 2004.

        The court said: “It is estimated that they sold more than 3,000 copies of programs and the material damage caused to Microsoft by the activities of Mr Ranks and Mr Vasiļevičs has been evaluated at €265,514.”

        The criminal law division of the Riga regional court in Latvia, which is hearing the case, asked the CJEU for its opinion on a specific issue that had arisen: whether the acquirer of a backup copy of a program, stored on a non-original medium, could re-sell that copy if the original had been damaged, and the initial acquirer no longer possessed or used the program.

      • A Weekend Full Of The NFL Violating Its Own Social Media Video Content Rules

        Ok, so what do we make of this? Well, as with many things to do with the NFL, the takeaways are both good and bad. The good is that the NFL clearly understands that video content blackouts are a thing of the past and that such content is a great driver for ratings, and not the opposite. But the bad is that the NFL seems to think that a top-down approach to controlling such content is the best approach to targeting viewers.

        And that’s just dumb. Not only dumb, in fact, but demonstrably silly. As I mentioned in the original post, the markets that host NFL teams are wildly diverse, from major markets like New York and Chicago — and now Los Angeles –, to relatively tiny markets like Green Bay and Charlotte. A one-size-fits-all marketing approach never made sense for NFL teams, but before the days of digital media there wasn’t a great deal in terms of diversity that could be achieved. But in the social media age? Marketing can be targeted and approached in a way tailored to specific fan-bases and markets. Why in the world would the NFL think that it had a better handle than each individual team, all of which employ their own social media managers, as to how to best drive viewership and attendance?

      • CJEU clarifies copyright exhaustion in Microsoft case

        The acquirer of a copy of a computer program may not provide their legitimate back-up copy to a new acquirer without the copyright holder’s permission, the CJEU has ruled

        [...]

        Article 4 of the Directive grants the copyright holder the right to do or authorise permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program. But it provides that the first sale in the EU of a copy of a computer program exhausts the distribution right, except for the right to control further rental of the program or a copy.

      • Tell the Copyright Office: Copyright Law Shouldn’t Punish Research and Repair

        After eighteen years, we may finally see real reform to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s unconstitutional pro-DRM provisions. But we need your help.

        In enacting the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the DMCA, Congress ostensibly intended to stop copyright “pirates” from defeating DRM and other content access or copy restrictions on copyrighted works and to ban the “black box” devices intended for that purpose. In practice, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions haven’t had much impact on unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content. Instead, they’ve hampered lawful creativity, innovation, competition, security, and privacy.

        In the past few years, there’s been a growing movement to reform the law. As locked-down copyrighted software shows up in more and more devices, from phones to refrigerators to tractors, more and more people are realizing how important it is to be able to break those locks, for all kinds of legitimate reasons. If you can’t tinker with it, repair it, or peek under the hood, then you don’t really own it—someone else does, and their interests will take precedence over yours.

      • New Anti-Piracy Unit Takes Over UK Anti-Camming Operations

        Those thinking about camming movies in a UK cinema have a fresh adversary to contend with. A new anti-piracy unit called the Film Content Protection Agency has just been launched with a mission to prevent people recording first-run movies. Unfortunately, the unit is already citing misleading legal information on its website.

      • Torrent admin spared jail as Swedish court baulks at industry demands

        A COURT IN SWEDEN has taken a less than heavy line on the administrator of a popular torrent site by resisting prosecution demands for a jail sentence and handing out community service and a fine instead.

        It’s a big fine at kr1.7m (about £157,000), and a large amount of the unnamed admin of the SwePiracy site’s time will now be spent clearing up canal banks and jet spraying graffiti, but it is not jail.

        TorrentFreak reported that the 25-year-old was found in charge of the local piracy site and ended up in a lot of trouble with an anti-piracy group that used to be called Antipiratbyrån but is now called the Rights Alliance.

10.12.16

Patents Roundup: Blackjack Patent Application, Apple’s Software and Design Patents, Decline in Patent Litigation and Alternating Troll Trends

Posted in America, Patents at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News about patents from around the Web, focusing on the USPTO in particular

Method of Playing Blackjack as a Patent?

A “patent application claiming a new method of playing Blackjack” was the subject of this new article from Patently-O — an article involving yet another one of those ridiculous patents (or applications) which often end up being used to shake down a lot of small companies, either in court or outside of the courts system (small companies usually prefer to settle outside any court because of the costs associated with legal defense).

To quote Patently-O:

The underlying appellate decision In re Smith involves a patent application claiming a new method of playing Blackjack. The new approach offered by offers ability to bet on the occurrence of “natural 0” hands as well as other potential side bets. Claim 1 in particular requires a deck of ‘physical playing cards” that are shuffled and then dealt according to a defined pattern. Bets are then taken with the potential of more dealing and eventually all wagers are resolved.

Apple Aggression With Patents

Not only small players are suffering. Large companies are trying to string barbwire around everything and then tax everyone.

This past week in the news we found FRAND proponents in Watchtroll, patent troll apologists everywhere in relation to the FTC and the VENUE Act, and we also found a lot of coverage of Apple’s patent war/assault on Android, either in relation to the infamous slide-to-unlock patent or those silly design patents which SCOTUS is poised to assess.

“Apple is competing in the courtrooms, not in the market, such that patent lawyers pocket a lot of money and products are modified for the worse.”Regarding the former, here is MIP alluding to a “107-page opinion [which] includes a majority opinion written by Judge Moore and three separate dissenting opinions filed by Chief Judge Prost and Judges Dyk and Reyna.”

Also in relation to the slide-to-unlock patent, here is Patently-O‘s coverage that says: “this case involves Apple’s patents covering slide-to-unlock; phone number recognition; and auto spell correction. At the district court, the jury found that three of Apple’s touch-screen patents infringed by Samsung devices (resulting in $119.6 million in damages). The jury also found one Samsung patent infringed by Apple, but only awarded less than $200,000 in damages. In a February 2016 opinion authored by Judge Dyk, the Federal Circuit reversed the jury verdicts – finding two of Apple’s patents invalid as obvious and the other not-infringed.”

These are software patents and separately there are design patents — a subject that the CCIA’s Mr. Levy wrote about (cross-posted at the Huffington Post), noting: “CCIA and other amici argued strenuously that under the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of § 284, it would be easy for patent trolls to start using design patents. After all, a design patent lets a patent troll threaten a company with losing all of its profits for any accused product. That’s orders of magnitude higher than they might be able to get with a utility patent, and should lead to much higher settlements.”

Apple is competing in the courtrooms, not in the market, such that patent lawyers pocket a lot of money and products are modified for the worse. Corporate media wrote about the latest twist, e.g. “Conundrum for Justices: Does a Design Patent Cover a Whole Smartphone?” from the New York Times and this from USA Today:

Chief Justice John Roberts said Apple’s iconic iPhone design applies to the exterior face of the phone — not “all the chips and wires.”

Apple is desperate to beat (or tax with patents) Android phones. How much money are they after? And given Apple’s declining share in tis market, how long will it be before Apple — like Microsoft — becomes more like a patent troll in this area?

The United States Government Recognises the Problem

Help might be on the way. “The government and the courts are finally getting fed up with patent trolls — and stupid patents,” (this means software patents) writes Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times today. It’s not a very thoughtful or profound article, but it does hit two birds with one stone (two strands of news). To quote:

Almost nobody disputes that America’s patent system is a mess, or that it’s been that way for an unconscionably long time.

Overworked and misguided patent examiners issue patents for manifestly undeserving claims. An entire industry of patent trolls has sprung up to assemble patent rights and exploit them, not to make products or develop services, but to harass other businesses into paying them off to avoid costlier litigation.

Efforts to reform patenting tend to run into resistance from big businesses, such as the pharmaceutical industry, that long ago figured out how to game the process and are disinclined to give up their advantage. As a result, a system that was written into the U.S. Constitution to encourage invention and innovation has been turned into a “dead weight … on the nation’s economy.”

The editor of IAM, writing about an upcoming event, reveals that an official-turned-lobbyist, David Kappos, will be at this event (speaking even). We predict he will talk about “clarity” as means of reaffirming his position that Alice is too vague and needs to be thrown away.

Litigation Numbers Decline

Whether or not Kappos will succeed, the patent system in the US is gradually healing itself. Kappos is one of the people who made it ill. There are less trolls, less software patents, and patent litigation numbers at the District Court and beyond and down, based on these latest figures from Lex Machina. Here is what IAM has just said about those:

New patent litigation filings fell in the third quarter as the overall volume of cases for the year approached levels not seen since 2011, according to data from Lex Machina.

From 1st July to 30th September 1,127 new lawsuits were filed in US district courts. That’s down from the total for the second quarter of 1,289, although up slightly from Q3 last year when 1,114 new cases were brought.

According to Lex Machina’s current prediction for the year, 2016 will see a total of just over 4,700 new lawsuits. This would be the lowest level since 2011. Over the last four years litigation volumes have been at unprecedented levels thanks, in large part, to new joinder rules introduced by the America Invents Act.

One of the characteristics of litigation volumes over the last two years is that the quarterly totals have often lurched from one extreme to another. Last year, for instance, saw one of the quietest recent quarters in Q3 but also two of the busiest in Q2 and Q4 as external factors such as the prospect of new patent legislation and new federal court procedures had an effect.

Lex Machina’s latest numbers confirm that quarterly totals are still very up and down, but the trend line for this year has undoubtedly been pointing south. With a huge spike in cases last November thanks to changes to pleading standards in patent cases, which came into effect on 1st December, it seems safe to assume that we’re going to see a fall, year-on-year in Q4.

Now that the US is moving towards a software patents-free (hopefully trolls-free as well) era with zones including Texas being safe for software developers (even after the VENUE Act or equivalent) we hope that the patent microcosm won’t succeed at turning the tide. Here is the National Law Review, one of their publications, covering the latest from the FTC:

FTC Releases Report on Patent Assertion Entities, Calls for Reforms to Reduce Nuisance Patent Lawsuits

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued its much anticipated study on patent assertion entities (“PAEs”) on October 6, 2016. The report, entitled Patent Assertion Entity Activity: an FTC Study, defines a PAE as “a firm that primarily acquires patents and seeks to generate revenue by asserting them against accused infringers.” The report highlights the business practices of PAEs (based on non-public data from 2009 to 2014) and includes recommendations for patent litigation reform. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez praised the report for providing “an empirical foundation for ongoing policy discussions,” and said that the report’s recommendations “are designed to balance the needs of patent holders with the goal of reducing nuisance litigation.” The report provides valuable insights into a key area of intersection between the antitrust and patent laws and proposes concrete reforms that seek to balance the benefits of legitimate infringement litigation against the harms of nuisance suits.

Patent Trolling More of ‘Thing’ in East Asia

Patent trolling is no longer just a problem in the US and more evidence emerges of the growth of patent trolling in east Asia. IAM writes a lot about it these days, without mentioning the T word [1, 2, 3], resorting to euphemisms like “NPE” and “PAE” instead. One article says that “Panasonic transferred around 500 patents to Inventergy in January 2014; Huawei had assigned a number of assets several months earlier. Nokia entered its licensing alliance with the company in June that year.” These are essentially PAEs. It looks like China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and various other countries will need their own FTC-like study and resultant patent reform pretty soon. These policies are self-destructive to any nation if they give rise to trolls. █

Software Patents Are Going Away and Their Proponents Fight Back Harder Than Before

Posted in America, Law, Patents at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It’s hard to say goodbye

A conductorSummary: An overview of some of the latest press coverage regarding software patents now that they are difficult to acquire and especially difficult to assert in a court (the higher up, the harder)

SOFTWARE patents are a scourge and a plague. They harm developers all around the world, even those not residing in the US. These patents often boil down to nonsense that’s neither innovative nor novel.

“Like most software patents, here we have a non-inventive step; there’s nothing new about a rating system but because it’s done “on a computer” and “over the Internet” or regarding a vehicle we’re supposed to think it’s innovative and deserving a patent monopoly.”The other day Benjamin Henrion joked, “what an invention!”

He was referring to this blurb that says “Uber files patent application on rating your “ride” https://t.co/HcaLtCUGtJ details seem trite; inventor Ben Kolin https://t.co/gXPvZSAy44″ (direct link).

Like most software patents, here we have a non-inventive step; there’s nothing new about a rating system but because it’s done “on a computer” and “over the Internet” or regarding a vehicle we’re supposed to think it’s innovative and deserving a patent monopoly. What a hard argument to sell…

Another new example of this Uber ‘innovation’ says that: “In big cities, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who never used #Uber. Take a look at their #patent history” (this links to an article by Audrey Ogurchak at Watchtroll’s site).

Putting aside how unethical Uber is (Richard Stallman has a dedicated page about the subject), these software patents from Uber remind us that they are a real problem and several recent tweets or articles spoke about the threat Alice (and invalidations of patents on software) pose to Uber’s market value. As if Uber’s monopolistic practices are something that needs to be guarded…

“It’s sad to see that IBM continues to align with the dark side when it comes to patents whilst actively suing companies using software patents.”With this cautionary tale out of the way, let’s look at some of the encouraging coverage we saw in these past few days (half a week) following the famous ruling against software patents — a ruling that we wrote four articles about (so far). Here is a new article titled “Patents a “terrible fit” for software”. It says: “Copyright is a sufficient system for protecting software and the patent system is a “terrible fit”, a US Federal Circuit judge has said. The comments followed a ruling in the Intellectual Ventures v Symantec patent infringement case”

A lawyers’ Web site too admitted the undeniable; “Software Patents on Shaky Ground With Federal Circuit in Case After Case” said the headline, but the article is behind a paywall. Scott Graham, of Law.com, wrote: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit put on what could have been a clinic last week on software patent eligibility.”

Above the Law, another Web site which targets lawyers, published this:

Prominent Pro-Patent Judge Issues Opinion Declaring All Software Patents Bad

Well here’s an unexpected surprise. A lawsuit brought by the world’s largest patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, and handled on appeal (as are all patent cases), by the notoriously awful Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) may have actually killed off software patents. Really. Notably, the Supreme Court deserves a big assist here, for a series of rulings on patent-eligible subject matter, culminating in the Alice ruling. At the time, we noted that you could read the ruling to kill off software patents, even as the Supreme Court insisted that it did not. In short, the Supreme Court said that any patent that “does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions” is not patent eligible. But then it insisted that there was plenty of software that this wouldn’t apply to. But it’s actually pretty difficult to think of any examples — which is why we were pretty sure at the time that Alice should represent the end for software patents, but bemoaned the Supreme Court not directly saying so, noting it would lead to lots of litigation. Still, the impact has been pretty widespread, with the Alice ruling being used both by the courts and the US Patent Office to reject lots and lots of software and business method patent claims.

More invalidations of software patents are being reported (coming out from CAFC), but don’t expect lawyers-led or lawyers-fed media to speak about these. One patent attorney wrote: “Fed Circuit Affirms 101 Ineligibility of a Patent Claiming Detection of Unauthorized Access to Medical Information: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/15-1985.Opinion.10-6-2016.1.PDF …”

This decision is only days old and we have not seen it mentioned much.

IBM’s software patents lobbyist in chief, Manny Schecter, is obviously upset. He wrote “No US statute renders software ineligible for patenting,” to which Henrion responded with “Free speech is enough to liberate IBM’s programmers.”

It’s sad to see that IBM continues to align with the dark side when it comes to patents whilst actively suing companies using software patents.

“If one is still in denial about the need for patent reform, then one is delusional or too obsessed with one’s legal invoicing/fees (profits).”LWN, a Linux news site, recognises that we’re moving towards the end of software patents, but a lot in the side of the lawyers (the very vocal minority) are still in denial or in “attack mode”. They are attacking the messenger or the credibility of the judgment in an elaborate attempt to defend software patents. Here we have proponents of software patents at Bilski Blog (cross-posted here) espousing political views to discredit the reform attempts. This was liked by proponents of software patents, as one might expect. To quote the concluding bits: “One of the most common concerns about our government—voiced from all parts of the political spectrum—is that Congress gets too little done. Thus, the worry that a Congressional “fix” to our patent system is not likely anytime soon is understandable. However, problems caused by any real or perceived Congressional dysfunction may be dwarfed by allowing courts to re-write the Patent Act. If there is ever an area where the balancing of interests calls for the legislative process to be involved, it is in our intellectual property system. One person’s view—or even one Court’s view—of a good solution, however well-intentioned, is not the right approach.”

If one is still in denial about the need for patent reform, then one is delusional or too obsessed with one’s legal invoicing/fees (profits). It’s not hard to see what motivates the above.

One can tell that things have become pretty bed for this camp when Martin Goetz is again writing in support of software patents, and moreover chooses Watchtroll as his platform, again. Some background of both Watchtroll and Goetz would help one understand the significance of this. As we are going to show in our next post, some other familiar faces are coming out of the woodwork right now, trying hard to stop patent reform if not a comprehensive overhaul. █

Links 12/10/2016: Ansible Galaxy is Free Software, FreeBSD 11 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 1:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The 5 most common support issues for open source developers

    What is the number one factor that software developers consider when choosing which open source software packages to use? A recent survey conducted by Rogue Wave Software says support. What is the second most important factor? Who will carry the burden of providing that support.

    Between developers, a dedicated internal open source software (OSS) support team, an internal IT department, and contractors (or an OSS support vendor) an unsurprising 67% of developers in the survey said they are expected to be responsible for support. We also analyzed 34,000 internal support requests to glean additional insights.

  • MOD Duo: Building an open source guitar stomp box

    Some time ago the MOD Duo jumped onto my radar. In a nutshell, it is a guitar stomp box that comes loaded with different effects and sounds. Instead of buying the multitude of guitar pedals that many musicians string together in complex, if somewhat beautiful ways, the MOD Duo negates all that. It is a single box and what’s more, it is powered by open source.

  • 27 Open Source DevOps Tools In 7 Easy Bites

    I recently wrote an article featuring 25 DevOps vendors worth watching. However, in the world of DevOps, there are an awful lot of good tools that don’t really have a vendor attached, and I thought it was time to give the open source tools their due.

    While I wrote that there are tools that don’t have vendors, there are vendors that are attached to some of these open source tools. Those vendors provide development support, along with, in some cases, customer support and even proprietary versions of some of the tools that exist alongside their open source cousins. As long as there was an open source version that wasn’t “crippleware,” it was eligible for the cut.

  • Apache Milagro: A New Security System for the Future of the Web

    With 25 billion new devices set to hit the Internet by 2025, the need for a better worldwide cryptosystem for securing information is paramount. That’s why the Apache Milagro project is currently incubating at the Apache Software Foundation. It’s a collaboration between MIRACL and Nippon Telegram and Telegraph (NTT), and Brian Spector, MIRACL CEO and Co-Founder, discussed the project in his keynote at ApacheCon in May.

    Spector said the project was born in a bar on the back of a napkin after a brainstorm about how one would rebuild Internet security from the ground up. That sounds like a lot of work, but Spector believes it’s absolutely necessary: the future of the Web is going to be very different from the past.

  • Flanders to publish soil erosion monitoring tool

    The new method, now used by 5 soil erosion specialists, is based on well-known open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, including the data viewing tool QGis and the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library. “QGis is the perfect platform for building GIS applications”, Huybrechts said at the FOSS4G 2016 conference in Bonn last August. “It’s open source, it is supported by a great community and it comes with a collection of tools and toolkits.”

  • DE radiation protection agency overcomes lock-in

    Germany’s Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, BfS) is taking steps to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in. Within the next few years, it plans to have replaced its legacy proprietary analysis and reporting tools by modern, open source-based tools. Moreover, the new system, which is being tested, will improve the geographic information capabilities, and will lower costs significantly.

    The radiation protection agency was in set up in 1989, three years after the catastrophic nuclear accident in Chernobyl. Its main task is to protect population and environment from damages due to radiation.

    To help with decision-making and with generating of reports, the BfS’ crisis unit has for years been using a customised, proprietary software solution. This ‘Integrated Measuring and Information System’ (IMIS) lets BfS make sense of the data generated by some 1800 radiation measuring stations across the country. IMIS continuously monitors the environment and is able to detect small changes in radioactivity. Its results are merged, evaluated, refined and presented in well-arranged documents.

  • Pieter Alexander Hintjens: 3 December 1962 – 4 October 2016

    After a long and painful illness, a battle with cancer over the last six years, my brother has died in Brussels, aged only 53.

    My love for him has always been the adoring, muted kind that looked up to the light he shone, that basked in his enthusiasm and tried, and failed, to keep up with the thousand-and-one ideas he gave voice and form to. Many of his passions were beyond my comprehension but very real, nevertheless. As a computer programmer, writer of internet protocols and founder of on-line communities, his interests went way over my head. As an author, latterly, we connected and I was able to collaborate with him on one of his books – The Psychopath Code – an involvement for which I am profoundly grateful: Not only has this particular book helped me to navigate a few tricky moments in my own life, but the understanding we shared was like coming home.

    I can’t begin to do justice to my brother’s legacy as a professional innovator, thinker, and networker. Pieter was one of these rare people totally unafraid to take chances, to think not just outside the box but into the next universe. How he maintained his enthusiasm and energy, where his inspiration came from, I shall not know in this lifetime.

    His death last Tuesday has opened up a hole in my life, a tear in the fabric of my normal. Poignantly – and painfully – it is only as his legacy becomes clearer that I notice the loss of his quiet, determined contribution in my life. Always, in the background, he encouraged me, supporting my modest hopes for an ordinary life: my ambitions to study, to write, to marry and have a child. In all these attempts he was unwaveringly supportive, while seeking so little from me in return. Of course, elder brothers are looked up to, and often expected to take the lead. But lately, in these last few years, while he faced pain and uncertainty – about which he has written so candidly on his blog – while he battled fear and the shadows of disappointment with his trademark wry humour, he faced these challenges fearlessly and with a fiery determination that is frankly awe-inspiring.

  • Software AG Launches Open Source Internet of Things Analytics Kit

    Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW) has significantly expanded the capabilities of its Apama Community Edition with a new Internet of Things (IoT) Analytics Kit, provided free of charge as Open Source Software under the Apache License, v2.0, along with the ability to run on Raspberry Pi. A different version of Apama Community Edition is also now available as a re-distributable runtime.

  • PhatWare Releases WritePad Handwriting Recognition Engine as Open Source

    PhatWare Corporation, a leading professional software and application developer, is pleased to announce that the entire source code of its award-winning, multilingual WritePad handwriting recognition engine is now available under GPL v.3 license.

  • Events

    • Announcing Google Code-in 2016 and Google Summer of Code 2017

      The Google Open Source Programs Office has announced Google Code-in 2016 and Google Summer of Code 2017. Google Code-in is for students from 13-17 years of age who would like to explore open source. “Students will find opportunities to learn and get hands on experience with tasks from a range of categories. This structure allows students to stretch themselves as they take on increasingly more challenging tasks.” Students will begin on November 28.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Maker Party 2016: Stand Up for a Better Internet

        Each year, Mozilla hosts a global celebration to inspire learning and making online. Individuals from around the world are invited. It’s an opportunity for artists to connect with educators; for activists to trade ideas with coders; and for entrepreneurs to chat with makers.

        This year, we’re coming together with that same spirit, and also with a mission: To challenge outdated copyright laws in the European Union. EU copyright laws are at odds with learning and making online. Their restrictive nature undermines creativity, imagination, and free expression across the continent. Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer wrote about the details in her recent blog post.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Cloudera Accelerates Portfolio of Self-Paced Big Data Training Courses
    • Survey Finds OpenStack Deeply Entrenched in the Telecom Space

      What percentage of players in the telecom industry now consider the OpenStack cloud platform to be essential or important to their success? According to a survey commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation, a whopping 85.8 percent of them do. That is more hard evidence that we are seeing actual deployments take the place of evaluation when it comes to OpenStack in the enterprise.

      The survey was executed by Heavy Reading and received 113 responses from representatives of telecom companies around the world: 54 percent from the US, 14.2 percent from Europe, 11.5 percent from the Asia Pacific region, 8.9 percent each from Central/South America and Canada; and 2.7 percent from the Middle East. Here are more of the key findings.

    • Recognizing active user contributors to OpenStack

      Within the OpenStack community, there are countless people conducting tests, maintaining infrastructure, writing documentation, organizing community events, providing feedback, helping with project promotion, and countless other roles that may or may not show up under the traditional list of contributors. Since a fundamental tenant of OpenStack is that much of the project’s governance comes from its active contributors, finding a way to expand the types of contributions that are “officially” recognized is an important step in bringing everyone’s voice to the table.

    • How to succeed as a remote documentation contributor in OpenStack

      Alexandra Settle, an information developer at Rackspace, will be speaking at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. Alexandra is a core reviewer for OpenStack manuals, also working on the OpenStack Ansible and Swift project documentation, and serves as a mentor in documentation for the Outreachy project. She’s been interested in information technology since high school and is a fan of Fedora Linux. She began her career as an intern at Red Hat and after spending years using Windows machines, and love the ease of use and functionality that came with using Linux.

  • Databases

    • Couchbase and the future of NoSQL databases

      Well, I’ve built and led developer communities for 10+ years at Sun, Oracle, and Red Hat, so I have experience in leading crossfunctional teams to develop and execute strategy, planning, and execution of content, and marketing campaigns and programs. I’ve also led engineering teams at Sun, and I’m a founding member of the Java EE team.

      At Couchbase, a developer advocate helps developers become effective users of a technology, product, API, or platform. This can be done by sharing knowledge about the product using the medium where developers typically hangout. Some of the more common channels include blogs, articles, webinars, and presentations at conferences and meetups. Answering questions on forums and Stack Overflow, conversations on social media, and seeking contributors for open source projects are some other typical activities that a developer advocate performs on a regular basis.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook Yarn’s for your JavaScript package

      Facebook, working with Exponent, Google, and Tilde, has released software to improve the JavaScript development experience, which can use all the help it can get.

      Yarn, introduced on Tuesday under a BSD license and without the patent clause that terminates Facebook’s React license for those involved in patent litigation against the company, is an alternative npm client. It’s not to be confused with Apache Hadoop YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which is cluster management software.

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • Russia’s Preference for Open-Source to Hurt U.S. Tech Stocks

      Amid rising political tensions with the U.S., Russia is planning to further lower its usage of licensed software from IT giants like International Business Machines Corp IBM , Microsoft Corporation MSFT , SAP AG SAP and Oracle Corporation ORCL .

      Per Bloomberg, “The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to restrict government agencies from buying licensed software, giving preference to open-source software.”

      The proposed law is an addition to an already existing federal law that came into effect on Jan 1, 2016, which restricts the use of foreign software in the public sector, if there is a domestic version available.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Paediatric Cancer Drug Being Developed Entirely In The Open

      The Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has posted a Malaria Box, containing over 400 compounds that might be effective against malaria to almost 200 research groups in two years. It’s an open science project, because the only stipulation is that information is deposited in the public domain (and therefore cannot be patented).

      GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s Open Lab project, the Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus near Madrid, Spain, enables visiting scientists to use GSK’s high-tech facilities to research neglected diseases such as malaria and TB.

      Even Bill Gates has tweeted that open-source collaboration between scientists could become a drug discovery catalyst.

      Now, one scientist is embarking upon a virtual pharmaceutical company that will develop a paediatric cancer drug in the open.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Shendy: A Low Cost Arsenic Detector for Drinking Water

        If you are designing life-saving tech to help refugees living in refugee camps, you’re probably not going to design a proprietary product, because doing so would be tantamount to signing the death warrant of a percentage of the refugee camp residents. Open source is how the most number of refugees can be helped. In that vein, learn about an initiative to design a low-cost. open source arsenic detector for use in ensuring safe drinking water in refugee camps.

  • Programming/Development

    • The State Of JavaScript

      Depending on who you ask, right now JavaScript is either turning into a modern, reliable language, or a bloated, overly complex dependency hell. Or maybe both?

      What’s more, there’s just so many options: Do you use React or Angular 2? Do you really need Webpack? And what’s this month’s recommended way of dealing with CSS?

    • A Javascript journey with only six characters

      Javascript is a weird and wonderful language that lets us write some crazy code that’s still valid. It tries to help us out by converting things to particular types based on how we treat them.

      If we add a string to something, it’ll assume we want it in text form, so it’ll convert it to a string for us.

      If we add a plus or minus prefix to something, it’ll assume we want its numerical representation, and will convert the string to a number for us, if possible.

    • rra-c-util 6.1
    • remctl 3.13

      remctl is a client and server that forms a very simple remote RPC system, normally authenticated with Kerberos, although including a remctl-shell variant that works over ssh.

    • Vala and Reproducibility

      This will help build process to avoid call valac in order to generate C source code, VAPI and GIR files from your Vala sources.

      Because C source is distributed with a release’s tarball, any Vala project could be binary reproducible from sources.

      In order to produce development packages, you should distribute VAPI and GIR files, along with .h ones. They should be included in your tarball, to avoid valac produce them.

    • Fuck You Startup World

      Fuck your crazy work hours. Nobody gives a fuck that Elon musk is working 100 hours a week, and Marissa Mayer pulling it to 130 hour work week while still breastfeeding her newborns. You’re not Elon Musk , you ain’t Marissa Mayer, you’re not going to get to space, and you won’t build the next Space X. Do me a favor, put your fucking Mac away and go play with your kids.

      [...]

      Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events that cost way too much money, you’re supposed to buy some fucking servers instead! Fuck spending money on ping pong tables that no one ever uses, fucking music rooms, nap rooms, meditation rooms, stress-free rooms, and pilates rooms. Fuck your ridiculous incentives that you give, too. Fuck your unlimited vacation policy, it’s fucking bullshit. We all know that your employees will take less time off.

    • Nailing Down Architectural Principles

      Software architecture needs to be documented. There are plenty of fancy templates, notations, and tools for this. But I’ve come to prefer PowerPoint with no backing template. I’m talking good old white-background slides. These are way easier to create than actual text documents. There are no messy worries over complete sentences. Freedom from grammatical tyranny! For a technical audience, concision and lack of boilerplate is a good thing. A nice mix of text, tables and diagrams gets the point across just fine. As a plus, this is naturally presentable — you don’t need a separate deck to describe your architecture when the deck is the reference document to begin with. As the architecture evolves, the slides evolve.

Leftovers

  • Amazon Wants to Get College Students Addicted to Prime

    Vincent Wang needed new jeans and a coat just before classes began this semester at the University of California, Davis, where he studies nutrition. Rather than trek several miles off campus to the nearest Target or Walmart, he ordered the clothes from Amazon.com Inc. and retrieved them from new Amazon pickup lockers right next to the university store that sells Aggies T-shirts and hoodies.

    Wang, 21, is one of millions of students who have taken advantage of Amazon Prime Student, which offers all the benefits of a regular Prime membership — quick delivery, music and video streaming and free online photo storage — for $50 a year, half the regular price. Amazon’s strategy echoes the one used for decades on college campuses by the credit card companies: snag young consumers early and, with artful promotions, try to make them loyal for life.

  • Science

    • Barack Obama: America will take the giant leap to Mars

      One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. This was years before we’d set foot on the moon. Decades before we’d land a rover on Mars. A generation before photos from the International Space Station would show up in our social media feeds.
      I still have the same sense of wonder about our space program that I did as a child. It represents an essential part of our character — curiosity and exploration, innovation and ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and doing it before anybody else. The space race we won not only contributed immeasurably important technological and medical advances, but it also inspired a new generation of scientists and engineers with the right stuff to keep America on the cutting edge.

    • Technology Brings Peace, Not Peril

      Peres’ vision stands in stark contrast to Lord Jonathan Sacks’ dystopian commentary calling computers and radical Islamists the “two dangers” of this century, defeated only by “an insistence on the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life.”

      On the contrary, I believe innovation and technology will help defeat terrorists and sustain and enhance human life.

      Innovation and technology have extended our lives – most children born in the early 1900s didn’t live past the age of 50, but the average U.S. lifespan is now almost 79 years. Artificial intelligence is helping doctors make complex diagnoses. 3D printing is producing low-cost prosthetics for children and those who otherwise couldn’t afford care. Drones are delivering blood and emergency medicine in developing countries. The rabbi should explain his point that “Every new technology…benefits the few at the cost of the many” to the paraplegic patients learning how to walk thanks to virtual reality.

      While Sacks decries the idea of self-driving cars, this innovation can save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. More than 35,000 people died on our roads last year, and the federal government estimates over 90 percent of crashes are caused by human error. Eliminating the great majority of automobile deaths and serious injuries would certainly meet Sacks’ goal of preserving “the sanctity of human life.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Long-lasting Wages of Neglect: Flint Residents Plagued Again by Water Crisis

      One year since a public health emergency was declared in Flint due to lead-contaminated water, the struggle continues for residents of the hard-hit city. The most recent issue they’re facing is an outbreak of shigellosis, a highly contagious bacterial infection that is transmitted through the accidental ingestion of infected fecal material and causes diarrhea, fever, and abdominal pain.

      Matt Karwowski, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC, says, “There is definitely some question about whether changes in hand-washing and hygiene practices may be playing a role. People in Flint have been concerned about the safety of their water supply, and that may be playing a role in their hygiene practices.”

    • Antitrust Suit Alleges Pharma Company Rubbished Its Own Product In Order To Stave Off Competition From Generics

      Techdirt has written a number of stories about how Big Pharma is never content with the patent bargain — that, in return for a time-limited, government-enforced intellectual monopoly, products will afterwards enter the public domain. Instead, companies have come up with various schemes to extend the life of that monopoly — and thus to cheat the public of the low-cost generic versions of the drug in question that should have appeared. The Daily Beast points to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 35 states and the District of Columbia against the makers of Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction, over the alleged use of one such scheme, known as “product hopping”.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster

      When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own aeroplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was shaking so violently that it was hard to read the instruments. An alarm was alternating between a chirruping trill and an automated voice: “STALL STALL STALL.” His junior co-pilots were at the controls. In a calm tone, Captain Dubois asked: “What’s happening?”

      Co-pilot David Robert’s answer was less calm. “We completely lost control of the aeroplane, and we don’t understand anything! We tried everything!”

      The crew were, in fact, in control of the aeroplane. One simple course of action could have ended the crisis they were facing, and they had not tried it. But David Robert was right on one count: he didn’t understand what was happening.

      As William Langewiesche, a writer and professional pilot, described in an article for Vanity Fair in October 2014, Air France Flight 447 had begun straightforwardly enough – an on-time take-off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.29pm on 31 May 2009, bound for Paris. With hindsight, the three pilots had their vulnerabilities. Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, was young and inexperienced. David Robert, 37, had more experience but he had recently become an Air France manager and no longer flew full-time. Captain Marc Dubois, 58, had experience aplenty but he had been touring Rio with an off-duty flight attendant. It was later reported that he had only had an hour’s sleep.

      Fortunately, given these potential fragilities, the crew were in charge of one of the most advanced planes in the world, an Airbus 330, legendarily smooth and easy to fly. Like any other modern aircraft, the A330 has an autopilot to keep the plane flying on a programmed route, but it also has a much more sophisticated automation system called fly-by-wire. A traditional aeroplane gives the pilot direct control of the flaps on the plane – its rudder, elevators and ailerons. This means the pilot has plenty of latitude to make mistakes. Fly-by-wire is smoother and safer. It inserts itself between the pilot, with all his or her faults, and the plane’s mechanics. A tactful translator between human and machine, it observes the pilot tugging on the controls, figures out how the pilot wanted the plane to move and executes that manoeuvre perfectly. It will turn a clumsy movement into a graceful one.

    • Canonical Patches New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

      Today, October 11, 2016, Canonical published several security advisories to inform Ubuntu users about new Linux kernel updates for their supported operating systems.

      Four new kernel vulnerabilities are affecting Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) or later versions, and three the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) series of operating systems. They are also affecting the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi 2 kernel.

      The first security flaw is an unbounded recursion in Linux kernel’s VLAN and TEB Generic Receive Offload (GRO) processing implementations, which could have allowed a remote attacker to crash the system through a denial of service or cause a stack corruption. It was discovered by Vladimír Beneš and affects Ubuntu 16.04 and 14.04.

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Systemd and Ubuntu users urged to update to patch Linux flaws

      Linux users should beware of a recently discovered systemd vulnerability that could shut down a system using a command short enough to send in a tweet and Ubuntu users should update to new Linux kernel patches affecting supported operating systems.

      SSLMate founder and Linux administrator Andrew Ayer spotted the bug which has the potential to kill a number of critical commands while making others unstable, according to Betanews.

    • Microsoft: No More Pick-and-Choose Patching

      Adobe and Microsoft today each issued updates to fix critical security flaws in their products. Adobe’s got fixes for Acrobat and Flash Player ready. Microsoft’s patch bundle for October includes fixes for at least five separate “zero-day” vulnerabilities — dangerous flaws that attackers were already exploiting prior to today’s patch release. Also notable this month is that Microsoft is changing how it deploys security updates, removing the ability for Windows users to pick and choose which individual patches to install.

    • Ministry of Defence CIO – defending the data assets of the nation

      An interesting example of knowing what is actually important, such as being ‘secure’ does not mean pulling up drawbridges and never talking. It does seem possible that the MoD has lesson it can teach industry in building security defences in depth, using a wide range of tools, that then map onto the future world of mobile and cloud infrastructures.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • New Clinton email reveals direct support for ISIS from two powerful Western allies

      A new Hillary Clinton email published by WikiLeaks as part of the ongoing release of hacked campaign files confirms that Daesh (Isis/Isil) has state backing. And from powerful Western allies, no less.

      Anti-terrorism analysts have long seen Daesh as a non-state-affiliated actor which grew out of an al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq (and later Syria). But the email sent by Clinton herself (dated 27 September 2014) shows there’s much more to the story.

    • Russkies at the Doorstep

      In a year noted for crude political discourse, eagerly serialized in the mainstream media, the MSM are themselves bellowing anti-Russian rhetoric, conspiracy theory, and fear-mongering. Of the two “evil of two lessers” contenders, Trump is the one who regularly gets hammered, justifiably in the case of his anti-Muslim and other racist and sexist slurs, while Clinton gets a pass, even an A+, for her repeated verbal assaults on Russia and its president, even as she reeks of class hostility toward Trump supporters.

      During the McCarthy era, the most perverse propaganda was about Russians hiding under beds; during the new cold war, it’s about Russians inside every telephone, computer, email, and website, while linking Putin to everything, says Guardian contributor Trevor Timm, “from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece, and Spain.” It’s hard to reconcile mainstream bogeymania with the missing media attention to the massive Big Brother spying on US citizens, the moral transgressions of which are lately presented in Oliver Stone’s humanizing portrait, “Snowden.”

      The quite literal femme fatale (without the alluring charm) has quite a deadly track record in the Middle East, but the MSM, which tout Clinton’s compassion for children and concern for human rights don’t bother to note her criminal record in the destruction of Libya and support for repressive Arab dictators, her backing of the coup in Honduras, or her threats to make war on Russia and destabilize and destroy yet another Arab country, Syria. Netanyahu is her favorite foreign statesman, while Trump is attacked for not being sufficiently obsequious toward the butcher of Gaza. MSM “debate” hosts never think to ask the right questions, such as why has she supported assaults on the main enemies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and Syria? Like her underworld counterpart, Willie Sutton, she’d have to say it’s because that’s where the money is. Despite his many crackpot ideas, Trump is more pragmatic, less neocon, about US intentions in the Middle East. Just take the oil, he says, and forget about regime change.

      Clinton’s eponymous Foundation is built on millions of dollars of generous payola from “too big to jail” financiers along with feudalistic Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and the head chopping capital, Saudi Arabia. Bahrain gave a mere $100 thousand to the Foundation but $32 million to another money laundering operation, the Clinton Global Initiative. Syria, Iran, and Russia didn’t pay the bribes and are paying the price. The MSM choose not press her on the issue. Wikileaks has become the newspaper of record.

    • US government warned last year that selling arms to Saudi Arabia could ‘implicate it in war crimes’

      Officials within the Obama administration raised concerns over a 2015 $1.3billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, citing worries that the Saudi military did not have the ability to intervene in Yemen without harming civilians, an investigation from Reuters has found.

      Full scale civil war between the Western and Saudi-backed government and Houthi rebels broke out early last year. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting, the UN estimates, and three million displaced from their homes. Saudi-led air strikes on the rebel-held city of Sanaa since March 2015 have killed thousands of civilians.

      According to emails, documents and interviews with several current and former officials familiar with the discussions, the US government’s lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether supplying arms for the Saudi campaign could make the US a ‘co-belligerent’ in the conflict under international law.

    • Pentagon Confronts a New Threat From ISIS: Exploding Drones

      Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in northern Iraq last week shot down a small drone the size of a model airplane. They believed it was like the dozens of drones the terrorist organization had been flying for reconnaissance in the area, and they transported it back to their outpost to examine it.

      But as they were taking it apart, it blew up, killing two Kurdish fighters in what is believed to be one of the first times the Islamic State has successfully used a drone with explosives to kill troops on the battlefield.

      In the last month, the Islamic State has tried to use small drones to launch attacks at least two other times, prompting American commanders in Iraq to issue a warning to forces fighting the group to treat any type of small flying aircraft as a potential explosive device.

    • Photos Show Fragments of U.S. Bombs at Site of Yemen Funeral Massacre

      Fragments of what appear to be U.S.-made bombs have been found at the scene of one of the most horrific civilian massacres of Saudi Arabia’s 18-month air campaign in Yemen.

      Aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition on Saturday bombed a community hall in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city, where thousands of people had gathered for a funeral for Sheikh Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the rebel-appointed interior minister. The aircraft struck the hall four times, killing more than 140 people and wounding 525. One local health official described the aftermath as “a lake of blood.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • EU draws fire for allowing ‘overfishing’ of Baltic cod

      European Union ministers have agreed to cuts in Baltic cod catch quotas for next year that fall well short of calls by scientists worried about the stock’s eventual collapse.

      The fisheries ministers agreed overnight Monday to reduce catches of western Baltic cod by 56 percent in 2017, despite calls by scientists for a 90-percent cut they say is needed to sustain stocks in Danish and German waters.

      EU fisheries commissioner Karmenu Vellu said the commission, the bloc’s executive, had proposed a reduction of 88 percent “to bring back the stock to sustainability as soon as possible,” but had to accept a compromise to reach a deal among all member states.

      Listening to the potential impacts on the different fishing fleets, Vellu said: “I have accepted a lower reduction that is still well above the lower limit of the scientific advice.”

    • Danish cod quotas slashed … but not enough, says environmental group

      Denmark’s environmental and food minister Esben Lunde Larsen has just completed tough negotiations in Luxembourg on next year’s fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea.

      Danish cod fisheries were hit hard, but not as hard as the EU Commission had originally planned.

      The EU Commission had originally envisaged a reduction of cod quotas in the western Baltic Sea of 88 percent. Larsen managed to negotiate that down to a reduction of 56 percent. In the eastern Baltic, the EU originally called for a reduction of 39 percent. The parties agreed on a 25 percent decrease.

    • Huge area of US West burned due to warming climate

      Wildfires in the American West can make for apocalyptic images, but they’re also routine, as the heat of the dry season can turn large areas of forest into fires-in-waiting. One lightning strike—or one careless human—can set off a blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.

      Several factors contribute to the extent of these wildfires. We’ve made efforts to put them out as soon as possible—it’s well intentioned and sometimes necessary to protect ever-expanding human communities. But in many places, putting out the fires has disrupted a natural process of forest housekeeping. With small bits of fuel allowed to accumulate on the forest floor for longer, fires become less frequent but much more intense.

      Climate also plays a role. Year-to-year variability leaves some summers noticeably drier and hotter than others. And then there’s climate change. What can we say about its influence on fires in the West?

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • New WikiLeaks emails show influence of Univision chairman in Clinton campaign

      The clashes between presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Spanish-language Univision television network began within days of Trump’s announcement last year that he was seeking the Republican nomination.

      Now, a series of emails pirated from the Democratic National Committee and published in the past week by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks show that within days of Trump’s June 16, 2015, announcement of his candidacy, Univision’s chairman, Haim Saban, was urging the Clinton campaign to take a tougher stance on Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

    • Media, Politics & The Death Of Intellectual Honesty

      Yeah, so I get that it’s political silly season, and people like to throw around all kinds of arguments of “bias” — especially towards the media. I’ve been on the receiving end of those accusations, but for the most part, I think claims of media bias are silly and over-hyped. What’s true, though, is that it’s all too easy to be sloppy in reporting and to try to hype up a nothing story into a something story. Here’s a story where no one comes out of it looking very good and the end result is a complete mess. It starts with Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald. Last night I saw a marginally interesting story by Eichenwald about how a Russian government connected news website, Sputnik, misread an email leaked via Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal to campaign chief John Podesta. The email contained a link and full text to a much earlier Eichnwald story about Benghazi and Clinton. The Sputnik story incorrectly stated that the text in the email was by Blumenthal, and not by Eichenwald. It took one sentence out of this longer article, and falsely claimed that Blumenthal was admitting that the mess in Benghazi was “preventable.”

    • Gary Johnson: The more you know him, the less you like him

      Personally, I like Gary Johnson. I got to know him in the 1990s when he was governor of New Mexico. I was working to end the drug war, legalize marijuana and treat hard drugs as a public health, not criminal issue. Johnson came out for marijuana legalization, so I spent some time in New Mexico helping that agenda.

      But, the more I got to know him the less I liked his political views. He took money from the private prison industry and proudly supported private prisons. Making prisons into profit centers creates ongoing human rights violations. Prisons should be a function of government not a corporate profit center. Johnson opposed needle exchange to prevent HIV/AIDS, drug treatment and programs to help people with drug problems get their lives going in a positive direction.

    • 8 Most Damning Takeaways from ‘October Surprise’ Email Hack from WikiLeaks–This Looks REALLY Bad
    • In the Democratic Echo Chamber, Inconvenient Truths Are Recast as Putin Plots

      Donald Trump, for reasons I’ve repeatedly pointed out, is an extremist, despicable, and dangerous candidate, and his almost-certain humiliating defeat is less than a month away. So I realize there is little appetite in certain circles for critiques of any of the tawdry and sometimes fraudulent journalistic claims and tactics being deployed to further that goal. In the face of an abusive, misogynistic, bigoted, scary, lawless authoritarian, what’s a little journalistic fraud or constant fearmongering about subversive Kremlin agents between friends if it helps to stop him?

      But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. — more so than ever — and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions or opposes those leaders is a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow.

    • WikiLeaks posts more John Podesta emails

      WikiLeaks Monday morning posted an additional 2,000 emails that appear to be from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
      This is the second hack in four days from WikiLeaks, which claims it has a trove of more than 50,000 emails from Podesta.

      The emails appear to be mostly from 2015, covering a litany of policy and strategy discussions between Clinton staffers on how to handle issues of the day and the press, including the release of the book “Clinton Cash” alleging nefarious activity by the Clinton Foundation. Another email has long-time Clinton aide Doug Band referring to Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.”

      Clinton campaign responded to the release by slamming the Trump campaign for “cheering on a release today engineered by Vladimir Putin,” after Trump adviser Jason Miller tweeted a link to the document page with the phrase “And here…we…go.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Strained to Hone Her Message, Hacked Emails Show

      On the eve of the New Hampshire primary in February, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton was worried. Hillary Clinton was about to go down to defeat in the state, and the former president was despondent.

      “He’s losing it bad today,” Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, wrote to John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, in an email. She added, “If you’re in NH please see if you can talk to him.”

      The email was one of thousands released by WikiLeaks on Monday that provided a revealing glimpse into the inner workings of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They show a candidacy that began expecting a coronation and was thrown badly off course by a misreading of the electorate and a struggle to define what she stood for.

      Stretching over nine years, but drawn mainly from the past two years, the correspondence captures in detail the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.

    • Bernie Sanders endorses his brother in race to replace David Cameron

      US presidential hopefuls do not often intervene in British parliamentary byelections. But then, not many presidential candidates are Bernie Sanders. And more than that, he is intervening on behalf of his older brother.

      Sanders, who missed out on taking the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, has recorded a brief but heartfelt campaign video aimed at voters in Witney, Oxfordshire, that talks up the attributes of his brother, Larry.

      Larry Sanders, who has lived in the UK since 1969, is standing for the Green party in the constituency, which will elect a new MP on 20 October to replace David Cameron, who quit the Commons last month.

    • Jill Stein Would Be a Blessing for the Supreme Court; Gary Johnson Would Be a Disaster
    • Hillary Clinton Campaign Avoided Helping Single-Payer Ballot Measure, Emails Show

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign was no fan of a major ballot measure to create a universal health care system — at least according to newly released documents from her campaign chairman’s email account.

      The emails from John Podesta’s account last November coincided with Clinton’s trip to the swing state of Colorado, where health insurers are funding the opposition to a ballot measure that would create a single-payer health care system in the state. Podesta and the Clinton campaign have not confirmed the authenticity of the emails but have not disputed them, and Wikileaks noted that Clinton appeared to confirm their authenticity during her Sunday night debate with Donald Trump.

    • Trump tells supporters to go vote on ‘November 28th’

      Donald Trump is asking his supporters to go out and vote him — 20 days after the presidential election is scheduled to take place.

      “Make sure you get out and vote,” Trump told supporters on Tuesday at rally in Florida. “November 28th.”

      Election Day is Nov. 8, 2016.

      To make matters worse, voters in the Sunshine State don’t have much time to register for the election.

    • In private correspondences, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker rubbished Sunday Guardian’s stories, calling it a “mouthpiece for the BJP”

      John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman for the 2016 US presidential elections, closely monitored and may have intervened in the controversy surrounding the Ford Foundation and other foreign charitable foundations last year, according to to a set of leaked emails released by Wikileaks on Tuesday.

      In the first half of 2015, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker sent a number of emails to Podesta, most of which were updates on events taking place in India after the Modi government tightened the rules governing foreign charitable foundations and NGOs. During this time, the Ford Foundation was put on a government watch list over funding it gave to activist Teesta Setalvad in 2009.

      One e-mail, for instance, appears to be a deep-dive monitoring of how the Indian media reported the government’s probes into foreign funding, and specifically how various newspapers and editorials viewed the Ford Foundation’s troubles.

      [...]

      One e-mail from Walker to Podesta, sent on June 8th 2015, strikes a note of frustration and notes that the Ford Foundation “ had sent urgent notes to the Reserve Bank of India asking for assistance” in transferring funds in order to ensure that the foundation could sustain its basic operations in India.

      “I promised I’d give you an update on any developments in India,” Walker writes. “At this point this point, we’ve heard nothing further from the GOI. I sent urgent notes to the Ministry of Home Affairs and Reserve Bank of India last week asking for assistance in immediately releasing our bank accounts from their current status so we can transfer funds from NY for basic operations (mostly salary support, not grants),” the email reads.

      The Ford Foundation president also angrily references the article carried by the Sunday Guardian in early June, which profiled the Ford Foundation’s activities in India while describing it as an “entity outside the law”.

      “I’m attaching an article from the Guardian, which purports to be an independent newspaper, but is really the mouthpiece for the government and BJP. It’s rife with misrepresentations and erroneous information…not a very encouraging article. I appreciate your help,” Walker wrote.

    • Is there actually evidence that Trump allies had a heads-up on what WikiLeaks was doing?

      On a plane somewhere over the United States on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta spoke to reporters about his email being hacked and the contents ending up at WikiLeaks.

      Podesta suggested that Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump’s who is working with a pro-Trump super PAC, may have known about the email hacking before the release.

      “I think it’s a reasonable assumption to — or at least a reasonable conclusion — that Mr. Stone had advance warning and the Trump campaign had advance warning about what Assange was going to do,” Podesta said.

      Is that a reasonable assumption, much less a reasonable conclusion?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Why the ‘Safe-Space’ Debate Is a Problem for Adjuncts

      The University of Chicago lit up social-media feeds last month after its dean of students published a letter informing incoming freshmen that “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” had no place on a campus dedicated to “freedom of inquiry and expression.”

      Although some journalists noted that the letter may have been aimed at pleasing high-profile right-wing donors, opposition to such measures doesn’t track neatly along party lines. Neither the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek nor the paleoconservative pundit Ann Coulter has much use for so-called “political correctness” measures.

    • Zambia: Internet censorship during the 2016 general elections?

      A research study by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and Strathmore University’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT).

    • Peter Thiel’s Lawyer Says He’s Stopped ‘Monitoring’ Gawker, But Still Sending It Bogus Takedown Demands

      Remember how the billionaire funder of Facebook and Palantir, Peter Thiel, insisted that he was bankrupting Gawker to protect your privacy? Well, the lawyer, Charles Harder, that Thiel set up with a monthly retainer, specifically to focus on lawsuits that could kill Gawker dead, has become something of a “celebrity” in the “let’s stomp out free speech” circle of celebrities. Last month, the Hollywood Reporter did a big profile on Harder and his newfound fame (and rapidly growing client list of famous people upset about press coverage). In some “bonus cuts,” reporter Eriq Gardner noted on Twitter that Harder told him he no longer “monitors” what’s left of Gawker (now called Gizmodo Media, and owned by Univision).

      [...]

      This is, to put it mildly, a load of complete bullshit. Harder, who in that profile claims “I believe very strongly in a free press” doesn’t seem to understand how the First Amendment works. Cook’s statement is clearly one of opinion, and it’s clearly protected speech. And despite Harder also saying in that profile that he’d like to change the standard for defamation of public figures, the law as it stands requires not just that the statements be false statements of fact, but also that they be said maliciously. And, yes, Harder is a public figure (remember, there was just a whole Hollywood Reporter feature about him).

      What Harder appears to be doing here is little more than threatening a SLAPP suit to try to shut up the press from saying negative things about him. Even the references to Cook being sued in the past are ridiculous, since most of those lawsuits are from Harder himself, and most of them are completely bogus.

      So far, it does not appear that Univision is complying with any of these demands (which is good to see). So, let’s see what Harder does next. Is he now going to go after Univision too? Will Thiel continue to fund that as well? Because most of the threats seem entirely bogus, and would be laughed out of court.

      And, of course, this is yet another reminder of why we really need a federal anti-SLAPP law to stop such bogus threats in their tracks.

    • Banned by the bureau: Censorship in Lebanon

      When Darine Hotait, the Lebanese-American filmmaker, learned that her film I say dust had been banned from screening at the Lebanese Film Festival (LFF), she was confused. She couldn’t think of a reason why the film got censored although some people had told Darine in advance that it was obvious that they would ban the film.

      They. The Bureau of Censorship, a division of General Security, one of Lebanon’s many military bodies. The bureau is not known for transparency and rarely discloses what exactly they have censored and why. They don’t want to be held accountable. They don’t want to leave any trace.

    • More Details Uncovered On Bogus Defamation Lawsuits Being Used To Delist Negative Reviews

      More details have also surfaced in a case Levy is still dealing with — the filing of a bogus defamation lawsuit on behalf of dentist Mitul R. Patel against an unhappy patient. In this peculiar case, both the supposed plaintiff and defendant claim to have had their signatures forged on the court documents used to secure an order to delist content.

      Patel’s motion to vacate the bogus lawsuit points a finger at a reputation management firm SEO Profile Defense LLC — led by Richart Ruddie — which Patel alleges filed the suit (and forged his signature) without his knowledge after he signed a contract with it for reputation management services.

      Additional details uncovered by Levy and Volokh suggest this isn’t the reputation management firm’s first bogus lawsuit rodeo.

    • NBC Delayed Story About Trump’s Access Hollywood Recording Over Fear That He Might Sue

      So just this past Thursday, we wrote about Trump’s habit of threatening to sue the press over any coverage he considers negative. In the past, we’ve also covered his stated plans to open up libel laws. The comments on that post got pretty ridiculous after people who can’t possibly be regular Techdirt readers complained that I was clearly just stirring up shit because I’m a Hillary Clinton supporter. This despite the fact that pretty much everything we’ve ever written about her has been critical too — including her own ridiculous comments mocking free speech and praising censorship. It also ignores that just a few days earlier I had also sided with the Trump campaign when it received a bogus, censorious, cease & desist letter from the city of Phoenix. We’re staying pretty consistent here: we don’t support censorship, no matter whose team you’re on. But, sure, I know. It’s crunch time and people are really concerned about supporting their team, rather than actually discussing issues.

      But this is an important issue. Threatening a free press with bogus defamation lawsuits and SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) claims are a really big problem. Case in point: on Friday, as I’m sure you’re already aware, the Washington Post published a video of Donald Trump happily discussing sexually assaulting women, and how it’s okay because he’s a celebrity. As you also know, this became the story of Friday and the weekend, as it appeared to push a bunch of people who had previously supported Trump over the edge to pull their support (why this story rather than earlier ones, I don’t fully understand, but…).

      Either way, the story led to a few different varieties of followup stories about how the Washington Post got the story. And all of them note that Access Hollywood found the tape itself last Monday, and realized it was newsworthy. They then took it to their corporate parent, NBC, and some work was done on getting the story out — but it kept getting pushed back. This led many to ask why it could possibly take so long for NBC to report on this. They knew the tape was authentic, so they didn’t need to confirm that.

    • Users enraged, confused over YouTube censorship
    • YouTube announces initiative for digital clean-up

      YouTube has launched a program called YouTube Heroes that will allow users to report inappropriate content in the form of a game.

      Members will earn points, advance in levels and gain access to exclusive rewards and features on the site dependent on the quality of their contributions.

      How do these “Heroes” earn points? By flagging inappropriate videos, adding captions to content and sharing their knowledge with other Heroes in message boards and Google Hangout sessions.

    • Censorship Kills Potential Twitter Acquisition

      Last year, I wrote about how Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) may be acquired by either Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) or Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL). Early this year, I soured on Twitter stock because economic weakness would hurt ad spending. I further soured on it after incidents of it censoring users for their political statements and its mismanagement of Periscope.

      In the past few weeks, the rumors of Twitter being bought crept up again. This list consisted of Saleforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Alphabet, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Verizon (NYSE:VZ), Microsoft, and Disney (NYSE:DIS). I think traders were bidding Twitter stock up because if Alphabet (the most likely buyer) had to compete with another firm, it would drive the price up.

      [...]

      Twitter isn’t like any other acquisition for the companies looking at it. Even for Microsoft, buying Twitter would be nothing like buying LinkedIn. The reason it is different is its public nature. While most companies are trying to avoid political controversy, Twitter would put them front and center of the action. This situation isn’t inherently bad, but with the way Twitter is treating free speech with disdain, it has become a potential problem for buyers.

      There have been many examples of Twitter suspending accounts which are politically incorrect. One example of this was journalist Glenn Reynolds getting his account suspended for tweeting “run them down” in reference to drivers being in a situation where protesters were blocking the streets and attacking cars which stopped. It’s not my place to discuss the veracity of this statement, but it isn’t Twitter’s place either! Twitter has become known for wielding a heavy hand when dealing with political statements. Deleting accounts is the last thing a firm with user growth problems needs. 17 million tweets were sent out pertaining to the recent presidential debate. This shows that political expression is paramount to the website’s existence. It needs to foster debate instead of stifling it.

    • Suit alleges censorship on Elkhart city Facebook page

      The accusation is one of censorship.

      “I think basically I was posting about issues around the Lerner Theater and the A.D.A. violations and discrimination the city was engaged in and they didn’t care for that too much and they deleted all those posts and eventually banned me from commenting,” said Richard Wolf.

    • Seh Calaz defies Censorship Board

      MABHANDITI frontman, Seh Calaz, on Saturday performed the controversial track, Hohwa — No Under 18, at a concert in Gweru at the weekend in defiance of the Censorship Board’s ban imposed of sexually-explicit song.

    • ‘End this censorship… and bring back library artwork’
    • NMC is not to bring a media censorship
    • National Media Center is not to censor media, aims to build reconciliation – Chairman

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Comcast in middle of Oregon fight over taxes and censorship

      Experienced television buyers say some television stations occasionally flag advertisements that use footage from rival stations, though most ultimately relent.

      The video-on-demand service — used by customers who want to watch a show after it has aired — reach a relatively small number of viewers. The pro-97 ads that mention Comcast have run on other Oregon cable and network providers.

    • Does NSA support of CYBERCOM blur lines?

      The Title 10 versus Title 50 debate has long surrounded the way intelligence and covert activity is conducted in accordance with the law. A key issue surrounding intelligence and war fighting efforts is the blurring of lines clearly identified in statutes. For example, intelligence organizations are barred from spying domestically on American citizens.

      As the discussions of a potential split between the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command continue to swirl, what would an empty-nested NSA, freed from its child organization, CYBERCOM, look like?

    • A Good American: Surveillance, 9/11 and the NSA

      The idea of small digital events linked together in a dance of relationships is illustrated elegantly on screen. There are shots of clouds of gnats buzzing in sunbeams, perhaps in reference to Binney’s rural Appalachian birthplace.

      The NSA’s response to the 9/11 revelations was to shelve ThinThread in favour of a much more expensive program, TrailBlazer. After NSA director Michael Hayden was appointed in 1999, Binney had been asked how he could use $1.2bn to revamp his operation. He calculated that he could organise surveillance on the entire planet in near real time, for just $300,000.

      Money may lie at the heart of the NSA’s questionable decision making. After 9/11, Binney recalls the order that came through from Maureen Baginski, the NSA’s head of Signals Intelligence (Sigint), to not rock the boat or embarrass large technology companies. “We can milk this cow for 15 years. 9/11 is a gift to the NSA. We’re going to get all the money we need and then some,” she is alleged to have said.

    • Encrypted communications could have an undetectable backdoor

      Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet today might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way.

      Many public-key cryptography algorithms that are used to secure web, email, VPN, SSH and other types of connections on the internet derive their strength from the mathematical complexity of discrete logarithms — computing discrete logarithms for groups of large prime numbers cannot be efficiently done using classical methods. This is what makes cracking strong encryption computationally impractical.

      Most key-generation algorithms rely on prime parameters whose generation is supposed to be verifiably random. However, many parameters have been standardized and are being used in popular crypto algorithms like Diffie-Hellman and DSA without the seeds that were used to generate them ever being published. That makes it impossible to tell whether, for example, the primes were intentionally “backdoored” — selected to simplify the computation that would normally be required to crack the encryption.

    • NSA-style agency could install ‘trapdoors’ in many cryptographic keys – study

      It took the research team “a little over two months” to break a weakened 1,024-bit key using “an academic cluster” of 2,000 to 3,000 CPUs.

      Two years after Snowden revelations exposed “Bullrun,” Heninger and others published research posting that the NSA could break powerful encryption. Getting past 1024-bit primes would require a machine that costs a few hundred million dollars, they wrote, yet that supercomputer would still only be able to crack about one 1024-bit prime a year. A well-funded and determined institution like the NSA could fit the bill.

      Since 2010, the National Institute for Standards and Technology has recommended using keys of at least 2,048 bits, though 1,024-bit keys are still common, Ars Technica wrote.

    • NSA could put undetectable “trapdoors” in millions of crypto keys

      Researchers have devised a way to place undetectable backdoors in the cryptographic keys that protect websites, virtual private networks, and Internet servers. The feat allows hackers to passively decrypt hundreds of millions of encrypted communications as well as cryptographically impersonate key owners.

      The technique is notable because it puts a backdoor—or in the parlance of cryptographers, a “trapdoor”—in 1,024-bit keys used in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Diffie-Hellman significantly raises the burden on eavesdroppers because it regularly changes the encryption key protecting an ongoing communication. Attackers who are aware of the trapdoor have everything they need to decrypt Diffie-Hellman-protected communications over extended periods of time, often measured in years. Knowledgeable attackers can also forge cryptographic signatures that are based on the widely used digital signature algorithm.

      As with all public key encryption, the security of the Diffie-Hellman protocol is based on number-theoretic computations involving prime numbers so large that the problems are prohibitively hard for attackers to solve. The parties are able to conceal secrets within the results of these computations. A special prime devised by the researchers, however, contains certain invisible properties that make the secret parameters unusually susceptible to discovery. The researchers were able to break one of these weakened 1,024-bit primes in slightly more than two months using an academic computing cluster of 2,000 to 3,000 CPUs.

    • Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations

      Unblinking Eye, EFF’s giant, deep research report (available in Spanish, English and Portuguese) on the state of surveillance law in latinamerica, reveals an alarming patchwork of overbroad powers given to police forces and government agencies.

      In the 1980s and 1970s, the military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil pooled their resources in something called “Operation Condor,” which was used to effect mass kidnappings, torture, murders and disappearances. Today, less than a generation later, these countries and their neighbors are effecting surveillance dragnets that are one click away from totalitarianism. Following a military coup in one of these countries, the new generalissimos would be able to quickly crush their opposition and undertake mass arrests of all potential dissidents.

      The surveillance laws in these countries have severely lagged behind the powers that the countries’ spies have bought for themselves through purchasing new high-tech toys from companies in the USA and EU. These old laws assume that wiretapping happens to one phone line at a time, not across a whole country’s communications — communications that yield far more intimate and compromising information than could be gleaned by spying on the old wireline telephone system.

    • Facebook, Twitter and Instagram sent feeds that helped police track minorities in Ferguson and Baltimore, report says

      A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

      The companies provided the data — often including the locations, photos and other information posted publicly by users — to Geofeedia, a Chicago-based company that says it analyzes social media posts to deliver real-time surveillance information to help 500 law enforcement agencies track and respond to crime. The social media companies cut off Geofeedia’s access to the streams of user data in recent weeks after the ACLU discovered them and alerted the companies about looming public exposure.

      The popularity of Geofeedia and similar programs highlights how the rise of social media has given governments worldwide powerful new ways to monitor crime and civil unrest. Authorities often target such surveillance at minority groups or others seeking to publicly air political grievances, potentially chilling free speech, said the ACLU’s California affiliate, which unearthed Geofeedia’s relationship with social media companies through a public records request of dozens of law enforcement agencies.

    • Twitter’s Woes Signal the End of the Social Wars

      Two buzzwords define the past decade of computing: mobile and social. Those days are coming to an end. Although smartphones and social media remain as important as ever, the war to control those platforms are over. Winners are being coronated as the losers are, at last, conceding.

      Microsoft plans to unload what’s left of its Nokia purchase, and BlackBerry—remember them?—is abandoning the hardware business. That essentially ends the smartphone wars, leaving iOS and Android as the dominant operating systems. Now, Twitter’s ongoing woes suggest the end of the social platform wars are nigh.

    • Facebook, Twitter cut access to monitoring tool used by police

      Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were handing over data to a monitoring tool that law enforcement agencies were using to track protesters, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

      The social media analysis tool, called Geofeedia, had been harvesting posts from the social media networks for surveillance purposes, and more than 500 law enforcement and public safety agencies have been using it, the ACLU said in a Tuesday report.

      Through a public records request, the ACLU found that Geofeedia had entered into agreements with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for their users’ data.

      In uncovered emails, Geofeedia said the tool was useful for monitoring protests in Ferguson, Missouri, involving the 2014 police shooting death of Mike Brown.

      The ACLU is concerned that the tool can “disproportionately impact communities of color,” through its monitoring of activists and their neighborhoods. Among Geofeedia’s features is an interactive map of real-time Instagram posts showing user locations.

    • Why PIA doesn’t fly a warrant canary: it’s solving the wrong problem

      Private Internet Access doesn’t have a warrant canary. That’s because warrant canaries alert somebody to damage that has already happened. The right way to go about the problem is to prevent the damage from happening in the first place.

      At PIA, privacy is at the soul of what we do. Our business partners have occasionally been surprised when we say upfront that we’re in privacy first, business second – but that’s the passion we have. Making money is a matter of being able to continue pursuing the primary goal, privacy, on a sustainable basis.

    • Twitter yanks data feeding tube out of police surveillance biz

      Twitter has suspended its commercial relationship with a company called Geofeedia – which provides social media data to law enforcement agencies so that they can identify potential miscreants.

      The social media company announced the change through its Policy account on Tuesday morning following the publication of a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California.

      The civil liberties advocacy organization obtained records indicating that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provided bulk user post data to Geofeedia, which markets its social media monitoring software to law enforcement agencies as a way to track activists, among other uses.

      Following reports alleging increased use of social media surveillance last month, both Facebook and its Instagram division ceased providing data to Geofeedia on commercial terms. Facebook did not respond to a request to provide further details.

    • Ron Wyden Discusses Encryption, Data Privacy and Security

      After Apple and the F.B.I. made their battle over encryption public in February, members of Congress quickly jumped into the debate. Some lawmakers promised new rules that would give authorities more access to smartphones, while others promised to fight off those laws.

      Yet after several hearings and bills, and the formation of congressional working groups, little has been done to resolve the central tug of war between the tech industry and federal authorities over civil rights versus national security.

      Law enforcement officials have argued that hundreds of criminal investigations have been held up by their inability to get access to locked smartphones and encrypted apps. Privacy advocates and tech companies say such access would cost people their personal information and lead to a slippery slope of surveillance.

    • “A First Amendment in the Digital Age”—Peter Zenger Lecture

      I had the honor of delivering the inaugural Peter Zenger lecture at Columbia Journalism School last week. The lecture is named for a newspaper publisher who was tried for libel in the 1730s for printing articles mocking and criticizing William Cosby, New York’s royal governor. Many historians consider Zenger’s acquittal to have been a milestone in the development of American press freedom. In my lecture last week, I offered some thoughts about digital-age threats to the freedoms of speech and the press, focusing mainly on government surveillance and secrecy. The text of my remarks is below. If readers have reactions, I’d love to hear them—I’m at Jameel.Jaffer [at] Columbia.edu.

    • Facebook’s Version of Slack Is Coming for Your Workplace. What Now?

      Sitting at work all day scrolling through Facebook is almost definitely frowned upon by your bosses, but Facebook wants to change that with the launch of a new version of Facebook—specifically designed for work—called Workplace.

      Facebook is ubiquitous. If it’s not Mark Zuckerberg handing out “Free Basics” to developing countries, it’s internet connectivity beamed down from giant, solar-powered drones. As of July 2016, the social network had 1.71 billion monthly users. Facebook is without doubt one of the most pervasive technological phenomenons of the 21st Century. Thing is, Facebook’s hit a brick wall when it comes to growth. Everybody who would want to use Facebook, generally speaking, is already, or at least will be using Facebook very soon. So, to eke out the last embers of growth in a saturated market, Facebook has now, officially, entered your workplace.

    • Toyota, BMW, Allianz ink data-sharing deal with autonomous start-up Nauto

      Global automakers Toyota, BMW and insurer Allianz will license technology from Silicon Valley start-up Nauto, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence systems in cars to understand driver behavior, Nauto said on Friday.

      Nauto Chief Executive Stefan Heck told Reuters the carmakers and insurer will integrate the technology into their test vehicles and use the aggregate and anonymized data – whether on driving habits, difficult intersections, or traffic congestion – to help develop their autonomous vehicle strategies.

      The investment by BMWi Ventures, Allianz Ventures and the Toyota Research Institute underscores the auto industry’s demand for smart systems to improve vehicle and driver safety, reduce liability and make fleet operations more efficient, while preparing for self-driving cars of the future.

    • Want to Remove a Google Result? File a Trumped-Up Lawsuit

      Across the US, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in order to remove defamatory material from review sites such as Yelp, or Google’s search results. That’s not unusual, but, the thing is, many of the defendants’ addresses are seemingly made-up, some of those named in the cases have never been informed of the suits, and some of the court documents contain forged signatures, according to The Washington Post.

      Linked to at least some of the cases is a selection of companies run by a Richart Ruddie, including SEO Profile Defense Network LLC, and Profile Defenders. Profile Defenders specialises in “online reputation management,” according to its website. In short, these companies and others are allegedly carrying out a pretty novel tactic to clean up content that would reflect negatively on its clients: filing fake lawsuits to encourage websites or online services to remove content.

    • Yahoo disables automatic email forwarding feature: AP

      Yahoo Inc disabled automatic email forwarding at the beginning of the month, the Associated Press reported, citing several users.

      While those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, users who would want to leave following recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to shift to rival services, the AP reported on Monday. (apne.ws/2dKpUW3)

      The company has been under scrutiny from investors after disclosing last month that at least 500 million user accounts were stolen from its network in 2014.

      Reuters reported last week, citing sources, that Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, a move that raised a lot of human rights concerns.

    • Power, secrecy and cypherpunks: how Jacob Appelbaum ripped Tor apart

      Edward Snowden’s face seems ever present in Berlin, where stickers on doors and lamp-posts promise there’s always “A bed for Snowden” and posters plug Oliver Stone’s eponymous film.

      The whistleblower’s explosive 2013 revelations about international government surveillance generated some good advertising for Berlin, cementing its reputation as hipster technology activist capital of the world. The city’s cheap lifestyle and post-second world war aversion to surveillance, as well as sympathetic Germany residency rules, have created a powerful network of support and infrastructure for its dedicated cyberactivism community. We are “poor, but sexy”, its residents like to say.

      Many of Berlin’s technologists work freelance, employed by anti-surveillance projects or secure messaging tools. And some are employed by Tor, a long running web anonymity project with something of a cult following.

      That community recently met in Seattle to tackle a new challenge: a long-running saga of allegations of sexual assault, bullying and harassment that has ripped Tor’s community apart.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Delta State Police Expose Another Illegal ‘Baby Factory’ In Asaba

      On Friday, Delta State Police Command discovered another ‘baby factory’ in Asaba, the Delta State capital, following a tip-off. The police, who stormed the factory located at Oduke area within Asaba metropolis, arrested the proprietor’s husband and a female syndicate who is alleged to be the operator – as a Nurse. Sunday Vanguard gathered that the husband’s duty was to impregnate the women, whose age-range is between 18 and 20; the wife then allegedly sells the children upon delivery. The Command rescued seven pregnant girls.

    • Wheelchair-bound woman gang raped in refugee centre after asking to use the toilet

      The victim had shared a taxi home with a man after going for dinner in a restaurant in Visby, Sweden, when she said she needed to use the toilet.

      Believed to be in her thirties, the woman was then offered to use the one at her fellow passenger’s home.

      Her lawyer Staffan Fredriksson said: “She followed him in and had no fears that something would happen. Then the man took advantage of the situation. The abuse started in the toilet.”

    • Law and Order – Trump Unit
    • Judge Posner Smacks Around Cabbies For Thinking That Cities Allowing Uber Violates Their ‘Property Rights’

      It’s no secret that cab companies and many cab drivers don’t much like Uber and Lyft. Competition is tough. And cabs in most cities have survived thanks to artificial limits on competition through medallions and the like. This has always been a stupid, and frequently corrupt, system. For years, before Uber and Lyft came along, people talked about the ridiculousness of artificially limiting competition in this manner, but it was only once those companies came along that the true ridiculousness was made clear. While some forward looking cabbies have embraced these and similar systems, others have been fighting the new reality, often in fairly ridiculous ways. In Milwaukee and Chicago, cab companies sued those cities, arguing that allowing this type of competition amounted to a Fifth Amendment violation, in the form of “taking private property for public use without just compensation.” What private property, you might ask? Well, according to the cab companies, the artificially restricted competition is their property. No, really.

    • 27 Arrested Resisting Dakota Access Pipeline on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

      On Monday, protests and actions were held across the country to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day and to oppose further construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. In North Dakota, hundreds of Native Americans and their allies gathered to resist the construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and members of hundreds of other tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. At least 27 people were arrested blockading construction at two separate worksites, including Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley.

    • DHS Inspector General Says Office Has No Idea How New Cybersecurity Act Is Supposed To Be Implemented

      The reanimated CISA, redubbed The Cybersecurity Act (a.k.a., OmniCISA) and hurried through the legislative process by stapling its 2000 pages to the back of a “must-pass” budget bill, is still in the processes of implementation. Not much is known about what the law is intended to do on the granular level, other than open up private companies to government surveillance so the USA can beat back “the cyber.”

      Surveillance aficionados were quick to lean on private companies to start sharing information, but the government needs to be taught new tricks as well. There’s plenty of info siloing at the federal level, which keeps the DHS, FBI, and others involved in the cyberwar from effectively communicating, much less sharing anything interesting they might have had forwarded to them by the private sector.

      The federal government has been less than successful in securing its own information — something CISA was also supposed to fix. The DHS’s Inspector General has performed a follow-up investigation on the department’s implementation of CISA’s requirements. For the most part, things seem to be moving forward, albeit in a vague, undefined direction.

      The OIG notes that the DHS has put together policies and procedures and, amazingly, actually implemented some of them. Better still, it has moved many critical account holders to multi-factor authorization. Unfortunately, the DHS still has a number of standalone systems that can’t handle multi-factor authorization, which will make them more vulnerable to being breached.

    • How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

      Before the United States permitted a terrifying way of interrogating prisoners, government lawyers and intelligence officials assured themselves of one crucial outcome. They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.

      Fifteen years later, it is clear they were wrong.

      Today in Slovakia, Hussein al-Marfadi describes permanent headaches and disturbed sleep, plagued by memories of dogs inside a blackened jail. In Kazakhstan, Lutfi bin Ali is haunted by nightmares of suffocating at the bottom of a well. In Libya, the radio from a passing car spurs rage in Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, reminding him of the C.I.A. prison where earsplitting music was just one assault to his senses.

      And then there is the despair of men who say they are no longer themselves. “I am living this kind of depression,” said Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan, who fears going outside because he sees faces in crowds as Guantánamo Bay guards. “I’m not normal anymore.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC: Comcast Routinely Charges Customers For Hardware, Services Never Ordered

      When you’re among the worst ranked companies for customer service in America, you consistently need to find new ways to ramp up your game if you want to take malicious incompetence to the next level. Enter Comcast, which despite constant promises that it’s getting better, routinely keeps finding itself in the headlines for immeasurably shady business practices. Earlier this year, for example, the company was sued by Washington’s Attorney General for charging users a $5 per month “Service Protection Plan,” then routinely and intentionally charging users for repairs that should have been covered under it.

      This week, America’s least-liked companies is finding itself in the headlines for another misleading practice: errantly and routinely billing customers for hardware or services they never ordered. According to a new FCC announcement, Comcast will be paying the agency $2.3 million to settle an investigation into the behavior.

    • To Combat Dropping Ratings, The NFL Thinks Fining Its Teams For Sharing Video On Social Media Is The Answer

      It’s been a time of remarkable progress of late when it comes to professional sports organizations being smart about how to pursue viewers in this here digital era. Major athletic institutions are finally opening up the door to wider streaming options, putting aside the doomsayers. Add to that that other leagues are starting to realize what a boon Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media product has been to viewership and attendance and it seemed like we were on the precipice of a golden age in digital sports media.

      Leave it to the NFL to ensure that we take at least one step backwards. What once seemed like a never ending funnel of money and upward trending viewership, the NFL has undergone something of a ratings correction as of late. It seems that amidst the controversy over head injury, bad officiating, the contraction of one-day fantasy football, and what some think is a generally declining quality of the on-field product, less people are watching games, both in person and on television. This had to happen at some point, if for no other reason than because NFL ratings over the past 2 decades were completely boffo. But the NFL’s choice to combat this inevitable decline takes a page from the days we finally just got over.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Assembly Adopts Revisions For Stronger Oversight, Protection Of Whistleblowers [Ed: it’s hogwash, it won’t change anything unless Gurry et al resign]

      After much negotiation, amendments to a World Intellectual Property Organization internal oversight mechanism were adopted today by the annual WIPO General Assembly. Under the amendments, investigating allegations of wrongdoing of high-ranking WIPO officials will be made more transparent and facilitate access to documents by WIPO member states in case of an investigation.

    • WIPO General Assembly Agrees On Two New WIPO Offices; No Deal On Design Treaty[Ed: paywall]
    • BGH rules for patentees on appeal – again

      In two decisions published yesterday on its website, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) overturned two decisions by the Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht) invalidating the patents in suit for lack of novelty. Both decisions are remarkable not because they break new ground in (patent) law (they don’t), but rather because the BGH corrects the fact finding of the lower court and finds in favour of the patentees. They fuel the impression that the Federal Court of Justice is more patent-friendly than the Bundespatentgericht, or, to put it another way, that the Federal Patent Court has become overly strict.

    • Trademarks

      • TTAB issues final rules to increase efficiency

        The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has issued final rules that will take effect in January. The biggest focus is on making filing completely electronic

      • Sanity: MasterCard Loses Absolutely Idiotic Trademark Challenge Against An Athletic Competition

        One wonders if there is a gas leak in the legal department at MasterCard HQ. Because there is nothing in those logos that would mislead a drunken chimp, never mind a human being. Yet MasterCard moved forward with challenging the trademark application for World Masters Games, because trademark bullying knows no limits. The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, fortunately, essentially laughed this out of the trademark office.

      • General Court confirms that body-builder silhouette cannot be registered as a trade mark for nutritional supplements

        In 2014 the applicant, Universal Protein Supplements Corp, filed an application with the EUIPO to have the EU territory designed in respect of the international registration of a figurative sign representing a body-builder. The application was for goods and services in the classes indicated above.

        The EUIPO examiner rejected the application, on grounds that the mark lacked any distinctive character and was descriptive for the purpose of Article 7(1)(c) of Regulation No 207/2009 on the (now) European Union Trade Mark (EUTMR).

        In late 2014 Universal Protein appealed the examiner’s decision.

    • Copyrights

      • Which “Brazil” Will Chair The Marrakesh Treaty Assembly?

        The supposedly impossible happened: The Marrakesh Treaty entered into force on 30 September, three months after reaching the necessary minimum of 20 ratifications. By then, 22 countries had done so – two more did so during the Marrakesh Assembly.

      • Court Rejects Massive Torrent Damages Claim, Admin Avoids Jail

        A former torrent site operator has largely avoided the goals of an aggressive movie industry prosecution in Sweden. Against a backdrop of demands for years in prison and millions in damages, the 25-year-old owner of private tracker SwePiracy was handed 100 hours community service and told to pay $194,000.

      • BREIN Tracks Down YouTube Pirate, Warns Others

        Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN continues to put pressure on pirates all over the Internet, including those on YouTube. This week they forced a pirating film uploader to cease his activities, warning that repeat infringers may have to pay penalties that could run into the thousands of euros.

      • MPAA Reports Pirate Sites and Hosting Providers to U.S. Government

        The MPAA has reported several piracy-promoting websites and services to the U.S. Government. The list features major torrent sites The Pirate Bay and Extratorrent, file-hosting services such as Openload and Rapidgator, and for the first time it also includes several of their hosting companies.

      • The Copyright Office wants your comments on whether it should be illegal to fix your own stuff

        Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, a law passed in 1998, people who fix things can be sued (and even jailed!) for violating copyright law, if fixing stuff involves bypassing some kind of copyright lock; this has incentivized manufacturers so that fixing your stuff means breaking this law, allowing them to decide who gets to fix your stuff and how much you have to pay to have it fixed.

        What’s more, DMCA 1201 has been used to punish and threaten security researchers who revealed defects in products with these locks, on the grounds that knowing about defects in these products make it easier to jailbreak them. That’s turning an ever-larger slice of the products we entrust with our private data, finances, health and even our lives into no-go zones for security r

Index: Our Jesper Kongstad Series of Danish Stories

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

LANDBRUG photo

Summary: A listing of our series of articles about the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation (EPO), including addenda

THE 14 recent posts about Jesper Kongstad are already indexed in our EPO wiki, but one single index with all the articles about Jesper Kongstad might also be valuable, so here it is:

  1. Danish Fairy Tales and Legends: The Secret Life of Jesper Kongstad
  2. Introduction to Jesper Kongstad, EPO Chairman of the Administrative Council
  3. Addendum: Controversial Chinchilla Farming by the Kongstad Family
  4. Danish Stories – Part II: Kongstad’s Political Masters in Denmark and Rumoured Connections to the Venstre Party
  5. Addendum I: Photos of Troel Lund Poulsen and Michael Dithmer
  6. Addendum II: Photos of Troel Lund Poulsen With Fur
  7. Danish Stories – Part III: Jesper Kongstad a Danish Civil Servant With a Distinctly Entrepreneurial Streak
  8. Danish Stories – Part IV: Jesper Kongstad and FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS
  9. Addendum I: FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS Technically Housed in Jesper Kongstad’s New Mansion?
  10. Addendum II: FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS – Further Information and a Mystery
  11. Danish Stories – Part V: Jesper Kongstad’s Chinchilla Fur Farming
  12. Addendum I: Danish Fur Industry – Further Information Regarding Political Lobbying
  13. Addendum II: Article About the Kongstads’ Villa Becoming a Breeding Farm for the Fur Industry
  14. Danish Puff Pieces: Latest ‘Puff Pieces’ From Denmark About the Opening of a New DKPTO Branch Office

We look forward to any updates from readers or correspondents in Denmark. We hope this will help Danish journalists further their breadth or scope of research for future articles. █

Addendum II: Article About the Kongstads’ Villa Becoming a Breeding Farm for the Fur Industry

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“It is easier than mink,” explains the wife of Jesper Kongstad, who is personally skinning chinchillas that she grows for profit.

Summary: An English translation of the article “Fra villa til chinchilla”, which makes it indisputable that the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the EPO (and his wife) collaborate with the bloody industry which turns animals into ‘fashion’ for the super-rich

TODAY’S feature article and the accompanying addendum teach us that a top EPO figure, the only one capable of doing something to stop Battistelli and his army of loyalists, is anything but ethical.

On numerous occasions we have mentioned an article (original in Danish) which we finally have an English translation of. The article helps establish close connections between the Kongstads and the fur industry in Denmark.

An English translation of this 2014 article from LandsbrugsAvisen is included below, plus some photos which we may be able to use (under Fair Use for criticism).

From the villa to chinchillas

Friday 28 February 2014

Written by Mia Winther Jørgensen

LANDBRUG photo
Majbritt Kongstad with the dog Hector. Hector was bought after the family moved to the farm. He is good at catching mice and finding runaway chinchillas. Jesper Kongstad works full time but supports Majbritt in the project and also helps to feed the animals and renovate the stables so that they can expand to three hundred animals.

Two years ago Majbritt and Jesper Kongstad decided to pack up and leave Rungsted and move to the countryside at Helsinge in Northern Zealand [Denmark]. As a result of coincidences and a strong desire for new challenges the villa was replaced by a chinchilla farm.

A hundred chinchillas have found their way to Bremelandsgård, but the goal is to triple the amount, as the chinchillas could be a source of income for Majbritt and Jesper Kongstad. The dream of chinchillas was planted at a dinner table where the Director of Kopenhagen Fur sowed the fledgling seeds for another Zealand fur farmer. Independence and rural life was appealing.

“We have not rejected Rungsted but rather we have chosen the countryside. I would like to be challenged again in connection with my work, and we would like to be close to nature so the farm here was the perfect choice,” says Majbritt Kongstad. The farmhouse was renovated and ready to move in. The 24 hectares of land is leased out. There should be work for one person on the farm when Jesper Kongstad the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office is in Copenhagen.

“My husband works more than full time, so the work on the farm has to be looked after by one person. When he retires we can look after the farm together. Chinchillas are easy to care for. I don’t understand why there are not more people breeding them because it is so straightforward,” says Majbritt.

LANDBRUG photo
Majbritt has skinned a total of 40 animals so far. It’s a learning process and it does not go quite as fast as for more experienced breeders.

The secret furs

Around 70,000 chinchilla pelts are sold annually via fur auctions held by Kopenhagen Fur. It is a small niche production and yet it was the choice which Majbritt Kongstad opted for.

“It is easier than mink. Mink, for example, requires a number of environmental approvals. Chinchillas are cute little animals and that makes it a pleasure to look after them,” says Majbritt. She was introduced to the world of fur at a dinner where the Director of Kopenhagen Fur spoke about fur production in such a captivating manner that Majbritt was enthralled.

This led to Majbritt undertaking practical training on a mink farm in Zealand. She carried out further research because a mink farm seemed like an overly ambitious project. The choice fell on chinchillas and shortly afterwards Majbrit started practical training on a chinchilla farm in Præstø in Southern Zealand.

“We didn’t sit down and have a brainstorming session about what to do in the country. It was probably mostly coincidences that came into play and which led to the decision to go for chinchillas. You can spend a very long time planning such things, but if you just throw yourself into it, you’ll find out how to do it along the way.”

She has a hundred animals so far but the plan is to expand to three hundred when the stables are renovated.

“We won’t get rich on it, but I expect that I should be able to make a profit. However, I am still learning and I spend a lot of time reading and going to the fur auctions, so I can learn more about which fur is the best.”

A Rural Idyll

Majbritt spends fifteen hours a week on the chinchillas. The family has no regrets about the change of lane.

“It is exciting and challenging, and that is what I wanted when I quit my job in the local authority at Fredensborg. I find it invigorating to care for the animals. It’s soothing. The animals make pleasant sounds and I can allow my thoughts to fly,” says Majbrit. Although it is pitch-dark and completely silent they are pleasantly surprised. “Neighbourliness is different in the countryside. People are prepared to help each other. It is an aspect that we had not seen before we moved,” says Majbritt Kongstad.

LANDBRUG photo
The chinchilla is not just an animal for skinning. The plan is to find out whether the meat can be used for livestock feed and she would like to sell the animals she cannot use as pets.

Any further comment is not necessary. The Kongstads are doing a fine job demonstrating their sociopathy. It’s not as though they really need the money and I doubt many people have it within themselves to slaughter the cute animal above and then skin it for some super-expensive coats. Well, Battistelli might be heartless enough to do it, but not most people… it takes an animal — not a human — to do such things to helpless animals. █

Addendum I: Danish Fur Industry – Further Information Regarding Political Lobbying

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Kongstad’s mansion of horror

Kongstad mansion
See "Controversial Chinchilla Farming by the Kongstad Family" for more such photos

Summary: The (international) political aspect of the fur industry and Kopenhagen Fur in particular, as covered by the media

WHILE researching for our latest long post that implicates a very high EPO figure we came across more evidence that shows the degree to which politics play a role in the systematic killing of tens of millions of small animals for their skin.

We did, for example, come across this stuff about the political influence of the fur industry in Israel. It seems that the international fur industry got heavily involved in efforts to stop the Israeli parliament passing a bill to ban the trade of mink and fox skins in Israel.

According to reports, Kopenhagen Fur played a key role in this. There’s an article about the affair here. As a reminder, there’s a link between Kopenhagen Fur and the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the EPO.

There are also some more detailed articles on Ha’aretz but they are subscription only. See “Report: Israeli Lawmakers Shelved Fur Ban After Taking Funded Trip to Denmark“

Summary: “Channel 1 report alleges that four MKs visited Copenhagen on International Fur Trade Federation’s dime.”

Read more in “Denmark, Israel and the Deathly Stench of Fur“

“It has become impossible to speak about the EPO without speaking about politics. Eponia does not exist in a vacuum.”Summary: “From 2009-2014, the world’s major fur associations – Denmark makes about $2 billion a year from the industry – waged an expensive battle to quash the Knesset bill to ban the trade of mink and fox skins in Israel.”

How many other countries has that happened in? Apropos payments for policy, see our article "Some Details About How the EPO’s President is Rumoured to be ‘Buying’ Votes and Why It’s Grounds/Basis for “Immediate Dismissal”" (published in May).

It has become impossible to speak about the EPO without speaking about politics. Eponia does not exist in a vacuum. █

Danish Stories – Part V: Jesper Kongstad’s Chinchilla Fur Farming

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Danish fairy tales are no fairy tales but horror stories

Mink political influence

Summary: Bremelandsgård has turned from a villa into a chinchillas slaughtering operation, owing to Jesper Kongstad’s fur farming venture

ARTICLES AND ADDENDA in this series about the business ventures of Jesper Kongstad, Chairman of the Administrative Council of the EPO, have so far included the following ten posts (plus some new gem from last night):

These ten previous parts of the series have attracted some interest from local media and EPO insiders. An EPO insider, for example, posted the following tweet (with newly-added photos) when our series started.

Killing chinchillas

The chinchillas angle attracted the most attention because of the animal cruelty element of it. The sad thing is, the super-rich probably lack the empathy to even understand why it’s immoral. They grow animals not for food or for leisure but for skin, as “fur” can imply something like wool (shaving it off rather than skinning to death for no purpose other than rich people’s fashion, not even for food).

Today’s last installment (last unless new information turns up or becomes available) is probably the most important. This one deals with the chinchilla fur farming venture.

As reported in a February 2014 article in the Danish farmers’ journal LandsbrugsAvisen (more on that in an upcoming addendum), Majbritt and Jesper Kongstad decided to sell their villa in the affluent suburban neighborhood of Rungsted on the Zealand coast north of Copenhagen in 2012 and relocate to a farmhouse in Valby, a rural area in the Gribskov municipality which is situated about 80 km north-west of Copenhagen.

“The sad thing is, the super-rich probably lack the empathy to even understand why it’s immoral. They grow animals not for food or for leisure but for skin, as “fur” can imply something like wool (shaving it off rather than skinning to death for no purpose other than rich people’s fashion, not even for food).”The villa in Rungsted was called “Strandhøj” and was located at Højagervej 6, 2960 Rungsted. The name “Strandhøj” has been used by Kongstad for some of his companies, for example STRANDHØJ HOLDING ApS which now operates under the name FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS (CVR number 25942507).

According to publicly available data on Danish real estate Web sites, the Rungsted villa had a floor space of 172 square metres and was sold in March 2012 for a price of 6.95 million DKK (approx. 934k EUR). It seems that it was originally purchased by the Kongstad family in January 2004 for the price of 3.91 million DKK (approx. 525k EUR) so this indicates that there had been a healthy appreciation in property prices in the neighbourhood during the intervening years.

“The inspiration for Ms. Kongstad’s interest in fur farming was reportedly provided by a dinner table conversation with Torben Nielsen, who was at the time the CEO of Kopenhagen Fur.”The new farmstead of Bremelandsgård is located at Vibelandsvej 8, Valby, 3200 Helsinge and was apparently purchased in May 2012 for a price of 7.5 million DKK (approx. 1 million EUR). The house boasts an impressive 240 square metres of floor space and the property also includes around 22 hectares of agricultural land. Sources include but are not limited to this one.

As far as is known, the purchase of the Bremelandsgård property was financed mostly by credit (mortgage). At the same time it is unclear what exactly happened to the proceeds of the sale of the Rungsted villa. This has caused some people to speculate that at least some of the proceeds might have been used to cover operating losses in one or more of the various private businesses forming part of the Kongstad family business conglomerate, in particular the losses incurred by FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS (CVR number 25942507) during the preceding years.

The move to the farmhouse has given Kongstad’s wife, Majbritt, the possibility to reinvent herself as a chinchilla breeder and director of a fur farming operation which forms the subject of today’s article.

The inspiration for Ms. Kongstad’s interest in fur farming was reportedly provided by a dinner table conversation with Torben Nielsen, who was at the time the CEO of Kopenhagen Fur.

In October 2011 Ms. Kongstad proceeded to place a small ad in Dansk Pelsdyravl (“Danish Fur Farming “) a trade magazine published by the Danish Fur Breeders’ Association. We have managed to get a copy of it [PDF], based on or derived from the source. The text of the small ad read as follows:

Wanted

Mink farm in Zealand for purchase.

Possibly as smooth change in ownership over a number of years.

Contact me if you are considering sale or cooperation.

After some initial research, it appears that Ms. Kongstad came to the conclusion that a mink farming operation was an overly ambitious project and decided instead to opt for chinchillas.

The Kongstads’ chinchilla fur farming venture has received coverage in a number of Danish agricultural journals and has also been featured on local television (we showed some images from this programme earlier on in this series).

“The company “Bremelandsgård” is a sole proprietorship registered in the name of Jesper Kongstad.”There is also an Internet presence on Facebook which is maintained under the name of “Kongstad Chinchilla”.

Although Majbritt Kongstad appears as the public face of the venture, the business operation seems to be actually controlled by a company called “Bremelandsgård” (CVR number 34572445) which is named after the farmstead in Valby.

The company “Bremelandsgård” is a sole proprietorship registered in the name of Jesper Kongstad.

According to the CVR entry, its main activity is “breeding of fur animals, etc.” The official registration data also indicates that the company engages in secondary lines of activity described as “business and other management consultancy activities”. Because “Bremelandsgård” is operated as a sole proprietorship no accounts are available.

“For readers who are not familiar with Denmark, it should be noted that it is a — if not the — major hub of the global fur industry. Denmark is home to 1,500 mink farmers who together rear about 17.2 million minks per year – about one-fifth of the world’s supply.”The connection to Torben Nielsen, the former CEO of Kopenhagen Fur, who is said to have inspired this venture is interesting and may be worth looking at in closer detail.

For readers who are not familiar with Denmark, it should be noted that it is a — if not the — major hub of the global fur industry. Denmark is home to 1,500 mink farmers who together rear about 17.2 million minks per year – about one-fifth of the world’s supply.

Kopenhagen Fur, which is the largest fur skin auction company in the world, is owned and managed by the Dansk Pelsdyravlerforening, the Danish Fur Breeders’ Association. The sale of more than 40 per cent of the world’s mink skin production is conducted from here. According to an article entitled “Adventures in the skin trade – How the Danes became masters of the global fur business” published in the Economist, Kopenhagen Fur auctioned 21 million pelts in 2013 and had a turnover of €2.1 billion.

Here’s a quick glance at this article, complete with an apt caricature:

Danish fur

In May 2014 the Danish press reported that Kopenhagen Fur had made a “secret donation” of 70.000 DKK (approx. 9,400 Euro) to the Danish liberal party Venstre which did not appear in the party’s accounts.

“In May 2014 the Danish press reported that Kopenhagen Fur had made a “secret donation” of 70.000 DKK (approx. 9,400 Euro) to the Danish liberal party Venstre which did not appear in the party’s accounts.”Connections between the Danish fur industry and politics have also been explored in a recently published book entitled Skjulte penge (“Hidden money”) which was written by Chris Kjær Jessen and Carl Emil Arnfred, two investigative journalists from the leading Danish national daily newspaper Berlingske. The book Skjulte penge investigates “power, political parties and lobbying in Danish politics”. Amongst other things it examines the role of the fur industry and Kopenhagen Fur and the influence which it exerts in political circles.

Here is a picture of the book’s cover:

Skjulte penge

In an article entitled Kan minkavlere købe sig til politisk indflydelse? (“Can mink breeders buy political influence?”) published by Dagbladet Information in June 2016, the Danish journalist Morten Frisch referred to the book Skjulte penge and discussed some of the known links between Kopenhagen Fur and various Danish politicians including those from the Venstre party with which Kongstad is rumoured to have close associations.

This is the source of the caricature at the top.

The extent of the Kongstads’ connections to Kopenhagen Fur and the Danish Fur Breeders’ Association is at present still unclear and needs further research.

“Connections between the Danish fur industry and politics have also been explored in a recently published book entitled Skjulte penge (“Hidden money”) which was written by Chris Kjær Jessen and Carl Emil Arnfred, two investigative journalists from the leading Danish national daily newspaper Berlingske.”What is known, however, is that the Bremelandsgård fur farming operation receives coverage in the form of puff-pieces in Dansk Pelsdyravl (“Danish Fur Farming”) a bi-monthly trade magazine published by the Danish Fur Breeders’ Association with a circulation of 4,000 copies.

Kopenhagen Fur which is owned and managed by the DFBA is also known to have given publicity on its Web site to fur farming events held at Bremelandsgård.

The most recent “open day” event took place on 17 September 2016 as reported on the Kopehagen Fur Web site.

“Kopenhagen Fur which is owned and managed by the DFBA is also known to have given publicity on its Web site to fur farming events held at Bremelandsgård.”The Kongstads are members of the Agricultural Association of the Gribskov Chamber of Commerce (Erhverv Gribskov Landbrugsforening) and are known to be active in local fur breeding circles. Majbritt Kongstad is listed as a member of the executive committee and current treasurer of the Zealand Chinchilla Association (Sjællands Chinchillaforening).

Committee meetings of the Zealand Chinchilla Association regularly take place at the Kongstad farmstead.

The annual committee meeting for 2015 was held at Bremelandsgård on Saturday 30 May 2015 as can be seen from an invitation sent to the committee members [PDF].

Some people have pointed out that Kongstad’s involvement in the fur farming business could potentially involve him in conflicts of interest.

One reason given for this is that as Director General of the DKPTO he is responsible for administrative decisions relating to intellectual property rights, including trademarks, in Denmark.

“Committee meetings of the Zealand Chinchilla Association regularly take place at the Kongstad farmstead.”As can be seen from the publicly accessible online database of the DKPTO, the Danish Fur Breeders’ Association has quite a number of registered trademarks assigned under its official Danish name Dansk Pelsdyravlerforening.

The most recently registered trademark assigned to the DFBA is “KOPENHAGEN FUR INVEST” which apparently refers to a publicly traded investment fund associated with Kopenhagen Fur.

It has also been suggested that Kongstad’s involvement in commercial fur farming could raise other awkward questions due to the fact that fur farming is banned or strictly regulated in many European countries and highly controversial in others because of ethical and/or animal welfare concerns. See this page for details.

“Some people have pointed out that Kongstad’s involvement in the fur farming business could potentially involve him in conflicts of interest.”Although chinchilla fur farming is currently perfectly legal in Denmark, some people have begun to wonder whether the involvement of the Director General of the DKPTO in such an enterprise would be compatible with the “dignity requirement” applicable to Danish civil servants under § 10 of the Danish Civil Servants Act:

“Officials must conscientiously abide by the rules that apply to their position, and both within and outside the service prove worthy of the esteem and trust that the position requires.”

For the moment these are open questions but it seems that Kongstad’s connections to the Danish fur industry and in particular to Kopenhagen Fur deserve further investigation. █

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