11.16.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The naked emperor continues to show his true colours
Summary: The authoritarian boss of the EPO, who tried to prevent his victims from speaking out about how they had been abused by him (using revocation of their pension as a threat), causes even greater anger within the Office, stirring up fresh conversations about how to remove him
THE EPO has gotten so bad that we’ve lost sight of the USPTO. The EPO is now an international scandal and we have begun approaching the world’s leading media, which ought to cover it like it covered FIFA, VW (Dieselgate), and so on.
In response to defamatory union-shaming by Battistelli (echoing/mirroring what he so stridently did to a judge) and some utterly tasteless comment from an anonymous coward, Prunier has just published another comment to clarify the following points:
As the person directly concerned, I am responding to anonymous who posted on Sunday, 13 November 2016 at 07:30:00 GMT
1) I deny having ever harassed or defamed anyone (nor have my other fellow staff reps or SUEPO officials unfairly sanctioned or to be sanctioned, since several are still targeted).
2) The alleged victim did NOT file a complaint against me. The person who filed it was a very close associate (and protégée) of Mr Battistelli.
3) 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.
It is therefore quite inappropriate for you to hide behind anonymity to give credit to Battistelli’s smear campaign without being in possession of any relevant information.
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.
Other new comments rightly express worry that nothing can stop Battistelli because the system is broken, partly because he himself broke it. One person wrote:
How does a “President of the Boards of Appeal” fit this paragraph of Article 10 EPC?
Uneasily I would say.
The fact is that the position of the “President of the Boards of Appeal” doesn’t exist under the terms of the primary law of the EPC.
It has been created under secondary legislation at the level of the Implementing Regulations.
In CA/D 6/16 the Admin Council decreed that Rule 12 should be replaced by the following new Rules 12a, b, c and d:
Rule 12a – Organisation and management of the Boards of Appeal Unit and President of the Boards of Appeal
Rule 12b – Presidium of the Boards of Appeal and business distribution scheme for the Boards of Appeal
Rule 12c – Boards of Appeal Committee and procedure for adoption of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal
Rule 12d – Appointment and re-appointment of the members, including the Chairmen, of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal
These new Rules entered into force on 1 July 2016.
They still don’t appear to have been published in the official online version of the Implementing Regulations.
But who cares about such fine points of detail nowadays … ????
Another person wrote:
“Battistelli is not doing what the Council wants. I asked what the Council can do and apparently the Council cannot do much because of the 3/4 of the votes clause. I said Battistelli just needs 10 countries to stay forever and follow his plans and nobody raised a credible objection. …
So let us imagine that Battistelli stays another few years to continue his plans. The Council cannot do much because of this blocking minority. What would the effect be? What would the European Patent system look like in, say, 2 to 4 years?”
Not so simple.
Without a 3/4 majority Batty cannot be replaced and can sit tight.
However, as shown in October a simple majority (i.e. 50%+) would suffice to prevent him from “following his plans”.
Thus, if a simple majority of the states decided to oppose him they could block any further action on his part.
Such a scenario would result in a stalemate situation rather than BB simply continuing his plans.
He would continue to sit on his throne but wouldn’t be able to enact any further “reforms”.
Not sure if we are heading in that direction but it is one possibility.
“I guess that the money the the European Patent Office funnels into the National Patent Offices is enough a reason to keep the ministers shut,” the following comment said; it resembles the hypothesis that delegates have their votes 'bought' by Battistelli. Here is what the comment said:
“He would continue to sit on his throne but wouldn’t be able to enact any further “reforms”.
No further “reforms” certainly, but he still would be able to fire people at will to put the AC under pressure and in an embarrassing situation – as it did with Prunier when the AC denied him the last “reforms” he had submitted.
It’s absolutely incomprehensible that no single European minister responsible for IP is intervening in a situation like this when the president of an international organization that is supposed to be under their control is totally going rogue …
I guess that the money the the European Patent Office funnels into the National Patent Offices is enough a reason to keep the ministers shut …
Disgusting.
In the coming days or weeks we are going to leak yet more documents and we are going to share some of them with leading journalists. It’s time for the whole world to see what happened to the EPO under the leadership of this naked emperor. As always, more leaks are very much welcome and encouraged, at the very least to help Battistelli with his goal of “transparency” (with which comes accountability). █
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Making GNU/Linux work the ‘Microsoft way’ so as to give Microsoft greater control
‘We had some painful experiences with C and C++, and when Microsoft came out with .NET, we said, “Yes! That is what we want.”‘
–Miguel de Icaza, now Microsoft employee
Summary: A warning about lots of prepared (in advance) Microsoft brainwash, or intentionally misleading material that strives to portray Microsoft as a friend of GNU/Linux even though the company actively attacks GNU/Linux and tries to bring the competitor under its own control
WHILE we prefer to focus on the EPO and the US patent system’s software patents (the USPTO still grants them, but courts barely tolerate these), something happened today which we cannot simply brush off and ignore.
“It’s all about proprietary software. There’s nothing to celebrate here.”If one believes the lie, Microsoft now “loves Linux” and has officially joined the Linux Foundation. I have already responded to that over at Tux Machines where I also included many dozens of links to today’s nonsense (reproduced below), which was virtually everywhere. Remember these were quietly prepared in coordination with Microsoft/Linux Foundation before the announcements were actually made. It’s a well-orchestrated PR blitz that came out within an hour or two, reaching a lot of news channels simultaneously and drowning out opposition/scepticism. Almost all the links are there, except newer ones that we’ve found since, e.g. [1, 2] (it is a multi-faceted E.E.E. move that serves to also impose .NET and proprietary SQL Server on more users). There are reactions on the Web from pro-GNU/Linux people who are not so easily fooled or mesmorised by the torrent of Microsoft propaganda, delivered primarily by Microsoft-friendly writers who got groomed and prepared for it at least a day in advance (one writer accidentally published his article half a day too early and quickly took it down, he told us). There is relevance to patents, as one Red Hat employee put it: “I do wonder what #Microsoft joining #Linux foundation means wrt to those 250+ patents #Microsoft licenses to #Android OEMs.”
Compare that to optimism from those who got paid to write Microsoft-friendly puff pieces in a Windows site lately. No doubt there will be a lot more puff pieces about it in the coming days, maybe also some editorials critical of the move (I got approached for comments).
It is not a “love affair” but an attack on GNU/Linux, a classic E.E.E. move. It is imposing .NET on us, too. It’s all about proprietary software. There’s nothing to celebrate here. It’s not a victory for the Linux Foundation but a defeat; they finally sold out as Microsoft bought them off for just half a million dollars (slush funds to Microsoft).█
Related/contextual items from the news:
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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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Posted in Asia, Europe, Patents at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The future of the EPO is like that of a pipeline/production line, totally drunk on “production” (quantity, not quality)
Summary: The EPO under Battistelli is increasingly just a pipeline of bogus/low-quality patents which fuel patent trolling all around the world and also in Europe (harming the European economy)
THE EPO under Battistelli’s awful leadership gradually becomes more software patents-friendly, whereas the USPTO is moving away from such patents. Such is the nature of the Office under Battistelli, the man who will be remembered as the person who brought down the whole Organisation, severely punishing staff that dared warn about it.
Software patents at the EPO should not be allowed, yet in two counties/continents that forbid these (India also) the EPO keeps promoting these. We have mentioned this many times before, especially last month. Today the EPO did it again and also today an article was published by Tufty The Cat (quite well known in patent circles). “The EPO issues invalid patents too,” said the headline and here is what the body said:
The sole drawing of the patent is shown here on the right. Basically, the patent claims a hairdressing salon in a shipping container (or some other kind of mobile structure) with a window cut into it. This is not, however, even the broadest claim. Claim 9 defines “A mobile structure for a hairdressing salon according to one of claims 1 to 7″. According to the usual EPO interpretation of the word “for”, this would cover any shipping container.
How this application got through the EPO system is at the moment quite beyond me. From a quick review of the prosecution file though, it seems that the examiner was persuaded that adding a window made the invention allowable over US 2006/137188 A1. Just in case anyone has any doubt about whether the invention is novel, let alone inventive, there is prior art in the form of shipping containers repurposed as hair salons such as this article from 11 June 2011 (before the 23 August 2012 priority date of the patent). For further avoidance of doubt, the internet archive wayback machine (which is normally accepted by the EPO as evidence of publication date) confirms that the article was available on 16 June 2011. One of the photographs in the article, shown below, seems to have everything required according to claim 1. Incidentally, the search that led me to this took about five minutes.
The subject of awful patent scope and EPO disregarding the instructions from politicians was discussed in Dutch Parliament yesterday. We have received more information since then and also engaged in a short discussion on the subject with the politician in question. One EPO insider said to us that a “similar debate should simultaneously take place in Germany, Austria and Belgium.”
Speaking of the EPO pushing software patents not only into Europe but potentially India too, see this new article from Jack Ellis at IAM. One patent maximalist said that “Dolby Selects India for Asserting Patents Against Chinese Companies,” but the actual headline is “Dolby is the latest foreign patent owner to select India for asserting against Chinese companies” and it shows a Western company playing a proxy game with patent predators in India (also see IAM’s remarks on this Harman acquisition):
Dolby has reportedly sued Oppo and Vivo in the Delhi High Court, accusing the two Chinese electronics and smartphone manufacturers of failing to pay appropriate royalties for use of its patented technologies. Dolby follows Ericsson in seeking to assert its rights in India, something that may indicate that the jurisdiction is growing in importance from an IP strategy perspective.
BGR India reported on Friday that the Delhi High Court had issued an order relating to cases that the audio technology company had filed against a number of defendants, including Oppo, Vivo and their parent firm BBK Electronics, as well as a number of affiliated local entities. IAM contacted Dolby on this matter, but the company declined to comment.
“Dolby follows Ericsson,” says the above and as we noted last year, Ericsson, a European company, officially brought patent trolls to Europe (to London in fact). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Linux has been around for quite a long time now, and there are always new folks finding their way to it. One Linux redditor recently asked how his fellow users got into Linux, and some of their answers are quite interesting.
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Server
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Sumo Logic’s report, entitled “The State of the Modern App in AWS,” uses statistics gathered from the company’s base of 1,200 customers to get an idea of how their apps are created and what they run on.
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It’s clear that in the service provider space, using a standard cloud platform to deliver carrier-class applications may not be sufficient. Service provider applications such as virtual private networks (VPNs), VoIP, and other virtual network functions (VNFs) can’t always be delivered by a best-effort cloud approach.
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Kernel Space
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I have known Jennifer Cloer from the very early days, even before the Linux Foundation was formed. She is among the most influential women in the tech world, especially in the open source world. I have been planning to start a series of interviews of those women who made it into CIO’s most influential women in Tech list. When I approached Jennifer, I learned about a development in her career that made this story even more interesting. Cloer is moving out of the Linux Foundation and venturing into a new world of her own.
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While Linux 4.9 will be released in just a few weeks, the remaining Reiser4 file-system developers have just updated their code to support the Linux 4.8 stable kernel.
Reiser4 for Linux 4.8.0 is now available for those wanting to run this out-of-tree file-system on the current stable kernel. The Reiser4 kernel is now compatible with 4.8 and there is also a kernel oops fix when mounting forward-incompatible volumes, unneeded assertions were removed, some VFS changes were made, and there is now rename2 support.
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After announcing earlier the release of Linux kernel 4.8.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the immediate availability of the thirty-second maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
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Today, November 15, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the eighth maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series.
On November 10, we reported on the availability of the Linux 4.8.7 kernel, which brought updates to the Radeon open-source graphics drivers and many other improvements, and it now looks like Linux kernel 4.8.8 is already out not even a week from the previous update. It’s not a major release tough, as it only changes a total of 49 files, with 368 insertions and 217 deletions.
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Graphics Stack
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On November 15, 2016, X Window System developer Keith Packard was pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the X.Org Server 1.19.0 display server for GNU/Linux distributions.
At the end of July 2016, the X.Org Server 1.18.4 maintenance update marked the end of life for the 1.18 series, which was unveiled approximately one year ago, on the 11th of November 2015. The 1.19 series of the X.Org Server display server entered development after that, and a first snapshot was ready for public testing on mid-September 2016.
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It’s been more than one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.18 was released and several weeks past the planned release of X.Org Server 1.19, but nevertheless it’s out there today under the “Cioppino” codename.
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Applications
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For faster Linux file search, with instant results as you type, take a look at the (superbly) named ANGRYsearch.
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Remember Fsearch? It’s a pretty nifty file search tool for Linux inspired by the Windows Everything Search Engine app.
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It’s not even been a week since Ubuntu Budgie was made an official flavor, but we’re already starting to see hints about what we could see its first release ship with.
The Budgie desktop environment that Ubuntu Budgie is based around is maintained and developed by the Solus Project, and forms the basis of the Solus Linux distribution.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A Linux user comes across sudo and su in terminal very often. If you are a new Linux user, you might be fascinated by the things you can do with sudo and su. Last week, I also told you about a Windows command that you can use to get sudo-like functionality. Sudo and su provide root privileges in two different ways. But, how are they different? Here, I’ll try to answer this query.
Before telling you the difference, let me tell you the meaning of a root user. The root user in a Linux system has the maximum permissions and he/she can do anything to the systems. Apart from letting a normal user install/delete some package, root user permissions also act as an extra security layer.
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Games
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Feral Interactive, the specialist Linux and Mac publisher who make their livelihood out of porting games for those undervalued platforms, have today announced the Total War: Warhammer Linux release date.
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The hand-painted puzzle adventure game by Teku Studios was crowdfunded on Kickstarter three years ago, and was recently released for Linux and other PC platforms on GOG and Steam.
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On November 15, 2016, Epic Games, through Alexander Paschall, was pleased to announce the general availability of Unreal Engine 4.14 for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS.
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It previously released to other stores, but it’s now made its way onto Steam as well.
While I’m not a massive fan of retro-looking games anymore, I have to admit they have done fantastic work on the style of it. They have the retro vibe completely nailed down to the point of tempting me to give it a go sometime.
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The developer told me they are excited to bring Jupiter Hell to Linux, as apparently DoomRL has been popular with the Linux community. Linux support for Jupiter Hell is included from the beginning, so that’s fantastic to hear.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Ibar has been Enlightenment’s primary launcher for at least a decade. What it lacked in features it gained in simplicity. However, as Enlightenment has grown, ibar has seemingly stayed stagnant. I wasn’t surprised when Mike Blumenkrantz informed me this would be one of the focuses of my internship. From the depths of Enlightenment’s growling, starving stomach, Luncher was born.
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Stephen Houston, an intern at Samsung’s Open-Source Group, wrote Luncher under the direction of Mike Blumenkrantz to replace the 10+ years old “Ibar” launcher.
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Reviews
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If you ask old Linux users which system is most trusted, stable, solid and supported, Debian of course will be among the leaders of the list.
Linux notes from DarkDuck reviewed Debian Squeeze back in 2011-2012: Xfce, GNOME, KDE and even LXDE versions. But these were Live versions of Debian 6 Squeeze.
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New Releases
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Today, November 15, 2016, the stable repositories of the Solus Linux-based operating system have been flooded with a lot of updated and new packages, bringing users the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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After entring Beta staged of development three weeks ago, Red Hat’s commercial Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 6 suites are now generally available and ready for deployment in production environments.
Prominent new features included in the Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 suite are the latest MySQL 5.7 and Redis 3.2 open-source databases, PHP 7.0 and Perl 5.24 dynamic open-source programming languages, along with the Git 2.9 open-source project management tool, Thermostat 1.6 Java virtual machine (JVM) monitoring utility, and Eclipse Neon 4.6.1 integrated development environment (IDE).
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Fedora
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One of the planned features of Fedora Hubs that I am most excited about is chat integration with Fedora development chat rooms. As a mentor and onboarder of designers and other creatives into the Fedora project, I’ve witnessed IRC causing a lot of unnecessary pain and delay in the onboarding experience. The idea we have for Hubs is to integrate Fedora’s IRC channels into the Hubs web UI, requiring no IRC client installation and configuration on the part of users in order to be able to participate. The model is meant to be something like this:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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After a small delay, the Debian-based Tails amnesic incognito live system has been updated today, November 15, 2016, to version 2.7, bringing us all the latest tools and technologies for surfing the Web anonymously.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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October’s release of Ubuntu 16.10 gave us our first real look at Unity 8 in its formative desktop guise.
But as we noted in our hands-on article at that time, Unity 8 on the desktop, while somewhat functional, offers a somewhat basic user experience.
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Another day, another vulnerability; The Register today reported that a new local vulnerability that can allow someone root access. Hack A Day also reported on a bug, this one sounded so fun the way they explained it. Elsewhere, OMG!Ubuntu! and Phoronix previewed Unity coming attractions sourced from Ubuntu 17.04 UOS summit notes and DarkDuck gave Debian 8 a quick run-through.
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The last look at Unity 8 gave users a bit of pause, but upcoming releases promise to be much improved. While focusing on a “full desktop experience,” convergence is still the key word of the day. They plan to make Snaps more important and rely less on .debs (eventually removing them altogether), they want to move the apps scope and dash into an “app drawer.” They hope to add multi-monitor support and implement full window management (app windows, dialog boxes, context menus, tool tips, and the like). OMG!Ubuntu! and Phoronix have more on that.
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Today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 17.04 was a convergence Q/A talk where Unity 8 and delivering a all-Snaps image (no Debian packages) were talked about for nearly one hour.
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Notwithstanding the antenna connectors themselves, the hardware is nice. I ordered the black metal case, and I must admit I love the many LED lights in the front. It is especially useful to have color changes in the reset procedure: no more guessing what state the device is in or if I pressed the reset button long enough. The LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce the glare that our electronic devices produce.
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Siemens’s first IoT gateway runs Linux on an Intel Quark and offers Arduino shield compatibility and connectivity to the company’s MindSphere cloud.
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Axiomtek’s latest, ruggedized eBox offers 6th Gen Core CPUs, 4x GbE, 2x mini-PCIe, SATA and mSATA, I/O expansion options, and up to 32GB DDR4.
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Phones
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Android
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So I have this cool Samsung Galaxy Android tablet which I only need to use as a camera. Guess what I did while setting it up. Yep, you guessed right – disabled WiFi. By the way, that’s disabling WiFi forever. So until I retire it or give it out to somebody else, that Android tablet will never, ever access the Internet.
The only “network” communication it will ever experience is with my desktop or laptop computer (when uploading or downloading files to/from it). And I don’t think I’ll ever use Wifi Direct. It’s a solution that works well for me, knowing that I’ll never have to deal with whatever privacy-breaching tricks Google or Samsung come with next. Unless they have a way of making the device call home without Internet access. Have they?
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Since I began using a Chromebook 5 years ago, the one thing I’d conceded was the idea of playing games for any reasonable amount of time on a Chrome OS device. Sure, web games are fun for a few minutes, but any real games (as real as they get for me at my age, anyway) were far out of the realm of reality.
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Navigating your way around a new Android device will get a lot easier once you’ve mastered a few handy touchscreen gestures.
For example, you can switch between Chrome tabs with a single swipe, while a two-finger swipe will add a whole new perspective to Google Maps. No sign of the virtual Home button? There’s a gesture that’ll bring it back. Read on for all that and more.
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ONEPLUS has refreshed its flagship OnePlus 3 smartphone – a mere five months after it was first announced. Dubbed OnePlus 3T, the new phone sports an upgraded SnapDragon 821 processor, better battery life, and improved 16MP front-facing camera.
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If you know startup phone maker OnePlus, you know all about how it doesn’t follow the rulebook.
From the company’s invite-to-buy OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 to this year’s premium OnePlus 3 to the company’s VR “launches,” the company walks to the beat of its own drum, not the industry’s.
Which is why the company’s doing something it’s never done before: replacing its flagship OnePlus 3 barely half a year later with the even better OnePlus 3T.
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There is no such thing as a perfect phone, regardless of how much we argue amongst ourselves. But there are definitely phones that are better than others. The OnePlus 3 is one of those. The compromises and cut corners are not as noticeable as in years past or when compared to other devices in this price bracket. Without a doubt, OnePlus struck a fantastic balance this year.
Whether we are talking hardware, software, or camera, it can hold its own with the big boys. Some might argue that it runs neck and neck with the ZTE Axon 7, and I don’t disagree. At $399, it is very difficult to beat this phone, even this late into 2016. Since Nougat is promised by the end of the year on the stable channel, I have no qualms with giving this phone a high recommendation, even in late 2016. If you are on a tighter budget and want great bang for your buck, this is a phone you should consider… at least right now. You never know when a better phone will suddenly appear.
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That little green Android elf is everywhere this Black Friday 2016 shopping season to help retailers slash the price of tablets, phones and more running Google’s mobile operating system based on the Linux kernel.
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Stream processing and real-time analytics are becoming “must-have” technologies for data-intensive companies.
These 10 open source stream processing projects under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation aim to solve the challenges associated with ingesting and processing high volumes of data at scale.
Yes, there’s overlap, and it can be difficult to determine the best one to use, but there is something for most every stream processing use case among these choices.
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Open source is often pitched as the only way to sell software to the enterprise of today. But what should you consider to build a business around a highly popular open source project?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Today, November 15, 2016, Mozilla unveiled the final release of the Firefox 50.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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The newest versions of Firefox for desktop and Android are available today. For information on what’s new with today’s release, check out the release notes. Also, keep an eye on this blog, as we have exciting Mozilla and Firefox news to share in the coming weeks.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is finishing up the removal of Java / GCJ support ahead of next year’s GCC 7 release.
At Phoronix we have previously reported on the dropping of GCC Java support for GCC 7 and with feature development ending, the rest of the GCJ / GCC Java support is being stripped out.
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Today we have achieved that goal. With the advice of counsel, we can begin accepting scanned copies of assignments from all contributors, regardless of where they reside. With a small update to our assignment contract, we can finally make it possible for all contributors to avoid having to send their forms via the post.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Hardware/Modding
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As part of its 2-year-old Open Source Car Control project, the autonomous driving software company said today at the Los Angeles auto show that it is making available a hardware development kit that can be retrofitted to Kia Souls from 2014 model year and later for self-driving technology research. The designs for the kit can be accessed for free, or an assembled kit can be bought from PolySync.
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Health/Nutrition
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In Nigeria, 75,000 children risk dying in “a few months” as hunger grips the country’s ravaged north-east in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
Boko Haram jihadists have laid waste to the impoverished region since taking up arms against the government in 2009, displacing millions and disrupting farming and trade.
Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has reclaimed territory from the Islamists but the insurgency has taken a brutal toll, with more than 20,000 people dead, 2.6 million displaced, and famine taking root.
UN humanitarian coordinator Peter Lundberg said the crisis was unfolding at “high speed”.
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Security
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A 17-YEAR OLD has appeared in court today and admitted seven offences in relation to last October’s TalkTalk hack.
The teen, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested in Norwich in November 2015 and charged with breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
The attacks on TalkTalk resulted in the personal data of almost 160,000 people, and the banking details of 15,656 people, being accessed.
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Trump campaigned as the “law and order” candidate, so I expect law enforcement to be better funded and sentences for breaking the law to be intensified. Law enforcement will probably be enabled with more ways to catch and identify hackers and those able to be brought to American justice will likely face longer and more severe sentences.
I, of course, support these measures. Unfortunately, all administrations learn how hard it is to catch and prosecute hackers, especially when they are located in unreachable areas. On a related note, I don’t think the new administration will be any more successful in trying to put down all the Russian ransomware campaigns.
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According to a recent security advisory published by Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll as CVE-2016-4484 and entitled “Cryptsetup Initrd root Shell,” it would appear that there’s a major vulnerability in Cryptsetup affecting many GNU/Linux systems.
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An error in the implementation of the Cryptsetup utility used for encrypting hard drives allows an attacker to bypass the authentication procedures on some Linux systems just by pressing the Enter key for around 70 seconds. This results in the attacked system opening a shell with root privileges.
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At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.
The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages — known as ping floods — use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.
BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.
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Defence/Aggression
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My new book, The Drone Memos, will be published by The New Press today. The Guardian is running a 4000-word slice of the 20,000-word introduction on its website this morning. The introduction is unsparing in its criticism of the Obama administration. I argue that the administration claimed too much power, and that its efforts to shield that power from congressional, judicial, and public review were irresponsible and short-sighted. I blame the administration for normalizing extrajudicial killing and for turning over to the next administration authorities that are breathtakingly broad and not subject to any meaningful constraint that can’t be lifted by a stroke of the next president’s pen.
I began writing the introduction a year ago and finished it several months ago, when the world looked very different than it does today. I have complicated feelings about the release of the book at this particular historical moment. Obama has been a great president in many ways, and the United States is a stronger, more humane, and more just country now than it was when he took office. If Donald Trump tries to fulfill even a small fraction of his campaign pledges, the next four years will be a true test of our democratic institutions, and I’m sure I’ll look back on the Obama years nostalgically.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Donald Trump’s stunning victory has left millions in dread and moved thousands into the streets. Fear has spread among immigrants and Muslims. The 20 million who have received health insurance under Obamacare worry about Trump’s vow to repeal it. The media speculate about what he might do: Will he really tear up the Iran nuclear deal or order the CIA to start torturing people again? But it is Trump’s denial of catastrophic climate change—he has repeatedly said he considers it a “hoax”—and his vow to reverse all of the progress made under President Obama to address it that pose some of the most chilling and potentially irreversible threats.
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The renowned American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has warned the US Republican party is now “the most dangerous organisation in world history” because of the denial of climate change by President-elect Donald Trump and other leading figures.
Following the US elections, Professor Chomsky said it appeared humans planned to answer what he called “the most important question in their history … by accelerating the race to disaster”.
Mr Trump has already appointed a prominent climate change denier to run his transition team covering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other advisers include people with close links to the fossil fuel industry.
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Finance
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Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and leading Brexit campaigner, has pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process.
The ex-justice secretary, who led the Vote Leave campaign with Boris Johnson, questioned why the UK cannot just leave the EU without having settled its future relationship with the bloc after having sorted out “housekeeping” related to outstanding payments.
Speaking at the newly formed Commons Brexit committee, he said there was a tendency for civil servants to think any problem requires more civil servants and suggested “Occam’s razor” should be applied, implying the simplest solution is the best one.
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There is no chance of completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) under US president-elect Donald Trump, a senior German official has said.
“We don’t harbour any hopes of a transatlantic trade deal,” the unnamed official told the Guardian, adding: “That’s not realistic.”
Along with the UK, Germany has been the main supporter of TTIP in Europe. Now that the UK is set to leave the European Union after June’s Brexit vote, the admission by Germany that TTIP is not going to happen is effectively the death-knell for the deal.
But the comments are hardly surprising in the wake of the earlier news, reported by Ars, that the US would abandon the similar Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). However, Germany’s acknowledgement represents a huge setback for the European Commission, which was still trying to persuade Trump to proceed with TTIP last week.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.
Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.
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A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint with federal election officials that alleges Stephen Bannon—recently named one of Donald Trump’s top White House advisers—may have gotten paid illegally during Trump’s campaign by pro-Trump billionaires.
And now, a new set of Federal Election Commission filings that haven’t yet been reported on may give the group’s case some additional heft.
At issue are payments of nearly $200,000 that a super PAC called Make America Number 1 made to a company tied to Bannon. On Aug. 17, Bannon left his post as chairman of Breitbart News and became the Trump campaign’s CEO. Available FEC filings show the campaign didn’t pay Bannon a salary. Larry Noble, General Counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said he believes the super PAC covertly paid Bannon for his campaign work through his moviemaking company. Neither the super PAC nor Bannon provided a response to Noble’s comment.
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Some Republicans acknowledged there had been a sea change since Trump surprised Democrats and some in his own party by defeating Hillary Clinton.
Republicans on Capitol Hill “are so excited. People are coming up to me, telling me they’ve been with Trump since day one,” Collins explained to reporters.
“And I kind of look and say, ‘Well, OK, if you say so.’
“Donald Trump has accomplished for us something no one thought possible. … Everything is red, and we’ve got four solid years to get this right.”
After winning the GOP nomination to be Speaker for the next two years, Ryan gave yet another shout-out to Trump — the second of the day.
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Soon after terrorist attacks killed 130 people in Paris last year, Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for saying the United States had “no choice” but to close down some mosques.
Two days later, Trump called in to a radio show run by a friendly political operative who offered a suggestion.
Was it possible, asked the host, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trump hadn’t really meant that mosques should be closed?
“Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants?” Bannon asked. He continued: “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within . . . to try to tear down this country?”
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Last week I wrote a bit about the ridiculous and misguided backlash against Facebook over the election results. The basis of the claim was that there were a bunch of fake or extremely misleading stories shared on the site by Trump supporters, and some felt that helped swing the election (and, yes, there were also fake stories shared by Clinton supporters — but apparently sharing fake news was nearly twice as common among Trump supporters than Clinton supporters). I still think this analysis blaming Facebook is wrong. There was confirmation bias, absolutely, but it’s not as if a lack of fake news would have changed people’s minds. Many were just passing along the fake news because it fit the worldview they already have.
In response to that last post, someone complained that I was arguing that “facts don’t matter” and worried that this would just lead to more and more lies and fake news from all sides. I hope that’s not the case, but as I said in my reply, it’s somewhat more complicated. Some folks liked that reply a lot so I’m expanding on it a bit in this post. And the key point is to discuss why “fact checking” doesn’t really work in convincing people whom to vote for. This doesn’t mean I’m against fact checking, or think that facts don’t matter. Quite the reverse. I think more facts are really important, and I’ve spent lots of time over the years calling out bogus news stories based on factual errors.
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For the people now protesting, good for you to make your views known. It is important.
May I also suggest you use the remaining time to protest Obama’s refusal to prosecute torture, curtail the NSA, fail to close Gitmo, his jailing of whistleblowers, his decision not to use his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute police killers of young Black men under existing civil rights laws, his claiming of the power to assassinate Americans with drones, and his war on journalists via gutting of FOIA?
Because silence on those issues means Trump inherits all of that power.
May I also suggest volunteering for some of: homeless shelters, LGBTQ and vet’s crisis lines, Planned Parenthood, Congresspeople who will work for these causes, ACLU, Occupy (who addresses the economic inequality that drove many Trump voters) and the like?
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The challenge of fake and misleading news has come to the fore in the wake of the US presidential election. Facebook has bore the brunt of the criticism that it allowed misinformation to spread unfettered on its network, skewing people’s perceptions and possibly the outcome of the election – something CEO Mark Zuckerberg vehemently denies.
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We spoke at length about who is really behind the meeting’s anti-tobacco agenda.
The Rebel was the only news outlet that reported on the ban on journalists, or the arrest of peaceful farmers who were protesting outside.
Those are just two of the stories the Rebel covered, thanks to your generous donations to our crowdfudning campaign.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The FBI has a new view into what’s happening on Twitter. Last week, the bureau hired Dataminr, a Twitter-linked analytics firm, to provide an “advanced alerting tool” to over 200 users. Twitter owns a 5 percent stake in Dataminr and provides it with exclusive access to the full “firehose” of live tweets, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking for illegal activity on the service.
“Twitter is used extensively by terrorist organizations and other criminals to communicate, recruit, and raise funds for illegal activity,” the FBI wrote in a contracting document. “With increased use of Twitter by subjects of FBI investigations, it is critical to obtain a service which will allow the FBI to identify relevant information from Twitter in a timely fashion.”
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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has turned to two of the country’s top media outlets to make their case for new surveillance capabilities in what critics say is a PR play orchestrated to sow public worry about privacy-boosting technology.
Police in Canada have long pushed for broadened surveillance powers that would force people to unlock their phones, for example, or force telecommunication companies to provide real-time access to subscriber information. No such laws currently exist, but to show why the police believe they need them to do their jobs, the country’s federal force worked with two of Canada’s most respected media entities.
The RCMP gave the CBC’s David Seglins and the Toronto Star’s Robert Cribb security clearance to review the details of 10 “high priority” investigations—some of which are ongoing—that show how the police is running into investigative roadblocks on everything from locked devices to encrypted chat rooms to long waits for information. The Toronto Star’s headline describes the documents as “top-secret RCMP files.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has signed an order for Lauri Love to be extradited to America where he’s accused of hacking into US government computer networks.
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The legal team for Chelsea Manning, imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower, has petitioned US President Barack Obama to reduce her prison sentence to time served. Chelsea has already spent six years in confinement, longer than any other US leaker in history. In 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted on several counts under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”
It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk. But if the Trump administration follows through on such ideas, it will find some assistance in a surprising source: President Obama’s have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.
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The long-awaited decision – expected to cause enormous disappointment – follows more than 40 years of campaigning, court cases and calls for the UK to right a wrong committed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Hundreds of Chagos islanders living in the UK and Mauritius have been waiting for an announcement for more than two years. But cost, economic viability and objections from the US military have been significant obstacles.
It is expected that the British government will provide a further package of compensation to the islanders and that the announcement will be accompanied by an official apology for the forced movement of 1,500 people. Half of the exiles have since died.
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The government is expected to make an announcement about the resettlement of Chagos Islanders who were expelled 40 years ago to make way for a US air base.
Chagossians were forced to leave the territory in the central Indian Ocean by 1973 to make way for a major US air base on Diego Garcia.
The expulsions are regarded as one of the most shameful parts of Britain’s modern colonial history and a lengthy campaign has taken place to give Chagossians the right to resettle in the British territory.
In June, former residents of the islands lost their legal challenge at the Supreme Court.
But the Foreign Office is now understood to be preparing to make an announcement on the Chagos Islands, also referred to as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Trademark, copyright, and patent law are three segments of the same basic concept: protecting businesses from unlawful use of their property. Unfortunately, a system that arose during Roman times has not been satisfactorily updated for the digital age. Particularly with issues regarding patent and trademark law, updates will be necessary to make sure that laws remain enforceable and do their work of protecting businesses.
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In the United States, patent laws date back to Colonial times and the United States Constitution. Patents have been viewed favorably and unfavorably at different times in American History. In general, during healthy economic times, patents are viewed as driving investment, innovation, and economic growth. During depressions, patents are viewed as economically unhealthy, and geared towards creating monopolies.
While patent law has worked to prevent inventors for many years, in 2011, This American Life did an episode of their show on a particular Silicon Valley phenomenon called “patent trolls.” Patent trolls are companies which do not conduct any kind of business of their own, but simply buy patents from inventors, and then threaten companies which are using those patents with lawsuits. Since American courts have been very pro-patent since the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, companies generally have no choice but to pay the patent trolls fees, or stop using patented technology.
According to Perry Clegg, founder of Trademark Access, patents are actually hurting innovation and harming economic growth. “Because so many technological developments piggyback on each other, it is sometimes impossible to create the next big innovation without incorporating previously patented technology.” When big innovations were decades apart, this might not have made as much difference. At the rapid pace of modern technological development, patent trolling can discourage companies from innovating, if they feel it likely that they will have to pay exorbitant fees to companies who exist only to prosecute based on perceived infringement.
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Trademark and patent laws must be updated
A generation ago, it was mostly big businesses that were concerned about protecting patents and trademarks. Now, as many more small companies are entering the technological fray, it is necessary for patent, trademark, and copyright laws to be updated to keep up with the digital times.
Especially as we move towards the age of the Internet of Things, these changes will only continue to accelerate. If government officials are not careful, outdated laws run the risk of stifling growth and harming innovation.
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Copyrights
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The reason is soon explained: this reference for a preliminary ruling from the French Conseil d’État is not just a case concerning the compatibility with EU law of the French loi (Law No 2012-287 of 1 March 2012) to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books, but – more generally – a case that questions the actual freedom of Member States to legislate independently on copyright issues.
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A broad range of industry associations, academic institutions, libraries and digital rights groups have submitted their opinions on the landmark piracy case between Cox Communications and BMG. They all warn the court that the district court’s decision to hold the ISP available for pirating subscribers can have disastrous implications.
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