01.16.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado in Europe, Patents at 3:46 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Despidiendo a los mensajeros/testigos en vez que a la parte culpable
Sumario: El equipo Battistelli (o Blatterstelli como Florian Müller lo llama) termina de botar del trabajo a aquellos que hablaron acerca de ABUSOS en la cumbre (Equipo Battistelli), en vez de desmantelarse a sí mismo.
Los MALEANTES que gobiernan la OEP (comparado a famosos criminales en televisión, incluyendo el Chapo Guzmán quien recientemente ha sido arrestado) han hecho todo lo que preveíamos. Despidieron a representantes de sus empleados. Esto viniendo de sociópatas cuyo régimen ha llevado a un incremento en el número de suicidios. La gerencia de hoy esta causando depresión, dañando la salud/bienestar de los empleados, crisis nerviosas, suicidios son inevitables. Periodistas deberían mirar en la vigilancia telefónica, keyloggers e camaras escondidas dentro de la OEP (vigilando incluso a los visitantes no sólo empleados) ¿Qué clase de atmósfera es esta? ¿Cuánta gente más tiene que morir antes de que el cambio se haga efectivo? La OEP está PODRIDA hasta el fondo en la gerencia quienes se estan deshaciendo de aquellos quienes lo dicen, obviamente para preservar sus propios trabajos. Esto no es la FIFA. Es algo mucho peor. Gente esta muerta. Pero por que sus objetivos son patentes (concepto que no mucha gente entiende correctamente) en vez de futbol no hay suficiente interes por los medios de comunicación principales, para bienestar de Pinocho Battistelli y compañía.
“Esto no es la FIFA es mucho peor. La gente esta muriendo.”Hay mucho que decir acerca de lo que la gerencia de la OEP hizo hoy. No alcanzará en un simple artículo, como no es una simple historia corta y no ha finalizado. Esperaran que despidiendo empleados lo terminaría todo, pero vamos a probarle lo contrario. El efecto Streisand (silenciar a los mensajeros) significa que el efecto imprevisible hizo la acción (despedir) menos digna y mas que inversamente proporcional en fuerza. Mucha información esta en camino, así que no se vayan.
Como muchos sitios importantes han cubierto estas noticias (Viernes es una oportunidad para leer las malas noticias del día) vamos a confíar en más voces anonimas. La corta historia es, la gerencia de la OEP confirmó lo que era obvio desde hace mucho. Sólo puede hacer simulación de juicios. Para hacerlo peor, la OEP esta tratando de abiertamente defenderlos.
“Bienvenidos a Eponia. Es mucho peor que la Rusia de Putin en términos de derechos humanos.”La SUEPO escribió esta tarde que ¨IPKAT reportó el resultado de las procedimientos disciplinarios contra tres de los representantes de empleados/representantes en su unión.¨ Aquí esta lo que Merpel escribió: ¨Con mucho pesar, Merpel reporta que se han enterado que Mr. Battistelli, Presidente del la OEP, ha despedido ala presente presidante de comité Elizabeth Hardon, y a un ex-presidente de representantes, Ion Brumme. El tesorero de la SUEPO Malik Weaver ha sido bajada de grado. Los cargos en contra de los que Merpel ha sabido (vealo aquí []) parecían tenuos al punto de ser desechados, y en los tres casos había una sanción impuesta en la pensión no sugerida por el Comité Disciplinario, en el caso de Ion Brummen bajar de grado era recomendado en vez de despedirlo, y en el caso de Malika Weaver suspensión de avanze no bajarla de grado.¨
Muchos comentarios estan publicados allí ahora mismo. Si alguien pudiera enviarnos Battistelli comunicaciones (acerca de los despidos de personas que se ´atrevierón´ a hablar des su ABUSO), sería asombroso. Tenemos nuevos documentes acerca de esto. OEP fuentes están advertidos no usar Gmail al menos lo hagan sobre Tor. No hemos comprometido nuestras fuentes en cerca de una décado y deseamos mantenerlo de esa manera.
Debería notarse que basado en nuestras fuente, el personal de la OEP despedido antes de fecha (haciendo una imitación de juicio una farsa/verguenza), en un esfuerzo de reducir la habilidad de responder (tarde/temprano los Viernes es tiempo perfecto).
“Debería notarse que basado en nuestras fuente, el personal de la OEP despedido antes de fecha (haciendo una imitación de juicio una farsa/verguenza), en un esfuerzo de reducir la habilidad de responder (tarde/temprano los Viernes es tiempo perfecto).”Navegando a través de algunos comentarios en IP Kat, encontramos una voz pro-OEP (anonima por supuesto) y el resto esta muy enojado. Una persona escribió: ¨Un comunicado del presidente ha sido circulado internamente. En el fuimos informados que ¨ninguno de los [despedidos o suspendidos representantes] reconocierón sus ´errores´, tampoco expresaron su intención de no repetirlos¨. Son culpables, y ni siquiera lo admiten. Esta gente es incorregible. Que bonita pieza de PROPAGANDA STALINISTA.¨
Si, esto sigue mucho a lo que vimos antes. No hay gobierno de ley dentro de la OEP. Asumir lo contrario es necio.
Otra persona preguntó: ¿Hay alguna manera de deshacerse de Pinocho Battistelli? Es una VERGUENZA para toda la comunidad de patentes [...] una VERGUENZA para la OEP y una VERGUENZA para el pueblo Francés. Deberíamos comenzar a circular una ¨petición¨ para su despido de la OEP. Estamos en una democracia, ¿no es cierto? (excepto en al OEP aparentemente).
Acerca de Pinocho Battistelli una persona remarcó: ¨Si, me gustó la cara hinchada del presidente. Que tal farsa, y que INCORREGIBLE MENTIROSO ES. Día muy triste para la Oficina, de la que estaba orgulloso de trabajar, pero no más. Simplemente orando que mi director no me haga ¨voluntario¨ para reunirme con el en su último esfuerzo propagándistico.¨
Una persona aludió a oficiales británicos preguntando: ¨¿Señores Aly y Denehey, cuándo van a despertar y hacer algo? Por favor!¨
Contacte John Alty y a sus colegas acerca del abuso de Battistelli y sus maleantes en contra mía. Estos COBARDES ni siquiera respondieron.
Otra persona preguntó: ¨¿Dónde esta la voz de los delegados del Reino Unido? Aqui esta el comentarion entero:
Ha sido reportado que los delegados alemanes, franceses y holandeses hablaron en el último meeting para expresar su preocupación acerca de la ¨situación social¨ y las acciones de la OEP contra los representantes de la SUEPO. ¿Dónde estaba la voz de los delegados del Reino Unido? ¿Porqué no alzaron su voz de preocupación? No pueden clamar no haber sido conscientes de lo serios fundamentos de preocupación.
Como Brítanico mismo, estoy AVERGONZADO por la aparente complicidad de la delegacion del Reino Unido al haber permitido que esto pase. Mientras que no delegación por sí misma tiene poder de vencer la voluntad de la mayoría, seguramente incluso Pinocho Battistelli podría resistir oposición concertada de los delegados de los 4 países cumbre.
Mientras que los representantes de la SUEPO puedan o no puedan ser más blanqueados, no es difícil ver que los cargos en contra de ellos no hubieran pasado ante una competente corte. Encuentro irónicao que parte (si no el núcleo de) los cargos en contra se basaban un un referencia a provisiones de la ley alemana. No sólo no había nadie en el comite disciplianrio competente para decretar en puntos de leyes nacionales alemans, pero los representantes de la SUEP fueron incapaces de basarse en las protecciones que la ley nacional les ofrecería!
Francamente, estoy disgustado que el dinero de los aplicantes se desperdicie en este mamarraco – y no sólo el desperdicio empeora por la realidad que el presidente ni siquiera siguió las recomendaciones del DC!
Predijo que la ausencia de respeto por la democracia y el gobierno de ley es tan evidente por los recientes eventes en la OEP van a tener desagradables consequencias. Sin embargo, mi temor es quen ninguna de ellas alcazará a aquellos que se escudan detrás de la inmunidad. ¿Tal vez sea tiemp que la AC levante esa inmunidad?
Aquí viene la comparación con la FIFA de nuevo. Esta persona escribio: ¨La barra a la que el presidente se reporta tiene que hacer algo. Este sujeto esta fuera de control. La FIFa estará buscando por nuevo lider pronto, talvez pueda asumir este rol donde hará menos daño a la reputación de la profesión de patentes en Europa. Mientras tanto aplicantes y examinadores sufren.¨
Si la gerencia de la OEP o equipo Battistelli piensa que acallará a sus críticos al despedir representantes, están muy equivocados. Abrió la caja de Pandora y la dejó abierta. ¨Parece qu la reputación de la OEP y de la AC esta arrastrada en el barro,¨ este comentario dijo. Urgimos a la gente a contactar sus delegados y hemos publicados sus detalles para hacerlo.
Un crítico que no respondio anonimamente (tuvo huevos) es George Brock-Nannested, quien ha escrito reportes my detallados acerca de los abusos de la OEP. Hoy el escribio:
Espere que la administración de Battistelli hubiera salvado su cara al hacer que los cargos caigan.
No puedo entender como una educación francesa pueda traer tal escándalosa manera de manejar un juicio justo.
Verguenza para los pequeños servidores públicos en los estados miembros que tienen que sentarse en sus manos. Directores en general, la mayoría pero con moral estamina de lombrices.
En completo disgusto,
Stefan Krempl, a Heise esritor (Germany’s biggest online IT newspaper), escribió acerca de los despidos pero necesitamos una traducción al Ingles/Español (voluntarios muchas gracias).
“En más de una década escribiendo acerca de estas materias nunca he encontrado maleantes que puedan salirse con la suy de esta manera.”Consideren este comentario que dijo: “Necesitamos una más coordinada estrategia europea para deshacernos de este PERNICIOSO presidente, que esta dañanado a la OEP, sus empleados y la industria european. Estoy ansioso de saber que puedo hacer on my país miembro para alcazar esto. Una cosa que me asombra es que al leer en algun lugar en una publicación de la SUEPO pueda ser que enjuicie a mi gobierno directamente por complicidad en negarme mis derechos, ejemplo el derecho de ser representado por una Unión, el derecho de un juicio justo, etc, entre las lines del caso holándes. Si casos así fuesen comenzados en cada país miembro, entonces nuestro miembros de AC despertarían.¨
Esto es un REYNO DE TERROR y como alguien comentó: ¨Deberían explicar que Pinocho Battistelli demandó que cada directorado envié 5 examinadores a una presentación del mismo a ser transmitida a través de la oficina el 4 de Febrero en The Hague (una para seguir en Munich). Preguntas pueden ser permitidas pero ¿Quién se atreverá si arriesgan su empleo?
Miren cuan ridículas e hipócritas acusaciones de la OEP contra los representantes de sus empleados. El juicio de imitación contra el señor Hardon muestra que ni siquiera bajo la ley – o reglas los empleados están a salvo. Recuerden como la OEP torció la ley británica de difamacion en un fallido esfuerzo de silenciar Techrights, habiendo hecho cosas similares anteriormente. La OEP tiene un larga historia de usar mal or representar mal para atacar a sus críticos. Estas personas son MALEANTES. Repetimos eso para asegurarno que se entiende. ESTA GENTE SON MALEANTES. En más de una década escribiendo acerca de estas materias nunca he encontrado MALEANTES quienes se salgan con la suya por mucho tiempo como estos.
“¿Entonces en qué clase de trampa la gente se a dejado atrapar cuándo se unieron a la OEP?”¨Soy un simple observador a estos eventes,¨ escribió esta persona, ¨pero me apostaría que todo esto ba a salirles por la culata a Pinocho Battistelli y sus chacales. SUEPO tiene ahora más de una causa que nunca para tener empleados amargados o asustados pare rodearse de. Sus números atendiendo las demostraciones y tomando parte de futuras huelgas crecerá de ahora en adelante.
¨Entonces de nuevo talvez esto era el plan de Pinocho Battistelli. En sus ojos, la SUEPO no será un socio negociador en vista de estas demostraciones. Hey presto! Una excusa para finalmente acabar el ¨diálogo social¨ en el que la gerencia esta (presupuestamente) comprometida, a pesar de todas las acciones y anuncios hasta ahora muestra tal ´compromiso´ es FALSO.¨
Otro comentario decia: ¨Pudieron lso SerRegs (o alguién más) haber prevenido a el ahora ex-empleados que hablen la verdad? Como ya no són empleados de la oficina, talvez es tiempo para que los detalles de su lado de la historia salga a la luz. La OEP no tiene ningún poder sobre ellos. Disclosura completa de toda evidencia documentaria pueda mover más de los complacientes delegados AC en acción.¨
¨La oficina paga sus pensiones,¨ un persona añadió, ¨y pienso puede forzar más de un 20% de penalización si es tan maligno. Y PB quiere el derecho de vetar futuro trabajo. Temo que su voluntar de hacer daño no ha sido llevada por completo.¨
¿Entonces en qué clase de trampa la gente se a dejado atrapar cuándo se unieron a la OEP? Hay necesidad de que haya una advertencia en la lata. Uno de los últimos comentarios (hasta ahora) pregunta: ¿Por favor algún franco-hablante pueda informar lo que esta pasando aquí al señor Pierre-Yves Le Borgn?¨
Un montón de este reporte de Merpel puede ser trackeado a estos dos comentarios [1, 2] que dicen ¨Hardon también pierde 20% de su pensión. Empleados protestando a 12:30 (y en The Hague tambien aparentemente). Triste día.¨
“Pinocho Battistelli y sus chacales deberían recordarnos que la FIFA es NADA or a nimiedad comparado con la OEP. pero hay ENCUBRIMIENTE de parte de los medios de comunicación.”¨La señorita Elizabeth Hardon ha sido despedida,¨ dice el segundo comentario. ¨De los otros dos representantes de empleados suspendidos, uno con tres niños, uno de ellos todavía bebe) han sido despedidos también, los otros severamente bajados de cargo.¨
Pinocho Battistelli y sus chacales deberían recordarnos que la FIFA es NADA or a nimiedad comparado con la OEP. pero hay ENCUBRIMIENTE de parte de los medios de comunicación. Como una persona lo puso, un estreno en el mundo internacional bajo ¨liderazgo¨ fránces¨…
Hay muchos asuntos en la OEP otros que la destrucción de su unión. Regresaremos a ellos otro día. Otra OEP patente, por ejemplo, ha sido otorgada para AYUDAR A CONSERVAR UN MONOPOLIO EN EL TRATAMIENTO DEL CANCER, basado en comunicados de prensa [1, 2].
“Vale notar que la OEP es tan ABUSIVA que no sólo despide a sus empleados pero también reduce pensiones (ganadas con tanto esfuerzo).”Estas burlas de juicio contra sus empleados son preocupantes por que suceden en Europa (con gran impunidad), entonces Europa pierde su autoridad moral, ejemplo sobre Rusia. Vale notar que la OEP es tan ABUSIVA que no sólo despide a sus empleados pero también reduce pensiones (ganadas con tanto esfuerzo). Estan robando dinero despues de causar serias perdidas personales en términos de honorarios legales. ¿Europa o China? Difícil de adivinar… y miren donde Battistelli viaja estos días.
Hubo una protesta hoy (espotánea/inesperada) en la OEP en Munich y otros lugares, con detalles a ser publicados pronto (siguiente parte ojalá). ¨Oficina Europea de Patentes Munich,¨ una persona escribió iba a tener una demostracion en frente de ella hoy, dentro de 2 horas. Vocero de la policía confirma hubieron 1,800 manifestantes!¨
Dos horas es buen tiempo de respuesta. Es espontáneo. Muy corto tiempo para 1,800 examinadores/participanes (es la mitad de ellos) para organizar en frente de estas alarmantes noticias [1, 2].
La OEP no ha dicho nada acerca de esto publicamente. La OEP Twitter account invita a hacer preguntas hoy, así que les pregunté: ¿Why Pinocho Battistelli despidió a sus críticos hoy?¨ La gerencia de la OEP nunca habla conmigo excepto a traves de sus agresivos abogados. Mientras apróximadamente 2000 de los empleados de la OEP protestaban en su contra (figurativamente asqueados de su directiva) la última campaña de relaciones públicas comienza. ¿Es parte del arreglo con FTI Consultants?. AVERGUENZATE OEP. Esto no ha acabado Pinocho Battistelli simplemente se esta haciendo de más enemigos. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado en Europe, Patents at 5:45 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“La última cosa un partido político deja es su vocabulario.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville
Sumario: La OEP, ahora ayudada por agentes de relaciónes públicas de FTI Consulting (con un presupuesto de cerca $100,000 dolares por mes), continúa engañado a los medios de comunicación y pretendiendo que todo esta bien, e incluso mejorando.
La Oficina ¨Europea¨ de Patentes (no realmente europea pero basada en Europa y manejada desde los Estados Unidos) no tiene nada bueno que decir excepto ¨piensa en los niños¨ (si son los niños europeos sin futuro) [1, 2] y más maquillaje verde (publicado en promedio una vez cada dos días todavía, la última vez hace dos horas, junto a otros temas recurrentes en Twitter).
Los forums de la SUEPO son (o fuerón, antes del colapso de su unión) mucho más activos que los forums de la propia OEP, los cuales la gerencia de la EPO quiere que la gente use (soporte de masas). Más adelante en el mes o el próxim mostraremos cuan ridículo ¨soporte¨ la OEP realmente tiene (todavía tenemos muchas historias en camino.)
“Algúnos de los números usados en el anuncio fueron expuestos aquí anteriormente.”Ayer la OEP hizo una declaración que tiene muchas fallas. Fue escrita por la OEP o la FTI Consulting (trato oscuro) ayudó a escribir esta tontería?
Benoît Battistelli es citado diciendo: ¨Las reformas internas que hemos iniciado para incrementar la eficiencia de la organización estan dando resultado.¨ Se está refiriendo a sus esfuerzos por DESMANTELAR su unión y aterrar a sus empleados?
Algúnos de los números usados en el anuncio fueron expuestos aquí anteriormente. Grotesco abuso de las estadísticas es una forma de arte. Como una persona familiar con estos números nos dijo hace algunos meses: ¨Este truco estúpido fue tratado vez tras vez el año pasado en diferentes blogs. El número es casi la mitad de ese. No quiero ir en un curso de leyes de patentes, pero en pocas palabras una larga parte de esas aplicaciones nunca llega a la puerta de la OEP.¨
“Basado en lo que hemos escuchado, ningún abogado de patentes o aplicantes de patentes está feliz con la OEP.”No hay duda, dado lo que sabemos y hemos escuchado, la OEP esta arrimándonos esta tontería a un montón de periodistas, esperando por repetición libre de criticismo o libre de facts.
Basado en lo que hemos escuchado, ningún abogado de patentes o aplicantes de patentes está feliz con la OEP. Se están quejando.Algunos abogados de patentes, aquellos que han estado promoviendo patentes de software en Europa (por que están teniéndo GANANCIAS por ello) pueden sentir como que las cosas han mejorado ahora que Alemania ignora la EPC y defiende las patentes de software, pero ellos están en minoría. En este caso particular, el autor ha estado haciendo esto hace tiempo (promoviendo patentes de software) y esta visitando la OEP en Munich estos días. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado en Europe, Patents at 12:30 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
La Justicia requiere transparencia, not oscuridad
Sumario: Derramando luz en la manera que los gerentes de los cuárteles de la OEP en Munich tratan de SILENCIAR sus críticos, disparar a los mensajeros, evitando cualquier revelación de sus malévolos actos y potencialmente disparándo (despido potencial).
El macábro Benoit Battisteli orgullosamente proclamó hoy (mencionó hace una hora por la OEP en Twitter) que hay ¨niveles de transparencia unprecedentes¨. Uno tiene que estar completamente desinfomado para creer a Pinocho Battisteli.
La gerencia de la OEP no ha cesado de ATACAR LAS UNIONES, como hicimos muy claro al principio de esta semana. Simplemente hay más ENCUBRIMIENTO. La gerencia o el Equipo de Pinocho Battistelli en Munich, muestra extremada HIPOCRECÍA ya que aperentemente es OK para la gerencia ´gotear´ información acerca de ´investigaciones´ a miembros de la barra (jueces) per no por miembros ordinarios de sus empleados hacer lo mismo. La OEP simplemente trata de controlar la narrativa (mecer al público) y sólo los ad hominem ataques de la OEP contra los acusados son considerados aceptables. Comentarios reaccionarios acerca de los acusadores son considerados traidores. ¿Qué clase de institución la OEP se ha convertido y cómo puede esperar ganarse el respeto de la gente que alguna vez tuvo?
“¿Qué clase de institución la OEP se ha convertido y cómo puede esperar ganarse el respeto de la gente que alguna vez tuvo?”Hace muchas semanas escribimos acerca del cubrimiento de los medios de comunicacion que era muy crítico del tratamiento de la OEP hacia los jueces (vean la traducción de JUVE de Techrights acerca de la gerencia de la OEP y Pinocho Battistelli) SUEPO tiene un nueva traducción (no la misma) en Inglés [PDF] y otros lenguajes. Para citar al sitio público, ¨los comenterios de JUVE en la falla del presidente de la OEP Benoit ¨Pinocho¨ Battistelli para promover su proposal de reforma al Jurado de Apelaciones. Traducciones del artículo están al alcanze en Inglés, Frances y Holandes.¨
Como hemos explicado aquí en cerca de una docena de artículos anteriormente, ¨reforma del Jurado de Apelaciones¨ es un EUFEMISMO o está mal llamado por que el objetivo real – dada la reluctancia a llenar posiciones vacantes y la ansiedad de alejarlos (entre otros factores) – es APLASTARLOS. Es acerca de ¨reforma¨ al mismo grado que destruccion de uniones es ¨investigación¨.
En orden de demostral la cacería de brujas de la OEP contra los representantes de la unión de empleados, hemos decidido compartir pedazos de texto y repelirlos con sentido común y entendimiento general de la situación total. Acompañando cada pedazo de texto (o pedazos de texto similares de cartas enviadas a personas diferentes) – mis disculpas a nuestros lectores por no traducirlas por falta de tiempo – están nuestros pensamientos, no los pensamientos de los acusados (a quienes nunca conversamos en alguna manera).
Tres ejemplos están alineados horizontalmente por motivo de comparación mostrando como tres representantes de la OEP fueron blanco de cartas dentro menos de una semana desde la primera (sólo unos días aparte).
¨Confidencial es suficientemente vergonzoso como si la naturaleza de las alegaciones abajo, ¨Personal¨ es algo engañoso porque, como mostraremos muchas de las mismas cartas fueron enviadas a diferentes personas. No hay nada tan personal acerca de esto. Es casi impersonal. El intento original aqui fue dividir y conquistar, i.e, evitar que la gente se comunique unos con otros, despues aplastarlos una vez que estén aislados. Una vez aíslados están débiles y hace la defensa legal más onerosa sino totalmente prohibitiba, fuera de alcanze, y su efectividad es limitada. Toda solicitud de secretividad necesita justificarse; simplemente poniendo la palabra ¨Confidencial¨ en todo no caberíá ya que muestra paranoia y dá al público razones de sospechas, preoucación y desconfianza. Típicamente crea mala conducta.
Parecen estar usando equipo de oficina antiguo para estampar estas cartas, así que sueños de ir completamente digital/electrónico todavía parece elusivo en los pisos altos de la oficina principal de la OEP.
¨Este modelo introductorio (3 cartas) muestra falta de creatividad, ¿no és cierto? Muchas de estas cartas probablemente pueden ser ¨dobladas¨ en una con extra frases especiales, especificas para recipientes individuales. La persona que las hizo era muy floja o perezosa que una señora fue referida en una carta como ¨Señor¨.
Enrolarse en la SUEPO es un blanco, ¿porqué? ¿Será porqué un masivo número de nuevos empleados ha decido unirse? ¿Alguién se está sintiendo amenazado? ¿Cómo todo este tiempo la gerencia de la OEP no tuvo problemas con enrolamientos en la SUEPO? ¿Se nécesita tomar ejemplos de 3 años atrás para repéntinamente decir que está mal unirse a la SUEPO? Esta clase de retroceso de 2 años (e incluso más atrás) muestra que la OEP está completamente DESESPERADA por TIRAR BARRO a convenientemente CHIVOS EXPIATORIOS que – simplemente como la Stasi en Alemania Oriental – esta ahora ´disparando´ los archivos (vigilancia masiva) y escaneando los estantes por pretextos y justificaciones retroactivas. Incluso busca informantes con algo de carácter-asesino, ´embarrar´ que pueda reconstruirse de varios años atrás. Es lo que algunos llaman ¨raspar el fondo del barril.¨
Aqui tenemos repetición de un alegato y el apelamiento a ¨legalidad¨, la que viniendo de la boca de la OEP (despues de desconsiderar lo que es legal o ilegal) – es reíble.
Aqui estan AMENAZANDO a los empleados y redefiniendo la reglas para dar pie a las acusaciones.
Ahora la OEP pretende – de nuevo! – que finalmente le importa las leyes de la Unión Europe y los estados asociados. Esto es cómico. Es como si la OEP torciera la ley del Reino Unido para SILENCIAR A LOS CRÍTICOS. La OEP gusta de las leyes de los estados asociados sólo cuando sirve a los objetivos de sus perversa gerencia.
Aqui tenemos a Lutz y otros (probablemente apelando a las leyes alemanas, lo que es divertido dado a lo que todo se ha estado diciendo acerca de Lutz con su bizarra interpretación de las leyes alemanas (que se supone entiende). Fue Lutz quien puso su nombre en los notories ¨derechos¨ frase – controversial memorandum interno que sirvió como preludio a suspensiones afectando a la SUEPO.
Aqui podemos ver una muy hipocrítica OEP. Dice que le importa la libertad de communicación. Bueno, todos debemos preguntar por que amenaza a bloggers y amordaza a sus empleados, empujando a muchas personas al anonimato y uso de seudónimos (para su propia protección). Esta no es la primera vez que la OEP pretende que le importa al libertad de expresión, privacidad y lo demás. Estos son disparos en el pie por que la gente que dice estas cosas a favor de la OEP se expone al rídiculo por su hipocresía infinita.
La hipocrítica OEP está ahora minimizando encubiertamente mientras ignorantemente arriesga las represalias de un infame agresiva OEP.
La OEP pretende importarle las leyes nacionales de nuevo? Selectivo a lo mejor, patético por lo menos.
Así que la OEP, una institución que le importa un bledo las órdenes de la corte y abusa de sus empleados (con continuos ILO casos), pretende hablar por justicia. Es como si BP hable por el medio ambiente y clima y Microsoft hable de Linux.
La OEP rechaza tolerar jucios en contra de ellos. Gran sorpresa aquí. Habiendo eliminado lo que quedaba de supervisión. Pinocho Battistelli aplasta cualquiera que desafíe su tiranía. Esa es la marca especial de los imperios. Sólo desobediencia civil o interferencia de afuera puede poner un fin a eso.
La hipocrítica OEP habla acerca de estádares y acusa críticos legítimos. Tiene ellos espejos el el edificio de la OEP en Munich? (especialmente en los pisos altos)? Mejor todavía, consigan estacas y ajo también. Esta gente en la cumbre falla objetivamente evaluar que estan haciendo por años.
La hipocrítica OEP resalta básicos derechos humanos, respete, principios de ley, sentido común, acountabilidad, integridad etc. Incluso un oficial borracho sería capaz de darse cuenta de la hipocrecía cuando tipean estas cosas.
Aquí están las vagas acusaciones de negligencia, como si no importaran que explicación es dada, la OEP acusador (juez etc.) lo rechazará. Esto NO ES JUSTICIA, es un hoja de rechazo.
Esto es hipocresía épica en encubrimiento. Mordazas son correctas para la gerencia de la OEP, pero no para los empleados, incluso para su propia protección contra un creciente gerencia ABUSIVA.
La hipocresía de la OEP en gotear detalles de una presente investigación. No los managers de la OEP usaron los medios de comunicación para personalmente atacar a un juez semana después de pagar un millón de dolares a una firma de relaciones públicas? Pinocho Battistelli se esta convirtiendo Sheldon Adelson.
Esto es sólo confidencial para la gerencia de la OEP. Su motivacion por confidencialidad is para hacerse favores a sí mismos. Cualquiera con sentido común se da cuenta de eso.
Miren como ellos arrogántemente rechazan la existencia de más de una parte en este ´juicio de imitación´, declarando puntos de vistas opuestos inválidos e ignorandolos completamente. Eso es ARROGANCIA y DECLARARSE SANTOS.
La OEP habla de integridad e ignora sus propios pecados de comprometerse a una investigación con los medios de Holanda y Alemania. Es un recurrente tema de hipocresía y dobles estándares.
Reláciones Públicas empleadas, pintando a investigadores abusivos [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] presentados como víctimas.
La arrogancia se muestra de nuevo. La representación está incorrecta por que nosotros los decimos? Qué clase de justicia es esta?
La gerencia de la OEP pretende guardar encubrir a trabajadores de bajo nivel que protegerse a sí mismo de fiscalización (y potencialmente de un juicio).
La OEP guarda la clándestinidad de su interna Stasi y pretende que soplando esta cubiérta expondría la identidad de sus pobres victimas. ¨Piensen en los niños…¨
¿Asústados de que las otras oficinas se enteren de las andánzas de la gerencia de OEP en Munich? ¿Es eso todo? Seguro que suena como información saliendo a la luz, es el enemigo, no la gente.
La gerencia de la OEP evidentemente esta paranóica de que el pueblo conozca lo que esta pasando y las cosas terminen fuera de control.
Esto nuevamente es el modus operandi de la OEP, mantener al público, sus empleados y sus representantes en tinieblas. HE AQUÍ DECLARAMOS LA LEY DE LA MORDAZA POR QUE LO QUE HACEMOS ES VERGONZOSO…
Así que aquí lo tenemos. Is más fácil para la gente ver la verdadera naturaleza de las alegaciones. Viéndolo en contexto, hay suficiente hipocresía, un bajo estandard y mucha manipulación por una cada vez más paranóica gerencia de OEP. █
“La verdad nunca causa daño a una causa que es justa.”
–Mahatma Gandhi
PS – La verdad nunca causa daño a causas justas, pero la verdad le importa un bledo a Pinocho Battistelli. Sus únicos intereses son mantener su tiranía para servir mejor a los intereses de las corporaciones multinacionales. La próxima semana va a Colombia a diseminar su maraña de mentiras para asi someter otro continente a los intereses de una oligarquía multinacional y joder a las próximas generaciones de este hermoso continente.
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Posted in Europe at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another extensive analysis of recent events and criticism of puff pieces from corporate media such as Focus, which now acts more like a ‘media partner’ of the EPO
THE EPO attacks not only staff, applicants, politicians, delegates, lawyers, bloggers and so on. It attacks the whole of Europe. It doesn’t act like a European body at all. It just acts like a clique of figurines whose goal is to best serve multinational corporations, no matter the means, just the goals (even if European laws have to be broken along the way). The figurehead, Battistelli, is very well connected [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], so he can get away with quite a lot of abuses, especially if these abuses cement the power of the powerful. This is why Belgian TV called him "sloeber".
Inside and outside the EPO Battistelli became somewhat of a laughing stock, but nonetheless a dangerous stock. People who are above the law or think they’re above the law (e.g. the CIA) tend to behave erratically, habitually causing people to commit suicide or just resorting to extrajudicial killings (metaphorically or literally).
Battistelli “has brought the EPO in disrepute and has totally ruined the atmosphere,” wrote this person a few hours ago. The full message also mentions Bergot, who is connected to Battistelli [1, 2, 3, 4]:
What is awful is the fact that BB can claim that all his actions are perfectly legal.
That the harassment has not been queried by a member of staff being allegedly harassed, but by Mrs Bergot, the “best” candidate for Head of personal according to her mentor BB, is legal. It is however a blatant misuse of the legal framework.
The disciplinary committee proposes, but the president disposes. He can take any decision he thinks fit. Thus his decision in the matter is legal.
The same goes with the joint/advisory committees. They can propose and the president disposes. In the past the, the General Advisory Committee (GAC) was composed from members of the management (Directors and PD), but when BB came, he put all the VP as members in the GAC.
It was anyway rare that they management representatives gave an opinion which was not along the line wished by the upper management, but it could happen, when the administration went too far. With the present manning, what else can the VP do than rubber stamp the decisions they have agreed to take in the Presidential Committee (That was actually the source of problems with R 19/12 as VP3 was sitting in those 2 instances). This is all perfectly legal, but there again a misuse of the law.
All what BB has done in that respect can only be qualified as misuse of power and of the law. What is done here is not to respect the deep meaning of the law, but to take advantage of it and crush others.
It is high time that this maleficent person and his minions leave the EPO. He has brought the EPO in disrepute and has totally ruined the atmosphere.
In his eyes, he might think to be a good manager, what is even to be doubted. Even as a good manager you do not need to rule by fear.
He is certainly not a leader, making a good case and trying to commit his people to follow him in his visions. BBs vision are limited to reigning as a king, enjoying life and having a court of crawlers and minions sustaining his immoderate ego.
Rumours has it that BB will tour South America at the end of the month, and even go to Cuba. We might thus have even more “validation” states the Morocco and the Republic of Moldova, whereby Tunisia is still to come.
We heard the same rumours. Will there be more UPC lobbying?
“2015 has been a positive year for EPO staff,” Battistelli is quoted as saying (what a ridiculous lie). President Battistelli wrote this in December. A month later he wrote: “In 2015 our Office proved to be more efficient than ever.”
Well, “let’s be honest,” said one person from the EPO. “It is safe to say that this perspective is not shared by many staff. My personal feeling is that, just like for the rest of our poor world, albeit a few promising highlights and shiny figures, 2015 has been a miserable year for the EPO. [...] December finished on a promising note, with the AC giving clear signals to the EPO management that things had to change. Unfortunately, as the quotes [from Battistelli] indicate, the first signs are not optimistic. Here are the reasons why.”
1- At least, the Communication department worked over Xmas
Despite the compulsory closure of the EPO over Christmas, the communication department was active on social media publishing trivia (see for instance 16 (!) posts on the twitter account during said period). It seems they have also been successful in placing an article in a large German national Magazine: the title summarises it all: “This boss pays 7,500 euros per month and has won nothing but trouble”, Focus, 02.01.15.
Let’s simply hope that in 2016 more journalists will actually investigate instead of publishing sanitized one-sided leaflets. As a welcome example see “Nice surprise: President loses support of the Board for Judicial Reform” JUVE, 23.12.15.
We already mentioned the bizarre thing which is EPO PR being active on the holiest of days (for Christians or for people who celebrate the new year, which is practically everyone in Europe). Regarding the puff piece, remember that the EPO spends almost 75,000 euros per month (that's like ten salaries for senior EPO staff) on some dubious reputation laundering campaigns. Examples are given from this puff piece as follows:
selected passages of the Focus article:
1. “Evil Boss harass employees – that is the story that is spread now by the SUEPO people. The story has only one problem: not true.”
2. “However, the biggest problem is the ongoing conflict with the SUEPO UNION. In an internal document from the Internal Audit reports of “defamatory mafia methods against the Office and the President”
The Mafia does not report crimes, it engages in crimes. It’s funny that a 'Mafioso' like Battistelli calls those who report his abuses "Mafia". Criminal charges against Željko Topić serve to defend the narrative of SUEPO, not Battistelli’s. Shame on Focus magazine for publishing such rubbish. Did FTI Consulting make it financially worthwhile? What is the full story here (if any) and what role did the PR team with its secret dirty tricks play this time around? Will this article be hereon cited as ‘proof’ that the EPO’s management (Battistelli and Topić for instance) are just the victims?
To quote further:
Spicy details:
1. The article fails to ask clarification from the mentioned union, let alone report upon its position.
2. The mentioned Internal Audit document is not known to the staff, its representation nor any Staff representative. It cannot be excluded that such document may be part of an confidential procedure. Neither can it be excluded that such leak stem from the highest levels of this organisation.
So once again, as before, the EPO's management shows its sheer hypocrisy by showing what's supposed to remain confidential to the press (as long as the press promises to issue puff pieces, i.e. be the EPO’s courier). It ought to make one wonder what Focus adopted as its business model. This is not journalism, it’s corporate activism (also known as lobbying).
What EPO has been doing so far resembles in many ways what happened in FIFA. To quote this new comment from IP Kat:
Why are the individual members of the AC so supine? Here some thoughts.
Recall the scandals at FIFA. Everybody knew what was wrong, but nobody did anything. It was because Mr Blatter managed the flow of dividends to individual members in such a way that most of them thought Blatter a hero. I wager that most EPC Member States see BB as a hero, for much the same reason. A few days ago I heard somebody say that the flow of money from the EPO is what funds (almost entirely) the entire Justice Ministry of Germany. Think on how such money flows might affect voting at meetings of the EPO’s AC.
Recall that the only thing that disturbed the steady state at FIFA was when the Americans decided to put their boots on. But the USA has no seat on the AC at the EPO. Don’t expect the 5th cavalry riding to the rescue any time soon. Europe has to sort this out on its own.
Why do AC member countries who should know better, and care more, do nothing? Perhaps because thgey cannot get a majority on the AC and so do not want to start a fight with BB that they cannot finish. Read the book on the Dreyfuss Scandal in Paris and see what it took to win against the Establishment in Paris. Seems to me that very little of the French mindset has changed in the intervening 120 years.
Fine words though (about not laying a finger on the SUEPO officers); they don’t cost anything at all. They salve the consciences of the AC members who utter these bold words, allowing them to say to themselves that they did everything possible to defend basic human rights and the Rule of Law.
Misgovernment, mismanagement. Troubles like at the EPO seem to be, these days, in international bodies, endemic, even inevitable. No wonder England wants to get out of the EU. What a pity it lacks today the confidence it used to have, that its legal system, founded on equity (fairness), is a model that ought to commend itself to everywhere else in the world. If it still had such confidence, it would have more “soft power” round the world. In the past, it would have been in permanent intensive dialogue with the other AC Member States, to build a consensus, and then would have spoken up more, at meetings of the AC.
Middle England has been brain-washed by its foreign-owned media, over decades, to be xenophobic. The English press barons want an offshore tax haven that includes London, England. They have most of the English politicians in their pocket (which is why the UK member of the AC says and does nothing). It’s all very sad.
Returning to the aforementioned analysis, we now have this:
2- Almost like father Christmas
In his Communiqué dated 12th of January, the President announces the exceptional bonus promised for achievement of the 2015 targets and production increase of 14%. No doubt will this news be broadcasted to the press as yet another proof of the above mentioned “boss” generousness.
The fact that this communiqué fails to men on the following details is maybe unintentional?:
· The corresponding budgets are financed through much larger savings made by the introduced new EPO career (in particular replacing pension-valid elements with one-off bonuses). So, instead of a “present”, it is at best a redistribution with substantial savings for the EPO.
· The EPO staff is against a bonus system in general and in particular one that divides staff, in particular between alphas vs. betas. Wasn’t the new career supposed to get rid of the division between A vs. B&C? Why should a collective reward for a collective performance distributed differently to staff? And why should an examiner get a larger bonus than a support staff?
· Hearing the almost magic numbers cited (14% production increase, quality over 98%, with a partial decrease of backlog of 66%), one could gain the impression that many still believe in father Christmas…
We have already responded to these figures (last week). We also expressed our certainty that the EPO’s aggressive PR team was trying to compel publishers to repost these claims without any fact-checking, investigation, etc.
Remember one thing: EPO management lies. It lies a lot. It gets caught lying. Why would anyone still believe it? It’s too risky a thing to do.
The last part of the above speaks about the attacks on staff representation. The following was composed before the firings were confirmed:
3- The Union is kindly invited while… its officials are getting tracked, disciplined and most probably fired!
The EPO administration has invited the UnionS to a meeting on the 20th of January. Yes, plural. Both SUEPO, with over 50% of the EPO staff and FFPE, a union whose last election took place in 2011 and unfortunately does not reveal its membership level, (rumoured to be between 10 and 50 members exclusively in the Hague at its creation – but a clarification from FFPE would be welcomed – let alone its election results). In this meeting it is suggested to discuss a Memorandum of Understanding, supposedly leading to the recognition of the UnionS in the EPO.
Such an invitation was already turned down twice by SUEPO in June 2015 as the conditions for such a talk were not given at the me due to the threats and investigation running on its officials. Today, with three officials suspended in Munich and at least one targeted in The Hague, it is hard to believe that such an invitation is genuine. We are eager to find out whether the rumour according to which FFPE would a end the meeting is true.
FFPE made a statement in support of SUEPO once before, but some believe it's a trap. Fracturing and dividing a community (‘divide and rule’ tactics) is a common union-busting or movement-crushing strategy. It’s used a lot against the success of Free/Open Source software (e.g. BSD versus GPL or distro/DE flamewars).
Going back to the text, we have this:
Last but not least, the fact that this meeting is being (invitation came in January the 8th) organised on the very day where a demonstration , the 20th of January in Munich, in support of the suspended SUEPO officials (planned December the 16th) speaks volumes about the EPO administration effective willingness to discuss with this EPO key social partner.
It should be also noted that an Accord Cadre was proposed to the President by SUEPO two years ago. This framework agreement proposal, which is basically the EU agreement adapted to the EPO structure, was proposed again last year. However, it was never commented upon nor could be discussed in substance at any stage of the broadly advertised “Union Recognition Working group”. The same can be said about the recurrent suggestion to ask the help of an independent external Mediators.
Last but not least, while the decision in the disciplinary procedure of the Munich Local Union and Staff Committee Chairman has been postponed by one month, a final showdown of Ms Hardon’s “trial” [...] The decision related to Malika Weaver and Ion Brumme should fall in a similar timeframe.
We know how it ended up and we wrote about this in the following articles (so far):
Comments about these firings are inviting some angry voices (rightly angry), even from stakeholders such as patent lawyers. One person wrote this afternoon that:
And still no meeting under Article 4aEPC.
If the reputations of the EPO, it’s President, and the AC sinking into the mire is not a matter affecting the European patent system and the Organisation, then what is?
If the hoped for launch of the unitary patent is not a matter affecting the European patent system and the Organisation, then what is?
The delay in meeting is God’s gift to the conspiracy nuts, and shows a singular lack of management by, or management of, the managers. A bloody mess like this is the last thing needed before the UK goes into a referendum (I know the EPO is not the EU, but shit sticks to those that throw it, those that receive it, and even those just standing close by).
The principal role of fonctonnaires is to make things function, not spread disfunction. No one is covered in glory by this affair.
Another person wrote:
It occurs to me that the departure of the UK from the EU might suit La Grande Nation very nicely. No more unpleasantness with Germany and the UK seeing issues similarly, and different from France. Instead, France can resume its former role, of lording it over the rest of the EU, spending the EU budget largely harvested from the taxpayer in Germany. BB is working in the national interest, that’s for sure.
The rest of the EU should mull over whether that would be the optimal outcome for their citizens. And then get stuck in, at the EPO-AC (amongst other places).
Regarding the attitude and role of the AC:
So, this is how the President responds to the AC’s provocative rejection of his BoA reforms. It’s the spiteful, vindictive reaction of a playground bully who has been ticked off by a teacher.
The EPO really needs someone who can provide positive leadership.
Contact delegates (i.e. the AC) and urge them to get more actively involved.
About “Battistelli and his cronies” this one comment said:
The EPO staff representatives have been a thorn in the side of Battistelli and his cronies. They have performed sterling work in criticising the various ill-concieved reforms with logical and irrefutable arguments exposing the incompetency of the upper management at the EPO, in particular VP5 Raimund Lutz. The vicious and disproportionate punishment dished out by Battistelli shows how well the staff representatives have done their jobs in exposing him and his inner circle for what they are.
The FFII’s President said a couple of hours ago that the “EPO does not follow the rule of law principle, it has to be abolished” (maybe restructured would be better). Financial strings to assure immunity/impunity have been noted by him when he wrote: “the flow of money from the EPO is what funds (almost entirely) the entire Justice Ministry of Germany” (he said that Germany “could gain my respect back if, in retaliation for the EPO dictatorship, they will refuse to ratify the UPC,” which Battistelli loves more than anybody else).
Anyone who can’t see that the EPO is in a state of crisis (Battistelli’s announcements pretend that everything is great and has never been better) is either brainwashed or self-deluding. Publications and journalists who pretend that this whole scandal is made up should have their integrity scrutinised. They deserve it. These sometimes turn out to have been paid by the EPO (Les Échos for example [1, 2, 3, 4]). █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Making up only the impression of justice or an appearance of fair trial (where Power always wins)
Summary: A closer look at how ‘justice’ is being done inside the European Patent Office (EPO), which is rapidly becoming synonymous with something like lynch mobs or Night of the Long Knives
HAVING just published Hardon's dismissal letter, shown a response from her lawyer, and explained the ludicrous case, we truly hope that readers see just what kind of an intolerable autocracy the EPO really is. No wonder its very own employees protest against it and sign petitions against its decisions. The European Patent Office is a Pariah for a reason. It spends a huge amount of money on PR (manipulating the media) because if more people knew what was going on at the EPO, the general German (and Dutch) public would march with pitchforks towards the Office.
On Friday morning one union leader was dismissed with a 20% cut in pension; another was dismissed and the last one downgraded (8 steps). The allegations are hypocritical and laughable. All with immediate effect, staff representatives are abruptly fired (having been suspended for two months) and if they can get fired, then everyone can. The allegations are rubbish, they are poorly supported (putting a London varnish/veneer on them by hiring CRG isn’t cutting it), and laws were probably broken by the investigator, not the investigated (e.g. illegal spying). Looking closer to what happened in recent days we have the following message, which is rather revealing:
The hearing in my disciplinary procedure took place on 10 December 2015. I was supported by a lawyer. The deadline for submitting our position was 9 December, i.e. the day before the hearing. Our request for postponement of the hearing was refused. Due to the mass of documents (some 800 pages) and the complexity of the case (three disciplinary procedures crammed in one) we were not able to respond any earlier. This left the Disciplinary Committee hardly a day to consider our arguments.
As I informed you in my previous mail, the hearing was a mockery. Although originally foreseen for two half days it was pushed through in just one afternoon. The opinion of the Disciplinary Committee was apparently finalised the day after the hearing, as it is dated 11 December.
I received the opinion on 17 December. I was informed that the opinion had been sent to the President on the same day. Not surprisingly, the Disciplinary Committee recommends my dismissal.
Art. 102 (3) ServRegs foresees that the employee be given an opportunity to be heard before a final decision is taken. After we reminded the administration of the applicable regulations, I was invited to respond to the opinion on 5 January at the latest. [...]
The same Article requires the President to take his decision within a month after receipt of the opinion, i.e. the final decision is due on 16 January at the latest.
Elizabeth Hardon
We still have a lot more to say and we shall soon revisit the case which relates to criminal charges against Željko Topić, the President’s right-hand man. The EPO’s management has opened a jar of warms. So will we. █
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
–Martin Luther King Jr.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
What’s the point appealing inside an autocratic mock trialling system?
Summary: A look at who’s behind the dismissal letter sent to Elizabeth Hardon, who repeatedly warned that Battistelli had a vendetta against her
THE CALM which we spoke about some days ago ended with a storm, which puts the EPO under incredible stress right now.
As George Brock-Nannestad put it today, “is a person who is proven to be in blatant disrespect of fundamental human rights still worthy of a public office, such as a “conseiller municipal”?”
“The next batches of disciplinary cases are under preparation in BB’s [Battistelli] shadow,” wrote another person, “almost ready to see the daylight! Instigate, orchestrate and keep on provoking … is the flavour of the day in the EPO!”
There are other cases against staff, but they’re not publicly known yet. SUEPO is just the first in the firing line, as we noted several weeks ago.
“Today was the darkest day in the history of the EPO,” this person wrote today. “The firing of two of the staff representatives and the downgrading of the third are punishments which are in now way commensurate with the alleged misdeeds of the accused. It´s very much like shooting somebody for not having a valid bus ticket.
“To take away somebody´s livelihood because he made public a letter addressed to himself is a sign of a particularly mean and vengeful character.
“The legal proceedings the three staff representatives have been subjected to are cases of institutional harassment that should lead to a strong intervention by the delegates of the AC, an overturning of the decisions and finally, the dismissal of the main culprit, B. Batistelli, who after yesterday´s decision has lost the right to be called a manager (ruthless dictator is now the proper definition). The same applies to Elodie Bergot, his stooge.
“If there is somebody who brought the EPO into disrepute it is Batistelli and his minions. At this stage they cannot even claim a golden handshake. Everyone involded in this travesty of justice should be removed as soon as possible.
“AC, do your job!”
As we have said time after time, they’ll do their job better if people actually contact them.
Today we present the dismissal letter, signed by nobody other than Battistelli himself. Elizabeth Hardon is probably vindicated (proven right) after she said he had been on a personal vendetta against her. It’s overzealous institutional harassment — the very same thing which the I.U. was in principle supposed to combat (it now does the very opposite, in the service and the interests of power [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]).
We decided to share the letter in HTML/text only, with a rebuttal to follow some time in the future. Elizabeth Hardon’s letter of dismissal is full of hypocrisy and zeal.
D812015 – Final decision under Article 102 (3) ServRegs
Dear Ms Hardon,
I. Introduction
I refer to the disciplinary proceedings initiated against you under Article 93 et seq. ServRegs. In summary, the charges made against you are that you breached:
(i) your obligation not to disclose to unauthorised third persons confidential and personal material internal to the EPO;
(ii) your obligation to abstain from any inappropriate, threatening and harassing statements or conduct towards your colleagues;
(iii) your obligation to co-operate with your employer in the context of an investigative and administrative process, and in particular your obligation to preserve the confidentiality which forms a necessary part of this process.
The Disciplinary Committee held a hearing with your participation on 10.12.2015 and delivered its opinion on 17.12.2015.
Your further comments were submitted to the Office through your legal counsel and received on 05.01.2016.
On the same day you also informed the Office that you did not wish to avail yourself of an oral hearing with Vice-President DG5 and Principal Director 4.3 scheduled for 08.12.2016 designed to give you the opportunity to develop your defence and/or make further representations or submissions under Article 102 (3) ServRegs.
The Disciplinary Committee has found unanimously:
(i) There was substantial evidence on file that you behaved in ways which were incompatible with your duties as a staff member and an elected staff representative by reason of your participation in systematic, destructive attacks upon your employer’s reputation and position in the public’s eye. Of six individual allegations considered separately, four were found valid (paras 46-53).
(ii) There was substantial evidence on file that you behaved in ways which were incompatible with your duties as a staff member and as an elected representative. What you had said and done at meetings of elected staff representatives was highly threatening and was intended to be so (para 69). You further aggravated the original act by subsequent actions during a second such meeting. The DC also noted that the behaviour at the hearing of the Disciplinary Committee was consistent with this assessment (paragraphs 67-69).
(iii) There had been a clear, systematic and deliberate breach of your duties under Circular 342 (Investigation Guidelines) and the rules of confidentiality brought to your attention specifically in the current disciplinary procedure.
The Office notes, therefore, that the majority of the allegations raised against you were found proven.
The Committee concluded, again unanimously, that the breaches evidenced are of such seriousness that dismissal from service according to Article 93 (2) (f) ServRegs can be the only appropriate and proportionate disciplinary measure.
All aspects of the case and all documents available on the file have been carefully and comprehensively considered, including your aforementioned last comments and your submission dated 15.12.2015. The following conclusions have been reached.
II. Procedural considerations
As regards the procedural aspects of the case and your specific formal requests filed during the disciplinary proceedings, the Disciplinary Committee has carefully explained its position. For the lengthy reasons it has provided, its unanimous position is that the procedure bears no formal flaws whatsoever (cf. §§ 11-38 of the opinion).
In this regard, the Office endorses the Committee’s conclusions and wishes to emphasise especially the following:
(i) The participation of Mr McGinley in the Disciplinary Committee does not convey any reasonable impression of bias nor of a conflict of interest. As a long serving member of the EPO management, it is inevitable that Mr McGinley, like
other senior managers, has participated in several meetings with members of the staff representation. In this capacity, he has been called upon to take positions on various matters concerning the Office and its staff. However, this clearly cannot render him unfit, without more, to sit on a Disciplinary Committee convened for the personal case of a staff representative.
(ii) Ms E. Bergot, Principal Director HR, participated during the proceedings and was present during the hearing of the Disciplinary Committee as a representative of the Office. By her very function as Head of Personnel in the EPO, acting on the basis of a written, direct delegation from the President to her, she is fully authorised to represent the Office in the course of disciplinary proceedings. The final decision on the present disciplinary case is taken by the appointing authority. No conflict of interest has been established in this regard such as to support, let alone necessitate, the exclusion of Ms Bergot.
(iii) You have been invited on numerous occasions by the Disciplinary Committee to access your copy of the witness transcripts pertaining to investigation report C-71. A copy of the report was made available to you for your use and/or your representative’s use at the EPO’s offices. Neither you nor your legal counsel has, however, made use of these facilities to inspect these documents in order to prepare your defence. The decision to allow you access to your own copy of the report, but to permit you to do so solely in the premises of the Office was fully justified by the Office’s interest in the protection of the integrity of the procedure and of the witnesses. The Office has respected at all times your statutory right to access the file and to be heard. No formal flaw has been established under these circumstances.
(iv) As regards the defendant’s request concerning the DPO authorisation, the Office’s explained both the technical and the legal aspects. It has explained the exact circumstances under which the investigation took place. For the avoidance of any doubt, the Office did not intercept your correspondence to Mr XX, nor access your private email account. Rather, it collected evidence in the context of an investigation against unknown persons within the premises of the Office and more specifically at one of the Office’s public PC kiosks. Screen shots of email correspondence and activities of Mr XX were obtained in that context. These included screen shots of two-way correspondence between Mr XX and you. It was in that way that your involvement came to light. It was demonstrated to the Committee that the Office had not relied upon intercepting your private email at all, and you were mistaken to think so. These reasons and details were considered carefully by the Disciplinary Committee who fully understood and accepted them. They do not require further elaboration.
III. Legal analysis
The Disciplinary Committee has found, unanimously, that the three charges alleged have been proven. In this regard, the Office endorses the Committee’s conclusions and wishes to emphasise the following:
(i) As regards the first charge, the Disciplinary Committee concluded that there is “substantial evidence in the file that you behaved in ways which are incompatible with [your] duties as a staff member and as an elected staff representative”. Although the Committee dismissed sub-charges at § 49-50, the rest of the incidents were considered sufficient to prove “a clear working relationship” between you and Mr XX whereby you were even observed “giving him instructions”.
It was in this framework of active co-operation that several means of disseminating confidential and defamatory material were discussed and then in fact widely used. By your course of conduct you put at risk and in fact harmed the Office’s public image, office morale and the harmony of staff-employer relations. Your actions severely damaged the interests of the EPO, its operations and its staff. As the Committee pointed out, these acts not only damaged the EPO’s reputation but detracted also the staff representation, and thereby a key institution of the EPO.
In view of the above and of your long experience as a staff representative, I consider your behaviour particularly disgraceful. You showed disrespect not merely towards your employer but also towards those colleagues who elected you with a mandate to promote the interests of the Office and its staff. In view of the intentional and systematic nature of your breaches of your duty of trust and loyalty, your conduct is considered as impossible to overlook, and irremediable.
(ii) As regards the second charge, the Disciplinary Committee concluded that you “behaved in ways which are incompatible with [your] duties as a staff member and as an elected staff representative”. The evidence brought before the Committee showed beyond any doubt that you did indeed use the term “sniper” during the first meeting of the Munich LSC. You repeated the term, adding a threatening gesture with your hand during a second meeting with some members of the LSC who had sought clarification.
In the specific context of the Office and the then very recent incidents concerning Mr N., the term used by you was “a deliberate, repeated and considered remark” and conveyed a clear and threatening meaning to at least one of the addressees, calculated to impact upon his/her decision to volunteer for the IAC. As the Committee notes (§ 65) correctly, you admitted you were aware of the fact that “snipers” had targeted Mr N. previously, and of the events leading to his political “assassination”. It is noted that you further failed to exercise your duty of care towards your colleagues in your professional and representative capacity by informing the Office.
On the contrary, you deliberately used the paradigm of Mr N.’s mistreatment to influence your colleagues’ decision on a sensitive issue of staff-employer relations. Your subsequent failure to mitigate the effect of your statements, and your behaviour during the investigation and the disciplinary hearing was further inconsistent with your duty of trust and loyalty towards your employer and your obligation to conduct yourself according to the standards expected of an international civil servant. You thereby further aggravated your misconduct.
(iii) As regards the third charge, the Disciplinary Committee found it proven that you breached your duty to co-operate with the Investigative Unit and to protect the confidentiality of the present proceedings. Reference is made in this regard especially to the incidents mentioned in §§ 2, 75-77 and 80 of the Disciplinary Committee’s opinion, It is noted that even your further comments to the Office dated 05.01.2016 were, it appears, copied to unauthorised third parties e.g. national delegations to the Administrative Council.
You confirmed during the oral hearing not merely that you were responsible for the matters alleged under Charge 3, but you sought to justify your actions as correct and defensible. You showed no contrition for the specific incidents when you breached the confidentiality obligations fundamental to a staff disciplinary procedure, but furthermore indicated a deliberate intention to persist with the breach of your employment duties in the future, despite your employer’s instructions and reminders of your obligations. Your lack of any understanding or acceptance of your obligations in this respect is noted. These can only be considered as an additional aggravating fact in these circumstances.
The aforementioned actions (i) – (iii) amount to clear, serious and repeated breaches of Art. 5, 14 (1), 20 ServRegs and of Art 4 of Circulars No. 341 and 342.
As set out in its report under Art. 100 ServRegs, the Office maintains that each one of these charges, individually, without more, fully suffices to justify the most serious of the disciplinary sanctions within the ServRegs, namely, dismissal.
In view of the above, the Disciplinary Committee is unanimously of the opinion that the appropriate sanction is dismissal (§ 87 of the opinion).
IV. Further considerations
The Disciplinary Committee states in its opinion (§ 9) that your previous disciplinary sanction (downgrading) cannot be taken into account again, in accordance with the principle of double jeopardy. The Office wishes to point out that it accepts that the previous misconduct cannot serve anew for a second sanction.
Nevertheless, it is considered relevant that the fact that the Office’s trust in you had already suffered a previous severe blow. The very similar pattern of that previous misconduct is also noted. A harmful statement was made, to the detriment of another staff member, and circulated by you without regard for the damage liable to result from this. This is considered an aggravating circumstance which cannot be ignored when assessing the proportionality of the final sanction in the present case.
V. Decision
Your behaviour amounts to serious and gross misconduct, violating the standards of integrity and conduct expected of an international servant and/or
required under Article 5 (1) ServRegs as well as your fundamental obligation of trust and loyalty towards your employer and to carry out your duties and conduct yourself solely with the interests of the Office in mind under Article 14(1) ServRegs.
The EPO is as an international public institution with a significant profile. It is critical to its interests that both the institution and its staff are seen to conduct themselves with the highest standards of professionalism. The repeated and various violations of your obligations described above and the aggravating circumstances outlined, far offset any possible mitigation. The Office considers that the relationship of mutual trust and confidence necessary for the continuance of the employment relationship has irretrievably and permanently broken down. Further, the very serious nature of these offences, their extent and their repeated nature regrettably justify the disciplinary measure of dismissal with an additional 20% reduction of your pension rights under Article 93 (2) (f) ServRegs.
For the avoidance of doubt, this disciplinary measure is considered appropriate even were one to disregard, contrary to section IV above, your previous disciplinary sanction.
Please note that this decision will take effect immediately. Pursuant to Article 53 (2) (3) ServRegs you will however receive a compensation corresponding to the statutory period of notice.
In view of the specific nature of your misconduct, you remain at all times excluded from entering the EPO premises. Authorisation of entry may be granted solely upon justified request. The Office also draws your attention to your obligations under Article 19 and 20 ServRegs which continue to be applicable beyond the termination of your employment relationship.
VI. Legal means of redress
You are informed that you may file a request for review in accordance with Article 109 ServRegs within a period of three months from the date of notification of the decision. Such a request may be filed with the Conflict Resolution Unit either by e-mail or by post.
Yours sincerely,
Benoit Battistelli
Cc: RAin S. Okyay
“Almost unbelievable,” one person wrote. “that one of Ms Hardon’s alleged crimes was to reveal details of ongoing investigations (about her) and to have thus allegedly caused an offence to those involved. In the meantime the EPO higher mgt have gone to the press to reveal personal details about the DG3 member but that has gone without any action although seemingly contrary to any concept of sub judice and impartiality. Clearly it is seen as a war and the end result defines the means.”
“Interesting but disgraceful case,” another person wrote about 3297. “ILOAT seems to ignore all standards of principle law here! Very odd and imminent for future cases. Moreover keep in mind that the defendant in that case was acquitted by 2 Dutch criminal courts! Proves that the staff is unprotected in such cases and moreover proves also that ILOAT is obsolete.”
“Nowadays there is no internal appeal against disciplinary decisions, so the dismissals (and the downgrading) are appealable directly to the ILOAT,” wrote another anonymous commenter. “One could hope for accelerated treatment of dismissal cases by the ILOAT. That also seems to be its practice, at least until recently. Many older dismissal cases were decided within 1.5 years with most of that time being spent on two rounds of submissions. But the more recent case of Judgment No. 3297, for example, took about 3.5 years from the filing of the complaint.”
Appealing in the Battistelli-controlled system is probably a waste of money and time. Contact the delegations and demand action. Do it now before Battistelli makes this system so messed up that merely contacting one’s national representatives becomes a ‘crime’. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Several more protests against the EPO are being reported on and attacks on representatives are a lot broader than what’s widely known and reported on
TODAY’s EPO coverage will delve deeper into the EPO’s firing of staff representatives. There was a big protest in Munich yesterday and a similar protest in The Hague attracted managers too. People are rapidly getting fed up. Even high-level staff (not just examiners but their managers or Directors) attends protests against the Office. How long can this last and how long will national delegations allow this to last?
Decision on the 3 staff representatives came ahead of the expected day (we have heard numerous explanations for this premature determination). They were not “disciplined” but hunted down in the witch-hunt sense. We have already shown what kind of ludicrous allegations were made against them; 2 dismissals and one downgrade are widely reportedly, but there were actually more. People just don’t know the full story yet. There are several additional stories being kept in the dark.
As one commenter put it a few minutes ago: “The misconduct /harassment of the EPO management is not limited to SUEPO representatives, but all the staff who became sick for work harassment can confirm that the EPO has full control of the Medical Committees(MC) which can decide whether a staff member is suffering of an occupational disease or not.Occupational disease related to their work conditions,willfully created by some EPO managers. Also in clear cases of harassment,the MCs (under full control of the EPO) do not recognize an occupational invalidity for not been the EPO liable for work harassment.I am available to provide written evidence of what I have just stated…”
“In the Hague,” we’ve learned based on an old message, “a spontaneous gathering of staff seems to be on its way in the canteen at 12:00 [....] in Munich; SUEPO invites staff to gather in front of the ISAR building, today at 12:30, in order to protest against this treatment of our elected staff representatives and hence of staff.”
Two more protests which we hope to get more details about (maybe photos too) are the following, as quoted:
- In Berlin, a spontaneous gathering will take place at 13:00 in front of the EPO entrance;
- in Vienna, , a spontaneous gathering will take place at 13:30 in front of the EPO entrance;
Help us document these protests as they help demonstrate to national delegations that even a large proportion of EPO staff is fed up. “The demonstration [above] has been authorised by the German local authorities,” said the source. It seems like German local authorities have become accustomed to EPO protests. Why don’t German local authorities consider launching a criminal probe into some of the tactics used by Battistelli and his 'family'? To what degree are these thugs immune to or exempted from the Rule of Law? Contact national delegates and demand urgent action. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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At work, I tried to teach my coworkers about open source software and Linux. Some welcome the subject with open arms, and others are very hesitant. I’ve shown them that everything we do can be done on Linux, except for one program that is vendor-specific and will be made available on iOS and Android soon, which would be great because the code could then be ported over to Linux.
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In easy-to-use HTML format, this fully searchable archive offers immediate access to the essential resource for the Linux enthusiast: Linux Journal. The archive contains all 260 issues of the magazine, from the premiere March 1994 issue through the most recent issue, December 2015. That’s 260 issues of Linux Journal, with well over 4,100 articles!
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Strace is a tool used to intercept system calls from your application to the Linux kernel. I find strace is invaluable for system administrators for two main reasons.
First off, we do not always have the source code of an application available, but we may still need to know what an application is doing. This can be anything from which files are opened, how much memory is being allocated or even why an application is crashing repeatedly.
Secondly, even if we do have the code, being a system administrator doesn’t imply being a developer. We may not know how to follow the code. I find that looking at system calls as opposed to lines of code is a bit more descriptive
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Server
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Servers are typically large machines that take up huge amounts of space on the floor or lots of space in a rack. A new Node.js Linux server has launched for developers who want to be able to write software for Internet of Things applications and other tasks that is very small. The server is called Ocean and it is about the size of a smartphone.
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Ocean a new wireless pocket sized server has been launched this week, which has been designed to provide a mobile server that combines both the “portability of a mobile phone with the flexibility of a Linux web server” says its developers.
Ocean is powered by a 1GHz ARM Dual-Core Cortex-A7 processor supported by 1GB DDR3 480MHz RAM and includes from 8 to 64GB of internal storage provided by a handy micro SD card slot.
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Today the wraps came off Ocean, a full server that’s the size of a mobile phone, with a built-in battery, so it can fit in your pocket and go where you do.
It’s a tiny computer that’s powerful enough to run a server — Node.js, to be precise — pre-loaded with Linux, a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, USB 3.0, a 4200mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and WiFi.
When I heard about Ocean it immediately struck me as a useful tool for my development side projects. If I could take my entire development server with me everywhere, including an external battery, there are so many cool things I could build.
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The development team behind Docker, the number one open-source application container engine for GNU/Linux operating systems, have had the pleasure of announcing that they have been working hard on the next major release of the software, Docker 1.10, which should be out in the coming weeks.
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Kernel Space
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If you’re reading the news lately, you probably know by now that Linux kernel 4.4 has been officially released and that it’s the new long-term support (LTS) branch of the Linux kernel, and also the latest stable and most advanced kernel.
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Besides the Logitech G920 support, other new handling in Linux 4.5 for HID devices include the Microchip Pick16F1454, new Wacom device support, and a quirk for the Lenovo Yoga 900 with ITE chips.
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The Linux Foundation’s latest training program aims to bring open source software expertise to a new demographic — people who are homeless, under-educated, single parents, have a criminal background or are disabled.
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Neil Brown has sent in his final MD subsystem pull request. Past this Linux 4.5 work, he’s stepping down.
The MD update itself isn’t too exciting with just having some clustered RAID1 and RAID5 journal updates. There’s also a Year 2038 fix and other minor changes. The details on that can be found via the pull request.
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There’s a rather hefty pull request of PowerPC architecture updates pending for the Linux 4.5 kernel.
Some of the PowerPC updates for Linux 4.5 include the ground support for a new Power9 MMU, optimized FP/VMX/VSX context switch, improved self tests, support for Nvlink NPUs, support for kexec on 476fpe, various other POWER9 updates, and a handful of other PowerPC updates.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.
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Applications
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I have just released version 1.19 of Obnam, the backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.
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A few minutes ago, January 15, 2016, Kovid Goyal announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Calibre 2.49 ebook library management software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
[...]
Development had been stalled for a few months, with many improvements in the
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Just a few minutes ago, the development team behind the well-known, cross-platform and open source FFmpeg multimedia backend have announced the release of FFmpeg 2.8.5, which is now available for download for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
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Clementine is one of the best music players out there and it looks like a new major update is in the works for it.
Clementine doesn’t get the updates that the community wants, but it’s still nice to see that the developers are still working on it. Even if the latest stable version of Clementine was released almost two years ago, it’s still one of the best. It’s light, fast, and has a very clear and user-friendly interface.
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A couple of years ago I was dissatisfied with mutt, mostly because the mutt-sidebar patch was dropped from the Debian package. That lead to me thinking “How hard can it be to write a modal, console-based mail-client?”
It turns out writing a client is pretty simple if you limit yourself solely to Maildirs, and as I typically read my mail over SSH on the mailhost itself that suited me pretty well.
Recently I restarted the mail-client. Putting it together from scratch to simplify the implementation, and unify a lot of the adhoc scripting which is provided by Lua. People seem to like the client, but the single largest complaint was “Can’t use it – no IMAP.”
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Redshift has become popular enough to have spawned several side-projects. It is itself the open source equivalent of a proprietary utility called f.lux, and you’ll need to avoid these when installing these from your distribution’s package manager. We’re going to stick with the simple redshift package to get things started and to explain some of its options; you can then go back and explore some of the alternatives if you like what it does.
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It’s been a long time since the last stable release, but I’m really happy to announce that MyPaint version 1.2.0 is ready. Windows binaries will be available soon, and Ubuntu packages available for testing through the usual PPA. Expect releases for other operating systems and distros in due course.
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Proprietary
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On January 13, we’ve reported news on the first updated in 2016 for the Opera Developer channel of the proprietary web browser, but Opera Software today announced the release of the first Beta version of the Opera 35.0 web browser for 2016.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I have made a new release of cjk-gs-integrate, the script that searches for all kind of CJK fonts, and makes them available to Ghostscript (and if asked for also to TeX by linking). The update has been uploaded to CTAN (link) and it will land in TeX Live within the next days.
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Games
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Papo & Yo, a popular game that was ported to Linux with the Humble Indie Bundle X two years ago finally has the Linux version on Steam.
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For those that haven’t been following the SteamOS 2.0 “Brewmaster” updates, it’s been a rather exciting 2016 so far.
Among the features that have landed in SteamOS 2 over the past week have included Xbox One Elite Controller support, updates to its packaged Linux kernel and other key packages, and then coming in today was Bluetooth support. The Bluetooth support allows for basic support for connecting to Bluetooth devices directly from the Steam UI on SteamOS for newer Bluetooth LE/Smart devices.
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A new Steam beta update has been released by Valve, and it brings a few fixes for the Steam Controller and some of the other components.
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Minority Media has announced that the Linux and Mac versions of Papo & Yo are available now on Steam. Based on Creative Director Vander Caballero’s childhood in South America, Papo & Yo follows a young boy, Quico, and his best friend Monster, a mostly-friendly beast with razor-sharp teeth. Monster loves Quico but has a serious problem: an addiction to poisonous frogs, which, when eaten, drive him into a murderous rage from which no one, even Quico, is safe. As Quico, players adventure through a mystical world, manipulating the environment to open up new paths and move forward on their quest to cure Monster of his addiction and save him from the greatest danger of all: himself.
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Superpowers goes open source, Oculus Rift VR headset support for Linux, Interesting talks at upcoming GDC conference, and more.
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The Mean Greens – Plastic Warfare is a title I really want to try, but I didn’t have time to get into the closed-beta. I’ve been told by a few people now that the Linux beta is running really well.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Today I am happy to announce the second snapshot release of the Moksha Desktop – 0.2.0. For those who prefer to play first and read release notes second you can find the release downloads on our GitHub repo here. Those who wish to try the latest Moksha desktop release on a live CD can download and update a Bodhi Linux Live CD.
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Jeff Hoogland from the Bodhi Linux project, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the Enlightenment desktop environment, was proud to announce the release of Moksha Desktop 0.2.0.
For those of you who are not in the loop, we will take this opportunity to inform you that Moksha Desktop is a fork of the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, created especially for the Bodhi Linux operating system, just like the MATE desktop is forked from the old-school GNOME 2 interface.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’m happy to announce KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0 and the first stable release of KPMcore. This release mostly focused on splitting user interface and partitioning library which will be used in the next release of Calamares. It also brings some bugfixes but unfortunately I wasn’t able to go through all reported bugs in bugzilla yet (but they don’t seem to be regressions).
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The developers behind the Kdenlive open source and free video editor software, which is being designed for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, have announced the release of Kdenlive 15.12.1.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hello all,
Tarballs are due on 2016-01-18 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.4 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.19.4. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
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The Ubuntu developers have set up a PPA for anyone who wants to try GNOME Software in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and users have been asked to provide feedback.
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Last time I blogged, I had gotten a preliminary implementation for the UI aspect of loading custom layers in GNOME Maps. In the past 2 weeks of Outreachy I’ve refined the implementation many times and improved functionality along the way thanks to astute reviews by Damián Nohales and my mentor Jonas Danielsson.
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EggSignalGroup allows you to connect to a bunch of signals on a single target object as a group. You can connect and disconnect them simply by setting the EggSignalGroup:target property. I find this convenient because I can setup the EggSignalGroup in my instance init function, and simply set the target when it becomes available. You can even bind it using g_object_bind_property() for even less application code.
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Since the last blog post I spent some time curing the ”amnesia“ of the POI type selection view. So, now it will show a list of (up to ten) most recently used types. And it will also save this list between runs.
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It is with great pleasure to present to you a first KaOS ISO for 2016.
As always with this rolling distribution you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.18.0, Plasma 5.5.3 and KDE Applications 15.12.1. Plasma 5.5 has brought new features in the Widget Explorer, expanded options in the Applications Launchers, new widgets including Color Picker & Disk Quota, restored support for legacy system tray icons, default font has moved to Noto and Desktop Tweaks for different handling of widgets plus option to disable the desktop toolbox.
Among the new Applications in 15.12 are Spectacle, the new screenshot capture program.
Many more are now fully ported to Frameworks 5 and are part of the stable tar release in their frameworks version.
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Months ago, I covered Solus Project as an alternative to Chrome OS. It made sense, as the Budgie desktop environment resembled the Chrome OS UI and the system integrated well with the user’s Google cloud account. Even at that early iteration, Solus was a solid distribution that made Linux incredibly easy to use.
Fast forward to now and Solus no longer exists as a shadow of Chrome OS. Solus is a distribution that lives somewhere in the intersection of the GNOME, Chrome OS, and Xfce Venn diagram. It is simultaneously familiar and brand new. With that “brand new familiarity” comes an ease of introduction you won’t find with other 1.0 distributions sporting a new desktop environment.
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Just a few moments ago, the KaOS developers were happy to announce the first update of their KaOS Linux rolling operating system in 2016, by releasing the new KaOS 2016.1 ISO images to users worldwide.
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Reviews
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Tough is the life of a distro reviewer, at least has been in the last months of 2015. One bad distro after another. What is distro, baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more. That bad. Seriously, nothing good happened this autumn. Crazily, Fedora 23 with its GNOME desktop was the closest to being a sensible distro. A few others delivered okay, but when you expect mega wow, okay just isn’t good enough. Oh yes, Netrunner Rolling scored zero.
So you can imagine my apprehension ere this review, wondering if I’m going to have another bad day fighting technology, regressions and retardation all combined. But let’s be optimistic. The glass is half-full, even if I like to drink from the bottle. To wit, Netrunner 17 Horizon, tested on my G50 machine, alongside Windows and many a Linux.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro folks use a beautiful icon theme called Menda-Circle in their distribution. The sources are public of course and is distributed under Creative Commons ShareAlike v4.0.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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These days, Microsoft doesn’t need SUSE anymore, partly because the once number two Linux distro has fallen way down on the list of popular Linux distros, partly due to the old Novell’s ineptitude and partly because of the deal with Microsoft, which as you might imagine, didn’t sit well in FOSS circles. These days, behind the practically-one-and-the-same one-two punch that RHEL/CentOS brings to the enterprise table, there’s a new number two in Unbutu, with Canonical seemingly intent on replacing the old Novell in the we’ll-sleep-with-Microsoft-if-it-keeps-the-rent-paid department.
Actually, Ubuntu seems to be a cheaper date than SUSE ever was. We’re not hearing anything about millions upon millions of dollars being poured into the Isle of Man the way Microsoft poured money into Utah back when Novell was still hoping for a Netware comeback. Nor are we hearing about Redmond buying thousands of support contracts to sell give away to it’s customers. What we are hearing is partnership after partnership after partnership between the company that loves Linux and the distro that thinks it is Linux.
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Another week – some new snapshots: 5 to be precise (0108, 0110, 0111, 0112 and 0113 will hit the mirrors soon). Sadly, the automatic snapshot announcements did no go out since 0111, something we will be looking at next week and then resume to automatic announcements of new snapshots.
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The community of openSUSE is expanding its outreach efforts to get more involvement from students and mentors to participate in the Google Summer of Code.
Members of the community have been working with University of Applied Science in Nuremberg to encourage interest Free Open Source Software, openSUSE and GSoC.
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Red Hat Family
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A new survey published by Red Hat Inc., seeking to measure the maturity of enterprise mobility efforts, reveals that a large majority of mobile developers prefer using open source software.
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Director William S. Kaiser sold 18,972 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, January 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $80.15, for a total value of $1,520,605.80. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 129,879 shares in the company, valued at $10,409,801.85. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this link.
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Fedora
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So what exactly does this announcement mean? Since OpenSSH client version 5.4, there has been a feature called roaming that allows the client to resume a session that has been interrupted. Both the server and client would need to support roaming for this to work.
Server support was never added, but the feature is on by default for OpenSSH clients up to version 7.1p2. There are two vulnerabilities that stem from this feature and could be exploited when a user connects to an “evil” SSH server.
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After Fedora 23, all Fedora Linux lovers are waiting for the Fedora 24 to come with exciting features, changes and improvements. But due to the current changes proposed by the developers need more time to accommodate into the Fedora 24, so the release schedule has been updated by 2 weeks. But here is the benefit also to this schedule update.
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The Fedora project today announced the revised released schedule for version 24 now in development. Jeff Hoogland posted of a new release of his home-brewed lightweight desktop and Ubuntu 15.04 nears EOL. Jack Wallen said Solus is “going places” and Dedoimedo wrote “Netrunner 17 Horizon redeems the Plasma desktop.” Today’s final food for thought comes from KDE’s Sebastian Kügler who discussed whether free software should protect users’ privacy too.
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The initial schedule for the Fedora 24 aimed for a release on May 17th. However, several of the changes proposed by developers are affect low level components, like the compiler and the C library (which is as fundamental as the kernel to what we think of as a “Linux distribution”). These changes involve rebuilding every package in the whole Fedora collection, and to accommodate that, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which oversees the schedule in coordination with the Fedora Program Manager (Jan Kuřík), added another two weeks.
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Debian Family
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The Debian developers have publicly announced their plans on migrating all of the PHP 5 to the brand-new and powerful PHP 7 release, as well as on changing the PHP packaging to allow co-installable versions.
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A few hours ago, the APT devs announced the release of the APT (Advanced Package Tool) 1.2 into the unstable repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
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During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum observed that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to believe a computer have a given security hole if it download a security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and proposed to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror. He was not the first to propose this, as the apt-transport-tor package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt to use Tor, but I was not aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu developers working for Canonical to patch the latest security flaws in various core components and applications of all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems published today, January 14, 2016, a new security notice informing users about the availability of an update for the OpenSSH software.
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Earlier today, we’ve been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9 software update for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices.
According to Mr. Zemczak, the day of January 14 was not quite exciting for landings, as the Ubuntu Touch devs only managed to release a new version of the powerd daemon, which promises to fix the annoying issue where that phone’s screen remained black after rejecting an outgoing call, as well as a new dbus-cpp version that fixes D-Bus bugs.
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Canonical announced AT&T (NYSE: T) will use its open source Ubuntu OS in enterprise, cloud and networking applications across its businesses, marking a major win that could eventually help Canonical’s smartphone efforts.
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Canonical, through Michael Vogt, proudly announced the availability of a new set of images for the all-snap architecture for the company’s Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system used in embedded and IoT devices.
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Canonical today announced the second edition of the Ubuntu Scopes Showdown contest for mobile developers who want to create the most innovative Unity 8 Scopes and apps for Ubuntu Phone devices.
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Immediately after informing us about the upcoming Ubuntu Scopes Showdown 2016 contests and its amazing prizes, Canonical proudly announced that they will be giving away a Dell laptop with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled at the UbuCon Summit 2016 event.
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A startup called MJ Technology wants to change that, and the company has announced that it will launch a crowdfunding campaign for two Ubuntu tablets on January 18th.
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The upward trajectory of Ubuntu and cloud computing remain tied closely together. Canonical has released findings from numerous surveys showing that Ubuntu is the base platform that the largest group of OpenStack deployments use.
Now, in an endorsement move from a very big player, AT&T has reached for Canonical to implement Ubuntu Linux in its cloud, network and enterprise infrastructure. As we covered here, some are saying that AT&T had closely evaluated Windows and chose Ubuntu instead.
Canonical made a statement saying that AT&T wants to forge the “network of the future,” and likes the idea of building more modular solutions that can scale easily and leverage open source.
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Almost as soon as the first version launched in 2004, Ubuntu permanently changed the Linux distribution landscape. 2004 was a time when the desktop was still important, and Ubuntu presented the Linux desktop not as alien territory, only to be ventured through with the right skills, but as a verdant pasture of adventure and possibility. As its 2004 tagline proudly proclaimed, this was Linux for Human Beings, and it enabled millions of people to use Linux who may not otherwise have done so.
Under the aegis of its parent company Canonical, Ubuntu is still a huge success. It’s now the distribution that non-Linux users will most likely have heard about, or have even tried. It’s used when migrating offices and local councils to Linux, and it’s used in many servers and cloud instances. It’s also the basis for many other popular distributions, including Mint, gNewSense, Google’s own derivatives and the semi-official KDE, Xfce and Gnome versions. Its easy installation and no-nonsense approach to adding applications or upgrades has forced every other distribution to up their game, and it’s helped make the Linux desktop a viable alternative to OS X and Windows.
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Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak today informs us that the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices has entered final freeze stage, which means that it will not get any more features.
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Canonical developers continue making progress in replacing the Ubuntu Software Center with GNOME Software.
For months Canonical has basically admitted defeat with their Ubuntu Software Center “app store” on the Ubuntu desktop. They’ve been wanting a new software store/center for a few years now and they decided with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to transition to GNOME Software — GNOME’s software center.
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Ubuntu announced its 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) release almost 9 months ago, on April 23, 2015. As a non-LTS release, 15.04 has a 9-month month support cycle and, as such, the support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 15.04 will reach end of life on Thursday, February 4th. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 15.04.
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Flavours and Variants
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A nice experiment made by wxl from the Lubuntu QA Team: running Lubuntu Xenial Xerus on a Raspberry Pi 2, with LXQt desktop. Made with Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker, and following simple instructions:
Get the image from here
Install the image
do-release-upgrade to Xenial
Install LXQt packages following the wiki guide
And that’s all. Enjoy Lubuntu in your new Pi. Remember this is just an experiment, it may be unstable. But what are Raspberry Pi computers for, but testing and having fun?
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Those who believe that less is indeed more are directed to the PXFmini autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi Zero – a seriously bijou bit of kit measuring just 31mm by 73mm and weighing in at 15g.
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Logic Supply’s Darek Fanton informs Softpedia today, January 15, about the availability of a new line of PCs targeted at embedded and industrial users, the Logic Supply ML340 series.
Logic Supply’s brand-new ML340 fanless and ventless computers are the next-generation version of the company’s best seller ML300 Series, providing their customers with a full 5-year lifecycle motherboards that are extremely essential when manufacturing sustainable hardware projects. The ML340 Series of PCs from Logic Supply is a great option for IoT (Internet of Things), automation, security, and digital signage applications.
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The Linux Foundation this week announced an expansion of the Dronecode project with investments from new members and the creation of three technical working groups. The foundation launched the open source project in 2014 in an effort to create a unified platform for commercial drone technology. Twenty-seven companies have joined Dronecode since, bringing membership to 51, officials said. New technical working groups will focus on areas of development the community views as critical to advancing the project’s mission.
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For the 20th anniversary of the Movie “Hackers” [Jamie Zawinski], owner of DNA Lounge in San Francisco, threw an epic party – screening the movie, setting up skating ramps and all that jazz. One of the props he put up was an old payphone, but he didn’t have time to bring it alive. The one thing he didn’t want this phone to do was to be able to make calls. A couple of weeks later, he threw another party, this time screening “Tank Girl” instead. For this gathering he had enough time to put a Linux computer inside the old payphone. When the handset is picked up, it “dials” a number which brings up a voice mail system that announces the schedule of events and other interactive stuff. As usual, this project looked simple enough to start with, but turned out way more complicated than he anticipated. Thankfully for us, he broke down his build in to bite sized chunks to make it easy for us to follow what he did.
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With all the talk about the Mycroft AI, people might have forgotten about the fact that it’s only happening because it’s a powerful device designed to turn your home into a smart one. And now we get to see its insides.
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Wind River announced a “Helix Chassis” connected car software suite, featuring Linux-based “Cockpit,” VxWorks-based “Drive,” and cloud-based IoT functions.
Intel software subsidiary Wind River has been busy developing its automotive oriented software for several years. The results of this process have ranged from safety critical, real-time control software based on its venerable VxWorks RTOS, to an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform based on its widely respected embedded Linux distribution, to a recently introduced Helix Cloud services platform for communication among Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This week, the company announced that this assortment of software, development tools, and services for the “connected car” market have become a new Wind River product suite, called “Wind River Helix Chassis.”
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Phones
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Android
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Remix OS is a modified version of Android that can run on practically any PC. It remixes Android into a desktop operating system, complete with applications running in windows, a Start menu, taskbar, desktop, and notification area.
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Google has been moving fast on iterating its IDE for developing Android apps. Announced two months ago, Android Studio 2.0 is on its fifth preview that makes further refinements to its marquee ‘Instant Run’ feature and fixes other bugs.
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CES took place last week in Las Vegas, and we’re still digesting all of the goodness that was announced at the show. Auto was a pretty big topic in Vegas, a bit surprising considering the NAIAS took place this week in Detroit. CES seemed a bit more of an Auto Tech show, morphing the two shows together. For Android Auto, we saw quite a few announcements. HARMAN, Kenwood and Pioneer all announced new head units for Android Auto. While Ford and Chrysler both announced their plans for implementing Android Auto into their future models. Let’s break them all down and see what happened in Vegas.
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Chinese Web company Baidu is announcing today that it is releasing key artificial intelligence (AI) software under an open-source Apache license. The WARP-CTC C library and optional Torch bindings are now available on GitHub, by way of Baidu Research’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL).
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Despite the odds being somewhat stacked against SFC, Sandler remains optimistic. But she points out enforcement is necessary to get companies to give back to open-source communities and stop them from wresting control of open-source projects and code.
“We think that compliance with the GPL is incredibly important. We think it’s important for society, important for business. We also have seen that companies are much, much less likely to comply if there aren’t consequences for not complying. It’s simple analysis, it’s not too hard to see.”
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Baidu, a massive Chinese web company along the lines of Google, has released artificial intelligence software WARP-CTC on GitHub. WARP-CTC, developed at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI lab, was created to improve speech recognition in Baidu’s end-to-end speech recognition program Deep Speech 2.
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Chinese search-and-everything-else web giant Baidu has joined Google and Facebook in open-sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) code in a bid to become a standard in an increasingly important market.
The company’s Warp-CTC C library has been published on GitHub through its Silicon Valley lab, with an accompanying blog post encouraging developers to try it out.
The CTC part stands for “connectionist temporal classification.” This combines different neural network designs to process data that is not perfectly aligned. In other words, making sense of complex patterns. The approach has proved invaluable in speech recognition.
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I am concerned. In the past years, it has become clear that real privacy has become harder to come by. Our society is quickly heading into a situation where an unknown number of entities and people can follow my every single step, and it’s not possible to keep to myself what I don’t want others to know. With every step into that direction, there’s less and less things about my life of which I don’t control who knows about it.
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Events
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Schuyler St. Leger is one of the superheroes of the maker movement. He’s a speaker, young maker, and was featured in Make magazine. His famous presentation, Why I love my 3-D Printer has received over 300,000 views on YouTube.
Schuyler is keynoting at SCaLE 14x, where he’ll talk about open source radio and how it’s impacting the world around us. We’re surrounded by radios in smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Wi-Fi access points, yet we often fail to realize their ubiquitous presence. The airwaves are a fantastic space for exploration, but where do we begin? Open source radio combined with open hardware is a rich space for exploration and experimentation.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at IBM’s flexible mainframes with Golang, Mozilla keeps FireFox OS in play for IoT, and other news.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Hortonworks, focused on Hadoop, has just announced Hortonworks Partnerworks, a global program to support and enable partners selling and implementing Hortonworks solutions. The company claims to have over 1,500 partners involved today, and the new partner program will give partners increased access to Hortonworks staffers and expertise.
Partnerworks will officially launch in early February, but details on its structure are out now.
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Databases
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ScyllaDB is designed to be a resilient NoSQL database and is currently in beta testing. It is designed from the ground up to take advantage of multiple core systems and to provide very high performance.
Don Marti, techical marketing manager for ScyllaDB, co-founded the Linux consulting firm Electric Lichen. He is a strategic advisor for Mozilla and has previously served as president and vice president of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and on the program committees for USENIX, CodeCon, and LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.
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BSD
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If you’re in the packet delivery business, and you’ve never tired OpenBSD, then you’re really missing out. Pretty much everything you care about as a network guy on production networks is configured via a virtual interface. This includes CARP, IPSEC, and all manner of encapsulation and tunneling protocols. This is awesome because all the tools designed to work on interfaces, like tcpdump, work on these virtual interfaces too. So if I want to get a look at my VPN traffic, I can tcpdump enc0.
Which brings up another great point, with OpenBSD, your packet inspection and general network troubleshooting toolbox is way better. Nmap, Argus, sflow, tcpdump, snort, daemonlogger, and etc.. all the best tools are right there on your router if you want them. No need to use a packet tap, because your router is the packet tap.
OpenBSD has myriad built-in daemons for OSPF, BGP, and every other router protocol, as well as application-layer protocol proxies. OpenBSD is by far the fastest, easiest way to setup an ftp proxy that I know of. It also has a kernel-space packet filter called PF, which is crazy feature-rich and and easy to use. If you can console configure an ASA, or are an iptables user, you’ll pick up PF’s syntax in about 15 minutes. All the normal stuff like NAT, redirection, and forwarding are there. Further, PF can do things like policy routing, where you tag packets based on criteria you choose, and then make routing decisions later based on those tags. PF has packet queuing and prioritization built-in, so you can make some classes of traffic more important than others.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In December, the FSF and community members carried out our yearly holiday season tradition of Giving Guide Giveaways.
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I don’t get to do all these at once every day, but still the majority of these tasks are performed on Emacs on a daily basis. I’m obviously getting more and more familiar with each tools and the general use of Emacs the more I use them. I would like to highlight a few thoughts about them:
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Public Services/Government
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There are other opportunities for private citizens to take part in building new technology for the government. Recently, 18F launched a micro-purchasing initiative in which it opens small projects to the public, who can bid to be paid for working on them. GSA also holds periodic hackathons, inviting the public to collaborate around some of the agency’s biggest problems, as do other agencies like the departments of Agriculture and the Interior. And of course, agencies that build their software in the open often allow outside citizens to contribute to a project.
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Open source increasingly is being accepted as the de facto standard within federal government agencies. For example, the October 2009 Department of Defense memorandum requested that federal agencies evaluate and implement these solutions whenever possible. Since that memorandum, the Federal Aviation Administration and a significant number of agencies within the Department of Defense, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the Defense Information Systems Agency have implemented open source.
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Public administrations in Portugal are turning to open source ICT solutions slower than anticipated by ESOP, a trade association of Portuguese open source companies. The country’s ICT policies should spur the uptake of this kind of software, but ESOP says that the country lacks open source experts.
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Openness/Sharing
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As the user-editing encyclopedia turns 15, dedicated editors are getting scarcer by the day
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As Wikipedia celebrates its 15th birthday, its co-founder has a vision: he wants every single person on the planet to have free access to knowledge
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Open Hardware
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Swiss engineer Christoph Laimer has built an open-source hardware, 3D printed watch with a tourbillon mechanism, uploading it to Thingiverse for you to print and assemble yourself.
The pioneering work in the was done by Nicholas Manousos, whose 2014 Tourbillon 1000% was the prime inspiration for Laimer.
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Science
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At the end of 2016 fewer than 25 percent of IT jobs in developed countries will be held by women, roughly the same as last year and perhaps even down a bit.
This lack of gender diversity in IT is both a social issue and an economic one as well, warns new research by consultants Deloitte.
Given that the global cost of IT is in the tens of billions of dollars, “the gender gap in IT costs the UK alone about $4bn annually”, according to the report.”So with that cost, gender parity (roughly 50 percent women in IT jobs) seems a reasonable goal over the long term.”
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Hardware
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Yes, SSDs tend to be faster than other storage. That is true, but unless you look deeper at the specs, you may end up with poor performance. Let me explain. This is a general knowledge article. Without a huge sample size, anything beyond generalizations don’t mean anything.
Installed an Anker USB3 front-panel on one of the systems here a few months ago. It was purely for convenience since the system has USB3 internal headers and USB3 storage has been working fairly well from the rear ports. Did a few quick checks and everything was just a little slower than I expected. Didn’t have any hard data, just that things were slower than expected. Gave it 3-stars on the review site.
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Health/Nutrition
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Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that is formed from the natural breakdown of uranium in the earth. Though you can’t see it or smell it, radon can enter your home through cracks in your foundation, well water, building materials and other sources, where it can contaminate the air you breathe.
Because radon is radioactive, it’s also carcinogenic; radon exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, second only to smoking.
Testing your home for radon is simple, and if levels are elevated there are ways to reduce them to protect your health.
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Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have long defended their die-hard positions against mandatory GMO labeling laws, often by feigning concern about the financial impact labeling laws would have on consumers. Labeling will be costly for manufacturers, who will pass those costs on to consumers, they consistently argue (despite studies suggesting otherwise).
As if concern for consumers’ wallets had anything to do with Big Food’s determination to deceive.
So the first question we asked the Campbell Soup Co. (NYSE: CPB) last week, following the announcement that Campbell’s will label all of its products that contain GMOs, was this: Will you charge more for these products after you label them?
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The report is a follow-up to one from November that detailed the state-sponsored doping program in Russia. The first report was the culmination of a nearly year-long investigation into Russia’s track-and-field industry that began after a German documentary, “Top Secret Doping: How Russia makes its winners” was released in December 2014. It provided an in-depth look at the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs and blood doping by Russian track and field athletes and the coaches, doctors, and state officials that encouraged it. After that report, the IAAF suspending the Russian track and field federation indefinitely — including, as of now, the Rio Olympics.
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Obamacare is leaving millions in serious financial pain, pointing up the need for universal health care—Medicare for all. That’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ position, and it is a crucial difference between him and Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
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Sanders, she now insists, would do so from the left by instituting a program — single-payer healthcare — that would be more progressive than the Affordable Care Act. Yet this possibility is portrayed in the starkest of terms. It’s as if the Clinton campaign saw a house burning down and told the fire department to put it out by setting the house next door on fire to suck up all the oxygen feeding the flames.
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Clinton is a very wealthy former first lady, senator and secretary of state with expensive homes in Washington D.C. and Chappaqua, New York, who launched her campaign with an Uber-eque logo and a slogan—fighting for “everyday Americans”— that rendered actual humans into a plastic composite sketch. Clinton is unlikeable because she comes across as the end product of a poll-derived algorithm with a calculus that accounts for everything—well, almost. Asked what kind of ice cream she liked last year, she conceded a system malfunction, responding “I like nearly everything.”
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But in the ensuing years, both Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton alone, from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the industry.
This means that Clinton brought in almost as much in speech fees from the health care industry as she did from the banking industry. As a matter of perspective, recall that most Americans don’t earn $2.8 million over their lifetimes.
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“European farms are still mainly small and family run, and cannot compete financially with large American businesses,” says Reuter. European farmers and food manufacturers export very little to the USA. The vast majority can expect little other than additional competition from a free trade agreement with the United States.
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Security
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Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that. Putting an unprotected server out on the Internet is like putting chum in the ocean water you are swimming in—it won’t be long and you’ll have a lot of excited sharks circling you, and the outcome is unlikely to be good. Everyone knows it, but sometimes under the pressure of deadlines, not to mention the inevitable push from the business interests to prioritize those things with more immediate visibility and that add to the bottom line, it can be difficult to keep up with even what threats you need to mitigate, much less the best techniques to use to do so. This is how corners get cut—corners that increase our risk of catastrophe.
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The OpenSSH project released an ssh client bug info that can leak private keys to malicious servers. A man-in-the-middle kind of attack identified and fixed in OpenSSH are dubbed CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778. How do I fix OpenSSH’s client vulnerability on a Linux or Unix-like operating system?
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Kitchen knives. Meat cleavers. Scissors. Stones. The current weapons of choice used by Palestinians in this latest wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank. At the time of writing, 22 Israelis, 150 Palestinians, an American and an Eritrean have been killed. In the past three months, there have been 105 stabbings – and many of the perpetrators have been women. With murmurings that this wave of violence constitutes a new uprising – a third intifada – I believe that if this is indeed a third intifada, it is very different than the two previous ones: it is less orchestrated – and more intimate. An Intimate Intifada.
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When the United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron argued in the House of Commons for approval to bomb Syria, he and his team made much of the accuracy of British bombing and the contribution it would make to the United States-led coalition’s war against ISIS. In the end, the vote on 2 December 2015 went in his favour, although the majority of Labour members of parliament and all those of the Scottish National Party were opposed.
To counter this opposition, the Conservative government has consistently claimed that its strike-aircraft and armed-drones are meticulous in avoiding civilian casualties. It is an important part of the case, and the government’s whole strategy would be undermined if it was clear that many innocent people were being killed. That evidence is beginning to emerge. But it is resolutely denied by the ministry of defence, echoing a strategy that long predates the decision to extend Britain’s role to Syria.
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The subject was Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the US. “This policy is a policy that makes it impossible to build the coalition necessary to take out ISIS,” Bush said. “The Kurds are our strongest allies. They’re Muslim. You’re not going to even allow them to come to our country? The other Arab countries have a role to play in this.”
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A new series from “NRA Family” reimagines children’s fairy tales with a pro-gun message.
In the January 14 series debut — Little Red Riding Hood — NRA Family’s editor asked, “Have you ever wondered what those same fairy tales might sound like if the hapless Red Riding Hoods, Hansels and Gretels had been taught about gun safety and how to use firearms?”
What followed was a gun-heavy version of Little Red Riding Hood that culminates with the protagonist and her grandmother holding the wolf at gunpoint until he is taken away by a “huntsman.”
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So, according to Tatchell, we should provide the Kurds with anti-aircraft missiles in the unlikely event ISIS capture and are able to run and pilot attack helicopters. Attack helicopters which Tatchell presumably thinks ISIS will be able to fly freely despite the US, Russian, UK and French aircraft dominating the airspace over significant part of Syria.
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Yesterday’s horrific attacks in Jakarta serve as a reminder of the ambitions and reach of radical Islamists. The killers used suicide bombs and pistols, relatively primitive weaponry, to target a densely populated area. The same could happen in Britain. The UK has to be prepared for the worst. To that end, the Metropolitan Police is going to train 600 extra armed officers, and armed patrols will more than double.
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Meet the hottest new commander in the increasingly secretive world of American warfare, Lieutenant General Raymond “Tony” Thomas. A rare portrait in the Washington Post paints him as a “shadowy figure” — an appropriate phrase for the general who has been leading the U.S. military’s “manhunters,” aka Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. They are considered the crème de la crème among America’s ever-larger crew of Special Operations forces, now at almost 70,000 and growing. Thomas is reportedly slated to take over Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and so head up that now massive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military. To put its ranks in perspective, think of the active duty militaries of Argentina (73,000), Australia (56,000), Canada (66,000), Chile (61,000), or South Africa (62,000). In other words, our secret “warriors” now outnumber the military contingents of major nations.
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In 2001, under George W. Bush, an EP-3 with 24 crew members was crashed by a Chinese fighter and forced to land on Hainan Island, where they were held for 11 days until we expressed “sorrow.”
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Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.
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Amid all the faux outrage coming from the neocons and their enablers in the media over the alleged “humiliation” of the US – Iran “paraded” the sailors in their media! They made one of the sailors apologize! The Geneva Conventions were violated! – hardly anyone in this country is asking the hard questions, first and foremost: what in heck were those two boats doing in Iranian waters?
And if you believe they somehow “drifted” within a few miles of Farsi Island, where a highly sensitive Iranian military base is located, then you probably think there’s a lot of money just waiting for you in a Nigerian bank account.
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The number of ISIS devotees living in or coming from the Caribbean is on the rise, according to U.S. Southern Command chief General John Kelly, who oversees “security” (and paranoia) throughout South America.
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The Republican presidential debates have focused heavily on foreign policy, with candidates one-upping each other’s threatening talk about military action against Iran and escalation in Syria and Iraq. But there has been virtually no attention paid to Saudi Arabia, a longtime American ally with well-documented ties to anti-American terror groups, including ISIS and al Qaeda.
That changed momentarily on Thursday night during the Fox Business Network debate in Charleston. Moderator Neil Cavuto asked John Kasich about Saudi Arabia’s recent execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, as well as the theory that the Saudi government is deliberately driving down oil prices in a bid to bankrupt American oil producers.
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Transparency Reporting
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Following Freedom of Information Act requests, the UK has classified the expense budget to police Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of the controversial Wikileaks website, as he remains locked away in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom.
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Last year, EFF launched our inaugural, tongue-in-cheek awards series for government agencies who thwarted, stymied, foot-dragged, and retaliated in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records requests. We called out secrecy over cell-site simulators, marveled at the $1.4 million fee estimate for the DEA’s “El Chapo” file, and panned Chicago Public Schools’ refusal to disclose what’s in its mystery meats.
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With the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill this week to amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), EFF and a coalition of other groups are calling on members of the Senate [.pdf] to pass a law that meaningfully improves government transparency and accountability through access to federal records.
It is becoming something of an annual tradition for Congress to introduce FOIA legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. This year’s bill is the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (H.R. 653), and it contains many of the same amendments to FOIA found in recent bills, including narrowing some of the most-abused exemptions in the law.
Even though members of both the House and Senate have strongly supported past FOIA bills, Congress has failed to pass a law after agencies subject to the bills’ heightened transparency requirements pushed back. For example, in 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice was instrumental in killing FOIA reform.
Despite what is likely to be another fight against DOJ and other federal agencies, EFF remains optimistic that Congress will pass comprehensive FOIA legislation this year. As the bill waits to be heard in the Senate, below is a summary of the good and bad aspects of the legislation along with some proposals EFF would like lawmakers to consider adding.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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When Walter Palmer, a wealthy dentist from Minnesota, killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe last July, people all around the word were sickened and outraged.
Action was quick. After the news broke, late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel used his monologue to read Palmer the riot act, then helped raise $150,000 in donations in less than 24 hours to support Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the Oxford, U.K.-based nonprofit that had been tasked with tracking Cecil’s location and activities. Within a month, thanks to pressure from the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Humane Society of the U.S. and public demand, American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines announced bans in the transport of “trophies” (i.e., animal parts) from Africa’s so-called big five species: the African lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, African leopard and white/black rhinoceros.
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Renowned food journalist Paul Greenberg isn’t convinced these ambitious aquaculture projects will solve America’s seafood dilemma. Americans often eschew native fish species and import exotic varieties instead, he told NPR’s The Salt. “Rather than trying to start up new and complicated ventures, first let’s try to eat the fish we’ve already got.”
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Climate change poses a significant threat to the fisheries that have sustained First Nations communities along Canada’s Pacific coast for thousands of years, according to a new study published Wednesday.
The paper, published in PLOS ONE, projects that the First Nations fisheries’ catch could decline by nearly 50 percent by 2050, decimating a traditional food resource and leading to economic losses up to $12 million.
“Climate change is likely to lead to declines in herring and salmon, which are among the most important species commercially, culturally, and nutritionally for First Nations,” said Lauren Weatherdon, who conducted the study when she was a University of British Columbia (UBC) graduate student. “This could have large implications for communities who have been harvesting these fish and shellfish for millennia.”
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The post-industrial impacts that humans have had on the Earth and its atmosphere may pinpoint the mid-20th century as the start of a new geological epoch.
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Finance
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I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of developers, and the talks I’ve given have led directly to the creation of several startups. I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.
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On Tuesday on the syndicated Howie Carr Show, Ted Cruz declared that Donald Trump “comes from New York and he embodies New York values.” That night on Fox, New York-born Megyn Kelly asked Cruz to explain exactly what “New York values” are. Cruz responded: “The rest of the country knows exactly what New York values are, and I gotta say, they’re not Iowa values and they’re not New Hampshire values.”
Yesterday Kellyanne Conway, president of Keep the Promise I, one of four significant pro-Cruz Super PACs, endorsed Cruz’s anti-New York perspective: “New York is home to many wonderful people and places, but the emphasis is more on money than morality. The line to get into Abercrombie & Fitch is a mile longer than the line to get into St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”
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2015 saw the campaign against TTIP grow into a mass movement of opposition across Europe. John Hilary asks whether 2016 could be the year we defeat TTIP and build a People’s Europe from below.
2015 was an incredible year in the fight against TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated in secret between the European Commission and the US government. The pan-European campaign grew exponentially as more and more people learned about the threats posed by the deal, culminating in October’s staggering anti-TTIP demonstration in Berlin. In the space of one year, over 3.2 million people signed the European Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP and the EU-Canada deal CETA, far and away the largest number ever recorded for such a petition.
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Long-term investment in public infrastructure is not, of course, an attractive proposition to the private sector, which is why successive UK governments have struggled to find investors for major projects. Distant returns are no return at all. It has taken years for a UK government to be brought kicking and screaming to the realisation that power stations will not be constructed without government involvement. The UK’s infamous Private Finance Initiative, initiated by John Major and enthusiastically adopted by the Blair/Brown government, has worked by dint of expensive income guarantees to the private sector. What these and many other examples have highlighted, emphatically so since the 2008 economic crisis, is that free markets are not free, that when they are poorly regulated they can and do lead to ruin, and that neoliberalism is sustained paradoxically by government intervention – though on a discretionary basis. The element of discretion is important because it tends to operate in favour of vested interests. Quantitative Easing didn’t go to the public but to banks and insurance companies.
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The world’s largest company could owe more than $8 billion in back taxes as a result of a European Commission investigation into its tax policies, according to an analysis by Matt Larson of Bloomberg Intelligence. Apple, which has said it will appeal an adverse ruling, is being scrutinized by regulators who have accused the iPhone maker of using subsidiaries in Ireland to avoid paying taxes on revenue generated outside the U.S.
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Theorists and principled souls on the Right are free-market advocates. They are convinced by Hayek and his followers that markets aggregate the will of the public better than governments do. This doesn’t mean that governments are unnecessary. As Rajan and Zingales put it in their very strong pro-free-market book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, “Markets cannot flourish without the very visible hand of the government, which is needed to set up and maintain the infrastructure that enables participants to trade freely and with confidence.” But it does mean that a society should try to protect free markets, within that essential infrastructure, and ensure that those who would achieve their wealth by corrupting free markets don’t.
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As we’ve written recently, a report from the World Bank suggests that the economic benefits from TPP will be slight for the US, Australia and Canada. New Zealand is predicted to do better, but not much: the econometric modelling predicts a 3.1% boost to its GDP by 2030 — roughly 0.3% extra GDP per year. That’s a pretty poor payback given the price participant countries will have to pay in terms of copyright, biologics and corporate sovereignty.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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With just three weeks to go before the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders is now in a statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton. According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, he trails her by just 3 points in Iowa, well within the margin of error. In other words, it’s a tie. A dead heat.
This is really, really, really big news.
Sanders is already beating Clinton in New Hampshire, and if he can pull-off a two-state sweep of the early primaries, that would completely change the dynamic of the race. And I mean completely.
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What Obama did not mention was this: he in fact can immediately “reduce the influence of hidden interests” on his own, without Congress or the Supreme Court, by issuing an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose any “dark money” contributions to politically-active non-profits.
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With polls suggesting that the Democratic race is getting tighter in the first-caucus state of Iowa and the first-primary state of New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders has won the support of one of the nation’s most prominent progressive networks.
The activist group MoveOn endorsed the Vermont senator after 78.6 percent of its members backed him last week in an online “primary”—which drew 340,665 votes, a greater total than is likely to participate in the February contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.
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This wouldn’t be the first time that Sanders has highlighted Clinton’s ties to Wall Street.
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A year ago, concerned that ordinary citizens would be locked out of the presidential nominating process, The Nation argued that a vigorously contested primary would be good for the candidates, for the Democratic Party, and for democracy. Two months later, Senator Bernie Sanders formally launched a campaign that has already transformed the politics of the 2016 presidential race. Galvanized by his demands for economic and social justice, hundreds of thousands of Americans have packed his rallies, and over 1 million small donors have helped his campaign shatter fund-raising records while breaking the stranglehold of corporate money. Sanders’s clarion call for fundamental reform—single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the breaking up of the big banks, ensuring that the rich pay their fair share of taxes—have inspired working people across the country. His bold response to the climate crisis has attracted legions of young voters, and his foreign policy, which emphasizes diplomacy over regime change, speaks powerfully to war-weary citizens. Most important, Sanders has used his insurgent campaign to tell Americans the truth about the challenges that confront us. He has summoned the people to a “political revolution,” arguing that the changes our country so desperately needs can only happen when we wrest our democracy from the corrupt grip of Wall Street bankers and billionaires.
We believe such a revolution is not only possible but necessary—and that’s why we’re endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. This magazine rarely makes endorsements in the Democratic primary (we’ve done so only twice: for Jesse Jackson in 1988, and for Barack Obama in 2008). We do so now impelled by the awareness that our rigged system works for the few and not for the many. Americans are waking up to this reality, and they are demanding change. This understanding animates both the Republican and Democratic primaries, though it has taken those two contests in fundamentally different directions.
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Perhaps more important than Sanders’s gain in the polls is how it happened: by patiently hammering on his message, regardless of what other candidates said
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I went into the screening with the distinct premonition that I would emerge in anger after seeing another maddeningly effective piece of Hollywood war propaganda. That’s how I felt last year after seeing American Sniper, a surprise blockbuster directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy sniper Chris Kyle. In American Sniper, no one asked why Iraqis were shooting at Kyle and the rest of the U.S. military in the first place (hint: we invaded and occupied their country and tortured some of them at prisons like Abu Ghraib). Despite such errors of context, American Sniper was a formidable movie. It was really human and stuck with the audience. Much credit goes to Eastwood, a skilled director, and Cooper, a charismatic actor. His thespian counterpart in 13 Hours is John Krasinski, the nice guy from The Office. As it turns out, Krasinski wields a stapler and a pun far more convincingly than an M-4.
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What does Donald Trump think about dictators and autocrats?
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Censorship
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At its core, the P.C. debate is about something meaningful. It is a discussion about how people should treat each other. The language we use to define it may change, but the conversation will keep going. Still, after more than three decades of repeating the same arguments, perhaps it’s time to recognize that the current iteration of this discussion has run its course.
A new debate could rely less on anecdote and more on actual data. It could be less about protecting rhetorical preferences and more about prohibiting actual censorship. It could dispense with political grandstanding and become more grounded in reality, without the apocalyptic and shallow narratives.
The end of the phony debate about political correctness will not be the end of the debate about political correctness. But it could be the beginning of something better.
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Most of us, says Marlon James in a brief video essay published at The Guardian, are nonracist. That leaves us with a clear conscience, he argues, but it does nothing to help fight injustice in the world. In fact, we can pull off being nonracist by being asleep in bed while black men are killed by police. We need to stop being nonracist, and start being anti-racist, he says.
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And, then of course, there’s the inevitable backlash over this. Presidential campaigns trying to censor people — or worse, a site like Wikipedia — is always going to backfire. It makes the campaign look thin-skinned, foolish and short-sighted.
I’m guessing that if this makes enough news, the Sanders campaign will back down on this, and say it was an overzealous lawyer or some other such thing, but there’s no reason such takedowns should ever be sent in the first place.
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Late last year, we relayed the story of Ai Weiwei, an artist who had previously used Legos to create political art in the form of portraits, being refused a bulk order of Lego blocks by the company. At issue was a long-standing company policy prohibiting its facilitation of blocks being used for political speech. As a result of Weiwei going public about the refusal, the story was Streisanded into the public consciousness, resulting in condemnation and shaming from more of the masses than would have ever been aware of the project otherwise.
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Actor Aditya Roy Kapur says that it is a constant struggle to maintain a balance between freedom of expression and censorship but the industry is endeavouring for it.
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Students in Ethiopia’s largest administrative region, Oromia, have been braving state-sponsored violence and censorship since November 2015 to protest a government development plan.
Human Rights Watch has reported that at least 140 peaceful protesters have died since the demonstrations began. Those killed include university and secondary school students, farmers and school teachers.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Ethiopian authorities and pro-government commentators say the number of dead is around five people.
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The head of Telegram, the most popular social media network in Iran, has again categorically denied making any concessions to Tehran regarding censorship.
On January 13, 2016, the Iranian media widely reported a statement by Iran’s Communications and Information Technology Minister Mahmoud Vaezi that the instant messaging service Telegram “has agreed to block any channel reported by Iran’s Communications Ministry.”
Pavel Durov, however, who is CEO of the widely used messaging service, said only “porn/ISIS” related content would be subject to censorship in Iran, as it is in other countries, but not any other content disapproved of by the Iranian government.
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EFF has been steadfast in its criticism of officials like FBI Director James Comey, who have implored tech companies to provide a backdoor to their customers’ encrypted communications. Now it appears as though the White House would like a backdoor to the First Amendment’s free speech protections by requiring private tech companies to monitor, censor, and automatically report speech on topics related to ISIS and terrorism.
EFF’s concerns come after White House officials held a high-level meeting with technology companies last week asking for help in addressing terrorists’ use of social media. The administration also announced a task force to fight terrorism online.
If the government directly censored the content of online speech about ISIS and other terrorist groups, it would be clearly unconstitutional. Private companies that host communications online, however, are normally not subject to the First Amendment and can set their own rules on the types of content and even viewpoints expressed on their services. Government officials know this and are now both subtly and not-so-subtly pressuring companies to achieve a result that the First Amendment prevents them from doing themselves.
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As they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Facebook, being a dominant force in the social media industry, certainly has a great deal of power, but how does it do in the responsibility department. It’s an important question, because as a platform essentially designed to facilitate speech and expression, it would seem necessary to treat with care how it collides with that speech when controversy arises. Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and time again how Facebook treats the question bureaucratically rather than with any kind of nuance. Between bending the knee to national interests, promising to censor speech deemed to be hateful, or just flat out hiding behind a wall of corporate speak in order to take down photos, the trend for Facebook is one of grip-tightening rather than free expression.
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Privacy
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As I noted in an update to this post, over the last several months, the Brennan Center has led an effort among privacy organizations to get the Intelligence Community to provide the transparency over its Section 702 surveillance that it dodged under the USA Freedom Act.
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Stop typing that jokey email immediately. Close your instant chat window. Don’t even think about logging into Facebook.
Why? The European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that bosses have the right to spy on staff’s work emails and electronic messages.
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Your computer’s IP addresses can be correlated to an online identity and even a physical location, typically accurate within a city block. In other words, any website you visit can know your physical location, even with every ad blocked and every social network logged out from. That is, unless you use Tor.
Tor is an “onion routing” network that lets people browse the web with a high degree of anonymity by bouncing their web traffic across multiple servers, called Tor relays, in such a way that each link in the chain knows the previous and next link but never the whole chain.
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A VICE News investigation has found evidence that sophisticated surveillance equipment that spies on people’s phones is being used across London, and uncovered a growing black market for the technology worldwide.
Signs of IMSI catchers — also known as stingrays or cell-site simulators — were found at several locations in the British capital, including UK parliament, a peaceful anti-austerity protest, and the Ecuadorian embassy.
A former senior surveillance insider also confirmed to VICE News that they have been used by UK police.
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The National Security Agency is adequately protecting Americans’ civil liberties and privacy as it shifts to a new intelligence collection program, it claimed in a transparency report released on Friday.
Two months after the NSA abandoned its controversial collection of phone records, the spy agency claimed to have satisfied eight separate principles to protect people’s privacy.
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This approach seems to solve a problem the NSA appears to have been having since 2009, how to query entirely domestic records with identifiers that have been algorithmically determined to be used by the same person. Here, the NSA will be able to match connected selectors to an approved one, and then send all of them to providers to obtain entirely domestic records.
But if I’m right in my reading of this, it leaves one hole in the privacy analysis of the this report.
Richards measures USAF, as she has other programs, against the Fair Information Practice Principles, which include a measure of Data Quality and Integrity. But the report’s analysis of that in this program completely ignores how central NSA’s own data is in the process.
[...]
I absolutely assume NSA is confident in its analysis, but to just dismiss it as uninvolved when it precedes the provider query ignores the implementation architecture laid out in this report.
In any case, I’m grateful we’ve got this report (I may have more to say on the minimization procedures, but they, like the report, are far clearer than the ones included in the old dragnet and for Section 702, perhaps because of the involvement of a Privacy Officer). I’m still thinking through the privacy implications of this. But really, this querying process should have been revealed from the start.
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Theresa May gives first hint costs may far exceed £240m estimate as it emerges even small-scale providers could be targeted
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End-to-end encryption has gained an unexpected ally: former National Security Agency head General Michael Hayden.
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At a secret location on New Year’s Eve 2015, a core team of Tor Project employees mingled with the Berlin cypherpunk underground. One person was missing: their new executive director, Shari Steele, who had been introduced publicly a few days earlier to much fanfare at the world’s oldest gathering of hackers: the annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.
Steele says it’s accurate to describe her as avoiding the spotlight. “That is the way I work, and how I will continue to work at Tor,” Steele told the Guardian. Former co-workers confirmed: she likes to work behind the scenes, and is extremely effective doing so.
Steele comes to Tor after 15 years as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization she joined as a staff lawyer in 1992 shortly after it was founded. A trained lawyer, Steele advised, among other bodies, the US sentencing commission on suitable terms for computer security offences and the National Research Council on encryption policy.
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From privacy protection and present buying to porn, incognito mode in Google’s Chrome is a popular way for the web browser’s more than a billion users to ensure that their surfing habits aren’t visible to other people with access to the device.
Spare a thought, then, for Toronto student Evan Andersen, who was surprised to find his incognito browsing come back to haunt him.
“When I launched Diablo III, I didn’t expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that’s exactly what replaced the black loading screen,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this month.
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Civil Rights
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From a policing standpoint, how would a person or movement of color be treated? Do you think that if a Black, Indigenous People, or Muslim militant group were to engage in an armed takeover of a National Wildlife Refuge or other federal structure that an instigating member would be allowed to travel 20 hours home through multiple states to give a radio interview to proselytize and visit family? I don’t think so, my serendipitous meeting with LaVoy surely indicating further inconsistency of application of law and enforcement concerning the militants of the Malheur standoff.
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ON MAY 6, 1882, U.S. President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first in a series of discriminatory legal measures aimed at curbing immigration from Asia. Speaking at the time of its passage, California Sen. John F. Miller, a leading proponent of the law, declared that the Chinese were “an inferior sort of men” and that “Chinese civilization in its pure essence appears as a rival to American civilization. It is a product of a people alien in every characteristic to our people, and it has never yet produced and can never evolve any form of government other than an imperial despotism. Free government is incompatible with it, and both cannot exist together.”
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Obama bluntly called out Islamaphobia, condemned hateful crimes against mosques, and promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison. He drew a clear distinction between the Muslim religion and ISIS killers. He pointed to the tragedy of American children being mocked and deemed suspicious because of their faith at school.
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TEN GUANTÁNAMO PRISONERS arrived in Oman today, a move that leaves fewer than 100 men held in the island prison.
The transfer follows President Obama’s pledge Tuesday night to “keep working to shut down the prison at Guantánamo,” a promise he has highlighted in the past three State of the Union addresses.
The move means that 14 people have left the prison in 2016. On Monday, Mohamed al Rahman al Shumrani was sent to his native Saudi Arabia, almost exactly 14 years after he first arrived in Guantánamo. Last week, one Kuwaiti man was sent home and two Yemeni men were resettled in Ghana.
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It’s not as though there weren’t plenty of options to mix up this year’s lineup of Oscar nominees. A quick glance over the list of artists and performers excluded from the 2016 Academy Awards nods confirms that once again, academy voters earned those widespread racial bias critiques and #OscarsSoWhite hashtags coming their way. Most important, though, is how they plainly missed the opportunity to give several vibrant talents their due.
Let’s review. Absent from the 2016 nominees announced Thursday morning were the likes of Idris Elba, whose blistering turn as African warlord commandant in “Beasts of No Nation” drew nearly unanimous praise and accolades from the same cinematic circles that feed into the academy’s trophy-baiting machinery. Also absent from the nominees’ club was “Beasts” director, producer and writer, Cary Fukunaga.
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In 2008, the Associated Press discovered that constables had committed a slew of felonies: child molestation, having sex with prisoners, and murder. It wasn’t until 2013 that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put in place standards of conduct for the state’s constables, in response to pressure to reign them in. President judges in district courts were tasked with creating Constable Review Boards to investigate complaints and dole out punishments.
But even with stricter policies and procedures to follow, constables keep abusing their power.
More recently, one threatened to arrest a prostitute if she didn’t sleep with him at the rate he set. Two convicted constables showed no remorse for handcuffing a woman who failed to pay a parking ticket and dragging her by her legs — in front of two children. One man was shot in the back and paralyzed when a constable tried to serve him papers for unpaid parking tickets. Three months ago, another constable was accused of strangling and beating his girlfriend.
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This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the police who protected Armstrong to death used excessive force during the 2011 incident—in particular, by shocking him with a stun gun five times in two minutes in a vain attempt to disengage him from a stop sign post to which he was clinging with his arms and legs. The cops ultimately pulled him off the post and pinned him to the ground facedown, one of them kneeling on his back and another standing on it, then handcuffed him and shackled his legs. “During the struggle,” the court noted, “Armstrong complained that he was being choked.” After the officers “stood up to collect themselves,” his sister noticed that he was motionless and unresponsive. When the cops rolled him over, they found that “his skin had turned a bluish color, and he did not appear to be breathing.”
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An update on voter suppression as the presidential election draws nearer and nearer.
In 2016, 10 states will be putting into place restrictive voting laws that they will be enforcing for the first time in a presidential election. These laws range from new hurdles to registration to cutbacks on early voting to strict voter identification requirements. Collectively, these ten states are home to over 80 million people and will wield 129 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.
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Lawyers for the city of Chicago, Illinois have dropped objections to the release of surveillance footage that shows the police shooting a black teenager in 2013. Cedrick Chatman was killed as he fled officers who stopped him for car theft.
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The city of Chicago released a video of another police officer killing an unarmed black teenager three years ago, after giving up a lengthy legal battle to keep it from the public eye.
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The city suddenly reversed its yearlong battle to suppress the video on Wednesday. As they did when fighting to bury video of Laquan McDonald’s death, members of Emanuel’s administration argued the video would inflame the public and jeopardize a fair trial in the Chatman family’s wrongful death lawsuit.
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According to court records, Clark began hitting C.F. before asking him to name the capital of Thailand and punched him in the groin, yelling “Bangkok.” The drunken bigot cop then walked away.
As C.F.’s friend was telling him that it would probably be a good idea for him to leave, Clark became aggressive once again. He then pulled out his pistol, with his finger on the trigger, shoved it in C.F’s face and began referring to his non-Muslim Asian victim as “an ISIS.”
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It also prosecuted Gen. David Petraeus for espionage for keeping secret and top-secret documents in an unlocked drawer in his desk inside his guarded home. It alleged that he shared those secrets with a friend who also had a security clearance, but it dropped those charges.
The obligation of those to whom state secrets have been entrusted to safeguard them is a rare area in which federal criminal prosecutions can be based on the defendant’s negligence. Stated differently, to prosecute Clinton for espionage, the government need not prove that she intended to expose the secrets.
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“Yes, that is a conspiracy,” the president said. “I’m only going to be here for another year. When would I have started on this enterprise?”
After unsuccessfully pleading with Congress over the past few years — years marked by mass shootings at schools, movie theaters, and churches — to pass gun control reforms, President Obama issued an executive order in early January. The package of modest reforms include clarifying background check rules for online sales and gun shows, increasing the number of federal agents conducting background checks and investigating illegal gun trafficking, investing $500 million in mental health care, and developing new gun safety technology.
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Sports fans in the city of St. Louis are having a rough go of it lately. Fresh on the heels of losing their football team to Los Angeles, now we are learning that the federal government has charged former Cardinals scouting director Christopher Correa with unauthorized access into the Houston Astros computer systems. While some had speculated that the government would go after the Cardinals under the Economic Espionage Act, it’s beginning to look like our original assumption that the CFAA would be the tool the government would wield has been proven correct. Also appearing to be correct were reports that the “hacking” that took place in this instance was of the less hack-y variety and more of the let’s-try-the-guy’s-old-password-y.
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With the New Year, the Obama administration has unleashed a new campaign of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting Central American women and children who fled to the U.S. in 2014 to escape violence in their home countries. Some 17,000 are at immediate risk of being dragged from their homes and families and being detained and deported.
“Our borders are not open to illegal migration; if you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values,” Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement announcing the action.
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Guatemala’s recent history bears the mark of a 36 year long, painful internal armed conflict, during which the State systematically violated the rights of the Mayan population.
According to the Report of the Commission for the Historical Clarification of Human Rights Violations in Guatemala, 83.3 percent of the human rights violations were committed against them.
Indigenous women have particularly suffered from the conflict. They have been victims of rape, abuse and sexual slavery.
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2015 was the year that concerns about the return of fascism went mainstream, thanks to the popularity of the likes of Donald Trump, who leads the polls to be the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Marine Le Pen, whose Front National topped the polls in the first round of the French regional elections (before defeat in the second).
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Little did Farrad know, when he posted a selfie with his .56-caliber handgun on Facebook, what problems he is going to face in near future. With a long time criminal history, he had two prior convictions for gun possession.
Posting a selfie on Facebook might be a daily affair for you and your buddies, but things get a can little harsh if you are a longtime felon. The same happened with Malik First Born Allah Farrad, 42, who was sentenced for 188 months for posting a selfie in October 2013 on Facebook.
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As asset forfeiture’s popularity continues to decline in the eyes of the public and certain legislators (but not in the eyes of its beneficiaries), arguments against reform efforts are becoming more desperate and strained. Hartford County state’s attorney Joseph I. Cassilly has been granted a pile of pixels at the Baltimore Sun to defend the “right” of Maryland’s law enforcement agencies to take money from people without charging them, much less convicting them.
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Body cameras have become democratized, for lack of a better word. They’re relatively cheap, easy to use and can be deployed with minimal setup. They hold the promise of increased transparency and accountability, but legislators seem far more interested in ensuring the new technology will have zero net positive effects.
Four Indiana legislators — two of them former law enforcement officers — have introduced a bill that will keep the public out of the loop as far as body camera footage is concerned.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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There’s no denying that web pages have gotten heavier and heavier over the years. Between advertising, widgets, images, scripts, trackers and everything else, the Web has become a ghetto of gigantic, bloated web pages. It’s really become something of an epidemic, and most sites don’t seem to be doing much if anything to slim down their pages.
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I have read with fascination what we would have called before a blog post, except it was featured on The Guardian: Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web The “blogfather” is Hossein Derakshan or h0d3r, an author from Teheran that was jailed for almost a decade for his blogging. The article is very interesting both because it shows how fast things changed in the last few years, technology-wise, but more importantly, how content-free the web have become, where Facebook’s last acquisition, Instagram, is not even censored by Iran. Those platforms have stopped being censored, not because of democratic progress but because they have become totally inoffensive (in the case of Iran) or become a tool of surveillance for the government and targeted advertisement for companies (in the case of, well, most of the world).
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For much of the last year now, Facebook has been under fire in India for its “Free Basics” zero rating campaign, which exempts Facebook-approved content from carrier usage caps, purportedly to the benefit of the nation’s poor. Critics however have argued that Facebook’s just trying to corner developing ad markets under the banner of altruism, and giving one company so much control over what’s effectively a walled garden sets a horrible precedent for a truly open Internet. Indian regulator TRAI has agreed so far, arguing that what Facebook is doing is effectively glorified collusion, and it’s demanding that Facebook shut the program down until a public conversation about net neutrality can be had.
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DRM
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For a few years now, broadcasters have whined endlessly about the use of VPNs to access Netflix in markets where the streaming service had yet to launch. You’ll recall that Australian broadcasters in particular loved to throw hissy fits over the use of VPN technology, accusing customers (paying for both Netflix and a VPN) of being “pirates” for refusing to adhere to regional viewing restrictions. Of course, ignored amidst all this whining (and the futile attempts to ban VPNs) was the fact that these users wouldn’t be going to these lengths — if they liked the existing services being made available to them.
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For those utilizing VPNs, proxies and unblocking tools to access geo-restricted content on Netflix, the party may soon be over. According to an announcement by the company’s Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture, people using such services will face new roadblocks in the coming weeks.
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Netflix services about 190 nations. It has announced that it will prevent VPN/proxy users from circumventing country-based content licencing restrictions.
In a blog post titled ‘Evolving Proxy Detection as a Global service’ David Fullagar, Netflix’s VP of Content Delivery Architecture, said, “We are making progress in licensing content across the world… but we have a way to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere. For now, given the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories, the TV shows and movies we offer differ, to varying degrees, by territory. In the meantime, we will continue to respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location.”
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Netflix says technology is now being deployed to prevent proxies from being used
Netflix is taking steps to thwart users who fake their location in order to get access to foreign shows and movies.
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Netflix is seen by many as the future of television, or at the very least, a major player in whatever television is becoming. The company recently announced that it is now available in more than 130 countries, and it has a portfolio of popular shows like Jessica Jones and Narcos. But not everyone is impressed, apparently.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Yosemite National Park is apparently changing the names of a bunch of famous sites and buildings in the park thanks to one of the most ridiculous trademark disputes you’ll ever hear about. Ever stayed at the famous historic Ahwahnee hotel? That’s not what it will be called next time you go. Camped in Curry Village? Not any more. All thanks to… trademark law.
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Copyrights
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And, of course, basically every other technological innovation was a threat of some sort. The radio was supposed to kill music. “Home taping is killing music” was a slogan! The RIAA undermined digital tapes and tried to limit CDs. It sued over the earliest MP3 players. It’s sued countless internet companies and even music fans.
Through it all, the refrain is always the same: if we don’t do this, “music will go away.”
But, of course, throughout it all, music only expanded. In the first decade of the 21st Century, more music was recorded than all of history combined, and it’s likely the pace has increased over the following five years as well.
And because of that, we’ve started to hear a new refrain from the same folks who insisted before that music was at risk of “dying” because of new technologies: that maybe there’s more music, but it’s clearly worse in quality. Some of this can be chalked up to the ridiculous pretension of adults who insist that the music of their youth was always so much better than the music “the kids listen to nowadays.” But plenty of it seems to be just an attack on the fact that technology has allowed the riff raff in, and the big record labels no longer get to act as a gatekeeper to block them out.
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Strap in, folks, because we’ve got quite a battle brewing. You may recall that Mike Huckabee recently found himself the subject of a copyright dispute with Frank Sullivan, a member of Survivor, over the use of the band’s hit song Eye of the Tiger at a rally for the release of Kim Davis. Davis was the county clerk who asserted that her right to express her religion — in the form of denying same sex couples the right to marry — overrode the secular law of the land, which is about as bad a misunderstanding of how our secular government works as can be imagined. Sullivan’s filing indicated that the rally was conducted by the Huckabee campaign and that the use of the song had been without permission, therefore it was an infringing use. Left out of the filing was any indication of whether the Huckabee campaign had acquired the normal performance licenses.
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