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08.17.16

Links 17/8/2016: GNOME and Debian Anniversaries

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Plane Maker Airbus Joins Hyperledger Blockchain Project

    French airplane manufacturer Airbus has officially joined the Hyperledger Project, the Linux Foundation-led blockchain initiative.

    The Toulouse-based manufacturer, which last year beat Boeing to sell more than 1,000 aircraft, is expected to “actively contribute” to the initiative, which also counts companies such as IBM, Intel and JPMorgan among its membership.

  • Hyperledger Announces Airbus as a Premier Member
  • Hyperledger Tests Open Strategy With First Blockchain Explorer

    Business blockchain consortium Hyperledger is now building an open-source tool that will let anyone explore the distributed ledger projects being created by its members.

    Originally conceived by an intern at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the proposal to create a blockchain explorer gained steam last month when it was informally proposed to members. It was then that other prominent contributors to the Linux-led group discovered they all had similar efforts underway.

    But instead of launching competing open-source services, an effort began to merge the blockchain explorers being developed by DTCC, IBM and Intel. The joint project has been dubbed the “Hyperledger Explorer”.

    Similar to block explorers already being offered for other public blockchains, the tool would make it easier to learn about Hyperledger from the inside, while still protecting the privacy valued by many of the non-profit organization’s members.

  • Does the Open-Source Model Enable Bitcoin-Stealing Wallet Apps?

    According to an Apple Insider report published on August 9, a disturbing trend has emerged on Apple’s App Store as a series of malicious copycats of well-known Bitcoin wallet apps became available to download. Some of the fake wallets looked quite similar to the real thing but were specifically tweaked to steal bitcoins from unsuspecting users. As a result some $20,000 reportedly ended up in the pockets of scam artists before Apple was able to filter and remove the apps from its store.

  • Vendor-supplied or open-source HMI software?

    When an HMI project requires more functionality than that offered by self-contained touchscreen units, the next step is to use an industrial PC-based system. The PC can be a traditional keyboard and mouse if the environment allows, or an integrated computer/touchscreen with varying degrees of environmental protection.

    [...]

    The three biggest advantages when using open source are the price (free or close to it), the programmer’s ability to modify and extend the code in any way required and having the final project being a smaller, more efficient product. The programming skill needed to create an application is somewhat higher than what is required using off-the-shelf development packages.

  • 5 steps for making community decisions without consensus

    Healthy open source communities usually include a wide range of people with different ideologies, goals, values, and points of view—from anarchists to CEOs of major corporations. The normal approach for making decisions that affect the entire community should be an attempt to reach consensus through discussion; however, what if you’re attempting to make a decision that is critically important, but there are irreconcilable differences in the community?

    The Xen Project community had such a decision to make in the wake of the XSA-7 security issue about the project’s security policy. We knew beforehand that there was unlikely to be consensus, so we thought carefully about how we could approach the discussion.

    Our main goals were to find a “center of gravity” of the community preference, and to make sure that the people who didn’t get what they wanted felt like their voice was heard and taken into consideration. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize my conclusions from that experience.

  • How to fire yourself: A founder’s dilemma

    I learned more about business, software, and, most importantly, people, in the first two years of Lucidworks than I did in the previous 10-15 years of school and work combined. Being a founder was (and is) a thrilling ride and one that expands your brain in ways you never knew it could expand. It’s also an addictive ride, as your brain starts to crave the novelty of newness that comes from context switching between a dozen different things, seemingly all at once, as well as the satisfaction that comes from being “the one who gets it done.” Not that you ever really are that person, but more on that in a moment.

  • Events

    • Is open source eating the world?

      Open source technology is understandably controversial, not least because it has massively eroded the software licensing revenues of established IT players.

      At a panel hosted by Rackspace, entitled ‘Open source is eating the world: Building on open source for enterprise’, participants disagreed over what was driving the production of open source, but not over the scale of disruption it had brought to the industry.

    • Rackspace open source cloud breakfast: techie toasties & cloudpaccinos

      As a side note of huge interest… during general discussions it emerged that (according to one statistic) the split between female and male developers is roughly 80% to 20% in favour of males, obviously. But, significantly, that split drops down to 90% to 10% — why that should be is unknown, but it may be a good pointer for where responsibilities lie.

    • Upskill U on Open Source & the Cloud With Heavy Reading

      On Wednesday in the Upskill U course “Using Open Source for Data Centers and Cloud Services,” Roz Roseboro, senior analyst at Heavy Reading, will address why and how operators are implementing open source for cloud platforms and services. This course will examine relevant open source projects for telcos, how open source differs from traditional standards bodies and what concerns operators have about open source, like security. (Register for Using Open Source for Data Centers and Cloud Services.)

    • HackerNest Tech Job Fair
    • Outreachy talk

      Yesterday I gave a talk about Outreachy to Girls Coding Kosova. Since there is isn’t anyone else from Kosovo who participated in Outreachy previously and they were not really informed about it, I thought I’d share my amazing experience and give some details about the program. I decided to focus more on the application process since that was the “tricky” part when I applied and seemed to be the same for them as well, since they had a lot of questions regarding the application part. I pretended to be applying for the second time and went through the application process step by step. Starting from choosing an organization, choosing a project, contacting mentors and coordinators via e-mail or IRC, making a small contribution etc.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Awards Nearly $600,000 to Qualifying Open Source Projects

        Last year, Mozilla launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. As The VAR Guy notes: “The Mozilla Foundation has long injected money into the open source ecosystem through partnerships with other projects and grants. But it formalized that mission last year by launching MOSS, which originally focused on supporting open source projects that directly complement or help form the basis for Mozilla’s own products.”

        Now, Mozilla has reported that it awarded a hefty $585,000 to nine open source projects in Q2 of this year alone. Here is more on a couple of the most interesting projects and what they are focusing on.

        PyPy. PyPy is a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.10 and 3.3.5). Its developers tout its performance advantages over Python.

      • Netflix will work on Firefox 49 for Linux [Ed: yay! DRM!]

        In the upcoming release of Firefox 49, Mozilla will include support for Google’s Content Decryption Module (CDM), Widevine. With this support, Firefox users on Linux will finally be able to watch Netflix content; previously Linux users had to watch Netflix using Google’s Chrome browser.

        Mozilla Firefox users on Windows and Mac already had the ability to watch Netflix content as Widevine was switched on earlier for those users. Firefox 49 brings the Linux version up to parity.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Keynote: Making Data Accessible – Ashish Thusoo, Co-founder & CEO, Qubole
    • OpenStack Community Challenged By Dearth Of Talent, Complexity

      The OpenStack community has grown at breakneck pace since the open-source cloud orchestration technology burst on the scene in 2010, a product of NASA and Rackspace Hosting.

      As envisioned by its developers, OpenStack provided a welcome alternative to proprietary IaaS solutions and an opportunity for independent service providers to build robust public and hybrid clouds with distributed computing resources that had the functionality and power to compete with the big boys, including industry-dominating Amazon Web Services.

    • How to Avoid Pitfalls in Doing Your OpenStack Deployment

      How fast is the OpenStack global cloud management market growing? Research and Markets analysts are out with a new report that forecasts the global OpenStack cloud management market to grow at a CAGR of 30.49% during the period 2016-2020.

      According to the report: “Cloud brokerage services that provide management and maintenance services to enterprises will be a key trend for market growth. However, this report and others forecast that technical issues and difficulties surrounding OpenStack deployments will be on the increase. In this post, you’ll find resources that can help you avoid the pitfalls present in doing an OpenStack deployment.

      “OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline,” Josh McKenty, who helped develop the platform, has told CRN, adding, “to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • US Government Reshapes Core Services Through Open Source

      Yesterday Kathryn Ryan interviewed Eric Hysen, the head of U.S. Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about his organisation’s efforts to streamline and improve government IT projects. Hysen, formerly a Silicon Valley tech guru at Google discusses how DHS is partnering top private sector tech expertise with innovators inside government to transform critical government services. This approach is part of a fundamental shift in thinking in the US that seeks to tackle Government services delivery problems through more open source and human centred design approaches. The interview is available here:

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Slovakian Public Procurement Bulletin published in XML format

        The Slovakian Public Procurement Office (PPO) has published its Public Procurement Bulletin in an open XML format, making all announcements of public procurement, including editorial corrections, available for download and (automated) processing.

      • “Helsinki Region Infoshare service increasing trust toward city and officials”

        Over the last five years, more than 1200 datasets have been published on the open data portal of Greater Helsinki, comprising the Finnish cities of Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo and Kauniainen. According to the City of Helsinki, just opening up the data has resulted in 1-2 percent savings. “Making lots of our city purchase data public has opened up a new view for citizens into city administration, and it increases people’s trust toward the city and its officials,” said Tanja Lahti, the project manager for the Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) service.

      • UN: open data to improve state accountability and transparency

        Publishing government data online can improve accountability and transparency not only of national governments, but also of parliaments and the judiciary. Consequently, open data will play an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1, 2]. “With growing access to social media, an increasing number of countries now proactively use networking opportunities to engage with people and evolve towards participatory decision-making. This is done through open data, online consultations, and multiple ICT-related channels.”

  • Programming/Development

    • Vala — seems ideal so far

      I was searching for a language to write the phone GUI with… python3+gtk3 is way too slow; 9 seconds for trivial application is a bit too much (on N900). python2+gtk2 is a lot better at 2 seconds. Lua should be even faster.

Leftovers

  • Google launches a mysterious open source operating system called Fuchsia

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Fears of global yellow fever epidemic grow as vaccine stocks dwindle

      A last-ditch effort to prevent yellow fever spreading through Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and potentially developing into a global epidemic is to be launched using vaccines containing a fifth of the normal dose because the global stockpile is so low.

      Yellow fever is frequently lethal, killing half of those who develop severe symptoms. It is transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is also responsible for the spread of Zika virus. There is a vaccine which protects people for life, but few adults had been immunised in Angola when yellow fever broke out there in December last year, and in the DRC, to where it has spread.

      If it takes hold in Kinshasa, a densely packed city of more than 10 million people, it is feared that infected mosquitoes could travel beyond the central African region, which has been experiencing so severe an outbreak that vaccine stocks are almost exhausted.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Rampaging South Sudan troops raped foreigners, killed local

      For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help. Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

      The Associated Press interviewed by phone eight survivors, both male and female, including three who said they were raped. The other five said they were beaten; one was shot. Most insisted on anonymity for their safety or to protect their organizations still operating in South Sudan.

      The accounts highlight, in raw detail, the failure of the U.N. peacekeeping force to uphold its core mandate of protecting civilians, notably those just a few minutes’ drive away. The Associated Press previously reported that U.N. peacekeepers in Juba did not stop the rapes of local women by soldiers outside the U.N.’s main camp last month.

      The attack on the Terrain hotel complex shows the hostility toward foreigners and aid workers by troops under the command of South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, who has been fighting supporters of rebel leader Riek Machar since civil war erupted in December 2013. Both sides have been accused of abuses. The U.N. recently passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution to send more peacekeeping troops to protect civilians.

      Army spokesman Lul Ruai did not deny the attack at the Terrain but said it was premature to conclude the army was responsible. “Everyone is armed, and everyone has access to uniforms and we have people from other organized forces, but it was definitely done by people of South Sudan and by armed people of Juba,” he said.

      A report on the incident compiled by the Terrain’s owner at Ruai’s request, seen by the AP, alleges the rapes of at least five women, torture, mock executions, beatings and looting. An unknown number of South Sudanese women were also assaulted.

      The attack came just as people in Juba were thinking the worst was over.

      Three days earlier, gunfire had erupted outside the presidential compound between armed supporters of the two sides in South Sudan’s civil war, at the time pushed together under an uneasy peace deal. The violence quickly spread across the city.

      Throughout the weekend, bullets whizzed through the Terrain compound, a sprawling complex with a pool, squash court and a bar patronized by expats and South Sudanese elites. It is also in the shadow of the U.N.’s largest camp in Juba.

      By Monday, the government had nearly defeated the forces under Machar, who fled the city. As both sides prepared to call for a cease-fire, some residents of the Terrain started to relax.

      “Monday was relatively chill,” one survivor said.

      What was thought to be celebratory gunfire was heard. And then the soldiers arrived. A Terrain staffer from Uganda said he saw between 80 and 100 men pour into the compound after breaking open the gate with gunshots and tire irons. The Terrain’s security guards were armed only with shotguns and were vastly outnumbered. The soldiers then went to door to door, taking money, phones, laptops and car keys.

      “They were very excited, very drunk, under the influence of something, almost a mad state, walking around shooting off rounds inside the rooms,” one American said.

    • Company That Sued Soldiers Settles Colorado Lawsuit

      In 2014, ProPublica published an investigation of USA Discounters, a subprime lender that, contrary to its name, specialized in enticing military service members into overpaying for furniture, electronics and appliances. When they fell behind on the high-interest loans, the company often took them to court in Virginia — a few miles from the company’s headquarters, but often nowhere near where the service members were based. With court judgments in hand, the company gained the power to seize money from soldiers’ paychecks or bank accounts.

    • Monsters to Destroy: Top 7 Reasons the US could not have forestalled Syrian Civil War

      The interventionist temptation, muted since the Iraq imbroglio, is now returning. Sec. Clinton’s team are already talking about taking steps to remove Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from office as soon as they get into the White House. An excellent and principled NYT columnist called the non-intervention in Syria President Obama’s worst mistake.

    • Hillary Clinton wants to review US strategy in Syria against Isis and Bashar al-Assad’s ‘murderous’ regime
    • Why Hillary’s neocon foreign policy will make the problem of Islamophobia worse

      In Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Democratic Party seems to have found the perfect counter to Donald Trump. Since Trump proposed banning Muslims from the US, his campaign has sought to exploit the fear that Muslims are dangerous and disloyal. But who could think that of the patriotic, constitution-waving Khans, whose son died fighting for the US?

      Trump suggested that Ghazala Khan did not speak for Islamic reasons. But this backfired and the episode appears to have hurt him in the polls. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been able to establish herself as the candidate of tolerance and liberal progress.

      But take a closer look and things are not that straightforward. It is easy to lose sight of why the Khans lost their son in the first place. Humayun Khan died fighting in the illegal war in Iraq, which was launched on the basis of Islamophobic lies, and supported by Hillary Clinton, as senator for New York.

      In 2011, Clinton was a leading figure pushing for military action in Libya. She initially presented the bombing campaign as a way to create a no-fly zone to protect civilians. Within three weeks, the real aim became apparent: regime change.

    • New Katanga trial shows DRC’s potential to try complex international crimes

      Germain Katanga, a warlord convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for murder and other crimes, thought he was getting released from prison in January. But he was wrong. He had been found guilty by the ICC on charges linked to a 2003 attack on the village of Bogoro, in the eastern province of Ituri of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – and had served the end of his 12-year sentence in a Kinshasa jail, at his own request.

    • Brazilian Intelligence Service Stokes Olympic Terrorism Fear for Its Own Benefit

      The enemy could not have chosen a worse time to turn up. On the eve of a major international sporting event, Brazil was simultaneously living through profound economic and political crises. With the country at its weakest moment and fears spreading rapidly, the bombshell dropped: A secret service report leaked to the press revealed that a group of Brazilian citizens, in collusion with foreign agents, planned to arm themselves in order to commit acts of violence and thus further destabilize the country.

      That was 30 years ago, in the first year of the post-dictatorship era. The event was the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. In Brazil, President José Sarney’s government was a disaster, and the cumulative inflation would reach 65 percent that year. The dangerous enemy rehearsing the moves to plunge the country into chaos? According to the secret service, which at the time was known as the National Information Service (Serviço Nacional de Informações, or SNI), the threat was the return of guerrilla warfare, funded by foreign agents, principally from Germany, but also involving the left-leaning opposition Workers’ Party and the trade union federation Unified Workers’ Central. Of course, the threat was just a delusion. It was fabricated by the SNI to warrant the criminalization of social movements and help stop the construction of a left-wing political project, but not only that. The creation of a dangerous enemy right at the beginning of the democratic transition justified the existence of an entity that had become the symbol of the dictatorship.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Hillary Clinton Picks TPP and Fracking Advocate To Set Up Her White House

      Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

      Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

      Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

      She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

      And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

    • Hillary Clinton Appoints Ken Salazar To Lead White House Transition

      Clinton has also faced questions from environmentalists about her record on pipeline construction, hydraulic fracking and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Salazar’s appointment will not allay those concerns: Since leaving government, he has made headlines promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the TPP and defending fracking.

      In November, Salazar authored a joint oped with former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt saying “The TPP is a strong trade deal that will level the playing field for workers to help middle-class families get ahead. It is also the greenest trade deal ever.” Politico reports that Salazar is now opposing a ballot measure designed to restrict fracking in his home state of Colorado. He has previously asserted that “there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone.”

    • Second phase of world’s biggest offshore windfarm gets go-ahead

      The world’s biggest offshore windfarm off the Yorkshire coast is to be expanded to an area five times the size of Hull after being approved by ministers.

      The multibillion-pound Hornsea Project Two would see 300 turbines – each taller than the Gherkin – span more than 480 sq km in the North Sea.

      Fifty-five miles off the coast of Grimsby, the project by Denmark’s Dong Energy is expected to deliver 1,800MW of low-CO2 electricity to 1.8m UK homes.

    • Can a ‘green growth’ strategy solve climate change?

      ‘Decoupling of global emissions and economic growth confirmed’ ran the headline on the International Energy Agency (IEA) website in March 2016. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change”, noted IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. It’s a popular idea that the decoupling of economic growth and carbon emission represents ‘green growth’ or ‘sustainable growth’, and that this is a powerful tool in the fight against dangerous levels of climate change. The idea was further pushed in a 2014 report co-authored by prominent economist Lord Stern, and backed by the United Nations, the OECD, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

  • Finance

    • CEO Tim Cook Decides Apple Doesn’t Have to Pay Corporate Tax Rate Because It’s “Unfair”

      Wouldn’t it be great if you could refuse to pay your taxes until you decided your tax rate was “fair”?

      That is, of course, not the way it works. Unless you’re Apple.

      Apple is currently holding $181 billion overseas, largely thanks to arbitrarily deciding that its most valuable intellectual property seems to live exclusively in low tax countries. For instance, at one time Apple’s subsidiaries in Ireland — a country with 4.6 million people — “earned” over one-third of all Apple’s worldwide revenue.

      And due to a very business-friendly quirk in U.S. tax law, Apple doesn’t have to pay any U.S. taxes on its overseas profits until it “brings them back” to America.

    • Cisco Systems to sack fifth of global workforce, says report

      Cisco Systems is reportedly planning to lay off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20% of the US technology company’s global workforce.

      San Jose, California-based Cisco was expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks as part of a transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric business, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company.

      Cisco, which had more than 70,000 employees as of 30 April, declined to comment.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Green Party candidate slams Clinton on email

      Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Monday ramped up her attacks on Hillary Clinton for using a private email system while serving as the nation’s top diplomat and maintaining a fuzzy boundary between her official and private duties.

      In an interview with CNN, Stein appeared to reiterate her call for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for mishandling government secrets, and also joined in the attacks on her relationship with the Clinton Foundation.

      “I think there should have been a full investigation,” Stein said. “I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened, and why top secret information was put at risk, why the identity of secret agents were potentially put at risk.”

      “There is much more that is coming to public attention about Hillary Clinton’s behavior, including the recent revelations about favors bestowed on the Clinton Foundation’s donors who got special deals, who got state partnerships,” she added, in a reference to recently released emails suggesting blurred lines between Clinton’s position as secretary of State and her vast personal and philanthropic connections.

      “If she wasn’t aware that she was violating State Department rules, it raises real issues about her competency.”

      Stein has previously criticized the Justice Department’s decision not to indict Clinton or her senior aides for the email set-up, a move that she said gave the Democratic presidential nominee “a pass.”

    • Charles Koch’s network launches new fight to keep donors secret

      A group tied to billionaire Charles Koch has unleashed an aggressive campaign to kill a ballot measure in South Dakota that would require Koch-affiliated groups and others like them to reveal their donors’ identities — part of a sustained effort by his powerful network to keep government agencies and the public from learning more about its financial backers.

      Americans for Prosperity, the largest activist group in the policy and political empire founded by industrialist Koch and his brother, David, launched a coalition this year to fight Initiated Measure 22, which calls for public disclosure of donors who fund advocacy efforts, the creation of a state ethics commission and public financing of political campaigns. It also limits lobbyists’ gifts to elected officials and lowers the amount of campaign contributions to candidates, parties and political action committees.

    • Why the Presidential Debates Will Suck Even Though They Don’t Have To

      Run by Party Elites and Lobbyists, Sponsored by Corporations

      In 1988, the CPD wrested the stewardship of general election presidential debates away from the fiercely independent League of Women Voters (LWV), which had run the events from 1976 to 1984.

      The CPD is nominally a nonpartisan organization, but its co-chairmen, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., and Michael McCurry, are senior Republican and Democratic Party figures, both of whom leveraged their time in politics to later work for corporate interests.

      Fahrenkopf chaired the Republican National Committee for six years before joining the Washington, D.C., law and lobbying firm Hogan & Hartson. From 1998 to 2013, he was the president of the American Gaming Association, a lobbying group for for-profit gambling interests.

      McCurry is a former Clinton White House press secretary who today works for the D.C.-based corporate and political communications firm Public Strategies Washington. Although his current client list is not public, he was employed on the “Hands Off Internet” campaign in 2006, working for telecommunications companies to kill net neutrality.

      The commission’s board of directors is composed of an entire strata of America’s elites including Howard G. Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Newton N. Minow, a former chairman of Citigroup and Time Warner — and Jim Lehrer.

      The debates themselves are consistently sponsored by private corporations. This year’s sponsors have yet to be announced, but in the past, they have included AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Southwest Airlines, J.P. Morgan, Ford Motor Company, and the Washington, D.C., international law firm Crowell & Moring.

      The CPD has not included a third-party candidate in a presidential debate since Ross Perot ran in 1992. Since 2000, its rules state that only candidates who consistently poll over 15 percent in national polls should be included.

    • Interrupting Trump’s strut is only a start

      Donald Trump says he is running for presidency against the crooked media. What should be the media response?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Revamped Chinese History Journal Welcomes Hard-Line Writers

      Wang Yanjun, who was ousted as deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu, with the latest issue of the journal on Tuesday, which still shows his name and that of other editors removed by its new managers.

    • China censorship: How a moderate magazine was targeted
    • “Ultra-left” Takes Over Journal as Ex-editor Loses in Court
    • Former editors of liberal Chinese magazine sue government after being forced out in takeover
    • China intellectuals sue over magazine, former editor loses appeal
    • Azerbaijan’s long assault on media freedom

      As a former Soviet republic, Azerbaijan has never had a strong record on press freedom. Since independence, the country’s journalists have been mistreated, while independent and opposition newspapers faced constant libel charges and other harassment from local law enforcement or criminal elements.

      Journalists and outlets that support government policies are left alone to fill their pages with praise, while those who take a more critical approach are punished. Official court documents detail how journalists have been sent to prison on trumped-up charges of hooliganism, extortion, trafficking, and instigating mass protests and violence.

      In practice, however, targeted journalists reported on official corruption, criticised extravagant government spending or documented illegal evictions. While the country’s leaders and key decision makers pay lip service to media freedom, the government continues to hunt down journalists, activists and human rights defenders.

    • Disappointing: LinkedIn Abusing CFAA & DMCA To Sue Scraping Bots [Ed: Remember the time Microsoft broke the Internet by undermining No-IP. Microsoft (i.e. NSA PRISM) owns LinkedIn and wants to harvest tons of personal information, not share even what’s public with others.]

      It’s been really unfortunate to see various internet companies that absolutely should know better, look to abuse the CFAA to attack people using tools to scrape public information off of their websites. In the past few years, we’ve seen Facebook and Craigslist do this (with Facebook recently winning in court).

      Now LinkedIn is doing the same thing, suing a bunch of anonymous users for scraping public information from LinkedIn. This is not the first time the company has done this. A few years ago, the company (using the exact same lawyers) filed a very similar lawsuit, eventually figuring out that the scraping was done by a wannabe competitor, HiringSolved, which pretty quickly settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay $40,000 and erase all the data it collected.

    • Billionaire Backer Of Palantir & Facebook Insists He’s Bankrupting Journalists To Protect Your Privacy

      We’ve already made it quite clear where we stand on Peter Thiel financing a number of lawsuits against Gawker Media as some sort of retaliation for some articles he didn’t like. Lots of people who really hate Gawker don’t seem to care how problematic Thiel’s actions are, but you should be concerned, even if you dislike Gawker — in part, because many of the lawsuits Thiel appears to be backing are clearly bogus and just designed to bankrupt the company, which happened a couple months ago.

      This week is the auction to see who ends up with Gawker, and Thiel is taking a weird victory lap with a silly and misleading oped in the NY Times where he argues that this was really all about making a stand for privacy and has nothing to do with shitting on the First Amendment. There’s a lot in the article that’s bullshit, and it deserves a thorough debunking, so here we go.

      First off, positioning himself as a champion of privacy seems laughable. After all, this is the guy who put the first money into both Palantir and Facebook. Palantir, of course, is the datamining operation used by governments and law enforcement around the globe to snoop through various databases and try to find magical connections. Palantir is rumored to be in trouble lately, in part because its technology isn’t that good, and it may have built a multi-billion dollar business on convincing clueless government officials that by sniffing through a variety of databases, it could magically find important “connections.” But

    • ​Why Github Removed Links to Alleged NSA Data

      Over the past few days, researchers have pored over dumped data allegedly belonging to a group associated with the NSA. The data, which contains a number of working exploits, was distributed via Dropbox, MEGA, and other file sharing platforms.

      The files were also linked to from a page on Github, but the company removed it fairly swiftly—despite having hosted plenty of hacked material in the past. It turns out that removal was not due to government pressure, but because the hacker or hackers behind the supposed breach were asking for cash to release more data.

      “Per our Terms of Service (section A8), we do not allow the auction or sale of stolen property on GitHub. As such, we have removed the repository in question,” Kate Guarente, from Github’s communications team, told Motherboard in a statement.

    • Guccifer 2.0 Censorship Shields DNC Corruption

      In June 2016, hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a trove of internal Democratic National Committee documents, which pointed to DNC staff violating its own charter in treating Hillary Clinton as the nominee long before the primaries even began.

      Included in the documents was a DNC dossier of possible attacks from Republican presidential candidates on Clinton, outlining counterpoints to their arguments in preparation for Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic nominee. The documents unquestionably prove the DNC violated their own charter and undermined democracy by strategizing for Clinton to win the Democratic primaries and general election.

      One of those strategies included manipulating media coverage for her benefit.

      “Use specific hits to muddy the water around ethics, transparency, and campaign finance attacks on HRC,” noted one of the leaked memos. In July, Guccifer 2.0 released additional documents to The Hill, including a DNC memo from March 2015 to Clinton campaign operatives outlining ways to legally solicit Clinton’s SuperPACs. The DNC made no efforts to dispute the content of the leaked documents. Instead, they offered a vague statement saying they were taken and leaked by suspected Russians hackers.

      On August 12, Guccifer 2.0 released more documents, which included congressional contact lists and passwords. This leak likely served to make public that the recent hacks of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were committed by Guccifer 2.0.

    • Poland approves bill outlawing phrase ‘Polish death camps’

      The Polish government has approved a new bill that foresees prison terms of up to three years for anyone who uses phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to Auschwitz and other camps that Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during the second world war.

    • Obasanjo tasks media on self-censorship

      He said, “I see Nigerian journalists pretending to be oblivious of the devastating role that the media has played in major conflicts on the continent. For instance, the case of the role of the press in triggering the Rwandan Genocide is instructive for Nigeria as we are increasingly polarized and divided along the ethnic lines with the press fanning the embers of division and separation.

      “The immediate concern for me is for the press not to be used as a wedge for separating us, but for the press to be an adhesive for bridging the gaps.”

    • Popular Pages Revolt Against Facebook’s Arbitrary Censorship

      A group of popular Facebook meme pages have launched a revolt against Facebook’s increasingly strict and bizarre censorship.

      The revolt, which includes some of Facebook’s biggest comedy pages, aims to catch Facebook’s attention in a show of dissatisfaction with the social network’s current policy enforcement system.

      “I have gone through a lot of post blocks and seen a lot of friends getting into issues with losing their accounts or pages even over the most inoffensive posts like this picture of Drake as a n64 controller that got my post blocked,” said one of the revolt’s organizers, Devin Shire, in an interview with Breitbart Tech.

    • Turkey’s continuing crackdown on the press must end

      Index strongly condemns the indefinite closure of newspaper Özgür Gündem by a Turkish court.

      The silencing — even temporarily — of one of Turkey’s last independent papers underscores the severe erosion of freedom of expression in the country. This crackdown on critical voices has accelerated since the attempt to overthrow the country’s democratically elected and increasingly autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

      “Waves of arrests rippling across the country have swept up journalists, academics and even artists and are rightly raising concerns around the world. This latest attack on media freedom sends a clear signal that president Erdogan is intent on playing politics with the public’s right to information and journalists’ right to report,” Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg said.

    • I don’t believe in censorship: Adoor Gopalakrishnan
    • It’s silly to have censorship in a democracy: Adoor Gopalakrishnan
    • I’m Opposed to Any Kind of Censorship: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Dallas PD Asks Attorney General For Permission To Withhold ‘Embarrassing’ Documents About Its Bomb Robot

      The unprecedented deployment of a bomb-defusing robot by Dallas police to kill an armed suspect raised several questions. While these robots have sometimes acted as part of a negotiation team in the past, no police department had previously rigged one up with an explosive device to take a suspect out.

      One question that remains unanswered is whether this use of the Dallas PD’s robot violated its own policies. Gawker’s Andy Cush filed a public records request for PD policies on using robots to kill and discovered Dallas law enforcement was basically making things up as it went along.

    • Activist Caucus: Occupying institutional politics in Brazil

      Amid a deep political crisis in Brasil, the goal is to develop a collaborative, pedagogical, supra-partisan and effective format of civic campaign for elections to be replicated and improved on future occasions.

    • German President Booed, Attacked; Claims “The People Are The Problem, Not The Elites”

      Official German State TV and State Radio reported that “a handful of right wing extremists” have attacked the president and disturbed the otherwise peaceful and welcoming reception of the President. This is simply not the case, as seen in the video…

    • Family of driver who died after seizure sues Ohio troopers

      The attorney alleges troopers didn’t offer medical attention because they were preoccupied with suspicions that Galloway had illegal drugs.

    • ‘My husband may die’ in a Colorado prison, says wife of CIA whistleblower

      The wife of former CIA officer and whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling says she’s concerned about the health of her husband, who was sentenced last year to serve three years in a Colorado prison.

      Sterling was convicted of espionage for leaking information to a journalist about a dubious U.S. government operation meant to deter Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He says he didn’t do anything wrong. The prosecution came as part of President Barack Obama’s crackdown on government leaks.

      Sterling is set for release in 2018. But his wife, Holly Sterling, told The Colorado Independent by phone from St. Louis, Missouri, that she worries health issues he’s having in prison might mean she’ll never see him on the outside again.

      “I’m concerned my husband may die,” she said. “I’m extremely concerned.”

      In the past few months, Jeffrey Sterling, 49, who says he has a history of atrial fibrillation, has been “subjected to unresponsive and dismissive medical care” at the Colorado federal correctional institution known as FCI Englewood, according to an Aug. 11 complaint he filed. Holly Sterling provided a copy of the complaint to The Independent.

    • Federal Judge Says Real-Time Cell Location Info — Whether Obtained With A Stingray Or Not — Requires The Use Of A Warrant

      An interesting decision by a federal judge in Florida suggests this district, at least, may not be amenable to the warrantless use of Stingray devices… or any other method that harvests cell site location data in real time.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Web at 25: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of World Wide Web

      Twenty-five years ago on August 6 1991, the first publicly available website was launched and the World Wide Web (WWW) was born.

      It was created by the now internationally known Sir Tim Berners-Lee who, just eight months earlier, first posted the simple text page on an internal web server hosted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

      In the 1980’s, Berners-Lee had been looking at a way for physicists to share information around the world without all using the same types of hardware and software.

    • Google Fiber Hasn’t Hit A ‘Snag,’ It’s Just Evolving

      When Google Fiber jumped into the broadband market in 2011, the company knew full well that disruption of an entrenched telecom monopoly would be a slow, expensive, monumental task. And five years into the project that’s certainly been true, the majority of Google Fiber launch markets still very much under construction as the company gets to work burying fiber across more than a dozen looming markets. Wall Street, which initially laughed at the project as an experiment, has been taking the project more seriously as Google Fiber targets sprawling markets like Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

      This week however things took an interesting turn with the news that Google Fiber was pausing deployments in Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon, to take stock of possible wireless alternatives. Neither deployment was formally official (both cities were listed as “potential” targets); and Google Fiber execs are simply considering whether or not it makes financial sense to begin using some fifth generation (5G) technologies to supplement existing fiber deployment.

      This isn’t really surprising; Under the guidance of former Atheros CEO Craig Barratt, Google has filed applications with the FCC to conduct trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. The company also recently acquired Webpass in the hopes of supplementing fiber with ultra-fast wireless wherever possible. Wireless has been on Google’s radar for several years. It’s a great option in cities where construction logistics are a nightmare, or in towns where AT&T’s using regulations to hinder fiber deployment.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Growing Call For Transparency Within African CMOs To Ensure Membership Confidence

      Collective management organisations (CMOs) in African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) member states, and Africa at large, have the potential to contribute to the growth and development of creative industries. However, they need to be supported, guided and supervised to ensure that they achieve the purpose for which they are established.

    • Who Should Get The Benefits When You Donate Your DNA For Research?

      Needless to say, lawyers are now involved in resolving the more mundane issues of ownership of the Blue Zone blood samples. But even if a court hands down its judgment for this particular case, the larger ethical issues will remain, and become ever-more pressing as the importance and value of DNA databases continues to rise.

08.16.16

Personal Audio LLC and Patent Troll Jim Logan Demonstrate the Harms of Software Patents and Why They Must Never Spread to Europe

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“James Logan freely admits that he’s never made a podcast,” according to USA Today (source of the photo below)

Jim Logan of Personal Audio

Summary: Jim Logan of Personal Audio (a notorious Texas-based patent troll) is still fighting with his bogus patent, having already caused enormous damage with a single software patent that should never have been granted in the first place (due to prior art, not just Alice)

THE USPTO‘s examiners have been so eager to grant patents and perhaps so out of touch that they granted a patent on podcasting to some parasite, in spite of extensive evidence of prior art (even the Patent Office has acknowledged this by now). As a result, many innocent people with a podcast had been hit (extorted) until the EFF stepped in to help. We last wrote about this earlier in the month and it turns out that after years of disputes the patent troll (which is the patent holder) is still not giving up. Just look what a monumental mess just one single erroneous grant by the USPTO has caused!

“Just look what a monumental mess just one single erroneous grant by the USPTO has caused!”Joe Mullin says that the “[p]odcasting patent troll fights EFF on appeal, hoping to save itself” (this patent is pretty much its entire capital/existence*). To quote:

The owner of a patent on podcasting is hoping to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Personal Audio and its owner, Jim Logan, lost their patent last year after lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed the US Patent and Trademark Office that various types of Internet broadcasts pre-date the patent, which claims a 1996 priority date.

The podcasting patent became famous and received national media attention after it was used to sue several high-profile podcasters, including Adam Carolla, who raised $500,000 and fought back for a time before reaching a settlement in 2014. Personal Audio had also sued several big TV networks, and its case against CBS went to a jury in September 2014. The jury found the patent valid and awarded Personal Audio $1.3 million, a victory that Personal Audio’s lawyers have noted in their appeal arguments.

The controversy is now in the hands of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court that handles all patent appeals. A three-judge panel heard arguments over the matter earlier this month.

Let this become a famous example of why software patents are a great menace to everyone, not just to developers. Sites of patent lawyers continue to advocate for software patents under the guise of ‘analysis’ (cherry-picking by patent lawyers who still resort to Enfish, despite admitting that it changed little or nothing at all) and WatchTroll, a vocal proponent of software patents, asks a loaded question in his latest headline, “Would Monopoly® be patent ineligible under Alice?”

“There should be absolutely no software patents in Europe (no matter what Battistelli does to ruin the EPO and crush the EPC these days), especially now that the USPTO demotes these.”Here again is the regression/resort/retreat to Enfish and BASCOM hype, as if two decisions among many hundreds will somehow salvage software patents as a whole. To quote WatchTroll: “The application of the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank by the Federal Circuit has been disappointing, to say the least. There have been some rays of hope for innovators with decisions in DDR Holdings, Enfish and BASCOM, but these bright spots shine so radiantly because they are scattered in a sea of despair.”

Despair to who? To patent law firms, i.e. not to actual development powerhouses and/or programmers.

We regret to see the Battistelli-run EPO being lured into software patenting in spite of the EPC. There are already misplaced priorities which favour large US-based companies at the EPO and the EPO increasingly uses the term “ICT”, which some can interpret as a vague insinuation/synonym of software patenting. See this pair of new tweets [1, 2] that ask: “Know how US & European practice differs for ICT applications?”

There should be absolutely no software patents in Europe (no matter what Battistelli does to ruin the EPO and crush the EPC these days), especially now that the USPTO demotes these. “Ever been to EPOPIC? Here are this year’s topics,” the EPO now writes in relation to an upcoming event. Looking at the sidebar under “key events” we see “ICT seminar 2016″ and “Indo-European conference on ICT-related patents 2016″, so there’s clearly some kind of a trend developing. The UPC threatened to bring software patents to Europe (so said multiple domain experts) and also bring patent trolls like Jim Logan. It’s a true danger when people like Battistelli race to the bottom in the name of “production” (even if it’s faked). █
_______
* Wikipedia says the firm, which is a “Texas-based company,” was “formed to enforce two patents applied to podcasting.” It’s described as a “patent holding company” (euphemism for troll).

The Patent Microcosm Hopes That the Originators of Software Patents Will Undermine the Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Posted in America, Patents at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hoping for a post-Alice software patents rebound/resurgence, obviously

PTAB

Summary: Now that the actions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which have been consistently upheld by the CAFC in precedential decisions, are suddenly being questioned the patent microcosm gets all giddy and tries to undermine PTAB (again)

SEVERAL decades ago the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) officially brought software patents to the USPTO. Things have been getting a great deal worse since then, as lots of very fundamental programming ideas turned into a monopoly, potentially enforceable against anybody with a computer and low-cost keyboard (and some rudimentary coding skills or access to the Internet, e.g. BBS for source code).

Well, as we noted the other day, based on early birds like Patently-O (typically ahead of the curve), PTAB (which is hostile towards software patents) is now being challenged by CAFC. WIPR has just published an article about it:

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has agreed to hear a dispute surrounding the rules for amending patents in Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) reviews before its full panel of judges.

In a decision handed down on Friday, August 12, the Federal Circuit decided to hear en banc a case involving a pool-cleaning product owned by Aqua Products, vacating its previous opinion.

This was then mentioned also by MIP and bigger Web sites for and by patent lawyers. “In a rare grant of a petition for rehearing en banc,” one author said, “the court decided that an appeal “warrants en banc consideration” of who bears what burden when amending in an IPR. In re: Aqua Products, No. 15-1177, slip op. at 2 (Fed. Cir. August 12, 2016). From the very beginning of IPRs, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has required the patent owner to bear the burden on a motion to amend.”

This is an important case for defenders of the de facto ban on most software patents, especially in light of Alice. As another new article from MIP put it this morning, “The Federal Circuit has issued a rare reversal of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board” (PTAB’s use of common sense reversed in Arendi v Apple). The legitimate concern here is that CAFC, which is not exactly known for integrity (contrariwise, it’s known for mischief and abuse in recent years), will interfere in the operation of PTAB, dominated by scientists rather than lawyers or judges with a law degree and not the faintest clue about programming. Here is another lawyers’ site stating that the “Federal Circuit [is] Going En Banc on IPR Standards for Amending”. Given that many patent lawyers now equate PTAB with “death squads” (what will they call it next? Stalin? Hitler?), we’re not terribly surprised to see this kind of bias or patent jingoism. A lot of patents news sites are hard for people to comprehend, probably by design/intention (jargon and reference to sections/cases rather than explicit concepts). This way the patent microcosm can ‘monopolise’ analysis and coverage, eventually misleading the readers and making it seem as though everything is rosy for software patents.

“A lot of people who promote software patents also wrongly equate patents with innovation.”In my personal view, the patent systems per se are not the problem; the problem is patent maximalism and limitless scope, as advocated by those who profit from that (notably patent law firms). They have cheapened/diluted patents/innovation to the point where many patents, once scrutinised in a court of law, simply get discarded. Increasingly, with PTAB around, some or these are discarded before they even reach the court (only after USPTO ‘examiners’ rubberstamp these). Notably, unassertible patents (because these patents are crap and their assignee/owner knows it) are not safe anymore.

A lot of people who promote software patents also wrongly equate patents with innovation. They have never implemented a single computer program in their entire life; they’re just armchair marketing people (shameless self-promotion) harping about “protection” or “innovation”, as if patents are not a two-edged sword that impedes and discourages development, usually impacting the smallest developers most profoundly because these developers cannot afford going to court. █

That Time When the Administrative Council Helped Battistelli Crush Oversight (Audit Committee) and What ILO Said About It a Month Ago

Posted in Courtroom, Europe, Patents at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli and KongstadSummary: Things are becoming ever more troublesome at the EPO as the Administrative Council enjoys inaction from the International Labour Organization (ILO), in spite of its role in destroying much-needed oversight at the behest of Battistelli

IN our only article about the EPO yesterday we mentioned the RFPSS meeting. Things are eroding if not disintegrating at the EPO and it’s taking its toll on staff while no effective oversight exists anymore. Someone in IP Kat‘s comments remarked on the contents of yesterday’s material as follows:

On the subject of pensions, there is some interesting commentary from the CSC on the latest RFPSS meeting.

http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sc16129cp.pdf

“The Office thus unnecessarily lowers the probability of reaching our long-term objective for the return on investment, thereby deliberately creating a situation that could be used to trigger further major reforms.

The governance in terms of risk monitoring is still unclear through inadequate role clarity, while such governance deficiencies are recognised as often leading to under performance”.

If one were inclined to believe in conspiracies, the actions of the Office (including eliminating independent oversight of finances, and seemingly ensuring “underperformance” of the pension reserve fund) could all be interpreted as preparation for an attempt to sequester the approx. EUR7,000 million in the reserve fund.

In such a hypothetical conspiracy, the Office would “manufacture” excuses to cut / eliminate pension benefits to those who should be the beneficiaries of the RFPSS fund, only to then conduct a new study that miraculously discovers a massive surplus in that fund. The conspiracy would then conclude with the pension fund surplus being “liberated” by the Office.

Of course, this is all very far-fetched and so ought to easy to dismiss as nothing more than pure speculation. Indeed, a far more plausible explanation is that there is no plan for a cash-grab, just an attempt to deal with the pension liability issue that I have discussed before. Still, the effectively lawless behaviour of the Office in recent years (especially when it comes to matters of staff rights / benefits) does make one wonder…

Someone then responded to that as follows:

I have been entertaining similar suspicions since before Mr. Battistelli’s too office, when his immediate predecessor generously spouted expressions like “fit for the future”, “doing nothing is not an option” (in other words: TINA — but what is the problem in the first place?) and imposing the IFRS charade. I would however employ a much stronger word than “sequester”.

The questions are IMO: who would be the happy beneficiaries of that heist, how would the loot be split among them, and how would it be transferred out of the EPOrg while maintaining appearances?

As we stated yesterday, we have no accounting expertise here (not even in our IRC channels), so we need to rely on input from those who understand such matters and can interpret the financial reports of the EPO. The following remark bemoans Battistelli's political background, which basically makes him unfit (as per qualifications) for the post he has held for over half a decade. To quote:

Don’t forget that there is a French Presidential election campaign coming up in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_2017

“Primaire à droite : les Amis de Sarkozy lancent un appel aux dons”

http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/primaire-a-droite-les-amis-de-sarkozy-lancent-un-appel-aux-dons-11-04-2016-5704991.php

This is why people who hold elected office for political parties should never be put in change of international organisations with large cash surpluses and no effective oversight.

Right now at the EPO there is virtually no accountability, as pointed out in another thread in relation to a subject we first covered here 2 years ago:

Perhaps we will never know. With the full knowledge and approval of the AC, one of BB’s first actions as president was to disband the only body (the Audit Committee) that could have provided transparency / independent oversight in connection with the EPO’s finances.

The ILOAT also placed its seal of approval on this dastardly act in Judgment 3698:

http://www.ilo.org/dyn/triblex/triblexmain.detail?p_lang=en&p_judgment_no=3698&p_session_id=122&p_language_code=EN

“The authority to establish or abolish the Audit Committee was vested in the Administrative Council alone, and these decisions did not infringe the complainant’s rights in any way, regardless of his role in the EPO.”

Judgment No. 3698 (originally in French) is dated a month ago (when many decisions came out, more than 80% of which rules against the EPO's management) and it relates to a decision we covered here last month. It’s Bernard Paye's complaint to ILO, which gave him a Pyrrhic victory many years too late. Here is the text of this decision with highlights in yellow. The complaint was made by “the principal author of the proposal to establish [the A]udit [C]ommittee,” based on the text:

Organisation internationale du Travail
Tribunal administratif

International Labour Organization
Administrative Tribunal

Registry’s translation,
the French text alone
being authoritative.

P.
v.
EPO

122nd Session
Judgment No. 3698

THE ADMINISTRATIVE TRIBUNAL ,

Considering the complaint filed by Mr B. Y. P. against the European Patent Organisation (EPO) on 15 March 2013 and corrected on 7 May 2013, the EPO’s reply of 5 March 2015, the complainant’s rejoinder of 24 April and the EPO’s surrejoinder of 31 July 2015;

Considering Article II, paragraph 5, of the Statute of the Tribunal; Having examined the written submissions and decided not to hold oral proceedings, for which neither party has applied;

Considering that the facts of the case may be summed up as follows: The complainant challenges the abolition of the Audit Committee of the EPO’s Administrative Council.

On 30 June 2011, following a proposal by the President of the European Patent Office, the Administrative Council adopted decision CA/D 4/11 abolishing the Audit Committee, one of its subsidiary bodies, with immediate effect. On 28 September 2011 the complainant, who was then Head of Internal Audit (Principal Directorate 0.6 of the European Patent Office), and Ms H., who chaired the Staff Committee, filed an internal appeal against this decision. They complained, inter alia, that the General Advisory Committee had not been consulted prior to the adoption of the challenged decision. In November 2012 Ms H. withdrew her appeal. Having heard the complainant, the Appeals Committee of the Administrative Council unanimously recommended on 11 December 2012 that his appeal be dismissed, considering, in particular, that the challenged decision had not been taken in breach of any “applicable legal provision”. By a letter of 20 December 2012, which constitutes the impugned decision, the complainant was notified that the Administrative Council had decided to dismiss his appeal.

In his complaint filed on 15 March 2013, the complainant asks the Tribunal to quash the impugned decision as well as decision CA/D 4/11 and to order the EPO to submit the initial proposal of the President of the Office to the General Advisory Committee. He also seeks compensation in the amount of 30,000 euros for the moral injury that he considers he has suffered and an award of costs.

The EPO submits that the complaint is irreceivable, in particular on the grounds that the complainant is impugning a general decision that does not adversely affect him. In the alternative, it asks the Tribunal to dismiss the complaint as unfounded.

CONSIDERATIONS

1. The Tribunal has jurisdiction under Article II, paragraph 5, of its Statute to hear complaints alleging “non-observance, in substance or in form, of the terms of appointment of officials and of provisions of the Staff Regulations”. In consequence, when “[t]he complainant does not allege the non-observance of any of the terms of his appointment or of any of the Staff Regulations applicable to him”, his complaint must be held to be irreceivable (see Judgment 2952, under 3).

2. The Tribunal observes that the complainant does not allege any violation of the terms of his appointment or of staff regulations that are applicable to him. His case does not relate to his administrative status but rather to the organisation of the EPO, his employer, for which he is plainly not responsible. The fact cited by the complainant that he was “the principal author of the proposal to establish [the A]udit [C]ommittee” that was subsequently abolished does not grant him any right to intervene in a decision to maintain that subsidiary body or not.

The authority to establish or abolish the Audit Committee was vested in the Administrative Council alone, and these decisions did not infringe the complainant’s rights in any way, regardless of his role in the EPO.

3. It ensues from the foregoing that the complaint, which the Tribunal is not competent to hear, is irreceivable and must be dismissed.

DECISION

For the above reasons,
The complaint is dismissed.

In witness of this judgment, adopted on 28 April 2016, Mr Claude Rouiller, President of the Tribunal, Mr Patrick Frydman, Judge, and Ms Fatoumata Diakité, Judge, sign below, as do I, Dražen Petrović, Registrar.

Delivered in public in Geneva on 6 July 2016.

(Signed)

CLAUDE ROUILLER
PATRICK FRYDMAN
FATOUMATA DIAKITÉ
DRAŽEN PETROVIĆ

The above relates to our previous post about complicity of the Administrative Council, in this particular case actively removing accountability or oversight from Battistelli, which the Council appears to be in bed with.

Citing another case, we have already shown how Battistelli worked against the European Patent Convention (EPC). How Battistelli can get away with all this isn’t something we can now defer to the Founding Fathers of the EPO anymore (most of them are deceased by now). █

The EPO’s Administrative Council Keeps Postponing Debate About Grounds for Firing the President

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli and KongstadLike FIFA coverups but much broader

Summary: A recollection of events prior to the latest Administrative Council meeting, where Benoît Battistelli’s failings and accountability for failing to correct them never even came up

“COMPLICITY” is increasingly becoming the correct term by which to describe the Administrative Council with its national delegations (who are supposed, at least in principle and in theory, to hold the EPO accountable). Disinterested or self-interested would be a more polite way to put/frame it. If they cared, they would have fired Battistelli already. Even if they kept their word or promise, he would be sacked by now. No secret endowments to this autocrat.

“Watch what Erdoğan is doing in Turkey right now (against military generals, judges, journalists etc.) to better understand how Battistellites (Benoît along with his largely French circle) are running the EPO.”Like in most autocratic regimes, control is exerted through fear and the Erdoğan- or Duterte-like Battistelli scares people at all levels, including delegates whom he bullies in plain sight (maybe to make an example). No wonder some top managers are leaving and others, who reportedly (based on rumours) thought about leaving, say the darnest things on TV in order to cover Battistelli's back.

Watch what Erdoğan is doing in Turkey right now (against military generals, judges, journalists etc.) to better understand how Battistellites (Benoît along with his largely French circle) are running the EPO. It’s something to be expected from third-world nations, but it’s happening in Bavaria, traditionally known for class and sophistication. Fear of Battistelli, including fear of firing him (long overdue), is apparent. Developments prior the latest Administrative Council meeting suggest that there was not a reversal of their position but rather abstinence from the topic of Battistelli’s abuses (breaking rules, including his own).

“The last B28 [Board 28, which privately admits there's an EPO crisis] meeting took place just ahead of the BFC meeting at the end of May,” we learned. “The B28 focused once again on following-up on the consequences of the resolution adopted by the Administrative Council on 16 March 2016. Of particular interest and importance for staff was whether there was any progress in the disciplinary matters, which should be fair and seen to be fair. According to the summary of conclusions of this meeting (B28/8/16), no tangible progress could be reported on then. In June, the President rejected the requests for review of Malika Weaver and Ion Brumme and thereby reconfirmed their disciplinary sanctions. Later the same month, the President apparently interfered with the independence of the Enlarged Board of Appeal proceedings, thereby preventing them from ruling on the merits in the case of the Judge accused of misconduct. Just a few days ahead of the Council meeting, the President suspended Laurent Prunier in The Hague, a further staff representative and SUEPO official to be sanctioned.”

“How convenient for Battistelli, who is no longer so far from his retirement anyway (maybe he will join Sarkozy with his political career thereafter).”One might expect, based on any of the above actions, that Battistelli would be considered in violation/deviance from the requirement set to him by the overseers. How can they possibly reconcile all this? Simple; just don’t mention any of that at all. That is precisely what happened at the meeting, as we wrote at the time. Based on text that was shown to us: “During the AC [Administrative Council] meeting, the Council was informed by both internal and external stakeholders on the flawed consultation process leading to the documents presented for their approval. As for the proposals themselves, among the more obvious deficiencies in the Boards of Appeal reform, the theme had been expanded to include post service employment restrictions and relocation and, according to the President, to be treated as a package. Finally, a review of the Investigation and Disciplinary Procedures which were originally on the agenda were postponed.”

That’s right. Postponed. 3 months! How convenient for Battistelli, who is no longer so far from his retirement anyway (maybe he will join Sarkozy with his political career thereafter). To quote further: “The circumstances leading to the disciplinary cases against staff representatives and Union Officials have been repeatedly raised with the delegations before and after the confidential Council session. [...] The only mention made in the summary of the C-session was that “the Council resolution will be followed up in one of the next meetings”.

This incredible procrastination shows that the Council is not at all interested in restoring stability to the Office. Put another way, the delegates are complicit; they’re a bunch of obedient cowards, maybe some of them paid for it.

In the mean time, judging by the spammy activity of the Twitter account this summer* (the PR team just keeps spamming for EIA 2017 e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]), there is the assumption that Battistelli will survive another year. If that actually happens, how many workers will even stay at the Office now that resignations and early retirements skyrocket? Rumours we heard say that Battistelli wants to extend the term of Topić’s EPO appointment in spite of the criminal charges against him (not to mention extreme unpopularity among staff, whom he attacks like he attacked staff in Croatia). █
_____
* Or just talking to everyone in general, e.g. [1, 2].

A Surge of Staff Complaints About the European Patent Office Drowns the System, Disservice to Justice Noted

Posted in Courtroom, Europe, Patents at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Self-explanatory graphs about the state of the justice [sic] system which is prejudiced towards/against EPO workers, based on internal reports

EPO justice 1

EPO justice 2

EPO justice 3

EPO justice 4

EPO justice 5

EPO justice 6

If EPO management cannot guarantee justice to its own staff, will it ever guarantee justice to patent holders (defendants and plaintiffs)?

Links 16/8/2016: White House Urged by EFF on FOSS, Go 1.7 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Why private clouds will suffer a long, slow death

      Analyst firm Wikibon believes that no vendor is making more than $100 million via OpenStack. If that’s anywhere near true, the sum total of all vendors has to be less than $2 billion.

    • M$ Shoots Foot, Again

      Not being able to sell software unbundled from hardware is a terrible deficit in a world where people are building open servers.

    • Microsoft: Why we had to tie Azure Stack to boxen we picked for you

      Microsoft has explained the rationale behind last month’s announcement that you won’t be allowed to simply download Azure Stack and get going.

      In July Redmond informed fans the only way they’d be able to get Azure in their own data centres would be on hardware of its choosing.

      Specifically, Azure Stack will only come pre-installed on pre-integrated servers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. Other OEMs, we’re promised, will follow.

      The Dell, HP and Lenovo will come “sometime” in 2017. Azure Stack had been expected by the end of 2016, but the work with to produce integrated systems will mean a delay.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds Announces the Second Linux Kernel 4.8 Release Candidate Build

      As expected, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday announcement for the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now available for public testing.

      Linux kernel 4.8 entered development last week, when the merge window was officially closed and the first Release Candidate development milestone released to the world. According to Linus Torvalds, the second RC build is here to update more drivers, even more hardware architectures, as well as to fix issues for supported filesystems and add some extra mm work.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks Now Requires Qt 5.5 or Later, Build 5.25.0 Updates Breeze Icons

        The KDE project announced this past weekend the release of KDE Frameworks 5.25.0, another monthly update to the collection of over 70 add-ons for the Qt5 GUI toolkit and the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

        KDE Frameworks 5.25.0 comes in time for the recently released KDE Plasma 5.7.3 maintenance update of the modern and widely used Linux desktop, promising to update many of the core components, including but not limited to Attica, which now follows HTTP redirects, the Breeze icon set with lots of additions, extra CMake modules, KDE Doxygen tools, KXMLGUI, KWindowSystem, and KWidgetsAddons.

        KDE apps like KTextEditor, KArchive, and Sonnet received bugfixes and other improvements in the KDE Frameworks 5.25.0. The release also comes with many other updated components, among which Plasma Framework, NetworkManagerQt, KXMLGUI, KCoreAddons, KService, Kross, Solid, Package Framework, KNotification, KItemModels, KIO, KInit, KIconThemes, KHTML, KGlobalAccel, KFileMetaData, and KDeclarative.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Users Get KDE Plasma 5.7.3, Mozilla Firefox 48.0 & Wine 1.9.16

        Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis has been happy to inform the community about the availability of the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment and software applications in the main repositories of the distribution.

        We bet that Chakra GNU/Linux users have been waiting for this announcement for quite a while now, and the main reason for that is the KDE Plasma 5.7.3 desktop environment, which brings a month’s worth of bug fixes, updated language translations, and improvements to many KDE apps and core components.

        In addition to the KDE Plasma 5.7.3 desktop environment, Chakra GNU/Linux users can now install some of the latest open-source applications, among which we can mention the Oracle VirtualBox 5.1.2 virtualization software, SQLite 3.13.0 SQL database engine, LibreOffice 5.1.5 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 48.0 web browser, and Wine 1.9.16.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Report of GUADEC 2016

        So this year was our first GUADEC, for both Aryeom (have a look at Aryeom’s report, in Korean) and I. GUADEC stands for “GNOME Users And Developers European Conference”, so as expected we met a lot of both users and developers of GNOME, the Desktop Environment we have been happily using lately (for a little more than a year now). It took place at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • 4MParted 19.0 Distrolette Now In Beta, Based on 4MLinux 19.0 and GParted 0.26.1

        4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, August 15, 2016, about the availability of the first public Beta release of the upcoming 4MParted distrolette people can use to partition disk drives independent of a computer OS.

      • Server-Oriented Alpine Linux 3.4.3 Lands with Kernel 4.4.17 LTS, ownCloud 9.0.4

        The Alpine Linux development team is happy to announce the release and general availability for download of the third maintenance update to the Alpine Linux 3.4 series of server-oriented operating systems.

      • First Beta of Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Hits the Streets, Based on Ubuntu 14.04.5

        Until today, Black Lab Linux 8.0 “Onyx” has been in the Alpha stages of development and received a total of four Alpha builds that have brought multiple updated components and GNU/Linux technologies, but now the Ubuntu-based operating system has entered a much more advanced development state, Beta, and the first one is here exactly six months after the development cycle started.

        “Today the Black Lab Linux development team is pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 8 ‘Onyx’ Beta 1. Bringing us one step closer to our goal of a stable, secure, and long term supported Linux desktop for the masses. ‘Onyx’ Beta 1 is a culmination of over 6 months of user collaboration and feedback,” says Roberto J. Dohnert, Black Lab Software CEO.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 Goes Stable with KDE Plasma 5.6.5 and Linux Kernel 4.6.5

        Softpedia was informed by the OpenMandriva team about the general availability of the final, production-ready release of the OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 operating system.

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 has been in development for the past four months, as the first Alpha build got released sometime in the third week of April 2016. Since then, the hard working development team behind this open source project have managed to keep up with the latest GNU/Linux technologies and software releases, so that they can bring you an usable and up-to-date computer OS.

        “OpenMandriva Lx is a cutting edge distribution compiled with LLVM/clang. Combined with the high level of optimization used for both code and linking (by enabling LTO) used in its building, this gives the OpenMandriva desktop an unbelievably crisp response to operations on the KDE Plasma 5 desktop which makes it a pleasure to use,” reads the announcement.

      • OpenMandriva 3.0, Google Linux Snub, TCP Vulnerability

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 was announced Saturday with Linux 4.6.5, Plasma 5.6.5, and systemd 231. An early reviewer said he liked OpenMandriva but Plasma not as much. Elsewhere all anyone can seem to talk about is Google’s decision to use something other than Linux to power its next embedded devices and a TCP vulnerability that could allow remote hijacking of Internet traffic. Patrick Volkerding has upgraded the toolchain in Slackware-current and Red Hat security expert said you can’t trust any networks anywhere.

    • Slackware Family

      • Zenwalk Linux 8.0 – A more Zen Slackware

        There were a few things I enjoyed about Zenwalk 8.0 and several I did not. Before getting to those, I want to acknowledge that Zenwalk is, in most ways, very much like Slackware. The two distributions are binary compatible and if you like (or dislike) one, you will probably feel the same way about the other. They’re quite closely related with similar benefits and drawbacks.

        On the positive side of things, I like that Zenwalk trims down the software installed by default. A full installation of Zenwalk requires about two-thirds of the disk space a full installation of Slackware consumes. This is reflected in Zenwalk’s focused “one-app-per-task” approach which I feel makes it easier to find things. Zenwalk requires relatively little memory (a feature it shares with Slackware) and, with PulseAudio’s plugin removed, consumes very few CPU cycles. One more feature I like about this distribution is the fact Zenwalk includes LibreOffice, a feature I missed when running pure Slackware.

        On the other hand, I ran into a number of problems with Zenwalk. The dependency problems which annoyed me while running Slackware were present in Zenwalk too. To even get a working text editor I needed to have development libraries installed. To make matters worse, the user needs a text editor to enable the package manager to install development libraries. It’s one of those circular problems that require the user to think outside the box (or re-install with all software packages selected).

        Other issues I had were more personal. For example, I don’t like window transparency or small fonts. These are easy to fix, but it got me off on the wrong foot with Zenwalk. I do want to acknowledge that while my first two days with Zenwalk were mostly spent fixing things, hunting down dependencies and tweaking the desktop to suit my tastes, things got quickly better. By the end of the week I was enjoying Zenwalk’s performance, its light nature and its clean menus. I may have had more issues with Zenwalk than Slackware in the first day or so, but by the end of the week I was enjoying using Zenwalk more for my desktop computing.

        For people running older computers, I feel it is worth noting Zenwalk does not offer 32-bit builds. The distribution has become 64-bit only and people who still run 32-bit machines will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Slackware.

        In the end, I feel as though Zenwalk is a more focused flavour of Slackware. The Slackware distribution is multi-purpose, at least as suited for servers as desktops. Slackware runs on more processor architectures, has a live edition and can dump a lot of software on our hard disk. Zenwalk is more desktop focused, with fewer packages and perhaps a nicer selection of applications. The two are quite similar, but Slackware has a broader focus while Zenwalk is geared to desktop users who value performance.

      • New Toolchain on Current

        Patrick is now upgrading basic toolchain in current branch. The basic trio combination (GCC, GLIBC, and Kernel) are normally the first one to update since it will be used as a base for next Slackware release.

        GCC is now upgraded to 5.4.0, which is the latest version for 5.x branch. Their latest version is at 6.1 while their development version is at 7.0.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Booting Lenovo T460s after Fedora 24 Updates
        • Flock 2016
        • Ideas for getting started in the Linux kernel

          Getting new people into OSS projects is always a challenge. The Linux kernel is no different and has it’s own set of challenges. This is a follow up and expansion of some of what I talked about at Flock about contributing to the kernel.

          When I tell people I do kernel work I tend to get a lot of “Wow that’s really hard, you must be smart” and “I always wanted to contribute to the kernel but I don’t know how to get started”. The former thought process tends to lead to the latter, moreso than other projects. I would like to dispel this notion once and for all: you do not have to have a special talent to work on the kernel unless you count dogged persistence and patience as a talent. Working in low level C has its own quriks the same way working in other languages does. C++ templates terrify me, javascript’s type system (or lack there of) confuses me. You can learn the skills necessary to work in the kernel.

        • Żegnajcie! Fedora Flock 2016 in words

          From August 2 – 5, the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, was held in the beautiful city of Kraków, Poland. Fedora contributors from all over the world attend for a week of talks, workshops, collaboration, fun, and community building (if you’re tuning in and not sure what Fedora is exactly, you can read more here). Talks range from technical topics dealing with upcoming changes to the distribution, talks focusing on the community and things working well and how to improve, and many more. The workshops are a chance for people normally separated by thousands of miles to work and collaborate on real issues, problems, and tasks in the same room. As a Fedora contributor, this is the “premier” event to attend as a community member.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Elive 2.7.2 Beta Is Out with Spotify Support, Improved Artwork, and Thunar Fixes

          On August 14, 2016, the Elive development team was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of yet another Beta version of the Elive Linux operating system.

          Elive 2.7.2 comes only three weeks after the release of the previous Beta build, version 2.7.1, to implement out-of-the-box support for the popular Spotify digital music service, giving users direct access to millions of songs if they have a paid subscription, and a much-improved artwork, as both the system and icon themes were enhanced.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Show Off Converged Terminal App Design

            Reshaping the classic terminal app to fit multi-form factor world isn’t easy, but it’s the task that the Canonical Design team face as part of their work on Unity 8.

          • Canonical Plans on Improving the Ubuntu Linux Terminal UX on Mobile and Desktop

            Canonical, through Jouni Helminen, announced on August 15, 2016, that they were planning on transforming the community-developed Terminal app into a convergent Linux terminal that’s easy to use on both mobile phones and tablets.

            Terminal is a core Ubuntu Touch app and the only project to bring you the popular Linux shell on your Ubuntu Phone or Ubuntu Tablet devices. And now, Canonical’s designers are in charge of offering a much more pleasant Linux terminal user experience by making Terminal convergent across all screen formats.

            “I would like to share the work so far, invite users of the app to comment on the new designs, and share ideas on what other new features would be desirable,” says Jouni Helminen, Lead Designer at Canonical. “These visuals are work in progress – we would love to hear what kind of features you would like to see in your favorite terminal app!”

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Coffee Shop DevOps: How to use feedback loops to get smarter
  • How to design your project for participation

    Working openly means designing for participation. “Designing for participation” is a way of providing people with insight into your project, which you’ve built from the start to incorporate and act on that insight. Documenting how you intend to make decisions, which communication channels you’ll use, and how people can get in touch with you are the first steps in designing for participation. Other steps include working openly, being transparent, and using technologies that support collaboration and additional ways of inviting participation. In the end, it’s all about providing context: Interested people must be able to get up to speed and start participating in your project, team, or organization as quickly and easily as possible.

  • Events

    • Open Source//Open Society Conference Live Blog

      This conference offers 2 huge days of inspiration, professional development and connecting for those interested in policy, data, open technology, leadership, management and team building.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • So long, Firefox Hello!

        After updating my PCLinuxOS install, I noticed that the icon of Firefox Hello had changed: it was read and displayed a message reading “Error!”

        I thought it was a simply login failure, so I logged in and the icon went green, as normal. However, I noticed that Hello did not display the “Start a conversation” window, but one that read “browse this page with a friend”.

        A bit confused, I called Megatotoro, who read this statement from Mozilla to me. Apparently, I had missed the fact that Mozilla is discontinuing Hello starting from Firefox 49. Current Firefox version is 48, so…

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Up to Release Candidate State, Support for SSH Protocol v1 Removed

      The FreeBSD Project, through Glen Barber, has had the pleasure of announcing this past weekend the general availability of the first Release Candidate for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 operating system, due for release on September 2, 2016.

      It appears to us that the development cycle of FreeBSD 11.0 was accelerated a bit, as the RC1 milestone is here just one week after the release of the fourth Beta build. Again, the new snapshot is available for 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit (i386), PowerPC (PPC), PowerPC 64-bit (PPC64), SPARC64, AArch64 (ARM64), and ARMv6 hardware architectures.

  • Public Services/Government

    • White House Source Code Policy Should Go Further

      A new federal government policy will result in the government releasing more of the software that it creates under free and open source software licenses. That’s great news, but doesn’t go far enough in its goals or in enabling public oversight.

      A few months ago, we wrote about a proposed White House policy regarding how the government handles source code written by or for government agencies. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has now officially enacted the policy with a few changes. While the new policy is a step forward for government transparency and open access, a few of the changes in it are flat-out baffling.

  • Programming/Development

    • Go 1.7 is released

      Today we are happy to announce the release of Go 1.7. You can get it from the download page. There are several significant changes in this release: a port for Linux on IBM z Systems (s390x), compiler improvements, the addition of the context package, and support for hierarchical tests and benchmarks.

      A new compiler back end, based on static single-assignment form (SSA), has been under development for the past year. By representing a program in SSA form, a compiler may perform advanced optimizations more easily. This new back end generates more compact, more efficient code that includes optimizations like bounds check elimination and common subexpression elimination. We observed a 5–35% speedup across our benchmarks. For now, the new backend is only available for the 64-bit x86 platform (“amd64″), but we’re planning to convert more architecture backends to SSA in future releases.

    • Go 1.7 Brings s390x Support, Compiler Improvements

      Go 1.7 includes a new port to the IBM System z (s390x) architecture, numerous compiler improvements, and more. Compiler work for Go 1.7 includes a new SSA back-end that yields 5~35% speedups on 64-bit x86, a new and more compact export data format, speed increases to the garbage collector, optimizations to the standard library, and more.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Serving Up Security? Microsoft Patches ‘Malicious Butler’ Exploit — Again

      It’s been a busy year for Windows security. Back in March, Microsoft bulletin MS16-027 addressed a remote code exploit that could grant cybercriminals total control of a PC if users opened “specially crafted media content that is hosted on a website.” Just last month, a problem with secure boot keys caused a minor panic among users.

      However, new Microsoft patches are still dealing with a flaw discovered in November of last year — it was first Evil Maid and now is back again as Malicious Butler. Previous attempts to slam this door shut have been unsuccessful. Has the Redmond giant finally served up software security?

    • Let’s Encrypt: Why create a free, automated, and open CA?

      During the summer of 2012, Eric Rescorla and I decided to start a Certificate Authority (CA). A CA acts as a third-party to issue digital certificates, which certify public keys for certificate holders. The free, automated, and open CA we envisioned, which came to be called Let’s Encrypt, has been built and is now one of the larger CAs in the world in terms of issuance volume.

      Starting a new CA is a lot of work—it’s not a decision to be made lightly. In this article, I’ll explain why we decided to start Let’s Encrypt, and why we decided to build a new CA from scratch.

      We had a good reason to start building Let’s Encrypt back in 2012. At that time, work on an HTTP/2 specification had started in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards body with a focus on network protocols. The question of whether or not to require encryption (via TLS) for HTTP/2 was hotly debated. My position, shared by my co-workers at Mozilla and many others, was that encryption should be required.

    • PGP Short-ID Collision Attacks Continued, Now Targeted Linus Torvalds

      After contacted the owner, it turned out that one of the keys is a fake. In addition, labelled same names, emails, and even signatures created by more fake keys. Weeks later, more developers found their fake “mirror” keys on the keyserver, including the PGP Global Directory Verification Key.

    • The Brewing Problem Of PGP Short-ID Collision Attacks
    • Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, IHG hit by malware: HEI

      A data breach at 20 U.S. hotels operated by HEI Hotels & Resorts for Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt and Intercontinental may have divulged payment card data from tens of thousands of food, drink and other transactions, HEI said on Sunday.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The U.S. will rearm Saudi Arabia to the tune of $1.5 billion as airstrikes resume in Yemen

      This week, the Pentagon announced its intention to sell $1.5 billion in armaments, tanks, and military advisory support to Saudi Arabia. If that sounds like a major deal, consider that the United States sold more than $20 billion worth of military equipment and support to the Saudis last year. And this is an alliance that goes back decades.

      All of that and much more from the United States is put to use in the fierce war that the Saudi military is waging against Shiite militias in Yemen. For instance, the Saudis command U.S.-made fighter jets that drop U.S.-made cluster bombs — a munition that is so imprecise that it has been banned by 119 nations. The U.S. provides targeting assistance, intelligence briefings and even daily aerial jet refueling for the Saudis and their coalition partners, which are mostly other oil-rich Persian Gulf nations.

    • China launches quantum satellite for ‘hack-proof’ communications

      China said it had launched the world’s first quantum satellite on Tuesday, a project Beijing hopes will enable it to build a coveted “hack-proof” communications system with potentially significant military and commercial applications.

      Xinhua, Beijing’s official news service, said Micius, a 600kg satellite that is nicknamed after an ancient Chinese philosopher, “roared into the dark sky” over the Gobi Desert at 1.40am local time, carried by a Long March-2D rocket.

      “The satellite’s two-year mission will be to develop “hack-proof” quantum communications allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light,” Xinhua reported.

      The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, or Quess, satellite program is part of an ambitious space programme that has accelerated since Xi Jinping became Communist party chief in late 2012.

    • China Launches “Hack-Proof Quantum Satellite” To Transfer Secure Data
    • Trouble Follows When the U.S. Labels You a ‘Thug’

      There is a nasty pattern in American political speech, going back into the 1980s at least: when a senior U.S. official labels you a thug, often times wars follow. Thug is the safest word of American Exceptionalism.

      So it is with some concern that lots of folks are pushing each other away from the mic to call Putin a thug (fun fact: Putin has been in effective charge of Russia for 15 years. As recently as the Hillary Clinton Secretary of State era, the U.S. sought a “reset” of relations with him.)

      While the current throwing of the term thug at Putin is tied to the weak evidence presented publicly linking a Russian hacker under Putin’s employ to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers, there may be larger issues in the background. But first, a sample of the rhetoric.

    • Putin’s incredible shrinking circle

      True to the informal tradition that August brings surprises in Russia, on the 12th it was announced that Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, was leaving his position as head of the Presidential Administration (AP) and taking up the new and rather less pivotal job of presidential representative for transport and the environment. In his place, Putin elevated one of Ivanov’s deputies, the essentially-unknown 44-year old Anton Vaino. Whatever Vaino’s strengths, this points to the way Putin is hollowing out his inner elite, surrounding himself with fewer but also less substantial peers, who are unlikely to challenge his worldview and opinions.

    • Doctors Without Borders Hospital Bombing in Yemen Earns Rare Saudi Rebuke at State Department

      After the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed a hospital in Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders on Monday, the U.S. State Department offered a rare condemnation of the coalition’s violence.

      “Of course we condemn the attack,” said Elizabeth Trudeau, a spokesman for the State Department.

      The State Department has previously deflected questions about coalition attacks by referring reporters to the Saudi government — even though the U.S. has supplied the coalition with billions of dollars of weapons, and has refueled Saudi planes.

      Trudeau also stressed that “U.S. officials regularly engage with Saudi officials” about civilian casualties — a line that spokespeople have repeated for months. Saudi Arabia has nevertheless continued to bomb civilian sites, including homes, markets, factories, and schools.

    • In Rudy Giuliani’s Universe, 9/11 Is Everything and Nothing

      Warming up the crowd for Donald Trump on Monday in Youngstown, Ohio, former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani offered a glimpse into the alternate reality he has now signed on to by describing the presidency of George W. Bush as a time of undisturbed peace and security for Americans.

      During “those eight years, before Obama came along,” Giuliani said, “we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States — they all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

    • Aid Worker in Aleppo Says Joint U.S.-Russian Airstrikes Would be “Diabolical”

      A British aid worker based in rebel-held East Aleppo says that reported plans by the United States and Russia to conduct joint airstrikes against the city are “ludicrous and diabolical,” and, if carried out, would have a disastrous impact on civilians living there.

      Tauqir Sharif, 29, speaking to The Intercept from a hospital in Aleppo, says that Russian and Syrian government airstrikes on the city are creating nightmarish conditions for ordinary people. The addition of American forces to the mix would compound the misery of civilians, while giving the impression that the United States was openly siding with the Assad government.

      Last week an alliance of Syrian rebels and Islamist groups broke the longstanding government siege on the eastern half of the city. Sharif says that since then, the frequency and intensity of airstrikes has increased. “There has been an almost constant bombardment from strikes because the regime is very, very angry that a corridor has been opened into the city from the south,” Sharif says. “The siege in some ways is still in place because it is very difficult to bring aid in due to constant airstrikes on vehicles driving the routes to the city.”

    • Six Years Later, the US Continues to Facilitate Saudi War Crimes

      Over six years ago, according to a State Department cable liberated by Chelsea Manning, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia met with Prince Khalid bin Sultan to complain about all the civilians the Saudis killed in an airstrike on a health clinic. Prince Khalid expressed regret about the dead civilians. But the Saudis “had to hit the Houthis very hard in order to ‘bring them to their knees.’”

    • US War Crimes or ‘Normalized Deviance’

      The U.S. foreign policy establishment and its mainstream media operate with a pervasive set of hypocritical standards that justify war crimes — or what might be called a “normalization of deviance,” writes Nicolas J S Davies.

    • Simplistic Second-Guessing on ISIS

      Official Washington’s neocons, the mainstream U.S. media and Donald Trump are on the same page at least in blaming President Obama for ISIS, a case of all three parties being wrong, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • Morrissey says leave voters were victimised and made to look irresponsible after Brexit

      Morrissey has accused the British media of victimising those who voted to leave the EU.

      The 57-year-old singer said he was left “shocked” by the unfair reporting following the outcome of the EU referendum.

      He claimed those who voted in favour of Brexit were judged as “racist, drunk and irresponsible” yet those who voted to remain were not questioned in the same way.

      Speaking to Israeli publication Walla! he said: “I am shocked at the refusal of the British media to be fair and accept the people’s final decision just because the result of the referendum did not benefit the establishment.

    • Banks Won’t Wait Around to See What Brexit Deal the U.K. Can Get

      Big investment banks with their European headquarters in London will start the process of moving jobs from the U.K. within weeks of the government triggering Brexit, a faster timeline than their public messages of patience would imply, according to people briefed on the plans being drawn up by four of the biggest firms.

    • Upset by Brexit, Some British Jews Look to Germany

      But looking for a way to ensure that he could still work and live in Europe once Britain leaves the bloc, Mr. Levine, 35, who was born in Britain and lives in London, decided to do what some Jews, including his relatives, might consider unthinkable: apply for German citizenship.

    • Brexit Timing Illusions Exposed in Unusual Tale of Greenland

      There’s a man in the European Union who has already led a country out of the bloc. His name is Uffe Ellemann-Jensen. He’s a former foreign minister of Denmark who handled negotiations on Greenland after its citizens voted to leave the EU in 1982.

      With a population of just 56,000 and a gross domestic product of about $2.5 billion, Greenland still took three years to exit. Ellemann-Jensen says any notion in Britain that all it needs to do is trigger Article 50 and two years later it will be out is illusory.

      “Negotiating Greenland’s exit was a fairly simple task that resulted in a relatively simple and easy to understand protocol,” Ellemann-Jensen, 74, said in an interview. “That took three years. Britain will take much longer. It’s impossible to say how long.”

    • U.K. Input Costs Jump as Pound’s Brexit Drop Fuels Prices: Chart

      The drop in the pound caused by the U.K.’s European Union referendum is already affecting manufacturers. Manufacturers’ costs for materials and fuels jumped an annual 4.3 percent in July, the fastest pace in three years. Still, the surge may not worry Bank of England officials yet, since policy makers have indicated they intend to look through any inflation generated by the currency’s slump as they add stimulus to bolster growth.

    • 7 Brexit promises that have already been abandoned

      As soon as we voted to Leave the EU, the phrase “post-truth” started to be thrown about a lot more, assisted in part by a certain national embarrassment running for US president.

      It’s probably fair to say the Leave campaign may have had something to do with this – campaign promises were literally abandoned the morning after the Brexit vote.

      Just to remind you, here’s what those who campaigned to Leave are really hoping people will shut up about.

    • Brexit Bulletin: Banks Already Plotting City Exodu

      Larger investment banks with their European headquarters in London are already making plans for their own withdrawal.

      Many plan to start the process of moving jobs from the U.K. within weeks of the government triggering Brexit, people briefed on the plans of four of the biggest firms told Bloomberg’s Gavin Finch.

      That suggests the banks may move faster than their public messages of patience would imply, and reflects dismay with the U.K.’s lack of a clear plan to protect its status as a global financial hub. There are concerns British-based banks will lose the right to sell services freely around the European Union.

    • Brexit damage to economy will outweigh modest wage gains, says study

      Damage to the economy caused by Brexit will more than offset the modest wage gains for British-born workers in low-paid jobs caused by cutting net migration to the tens of thousands a year, a study has found.

      A report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank said there would be a small pay increase to native-born employees in sectors such as security and cleaning if there was a big cut in the number of workers arriving in Britain from overseas.

      But it estimated that these benefits would fail to compensate for the reduction in real incomes caused in the short term by the higher inflation triggered by a falling pound, and in the long term by a slowdown in the economy’s growth rate.

    • Will ‘decent work’ or Victorian brutality mark India’s dash for the top?

      Although all too often glossed over, Victorian Britain’s harsh working conditions are no secret.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Assange: DOJ set ‘new standard’ for Clinton

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Department of Justice (DOJ) set a new standard for its investigations with its probe of Hillary Clinton.

      “Our D.C. lawyers are delivering a letter tomorrow to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to explain why it is that the now six-year-long national security and criminal investigation being run against WikiLeaks, the reason I have political asylum, has not been closed,” he said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Monday.

      “Because the DOJ, whose actions seem to be setting a new standard by closing the Hillary Clinton case,” Assange added. “The Hillary Clinton case has only gone for one year.

      “Hillary Clinton’s case has been dropped, the case against WikiLeaks continues. So why is it that the quote, ‘pending law enforcement proceedings’ against WikiLeaks continue? There’s a problem here.”

      Assange compared the DOJ’s investigation of his organization with the agency’s probe of Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

      “It was closed under the basis that [FBI Director] James Comey said that they couldn’t establish that there was an intent to damage national security,” he said of the DOJ’s probe of Clinton. “In our case, there’s no allegation that we have done anything except publish information for the public.

      “The U.S. government had to say under oath in 2013 not a single person has been physically harmed by our publication. You don’t have intent. You don’t have serious harm.”

      Assange added Clinton’s campaign is trying to discredit WikiLeaks by focusing on his lack of American citizenship.

      “Of course they’re desperate for anything,” he said. “We operate and report on all different countries. We have staff in the United States. That’s what we do for every country.

    • Ten years ago, Trump’s campaign manager warned of a rigged election — in Ukraine

      “The only way” Hillary Clinton can win in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump said at a rally in that state on Friday evening, “and I mean this 100 percent — [is] if in certain sections of the state they cheat, OK?” That was “the way we can lose the state,” he said, of a state where he currently trails by 9 points. “And we have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching.” On Saturday, his campaign unveiled an effort to somehow formalize the campaign’s fraud-prevention system, encouraging sign-ups on their website for “Trump Election Observers.”

      There’s no demonstrated in-person voter fraud problem in Pennsylvania (or anywhere else, for that matter), and it’s not clear if Trump’s fraud-prevention effort is simply an attempt to collect voter contact information and boost GOP voter enthusiasm, or if it’s actually meant to combat a problem that doesn’t exist. But it’s not surprising that this is a part of Trump’s campaign in one sense: When Trump’s campaign director Paul Manafort was helping to coordinate the campaign effort of a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine in 2006, he used similar tools and rhetoric.

    • Democratic National Committee Creates A ‘Cybersecurity Board’ Without A Single Cybersecurity Expert

      The Democratic National Committee, still reeling from the hack on its computer system that resulted in a bunch of leaked emails and the resignation of basically all of its top people, has now created a “cybersecurity advisory board” to improve its cybersecurity and to “prevent future attacks.”

    • Con vs. Con

      During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal media, epitomized by MSNBC, ruthlessly purge those who challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Liberal pundits, such as Paul Krugman, lambaste critics of the political theater, charging them with enabling the Republican nominee. Liberals chant, in a disregard for the facts, not to be like Ralph Nader, the “spoiler” who gave us George W. Bush.

      The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

    • Did Trump Campaign Manager Reap Millions in Stolen Ukrainian Wealth?

      The bromance between Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—even when reminded of the murders of anti-Putin journalists—has been one of the oddities of the 2016 presidential campaign. Besides Trump’s praise of Putin as a strong leader, and the GOP presidential nominee’s invitation to Russia to hack into the email server of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, there’s the work done on behalf of a Putin ally by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager.

    • Milwaukee’s War on Black People

      Donald Trump supporter and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke has built a national profile by openly declaring war on the Black Lives Matter movement, from the floor of the Republican National Convention to the pages of national media outlets, once even proclaiming on social media that racial justice protesters will “join forces” with ISIS.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • WordPress blocks latest Guccifer 2.0 docs

      The blog platform WordPress blocked or obfuscated public access to the entire recent cache of documents from the account of hacker Guccifer 2.0, including the contact information for Democratic members of Congress and lists of passwords.

      Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers behind the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) breach last month, published some of the documents taken from the DCCC system on Friday.

      “Some content on this page was disabled on August 13, 2016 upon receipt of a valid complaint regarding the publication of private information,” the site posted in place of the documents and accompanying blog post, along with a link to its privacy policy.

      While the site only deleted one file — the database of congressional contact information — deleting the post removed all links to other documents in the recent cache. Knowing a direct web address of the files, a user could still download them. The site no longer provides any direction on how to get to those documents.

    • “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment

      For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people who’ve been trying to figure this out for a decade.

    • Abuse on Twitter is a ‘fundamental feature,’ report says

      Its commitment to free speech since its very beginning, plus the pressure to grow the number of users, have overshadowed efforts to curtail the abuse on the platform, former employees told BuzzFeed News. Add to that the general internal chaos of a startup.

      [...]

      The article echoes some of the well-known criticisms of the internet firm, such as the allegation that it takes better care of celebrities who complain of abuse than it does average people.

      Twitter has deployed something called the “censoring algorithm” — for example, when it has hosted town halls with famous people such as Caitlyn Jenner — the story said.

      Perhaps Twitter’s “original sin” was its homogenous leadership team, a former employee told BuzzFeed. White, male leaders didn’t prioritize the abuse problem in part because they were not victimized.

    • National anti-censorship group weighs in on book battle in Chesterfield County

      In a letter sent to Chesterfield’s School superintendent this month, the National Coalition Against Censorship asked the school system to do away with plans to review several books from a summer reading list some parents voiced concerns over, alleging they are not age appropriate and are objectionable.

      “Parents have complete control. This was an optional book list. The right response at this point is if parents don’t want their kids reading things, then they tell their kids not to read it,” said Claire Guthrie-Gastanaga with the ACLU of Virginia.

      The ACLU is part of the coalition and says beyond limiting diversity in education, there are legal troubles with taking books off reading lists.

    • AdWeek Articles On Google Ad VP Torrence Boone Hit With Bogus DMCA Notices Issued By Bogus ‘News’ Websites

      It appears there’s still no shortage of quasi-reputation management efforts being deployed in the form of bogus DMCA takedowns issued by bogus “news” websites.

      Pissed Consumer uncovered this shady tactic back in April, noting that legitimate-sounding sites like the “Frankfort Herald” and the “Lewisburg Tribune” were issuing takedown notices on complaints posted to the gripe site. These fake news sites tended to be filled with a blend of scraped content and and negative reviews/posts from sites like Pissed Consumer and Ripoff Report copy-pasted in full and backdated to make them appear as if they’d appeared at the bogus sites first.

      Our article about this tactic, containing some additional details we tracked down, caught the eye of an entity called Web Activism, which is now digging up as many details as it can about this DMCA-abusing reputation management tactic. Web Activism notified Adweek that a couple of past articles hosted there were being targeted by bogus DMCA notices.

    • Who Filed Fake Copyright Infringement Complaints Against AgencySpy?

      Earlier this year, someone using a fake name, a fake employer and a fake job description filed a fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request with our parent company’s legal team.

      Here’s what almost certainly happened: A reputation PR firm had a client who wanted a post written way back in 2010 to disappear from Google’s search results forever, so an employee of this firm copied and pasted our post into a fake news story, backdated it to make the claim more believable, then used a fictional but official-sounding identity to threaten our employer with unspecified legal action.

    • Which Crazy Copyright Holder Took Down Katie Ledecky/Carlos Santana ‘Smooth’ Mashup First?

      Someone — either the Olympics or whoever holds the copyright to the song — issued a takedown. This is ridiculous. The use here was almost certainly fair use. But when you have two of the most aggressive copyright aggressors around — record labels and the Olympics — I guess it’s no surprise that they would ignore fair use and take down content like this, which is the kind of content that would likely only get more people interested in either the Olympics or the music. But, no, copyright is apparently more important than that.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Alain Philippon pleads guilty over smartphone password border dispute

      A Quebec man who refused to give his smartphone password to border officials at Halifax Stanfield International Airport last year has pleaded guilty and been fined $500.

      Alain Philippon, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., had said he would fight the charge of hindering or obstructing border officials, but changed course Monday morning when his lawyer entered a guilty plea on his behalf in provincial court in Dartmouth, N.S.

    • Malaysian maid agencies stunned by new directive barring non-Muslim maids for Muslims

      Maid agencies in Malaysia are stunned by a “new” directive imposed by the Immigration Department barring them from hiring non-Muslim maids.

      Employers have questioned the rationale behind the policy, which department officials said was not new, as they were worried that they may not get any maids at all.

      Malaysian Maid Employers Association (MAMA) president Engku Ahmad Fauzi said the policy would limit the supply of maids for Muslims.

      “Religion should not be an obstacle. When you work in an office, you don’t base it on religion and likewise, this should not be the case for the maid in the home,” he said on Sunday (Aug 14).

    • Helsinki Uber drivers now face criminal charges when caught

      Police in Helsinki are criminally charging drivers caught working for the smartphone-based chauffeur service Uber. Previously, drivers found behind the wheel of an Uber only faced a misdemeanor fine.

    • Egyptian judo athlete sent home after refusing to shake hand of Israeli opponent

      For all the professionalism that has overwhelmed the Olympics, the games are supposed to be conducted with a spirit of sporting fraternity.

      And officials reacted sternly after a member of the Egyptian judo team refused to shake hands with the Israeli athlete who had just defeated him.

      The International Olympic Committee said Islam El Shehaby received a “severe reprimand” for his behaviour following his first-round heavyweight bout loss to Or Sasson last Friday.

    • Police to hire law firms to tackle cyber criminals in radical pilot project

      Private law firms will be hired by police to pursue criminal suspects for profit, under a radical new scheme to target cyber criminals and fraudsters.

      In a pilot project by the City of London police, the lead force on fraud in England and Wales, officers will pass details of suspects and cases to law firms, which will use civil courts to seize the money.

      The force says the scheme is a way of more effectively tackling fraud – which is now the biggest type of crime, estimated to cost £193bn a year. It is overwhelming police and the criminal justice system.

      The experiment, which is backed by the government and being closely watched by other law enforcement agencies, is expected to lead to cases reaching civil courts this year or early next year.

      Officers will use the private law firms to attempt to seize suspects’ assets. If unsuccessful, police could decide to leave it at that or pursue the case themselves through the criminal courts.

      Commander Chris Greany, head of economic crime at City of London police, said: “It is a huge shift … Civil recovery allows us to get hold of a criminal’s money sooner, and repay back victims sooner.”

    • Study Says Police Body Cameras Have Contributed To Increased Uses Of Deadly Force

      While I don’t doubt that some officers believe footage may assist them in justifying shootings, there’s very little here that suggests anything more than a statistical blip. No such increase was noted in 2013 or 2014, and a 3.64% increase would seem to be a fluctuation, rather than anything correlative.

      The authors of the study note one issue that may be skewing the numbers slightly upward: there’s very little data available to differentiate between justified shootings and unjustified shootings. Without this, it’s difficult to draw the conclusion that officers have made conscious or unconscious decisions about the perceived exculpatory value of capturing deadly force incidents on tape. And yet, such a conclusion is being tentatively drawn.

    • Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths

      In the wake of high-profile police shootings, the Obama administration has encouraged local police departments to equip their officers with body-worn cameras. The devices, said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “hold tremendous promise for enhancing transparency, promoting accountability, and advancing public safety.”

      A new study by Temple University researchers, however, suggests that the wearable video cameras may not lead to fewer police shootings of civilians, but may actually make officers more likely to use lethal force.

    • African-American Women Make Olympic History

      After winning an Olympic medal, Simone Manuel said, “It means a lot, especially with what is going on in the world today, some of the issues of police brutality. This win hopefully brings hope and change to some of the issues that are going on.”

    • This Is What You Get

      The police shooting of another young black man, this time in Milwaukee, has proved “a spark to a powder keg” that is the city’s decades-long segregation, toxic racial climate, gross economic inequity, police abuses, and political leadership that not only ignored but often exacerbated those tensions. The death of Sylville Smith, 23, has provoked two days and nights of sometimes violent protests by a community that, said the brother of another police shooting victim, “has nothing. It’s a neglected community. To burn down something, to them, it meant, ‘Do you hear us now?’”

      The shooting and riots have put a spotlight on what has been called the worst place to be black in America, a city so segregated and divided from its suburbs that an old racist joke claims the city’s 16th Street viaduct bridge is the longest in the world because it links “Africa to Europe.” Milwaukee’s population of 600,000 is roughly 60% black and Latino, with a poverty rate of over 30%, dilapidated infrastructure, and little or no access to decent jobs; its suburbs are rich, up to 96% white and staunchly Republican – and Gov. Scott Walker is blamed for long working to keep it that way.

    • Tribute to Fidel Castro on His 90th Birthday
    • Fidel the Guerrilla in 2015–16 and Beyond

      Fidel stepped out of his hideaway, as though from a mountain hideout, to provide the very first salvo against illusions about U.S. imperialism. However, this is coupled with the expressed desire for a peaceful solution of the decades of conflict between the two neighbours, which is worth repeating: “I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged one word with them, though this does not in any way signify a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or threats of war.”

    • Fidel Castro: 90 Revolutionary Years

      In October 1960, Senator John Kennedy said: “Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years – a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state – destroying every individual liberty.” This gives a measure of Fidel’s audacity to undertake his own legal and political defence.

    • Human Rights Groups Hold Candle Lighting for the Victims of Extra Judicial Killings; Call on President Duterte to Stop the Killing & Respect the Rights of Every Individual, and Follow Due Process

      iDefend, composed of Human Rights Defenders, has come out with a public statement and organised the candle lighting as a form of protest to #StopTheKillings on 15th August 2016, Monday at Tomas Morato cor. Timog Cirlce and Welcome Rotonda in Quezon City.

    • Kerry’s Brazil Meeting: Showing Support for an Illegitimate Government

      On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) also weighed in, noting, “After suspending Brazil’s first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights.” He added: “The United States cannot sit silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined.”

      It is extremely rare to see this type of challenge to the policy of an administration from members of Congress of the same party, over a country as big and important as Brazil. In dealing with such a country, with a land mass that is bigger than the continental United States, more than 200 million people, and the seventh largest economy in the world, it is normal for Democratic legislators to defer to their Democratic president, especially in an election year.

  • DRM

    • It looks like the headphone jack dilemma will be pretty messy to start

      As you’ve heard ad nauseam, Apple appears extremely likely to remove the headphone jack from its next iPhone. This hasn’t gone over well! Apart from forcing some people to buy new wired (or wireless) headphones, it’s likely to raise the cost of the average headphone, and make many learn to live with dongles.

      Still, there are some potential benefits to adopting a digital audio connection like Lightning — noise-cancelling could become standard, for instance, and higher-end Lightning cans could provide better sound. Plus, if Apple makes jack-less iPhones the norm, it’d at least do so in one fell swoop. Lightning replaces 3.5mm, and that’s that.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • AbbVie v Amgen: Is the “patent dance” fair for both sides?

      The suit is the first filed under the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA) in which two parties have disagreed upon which patents should be in dispute, and raises a question about the efficacy of the “patent dance” process established by the BPCIA.

    • A Specification’s Focus on Particular Embodiment Not Limiting if Other Embodiments are also Expressly Contemplated

      The claim at issue is directed to a conveyor and “automatic” collating system for prescription containers. U.S. Patent No. 6,910,601, Claim 8. The claim itself does not specify how the collation occurs, but throughout the specification the patentee indicates that the containers will be collated by patient name and storage space availability. Seeing that distinction, the district court agreed with the challenger that the claims fail because they were not commensurate with the written description of the invention. [...]

      “Without including a limitation to address the storage by patient name, the claims are simply too broad to be valid.”

    • Trademarks

      • Trademark Office Tosses Phyllis Schlafly’s Opposition To Her Son’s Brewery Name Trademark Application

        We discuss trademark disputes centering on the beer and alcohol industry around here because that particular industry is finding itself at something of a barrier centered on how brews are named. Still, one story from a couple of years ago was particularly head-scratching. That story was that of Schlafly beer, made by Tom Schlafly’s St. Louis brewery, and the opposition to his trademark application from his aunt and cousin, Phyllis and Bruce Schlafly repsectively. Both family members filed oppositions to the trademark application, claiming that having their last name associated with an alcoholic product would negatively impact them. Bruce is an orthopedic surgeon, making one wonder exactly how bone-shattering Schlafly beer actually is. Phyllis, meanwhile, is a super-conservative commentator with an audience particularly cultivated amongst Mormons and Baptists, therefore an alcohol product with her surname on it would be ultra negative for her commentating business.

    • Copyrights

      • Attribution on the web

        The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

        That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

        As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

      • Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don’t Work

        For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is “the answer” for the declining news business, we’ve been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really been “the news business” (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It’s always been the community and attention business. And in the past they were able to command such attention and build a community around news because they didn’t have much competition. But the competitive landscape for community and attention has changed (massively) thanks to the internet. And putting up a paywall makes it worse. In most cases, it’s limiting the ability of these newspapers to build communities or get attention, and actively pushing people away.

        And, yes, sure, people will point to the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as proof that “paywalls work.” But earth to basically every other publication: you’re not one of those publications. The paywalls there only work because of the unique content they have, and even then they don’t work as well as most people think.

        Not surprisingly, more and more newspapers that bet on paywalls are discovering that they don’t really work that well and were a waste of time and effort — and may have driven away even more readers.

      • Newspapers rethink paywalls as digital efforts sputter

        Newspapers in the English-speaking world ended paywalls some 69 times through May 2015, including 41 temporary and 28 permanent drops, according to a study by University of Southern California researchers.

      • US Seizes Dotcom’s Millions, Entrepreneur Fights Back

        On Friday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected efforts by Kim Dotcom to regain control over millions of dollars in assets seized by the US Government. By remaining outside the US, the court found that the Megaupload founder is a fugitive from justice. But Dotcom isn’t ready to give in and will take his case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

08.15.16

Links 15/8/2016: Linux 4.8 RC2, Glimpses at OpenMandriva Lx 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • One Of The Best Note-Taking Apps ‘Simplenote’ Is Now Open Source

    Simplenote, a lean but powerful note-taking app, has been made open source by its owner Automattic. Released under the GPLv2 license, developers can use its code for different platforms and take the app in new directions. But, it seems like the server-side code of the app is not yet released.

  • Research reports explore the open-source software market

    The mantra “you get what you pay for” doesn’t always to software. Because sometimes the best software really is free.

  • Events

    • Where in the World is the OSI?

      If you’re out and about at conferences this month, we hope that you’ll have a chance to attend one of these talks by OSI Board Members. If you’re an OSI member and you’ll be giving at talk about open source topics, please get in touch. We’d love to let folks know about your talk!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 49 for Linux gains plugin-free support for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

        The Linux version of Firefox 49 is due for a proper release in September, although preview versions are currently available for those who want to try it out. With Widevine being free for anyone to use, Firefox’s adoption of plugin-free support for it could well mean that the standard is embraced by a larger number of sites. Support for DRM makes the protocol particularly appealing to content providers, as does the lack of license fee.

      • Firefox 49 for Linux Will Let You Watch Netflix Without Plugins

        Firefox is to begin supporting the Google Widevine CDM on Linux from next month, allowing native, plugin-free playback of encrypted media content like Netflix.

      • Firefox 49 To Offer Linux Widevine Support, Firefox Also Working On WebP Support

        There are two exciting bits of Mozilla Firefox news to pass along today: Winevine support on Linux out-of-the-box to handle Netflix and friends. Separately, WebP image support is being worked on.

        Trailing the Windows and OS X support, Winevine is being advertised as supported out-of-the-box now on Firefox for Linux. This change will happen for the upcoming Firefox 49 release.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • This Theme Pack Makes GIMP Look and Behave like Photoshop

      We’re all aware The GIMP is the best free alternative to Photoshop — but is there a way to make it look like Photoshop, too? This is open-source software we’re talking about, of course there is a way! Why Use a GIMP Photoshop Theme?

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

    • VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

      Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig’s bid to have VMware’s knuckles rapped for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has failed, for now, after the Landgericht Hamburg found in Virtzilla’s favour.

      The Software Freedom Conservancy backed Hellwig when he alleged that some of his contributions to the Linux kernel have found their way into VMware’s very proprietary flagship ESXi product, in a component called “vmklinux”. Hellwig and the Conservancy believe that as ESXi includes code licensed under the GPLv2, ESXi should itself be released as open source code under the same licence.

    • Linux developer loses case against VMware

      Hellwig claimed the outfit had violated version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence and says he will appeal against the verdict.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Open data on open data portals

        The Open Data Inception project presents a comprehensive list of more than 2600 open data portals all over the world. The information is geotagged so it can be searched by topic as well as country.

        The list has been compiled by the Open Data Soft company as a showcase. They wanted to bring together as many open data resources as they could, and present these on a map per country for easy browsing.

        The creators aim to maintain the list and ask visitors to contribute links to portals and datasets that are currently not yet in the list. The dataset itself has also been made available as open data.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Chemists to get their own service for preprint sharing

        Physics researchers have a long history of sharing work they’re preparing for publication in order to solicit suggestions and comments from their peers. Like so many things, this behavior migrated to the Internet: Cornell University’s arXiv server hosts over 1.1 million documents, many of which later appeared in formal peer-reviewed literature.

        The physics and astronomy communities see arXiv as beneficial, and biologists put together their own database called The BioRxiv. Now it appears that chemists are going to get their own equivalent. The American Chemical Society is asking for input from the research and publishing communities about what they’d like to see in a ChemRxiv.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Amazon Announces Application Load Balancer for the Cloud

        Load balancers have been part of the networking landscape for decades, more often than not in recent years being lumped together under the category of Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). Various load balancing services have been available in the cloud, but this week Amazon announced a significant new entrant – the Application Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancing.

      • Carnegie Mellon U aims to unlock industrial 3D printing potential with new consortium that includes GE, Alcoa and United States Steel

        You don’t need to be an expert to see that 3D printing is slowly finding its way into the hands of designers throughout the world. From prototype airplane parts to hip replacements and implantable organs; 3D printing is appearing everywhere. But for the 3D printing revolution to really pick up steam, a major push or technological breakthrough is needed to make this a truly accessible and affordable large-scale manufacturing option. In an attempt to realize that breakthrough, Carnegie Mellon University has announced a new consortium that brings together major companies, nonprofit institutes and the US government. Together, they will be working to fully unlock the potential of industrial 3D printing.

Leftovers

  • Kenny Baker, ‘Star Wars’ Actor Behind R2-D2, Dead at 81

    Kenny Baker, the actor who portrayed the robot R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 81.

  • Orkut, once India’s social media darling, is back

    In 2004, a Turkish engineer at Google, Orkut Buyukkokten, started the social network Orkut.com. According to a Forbes report, it gathered 27 million users by 2009. Most of them were from India and Brazil. With time, its sheen wore off as Facebook and Twitter got ahead in the race. When Google finally shut it down in September 2014, the internet saw nostalgic tributes. For many, Orkut was their introduction to social networking. Now, 41-year-old Buyukkokten is back in the game. His new social network, Hello, is already off the ground and active in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Ireland, among other countries. The location-based social network is due for launch in India by September. Buyukkokten spoke to TOI over a video call from San Francisco and discussed his time spent at Google, building Orkut, and the way we are online.

  • Kenyan Start-Ups Make The Ride Tough For Uber

    After making a dramatic entry into the African market late last year that was marked by as much drama as elsewhere in the world, global taxi hailing service Uber is facing tough times in the Kenyan market, thanks to a number of innovative tech start-ups that are giving the company a run for its money.

    Local start-ups in the East African country have come up with innovative apps similar to that of Uber, but which have additional features suited to the local market situation and demands.

    While Uber in Kenya has a provision for cash payments in a country where electronic payments remain a preserve of the elite, local firms have come up with a payment feature where fares can be paid by use of the popular and ever-growing mobile money service M-Pesa, a Kenyan creation that has caught the attention of the entire world of money transfers.

  • Population projections reveal shocking future trends

    Finland is home to fewer children now than at anytime in the last century. In a decade the number of pensioners will exceed the number of working-aged adults. The latest projections from Statistics Finland paint a sparse and elderly future.

  • Science

    • Switzerland Stars, China In Top 25, Innovation Rating Finds

      A global innovation rating has found Switzerland to be the most innovative nation in the world for the sixth consecutive year even if some other countries are on its heels. The lead group of countries continued to be mainly composed of most economically advanced nations, while innovation is lagging in many developing countries, but China and India made notable leaps up the list this year. The rankings stirred a broader discussion today of the shifting global economy and the role of innovation, including a call for a new approach to global innovation governance.

    • Is 5G technology dangerous? Early data shows a slight increase of tumors in male rats exposed to cellphone radiation

      As wireless companies prepare to launch the next generation of service, there are new questions about the possible health risks from radiation emitted by cellphones and the transmitters that carry the signals.

      Concerns about the potential harmful effects of radiofrequency radiation have dogged mobile technology since the first brick-sized cellphones hit the market in the 1980s.

      Industry and federal officials have largely dismissed those fears, saying the radiation exposure is minimal and that the devices are safe. Incidences of and deaths from brain cancer have shown little change in recent years despite the explosion in cellphone usage, they note.

    • Vikings Possibly Spread Smooth-Riding Horses Around the World

      This week, equestrian athletes at the Rio Olympics are competing in an event called “dressage,” in which they guide their horses to perform complex combinations of different gaits, including the walk, trot and canter.

      One type of footwork (or hoofwork, if you will) you likely won’t see is an “amble,” a sometimes comical four-beat gait that’s faster than a walk, slower than a gallop and well-suited for smooth, long rides.

  • Hardware

    • Storage Solutions – All You Need To Know

      Being a computer user, at some point of time we all were introduced to the fear of losing our data. I know it sounds familiar because we all love our data. The data can be of many types but most importantly you would not like to know that your precious pictures have been deleted due to new operating system installation or hard drive has been damaged. In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of cloud storage and different popular cloud storage that provide more free space.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Social costs of Flint’s lead drinking water crisis equal $395 million

      The social costs stemming from dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., such as the effect on children’s health, amount to $395 million, according to an analysis by a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

    • Patient groups that backed new cancer drug received £60,000 from pharma firm

      THREE patient groups that successfully lobbied for a new leukaemia drug to be on the NHS received over £60,000 from the pharma firm behind the product.

      One of the charities relies on Big Pharma for 70 per cent of its funding and has a trustee with financial links to Janssen-Cilag, which manufactures the Ibrutinib drug.

      Professor David Miller, an academic who is also a transparency campaigner, said the practice of healthcare giants funding these groups “distorts” the decision-making process.

    • Grizzly Delisting and the Irony of Public Comments

      When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asks for public comments, they don’t mean you, and they don’t mean me. In fact, they don’t mean the public at all.

      Dan Ashe, the Director of the USFWS, highlighted the public’s ability to make public comments in his March 3rd announcement of the agency’s proposal to delist grizzlies from the endangered species list and he made much ado about the importance of the public’s input.

      Did he mean it? In a word, no.

    • Florida Keys Residents Resist Controversial GMO Mosquito Trial

      Residents of the Florida Keys are up in arms over a plan to release genetically-modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Key Haven neighborhood and are trying to get the word out about the trial, which they say would make them “lab rats” in their own community.

      The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the controversial study by U.K.-firm Oxitec earlier this month, amid renewed fears over mosquito transmission of the Zika virus.

      “We need to help educate the public about the very real, scientifically based problems with this genetically modified mosquito release,” Mara Daly, who has been helping organize a protest at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board meeting Tuesday afternoon, told the Miami Herald.

    • Protest planned at bug board over genetically modified mosquitoes

      A Keys woman says a protest Tuesday at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board will target the release of genetically modified mosquitoes.

      “We will be outside with signs protesting peacefully. I think this will be the opportunity for moms, teachers, nurses to have a voice. I just wanted to give people a little push to do it,” said Mara Daly, who works at a Key Largo salon. “It’s to let them know there are concerns from people they have not heard from. Maybe the fat lady has already sung, I don’t know.

      The meeting starts at 3 p.m. at the board’s building, 503 107th St. in Marathon. Agenda items include an update on the Zika virus and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Aug. 5 approval to allow a test release of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the Lower Keys neighborhood of Key Haven. Aedes aegypti spread Zika, which can cause birth defects in the children of pregnant women, and whose symptoms include fever and pain in the joints, bones and muscles.

    • Holding Monsanto to Account: the People’s Tribunal in The Hague

      As one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, Monsanto’s activities affect us all.

      Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

      That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

  • Security

    • Hacker demonstrates how voting machines can be compromised [Ed: Microsoft inside]

      Concerns are growing over the possibility of a rigged presidential election. Experts believe a cyberattack this year could be a reality, especially following last month’s hack of Democratic National Committee emails.

      The ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee sent a letter Monday to the Department of Homeland Security, saying in part: “Election security is critical, and a cyberattack by foreign actors on our elections systems could compromise the integrity of our voting process.”

      Roughly 70 percent of states in the U.S. use some form of electronic voting. Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarm, reports CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal.

    • Another Expert Weighs in on Election Hacking

      Today the old Gray Lady, the New York Times, no less, weighed in on election hacking in an Op/Ed piece titled The Election Won’t be Rigged. But it Could be Hacked. Of course, anyone who’s read my second cybersecurity thriller, The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Election and Deceptions, already knew that.

      The particular focus of the NYT article is that since voting can be hacked, it’s vital to have a way to audit elections after they occur to see whether that has been the case, and to reveal the true electoral result.

    • Linux.Lady Trojan Turns Redis Servers to Mining Rigs
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.11
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.12
    • New FFS Rowhammer Attack Hijacks Linux VMs

      Researchers from the Vrije University in the Netherlands have revealed a new version of the infamous Rowhammer attack that is effective at compromising Linux VMs, often used for cloud hosting services.

    • Minica – lightweight TLS for everyone!

      A while back, I found myself in need of some TLS certificates set up and issued for a testing environment.

      I remembered there was some code for issuing TLS certs in Docker, so I yanked some of that code and made a sensable CLI API over it.

    • Guy Tricks Windows Tech Support Scammers Into Installing Ransomware Code

      A man named Ivan Kwiatkowski managed to install Locky ransomware on the machine of a person who was pretending to be a tech support executive of a reputed company. Ivan wrote his experiences in a blog post tells that how the tech support scammer fell into the pit he dug for innocent people.

    • Fixing Things

      Recent reports that TCP connections can be hijacked have kicked an anthill at Kernel.org. Linus and others have a patch.

    • Linux TCP flaw fix likely in next stable release

      A patch to fix a weakness in the transmission control protocol used in the Linux kernel since 2012, which could lead to remote hijacking of Internet connections, is available in the public stable queue tree and is likely to be included in the next stable release.

    • Linux Has a TCP Flaw, Researchers Find
    • Can’t Trust This!
    • Monday’s security advisories
    • Running a Hackathon for Security Hackers

      H1-702 was one piece in a picture to ensure HackerOne is the very best platform and community for hackers to hack, learn, and grow.

    • It’s the Year of Application Layer Security in Public Clouds

      The cloud continues to be a significant force in enterprise computing and technology adoption. Enterprises that have adopted cloud have seen slashes capital expenses, increased agility, centralized information management, and scaled their businesses quickly.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Isis ranks dwindle to 15,000 amid ‘retreat on all fronts’, claims Pentagon

      A top US commander has claimed the military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have taken 45,000 enemy combatants off the battlefield and reduced the total number of Islamic State fighters to as few as 15,000.

      Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland said both the quality and number of Isis fighters was declining, while warning that it was difficult to determine accurate numbers. Earlier estimates put the number of Islamic State fighters at between 19,000 and 25,000 but US officials say the range is now roughly 15,000 to 20,000.

    • ISIL fighter number falls to 15,000 as Manbij capture Cuts off Route to Europe

      Without Manbij, Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) will find it more difficult to import weapons and foreign fighters to al-Raqqa. Other routes still open to it, such as Jarabulus, are also under pressure and could be the next target of the Syrian Democratic Forces. It is much further to import foreign munitions.

      Daesh as a territorial power is coming to a slow end; Daesh as a source of terrorism still has a good long run.

    • No, Obama did not found ISIL, Mr. Trump: That was the GOP

      There had been no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush invaded. Operatives flocked there to fight the US troops, and gathered under the rubric first of al-Tawhid of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But al-Zarqawi initially had bad relations with Usama Bin Laden. In order to fight the US presence, he made up and joined al-Qaeda and formed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. AFter he was killed by the US in 2006, the new, Iraqi leadership declared itself the Islamic State of Iraq and deepened their al-Qaeda affiliation.

    • Jeremy Corbyn interview: ‘There are not 300,000 sectarian extremists at large’

      I have just heard the result. Very disappointed. People joined the Labour party in order to take part in the party and were specifically told that they were able to vote in the leadership election and that was decided by the high court that they could. The appeal court has said they can’t and I would imagine that those who brought the case will be considering whether or not to take it to the supreme court.

    • Trashing Nicaragua’s Success

      The New York Times is the best old-style, broad-sheet newspaper in America; it still covers the world with resourceful and enterprising reporters and commentators. But, then, there’s the other New York Times, the imperial rag that prints editorials like the one on August 5 titled “ ‘Dynasty,’ the Nicaraguan Version.” It’s not that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is a saint or even a model democrat; it’s that the editorial department and the writer who penned this sloppy embarrassment are still playing a version of the Reagan Cold War game of the 1980s. Those days are over; one hopes for something a bit more worldly.

    • Seymour Hersh on White House Lies About bin Laden’s Death, Pakistan and the Syrian Civil War

      In The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh offers a compelling alternative version to the details that led to bin Laden’s death. He also investigates unproven assertions justifying the US’s thus far disastrous involvement in the Syrian civil war. Truthout recently interviewed Hersh about the book.

    • Hillary Clinton Donors and Jeb Bush Donors Are the Same People

      It seems that Hillary Clinton donors and Jeb Bush donors don’t care much which of the two of them wins, as long as one of them does.

      Mark Horne has written about how easily George Bush and Bill Clinton get along. We also find that Hillary Clinton is perfectly acceptable to the financial elite as a speaker when George Bush can’t make a scheduled (and highly paid) speaking event.

      If you needed confirmation for what you might guess on the basis of such stories, here it is from the Daily Beast: “Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush

      For some wealthy donors, it doesn’t matter who takes the White House in 2016—as long as the president’s name is Clinton or Bush.

      More than 60 ultra-rich Americans have contributed to both Jeb Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s federal campaigns, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Vocativ and The Daily Beast. Seventeen of those contributors have gone one step further and opened their wallets to fund both Bush’s and Clinton’s 2016 ambitions.

      After all, why support just Hillary Clinton or just Jeb Bush when you can hedge your bets and donate to both? This seems to be the thinking of a group of powerful men and women—racetrack owners, bankers, media barons, chicken magnates, hedge funders (and their spouses). Some of them have net worths that can eclipse the GDPs of small countries.

    • The bombing comes just as the U.S. announced a $1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia

      A Saudi-led coalition airstrike has hit a hospital in Yemen on Monday, killing at least seven and injuring at least 13, Reuters reports.

      A witness said the attack on the clinic, located in the Abs district in Yemen’s northern Hajja province and supported by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), could not be immediately evacuated because rescue crews feared more bombings were coming as warplanes continued flying over the area.

    • 10 Children Killed in US-Backed Coalition Strike: Yemeni Officials

      Ten children were killed and 28 other children were wounded on Saturday when an airstrike struck a school in northern Yemen, medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said.

      All the casualties were 8-15 years old, the group, which uses its French acronym, MSF, posted on Twitter.

      Yemeni officials say that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition was responsible for the attack, the Associated Press reports.

      As Reuters explains, “Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched thousands of air strikes against the Houthis since they drove the internationally recognized government into exile in March 2015.”

    • Airstrike on Yemen school kills 10 children, wounds dozens

      Yemeni officials and aid workers say an airstrike on a school purportedly carried out by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen has killed at least 10 children and wounded dozens more.

      The Islamic school says in a statement that the Saturday strike in Saada, deep in the Houthis’ northern heartland, was part of raids that have resumed against the rebels after peace talks collapsed earlier this month.

    • As ISIS Brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Department Cut Eyes and Ears on the Ground

      An investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post finds that Secretary of State Clinton initially pressed to keep civilian programs and listening posts after the U.S. troop pullout in 2011, but then her State Department scrapped or slashed them at the behest of the White House and Congress.

    • People in Syria’s Manbij Rejoice by Shaving, throwing off Veil as ISIL fighters Flee

      People in Syria’s norther town of Manbij, now entirely liberated from the rule of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), rejoiced on Saturday. Men shaved their beards (which had been imposed on them by the fundamentalists) and women threw off their burqas (full-face veils) and burned them. The burqa is a Gulf custom, not a Muslim one, and many Muslim countries frown on it, including Egypt. In 2010 it was banned in Syrian schools.

      People were also happy in the city that Daesh fighters, who had taken 2,000 hostages, released some of them as they escaped for Jarabulus, the last major border town they hold.

    • Liberals rally to sink Obama trade deal

      Liberals are amping up their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on and off of Capitol Hill, amid escalating concerns that the package will get an 11th hour vote after the November elections.

      Republican leaders in both chambers have said it’s unlikely the mammoth Pacific Rim trade deal will reach the floor this year. But the accord remains a top priority for President Obama in the twilight of his final term, and the critics — leery of pro-TPP members in both parties — aren’t taking anything for granted.

      Liberal TPP opponents this month have launched a new wave of petition campaigns and fundraising drives; a free concert series is touring the country through the summer; and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are vowing to do “everything we possibly can,” in the words of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), to block a vote this year.

      “Make no mistake about it, Speaker [Paul] Ryan and the administration are working hand-in-hand to plot a path for the TPP in a lame duck session of Congress,” DeLauro, who’s among the loudest TPP critics, said this week in an email. “They will do everything possible to try to pass the TPP after the election.”

    • How Blocking the Saudi Arms Deal Could Help Stop Lame Duck TPP

      In this strategy memo on why progressive Democrats and Empire-skeptic Republicans should do what they reasonably can to assist efforts to block the recently proposed Saudi arms deal, I will cover four points.

    • Amid More Civilian Deaths, Lawmakers Push to End Saudi Arms Flow

      U.S. senators are attempting to block the State Department’s deal to sell Saudi Arabia nearly $1.5 billion in weapons, just days after the move was announced by the Obama administration.

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Foreign Policy that he would “work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale. Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

      Congressional opposition to the arms sale came as the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed military coalition broke an unsteady five-month ceasefire in Yemen last week and resumed bombing in the capital city of Sana’a—prompting immediate reports of civilian deaths. On Saturday, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that an airstrike on a school in northern Yemen killed 10 children and wounded 28 others.

      Paul and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), both of whom sit on the Foreign Relations Committee, are outspoken critics of the coalition.

      “If you talk to Yemeni Americans, they will tell you in Yemen this isn’t a Saudi bombing campaign, it’s a U.S. bombing campaign,” Murphy said in June. “Every single civilian death inside Yemen is attributable to the United States.”

    • New Hacks Threaten Chaos for Soros and Democratic Party

      Online hacktivists have thrown the Democratic elite into complete chaos after a pair of websites, Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, posted a series of leaks this weekend exposing the personal data of federal lawmakers and the internal records of party donor and influencer George Soros.

      Purporting to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide,” DCLeaks on Saturday published more than 2,500 documents, which included “workplans, strategies, priorities, and other activities” related to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

      The Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist a major donor to the Democratic Party and, predictably, conservative and other ideological websites are having a field day with the data drop.

      Less than 24 hours before that leak, the infamous Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacker Guccifer 2.0 late Friday published a spreadsheet containing the personal cellphone numbers and email addresses of nearly 200 current and former members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and their staff.

    • DNC creates cybersecurity advisory board following hack

      The Democratic National Committee is creating a four-member cybersecurity advisory board, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.

      The advisory board is a response to the recent DNC hack and subsequent email leak that led to the resignation of former Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top DNC officials.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Watch Your Coastal Property. Here Comes the Sea

      Climate scientists have long warned of a rise in sea level as global warming melts the world’s glaciers. But while the level has been increasing at about 3.5 millimeters a year, the rate of increase itself has fluctuated, leading some people to doubt the warnings and the broader impact of rising carbon emissions.

      Fresh evidence, in a study published today in Scientific Reports, suggests the scientists were right, and that satellite measurements have been distorted by the eruption in 1991 of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

      The volcanic eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century, is estimated to have spewed almost 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, lowering global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1991 to 1993, as gas and dust particles blocked solar radiation, and causing sea levels to drop. The researchers, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Old Dominion University, used models to calculate the impact of the Pinatubo eruption and found that sea levels fell about six millimeters.

    • McKibben: Time to Declare a War (Literally) on Climate Change

      We’re under attack, says author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben, and the only way to defeat the enemy is to declare a global war against the destructive practices that threaten the world’s imperiled ecosystems and human civilization as we know it.

      In a new piece published Monday in The New Republic, the co-founder of the global climate action group 350.org says there is simply no more time to waste and that a full-scale mobilization, like the one orchestrated by the U.S. government during World War II, is now necessary if the adversary—human-caused global warming and the climate change that results—is to be vanquished.

      “World War III is well and truly underway,” writes McKibben. “And we are losing.”

    • We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

      In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

    • ExxonMobil’s Latest Campaign to Stonewall Federal Climate Action

      Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax. If true, that’s big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world’s biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.

      But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?

    • Hunger Strike Pushes South Korea to Defer Coal Plant Plan

      Finally, on the afternoon of July 26, the Ministry announced the proposed plant would be delayed indefinitely.

    • If It Hadn’t Been for Those Meddling Climate Kids

      In 1962, Diane Arbus took a photo of a lanky young boy in Central Park holding a hand grenade. He stands before the camera, a deranged look on his face, his free hand contorted into a menacing claw. It’s an iconic image that captured the generational tension around the Vietnam War and, according to songwriter of that time Graham Nash, one that questions the lessons we teach our children.

    • “Don’t Rely on Your Past Experiences:” La. Battles “Unprecedented” Flooding

      Louisiana continues to battle “unprecedented” flooding on Sunday, as experts warn that the historic rainfall that sparked the rising waters is the kind of extreme weather event to expect on a warming planet.

      Over 7,000 people have been rescued, at least three people have died, and a state of emergency has been declared.

      “This is unprecedented,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Saturday. “Please don’t rely on your experiences in the past.”

    • Louisiana Flooding: At Least Three Dead, 7,000+ Rescued

      More than 7,000 people have been rescued from their homes after massive floods swept across Louisiana, and officials warned Sunday that even though the rain had subsided, dangers loomed.

      “It’s not over,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said Sunday. “The water’s going to rise in many areas. It’s no time to let the guard down.”

    • Is Undead Smallpox Reemerging From Siberian Graves?

      As if the news that resurrected anthrax from thawed-out reindeer wasn’t bad enough, increasingly warming temperatures are prompting renewed fears that permafrost could thaw enough to unleash smallbox from remote Russian cemeteries.

      As The Siberian Times reports, this year the permafrost melt has been three times more extreme than usual above the Arctic Circle, causing erosion near graveyards of a town where smallpox wiped out 40 percent of the population decades ago.

      Yet, some scientists argue that it’s not the graves we should be worried about.

      Scientists from Russia’s Virology and Biotechnology Center (or Vector) in Novosibirsk are investigating the bodies, some of which show bone sores associated with smallpox. Fortunately, only fragments of the strain’s DNA were found, rather than any evidence of surviving smallpox. However, the center plans to conduct more research on “deeper burials” in the future, just to make sure. So far, luckily, that’s been the case for years, as another expedition in 2012 found only “fragments” as well.

    • Anthrax Strikes Wildlife in Rapidly Thawing Arctic

      A full-scale medical emergency has broken out in the Yamal region of Siberia, with troops from the Russian army’s special biological warfare unit spearheading efforts to contain an outbreak of anthrax.

      A 12-year-old boy died after consuming infected venison, other people are believed to have died or become infected with the disease, and thousands of reindeer suspected of carrying it have been killed and incinerated.

      One of the main reasons cited for the outbreak of anthrax – one of the world’s most deadly pathogens – is an unprecedented heatwave experienced in the north Siberia region in recent weeks. Temperatures have been between 25°C and 35°C, which is way above the average for the time of year.

      Anthrax, an infection caused by the bacterium Bacillum anthracis, can occur naturally in certain soils, with infection usually spread by grazing animals. It has also been developed for use in chemical warfare.

    • Are Climate-Related ‘Hot Blobs’ Spreading and Killing Marine Life Worldwide?

      A massive swath of hot water off the West Coast of North America devastated marine life for years—killing sea lions, whales, starfish, birds, and more—and new research finds that such marine heatwaves are growing more and more frequent.

    • ‘The blob’: how marine heatwaves are causing unprecedented climate chaos

      First seabirds started falling out of the sky, washing up on beaches from California to Canada.

      Then emaciated and dehydrated sea lion pups began showing up, stranded and on the brink of death.

      A surge in dead whales was reported in the same region, and that was followed by the largest toxic algal bloom in history seen along the Californian coast. Mixed among all that there were population booms of several marine species that normally aren’t seen surging in the same year.

      Plague, famine, pestilence and death was sweeping the northern Pacific Ocean between 2014 and 2015.

    • The Blob That Cooked the Pacific

      The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too.

      Kathi Lefebvre is talking about the whales as we crunch across a windy, rocky beach, 200 miles north of Kodiak. In a typical year eight whales are found dead in the western Gulf of Alaska. But in 2015 at least a dozen popped up in June alone, their bodies so buoyant that gulls used them as fishing platforms. All summer the Pacific Ocean heaved rotting remains into rocky coves along the more than 1,000-mile stretch from Anchorage to the Aleutian Islands. Whole families of brown bears feasted on their carcasses.

      Lefebvre, a research scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington, had examined eye fluid from one of the carcasses in a failed attempt to winnow the cause of death. Now the two of us are on Kachemak Bay in Homer, Alaska, inching toward a wheezing, dying sea otter sprawled out on the shore. Otter deaths are skyrocketing on the shoreline beneath the snowcapped Kenai Mountains, so Lefebvre is here to see whether the fates of these otters and whales are somehow intertwined.

    • The Earth Just Experienced the Hottest Month on the Books. Period.

      On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever.

      According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880.

      This marks the 10th straight month to set a new monthly warming record, based on NASA’s analysis. “Every month so far this year has been record hot,” reported Climate Central’s Andrea Thompson. “In NASA’s data, that streak goes back to October 2015, which was the first month in its data set that was more than 1C hotter than average.”

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases its monthly temperature report on Wednesday and it is likely theirs will reflect a 15-month streak of record-shattering heat. (Some previous reporting on monthly records here, here, here, and here.)

      What’s more, because July is typically the hottest month of the year, it stands that July 2016 was “the warmest month of any in a data record that can be extended back to the nineteenth century,” according to the U.K.-based Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), which last week published similar temperature results.

    • Spotting the Havoc Wreaked by Climate Change

      I returned home angry. How can we, as Americans, be even contemplating the idea of installing at such a moment of crisis in mankind’s history, either of two candidates who don’t really give a damn that we are destroying the earth’s ability to sustain human life, or for that matter, most of the astonishing ecosystem that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Trump denies that climate change is real, while Clinton, vastly funded by a banking industry that finances the industries that are destroying the earth, by energy companies, power companies and automotive companies that are doing the actual destruction, has no intention of taking dramatic action to halt the pumping of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    • Evidence Suggests the Oil Industry Wrote Big Tobacco’s Playbook, Then Used It to Lie About Climate Change

      A recent analysis of more than 100 industry documents conducted by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, has revealed that the oil industry knew of the risks its business posed to the global climate decades before originally suspected.

      It has also long been assumed that, in its efforts to deceive investors and the public about the negative impact its business has on the environment, Big Oil borrowed Big Tobacco’s so-called tactical “playbook.” But these documents indicate that infamous playbook appears to have actually originated within the oil industry itself.

      If that is true, it would be highly significant — and damning for Big Oil — because the tactics used by the tobacco industry to downplay the connection between smoking and cancer were eventually deemed to have violated federal racketeering laws by a federal court. The ruling dashed efforts by Big Tobacco to find legal cover under the First Amendment, which just happens to be the same strategy that ExxonMobil and its GOP allies are currently using to defend the company against allegations of fraud. If the playbook was in fact created by the oil and gas industry and then later used by ExxonMobil, it ruins the company’s argument of plausible deniability, making it highly likely that the company violated federal law.

    • How Bad Is Your Air-Conditioner for the Planet?

      As of 2009, nearly 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioners, which account for about 6 percent of all the country’s residential energy use…

  • Finance

    • Housing official in Silicon Valley resigns because she can’t afford to live there

      Once Kate Downing and her husband Steve did the math, it was obvious that if they wanted to raise a family, staying in Palo Alto, California, was not an option. Although Steve, 33, works as a software engineer at a nearby Silicon Valley technology company and Kate, 31, is a product attorney at another tech firm, the cost of owning a home near their jobs has simply become too steep for them.

      If they wanted to purchase their current house – which they rent with another couple for $6,200 a month total – it would cost $2.7m plus monthly mortgage and tax payments of $12,177, adding up to more than $146,000 a year.

      Instead, the couple will soon relocate 45 miles south to Santa Cruz, a city by the beach where they can afford to purchase a home and eventually raise children.

    • Raise America inspires a new generation of organizing for low-wage workers

      While the Fight for $15 raises headlines and wages across the United States, June 15 saw a national day of action in cities around the country for the annual anniversary of the Justice for Janitors campaign. For SEIU Local 32BJ, which handles 155,000 property service workers along the East Coast from New Hampshire to Florida, this was a chance to reclaim the history of a campaign that did the unthinkable in the early 1990s.

    • The ‘Big Lie’ Behind the Rosy Unemployment Rate

      When Donald Trump on Monday questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s glowing employment reports, it may have seemed like another unsubstantiated outburst from a famously loose-with-the-facts candidate. But in this case, he was joining a bipartisan chorus of businesspeople, economists and lawmakers who say the monthly employment report is an artificial portrait deliberately airbrushed by statisticians to make the jobs picture look better than it really is.

    • How labor’s decline opened door to billionaire Trump as ‘savior’ of American workers

      Out of the economic maelstrom of the last decade, Donald Trump has emerged as the improbable, and self-proclaimed, champion of American workers.

      And that’s despite the fact that Trump has failed to articulate substantive policy positions regarding labor issues, other than generic railing against foreign competition and bad trade deals. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, for one, has attacked him by tweeting a number of examples in which Trump’s past behavior shows that he is no friend to working people.

    • Are You Sure You Want to Eat That?

      Whether we shop for sustenance at a chain grocery store, the corner bodega or even at a farmers market, we all share a basic desire—to not get sick from the food that is supposed to nourish us. In fact, much of the time, most of us don’t think twice about the safety of our food.

      But not all nations have the same food safety standards as ours, and if the controversial trade deal known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) goes into effect, some of the food in our stores may not be safe to eat.

      The TPP puts the interests of Big Food ahead of yours and mine. That’s because it wasn’t negotiated in the public’s interest. The TPP is instead intended to allow corporations to expand into new markets and make more money. If passed, it will overwhelm already overtaxed border inspectors, flood our food system with potentially unsafe imports and even empower other countries to challenge our common sense food safety protections as illegal trade barriers.

    • Social Security and the 1 Percent

      Between 1982 and 2014, the percentage of wage income escaping taxation went from 10.0 percent to 17.3 percent, an increase of 7.3 percentage points; the top 1 percent of wage earners saw their share of total wage income go up 5.1 percentage points during the same time period. This means that the greater share of wages going to the top 1 percent of wage earners accounts for over 70 percent of the increase in untaxed earnings.

    • The Brexit Hangover Just Got Worse

      Those who supported a departure from Europe are only now coming to terms with the crippling economic realities—including the fact that many didn’t quite understand the rules and the whims of their neighbors.

    • Economists have worked out how much Brexit could cost us

      Or at least that is the theory put forward by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which has calculated the cost of leaving the single market.

      Not being a member (which is a possible scenario) could see the UK lose out on an additional 4% of GDP by 2030, the IFS has said.

      That 4% is equivalent of two years worth of growth, and equates to around £70 billion in today’s money – or £2,900 for each household.

      It said that loss would outweigh the benefit of no longer paying in a net £9bn a year into the European Union budget.

      The gloomy forecast comes after senior European politicians made it clear Britain can’t keep its membership of the single market unless its makes sizeable contribution to the EU budget and allows the free movement of EU workers.

    • Sports Direct will pay back thousands of workers after giving them less than minimum wage

      Sports Direct has agreed to pay money back to thousands of workers who lost out after being effectively paid less than minimum wage by the company while employed in its warehouses, according to a report from The Guardian.

      The payments centre around an investigation into Sports Direct’s working and employment practices by the House of Commons Business Select Committee, which found that conditions in some of the company’s warehouse facilities were akin to those in a “Victorian workhouse.”

    • Post-war fantasies and Brexit: the delusional view of Britain’s place in the world

      Claims about Britain’s past are made regularly in the referedum debate. But claims about Britain’s historical place in the world – courageously standing alone, being outnumbered and outgunned but in the end outperforming everyone – are not based on fact, writes Mike Finn. These myths could nonetheless have very real consequences: this is the self-image that the Brexit campaign portray and which many think they will revive by voting to Leave.

    • John Oliver: We Should Be Worried About the Subprime Car Loan Bubble That’s About to Burst (Video)

      In a scary and important episode, the “Last Week Tonight” host sounds a warning about a boom in subprime automobile loans that promises to make “your eye twitch with flashbacks to the mortgage crisis.”

    • Three More Reasons Why We Need to Stop CETA

      Last week I joined activists and campaigners from across the globe who came to Canada for the World Social Forum. A major topic of discussion was the problems with TTIP-style free trade agreements and how we can stop them.

      For us in Europe the big one is now CETA – the Canada-EU trade deal (formally the Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement) which could become law as early as next year. Unless we stop it.

      Our allies from across Europe and Canada gave some strong reasons for us to get more active on CETA.

    • Congress: AWOL and Out of Control

      Taken as whole, with exceptions, the American people have the strangest attitude toward the Congress. Our national legislature spends nearly a quarter of our income and affects us one way or another every day of the year. Yet too many people withdraw in disgust instead of making Congress accountable to them. Warren Buffett once said, “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

      People have a low regard for Capitol Hill. Polls show less than 20% of people approve of what Congress does and does not do. In April a poll registered a 14% approval rate. People know that Congress takes a lot of days off – all with pay. Senators and Representatives work over 100 fewer days than average Americans do. Specifically, members were in session 157 days in 2015 and 135 in 2014. This year the House is scheduled to be in session for only 111 days, with the August recess alone stretching nearly six weeks.

    • Unruly Britannia: Why we can no longer call our kingdom ‘united’

      This is what shrunken dreams look like. This Britain post-Brexit contained not one reference to Scottish independence and the prospect of any future referendum. Worse, there wasn’t one mention of the threat to the Northern Irish peace process, which has been dealt a severe blow by the hauling out of Europe of the UK. Many people, particularly in London elites, will say that these divisions have always existed as they currently do. But that’s not true; they are in fact getting worse. Two conceptions of ‘Britain’ characterise and feed into this spiral of deepening divisions. One is the vision held by ‘winner Britain’: the view of those who have made it, think they can make it, or hang on the coat tails of this class. They tell themselves they are a cosmopolitan, outward focused group – but only with time for similar minded people. This was one of the defining features of the Brexit debate – that the Remain side and the large parts of the London media couldn’t understand anything beyond this class. Any opposition, from places such as ‘the North’ was about handing on to the past, or worse, about being losers. The second factor is the emergence of an English nationalism – which in large part presents itself in opposition to the above. It claims that in recent decades we have ‘lost’ control of our country – to immigrants, the PC brigade, and Europe – and now is the time to ‘take it back’.

    • The “$500 million club” of colleges tends to be stingy with aid to low-income students

      Call them the top four percent: elite private colleges and universities that together sit atop three-quarters of the higher education terrain’s endowment wealth.

    • Trade, Truth and Trump

      Donald Trump is a hateful bigot, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong. It would be a huge step forward if his critics could acknowledge that the recent pattern of trade has been harmful to large segments of the population. Furthermore, this is due to the way trade policy was designed, not the uncontrollable forces of globalization.

      If respectable leaders in politics and the media continue to repeat glib clichés rather than taking the economic reality of trade policy seriously, it should not be surprising that the victims of trade will look to demagogues like Trump. It is unfortunate when we get a more honest discussion of a major policy issue from Donald Trump than the New York Times.

    • The medical debt crisis: The prognosis is still dire for Americans struggling to pay off massive health care bills

      Recent evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the burden of medical debt for American consumers. Yet, especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid, millions of Americans still lack insurance and many plans offer thin coverage. The result is that in 2014, 64 million people were struggling with medical debt, the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. In my latest Demos report, “Enough to Make You Sick: The Burden of Medical Debt,” I explore how medical debt affects household finances and why we need more aggressive policies to reduce medical debt.

      My report details the results of two surveys (in 2008 and 2012) Demos commissioned to explore the finances of lower to middle-income households carrying credit card debt. I find that households carrying medical debt on their credit card are more likely to take extreme measures to pay off their debts and forgo care. Medical debt has significant negative impacts on household finances, even when people are insured. A public option could help reduce the chances of people taking on medical debt, and that more rigorous consumer protection could mitigate the consequences.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ¡Fuera Trump!: Our Writer Traveled to Mexico City, Where People Definitely Had Choice Words for ‘The Donald’

      Responses varied. While the organillero didn’t believe Trump would win the election, some predicted that Trump would take it all in November. Others hinted at a conspiracy between Trump and Mexico’s president. A few bluntly compared Trump to Hitler. And some likened his campaign to a stunt, instead of an honest attempt to win the White House. Lots of people described the man with the darkest of humor: His campaign is a joke, but not a funny one.

    • The Summer of the Shill

      Campaign 2016 won’t just have lasting implications for American politics. It’s obliterated what was left of our news media

    • The BBC must improve how it reports statistics

      How much does the UK contribute to the EU each week? How tired did you get of hearing that question, and of the inaccurate answer that it’s £350 million?

      Even if you didn’t watch the debates or read the op-eds, it was hard to miss the pictures of Boris Johnson and other high profile Vote Leave campaigners standing in front of a big red bus with the inaccurate £350 million statistic emblazoned across the side.

      Misleading claims supported by murky statistics were used on both sides of the EU referendum debate. But the £350 million claim became the iconic slogan of the Leave campaign, and helped to show why the BBC needs to be braver in challenging statistical assertions if it is to be a useful public service.

    • The Racial Wealth Gap Will Persist Until Neoliberalism and Its Peddlers Are Defeated

      For the leaders of the fight for racial equality throughout the twentieth century, anti-discrimination and anti-capitalism went hand in hand; the struggle for economic justice was always viewed as integral to and inseparable from the struggle for racial justice.

      “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community,” Martin Luther King Jr. said at an AFL-CIO convention in 1961, expressing the prevailing sentiment among the socialist leaders of the civil rights movement.

      Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, emphasized the importance of organized labor in advancing the rights and material conditions of black Americans in a 1971 essay, in which he asserted both the centrality of unions and the need for a radical approach to inequality.

      He urged that “only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America’s resources for those in greatest need of them” would be enough “to meet the present crisis.”

    • TV Networks Should Open Up the Presidential Debates

      If ten major TV networks got together and decided to nationally televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and right-leaning Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, while barring other candidates including Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias or exclusion.

      But what if the televised debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

      In the coming weeks, we need to generate a debate about the debates – who controls them and which candidates are included. That’s the goal of a new petition launched by RootsAction.org, a group I co-founded.

      Beginning in 1988, major TV networks granted journalistic control over the debates to a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is often called “nonpartisan.” That’s absurdly inaccurate. “Bipartisan” is the right adjective, as it has always carried out the joint will of the Republican and Democratic parties. (See George Farah’s meticulously reported book, “No Debate.”)

    • The Pro-Nuclear War Party

      According to a Wall Street Journal report, the following people and entities would like the United States to begin a nuclear war: Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. If any of those people or entities believe they can prove a case of libel, it might be a huge one. (Are you listening, Rupert?)

      According to Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper, the White House has been discussing the possibility of declaring that the United States no longer has a policy of engaging in the first use of nuclear bombs. The trouble is that those individuals and nations named above object. They insist, we are told, that the United States should have the policy of beginning a nuclear war.

      Have the people of the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United States itself been polled on this? Has any legislature pretending to represent any of those populations voted on this? Of course not. But what we could do, perhaps, is amend the policy to read: “When the United States begins the nuclear war, it shall announce that it is doing so in the name of democracy.” That should be good.

      Has Mr. Kerry, Mr. Carter, or Mr. Moniz been evaluated by a psychiatrist? Was Mr. Kerry against this before he was for it? The important question, I believe, is whether they want to start the nuclear war with any hatred or bigotry in mind. If what they intend is a loving, tolerant, and multicultural nuclear war, then really what we ought to be worrying about is the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump who has said that he’d like to kill families — and particular types of families.

      Now, I am not claiming to have fathomed the evil of Mr. Trump, but it has been U.S. policy since before there was a United States to kill families. And it is my strong suspicion that a nuclear war and the nuclear winter and nuclear famine it would bring to the earth would harm at least some families of every existing type.

    • ‘Bipartisan Fraud’: Debate Rules Shut Out Third-Party Candidates

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Gary Johnson nor the Green Party’s Jill Stein had enough support to get a spot onstage alongside Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which open debate advocates say amounts to a fraud of bipartisanism.

      One such advocacy group, RootsAction, launched a petition on Monday calling for the executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Broadcasting, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Univision, and Telemundo to present debates including all four candidates, even if the commission—or Trump or Clinton—wants otherwise.

      “If Trump or Clinton balk, let them know you’re happy to leave their podium empty,” the petition states.

    • Third-party candidates on outside as debate criteria released

      The Commission on Presidential Debates has released the polls it will use to decide the participants of September’s first presidential debate as third-party candidates struggle to make the stage.
      Candidates will need to hit an average of 15 percent in polls conducted by ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, and NBC/Wall Street Journal. The 15 percent threshold had been announced months ago, but the commission released its polling selections on Monday after consultation with Frank Newport, the editor-in-chief of Gallup.

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump are virtually assured a slot each on the stage for the Sept. 26 debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. But it remains unlikely that a third-party candidate will join them, despite voters’ historic dislike of both Clinton and Trump.

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson nor Green Party nominee Jill Stein would qualify, and neither has come close to hitting 15 percent in any qualifying poll.

    • Political Word Games

      Understandably Mr. Trump took umbrage at the suggestion he had sacrificed nothing, and to prove his point, gave us all a new understanding of the word “sacrifice.” Mr. Trump said: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of job. . . built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” Thus, the new meaning for sacrifice is being very successful in whatever you undertake.

      Hillary Clinton has imparted new meaning to words that were commonly associated with things electrical. The words are “Short Circuit.” “Short circuit” first entered the lexicon in its new incarnation when Ms. Clinton was discussing her use of email while serving as Secretary of State. Although the use or misuse of her email is of no substantive importance, her attempts to consistently explain her email procedures, while serving as Secretary of State, has given the question a life of its own that far overshadows any substantive concerns over her practices.

    • Inside the administration’s $1 billion deal to detain Central American asylum seekers

      As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company, to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum.

      The four-year, $1 billion contract — details of which have not been previously disclosed — has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained at the facility. Critics say the government’s policy has been expensive but ineffective. Arrivals of Central American families at the border have continued unabated while court rulings have forced the administration to step back from its original approach to the border surge.

      In hundreds of other detention contracts given out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, federal payouts rise and fall in step with the percentage of beds being occupied. But in this case, CCA is paid for 100 percent capacity even if the facility is, say, half full, as it has been in recent months. An ICE spokeswoman, Jennifer Elzea, said that the contracts for the 2,400-bed facility in Dilley and one for a 532-bed family detention center in Karnes City, Tex., given to another company, are “unique” in their payment structures because they provide “a fixed monthly fee for use of the entire facility regardless of the number of residents.”

    • With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton

      His chances, as measured in the polls, went almost overnight from fairly decent to utter crap. For much of this year, populism had the gilded class really worried. There was Bernie Sanders and the unthinkable threat of a socialist president. There was the terrifying Brexit vote. Just a short while ago the American national newspapers were running page-one stories telling readers it was time to take seriously Trump’s followers, if not Trump himself. And on 3 August, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman actually typed the following: “It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust [Hillary] Clinton and are so worried about the future – jobs, globalization and terrorism” that they might actually vote for Trump.

      Yes, it scared Friedman that the American people didn’t like their masters any longer. As it has no doubt scared many of his rich friends to learn over the past few years that the people formerly known as middle class are angry about losing their standard of living to the same forces that are making those rich people ever more comfortable.

    • Robert De Niro Compares Donald Trump to His ‘Taxi Driver’ Character: He’s ‘Totally Nuts’

      Robert De Niro compared Donald Trump to Travis Bickle, the mentally disturbed character he played in the 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”

      “What he has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even… he is totally nuts,” De Niro said.

      His comments came during a Q&A at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday, according to the AP.

      Elaborating on the character which earned the actor an Oscar nomination, De Niro said, “One of the things to me was just the irony at the end, [Bickle] is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too.”

      He then drew a comparison to the current presidential candidate for the Republican party: “People like Donald Trump who shouldn’t be where he is so… God help us.” The AP reports that De Niro’s comments were met with applause.

    • Trump: I’m running against media, not Clinton

      Donald Trump said Saturday that his true opponent in the general election is the media.

      “I’m not running against crooked Hillary, I’m running against the crooked media,” Trump said at a rally in Fairfield, Conn. “That’s what I’m running against, I’m not running against crooked Hillary.”

      Trump has repeatedly lashed out at media that he calls “dishonest” over the course of his campaign.

      Earlier Saturday, he bashed the New York Times after a report came out in which sources characterized Trump as “sullen” and struggling to recover in light of lagging poll numbers.

      He renewed those attacks on the Times at the rally Saturday, saying he’s considering revoking their credentials to cover his rallies.

      “I’ll tell you in particular lately we have a newspaper that’s failing badly, its losing a lot of money, its gonna be out of business very soon: the New York Times,” he said.

      Trump blasted the use of anonymous sources in the Times report, saying “I don’t think they have any names.”

      “They never call me,” he added. “It’s going to hell.”

      “Maybe what we’ll do,” Trump continued, “we’ll start taking their press credentials away from them.”

    • Pirates Looking Into “Election Pokéstops”

      The Pirate Party is looking into the idea of setting up “election Pokéstops” to attract more young people to take part in the vote.

      Kjarninn reports that in the most recent election – the municipal elections of 2014 – voter turn-out for those aged 18 to 29 was only at about 50%. To help improve this situation, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and other Pirates are currently looking into an unconventional way to get young people to the polls: namely, by setting up Pokéstops at polling places.

      To this end, Birgitta is hoping that the company Unity Technologies could take part in the project. The company, which amongst other things takes part in designing the Pokémon Go environment in Iceland, is partially owned by Icelander Dav­íð Helga­son.

    • new shadow passwd functions

      Long, long ago, password hashes were kept in the /etc/passwd file. This is obviously bad because it allows users to pry into other users’ hashes, attempting to crack them. The solution was to move the real hashes to another file, called master.passwd on OpenBSD. BSD systems also turn the text passwd files into a database file so that calling getpwnam is fast even with thousands of users on a 10MHz vax.

      On some systems, e.g. Linux, there are two sets of functions. Normal functions like getpwnam that open the regular passwd files, and shadow functions like getspnam that open the files with password hashes. The problem is that struct passwd and struct spwd are not the same, making it difficult to write code that can work with both variants. Everything must be written twice, even though the code will be identical except for a few characters difference.

    • Found: A New Major Opposition Party

      Imagine what a Commons party could achieve with this menu! It could also blacklist Congressional members and Administrations ignoring these demands, despite their swearing to “promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Or cut the Pentagon’s allocation in half and put the remainder into domestic needs.

      Such movements also taught veteran campaigners and newbies to put principles before personalities in everything from fundraising, canvassing, creating media and overpass signs, phonebanking, fliering, street theatre and demonstrations and running those “huuuuge” rallies around the country.

      Meetings usually weren’t held in plush quarters or rented halls, but in homes, warehouses, libraries, schools, pizza parlors, pubs and backyard potlucks. Leadership generally followed Napoleon’s guideline: “Every French soldier carries a [general’s] baton in his knapsack.” So leaders were rotated from the ranks instead of bossy, ambitious wannabe “generals.”

      Occupy’s democratic meeting methods reappeared: timed agenda items, fair input by “stacking,” “twinkling” fingers for approvals, and projects assigned to initiators.

      In his latest major interview, Sanders spoke for the fearful, the despairing, and the angries about what those in other times and other places did to change their countries, and to follow their example unless we want to be ruled by lesser evils preferring we vanish.

    • Stark New Evidence on How Money Shapes America’s Elections

      Outrage over how big money influences American politics has been boiling over this political season, energizing the campaigns of GOP nominee Donald Trump and former Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders alike. Citizens have long suspected that “We the People” increasingly means “We the Rich” at election time.

      Yet surprisingly, two generations of social scientists have insisted that wallets don’t matter that much in American politics. Elections are really about giving the people what they want. Money, they claim, has negligible impact on elections.

      That was a good line for Cold War propaganda, and good for tenure, too. Corporate titans seized upon it to argue that their money should be freer to flow into political campaigns. Not only billionaires, but academics, too, argued that more money in elections meant more democracy.

      Even today, many academics and pundits still insist that money matters less to political outcomes than ordinary citizens think, even as business executives throw down mind-boggling sums to dine with politicians and Super Pacs spring up like mushrooms. The few dissenters from this consensus, like Noam Chomsky, are ignored in the U.S. as “unpersons,” though they are enormously respected abroad.

    • Thousands of Pages of Confidential Think Tank Documents Detail Corporate Ties, New York Times Reports

      Thousands of pages of confidential internal think tank emails and documents published by the New York Times yesterday shine a revealing spotlight on how some of the nation’s most prominent think tanks are used by corporate donors to promote specific policies — while concealing the financial interests involved.

      The emails provide a “smoking gun” of evidence that corporations that donated to non-profit think tanks like The Brookings Institution were promised specific receivables in return.

      For example, Lennar Corp., a home building company and Brookings donor was offered a spot as a Brookings senior fellow for one of its executives. “’He would be a trusted adviser,’ an internal Brookings memo said in 2014 as the think tank sought one $100,000 donation from Lennar,” the Times reported.

      While critics of the institutions may have long suspected that corporate donors receive special treatment from the think tanks they back, think tanks have managed to maintain an air of independence and the respect of many policy makers in Washington D.C.

      The newly revealed emails are striking in part because they reveal how corporate interests have affected left-wing think tanks like Brookings, which are sometimes regarded as less under the corporate thumb than right-wing overtly pro-corporate think thanks like the American Enterprise Institute or The Heartland Institute.

      The documents show the precise ways that corporate donors are able to control the messages coming out of the think tanks they fund behind the scenes, while still preserving a public veneer of independence.

      “The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete,” the Times reported. “Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports. Donors have outlined how the resulting scholarship will be used as part of broader lobbying efforts.”

    • For millennial voters, the Clinton vs. Trump choice ‘feels like a joke’

      Jo Tongue doesn’t have much time for politics, but the Hillary and Trump show is hard to tune out. And even harder to take. To this 31-year-old mother of two, with a third on the way, the presidency should be an honorable office, but instead she feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

      “Watching Jimmy Fallon, I feel like, ugh, is this how we should start out? We’re already mocking our president?”

      Tongue says she is both “sad” and “defeated” and — in a world filled with shootings, bombings and financial strain — maintains scant hope that a new president will change any of it.

      At a sports bar 1,800 miles away in Goldsboro, N.C., Aaron Stewart is shooting pool with a buddy and thinking the same thing. The pair doesn’t just feel cut off from the current campaign, but from a political system they see as controlled by mysterious networks, greased by money and off-limits to people like them.

      “I’m not really a conspiracy theo rist, but the system is corrupt,” says Stewart, 21, who works at a convenience store. He draws a $1 bill from his wallet, holds it up to the bar’s faint light and declares, “This little piece of paper tells me what I can and cannot do.”

      At the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in California, the summer interns are up on the issues. But Dominic Cicerone has a similar sense of foreboding. For him, the big issue is his own safety — he was afraid to go to the July 4 fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf because the Islamic State had released a video claiming San Francisco as a target — and neither candidate is easing his concerns.

    • The Real Reason They Attack Jill Stein

      The attacks on Jill Stein’s blossoming supporter base from establishment Democrats have continued as frantically and aggressively as ever, despite Hillary Clinton enjoying a comfortable and enduring lead in the polls over Donald Trump. Numbers have stabilized, and it looks like Hillary will win without the support of the Bernie-or-Bust crowd.

      So why continue the vitriol? It hasn’t lessened. In fact, it’s ramped up, and our social media news feeds are teeming with false accusations of Stein being anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-Bernie Sanders, and now, surprise surprise, an anti-American Putin sympathizer.

      Yes, the old red under the bed tactic. Clinton ally John Aravosis has continued the Democrats’ bizarre resurrection of the time-honored McCarthyist tradition of red-baiting their critics and political opponents, joining the Democrats’ diversionary tactic of pointing indignantly at Russia and its ties to Trump for the DNC hacks in the hopes that it will make everyone forget about the content of the leak itself. Over the weekend, Aravosis wrote an attack editorial, casting suspicion on Stein for attending a convention for alternative media outlet RT last winter, which Aravosis laughably tries to spin as evidence that the anti-war Green party candidate is a traitor in league with “the Kremlin’s propaganda agency.”

    • The U.S.: a four- or five-party country jammed into a two-party system

      Years ago, when Boris Yeltsin came to town, I had a chance to ask him one question. Through a translator, I asked this: “You call yourself a Communist, but you disagree with the Communist Party’s ideology on most subjects. What makes you a Communist?” He replied: “Party card.”

      By the time Yeltsin became president, opposition parties were still banned. But being a Communist didn’t require you to believe anything in particular. Yet the system still required you to be a card-carrying Communist to run for office. I don’t favor a one-party system.

      Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. Never really was. Never really claimed to be.

      Donald Trump is not a Republican. Not in any meaningful sense.

      But in America, since the Dem-Repub duopoly took over our system in 1856, if you want to be president, you have to be the nominee of one of the two major parties.

    • The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee

      All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

      They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

      The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

      They can’t go with Donald Trump. He’s too volatile and unhinged.

      The erstwhile Goldwater Girl and Goldman Sachs busker can be counted on to do the normal political things, not the abnormal haywire things. Trump’s propounding could drag us into war, plunge us into a recession and shatter Washington into a thousand tiny bits.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Attacks Against Jill Stein Are “Going to Go Through the Roof”

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke via video stream to the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, about the corporate control of information during the 2016 election. He also predicted that attacks against Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein would surge ahead of November’s election.

    • Jill Stein Smeared As Anti-Vaccine Crank As Sanders Supporters Consider Alternative To Clinton

      As Hillary Clinton officially became the Democratic Party’s nominee, interest in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein grew exponentially. Several establishment journalists, including those known for their open contempt for dissent, turned their attention to Stein to marginalize her campaign before it picked up more than a small amount of support from disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.

      One false and slanderous claim against Stein has picked up a huge amount of traction in the press: the idea that Stein is an “anti-vaxxer,” opposes vaccines, or has pandered to individuals who believe vaccines cause autism.

      The Washington Post is primarily responsible for this smear. It had two of its reporters, Sarah Parnass and Alice Li, interview Stein. David Weigel, another Post journalist, wrote about the interview, and a Post editor gave it the following headline, “Jill Stein on vaccines: People have ‘real questions,’” which was extremely misleading.

      At the moment, over a dozen media outlets have picked up the interview and chastised Stein for supposedly having anti-science views. Some of the pieces on Stein’s interview are mean-spirited, written by journalists who would have found something to make her look like a crank even if the Post had not spoken with her about vaccines.

    • Stein hits Clinton on emails: Voters “owed an explanation”

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein attacked Hillary Clinton on Monday for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State, amid reports that notes from Clinton’s interview with the FBI during its probe of the matter would be turned over soon to Congress.
      Declining to say whether she thought Clinton should have faced criminal charges from the FBI after its probe, Stein said that the issue “raises real questions about her competency.”

      “I think there should have been a full investigation. I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened, and why top secret information was put at risk, why the identity of secret agents were potentially put at risk,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello.

    • Why Latinos Support Donald Trump

      No amount of semantic somersaulting can whitewash the racist overtones of Donald Trump’s campaign.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How to Make YouTube Stop Watching What You Watch

      A. When you are logged in to your Google Account, YouTube keeps a running list of everything you watch on the site for a few reasons. For one, YouTube uses your viewing history to suggest other videos it thinks you may like, similar to the way Netflix makes recommendations for its members.

      [...]

      Next, click the Pause Watch History button. If you would also like to wipe out the collected list of clips, click the Clear All Watch History button next to it. If you do not want to clear all videos from the list — but want to remove some of them — click the “X” on the right side of the screen next to a listed clip.

    • New law targets people who leak classified information

      People who leak Government information will be targeted with a new offence that carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

      Prime Minister John Key has announced legislation that will also let the Government Communications Security Bureau spy on New Zealanders’ private information.

      The bill comes in the same week that information leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden resulted in media reports about the GCSB’s monitoring of a Fiji democracy activist.

      The Government denied the new power to target whistle blowers was related to the Snowden leaks.

      Its introduction is a response to a broad-sweeping intelligence review by Sir Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy, released in March with 107 recommendations.

    • Report: Target of NSA’s online surveillance identified

      Tony Fullman was targeted from July through August 2012…

    • NSA is everywhere: New Zealand peace activist victim of ‘illegal’ PRISM snooping program

      A new report by The Intercept and Television New Zealand reveal the National Security Agency (NSA) worked with New Zealand’s government to illegally spy on one of its citizens in a failed terrorism investigation.

      A group of “democracy and freedom” activists were thought to be plotting the overthrow of Fiji’s military regime in 2012, according to the Kiwi snoops at the Security Intelligence Service (SIS).

      With help from the NSA via the Five Eyes alliance, which Edward Snowden called a “supra-national intelligence organization that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries,” they staged a covert operation to catch the alleged terrorist group.

      Snowden’s leaked documents show the NSA intercepted Facebook communications and emails between associates of the Fiji Democracy and Freedom Movement campaign, using the PRISM surveillance system, before passing the information onto New Zealand on the other side of the globe. More than 190 pages of documents between May and August 2012 reveal the scale of the NSA’s spying.

    • After NZ spooks misidentified pro-democracy activist, NSA spied on him for them

      Tony Fullman is one of the only people that we know to have been targeted by Prism, the NSA’s signature mass-surveillance tool: he’s a Fijian-born expatriate with New Zealand citizenship, and had his passport seized and his name added to terrorism watchlists after the NSA helped their New Zealand counterparts spy on him, intercepting his bank statements, Facebook posts, Gmail messages, recorded phone conversations, and more.

      Fullman is one of the organisers of “thumbs up for democracy,” a peaceful online campaign that questions the legitimacy of Frank Bainimarama, an authoritarian military dictator who seized control of Fiji in a coup. An internal NZ investigation revealed that the New Zealand government mistook a group of NZ-based Fijian pro-democracy activists for terrorists and illegally spied on 88 of them between 2003 and 2012, including Fullman.

      Fullman was naturalised into NZ citizenship after moving there when he was 21, and worked for 20 years as a civil servant in the tax department, while volunteering at a soup-kitchen and completing two Master’s degrees (one in public management, the other in IT). He moved back to Fiji in 2009 to run the country’s water authority.

    • Report reveals identity of NSA and PRISM surveillance target

      It’s been over three years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of documents detailing the extent to which the American government was able to spy on its citizens. A big part of those revelations was PRISM, a system that allowed the government to expediently request and collect data from a variety of huge internet companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more. Today, a new report from The Intercept contains details on the first person to be identified as a target of PRISM.

      Tony Fullman of New Zealand was targeted in 2012 by the NSA in cooperation with the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The NSA was able to intercept his Facebook chats and Gmail messages and passed them along to the GCSB, which itself did not have the authority to monitor Fullman’s communications. Fullman was apparently targeted because New Zealand believed that he was planning an act of terrorism, but it turns out that intelligence was incorrect. That didn’t stop the New Zealand government from raiding his home and revoking his passport, however.

    • This Was the First Confirmed Prism Surveillance Target

      A new report based on the leaks of former U.S. National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden has for the first time named a target of the NSA’s controversial Prism program—a civil servant and pro-democracy activist named Tony Fullman.

    • What it looks like when the NSA hacks into your Gmail and Facebook

      For the first time, a target of the National Security Agency’s controversial Prism program has been identified.

      Tony Fullman, a New Zealand citizen who was born in Fiji, had the contents of his Facebook and various Gmail accounts intercepted by the NSA, The Intercept reports, based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • ViaSat’s encryptors NSA-certified [Ed: ViaSat really wants us to know it’s in bed with the NSA; assume “golden key”?]
    • Special investigation: Inside one of the SIS’s biggest anti-terrorism operations

      One of the Security Intelligence Service’s biggest ever anti-terrorism operations – conducted between July and August 2012 – targeted a group of pro-democracy campaigners who it mistakenly thought were planning to overthrow the military government in Fiji.

      A New Zealand man had his communications monitored, probably illegally, his home raided and his passport cancelled by the SIS. But there were no guns or bombs. He was not part of a plot.

      The man, Tony Fullman, was a long-time public servant and peaceful pro-democracy campaigner who, like the New Zealand and Australian governments at that time, was opposed to the Bainimarama military government.

    • BRITISH PM CAMERON HOAXED BY DRUNK PRANK CALLER AS GCHQ BOSS
    • Did The FBI Get Confused And Arrest One Of Its Own Informants For Helping Create One Of Its Own Plots?

      For a few years now, we’ve been writing about how the FBI has been arresting a ton of people for “terrorism” who were really guilty of little more than being gullible and naive and pushed by FBI undercover agents and informants into taking part in a plot that wouldn’t exist but for the FBI itself. These so-called own plots seem to be a huge part of what the FBI does these days. Somewhat ridiculously, courts have (mostly) allowed these, claiming that if, eventually, the accused person expressed some support for terrorism or terrorist groups, it shouldn’t be considered entrapment. But, over and over again, you see cases where it’s clearly the FBI doing not just the majority of the plotting, but also pushing and pushing targets to “join” the plot, even when they show sustained resistance. The more details you read about these cases, the more ridiculous they get.

      However, in just the latest example of this — the arrest of Erick Hendricks for supposedly trying to recruit people to carry out attacks for ISIS — there’s been something of an odd twist. Hendricks claims he has no idea why he was arrested because he’s been an FBI informant for years, helping the FBI find other gullible souls to entrap in these “own plots.” As Marcy Wheeler notes, it’s possible the FBI lost track of one of its own informants and ended up having him “caught” in one of the plots where he thought he was helping the FBI find possible terrorists. Wouldn’t that be something.

    • In Bungled Spying Operation, NSA Targeted Pro-Democracy Campaigner

      As part of the spy mission, the NSA used its powerful global surveillance apparatus to intercept the emails and Facebook chats of people associated with a Fijian “thumbs up for democracy” campaign. The agency then passed the messages to its New Zealand counterpart, Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB.

    • Snowden Docs Show NSA, New Zealand Spied On Pro-Democracy Activists [Ed: Snowden’s remark]

      The “act of terrorism” claims were odd, considering Fullman’s activism was aligned with the New Zealand government’s own views: opposition to neighboring Fiji’s authoritarian ruler, Frank Bainimarama. Utilizing PRISM, the NSA intercepted Fullman’s Gmail and Facebook messages, along with gathering everything it could from his public postings — including this data on his apparently terrorism-related personal vehicle.

    • NSA Hacked? ‘Shadow Brokers’ Crew Claims Compromise Of Surveillance Op
    • Hackers claim to be selling NSA cyberweapons in online auction
    • Hacking group purportedly hacked NSA-linked Equation Group, auctioning cyber weapons
    • Hackers Say They Hacked NSA-Linked Group, Want 1 Million Bitcoins to Share More
    • Hackers Claim to Auction Data Stolen From NSA-Linked Spies
    • Hackers claim to auction NSA source code
    • Group claims to have hacked the NSA, wants $500 million to release files
    • NSA offshoot ‘The Equation Group’ has been hacked
    • So, Uh, Did The NSA Get Hacked?
    • The Tools The NSA Uses To Snoop Are Allegedly Being Auctioned Off By Hackers

      We’ve known for a while, thanks to the Snowden leaks and the ensuing investigations, that the NSA has both broad authority to breach and investigate the communications of innocent Americans and the tools to get into your private business with ease. It’s been an ugly chapter in American history, and it’s about to get a lot uglier with the news that the NSA has been hacked, and all its spying tools might soon be online for anybody to use.

    • ‘Shadow Brokers’ claim to have hacked an NSA-linked elite computer security unit

      Cybersecurity experts are searching for answers after an unidentified group claimed on Monday to have hacked into “Equation Group” — an elite cyber-attack group associated with the NSA.

      The “Shadow Brokers” claimed in a post on blogging service Tumblr to have hacked Equation Group, and say they are holding an “auction” to sell off the “cyber weapons” they were able to steal. Shadow Brokers have also provided a sample of files, free to access, to “prove” their legitimacy.

    • Should cloud vendors cooperate with the government?

      35 percent believe cloud app vendors should be forced to provide government access to encrypted data while 55 percent are opposed. 64 percent of US-based infosec professionals are opposed to government cooperation, compared to only 42 percent of EMEA respondents.

      “Forcing cloud app vendors to comply with government or law enforcement access requests to data has provided a real mixed bag of responses, with everything to no way, to help yourself, and even to I don’t care. This really makes no sense because surely with so much debate about the challenges facing law enforcement, to the privacy considerations that have dominated the press we would have expected at least some common consensus. This of course creates a challenge for app vendors, because it will not be possible to create models to suit all opinions. It therefore demands some form of open debate on the best approach to take in terms of addressing this most challenging issue,” Raj Samani, CTO EMEA at Intel Security, told Help Net Security.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Muslims Are Celebrating Murderer Of The Glasgow ‘Apostate’ Shopkeeper

      Muslims around the world are celebrating a British man, who murdered an innocent shopkeeper who they considered an “apostate”, as an Islamist hero.

    • Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Portugal has asked Russia for help in extinguishing forest fires, head of the press service of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Alexei Vagutovich, told Sputnik, and Russia is happy to help out.

    • In Zambia’s contentious election, the EU finds a new challenge

      Supporters of the United Party for National Development opposition party attend election rally in Lusaka, Zambia, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016 amid concerns about political violence. Moses Mwape / Press Association. All rights reserved.Zambians went to the polls on August 11 in presidential and parliamentary elections in what is expected to be a tight race between President Edgar Lungu’s governing PF party and the opposition UPND led by Hakainde Hichilema. The EU on the ground, along with other international observers, can exert a positive influence in what has been a tense and sometimes violent campaign. In its new Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy the EU commits to supporting democracies where they emerge, for “their success […] would reverberate across their respective regions” – Zambia presents an opportunity for the EU to show it still has serious clout as a foreign policy actor.

    • Your Parents Aren’t Your Parents, an Announcer Tells an Olympian

      Many eyes were watching, then, as NBC learned a lesson, maybe. Biles has been open about her family; she and her sister were adopted at a young age by her maternal grandfather and his wife. “I call them Mom and Dad. Everything’s just been so normal,” she’s been quoted. But NBC announcer Al Trautwig seemed to feel he knew better, referring repeatedly to Biles’ “grandparents.” When someone on Twitter noted that was incorrect, Trautwig responded, “they may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.”

      After, one imagines, a call from PR, Trautwig declared he regretted that he “wasn’t more clear in my wording,” though he didn’t explain what it was he was trying to “word” or why. (USA Today wrote that he had apologized “for suggesting that Simone Biles’ parents through adoption are not really her parents.” If saying “they are NOT her parents” is “suggesting” they are not her parents, then sure.)

      Olympics coverage involves a lot of storytelling; commentators create narratives for athletes, and no doubt some feel it’s “humanizing” when, faced with one of the best athletes in the world, they focus on what one called her “broken home.” Of course, what they’re really revealing is just the narrowness of their vision.

    • Recent court decisions fuel renewed push for restoring the Voting Rights Act

      In an op-ed for Time magazine, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said these decisions “have been a triumphant win for voting rights advocates, but they are not the long-term answer.”

      “As we face the first presidential election without a fully functioning VRA,” he wrote, “it is more critical than ever to restore the full powers and protections of the law.”

      Greenblatt observed that “the backdrop of the latest set of rulings paints a bleaker picture — one of legislatures around the country passing laws that discriminate against voters of color.”

    • One Quote Predicts Today’s Police Brutality Nearly 50 Years Ago

      The violence of last week conjures up the history and memory of the violence and racial tension of 1968, and a quote from a famous author and cultural critic makes the comparison seem all too apt.

    • Online crime: UK cops to use law firms to tackle fraud in civil courts

      A pilot scheme run by the City of London police will use law firms working for profit to tackle online crime and fraud cases.

      Cops will pass details of cases to companies involved with the scheme. They will be tasked with attempting to seize the assets of suspects—and, if successful, receive a share.

      The advantages for the police are twofold: more cases can be tackled, since some will be handled by the law firms, and suspects will be pursued in civil courts, whereas police have to go through the criminal court system in order to use provisions from the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).

    • DEA Accessing Millions Of Travelers’ Records To Find Cash To Seize

      The monster is insatiable. The DEA loves taking cash from travelers so much it has hired TSA screeners as informants, asking them to look for cash when scanning luggage. It routinely stops and questions rail passengers in hopes of stumbling across money it can take from them.

      But it goes further than just hassling random travelers and paying government employees to be government informants. As the USA Today’s article points out, the DEA is datamining traveler info to streamline its forfeiture efforts.

    • Documents Confirm CIA Censorship of Guantánamo Trials

      In January 2013, during the military trial of five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, a defense lawyer was discussing a motion relating to the CIA’s black-site program, when a mysterious entity cut the audio feed to the gallery. A red light began to glow and spin. Someone had triggered the courtroom’s censorship system.

      The system was believed to be under the control of the judge, Col. James Pohl. In this case, it wasn’t.

    • Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA

      When US media—to say nothing of the leading contender to be the next president of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse. When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged blabbering.

      [...]

      If the Washington Post had to argue that US meddling was the good kind of meddling, because it’s a necessary balance to Putin’s autocratic rule, this nuance would get in the way of the Post’s simplistic “paranoid strongman vs. good, clean US democracy” dichotomy, so the reader is left with the ahistoric and childish impression that the US doesn’t interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries.

      [...]

      To omit the endless string of examples of US interfering in other countries in an editorial about fears of US interfering in other countries is at best negligent and at worst deliberately obtuse. It’s hard to describe foreign leaders as being paranoid about US meddling and coups if you acknowledge that the US has been involved in meddling and coups for more than a century.

    • Humanitarian Nightmare for Colombia’s Wayuu Fails to Awaken Corporate Media

      Colombia’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to ensure that the Wayuu, the largest indigenous community in the country, have access to basics of survival, including drinkable water. Last year, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights called attention to the crisis, noting the documented deaths of more than 4,700 Wayuu children in just the last eight years—although the Wayuu themselves say the number is closer to 14,000 children who have died from preventable disease, thirst and malnutrition. It’s a humanitarian nightmare, but as human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik noted in a piece for Huffington Post, corporate media appear unmoved.

      The Wayuu are suffering not just from climate change–driven drought, but from the loss of access to the Rancheria River, drained by a dam built in 2011 for the coal mining company Cerrejon. Cerrejon Mine, at first a joint venture between Colombia and Exxon, opened in 1983 and has been displacing indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities ever since. Kovalik reports that Cerrejon now uses 17 million liters of water a day, while residents of the region have an average of 0.7 liters a day to live on.

    • When USA Gymnastics Turned a Blind Eye to Sexual Abuse

      With the summer Olympics in full swing, three reporters at the Indianapolis Star newspaper have been investigating painful secrets kept by some of the nation’s young gymnasts-in-training.

      For this ProPublica Podcast, I talked with Marisa Kwiatkowski, Mark Alesia and Tim Evans about their incredible report on sexual misconduct by coaches affiliated with USA Gymnastics, the nonprofit responsible for developing the United States’ gymnastics team for the Olympics and training thousands more children and young adults.What the reporters discovered was that the organization had policies on reporting sexual abuse that were likely to discourage people from speaking up.

    • The Right-Wing Legacy of Justice Lewis Powell, and What It Means for the Supreme Court Today

      The memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was breathtaking in its scope and ambition, and far more right-wing than anything Scalia ever wrote. It was, as writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article published by CounterPunch, “A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down.”

      Back in 1971, when the memo was prepared, Powell was a well-connected partner in the Richmond-based law firm of Hutton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson and sat on the boards of 11 major corporations, including the tobacco giant Philip Morris. He also had served as chairman of the Richmond School Board from 1952 to ’61 and as president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to ’65. In 1969, he declined a nomination to the Supreme Court offered by President Nixon, preferring to remain in legal practice, through which he reportedly had amassed a personal fortune.

    • Man Claiming that He is the Brother of Man Shot by Officers Speaks to CBS 58 During the Violence

      CBS 58′s Evan Kruegel spoke exclusively to a man claiming to be the brother of the man shot and killed by police yesterday.

      He was with a crowd of people at the O’Reilly Auto Parts as it burned last night.

      “There is riot going on because once again the police have failed to protect us like they said they would. They failed to be here like they say like they sworn in to do. Us as a community, we are not going to protect ourselves. But, we don’t have anyone to protect us than this is what you get. So you got riots. We got people right here going crazy. We are losing loved ones everyday to the people that are sworn in to protect us,” said the man.

    • “This is the Madness They Spark”: Uprising in Milwaukee After Police Kill 23-Year-Old Black Man

      Protests are continuing in Milwaukee two days after police shot dead a 23-year-old African-American man named Sylville Smith. On Sunday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard after local residents set fire to police cars and several local businesses, including a gas station, on Saturday night. Seventeen people were arrested. Four police officers were reportedly injured. Milwaukee police say Smith was shot while trying to flee from an officer who had stopped his car. Police Chief Edward Flynn said he had viewed video from the officer’s body camera, and it showed Smith had turned toward him with a gun in his hand after the traffic stop. Many local residents said the tension between their community and the police has been rising for years. Milwaukee is considered to be one of the most segregated cities in the country. We speak with Muhibb Dyer, community activist, poet and co-founder of the organization Flood the Hood with Dreams.

    • Milwaukee Sheriff Provokes Outrage, Blames ‘Urban Pathology,’ ‘War on Police’ for Police Brutality

      Days of demonstrations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin following Saturday’s fatal police shooting have shined a national spotlight on the city’s segregation and police practices—and the city’s infamous right-wing sheriff provoked further outrage Sunday when he blamed the community of the shooting victim for the police violence that ended his life.

      Clarke decried “urban pathologies” and a “war on police”—popular right-wing catchphrases—in impoverished, largely black communities for the demonstrations and the shooting that provoked them.

      “The urban pathologies have to be addressed to shrink the growth of an underclass,” he said, referring to the community which has suffered through the deaths of many of its members at the hands of police.

    • Black Americans and Police State Fascism

      Korryn Gaines was shot to death by police in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Her five year-old son was also shot and injured. Ms. Gaines came into contact with police initially because of a traffic violation and a dispute with her boyfriend. Every day thousands of people are given tickets or make accusations against one another but rarely do they have an expectation of ending up dead as a result.

      Arrest warrants are the first line of defense for the police, who are the 21st century embodiment of the slave patrol. If black people are lucky they may have to pay a fine or suffer some inconvenience, if unlucky they are killed.

    • Justice and accountability for war related sexual violence in Sri Lanka

      As the testimonies of survivors of sexual violence in Sri Lanka’s long war enter the public domain and the government designs transitional justice mechanisms, is an end to impunity in sight?

    • The Dark Secret of Israel’s Stolen Babies

      According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking.

      A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption.

      Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organisations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye.

      Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, health ministry staff, and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up.

      [...]

      Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door.

      The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”.

    • Eliminate Profit from Punishment

      In July 2010, Marissa Alexander, a young Black woman from Florida, faced the fight of her life only nine days after giving birth to her youngest daughter. Her estranged husband, Rico Gray, attacked, strangled, and threatened to kill Marissa in her own home. To get rid of Rico, Marissa fired a warning shot into the ceiling. The single shot injured no one. And yet she was subsequently charged with several criminal charges and incarcerated for a victimless crime.

      Marissa’s story is just one example of how prisons, profit, policing, and poverty are intimately connected. Prisons have long been warehouses for the poor and individuals who are unable to defend themselves in a vicious legal system. Undue profiling by law enforcement has long been the gateway into the incarceration system. And increasingly rich people and the multi-billion dollar security industry make money off of mass incarceration.

      Marissa Alexander fought a long battle in the Florida courts to appeal her conviction on the basis of her right of self-defense. She eventually was successful and in 2015 she was released from jail and put on probation. But in the meantime, she paid a high cost. Throughout her entire ordeal, she not only missed irreplaceable time with her children. She also had to pay $105 every week for the use of an ankle monitor while she was under house arrest and an additional $500 every other week for a bond cost.

    • Doncaster girl raped at gunpoint in Pakistan so cousin could get British visa

      But for Tabassan Khan, it marked the beginning of a very different life. British-born Tabassan, given a new name to protect her identity, was told she was going on a summer holiday.

      Instead, she was forced at gunpoint to marry a cousin six years her senior in Pakistan. She was held captive and abused over the next three years.

      Now, having found a way back to safety, she wants to share her story and shine a light on the plight of thousands of young British victims.

      Her life had already been difficult. Her father had murdered her mother when she was 12, leaving her and three brothers in the care of an aunt in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

      The now 26-year-old said: “I thought I was going to Pakistan on holiday. I was excited. Then two months passed and it was time to start the school year. I asked my uncle when I should go back and he just kept saying, ‘Stay a bit longer’ for weeks. After four months, he came up to my room with a gun and told me I had to marry my cousin.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Can’t Save Community Broadband — But We Can

      Last year, while most of us were focused on the FCC’s Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality, the FCC quietly did one more thing: it voted to override certain state regulations that inhibit the development and expansion of community broadband projects. The net neutrality rules have since been upheld, but last week a federal appeals court rejected FCC’s separate effort to preempt state law.

      The FCC’s goals were laudable. Municipalities and local communities have been experimenting with ways to foster alternatives to big broadband providers like Comcast and Time/Warner. Done right, community fiber experiments have the potential to create options that empower Internet subscribers and make Internet access more affordable. For example, Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to one of the nation’s least expensive, most robust municipally-owned broadband networks. The city decided to build a high-speed network initially to meet the needs of the city’s electric company. Then, the local government learned that the cable companies would not be upgrading their Internet service fast enough to meet the city’s needs. So the electric utility also became an ISP, and the residents of Chattanooga now have access to a gigabit (1,000 megabits) per second Internet connection. That’s far ahead of the average US connection speed, which typically clocks in at 9.8 megabits per second.

  • DRM

    • Why Apple Removing The Audio Jack From The iPhone Would Be A Very, Very, Very, Bad Move

      It’s been rumored for months now that the next iPhone will be removing the standard analog headphone jack — the same jack that’s existed on portable audio devices for ages. It would immediately make a whole bunch of headphone and microphone products obsolete overnight for those who use iPhones. And while some have compared it to when Apple surprised everyone nearly two decades ago in removing the floppy drive from the iMac, this is quite different. The floppy drive really was pushing the end of its necessary existence, and with the internet and (not too long after) the rise of USB, the internal floppy drive seemed less and less important. But that’s not the case with the standard audio jack.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • More examples of how licensing kills progress: the stories of Gopher and GIF

      At Private Internet Access, we’re dependent on – and celebrating – the existence of free and open strong cryptography. Time and again, people proclaiming the virtues of monopolies and exclusive rights – copyrights, patents – are trying to push their model of closedness and permissioned gates onto the Internet. And time and again, the Internet rejects the notion wholesale.

      Without free and open cryptography, we would not have strong privacy today – and without strong privacy, we no longer have Freedom of Speech at all, in the wider social context. Numerous commissions have looked at the possibility of outlawing private encryption altogether today, like private encryption was banned in France before the first crypto wars, with the usual scapegoat of “because terrorism”. However, they all concluded that because of the mere existence of free and open cryptography, which fall under free speech laws since the first crypto wars, terrorists will always have access to strong cryptography – unlike with gun regulation, there are no per-item sales you can regulate.

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