11.17.16
Posted in Site News at 3:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Status report on the site’s issues today
Some readers have noticed and have reported to us site access issues (downtime or other difficulties). I personally have spent all day today (since 7AM and more so after 1PM) combating a bizarre kind of DDOS attack, which always came from the same network, owned by Lockheed Martin Corporation. I can say so with certainty. I spent many hours trying to tackle and properly investigate this.
I do not know what motivates this and whether some machines at the Lockheed Martin network (Fairfield, Connecticut, United States) got compromised, but all I know is that for one reason or another someone wants to drive the servers out of memory and knock the site offline. These attacks have been pretty persistent over the past 8 hours. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Whose system is it anyway?
![Patent box](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/patent-box.png)
Reference: “The “Patent Box” – Proof That the UK is a Rogue State in Corporate Tax”
Summary: Patents are, over time, becoming not about innovation but about passage of heaps of monopolies to large corporations that then use them to evade tax (the patent box loophole)
TODAY we became aware of this blog post from just two days ago. “USPTO Memo Indicates a ‘European’ Approach to Software Inventions,” says the headline, tacitly implying that the EPO is strict on software patents even though the opposite is true (especially in recent years). Lawyers’ favourite CAFC cases are presented as evidence. For instance:
Earlier this month, the USPTO issued a memorandum to patent examiners discussing recent court decisions regarding the patentability of software inventions. The memo refers to three federal circuit decisions in which software inventions were found to be eligible for patent protection. The three decisions mentioned in the memo are McRo v. Bandai (Sept. 2016), BASCOM v. AT&T (Jun. 2016) and Amdocs v. Openet (Nov. 2016).
Recently, I summarised the McRo and BASCOM decisions in a blog post for Cambridge Wireless. The Amdocs decision was issued only a day before the USPTO published its memo to examiners on this issue. Therefore, Amdocs is not considered in detail in the memo. However, the USPTO states that further guidance on the Amdocs decision will be given at a later date.
The USPTO is always behind the times when it comes to regulating patent quality. We saw that as recently as this year because it took 2-2.5 years for the USPTO to truly come to grips with Alice. In the mean time, the EPO went in the opposite direction and insiders tell us that they grant software patents because there is growing pressure to keep up with ‘production’ demands (where grants are rewarded, not proper/thorough examination). A new Central Staff Committee report [PDF]
was also leaked to us today. The Central Staff Committee is concerned that 15% increase in so-called ‘production’ results in reductions for staff. Figures are shown to support this claim and also some ‘missing money’ becomes the subject of inquiry. One has to wonder where all that money comes from and how this so-called ‘production’ is attained without increases in staffing. Of course, all it means is that patent quality continues to nosedive.
Speaking of fiscal irregularities and low patent quality, Benjamin Henrion highlight this new article about “patent boxes” — a subject we wrote about before. “Race to the bottom and Apple fiscal evasion via patents will continue with the blessing of Europe,” Henrion noted, as it’s quite common and increasingly ‘normal’ for large corporations to dodge (or evade) tax with patents as a hidden instrument of some kind of “money laundering” . Here is what the Wall Street media said this week:
Adoption of legislation for a common consolidated corporate tax base by 27 EU member states would resolve current patent box conflicts and end transfer pricing disputes that cost multinational companies hundreds of millions of dollars in double taxation, according to EU and industry officials.
Speaking at a Nov. 15 conference hosted by the Federation of European Accountants, Uwe Ihli, the chief architect of the October CCCTB proposal unveiled in October, said tax credits for research and development in the pending legislation are seen as a way to prevent harmful tax competition, triggered by the rush to attract investment by high-tech companies via tax breaks on intellectual property profits.
“We believe the research and development tax breaks in the new proposal will not only be a major attraction for businesses but they will also help resolve the divisions in the EU over patent box tax regimes,” Ihli said.
He added that the R&D terms are based on EU state aid rules and in line with the OECD’s modified nexus approach.
If a process patent-granting en masse can become just an instrument for the benefit of large corporations, and patents are made a lot easier to get, what does that say about the real beneficiaries of today’s EPO? Regarding Apple’s patents, we are planning some articles about those. The EPO is doing a terrible job and it’s not hard to guess who will pay the price. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another troubling message from a victim of Battistelli reveals the depths of the boss’ depravity
![Battistelli fired](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/battistelli-fired.png)
A once-respected patent office is now ruined by a psychopathic, aggressive bully
Summary: False accusations, manufactured (by Team Battistelli) complaints, lies about the judgment, and secrecy by threats is now the ‘golden’ standard mastered by Battistelli, a liar and abuser so villainous that he deserves no place in society, let alone a well-funded patent office
THIS MORNING’S outline from IP Kat took stock of news regarding Laurent Prunier, whom Battistelli fired while defaming him in front of all staff — certainly a Battistelli classic. This is what IP Kat said:
Firings will continue until morale improves – Merpel revisits the EPO
Merpel growls in disappointment at the dismissal of Laurent Prunier, Secretary of SUEPO The Hague and member of the EPO’s Central Staff Committee.
Understanding of this case is crucial because it’s one of many; it’s part of a pattern which is bound to repeat until stopped.
Battistelli has since then added to his lies using a column at IAM, which is increasingly giving a voice to both sides (more so than before). IAM has thankfully given Prunier (i.e. the accused as well) an opportunity to respond (response behind a paywall, although there are ways for getting around it, at least temporarily). The key part says:
Dear Mr Wild,
As the person directly concerned, I am responding to Mr Battistelli’s letter to you and would appreciate if you could publish this answer so that your readers can be fully informed.
I deny having ever harassed or defamed anyone (nor have I seen any of my fellow colleagues, staff reps and/or SUEPO officials harassing or defaming anyone).
The alleged “victim” did NOT file a complaint against me. The person who filed it was a very close associate of Mr. Battistelli.
The staff representatives in the disciplinary committee have not found that I was guilty of harassment. That finding was 3:2, only by management side.
The easiest solution for the public to assess the truth vs. story-telling is for Mr Battistelli to lift the confidentiality he imposes on me and I will gladly publish all the documents.
Bien cordialement – Best regards
Laurent Prunier
A lot of the above seems familiar as political enemies are often eliminated in this way (someone from the past exploited to manufacture a highly distorted case without that someone’s will at all, only to be followed by mere illusion of justice). Several current examples come to mind, but these are outside the scope of this post (Wikileaks for instance).
The sheer abuse Battistelli subjects staff representatives to, not to mention the systematic harassment from this sociopath, urgently needs to stop. Where are those pet chinchillas of the Administrative Council? It’s clear that Battistelli metaphorically spits on them. He needs to be fired with immediate effect and forced to pay compensation to the Office he ruined. Take away his pension, too. See how he feels about it when he’s the one on the receiving end…
But how can Battistelli be so belatedly dismissed for his antisocial behaviour and violation of his own rules? “The alternative would be unworkable if any one country could effectively fire a president,” says the following new comment. To quote the whole comment:
While I share your pain, the system is of course designed so that a single person or country cannot interfere. The alternative would be unworkable if any one country could effectively fire a president. There are of course ways and means but that is like a policy of mutual destruction whereby no agreement or diplomatic post would be respected (head of the EPO is, I think, a diplomatic passport post). Countries are rightly wary of interfering in what are tacit reciprocal agreements of respect. The ability of a non-office country I.e. not NL, DE, BE to intervene is very limited in any case.
Today (actually bumped up in the news although it’s a little old), from Boult Wade Tennant comes this article “concerning disclaimers at the EPO” as it speaks of the process through which law firms and/or their clients (applicants) typically go along when attempting to be granted an EP. “When the claims of a European patent application or patent are amended,” it says, “the amended claims must satisfy Article 123(2) EPC in order for them to be allowable. Article 123(2) EPC specifies that the European patent application or European patent may not be amended in such a way that it contains subject-matter which extends beyond the content of the application as filed. The European Patent Office (EPO) is well-known for its strict approach in making this assessment. The “gold standard”, frequently cited in EPO case law, requires that an amendment can only be made within the limits of what the skilled person would derive directly and unambiguously, using common general knowledge, from the application as filed (see G 3/89, G 11/91, G 2/10).”
Well, “gold standards” are no more at the EPO. There’s just one man with a golden crown and he has already decided that the goal is to grant patents as much as possible, as quickly as possible, until it all runs out and examiners become redundant. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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The latest semi-annual list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers was released on November 14, showing little change at the top of the list. The China-based Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which first claimed the title of the world’s fastest system in June 2016, still reigns supreme.
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Supercomputers are one of those topics that keep a large part of the world guessing as to their meaning. One thing everyone can agree on, however, is how Linux is clearly the most prominent operating system on these machines.
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Today’s software is served from the cloud and the world’s data is stored in the cloud. The benefits are clear. Let the cloud platform providers deal with the complexities of managing servers and data centers, let the users enjoy continuous experience across multiple devices and let developers focus on their applications. In this article, I’ll focus on developer tools that migrated to the cloud. Development shops used to run servers in the office or rented servers from private hosting providers. This is not necessary anymore. All functions can now be served on the cloud.
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Kernel Space
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I have covered Microsoft’s interference with FOSS for over a decade and carefully studied even pertinent antitrust documents. I know the company’s way of thinking when it comes to undermining their competition, based on internal communications and strategy papers. Even days ago we got this in the news.
The pattern of embrace and extend (to extinguish) — all this while leveraging software patents to make Linux a Microsoft cash cow or compel OEMs to preinstall privacy-hostile Microsoft software/apps with proprietary formats (lockin) — never ended. What I see in the Linux Foundation right now is what I saw in Nokia 5 years ago and in Novell 10 years ago — the very thing that motivated me to start Boycott Novell, a site that has just turned 10 with nearly 22,000 blog posts.
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QUITE a few additional articles — mostly puff pieces (below is a complete/exhaustive list) — have been published since yesterday’s blog post, which was followed by a short article from Techrights. There is a lot of Microsoft PR inside the news/media right now (more and more by the hour) and it’s coordinated (sometimes in advance, based on what we learned yesterday) by Microsoft
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Today The Linux Foundation is announcing that we’ve welcomed Microsoft as a Platinum member. I’m honored to join Scott Guthrie, executive VP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, at the Connect(); developer event in New York and expect to be able to talk more in the coming months about how we’ll intensify our work together for the benefit of the open source community at large.
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No, this isn’t The Onion and it’s not April Fool’s Day. Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation.
Microsoft announced that it was joining forces with The Linux Foundation at the Microsoft Connect developer event in New York.
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Microsoft is hosting its annual Connect(); developer event in New York today. With .NET being at the core of many of its efforts, including on the open-source side, it’s no surprise that the event also featured a few .NET-centric announcements…
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Microsoft demonstrates its commitment to open source by joining Linux Foundation [Ed: Microsoft advocacy sites (often paid-for nonsense) like to pretend to themselves that Microsoft is now a good citizen, not racketeer. iophk: “You’ve probably seen links about LF joining Microsoft so I won’t add them. It would have been news if Microsoft joined OIN.”]
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Has Microsoft promised not to use their patents against Linux? Does their kernel actually contain vfat code? Can I even get source for “their” Linux kernel?
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Microsoft Takes Platinum Membership in Linux Foundation [Ed: By accepting payments from a proprietary software proponent that lobbies for software patents and attacks Linux the Linux Foundation shows it's Open... for Business, not Open Source]
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The sun4i DRM driver changes have been submitted for inclusion in DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.10.
The main feature change for sun4i-drm with Linux 4.10 is support for the Allwinner A31 SoC display engine. Supporting the display hardware on the A31 requires less than 100 lines of new code compared to the existing Allwinner DRM display support. The A31 SoC has been available since 2012 and is used by many Chinese tablets.
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Graphics Stack
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Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.10 is support for explicit fencing for atomic DRM drivers.
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Mesa 3D founder Brian Paul has added a relatively simple but useful improvement to core Mesa for dumping more debugging and performance information.
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The days of the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver are numbered, at least for end-user relevance.
Rob Clark, the lead developer of the Freedreno driver as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware, is now encouraging users to use xf86-video-modesetting over xf86-video-freedreno. Of course, still using the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno as well as its Gallium3D driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine-Staging has been running a bit behind on their announcements for new versions of this Wine branch carrying various experimental/testing patches while today they announced both versions 1.9.22 and 1.9.23.
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Just a few moments ago, the development team behind the Wine Staging open-source project that attempts to distribute a more advanced version of the popular Wine software for running Windows apps and games on Linux-based operating system, announced the release of Wine Staging 1.9.23.
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Games
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At Steam Dev Days in October, Valve programmer Joe Ludwig confirmed that the company will expand SteamVR to Linux and Mac operating systems.
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Speaking on his Patreon post he announced them both together. Both games were originally developed by Ska Studios who went on to make Salt and Sanctuary, and published by Microsoft Game Studios.
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Windows is the dominant force for those wanting to indulge in some VR gaming fun right now. The OS is supported by various HMDs, quality VR entertainment and games titles, and the muscle of systems makers such as Dell, MSI, and several more pushing VR adoption. However, Valve will encourage wider OS support by bringing a SteamVR beta to Linux and Mac OSX computers “in the next few months”.
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Note: The game is currently in Beta and it will be wiped before the final release. It has supported Linux for a long time now.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Here is the fourth Krita 3.1 beta! From the Krita 3.1 on, Krita will officially support OSX. All OSX users are urged to use this version instead of earlier “stable” versions for OSX. We’re releasing a fourth beta because of more changes to the code that actually saves your images… We’ve tried to make it much safer, but please do test this!
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Today, November 16, 2016, Krita Foundation announced the availability of the fourth and probably the last Beta snapshot of the upcoming major Krita 3.1 release of the cross-platform and open-source digital painting app.
Krita 3.1 Beta 4 is here approximately one week after the third Beta development milestone, which we hoped would be the last for this release cycle, but it looks like a few more bugs needed attention. Therefore, the new release improves stabilizer’s framerate and addresses crashes that occur when attempting to draw on the scratch pad.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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The openSUSE Project had the pleasure of informing Softpedia today, November 16, 2016, about the general availability of the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system for personal computers.
Designed to offer users only well-established Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies, and built using the source code from the recently released SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLE) 12 Service Pack 2 (SP2) operating system, the second major update to the openSUSE Leap 42 open-source and free distribution is here after being in development for the past six months. There are numerous new features and updated components in openSUSE Leap 42.2, some of which Tumbleweed users are already enjoying.
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Members of the openSUSE Project are pleased to announce the release of the next minor version of Leap; openSUSE Leap 42.2! Leap is made to give stability-minded users and conservative technology adopters peace of mind. openSUSE Leap 42.2 is powered by the Linux 4.4 Long-Term-Support (LTS) kernel and is a secure, stable and reliable server operating system for deploying IT services in physical, virtual or cloud environments.
A selective process of including well-established packages in openSUSE Leap 42.2 gives new meaning to the term Linux Optimization; openSUSE Leap is simply the safe choice that offers Linux professionals a user-friendly desktop and a feature-rich server environment.
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Hitting the web this morning is the official release of openSUSE Leap 42.2.
OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 makes use of the older Linux 4.4 kernel due to its LTS status, makes use of the KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop by default, and a wide variety of other package updates. OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 continues to be derived from SUSE Linux Enterprise.
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While I was off fighting viruses, SUSE released an update to its SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, a popular business Linux operating environment. The focus of this service pack appears to be accelerating network performance, enhancing support for SAP applications and HANA, improving support for IBM Power architecture systems and other important improvements.
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Red Hat Family
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Softpedia was informed today, November 17, 2016, by NethServer’s Alessio Fattorini about the immediate availability of the second and most probably the last Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming CentOS-based NethServer 7 Linux distro.
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So we’re launching a new resource to help teams everywhere better leverage the power of open. “What is the Open Decision Framework?” outlines one of our community’s most-consulted resources: the Open Decision Framework from the People team at Red Hat, a tool any organizational leader can use to become a more savvy, sensitive, sophisticated—and yes, more open—maker of decisions.
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Finance
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Debian Family
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In order to better understand and document who contributes to Debian, we (Mathieu ONeil, Molly de Blanc, and Stefano Zacchiroli) have created this survey to capture the current state of participation in the Debian Project through the lense of common demographics. We hope a general survey will become an annual effort, and that each year there will also be a focus on a specific aspect of the project or community. The 2016 edition contains sections concerning work, employment, and labour issues in order to learn about who is getting paid to work on and with Debian, and how those relationships affect contributions.
We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible—whether you’ve submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintain packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-30 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project and employment status.
In an effort to reflect our own ideals as well as those of the Debian project, we are using LimeSurvey, an entirely free software survey tool, in an instance of it hosted by the LimeSurvey developers
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This is an extension of part 1 which I shared few days ago. This would be a longish one so please bear.
First of all somebody emailed me this link so in the future a layover at Doha Airport will be a bit expensive from before, approx INR 700/- added to the ticket costs…
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Earlier this year Ubuntu developers announced Netplan as a new, consolidated network configuration tool. Netplan was added to Ubuntu 16.10 and more improvements are on the way for Ubuntu 17.04.
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Discussed today during the Ubuntu 17.04 Online Summit was the dwindling state of PowerPC (32-bit PPC) and i386 (x86 32-bit) support for Ubuntu and overall Linux for that matter. Images are still being produced but likely for not much longer although the package archives are anticipated to remain.
Routinely the past few years there have been discussions over discontinuing Ubuntu i386. No announcements were made today but from the sounds of it, the official images might not be produced much longer while other Ubuntu spins may still produce them. The Ubuntu i386 archives also aren’t endangered of disappearing anytime soon as they are still needed for 32-bit software compatibility, etc.
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As reported earlier in the week, Canonical held its Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event between November 15 and November 16, 2016, during which members of the Ubuntu community were able to learn more about what’s coming to the Ubuntu 17.04 Linux.
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Last month, we discussed here the fact that we’ll be covering the entire development cycle of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, which is expected to launch sometime in April 2017.
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Curious to know more about Unity low graphics mode in Ubuntu? Canonical has explained more.
We first reported that Unity 7 was getting low graphics mode back in July. Since then, the feature rolled out as part of Ubuntu 16.10, and the first LTS point update to Ubuntu 16.04.
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WinSystems unveiled the first PC/104 SBC to use Apollo Lake SoCs, featuring PCIe/104 OneBank and dual GbE, and launched an EBX SBC based on Bay Trail Atoms.
WinSystems announced the PC/104 form factor PX1-C415 and EBX-style EBC-C413 — two SBCs featuring Intel Atoms from the current, 14nm “Apollo Lake” Atom-E3900 generation and the 22nm “Bay Trail” Atom E3800 generation, respectively. Both systems use Atom-branded models only, rather than related Pentium and Celeron SoCs. They both support -40 to 85°C temperatures, and run x86 friendly OSes including Linux and Windows, supported by drivers. Earlier Atom-based SBCs from WinSystems include the 3.5-inch SBC35-CC405.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Android
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A Chinese company has been caught pre-loading Android phones with software that sends peoples’ text messages, location information, and call records to a Chinese server, The New York Times reports. Shanghai Adups Technology Company, otherwise known as Adups, says its code runs on over 700 million phones, although the scale of this particular issue is unknown.
But mobile security researchers say they already confronted Adups, and warned vendors who sold its products, about the backdoors over the last few years, to little avail.
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Jono mentioned that it’s his goal in life to “understand every nuance of how we build predicable, productive, and accessible communities.” He says we are surrounded by communities. We have Wikipedia, the maker movement, and the public becoming the VC for crowdfunding. The data backs up this trend. Community growth participation is growing across industries. Using a commercial software methodology, it would cost over $10 billion to build Wikipedia and/or Fedora. Open source is not just a passing phase.
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Regardless of where you work in the stack, if you work with open source software, there’s likely been a time when you faced burnout and other unhealthy side effects related to your work on open source projects. A few of the talks at OSCON Europe addressed this darker side of working in open source head-on.
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Not many organizations have the cloud expertise that Netflix has, and it may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Netflix regularly open sources key, tested and hardened cloud tools that it has used for years. We’ve reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting “Monkey” cloud tools as part of its “simian army,” which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.
Netflix previously released Chaos Monkey, a utility that improves the resiliency of Software as a Service by randomly choosing to turn off servers and containers at optimized times. Then, Netflix announced the upgrade of Chaos Monkey, and Chaos Monkey 2.0 is now on github. Now, in an interview with infoQ, Netflix Engineer Lorin Hochstein weighs in on what you can get out of this tool.
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Rachel Nabors started off the second morning of All Things Open with a great talk about the need for designers in open source.
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I don’t generally use word processors or WYSIWYG applications, because they all tend to assume that you’re designing for a single output. However, for this project I was designing for a specific output; I wanted to produce a file that would be printable on a single US Letter and A4 sheet of paper, which would then be folded into a PocketMod, and carried in one’s wallet, or used as a bookmark in a gaming book. Having used it for professional print work at a former job and for some community conferences, I knew that Scribus was the tool for the job.
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This is a paid press relase. CoinTelegraph does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company. CoinTelegraph is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the press release.
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Geospatial information system (GIS) solutions make sense of location-aware data, turning it into usable insights in industries as diverse as energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, finance, and all levels of government
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The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of another incremental update, version 0.4.3. This would be fourth such release the project has made this year, an indication we hope of the steady progress that we have made. Approximately 342 issues were resolved since the release of 0.4.2, with the oldest dating all the way back to 2006 involving text alignment.
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ReactOS 0.4.3 is now available as the newest version of this open-source OS that seeks to re-implement the interfaces of Windows.
As described earlier, ReactOS 0.4.3 has a ton of changes. ReactOS 0.4.3 has many fixes/improvements to its kernel, less crashes in the Win32 subsystem, file-system fixes, a USB audio driver has been started, a basic filter driver added, TCP/IP fixes, improvements to kernel-mode DLLs, a rewritten WinSock 2 DLL, and much more.
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Today, November 16, 2016, the development team behind the ReactOS free and open-source computer operating system designed to be compatible with Windows applications and drivers, announced the release of ReactOS 0.4.3.
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When it comes to commercial and open source tools (i.e., paid and free software) the debate as to which category of software is better continues, leaving egos, careers, and forums in ruins. I personally think that it’s impossible to definitively prove that one class of software is the best for every situation. The best source code scanning tool in the world may not do a thing for you if it doesn’t run against your code.
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Events
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This year marks the 15th Blender Conference, held in Amsterdam around the last weekend of October every year. I’ve attended quite a few of these conferences, and each year feels better than the one before. If you’ve never attended the Blender Conference, allow me to set things up for you: By open source conference standards, it’s a pretty small event. But for events focused on a single open source program, the Blender Conference is pretty impressive. I think attendance this year clocked in right around 300 people, and tickets were sold out more than a month in advance.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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While Android already supports Vulkan, Chrome/Chromium OS currently does not support this newest graphics API from The Khronos Group. However, there is work underway in supporting Vulkan on Chromium OS.
Chad Versace, a former Intel OTC graphics driver developer who joined Google earlier this year, is working on bringing Vulkan to the open-source Chromium OS and likely from there into Chrome OS officially.
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Mozilla
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Immediately after the release of the Tails 2.7 anonymous Live CD, the Tor Project was pleased to announce the official availability of Tor Browser 6.0.6 open-source and cross-platform web browser for surfing the Web anonymously.
Tor Browser 6.0.6 is a minor, yet necessary maintenance update to the 6.x series of the Firefox-based browser, adding support for the latest stable Tor 0.2.8.9 anonymous network, as well as the latest Mozilla technologies. Tor Browser 6.0.6 is here one and a half months after the 6.0.5 point release and it looks like it’s based on Firefox 45.5.0 ESR (Extended Support Release).
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While Firefox’s 50 milestone failed to introduce any major features to the open-source, free and cross-platform web browser used by millions of people worldwide, it looks like Mozilla has some big plans for the next major release.
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SaaS/Back End
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No man is an island, nor is OpenStack removed from the fates of two of its – until recently – best-known names.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was once the largest single contributor to OpenStack. Now, HPE is getting rid of its OpenStack engineers as it turns over responsibility for its OpenStack work to MicroFocus under a deal announced in September.
The ascent of OpenStack-consulting wunderkind Mirantis experienced a hiccup with its decision to unload 100 OpenStackers and reallocate another 100. Mirantis is understood to have let go devs working on the Solum platform-as-a-service and Savanna Hadoop-as-a-service projects it started in 2013.
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Education
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Open Source communities are as vibrant as the participants within them – as with any community, your return is proportional to your investment. An example of someone who is intuitively aware of this is Bas Brands. In an interview for Moodlerooms’ E-Learn Magazine, he tells his experience of sustaining a lifelong relationship with Moodle’s Open Source community, while makes a name for himself and a learning company with alluring prospects.
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Funding
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Open-source based testing vendor looks to accelerate its business with new funding.
Before any company deploys any web or mobile app, it needs to test, and that’s where Sauce Labs fits in. Sauce Labs announced on November 15 that it has raised a $70 million series E round of funding. The new capital will be used to help Sauce Labs expands its go-to-market and engineering efforts.
The new round of funding was led by Centerview Capital Technology, IVP and Adams Street Partners. Total funding to date for Sauce Labs now stands at $101 million.
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BSD
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A few days back I wrote about Qualcomm Falkor support coming to GCC while now the LLVM compiler stack has received the similar treatment.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While GCC 7 feature development is officially over, one of the late patches to land for GCC 7.1 in trunk are improvements to the NVIDIA NVPTX back-end.
The big code that landed today in GCC are all of the prerequisites for supporting OpenMP offloading with the NVPTX back-end. PTX is the IR used in NVIDIA’s CUDA that is then consumed by the proprietary graphics driver for converting this representation into the actual GPU machine code. The NVPTX back-end has been part of GCC for a while now as part of OpenACC offloading and now the recent focus on OpenMP offloading.
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Public Services/Government
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The mood in governments around the world has swung behind open source and open standards, but the shift is not being driven by cost cutting alone.
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Licensing/Legal
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The Linux Foundation today released a free e-book, Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise, that serves as a practical guide for organizations on how best to use open source code and participate in open source communities while complying with the spirit and the letter of open source licensing.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has made all its models from the last 15 years available on an open source platform called the Knowledge Junction, which also encourages external submissions of data, images and videos that could go on to be used by EFSA in its risk assessments.
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Open Access/Content
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With college being as expensive as it is, the high price of textbooks has always been a problem for students. Books can increase the cost of college by thousands of dollars, which can be troublesome for those already struggling to make ends meet. However, groups on campus are making efforts to alleviate this problem and make affordable textbooks a reality. The UConn bookstore recently donated $30,000 towards addressing this concern. In addition, the Undergraduate Student Government has been working along with UConnPIRG to provide open source textbooks for the student body.
The first major initiative was undertaken with chemistry professor Dr. Edward Neth, who teaches CHEM 1124, 1125 and 1126. Working with a $20,000 donation from the student government, Neth edited an existing open access textbook and adapted it for his classes. Other chemistry professors have begun using open source textbooks as well, and this has already saved students thousands of dollars.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom’s wireless “Internet of Things” business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets.
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Programming/Development
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We would like to share with you the sad news, that Rob Collins has passed away earlier this month, on November 2nd, after a short but intense illness.
Many of you may know Rob from the sponsored massage sessions he regularly ran at EuroPython in recent years and which he continued to develop, taking them from a single man setup (single threaded process) to a group of people setup by giving workshops (multiprocessing) and later on by passing on his skills to more leaders (removing the GIL) to spread wellness and kindness throughout our conference series.
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When programming, I often find it’s useful to represent things as a compound. A 2D coordinate consists of an x value and y value. An amount of money consists of a number and a currency. A date range consists of start and end dates, which themselves can be compounds of year, month, and day.
As I do this, I run into the question of whether two compound objects are the same. If I have two point objects that both represent the Cartesian coordinates of (2,3), it makes sense to treat them as equal. Objects that are equal due to the value of their properties, in this case their x and y coordinates, are called value objects.
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Hardware
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Apple is selling two new computers that it’s calling MacBook Pros: one model without the new Touch Bar and one model with a Touch Bar. But according to a teardown of the Touch Bar model by iFixit, the differences don’t stop there. The Touch Bar has an entirely different motherboard, cooling system, and internal layout. Unfortunately some of those changes make it even more difficult to repair than its cousin.
The Touch Bar MacBook Pro has a much larger cooling system than the non-Touch Bar model—it uses two fans instead of one, and the symmetrical and vaguely mustache-shaped logic board wraps around both of them. The odd layout (plus the need to make additional room for extra chips like the Apple T1 and the second Thunderbolt 3 controller) leaves less room for other things, and as a result Apple has soldered the SSD to the motherboard in the Touch Bar MacBook Pros, much as it has in the 12-inch MacBook.
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Health/Nutrition
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When countries belong to several international instruments, some aspects of those instruments may run contradictory to one another. A symposium held recently by the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) sought to explore the interrelations between the convention and the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Farmers’ rights lie at the intersection of the two treaties and while some find the treaties complementary, some others view them as contradictory on farmers’ rights. Meanwhile, farmers themselves have been blocked from participating in deliberations.
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Security
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The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is undoubtedly the most widely used protocol on the Internet today. If you have ever done an online banking transaction, visited a social networking website, or checked your email, you have most likely used TLS. Apart from wrapping the plain text HTTP protocol with cryptographic goodness, other lower level protocols like SMTP and FTP can also use TLS to ensure that all the data between client and server is inaccessible to attackers in between. This article takes a brief look at the evolution of the protocol and discusses why it was necessary to make changes to it.
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Linux enjoys a level of security that most platforms cannot touch. That does not, in any way, mean it is perfect. In fact, over the last couple of years a number of really ugly vulnerabilities have been found — and very quickly patched. Enough time has passed since Heartbleed for those that do to find yet another security issue.
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Over the last few weeks, a series of powerful hacker attacks powered by the malware known as Mirai have used botnets created of internet-connected devices to clobber targets ranging from the internet backbone company Dyn to the French internet service provider OVH. And just when it seemed that Mirai might be losing steam, new evidence shows that it’s still dangerous—and even evolving.
Researchers following Mirai say that while the number of daily assaults dipped briefly, they’re now observing development in the Mirai malware itself that seems designed to allow it to infect more of the vulnerable routers, DVRs and other internet-of-things (IoT) gadgets it’s hijacked to power its streams of malicious traffic. That progression could actually increase the total population available to the botnet, they warn, potentially giving it more total compute power to draw on.
“There was an idea that maybe the bots would die off or darken over time, but I think what we are seeing is Mirai evolve,” says John Costello, a senior analyst at the security intelligence firm Flashpoint. “People are really being creative and finding new ways to infect devices that weren’t susceptible previously. Mirai is not going away.”
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Next time you go out for lunch and leave your computer unattended at the office, be careful. A new tool makes it almost trivial for criminals to log onto websites as if they were you, and get access to your network router, allowing them to launch other types of attacks.
Hackers and security researchers have long found ways to hack into computers left alone. But the new $5 tool called PoisonTap, created by the well-known hacker and developer Samy Kamkar, can even break into password-protected computers, as long as there’s a browser open in the background.Kamkar explained how it works in a blog post published on Wednesday.
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You probably know by now that plugging a random USB into your PC is the digital equivalent of swallowing a pill handed to you by a stranger on the New York subway. But serial hacker Samy Kamkar‘s latest invention may make you think of your computer’s USB ports themselves as unpatchable vulnerabilities—ones that open your network to any hacker who can get momentary access to them, even when your computer is locked.
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In all three case, the encrypted system partition is still encrypted, so you data is still save. However, as detailed in the bug report, unencrypted partitions, like ones mounted at /boot and /boot/efi (on UEFI systems) might still be open for exploitation. But how far can an attacker go on such system, when the system partition is still encrypted? Not far, I hope.
A bug always has a solution, and in this case, the authors provided an easy-to-apply workaround. I’ve expanded on it a bit in the code block below. If after applying the workaround you discover that it does not work, welcome to the club. It didn’t work on all the encrypted systems I applied it on – Ubuntu 16.10, Manjaro 16.10, and Fedora Rawhide. By the way, all three distributions were running either Cryptsetup 1.7.2 or 1.7.3.
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Everyone uses open source. It’s found in around 95 per cent of applications and it’s easy to understand why. Open source’s value in reducing development costs, in freeing internal developers to work on higher-order tasks, and in accelerating time to market is undeniable.
The rapid adoption of open source has outpaced the implementation of effective open source management and security practices. In the annual ‘Future of Open Source Survey’ conducted earlier this year by Black Duck, nearly half of respondents said they had no formal processes to track their open source, and half reported that no one has responsibility for identifying known vulnerabilities and tracking remediation.
The flip side of the open source coin is that if you’re using open source, the chances are good that you’re also including vulnerabilities known to the world at large. Since 2014, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has reported over 8,000 new vulnerabilities in open source software.
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Defence/Aggression
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Vladimir Putin has signed an order to have Russia withdrawn from the International Criminal Court (ICC) amid calls for his military to be referred over air strikes backing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.
The President instructed Russia’s foreign ministry to notify the United Nations of the country’s refusal to be subject to the body’s activity on Wednesday, following the same move by Gambia, South Africa and Burundi.
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A Malaysian delegation led by Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman will be attending the Emergency Meeting of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers to be held in Makkah, Saudi Arabia tomorrow (Nov 17).
The Foreign Ministry said the Yemeni Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia on Oct 9 and 27 was up for discussion in the Emergency Meeting.
“Malaysia’s participation at this meeting is an affirmation of its solidarity with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the missile attacks.
“Malaysia hopes that the ongoing conflict in the region will be resolved through peaceful means,” the ministry said in a statement today.
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President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his campaign railing against the Iran nuclear deal, even raising the possibility of scrapping the agreement immediately upon taking office.
But many of the deal’s most ardent critics are now saying: “Slow down.”
As the reality of Donald Trump’s White House win sinks in among nuclear deal opponents, some are insisting that pulling out of the agreement is unwise. Instead, they say, Trump should step up enforcement of the deal, look for ways to renegotiate it, and pursue measures to punish Iran for its non-nuclear misbehavior. Such a multi-pronged, get-tough approach may even give Trump cover to fend off any criticism he may get for keeping the deal.
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I was the former nuclear missile launch officer who in October appeared in a TV advertisement for Hillary Clinton, saying: “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone.” The ad featured various quotes from Trump’s campaign rallies and interviews, in which he says, among other things: “I would bomb the shit out of ’em,” “I wanna be unpredictable,” and “I love war.” As I walked through a nuclear missile launch center in the ad, I explained that “self-control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Area 51 will probably always be a part of science folklore, even if the truth about the legendary site is probably much more boring than many anticipate.
Turns out, when the intelligence community is talking about Area 51, it’s actually referring to a military dining facility, according to years long Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA.
“3 years to declassify Area 51 Intellipedia entry—and I discover it’s a dining hall at [Fort] Bliss?” the owner of The Black Vault, an online depository of FOIA requests, tweeted on Tuesday.
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The UN World Intellectual Property Organization, the foremost international body for intellectual property rights, today announced that it will make all of its publications available under Creative Commons licences – which said it helped to develop along with other organisations. The move, made along with a wide range of other major international organisations, is an effort to make its publications as widely accessible as possible, an indirect nod to the limiting nature of copyright.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline protested in Canada and cities around the USA on Tuesday, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.
Tuesday was recognized as a “Day of Action” by opponents of the 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter underground pipeline planned to deliver crude oil from production areas in North Dakota to Patoka, Ill. The pipeline would cross through land considered sacred by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and environmentalists worry about how the pipeline might affect water quality.
Former Democratic presidential candidate and independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders joined demonstrators outside the White House on Tuesday evening. In a tweet, he encouraged President Obama to “stop this pipeline anyway you can. Declare Standing Rock a national monument.”
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Donald J. Trump’s positions on climate change amount to a declaration of war on young people like me. But millennials have a stronger position in this fight than it may first appear.
There is no way to sugarcoat the consequences of what happened on Election Day. Mr. Trump is a disaster for the planet. His plan to “cancel” America’s adherence to the Paris climate agreement and accelerate fossil fuel production threatens to destroy global momentum on climate change. At the international climate talks now taking place in Marrakesh, Morocco, American environmentalists cried upon learning of Mr. Trump’s victory.
“Without U.S. action to reduce emissions and U.S. diplomatic leadership, implementation of Paris will surely slow,” Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, told The Associated Press. Keeping the increase in global warming to below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which most scientists believe is the tipping point for catastrophic changes to the earth’s natural systems, “would become impossible,” Professor Oppenheimer said.
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The Paris climate agreement, a historic international treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, has only been in effect for 12 days. But if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign promise to “cancel” the agreement, America’s participation in the pact could be halted before it begins.
In the wake of the election, there’s been a lot of speculation as to what could happen if the US reneges on their promise. Like all presidents before him, not everything Trump promised on the campaign trail will come to pass. But when a man who has said climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese government (a comment he later said was a joke) is elected to the White House, you might want to take his stated intentions on a major climate agreement seriously.
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Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his Russian counterpart Alexander Novak are said to be heading to Qatar later this week for an unscheduled meeting, according to industry sources quoted by Reuters. The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is meeting in Doha, and though OPEC’s de factor leader Saudi Arabia is not a member of the gas forum, OPEC’s Algeria, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, and Venezuela are.
According to Reuters sources who had spoken on the condition of anonymity, the Saudi minister was expected to meet other OPEC ministers, and maybe Russia’s Novak, this coming Friday.
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Saudi Arabia has had a bad week: the kingdom, having spent tens of millions in “donations” to fund not only the Clinton Foundation which is now irrelevant, but also allegedly to sponsor 20% of Hillary’s presidential campaign, has suddenly found itself with no “influence” to request in exchange for its “generosity.” Instead, it is forced to engage in something it loathes: open diplomacy.
As a result, its first attempt at engaging with the US president-elect, amounts to what is effectively a thinly veiled threat wrapped as a warning. As the FT reports, “Saudi Arabia has warned Donald Trump that the incoming US president will risk the health of his country’s economy if he acts on his election promises to block oil imports.”
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In yet another sign that behind the frequently blasted OPEC headlines meant to suggest a sense of OPEC unity yet which do nothing more than incite a short squeeze (as even Morgan Stanley has now admitted), there is far less cohesion, moments ago we learned that Nigeria’s Oil minister Emmanuel Kachikwu is the latest to skip this week’s Doha meeting scheduled for November 17 and 18. Earlier today we found that Iraq’s oil minister would likewise bypass the energy talks this week in Qatar, where rival producer Saudi Arabia plans to hold talks with Russia on possible collective action to limit production. Earlier today Bloomberg reported that his Iranian counterpart is also said to be giving the meeting a miss.
Iraq and Iran both want exemptions from any OPEC cuts in output, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia, the producer group’s biggest member, to bear the brunt of a possible reduction. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has yet to find a way to finalize a preliminary deal it reached in September to curtail supply, ending a two-year policy of pumping without limits.
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China has rejected Donald Trump’s claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax, urging the US president-elect to take a “smart decision” over his country’s commitment to the fight against global warming.
Trump, who is the first self-declared climate change denier to lead one of the world’s top emitters, has dismissed global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” and claimed the concept “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.
But speaking at UN climate talks in Marrakech on Wednesday, China’s vice foreign minister, Liu Zhenmin, pointed out that it was in fact the billionaire’s Republican predecessors who launched climate negotiations almost three decades ago.
“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.
The IPCC was set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in 1988 in a bid to better understand and respond to the risks of climate change. It received the 2007 Nobel peace prize for helping build “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming”.
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Finance
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Snap Inc. has confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering that may value the popular messaging platform at as much as $25 billion, a major step toward what would be one of the highest-profile stock debuts in recent years.
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On both sides of the Atlantic, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada is hugely controversial. A record 3.3 million people across Europe signed a petition against CETA and its twin agreement TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). European and Canadian trade unions, as well as consumer, environmental and public health groups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) reject the agreement. Constitutional challenges against CETA have been filed in Germany and Canada and the compatibility of CETA’s controversial privileges for foreign investors with EU law is likely to be judged by the European Court of Justice.
The controversy has also reached governments and parliaments. Across Europe, more than 2,100 local and regional governments have declared themselves TTIP/CETA free zones, often in cross-party resolutions. National and regional parliaments, too, worry about CETA, for example in Belgium, France, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands. In October 2016, concerns in four sub-federal Belgian governments (led by Wallonia) over the agreement’s negative impacts, and in particular its dangerous privileges for foreign investors, nearly stopped the federal government from approving the signing of CETA.
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Following the revelation that former Commission President Barroso would join Goldman Sachs International, Juncker had to be prodded long and hard before passing the case on for assessment at the Commission’s ad-hoc ethics committee. At the start of November, the committee published its opinion, criticising Barroso’s lack of judgment regarding his new roles as chairman and adviser at the bank.
And yet, the committee failed to find sufficient evidence that a breach of the ethics requirements in the European Treaty had occurred.
Juncker is now proposing an extension of the cooling-off period for outgoing presidents from 18 months to three years. Anticipating that this may not sit well with other Commissioners, he has insisted he would still subject himself to this longer period of abstinence, even if his colleagues were to object to the change of rules for ex-presidents.
It is, of course, positive to see the Commission finally accepting that there is a problem with its ethics rules. But Juncker’s proposal is yet another example of the Commission’s highest level insisting on regulating itself, and, after months of ignoring the public outcry over Commissioners’ scandals, it does too little to prevent future cases.
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Martin Selmayr is admired, despised and feared. What’s clear: He’s the most powerful EU chief of staff ever.
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Barack Obama has given a rousing defence of the virtues of democracy and warned that a backlash against globalisation is boosting populist movements around the world, in what was billed as his last public address abroad.
Speaking near the Acropolis of Athens, the outgoing US president said that democracy – like the version invented by the ancient Greeks “in this small, great world” – might still be imperfect, yet for all its flaws it fostered hope over fear.
“Even if progress follows a winding path – sometimes forward, sometimes back – democracy is still the most effective form of government ever devised by man,” Obama said.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s staff in key Midwest states sent out alarms to their headquarters in Brooklyn. They were facing a problematic shortage of paid canvassers to help turn out the vote.
For months, the Clinton campaign had banked on a wide army of volunteer organizers to help corral independents and Democratic leaners and re-energize a base not particularly enthused about the election. But they were volunteers. And as anecdotal data came back to offices in key battlegrounds, concern mounted that leadership had skimped on a critical campaign function.
“It was arrogance, arrogance that they were going to win. That this was all wrapped up,” a senior battleground state operative told The Huffington Post.
Several theories have been proffered to explain just what went wrong for the Clinton campaign in an election that virtually everyone expected the Democratic nominee to win. But lost in the discussion is a simple explanation, one that was re-emphasized to HuffPost in interviews with several high-ranking officials and state-based organizers: The Clinton campaign was harmed by its own neglect.
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Donald Trump railed against the “failing” New York Times throughout the 2016 election, and days after winning the presidency claimed the paper was “losing thousands of subscribers” for its “very poor and inaccurate” election coverage.
Not so, says the Times. The paper has picked up new subscribers to both its print and digital editions at four times the normal rate, according to spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades-Ha.
The Times is one of several publications to tout increased paid readership or donations in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. The uptick in subscriptions is a bright spot amid a flurry of unflattering post-mortems on the media’s role in propelling Trump to become the Republican nominee and general uncertainty about the industry’s influence going forward.
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We are already hearing from Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions that it is incumbent on Americans to normalize and legitimize the new Trump presidency. We are told to give him a chance, to reach across the aisle, and that we must all work hard, in President Obama’s formulation, to make sure that Trump succeeds. But before you decide to take Obama’s advice, I would implore you to stand firm and even angry on this one point at least: The current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.
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FBI Director James Comey’s credibility is under heavy fire due to his headline-making public statements about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton that have entangled the bureau in presidential politics.
Republicans howled in July when Comey publicly declared he wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Over the weekend, Democrat Clinton reportedly told supporters she blames her surprising loss to President-elect Donald Trump on Comey’s announcement 11 days before the election that he had restarted the email probe, as well as his announcement two days before the election that an examination of newly discovered emails had not changed his July findings.
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Federal prosecutors in Boston have opened a grand jury investigation into potentially illegal campaign contributions from lawyers at the Thornton Law Firm, a leading donor to Democrats around the country, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The US attorney’s office is one of three agencies now looking into the Boston-based personal injury firm’s practice of reimbursing its partners for millions of dollars in political donations, according to the two people. The law firm has insisted that the donations were legal, but, soon after the Globe revealed the firm’s practice, politicians began returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.
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These things have been ongoing for the past 15 years. Obama prosecuted more dissidents, er, “whistleblowers,” than all previous presidents combined, and he did by calling them spies under the 1917 Espionage Act. The NSA as state security has been monitoring you under two administrations.
Militarized police forces received their tanks and other weapons from two presidents. All of the terrible events that lead to Black Lives Matter took place before the election, and the killers were for the most part left unpunished by both the judiciary for criminal murders, and by the Federal-level Department of Justice for violation of civil rights. Unlike during the 1960s when the Feds stepped in and filed civil rights charges to bust up racism among local and state governments, the last two administration have not.
When people do bad things and know they’ll get away with them, that is “normalization,” not just some hate words we have sadly all heard before.
As for war and fracking, um, the U.S. has been engaged in global wars for 15 years, and set the Middle East on fire. Fracking has been destroying our nation for years, and oil dumped into the Gulf back in 2010.
Fascism did not start on November 8. We have been living in a police state of sorts for some time before you all discovered it will start next year.
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Longtime Donald Trump supporter and activist investor Carl Icahn confirmed on Tuesday that the president-elect is looking at Wall Street veteran Steven Mnuchin as his choice for treasury secretary and billionaire Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary.
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Donald Trump’s new hires should brace themselves for a full immersion in government ethics school.
They’re going to need it given the president-elect’s sprawling business empire and his lack of interest in selling off his companies and properties outright.
The Republican’s appointees will be running departments and agencies with direct ties to their boss’ businesses and wider political interests, from an IRS audit into his tax records to National Labor Relations Board enforcement of cases involving his hotel workers to the FBI’s investigation into the suspected Russian cyberespionage aimed at influencing an election that Trump just won.
Unlike past presidents who took office with considerable wealth, from George H.W. Bush to John F. Kennedy, the setup Trump is creating for his financial assets — leaving his three oldest adult children and a “team of highly skilled executives” in charge while he’s in the Oval Office — appears likely to expose large numbers of people the president hires to an unprecedented set of conflicts spanning his entire federal government.
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Speaking at President Gerald Ford’s alma mater, The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon.
Stopping short of saying Clinton did anything wrong, Jackson told a large crowd of University of Michigan students, faculty and administrators gathered at daylong celebration of his career that Obama should short-circuit President-elect Donald Trump’s promised attempt to prosecute Hillary Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.
“It would be a monumental moral mistake to pursue the indictment of Hillary Clinton,” Jackson said. He said issuing the pardon could help heal the nation, like Ford’s pardon of Nixon did.
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Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has spent the better part of the last year living in the main gladiator pit of 2016, becoming as much a target for Donald J. Trump as any of his opponents and emerging as a pivotal figure in the forced resignation of the Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes, whom she accused of sexual harassment.
On Tuesday, she was in her office at the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, taking stock, preparing for the next phase — a Trump presidency — and warning fellow journalists to look at her experience during the campaign as a potential cautionary tale.
“The relentless campaign that Trump unleashed on me and Fox News to try to get coverage the way he liked it was unprecedented and potentially very dangerous,” she said, casual but animated behind her translucent desk. If he were to repeat the same behavior from the White House, she said, “it would be quite chilling for many reporters.”
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Twitter has suspended the accounts of a number of American “alt-right” activists hours after announcing a renewed push to crack down on hate speech.
Among the accounts removed were those of the self-described white-nationalist National Policy Institute, its magazine, Radix, and its head Richard Spencer, as well as other prominent alt-right figures including Pax Dickinson and Paul Town.
Spencer, who according to anti-hate group SPLC “calls for ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ to halt the ‘deconstruction’ of European culture”, decried the bans as “corporate Stalinism” to right-wing news outlet Daily Caller.
“Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt right out of existence,” Spencer said. “They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” Members of the Reddit forum r/altright called the move a “purge”.
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Liu Yunshan, the No. 5 in the Politburo Standing Committee and in charge of ideological control, doesn’t look like an internet guru or a man who can influence the future of one of humanity’s great inventions.
Yet the 69-year-old senior cadre will be the keynote speaker at the third World Internet Conference, an event organised by the Chinese government.
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As China hosts execs from global tech companies at its World Internet Conference, human rights advocates are warning that online censorship in the country is only getting worse.
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As so often, The Beatles led the way. Barely a month before Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comments got their records burned in America, The Beatles almost pole-axed their “lovable Moptops” image with the sleeve for a US-only album, Yesterday… And Today. Satirising their US label’s latest mincing of their UK records into an extra LP, the Fabs kitted themselves up as butchers for the cover, chopping up dolls with gleeful grins. The Beatles as a premonition of Alice Cooper was all too much, and quickly recalled copies had an innocuous publicity pic glued over the grisly bloodbath.
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Police and officials of the State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations have raided at least 26 shops and six homes in October and early November across Azerbaijan to seize religious literature being distributed without the compulsory state permission. Some book sellers have already been punished. All the literature seized from shops appears to have been Muslim.
Not one State Committee official in Baku or in branches around the country, police officer or court would discuss these raids, literature seizures or punishments with Forum 18.
The “Expertise” Department at the State Committee in Baku – which implements the state censorship – told Forum 18 on 16 November its head Nahid Mammadov was out of the office and no-one else could speak for the department. Asked about the many raids, the man simply said that everything done was “in the law”. The man who answered the phone of State Committee official Aliheydar Zulfuqarov – who participated in raids on shops in the southern town of Masalli (see below) – put the phone down when Forum 18 introduced itself. The State Committee press office told Forum 18 its head, Yaqut Aliyeva, was away until 18 November and no-one else could speak to the press.
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As the democratic credentials of ‘official politics’ are being increasingly questioned, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) recently chalked up a modest victory against establishment efforts to prevent alternative voices from being heard.
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An assistant professor’s list of fake and misleading websites, many of which have driven the dialogue of politics this election season, is going viral after being published this week.
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On Tuesday Twitter announced it was rolling out new tools for reporting abuse on its network and later that day it suspended numerous “alt-right” accounts. Then Facebook came under fire after a report exposed it knew how to combat fake news articles, but did not tackle the problem for fear of conservative backlash. Facebook has since removed ads from fake news sites and a “rogue” team allegedly been put in place to take on fake news. Google, who was criticized for fake news filtering onto its front page, is also taking action to ensure more real reporting from credible outlets is highlighted. On the surface this news seems positive, but to some Donald Trump supporters this news means one thing: censorship.
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The spread of fake online news has itself been hitting headlines in recent weeks, with accusations flying that such content may have helped sweep Donald Trump into the White House.
Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communications and media at Massachusetts’s Merrimack College, has created a list of websites as a teaching resource for her students, which categorises websites and organisations that publish “false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ‘news’ sources.”
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Information doesn’t flow through the internet as freely as it seems. Depending on which country you live in, you may see different content on a webpage—or no content at all. As the internet has become the most important public space for everything from protest movements to pornography, governments around the world have started locking it down. And that has given rise to a new field of research: the science of censorship. ScienceInsider caught up with Phillipa Gill, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, to find out what’s cooking in this online cat and mouse game. She spoke to us yesterday from the Internet Measurement Conference in Santa Monica, California, which she co-chaired. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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A century ago, viewing a picture of a woman’s exposed decolletage was considered a “grave danger” to the average person’s moral health.
“Suggestive” or violent images – laughably tame by today’s standards – were quickly sliced from incoming films by New Zealand Government censors. They were the moral guardians of what the country viewed.
Today, as censorship in this country celebrates its centenary, critics are asking – is there even any point?
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Palestine Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, 18MillionRising and Dream Defenders also signed the letter, which specifically points to the disabling of Palestinian journalists’ accounts and the removal of Black activists’ content as examples of Facebook’s censorship.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Imagine if every newspaper came with a mandatory T-shirt. Suddenly, that tabloid you paged through out of curiosity becomes part of your identity. You have to explain to friends that despite being a walking billboard, you don’t actually agree with The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorials, or think The New York Times is too liberal but still covers the facts. Increasingly, you stick to outlets you unambiguously approve of, reinforcing things you already believe.
This is how Facebook imagines the future of news, and it’s absurd.
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The 2016 election took place under the spectre of a bubble. Not the subprime mortgage lending bubble that shaped the 2008 election, but the “filter bubble”. Tens of millions of American voters gets their news on Facebook, where highly personalized news feeds dish up a steady stream of content that reinforces users’ pre-existing beliefs.
Facebook users are increasingly sheltered from opposing viewpoints – and reliable news sources – and the viciously polarized state of our national politics appears to be one of the results.
Criticism of the filter bubble, which gained steam after the UK’s surprising Brexit vote, has reached a new level of urgency in the wake of Donald Trump’s upset victory, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s denial it had any influence.
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They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.
But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.
The building was designed by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates, whose grand vision was to create a communication nerve center like a “20th century fortress, with spears and arrows replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Among the many conflicts marked during this year’s Remembrance Day commemorations, the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the First Gulf War provided a timely reminder of what can be achieved when nations work together.
In an age when the very notion of military intervention has become anathema for political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, the highly successful 1991 campaign to liberate the Gulf state of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s illegal annexation marked a high point in relations between the West and its Arab allies.
Western forces, it is true, were responsible for conducting most of the operation. But the supporting role provided by Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, which actively facilitated the formation of a 500,000-strong foreign army on its soil, was invaluable.
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Indonesia was thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after the National Police named the Christian governor of the country’s capital a suspect in a blasphemy investigation over comments he made about the Quran. Outrage over those remarks set off bloody street protests this month.
The governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s popular leader, has been barred from leaving the country as the authorities continue their investigation of him, Tito Karnavian, the national police chief, said at a televised news conference.
Mr. Basuki, who is known as Ahok and is running for re-election in February, has been a political target of radical Islamic organizations since taking office in 2014. Some of those groups seized on comments he made in September to a group of fishermen, in which he lightheartedly cited a Quran verse that warns against taking Christians and Jews as friends.
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The 25-year-old is not allowed to leave the country after claiming she was attacked by two UK men last month.
The situation is not uncommon in the middle-eastern country that prohibits women from being alone with men who they are not married or directly related to.
Under Sharia law, adultery can be substantiated through a confession or if four people witnessed the offence and testified before the court.
The men are understood to have flown back to the UK.
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A British tourist has been arrested and charged with illegal “extra-marital sex” in Dubai after telling police she had been gang raped.
The 25-year-old woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was on holiday in the United Arab Emirates when she was allegedly attacked by two British men last month.
When she reported the rape at a police station, she was allegedly arrested for breaking Emirati laws against extra-marital sex, while her attackers have since flown home to the UK.
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Even the extreme legal theories of the George W Bush administration were mild compared to some of the “compromise” positions Obama’s DoJ argued for, and now Donald J Trump gets to use those positions to further its own terrifying agenda of mass deportations, reprisals against the press, torture and assassination, and surveillance based on religious affiliation or ethnic origin.
When it came to things like closing Guantanamo, Obama argued for limits on establishing offshore black-sites and military tribunals, but refused to shut the door on them. So maybe Trump won’t be able to use Gitmo to house the people he has kidnapped by his CIA, but he can use the legal authority that Obama argued for to set up lots of other Guantanamos wherever he likes.
Likewise torture: Obama decided that it was better to move and and bury the CIA torture report, and had his DoJ block any attempt to have torture declared illegal, which would have given people opposing Trump’s torture agenda with a potent legal weapon that is now unavailable to them.
Obama argued that the president should be able to create kill lists of Americans and foreigners who could be assassinated with impunity, and argued against even judicial review of these lists.
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President-elect Donald Trump, the American people voted you as the future 45th President of the United States and entrusted you with many missions and responsibilities. As head of a great democracy you will be the defender of what the forefathers of the American nation cherished the most: liberty and freedom of speech for all the citizens irrespective of their origin, religion, wealth or social status.
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As you may have noticed, a lot of people have opinions on the election that just happened. And, many people are using social media to express those opinions, for good or for bad. Some people are excited, some people are angry. And no matter which side you fall on, you should recognize that expressing opinions on social media is protected (and should be encouraged as part of a healthy political process involving public discussion and debate). Kevin Allred, a lecturer at Rutgers University, is definitely on the side of folks who aren’t happy with the results of the election. And, like many, he’s been tweeting about his opinions on the matter. Having read through his Twitter feed, it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary from stuff that I’ve seen from others. In fact, I’d argue that it actually seems fairly tame.
Either way, last night he Tweeted that the NYPD had come to his house because the police at Rutgers believed he was “a threat” based on some of his tweets. There were two tweets in particular. One was about burning a flag in protest and the other was a rhetorical question about the 2nd Amendment.
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Allred blames Trump for this — and while we’ve made it clear that we’ve got lots of concerns about Trump’s views on free speech, Trump isn’t exactly directing police to pick up people for various tweets. But the whole situation is extremely disturbing nonetheless. It’s frightening how little law enforcement seems to recognize or care about the First Amendment.
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Imprisoned Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is petitioning President Obama to grant her clemency before he leaves office. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after being convicted of passing hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and for years was denied gender-affirming surgery.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The Federal Communications Commission has deleted every major item from the agenda of its monthly meeting, apparently submitting to a request from Republicans to halt major rulemakings until Donald Trump is inaugurated as president.
Republicans from the House and Senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday urging him to stand down in his final months as chairman. The GOP pointed out that the FCC halted major rulemakings eight years ago after the election of Barack Obama when prompted by a similar request by Democrats.
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Republicans in Congress have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid passing any controversial regulations between now and Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. If FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler complies with the request, it could prevent passage of rules designed to help cable customers avoid set-top box rental fees—and any other controversial changes.
“Leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon change,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to Wheeler yesterday. “Congressional oversight of the execution of our nation’s communications policies will continue. Any action taken by the FCC following November 8, 2016, will receive particular scrutiny. I strongly urge the FCC to avoid directing its attention and resources in the coming months to complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing.”
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DRM
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Sony recently released the slightly-more powerful Playstation 4 Pro console, a beefier version of its existing PS4 console that brings 4K and HDR functionality to customers with 4K sets. 4K was already proving to be a bit of a headache for early adopters, many of whom didn’t realize that in order to get a 4K device to work, every device in the chain (particularly their audio receiver) not only needs to support 4K and the updated HDMI 2.0a standard for HDR (high dynamic range), but HDCP 2.2 — an updated version of the copy protection standard used to try and lock down video content.
HDCP has always been a bit of a headache, like so much DRM usually causing consumers more trouble than it’s worth, and then being ultimately useless in trying to prevent piracy that occurs anyway. The latest incarnation of this issue appears to be plaguing PS4 Pro owners, who are plugging their $400 console into their expensive new receiver and 4KTV only to find that the unit doesn’t work as advertised.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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As reported by this blog through a breaking news post, yesterday the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its decision in Soulier and Doke, C-301/15.
This was a reference for a preliminary ruling from the French Conseil d’État (Council of State) and concerned the compatibility with EU law [read: the InfoSoc Directive] of the 2012 French law to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books.
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A complaint from the MPAA has led the cyber-crime division of Ukraine’s National Police to raid FS.to, one of the country’s most popular pirate sites. Thus far 60 servers have been seized and 19 people have been arrested, but police fear the site could reappear since some individuals are on the run and a mirror site may be standing by in Russia.
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Two employees of anti-piracy outfit MarkScan have been arrested by Indian police. The men are accused of masquerading as competing anti-piracy firm Aiplex, informing its clients via a fake website that the company was shutting down, and suggesting MarkScan as an alternative. The CEO of the company was allegedly in on the scam, which is still under investivation.
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