11.23.14
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Vesna Stilin speaks about her confrontation with EPO Vice-President Željko Topić, who has criminal lawsuits against him in Croatia
THE Croatian link in the EPO is causing some serious problems for the EPO, based on E-mails that we have received and will say more about in the future. The corporate media has joined the campaign to reform the EPO (potentially by letting heads roll) and people who are the victims of Željko Topić, the man faces criminal charges in Croatia, also speak out. This is important because he is the EPO Vice-President and simultaneously he is in the midst of very serious abuses that can potentially land him in prison.
Writing to IP Watch under the heading “Right of Reply”, Vesna Stilin, a famous victim of Topić, published the following item. To quote IP Watch and to give Stilin a voice that she deserves:
I refer to the article “EPO Internal Strife Spills Over Into European Parliament, Human Rights Court”, published by Intellectual Property Watch on 15 May 2014 (IPW, European Policy, 15 May 2014) and hereby request to exercise my right of reply by way of publication of the following statement:
Although the article is to be commended for giving a useful overview of the controversy surrounding Mr. Topić’s appointment as Vice-President of the EPO, several of the statements attributed to Mr. Batistelli and to Mr. Topić contain factually incorrect and/or misleading information. Moreover, in at least some cases it appears to me that these statements are damaging to my reputation and good name.
The claim attributed to Mr. Batistelli and Mr. Topić in the published article to the effect that the allegations which I have raised about Mr. Topić amount to a “smear campaign” is incorrect. My efforts in this regard represent a legitimate attempt to obtain legal redress, inter alia by means of judicial review, with respect to matters concerning my statutory rights as a citizen and as a former employee of the Croatian State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). The legal actions which I have initiated in this regard have been widely reported on in the Croatian media in recent years and as far as can be determined, Mr. Topić has not made any request for a correction of the aforementioned Croatian media reports which he would clearly have been entitled to do under Croatian law if the allegations contained in these reports amounted to nothing more than a baseless and unfounded “smear campaign”.
The statement attributed to Mr. Topić according to which “Vesna Stilin was dismissed by the government of Croatia, not by me, from her position as my assistant at SIPO” is formally correct in so far as the power of appointment and dismissal of Assistant Directors of the SIPO lied with the Croatian Government. However, the statement is grossly misleading insofar as it obscures the key role which Mr. Topić played in the process of my dismissal from the SIPO. The fact of the matter is that the Government took its decision to dismiss me from my position based on Mr. Topić’s recommendation as set forth in two letters which he wrote to the former Croatian Prime Minister, Mr. Ivo Sanader: one of which was placed on the official record (abolishing Copyright and Related Rights Department, without any explanation, with less employees which has been contrary to the recommendation made by independent EU experts in field of Copyright and Related Rights and contrary of Topic’s statement in CARDS program No. 96022 and No. 60343 ) and a further version which was treated as “strictly confidential” with the evident aim of preventing disclosure of its contents to me (contrary to the Law on Access to Information) and which led to me filing a lawsuit for criminal defamation against Mr. Topić.
The statement attributed to Mr. Topić concerning my unsuccessful candidacy for the position of Director-General of the SIPO and his comments concerning the legal proceedings which I subsequently initiated in relation to this matter, including the remarks referring to “absurd complaints” with the ECtHR, amount to an unacceptable misrepresentation and trivialization of the facts of the matter which may be summarized as follows:
I applied for the position of Director-General of the SIPO in 2008. My application was submitted after Mr. Topić had unilaterally, contrary to the legal procedure, abolished the SIPO’s Copyright and Related Rights Department and thus my post as Assistant Director in charge of that Department. If Mr. Topić had not engineered the abolition of my previous post – which was used to justify my dismissal from the SIPO – I would have had no reason to apply for the position of Director-General.
In the decision Us-4201/2008-6 from September 24th 2008, the Administrative Court rejected my complaint against Mr. Topić’s re-appointment as Director General stating inter alia that I could not apply for the position because there had been no public vacancy notice. In subsequent proceedings concerning the same matter before the Constitutional Court, I submitted evidence that the lack of a public vacancy notice, in concrete situation was contrary to the applicable statutory requirements and the practice followed by the previous Government.
In the same complaint filed with the Administrative Court (Us-4201/08 from April 21th 2008), I pointed out inter alia that, at the time of Mr. Topić’s re-appointment, the Government had not been properly informed about certain actions on the part of Mr. Topić which prima facie appeared to constitute criminal acts under Croatian law, including a covert agreement with the former Minister of Science (in charge of inspection under SIPO, who suggests appointment/dismissal of Director General of SIPO to the Government), for whose benefit Mr. Topić had apparently arranged provision of an Audi 6 vehicle at the expense of the SIPO.
Following the various allegations which I raised in this regard, the Government demanded an official inspection of the SIPO in January 2009. However, this official inspection was never carried out as has since been confirmed in writing by the competent Ministry of Economy and Enterprise to which supervisory responsibility for the SIPO had been transferred. In an official Memorandum of February 3th 2012 which was signed by Mr. Topić himself, the nonexistence of the inspection of SIPO since 2008 was confirmed. In the absence of a proper independent official inspection into these matters by the competent Government Ministry, the assertion attributed to Mr. Topić according to which the allegations which I raised “have been rejected after examination as entirely unfounded” does not stand up to scrutiny.
Following the dismissal of my complaint by the Croatian Constitutional Court, which is the final domestic instance, I proceeded to submit an application to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (filed August 20th 2011) in accordance with my statutory entitlement as a citizen of a signatory state to the European Convention on Human Rights. This action is still pending before the European Court of Human Rights.
The article also contains a statement attributed to the EPO President Mr. Battistelli according to which neither the AC nor Battistelli knew of the allegations against Topić at the time of his appointment “but since the charges have been made public they have all been cleared” and a further statement attributed to Mr. Topić according to which “There are no civil proceedings or criminal charges against Topić in Croatia, and he has provided a required certificate showing no criminal record”. These statements are misleading because prior to Mr. Topic’s appointment to the EPO a second criminal lawsuit against Mr. Topic was pending in Zagreb. The evidence relating to this fact was communicated to the President of the EPO and the Administrative Council by the end of 2013 (Minutes of proceedings before the Criminal Court of Zagreb, May 4th 2010, No. K 163/09). This second criminal lawsuit against Mr. Topic was mentioned in two judicial decisions before the Criminal Court of Zagreb (May 31th 2010 No.K-163/09 and May 23th 2011 No.K-238/10) concerning the “defamation” version of my dismissal. Furthermore I also communicated the evidence of further criminal charges against Mr. Topić filed with the Croatian Public Prosecutor (January 9th 2013) to the President of the EPO and the Administrative Council. Under Croatian law, a criminal record is not registered until after a final court judgment has been made. As the aforementioned cases against Mr. Topić are still pending and have not yet reached that stage, this is the reason why he was in a position to provide the EPO with a certificate showing no criminal record.
The statement attributed to Mr. Topić according to which a private lawsuit which I initiated against him for alleged slander was dismissed with an order that I should pay all costs and legal fees is incorrect because suggests the issues underlying this lawsuit have been finally resolved before the Croatian courts which is not the case. The fact of the matter is that although the lawsuit in question was dismissed by the Appeal Court after being two times remitted back to the first instance from the Appeal Court, the decision of the Appeal Court forms the subject of a pending complaint which I submitted to the Croatian Constitutional Court on April 14th 2014. I have also lodged an appeal concerning the matter of costs which is likewise pending. Finally, there is a pending criminal complaint in which I challenged the veracity of the testimony provided by a witness who gave evidence in Mr. Topić’s favour and on which the impugned judgment relied. From these facts it should be evident that legal proceedings in relation to the above lawsuit are still ongoing before the Croatian courts and have not yet been resolved in a final manner contrary to what is implied by the above-mentioned statement of Mr. Topić.
I would be grateful if you could arrange for my response to be published in a suitable format and linked to the original article.
Stilin’s letter is framed as a rebuttal, but it actually serves to reinforce some of the other things published in the original article. Stilin preceded her article with the following words: “this letter is published under the legal right of reply of an individual referenced in a previous article published in Intellectual Property Watch. It is published upon her request.”
Being a statement from Stilin herself, we deem it quite an accurate representation of the Željko Topić affair. In the coming weeks we are going to publish more material highlighting what happened in SIPO and the role played by Željko Topić. █
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11.16.14
Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The abuses of Željko Topić, who has gained notoriety in his home country, are rapidly becoming public knowledge across all of Europe
THE trend changes for the better as blind support for the EPO is ending. People now realise just how rotten the EPO has become and there are various actions being taken by the public and even EPO staff (more on that in the coming weeks). Quite importantly, evidence is now coming to light so as to bolster the stories we have broken over the past few months.
The latest Croatian press article on this topic (of Topić), published by tjedno.hr on the 18th of October 2014, says quite a mouthful. Our sources have been working on getting an English translation which we now have. The photo in the article shows Topić on his way to attend a recent hearing at the Municipal Criminal Court in Zagreb and the last paragraph contains a mention of “articles published on Internet portals across Europe during the last month,” which our sources understand to be a reference to the recent series of publications by Techrights.
For readers’ information we finally have an English translation of this most recent article from tjedno.hr [PDF]. Here it is in full, as plain text with rudimentary formatting:
ŽELJKO TOPIĆ AND HIS LIES IN MUNICH
Date: 18 October 2014
Six criminal lawsuits are pending in Croatia against the EPO Vice-President
Text: Portal Tjedno Research Team
Photography: Markus Wolf
According to publicly available information, “Master” Željko Topić, was appointed as Vice-President in charge of the EPO’s General Administration Department on 28 March 2012 with the vigorous support of the EPO President, Benoît Battistelli. At the time of his appointment, it is claimed that neither the EPO’s Administrative Council nor its President Battistelli were informed about certain interesting facts which have emerged in relation to Mr. Topić.
Nevertheless, according to an official statement by the EPO President, after the charges had become publicly known they were all clarified. Judging by the published photograph of Željko Topić accompanied by his lawyer from the Zagreb law firm Gajski – Prka – Saucha & Partners Ltd. which was taken in front of the Municipal Criminal Court in Zagreb on the morning of 29 September 2014, it would appear that things are not quite so clear.
A COURT APPEARANCE IN ZAGREB
In one of his recent public statements, published in May 2014 by a Geneva-based Internet portal specializing in intellectual property matters (www.ip-watch.org), “Master” Topić officially declared that there were no legal proceedings or criminal charges pending against him in Croatia. At the same time he claimed that he had presented the EPO with the required certificate of good conduct confirming there are no criminal convictions against him. Mr. Topić’s statements are, however, misleading for his employer. From the foregoing, it can be concluded that for whatever reason Željko Topić has grossly deceived his European employer in Munich by knowingly giving false information designed to obscure the truth.
We do not know how Željko Topić justified his absence from his workplace at the EPO in Munich on the day when he was caught by the photographic lens in Zagreb. We can only speculate as to whether he decided to take annual leave, sick leave or whether he may even have misled his employer perhaps by deliberately submitting a duty travel request for an official business trip to a meeting in Zagreb financed by EPO, knowing full well that his attendance was required at the Municipal Criminal Court. Judging by his publicly expressed claims that he is not subject to any criminal proceedings in Croatia, it is difficult to avoid the impression that he may have been economical with the truth concerning the real reasons for spending time in Zagreb on the Monday in question. Or, perhaps, he relied on the concept and plot of the movie “When Father Was Away on Business” by the famous director Emir Kusturica.
AT LEAST SIX CRIMINAL OFFENCES
For the time being we have no idea what the Municipal State Attorney General in Zagreb, Željka Pokupec, thinks about all this as she has been busy dealing with another matter falling under her jurisdiction, namely bringing a final indictment for the illegal procurement of a VW Touareg V6 against the person directly responsible for the supervision of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), Mr. Dragan Primorac, one of Ministers in the then Government of Mr. Sanader. In connection with criminal charges filed with Office of the State Attorney, a reasonable suspicion was expressed in the criminal complaint to the Bureau for Combating Corruption and Organized Crime (USKOK) in Zagreb that Željko Topić may have bribed the former Minister Primorac with an Audi A6 vehicle in order to secure the renewal of his mandate as Director of the SIPO. In the course of this state-funded “re-parking” of official cars, Željko Topić “re-parked” a Mercedes for his own personal use as has been previously reported on by many media. The aforementioned and third pending criminal charge against Topić in the Mercedes case, has been gathering dust for several years on the desk of Željka Pokupec’s deputy, Sunčica Blažević.
The fourth known criminal charge against “Master” Topic which has been filed with the District Attorney’s Office in Zagreb has proceeded from the stage of “pickling” into the “fermentation” phase and is currently in the hands of Sineva Vukušić. The criminal charges filed with the District Attorney’s Office in Zagreb relate to the matter of allegedly unlawful changes to the structure of the state administration in the field of Copyright and Related Rights. Under the Criminal Code of the Republic of Croatia, the charges against Željko Topić in this particular case carry a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison.
According to the latest information from the state administration of the Republic of Croatia, a preliminary investigation has been conducted into another potentially very serious criminal case dating from 2005 which concerns the “disappearance” of a significant amount of financial assets and which involves a feasibility study from a Swedish* foundation relating to the strengthening of institutions entitled “A Feasibility Study for Restructuring the SIPO as a Self-Financing Organization”. We have learnt unofficially that this appears to have been an attempt at project financing for the private advantage of the former SIPO Director with the ultimate aim of separating this institution from the Treasury of the State Administration and attaching it directly to the financial “udder” provided by the WIPO and EPO. All those who have seen the document referring to the planned privatization of the SIPO under the direction of Željko Topić have noted its similarity to the HDS-ZAMP scheme of President Ivo Josipović. This document is currently being withheld by four Ministries of the Republic of Croatia which are said to be ignoring written requests for its release [under the Freedom of Information Act].
[* Translator’s Note: The reference to a “Swedish foundation” seems to be incorrect because reliable sources have indicated that the document referred to is in fact a feasibility study carried out by the Danish Patent and Trademark Office in the context of an EU twinning project.]
Thus, along with two further criminal charges against Topić by private plaintiffs, there are at least six criminal proceedings pending against him in Croatia as our portal has already reported. However, according to other sources, the number of criminal charges which have been filed against “Master” Topić may in fact be significantly higher.
THE OUTCRY AT THE EPO IS GETTING LOUDER
As we learned from our sources in Munich, Topić’s suitability for the office of Vice-President is “a fairly contentious issue” within the EPO. Taking into account various outstanding allegations and apparently uncontested newspaper reports, the general opinion of EPO staff is that there are many unanswered questions about Topic’s appointment. As we learned unofficially, EPO employees are also extremely frustrated about the situation because they feel that there is no adequate official response and they believe that “some kind of independent investigation” is required.
The EPO’s Administrative Council has remained completely silent until now and has taken no official position with regard to Topić’s case, which is very strange because it carries direct responsibility for the appointment and it is also the sole official EPO body which is competent to carry out investigations and disciplinary proceedings against the President and Vice-Presidents.
In addition, the relationship between staff and senior management of the European Patent Office (EPO) which has already been badly strained due to conflict with the President Benoît Battstelli, has been further complicated by the continuing presence of Vice-President Topić in Munich. In the meantime the controversy about Topić’s suitability for his current position has also reached the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg and the Croatian NGO Juris Protecta (Association for the Promotion of the Rule of Law) has filed a petition with the European Parliament in Brussels.
Furthermore, it has emerged that when his first term of office as SIPO Director was due to expire in 2008, Topić had allegedly been involved in a number of unlawful actions leading to the expectation that his mandate would not be renewed.
Professional experts close to the case claim that Željko Topić should not have been reappointed because of previously observed “irregularities” in his management of the SIPO. However, the relevant information appears to have been suppressed and was not properly taken into account, because if it had been, it would have resulted in him being deemed ineligible for public office in the Republic of Croatia and beyond. Allegedly unlawful actions during his two terms of office as Director of the SIPO in Zagreb have never been fully and transparently investigated, and the Croatian Government appears not to have been duly informed in accordance with the statutory requirements. His penultimate term of office at the SIPO was renewed by the former “anti-corruption” Prime Minister of Croatia, Ms. Jadranka Kosor, despite the fact that before signing the decision of her Government to re-appoint “Master” Topić she had been warned about his allegedly corrupt practices.
Moreover, during the term of office of the convicted former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, Jadranka Kosor had served as the Minister in charge of the government department responsible for supervising the SIPO and its former Director, Željko Topić.
WAS MINISTER JOVANOVIĆ SACKED BECAUSE OF TOPIĆ?
Using the same corrupt templates as Sanader’s government, the final disputed re-appointment of “Master” Topić as Director of the SIPO was approved by the Government of Zoran Milanović [in 2012] on the recommendation of the then competent Minister, Željko Jovanović. Moreover, the official procedure relating to his final re-appointment as Director of the SIPO was tainted by a series of deliberate legal deficiencies and unlawful acts and a lack of proper institutional supervision. Based on the limited information available from government circles, there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the “Topić Affair” may have been one of the factors which contributed to the recent dismissal of the outspoken Minister Željko Jovanović. It can be concluded from the above that the HDZ and SDP have been playing the same long-standing personnel game in the civil service using the same deck of previously “marked” cards.
Whether by coincidence or not, the chef de cabinet of the Croatian Prime Minister – Tomislav Saucha – is the husband of one of the attorneys from the law firm of Gajski – Prka – Saucha and Partners Ltd. which represents Željko Topić in the pending criminal lawsuits in which he is involved. In addition to this detail, it is worth noting that an official of the Croatian Government – Mr. Milan Sentić, adviser to the Prime Minister for Co-operation with the Public – comes under the direct remit of Tomislav Saucha. Mr. Sentić would hardly have merited any attention here if it hadn’t been recently discovered that, instead of having been duly forwarded to the Prime Minister Milanović, citizens’ complaints concerning the case of Željko Topić have remained buried somewhere in the filing cabinet of this government advisor. It seems that the only person competent to determine whether or not the petitions against “Master” Željko Topić were hidden by Mr. Sentić on the orders of Tomislav Saucha (perhaps in response to verbal instructions coming from his wife – a lawyer on the team of legal “avengers” which represents the Munich-based “Master”) is the Prime Minister Zoran Milanović himself.
To conclude, the actions of Željko Topić referred to above appear to fulfil the definition of criminal acts under Croatian law. Who – and for what motive – has been successfully preventing his prosecution in Croatia for many years now? Answers to these serious and unresolved questions will hopefully be provided in the near future by some of the high-level EU institutions as has been suggested by numerous articles published on Internet portals across Europe during the last month.
Shortly after the above article we were contacted by Zagreb-based (Croatia) people who are familiar with this saga and sent us further information and some photos. These people were mentioned here before in a somewhat different context but a similar subject and they claim to be “an independent association called “No Corruption” [that] perform[s] monitoring of Croatian journalism.” These are real people with real names and they have shared their information with selected European groups, the European Commission, and journalism watchdogs. “Tracing your posts on the website techrights.org,” they said, “we are submitting you the following link [as above] from the Croatian Internet portal that talks about the same topic. However, what is more interesting than the text itself is the cover photo. On it, there is the incriminated person from your texts along with his lawyer who is from Zagreb. Why is this photo interesting? Let’s analyze this in the following order…
“Last year (2013) in June, the journalist Zeljko Peratovic published an article in English about Zeljko Topic entitled “A wrong man sitting at the EPO?” But the article has disappeared in March/April 2014 from the 45lines.com Web site.”
The reason, according to “No Corruption”, is that “Journalist Zeljko Peratović and corrupted Željko Topić was represented by attorney Mr. Janjko Grlic.
“There is a serious doubt that Mr. Željko Topić by the means of his lawyer Mr. Janjko Grlic had influence on his other client, journalist Zeljko Peratovic to delete (remove) the previously published article from the portal he is editing. There also remains a doubt with a very clear closed circle of indications that for the job of removing the article from the portal he received money, or a service of some kind in the form of past or future legal services by Mr. Janjko Grlic which were paid for by Mr. Zeljko Topic. The above-described actions can be considered corruptive, meaning it is a criminal offense.
“Given that this mentioned member of the Croatian Journalists’ Association is also a member of other international journalists’ associations, we are sending this letter to them as well because we believe that he should be dismissed from the ranks of professional journalists. At the same time we will ask for the whole of the EU and worldwide journalistic profession to be informed about this. It is interesting that Mr. Zeljko Peratovic in his work as a journalist presents himself as a great fighter for human rights and as an anti-corruption activist!?
“To conclude, the actions of Željko Topić referred to above appear to fulfil the definition of criminal acts under Croatian law.”“In addition, it is suspected that journalist Zeljko Peratovic by the means of the same lawyer for the purposes of corrupt Mr. Željko Topić “briefed”, meaning gave professional advice, on how to sue his colleague Mrs. Slavica Lukic at the Croatian Journalists’ Association Court. She is a journalist (“Jutarnji list”) who wrote very critically about Mr. Željko Topić’s criminal activity. The lawsuit was dismissed. It was observed also that on two occasions that journalist Zeljko Peratovic on his portal www.45lines.com, in a twisted and questionable manner, criticizes journalist Mrs Slavica Lukic. This negative writing by the mentioned journalist about Mrs. Slavica Lukic has a political background, and is the act of shallow and see-through retaliation against her husband, Mr. Milorad Pupovac.
“Finally, we wish to inform you about the perfidious way in which Mr. Željko Topić corrupts parts of the Croatian Justice (Commercial and High Commercial Court in Zagreb) where there are trials of high financial value within the scope of the rights of commercial property. We are enclosing photos with the names of judges. The photos were shot during the last year’s conference in EPO in Munchen. The invitation to the conference was sent by Mr. Željko Topić by means of EPO. The names of judges from the photos are associated with several lawyers and make up a sophisticated network of corruption in Croatia.
“Based on this, we believe that any further comment is superfluous.”
All the photographs are presented below for readers’ assessment. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With Aorato acquisition Microsoft helps protect the criminals (from whistleblowers) and with lies about .NET Microsoft distracts from a bug that has facilitated remote access into Windows (by those in the know) for nearly two decades
MICROSOFT IS A company of liars, centred around media manipulation. This is why not enough people know about the company’s sheer levels of malice, crimes, and disregard for people.
Microsoft keeps throwing money around for favourable publicity, so not enough criticism is published where it’s well overdue. Today we’ll tackle several stories that deserve more attention from an appropriate angle, not a promotional (marketing) angle.
A few days ago Microsoft decided to buy a military-connected (IDF/Israel) anti-whistleblowing ‘software’ company. What a lot of shallow coverage failed to mention was the real purpose of the software (not often marketed as such). To quote one report: ‘“Snowden reportedly used colleagues’ passwords to access sensitive docs,” he told me. “Even if the user activity seems legitimate, the same account would actually present suspicious or abnormal behavior behind the scenes which Aorato would detect.”’
Actually, to keep the facts in tact, the NSA leaks were made possible by GNU WGet on the leakers’ side (same as Bradley/Chelsea Manning) and that horrible Microsoft SharePoint on the leaked side (NSA). It means that Microsoft itself was the problem which it claims to be trying to solve. We mentioned the role of SharePoint several times before. The acquisition by Microsoft seems to be geared towards stopping whistleblowing and hence defending corruption (so that Microsoft, for instance, can defend the NSA). How ethical a move, eh? So much for a ‘champion’ of privacy as it purports to be.
Anyway, there is a 19-year bug door in Microsoft Windows (almost no version is exempted from remotely-invoked full capture), but the press hardly covers it. We must give some credit to the BBC for covering it (for a change) and "calling out Windows". Other British press covered other inherent issues in Windows (compromising Tor) [1] and it looks like Dan Goodin is finally covering some security problems in proprietary software [2] rather than always picking on FOSS, then hyping it up with ugly imagery and exaggeration.
A reader of ours suspects that the .NET announcement was designed to distract from horrible security-related news. The .NET announcement is nonsense because it’s false (we wrote two posts about the .NET PR nonsense) and it also predicts future events like Visual Studio going cross-platform although the latest version of Visual Studio (proprietary) already runs under GNU/Linux using Wine, i.e. the Windows build works under GNU/Linux as it’s fully compatible anyway, for those foolish enough to want it. This is not news and the same goes for Office and other well-known Microsoft software. Xamarin staff keeps trying hard to infect GNU/Linux with .NET (that’s what they do) and as this very stupid article about .NET shows, the .NET nonsense did indeed help bury the news about the bug door. This disgusting article even gives credit to Microsoft for having fixed massive 19-year-old bug (only after IBM had found it). When bash or openssl have a bug, then FOSS is all bad, apparently. When Microsoft has a bug door for 19 years, the media says well done to Microsoft (for fixing it after another company forced it to). One has to wonder if this flaw (voluntary or involuntary) is part of Microsoft’s collaboration with the NSA, which made Stuxnet and has made yet another piece of Windows malware together with Israel. Here is a new article from The Intercept:
The Digital Hunt for Duqu, a Dangerous and Cunning U.S.-Israeli Spy Virus
Boldizsár Bencsáth took a bite from his sandwich and stared at his computer screen. The software he was trying to install on his machine was taking forever to load, and he still had a dozen things to do before the Fall 2011 semester began at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he taught computer science. Despite the long to-do list, however, he was feeling happy and relaxed. It was the first day of September and was one of those perfect, late-summer afternoons when the warm air and clear skies made you forget that cold autumn weather was lurking around the corner.
Bencsáth, known to his friends as Boldi, was sitting at his desk in the university’s Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, a.k.a. CrySyS Lab, when the telephone interrupted his lunch. It was Jóska Bartos, CEO of a company for which the lab sometimes did consulting work (“Jóska Bartos” is a pseudonym).
“Boldi, do you have time to do something for us?” Bartos asked.
“Is this related to what we talked about before?” Bencsáth said, referring to a previous discussion they’d had about testing new services the company planned to offer customers.
“No, something else,” Bartos said. “Can you come now? It’s important. But don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”
Bencsáth wolfed down the rest of his lunch and told his colleagues in the lab that he had a “red alert” and had to go. “Don’t ask,” he said as he ran out the door.
A while later, he was at Bartos’ office, where a triage team had been assembled to address the problem they wanted to discuss. “We think we’ve been hacked,” Bartos said.
They found a suspicious file on a developer’s machine that had been created late at night when no one was working. The file was encrypted and compressed so they had no idea what was inside, but they suspected it was data the attackers had copied from the machine and planned to retrieve later. A search of the company’s network found a few more machines that had been infected as well. The triage team felt confident they had contained the attack but wanted Bencsáth’s help determining how the intruders had broken in and what they were after. The company had all the right protections in place—firewalls, antivirus, intrusion-detection and -prevention systems—and still the attackers got in.
The ability to keep people’s rights away and keep the population down depends on passivity and conformity, including the use of Windows. Avoiding Microsoft Windows is imperative for those not wishing to be controlled remotely. As Microsoft’s collaborations with the NSA serve to show, mass surveillance on the whole world is practically contingent upon not just innovation but sabotage and social engineering with corporate buddies. Eradication of Microsoft software isn’t about competition only; it’s about justice. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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There are suggestions that the malware code has been around for a while, and has predecessors, and F-Secure warned internet users, anonymous or otherwise, to tread carefully when they download.
“However, it would seem that the OnionDuke family is much older, based on older compilation timestamps and on the fact that some of the embedded configuration data makes reference to an apparent version number of four, suggesting that at least three earlier versions of the family exist,” the firm added.
“In any case, although much is still shrouded in mystery and speculation, one thing is certain: while using Tor may help you stay anonymous, it does at the same time paint a huge target on your back.
“It’s never a good idea to download binaries via Tor (or anything else) without encryption.”
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Three weeks ago, a security researcher uncovered a Tor exit node that added malware to uncompressed Windows executables passing through it. Officials with the privacy service promptly shut down the Russia-based node, but according to new research, the group behind the node had likely been infecting files for more than a year by that time, causing careless users to install a backdoor that gave attackers full control of their systems.
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Posted in Microsoft at 6:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Steve Ballmer is ranting against net neutrality and Juniper’s business is in trouble after a lot of executives from Microsoft took over most top positions there
Microsoft is once again shown publicly for what it really is; it can be easily seen as anti-net neutrality, thanks for the most part to its longtime CEO (who is now replaced for PR purposes). Microsoft’s record of hostility towards net neutrality must not to be forgotten as we covered it several times before and provided examples.
Well, speaking of networking, a reader tells us that the person who replaced the Microsoft veteran who had run Juniper for years has just resigned. “He joined from Barclays Plc,” told us this reader, “but I have yet to find out what kind of ‘technology’ he was involved with there.
“How much ongoing damage has been caused by the influx of softers like now-gone Kevin Johnson and how many people and their legacy are still there that he brought in? Softers would not be a good match for the core technologies the company brings in its money with” because it contributed to BSD.
“The incoming CEO, Rami Rahim,” adds the reader, “has been with Juniper 17 years, so that is promising since they use FOSS (OSS) in-house at least in the devices they sell. However, that is just an uniformed guess, who knows the internal politics. The CRN article (not linked to) blathers about being on-message and sales teams rather than technology and function.
“Then there’s this:
Juniper’s decline has been linked by some industry-watchers to the management changes that have taken place in recent years, including the influx of staff who previously worked at Microsoft, but Brooks – himself a former employee with the software {sic} giant
“This one has a lot of links. One thing to remember is that these boxes are going to be tap points for surveillance.”
The same has been revealed to be the case last week when it comes to Cisco routers (used against anonymity). We shared links about that yesterday.
In addition, what would be the impact of having Juniper filled with executives from a net neutrality-hostile company? █
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