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… computers, we had boxes of floppy disks with amazing software like FreeHand, QuarkXPress, CorelDraw, and many others. And all could be had for only a few hundred dollars. At that time, we had to order the boxes of disks from software publishers and install them, disk-by-disk. Then publishers would introduce new, incredible enhancements and upgrades that could be purchased for… a couple hundred bucks.

10 Best Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Programs I Found in 2016 …

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/28/openvpn-2-4/feed/ 0 Links 27/10/2016: Major Changes in Unity 8, Nextcloud Targets Phones http://techrights.org/2016/10/27/nextcloud-targets-phones/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/27/nextcloud-targets-phones/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:06:09 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96444

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Linux and the Imaginary New User

      Linux has always had a reputation for being difficult to use. Consequently, when developers began improving users interfaces, they concentrated on what they imagined that new users needed. They rarely had the actual opportunity to observe new users, but the new user they imagined became a standard figure among developers, often surviving to this day.

      Yet after observing this habit for over a decade, I wonder more than ever if the imaginary new user still exists, or ever existed at all. I suspect, too, that the emphasis on this figure has been a detriment to other types of users.

    • Awwh, This Linux Wallpaper Is Adorable

      I pimped some Fedora community wallpapers yesterday, there was that (rather gorgeous) Ubuntu Timeline wallpaper a few weeks back, and the steam from hype-train that brought the “new” Ubuntu default wallpaper still lingers in the air a bit.

      So — honestly — I wanted so bad not to write about yet another wallpaper.

  • Server

    • The Point Of Docker Is More Than Containers

      Spending time with Docker during Cloud Field Day about a month ago opened my eyes to the larger ecosystem that Docker is building, and that others are building around it. There is so much more to Docker than just the idea of immutable containers.

      For a start, Docker made using containers easy. That’s no small feat for a tricky piece of technical infrastructure. Making it easy, and specifically easy for developers, to use removed a lot of friction that was no small contributor to the pain of other, earlier methods. It gave developers are really simple way to create a fully functional development environment, isolated from all other dependencies, with which to work.

    • What are the Top NFV Risks for Carriers?

      What are the risks of network functions virtualization (NFV)? As with any emerging technology, moving fast or picking the wrong components can do more harm than good. Let’s spend some time breaking down the NFV risks in building a virtual network.

      I have spent the few months gathering feedback from various service providers to get their view on whether NFV and its cousin software-defined networking (SDN) are ready for prime time. Even though many service providers expressed optimism that NFV technology is moving toward maturity, there are definitely cautionary tales on what to look out for.

      This article serves as an introduction to the challenges of NFV component selection – later articles will refer in more detail to the challenges in selecting NFV hardware and software components such as OpenStack and Open vSwitch.

    • “DevOps is a management problem”

      Improving your own organization’s performance – from where they are now to performance levels equal to the industry leaders – seems like a very long and difficult road. What is missing in most organizations? We talked to Damon Edwards, co-founder and managing partner of DTO Solutions and DevOpsCon speaker, about the challenges that accompany DevOps and how a repeatable system that empowers teams to find and fix their own problems looks like.

    • Manage disk image files wisely in the face of DevOps sprawl

      A disk image is simply a file, but that seemingly innocuous file contains a complete structure that represents applications, storage volumes and even entire disk drives.

    • TNS Guide to Serverless Technologies: The Best Frameworks, Platforms and Tools

      Even if you don’t need the servers themselves, serverless technologies could still require plenty of supporting software. Frameworks are needed to codify best practices, so that everyone is not out to reinvent the wheel, especially when it comes to interfacing with various languages such as Go, JavaScript and Python. And platforms are needed to help people avoid spending too much time on configuring the underlying infrastructure, perhaps by handing the work off to a service provider.

      Just in time for the Serverless conference in London, this post highlights some of the most widely used frameworks and platforms, as well as other supporting tools, that make successful serverless-based workloads happen.

  • Kernel Space

    • BUS1 Kernel Message Bus Posted For Review

      David Herrmann has posted the initial patches for review of the BUS1 kernel message bus, the successor to KDBUS as an in-kernel IPC mechanism.

      Herrmann announced, “This proposal introduces bus1.ko, a kernel messaging bus. This is not a request for inclusion, yet. It is rather an initial draft and a Request For Comments. While bus1 emerged out of the kdbus project, bus1 was started from scratch and the concepts have little in common. In a nutshell, bus1 provides a capability-based IPC system, similar in nature to Android Binder, Cap’n Proto, and seL4. The module is completely generic and does neither require nor mandate a user-space counter-part.”

    • Linux 4.9 Is Going To Be The “Biggest Ever” Linux Release

      The next Linux kernel release, i.e., Linux 4.9, could be the biggest ever Linux release in terms of the commits. Linus Torvalds shared this news in the release announcement of Linux 4.9-rc2. He also hinted at the possibility of turning 4.9 into an LTS release. The final build of the kernel is expected to arrive in December.

    • Why Is The Penguin Tux Official Mascot of Linux? Because Torvalds Had Penguinitis!

      The official mascot of the Linux kernel developed by Linus Torvalds is a penguin named Tux. You might have thought about the probable reasons why a penguin has been used as the face of the Linux kernel. Some people believe that Torvalds was bitten by a penguin that’s why he chose one to represent his kernel.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Dual-GPU integration in GNOME

        Thanks to the work of Hans de Goede and many others, dual-GPU (aka NVidia Optimus or AMD Hybrid Graphics) support works better than ever in Fedora 25.

        On my side, I picked up some work I originally did for Fedora 24, but ended up being blocked by hardware support. This brings better integration into GNOME.

      • ‘GNOME To Do’ App Picks Up New Features

        GNOME To Do is one of those apps you’ve probably heard of, but do not use. And with a bunch of rivals task managers and to-do list apps available on Linux — from Simplenote to Remember the Milk — and online, the little app that might has its work cutout.

  • Distributions

    • Benefits Of Using Lightweight Linux Distributions

      There are quite a few lightweight linux distributions around but why should you care especially when most of our PCs that are on the market boast some very fast multi-core processors, large volumes of RAM and very fast Solid State Drives. Sure they can bring new life to old machines but there are many other reasons why they could be awesome for you.Let me give you a few reasons you would so much benefit from going with a Lightweight Linux distribution.

    • New Releases

      • TheSSS 20.0 Server-Oriented Linux Distro Ships with Linux Kernel 4.4.17, PHP 5.6

        4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, October 26, 2016, about the release and immediate availability of version 20.0 of his server-oriented TheSSS (The Smallest Server Suite) GNU/Linux distribution.

      • Quirky 8.1 Linux Is Built with Ubuntu 16.04 Binary DEBs, Supports Raspberry Pi 3

        Puppy Linux developer Barry Kauler was happy to announce the general availability of his Quirky 8.1 “Xerus” GNU/Linux distribution built with binary DEB packages from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

        Quirky 8.1 “Xerus” is here to replace the old “April” series, and while it is indeed built using the binary DEBs of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, it stays true to being a distro from the Puppy Linux family and not an Ubuntu clone. However, it lets users install packages from the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) software repositories, a feature that was not available in the Quirky “April” releases.

      • Alpine Linux 3.4.5 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.4.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

        This is a bugfix release of the v3.4 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.27 kernels and it contains important security fixes for the kernel and for musl libc.

      • Alpine Linux 3.4.5 Released with Linux Kernel 4.4.27 LTS, Latest Security Fixes

        A new maintenance update of the server-oriented Alpine Linux 3.4 operating system has been released, bringing a new Linux kernel version from the long-term supported 4.4 series and the latest security patches.

        According to the release notes, Alpine Linux 3.4.5 is now available as the most up-to-date version of the GNU/Linux distribution based on musl libc and BusyBox, it’s powered by the Linux 4.4.27 LTS kernel, which was fully patched against the “Dirty COW” vulnerability, and includes numerous updated components and applications.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Miniconf 2016

        As I noted when I resurrected the blog, part of the reason why I managed to come back to “active duty” within Gentoo Linux is because Robin and Amy helped me set up my laptop and my staging servers for singing commits with GnuPG remotely.

        And that happened because this year I finally managed to go to the Gentoo MiniConf hosted as part of LinuxDays in Prague, Czech Republic.

    • Arch Family

      • ArchBang – Best Arch based distro for old or low-end hardware with high performance and low resource utilization

        Arch Linux is very unique, compare with other Linux distributions because it doesn’t comes with live ISO & Desktop Environment. Arch gives you the full freedom to customize the installation as you wish, When you boot up, you’ll be end up with a terminal and most of the people panic here because they don’t want to build from scratch.

        There are many, Actively developed Arch derived Linux distributions are available with pre-installed Desktop environment. I would advise you to go with any one distribution as you wish.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Why does software development take so long?
      • Debian’s New Look, Red Hat Giveaways, Ubuntu Advantage

        The newest eye candy to grace the default desktops of Debian 9 users is very tasteful and beautiful. The color palate is easy on the eyes while providing warmth and a professional aura. This year’s winner is a remarkably wonderful job by returning designer Juliette Belin, who just happened to have designed last version’s theme. 3,479 folks voted and Laura Arjona explained the vote gathering and counting methodology. I started getting a headache trying to understand that, so suffice to say the prettiest won. The other submissions are being combined into one package for easy installation.

      • Derivatives

        • DebEX Distro Now Lets You Create an Installable Debian 9 Live DVD with Refracta

          After informing us of the release of Exton|OS Light Build 161021, today, October 26, 2016, GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton sent an email to announce the availability of DebEX Barebone Build 161025.

          The latest version of the DebEX Barebone GNU/Linux distribution, build 161025, is here, based on the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” (Debian Testing) operating system and kernel 4.8.0-21-exton, a specially crafted Linux kernel package based on the latest stable Linux 4.8 kernel.

        • KNOPPIX 7.7.1 Public Release

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 17.04 Daily Builds Are Now Available to Download

            Ubuntu 17.04 Daily Builds Are Now Available to Download http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/10/ubuntu-17-04-daily-iso

          • Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Daily Build ISO Images Are Now Available for Download

            Now that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is officially open for development, the first daily build ISO images have published in the usual places for early adopters and public testers.

          • Infographic: Ubuntu Advantage explained

            Ubuntu Advantage is the commercial support package from Canonical. It includes Landscape, the Ubuntu systems management tool, and the Canonical Livepatch Service, which enables you to apply kernel fixes without restarting your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems.

            Ubuntu Advantage gives the world’s largest enterprises the assurance they need to run mission-critical workloads such as enterprise databases, virtual/cloud hosts or infrastructural services on Ubuntu.

            The infographic below gives an overview of Ubuntu Advantage, it explains the business benefits, why Ubuntu is #1 in the cloud for many organisations and includes a selection of Ubuntu Advantage customers.

          • New Video Shows Changes Headed to Unity 8

            A new YouTube video claims to show an ‘quick overview of what’s to come to Unity 8’ in a future update.

            Uploaded by Kugi Javacookies (not sure if that’s his real name), the clip is described as offering a “quick overview of what’s to come soon to Unity 8. Since the silo has now been signed-off by QA, so it will probably land really soon.”

            Kugi adds that he finds it “awesome to actually follow projects even up to the small details. Codes in launchpad, actual projects in bileto and queued silos for QA testing in Trello. Really cool! :D”.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • New Cortex-M chips add ARMv8 and TrustZone

      ARM launched its first Cortex-M MCUs with ARMv8-M and TrustZone security: the tiny, low-power Cortex-M23 and faster Cortex-M33.

      At the ARM TechCon show in Santa Clara, ARM unveiled two new Cortex-M microprocessors that will likely emerge as major Internet of Things workhorses over the coming decade, supplanting most existing Cortex-M designs. The Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 are also the first Cortex-M processors with ARMv8-M technology, enabling ARM TrustZone security, among other benefits. The TrustZone support is enabled via a new IoT-oriented CoreLink SIE-200 network-on-chip, which adds IP blocks on top of the AMBA 5 AHB5 interface. ARM also announced a TrustZone CryptoCell-312 technology for creating secure SoCs based on ARMv8-M.

    • Open Source Operating Systems for IoT

      Over the past decade, the majority of new open source OS projects have shifted from the mobile market to the Internet of Things. In this fifth article in our IoT series, we look at the many new open source operating systems that target IoT. Our previous posts have examined open source IoT frameworks, as well as Linux- and open source development hardware for IoT and consumer smart home devices. But it all starts with the OS.

      In addition to exploring new IoT-focused embedded Linux-based distributions, I’ve included a few older lightweight distributions like OpenWrt that have seen renewed uptake in the segment. While the Linux distros are aimed primarily at gateways and hubs, there has been equivalent growth in non-Linux, open source OSes for IoT that can run on microcontroller units (MCUs), and are typically aimed at IoT edge devices.

    • Congatec’s first Apollo Lake COMs include SMARC 2.0 model

      Congatec announced three Linux-friendly COMs based on Intel’s new Atom E3900 SoC: a Qseven, a COM Express Compact, and one of the first SMARC 2.0 modules.

      Congatec is one of the first vendors to announce a major product lineup based on Intel’s newly announced, 14nm-fabricated Atom E3900 “Apollo Lake” SoCs. In addition to the Qseven form-factor Conga-QA5 and the COM Express Compact Type 6 CongaTCA5 modules, the company unveiled the Conga-SA5, which is billed as Congatec’s first SMARC 2.0 module. In fact, the Conga-SA5 appears to be the company’s first SMARC COM ever, and one of the first SMARC 2.0 models to be fully announced. (See more on SMARC 2.0 below.)

    • Intel launches 14nm Atom E3900 and spins an automotive version

      The Linux-ready Atom E3900 series, which was formally announced at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona on the same day as the start of ARM TechCon in Silicon Valley, has already started rolling out to some 30 OEM customers, some of which have already announced products (see below). The first Apollo Lake based products will ship 2Q 2017, says Intel.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Chain Releases Open Source Blockchain Solution for Banks

    Chain, a San Francisco-based Blockchain startup, launched the Chain Core Developer Edition, which is a distributed ledger infrastructure built for banks and financial institutions to utilize the Blockchain technology in mainstream finance.

    Similar to most cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin, developers and users are allowed to run their applications and platforms on the Chain Core testnet, a test network sustained and supported by leading institutions including Microsoft and the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts (IC3), which is operated by Cornell University, UC Berkeley and University of Illinois.

  • Netflix Upgrades its Powerful “Chaos Monkey” Open Cloud Utility

    Few 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 tims. Now, Netflix has announced the upgrade of Chaos Monkey, and it’s worth checking in on this tool.

  • Coreboot Lands More RISC-V / lowRISC Code

    As some early post-Coreboot 4.5 changes are some work to benefit fans of the RISC-V ISA.

  • Nextcloud Advances with Mobile Moves

    The extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has been much in the news lately. CTO and founder of ownCloud Frank Karlitschek resigned from the company a few months ago. His open letter announcing the move pointed to possible friction created as ownCloud moved forward as a commercial entity as opposed to a solely community focused, open source project.

    Karlitschek had a plan, though. He is now out with a fork of ownCloud called Nextcloud, and we’ve reported on strong signs that this cloud platform has a bright future. In recent months, the company has continued to advance Nextcloud. Along with Canonical and Western Digital, the partners have launched an Ubuntu Core Linux-based cloud storage and Internet of Things device called Nextcloud Box, which we covered here. Now, Nextcloud has moved forward with some updates to its mobile strategy. Here are details.

  • Enterprise Open Source Programs Flourish — In Tech and Elsewhere

    If you cycled the clock back about 15 years and surveyed the prevailing beliefs about open source technology at the time, you would find nowhere near the volume of welcome for it that we see today. As a classic example, The Register reported all the way back in 2001 that former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer made the following famous statement in a Chicago Sun-Times interview: “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

  • 5 More Reasons to Love Kubernetes

    In part one of this series, I covered my top five reasons to love Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration platform created by Google. Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in July of 2015, where it is now under development by dozens of companies including Canonical, CoreOS, Red Hat, and more.

    My first five reasons were primarily about the project’s heritage, ease of use, and ramp-up. The next five get more technical. As I mentioned in part one, choosing a distributed system to perform tasks in a datacenter is much more complex than looking at a spreadsheet of features or performance. And, you should make your decision based on your own needs and team dynamics. However, this top 10 list will give you my perspective, as someone who has been using, testing, and developing systems for a while now.

  • Bankers plan to give Corda blockchain code to Hyperledger project
  • Are European Banks Falling Behind in Blockchain Development?
  • Hyperledger adds 10 new members to support open source distributed ledger framework

    The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project has announced that 10 new members have joined the project in order to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.

  • The Blockchain Created By Ethereum’s Fork is Forking Now

    A blockchain that was born out of the rejection of a contentious technical change is on the cusp of making a decision some argue contradicts its core values.

    That’s the situation the developers behind ethereum classic face ahead of a hard fork expected to be enacted on its blockchain on 25th October (should network participants approve the upgrade). Originally formed in reaction to a decision by the ethereum community to edit its “immutable” ledger, the fork caused an ideological schism among its enthusiasts.

    Alarmed by the action (or seeing a chance to profit by continuing the original network), miners and speculators began running its blockchain, which developers named “ethereum classic”. Other investors then bought into the vision, and today, there are currently 85m classic ethers (ETC) worth $87m.

  • Events

    • Science Hack Day India 2016

      Few months back Praveen called to tell me about the new event he is organizing along with FOSSASIA, Science Hack Day, India. I never even registered for the event as Praveen told me that he just added mine + Anwesha’s name there. Sadly as Py was sick for the last few weeks, Anwesha could not join us in the event. On 20th Hong Phuc came down to Pune, in the evening we had the PyLadies meetup in the Red Hat office.

    • Science Hack Day, Belgaum

      It started quite early with Kushal telling me that Praveen Patil was organizing a Science Hack Day with Hong Phuc’s help and that it might be an interesting place to come to. He mentioned that there were many interesting people coming in and that Nisha and I would have a good time. I wasn’t very keen though because of my usual reluctance to get out and meet people. This was especially an issue for me with Cauldron and Connect happening back to back in September, draining most of my ‘extrovert energy’. So we were definitely not going.

    • FOSDEM 2017 Real-Time Communications Call for Participation

      FOSDEM is one of the world’s premier meetings of free software developers, with over five thousand people attending each year. FOSDEM 2017 takes place 4-5 February 2017 in Brussels, Belgium.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • From OpenStack Summit, Red Hat Reports That the Deployment Era is Here

      As noted here yesterday, OpenStack is here to stay in enterprises. A new study by 451 Research analysts shows that about 72 percent of OpenStack-based clouds are between 1,000 and 10,000 cores and three fourths choose OpenStack to increase operational efficiency and app deployment speed.

      Meanwhile, in conjunction with OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Red Hat is out with very notable results from its polling of its OpenStack user base. Its study found that production deployments increased hugely in the last year, according to a survey of 150 information technology decision makers and professionals carried out by Red Hat.

    • You can run the same programs on 16 different OpenStack clouds

      Cloud companies like to talk about about how you can avoid vendor lock-in. And OpenStack just showed how to make it happen.

      Sixteen different vendors did a live demo at OpenStack Summit showing that you could run the same software stack on 16 separate OpenStack platforms.

    • ​Where OpenStack cloud is today and where it’s going tomorrow

      The future looks bright for OpenStack — according to 451 Research, OpenStack is growing rapidly to become a $5-billion-a-year cloud business. But obstacles still remain.

    • ​Mirantis OpenStack: The good news and the bad news

      Mirantis recently signed a major deal with NTT, but the company is also laying off some of its employees.

    • The World Runs on OpenStack

      The OpenStack Summit keynotes got underway the morning of October 25, with Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation, declaring that the world runs on OpenStack.

    • Study: OpenStack is Marching Forward in Enterprises

      How fast is the OpenStack global cloud services market growing? Research and Markets analysts came out with a new report recently that forecasts the global OpenStack cloud market to grow at a CAGR of 30.49% during the period 2016-2020. Many enterprises now have large scale OpenStack deployments, and in conjunction with this week’s OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, new study results are shedding light on exactly how entrenched this open cloud platform is in enteprises.

      The bottom line is: OpenStack is here to stay in enterprises.

      OpenStack deployments are getting bigger. Users are diversifying across industries. Enterprises report using the open source cloud software to support workloads that are critical to their businesses. These are among the findings in a recent study by 451 Research regarding OpenStack adoption among enterprise private cloud users. About 72 percent of OpenStack-based clouds are between 1,000 and 10,000 cores and three fourths choose OpenStack to increase operational efficiency and app deployment speed. The study was commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation.

      Here are some of the companies discussing their OpenStack deployments in Barcelona: Banco Santander, BBVA, CERN, China Mobile, Comcast, Constant Contact, Crowdstar, Deutsche Telekom, Folksam, Sky UK, Snapdeal, Swisscom, Telefonica, Verizon, Volkswagen, and Walmart. You can find some of the specific deployment stories from the companies at the OpenStack User Stories page.

    • OpenStack Adoption and Revenues on the Rise

      One thing you can count on at the semiannual OpenStack Summits are new studies and reports about OpenStack. And that’s the case at the OpenStack Summit going on in Barcelona, Spain, now through Oct. 28. A number of studies are being discussed at the event, including the October 2016 OpenStack User Survey and new analysis on the state of OpenStack from analyst firm 451 Group. According to the 451 Group, the OpenStack software market will generate $1.8 billion in revenue in 2016 and grow to $5.7 billion by 2020. The firm is forecasting that the five-year compound annual growth rate for OpenStack from 2015 through 2020 will be 35 percent. The semiannual OpenStack User Survey is also a topic of discussion at the OpenStack Summit, providing insight into the state of OpenStack deployment. Among the high-level findings is that 71 percent of OpenStack clouds are now in production and fully operational, up from 59 percent in 2015. Also of note is how well-regarded the Kubernetes orchestration system has become, outpacing CloudFoundry in terms of user interest. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the latest OpenStack research studies.

    • ​HPE backs off from OpenStack development

      HPE still supports OpenStack in its Helion cloud program, but it’s cutting way back on how much it’s spending on helping create OpenStack.

    • Is OpenStack Cloud Interoperability a Myth?

      Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, argues that interoperability doesn’t start at the infrastructure layer. It starts with applications, he said.
      BARCELONA—A keynote highlight on Oct. 26 at the OpenStack Summit here was a live, onstage demonstration with 16 OpenStack vendors, all showing a degree of interoperability. The demonstration was part of an interoperability challenge, though, according to Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis and member of the OpenStack board of directors, the infrastructure layer is not necessarily the right place to emphasize interoperability.

    • Communications Leaders Choose Red Hat OpenStack Platform for Powering Cloud Deployments to Deliver New Services
    • Red Hat: OpenStack moving beyond the proof-of-concept phase

      Red Hat’s annual poll found that 43 percent of respondents have deployed the cloud platform in production, compared to just 16 percent one year ago. The company reckons the increase reflects efforts by the community to address complexity and deployment issues that were previously known to have been a major roadblock to adoption.

      The study also noted that the steep learning curve for deploying OpenStack is being addressed as a growing number of engineers become certified to operate the platform. In addition, Red Hat cited cloud native application development as another driving force in enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

    • OpenStack Summit Emphasizes Security, Interoperability

      From security to interoperabilty to use cases and everything in-between, this week’s OpenStack Summit from Oct. 25 to 28 in Barcelona, is set to illuminate the cloud. This year’s event, which brings together vendors, operators and developers of the open-source cloud platform, will offer more sessions than ever before on securing OpenStack clouds.

      The Barcelona Summit follows the release of the OpenStack Newton milestone, which debuted on Oct. 6. While discussions about the most recent release are always part of every OpenStack Summit, so too are case-studies from operators of OpenStack clouds.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF Blogs: Who in the world is changing it through free software? Nominate them today!

      Nominations for the 19th annual Free Software Awards opened at LibrePlanet 2016, right after the most recent Free Software Awards were presented — and we need you to nominate more projects by November 6th, 2016 at 23:59 UTC. For details see instructions below.

      If you know a free software contributor or project that deserves celebration, don’t hesitate to nominate them! This is your opportunity to publicly recognize people and projects that have inspired you. Your nominations will be reviewed by our awards committee and the winners will be announced at LibrePlanet 2017.

    • denemo @ Savannah: Version 2.0.14 is imminent, please test
    • Development of a New MetaHTML

      MetaHTML is being ported to modern GNU/Linux systems by a small team of eager contributors. We are happy to announce the new developments in the world of GNU MetaHTML.

    • guile-curl v0.4 released

      I am pleased to announce an small update of guile-curl, which is a library for fetching files by URL from the internet in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It supports many protocols, such as https, ftp, tftp, and, most importantly, gopher.

  • Public Services/Government

    • While Other Cities Go Linux, Toronto Bets Big on Microsoft Software [Ed: Toronto joins the Dark Forces]

      The partnership between Microsoft and the city of Toronto certainly comes at the right time, as other authorities across the world already announced decisions to give up on Windows and Office and replace them with open-source alternatives.

      Munich is the city that started the entire trend, but it wasn’t at all a smooth transition. Some of the local officials proposed a return to Microsoft software, claiming that training and assistance actually impacted productivity and explaining that in the end it all pays off to use Microsoft software because of the familiarity that users experience, which translates to a substantial productivity boost.

      And yet, the transition off Microsoft products is happening and more authorities are willing to do it, not necessarily because of the costs, but also due to security concerns, as is the case of Russia.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Using Open Source for Data

        Bryan Liles, from DigitalOcean, explains about many useful open source big data tools in this eight minute video. I learned about Apache Mesos, Apache Presto, Google Kubernetes and more.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open-Source Toolkit Lets Communities Build Their Own Street Furniture

        Despite the vast amount of customization options technology has allotted us, it can still be difficult to create projects that are community-centric. For example, though 3D printing can help us personalize our own jewelry, it has limited use for outfitting parks with trash cans or equipping bus stops with comfortable seating. Still, hyper-customizable tech has taught us the convenience of managing our own products, eliminating the bureaucratic complications of mass produced, production-line assembly.

        Leveraging this ideology to better the community, the Better Block Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to building local communities, has developed an open-source toolkit for creating a variety of fixtures for communities. The platform, called Wikiblock, allows designs ranging from benches to beer garden fences to be downloaded and taken to a maker space where a computer-aided machine can print the design from plywood. Similar to Ikea’s simplistic, DIY approach, the printed wood can be assembled by hand, without glue or nails.

      • How to make a lighted, porch bag for Halloween

        While I typically go all out for Halloween decorations every year, I’ll admit I’m feeling tired this year. I still wanted to delight the neighborhood kids with simple details, so I decided to make lighted bags for my front porch railing this year.

        If you are someone who has a paper cutting machine like the Silhouette, this project will likely be a lot easier. Simply import the SVG file, resize for whatever size box you want, cut out, and assemble. However, for those of you who don’t have one, I’ve included instructions on how to make this project without any machine at all.

        The box was created with the help of artists who share their art at OpenClipArt. I also used Inkscape to create the SVG file. If you don’t like bats, you could modify the SVG file to include other types of clipart in the center of the bag.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Antimicrobial Resistance Should Not Overshadow Broader Issue Of Access To Medicines, Some Say

      While the issue of antimicrobial resistance has arrived in high-level discussions, and there is a consensus that the problem must be tackled one way or another to avoid slipping back into a pre-antibiotic era, some voices are highlighting the need to remember that other health issues remain unmet, and access to medicines is still an acute problem.

      On 25 October, the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization organised a joint technical symposium on antimicrobial resistance. The symposium sought to achieve a better understanding of the global challenge of antibiotic resistance and examine possible ways forward.

      Most speakers invited to the event presented possible solutions to boost research and development for new antibiotics and the need to restrict the use of existing antibiotics to prevent the building up of microbe resistance. However, some speakers insisted on the fact that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is only a part of the issue of access to medicines.

    • Between Quick Wins And Long Roads Ahead On Antimicrobial Resistance

      Raising awareness, creating effective stewardship, national action plans on antimicrobial resistance, building trust and getting onto the agenda of the G20 are critical to fostering access and appropriate use of antibiotics, according to speakers at yesterday’s joint technical symposium on antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

      The annual trilateral cooperation event between the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization and World Trade Organization was held on 25 October. The first panel of the symposium discussed the balance between fostering access to antibiotics whilst ensuring their appropriate use.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Why Clinton’s plans for no-fly zones in Syria could provoke US-Russia conflict

      The former strategists spoke to the Guardian as Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump warned that Clinton’s proposal to establish “safe zones” to protect beleaguered Syrian civilians would “lead to world war three”.

      The proposal of no-fly zones has been fiercely debated in Washington for the past five years, but has never attracted significant enthusiasm from the military because of the risk to pilots from Syrian air defenses and the presence of Russian warplanes.

      Many in US national security circles consider the risk of an aerial confrontation with the Russians to be severe.

      “I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft,” said James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, on Tuesday in response to a question from the Guardian at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    • Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors.
    • UK deploys hundreds of troops and aircraft to eastern Europe

      The UK is deploying hundreds of troops, as well as aircraft and armour to eastern Europe as part of the biggest build-up of Nato forces in the region since the cold war. The deployment is taking place during growing tensions over a series of high-profile Russian military manoeuvres.

      RAF Typhoon aircraft from RAF Coningsby will be sent to Romania for up to four months, while 800 personnel will be sent with armoured support to Estonia, 150 more than previously planned, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. France and Denmark will also commit more troops, the British government said.

    • Looking Ahead: Clinton’s Plans for Syria

      Hillary Clinton has a plan for defeating Islamic State in Syria. Donald Trump has one, too. With the conflict in Syria spreading beyond its borders, it’s essential to understand the new president’s strategies – and how they may need to be adjusted over the next four years.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks ‘sowing the seeds of its own destruction’ says former NSA chief [Ed: repeats the “Russia” smear]

      A former deputy director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), John C Inglis, believes that WikiLeaks – the whistleblowing platform led by Julian Assange – has become “internally confused” in recent years and that “natural forces” may soon wipe it out.

      “WikiLeaks might be in fact be sowing the seeds of its own destruction,” Inglis told IBTimes UK in an exclusive interview on 25 October, indicating the organisation has overstepped a boundary by leaking material which has the potential to influence the upcoming US presidential election.

    • Former NSA deputy director opens up about Snowden, Trump and mass surveillance

      To the former deputy head, Snowden is not a whistleblower and may indeed be an unwitting pawn of the Kremlin. Sitting calmly in the British Museum, London, Inglis exclusively told IBTimes UK how the agency was “stunned” by the leak now commonly known as the ‘NSA files’.

    • Roundtable: Former Deputy Director of NSA Talks Insider Threats

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Reads like you’re punting’: Why Clinton chopped a Keystone XL reference from her book

      A reference to the Keystone XL pipeline was chopped from Hillary Clinton’s memoir due to political considerations, according to the latest batch of stolen emails posted Thursday on Wikileaks.

      While writing the book Hard Choices, Clinton initially included a reference to the pipeline at the urging of her daughter, Chelsea, according to a 2014 email purportedly sent to her current campaign chair John Podesta.

      “She decided to write about Keystone because her daughter suggested that it would be a glaring omission and look like an even worse dodge if she left it out,” said the note from Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin.

      The note said the passage was crafted with some help from Podesta, then edited by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The ill-fated phrases referred to Keystone XL as a tough choice amid the transition to a clean-energy economy. They concluded with Clinton refraining to take sides, out of respect for her successor John Kerry, who led the project review as Secretary of State.

      Her book editor apparently wanted the section dropped — because it read like a political dodge.

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Worldwide Solidarity with a Green Party POTUS

      ES, “that Sea Shepard Captain, Paul Watson.” YES, “that Woodstock.” Sea Shepard Captain Paul Watson cast his vote the other day, and shared his experience about his experience as an early voter.

    • The Radical, Grassroots-Led Pirate Party Just Might Win Iceland’s Elections

      Though she’s grown out the blue-dyed coiffure, Birgitta Jónsdóttir still brightens up the anodyne halls of the Althing, Iceland’s parliament in Reykjavík, the country’s capital. In stockinged feet, a white-cotton hippie skirt, and a dark-blue embroidered waistcoat, the 49-year-old Jónsdóttir refuses to fit the classic mold of politician, even though she’s occupied a parliamentary seat for seven years, since 2012 as the front person of the Pirate Party. Jónsdóttir, the former WikiLeaks spokesperson and a published lyricist, calls herself a “poetician,” since verse is her true calling, she says, not the daily grind of politics. Yet if Iceland’s national elections were held today and not on October 29, the Pirates could head up a new government on this rugged island of 330,000 souls—possibly with Jónsdóttir as prime minister.

      Iceland’s political status quo—a Nordic-style parliamentary democracy, dominated for decades by pro-NATO conservatives—was shattered when the country went bust in the 2008 financial crisis, pitching Iceland into its deepest crisis since full independence and the republic were declared in 1944. This year, Iceland was rocked again when the Panama Papers leak exposed corruption among top politicos, including the prime minister, who resigned under fire. “People here are angry and frustrated,” says Karl Blöndal, deputy editor of the center-right Morgunbladid. “In the minds of many voters, the Pirates are the only untainted party, and with them Birgitta carries authority. She’s been the face of the opposition since the crash.”

      Although the Pirates began surging in polls more than a year ago, peaking at 43 percent in April, Jónsdóttir has been coy about whether she’d take the country’s highest post if elections go in the party’s favor and supporters insist on her as prime minister. (Iceland’s Pirates have slipped considerably in surveys since early this year; currently, they’re neck and neck with the ruling Independence Party.) The object of her desire, she says, is the Althing’s presidency, an office from which she could reinvest power in the legislature—one means of bringing politics nearer to the people, a cause close to Pirate hearts.

    • The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own

      No humans were remotely piloting the drone, which was nothing more than a machine that could be bought on Amazon. But armed with advanced artificial intelligence software, it had been transformed into a robot that could find and identify the half-dozen men carrying replicas of AK-47s around the village and pretending to be insurgents.

      As the drone descended slightly, a purple rectangle flickered on a video feed that was being relayed to engineers monitoring the test. The drone had locked onto a man obscured in the shadows, a display of hunting prowess that offered an eerie preview of how the Pentagon plans to transform warfare.

      Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.

    • The Clinton Campaign Should Stop Denying That The Wikileaks Emails Are Valid; They Are And They’re Real

      Being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, here’s how Brazile tries to claim that the emails are not real, but basically comes out with a word salad of nothing, rather than simply admitting that the email is legit.

    • Jill Stein: The Best Way to Boost the Economy Is by Saving the Planet

      Our nation—and our world—face a perfect storm of economic and environmental crises that threaten not only the global economy, but life on Earth as we know it. The dire, existential threats of climate change, wars for oil, and a stagnating, crisis-ridden economic system require bold and visionary solutions. In this election, we are deciding not just what kind of a world we want, but whether we will have a world at all.

      There is a growing concern in advanced economies that governments are running out of options to stabilize a precarious and volatile global economic system. Since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the Fed’s large-scale bond purchases, called quantitative easing, have helped push interest rates close to 0% and have done more to serve Wall Streets’ interests by way of propping up the stock market than by boosting the overall economy for average Americans.

      These have proven to be temporary fixes, providing a semblance of “recovery” without addressing the underlying problems in the real economy: stagnating demand, lack of productive investment, staggering inequality and concentration of wealth—not to mention the climbing cost of climate-related disasters, like floods and wildfires, which have cost $26.9 billion dollars in 2016 alone. As recent warning signs in the U.S. market have shown, we are hardly out of the woods when it comes to preventing another big crash. Keeping interest rates super low has only produced the illusion of a healthy economy. Without sound fiscal policies targeted to help ordinary Americans, economic growth will stagnate.

    • Chris Hedges vs. Eddie Glaude: Should Progressives Vote for Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein?

      Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, debate the issue of strategic voting and the role of third-party candidates.

    • WikiLeaks memo exposes ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’

      He dubbed those for-profit pursuits “Bill Clinton, Inc.” The resulting deals often involved a mix of foundation donations, paid speeches and consulting contracts for Bill Clinton, lumping charitable and personal financial work together in ways that may have crossed ethical boundaries.

      Bill and Hillary Clinton have both defended the work of the Clinton Foundation as completely independent of their family’s finances or political ambitions. Critics have frequently accused the Clintons of using their foundation to enrich themselves and grow their political clout in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

      However, the Band memo makes clear the inextricable ties between Bill Clinton’s personal profits and his eponymous charity. What’s more, it reveals the fact that Teneo’s operation, at least in the early months of its existence, was heavily dependent on the Clinton name and foundation to build relationships with its clients.

      One example found in the memo involves GEMS Education, a for-profit education corporation that has been linked to the teaching of Sharia Law. The group paid Bill Clinton nearly $6.2 million between 2011-15, when the former president ended his contract with the firm ahead of Hillary Clinton’s campaign launch.

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton Team Leaked Creepshot of Bernie Sanders in His Swimming Suit

      The Clinton campaign buzzed over a picture of Bernie Sanders in his swimming suit, at the same time they were pushing stories about the Vermont Senator attending a fundraiser for Democrats with wealthy supporters.

      Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, emailed the attached photo of Sanders relaxing by the pool at the DSCC retreat to Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary.

    • Memo reveals interplay between Clinton Foundation, personal business

      An internal memo released Wednesday by WikiLeaks reveals new details about the interplay between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton family’s personal business interests.

      The 12-page document is penned by Doug Band, a longtime Clinton confidant who had been the Clinton Foundation’s primary fundraiser for a decade.

      Band wrote the memo as a principal for Teneo, a private consulting firm that raised tens of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation while also acting as a personal in-house agency for Bill Clinton.

      In the memo, Band describes his “unorthodox” role in raising money for the nonprofit foundation while simultaneously securing for-profit opportunities for the former president.

      The document argues that Band’s dual lines of work were “independent” of one another. The memo came after criticism from Chelsea Clinton — revealed in a separate email published by WikiLeaks — over Band’s role within the family’s network of interests.

      The memo states that as of November 2011, Teneo had raised tens of millions for the foundation and produced between $30 million and $66 million in revenue for Bill Clinton through various “business arrangements,” including paid speeches.

    • Aide: He arranged for $50M in payments for Bill Clinton

      A close aide to Bill Clinton said he arranged for $50 million in payments for the former president, part of a complicated mingling of lucrative business deals and charity work of the Clinton Foundation mapped out in a memo released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.

      The report was written by Doug Band, who has transitioned from his job as a Clinton aide to a partner in Teneo Consulting, a company whose client roster now includes some of the biggest companies in the world. Along the way, Band wrote, he also pushed his clients and contacts to donate millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and to help win business deals for Bill Clinton.

    • WikiLeaks does good work. It’s not Assange who’s gone off the deep end, it’s us

      What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.

    • Hacked memo offers an angry glimpse inside ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’

      As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton’s doing it, too.

      The unusual and brash rejoinder from veteran Clinton aide and Teneo Consulting co-founder Doug Band is scattered across the thousands of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, but a memo released Wednesday provides the most detailed look to date at the intertwined worlds of nonprofit, for-profit, official and political activities involving Clinton and many of his top aides.

    • The Green Party in the U.S. is a “Movement Party”
    • ‘There’s no good answer’: Podesta leaks show Clinton campaign stumped by email server debacle

      With the whistleblowing site promising the release of around 50,000 emails from Podesta, Wednesday’s dump brings to 33,042, the number of messages published by WikiLeaks so far.

    • WIKILEAKS: Clinton Camp Asked For Money From Donor With Russian Oil Ties

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign pitched a small group of wealthy liberals worried about global warming to become “climate policy donors,” according to a leaked email chain.

      One of those donors, however, has taken money from a Bermuda-based law firm with extensive ties to Russia. The email chain was one of thousands published online by WikiLeaks from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s hacked Gmail account.

    • Clinton campaign chair John Podesta gave his email login info to hackers after clicking on phishing link

      How did alleged hackers get access to the email account of John Podesta, the chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign? Apparently he just gave them his password.

      This is according to a leading cybersecurity firm, which says Podesta fell for a simple phishing scam frequently used in spam mail.

      A researcher at the company SecureWorks told Motherboard that Podesta was sent an email on March 19 that appeared to have come from Google. In the email was a link using Bitly, a URL shortening service. Podesta clicked on this link, which took him to a fake Google page, where he then typed in his login information.

      According to the cybersecurity firm, this is how the email account of former secretary of state Colin Powell was also hacked.

      The alleged hackers appear to later have sent Podesta’s emails to the whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks, which has published them this month in installments. WikiLeaks says it has 50,000 messages to and from Podesta, and has published roughly 2,000 per day.

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton’s Campaign Chairman Lost His Cell Phone Getting Out Of Cab, Leaked Podesta Email Shows

      John Podesta lost his cell phone getting out of a cab, the latest dump of WikiLeaks‘ “The Podesta Emails” indicates. Podesta, the chairman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, appears to have sent an email to Eryn Sepp on July 19, 2015, in which he asks for help finding his lost phone.

      “[I] lost my phone this am. It must have fallen off my belt getting in or out of the cab. I used Diamond and had a 4:45 pick up at Brandywine. Can you call Diamond Cab and see if the cab driver found it. They should be able to figure it out given the pickup. The receipt says #Diamond 444 C502,” Podesta appears to have written, according to the allegedly leaked email in WikiLeaks’ Podesta files.

      Readers have speculated that this incident might have been the way whoever delivered the Podesta files to WikiLeaks was able to access Podesta’s emails.

    • ‘Take the Money!!’ and other highlights from the Podesta email leak

      Throughout the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign presented her as a crusading reformer who would take on powerful corporate interests and curb the role of big money in American politics.

      But the recent WikiLeaks dump of campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails offers revealing snapshots that tell a somewhat different story. Top aides plot to “scare our people into giving bigger sums.” They debate whether to take cash from registered foreign agents: “Take the money!!” one senior campaign official advises. A top corporate lobbyist, pressed to “hit up” his clients for Clinton campaign coffers, asks for high-level help to advance one of those client’s interests. And there are new details about the overseas cash that rolled into the Clinton Foundation — including a $12 million commitment from the king of Morocco that Hillary Clinton personally helped facilitate.

      The emails also disclose just how nervous top Clinton advisers were that Vice President Joe Biden might get into the race (Podesta himself was convinced he was getting in.) And they fretted about their own candidate’s limitations. “Almost no one knows better [than] me that her instincts can be terrible,” wrote one longtime Clinton aide.

    • Why Bernie Was Right

      Wikileaks’ latest document dump vindicates Bernie Sanders’ critique of Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment.

    • The FBI’s Clinton Probe Gets Curiouser

      Hillary Clinton may win the election in two weeks, but the manner of her victory will bedevil her in the White House. Specifically, evidence keeps turning up suggesting that the FBI probe into her emails was influenced by political favoritism and double standards.

    • Pirates Could Rule Iceland After Upcoming Legislative Elections

      The Pirate Party promises to clean up corruption, grant asylum to Edward Snowden and accept the bitcoin virtual currency.

      Riding a wave of anger over perceived corruption among Iceland’s political elite, the Pirate Party is doing well in the polls ahead of Saturday’s general election.

    • WikiLeaks shows Clinton hid email scandal from her own staff

      Hillary Clinton’s closest aides hid the private email scandal from her campaign team in the months before the official launch of her presidential campaign, emails made public by WikiLeaks show.

      Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, and Neera Tanden, co-chair of Clinton’s transition team, each expressed shock at the revelations about her private server as they emerged in early March 2015.

      Although Clinton’s team had performed research on her in 2014 as staff prepared for her campaign, Clinton’s inner circle apparently steered Mook and others away from the issue until it was too late.

      When Podesta asked Mook if he had “any idea of the depth of this story,” Mook answered simply, “Nope.”

    • 2016 The Choice: Washington Post reporter on a WikiLeaks hacked memo and ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’

      On Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016, Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric speaks with Washington Post political investigations reporter Rosalind Helderman about her article detailing a hacked memo released by WikiLeaks that appears to implicate former President Bill Clinton in a pay to play scenario.

      Yahoo News Now Special Edition: “2016 The Choice” — Every weekday until the election, we’ll be coming to you live from the Yahoo Studios in New York City, bringing the latest information and analysis of the day’s most compelling storylines in the race for the White House.

    • Erica Garner blasts Clinton campaign over discussions staffers had about her father’s death in WikiLeaks emails

      Erica Garner, the daughter of police chokehold victim Eric Garner, ripped the Hillary Clinton campaign in a series of tweets Thursday after new campaign emails released by WikiLeaks showed how the Democratic nominee’s staffers discussed the death of her father.

      “I’m troubled by the revelation that you and this campaign actually discussed ‘using’ Eric Garner … Why would you want to ‘use my dad?” Garner tweeted along with a link to emails released by WikiLeaks. “These people will co opt anything to push their agenda. Police violence is not the same as gun violence.

    • WikiLeaks: Team Hillary Feared Clinton-Cosby Comparisons

      Political operative Ron Klain in January sent an “urgent” email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff warning of possible questions she might face, including how her husband’s sexual indiscretions might compare to disgraced comedian Bill Cosby.

      Klain’s insights became public Thursday thanks to the latest dump by WikiLeaks of campaign Chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails.

      Klain, who served as chief of staff to Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, wrote that the campaign needed to set aside time to discuss the political questions, which now seem to be really owning the coverage.”

      Klain had several under the heading “WJC Issues.”

      One was particularly harsh: “How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?”

    • Wikileaks Reveals How Bill Clinton Profited From the Clinton Foundation

      A new cache of hacked e-mails, released Wednesday by WikiLeaks, is shedding new light on how Bill Clinton made millions of dollars while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, and raising questions about whether there may have been conflicts of interest between foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and the former president’s personal business.

      In one 2011 memo written by Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Band explains how he worked for years to raise $46 million for the Foundation through the Clinton Global Initiative, while also leveraging his relationships with corporate sponsors to secure lucrative speaking arrangements and consulting gigs for the former president. Band, who wrote the 12-page memo in response to an internal audit being conducted by lawyers for the Clinton Foundation, described the money-making endeavor as “Bill Clinton, Inc.”

      Those for-profit activities largely involved “speeches, books, and advisory service engagements” in which Band and his private consulting firm, Teneo, acted as “agents, lawyers, managers, and implementers.” Teneo also negotiated “in-kind services for the President and his family—for personal travel, hospitality, vacation, and the like.” By 2011, Bill Clinton had secured over $50 million in compensation and received an additional $66 million in future contracts, according to the memo. Among the deals were a number of paid speeches to corporations including banks like UBS and Barclays, and an $18 million arrangement to serve as “honorary chancellor” for Laureate International Universities, a for-profit college. Some foundation donors were also clients of Teneo, although there is no evidence of any quid pro quo.

    • WikiLeaks-released memo outlines Bill Clinton’s lucrative speeches

      In the memo, Band details how he set up for-profit deals for the former president, both involving money and “as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”

      Band’s memo covers 2001 to 2011, during which time “President Clinton’s business arrangements have yielded more than $30 million for him personally with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years, should he choose to continue with the current engagements.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Musical Space: Censorship

      As you can imagine, the Nazis and the Soviet Union clamped down hard on music. Not only were many pieces permanently taken from society, but their composers as well. Modern Russia has also done its share; witness the imprisonment of the feminist Russian protest-punk band Pussy Riot in 2012.

    • Internet Celebrity ‘Bardock Obama’ Talks Censorship, ‘Dragon Ball Super’ In Interview [Exclusive]

      Censorship isn’t fun. Sure, some things need to be censored, but the politically correct world that we live in now has caused many people to fear expressing their opinions, even if it’s something harmless or backed by facts. You have a political view? Well, maybe you should hold it back because others may disagree. You don’t like a certain athlete’s protest of the national anthem? Delete that Instagram post because you’re going to get death threats. Fear has consumed us like a fire in a time of needing to please everyone, and it’s causing both panic and frustration among social media users.

    • With Interest In Profile Defenders’ Questionable Lawsuits Rising, The Lawsuits Start Falling

      Earlier this year, we were among the first to write about the highly questionable practice of “reputation management” companies filing clearly bogus lawsuits against unknown defendants, only to magically have those “defendants” show up a day or two later with an agreement that they had posted defamatory content. The goal of these lawsuits was obvious: get a court order. That’s because many platform websites, including Google, won’t take down or delink content based on a claim of defamation, but will do so if there’s a court order. Of course, filing a real lawsuit has all sorts of problems, including money and actually needing to have a real case. These reputation management lawsuits got around all of that by basically faking defendants, having them “agree” to a settlement admitting to defamation, and getting a court order saying that the content is defamatory. Neat and clean. And total abuse of legal process.

      Last month, Public Citizen’s Paul Levy (who has helped defend Techdirt against some legal bullies) picked up on this thread and found evidence of more bogus lawsuits. A few weeks ago, he and famed law professor Eugene Volokh teamed up to reveal more details on a series of such lawsuits, which all seemed to be connected back to a guy named Richart Ruddie and an operation that goes by a bunch of names, but mainly Profile Defenders. It appears that Ruddie/Profile Defenders is not the only one filing these kinds of lawsuits, but he’s been prolific. So far, Ruddie’s only response is a bizarre press release touting his “anti-cyberbullying skills.”

    • Pissed Consumer Sues Reputation Management Firms Over Their Bogus Lawsuit/Fake Defendant/Takedown Scams

      In the last few weeks, we’ve written a few posts about Richart Ruddie’s company, Profile Defenders, which appears to be “improving reputations” online by filing bogus defamation lawsuits, finding a bogus made-up “defendant” to “admit” to posting defamatory information, reaching a “settlement” and getting a court order. The whole scheme is about getting that court order, which is then sent on to Google and others (mainly Google). The whole point: if Google sees a court order saying that some content is defamatory, it will de-index that page. That the whole process to get that court order is a total sham is basically ignored. That may be changing. We were just noting that some of Profile Defenders’ cases are in trouble, and at least one has had the court order vacated.

    • Facebook’s Arbitrary Offensiveness Police Take Down Informational Video About Breast Cancer Screening

      Stories of Facebook’s attempt at puritanical patrols of its site are legion at this point. The site has demonstrated it cannot filter out parody, artwork, simple speech in the form of outrage, iconic historical photos, or sculpture from its prude-patrol censorship. As a private company, Facebook is of course allowed to follow its own whim when it comes to what is allowed on its site, but as an important tool in this era for communication and speech, the company is also a legitimate target for derision when it FUBARs this as badly as it does so often.

      So queue up the face-palming once more, as Facebook has decided to remove a video posted by a Swedish cancer charity informing women how to check for breast cancer, because the video included animated breasts, and breasts are icky icky.

    • Amazon slammed for censoring female erotica writer Anais Nin

      THERE’S a new book out by 20th century erotica pioneer Anais Nin — but you won’t find it if you search on Amazon.

      The world’s largest bookseller has black-listed erotica collection Auletris, the latest posthumous Nin work, after its publisher refused to edit the text to remove its more salacious details.

      But Nin’s literary cult following has slammed the retailer for “hypocrisy”, arguing that its censorship policy is haphazard and nonsensical.

      Long before the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon brought erotic fiction to the mainstream, French bohemian Anais Nin penned the writings that would see her hailed by critics as among the best authors of female erotica.

      Delta of Venus and Little Birds, erotica collections published in the late 1970s after Nin’s death,can both be searched and bought on Amazon.

    • Putting a muzzle on the right to disagree
    • Read This Dad’s Perfect Response To An Ironic School Permission Slip
    • This Kid Needed A Permission Slip To Read ‘Fahrenheit 451′, & Dad’s Response Was Perfect
    • Daily Show Writer’s Reaction Letter On Censorship Goes Viral
    • 8th Grader Has to Have a Permission Slip Signed to Read ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Dad Responds Epically

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Alibaba’s Boss Says Chinese Government Should Use Big Data Techniques On Its ‘Citizen Scores’ Surveillance Store

      He gave a concrete example of how big data techniques could be used in this context (original in Chinese). He said that there was nothing suspicious about somebody buying a pressure cooker or a clock, nor anything suspicious about someone buying ball bearings. But if somebody buys all of them together, you have a suspicious pattern. His suggestion that data mining techniques applied to everyday purchases might help the authorities to spot these patterns and to stop criminals before they act — a familiar enough idea — indicates that he is thinking of China’s plans to track every transaction from every shop as part of its “citizen scores” project.

      Once that data is gathered, it would indeed be possible to start applying big data techniques as a matter of course in order to spot correlations — something already being used on Internet data by the NSA and GCHQ. But Ma’s suggestion is to go even further, and to analyze every digital breadcrumb people drop for possible significance when combined with more data points, whether their own or of others.

    • Google’s Quiet, Confusing Privacy Policy Change Is Why We Need More Transparency & Control

      Last week, I wrote about how privacy is about tradeoffs, and despite what some people claim, there’s no such thing as “absolute privacy,” nor would you actually want something approximating what people think they mean by it. The real issue is the tradeoff. People are quite willing to trade certain information in exchange for value. But, the trade has to be clear and worth it. That’s where the real problems come in. When we don’t know what’s happening with our data, or it’s used in a sneaky way, that’s when people feel abused. Give people a clear understanding of what they’re giving and what they’re getting and you eliminate most of the problem. Then give end users greater control over all of this and you eliminate even more of the problem.

      This was our thinking in designing a Privacy Bill of Rights for companies to abide by in designing their services (along with EFF and Namecheap).

      It appears that Google would fail to meet the standards of that bill of rights. Last week, ProPublica wrote about how Google quietly changed the privacy policy related to how it connects DoubleClick advertising to other data that it has about you, allowing the company to actually link your name and other identifying information to you as you surf around the web. And, on top of that, it apparently includes tying what you type in Gmail to the ads you might see.

    • Pardoning Edward Snowden

      New attention is being paid to American exile Edward Snowden these days with the release of a movie by filmmaker and screenwriter Oliver Stone. Titled “Snowden,” it looks into what drove the National Security Agency (NSA) contract worker to take top secret documents from his workplace.

      More attention to Snowden is also being generated with the calls by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union for President Barack Obama to pardon him.

    • Former NSA contractor again asks to be released from jail after alleged document theft

      A former National Security Agency contractor charged with stealing government property and taking classified information appealed to be released from prison in a motion Tuesday as he awaits trial.

      Harold T. Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, was charged in August with stealing 50 terabytes of information over two decades. Martin’s lawyers have not denied the theft but have characterized him as a hoarder who started taking documents home to help him get better at his job.

      On Friday, Martin’s lawyers tried to convince a judge to release him, but Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite ruled he was a flight risk and had to remain in jail.

    • “He’s not Edward Snowden,” lawyers for accused NSA contractor tell judge

      Defense attorneys representing Harold Martin, the former National Security Agency contractor accused of stealing a vast quantity of classified materials, have asked a more senior judge to review the decision that kept their client in federal custody.

      On Tuesday, Martin’s federal public defenders filed a “motion to review detention order,” asking US District Judge Richard D. Bennett to overrule his more junior colleague’s decision last Friday to keep Martin behind bars.

      In August, when Martin was arrested, investigators seized 50 terabytes’ worth of data and many other printed and classified documents from Martin’s home in suburban Maryland. If all of this data was indeed classified, it would be the largest such heist from the NSA, far larger than what former contractor Edward Snowden took.

      During last week’s hearing, James Wyda, one of Martin’s lawyers, told US Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite that his client “is not Edward Snowden. He’s not someone who, due to political ideas or philosophical ideas or moral principles, thinks he knows better than everybody else.”

    • Yahoo Asks James Clapper To Please Let It Talk About The Email Scanning It Did For The Government

      “Does not exist” is not nearly the same thing as “did not exist.” This means Yahoo is no longer scanning emails in this fashion, not that it never performed this scanning.

      The letter does make a good point about transparency. Currently, Yahoo is unable to defend itself against any allegations because it is likely under a gag order. Yahoo would like Clapper’s office to share in the public pain, especially since it had a problem sharing in the communications gathered on its behalf by the email provider.

      Public embarrassment or not, Clapper’s office is probably not rushing through a declassification review of this Section 702 FISA order. It could still be months or years before the government produces this document and/or allows Yahoo to speak openly about its email scanning program.

      Perhaps recognizing that a displeased letter to the ODNI doesn’t create much leverage, the company appears to be making this a global issue, rather than simply a domestic one. Marcy Wheeler points out that the letter mentions Yahoo’s global reach and users several times and namechecks the EU’s Privacy Shield agreement. This may be the key that loosens the Intelligence Community’s Glomarred lips.

    • ACLU Sues Government Over Unreleased FISA Court Opinions

      The US government is still holding onto its opacity ideals while publicly touting transparency directives. The FISA court — which presides over the NSA’s surveillance programs — has normally been completely shrouded in darkness. Things changed in 2013 after Ed Snowden began leaking documents.

      Forced into a conversation about domestic surveillance, the administration responded with more transparency promises and the signing of the USA Freedom Act into law. The new law curtailed the collection of domestic business records (phone metadata and other third-party records) and required the court to make its opinions public following declassification reviews.

      All well and good, but the government has apparently decided the new law only requires transparency going forward. FISA opinions dating back to 2001 still remain locked up, despite transparency promises and reform efforts.

    • Kuwait Backtracks On Mandatory DNA Database Of All Citizens And Visitors

      A few weeks ago, we reported on a move by some public-spirited lawyers in Kuwait to challenge an extraordinary new law that would require everyone in the country — citizens and visitors like — to provide their DNA for a huge new database. It seemed like a quixotic move, since the Kuwaiti authorities were unlikely to be intimidated by a bunch of lawyers.

    • Cyber after Snowden

      The damage, scar tissue, and cleanup process in a post-Snowden world

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Netflix CEO Wary That AT&T’s Latest Merger Could Hurt Streaming Competitors

      Streaming video competitors are justifiably nervous about AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Consumer advocates have been raising alarm bells since the deal was announced, warning that AT&T could make it more difficult than ever for streaming providers to gain access to the content they’ll need to compete with AT&T’s upcoming DirecTV Now streaming service. They’re also concerned that AT&T will continue to use zero rating to give its own content a distinct advantage, while penalizing streaming competitors like Netflix and Amazon.

    • Google Fiber Announces Layoffs & Deployment Pause, Will Likely Pivot To Wireless

      Back in August a report emerged claiming that Google Fiber executives were having some second thoughts about this whole “building a nationwide fiber network from the ground up” thing. More specifically, the report suggested that some executives were disappointed with the slow pace of digging fiber trenches, and were becoming bullish on the idea of using next-gen wireless to supplement fiber after acquiring fixed wireless provider Webpass. As such, the report said the company was pondering some staff reductions, some executive changes, and a bit of a pivot.

      Fast forward to this week when Access CEO Craig Barrett posted a cheery but ambiguous blog post not only formally announcing most of these changes, but his own resignation as CEO. According to Barrett, Google will continue to serve and expand Google Fiber’s existing markets (Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Kansas City, Nashville, Provo, Salt Lake City, and The Triangle in North Carolina), and will also build out previously-announced but not yet started efforts in Huntsville, Alabama; San Antonio, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and Irvine, California.

    • Alphabet Cutting Jobs in Google Fiber Retrenchment

      Google in the past two years put in place plans to expand its Fiber fast internet service to more than 20 cities. Inside the company, executives harbored bigger ambitions: to deliver service nationwide and upend the traditional broadband industry.

      Google parent Alphabet Inc. reset the project on a more humble footing on Tuesday. Craig Barratt, head of the Access unit that includes Google Fiber, is leaving, and about 9 percent of staff is being let go, according to a person familiar with the situation. The business has about 1,500 employees, meaning there will be more than 130 job losses.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • As The Cubs Head To The World Series, The Team Is Also Raging Against Single-Word Trademarks

        On the bright side, I suppose, if the plan by the Cubs was to undertake an overly aggressive stance on trademark protection every round of the playoffs, there’s only one round left, so this should be it. We had just been discussing that as the team entered the League Series to attempt to make the World Series, it had filed a lawsuit against the many street vendors that line the path to Wrigley Field for selling counterfeit merchandise. This suit, while perfectly within the rights of the team, bucked a decades-long trend of allowing those sales. It was part of the tradition of going to a game, walking by these vendors and seeing their kooky designs. Another tradition for the team is raising a blue “W” flag whenever they win. That “W” was part of trademark opposition by the Cubs and MLB when a business unrelated to the professional sports market dared to use the single letter in a logo for its financial services product.

        And now it seems that, on the eve of the World Series, the Cubs are going after more than one kind of W still, as well as the letter C.

      • Car-Freshener Wields Little Trees Trademark To Bankrupt Non Profit That Helped Ex-Cons And Recovering Addicts

        Back in August, Mike wrote about a trademark case between Car-Freshner Corp., the company that makes those ubiquitous tree-shaped air-fresheners, and Sun Cedar, a tiny non-profit that made real-wood fresheners while employing at-risk folk in the form of the homeless, ex-cons and recovering addicts. It was a strange case for any number of reasons, including the dissimilar appearance between the product of the two companies, the wide delta of size of the two companies, and the very nature of the work Sun Cedar was attempting to do as a social good. Sadly but unsurprisingly, Car-Freshner trotted out the excuse that it had to sue this small non-profit or risk losing its trademarks.

        And now it seems like, rather than working out some other kind of arrangement that would have allowed Sun Cedar’s good work to continue, the trademark dispute has resulted in the end of the non-profit entirely, at least in its current iteration. Even with an attorney agreeing to represent the non-profit for free, the costs of taking on the suit in far-off NYC simply killed the whole operation.

      • Trademark Suit Dashes Hopes Of Lawrence Company That Hired The Homeless

        The company that filed the suit, Car-Freshner Corp. of Watertown, New York, is known for its aggressive defense of its trademark. It once sued a greeting card company for using a scratch-and-sniff air freshener shaped like a tree.

        Mediation efforts between Sun Cedar and Car-Freshner were unsuccessful and last month Sun Cedar filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Its shop, a converted garage, now sits idle. The equipment Adams purchased will be sold to pay off Sun Cedar’s debts.

    • Copyrights

      • The Reason The Copyright Office Misrepresented Copyright Law To The FCC: Hollywood Told It To

        There was some oddity over the summer, when the Copyright Office flat out misrepresented copyright law to Congress and the FCC with regard to the impact on copyright of the FCC’s (now dead) proposal to create competition among set top box providers. As we’ve explained over and over again, there were no copyright implications with the FCC’s proposal. All it said was that if an authorized user wanted to access authorized content via a third party device, that authorized user should be able to do so. And yet, the Copyright Office, incorrectly, seemed to make up an entirely new exclusivity in copyright law (one that would outlaw DVRs) that basically said not only could a content provider license content to a cable TV provider, but it could also limit the devices on which end users could view that content.

        Simply put: that’s wrong. That’s not how copyright law works, and we’ve known that since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Betamax case decades ago.

        But why would the Copyright Office so misrepresent copyright law? That was the perplexing part. Even with a bunch of copyright professors explaining how wrong the Copyright Office was, the Office still went ahead with its letter. Of course, as with so many policy issues, it really seemed like the Copyright Office was just acting like a lobbying arm of Hollywood.

      • Linking to unlicensed content: Swedish court applies GS Media

        In 2012 the claimant (Rebecka Jonsson) filmed a bungee jumping session gone wrong in Africa.

        Someone (not Ms Jonsson) uploaded the video on YouTube. On 9 January 2012 the YouTube video was embedded on the L’Avenir website run by the defendant, in the context of an article describing the incident.

        The claimant had neither authorised the publication of the video on YouTube, nor its embedding in the L’Avenir article.

        In her action before the Attunda District Court, Ms Jonsson claimed that L’Avenir had infringed copyright in her video by both embedding it on its website and publishing a frozen still of the video. She sought damages for EUR 1931 against the defendant, as well as award of litigation costs.

        The Swedish court stated at the outset that the video is protected by Swedish copyright law, and noted how the circumstance for which the claimant’s video was (and still is) available on YouTube does not mean that no copyright infringement has occurred. This is because the claimant had not authorised the publication of the video on YouTube, nor – apparently – anywhere else on the internet.

      • Shameful: Perfectly Reasonable Academic Book On Gene Kelly Killed By Bogus Copyright Claims

        Remember when a copyright maximalist think tank guy insisted that copyright would never, ever be used for censorship? Well, about that…

        Earlier this year, we wrote about a crazy lawsuit filed by Gene Kelly’s widow, after finding out that a college professor named Kelli Marshall was working on a book collecting interviews with Gene Kelly. Marshall and her publisher reached out to a number of people associated with those interviews to clear any legitimate copyright claims (interview collection books are pretty common, and the copyright issue rarely gets in the way). Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, claimed that she held the copyright on all of Gene Kelly’s interviews, and sued Marshall for infringement. This was crazy for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that the person being interviewed very rarely holds a copyright in the words they said (and Kelly’s widow made a mad dash to the copyright office to try to register these interviews right before suing). There’s also the whole fair use thing.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/27/nextcloud-targets-phones/feed/ 0 Links 11/10/2016: Torvalds’ ARM Rant, End of Production of Galaxy Note 7 http://techrights.org/2016/10/11/torvalds-arm-rant/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/11/torvalds-arm-rant/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2016 10:37:10 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96010

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Look At The Most Promising Next-Gen Linux Software Update Mechanisms

    With traditional software package management solutions like APT and Yum showing their age and not adapting well to the embedded world and the slew of new areas for Linux like IoT, a new generation of atomic-based Linux software update solutions continue to be worked on. Matt Porter of the Konsulko Group is presenting at this week’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 with a comparison of these update technologies.

    Incremental atomic updates have been what’s being pursued by multiple Linux software vendors for delivering more reliable distribution updates, smaller sized updates via binary deltas, and generally allow rollbacks in case of problems. Some of the new distribution update mechanisms covered included SWUpdate, Mender, OSTree, and swupd. Interestingly, not mentioned in the slide deck is Ubuntu’s Snappy.

  • Desktop

    • Microsoft remains silent as Surface Pro 3 battery woes pile up

      Surface Pro 3 battery woes have gone from bad to dire. Microsoft, meanwhile, is hiding and stonewalling again.

      SP3 owners with LGC batteries have been complaining since the middle of September about bad batteries — greatly diminished capacities, tablets that refuse to run unless they’re plugged into the wall, and charge times measured in minutes, not hours. A month later, and the Microsoft Answers forum thread about bad LGC batteries is up to 18 pages. A separate thread for general SP3 battery problems is at 131 pages and growing rapidly.

  • Server

    • No SDN Kubernetes

      How these requirements are implemented is up to the operator. In many cases this means using a software defined network “SDN” also called an overlay network (e.g. flannel, weave, calico) or underlay network (MACvlan, IPvlan). The SDNs all accomplish the same three goals but usually with different implementation and often unique features.

      But the networking requirements doesn’t mean you have to run an SDN. It also means you can implement a traditional SDN product in a non-traditional way. Let’s look at the simplest solution for networking in Kubernetes.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s Epiphany Browser Is Quick To Working On 3.24 Features

        It’s been just over two weeks since GNOME 3.22 was released while already a ton of feature work has been landing in Epiphany, GNOME’s Web Browser.

        It’s looking like the Epiphany web-browser update in GNOME 3.24 will be another feature-packed release. Some of the work that’s landed in the past two weeks already includes a lot of work around redoing the browser’s bookmarks support, removing obsolete code in different areas, a lot of work on sync support, asynchronous Storage Server support, a new preferences dialog user-interface, and more.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

    • New Releases

      • GoboLinux 016 Joins the 64-bit Revolution, First Alpha Is Based on Awesome WM

        GoboLinux developer Lucas C. Villa Real announced today, October 10, 2016, the general availability of the first Alpha pre-release version of the upcoming GoboLinux 016 GNU/Linux operating system.

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Beta released-Final release is expected at the end of month

        Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is making its way to final release and it is now one more step closer to this by having its beta release.Yes, the Ubuntu based beauty with Moksha DE(Moksha is a forked version of well known Enlightenment DE) got its beta release i.e. Bodhi LInux 4.0.0 Beta after months of release of Alpha version.Back in July,Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 alpha released.

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Beta Out, Final Release Lands This Month Based on Ubuntu 16.04

        Today, October 10, 2016, Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the Beta pre-release of the upcoming Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 operating system.

        Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Beta comes exactly one month after the release of the second Alpha milestone, bringing the development cycle to an end, as the developer plans to launch the final version of the Ubuntu-based distribution by the end of the month. As expected, the Beta contains many improvements and fixes to some of the bugs reported by users since the Alpha builds.

    • Arch Family

      • Antergos – Best Arch based distro for beginners, whoever want to taste arch, give a try

        As we know Arch Linux is one of the best Linux Distribution ever because we can customize whatever we want. We can get all the latest software’s because of rolling release but its very difficult for freshers, installation & configuration. Today i’m going to show you, how to install Antergos – The Best Arch based distro for beginners, whoever want to taste arch Linux give a try, i can assure worth to try.

    • Slackware Family

      • You Can Now Run Linux Kernel 4.8.1 on Your Slackware 14.2 System, Here’s How

        GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton announced earlier, October 10, 2016, that he made a new, special kernel based on Linux kernel 4.8.1 for Slackware and Slackware-based distributions.

        Linux kernel 4.8.1 is the first point release to the Linux 4.8 series, which is the latest and most advanced stable kernel to date, and now you can install it on your Slackware operating system thanks to Arne Exton. The new build is designed for 64-bit (x86_64) installation and works with Slackware 14.2 (Current), Zenwalk, Slax, and SlackEX, but it should work on any 64-bit Slackware 14.2 derivative, such as Salix.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Arrow now offering Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions in UK

        Arrow has announced it has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme, allowing it to distribute the company’s hybrid cloud solutions to its channel customers in the UK.

        Now customers and independent software vendors can benefit from Arrow’s extensive partner network, which in turn, will be fully supported to sell Red Hat’s innovations.

        The products Arrow will be selling will help cloud hosting, system integrators and managed service providers resell Red Hat’s full range of products using its on-demand, via multi-tenant, dedicated, and managed models.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Ease of 3D Printing in Fedora

          Fedora has been known to be the best OS for 3D printing already for some time, mainly due to the work of Miro (he packaged all the available open source software for 3D printing, prepared udev rules to automatically connect to 3D printers etc.), but I was still surprised how easy it is to 3D print with Fedora these days. It really took just a couple of minutes from a stock system to start of the actual printing. It’s almost as simple as printing on papers.
          There is still room for improvements though. Some 3D printing apps (Cura Lulzbot Edition is one of them) are available in the official repositories of Fedora, but don’t have an appdata file, so they don’t show up in GNOME Software. And it would also be nice to have “3D Printing” category in GNOME Software, so that the software is more discoverable for users.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian is participating in the next round of Outreachy!

        Following the success of the last round of Outreachy, we are glad to announce that Debian will take part in the program for the next round, with internships lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.

        From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

        Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

      • Debian Fun in September 2016

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The Open Source Era: A Q&A With Canonical CEO Jane Silber

            Canonical, a 750-person company with employees in more than 42 countries around the world, is the driving force behind Ubuntu open-source software. Although Canonical and Ubuntu are well-known and well-respected among hardcore technologists, most consumers have probably never heard of either.

            This is an unfortunate reality of open-source software. Products and projects dedicated to democratizing technology by making computer use free and fair for everyone often fly under the radar. Whether Canonical and Ubuntu become synonymous with the general consumer is largely dependent on whether or not consumers move away from traditional device usage. Can Canonical’s vision for a converged computing experience across a spectrum devices make the Canonical name as synonymous with desktop users as it is with users of its enterprise cloud and application performance management (APM) solutions?

            I chatted with Canonical CEO Jane Silber, a remarkable executive with a rich technological background, over email about the challenges Canonical faces in consumer computing and even television, as well as how the company plans to maintain its status in the enterprise cloud and software markets.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • ETSI releases first SDN software stack as open source

    This week, standardisation organisation ETSI published OSM Release ONE, an open-source software stack to implement Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDN, or network virtualisation, brings the management of computer networks to a higher level by abstracting the physical infrastructure. This allows network administrators to manage their networks in a more flexible, or even a fully automated, dynamic way.

  • Google’s Open-Source Noto Font Covers All Languages
  • Google Noto is an open source font family for more than 800 languages
  • Google releases open source font Noto to eliminate the tofu problem

    You may not have heard of the tofu problem, but you have almost certainly experienced it. If you visit a website or open a document that can’t display a particular character, you’ll see a white box symbol resembling a cube of tofu. Now Google has a solution.

    The Noto font project (it’s a mashup of ‘NO more TOfu’) has been something of a labor of love, taking five years to reach its conclusion. But the result is an open source Noto font family which Google says includes “every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters”.

    Talking about the new font family, Google says: “The Noto project started as a necessity for Google’s Android and ChromeOS operating systems. When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge. It required design and technical testing in hundreds of languages, and expertise from specialists in specific scripts. In Arabic, for example, each character has four glyphs (i.e., shapes a character can take) that change depending on the text that comes after it. In Indic languages, glyphs may be reordered or even split into two depending on the surrounding text”.

  • Google’s New Fonts Chip Away at Written Language Barriers

    Project Noto, one of Google’s most ambitious undertakings ever, has reached a milestone. Noto now supports 800 languages and 100 writing scripts, the companies announced last week. Google and Monotype launched the open source initiative to create a typeface family that supports all the languages in the world, even rarely used languages. Both serif and sans serif letters with up to eight weights are supported, as well as numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation. “Noto” is short for “no tofu.”

  • Syncano makes it’s dashboard open source

    Syncano has open-sourced its Dashboard platform, so that more developers will be able to access the libraries and repositories to help them build apps faster.

    Up to now, Syncano’s Dashboard has been a private project. With the company’s release of the Dashboard on GitHub, a new repository has been created that allows contributions, pull requests, and issue requests from any developer with a GitHub account.

  • AT&T plans to launch ECOMP into the open source community by Q1 2017

    AT&T is hopeful that it can launch its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) virtualization platform into the open source community during the first quarter of 2017.

    The telco said that this will further its goal to make ECOMP the telecom industry’s standard automation platform for managing virtual network functions and other software-centric network capabilities.

    Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs Domain 2.0 architecture and design, said in a blog post that by launching ECOMP into open source, “community members can use and contribute to the evolution of this software platform.”

  • Open Source Initiative Welcomes Open edX as Newest Affiliate Member
  • Ulterius Dials In With Open-Source Remote Desktop PC Management

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Best Open Source CMS

      Trying to determine the best open source CMS is a lot like choosing the best shoes. In the end, it’s a matter of perspective. However, it’s accurate to point out that the real differences between each open source CMS are usually feature related. The main items of concern range from add-ons to security and are factors you should consider when choosing the best CMS for your needs.

      In this article, I’ll share what I believe are the best open source CMS options available today. Bear in mind that not everyone is willing to sacrifice ease of use for security or security for ease of use. There is no single answer for everyone. Let’s get started, shall we?

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)/Microsoft

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Officially Released

      Following the recent delays, FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE is now officially available.

      FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE was announced this morning as the latest major update to this BSD operating system.

      Among the many changes for FreeBSD 11 is 802.11n WiFi support, better WiFi/wireless support in general, native graphics support for the Bhyve hypervisor, official support for ARM 64-bit / AArch64, vastly improved/updated DRM graphics driver code, and much more.

      FreeBSD 11.0 can be downloaded from the FreeBSD.org announcement.

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Operating System Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

      Today, October 10, 2016, the FreeBSD Foundation proudly announced the release and general availability of the FreeBSD 11.0 operating system based on the latest BSD and Open Source technologies.

      FreeBSD 11.0 has been in development since March 2016, during which it received a total of four Beta builds and three Release Candidates. FreeBSD 11.0 packs a large number of new features and improvements, among which we can mention support for the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, support for NUMA memory allocation and scheduler policies, as well as out-of-the-box support for Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2, and Beaglebone Black peripherals.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • State Of The Map, Thanks!

        Thanks to everyone who made it to the international State Of The Map conference in Brussels two weeks ago. With around 400 attendees from 52 different countries, this was a fantastic event bringing our community together.

        Huge thanks to the team of organisers, and local volunteers in Belgium who helped make it such a success. We saw some of these people up on stage at the end of the conference:

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Zula Open Source Audiophile Amplifier Hits Kickstarter (video)

        Audioberry has unveiled a new open source amplifier they have created which has been designed to provide audiophile amplification for streaming devices as well as mini PCs such as the Raspberry Pi.

        The Zula amplifier has been developed to be the best in class, providing both exceptional value together with superb sound, and is now available to back. With pledges starting from just £24 for the Zula Raspberry Pi internal mount kit which will start shipping during November 2016.

  • Programming/Development

    • More software engineers over age 40 may join a lawsuit against Google

      Google suffered a setback in an age discrimination suit this week. A judge ruled that other software engineers over age 40 who interviewed with the company but didn’t get hired can step forward and join the lawsuit.

      The suit was brought by two job applicants, both over the age of 40, who interviewed but weren’t offered jobs.

      Specifically, the judge has approved turning the suit into a “collective action” meaning that people who “interviewed in person with Google for a software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position when they were 40 years old or older, and received notice on or after August 28, 2014, that they were refused employment, will have an opportunity to join in the collective action against Google,” the ruling says.

    • RISC-V Backend For LLVM Making Progress

      The ongoing development of a RISC-V back-end for the LLVM compiler stack continues making progress and stepping closer to merging to mainline.

      Alex Bradbury issued a status update concerning the state of the RISC-V patches for LLVM. Six of the patches so far have been reviewed and ready to land, three are being reviewed still, and two patches are yet to be reviewed. It’s looking like within the months ahead this RISC-V back-end will be merged so LLVM can support this open-source CPU ISA.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • French Company Sues Apple Because of Improper HTML5 Support in iOS

      Nexedi, a French software development company, is suing Apple in a French court because of the sorry state of HTML5 support on iOS, and because Apple actively prevents third-party browser engines from running on iOS.

      The company filed a civil lawsuit in France because a local law gives it the best chances of succeeding in its effort. A local French law passed a few years back prevents large companies from imposing unbalanced contracts on smaller businesses.

      Nexedi says that Apple forces software developers to sign an unfair contract when submitting an app to the iOS App Store that states that all web content should be handled by a WebKit-based browser engine.

      The French company’s problem is that the WebKit engine is seriously lagging behind when it comes to supporting modern HTML5 features. Because Apple forces iOS app developers to use WebKit-based browsers, developers must invest serious time and effort into porting modern apps to work with the limited version of HTML5 supported in iOS, indirectly cutting down their profits.

    • Here’s Why These Open Source Programmers Have Sued Apple

      Nexedi, a French open source software vendor has sued Apple. The lack of support for standard web technologies on iOS irked the company, resulting in the allegations that Apple’s App Store contract is unfair. We have contacted Apple for a clarification and we’ll be keeping you in the know.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • WikiLeaks Reveals UFO ​Messages in Clinton Campaign Emails

      The former lead singer of the band Blink 182 was in recent contact with ‘s campaign chairman John Podesta about UFOs, newly disclosed emails show.

    • Neural Net Computing Explodes

      Neural networking with advanced parallel processing is beginning to take root in a number of markets ranging from predicting earthquakes and hurricanes to parsing MRI image datasets in order to identify and classify tumors.

      As this approach gets implemented in more places, it is being customized and parsed in ways that many experts never envisioned. And it is driving new research into how else these kinds of compute architectures can be applied.

    • Vint Cerf Warns Humanity: Can Our Data Survive Longer Than A Century?

      Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) co-author Vint Cerf is hailed as “the father of the internet,” but now he’s worried about an even larger communications protocol, on a scale of thousands of years. How will our civilization communicate with people in the future? When it comes to generations yet to come, how will we preserve the glory that is present-day, 21st-century society?

      Yes, we’ve got storage media — but for long-lasting durability, does it really compare with centuries past? “We’re going backward,” Cerf argued in his column published in Communications of the ACM looking fondly back at the history of humankind — and the way bygone eras preserved glimpses of their lives to echo down through the ages. It’s like a tour of humanity’s mediums over the last 17 millennia, offering the breath-taking perspective of a tumble through time.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Michigan paid more than FEMA for Flint emergency supplies

      The State of Michigan likely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars too much for emergency supplies related to the Flint drinking water crisis because it used no formal bidding process, relied almost exclusively on one out-of-state company with ties to a top aide to Gov. Rick Snyder, and didn’t turn to Michigan companies already approved to do business with the state, a Detroit Free Press investigation has found.

      The Free Press compared Flint purchasing records by the State of Michigan between October and January with purchasing by the Federal Emergency Management Agency between January and August.

    • New parents charged £30 to hold their newborn baby as part of popular skin-to-skin bonding experience

      A dad claims a hospital charged him and his wife £30 to hold their newborn son.

      Ryan Grassley says he had to pay the fee, worth $39.35 in US money, for his wife to hold their tiny newborn immediately after he was delivered by C-section.

      The Utah father shared a snap of the itemized bill, which included a charge for “skin-to-skin after c-sec,” on Reddit – with readers offering a mixed rection.

      Grassley said when his son was born by C-section at Utah Valley Hospital on September 4, the operating room nurse asked if the couple wanted to do “skin to skin.”

      They agreed and their baby was cleaned-up and handed over for his time with mum.

      The practice, viewed to have many benefits, is when a new baby’s bare skin is placed against its mother’s to help them bond.

    • US Media Don’t Need to Look Abroad to Find an Abortion Crisis

      US media saw a story in the work boycott and street protests by some 6 million women in Poland that led to a reversal of government plans to put through a complete ban on abortion, including in cases of rape or danger to a woman’s life. Stories in major outlets pointed out that Poland’s laws are already among the most restrictive in Europe; they noted the concerns of human rights advocates that the ban would criminalize women and doctors, and make women who have miscarriages subjects of suspicion and investigation. It was good to see, but it did make one wonder: If those conditions are unacceptable, they’re unacceptable whether they’re de jure or de facto, right?

    • It’s Time to Go, Hyde Amendment

      Enacted in 1976, the Hyde Amendment turns 40 years old this year. The Hyde Amendment was introduced by the late Henry Hyde, a Republican from Illinois who sought to ban abortions outright. Disappointed that the Supreme Court had just ruled that the Constitution protects the right to an abortion, Rep. Hyde introduced the amendment to restrict abortion access for those who qualify for Medicaid.

      The amendment withholds insurance coverage for abortion care in virtually all cases from women who qualify for Medicaid and others who access their health insurance through the federal government. Effectively, it reserves the right to an abortion for those privileged to afford it.

    • Is toxic trade in your backyard?

      If passed by Congress, two pending U.S. trade deals – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – would give some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations broad new rights to challenge our climate protections in private tribunals. For the first time, these corporations could ask unaccountable panels of corporate lawyers to order U.S. government compensation if such protections interfered with their widespread fossil fuel projects.

  • Security

    • One election-system vendor uses developers in Serbia

      The use of proprietary systems in elections has its critics. One Silicon Valley group, the Open Source Election Technology Foundation, is pushing for an election system that shifts from proprietary, vendor-owned systems to one that that is owned “by the people of the United States.”

    • Europe to Push New Security Rules Amid IoT Mess

      The European Commission is drafting new cybersecurity requirements to beef up security around so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Web-connected security cameras, routers and digital video recorders (DVRs). News of the expected proposal comes as security firms are warning that a great many IoT devices are equipped with little or no security protections.

    • Internet of Things botnets: You ain’t seen nothing yet

      Internet of Things (IoT) botnet “Mirai” is the shape of things to come and future assaults could be even more severe, a leading security research firm warns.

      Mirai powered the largest ever DDoS attack ever, spawning a 620Gbps DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity. Source code for the malware was released on hacker forums last week.

      The malware relied on factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords to compromise vulnerable IoT devices such as insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and the like.

      PenTestPartners, the UK security consultancy behind numerous hack on Iot devices ranging from Wi-Fi enabled kettles to cars, said that the botnet finally illustrates the consequences of IoT vendors cutting the corners on security.

    • The top three Wi-Fi pen testing tools in Kali Linux

      Every hacker and security researcher loves Kali Linux. The developers of Kali Linux ethical hacking distro have released the second Kali Rolling ISO release i.e. Kali 2016.2. Just like the previous one, Kali promises to deliver lots of new updates and changes in this release. Over the course of past few months, Kali developers have been busy adding new tools to Kali and fixing multiple bugs. For example, they have added HTTPS support in busybox that allows secure installation over SSL.

      Kali Linux provides you the flexibility to install your favorite desktop environment and personalizing your experience. However, Kali developers note that users often talk about how they would love to see another desktop environments instead of GNOME.

    • How ‘Security Fatigue’ Affects Our Choices Online

      A new study claims many users suffer from ‘security fatigue,’ which affects the choices we make online. What’s the real answer and where does the root cause sit?
      An overabundance of security news and alerts has led to “security fatigue,” which is causing users to make bad choices when it comes to online security, suggests a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

    • Apache Milagro: A New Security System for the Future of the Web
    • Ransomware hackers are hitting the NHS in the knackers [ophk: "politicians’ heads should roll for running MS anywhere near the NHS”]

      Rashmi Knowles, chief EMEA security architect at RSA, said: “Ransomware is an extremely lucrative business for cyber criminals as once they are in they just need to encrypt the data. Whereas actually stealing data and then trying to resell makes it a much longer process.

      “Current data shows that ransomware cases are expected to double from 2015 to 2016, and it should come as no surprise that breaches continue to happen as frequently as they do.

      “The results show organisations relying on a fragmented foundation of data and technologies. Because it remains siloed, visibility is incomplete, making attacker activity difficult to scope.

      “As a result the speed with which they can detect and investigate threats becomes a real challenge.”

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Exclusive: As Saudis bombed Yemen, U.S. worried about legal blowback

      The Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from some officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials.

      State Department officials also were privately skeptical of the Saudi military’s ability to target Houthi militants without killing civilians and destroying “critical infrastructure” needed for Yemen to recover, according to the emails and other records obtained by Reuters and interviews with nearly a dozen officials with knowledge of those discussions.

      U.S. government lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether U.S. support for the campaign would make the United States a “co-belligerent” in the war under international law, four current and former officials said. That finding would have obligated Washington to investigate allegations of war crimes in Yemen and would have raised a legal risk that U.S. military personnel could be subject to prosecution, at least in theory.

    • Obama DOJ drops charges against alleged broker of Libyan weapons

      The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.

      Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

      The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

    • The Nobel Peace Prize Has Become A Cruel Joke

      Notable peace activists needn’t apply. Despicable war criminals time and again become Nobel Peace Prize honorees.

      This year was no exception, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos the latest recipient for negotiating dubious peace with FARC-EP freedom fighters.

      James Petras earlier called them “the longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world…founded in 1964…legitimate resistance” against ruthless Colombian repression.

    • Isis recruiting violent criminals and gang members across Europe in dangerous new ‘crime-terror nexus’

      “Sometimes people with the worst pasts create the best futures,” reads the slogan, emblazoned on an image of a masked fighter wielding a Kalashnikov, walking into blinding light.

      The poster was shared on Facebook by Rayat al-Tawheed, a group of British Isis fighters from London calling themselves the “Banner of God”.

      Their target is young men looking for redemption from crime, drugs or gangs, willing to save their souls by waging jihad for the so-called Islamic State.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks releases Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches in ‘handy Kindle format’

      After months of calls upon Hillary Clinton to release her Wall Street speeches, they are now more available and accessible than ever before, with WikiLeaks publishing them in Kindle format.

      If a word document or a PDF does not suit the reader, all they need to do is download to file to their Kindle and read the extracts on the move.

      WikiLeaks dumped the excerpts online last Friday, claiming they showed excerpts of paid, closed-door speeches to Wall Street executives, out of a batch of more than 2,000 emails belonging to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

    • Wikileaks: New York Times Caught Providing Bill Clinton Questions Before ‘Interview’

      The New York Times provided questions to former President Bill Clinton before an interview with Nicholas Kristoff, the Wikileaks release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta emails has revealed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • A military view on climate change: It’s eroding our national security and we should prepare for it

      In this presidential election year we have heard much about some issues, such as immigration and trade, and less about others. For example, climate change was discussed for an estimated 82 seconds in the first presidential debate last week, and for just 37 minutes in all presidential and vice presidential debates since the year 2000.

      Many observers think climate change deserves more attention. They might be surprised to learn that U.S. military leaders and defense planners agree. The armed forces have been studying climate change for years from a perspective that rarely is mentioned in the news: as a national security threat. And they agree that it poses serious risks.

      I spent 32 years as a meteorologist in the U.S. Navy, where I initiated and led the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change. Here is how military planners see this issue: We know that the climate is changing, we know why it’s changing and we understand that change will have large impacts on our national security. Yet as a nation we still only begrudgingly take precautions.

    • Dahr Jamail on Climate Disruption, Richard Phillips on Trump’s Taxes

      This week on CounterSpin: From vanishing ice to animal die-offs to increasing wildfires, scientists use words like “unprecedented” and “staggering” to describe the evident impacts of human-driven climate disruption. Elite media say they take it all very seriously…. How far are they from taking it seriously enough?

      Dahr Jamail is a staff reporter at Truthout and author of a number of books, including Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and the forthcoming The End of Ice.

    • Coverage of Haiti and Hurricane Reinforces a Sad, Static Storyline

      While the extent of the damage exacted by Hurricane Matthew on Haiti is not yet known, more than 500 deaths have been reported. But with the storm moving toward the US, media too are moving, leaving in their wake the sorts of stories you would predict: “Fragile Haiti in the Line of Fire From Matthew” (USA Today, 10/3/16), “Impoverished Haiti Braces for ‘Catastrophic’ Floods as Hurricane Approaches” (Reuters, 10/4/16) and, from the New York Times (10/4/16), “A List of Previous Disasters in Haiti, a Land All Too Familiar With Hardship.”

    • Proposed Pipeline Sparks Widespread Dissent

      The People over Pipelines march packed the streets with local activists in July who came together in protest and embarked on a five day trek across 55 miles, covering only a fraction of the proposed path for the high-pressure fracked natural gas pipeline we seek to stop. Despite such a powerful and outspoken movement, policymakers have neglected to restrain Spectra Energy from constructing the Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline. Such disregard for the resolution of the people, and a tendency to overlook what is truly best for our wellbeing, is not only a clear sign of rapacious ignorance, it’s simply undemocratic.

      Many people, including high schoolers like me, have raised countless concerns about this pipeline, ranging from local safety threats to the consequences of climate change. From neighborhood-disrupting construction and family displacement from the abuses of eminent domain, to water pollution from hydraulic fracturing, to transporting the explosive gas through leak-prone pipelines, to climate disruption—essentially every aspect of this pipeline is hazardous. Not to mention, scientists say we can’t afford to build even one more pipeline if we’re serious about avoiding catastrophic climate change.

    • ‘We Must Honor Our Mother’: Actress Shailene Woodley Arrested at DAPL

      Actress Shailene Woodley has been arrested for trespassing at one of the construction sites for the Dakota Access oil pipeline, multiple reports confirm.

      She was one of 28 people taken in for criminal trespassing, according to the Bismarck Tribune, which reported that more than 200 people were demonstrating at one of the construction sites outside a 20-mile buffer that the federal government had requested the company respect.

    • Hillary Clinton Touted Her Record of Spreading Fracking in Secret, Paid Speeches

      Behind closed doors on the paid speaking circuit, Hillary Clinton was far more candid than she has been in public about her prominent role as Secretary of State in exporting American-style hydraulic fracturing — the controversial, environmentally damaging technique best known as fracking — to countries all over the world.

      “I’ve promoted fracking in other places around the world,” she declared during a 2013 paid talk to Deutsche Bank, adding that she launched a new wing of the State Department devoted to the initiative.

      During a paid speech in Canada the following year, Clinton touted her role in “accelerating” natural gas development in Europe, calling attention to Poland’s embrace of fracking as a positive step.

      The contrast with the rhetoric Clinton has used on the campaign trail is striking. Clinton has rarely spoken in public of her role selling fracking abroad, and at times positioned herself as a skeptic of the controversial drilling technique. In the lead-up to the New York Democratic primary, Clinton’s campaign released a television advertisement that gave the impression that she has worked to discourage fracking.

    • The $20 Billion Arctic Pipeline That Will Haunt Canada Forever

      The vision came to Jonas Antoine during a drum session with the other men of the tribe. Jonas is not a medicine man, but it was a medicine dream, of the kind that visited his Dene ancestors. He was in the village of Wrigley in a remote section of Canada’s Northwest Territories, standing at the cliff on the edge of town, looking out over the massive river valley, and as he beat the hand-held drum and chanted with the men he saw something out on the horizon.

      “I saw skyscrapers rise out of the ground,” Antoine told me. “We’re drumming, drumming, and I saw them. In the distance, rising out of our beautiful mountains. And I thought, ‘This can’t happen here.’ I knew I had to stop it.”

    • Why Rush Limbaugh thinks Hurricane Matthew is liberal propaganda

      Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh offered a bold assessment of Hurricane Matthew on Wednesday: the category 4 storm was exaggerated by the Obama administration in order to validate climate change theories.

      At the crux of Limbaugh’s argument was the so-called ‘hurricane drought’ in the United States, which ended when Matthew made landfall in Florida last week. After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, former vice president Al Gore predicted that hurricane activity would increase as a result of man-made warming.

      “And then what happened? We had 11 years of no hurricanes – 11 straight years of no major hurricanes striking land in the United States, which just bores a hole right through the whole climate change argument,” Limbaugh said on his talk radio show. “They want people to think this way: Hurricane reported. Must be climate change.”

    • Climate Change Doubled the Size of Forest Fires in Western U.S., Study Says

      “No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger”

      Man-made climate change has doubled the total area burned by forest fires in the Western U.S. in the past three decades, according to new research.

      Damage from forest fires has risen dramatically in recent decades, with the total acres burned in the U.S. rising from 2.9 million in 1985 to 10.1 million in 2015, according to National Interagency Fire Center data. Suppression costs paid by the federal government now top $2 billion.

      Now a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that a significant portion of the increase in land burned by forest fires can be attributed to man-made climate change. Other factors are also at play, including natural climate shifts and a change in how humans use land, but man-made climate change has had the biggest impact. That trend will likely continue as temperatures keep rising, researchers said.

  • Finance

    • The Dash For Cash: Leaked Files Reveal RBS Systematically Crushed British Businesses For Profit

      The Royal Bank of Scotland killed or crippled thousands of businesses during the recession as a result of a deliberate plan to add billions of pounds to its balance sheet, according to a leaked cache of thousands of secret documents.

      The RBS Files – revealed today by BuzzFeed News and BBC Newsnight – lay bare the secret policies under which firms were pushed into the bank’s feared troubled-business unit, Global Restructuring Group (GRG), which chased profits by hitting them with massive fees and fines and by snapping up their assets at rock-bottom prices.

      The internal documents starkly contradict the bank’s public insistence that GRG acted as an “intensive care unit” for ailing firms, tasked with restructuring their loan agreements to “help them back to health”.

    • Yle: State funding for sports bodies used mainly for admin and personnel costs, not athletes

      An Yle Sports analysis of available data has shown a sizeable 64-percent increase in state funding for Finnish sporting associations, much of it used to cover administrative and personnel costs, leaving athletes largely to fend for themselves. In many cases sports administrators are earning over 100,000 euros annually, while top athletes are trying to make ends meet on less than 1,200 euros a month.

    • ‘Poverty Is a Product of the Institutions We Have in Society’

      The new census data show the steepest one-year decline in the US poverty rate in decades. The dip from 14.8 percent to 13.5 percent was widely heralded, if some did indicate that declarations like the New York Times’ “Millions in US Climb Out of Poverty at Long Last” might be overblown. The rate was 11.3 percent in 2000, after all, and the gains aren’t evenly spread around, or necessarily sustainable.

      When corporate media talk about poverty, this is often what it looks like. “Experts” talk about what amount and sorts of resources it “makes sense” to allow people to have before they’re eligible for what amount or sort of assistance from the state, and how tweaks to those rules may affect the overall number of people who qualify to be labeled poor.

    • Facebook accused of ‘picking and choosing’ tax rules after paying just $5 million in UK

      Facebook ended up with an £11.3 million ($14 million) tax credit in the U.K. last year, which more than offset the amount it was charged, according to a new company filing, adding to concerns that the social media giant isn’t paying enough into the country’s coffers.

    • Facebook paid $5.16 million in UK taxes last year, 1,000 times what it paid in 2014

      Facebook paid £4.16 million ($5.16 million) in UK corporation tax last year, the company revealed on Sunday, a huge increase on the paltry £4,327 (around $5,367 at current exchange rates) it paid the year before. The company’s accounts show a turnover of £210 million, and a taxable profit of £20 million, on which it paid standard UK corporation tax rate.

      While technically compliant with UK tax laws, Facebook’s previous payments drew criticism from campaigners and politicians, who complained that the billion-dollar company was shirking its moral responsibility to pay tax in countries that it did business in. The criticism prompted Facebook to overhaul its UK tax structure, changing its policy so it counted UK ad sales as taking place the UK, rather than in Ireland — a tax loophole that had allowed to to pay minimal levels of tax on billions of dollars in profits.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • A Government Is Seizing Control Of Our Election Process (And It’s Not The Russians)

      There is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day – it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.

    • GOP ex-prosecutors slam Trump over threat to ‘jail’ Clinton

      Donald Trump’s debate-night vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email setup and put her “in jail” provoked a sharp blowback from former U.S. prosecutors, who said Trump’s view of the Justice Department serving the whims of the president is antithetical to the American system.

      While presidents appoint the attorney general, they do not make decisions on whom to prosecute for crimes — and were Trump to do so, prosecutors warned, he would spark a constitutional crisis similar to that of the “Saturday Night Massacre” in the Nixon administration. In that case, Nixon attempted to fire the prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, and the top two Justice Department officials resigned on the spot.

    • Trump Is Not the Only Grabber Who Must Go

      As far as I’m concerned, there are 54 Trumps in the US Senate and 237 Trumps in the House. You can’t make this look good by removing your endorsement from Trump. Yes, Trump has to go — but so do you, all of you. Starting with the election on November 8th, we need to show up at the polls and remove as many of you as possible. This abuse of women stops now. I believe that most women and many men are going to determine their vote with this one thought, thanks to you and Trump:

    • New Jersey’s Student Loan Agency Has Started Getting Good Reviews — By Giving Free Stuff

      Over the past few years, dozens of borrowers have written devastating reviews of the New Jersey state agency whose student loans, as we have detailed, have strikingly onerous terms.

      “This place doesn’t even deserve one star,” posted Ashante Patterson on Google’s review platform. “It is a scam and horrendous organization that preys on and belittles borrowers.”

      “You are better off not going to college,” wrote another reviewer, Nik Sharma, about the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, also known as HESAA. “They are the absolute worst and are inhumane.”

    • NBC waited for green light from lawyers before airing Trump video

      NBC News was aware of video footage of Donald Trump making lewd and disparaging remarks about women for nearly four days, a network executive said Saturday, but held onto the recording until lawyers finished reviewing the material.

      The network’s caution led to an awkward result: NBC News was scooped by The Washington Post, which took just five hours to vet and post its story. A tip from an individual led to The Post breaking one of the most consequential stories of the 2016 presidential campaign.

    • Trump Shows His Inner Dictator

      “I didn’t think I’d say this,” Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton, as he took a couple of steps across the stage at the second Presidential debate, on Sunday night in St. Louis. “But I’m going to say it—and I hate to say it.” At that point, just nineteen minutes in, it was already hard to imagine what might give Trump any qualms. He had already said that her record was “terrible” and “disgraceful,” and that she “should be ashamed”; called Clinton’s husband, Bill, the worst abuser of women “in the history of politics in this nation,” and claimed that Hillary had “viciously” attacked women who had made allegations against him (three of those women were Trump’s guests at the debate); accused her of “laughing at the girl who was raped” by a man she had represented as a young lawyer (he’d brought her, too); accused her of being behind birtherism, which he himself had pushed; and objected when Clinton referred to Michelle Obama, who has been campaigning for her, as her friend—objected, it seemed, to the idea that Clinton could have any friends but Sidney Blumenthal (“he’s another real winner that you have”).

      In those first nineteen minutes, Trump had also repeatedly insisted that a video that emerged last Friday—outtakes from “Access Hollywood,” in which he told the host, Billy Bush, that because Trump was “a star” he could do whatever he wanted to women without their consent (Anderson Cooper, the moderator, paraphrased one line as “grabbing their genitals”)—was an example of “locker-room talk.” Trump made a vague expression of contrition, but with the air of a man looking over the moderators’ shoulders for a sign pointing to said locker room. And he had claimed that Clinton had cheated in her primary victory over Senator Bernie Sanders. Referring to Sanders’s endorsement of Clinton, Trump said, “I was so surprised to see him sign on with the devil.” That was a few seconds before he sighed, overcame his supposed reluctance to speak harshly, and pushed American political discourse to even lower depths.

    • The media’s Weimar moment

      In June 1954 on national television, Joe Welch, the US Army’s chief counsel, exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dubious morality with those two legendary questions: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Such was the novelty of television back then that having given McCarthy an authoritative forum for his views, TV could now serve as the instrument of his destruction.

      We all know what followed. The media attained the highest point of its legitimacy and authority during the Vietnam War with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and then the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. That ascendancy ran parallel to the rapid discrediting of politics as a vocation. Journalists were heroes. Politicians were scoundrels.

      Thirty years later, with the revelations of the media’s blindness to and sometimes complicity with the lies that led America into the Iraq War, journalists joined politicians in the space of detention into which public opinion puts those figures who betray the people’s trust. From that point on, America, once dubbed the oldest young country in the world by Gertrude Stein, began to experience the historical version of a senior moment. It began to undergo a Weimar moment.

      Existing between 1919 and 1933, the Weimar Republic was Germany’s first experience of democracy. Transparency of the political process, freedom of association, an openness to all groups and factions to express themselves and vie, through legitimate means, for power became established features of social and political life. Culture underwent a revolution as well. To borrow a formulation from Peter Gay’s landmark study of the Weimar period, outsiders such as Jews, homosexuals, experimental artists, and daring psychologists became insiders.

      The results, however, were disastrous. The instruments of democracy were appropriated by anti-democratic forces and used to undermine the democratic institutions that had made them available. And the breaking of cultural taboos reverberated from high culture into the depths of popular culture and custom, making once-taboo practices, from bestiality to pedophilia, semi-underground styles of gratification. Occurring simultaneously, the twin specters of economic despair and profligate wealth beset the population.

    • Donald Trump in 1993: ‘It’s fortunate I don’t have to run for political office’ – video

      In a 23-year-old video interview unearthed in New Zealand on Monday, Donald Trump says it is fortunate he is not running for political office given his belief that ‘certain women are more beautiful than others’. The TV interview by reporter Owen Poland was recorded in 1993, when Trump was making an ultimately unsuccessful bid to start a casino in New Zealand

    • Trump Taj Mahal Closes After 26 Years on Atlantic City Boardwalk

      Donald Trump opened his Trump Taj Mahal casino 26 years ago, calling it “the eighth wonder of the world.”

      But his friend and fellow billionaire Carl Icahn closed it Monday morning, making it the fifth casualty of Atlantic City’s casino crisis.

    • UN Critic of Donald Trump Must Be Silenced, Russia Says

      Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations filed a formal complaint last month demanding that the head of the world body’s human rights organization cease criticizing Donald Trump and other anti-Muslim politicians.

      Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, confirmed to the Associated Press on Friday that he had delivered a démarche, a form of diplomatic protest, to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last month. The complaint was in response to comments from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, denouncing the racist rhetoric of Trump and European nationalists, including Geert Wilders, the Dutch populist who has promised to close mosques and ban the Koran if elected.

      “Prince Zeid is overstepping his limits from time to time and we’re unhappy about it,” Churkin told the AP.

      There was no indication that Trump requested Russia’s intercession on his behalf, or that he was even aware of the comments from the head of the UN rights group. Across the West, Russia has been accused of supporting inward-looking, nationalist demagogues who are considered less likely to be critical of Russian foreign and domestic policies. Hillary Clinton and her supporters have seized upon Trump’s boasts about being praised by Russian President Vladimir Putin as evidence of his naivety in world affairs.

    • What Got Left Out–and Right-Spun–at VP Debate

      The vice presidential debate (10/4/16) provided a stark picture of just how distorted corporate media’s priorities are compared to issues of actual consequence in people’s lives. Questions of national security and national debt consumed the evening, while issues such as abortion, poverty, LGBTQ rights and climate change were never asked about.

      Some of the topics that moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News asked about: Russia, North Korea nuking the United States, ISIS/terrorism, why the US should bomb the Syrian and Russian air force and Donald Trump’s taxes.

      Topics that Quijano did not ask about: climate change, poverty, abortion, healthcare, student debt, privacy, LGBTQ rights or drug policy. There were no questions about these issues in the first presidential debate, either (FAIR.org, 9/27/16).

      Quijano did ask about immigration, a topic overlooked in the presidential debate. The economy was addressed via questions about the national debt and Social Security “run[ning] out of money.” Jobs and trade issues, which were discussed at some length by the presidential candidates, were not topics of questions in the VP debate.

      This is the 11th consecutive debate with a Democratic candidate for president or vice president that did not ask about poverty or abortion (FAIR.org, 5/27/16). The candidates did discuss abortion, but only in the context of an open-ended question about “balanc[ing] your personal faith and a public policy position,” which invited a religious reading of reproductive rights.

    • Both Campaigns Enthusiastically Violate Ban on Super PAC Coordination, Watchdog Says

      In another noble, doomed attempt to encourage the Federal Election Commission to enforce campaign finance law, the Campaign Legal Center filed complaints Thursday against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and several Super PACs supporting them for illegal coordination.

      The Campaign Legal Center is a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., nonprofit that frequently files such complaints — including one based on The Intercept’s reporting — on which the FEC then generally takes no action.

      The FEC’s coma-like state is due to the ferocious opposition of its three Republican members to almost any restriction on money in politics. The FEC has six members, and by law no more than three can be from any one political party, so on many significant votes the commission deadlocks 3-3.

      Based on the CLC’s current complaints, it’s difficult to say whether the Trump or Clinton campaign more joyfully violates campaign finance rules.

      Several 2010 court decisions, including Citizens United, made it possible for Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money supporting candidates for federal office. The Supreme Court determined that this would not “give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” so long as Super PACs’ expenditures were truly independent — i.e., not coordinated with candidates’ campaigns.

    • We’re Not With Him: GOP Discovers Women’s Rights, Slams Donald Trump

      It takes a lot to rouse the feminist indignation of the GOP, but even Washington’s most diehard opponents of women’s rights are condemning Donald Trump’s comments in a 2005 recorded conversation with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. The Republican presidential nominee said, among other things: “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” and “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

      Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and other members of the Republican leadership distanced themselves from Trump’s comments.

      Pence issued a statement rejecting his running mate’s conduct. “As a husband and father, I was offended by the words and actions described by Donald Trump in the eleven-year-old video released yesterday. I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them,” Pence said.

      Yet Pence’s record is not exactly out of sync with Trump’s words. Indeed, as a governor and legislator, Pence has been an innovator when it comes to measures that obstruct women’s rights. In Congress in 2007, he sponsored the first bill to defund Planned Parenthood. He is credited with starting the fight against the organization, which offers contraception, STI screenings, and primary care — as well as abortions.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Kosher Internet: A Niche, But Necessary Market for Ultra-Orthodox Jews

      Jonathan was 20 when he left orthodox Jewish school, or yeshiva, and got his first computer: a ThinkPad laptop to get him through his college program in engineering. Having grown up in Jerusalem in the 1980s and 90s, he had gone the entirety of his life without a computer, or even a television at home—as was, and remains customary to varying degrees among Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews. Still, that didn’t stop the future programmer from falling in love with computers.

      While packs of yeshiva boys would sneak into town, crowding internet cafes to watch soccer or porn, or merely to cruise the web—the secular world only a click away—Jonathan hacked his school’s internet filters blocking certain websites in the name of ruchnius, or spirituality. Though he had ventured outside the insular Haredi community where he grew up, the Jerusalem College of Technology still adhered to strict codes of religiosity, which included filtering the internet.

    • Torrent-based websites that cannot be censored?

      This is exciting. The Web2Web project claims to be able to put web pages on the Internet that cannot be taken down, using torrents and Bitcoin. And it can be run from any modern browser.

    • Too many academics are now censoring themselves

      My colleague at another university showed a picture of an emaciated Hungarian Jewish woman liberated from a death camp. A student, yelled out, “stop showing this, I did not come here to be traumatised”, disrupting his lecture on the Hungarian Holocaust. After the student complained of distress, caused by the disturbing image, my colleague was told by an administrator to be more careful when discussing such a sensitive subject. “How can I teach the Holocaust without unsettling my students?” asked my friend. Academics who now feel they have to mind their words are increasingly posing such questions.

    • Users enraged, confused over YouTube censorship

      YouTube users are up in arms over the platform’s recent censorship of content, the most notorious example being the removal of videos showing Hillary Clinton stumbling during a 9/11 event.

      Users have already been complaining about the YouTube policy that denies revenue to content it deems as not “advertiser friendly.”

      Since late August, some users noticed that YouTube had removed ads from any videos that go against newly updated guidelines, which means the people who uploaded the videos wouldn’t make any money. The process is called “demonetization.”

    • What would Sixties rebels make of consent classes?

      If you want an example of how thoroughly today’s campus activists have lost the plot, look no further than mandatory consent classes. After starting life in the US, these workshops – now rolled out at more than 20 UK campuses – are at the cutting edge of campus Orwellianism. (As Brendan O’Neill has pointed out, there is a profound irony in making classes on consent mandatory.) But, more crucially, this creepy desire to regulate students’ sex lives – pushed, in the main, by student leaders themselves – is undermining the hard-won gains of student activism itself.

      As this new academic year has begun, there have been pockets of resistance to consent classes. At the University of York, students staged a walkout. ‘Consent talks are patronising’, 23-year-old student Ben Froughi told the Mail. ‘If students really need lessons in how to say yes or no then they should not be at university.’ Last week, at Clare College, Cambridge, a consent class was held, and no one showed up. Clare’s women’s officer posted a picture of the empty lecture hall on social media, decrying students’ evident apathy as a ‘huge step backwards’. She later deleted the post.

    • Ben Affleck’s ‘PR Dopes’ Called Out for ‘Censorship’ At Press Junket
    • NDTV’s Censorship Of Chidambaram’s Interview Is Rather Curious

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Facebook Workplace Tries to Muscle In on Your Job [iophk: "centralized surveillance"]

      One in four people on Earth use Facebook to connect with friends and family. But Mark Zuckerberg and company really want all those people to use the social network for office chatter, too.

      This morning, at an event in London, the company formally released Facebook Workplace, a service designed specifically for business communication. It first unveiled the service—originally called Facebook for Work—eighteen months ago, testing it with many businesses. Now, Workplace is available to any organization that wants it. Facebook will charge a monthly fee to businesses who use the service—the first time it will generate revenue through fees instead of ads.

    • Facebook Wants to Kill Work Email With This New App

      You can officially add Facebook to the list of software companies seeking to all-but-eliminate corporate email.

      The social network’s much-anticipated business edition—formally dubbed Workplace by Facebook, rather than the Facebook at Work moniker used during its 18-month beta test—has already been adopted by more than 1,000 companies, according to information that Facebook plans to share Monday evening during the product’s official launch event in London.

    • Apple Watch banned from UK cabinet meetings over Russian hacking fears

      Politicians in the UK have reportedly been banned from wearing the Apple Watch to cabinet meetings over fears the device could be hacked. According to a report from The Telegraph, the government is worried that the Apple Watch’s microphone could be used to listen in on high-level policy discussions, especially by Russian spies.

      It’s a justified paranoia, especially after the announcement last week from the US government that it is officially blaming Russia for the hack on the Democratic National Committee. A source in the UK told The Telegraph: “The Russians are trying to hack everything.”

    • In the UK, running a blog over HTTPS is an act of terrorism, says Scotland Yard

      In a bizarre case, Scotland Yard is accusing a person for six separate acts of preparing terrorism. Those six acts include researching encryption, developing an “encrypted version” of his blog, and instructing others how to use encryption.

      This is one of those cases where you do a double take. As reported by Ars Technica, UK’s Scotland Yard is charging a Cardiff person with preparing for terrorism – but the list of charges shows activities we associate with very ordinary precautionary privacy measures. “Developing an encrypted version of a blog” can be read as, and probably means, publishing it over HTTPS – such as this blog and many others, simply because it’s considered best practice.

    • U.S. Tech Giants Are Investing Billions to Keep Data in Europe

      In the battle to dominate Europe’s cloud computing market, American tech giants are spending big to build up their local credibility.

      Amazon Web Services, the largest player, announced last week that it would soon open multiple data centers in France and Britain. Google, which already has sites in countries like Finland and Belgium, is expected to finish a new multimillion-dollar data complex in the Netherlands by the end of the year.

    • NSA In Support Of Encryption Is ‘Disingenuous’: EFF Purports

      On Wednesday, CAMBRIDGE, Ma. – The NSA, National Security Agency appeared in support of encryption. But the stance was quickly contested by the privacy advocates, who criticizes the agency for peculiar definition of the term “encryption” than others.

      The general counsel for the NSA, Glenn Gerstell, asserted that the company “believes in strong encryption” during the panel, “Privacy vs. Security: Beyond the Zero-Sum Game,” on (CCS) Cambridge Cyber Summit conducted by MIT.

    • Unblinking Eyes: The State of Communications Surveillance in Latin America

      In December 1992, following a hastily-drawn sketch of a map given to him by a whistleblower, the Paraguayan lawyer Martin Almada drove to an obscure police station in the suburb of Lambaré, near Asunción. Behind the police offices, in a run-down office building, he discovered a cache of 700,000 documents, piled nearly to the ceiling. This was the “Terror Archive,” an almost complete record of the interrogations, torture, and surveillance conducted by the Paraguayan military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. The files reported details of “Operation Condor,” a clandestine program between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil between the 1970s and 1980s. The military governments of those nations agreed to cooperate in sending teams into other countries to track, monitor, and kill their political opponents. The files listed more than 50,000 deaths and 400,000 political prisoners throughout Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela.

    • Subpoena to Encrypted App Provider Highlights Overbroad FBI Requests for Information

      A recently revealed grand jury subpoena shows that the FBI is likely continuing to ask companies for more information than the law allows, according to technology and privacy attorneys interviewed by The Intercept.

      Earlier this year, the FBI served Open Whisper Systems, the creator of Signal, a popular end-to-end encrypted messaging application, with its first criminal grand jury subpoena. On Tuesday, Open Whisper Systems and its lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union successfully challenged a gag order forbidding the company from speaking about that request.

      The published documents show that the FBI requested “any and all subscriber information and any associated accounts to include subscriber name, address, telephone numbers, email addresses, method of payment, IP registration, IP history logs and addresses, account history, toll records, upstream and downstream providers, any associated accounts acquired through cookie data, and any other contact information from inception to the present” for two phone numbers.

    • What would a CYBERCOM-NSA split mean?

      Much has been made over the discussions surrounding a potential separation of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. Such a determination would involve severing the “dual-hat” leadership of these organizations, which share the same chief, as well as raise questions of what CYBERCOM standing up as its own independent organization might look like.

    • Briefing Unsealed in Court Battle Over National Security Letters

      EFF Argues that NSL Secrecy Violates First Amendment and Chills Debate on Government Surveillance

      San Francisco – An appeals court published redacted briefing by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today arguing that national security letters (NSLs) and their accompanying gag orders violate the free speech rights of companies who want to keep their users informed about government surveillance.

      EFF represents two service providers in challenging the NSL statutes in front of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Most of the proceedings have been sealed since the case began five years ago, but some redacted documents have been released after government approval.

    • USA FREEDOM Act Requires Government to Declassify Any Order to Yahoo

      In the wake of reports this week that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered Yahoo to scan all of its users’ email in 2015, there are many unanswered legal and technical questions about the mass surveillance.

      But before we can even begin to answer them, there is a more fundamental question: what does the court order say?

      We should be able to answer this question. Section 402 of the USA FREEDOM Act, passed in June 2015, specifically requires government officials to “conduct a declassification review of each decision, order, or opinion issued” by the FISC “that includes a significant construction or interpretation of any provision of law.” The Yahoo order would appear to fall squarely within this provision.

      Congress passed Section 402 to end decades of secret FISC-created law after learning that the court was interpreting federal statutes and the U.S. Constitution in secret and without the benefit of any other voices to counter arguments by the Executive Branch.

    • Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone

      In July I wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working without the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.

      The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my setup, identify and keys. The reason behind this major mess was running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have started storing everything in userdata/ in git, to be able to roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling back to an earlier version, one need to use the ‘reset session’ option in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare time.

      I’ve also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send. I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and thus try to keep the number of support requests down.

      Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly, making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run the wrapper and click the ‘Register without mobile phone’ to get going now. I’ve also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.

    • Self-driving cars won’t just log miles and road markers; they’ll be logging you

      A Silicon Valley company called Nauto announced a partnership with Toyota’s Research Institute, BMWi Ventures (a venture capital company founded by BMW), and insurance company Allianz Ventures to bring driver analysis to autonomous vehicles.

      Nauto currently produces a $400 aftermarket camera- and sensor-equipped device that attaches to a car’s windshield to analyze driver behavior. According to Reuters, the device is part-dash cam—snapping footage and tagging “events” like accidents—and part-driver monitor—detecting possible driver distraction in the car like drinking or texting. Nauto then collects and anonymizes this information to draw conclusions about driver habits, intersections, and congestion in certain areas.

    • Remotely accessing an IP address inside a target computer is a search

      First, several readers pointed out that the government actually has made this argument. You can read the government’s argument here in the Michaud case (pages 6-7) and here in the Lemus case (pages 8-12). My apologies for the misstatement, and thanks to reader Jonathan Mayer for sending on the briefs.

      Second, some readers argued that a Tor user loses a reasonable expectation of privacy in IP addresses because the user must disclose his true IP address to Tor. This is essentially the argument the government (briefly) makes in Michaud: By using Tor, you are sending your IP address to Tor, which is ultimately hosted by “an unknowable collection of strangers” who are running Tor exit nodes. You have put out your IP address to lots of people, which means that you have no expectation of privacy in it.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • How Sweden became an exporter of jihad

      Sweden is a peaceful democratic state that has long been a safe haven for those fleeing conflict. Yet many young people whose families took refuge there are now turning their back on the country. More than 300 people have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, making Sweden per capita one of the biggest exporters of jihadists in Europe.

      I meet a young woman in the basement of a building in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. She seems like any other young Western woman, wearing tight clothing and make-up. But she has recently returned from Raqqa in Syria, where her husband died fighting for the so-called Islamic State (IS).

    • Pimping charges over escort ads could erode tech firms’ legal protection: experts

      The CEO and owners of Backpage.com are accused of heinous crimes, but California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ indictment of the three men could lead to a major upheaval for some Silicon Valley tech companies, experts said Friday.

      [...]

      In going after Backpage, Harris — in the midst of a U.S. Senate campaign — might have been emboldened by last year’s courtroom victory over the operator of a revenge-porn website. Kevin Bollaert was sentenced to 18 years in prison — despite a Section 230 defense, Goldman said.

      It was Bollaert’s design and operation of the site, rather than just the hosting of third-party content, that helped Harris get a conviction, Goldman said. “It’s possible they think they can hold (the Backpage defendants) accountable for the design and operation of Backpage, which has been in (prosecutors’) opinion optimized to facilitate online prostitution ads,” Goldman said.

    • Police Unions Reject Charges of Bias, Find a Hero in Donald Trump

      During the first presidential debate, Donald Trump answered a question about how to heal the country’s racial divide by boasting of his law enforcement endorsements.

      “We have endorsements from, I think, almost every police group,” he said, before rephrasing to “a large percentage of them.” Later in the debate, in response to a question about cybersecurity, he boasted again: “I was just endorsed by ICE. They’ve never endorsed anybody before on immigration. I was just endorsed by ICE.”

      As is often the case, the candidate’s statements were hyperbolic in the first claim and plain incorrect in the second. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency operating under the Department of Homeland Security, did not, of course, endorse anyone, even though the National ICE Council, the union representing 7,600 of ICE’s 20,000 employees, did endorse Trump. And while the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police association in the country, as well as some local police unions, also endorsed Trump, that’s hardly every police group in the country.

      But Trump did have a point: At a time when law enforcement is perhaps the only issue that divides Americans more than the presidential election itself, a notable number of police and immigration officers are throwing their weight behind his candidacy — at least through their unions and associations.

    • Ways You Can Be Killed During An Encounter with Police

      How do you defend yourself against individuals who have been indoctrinated into believing that they are superior to you, that their word is law, and that they have the power to take your life?

      Most of all, how can you maintain the illusion of freedom when daily, Americans are being shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, challenge an order or just exist?

      The short answer: you can’t.

      Now for the long answer, which is far more complicated but still leaves us feeling hopeless, helpless and vulnerable to the fears, moods and misguided training of every cop on the beat.

      If you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply (or die).

    • Avoiding Contempt of Court, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach Says He’ll Let People Vote

      Under the threat of contempt of court, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has agreed to register thousands of eligible voters and to properly notify them that they are registered. His announcement came after a federal judge summoned him to a contempt hearing for failing to fully carry out the court’s order and add about 18,000 voters to the rolls.

      Kobach is the architect of laws across the country that have created barriers for eligible voters to register and vote, including requirements that people present citizenship documents at the time of registration and restrictions on the forms of ID voters must provide. Kobach has helped develop model legislation for these restrictions and coached legislators in how to pass them. Other states have eliminated same-day registration and narrowed time periods for voting — mainly affecting people of color.

      Some legislators have admitted that it is part of their political strategy to spread false fear of electoral fraud in order to issue stricter rules for voter registration. Judges in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, and North Dakota have recently ruled that states restrictions on voters discriminate on the basis of race.

    • Gov. LePage’s Binder of Black and Brown People Is Actually Pretty White

      According to our count, more than half of the people in Gov. LePage’s binder are white.

      Last month, Maine’s Gov. LePage once again got our attention when he claimed to be keeping a binder of “every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state,” 90 percent of whom, he said, are Black or Hispanic.

      We couldn’t believe that was true, so we filed a public records request for the binder. On Monday, we got in line at the state house to receive our copy on CD.

      What we received could best be described as a scrapbook: a random, incomplete collection of newspaper clippings and press releases from the Maine Department of Public Safety. Some press releases don’t include photos of the arrested. Some contain handwritten notes from the governor himself: “get photo for my album;” “please be sure we get all mugs with release;” “file pictures in my binder for historical value.”

      While the binder paints an incomplete picture of the demographics of drug arrests in Maine, it very clearly does not support the governor’s assertions that over 90 percent of the people in his scrapbook are Black or Hispanic. While it is impossible to tell the race of all arrestees included in the binder, at least 50 of the 90 people pictured appear to be white. In other words, the governor greatly exaggerated the role people of color play in Maine’s drug trade.

    • For Mexican Towns Attacked by Cartel, Few Answers and No Justice

      It was a brazen attack. Some 60 gunmen linked to the brutal Zetas cartel descended on a quiet cluster of towns just south of the Mexican border in the spring of 2011 and launched a door-to-door extermination campaign that went on for weeks, leaving an untold number of people dead or missing. Yet in the five years since the slaughter in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, the Mexican government has failed to fully investigate, much less address the needs of the victims and their families, according to a preliminary report released today by a panel of scholars and human rights investigators.

      “It’s horrifying because it was all so blatant,” said Mariclaire Acosta, a veteran human rights investigator who advised the panel. “This wasn’t a hidden crime. It all happened out in the open, and not one government agency did anything to stop it.”

      Such charges have become a disturbing echo in Mexico, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by drug violence, either at the hands of traffickers or corrupt security forces, and the crippled — often complicit — justice system is incapable of pursuing those responsible. Sunday’s report suggests that Mexicans have begun to look for ways, at the very least, to get to the truth, rather than sitting idly and wait for justice from their government. They are increasingly calling for help from external experts, both at home and abroad, to oversee investigations into the most egregious crimes. And government leaders — who may or may not be committed to real reforms, but seem prickly about public opinion polls — are relenting.

    • Hell in “Dark Prison”: New forms of torture at CIA black site revealed

      Previously undisclosed methods of torture used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have been revealed in a new report by Human Rights Watch.

      Two Tunisian men detained without charge or trial in a CIA black site in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2015 independently described to the rights group several excruciating forms of abuse they endured at the hands of the CIA.

      The detainees, who were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation and hunger, recalled being brutally beaten all over their bodies with batons by U.S. interrogators. They also said they were repeatedly punched and kicked. One man suffered broken bones in these beatings.

      Even more grueling were the many weeks the detainees endured chained by their hands to the ceilings of their cells for repeated 24-hour periods. These days of torment were only punctuated by short breaks for interrogations or other forms of torture. One man said he was forced to hang like this for roughly three months; another said he suffered through it for a month.

    • 40 boys in mass brawl at troubled Danish asylum centre

      Around 40 underage asylum seekers participated in a mass brawl at the children’ asylum centres Børnecenter Tullebølle on Sunday, local news site Fyens.dk reported.

      Boys from the same centre were also involved in a fight involving upwards of 100 minor asylum seekers during a football match against another centre in July.

      The following month, five teenage boys from the centre were charged for sexual assaults committed during the Langelandsfestival. Three were charged with groping, and two for raping a 16-year-old girl.

    • Malmö nightclub rocked by powerful explosion

      A popular nightclub in Malmö was damaged in a powerful explosion in the early hours of Monday.

      No one was injured in the blast, which was heard across large parts of central Malmö shortly after 1.30am on Monday.

      Babel, a popular nightclub and concert venue in the Möllevången area, was damaged in the explosion, which shattered windows on the first floor. A car parked on the street outside was also damaged.

      Police examined the property overnight. The explosion is believed to have been intentional, but in the morning it was still unclear what had caused the detonation.

    • Girl under 15 married every seven seconds, says Save the Children

      One girl under the age of 15 is married every seven seconds, according to a new report by Save the Children.

      The study says girls as young as 10 are forced to marry much older men in countries including Afghanistan, Yemen, India and Somalia.

      Save the Children says early marriage can trigger a cycle of disadvantage across every part of a girl’s life.

      Conflict, poverty and humanitarian crises are seen as major factors that leave girls exposed to child marriage.

      “Child marriage starts a cycle of disadvantage that denies girls the most basic rights to learn, develop and be children,” said Save the Children International CEO Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

    • The Freedom to Associate

      In 1854, an Austrian priest and physics teacher named Gregor Mendel sought and received permission from his abbot to plant a two-acre garden of pea plants on the grounds of the monastery at which he lived. Over the course of the next seven years, he bred together thousands upon thousands of the plants under carefully controlled circumstances, recording in a journal the appearance of every single offspring that resulted, as defined by seven characteristics: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. In the end, he collected enough data to formulate the basis of the modern science of genetics, in the form of a theory of dominant and recessive traits passed down in pairs from generation to generation. He presented his paper on the subject, “Experiments on Plant Hybridization,” before the Natural History Society of Austria in 1865, and saw it published in a poorly circulated scientific journal the following year.

      And then came… nothing. For various reasons — perhaps due partly to the paper’s unassuming title, perhaps due partly to the fact that Mendel was hardly a known figure in the world of biology, undoubtedly due largely to the poor circulation of the journal in which it was published — few noticed it at all, and those who did dismissed it seemingly without grasping its import. Most notably, Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published while Mendel was in the midst of his own experiments, seems never to have been aware of the paper at all, thereby missing this key gear in the mechanism of evolution. Mendel was promoted to abbot of his monastery shortly after the publication of his paper, and the increased responsibilities of his new post ended his career as a scientist. He died in 1884, remembered as a quiet man of religion who had for a time been a gentleman dabbler in the science of botany.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Members Still Debating Changes To Oversight At WIPO

      Stung by what some saw as a botched process for handling an investigation into allegations from senior officials about the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO members are working this week to agree on changes to procedures. A new draft text circulated this morning introduces additional responsibility for governments in the process, and is under discussion today. At press time, ambassadors from the African Group were meeting among themselves and asked to hold up the process until internal agreement could be reached on the text. The plenary is scheduled to reconvene at four o’clock today.

      The annual WIPO General Assemblies are taking place from 3-11 October.

      The latest draft text of the proposed changes to the WIPO Internal Oversight Charter changes is available here [pdf]. The latest version accepted many of changes in the previous version [pdf], but the latest text goes much further.

    • Promoting Transparency in Trade Act Would Bring Long-Needed Reforms to the USTR

      The one important thing that the current legislation omits to do is to require the publication of consolidated draft texts of trade agreements after each round of negotiations. This reform, alone, would be a significant advance which would bring trade negotiations into line with other intergovernmental treaty negotiations such as those that take place at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It is unfortunate that, although it was part of an earlier draft, this didn’t make it into the current draft bill. We are hopeful that the bill can be amended to include this in its final form.

      None of these three proposals, even including the omitted one, is particularly radical. They are far less radical, for example, than a separate proposal by Congressman Morgan Griffith that would actually divest the USTR of its authority and move it to a committee of Congress. EFF considers the Promoting Transparency in Trade Act to be an important and achievable step forward in making long-needed reforms to the USTR. Provided that it can be amended to include the publication of consolidated texts, EFF supports the bill.

    • Key takeaways from the IP Enforcement Forum 2016

      Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) provide a good example of a technology where different IP rights have a role to play, and Noam Shemtov, senior lecturer in IP at Queen Mary University of London, examined the merits of patents, trade marks, trade dress, unfair competition, registered designs and copyright in a discussion that covered cases including Apple’s slide-to-unlock feature and the pending dispute Microsoft v Corel (over Microsoft Office) in the US.

    • Examining the Madrid Protocol in Africa

      International Registrations are not being properly administered in several African countries, and take up by local businesses has been low. Wayne Meiring explains why this is a problem

      Much has been written about the Madrid Protocol in Africa. The focus has been on the common law issue and the issue regarding the accession of OAPI. This article, however, looks at two other issues. The first is that in many member countries International Registrations (IRs) are not being properly administered. The second is the fact that to a great extent, IRs are not being used by African IP rights holders to any significant degree.

    • Interview With Brazilian Culture Minister Marcelo Calero

      At last week’s first-ever Assembly of the Marrakesh Treaty, Intellectual Property Watch caught up with the Assembly Chair, new Brazilian Culture Minister Marcelo Calero. In a video interview with William New, he talked briefly about the importance of libraries and of implementing the Marrakesh Treaty.

    • The Whole VR Porn Industry Is Talking About These Patent Lawsuits

      For the past few years, the media’s been abuzz about the promise of VR porn. VR technology keeps getting better and more affordable, and adult entrepreneurs are eager to find a medium that might actually make them money. Throw in the fact that the immersive properties of VR are ideal for the intimate experience of porn viewing, and it starts to seem like a perfect storm for the future of high-tech erotic entertainment.

      What force could possibly derail the adult industry’s virtual reality dreams? Well, for starters, patents.

      Two weeks ago, the National Law Review reported that Virtual Immersion Technologies LLC had begun enforcing patent 6409599, an incredibly broad patent for an “interactive virtual reality performance theater entertainment system.” The patent is at the heart of a handful of active lawsuits—including one related to VR porn, and another about teledildonics—and other VR companies, even those that haven’t been sued themselves, are beginning to panic.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/11/torvalds-arm-rant/feed/ 0 Software Patents a Dying Breed, But Patent Lawyers in Denial Over it and Notorious Judge Rodney Gilstrap Ignores Alice (Supreme Court) http://techrights.org/2016/07/27/rodney-gilstrap-ignores-alice/ http://techrights.org/2016/07/27/rodney-gilstrap-ignores-alice/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2016 23:37:03 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94636 The trolls’ best friend, Mr. Gilstrap

Rodney Gilstrap

Summary: A look at what law and practice are saying about software patents, contrasted or contradicted by the patent industry and trolls-friendly courts (which make business out of or together with patent aggressors)

TECHRIGHTS spent a lot of time writing about Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo. Microsoft took everything it wanted from Yahoo and left a dead company to rot, as usual (that’s Microsoft’s modus operandi as one can see in Corel, Novell, Nokia et cetera).

Now that Yahoo is sold (and journalists don’t bother mentioning how Microsoft killed Yahoo) the think tank which is IAM says: “While that deal will involve the bulk of Yahoo!’s traditional business, it does not involve the Excalibur patent portfolio, a stockpile of around 2,700 assets that the company has spun out into a separate vehicle to be sold separately.”

“Microsoft took everything it wanted from Yahoo and left a dead company to rot, as usual (that’s Microsoft’s modus operandi as one can see in Corel, Novell, Nokia et cetera).”We always sensed the danger that Yahoo would give its software patents to some hostile entity or a Microsoft-made entity like CPTN. Yahoo has a lot of software patents, but they’re quite worthless after Alice and some are nearing their expiry. The good news is, one single decision at the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) had supreme impact and this lowers the risk to software developers everywhere in the world (if they trade within the US or export to the US).

A lot of patent lawyers/attorneys keep pondering/assessing tricks for portraying software patents as non-abstract (even though they always are), in light of Alice whose impact was incredibly profound.

As expected all along, Bascom is exploited by software patents proponents including Watchtroll’s site (patent attorney John M. Rogitz in this case). He says that the case of “DDR begins with Mayo step 1 analysis without definitively declaring whether the claims are or are not abstract. Instead, the opinion observes what the claims are not: they are not a mathematical algorithm or a fundamental economic or longstanding commercial practice, but instead address a business challenge (retaining website visitors), a challenge particular to the Internet. Instead of declaring this not to be “abstract”, however, Judge Chen simply points out that identifying the precise nature of the abstract idea is not as straightforward as in Alice given the various varying formulations of the underlying abstract idea presented by the infringer and by the dissent.”

Unless Judge Chen actually wrote a computer program, it is likely that understanding of abstractness of algorithms would be deficient. Watch the very latest pro-software patents lobbying/promotion from Shelston IP [1, 2]. They’re preying on ignorance and looking for exceptional court decisions not only to preserve software patents in the US/Australia but also bring them elsewhere (like Australia’s neighbours and in particular a defiant New Zealand).

“Unless Judge Chen actually wrote a computer program, it is likely that understanding of abstractness of algorithms would be deficient.”Speaking of judges, Rodney Gilstrap is a villain, not a judge (recall his track record in East Texas [1, 2, 3, 4]). He deals with an enormous number of troll cases where software patents are treated favourably and practicing businesses are forced to pay parasitic trolls. As it turns out, he also publishes documents in Microsoft Word format (maybe a clerical error). He is publishing in formats that only Microsoft customers can properly access, much like the EPO (see today’s tweet which mostly matters to people who are using Microsoft Windows, not anything else).

“Section 101 is a powerful tool for patent defendants, if they can get heard,” Joe Mullin says in his summary and here is the beginning of the article “East Texas judge backs off restrictive “abstract” patent motion rules”:

US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas hears more patent cases than any other federal judge. Last year, he installed a set of controversial rules for those cases, leading to rare public criticism. Changes to Gilstrap’s order (Word file), dated last week, suggest some of those rules have been withdrawn.

Section 101 of the US patent laws is what the Supreme Court has deemed bans overly abstract patents. Since the high court decided Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, Section 101 has become more important, since courts have been reading it as banning many software patents that recite basic processes.

Last year, the patent rules for Gilstrap’s court held that defendants seeking to file a motion under Section 101 “may do so only upon a grant of leave from the Court after a showing of good cause, which shall be presented through the letter briefing process.”

Gilstrap is out of control. More people need to speak about it. CAFC too had such a judge, but he was ejected for misconduct.

Patent trolls are going after small companies if they don’t wish the claims to be challenged or for trials to be concluded. It’s a rogue system, so in addition to ending sofwtare patents it would be useful to prevent venue shifting to Rodney Gilstrap with his bogus Texan ‘court’ (whose district openly advertises itself as being friendly towards trolls). What a mess of a system! This needs to be tackled immediately. █

“There`s no present. There`s only the immediate future and the recent past.”

–George Carlin

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/07/27/rodney-gilstrap-ignores-alice/feed/ 0 Links 7/7/2016: New Information About Ian Murdock, New Snap Desktop Launchers http://techrights.org/2016/07/07/snap-desktop-launchers/ http://techrights.org/2016/07/07/snap-desktop-launchers/#comments Thu, 07 Jul 2016 09:20:33 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94224

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Who needs a GUI? How to live in a Linux terminal.

      Ever consider the idea of living entirely in a Linux terminal? No graphical desktop. No modern GUI software. Just text—and nothing but text—inside a Linux shell. It may not be easy, but it’s absolutely doable. I recently tried living completely in a Linux shell for 30 days. What follows are my favorite shell applications for handling some of the most common bits of computer functionality (web browsing, word processing, etc.). With a few obvious holes. Because being text-only is hard.

    • Not Your Mother’s Linux

      As someone who’s primarily used Windows since the early ’90s (with some minor dabbling in OS X), I’ve found Ubuntu MATE Linux to be pretty intuitive during my month or so of casual experimentation. I would even go so far as to say it’s been easier to figure out than recent iterations of Windows — which I hope says more about how clunky that old operating system has become and less about how woefully incompetent I might be with computers.

      I have a confession to make — one that will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read this column in the past. I’m not really a computer person. My mother would disagree, but she’s never owned a computer — no matter how many times I’ve tried to get her on board for the admittedly selfish reason of being able to communicate with her in a fashion that avoids phone companies and post offices. She insists it’s because she “doesn’t like to type,” but I know her mistrust of technology goes far beyond computers (and if I got her a tablet, she’d be annoyed at the endless invasion of fingerprints — a complaint to which I can relate).

    • Full-screen Nagware: Microsoft’s Final Attempt To Push Windows 10 Is Its Worst Yet

      Microsoft has been able to convince millions of users to install Windows 10 on their PCs. To grab more user base, Microsoft is now showing full-screen upgrade pop-ups notifying the people to perform the upgrade before 29.

  • Kernel Space

    • Doing for User Space What We Did for Kernel Space

      I believe the best and worst thing about Linux is its hard distinction between kernel space and user space.

      Without that distinction, Linux never would have become the most leveraged operating system in the world. Today, Linux has the largest range of uses for the largest number of users—most of whom have no idea they are using Linux when they search for something on Google or poke at their Android phones. Even Apple stuff wouldn’t be what it is (for example, using BSD in its computers) were it not for Linux’s success.

      Read more

    • More Polaris & Tonga Fixes For Linux 4.7

      Another batch of AMDGPU DRM driver fixes has been sent in for landing in Linux 4.7.

      These latest AMDGPU fixes are for taking care of some PowerPlay issues for Radeon RX 480 “Polaris” and Tonga (e.g. Radeon R9 285) graphics cards. There are no other changes outside of these Polaris/Tonga PowerPlay fixes.

    • Stale Data, or How We (Mis-)manage Modern Caches by Mark Rutland
    • Taming the Chaos of Modern Caches

      “If you’re a bit tired, this is a presentation on cache maintenance, so there will be plenty of opportunity to sleep.” Despite this warning from ARM Ltd. kernel developer Mark Rutland at his recent Embedded Linux Conference presentation, Stale Data, or How We (Mis-)manage Modern Caches, it was actually kind of an eye opener — at least as far as cache management presentations go.

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD’s Linux Driver Will Likely See A Power Change For The Radeon RX 480 Too

        By now you may have heard that there is the potential for the Radeon RX 480 to draw more power from the PCI-E bus than it’s rated to provide. In rare situations, this could potentially cause problems for the system. AMD/RTG is preparing to release a Windows driver fix while I checked in with AMD about addressing this situation under Linux.

      • AMD improves its Linux drivers

        It looks like AMD has finally got the memo when it comes to Linux machines. Its new AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 driver offers day-one support for its new Radeon RX 480 from day one.

        The new driver is currently available for download from AMD’s website. It is officially supported on 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It’s very similar to the earlier beta release and AMD still calls it a beta, but apparently it is stable and there are installation instructions on the website.

      • Dirk Hohndel Is No Longer Intel’s Chief Linux/OSS Technologist

        Well this somehow slipped under our radar last week and comes as a big surprise… Dirk Hohndel has left Intel Corp after being their chief Linux and open-source technologist the past number of years.

        Dirk Hohndel had been working at Intel since 2001 where he had been leading the Linux/open-source charge. Dirk frequently spoke at Linux/FLOSS conferences about Intel’s involvement in these areas. Given his tenure at Intel and his frequent involvement in the Linux/open-source communities, it comes as a surprise to see him leave. Prior to Intel, he was CTO at SUSE.

      • OpenChrome 0.5 Has Working Support For Multiple Monitors

        For those still leveraging VIA x86 hardware on Linux, the DRM/KMS driver hasn’t been restored yet but there is a new xf86-video-openchrome DDX feature release now available.

        Kevin Brace has continued taking up the maintenance of the OpenChrome X.Org driver. Three months ago he released xf86-video-openchrome 0.4 while now available is OpenChrome 0.5.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME and Flatpak

      • GNOME Calendar supports alarms

        In another of my (appearently common) insomnia nights, I decided to add a cool new to my pet application – Calendar.

      • GNOME Calendar Will Support Alarms, GNOME Software to Better Handle Flatpaks

        The GNOME developers are hard at work this summer to bring you the latest innovations and technologies for the modern GNOME 3 desktop environment, as part of the GNOME 3.22 release.

        GNOME 3.22 is in heavy development until the end of September, when the final release will hit the streets, but it will take a while (~two or three weeks) for it to arrive in the main software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux operating systems, Arch Linux being among the first, but it will worth the wait.

      • Flatpak, Snap and AppImage

        Over the past few months we have been hearing a lot about two new package formats, Flatpak and Snap (aka Snappy, aka snaps). These two new methods of packaging software have been getting a lot of attention, especially in the Ubuntu and Fedora communities. Both package formats attempt to make packaging easier for developers as all of an application’s dependencies can be bundled in the one portable package. Both Flatpak and Snap also claim to be (in theory at least) universal. The idea here is that any distribution which provides the Snap framework will be able to run any Snap package. Likewise, any Linux distribution with the Flatpak software installed should be able to run any Flatpak package. This should make it possible for developers to make one package for their software which will run on any distribution.

  • Distributions

    • This Week in Solus – Install #30

    • Reviews

      • Running Linux on the Acer Switch Alpha 12

        The Acer Switch Alpha 12 is a 2-in-1 tablet with a high-resolution display, a detachable keyboard cover, an optional pressure-sensitive pen, and after having reviewed the tablet, I can say it offers the kind of performance you’d expect from a mid-range laptop… but in a 2 pound, fanless package.

        Best of all, the Switch Alpha 12 is reasonably priced: you can buy one for about $600 and up.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • New toolset makes it possible to build and ship Docker containers within Ansible

        A new project from the creators of the system automation framework Ansible, now owned by Red Hat, wants to make it possible to build Docker images and perform container orchestration within Ansible.

        Ansible Container, still in the early stages of development, allows developers to use an Ansible playbook (the language that describes Ansible jobs) to outline how containers should be built; it uses Ansible’s stack to deploy those applications as well.

      • Red Hat, Eurotech collaborate on IoT cloud platform
      • Red Hat expands cloud management solution

        Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution.

      • What You Missed at DevNation & Red Hat Summit 2016
      • Red Hat’s Ansible Container Aims to Streamline Container Workflows

        The system automation framework Ansible, which is under the wing of Red Hat, has given rise to a new way to build Docker images and perform container orchestration within Ansible. Ansible Container allows for the complete creation of Docker-formatted Linux containers within Ansible Playbooks, eliminating the need to use external tools like Dockerfile or docker-compose.

        The new toolset is now available on GitHub. Here is more on what it can do.

      • A brief guide to hiring with culture in mind

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Upgraded from F23

          It was my first upgrade from a previous release and all went fine and smooth.

        • Event report: Fedora Cloud FAD 2016

          Around a month back the Fedora Cloud Working Group met in Raleigh for two days for Cloud FAD. The goal of the meet was to agree about the future we want, to go through major action items for the coming releases. I reached Raleigh one day before, Adam Miller was my room for this trip. Managed to meet Tom after a long time, this was my first visit to mothership :) I also managed to meet my new teammate Randy Barlow.

        • Summer training 2016 is on

          The 9th edition of dgplug summer training started few weeks back. This year in the IRC channel (#dgplug on freenode) we saw around 186+ nicks participating in the sessions. Till now we have went through communication guidelines, IRC, mailing list how to, a text editor ( Vim in this case), blogging, basic bash commands, a few more bit advanced bash commands. We also learned about reStructured Text, and Sphinx. We also managed to live demos to all students from the mentor’s terminal.

    • Debian Family

      • The State Of Systemd In Debian (2016)

        Debian developer Michael Biebl has presented a status update on systemd in Debian at this week’s DebConf 16 event in Cape Town, South Africa.

        On Tuesday was a presentation by Biebl about systemd in Debian and the progress that’s been made with systemd as the default init system for the past year. The video presentation has yet to be uploaded, but there are PDF slides for those interested.

      • Mysterious death of software pioneer Ian Murdock ruled suicide

        Ian Murdock, the Linux programmer who died under mysterious circumstances after claiming he was beaten by police, hanged himself.

      • New Details Emerge About Debian Founder Ian Murdock’s Death
      • Murdock Death Ruled Suicide, Terrible Linux Regressions

        CNN’s Jose Pagliery today reported that Ian Murdock’s death was officially ruled a suicide. Murdock, who founded Debian GNU/Linux in 1993, became despondent after a run-in with San Francisco police. He took to social media to accused police of brutally beating him and threaten suicide. Murdock was found hours later face down with an electrical cord tied around his neck. The investigator said he found no obvious signs of trauma although the autopsy directly contradicts that statement. Pagliery reported that no announcement had been made publicly and that the details of his body being covered in bruises only came out in the autopsy report obtained by CNN. “The autopsy records also note his body was covered in bruises — on his chest, abdomen, back, arms and legs.”

      • twenty years of free software — part 9 small projects
      • Avoiding SMS vendor lock-in with SMPP

        There is increasing demand for SMS notifications about monitoring alerts, trading notifications, flight delays and other events. Various companies are offering SMS transmission services to meet this demand and many of them aggressively pushing their own proprietary interfaces to the SMS world rather than using the more open and widely supported SMPP.

      • Derivatives

        • Debian Edu / Skolelinux Jessie

          Then Debian Edu is for you. The teachers themselves or their technical support can roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.

          The Debian Edu developer team is happy to announce Debian Edu 8+edu0 “Jessie”, the latest Debian Edu / Skolelinux release, entirely based on Debian 8 “Jessie”, update 8.5. Upgrades from previous beta releases of Debian Edu Jessie to this release are possible and encouraged!

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Review: Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS shines

            Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) represents the first release from Canonical to deliver long-term support since 2011 (version 14). While the latest improvements may not be entirely revolutionary, Ubuntu 16.04 rounds up exciting features to fortify the server base and enhance the desktop experience. InfoWorld reviewed the new desktop release in April. In this review, I’ll focus on the server.

            One of the key updates in this release comes by way of the new Snap package archive. Canonical’s LTS repositories are notoriously outpaced by modern software release cycles. It’s the classic trade-off for stability: Canonical moves slowly to adopt new versions of packages in order to vet applications and ensure they don’t muck up your system. Unfortunately, that induces a lag time that leaves users waiting as the latest and greatest software passes them by.

          • Ubuntu Linux to be bundled as preferred OS with Pivotal Cloud Foundry app platform

            Canonical and Cloud Foundry developer Pivotal have agreed a partnership in which Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux will become the preferred operating system for running Cloud Foundry, with secure certified Ubuntu images included.

            Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular platform-as-a-service suites for developing and deploying cloud-native applications, and versions of it are integrated in a number of platforms such as IBM’s Bluemix developer cloud and HPE’s Helion Stackato.

          • Pivotal Adds Ubuntu to Cloud Foundry

            The steady shift to cloud native infrastructure continues with a partnership between enterprise software vendor Pivotal and Linux specialist Canonical that will provide secure images from Canonical’s Linux distribution Ubuntu on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

          • uNav GPS Navigation App for Ubuntu Phones Now Offers Offline Maps, Convergence

            Today, July 6, 2016, Marcos Costales has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability of a new update of his uNav GPS navigator app for Ubuntu Phone devices.

          • Nexus 6 Is Now an Unofficial Ubuntu Phone, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Support Coming Soon

            We told you the other day that Ubports’ Marius Gripsgård is on vacation, which means that he has a lot of time on his hands to improve the unofficial Ubuntu Touch port for various devices.

          • Linux Distributions Are Soon Dropping The Support For 32-bit Computers

            Today, few people are using the hardware that can’t run 64-bit CPUs. A recent proposal by Ubuntu’s Dimitri John Ledkov states that Canonical will be killing the 32-bit hardware support soon. This move is also inspired by the fact that 32-bit testing needs double effort and turns out to be costly for an open source project.

          • Canonical-Pivotal partnership makes Ubuntu preferred Linux distro for Cloud Foundry
          • Ubuntu Announces New Snap Desktop Launchers

            Canonical developers have been working on new Snap desktop launchers for improving integration of Snap GUI packages with the converged Ubuntu desktop.

            These new Snap desktop launchers provide a closer and more unified level of integration among packaged desktop applications. Didier Roche, Ubuntu Desktop Technical Leader at Canonical, explained, “The goal was to streamline the experience and ensuring that all following user visible features are working, independent of the toolkit or technology you are using.”

          • Announcing new snap desktop launchers

            Integrating desktop applications with snaps has been a little bit challenging in terms of getting them looking and behaving as part of the system. This means following general desktop theming, having global application menu integration, getting the icon caches, getting configuration keys and such. Also, the technologies and toolkits like GTK, Qt, demand a little bit of expertise on that front.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint 18 – Forgetting Sarah Linux

              Linux Mint. Version 18. Sarah. Cinnamon Edition. This was supposed to be the sweetest LTS yet. Only it’s very buggy, it’s worse than the previous edition and the three before, or maybe all of them. It’s even buggier than Ubuntu, and it’s been released a good two months after its parent. There are so many regressions in the system. And I know I’m trying every trick in the English language and scientific method to explain and convince you that this has nothing to do with my hardware, because with the same nuts and bolts in place, you can still baseline, calibrate, evaluate, and compare over time.

              With none of the other parameters changed – my box and me – Mint 18 Sarah is just not a very good release. The live session is awful. I don’t have any smartphone support, at all. Quite a few other aspects of the desktop experience are missing or lacking, and they are just not as refined as they used to be. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, yesterday you told me about the blue blue distro. This season is bad. There’s no other way of putting it. And my experience was so unrewarding, there are many other aspects of this system that I just did not evaluate in any depth, like the x applications and such. What’s the point?

              I wish I could tell a different story. But the simple reality is, I can’t. It defies logic that the previous releases of Mint or perhaps Xubuntu 15.04 or whatever give me everything I need, but this new LTS struggles in roughly 6 out of 10 critical areas. Read it any way you will, think what you want of me, seek flaws in my methods, seek affirmation in my words, there’s no escaping the awful and painful conclusion. One, I’m shattered. Two, this season is absolutely terrible. Three, Sarah Cinnamon deserves only about 3/10. Please stick with the R-releases, and do not upgrade.

            • Upgrading Linux Mint 17.3 to Mint 18 In Place

              Okay, I thought I could wait, but I couldn’t, so yesterday I decided to do an “in place” upgrade of my office desktop from Linux Mint 17.3 to Mint 18.

              It didn’t go smoothly.

              First, let me stress that the Linux Mint community strongly recommends a fresh install every time you upgrade from one release to another, and especially when it is from one major release, like Mint 17, to another, i.e. Mint 18. They ask you to backup your home directory and package lists, base the system and then restore. The problem is that I often make a lot of changes to my system which usually involves editing files in the system /etc directory, and this doesn’t capture that.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Florida Doctor Pleads Guilty to Fraud — Years After Complaints About His Prescribing

      Seven years after a U.S. senator cited him as a national example of aberrant practices, the onetime top prescriber of antipsychotic drugs in Florida’s Medicaid program is in federal custody awaiting sentencing on fraud charges.

      The second-highest prescriber is serving a four-year term in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud charges in 2012, but he only relinquished his license to practice medicine in Florida last fall.

      Taken together, the cases illustrate how long it can take regulators and law enforcement to take action against problem doctors — and how those physicians can continue prescribing drugs paid for by taxpayers in the meantime. In 2011, ProPublica wrote about the suspicious prescribing patterns of the two Miami-area psychiatrists, Fernando Mendez-Villamil and Huberto Merayo.

    • Ghostbusters, GMOs and the Feigned Expertise of Nobel Laureates

      The letter is a defense of “Golden Rice”, a GMO said to address vitamin deficiencies associated with blindness in the Global South and perhaps one of the worst of the frequent scientific frauds perpetrated by biotechnology interests. The Nobel Prize recipients fell for a zombie rice story that refuses to die and persists as a central legitimizing narrative in the pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric that regularly spews from the pro-GMO propaganda machine. I have written about this in the past to show how Monsanto and the other Gene Giants are spending hundreds of millions on a deceptive campaign to misinform the public about the fake scientific consensus they spin based on inadequately designed industry-led studies of risk, toxicology, and food safety (see the post of May 2, 2014).

    • Activists Expose Monsanto’s Senate Lackeys Minutes Before DARK Act Vote

      Just before a controversial genetically modified (GM or GMO) labeling bill came up for a cloture vote in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, food and consumer advocates dropped over $2,000 on the chamber floor in a symbolic protest against what they are calling the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” (DARK) Act.

    • What Percentage of Doctors at Your Hospital Take Drug, Device Payments?

      Where a hospital is located makes a big difference in how many of its doctors take payments from drug and medical device companies. See how your state compares and look up your hospital below.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Java Deserialization attacks on JBoss Middleware

      Recent research by Chris Frohoff and Gabriel Lawrence has exposed gadget chains in various libraries that allow code to be executed during object deserialization in Java. They’ve done some excellent research, including publishing some code that allows anyone to serialize a malicious payload that when deserialized runs the operating system command of their choice, as the user which started the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The vulnerabilities are not with the gadget chains themselves but with the code that deserializes them.

    • Linux Mint 18 improves security, but at a cost

      The default update settings of Linux Mint would not update the Linux kernel or notify the user when security updates and bug fixes were published upstream (from Ubuntu, which Mint is directly based on, or Debian, which is the basis of Ubuntu). This default behavior left users vulnerable to root exploits, and potential hardware issues for which patches were issued alongside security fixes. Other upstream updates were also blacklisted from Linux Mint for conflicting with the design of the Cinnamon desktop.

    • Safer automotive software through Open Source?

      Linux is about to conquer one of the last blank spots in the world of open source software: The car. EE Times Europe talked with Dan Cauchy, General Manager of Automotive at the Linux Foundation, about intentions and status of Automotive Grade Linux.

    • GnuTLS 3.5.2

      Released GnuTLS 3.3.24, GnuTLS 3.4.14, and GnuTLS 3.5.2 which are bug fix releases in the old, current and next stable branches.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama Makes It Official: Either Trump or Clinton Gets to Keep Longest War in US History Going

      Confirming that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will inherit the longest war in U.S. history, President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that over 8,000 troops will stay in Afghanistan after he leaves the White House.

      The figure is thousands more than the 5,500 soldiers he said in October 2015 would remain in the country.

    • Confessions of a War Propagandist

      Scheunemann was the public relations mastermind and one of the most influential behind the scenes operators in Washington during the winter of 2002-2003. Many of the talking points (“We will be greeted as liberators,” “Sadaam has used chemical weapons on his own people,” “Rogue state rollback”) came right out of our office. A former aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Majority Leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann proudly displayed a signed letter and framed photograph from President Clinton on his office wall, thanking him for his drafting of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, the stated goal of which was regime change. A frequent visitor to our office was Ahmad Chalabi, the American educated Iraqi dissident who provided much of the information that was passed directly to the Department of Defense and the White House through our office.

    • ‘Military action was not a last resort’: Chilcot finally releases Iraq War report

      Britain chose to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003 before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted, the Chilcot Inquiry has found. Sir John Chilcot’s seven-year inquiry concluded that military action “was not a last resort.”

      The massively delayed and hugely controversial Chilcot Inquiry, reporting back on Wednesday, was tasked with examining the first eight years of the war, starting with the run-up to hostilities and including the period of occupation.

    • U.K. Iraq Inquiry Criticizes Blair and Spies Over War Failures

      Britain’s involvement in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a failure, carried out before peaceful options had been exhausted and based on intelligence that was overstated, an official inquiry concluded.

      The investigation into the build-up to the war, its execution, and aftermath is highly critical of government ministers, the intelligence services and the military. But the biggest impact of the report, published Wednesday by former civil servant John Chilcot, will be on the reputation of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the man responsible for Britain’s involvement.

    • Chilcot report: 2003 Iraq war was ‘unnecessary’, war was not ‘last resort’ and Saddam Hussein was ‘no imminent threat’

      The long-awaited official report into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War has delivered a scathing verdict on Government ministers’ justification, planning and conduct of a military intervention which “went badly wrong, with consequences to this day”.

    • Jeremy Corbyn apologises on behalf of Labour for ‘disastrous decision’ to join Iraq War

      Jeremy Corbyn has apologised on behalf of the Labour Party for Tony Blair’s “disastrous decision” to go to war in Iraq.

      “The decision to go to war in Iraq has been a stain on our party and our country,” the Labour leader said after apologising at a private meeting with families of some of the 179 British servicemen and women killed in Iraq, veterans of the military operation and Iraqis who lost family members.

    • 5 takeaways from Chilcot Report on Tony Blair’s Iraq war

      Thirteen years on and the magnitude of the Iraq war continues to grow.

      The 2003 invasion and its devastating aftermath now infects every sinew of British politics. Trust in government is shot, the special relationship undermined, Britain diminished.

      Despite widespread public acceptance that the invasion has proved a disaster, Wednesday’s official judgement remained shocking for the sheer force of its condemnation.

      After seven years and £10 million of public money, Sir John Chilcot finally produced his findings and certainly pulled no punches. No element of the British establishment escaped unscathed, least of all former prime minister Tony Blair.

      The British army had been let down and humiliated, Chilcot found. Blair’s cabinet had been supine and the intelligence was just wrong.

    • The Tragedy of Tony Blair

      The scathing Chilcot verdict on Tony Blair’s contribution to the war on Iraq brings to mind a more awful tragedy: that more politicians – notably of the American variety – have not suffered the public, private and utter disgrace now falling on Perfidious Albion.

    • Tariq Ali on Chilcot Iraq Report: Tony Blair is a War Criminal for Pushing Us into Illegal War

      While Iraq is marking a third day of mourning, a long-awaited British inquiry into the Iraq War has just been released. The Chilcot report is 2.6 million words long—about three times the length of the Bible. Using excerpts from private correspondence between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush, the report details how Blair pushed Britain into the war despite a lack of concrete intelligence. For example, eight months before the invasion, Blair wrote to Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” Then, in June 2003, less than three months after the invasion began, Blair privately wrote to Bush that the task in Iraq is “absolutely awesome and I’m not at all sure we’re geared for it.” Blair added, “And if it falls apart, everything falls apart in the region.” For more, we speak with British-Pakistani writer, commentator and author Tariq Ali.

    • Tony Blair unrepentant as Chilcot gives crushing Iraq war verdict

      A defiant Tony Blair defended his decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 following the publication of a devastating report by Sir John Chilcot, which mauled the ex-prime minister’s reputation and said that at the time of the 2003 invasion Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat”.

    • Hacked Former NATO General Defends Plotting to Push Obama to Escalate Tensions With Russia

      Former NATO Commander Philip Breedlove defended himself on Saturday after The Intercept reported on leaked emails that showed him plotting to push President Obama to escalate tensions with Russia. “I think what you see is a commander doing what commanders ought to do,” Breedlove told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    • Merkel Urged to Temper NATO’s Belligerence

      U.S. intelligence veterans are calling on German Chancellor Merkel to bring a needed dose of realism and restraint to the upcoming NATO conference, which risks escalating the dangerous new Cold War with Russia.

    • General Breedlove and the Russophobes
    • Israel’s New Open-Fire Rule Authorizes ‘Extra-Judicial Execution’ of Palestinian Youths

      Israeli police are officially permitted to use deadly force against stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers, according to updated regulations made public on Tuesday by an Israel-based human rights organization.

      The new open-fire regulations, revealed by Adalah, a rights organization and legal center that defends Palestinians living in Israel as well as the occupied territories, state that “an officer is permitted to open fire [with live ammunition] directly on an individual who clearly appears to be throwing or is about to throw a firebomb, or who is shooting or is about to shoot fireworks, in order to prevent endangerment.”

    • Yemeni Drone Victim Responds to President Obama’s Civilian Casualty Figures
    • Happy Flag-Waving Drone Document Dump

      ODNI (update–and now I Con the Record) has released its report on the number of drone deaths. The overview is that the US intelligence community is reporting (more on that in a second) far, far fewer drone deaths than credible outside researchers do.

    • The Nonviolent History of American Independence

      Independence Day is commemorated with fireworks and flag-waving, gun salutes and military parades . . . however, one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, wrote, “A history of military operations . . . is not a history of the American Revolution.”

      Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a powerful role in achieving American Independence from British rule. Benjamin Naimark-Rowse wrote, “the lesson we learn of a democracy forged in the crucible of revolutionary war tends to ignore how a decade of nonviolent resistance before the shot-heard-round-the-world shaped the founding of the United States, strengthened our sense of political identity, and laid the foundation of our democracy.”

    • Chilcot Report: Tony Blair Told George W. Bush, “If We Win Quickly, Everyone Will Be Our Friend.”

      The Chilcot Report, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation.

      Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

    • From Paris to Istanbul, More ‘War on Terror’ Means More Terrorist Attacks

      At least 41 people were killed in the recent bombing of Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.

      The day before, suicide bombers killed five people in Qaa, a small village in Lebanon. And while the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed war in Yemen continues to rage, an ISIS affiliate claimed responsibility for attacks in the Yemeni port city of Mukalla that killed at least 12.

    • In Political Fights Over Chilcot Report, Iraqi Lives Don’t Matter

      The bitter political debate over the 2003 Iraq war resumed once again on Wednesday in the United Kingdom and the United States, thanks to the release of a report on the British role in the invasion and occupation.

      Parsing the report, prepared by a committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot, will take time since it runs to 2.6 million words, but the reaction online has already begun. Partisans for and against the war are sifting through the text for new details that might support their original positions, a reminder that Iraq has only ever mattered to most Americans and Britons as material for attacks on their political opponents.

      That becomes glaringly obvious when you compare the intensity and volume of commentary on the report to how relatively little was said about a suicide bombing in Baghdad on Sunday that killed 250 Iraqis.

    • Terrorism’s Murky Message

      Moreover, there are different scales on which to measure sophistication besides the number of people involved. Success in killing people other than oneself might be one of those ways of measuring. The recent attacks have presented a mixed picture in this regard. The triple suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia don’t look very sophisticated. One of the bombers managed to kill four security guards, but the other two blew up no one but themselves.

    • Bush, Blair and the Lies That Justified the Illegal Iraq War

      In front of the assembled 1,500 journalists, Bush showed a series of slides of himself looking under papers, behind drapes and out the window of the oval office. A smiling Bush narrated, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” followed by, “Nope, no weapons over there,” and “Maybe under here?” The transcript shows that this stand-up routine was greeted with “laughter and applause.”

    • Lost in the Military-Industrial Complex

      Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have ducked any serious discussion of America’s escalating military spending, suggesting that whoever wins will be captive of President Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex,” writes Chuck Spinney.

    • Where Are The Drone Casualty Figures the White House Promised Months Ago?

      Despite months of repeated promises, the White House has yet to release its estimate of civilian casualties from the administration’s drone program – a delayed disclosure the New York Times Editorial Board described as “too little, too late.”

      In March, Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama chief counterterrorism adviser, announced that the White House would “in the coming weeks” release an “assessment of combatant and non-combatant casualties” from U.S. drone strikes since 2009. Monaco doubled down on the commitment in a second speech a few weeks later.

      The figures are likely to show aggregate numbers of people killed by country in nations not recognized as battlefields – like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya – according to the Washington Post. Death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be included.

      The President is also expected to sign an executive order requiring the release of annual casualty figures going forward.

  • Classification

    • FBI: Clinton “Extremely Careless” Handling Classified Info, But No Charges Recommended

      The bureau also revealed it was likely that Clinton’s personal email server was compromised by foreign hackers.

    • The Department of Political Justice

      Is it worth impairing the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice to save Hillary Clinton…

    • FBI: Hillary Clinton Broke the Law, But Don’t Prosecute Her

      The latest in shocking but not surprising news came yesterday as FBI Director Jim Comey formally recommended not indicting Hillary Clinton for her alleged mishandling of classified information.

      Given America’s less-than-stellar track record of prosecuting the powerful, this outcome has been a virtual certainty for some time. Even so, the event is still important. It offers the clearest evidence to date that the rule of law does not exist. One set of rules applies to the politically connected, and an entirely different set applies to everyone else. Nothing could illustrate this fact better than the Clinton email scandal.

    • In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict

      The long-roiling question finally has been answered: Hillary Clinton will not be indicted for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. Period. Full stop. Pause a moment, and let it sink in.

      FBI Director James Comey delivered the word in a surprise news conference Tuesday morning, exactly three days after Clinton’s 3½-hour interview Saturday at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

      There was plenty of evidence that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and her staff had been “extremely careless” in their handling of classified and sensitive information, Comey said, but not enough to prove they had acted with the criminal intent or willfulness needed to secure a conviction. “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he concluded.

      While the FBI’s evaluation technically is not binding on the Justice Department, any indictment is now clearly off the table. Last week, following her embarrassing and ethically suspect encounter with Bill Clinton on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, Attorney General Loretta Lynch publicly pledged to follow the bureau’s lead. And the bureau, via Comey, has spoken.

    • Commentary: What the FBI didn’t say about Hillary Clinton’s email

      Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s recommendation that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for her use of an unclassified email server while secretary of state is significant, but what he did not address is equally important.

    • Why Hillary Clinton Should be Prosecuted for Reckless Abuses of National Security

      Yesterday FBI Director James Comey described Hillary Clinton’s email communications as Secretary of State as “extremely careless.” His statement undermined the defenses Clinton put forward, stating the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received; eight contained information classified at the highest level, “top secret,” at the time they were sent. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails.

      All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation, specifically of Title 18 Section 793(f) of the federal penal code, a law ensuring proper protection of highly classified information. Director Comey said that Clinton was “extremely careless” and “reckless” in handling such information. Contrary to the implications of the FBI statement, the law does not require showing that Clinton intended to harm the United States, but that she acted with gross negligence.

      The recent State Department Inspector General (IG) report was clear that Clinton blithely disregarded safeguards to protect the most highly classified national security information and that she included on her unprotected email server the names of covert CIA officers. The disclosure of such information is a felony under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Wanton Disregard for US Laws and National Security

      There is a new poster child for the U.S. government’s double standard in dealing with violations of public policy and public trust—former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who will receive no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security. Clinton merely received a blistering rebuke from FBI director James Comey, who charged her with “extremely careless” behavior in using multiple private email servers to send and received classified information as well as using her personal cellphone in dealing with sensitive materials while traveling outside the United States. Some of these communications referred to CIA operatives, which is a violation of a 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act to protect those individuals working overseas under cover.

    • Hillary Clinton as Damaged Goods

      FBI Director Comey’s judgment that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” but not criminal in her sloppy email practices leaves her limping to the Democratic nomination and stumbling toward the fall campaign, writes Robert Parry.

    • FBI Recommends ‘No Consequences’ for Clinton’s Reckless Email Handling
    • FBI Declares ‘No Charges Are Appropriate’ in Hillary Clinton Email Investigation

      Comey noted in his statement: “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.”

    • Judge Responds To Open Records Request By Having Requester Indicted, Arrested

      We’ve seen government officials do some pretty questionable things to avoid turning over documents to FOIA requesters. The most common method is just to stick requesters with a bill they can’t pay. Stonewalling is popular, too — so much so that the federal government sends out “Still interested?” notices to people whose requests have been backburnered for years.

      More rarely, officials will race requesters to the courthouse, hoping to secure a judgment in their favor stating that they’ve already fully complied with a FOIA request — even when they’ve done nothing but withhold and redact. Stripped of all the legal wrangling, this is basically the government suing individuals for asking for documents, forcing taxpayers to go out-of-pocket if they hope to counter the officials’ assertions.

    • WikiLeaks Releases Over 1,200 Clinton Emails on Iraq War

      WikiLeaks on Monday marked the yearly celebration of American independence by releasing over 1,200 private emails belonging to former secretary of state and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton pertaining to the Iraq War.

      The whistleblower platform announced the new archive in a tweet, noting that the emails would be made public just two days before the UK government is set to release its official inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, initiated by former U.S. President George W. Bush with substantial backing from then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

      Adding even more fuel to the speculation surrounding the Chilcot Inquiry, WikiLeaks on Monday also released a complete list of British MPs who voted to invade Iraq.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Change Deniers Can Rest Easy Knowing The Democratic Party Isn’t Out To Prosecute Them

      Last week, a couple right-leaning news publications published headlines suggesting that the Democratic Party wants to prosecute individual people who disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change.

      This is not true, and the stories themselves don’t suggest it. But the headlines are conspicuously misleading. “Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics,” screamed one headline from The Daily Caller. Townhall’s headline read nearly the same. The Washington Times went with “Democrats force Clinton’s hand on prosecution of climate skeptics.”

    • Big Coal Just Saw One Of Its Favorite Loopholes Closed

      The Obama Administration last week took a closely-watched first step in its effort to reform the federal coal program by issuing a rule that will make it harder for coal companies to dodge royalty payments when mining on taxpayer-owned public lands.

      The rule, issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), closes a loophole that enabled coal companies to sell coal to their own subsidiaries — and then pay royalties on that artificially depressed price. Through these self-dealing transactions, coal companies have been able to shortchange U.S. taxpayers and state governments millions of dollars in royalty payments that are owed on federal coal.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • Sterling falls to new low against the dollar in Asia trade

      The pound has hit a new low in Asian trading as concerns about the UK’s vote to leave the European Union continue to weigh on investor confidence.

      It touched 1.2798 against the dollar on Wednesday, a 31-year low, before recovering slightly to $1.2963.

      The pound has now fallen about 14% against the dollar since hitting $1.50 ahead of the referendum result.

    • How Brexit Will Affect U.S. Foreign Policy

      British voters’ decision to leave the European Union last week caused panic in world financial markets, with stocks dropping like a stone around the world. The British pound and the euro sank, and many “experts” lamented the beginning of the end of the EU. Maybe it’s true that Brexit will lead to a period of instability in stock markets, currencies and European politics. But there’s a bigger issue at play—European foreign policy in support of U.S. interventions around the world.

      As Chris Hedges eloquently noted in a recent Truthdig column, the U.K. is generally viewed as the closest ally of the United States. Washington uses that relationship to push its foreign policy under the guise of European and Western unity.

      Is Libya falling apart? The U.S. and EU intervene, and it’s all a show of unity.

    • Brexit: the cost of bad governance

      What has come to pass in the United Kingdom with the referendum on membership of the European Union would be called bad governance and patronage anywhere across the developing world. Short-sighted self-interest and political ambition have trumped long-term vision and the collective good. This is, by definition, the problem besetting all those countries that the UK and other international donors work with in efforts to help them become more effective – as well as fairer and more inclusive.

    • Lionel Messi handed jail term in Spain for tax fraud

      Argentina and Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for tax fraud, Spanish media say.

      His father, Jorge Messi, was also given a jail term for defrauding Spain of €4.1m (£3.5m; $4.5m) between 2007 and 2009.

      They also face millions of euros in fines for using tax havens in Belize and Uruguay used to conceal earnings from image rights.

      However, they are likely to avoid jail.

    • CETA will be voted on by EU member states after all, perhaps thanks to Brexit

      In an unexpected move, the European Commission has announced that national parliaments will be given the chance to vote on the CETA trade deal with Canada. As Ars reported last month, it was widely expected that the commission would try to claim that CETA was an “EU-only” agreement, meaning it would therefore be only need to be ratified by the three main EU institutions: the Commission itself, the Council of the European Union, and the European Parliament.

      In a press release announcing its formal proposal for the signature and conclusion of the EU-Canada trade deal, the European Commission explains its decision as follows: “To allow for a swift signature and provisional application, so that the expected benefits are reaped without unnecessary delay, the commission has decided to propose CETA as ‘mixed’ agreement”—that is, requiring all of the individual EU governments to ratify the deal as well.

    • TTIP impossible in 2016, French minister says

      It will be “impossible” for the European Union and the United States to conclude negotiations on a trade deal by the end of 2016, France’s junior minister for trade and commerce said on Tuesday (5 July).

      “I think a deal in 2016 is impossible and everyone knows it, including those who say otherwise,” said the minister, Matthias Fekl in a statement highly critical of the deal.

      Fekl’s position doesn’t seem to be a big surprise. France has already said that TTIP talks are likely to grind to a halt because of Washington’s reluctance to make concessions. But the real reason seems to be that France will hold presidential elections in April-May 2017 and the incumbent president François Hollande doesn’t want this issue to be part of the campaign.

    • The TTIP and the privitization of health

      The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty (TTIP) may present a genuine threat to health and to the outcomes we have reached in the healthcare systems today. With all its problems, the National Health Care System (SNS) that we know today, is internationally recognized as one of the best and most efficient in the world. In the State of Spain, Osakidetza holds recognized prestige in this field. Experts agree that “universal health systems with public property and management and based on Primary Care are those that offer the best results in health and are also the most efficient, the fairest and the most humane”.

    • SRSLY: BoJo, The #Brexit Bro

      BoJo is the tousle-haired towhead who went to the most haute of all British high schools for boys — it costs $13,000 just to drop out in the middle of a term, and that’s a bargain thanks to the falling value of the Great British pound — and yet, he managed to convince vast swaths of the plebeian old country (and I do mean old: “Leave” crushed among British seniors) that he should be their medium for social change. Johnson was previously the mayor of London, which voted heavily to stay, before he became the hair of the Leave Campaign.

      [...]

      He later lost a political appointment for lying to a superior about an affair he was having with a columnist at the magazine he was editing. He might’ve gotten away with that one if, according to the Daily Mail, the columnist hadn’t been a famous socialite whose mother revealed publicly an abortion stemming from the affair with Johnson. Johnson had previously dismissed the affair rumors as an “inverted pyramid of piffle.” Natch.

    • Despite Anti-Trade Rhetoric, Donald Trump’s Campaign Team Includes Pro-Trade Lobbyists

      Donald Trump denounced the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement on Tuesday and charged that Hillary Clinton, a long-time supporter of the deal, is deceiving voters when she says she now opposes it.

      Trump wasn’t wrong to charge that Clinton has surrounded herself with members of the global elite who promote and benefit from deals such as TPP. In fact, many members of Clinton’s inner circle have continued to advocate for the trade agreement.

    • Donald Trump’s Evil Twin Brother

      Just to clarify, Carl Icahn couldn’t actually be Trump’s biological “twin” because at age 80, he’s ten years older than his fellow billionaire. Still, in regard to swinish greed, naked ambition, and unvarnished contempt for working men and women, he surpasses Donald in almost every category, which is saying something, and which is why, even in hard-bitten business circles, Icahn has been described as “evil.”

      Carl Icahn gained fame in the 1980s with his “raider mentality” and highly publicized hostile takeovers of corporations. He would borrow enormous sums of money to purchase a company, then pay off the accrued debt by breaking it up and selling its components, basically destroying the company. One can’t help but recall Harold Wilson’s reference to Edward Heath: “He reminds me of a shiver looking for a spine to run down.”

    • New York Isn’t Telling Tenants They May Be Protected From Big Rent Hikes

      In February of 2015, Lilian Piedra received a letter with devastating news: Her landlord was jacking up the rent for her four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights from $2,100 a month to $3,500.

      The notice did not say she faced eviction, but Piedra immediately understood that’s what it meant. She and her husband were already struggling to raise three young children on her salary as a bank customer service representative and his as a parking garage manager.

    • Sports Direct reports worse-than-forecast 15 percent drop in profit

      British retailer Sports Direct (SPD.L) posted a worse-than-expected 15 percent drop in annual profit on Thursday, blaming tough conditions on the high street and negative publicity about its working practices.

      The company, which is not paying a dividend, said current political uncertainty after Britain voted to leave the European Union last month was likely to act as a continuing drag on consumer confidence.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Rebuffs Bernie’s Policy Demands

      Eager to hold the political “center,” Hillary Clinton has budged little on Bernie Sanders’s policy proposals beyond nice-sounding platitudes, a strategy that could lead to clashes at the Democratic convention, says Lawrence Davidson.

    • In the Bloodpot of Human Hearts: Standing Up Against Old Man Trump and His Creepy Racist Son Too

      The lyrics, scribbled by Guthrie over 60 years ago but just discovered earlier this year, describe the racist rental policies of Trump Sr.’s housing project Beach Haven. Notes Guthrie, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/Just how much/Racial Hate he stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line.” In honor of the release, Morello shot a video in which he proclaims, “I’m standing up against Old Man Trump.” He goes on vis a vis the son who followed in his father’s – and grandfather’s – bigoted footsteps, “When it comes to race relations, he’s like an old-school segregationist. When it comes to foreign policy, he’s like an old-school napalmist. When it comes to women’s issues, he’s like a frat-house rapist. So let’s not elect that guy.”

    • Clinton’s Pro-Charter School Comments Draw Boos from Teachers Union

      Hillary Clinton was booed at a National Education Association (NEA) event on Tuesday after suggesting that public schools have something to learn from their charter counterparts.

      “When schools get it right, whether they’re traditional public schools or public charter schools, let’s figure out what’s working and share it with schools across America,” she said to the labor union’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., provoking audible boos. “Rather than starting from ideology, let’s start from what’s best for our kids.”

    • The GOP’s Date from Hell

      For a half century, Republicans pandered to Americans angry about racial integration and other social change – even as GOP elites got rich off the “base” – leading to Donald Trump, the party’s date from hell, says Michael Winship.

    • Sanders Reportedly Booed by House Dems Who Just Want Clinton Endorsement Already

      Bernie Sanders spoke to Democratic members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday but was reportedly booed as he attempted to explain that his endorsement of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton might not fit into an easy timeline and that transforming the nation is about more than one election.

      While providing anonymity to all of its sources, Politico reported how “one person inside the room” said there were “boos from lawmakers” while Sanders was addressing questions about endorsing Clinton.

      One unnamed “senior Democrat” described being personally frustrated that Sanders used the meeting to talk about the central issues of his historic campaign while refusing to simply say when Clinton would receive his blessing publicly. “It was frustrating because he’s squandering the movement he built with a self-obsession that was totally on display,” the individual said.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Europol’s online censorship unit is haphazard and unaccountable says NGO

      Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (IRU) celebrated its first birthday at the weekend, but civil liberties organisations are worried that it goes too far in its efforts to keep the Web free from extremist propaganda.

      The IRU has been up and running since July 2015 as part of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) in the Hague. The unit is charged with monitoring the Internet for extremist propaganda and referring “relevant online content towards concerned Internet service providers” in particular social media. Much was made of how the IRU could “contact social network service provider Facebook directly to ask it to delete a Web page run by ISIS or request details of other pages that might be run by the same user.”

    • DA Demands Answers for SA’s UN Vote Against Internet Freedom

      South Africa’s vote against a United Nation (UN) resolution promoting Internet freedom is disturbing but unsurprising, given the ANC-government’s penchant for censorship.

      Last week, the South African government’s representatives at the UN voted against a resolution that sought to promote and protect human rights on online platforms. Part of the resolution sought to condemn the intentional disruption of Internet access to the public. In voting against this resolution, South Africa has joined the ranks of China, Russia and North Korea, countries that have poor human rights track records and are the biggest practitioners of censorship.

    • Selected-Information Age: The new face of censorship

      South Africa voted with China and Russia against a UN resolution on freedom of the internet. It is ironic that censorship is flourishing in the information age.

      Two beliefs exist about modern journalism. One is that the digital revolution is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the internet and the social media platforms it spawned, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, are shifting power from high authorities to civil society and to bloggers, or rather, “citizen journalists.”

    • Helen Suzman Foundation launches court case against SABC censorship

      On Monday 4 July, News24 reported that the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) has launched an urgent court bid to stop the SABC from implementing its decision to censor reporting of protests.

      The application is against the SABC, its board, COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng and Communications Minister Faith Muthambi, the HSF said in a statement on Monday.

    • Anti-censorship picketers to SABC: Cooperate or face more demonstrations

      An anti-censorship picket is underway outside the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) offices in Auckland Park, despite SABC management refusing to meet with protesting organisations.

      The picket is being led by the Save Our SABC (SOS) Coalition, together with the Gauteng South African Communist Party (SACP).

    • SABC protests to continue this week

      Protests will continue for the rest of the week in connection with SABC censorship and the dismissal of SABC journalists.

      The protest campaigns are being organised by civil societies such as Right2Know Campaign and SOS Coalition as well as Support Our SABC campaign.

    • Has Subaru’s SiriusXM ‘Censorship’ Crossed a Line?

      “Subaru has no business monitoring what I listen to and resetting my radio every time I turn off the car, when, in Subaru’s high and mighty opinion, I’m listening to something questionable,” remarked Patton.

    • UK High Court Upholds Blocking Of Infringing Websites In Trademark Cases

      Internet service providers can be ordered to block websites that offer counterfeit goods for sale despite the lack of an express law to that effect in trademark cases, the UK Court of Appeal for England and Wales said in a 6 July decision.

    • Professor breaks silence in University of Northern Colorado academic freedom case
    • University of Northern Colorado President Kay Norton’s letter to campus community
    • EXCLUSIVE: Transcript of Bias Response Team Conversation with Censored Professor
    • Colorado ‘Bias Response Team’ Threatened Prof To Change His Lessons
    • UNC prof shares tale of censorship by Bias Response Team
    • Campus opinion police

      The latest low point in higher education comes from the University of Northern Colorado, where the campus Bias Response Team came down on two professors for merely suggesting supposedly controversial viewpoints to students.

      The professors didn’t argue their opinions. And they didn’t compel students to do so, either. They simply suggested them. But that was enough for offended students to report them.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Shaping Traffic and Spying on Americans

      At the Intercept earlier this week, Peter Maass described an interview he had with a former NSA hacker he calls Lamb of God — this is the guy who did the presentation boasting “I hunt SysAdmins.” On the interview, I agree with Bruce Schneier that it would have been nice to hear more from Lamb of God’s side of things.

      But the Intercept posted a number of documents that should have been posted long, long ago, covering how the NSA “shapes” Internet traffic and how it identifies those using Tor and other anonymizers.

      I’m particularly interested in the presentations on shaping traffic — which is summarized in the hand-written document to the right and laid out in more detail in this presentation.

      Both describe how the NSA will force Internet traffic to cross switches where it has collection capabilities. We’ve known they do this. Beyond just the logic of it, some descriptions of NSA’s hacking include descriptions of tracking traffic to places where a particular account can be hacked.

      But the acknowledgement that they do this and discussions of how they do so is worth closer attention.

      That’s true, first of all, because of wider discussions of cable maps. In discussing the various ways to make Internet traffic cross switches to which the NSA has access, Lamb of God facetiously (as is his style) suggests you could bomb or cut all the cable lines that feed links to which the NSA doesn’t have access.

    • Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy for the FBI to Spy on Journalists

      Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures.

      The classified rules, obtained by The Intercept and dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of National Security Letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form.

      Media advocates said the documents show that the FBI imposes few constraints on itself when it bypasses the requirement to go to court and obtain subpoenas or search warrants before accessing journalists’ information.

    • FBI Must Not Sidestep Privacy Protections For Massive Collection of Biometric Data

      The FBI, which has created a massive database of biometric information on millions of Americans never involved in a crime, mustn’t be allowed to shield this trove of personal information from Privacy Act rules that let people learn what data the government has on them and restrict how it can be used.

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed comments today with the FBI, on behalf of itself and six civil liberties groups, objecting to the agency’s request to exempt the Next Generation Identification (NGI) database from key provisions of federal privacy regulations that protect personal data from misuse and abuse. The FBI has amassed this database with little congressional and public oversight, failed for years to provide basic information about NGI as required by law, and dragged its feet to disclose—again, as required by law—a detailed description of the records and its policies for maintaining them. Now it wants to be exempt from even the most basic notice and data correction requirements.

      NGI includes prints and face recognition data from millions of everyday people who’ve committed no crime but have had their biometric data collected when they needed a background check for a job, applied for welfare benefits, registered for immigration, or obtained state licenses to be a teacher, realtor, or dentist. For example, NGI holds millions of photographs searchable through facial recognition and accessible by 20,000 foreign, federal, state, and municipal-level law enforcement agencies.

    • EFF and ACLU-led Coalition Opposes Dangerous “Model” Employee and Student “Privacy” Legislation

      EFF, ACLU, and a coalition of nearly two-dozen civil liberties and advocacy organizations and a union representative are urging the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) to vote down dangerous model employee and student privacy legislation.

      The bill, the Employee and Student Online Privacy Protection Act (ESOPPA), is ostensibly aimed at protecting employee and student privacy. But its broad and vaguely worded exceptions and limitations overshadow any protections the bill attempts to provide. As our joint letter explains, ESOPPA will result in only further invasions of student and employee privacy.

      The ULC is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to researching, drafting, and promoting the enactment of uniform state laws, which it drafts and circulates as “models.” The ULC will vote on ESOPPA on July 11 at its annual meeting, and if it passes, the ULC will circulate the bill to legislators across the country in the hope of uniform adoption in all fifty states. But ESOPPA falls far short of its goal and does not live up to the prevailing standard for protecting social media privacy currently being enacted by the states and as required by the U.S. Constitution.

    • Go Big, Go Global: Subject the NSA’s Overseas Programs to Judicial Review

      The next round of surveillance reform is a time for the United States to go big – and to go global. We should get out of our defensive crouch and show the world how to balance robust intelligence capabilities with rules to protect privacy and civil liberties in the digital age.

      Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes collection of data inside the United States, so long as the direct targets are foreign citizens located outside the United States, with judicial review on a programmatic basis. Section 702 expires at the end of 2017. The debate over reauthorizing it pits supporters ­– who argue the law is vital and should be extended without change – against civil libertarians who urge its expiration or at least significant reforms. This paper is an effort to reframe that debate.

    • India’s High-Tech Billion-Person Aadhaar Identity System Can’t Cope With Real-Life Biometrics

      It sounds like getting India’s 1.29 billion population to use the Aadhaar system for routine daily transactions is going to be something of a challenge, to put it mildly.

    • Going Underground – the Snoopers’ Charter

      Here is a recent interview I did for the RT UK’s flagship news channel, “Going Underground” about the horrors of the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill – the so-called “snoopers charter” – that will legalise previously illegal mass surveillance, mass data retention, and mass hacking carried out by GCHQ in league with the NSA…

    • “Only Facts Matter:” Jim Comey Is Not the Master Bureaucrat of Integrity His PR Sells Him Has

      There’s an intimately related effort Comey gets some credit for which in fact led to fairly horrible conclusions: torture. Jack Goldsmith, with Comey’s backing, also withdrew the shoddy John Yoo memo authorizing waterboarding and other torture (Goldsmith also prevented Yoo from retroactively authorizing more techniques).

    • Federal Court Hears Long Overdue Arguments Over 2008 Surveillance Law

      More than seven years after President George W. Bush signed a law authorizing warrantless surveillance of international communications, a federal appellate court heard arguments challenging the 2008 law for the first time.

      Congressed passed the FISA Amendments Act in the wake of revelations that the Bush administration was wiretapping all Americans’ transnational communications. Rather than reigning in the program, Congress effectively legalized it – providing legal immunity to the phone companies involved, and allowing the government to conduct surveillance without a court order, as long as the “target” was a foreigner living overseas.

      In 2013, documents from by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the government cites the law as the legal authority for its PRISM and Upstream programs – which collect Americans’ emails and browsing histories with individuals and websites hosted overseas.

    • Author adds perspective to NSA’s covert activities

      The intelligence community hasn’t always escaped study. Long before Snowden became the patriot or goat, depending on perspective, the Church Committee in the U.S. Senate took a look into the government’s spy agencies after Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon put the CIA and NSA on personal projects.

    • The Secrets that Remain about Journalist NSLs

      Which brings me back to the other point about NSLs I keep harping on. The 2014 NSL IG report showed that the FBI was not reporting at least 6.8% of their NSLs, even to Congress, much less to the Inspector General. When asked about that, FBI said an accurate number was really not worth trying to do, even while it admitted that the uncounted NSLs were “sensitive” cases — a category that includes journalists (and politicians and faith leaders).

    • Facebook’s Flip-Flop: Is It a Law Enforcement Thing?

      It started when — as increasingly happens in her work — someone came to her with a scary problem. Facebook recommended he friend someone he had only just met for the first time at a meeting for parents of suicidal teens. In response, Facebook confirmed they do use co-location for such recommendations.

    • Massive Security Boost: TOR Privacy Features Are Coming To Mozilla Firefox

      In order to make your web browsing experience a lot better, Mozilla is integrating some key privacy features of TOR browser into its Firefox web browser. These features will go live with the final Firefox 50 release and make it a better Google Chrome alternative.

    • Court to Hear Case on NSA’s Warrantless Spying Program

      On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in U.S. v. Mohamud, where a man is fighting his conviction for Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction after undercover agents caught him attempting to remotely detonate a fake bomb that agents had provided. Mohamed Osman Mohamud is appealing, saying that federal agents illegally monitored his online activity during their investigation, getting data through an NSA surveillance program, Reuters reported. Through that program, the NSA collected information from online communications and international phone calls of Americans without a warrant.

    • Senate Funding Bill For State Dept. Asks It To Figure Out Ways To Stop Bad People From Using Tor

      It would appear that Congress is not so happy that the State Department is a major funding source for the Tor project. Tor, of course, is the internet anonymyzing system that was originally developed with support from the US government as a way to promote free and safe access to the internet for people around the globe (mostly focusing on those under threat in authoritarian countries). Of course, other parts of our government aren’t huge fans of Tor, because it doesn’t just help activists and dissidents in other countries avoid detection, but also, well, just about anyone (except on days when the FBI decides to hack their way in).

      There has, of course, always been some tension there. There are always the conspiracy theorists who believe that because Tor receives US government funding it is by default compromised. Those tend to be tinfoil hat wearing types, though. The folks who work on Tor are not exactly recognized for being particularly friendly to intrusive government surveillance. They tend to be the exact opposite of that. And, of course, part of the Snowden revelations revealed that Tor was one tool that still stymied the NSA in most cases.

    • 9th Circuit To Hear ‘Christmas Tree Bomber’ Appeal Wednesday
    • ‘Christmas tree bomber’ will appeal conviction
    • Mohamed Mohamud case and challenge to electronic surveillance go before appeals court
    • Oregon Lawyers Question American Surveillance Tactics
    • Appeals court hears warrantless spying case. Could it change surveillance law?
    • Warrantless surveillance in Portland holiday tree-lighting bomb plot challenged in court
    • US defends warrantless spying in Christmas tree bomber case
    • Man convicted of Portland tree-lighting bomb plot wants sentence overturned
    • Appeals court hears challenge to use of NSA data in criminal cases
    • Christmas bomber case appeal challenges NSA surveillance
    • Attorneys debate use of warrantless surveillance in Portland bomb appeal
    • Mohamed Mohamud back in court today to appeal conviction

      Mohamed Mohamud, the young Somalian American convicted in 2014 of trying to bomb Portland’s downtown square during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in November 2010, is back in court today where an appeal of his conviction will be heard.

      The appeal will be heard today by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit at 11 a.m. at the Pioneer Square Courthouse in Portland.
      Mohamud is serving a 30-year prison sentence. The appeal argues the sting operation was a setup. It also claims the FBI surveillance of Mohamud violated his constitutional right against unlawful search and seizure. Mohamud’s lawyers are seeking a reversal of his conviction or a new trial.

      Prosecutors are standing firm, saying Mohamud intended to commit an act of terrorism.

    • U.S. court to hear arguments in warrantless NSA spying case

      A U.S. appeals court will weigh a constitutional challenge on Wednesday to a warrantless government surveillance program brought by an Oregon man found guilty of attempting to detonate a bomb in 2010 during a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

      The case before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of its kind to consider whether a criminal defendant’s constitutional privacy rights are violated under a National Security Agency program that allows spying on Americans’ international phone calls and internet communications.

      Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-American, was convicted in 2013 of plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

    • VIDEO: Oh I do like to spy beside the seaside – GCHQ invites bids for learn-on-the-job cash [Ed: puff piece]
    • NSA Looks to IT Industry to Harden Vulnerable U.S. Nets [Ed: Another “NSA is the Good Guys” puff piece; they actively undermine networks’ security]
    • Protect your privacy: Resist mass cracking by US law enforcement

      In 2014, the Judicial Conference of the United States, which frames policy guidelines for courts in the US, proposed changes to Rule 41 of the FRCrmP that gives federal magistrate judges the authority to issue warrants for cracking and surveillance in cases where the targeted computer’s location is unknown. That means law enforcement could request warrants allowing mass cracking of thousands of computers at once. The Supreme Court, which oversees the Rules, submitted the changes to the US Congress in April. This is an unprecedented, broad government cracking authorization, and it is dangerous to the privacy and security of all Internet users.

    • The single reason I trust Google with my data
    • The Two Reasons I Don’t Trust Google With My Data
    • Should you trust Google with your data?

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Former Police Chief Pushes Through Legislation To Keep Body Cam Footage Out Of The Public’s Hands

      Whatever accountability and transparency could be achieved with the deployment of police body cameras often seems to be undercut by legislative activity. Minnesota legislators, prompted by law enforcement, tried to cut the public out of the process. So did a sheriff-turned-legislator in Michigan. The LAPD preemptively declared its body cam footage would not be considered “public records,” which means legislators will have to act to roll back the PD’s policy. And in Illinois, a law enforcement agency decided to stop using body cameras altogether because accountability is just too much work.

      Over in North Carolina, one legislator is sponsoring a bill that would exempt body cam footage from public records laws. His concern, of course, is the privacy of all involved.

    • Chelsea Manning ‘rushed to hospital after trying to take own life’

      Chelsea Manning, the military whistleblower serving a 35 year sentence, has been rushed to hospital after reportedly trying to take her own life.

      A US media report said that Manning, who is being held at in a cell at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was taken to hospital early on Tuesday morning. CNN said that it was believed that the 28-year-old had tried to take her life. There was no immediate independent confirmation of this.

    • Police Claim They Arrested Man Who Burnt American Flag Because Of Threats He Received

      Meet Bryton Mellott. Bryton’s just a guy from Urbana, IL. A guy with a Facebook page that he uses to share stuff with friends, post hilarious memes, and post a picture of himself burning the American flag on the 4th of July, the anniversary of when President Washington personally haymaker-punched the King of England right in the face (I think), thereby setting all some Americans free of our British overseers.

      As you can imagine, lots of people didn’t like Bryton’s picture. Some called the police about it for reasons we will get into in a moment. Others threatened him with violence and death. Still others threatened him with violence and death at his place of work. A few meager folks stuck up for him. You know, Facebook.

      And at the end of the day, Bryton was arrested by Urbana police.

    • Whitewashing Sharia councils in the UK?

      In an Open Letter to the UK Home Secretary, hundreds of women’s human rights organisations and campaigners warn against a further slide towards privatised justice and parallel legal systems.

    • From Captive to Captor: A Journalist’s Journey from Prisoner to Prison Guard

      Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer has spent much of his career reporting on criminal justice. For years he’d been frustrated by the secretive nature of the American private prison industry. Tired of old-fashioned document-hunting, he tried an unconventional approach. He went undercover, spending four months as a prison guard at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana.

      His 35,000-word story provides a rare, harrowing look at the closed world of private prisons — a system that holds 131,000 people nationwide. What he saw still haunts him: men stabbing each other with handmade knives as guards looked on; officers in tactical gear storming the prison’s dormitories; an assault victim writhing in panic as he pleaded for protection from a predatory inmate; a prisoner whose gangrene went untreated so long he had to have his legs amputated.

    • Tomgram: Nick Turse, Revolving Doors, Robust Rolodexes, and Runaway Generals

      Here’s an oddity: Americans recognize corruption as an endemic problem in much of the world, just not in our own. And that’s strange. After all, to take but one example, America’s twenty-first-century war zones have been notorious quagmires of corruption on a scale that should boggle the imagination. In 2011, a final report from the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars were lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan (which undoubtedly will, in the end, prove an underestimate). U.S. taxpayer dollars were spent to build roads to nowhere; a gas station in the middle of nowhere; teacher-training centers and other structures that were never finished (but made oodles of money for lucky contractors); a chicken-plucking factory that never plucked a chicken (but plucked American taxpayers); and a lavish $25 million headquarters that no one ever needed or bothered to use. Thanks to tens of billions of U.S. dollars, whole security forces were funded, trained, armed, and filled with “ghost” soldiers and police (while local commanders and other officials lined their pockets with completely unspectral “salaries”). And so it went.

    • Alaa Abd El Fattah Must Be Released, Says UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention

      Nearly two years ago, along with the Media Legal Defence Initiative and with consent and input from his family, we submitted a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) for the release of Egyptian coder, blogger, and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah. Abd El Fattah was arrested on November 28, 2013, two days after participating in a peaceful demonstration against a law allowing Egyptian civilians to be tried in military courts. His arrest was conducted without a warrant, he was beaten by police officers, and authorities raided his home while his wife and child were present. He was later sentenced to five years in prison.

    • Brazil’s Globo Attacks Protesting Cops to Protect Its Olympics Payday

      Police officers and firefighters in Rio de Janeiro protesting their lack of pay as the Olympics approach are engaged in “ethically reprehensible” actions “bordering on terrorism,” according to an editorial on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro’s largest newspaper, O Globo. The newspaper, a property of Grupo Globo, which is owned and controlled by the billionaire Marinho family, is Brazil’s dominant media conglomerate and a primary sponsor and beneficiary of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

      In attacking the police, the paper was not criticizing the epidemic of police killings of black and brown youth, nor the militarized occupation of many of Rio’s slums that has failed to improve public security, nor the criminal gangs of off-duty and former officers, known as milícias, that violently control and extort vast swaths of the city. Instead, Globo’s indignation was targeted at public servants nonviolently demonstrating for a basic worker’s right — being paid — as part of a protest that happens to threaten Globo’s own business interests worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a fact the paper neglected to disclose to its readers.

      “Welcome to Hell. Police and firefighters don’t get paid; Whoever comes to Rio de Janeiro will not be safe,” read a sign in English held by disgruntled police officers in Rio’s international airport on Monday, just weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics. The state of Rio, after wasting billions on lavish corporate tax breaks and delayed, over-budget Olympic construction contracts with notoriously corrupt firms, has declared a financial emergency, forcing it to cut benefits, postpone paying salaries and pensions to public workers, and slash operating budgets. Police and firefighters have for months been in conflict with the state over budget shortfalls. The state’s teachers union has been on strike for nearly four months.

    • ‘What Is a Journalist if Not an Advocate on Behalf of the Public?’

      Today’s US news watchers might not recognize that the pretense of objectivity in journalism, the view that reporters should strive to report the news as if from nowhere, is—besides not being possible—not a value that adheres to journalism the world around, or that has even always held sway in this country. Many of those thought of as the giants of the profession — Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens — were advocacy journalists before that term was considered not just a pejorative, but an oxymoron. Things seem to be changing again, though, with a growing awareness that if taking a side against poverty or racism or climate change means breaking some rule of straight journalism, then it’s the rules that ought to change.

    • Does More Security at Airports Make Us Safer or Just Move the Targets?

      At Ataturk airport, passengers pass through metal detectors and their bags are scanned as they enter the terminal.

      This differs from the procedures at most American airports, where anyone can enter the terminal without being screened.

      Turkish officials said the attackers initially tried to enter the building, but were turned away at the security screening.

      They returned with “long-range rifles” from their suitcases. Two of the attackers entered the terminal in the ensuing panic.

      One set off his explosives on the arrivals floor of the terminal; the other detonated his on the departures floor one level above. A third attacker blew himself up outside the terminal as people fled.

    • Falcon Heights shooting: Facebook video captures aftermath of fatal police encounter in Minnesota

      Ms Reynolds described the sequence of events repeatedly throughout the video, during which she said the officer asked the driver for his license and registration.

      “He told him that it was in his wallet, but he had a pistol on him because he’s licensed to carry. The officer said don’t move. As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times,” she said.

    • Senate Bill Would Force Red Cross to Open Books to Outside Oversight

      Legislation introduced in the Senate today would open the American Red Cross to outside oversight that it has long resisted.

      The bill was introduced by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, following a lengthy investigation by his staff that raised questions about the charity’s spending after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and documented how Red Cross leaders resisted an earlier congressional inquiry. Grassley launched his probe in response to reporting by ProPublica and NPR.

      Grassley’s American Red Cross Transparency Act, would amend the group’s congressional charter to allow unfettered access to its records and personnel by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The Red Cross operates as a private nonprofit but was created by Congress over 100 years ago and has a mandated role to work alongside the federal government after disasters.

    • Major New Brazil Events Expose the Fraud of Dilma’s Impeachment — and Temer’s Corruption

      From the start of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification was that she used a budget trick known as pedaladas (“peddling”: illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt. But this week, as the Senate conducts her impeachment trial, that accusation was obliterated: The Senate’s own expert report concluded there was “no indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any such budgetary maneuvers. As the Associated Press put it: “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” In other words, the Senate’s own objective experts gutted the primary claim as to why impeachment was something other than a coup.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Pressure Helps Bring Netflix To Comcast Cable Boxes

      We’ve long noted how Comcast is a bit of an anti-competitive jackass on both the TV and broadband fronts. When the nation’s biggest cable provider isn’t using usage caps to hinder streaming video competitors, it’s busy finding new and creative ways to prevent paying customers from wandering too far outside of Comcast’s well-cultivated walled garden. And while many global cable companies have joined the year 2016 by integrating Netflix functionality into their cable boxes for consumer benefit, Comcast has historically fought such a move, instead trying to drive consumers to its own Netflix knockoff.

    • Dish Sues Tribune Because It Called The Company ‘Dishgusting’

      For years now, consumers have been stuck in the middle of increasingly-ugly carriage fee disputes between broadcasters and cable companies. Usually they go something like this: a broadcaster demands a massive rate hike from cable companies to carry their channels. Cable TV providers balk, and the broadcaster pulls access to the channels in question until the cable provider pays up. Consumers not only lose access to content they’re paying for (refunds are never provided), but they’re also hammered by ads from both sides trying to get consumers to call and bitch at the other guy for being greedy.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The USPTO Moves to Clear “Trademark Deadwood”

        Is there a “trademark deadwood” problem? The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) thinks there is a “trademark deadwood” problem in its register. On June 22, 2016, the USPTO announced its intention to make new rules requiring additional documentation under section 8 and section 71 of the Trademark Act to ensure that a party is actually using the mark in commerce.

        It is axiomatic in the United States that use is a prerequisite for trademark rights. With respect to some limited exceptions, use is required to obtain rights at common law and to secure federal registration on the Principal Register. Fundamentally, if there is not use, there is ordinarily less opportunity for goodwill to develop or for a likelihood of confusion to arise.

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Hints at Second Coming of Megaupload

        Kim Dotcom has confirmed to TorrentFreak that he has a brand new cloud storage site under development. After an extended planning period, the entrepreneur says the platform will be his best creation yet. It could launch next January with a name that “will make people happy.”

      • UK Bill Introduces 10 Year Prison Sentence for Online Pirates

        The UK Government’s Digital Economy Bill, which is set to revamp current copyright legislation, has been introduced in Parliament. One of the most controversial changes is the increased maximum sentences for online copyright infringement. Despite public protest, the bill increased the maximum prison term five-fold, from two to ten years.

      • Porn sites will require age verification checks in the UK by 2017

        THE UK GOVERNMENT has unveiled the Digital Economy Bill that includes plans for age verification requirements on porn websites.

        The government has long been keen on this idea. We’re still none the wiser as to how such checks will be implemented, but the Digital Economy Bill explains that sites will be required to obtain age verification from visitors to stop children accessing such websites accidentally or purposefully.

        This is unlikely to go down well with privacy advocates, and the Open Rights Group has previously spoken out about the porn age check plans.

      • Mike Huckabee paying $25,000 for playing ‘Eye of the Tiger’

        Failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is paying $25,000 for playing “Eye of the Tiger” at a rally last year without the band’s permission, CNNMoney has discovered.

      • Mike Huckabee Settles For Five Figures With Survivor Over Copyright Infringement

        The claim that the rally was a religious gathering and not connected to the Huckabee campaign reportedly fell apart because he had listed the rally as a campaign expense on his records. Interestingly, despite Huckabee’s claim that it was not a campaign event, that it was so will allow him to use his campaign’s warchest to pay off the settlement.

      • American Copyright Trolls Continue To Abuse Canadian Courts In Search Of Easy Settlements

        In the United States, copyright trolls are finding it more difficult to save on filing fees by pursuing file sharers en masse. More than a few judges have shot down attempts to file infringement suits against “Does 1-30,” etc., ruling that these defendants are improperly joined.

        Meanwhile, in Canada, copyright trolls are trying a novel approach to suing alleged file sharers in big bunches: the reverse class action. Voltage Pictures is suing a nominative “class” of Does yet to be named for copyright infringement. This is its attempt to route around restrictions placed on it by another court, as well as the costs associated with complying with the demands.

        But in doing so, Voltage Pictures is making a mess of Canadian privacy laws. Rogers, the service provider standing between Voltage and the subscriber information it’s demanding, wants to know why the studio is abusing Canada’s “notice and notice” system to obtain information it’s not supposed to be able to acquire without a court order.

      • Why The Latest Supreme Court Ruling In Kirtsaeng May Have A Much Bigger Impact On Copyright & Fair Use

        Earlier this month, we wrote briefly about the Supreme Court’s second Kirtsaeng ruling, which focused on the issue of fee shifting in copyright cases. We didn’t spend that much time on it (and hadn’t covered the run up to the Supreme Court either). We had basically assumed that the first Kirtsaeng ruling from the Supreme Court, about whether or not the First Sale Doctrine applied to goods outside the US, was the real legacy of the Kirtsaeng fight, rather than a more mundane issue about fee shifting — especially when the more recent Kirtsaeng ruling was basically just “courts need to look at more than just if the original lawsuit was ‘objectively reasonable’” (but fails to give much guidance about what else should be looked at). Yes, we noted, this may ward off some bogus copyright lawsuits, depending on what standards the courts start to coalesce around, but there wasn’t much big news in the ruling.

      • UK Proposes To Tighten IP Protections Online

        The United Kingdom Digital Economy Bill, floated this week, aims to “enable access to fast digital communication services for citizens and businesses, to enable investment in digital communications infrastructure, to shape the emerging digital world to the benefit of children, consumers and businesses, and to support the digital transformation of government, enabling the delivery of better public services, world leading research and better statistics,” the UK government said in the document.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/07/07/snap-desktop-launchers/feed/ 0 Links 24/6/2016: Xen Project 4.7, Cinnamon 3.0.6 http://techrights.org/2016/06/24/cinnamon-3-0-6/ http://techrights.org/2016/06/24/cinnamon-3-0-6/#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2016 11:59:45 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=93837

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Coach of world 1500m champion arrested as part of EPO probe released but forfeits passport as investigation continues

      Somalian coach Jama Aden and two other detainees has been instructed to report to court once a month and have had their passports forfeited after being released by police as an investigation into the alleged doping of athletes continues in Spain.

      A Moroccan physiotherapist, who was also arrested as part of the initial operation on Monday (June 20), and Qatari 800 metres runner Musaeb Balla were placed under the same conditions by a judge.

      The operation had been carried out by police, in collaboration with the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency (AEPSAD) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), at a hotel where the Somali coach was staying with his training group.

    • Nigel Farage: £350 million pledge to fund the NHS was ‘a mistake’

      Nigel Farage has admitted that it was a “mistake” to promise that £350million a week would be spent on the NHS if the UK backed a Brexit vote.

      Speaking just an hour after the Leave vote was confirmed the Ukip leader said the money could not be guaranteed and claimed he would never have made the promise in the first place.

    • EU referendum: Nigel Farage disowns Vote Leave ‘£350m for the NHS’ pledge hours after result

      Nigel Farage has disowned a pledge to spend £350 million of European Union cash on the NHS after Brexit.

      The Ukip leader was asked on ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme whether he would guarantee that the money pledged for the health service during the campaign would now be spent on it.

    • Waukesha gets permission to draw water from Lake Michigan

      The governors of the eight U.S. states surrounding the Great Lakes, including Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, today in Chicago unanimously approved diverting Lake Michigan water to supply a Wisconsin community just outside the Great Lakes basin — but only with conditions, including that water withdrawn must be treated and returned to the basin.

      The controversial decision to allow Waukesha, Wis., access to Lake Michigan water marks the first test case of the Great Lakes Compact, an agreement ratified by the lake states in 2008 to protect the Great Lakes from large-scale water diversions out of the Great Lakes basin.

    • This US City’s Move to Divert Great Lakes Drinking Water Is Just the Beginning

      The drinking water of Waukesha, Wisconsin, is contaminated. On Tuesday, the suburban city won its 13-year-long-bid to divert water from the Great Lakes, by way of Lake Michigan, to appease its thirsty inhabitants. Environmentalists are worried the diversion will have a devastating impact on the lakes that so many people rely on—and critics say it could pave the way for similar requests.

      It’s just the beginning of what many worry will be growing fights over who has the right to clean drinking water from the Great Lakes.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Armed police at scene of Germany cinema shooting

      An armed man has reportedly been shot dead by police officers after storming a cinema complex in Viernheim, in Germany’s Hesse region. The man reportedly fired into the air as he entered the cinema and is said to have taken hostages, all of whom have escaped uninjured

    • Not the Chilcot Report

      It was an aggressive war on the basis of lies, for which people still die today, all over the world.

    • Colombia and Farc rebels sign historic ceasefire deal to end 50-year conflict

      Final peace deal will require approval in referendum but formal cessation of hostilities and Farc’s acceptance of disarmament are key steps toward resolution

    • Pakistan Mourns Sufi Singer Amjad Sabri After He Was Shot Dead in Karachi

      The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the assassination

      Thousands of people in Pakistan mourned the death of one of the country’s most famous musicians, Amjad Sabri, on Thursday, a day after he was shot dead by armed assailants in broad daylight in the city of Karachi.

    • Amjad Sabri: Pakistanis mourn singer killed by Taliban

      Pakistan is mourning one of its most famous singers, Amjad Sabri, who was shot dead in Karachi by militants.

      Thousands paid their respects, throwing rose petals over an ambulance carrying his coffin. A faction of the Pakistan Taliban claimed Wednesday’s attack.

      Sabri performed Qawwali devotional music from the Sufi tradition, an Islamic practice opposed by extremists.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • German government agrees to ban fracking indefinitely

      Germany’s coalition government agreed to ban fracking for shale gas indefinitely on Tuesday, after years of fractious talks over the issue, but environmental groups said the ban did not go far enough and vowed to fight the deal.

      Test drilling will be allowed but only with the permission of the respective state government, officials said.

  • Finance

    • ‘Britons, vote in our name’: UK referendum dominates continental front pages

      Germany’s Bild newspaper promised on Thursday that Germans would not hog hotel sunloungers and would make key concessions to the England football team if the UK voted to stay in the European Union.

      “Dear Brits, if you remain in the EU … then we ourselves will recognise the Wembley goal,” Bild declared above a picture of Geoff Hurst’s controversial extra-time goal in the 1966 World Cup final, when England beat West Germany. The paper said Germany would go without its goalkeeper in the next penalty shootout between England and Germany.

    • I Will Vote Remain Because I Love My Mum

      After voting tomorrow I shall fly down to take part in an alternative online referendum results programme from the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange, to give you a chance to hear a discussion of the results without having to listen to yet more neo-liberal spokesmen spouting establishment propaganda.

      It is no secret I am an enthusiast for the EU. However as an ardent Scottish nationalist it has of course crossed my mind that it might be a plan to vote tactically for Brexit, to provoke a new independence referendum.

      I have decided against this for two reasons. First, there is no way the Establishment is going to allow Brexit to happen. And second, I love my mum, who is English and moved back from Inverness to Norfolk following the death of my father a decade ago. I wish England and the English nothing but well. An independent Scotland inside the EU would be disadvantaged by having its only land border with an ailing England outside the EU.

    • Farage declares ‘remain will edge it’ as polls close in historic vote

      The polls have closed in Britain’s referendum on EU membership, with a survey suggesting a bitterly close fight and the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, saying it “looks like remain will edge it”.

    • Intel Fighting EU’s $1.4B Fine Levied 7 Years Ago

      Today’s topics include Intel’s return to a European Union court to fight a $1.4 billion antitrust fine, the FAA’s finalized commercial drone rules, the addition of new business-oriented features to Drobox’s cloud storage service, and Docker’s launch of its containers-as-a-service management and orchestration software.

    • Pound rises – do markets believe Remain has won?

      Sterling hit a 2016 high today against the dollar and could be on track for one of its strongest weeks on the markets – in terms of increase in value – for 30 years.

    • FTSE 100 hits two-month high on Remain hopes

      The FTSE 100 hit a two-month high and the pound surged as investors bet on the UK voting to remain in the European Union.

      London’s blue-chip shares rose 1.2% to 6,338.1 points, with miners, banks and travel firms rising.

      Sterling almost hit $1.50 after Leave campaigner Nigel Farage said it looked as though Remain had “edged” the vote.

      Wall Street also jumped in late trading, with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 both closing 1.3% higher.

    • EU referendum: Pound hits lowest level since 1985

      The value of the pound has fallen dramatically as it emerged that the UK had voted to leave the EU.

      At one stage, it hit $1.3305, a fall of more than 10%, and a low not seen since 1985.

      The Bank of England said it was “monitoring developments closely” and would take “all necessary steps” to support monetary stability.

      Before the results started to come in, the pound had risen as high as $1.50, as traders bet on a Remain victory.

    • Going on holiday soon? You’re the first victim of the leave victory

      Many UK holidaymakers travelling abroad will pay more for foreign currency as the pound plunged to its lowest level since 1985 following the EU referendum.

      Sterling was down against every single major currency group.

    • Scotland’s Status Returns to the Center of Attention

      All 32 voting areas in Scotland voted to stay in the European Union, but they were outnumbered by an overwhelming “Leave” vote in England and Wales.

      That has created an immediate political dilemma for Scotland, which in a referendum in September 2014 voted against secession from the United Kingdom.

      Scotland, which has been legally in union with England and Wales since 1707, is considered the most pro-European part of the United Kingdom, and the decision by British voters to leave the 28-member European Union could prompt a second independence vote.

    • UK votes to leave the EU in historic referendum
    • Nicola Sturgeon: Second Scottish independence vote ‘highly likely’ after Brexit vote

      Nicola Sturgeon has said a second independence referendum is “highly likely” after Scotland’s voters overwhelmingly backed Remain.

      Scotland was out of step with England and Wales after all 32 of its local authorities voted to stay in the EU.

      Speaking this morning after the result was declared, the Scottish First Minister said it was “democratically unacceptable” that Scotland had been taken out of the union against its will.

    • Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland sees its future as part of the EU as Brexit confirmed

      Nicola Sturgeon has said the people of Scotland see their future as part of the European Union, after it became clear Britain had voted for Brexit in a historic referendum.

      Speaking after all 32 local authorities delivered a vote to Remain in Scotland, the First Minister welcomed her country’s “unequivocal” vote to stay in Europe. But despite the vote, the country still faces having to exit the European Union after the Leave campaign edged ahead across the UK.

    • LuxLeaks special committee’s first country visit: Belgium is breaching EU tax law

      This Tuesday a delegation of the European Parliament’s special committee on tax rulings and similar measures has completed its first country visit to a Member State with a problematic ruling practice. Visits to at least the UK, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland will follow. The programme included discussions with tax experts, the Belgium parliament and the commission responsible for tax rulings. On the lessons from this visit Green committee members Sven Giegold and Philippe Lamberts conclude:

    • David Cameron says he will stand down as Prime Minister – new PM by October

      The Prime Minister said he had been honoured to serve as Prime Minister for the past six years. He held nothing back in his campaign. He always believed Britain would be safer, stronger and better off inside the EU. He said it was only right for someone else to lead the country in this new direction.

    • Rest in peace UK

      I am mourning for the UK. I feel so much pain and pity for all my good friends over there. Stupidity has won again. Good bye UK, your long reign has found its end.

    • FTSE 100 sees £120bn wiped off its value in worst day of losses since financial crisis

      The FTSE 100 has plunged more than 8 per cent in its biggest opening slump since the financial crisis, wiping £120 billion off the value of the 100 biggest UK companies.

      Banks were particularly badly hit, with shares in a number of banks losing at least 20 per cent of their value on opening, including Lloyds, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutschebank.

    • Shares and pound plunge on Leave vote

      The FTSE’s slump was its biggest one-day fall since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008.

    • UK now poorer than France as pound hits 30-year low and FTSE 100 drops 8.7pc following British vote to leave EU

      The FTSE 100 fell as much as 8.7pc when the London market opened after the UK voted to leave the European Union, an unexpected outcome that prompted the resignation of prime minister David Cameron this morning.

      The blue chip index recovered slightly to a loss of 4.9pc, but the FTSE 250 – which is considered a closer barometer of the UK economy – fell by 12.3pc before paring losses back to 7.1pc.

    • Spanish minister calls for Gibraltar to be returned to Spain on back of Brexit vote

      Spain’s Foreign Minister José García-Margallo y Marfil has proposed a shared British-Spanish sovereignty over Gibraltar followed by the “restitution” to Spain, after the British territory voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU while the U.K. overall voted to leave.

      “Our formula … is British-Spanish co-sovereignty for a determined period of time, which after that time has elapsed, will head towards the restitution of Gibraltar to Spanish sovereignty,” García-Margallo told Spanish radio on Friday, AFP reports.

      Gibraltar, a former Spanish territory which was ceded to Britain in 1713, heavily relies on Spain for its economy, with over 12,000 people commuting across the border every day.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Tories Will Knit Back Together Quicker than Joe Ledley’s Leg

      The purpose of the Conservative Party is simply to be in power. The object of power for them is to make sure that nobody else can use the power of the state to counteract the power of the wealthy and curb their excesses.

      You will therefore be amazed by how, whatever the result today, the Tory cabinet will next week be smiling together in a show of unity. Because unity is needed for power. That they were calling each other liars, abusers of government funds, racists, unpatriotic or inciters to murder will be heartily brushed off as the rough and tumble of politics. Cameron will sleep soundly in his bed in Number 10.

    • WaPo Cites FAIR on C-SPAN’s Record of Bias

      The Washington Post‘s Callum Borchers (6/23/16) cited FAIR research in a story about complaints that C-SPAN continued to cover the Democratic sit-in on the House floor even after House Speaker Paul Ryan had the network’s cameras turned off.

      “This isn’t the first time C-SPAN has been accused of taking sides, of course,” Borchers wrote, noting that usually, “the charge is that it has a conservative bias.”

    • CMD Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Prosecutors’ Appeal in John Doe II Corruption Case

      On Wednesday, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the Brennan Center for Justice, and Common Cause filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to grant a hearing and overturn a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that shut down a criminal investigation into potentially illegal campaign coordination between Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and groups that spent millions during the 2011-2012 recall elections.

    • Clinton’s private e-mail was blocked by spam filters—so State IT turned them off

      Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off—potentially exposing State’s employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails.

      The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton, “We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Clinton replied, “Let’s get [a] separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • 100 years ago in Spokane: Petition sought end of movie censorship ordinance

      The censorship ordinance was mainly about sexually suggestive movies and plays, but it also was intended to prohibit movies that incited racial hatred.

    • Information Warfare: China Demands Better Censorship

      In a rare move Chinese leaders recently criticized, in public, their own Propaganda Department for not doing its job. The Propaganda Department is the several hundred people who direct the vast censorship

    • Turkey blocks Google Cache to stop censorship circumvention, breaks its own internet

      It was first speculated that the Google domain might be simply overlooked among a long lists of URLs to be censored by the authority, just like the ‘accidental’ censorship of shortening service Bit.ly last year. But local sources reported that the ban was intended to block access to Google servers, which keep a cached copy of content previously banned in Turkey.

      Indeed, various Google services have been used in Turkey to circumvent political censorship. During the Gezi Protests of 2013, protesters tagged ‘8.8.8.8’ graffiti (Google’s Public DNS) on walls to broadcast ways to avoid DNS-filtering (a method for censoring internet content). Turkish authorities resorted to IP-blocking and even DNS-hijacking to prevent access to social media during the 2014 local elections. For Turkish citizens who cannot use VPN or the Tor anonymity network, which masks users’ locations and identities, both Google Cache and Google Translator were suggested options among lists of proxies since then.

    • Rather Than Launch A Massive DDoS Attack, This Time China Just Asks GitHub To Take Down Page It Doesn’t Like

      You may recall that a year ago, a massive DDoS attack was launched against GitHub from China. The attack itself was somewhat clever, in that it effectively turned the Great Firewall around, using Chinese search engine Baidu’s ad platform and analytics platform to basically load code that contributed to the attack. The target of the attack were two tools that helped people in China access material that was blocked in China by the Great Firewall. Of course, this attack was actually the second attempt by China to stop people from accessing such information on GitHub. The first attack involved just using the Great Firewall to block GitHub entirely (it needed to block the entire GitHub, rather than just specific pages, because GitHub is all HTTPS) — but that caused Chinese programmers who rely on GitHub to freak out and point out that they rely on GitHub to do their jobs.

    • Web content blocking squeezed into draft EU anti-terrorism law

      A vote in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee early next week will set the stage for a debate over Web content blocking and terror attacks. It comes during a jittery period of concern around extremist activity online following the atrocity in Orlando and the murder of British politician Jo Cox.

    • West Allegheny student petition decries censorship of reading list

      In response to parents’ demands this year that some books be removed from the West Allegheny High School reading list, about 200 students have signed a petition asking the district not to use censorship in an attempt to shield teens from problems they may be encountering in their lives.

      “You’re trying to protect the children and I see that, but you’re really sheltering them and making them ignorant to issues that actually plague our society and are relevant right now,” student Renae Roscart,15, said of the parents who had sought the removal of some books.

    • Don’t Look! Erotic Khajuraho Drawings Show Hypocrisy of Censorship

      While Shiv Sena’s repeated attempts at beating, slapping and thrashing couples on Valentine’s Day started as a hot topic for outrage, it ended up as a Twitter joke.“It’s not part of Indian culture,” is what they often announce.

    • Twitter trolls are reporting Muslim girls to the police for posting ‘blasphemous’ messages online

      This weekend an account was spotted sending screenshots of ‘blasphemous’ tweets to the Dubai police and calling for action, after a 16-year-old girl rewrote a passage of the Quran to include a slang term for vaginas

    • SEX AND CENSORSHIP

      Although I believe censorship is a potential danger to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, I find myself wistful for the bad old days of the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1930s and 1940s.

      [....]

      There’s the smarmy sexualization of “family” sitcoms and the suggestive advertising using sex to sell.

    • Icasa to hold public hearing on SABC censorship
    • Public hearing looms over SABC censorship
    • Activists Say the SABC’s New Editorial Policy Is Shutting Them Out

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court Rules the FBI Does Not Need a Warrant to Hack a Computer

      In one of the many ongoing legal cases surrounding a dark web child pornography site, a judge has written that the FBI did not require a warrant to hack a suspect’s computer.

      According to activists, the ruling could have serious implications for how law enforcement is able to conduct remote searches.

      “The Court finds that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred here because the Government did not need a warrant to capture Defendant’s IP address,” Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., a senior United States District Judge, wrote in an opinion and order on Tuesday. He adds that the government did not require a warrant to extract other information from the suspect’s computer either.

    • VPN Providers Protest Plans to Expand Government Hacking Powers

      Proposed legislative changes that will increase law enforcement’s ability to hack into computers are under attack by a broad coalition. Google, EFF, Demand Progress and FightForTheFuture are joined by TOR, Private Internet Access and other VPN services seeking to block changes to Rule 41.

    • In Wisconsin, a Backlash Against Using Data to Foretell Defendants’ Futures

      When Eric L. Loomis was sentenced for eluding the police in La Crosse, Wis., the judge told him he presented a “high risk” to the community and handed down a six-year prison term.

      The judge said he had arrived at his sentencing decision in part because of Mr. Loomis’s rating on the Compas assessment, a secret algorithm used in the Wisconsin justice system to calculate the likelihood that someone will commit another crime.

      Mr. Loomis has challenged the judge’s reliance on the Compas score, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which heard arguments on his appeal in April, could rule in the coming days or weeks. Mr. Loomis’s appeal centers on the criteria used by the Compas algorithm, which is proprietary and as a result is protected, and on the differences in its application for men and women.

    • EU to adopt new US data rules in July

      The European Commission is set to present a new draft of its data-exchange pact with the US, the Privacy Shield, in early July.

      EU justice commissioner Vera Jourova told EUobserver in a recent interview that the most contentious issues had been agreed by Washington and Brussels.

      These concerned access to data by US security services, bulk collection of people’s personal information and independent oversight.

    • Snoopers’ Charter: Government explains why it needs the power to hack into everyone’s devices

      GCHQ WILL have the power to hack into the devices of entire towns under the forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill, according to a recently released Home Office briefing document.

      The ‘Operational Case for Bulk Powers’ is intended to explain why the security services need such wide-ranging and intrusive powers of surveillance and hacking granted under the so-called Snoopers’ Charter.

      The document uses a series of examples to make its case, citing terrorism, serious crime, terrorism, paedophiles, terrorism, state-based threats and, of course, terrorism.

    • GCHQ explains why it may want to hack every computing device in your town

      The Home Office has made the case for GCHQ’s new powers of bulk collection and hacking under the Investigatory Powers Bill, which will become law once it passes its third reading in the House of Lords, in a new document released this week.

      “The draft Investigatory Powers Bill… seeks to update the law to reflect technological change, ensuring that these powers – including those relating to sensitive capabilities available to the security and intelligence agencies – are set out transparently and consistently, with robust safeguards and world leading oversight,” claims the document.

    • Russia’s Problem (According To Russian Politicians): Not Enough Mass Surveillance

      When you look back at Techdirt’s coverage of Russia’s attempts to control its people and shut down online dissent, it’s unlikely you will be thinking to yourself: “What Russia really needs is more mass surveillance.”

    • Privacy Shield: Experts in the dark on planned EU-US data sharing pact

      National representatives charged with assessing the European Union’s controversial Privacy Shield proposal still haven’t seen the final text of the would-be Safe Harbour replacement, Ars has learned.

      The so-called Article 31 working group—which includes officials from the bloc’s 28 member states and the European Commission—held its last meeting on Monday. But despite anticipation, the commission didn’t deliver a new draft of the data-sharing deal it is negotiating with the US, and some delegations are getting frustrated.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FBI, police visit activists’ homes in advance of Republican National Convention

      Law enforcement investigators this week began visiting the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence for possible planned demonstrations surrounding the upcoming Republican National Convention.

      Activists said they view the “door-knock” visits as intimidating. A spokeswoman for the local branch of the FBI acknowledged that “community outreach” is taking place as law enforcement officials try to make sure next month’s GOP convention is a “safe and secure” event.

      Jocelyn Rosnick, a leader with the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-leaning group planning legal support for RNC protesters, said over a dozen activists have reported visits by teams of federal and local law enforcement officials this week.

      Some of the activists are involved with groups planning RNC demonstrations, while some aren’t, she said. She also said that some of the people who were visited were among the 71 people who were arrested in May 2015 in the aftermath of protests that broke out following the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a then-Cleveland police officer who had been charged with voluntary manslaughter in connection with the 2013 shooting deaths of two Cleveland motorists following a police chase.

    • FBI and Police are Knocking on Activists’ Doors Ahead of Republican National Convention

      Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have been knocking on the doors of activists and community organizers in Cleveland, Ohio, asking about their plans for the Republican National Convention in July.

      As the city gears up to welcome an estimated 50,000 visitors, and an unknown number of protesters, some of the preparations and restrictions put in place by officials have angered civil rights activists. But the latest string of unannounced home visits by local and federal police mark a significant escalation in officials’ efforts to stifle protest, they say.

      “The purpose of these door knocks is simple: to intimidate the target and others in efforts to discourage people from engaging in lawful First Amendment activities,” Jocelyn Rosnick, a coordinator with the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, wrote in a statement denouncing the home visits.

    • Teen Sues U.S. Over Cavity Drug Search for Which She was Billed $575

      Ashley Cervantes, a then 18-year-old American citizen, was stopped at the Mexico border and, for some unspecified reason, perhaps related to her being young and of Hispanic ethnicity, accused by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of smuggling drugs.

    • The Campaign To Dox Twitter Users In Islamic Countries For ‘Blasphemy’ And Supporting LGBT Rights

      Nearly half a decade ago, we wondered publicly what a company like Twitter, a self-proclaimed advocate of free and open speech, would do if confronted by a government that is anything but. In that post, Mike discussed how Twitter had been used to rant against the government in Saudi Arabia, and wondered what would happen if Saudi Arabia decided to make such speech illegal. But what if it’s not direct government action but that of other users that threatens such speech? While we have seen some governments routinely punish internet speech they don’t like, we’re now seeing signs of non-government individuals getting into the racket as well, as a way to silence the kind of barely-progressive speech a company like Twitter would likely say it wants to protect.

    • #LibbyLeaks: Oakland Mayor Launches Investigation Against City and Police Whistleblowers [iophk: "Multiple separate scandals and they try to distract with this instead"]

      This week, the national spotlight is on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and her embattled police department — and the headlines aren’t favorable.

      And now the Express has learned that Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth have opened an investigation to identify internal whistleblowers and leaks, according to multiple city and police sources, who asked not to be identified because they fear retaliation.

      The investigation started after recent news reports exposed details regarding multiple police-misconduct cases, as well as efforts by city and police officials to keep the misconduct hidden from the public.

    • Interpol says it’s seeking public help to track down 123 suspected human traffickers

      Interpol said on Thursday (June 23) it is seeking public help to track down 123 suspected human traffickers wanted around the world.

      The largest international police organisation put out the public appeal from its base in Lyon, France, in a bid to bring the remaining fugitives to justice.

      “People smuggling is a global issue which is why international cooperation through operations such as Hydra are essential,” said Interpol’s director of Operational Support Michael O’Connell in a statement announcing the programme’s launch.

      The operation, known as Infra Hydra, involves 44 countries as well as the EU police agency Europol, and has already made 26 arrests and located 31 other suspects, Interpol said.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • North Carolina’s New Broadband Plan Forgets To Include ‘Don’t Let ISP Lobbyists Write Shitty State Telecom Law’

      For years we’ve noted how 19 states have effectively let companies like AT&T and Comcast write protectionist state broadband laws to protect the status quo. Such laws usually either block or hamstring frustrated communities looking to build their own broadband networks, or in some instances from striking public/private agreements with companies like Google Fiber. Last year the FCC finally started paying attention to such bans, stating it intends to use Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preempt restrictions conflicting with its Congressional mandate to ensure even broadband deployment.

      The FCC’s action specifically targeted bans in both Tennessee and North Carolina, both states where incumbent telecom lobbyists quite literally control state legislatures. Both states’ dysfunction on this front is legendary, yet both chose to sue the FCC in court to, they claim, defend “states rights” from federal government “overreach” (defending state residents from shitty telecom law written by lobbyists isn’t much of a concern).

    • DTN: Vint Cerf And NASA Just Created An Internet For Whole Solar System

      Making the communication systems more reliable for its future missions, NASA and Google VP Vint Cerf has created a Solar System Internet service. Called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, this service is already incorporated in the software suite at the International Space Station.

    • Senate Report Cites Charter, Time Warner Cable Overcharges

      According to a copy of a staff report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Charter and Time Warner Cable (now a part of Charter) have failed to refund customers for overcharges, but both have taken steps to correct the issue.

      The report found that MVPDs vary greatly in how they handle billing overcharges, but that while “Time Warner Cable and Charter have procedures for identifying overcharges and removing them from customers’ bills prospectively, [n]either company, however, has automatically provided full retroactive refunds or credits for past overcharges.”

  • DRM/E-books

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • South Centre Steps Up Activity On IP, Medicines Access, Trade, Investment And More

      The Geneva-based organisation represents the interests of its developing country members.

    • Trademarks

      • Defending Our Brand

        We’ve forged relationships with millions of websites and users under the name Let’s Encrypt, furthering our mission to make encryption free, easy, and accessible to everyone. We’ve also worked hard to build our unique identity within the community and to make that identity a reliable indicator of quality. We take it very seriously when we see the potential for our users to be confused, or worse, the potential for a third party to damage the trust our users have placed in us by intentionally creating such confusion. By attempting to register trademarks for our name, Comodo is actively attempting to do just that.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Boss: Europe’s Geo Unblocking Plans Threaten Movie Industry

        MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd fears that Europe’s plans to limit geo-blocking will “cause great harm” to the movie industry. In a keynote address at the CineEurope convention, Dodd warned that broad access to movies and TV-shows will result in fewer films and higher prices for consumers.

      • Court Orders Usenet Providers to Expose Prolific Pirates

        Dutch Usenet providers Eweka and Usenetter have been ordered to hand over the personal details of two uploaders who shared over 2,000 pirated e-books. The case was initiated by local anti-piracy group BREIN, which plans to offer a settlement to the accused uploaders.

      • Jury finds Led Zeppelin did not steal intro to ‘Stairway to Heaven’

        Led Zeppelin did not steal a riff from an obscure 1960s instrumental tune to use for the introduction of its classic rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven,” a federal court jury decided Thursday.

        The verdict in Los Angeles settles a point that music fans have debated for decades but didn’t find its way to court until two years ago, when the trustee for the late Randy Craig Wolfe filed a copyright lawsuit.

      • Led Zeppelin Wins Copyright Case Over Stairway To Heaven

        Back in April, we talked about the fact that the lawsuit against Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page for copyright infringement over “Stairway to Heaven” was moving forward to a jury trail, and how ridiculous it was. As we noted, the song was written in 1970, and it’s a bit crazy to argue after all these decades that there’s infringement. But, more importantly, the similarities between Stairway and the Spirit song “Taurus” were just a few common notes that were predated by many artists, including Bach’s Bouree in E Minor. Still, as we’d seen with the Blurred Lines case, when copyright cases go to juries over song similarities, they often turn out wacky. The intricacies of copyright law are tossed out the window and often “hey, these sound similar” seems to win out.

      • Led Zeppelin Wins ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Jury Trial

        A jury rules in the band’s favor after hearing testimony and arguments that the iconic song was a copyright infringement of Spirit’s “Taurus.”

      • Good News: California Legislature Dumps Stupid Plan To Copyright All Government Works

        Back in April, we noted that California Assemblymember Mark Stone was pushing some legislation to basically push California governments to copyright and trademark everything they could. This was a bad kneejerk response to the admittedly ridiculous situation in Yosemite, where the concessions vendor had trademarked various park names and then tried to hold them ransom. Of course, the proper response is to make sure that kind of thing can’t be covered by trademark or copyright law, not push state government entities to lock up things under intellectual property laws.

      • Digitising public domain images creates a new copyright, rules German court

        A Berlin court has ruled that digitising paintings that are in the public domain creates new copyrights, even if the intent is to create a faithful image rather than produce an artistic interpretation.

        The case was brought by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum (REM) in Mannheim, Germany, against the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland—the local German chapter of the global Wikimedia movement—over 17 images of the museum’s public domain works of art, which have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

      • Terrible Ruling In Germany: Digitizing The Public Domain Creates New Copyright

        This is not a particularly new issue — it’s come up many times in the past. In the US, thankfully, we have a nice precedent in Bridgeman v. Corel that states clearly that exact photographic copies of public domain works are not protected by copyright, because they lack the originality necessary for a copyright. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some US Museums from looking to route around that ruling. Over in Europe, where there is no Bridgeman-like ruling, we tend to see a lot more of these kinds of attempts to relock down the public domain by museums. There have been similar attempts in the UK and in France, though as far as I can tell, neither case went to court.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/06/24/cinnamon-3-0-6/feed/ 0 Samsung’s Patent Cases Matter to Design Patents (Scope), to Android, and by Extension to GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2016/06/12/design-patents-scotus/ http://techrights.org/2016/06/12/design-patents-scotus/#comments Sun, 12 Jun 2016 22:56:57 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=93461 Samsung has the power to put an end to a controversial type of patents that are similar to software patents

Gates
Slide to unlock: novel or medieval?

Summary: A couple of new developments in Apple’s dispute about the ‘design’ of Samsung’s Android phones, which emulate extremely old concepts in digital form

WE are definitely not friends of Samsung (never have been), but some of its patent cases in recent years (especially against Microsoft and Apple) have had profound implications/impact.

“How on Earth were such patents granted in the first place?”Here is Professor Mark Lemley sharing his “brief for 50 IP professors on design patent damages in the Samsung v. Apple Supreme Court case” (local copy to ensure it endures the test of time). This is one of several such cases that involve Apple and Samsung. Florian Müller wrote that this is about as absurd as Microsoft’s patent bullying “over tiny arrow”. To quote the relevant part: “This is one of the patents Microsoft is presently asserting against Corel. Last summer I reported on Corel drawing first blood by suing Microsoft over a bunch of preview-related patents. A few months later, Microsoft retaliated with the assertion of six utility patents and four design patents. The Electronic Frontier Foundation named one of Microsoft’s design patents-in-suit the “stupid patent of the month” of December 2015 because it merely covered the design of a slider. But that patent isn’t nearly as bad as U.S. Design Patent No. D550,237, which practically just covers a tiny arrow positioned in the lower right corner of a rectangle. If you look at the drawings, particularly this one, note that the dotted lines mark the parts that aren’t claimed. What’s really claimed is just a rectangle with another rectangle inside and that tiny graphical arrow in the bottom right corner.”

“This sounds good on the surface, but unless the SCOTUS Justices rule on this, the perceived legitimacy of design patents may persist.”How on Earth were such patents granted in the first place? It’s not surprising that USPTO patent quality has declined so badly and so quickly and there are new patent quality studies regarding the USPTO. Will any similar studies look closely at EPO patent quality as well?

According to an Apple advocacy site, patents on design might not reach SCOTUS after all. This is bad news to all who hoped that SCOTUS would put en end to design patents once and for all.”Samsung Electronics welcomes support for overturning U.S. court ruling in Apple case,” said this new article, which along with others said “Justice Department Urges High Court Overturn Award to Apple Over Samsung Smartphones”. This sounds good on the surface, but unless the SCOTUS Justices rule on this, the perceived legitimacy of design patents may persist. As Müller put it: “Reading all amicus briefs in Samsung v. Apple (design patent damages). Momentum behind call for reasonableness is very impressive.” It looks very likely that if the SCOTUS rules on this, it will help demolish many design patents by extension, in the same way that Alice at SCOTUS put an end to many software patents in the United States. “A federal appeals court awarded about $500 million in damages to Apple for design patent infringement,” recalled one article, demonstrating just how much money can be at stake due to one single patent. “Design patent owners shouldn’t get 100% of the profits when only 1% of the product infringes, EFF tells court,” according to the EFF’s Twitter account and accompanying blog post that says: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the U.S. Supreme Court today to reverse a ruling that required Samsung to pay Apple all the profits it earned from smartphones that infringed three basic design patents owned by the iPhone maker.

“Apple is the aggressor, whereas Samsung — like Google — is hardly ever initiating patent lawsuits.”“The $399-million damage award against Samsung, upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the Apple v. Samsung patent lawsuit, should be thrown out, EFF told the court in an amicus brief filed today with Public Knowledge and The R Street Institute. Forcing defendants to give up 100% of their profits for infringing designs that may only marginally contribute to a product’s overall look and functionality will encourage frivolous lawsuits and lead to excessive damage awards that will raise prices for consumers and deter innovation.”

Don’t fall for the corporate media’s narrative of Apple as the victim even when software patents are to blame. Apple is the aggressor, whereas Samsung — like Google — is hardly ever initiating patent lawsuits. We hope that Samsung will take this all the way up to the Supreme Court (more expensive to Samsung but collectively beneficial to all) and eventually win. The net effect might be the end of many design patents in the US. Those patents so often threaten GNU/Linux or Android products, as we have repeatedly shown here over the years. Will Samsung do a public service here? █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/06/12/design-patents-scotus/feed/ 0 Media Sites Still Filled to the Rim With Pro-Software Patents Propaganda (Lies by Omission) http://techrights.org/2016/06/06/alice-omissions/ http://techrights.org/2016/06/06/alice-omissions/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2016 09:36:12 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=93217 Selective media coverage as a biasing strategy

India Nepal cartoon

Summary: Sites of patent lawyers continue to tell only a fraction of the whole story, focusing on one single old case involving Microsoft (which supports software patents) rather than the full picture (Alice and PTAB crushing software patents in the United States)

PATENTS on software are worse than inessential. They’re extremely harmful, especially but not only to software developers (irrespective of the type of software and whether it’s proprietary or not). They are being promoted for (self) gain by billionaires and patent lawyers, as we noted in our previous post. So why are we still hearing software patents advocacy? Well, for one thing, patent lawyers have a grip on the media. They even have their own media sites and these often look like news sites (basically marketing/sales disguised as analysis or reporting). This post presents some of the latest propaganda on these matters.

According to this recent post from a patent lawyers’ site: “A court was easily able to analogize claims of two patents directed to electronic messaging to manual communications processes; the court consequently granted a motion for summary judgment of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Mobile Telecommunications Technologies LLC v. Blackberry Corp., No. 3:12-cv-1652-M (N.D. Texas May 12, 2016).”

“They’re extremely harmful, especially but not only to software developers (irrespective of the type of software and whether it’s proprietary or not).”Notice the “invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 101″ part. We’re seeing lots of that today, but patent lawyers would rather de-emphasise or ignore such things. “US Pat 8,545,575,” wrote Patent Buddy the other day. “This is the patent a UT Judge held invalid under 101/Alice” (the SCOTUS ruling on Alice in 2014).

There’s more of that, e.g. Patent Buddy’s “Portable Data Storage Device Patent Unpatentable Under 35 U.S.C. § 101″ (same grounds).

The cited decision is described as follows: “In a final written decision, the Board found claims of a patent directed to a portable data storage device unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101.”

And from the decision: “The underlying concept of claims 13 and 14, particularly when viewed in light of the ’720 patent specification, is conditioning and controlling access to content based upon payment. This is a fundamental economic practice long in existence in commerce. We are, thus, persuaded, based on the ’720 patent specification and the claim language, that each of claims 13 and 14 is directed to an abstract idea.”

“They even have their own media sites and these often look like news sites (basically marketing/sales disguised as analysis or reporting).”Looking at the site best known for software patents advocacy, they now have an article titled “Avoiding Alice Rejections with Predictive Analytics” (trying to find loopholes around the law). “Having affirmed the claim construction,” says another such site, “the Federal Circuit likewise affirmed summary judgment of noninfringement, adding that disclaimer applied to both literal infringement and to infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.”

This is actually about CAFC, not SCOTUS. CAFC is responsible for bringing software patents to the United States in the first place.

3 days ago Ping Hu and Michael McNamara of Mintz Levin tried hard to cherry-pick cases to bring back software patents, in spite of SCOTUS. Their ‘article’ was titled “A New Hope for Software Patents?” It looks like an analysis, but it’s shameless self-promotion, as usual. Mintz Levin wasn’t alone here. Patent lawyers are so desperate to spread one single case (Enfish v Microsoft) to the appeals folks in order to save software patents. See “The PTAB Applies Enfish” (the case everyone leans on for legitimisation of software patents). It says: “However, relying on the recent Enfish decision, the PTAB found that the claimed method did not recite an abstract idea. Id. at 15. In so finding the PTAB faulted Petitioner’s argument for failing to analyze the claims as a whole. Id. at 15. The PTAB went on to analyze the claimed method under the second step of the Alice test and found that it too was not met. Id. at 16. The PTAB found that, like the claims in DDR Holdings, the challenged claims are necessarily rooted in computer technology. Id. at 17.”

“CAFC is responsible for bringing software patents to the United States in the first place.”PTAB is not stupid (or corruptible or greedy like the USPTO), so almost every software patent that comes there will end up dead. The blog post “Corelogic, Inc. v. Boundary Solutions, Inc. (PTAB 2016)” says: “On May 24, 2016, the U.S. Patent Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a decision denying institution of covered business method (CBM) patent review of U.S. Patent No. 7,092,957 owned by Boundary Solutions.”

That’s more of the same, obviously. Even Apple is now running to the PTAB, having found itself on the receiving end of abuses it's now so renowned for. To quote IAM: “Shortly after Smartflash won a $533 million infringement decision against Apple early last year this blog pointed out that the NPE [troll] was still unlikely to ultimately receive such a big payout. For one thing the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has shown its predilection for over-ruling big district court awards, particularly from the Eastern District of Texas and particularly damages awarded to NPEs.”

What’s noteworthy here is that Apple, which uses software patents against Android (and by extension Linux) suddenly does not like them (because they’re used against Apple) and resorts/retreats to PTAB for reprieve. How pathetic is this? Double standards all over this…

“What’s noteworthy here is that Apple, which uses software patents against Android (and by extension Linux) suddenly does not like them (because they’re used against Apple) and resorts/retreats to PTAB for reprieve.”Regarding PTAB, also see MCM v HP Briefs. To quote Patently-O: “MCM-Petition-and-Appendix: (1) Whether inter partes review (IPR) violates Article III of the Constitution; and (2) whether IPR violates the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution. Response Due June 30, 2016.”

The inter partes reviews are carried out by PTAB, which we need a lot more of (the EPO equivalent, E/BoA, is being crushed by Battistelli these days).

Going back to Enfish v Microsoft, 3 weeks later patent lawyers still try to prop up this one single pro-software patents ruling. CoffyLaw published this promotional piece and Bastian Best is cherry-picking cases again, citing Michael Best who latches onto CAFC. Fish & Richardson PC, which we mentioned here many times before, also joins the opportunists with a so-called ‘analysis’ or comparison between Enfish and TLI (a case which soon after Enfish crushed software patents at the same court). Meanwhile, a Microsoft-connected patent lawyers firm (Shook Hardy and Bacon LLP) is trying to expand patent scope with a so-called ‘analysis’. The common thing (or theme) here is that they only pay attention to what suits their agenda. It’s not analysis, it’s propaganda.

“The common thing (or theme) here is that they only pay attention to what suits their agenda. It’s not analysis, it’s propaganda.”Owing to patent lawyers’ hype and media saturation, Enfish v Microsoft is now widely known only for reinforcing software patents in the US. “Enfish Could Not Save Patents Asserted Against Nvidia,” Patent Buddy wrote, citing this PDF. So obviously there’s not much impact to Enfish v Microsoft after all.

Why does the media keep covering it like it’s a groundbreaking decision? Here is the corporate media mentioning it almost a month later, stating: “The court wrote in Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp that any “improvement to computer functionality itself” overcomes the abstract idea exception to patent eligibility that holds that what is abstract can’t be patented.” Yes, but how many similar cases were decided/ruled against software patents? Why are these being ignored? Selective attention? Or just propaganda dressed up as ‘reporting’? These are rhetorical questions really. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/06/06/alice-omissions/feed/ 0 Links 5/6/2016: SouthEast LinuxFest, Debian 8.5 Released http://techrights.org/2016/06/05/debian-8-5-released/ http://techrights.org/2016/06/05/debian-8-5-released/#comments Sun, 05 Jun 2016 15:06:53 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=93181

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Meet The Fast And Beautiful Cub Linux 1.0 — “Cub = Chromium + Ubuntu”

    Cub Linux is created by combining the best features of Chromium OS and Ubuntu Linux i.e. speed and Google integrations of Chromium + power and compatibility of Ubuntu Linux. This cloud centric operating system is currently based on Ubuntu Linux LTS 14.04 ‘Trusty Tahr’ and is available for download as a Release Candidate.

  • Interview with the Creators of SilentKeys; Preevio

    I got the opportunity to talk to Iann De Maria and Romain Pironneau earlier today about the launch of their Kickstarter campaign for an Edward Snowden inspired privacy-oriented keyboard that runs a live Linux OS. Read on to find out what got said!

  • FOSS and Grits With Southern Fried Linux

    There’s a component to the SouthEast LinuxFest that’s not seen at most other free and open source conferences, as the conference seeks to celebrate not only FOSS, but Southern culture as well.

    The SouthEast LinuxFest is the conference that dares to be different. That’s because along with “Linux” and “FOSS,” “hospitality” is always a keyword at SELF, which will get cranked up next Friday, June 10. Hospitality — as in the “bless your heart” version known as “southern hospitality” — is sure to be on full display. That’s a given.

    I point this out not for the benefit of good ol’ boy or girl FOSSers who call the Southeast home — ’cause y’all already know — but for those who live outside the area who might not be aware that SELF allows attendees the chance to not only be immersed in the culture of free and open source software, but in the culture of the New South as well.

  • Desktop

    • “10”‘s Nagware Ruins Your Day

      If you want software that works for you rather than you being a slave to its supplier, use Free/Libre Open Source Software like Debian GNU/Linux. It saved me many times from re-re-reboots, malware and slowing down.

    • Even in remotest Africa, Windows 10 nagware ruins your day: Update burns satellite link cash

      When you’re stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord’s Resistance Army, then life’s pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.

      The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • The History of Open Source & Free Software, Pt. 1, w/ Special Guest: Richard Stallman

      In the early 1980’s Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF): a socio-technological movement that revolutionized the software world. In this episode we’ll hear Stallman himself talking about the roots of the movement, and learn of its early struggles.

    • Our First Podcast, with ProfessorKaos64

      We are introducing today a new way to enjoy BoilingSteam with our first podcast. It was recorded on the 22nd of May, along with our special guest, ProfessorKaos64, who is pretty well known in the linux gaming community for his work on expanding SteamOS beyond its initial scope of only launching Steam games. You can check his SteamOS-tools page on Git-hub to find out the extent of his work so far.

  • Kernel Space

    • OpenSwitch Finds a New Home
    • HP’s OpenSwitch becomes a Linux Foundation Project

      HP’s open source networking operating system, OpenSwitch, is now a Linux Foundation project.

      Many industry players are joining the project, including Broadcom, Cavium, Extreme Networks, LinkedIn, Mellanox, Nephos Inc., P4.org, Quattro Networks, SnapRoute and, of course, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

    • HPE-backed OpenSwitch OS becomes Linux Foundation project
    • EU Parliament Votes for Smart Regulation of Blockchain Technology

      European Parliament members (MEPs) voted to take a hands-off approach to regulating blockchain technology, Ars Technica reports. Following the vote, unnamed sources told Ars Technica that European Commission staffers are working hard to understand the distributed ledger technology behind virtual currencies ‒ seven years after the launch of Bitcoin, with venture capital investments now totalling more than €1 billion.

    • On Getting Patches Merged

      In some project there’s an awesome process to handle newcomer’s contributions – autobuilder picks up your pull and runs full CI on it, coding style checkers automatically do basic review, and the functional review load is also at least all assigned with tooling too.

      Then there’s project where utter chaos and ad-hoc process reign, like the Linux kernel or the X.org community, and it’s much harder for new folks to get their foot into the door. Of course there’s documentation trying to bridge that gap, tools like get_maintainers.pl to figure out whom to ping, but that’s kinda the details. In the end you need someone from the inside to care about what you’re doing and guide you through the maze the first few times.

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Published AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver (for Linux)

        On Windows, we really only have one graphics driver per GPU. On Linux, however, there is a choice between open drivers and closed, binary-only blobs. Open drivers allow users to perpetuate support, for either really old hardware or pre-release software, without needing the GPU vendor to step in. It can also be better for security, because open-source software can be audited, which is better (albeit how much better is up for debate) than just having a few eyes on it… if any at all.

    • Benchmarks

      • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan Performance

        $699 USD is a lot to spend on a graphics card, but damn she is a beauty. Last month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 as the current top-end Pascal card and looked great under Windows while now finally having my hands on the card the past few days I’ve been putting it through its paces under Ubuntu Linux with the major open APIs of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VDPAU. Not only is the raw performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 on Linux fantastic, but the performance-per-Watt improvements made my jaw drop more than a few times. Here are my initial Linux results of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition.

      • The Importance Of Benchmark Automation & Why I Hate Running Linux Games Manually

        Yet again with today’s GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review there were multiple people asking “why XYZ Linux game wasn’t tested”, a recurring topic now over the past several years.

        XYZ game wasn’t tested in that review or any other article since it can’t be properly automated, that’s usually the explanation whenever prompted in the forums. The game/engine wasn’t either designed to be automated-benchmark friendly, the developers disabled it in the debug build, or in many cases when it’s ported to Linux by companies like Feral Interactive they simply didn’t bother with porting that functionality to Linux.

      • Some Extra, One-Off Benchmarks Of The GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux
      • See How Your Linux System Compares To The Performance Of A GeForce GTX 1080

        While finishing up the large GPU comparisons with the GTX 1080, I did run a few preliminary results in different benchmarks and uploaded them to OpenBenchmarking.org. Thanks to our benchmarking software, you can easily compare your own system to this $699 NVIDIA graphics card running under Linux.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Revival Icon Set: An Icon Theme Reborn From Old Icon Theme

      There are plenty of icon themes available for Linux desktops but we always welcome new eyecandy study stuff which wants to make Linux desktop elegant and different. Revival icon set is a remastered version of an old icon theme which I don’t know because it is not mentioned on source page. The icons in this set are kind of gradient variation and mimetypes taken from Emerald icon theme, it come with in three different folder colors: Blue, Orange, and Mint green folders. It is compatible with most of the desktops such as Unity, Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE and others. It is in active development, so if you want to contribute in any way you can do it via this page.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Upgrade/Install Latest KDE Plasma 5 in Kubuntu 16.04/Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial
      • Antu Icons Inspired from OS X, Android, and Flyme for Linux Desktop

        You may have tried many icon themes to make your desktop elegant and unique, Antü is another great looking icon theme which has some elements inspired from OS X, Android and Flyme OS. The idea behind this icon theme is to make a clean and soft icon set which can be used an alternative to Breeze in KDE and this icon theme was only available for KDE desktop but ZMA from Gnome-look manage to port it for other desktops such as Unity, Gnome, Xfce, Lxde, Mate, Cinnamon and others. The original Antü version for KDE desktop offers two variants one is for light panel and other for dark panel contains approximately 1500+ icons, the ported Antu-Universal version has four versions and ZMA added more icons approximately 3000+ icons. Both icon sets are in constant development and you report issues to theme and hopefully they are gonna fix it in next release. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool to change icons.

      • Crane – alpha version

        In the old version of GCompris, the dimensions of the window were locked, so there was only one mode: desktop mode. In the current Qt version, the window can be resized in any way the user wants. To address this issue, i had to adapt the activity to the new demands.

      • Plasma’s Publictransport to get some reworking !

        This summer I’ll be working on trying to bring back to life the Publictransport Plasma applet, as part of a Google summer of code project, mentored by Eike Hein and Mario Fux, which will need both reworking and rewriting of the present code for it to be able to work with Plasma5. To know more about the project, take a look at it’s wiki page on userbase.kde.org and a detailed explanation about the project by it’s author , Friedrich Pülz.

      • [Krita] Design the Kickstarter T-shirt!

        The Kickstarter has been funded so we’ll be needing T-shirts! Here’s your chance to earn fame by designing the one we’ll send to our backers: Special June drawing challenge!

      • Plasma 5.6.4 available in 16.04 Backports

        The Kubuntu Team announces the availability of Plasma 5.6.4 on Kubuntu 16.04 though our Backports PPA.

      • Building KDE Frameworks on MsWindows
      • Full emojis support for your KDE/Qt applications

        So in the past month I’ve devoted my weekends to get proper emojis support ready for KDE software. Thanks to our fantastic KEmoticons framework, all the heavy lifting is already done, we just needed a theme and utilize the theme.

      • Anatomy of a bug fix

        But let’s take a look at a particularly nasty bug, one that we couldn’t fix for ages. Ever since Krita 2.9.6, we have received crash reports about Krita crashing when people were using drawing tablets. Not just any drawing tablets, but obscure tablets with names like Trust, Peritab, Adesso, Waltop, Aiptek, Genius — and others. Not the tablets that we do support because the companies have donated test hardware to Krita, like Wacom, Yiynova and Huion.

      • KDAB at SIGGRAPH in July
      • Webinar – Introducing Qt 3D
      • Qt World Summit USA

        This year the Qt World Summit will be held in California and KDAB will be there as a major sponsor! you’ll also find some of our trainings on offer during the pre-conference training day on October 18th.

      • Taming the Beast

        One of the lesser-known features in KDE Applications and Plasma is the Kiosk Framework, a means of restricting the customizability of the workspace in order to keep users in an enterprise or public environment from performing unwanted actions or modifications.

      • Voy: Message passing library for distributed KRunner (Part 1)
      • KEXI 3

        Spolier: 0% of mockups here, top picture: kexi.git master, bottom picture: to-be-published GUI.

      • Coding at Lakademy Pt II
      • Lakademy 2016 – Starting to automate some servers on KDE

        Lakademy is a great event that happens every year since 2014. It is a Latin American event, but normally it happens in Brasil (Let’s try to do that in another place in Latin American? Do you have a good one? Let us know).

      • LaKademy 2016: one more reinvigorating event

        It was a great honor to participate this meeting again. I’ve been participated since Akademy-Br, in 2010, when I became a contributor to community. Like the other years, I worked in translation and promo activities. Me, Frederico and Camila decided to start a review work on all Plasma 5 translation files, messages and docmessages. There are many things that needs to be revised, especially in the documentation files. Moreover, as Brazil implemented a new orthographic agreement recently, we would like to update the translations to follow these changes. Of course, the amount of work is huge, the review process of all these files is tiring and can take a while, so just we started it during the event.

      • New Plasma Task Manager backend: Faster, better, Wayland

        During the last several months, I’ve been rewriting the backend for Plasma’s Task Manager, the strip of launchers and windows embedded into the panel at the bottom of the screen.

      • Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 3-TeXLa is alive)

        Today is a great day because the question “Wiki, what’s going on?” has a precise answer: “TeXLa is alive!”

      • TeXLa editing hack with Kile
      • WTL editing hack with TeXLa
      • Strong kickoff

        Ever since I’ve connected with my mentor (Stefan) I’ve worked on LabPlot. Even before the community bonding period I have implemented LaTeX exporting support for spreadsheets and matrices. You can export now your datas in LaTeX tables, this is the export’s dialog:

      • Gsoc 2016 Neverland #2

        I have been spending about one week thinking about how I should structure the templates and the themes, so you can build themes for WP, Drupal … with only one Html theme.

      • Work peroid.

        With the beginning of the coding period, I have set up all my accounts ,have read more about Qt5 and GSL libraries,had the discussion about the project with my mentor and finally done with the most boredom job, that is , taking university examinations.

      • GSoC Update 1: The Beginning

        The project idea’s implementation has undergone some changes from what I proposed. While the essence of the project is the same, it will now no longer be dependent on Baloo and xattr. Instead, it will use a QList to hold a list of staged files with a plugin to kiod. My next milestone before the mid-term evaluation is to implement this in a KIO slave which will be compatible with the whole suite of KDE applications.

      • #24: GSoC with KDE – 3

        As the first part of my project, I had to implement an IMAP client for fetching emails from an IMAP server. I used KIMAP library in the process. With the help of my mentor and Daniel Vratil and Luca Beltrame, I implemented a working IMAP client. Daniel and Luca helped me with the API details, since the one available was lacking some of the details. Still, most of the methods were fine. The only minor issue related to the API was a specific function overloading in KIMAP::FetchJob. The new Qt signal/slot mechanism is good and all, but since it does static checking, we need to specify the exact methods. In this particular case, to resolve ambiguity, we need to cast it. Which looks not very beautiful. Hence, Qt recommends not to use function overloading.

      • Unlocking wallet during startup

        While setting up plasma5 I found a solution for something that had been bothering me forever. Basically, while session management is restoring all windows, the wallet isn’t open yet, so if the wallet is needed to get online (wifi password), all the apps being restored (in my case, about 20 konqueror windows) have no networking yet and just show error pages.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Budgie-remix: Unity Light and then some

      When half a dozen major desktops are used by Linux distributions, what chance does a new one have? In the case of budgie-remix, a better chance than you might expect. With the combination of an unexpected endorsement and a lightweight and elegant desktop environment, Budgie-remix could manage to become the first distribution since Linux Mint to capture the interest of a large percentage of users.

      Budgie-remix builds on the work of Ikey Doherty for the budgie desktop, which is featured in the Solus distribution (formerly Evolve OS). David Mohammed, best known for the development of the Rhythmbox music player, packaged Budgie for Ubuntu, then noticed that Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu had left a message on Google+ saying, “Happy to support an application to make this an official *buntu flavour, if there is a community around the packaging.”

    • Budgie-Remix 16.04

    • Reviews

      • Alpine Linux Desktop

        I recently resurrected an older, but relatively small laptop to use in cattle class on an airplane, where a full-size laptop is eternally in danger of being crushed by the seat in front. Unfortunately, the laptop was running Windows Vista, a curse inflicted on many laptops of its era, when Microsoft went through one of its phases of pretending that people seek deeper meaning from an operating system as opposed to just hoping it will keep running and not break their applications. (What’s that, you say? They’re doing it right now by pretending that the next generation of children will be transformed by the tiny, incremental improvements they made to Windows? So surprising.)

      • An Everyday Linux User Review Of 4MLinux 17.0 – The Stable One?

        The GUI looks stylish and 4MLinux performs well. There are a few too many whys to be answered before I could use this over something like Q4OS and AntiX.

        For instance:

        Why can I not get a wireless network connection?
        Why after installing 4M Linux does it boot to a command prompt and not a GUI?
        Why have applications installed that are dependent on other applications which aren’t installed?

        There is in general a good selection of lightweight applications installed and the extensions menu gives you access to a few key applications such as a decent browser and office suite.

        The games section is very nice and the inclusion of DOOM and Quake is a good touch.

        The trouble is that I can see some nice things but I can’t think of a reason why I would use 4M Linux over something else.

        The key fix for the next release is to nail wireless network connections. Borrow the code from another distribution or include a network manager that just works. Puppy Linux has a tool called Frisbee which is lightweight and not so pretty but it definitely works. If in doubt use that.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Got SELinux?

        We are working to get SELinux and Overlayfs to work well together. Currently you can not run docker containers

      • PHPUnit 5.4

        RPM of PHPUnit version 5.4 are available in remi repository for Fedorra ≥ 21 and in remi-test repository for Enterprise Linux (CentOS, RHEL…).

      • PLUMgrid SDN Suite Works with Red Hat OpenStack

        Players in the emerging software-defined networking (SDN) arena are continuing on the path to interoperability as the industry shakes itself out, with PLUMgrid Inc. announcing its SDN suite is certified for the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.

      • PLUMgrid’s ONS 5.0 for OpenStack now certified for use with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8

        PLUMgrid is bringing its Open Networking Suite to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8. ONS 5.0 is now certified for use with the Red Hat OpenStack distribution, providing another option for deploying software-defined networking capabilities for OpenStack-based clouds.

      • Firms Explain How To Overcome Open Source Development Challenges

        Who better to explain how to overcome the challenges of managing open source projects and cultures than open source champions Red Hat Inc. and Docker Inc., both of which have come out with brand-new resources detailing their in-house processes and best practices for community software development?

        Within days of each other, Red Hat open sourced a best practices tool for managing open source projects, while Docker continued its blog series on how it does the same, this week focusing on its internal processes, such as how it promotes contributing developers to maintainer status.

      • How To Hire Software Testers, Pt. 3

        I am a QA contractor at Red Hat responsible for finding over 1600 bugs, a general purpose open source developer, Red Hat Certified professional, cloud hacker and an entrepreneur! My latest start-up is Mr. Senko!

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Cloud FAD 2016

          Then you should *totally* participate remotely in the Cloud Working Group’s Fedora Activity Day (FAD) in Raleigh, NC on June 7th and 8th! The Cloud Working Group will be making decisions, tackling tickets, and writing code to help with topics like automated testing, documentation, and increasing our public cloud provider footprint.

          Be sure to check out the Cloud FAD wiki page, sign up as a remote attendee, and join us in #fedora-meeting-3 on Freenode during the event.

        • Korora 23 Gnome – Fedora on steroids

          Here we go. A Fedora spin that is a bit confused from so much spinning. Overall, this distro works well. In a way. Korora is a decent, admirable attempt to transform a rather nerdy system into something anyone can use, with good looks, media codecs availability out of the box, lots of programs, and some additional friendly and gentle tweaks. Not bad.

          On the other hand, the execution is not flawless. The installer killed my GRUB, the package manager is plain stupid, the updates are done the wrong way, there are half a dozen semi-annoying bugs in day-to-day activities, and the networking needs significant and immediate improvements. All in all, not enough to sway me over. Korora 23 Coral gets about 7.5/10 on a sunny day, and I’m probably being generous. Then again, it’s the best effort this spring yet, all distros included, and it does shine a ray of hope into my grizzled heart. Plus, it’s better than the previous version I tested, so it might actually be majestic one day. Or like Xubuntu, steadily improve for four years until it becomes da bomb and then bomb. Korora, worth testing. And I’ll check the KDE spin, too.

        • DNF / YUM History

          I wasn’t too worried as I can get around in the command line just fine, but I still wanted my GUI for other reasons as this is a home workstation, not a server. I recalled a command from my Red Hat training that proved to be very useful in this situation. DNF History (yum history for CentOS and Red Hat). You will need to be logged on as root to perform this action of course. If it won’t fit on the screen just type the command dnf history | less then take note of the ID number on the left of the screen. The offending removal I had was ID 96. Then you just type DNF history undo 96 and the system will install all the packages that were removed earlier. I tried other things while I was there and messed it up a bit more, which is why you see in the screen shot individual gnome installs. I used the history to see what packages were removed and then did a batch install of them all. I then finished up with a systemctl set-default graphical.target and a reboot.

        • Fedora TTY on my hotel TV?

    • Debian Family

      • Debian GNU/Linux 7.11 “Wheezy” Is the Last in the Series, Debian 8.5 Out Now

        Just a few moments ago, June 4, 2016, the Debian Project announced on their Twitter account that the eleventh and last maintenance release in the stable Debian GNU/Linux 7 “Wheezy” operating system is now available for download.

        The Debian GNU/Linux 7.11 update is now available for all users that are still running the “Wheezy” distribution on their personal computers or servers, and it looks like this is the last install medium that will be ever made available for the Debian GNU/Linux 7 series.

      • Updated Debian 8: 8.5 released
      • Debian 8.5 Released, Debian 7.11 Is Out Too For Ending Wheezy

        Debian updated their stable and old-stable releases this weekend.

        Debian 7.11 is the project’s 11th and final point release to Debian 7 “Wheezy” with this version incorporating security updates and various bug fixes.

      • Weekly Report for GSoC16-Community bonding period

        The period where we introduce ourselves to the Debian community. I have updated my debian wiki page to introduce more about myself to the Debian community.

      • Reprotest repository exists and installs

        I had family obligations for most of the past week, so I haven’t had a chance to do more than get started on reprotest. The repository now contains a version of reprotest that can be installed with pip/setuptools (run python setup.py install in the repository directory or pip reprotest/ from its parent directory) or with debhelper (run debuild -b -uc -us in the repository, then install the resulting .deb). I’ve tested this works by installing into a virtualenv and onto my own system, but if anyone else wants to verify this, that would be great. At the moment, reprotest doesn’t do anything, mind.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • You Can Now Have All the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Live DVDs Into a Single ISO Image

            Softpedia was just informed today, June 4, 2016, by Željko Popivoda from the Linux AIO team that the Linux AIO Ubuntu project has finally been updated to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system.

          • Ubuntu Phone used by 60+ year olds

            Overall, BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Phone fared decently in the hands of people who probably constitute the least prioritized demographic for the development and product teams over at BQ and Canonical. Essentially, this is still a beta nerd toy, and yet, it didn’t draw hatred or anger with the unlikely pair of victims. In fact, that is probably the highest accolade one can pile on a brand new device trying to edge its way into a shark-infested, saturated market of mobile providers.

            It’s not perfect, and my tech-savvy eyes sees far more faults than a casual user, which is often how it is. That also explains why you cannot really fully trust techies to review products, not unless they can disassociate their geeky knowledge from the end-user mission. For most people, this means good sound quality, good signal reception, the ability to call and message and chat and whatnot, the ability to take some photos and videos and share them with their friends, and a few other simple things like that. It’s not about glamor and quad-core computation and touch screen crystal density. I always try to take this stance, but to be triple-sure, I let my generic progenitors roadtest the Ubuntu Phone and give their own verdict. A true, practical, down-to-earth judgment sans any touch Utopia nonsense.

            Anyhow, the Ubuntu Phone isn’t a bad product really. This is a good start. A very good start. However, the devil is in the fine details. And money is in the applications and the seamless integration among all aspects of online and media. So I’d focus there, to make sure that Ubuntu users can enjoy music and video and buy stuff without having to go through any hoops and loops that iOS or Android users need not to. That’s how this little thing will guarantee its survival and eventual success. Because largely, the actual platform is irrelevant. But then, throw in Convergence, and Ubuntu has an awesome opportunity to be a truly all-spectrum operating system, ahead of all the rest. Even Microsoft. Fingers crossed. We’re done here. Stay tuned for more fun.

          • Still and rigid or adaptable? Tell us about your app
          • Your Complete Guide to Ubuntu Touch OTA-11

            Ubuntu OTA-11 is the latest update to Ubuntu for phones and tablets — and it brings some big new features to the fore.

            Among the changes OTA-11 brings to supported devices is initial wireless display support for the Meizu PRO 5.

            A staged rollout, be aware that it can take up to 24-48 hours for all supported devices to be notified of the update (tip: remember to keep your Wi-Fi turned on as the update is around 100MB+ in size).

          • Ubuntu OTA 11: Meizu Pro 5 Wireless Display

            The latest Over-The-Air update (OTA) 11 is out! We’ve introduced wireless capabilities to the Meizu Pro 5, which gives users the full Ubuntu PC experience running from a smartphone.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • How Apple lost its way: Steve Jobs’ love of simplicity is gone

    Four years ago, I wrote a book about Apple and the power of simplicity. It was the result of my observation, having worked with Steve Jobs as his ad agency creative director in the “think different” years, when Apple’s stellar growth was rooted in Steve’s love of simplicity.

    This love – you might call it obsession – could be seen in Apple’s hardware, software, packaging, marketing, retail store design, even the company’s internal organization.

    But that was four years ago.

  • Deathbed conversion? Never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant to the last

    Only a particular species of creep could persuade me to write to the son of a friend and ask him to describe the death agonies of his beloved father. I typed that he must say “I would rather not talk about it” if he wished, then sent an email to Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens.

    I sat back, feeling dirty and not expecting a reply. I would not have troubled Alexander had not journalists at the nominally serious Times and BBC promoted the claim of a strange, spiteful book that Christopher Hitchens was “teetering on the edge of belief” as he lay dying from cancer of the oesophagus.

    The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist is the work of a true fanatic, who has never learned when to seize a golden opportunity to hold his tongue. Recounting a memorial for Hitchens in New York, for instance, Larry Alex Taunton has to say how much he hates the event and the mourners. “The funeral, like the man himself, was largely a celebration of misanthropy, vanity and excess of every kind,” he intones.

  • Microsoft fixes borked Outlook and Hotmail spam filter problem

    MICROSOFT HAS FIXED a problem with its Outlook and Hotmail spam filters that has saw users inundated with dinkle enhancement and Nigerian lottery scam emails.

    Microsoft first confirmed the problem on Tuesday evening, albeit vaguely, on its Service Status page with the message: “Some users may be receiving excessive spam mail.”

  • Science

    • How this odd-looking camera changed how we take photos

      When you take a photo, it helps to have a pretty accurate idea of what will be inside the frame. It’s something we take for granted now. But early photographers had to guess, because they couldn’t look directly through the lens to see what they were snapping.

      There were some cameras at the end of the 19th Century that sort of solved this, using a swinging mirror that reflected the view from the lens to the photographer peering into the top of the camera. But it was rudimentary. Often the mirror had to be raised separately using a piece of string before the camera could be used. And the cameras themselves were huge.

  • Hardware

    • Next-Generation ThunderX2 ARM Targets Skylake Xeons
    • Nobody wants Intel’s Core M processor, and Computex proves it

      Asus led Computex 2016 with its biggest PC announcement of the year, the Zenbook 3. Super-thin, yet affordable, the system was compared repeatedly to the MacBook, particularly in the area of performance. Asus pointed out that unlike Apple’s system, which uses a Core M processor, the Zenbook 3 has a full-fledged Core i5 or i7. That makes it up to 30 percent quicker.

    • ARM Unveils The Mali-G71 Graphics Processor And Cortex-A73 Processor With A Focus On Virtual Reality Performance

      Have you recently stopped to think about what modern smartphones can do? It’s amazing how much power is packed into these small little devices that we carry around all day, and it’s even more amazing that most of that power resides in teeny tiny chips that are lodged somewhere between the huge screen and the big battery.

    • Fanless Pico-ITX SBC uses Braswell SoCs, packs up to 8GB RAM

      Commell’s “LP-176” is a Pico-ITX SBC with Intel’s “Braswell” processors, featuring mini-PCIe, USB 3.0, SATA III, GbE, HDMI, and optional DisplayPort.

      Commell’s modestly configured LP-176, which follows Commell Pico-ITX form-factor boards such as the Bay Trail Atom E3800 and Celeron based LP-173, gives you a choice of two quad-core SoC’s from Intel’s Braswell line of 14nm system-on-chips. For the highest performance, there’s a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium N3710 with 6W TDP, and for the highest power efficiency at a lesser price, there’s a 1.04GHz Atom X5-E8000 with a 5W TDP.

    • Sensor oriented Marvell Cortex-A7 SoC targets IoT

      Marvell’s dual-core Cortex-A7 “IAP220” SoC for low-power IoT and wearables runs Linux, Android, or Brillo, and offers an integrated sensor hub.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • EU referendum: Brexit ‘would boost NHS by £100m a week’

      Leaving the European Union would allow the UK government to spend an extra £100m a week on the NHS by 2020, leading Brexit campaigners have said.

      Justice Secretary Michael Gove called on the government to pledge the money in the event of an EU exit – saying it would come from the UK’s EU budget.

      It comes after Mr Gove took part in a televised Q&A, urging voters to “take back control” from “Europe’s elites”.

      The Remain campaign described the NHS spending claim as “totally dishonest”.

      Greg Hands, chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “Doctors and nurses want to stay in Europe because they understand that quitting the single market would damage the NHS by shrinking the economy.

    • U.S. Death Rate Rises, But Health Officials Aren’t Sure Why

      For the first time in many years, the overall death rate ticked up in 2015, according to new federal data.

      It’s not clear why and experts have to go through and analyze the data a little more thoroughly before they can say where and in which groups the deaths rates rose. But the initial data for 2015 from the National Center for Health Statistics shows the adjusted death rate went up from 723 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014 to nearly 730 deaths per 100,000 in 2015.

    • First Rise in U.S. Death Rate in Years Surprises Experts

      The death rate in the United States rose last year for the first time in a decade, preliminary federal data show, a rare increase that was driven in part by more people dying from drug overdoses, suicide and Alzheimer’s disease. The death rate from heart disease, long in decline, edged up slightly.

      Death rates — measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people — have been declining for years, an effect of improvements in health, disease management and medical technology.

      While recent research has documented sharp rises in death rates among certain groups — in particular less educated whites, who have been hardest hit by the prescription drug epidemic — increases for the entire population are relatively rare.

      Federal researchers cautioned that it was too early to tell whether the rising mortality among whites had pushed up the overall national death rate. (Preliminary data is not broken down by race, and final data will not be out until later this year.) But they said the rise was real, and while it is premature to ring an alarm now, if it continues, it could be a signal of distress in the health of the nation.

    • AP Exclusive: How candy makers shape nutrition science

  • Security

    • Top 10 Common Hacking Techniques You Should Know About

      Unethical hacking can be called an illegal activity to get unauthorized information by modifying a system’s features and exploiting its loopholes. In this world where most of the things happen online, hacking provides wider opportunities for the hackers to gain unauthorized access to the unclassified information like credit card details, email account details, and other personal information.

      So, it is also important to know some of the hacking techniques that are commonly used to get your personal information in an unauthorized way.

    • Hackers, your favourite pentesting OS Kali Linux can now be run in a browser
    • Core Infrastructure Initiative announces investment in security tool OWASP ZAP

      The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) is continuing its commitment to help fund, support and improve open-source projects with a new investment. The organization has announced it is investing in the Open Web Application Security Project Zed Attack Proxy project (OWASP ZAP), a security tool designed to help developers identify vulnerabilities in their web apps.

    • The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative Invests in Security Tool for Identifying Web Application Vulnerabilities
    • Study Shows Lenovo, Other OEM Bloatware Still Poses Huge Security Risk [Ed: Microsoft Windows poses greater risks. Does Microsoft put back doors in Windows (all versions)? Yes. Does it spy on users? Yes. So why focus only on Asian OEMs all the time?]

      Lenovo hasn’t had what you’d call a great track record over the last few years in terms of installing insecure crapware on the company’s products. You’ll recall that early last year, the company was busted for installing Superfish adware that opened all of its customers up to dangerous man-in-the-middle attacks, then tried to claim they didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Not too long after that, the company was busted for using a BiOS trick to reinstall its bloatware on consumer laptops upon reboot — even if the user had installed a fresh copy of the OS.

      Now Lenovo and its bloatware are making headlines once again, with the news that the company’s “Accelerator Application” software makes customers vulnerable to hackers. The application is supposed to make the company’s other bloatware, software, and pre-loaded tools run more quickly, but Lenovo was forced to issue a security advisory urging customers to uninstall it because it — you guessed it — opened them up to man-in-the-middle attacks.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • electrum ssl vulnerabilities

      One full month after I filed these, there’s been no activity, so I thought I’d make this a little more widely known. It’s too hard to get CVEs assigned, and resgistering a snarky domain name is passe.

      I’m not actually using electrum myself currently, as I own no bitcoins. I only noticed these vulnerabilities when idly perusing the code. I have not tried to actually exploit them, and some of the higher levels of the SPV blockchain verification make them difficult to exploit. Or perhaps there are open wifi networks where all electrum connections get intercepted by a rogue server that successfully uses these security holes to pretend to be the entire electrum server network.

    • Stop it with those short PGP key IDs!

      PGP is secure, as it was 25 years ago. However, some uses of it might not be so.

    • Wolf: Stop it with those short PGP key IDs!
    • There’s a Stuxnet Copycat, and We Have No Idea Where It Came From [iophk: “Windows strikes again“]

      After details emerged of Stuxnet, arguably the world’s first digital weapon, there were concerns that other hackers would copy its techniques.

      Now, researchers have disclosed a piece of industrial control systems (ICS) malware inspired heavily by Stuxnet. Although the copycat malware—dubbed IRONGATE by cybersecurity company FireEye—only works in a simulated environment, it, like Stuxnet, replaces certain types of files, and was seemingly written to target a specific control system configuration.

      “In my mind, there is little room to say that these are the same actors,” behind Stuxnet and IRONGATE, Sean McBride, manager at FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence told Motherboard in a phone interview.

      But clearly, and perhaps to be expected, other hackers have paid very close attention to, and copied one of the most powerful pieces of malware ever, raising questions of who else might have decided to see how Stuxnet-style approaches to targeting critical infrastructure can be adapted.

    • Are firewalls still important? Making sense of networking’s greatest security layer

      Firewalls have become the forgotten part of security and yet they are still the place an admin reaches goes in a crisis

    • Software Now To Blame For 15 Percent Of Car Recalls

      Apps freezing or crashing, unexpected sluggishness, and sudden reboots are all, unfortunately, within the normal range of behavior of the software in our smartphones and laptops.

      While losing that text message you were composing might be a crisis for the moment, it’s nothing compared to the catastrophe that could result from software in our cars not playing nice.

      Yes, we’re talking about nightmares like doors flying open without warning, or a sudden complete shutdown on the highway.

      The number of software-related issues, according to several sources tracking vehicle recalls, has been on the rise. According to financial advisors Stout Risius Ross (SSR), in their Automotive Warranty & Recall Report 2016, software-related recalls have gone from less than 5 percent of recalls in 2011 to 15 percent by the end of 2015.

    • Effective IT security habits of highly secure companies

      Critics may claim that applying patches “too fast” will lead to operational issues. Yet, the most successfully secure companies tell me they don’t see a lot of issues due to patching. Many say they’ve never had a downtime event due to a patch in their institutional memory.

    • Introducing Security Snake Oil

      It has become quite evident that crowd-funding websites like KickStarter do not take any consideration to review the claims made by individuals in their cyber security products. Efforts made to contact them have gone unanswered and the misleading initiatives continue to be fruitless so as a community, we have to go after them ourselves.

    • CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) [iophk: "FB-like bottleneck and control for now available for self-hosted sites"]

      CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate services for CDN, DNS, basic DDOS protection and other (superficial) security needs. You can have all these services in a one stop shop and you can have it all for free. It’s hard to pass up the offer and go for a commercial solution. Generally speaking, CloudFlare service is as stable as they come, their downtime and service interruption are within the same margin as other similar services, at least to my experience. I know this because I have used them for two of my other websites, until recently.

      But what about the users? If you live in a First World Country then for the most part you probably wouldn’t notice much difference, other than better speed and response time for the websites using CloudFlare services, you will be happy to know that because of their multiple datacenter locations mostly in USA, Canada, Europe and China, short downtimes won’t result in service interruptions for you because you will be automatically rerouted to their nearest CloudFlare data center and they have plenty to go around within the first world countries.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • ‘Left, Right & Center’: A Movement for Peace

      Scheer disagreed, saying Clinton should be listening more to the progressive side of the party. If she doesn’t, he said, he fears that Clinton will move forward with a neoconservative, pro-war agenda unchecked.

    • Next Time Someone Says Nothing Is Made in the USA Anymore, Show Them This
    • America Excels in Business of Death [Ed: always same as above]

      America may lag behind the developed world in many categories, but it is No. 1 in the “merchant of death” business, experiencing a boom in the commerce of boom, especially in areas destabilized by U.S. invasions, notes JP Sottile.

    • Judge Upholds Life Sentences in Fort Dix Plot, But Advocates Say Fight Will Go On

      A U.S. district court judge has denied an attempt to overturn the convictions of Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka, three brothers who were sentenced to life in prison on dubious charges that they conspired to attack a military base in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

    • Media Trumpwash Clinton’s Reckless Foreign Record

      Almost all of the praise was premised on two assumptions: A) Trump presents a horrific risk to the planet and B) Clinton is the antidote to this, a “steady hand” in a dangerous world.

      Point A, it’s worth emphasizing, is true. Trump’s Muslim immigration ban and his claim that climate change is an “expensive hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese” are certifiable and racist. His plan to seize the natural resources of other countries reverts us back to outright 19th century colonialism. His violent and inciting rhetoric presents a clear danger to immigrants, women and people of color.

      But B, the idea that Clinton is, by contrast, a prudent foreign policy moderate, is an establishment media assertion with little or no supporting evidence.

      Clinton has a long, objectively verifiable track record of acting recklessly on matters of foreign policy that seems to have slipped into a memory hole as the prospect of a Trump presidency looms overhead. While one would expect this rewriting of history to come from Clinton surrogates, it’s increasingly bizarre coming from nominally independent media pundits.

    • Poland’s ‘Cold War II’ Repression

      As the U.S. government ratchets up a new Cold War, Poland is taking hostility toward Russia to the next level, inviting in U.S. military bases and arresting an anti-NATO politician on vague “espionage” charges, writes Gilbert Doctorow.

    • ‘God paid him back with Parkinson’s disease’: The death of Muhammad Ali brings out the trolls

      To the surprise of no one, the tragic death of boxing icon Muhammad Ali brought out the ugly side in some people who faulted him for everything, including his religion, his stance against the Vietnam War and his outspokenness about social issues.

      Once the world’s greatest and best known athlete, Ali was never one to hold back when he had an opinion, speaking his mind during the Civil Rights movement and in opposition to the war in Vietnam when he refused induction into the service.

      Ali famously stated his case when he told the press, “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

    • Muhammad Ali: An American Muslim

      He was more than a boxer, he was an anti-establishment icon.

    • Muhammad Ali, R.I.P.

      Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali, died today. He was a champion boxer and a brave man.
      He refused conscription into the Vietnam War, was framed up on false draft evasion charges and stripped of his world heavyweight boxing championship. In 1971 the US Supreme Court overturned his false conviction.

    • Muhammad Ali (1942-2016): Anti-War Legend and Boxing Great Dies at 74

      Boxing great Muhammad Ali, known around the world as a humanitarian who spoke out forcefully against racial inequality, social injustice, and the Vietnam War during the 1960′s, has died at the age of 74.

    • The Greatest — Muhammad Ali — Dies at 74

      This was a long way from the 1960s and 1970s, when, to many white Americans, Ali — the former Cassius Clay and one-time heavyweight champion of the world — was vilified as a menacing black man, a symbol of a “foreign” religion (Islam), and a fierce opponent of America’s war in Vietnam who defied his government by refusing to be drafted, risking prison and the withdrawal of his boxing title.

    • Families of Death Squad Victims Allowed to Sue Chiquita Executives

      In what supporters described as “a victory for accountability for corporate crimes,” a U.S. judge ruled in favor of allowing Colombians to sue former Chiquita Brand International executives for the company’s funding of a paramilitary group that murdered plaintiffs’ family members.

    • Muhammad Ali: The Original Activist-Athlete

      Whether it was refusing to be drafted into the U.S. Army to fight in Vietnam 1967, literally talking a suicidal stranger off a ledge in 1981, or speaking out against the Islamophobia of presidential candidates in 2015, Ali’s greatness extended far beyond the ropes of the boxing ring, and his voice was more impactful than his fists.

    • UN Adds US-Supported Saudi Coalition to ‘List of Shame’ for Killing Children in Yemen

      The United Nations has blacklisted the Saudi Arabia-led coalition for maiming and killing scores of children with its campaign in Yemen.

      According to an annual report on children and armed conflict released by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the coalition was responsible for 60 percent of a total of 510 deaths and 667 woundings in 2015 after its campaign began in March—a six-fold increase, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) separately pointed out.

    • Kurds urge Canada to provide heavy weapons for war against ISIL, as well as for their independence

      The Kurds are pushing Canada to supply them with the heavy weapons they need to fight ISIL — as well as to defend themselves after they separate from Iraq.

      The Canadian military has a stockpile of armoured vehicles that could be of use to the Kurds but has yet to figure out whether to turn those over.

      The military has in its surplus stocks three Husky armoured vehicles used in Afghanistan to help clear improvised explosive devices and one Buffalo vehicle used for similar operations, according to data compiled by the Canadian Forces. Also surplus are 181 Coyote wheeled armoured vehicles and 46 tracked light armoured vehicles. Some of those upgraded carriers were used in Afghanistan and received good reviews for how they protected troops.

    • Libya’s ‘Chaos Theory’ Undercuts Hillary

      Hillary Clinton’s Libyan “regime change” project remains in chaos with one U.S. official likening rival factions to rogue water “droplets” resisting a U.S.-carved rewards-and-punishment “channel” to reconciliation, reports Robert Parry.

    • Operation Condor: A transnational criminal conspiracy, uncovered

      On May 27, for the first time ever, a court in Latin America ruled that Operation Condor was a supranational criminal conspiracy organized to disappear political opponents across borders. The verdict was handed down by an Argentine court that convicted 14 high- and mid-ranking Argentine military officers who acted during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and one Uruguayan military officer, for their involvement in this criminal plan.

    • Of Gorillas and Palestinians

      On May 28, a 3-year-old child somehow entered a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. After being picked up by a 17-year-old gorilla, zoo officials felt the child was in immediate, mortal danger and the gorilla was quickly shot and killed. The child was unharmed.

      This is certainly a sad story; the gorilla was of a rare breed, and in picking up the child, was only doing what such animals do: it saw a curiosity, and went to explore it. Zoo officials say they had no choice but to kill the animal, because the child was at great risk.

      There has been much discussion about this situation. There were initial news stories, with continual follow-ups; commentary from experts and the general public, etc. There is much anger directed at the zoo, with many people weighing in to say the gorilla was helping, and not harming, the child, and that zoo officials over-reacted. Anonymous hackers have attacked the zoo. As evidence of the publicity and interest this situation garners, a Google search of the combined words ‘”Harambe”, the name of the gorilla, and “Cincinnati Zoo” brings up nearly 1,000,000 results.

    • Admit that Islam drives Isis, says BBC religion boss

      The BBC’s Muslim head of religion and ethics has said it is untrue that Isis has “nothing to do with Islam”. Aaqil Ahmed acknowledged it was an “uncomfortable” truth that the terrorist group is inspired by Islamic doctrine.

      Mr Ahmed was speaking at Huddersfield University when he was asked to defend the corporation’s policy of referring to Isis as the “so-called” Islamic State. At an event organised by Lapido, the centre for religious literacy in journalism, the barrister Neil Addison said: “You wouldn’t say ‘so-called Huddersfield University’.”

    • News Guide: German Vote Recognizing Armenian Genocide

      Germany’s Parliament voted Thursday to label the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago as genocide.

      The move threatens to increase tensions with Turkey at a sensitive time when Ankara is playing a key role in stemming the flow of migrants to Europe.

    • Turkey recalls ambassador after German MPs’ Armenian genocide vote

      Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Berlin after German MPs approved a motion describing the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago as genocide – a decision that the Turkish president said would “seriously affect” relations between the two countries.

      The five-page paper, co-written by parliamentarians from the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Green party, calls for a “commemoration of the genocide of Armenian and other Christian minorities in the years 1915 and 1916”. It passed with support from all the parties in parliament. In a show of hands, there was one abstention and one vote against.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI accused of spying on defense in Medicare fraud case

      In a stunning twist in a long-running Medicare fraud case, both the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI stand accused of spying on a defendant’s lawyer by illegally and secretly obtaining copies of confidential defense documents.

      Court papers filed last week by attorneys for Dr. Salo Schapiro contend the secret practice was not the action of “just one rogue agent or prosecutor.” Rather, it was apparently an “office-wide policy” of both the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI that’s gone on for “at least 10 years.”

    • NSA Kills People Based on Metadata, But Can’t Preserve Its Own Personnel Metadata for a Simple FOIA

      Over at Vice News, I’ve got a story with Jason Leopold on 800 pages of FOIAed documents from the NSA pertaining to their response to Edward Snowden. Definitely read it (but go back Monday to read it after VICE has had time to recover from having NSA preemptively release the documents just before midnight last night).

      But for now I wanted to point out something crazy.

    • EU financial sector lacks transparency, situation deteriorating

      The EU financial sector currently lacks financial transparency, and this has become not better but worse over the last three years, so say three researchers in economics and governance in a joint blog post. “This is worrying, because the further successful integration of the EU financial sector requires financial market participants and the public to be able to access information on banks’ activities and health across borders.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • PM and Boris clash over EU fishing laws

      David Cameron and Boris Johnson have clashed over the impact of the European Union on the UK’s fishing industry.

      Mr Johnson, from the Leave campaign, told BBC’s Countryfile British fishermen needed to be freed from “crazy” EU rules.

      But the prime minister said the value of the UK’s fishing industry had gone up over the last five years.

      The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy sets rules for the amount of fish each country’s boats can catch.

      Mr Cameron and Mr Johnson are leading campaigners on opposing sides of the EU referendum, to be held on 23 June.

    • Norway reportedly agrees on banning new sales of gas-powered cars by 2025

      Norway’s four main political parties have been discussing a possible ban on new gasoline-powered car sales (diesel or petrol) for quite some time, but they were not able to come to an understanding until now, according to a new report from Dagens Næringsliv (Paywall), an important newspaper in Norway.

      The four main political parties, both from the right and the left, have agreed on a new energy policy that will include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales as soon as 2025 – making it one of the most aggressive timeline of its kind for such a policy. What’s probably most remarkable here is that Norway is currently one of the world’s largest Oil exporters.

      India confirmed that it is evaluating a scheme for all its fleet to be electric by 2030 and the Dutch government is discussing the possibility to ban gas-powered car sales and only allow electric vehicle sales starting also by 2025, but the idea divides the parliament.

    • Nature Keeps Cities from Making Us Dead Inside

      I bailed on my most recent city, Baltimore, in 2012. First it was to somewhere deep as hell in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, and then it was to this place here in Washington state, which is still in the mountains but at least has respectable internet service. Leaving the city at that time seemed like a pretty good call—all of a sudden, I realized that as a remote worker I didn’t need it.

    • Microplastics killing fish before they reach reproductive age, study finds

      Tiny particles of plastic litter in oceans causing deaths, stunted growth and altering behaviour of some fish that feed on them, research shows

    • Canada’s Rapidly ‘Greening’ North is Bad News For Everyone

      Going green sounds like a good thing, but not in Canada’s north. There, a changing climate and warmer temperatures are transforming semi-frozen tundra into grass for much of the year.

      Almost 30 percent of the land area of Canada and Alaska together is greener than it was in 1984, a new study in Remote Sensing of Environment reports. While that’s not a surprising statistic to these researchers—it echoes what other studies have been showing—the new study documents in painful detail just how these changes are happening.

      Previous satellite studies showed a resolution of roughly 4 kilometers squared. The latest data using Landsat 5 and 7 (the same satellite series that showed us the shocking Fort Mac fires) brings that resolution down to just 30 meters, meaning they could do a hyper-local analysis. As Landsat’s infrared sensors are sensitive to the greens of leaves and bushes, this allows researchers to map how tree cover or land cover change over time.

    • A Bunch of Nuclear Power Plants Are Closing, and It’s Because of Fracking

      The onetime energy source of the future lost more ground this week, as the largest US nuclear power company said it will pull the plug on two money-losing plants in Illinois.

      Exelon announced Thursday that it would be closing the Clinton nuclear plant, about 160 miles south of Chicago, and the twin-reactor Quad Cities plant, on the Mississippi River near Moline. Exelon said the two plants have lost a total of $800 million in recent years, and it had lobbied hard for a surcharge on power bills to support the plants—a plan critics called a bailout.

    • Indonesian forest fires caused largest increase in atmospheric CO2 since measurements began

      Last year’s extensive forest fires in Southeast Asia, most notably Indonesia, were responsible for the highest levels of atmospheric CO2 emissions ever measured, according to research published today from King’s College London.

      Writing in Nature Scientific Reports, Professor Martin Wooster from King’s and the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation, together with colleagues from institutions across Europe and Indonesia, said that last year’s record growth in CO2 was caused by the impacts of El Nino and the long- term growth in CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels.

      Much of Indonesia was naturally covered by forests, and some grew on a thick layer of moist, carbon-rich peatland storing more than 55 billion tonnes of carbon, far more carbon than is stored in their above ground vegetation. However, decades of forest clearance and the drying out of the normally moist peatlands for agriculture using extensive networks of drainage canals has made extensive parts of the Indonesian landscape much more flammable than before.

      Professor Wooster, explained ‘We saw the strongest growth in the global atmospheric concentration of CO2 with an increase of more than 40% higher than the last decade’s average annual atmospheric CO2 global growth rate.

    • Sudden appearance of crater dubbed ‘the Gateway to the Underworld’ in Siberia is a warning to our warming planet

      It is known as “the Gateway to the Underworld” by local people who fear to go near the massive crater that suddenly appeared in the frozen heart of Siberia.

    • 5 ‘Innocent’ Things We Do (Are Environmentally Catastrophic)

      If you’re anything like us, you do your fair share to preserve this fragile planet of ours for future generations: You recycle your plastics, you take a carpool to work rather than driving your monster truck, and you enjoy black rhino steaks only on special occasions (such as a successful black rhino hunt from the window of your monster truck). But it turns out that even staunch conservationists like ourselves can be unknowingly dealing Mother Nature swift and repeated kicks to the shin, because the little things we do every day without so much as a second thought can have unbelievably massive effects on the environment. For instance …

    • EPA Finds Widely-Used Weed Killer Could Threaten Animals

      Atrazine is the second-most widely used herbicide in the United States. Manufactured by the chemical giant Syngenta, farmers have sprayed, on average, 70 million pounds of the weed killer on cropland across the country for the last twenty years. Half of the corn grown in the United States — some tens of millions of acres — is treated with atrazine.

    • The Climate and a Very Hot Election Year

      Miami Beach flooding has “spiked drastically,” measuring +400% in only one decade!

    • Storm surge imperils 455,000 Tampa Bay homes, report says

      Nearly 455,000 Tampa Bay homes could be damaged by hurricane storm surges, the most in any major metro area except Miami and New York City. And rebuilding all those homes could cost $80.6 billion.

      That’s according to a report released Wednesday by CoreLogic, a global property information firm, as the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season officially kicks off with two named storms already on the record books.

      CoreLogic said 454,746 Tampa Bay homes are vulnerable to hurricane flooding, a number that represents about a third of all the area’s homes. Of those, 92,103 are in what CoreLogic calls the “extreme’’ risk zone. That means they could be affected by even a relatively modest Category 1 with winds from 74 to 95 mph and a surge in the 4- to 5-foot range.

    • This Is What Insurgency Looks Like

      A week before the action the Albany Break Free steering committee defined their basic message. Potentially explosive crude oil “bomb trains” roll through Albany and surrounding communities, polluting the air and contributing to the climate crisis. Primarily low-income communities of color are put at risk. The urgent need to address climate change means that fossil fuels have to be left in the ground and a transition made to a “twenty-first century renewable energy economy.” They called for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, power plants, compressor stations, and storage tanks. And they called for a just transition away from fossil fuel energy with training and jobs for affected workers, so “no worker is left behind.”

    • Climate Change Censorship: Australia and UNESCO

      Despite lauding various efforts to pursue “clean energy” (PM Malcolm Turnbull decided to reverse the previous leader’s decision to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation), environmental politics in Australia remains a dirty business.

      Turnbull demonstrated as much in March by announcements that he would remove funds from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and replace it with a new, slogan rich “Clean Energy Innovation Fund”. Turnbull is particularly keen on copyrighting innovation, a substitute, he finds, for actual de-funding strategies for the essentially redundant environment portfolio.

    • Top-placed endurance horses test positive for EPO

      The horses that finished first and second at the CEI1* endurance race at Doha, Qatar, on April 22 have tested positive for a banned substance, the FEI has announced.

    • FEI: Two Endurance Horses Teste Positive for Human EPO

      The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) has announced two adverse analytical findings involving prohibited substances.

    • House GOP Again Trying to Gut Climate Science Funding

      Funds for NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—agencies that conduct critical climate change research, among other things—are on the chopping block as the Republican-led U.S. House and Senate hash out their 2017 spending bills.

      According to Climate Wire, “The spending bill passed by the House Appropriations Committee last week allocates $128 million for NOAA’s climate research, a 20 percent cut from the previous year. The bill allocates $1.7 billion for NASA’s Earth Science division, a 12 percent cut from 2016.”

      Specifically, House appropriators cut funding for climate labs run by NOAA by 17 percent below 2016 levels, which will impact efforts to update carbon dioxide observatories and track U.S. emissions, and also cut funding for ocean acidification research by 15 percent below 2016 levels.

    • Call to ‘Save Oceans, Protect Workers’ Goes Airborne as Greenpeace Targets Walmart

      Greenpeace activists converged in Fayetteville, Arkansas this week to call attention to global human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by retail giant Walmart ahead of the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.

      The environmental group flew its thermal airship over the company’s world headquarters in Fayetteville on Wednesday, displaying banners that read, “Walmart: Cleanup needed in the tuna aisle,” and “Save oceans. Protect workers,” a reference to the company’s sale of canned tuna brands that Greenpeace says are destructive and unethically produced.

    • #ExxonKnew About Climate Change And ExxonKnows How To Use Trade Deals To Get Its Way

      Public outrage has been brewing about the fact that ExxonMobil—one of the the world’s biggest oil companies—knew about climate change as early as 1977 and yet promoted climate denialism and actively deceived the public by turning “ordinary scientific uncertainties into weapons of mass confusion.”

      A little-known fact, however, is that while ExxonMobil was misleading the public about climate disruption, it was also using trade rules to increase its power, to bolster its profits, and to actively hamper climate action.

    • Crude L.A.: California’s Urban Oil Fields
    • ‘Bomb Train’ Derailment Sparks Fire in Columbia River Gorge (Video)
    • Train carrying oil derails near Oregon’s Columbia river gorge

      A train towing cars full of oil derailed on Friday in Oregon’s scenic Columbia river gorge, sparking a fire that sent a plume of black smoke high into the sky.

      The accident happened around noon near the town of Mosier, about 70 miles east of Portland. It involved eight cars filled with oil, and one was burning, said Ken Armstrong, state forestry department spokesman. There were no fatalities or injuries.

    • Major Oil Train Derailment In Oregon

      A Union Pacific train carrying volatile Bakken crude oil derailed in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge Friday afternoon, sparking a large blaze and prompting evacuations and road closures around the nearby town of Mosier. No deaths or injuries were reported.

    • ‘Bomb Train’ Hits Oregon Community as Feared Derailment Comes to Pass

      A fire is burning and large plume of smoke is rising after a train carrying oil derailed not far from the Columbia River in the town of Mosier, Oregon on Friday.

      Termed colloquially by their opponents as ‘bomb trains,’ the increased threat of oil-by-rail disasters has been of growing concern across North America in recent years. Friday’s disaster is just the latest in a long string of such accidents that have rocked communities and devastated fragile ecosystems in both the U.S. and Canada.

    • Oil train derails near Mosier in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge

      An oil train derailment Friday in the Columbia River Gorge near Mosier sent up a massive plume of black smoke and stoked long-standing fears about the risks of hauling crude oil through one of the Pacific Northwest’s most renowned landscapes.

    • Seine up to highest level in 35 years, Paris landmarks shut
    • Louvre Shuts Doors as Paris Gripped by Historic Flooding

      Paris’s Louvre Museum is among the city’s historic landmarks being shut on Friday as heavy rains caused the Seine River to swell to levels not seen in over three decades.

      “I am really sorry, but we’re closed today,” one Louvre staffer told visitors, the Associated Press reports. “We have to evacuate masterpieces from the basement.”

      The Washington Post reports: “By early Friday evening, the Seine is expected to crest at approximately 21 feet, nearly 17 feet above its normal level. Authorities anticipate the water to remain high throughout the weekend but to gradually recede next week.”

  • Finance

    • Major attacks Vote Leave ‘deceit’ as Johnson defends campaign

      Former PM Sir John Major has hit out at the “squalid” and “deceitful” campaign to get Britain out of the EU.

      He told Andrew Marr he was “angry about the way the British people are being misled” by fellow Conservative Boris Johnson and Vote Leave.

      He urged Mr Johnson to stop putting out information on immigration and the NHS which he knew to be false.

      Mr Johnson stood by Vote Leave’s figures and called for an end to “blue-on-blue” conflict.

    • Philly Says No to Poor People’s March at DNC: an Interview with Cheri Honkala

      The Democratic National Convention will take place in Philadelphia, from July 25th through July 28th. City authorities have issued permits for four marches during the convention, but they have thus far refused to grant a permit to the March for Our Lives organized by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. I spoke to campaign organizer, Philadelphia native, and former Green Party vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala.

    • Meaningful work not created – only destroyed – by bosses, study finds

      Bosses play no role in fostering a sense of meaningfulness at work – but they do have the capacity to destroy it and should stay out of the way, new research shows.

      The study by researchers at the University of Sussex and the University of Greenwich shows that quality of leadership receives virtually no mention when people describe meaningful moments at work, but poor management is the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

    • Affordable Housing is Out of Reach for Many American Workers

      In no state, metropolitan area or county in the United States can a full-time worker earning the prevailing minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. A new report released today by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) reveals the disparity between rental housing costs and renter income in every jurisdiction across the country.

      Out of Reach 2016: No Refuge for Low Income Renters, calculates the housing wage – the hourly wage someone working full-time, 40 hours a week, would need to earn in order to afford a modest apartment without spending more than 30% of household income on rent and utilities – for every state, metropolitan area and county in the country.

    • Predatory Payday Lenders’ Top Democratic Ally Flip Flops On New Rules

      After months of public pressure and a stiff primary challenge from her left, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) reversed her position on payday lending Thursday.

    • Employment Lies

      The average work week is no longer 40 hours. The shrinkage of the average work week to 34.4 hours (May) is another reason for declining real median family income. Assuming 3 weeks of vacation, a 34.4 hour work week is 274.4 hours less per year. At $20 per hour, for example, a 34.4 hour work week produces $5,488 less annual income than a 40 hour week.

    • Trump University Shows Why For-Profit Motives Don’t Belong In Education

      Revelations from documents connected to Trump University are generating outrage across the political spectrum, from my colleague Terrance Heath, who called it “a scheme to transfer wealth from people who had little,” to the conservative journal National Review which carried an editorial proclaiming it “a massive scam.”

      Much of the commentary has focused on the “playbook” that guided sales reps for Trump U in how to coerce prospective students to sign up for the bogus degree program. A review of the document by CBS News highlights the hard sell tactics Trump U staffers used to push prospects into committing many thousands of dollars – upwards of $35,000 – to a course of study that many of those students now concede turned out to be “useless information.”

    • It’s England’s Brexit

      Whatever the result of the referendum, whether it is a healthy majority for Remain, a narrow one, or a vote to Leave, the heart of the matter is that England has to have its own parliament. What the referendum reveals is that England both monopolises and is imprisoned by British Westminster and its culture of ‘to the victor the spoils’. To escape from this England is embracing Brexit because no other solution is on offer. It may be intimidated into remaining in the EU through fear of the economic consequences. But England’s frustrated desire for democracy has turned it against the EU rather than the real culprit, the British state.

    • Brexit and the law of unexpected consequences

      The exit of Britain could contribute not to disintegration but a consolidation of authoritarian governance in the European Union.

    • Cable Company Admits It Gives Poor Credit Score Customers — Even Worse Customer Service

      As I’ve noted a few times, telecom sector investor conferences are amusing for the simple fact that many cable executives — notably those of the old guard — haven’t yet figured out that what they say at them can be heard by the general public. As a result we’ll often see companies make candid statements they’d never say otherwise, forcing PR departments to then try and backpedal away from the comments.

    • MassMutual Financial Group to lay off nearly 100 more employees in Springfield

      MassMutual Financial Group will lay off nearly 100 employees from its information technology department.

      MassMutual spokesman James Lacey confirmed the layoffs Tuesday morning, saying the employees would leave over the next 18 months. MassMutual is outsourcing the work to a company with which it has had a longtime business relationship, he said.

      “MassMutual continually reviews its operations to ensure we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible to deliver the greatest value to our policy owners and customers.” Lacey said. “At times, these decisions impact our staffing levels. And when they do, we are committed to a thoughtful and respectful process. While decisions like this are never easy, such activities are necessary to meet the evolving needs of our customers and compete as effectively as possible both today and in the future.”

    • Moody’s downgrades Finland’s credit rating, upgrades outlook to stable [Ed: reckless and corrupt speculators]

      The last of the three major credit ratings agencies has now also stripped Finland of its coveted triple-A credit rating, citing the country’s ongoing economic problems. But in a nod to the government’s austerity programme, Moody’s investor services unit upped Finland’s credit rating outlook from negative to stable.

    • Noam Chomksy: There’s nothing free about free trade agreements

      Two weeks after Greenpeace released 280 pages on the TTIP trade agreement, Noam Chomsky spoke with Channel 4 about why he believes the new agreement has nothing to do with reducing tariffs, calling it “pretty extreme.”

      According to Greenpeace: “Whether you care about environmental issues, animal welfare, labor rights or internet privacy, you should be concerned about what is in these leaked documents. They underline the strong objections civil society and millions of people around the world have voiced: TTIP is about a huge transfer of power from people to big business.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Truthdig to Host Green Party’s Jill Stein on California Primary Night

      Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has quite the résumé. A two-time Harvard graduate, Stein began her career as a family physician before her environmental activism propelled her into the sphere of politics.

      “I used to practice clinical medicine, taking care of patients,” she said in an interview with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer. “Now I practice political medicine, because it’s the mother of all illnesses.”

      Stein will be in the Truthdig offices Tuesday evening for a “Facebook Live” discussion on the final state presidential primaries, including California’s, which will be a deciding factor in the presidential race.

    • The Chaos of a Hillary Clinton Presidency: Corporate Dominion and Open Rebellion

      If Hillary Clinton occupies the White House her presidency will be unpleasant for her and chaotic for the country. Ms. Clinton will encounter a nationwide rebellion she cannot comprehend and hence will not address.

      The rebellion is already underway, and it will continue. It is not a violent, man-the-barricades revolution, but a visible one in which millions of voters in both parties are openly rejecting conventional candidates. They are seeking a radical transformation of American governance.

    • Hillary Clinton Super-Lobbyist Says “We’re Not Paid Enough,” Pans Obama Lobbying Reforms

      Leading Democratic super-lobbyist and Hillary Clinton bundler Heather Podesta derided President Obama’s lobbying reforms Wednesday, while laughing off concerns about her own sky-high compensation.

      “I think Obama hurt himself by taking such an arms-length posture with the Washington community,” Podesta, a multimillionaire who has represented chemical companies, health insurers, and for profit-colleges, told Vox’s Ezra Klein. “By attacking Washington in that way, there was a bit of a brain drain. And a lost opportunity.”

    • The People Are the Story–and Corporate Media Are Missing It

      At FAIR, we always say the primary measure of media in an election is not how fair they are to this or that candidate, but how fair they are to the people—all of the people who are affected by the outcome of this particular process, such as it is, and need to see how it functions in relation to them and their needs and concerns. The people are the story—and how well they are represented by a process that’s ostensibly intended to do that.

      That corporate media don’t see things that way is indicated by the resounding uninterest with which they greeted a poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The mid-May survey of more than a thousand registered voters found fully 90 percent lack confidence in the country’s political system. Forty percent describe it as “seriously broken.” Seventy percent—equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans—say they are “frustrated” by the 2016 election; 55 percent describe themselves as “helpless.” Only 17 percent think the Democratic Party is open to new ideas, while 10 percent say that of Republicans. Seven in 10 think primaries and caucuses ought to be open. And 1 in 4 say they have hardly any confidence their vote will be counted! I want to underscore that these are registered voters—in other words, the ones who haven’t become totally disaffected.

    • Democrats in Dis-Array

      With rumors flying that establishment Democrats might hand Hillary Clinton her hat before the Democratic Convention to replace her with Joe Biden, John Kerry or some other grey-suited hand-job for empire and the Chamber of Commerce, the greatness that is the U.S. in 2016 keeps mounting. (Bernie Sanders’ name must have been accidently left off of the list— an oversight no doubt soon to be corrected). That Mr. Sanders’ program is the ghost of Democrats past (circa 1964) suggests that the Democratic establishment must be looking toward the future (1980). Michael Dukakis appears to still be alive and available. This written, being alive might not be a requirement for making the list.

    • Trump or Clinton, Screwed Either Way

      After disaster strikes, it often turns out that there were several contributing factors behind it. Looking back, though, there was usually one key moment when One Really Bad Decision was made — when catastrophe might have been avoided had the people in charge done something different.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Flat and Misleading Foreign Policy Speech

      Yesterday, Hillary Clinton gave a foreign policy speech in San Diego that was notably flat and misleading. It’s been getting decent reviews in the mainstream media for the zingers she tossed at Donald Trump. But when you listen to the speech (you can watch it here) and think about it, you realize how insipid and unoriginal it really was.

      Here are my thoughts on Clinton’s speech:

      1. The speech featured the usual American exceptionalism, the usual fear that if America withdraws from the world stage, chaos will result. There was no sense that America’s wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. have greatly contributed to that chaos. Oh, there was also the usual boast that America has the greatest military. That’s what Imperial and Nazi Germany used to boast — until the Germans lost two world wars and smartened up.

    • The Escalating Fight Between Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders

      But Sanders was not thrilled with co-chairmen of two standing committees, Barney Frank and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy. International Business Times recently explained that Frank’s position is an obstacle for the Sanders campaign, noting that Frank not only “sits on the board of directors of a major bank that was recently named in a lawsuit about an alleged Ponzi scheme,” but that he “has also publicly boasted about the money he has raked in from Wall Street, both as a lawmaker and now as a top Democratic Party power broker.” Essentially, Frank’s position in the party encapsulates what Sanders believes is wrong with the current political system.

    • Sanders Explains Why He Keeps Going And May Just Win California on Tuesday

      But other states also will be voting Tuesday and DeMoro warned about the coming media spin. “There will be a narrative, a lie that comes out on June 7,” DeMoro said. “She will not have the pledged delegates. You have to sound the alarm. This is not over. We are going to win California.”

      Statements like that are baffling to Clinton supporters. They don’t understand the fervor behind Sanders. They say there’s no way superdelegates—elected officials, party leaders and allies who comprise 15 percent of the national convention delegates who will pick the 2016 nominee—are about to drop their overwhelming and longstanding support of Clinton.

    • Blaming Sanders: Why Democratic Party Unity is Officially Impossible

      I’m not going to suggest that people shouldn’t like Hillary Clinton if they adore her, and many do, but for her champions to continue the arrogant argument that she is anything more than a smug politician with a big stick, i.e., a cozy relationship with corporate America and the military industrial complex, is silly obfuscation.

      Such denial flies in the face of reality given Clinton’s attachment to and her unmovable faith in the neoliberalism of our age, which more-progressive thinkers—never mind the remnants of the Left—see as problematic.

    • Has Sanders Betrayed His Revolution by Endorsing Jane Kim?

      Bernie Sanders is calling for a “revolution.” Were his proposals implemented, some positive changes could occur. Life threatening global environmental problems could be more seriously addressed, economic inequality could be reduced, everyone could be guaranteed health care as a right, and public higher education could be tuition free.

      To carry out his “revolution,” there will need to be a well-organized mass movement that is not dependent on a single individual such as himself. It will obviously need help and support from other political leaders.

    • Puerto Rico Slashes Polling Places For The Democratic Primary, Laying The Groundwork For Chaos

      In early May, Puerto Rico’s Democratic Party announced that more than 1,500 polling places would be available for the island’s June 5 Democratic primary. A few weeks later, they slashed that number to just over 430 — a reduction of more than two thirds.

      In 2008, the island’s last competitive Democratic primary, there were more than 2,300 polling places.

      Some are warning of long lines and voters left unable to access the ballot box, as an estimated 700,000 Puerto Ricans will vote this Sunday, and polling places will only be open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m..

      Worse, many voters will have to visit two separate locations to cast ballots in the presidential primary and the local primaries held the same day. Voter turnout and engagement has for years been much higher on the island than in the 50 U.S. states, but these changes may present too heavy a burden for low-income residents who lack transportation options or who need to work.

    • How Nate Silver Provides Political Cover for Hillary Clinton

      If you want to know whether to take a spike in Donald Trump’s poll numbers seriously or whether Ohio’s likely to go red or blue in the general election, ask Nate Silver. Look elsewhere if you want to know whether Hillary Clinton is a Sanders-like progressive or something entirely different.

    • The Missing Clinton-Sanders Debate: California Dreaming?

      In opting out of the last of her previously agreed upon debates with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton returned to campaign-long theme – her inevitability. And entitlement. Her supporters told us from the start that Clinton was entitled to the nomination because party leaders had decided. And her nomination was inevitable because party leaders had decided – as her immediate and continuing domination of the superdelegate count showed.

      That Clinton really shouldn’t have to worry about Sanders at all, because she should be concentrating on Trump, has also been a continual part of the Clinton argument: She’s gonna win; Sanders can only make her look bad.

      Debates happened, nonetheless, allowing Sanders to upend the standard discussion. America found out that you could forego the billionaires’ bucks and still out-fund raise the “inevitable” candidate with millions of contributions averaging $27. Sanders introduced the ideas of democratic socialism into the American mainstream – and then demonstrated a massive following for them. Doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour was put on the table as Sanders hammered on the theme that no one who works full time should be poor. Medicare-for-all was back on center stage.

    • Fueling Sanders’ Turnout Hope, California Reports Record Surge of New Voters

      With national anticipation growing ahead of five upcoming Democratic primaries on Tuesday and with so much hinging on the outcome in California, the Bernie Sanders campaign received encouraging news late Friday as the California secretary of state’s office reported soaring registrations of new voters, especially for Democrats.

    • What Americans abroad know about Bernie Sanders and you should know too

      As the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House moves from ludicrous to terrifying, it’s time to reconsider the electability question. Despite polls suggesting that Hillary Clinton is more likely to lose the general election than Bernie Sanders, her supporters routinely argue that Sanders’ program is too radically utopian to have a chance. Often a note of condescension is injected: Young people support Sanders because they want free stuff. Once his proposals are seriously considered, it’s argued, any adult will reject them out of hand.

      Although countless analyses have been devoted to the demographics each candidate needs to win, one demographic has not been part of the national conversation. Sanders won the first global Democratic Party primary by a landslide — 69% of the vote — that the media hardly noted and never analyzed. Democrats Abroad, the overseas arm of the Democratic Party, organized the election, which took place in March, to represent citizens who live outside the U.S., a group the Democratic National Committee considers the 51st state.

    • My Role With the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee

      I am, of course, a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, so is Bernie Sanders, and so, according to a recent Gallup poll, are a majority of Democrats. But the crude effort to reduce Sanders’ entire campaign and my entire life’s work to an effort to “get Israel” betrays an unsettling anti-Arab bias and a bizarre obsession to which I must respond. It does damage to Sanders, to me, and to our nation’s ability to have an honest conversation about a critical issue of importance.

      By focusing exclusively on Israel and ignoring all of the other concerns that Sanders has brought to this year’s presidential campaign, the press does a grave disservice to his efforts to elevate the issues of universal health care, free college tuition, raising the minimum wage, investing in clean energy, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and making Wall Street pay its fair share in taxes. This is a not so subtle attempt to demean the man and dismiss his candidacy as marginal.

      The same is true for me. In response to the question from the editorial writer as to why Bernie may have appointed me, I recited a bit of my resume. To be sure, I am the proud founder of a number Arab American organizations, but I have also served on the DNC for 23 years. I have been on the DNC Executive Committee for the past 15 years; co-Chaired the DNC Resolutions Committee for the past 10; and have chaired the party’s Ethnic Council since 2009. I served as Ethnic Outreach Advisor to both the Gore 2000 and the Obama 2008 Campaigns. And President Obama has twice appointed me to two-year terms on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

      When the mainstream media and the far-right groups converge in turning my entire life’s work into a one-dimensional caricature—“pro-Palestinian activist”—they are not complimenting me. They are setting me up. Make no mistake, I am proud of my advocacy for Palestinian rights, but given the political climate in which we live, such crude reductionism lays the predicate for political exclusion, violence, and threats of violence. Over the years, Arab Americans have suffered from all of these challenges to our rights. I know. I’ve been there.

    • We can’t have more of the same: The very real dangers of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy

      Just what we needed: another foreign policy speech from Candidate Clinton. This one arrived last Thursday in San Diego—well-chosen ground, given the Navy’s immense base on the city’s shore and the Marine Expeditionary Force garrisoned at Camp Pendleton. It has a long military tradition, San Diego, and the projection of American power is what drives the local economy. Perfect for Clinton. Her speech to this crew-cutted, right-wing town was, of course, “major”—as all of her speeches on the foreign side cannot help but be.

      Clinton’s people advised the press beforehand that, major or not, this presentation was not intended to break any new ground—no new positions, no new policy initiatives or ideas. This hardly had to be explained, of course: Hillary Clinton has no new ideas on American foreign policy. That is not her product. Clinton sells continuity, more of the same only more of it because it is so good. In continuity we are supposed to find safety, certainty and security.

      I do not find any such things in the idea that our foreign policy cliques under a Clinton administration will simply keep doing what they have been doing for many decades. The thought frightens me, and I do not say this for mere effect. In my estimation, and it is no more than that, the world is approaching maximum tolerance of America’s post–Cold War insistence on hegemony. As regular readers will know, this is why I stand among those who consider Clinton’s foreign policy thinking, borne out by the record, the most dangerous thing about her. And there are many of us, by the evidence.

    • Latinos, Millennials Lead California Voter Tsunami

      This election season has been rife with complaints regarding voter registration, and many Americans are starting to question the notion of closed primaries. In some states, there have been allegations of election fraud.

    • Calif. sees record high voter registrations going into primary

      A record number of voters have registered in California ahead of its presidential primary this week, the state’s secretary of state announced Friday.

      A report released on Friday shows that there are 17,915,053 voters registered as of the state’s May 23 deadline, the most the state has ever seen going into a primary.

      “Nearly 18 million California citizens are registered to vote in the June 7 Presidential Primary,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement.

      “In the 45 days leading up to the voter registration deadline, there was a huge surge in voter registration — total statewide voter registration increased by nearly 650,000. Part of this surge was fueled through social media, as Facebook sent a reminder to all California users to register to vote.”

    • As Dems’ Primary Saga Plays Out, California Latino Voter Registration Surges

      Bill Velazquez, Sanders’ National Director for Latino Outreach and a native of East Los Angeles, said the campaign has seen increased involvement and response to canvassing from the Latino community. Latino Sanders supporters had been organizing in the state on their own for a while, some for a year, before the campaign set up in the state.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Black Lives Matter Activist Jasmine Richards Is Convicted of ‘Felony Lynching’

      A jury in Pasadena, Calif., this week convicted Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards of “felony lynching.” Richards, 28, is the first African-American to be tried on the controversial charge, which authorities only recently renamed “attempting to unlawfully remove a suspect from police officers.”

      Sonali Kolhatkar discusses the case with Anthony Ratcliff, a Black Lives Matter organizer and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, on her program “Rising Up With Sonali.”

    • Visualizing the Landscape of Migrant Deaths in Arizona

      Just a few hours south of Tucson, on the other side of the border, there’s a quiet, dusty Mexican town called Sásabe. The streets are empty, the pavement rutted in places, overcome by the sandy earth in others. Like countless towns along the border, Sásabe feels less like a place where people are born, grow up, live, work, marry and raise children; and more like a way station, a place designed for an itinerant population of migrants and would-be border crossers. Somewhere to rest. A place to buy water and food. A place to consider the journey thus far, and prepare for the trials to come. At midday the heat is blinding. After dark, the desert is cold and unforgiving. There are few shops or restaurants, and no identifiable center of town. Sásabe long ago gave in to the reality of its unfortunate location. Everything feels temporary, and one imagines that the houses themselves could pack up and go, if they were called upon. There’s an image: This cluster of anonymous, dun-colored buildings trudging north across the scrub brush. Of course they would stop at the wall because Sásabe’s defining feature is the border fence, rising to the north, marking the town’s beginning and its unfortunate end.

    • Sanders v. Clinton on Palestine: No Contest

      The California Democratic Primary is this Tuesday, June 7. Whatever “The Movement” means to you, if you care about human decency and international human rights we need a Sanders victory and a Clinton repudiation in California on June 7—and beyond.

    • Gazans on Brink of Further Humanitarian Disaster as Blockade’s Battering Goes On

      As the blockade of Gaza—widely denounced as “collective punishment”—marks its ninth anniversary this month, Oxfam is urging the global community to apply pressure on Israel to allow the territory’s residents to exercise their most fundamental human rights.

      Israel imposed the blockade in 2007 when Hamas gained control of the territory, and is, according to a panel of experts reporting to the UN Human Rights Council, in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

    • Gaza Emergency

      During the violence, 118 UNRWA installations were damaged, including 83 schools and 10 health centres. Over 12,600 housing units were totally destroyed and almost 6,500 sustained severe damage. Almost 150,000 additional housing units sustained various degrees of damage and remained inhabitable. The conflict led to a homelessness crisis in Gaza, with almost 500,000 persons displaced at its peak; thousands remain displaced to this day.

    • Dismantling Civil Society in Bahrain

      Like a vise which first grips its object and then slowly, deliberately and inexorably crushes it, the al-Khalifa regime has done similarly to civil society in Bahrain. It did not stop when peaceful, pro-democracy, reform protests erupted in 2011 and were violently put down by government forces aided by an invasion of Saudi troops in March of that year. Indeed, the vise continues to close and relentlessly so.

      Nationalities have been revoked, mosques razed, citizens deported, human rights activists imprisoned on flimsy charges of insulting the monarchy at the least or plotting its overthrow at worst, and the most perfunctory of dialogues with the opposition abandoned. By smothering the figures and institutions who dare challenge the authority of the ruling dynasty in the most benign of fashions – a tweet, waving the country’s flag, tearing up a photo or merely questioning the tenure of the world’s longest serving prime minister – the Bahraini regime and its Gulf allies would like to believe monarchical rule has been preserved. Such desperate measures however, only speak to its precarity.

    • Netanyahu Consolidates Power Over Israeli Society

      I recently mentioned the German word Gleichschaltung – one of the most typical words in the Nazi vocabulary.

      “Gleich” means “the same”, and “Schaltung” means “wiring”. The long German word means that everything in the state is wired up the same way – the Nazi way.

      This was an essential part of the Nazi transformation of Germany. But it did not happen in any dramatic way. The replacement of people was slow, almost imperceptible. In the end, all important positions in the country were manned by Nazi functionaries.

      We are now witnessing something like this in Israel. We are already well into the middle of the process.

      Position after position is taken over by the far-far right, which is ruling Israel now. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

    • Hard Times Ahead for the Israel Lobby (Thank Sanders and Trump)

      A number of Israel-first billionaires and millionaires – people like Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and others of their ilk — glommed onto the Republican Party years ago. Despite Trump, many of them will probably continue stuffing the pockets of biddable Republican politicians.

    • Trump-Fueled Violence Continues As Protests In San Jose Turn Bloody

      The scene outside Donald Trump’s rally in San Jose, California Thursday night turned violent as anti-Trump protesters attacked the presumptive Republican nominee’s supporters, punching and attacking them and repeatedly calling them names.

      Though violence at Trump rallies has become a common occurrence, most incidents have involved violence instigated by both Trump supporters and protesters. In San Jose, however, Trump supporters were seemingly randomly attacked by protesters.

      Videos from the event show anti-Trump protesters attacking Trump supporters as they left the rally, leaving them bloody. According to the Washington Post, “protesters jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs, and stole ‘Make America Great’ hats off supporters’ heads before burning them and snapping selfies with the charred remains.”

    • The Unendurable Horrors of Leadership Camp

      One of the strange things about the business world is the extent to which its jargon is euphemistic. When we talk about leaders, we’re talking about bosses. Yet for some reason bosses don’t like to admit what it is they do. That’s why employees become “team members,” why firing becomes “letting go.” In a way, it suggests that people’s human instincts are that capitalism is something rotten; the more you describe it with precision, the more horrendous it sounds. At the level of uplifting abstractions, derived from self-help culture, everything can be pleasant and neutral. It’s only when you hack through the forest of buzzwords that you can understand what is actually being discussed.

    • White Youths Shouting Racial Slurs Chase Black Teenager to His Death (Video)

      Sixteen-year-old Dayshen McKenzie collapsed and died after being chased through the hot streets of Staten Island recently by a group of mostly white young men yelling racial slurs.

      “I got a gun!” one pursuer shouted, according to witnesses. “I’m gonna shoot you, n- – - -a!,” yelled another.

      A friend of McKenzie’s said they and the group of white teenagers were outside a hamburger shop when they got into an argument, which ended when the white teens left. But the group returned and began to chase them.

      “They were calling us n- – - -rs,” said Harry Smith, according to the New York Daily News. “I just heard a lot of racial slurs. They were mixed—some white, some of them were Hispanic. But nobody was black.”

    • Hillary Promises Not to Order the Military (!?!) to Torture

      Though I agree with the general sentiment that Donald Trump should not be trusted with America’s nuclear codes, there’s a lot I loathed in Hillary’s foreign policy speech yesterday.

      Her neat espousal of American exceptionalism, with the specter that another country could make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety, is especially rich coming from a woman who has negotiated several trade deals that give corporations the power to make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety.

    • Alberto Gonzales Offers The Worst Defense Of Trump’s Racism

      During an interview with CNN on Friday, Donald Trump repeatedly insisted that U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s Latino heritage is a legitimate reason why he’s unfit to preside over a Trump University fraud case.

      Curiel is an American — he was born in Indiana. His parents are from Mexico.

      [...]

      Gonzales’ argument rests on largely ignoring Trump’s own words and inventing new reasons for Trump’s objection that, even if true, seem irrelevant. He discusses Curiel’s affiliation with a San Diego-based Latino lawyers group and suggests that association might render him unable to render a fair judgment.

      [...]

      But Curiel’s association with a Latino lawyers association is no more improper than is a black judge’s association with the NAACP. Yet the hypothetical NAACP-associated black judge would still be able to preside over a race discrimination case, because barring him or her from doing so would be blatantly racist. Federal courts have consistently rejected the notion that a judge’s ethnicity renders them unable to fairly decide cases.

    • Rome–Victims “very skeptical” of new Vatican abuse policy
    • Pope scraps abuse tribunal for negligent bishops

      Pope Francis on Saturday scrapped his proposed tribunal to prosecute bishops who covered up for pedophile priests and instead laid out legal procedures to remove them if the Vatican finds they were negligent.

      The new procedures sought to answer long-standing demands by survivors of abuse that the Vatican hold bishops accountable for botching abuse cases. Victims have long accused bishops of covering up for pedophiles, moving rapists from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police — and suffering no consequences.

    • Pope Francis Abandons Proposal to Prosecute Bishops for Covering Up Abuse

      The Catholic Church has been struggling to remedy internal proceedings ever since it was revealed in 2002 that bishops across the nation shielded pedophile priests from consequences.

      Last year, Pope Francis looked to hold bishops accountable when he announced the creation of a tribunal with authority to dismiss bishops who played a role in covering up abuse. But now the pope has apparently changed his mind.

    • Donald Trump Suddenly Remembers Muhammad Ali

      It was unfathomable that Trump could forget Muhammad Ali, the consensus greatest boxer in history, a world-renown activist-athlete who always put his identity as a Muslim front and center.

    • Trump Responds To Accusations Of Racism With Fake Photo Of Black Supporters

      It was not taken at a Trump event. Rather, it was taken at the “The 27th annual Midwest Black Family Reunion” held in Ohio in August 2015. The event featured “music, art, chess, children’s games and other activities.”

      Last year, Trump attracted controversy when he retweeted fake statistics claiming 81% of white murder victims were murdered by blacks. The actual figure is 14%.

      [...]

      Speaking to BuzzFeed News, the parents in the photo — Eddie and Vanessa Perry — said they are not Trump supporters. They aren’t endorsing or publicly supporting anyone. Eddie Perry called Trump’s use of the photo “misleading” and “political propaganda.”

    • Saudi Arabia bought a huge stake in Uber. What does that mean for female drivers?

      This week the Silicon Valley-based ride-sharing app Uber announced it was getting a huge new injection of funding. But the money wasn’t coming from any of the standard investors from the U.S. tech world.

      Instead, it was coming from Saudi Arabia.

      The Saudi state’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) was putting $3.5 billion into the company, the largest investment in Uber to date. The move has raised eyebrows, however, due to one of the kingdom’s most notorious domestic policies: Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women cannot legally drive.

    • Migrant crisis fuels sex trafficking of Nigerian girls to Europe

      A promising student who dreamed of going to university, Mary was 16 when a woman approached her mother at their home and offered to take the Nigerian teenager to Italy to find work.

      Pushed to go by her family who hoped she would lift them out of poverty, Mary ended up being trafficked into prostitution.

    • Dangerous migrant smuggling routes flourish in lawless Libya

      After a flurry of boat departures that sent hundreds of migrants to their deaths in the Mediterranean, survivors told police they had been kept for weeks on one meal a day in holding houses near the Libyan shore.

      Then they boarded the rubber or wooden vessels, but only those co-opted to run or drive the boats were given life-jackets, according to accounts given to Italian police.

    • Listen To Paul Ryan Say That He Cares More About Gutting Medicare Then He Does About Racism

      A court in Seattle has lifted an order that required our client MuckRock to remove documents one of its users obtained from a public records request.

      Agreeing with EFF, King County Superior Court Judge William Downing ruled that the previous order amounted to a prior restraint on speech that violated the First Amendment, and rescinded it along with denying plaintiffs’ request to extend it.

      The upshot is that MuckRock and its co-founder, Michael Morisy, are no longer prohibited from publishing two documents the court had previously ordered the website to take down.

      More than a week ago, several companies sued MuckRock, one of its users, and the city of Seattle after the user filed a public records request seeking information about the city’s smart utility meter program.

    • Palestine’s forgotten children

      Next year will mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration and the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Britain has a historic responsibility to challenge the Israeli government’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza.

    • Jacob Appelbaum, Digital Rights Activist, Leaves Tor Amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations

      On Thursday, the Tor Project quietly announced the departure of leading digital rights activist Jacob Appelbaum from its board. At first, they didn’t say why — now, we know.

      On Friday afternoon, members of the cryptography community accused Appelbaum publicly of multiple instances of sexual assault against people in the Tor community, and attributed these accusations to Appelbaum’s departure from the Tor Project.

    • Bank of America puts single mom through hell after she tries to access money from death lawsuit

      A Detroit woman is accusing Bank of America of discrimination after they placed a hold on money she received as part of an insurance settlement over the death of her brother — and then accused her of fraud.

      Christina Anderson, a single mother of four, told Fox News 2 Detroit that her younger brother recently died and she received $50,000 as part of insurance settlement that was wired directly to her account with Bank of America on May 20.

      According to Anderson, the bank told her there was an initial two-hour hold on the money and afterwards she was free to draw against it, which she did over the course of several days by making two substantial withdrawals.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • EU’s forthcoming Net Neutrality rules Leaked: Here’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

      A draft version of the EU regulators‘ guidelines on net neutrality has been leaked . The good news: they’re not terrible. The bad news: they contain huge loopholes on all essential points. This post explains what this means for Europe’s upcoming net neutrality reform.

    • Internet Boom Times Are Over, Says Mary Meeker’s Influential Report

      Growth of internet users worldwide is essentially flat, and smartphone growth is slowing, too. Those sobering insights were among the hundreds packed into the much-awaited Internet Trends report, an annual tech industry ritual led by Mary Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

      Wearing an Apple Watch while standing at a podium onstage at Recode’s technology conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on Wednesday, Meeker blazed through highlights from her 213-slide presentation in roughly 20 minutes. She said the number of global internet users hovers around 3 billion, with new ones slow to come online. She attributed the slowdown to stagnating gross domestic product. Global GDP growth in six of the last eight years was below the 20-year average.

    • CSS at BBC Sport (Part 1)

      I promised I’d write a blog with more details so here goes. When I started writing this I realised there was lot to say so I’m going to split this two blog posts which covers how we’re approaching CSS at BBC Sport.

      The BBC Sport website is the UK’s most popular sports website, providing coverage of around 50 different sports. From major sports such Football, Formula 1, Cricket and Rugby, to minor sports like as Archery, Bowls and Handball. On average we receive 26 million unique browsers a week. As is now common across the web, the number of users accessing BBC Sport from a mobile device has been steadily increasing of the last few years. We now on average receive more than 50% of traffic from mobile devices, with this percentage increasing at weekends as people are keeping up to date whilst out and about.

    • Another Broadband CEO Admits: Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Capacity

      Supporters of internet data caps want to have things both ways: admitting that the monthly usage limits have nothing to do with congestion, while simultaneously arguing that those who use the most should pay more (but not that those who use the least should get any discount). Thus it’s refreshing that one broadband exec both acknowledged the congestion myth and said his company has no intention of instituting caps… at least for now.

    • Data caps are a business decision—not a network necessity, Frontier says

      Frontier Communications, newly expanded after purchasing Verizon wireline networks in three states, says it has no plans to impose Comcast-style data overage charges.

      “We have not really started or have any intent about initiatives around usage-based pricing,” CEO Daniel McCarthy told investors Wednesday at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. “We want to make sure our product meets the needs of customers for what they want to do, and it doesn’t inhibit them or force them to make different decisions about how they’re going to use the product.”

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Interview – Indigenous Concern Over Rising Focus On IP In WIPO TK Talks

      Indigenous peoples have been the victims of repeated acts of biopiracy while the international community has failed to act to prevent it, indigenous representatives said in an interview this week. The World Intellectual Property Organization has been discussing ways to address that issue for some 16 years, without success. As negotiators continue to seek consensus on what a potential treaty could achieve, indigenous peoples feel the spotlight has drifted from their issues to technical issues of the intellectual property system and highlighted attention on users of the system.

      Over the years, the voluntary funds that allowed indigenous participation at WIPO have been depleted and repeated calls for funds by WIPO, indigenous peoples, and some delegations have remained unanswered. In the eyes of indigenous peoples, this reflects a lack of interest of WIPO members in having their participation, rendering the process illegitimate.

    • Innovation And Access: Fission Or Fusion? Interview with Dr. Kristina M. Lybecker, Associate Professor of Economics at Colorado College

      In the light of the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, this series of sponsored articles challenges experts to give their views on the policies that best support the development of solutions to societies’ greatest challenges and how enabling policy environments, including IP systems, influence the development and flow of new technologies and services in different sectors, fields of technology, and jurisdictions. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors. Below is an interview with Dr. Kristina M. Lybecker, Associate Professor of Economics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs (US).

    • Trademarks

      • Sony’s New Emoji Animated Movie At Trademark Odds With Guy Who Trademarked Emojis

        It probably goes without saying that the word “emoji” is now a full member of the popular lexicon. So popular, in fact, that Sony is apparently going to release an animated film called The Emoji Movie, which will follow the “lives” of a bunch of emojis, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom. But, as the release of the film is currently in the works, Sony is also apparently preparing to fend off a trademark claim from Marco Husges, a game developer and emoji creator.

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube Threatens Legal Action Against Video Downloader (Update)

        YouTube continues to crack down on sites and services that allow people to download videos from the site. Most recently, YouTube urged the operator of TubeNinja to cease his activities, or face potential legal action instead. For now, however, the video download service has no plans to change its course.

      • Anti-Piracy Group Wants to Take Down ‘The Internet’

        It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but one anti-piracy outfit is targeting everything that comes into its path. Over the past week Copyright UNIVERSAL has tried to censor legitimate content from Netflix, Amazon, Apple, various ISPs, movie theaters, news outlets and even sporting leagues.

      • BitTorrent Goes All In on Media, Moves Sync App to New Venture

        BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the popular uTorrent file-sharing client, will increase its focus on online media. The company plans to open a studio in Los Angeles and is working on several new applications. Meanwhile, its popular Dropbox competitor “Sync” will rebrand and move to a new company.

      • What Happened When a Student Streamed a Movie on Facebook Live

        It was just a matter of time until this happened. A student watching a rom-com at an Illinois cinema decided to use his phone to live-stream the film to his Facebook feed, leading the theater to claim (falsely) he had been “arrested” by police.

      • Student Arrested in U.S. For Live Streaming a Movie on Facebook – Updated

        A student has been arrested in Chicago for filming at a movie premiere and live streaming it on the Internet. The individual reportedly used a camera phone to live stream on Facebook but the infringement was monitored by an anti-piracy outfit 8,200 miles away in India who alerted police in the United States.

      • DVD Release Delays Boost Piracy and Hurt Sales, Study Shows

        A new academic paper from Carnegie Mellon University examines the link between international DVD release delays and piracy. The study shows that release delays give rise to increased piracy, hurting sales in the process. In addition, the researchers conclude that the movie industry should consider minimizing or eliminating the unneeded delays.

      • A De Minimis Amount of Creative Freedom: Courts Push Back to Protect Music Sampling

        Too often copyright maximalists take the view that if anyone is making money and using a copyrighted work, no matter how or how minimally, then the copyright owner should get a cut. That’s the attitude that has pushed, among other things, a “clearance culture” in music sampling, a belief that permission is needed to create something new that includes samples.

      • A guy trained a machine to “watch” Blade Runner. Then things got seriously sci-fi.

        Last week, Warner Bros. issued a DMCA takedown notice to the video streaming website Vimeo. The notice concerned a pretty standard list of illegally uploaded files from media properties Warner owns the copyright to — including episodes of Friends and Pretty Little Liars, as well as two uploads featuring footage from the Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner.

        Just a routine example of copyright infringement, right? Not exactly. Warner Bros. had just made a fascinating mistake. Some of the Blade Runner footage — which Warner has since reinstated — wasn’t actually Blade Runner footage. Or, rather, it was, but not in any form the world had ever seen.

      • Warner Bros. DMCAs Insanely Awesome Recreation Of Blade Runner By Artificial Intelligence

        I’m going to dispense with any introduction here, because the meat of this story is amazing and interesting in many different ways, so we’ll jump right in. Blade Runner, the film based off of Philip K. Dick’s classic novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, is a film classic in every last sense of the word. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely should. Also, if you indeed haven’t seen the movie, you’ve watched at least one less film than an amazing artificial intelligence software developed by Terrance Broad, a London-based researcher working on his advanced degree in creative computing.

      • Rome Court of First Instance says that ISP’s unjustified delay in removing infringing content … removes safe harbour protection

        When does an internet service provider (ISP) lose its safe harbour protection because, upon obtaining actual knowledge or awareness of third-party illegal contents, it has not acted expeditiously to remove or disable access to such contents?

        According to the Tribunale di Roma (Rome Court of First Instance), this is for example the case of an ISP that acts months after the request of the concerned rightholder.

      • This Is Bad: Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get A Brand New Copyright

        Whoo boy. Did not expect this one. For a while now, we’ve noted a variety of lawsuits over pre-1972 sound recordings, due to a quirk in copyright law. You see, for a long time, sound recordings were not covered by federal copyright at all (the compositions were, but the recordings were not). State laws did jump in to fill the gap (often in terrible ways), but in the 1970s, when the Copyright Act was updated, it finally started covering sound recordings as well… but only for songs recorded in 1972 or later. This has left all songs recorded before that in a weird state, where they’re the only things still covered by a mess of confusing state copyright laws. The easy way to fix this would be to update the law to just put all such sound recordings under federal copyright law. But the RIAA has resisted this heavily, recognizing that keeping them away from federal copyright law is allowing them the ability to keep them under copyright even longer and to squeeze a lot of extra money out of music streaming companies.

        Last fall, we wrote about the record labels moving on from streaming companies to instead suing CBS over its terrestrial radio operations playing pre-1972 songs as well. CBS hit back with what we considered to be a fairly bizarre defense: claiming that it wasn’t actually playing any pre-1972 music, because all of the recordings it used had been remastered after 1972, and those recordings should have a new and distinct copyright from the original sound recording. As we noted at the time, an internet company called Bluebeat had tried a version of this argument years earlier only to have it shot down by the courts (though its argument ignored the whole derivative works issue).

      • EU-Funded Study On The Cost Of Copyright Infringement Dismisses Key Real-World Factor As ‘Outside Its Scope’

        You may notice a certain one-sidedness there: this is all about infringement and enforcement, with nothing about whether the current copyright laws are part of the problem, or whether they are even fit for the digital age. Given that bias, the subject of the Observatory’s latest report will come as no great surprise: “The economic cost of IPR infringement in the recorded music industry.”

        [...]

        I predict we’ll be seeing these numbers a lot in the future, because the music industry will be quick to seize on them as “objective” figures that are above suspicion, unlike industry-sponsored analyses. But of course, things are not always what they seem, and it’s worth reading the full report in order to find out what is really going on here. Nearly half of the 48-page is taken up with appendices outlining the forecasting model used to calculate those “lost sales.”

        [...]

        Thus it is taken as axiomatic that every lost sale would have converted to a real sale if a magic wand had been waved, and piracy had become impossible. No justification is offered for this huge assumption, and that’s not surprising, since it doesn’t exist: in the real world only a fraction of those “lost sales” would ever be converted to actual sales. So even if we accept the modelling in the appendices is correct, the figures that result must be reduced by some factor to take account of this. It’s hard to say what that factor is, but it affects all the headline figures — the 5.2%, the 2,155 jobs, and the €63 million in government revenue. Actually, things are even worse than they seem, because the study doesn’t explore the possibility that online sharing boosts sales, rather than reduces them.

        [...]

        Which apparently showed the HADOPI anti-piracy law “caused iTunes music sales to increase by 22-25% [in France] relative to changes in the control group [countries].” Except that it didn’t, as Techdirt noted at the time.

      • Two Separate Copyright Rulings Around The Globe May Finally Clear The Copyright Way For Sampling

        A big part of the problem was a horrible ruling in the 6th Circuit in one of the (many) Bridgeport cases (a company that is alleged to have forged records to get control over heavily sampled works, and then sued lots of artists over their samples). In Bridgeport v. Dimension Films, a confused 6th Circuit appeals court made a bunch of nutty comments in a ruling, including “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.” That case, which didn’t even look at the fair use issue, effectively wiped out another legal defense against accusations of copyright infringement, known as “de minimis use.” The court’s bizarre ruling contradicted plenty of others in basically saying there’s no such thing as de minimis use because each sampled note has value or it wouldn’t have been sampled.

      • De Minimis Music Sampling Isn’t Infringement–Salsoul v. Madonna

        There are several alternative tests for gauging “substantial similarity” in copyright cases. The flagship test is the “ordinary observer” test, but variations include the (baffling) extrinsic/intrinsic test and the abstraction-filtration-comparison test. With respect to sampling sound recordings, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films created another variant: any sound recording sampling, no matter how minor, was per se infringement, period. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit rejected Bridgeport’s per se rule, holding that the “de minimis” defense (most prominently associated with Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Television) applied to music sampling.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/06/05/debian-8-5-released/feed/ 0 Links 6/3/2016: KDE Sprint at CERN, Collabora Office 5.0 http://techrights.org/2016/03/06/collabora-office-5-0/ http://techrights.org/2016/03/06/collabora-office-5-0/#comments Sun, 06 Mar 2016 15:39:41 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=90116

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ReactOS Participation in Google Summer of Code 2016
  • ReactOS: Building a Free-Licensed Windows

    From dual-booting to WINE, free software has always struggled to provide a solution for running Windows applications. However, few of these efforts have been more ambitious than ReactOS, a free-licensed implementation of Windows. The project has been at work since 2006 and, in February 2016, ReactOS finally released its first alpha version, after a decade of difficult and necessarily cautious development.

  • ReactOS Gains Btrfs File-System Support

    ReactOS, the project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows (Server 2003), now has Btrfs file-system support.

    While there’s just a primitive Btrfs driver for Windows, ReactOS has already gained native Btrfs file-system support.

  • MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

    After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

    We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

  • 10 months later, MAME finishes its transition to open source

    Almost a year after the folks who maintain the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or (MAME) said they would make the project completely open source, they’ve declared the transition a success.

    MAME is seen by many developers to be the foremost emulator of arcade games, and while MAME source code has long been freely available for use, it hasn’t technically been open source.

  • MAME is now free as well as free of charge

    MAME, the arcade emulator originally created by Nicola Salmora 19 years ago, is now comprised entirely of free and open-source software. It’s taken a lot of wrangling, reports MAMEDev.org, due to the large number of contributors and interlinked components.

  • After 19 Years, MAME Goes Open Source

    The MAME Team has announced that after 19 years – MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has gone open source.

    The arcade emulator is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license. This means the source code for the long-running emulator is readily available to fans – you’ll now be able to modify, utilize, and distribute it for a variety of purposes.

  • Machine Learning for Hackers with Debian and Ubuntu

    Data Science and Machine Learning are hot topics at the moment. Many people are considering how to extend their skills into these areas and many solutions have appeared, including full online degrees, free online courses combined with free software and for those who prefer hard copy, a staggering choice of books on the topic.

  • Machine Learning and Open Source: What You Need to Know Now

    The basic goal with most machine learning tools is to take a vast quantity of data and reduce it to manageable, actionable insights. Now, some of the biggest tech companies are putting the tools in place to let the community advance these efforts. Expect much more in this space as 2016 continues.

  • Serro unveils new open source SDN framework, AuSM

    Serro Solutions, a San Francisco-based technology services firm, has made its new SDN framework open source. Automated Service Manager, or AuSM, is aimed at connecting network tools via API. AuSM creates a single platform from which users can write unified business policies and implement them consistently across data center networks, WANs and storage systems.

  • The One thing you can do to Ensure Success in Open Source Deployments

    What is it about an Open source project that gets business excited? and more importantly, is – ROI- under the hype?

    The primary reason most enterprises focus on Open source solutions is the potential cost savings. This is followed closely by the abilityto fix or modify the technology to something specific for the business, without having to wait for enterprise software updates. Thereare more Open source middleware products, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings and application development frameworks, with the ability to change out an underlying, closed source vendor.

  • HFOSS: Quiz #1

    In the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, quizzes are in the form of blog posts submitted during the class period. The room stays quiet, but it is an open IRC quiz, so many of the students collaborated with each other in #rit-foss on freenode for the quiz.

  • VoIP Supply Bolsters its PBX Appliances via Three Open-Source Models
  • NFV/SDN Reality Check: DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks – Episode 49
  • DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks
  • OPNFV Unveils Second Release of Open-Source NFV Platform

    “Brahmaputra” brings a range of new features that come from collaboration with other projects, including OpenDaylight and OpenStack.

    The industry consortium developing an open-source platform for network-functions virtualization is unveiling the second release of its software, which not only brings an array of new features and use cases but also is an indication of the growing maturity of the group.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 49 released to stable channel, smooth scrolling now enabled by default
      • Taint Tracking for Chromium

        For future work in the Web context, the approach presented here can be made compatible with server-side taint tracking to persist taint information beyond the lifetime of a Web page. A server-side Web application could transmit taint information for the strings it sends so that the client could mark those strings as tainted. Following that idea it should be possible to defeat other types of XSS. Other areas of work are the representation of information about the data flows in order to help developers to secure their applications. We already receive a report in the form of structured information about the blocked code generation. If that information was enriched and presented in an appealing way, application developers could use that to understand why their application is vulnerable and when it is secure. In a similar vein, witness inputs need to be generated for a malicious data flow in order to assert that code is vulnerable. If these witness inputs were generated live while browsing a Web site, a developer could more easily assess the severity and address the issues arising from DOM-based XSS.

    • Mozilla

      • Introducing the WebVR 1.0 API Proposal

        2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for Virtual Reality. Many consumer VR products will finally be available and many top software companies are ramping up to support these new devices. The new medium has also driven demand for web-enabled support from browser vendors. Growth in WebVR has centered on incredible viewing experiences and the tools used to create online VR content.

      • Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon

        Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Collabora Office 5.0 Release
    • Bruce Byfield Interview: Designing With LibreOffice

      Our colleague Bruce has a book coming out! It’s called Designing with LibreOffice. It tackles the subject of how to make documents look good and professional, while taking advantage of all the design features LibreOffice has to offer. So I got together with Bruce and we talked about his book, LibreOffice, design, and the eternal struggle of documenting Open Source projects.

    • Collabora Office 5.0 Released As Its LibreOffice Enterprise Flavor

      The folks at Collabora have released version 5.0 of Collabora Office, their downstream distribution of LibreOffice.

      Collabora Office 5.0 pulls in features from upstream LibreOffice 5.0 as well as some backported features from LibreOffice 5.1. Collabora Office 5.0 features improvements to the Microsoft filters, UI enhancements, remote file open/save support, security fixes, and much more.

    • Losing the Art of Wiki

      The past few months I read here and there around the LibreOffice community complaints about our wiki. According to these sources, our wiki is unusable, chaotic and poorly maintained. As we have a full time team dedicated to infrastructure management I am pretty sure that last criticism is unjustified to a large extent at least, but it also dawned on me that very few people around the LibreOffice project or any other community, for that matter, hail wikis as their most important tool or platform. Obviously, we are no longer in 2007. But what’s happening here is interesting, because it seems that people may have actually forgotten about the basic reasons wikis are around.

    • How To Cite PDF & Make Bibliography with Zotero & LibreOffice
    • How to create list for LibreOffice Calc cell

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 Brings Security Fixes, Hyper-V Tweaks

      FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 was released today as the newest development milestone leading up to FreeBSD 10.3 that should be officially released later this month.

      FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 has a number of OpenSSL security fixes, Hyper-V driver changes, regression fixes, and other bug fixes.

    • Pre-orders for 5.9 are up!

      OpenBSD 5.9 is shaping up to be quite a big release, and pre-orders for the CD sets have just been activated.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Helsinki region utilities turn to open source

      Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY) is turning to open source software solutions for its web applications and other online services. The first open source-based service to go live is the one for water metering. Others will follow soon, says Risto Sipilä, who works for Cybercom, an IT consultancy contracted by HSY to help build the services.

    • Basque open source sector almost doubles

      The revenue and number of IT workers employed by open source service providers in the Basque Country has nearly doubled in 2015, according to figures published by a regional trade group for the sector, ESLE. The combined 2015 revenue of the nearly 40 companies that ESLE represents is 58 million compared to 31 million the year before. The number of workers grew by 413 new staff members. Altogether, ESLE members now employ 1033 people.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source on another level

      BrewDog, a UK brewery which soon celebrates its tenth anniversary, has decided to “open source” all of their 215 beer recipes. From their original and still extremely popular (and tasty) beer “PUNK IPA“, moving on to “Hops Kill Nazis“, “Doodlebug” and finally arriving at their latest “Jet Black Heart” which was first brewed last month (!)

    • Raspberry Pi 3, Linux Mint security breach, Google data processing for the Zika virus, and more
    • This Open Source Script Lets You (and Police) Search Twitter For Guns

      It’s now possible to do both of these things, thanks to a free, open-source tool designed by security researcher Justin Seitz as a part of his larger open-source intelligence project.

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • First Open Source GPU Could Change Future of Computing

        Nyami is significant in the research, computing and open source communities because it marks the first time open source has been used to design a GPU, as well as the first time a research team was able to test how different hardware and software configurations affect GPU performance. The results of the experiments the researchers performed are now part of the open source community, and that work will help others follow in the original research team’s footsteps. According to Timothy Miller, a computer science assistant professor at Binghamton, as others create their own GPUs using open source, it will push computing power to the next level.

      • We are happy to share our FREE and OPEN-SOURCE microprocessor system PULPino!

        Not a toy design: PULPino is a mature design: it has been taped-out as an ASIC in UMC 65nm in January 2016. The PULPino platform is available for RTL simulation as well for FPGA mapping. It has full debug support on all targets. In addition we support extended profiling with source code annotated execution times through KCacheGrind in RTL simulations.

        And it is free, no registration, no strings attached, you can use it, change it, adapt it, add to your own chip, use it for classes, research, projects, products… We just ask you to acknowledge the source, and if possible, let us know what you like and what you like and don’t like.

      • Wiring was Arduino before Arduino

        Hernando Barragán is the grandfather of Arduino of whom you’ve never heard. And after years now of being basically silent on the issue of attribution, he’s decided to get some of his grudges off his chest and clear the air around Wiring and Arduino. It’s a long read, and at times a little bitter, but if you’ve been following the development of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle, it’s an important piece in the puzzle.

Leftovers

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/03/06/collabora-office-5-0/feed/ 0 Links 28/2/2016: Raspberry Pi 3, Copyleft Fights http://techrights.org/2016/02/28/copyleft-fights/ http://techrights.org/2016/02/28/copyleft-fights/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2016 22:52:28 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=89819

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Manufacturers start to lock down Wi-Fi router firmware. Thanks, FCC.

    Curious. The FBI wants Apple to open up its own software while the FCC wants wireless router manufacturers to lock theirs down. And both demands are unacceptable, misguided, and will ultimately fail. Why? When it comes to the former, well, we don’t have time to wade through that quagmire, but as to the the latter, we have to go back to 2015 …

    [...]

    Why is this lockdown a bad idea? Because there are thousands of private users, academic researchers, and developers who rely on having wireless routers that are capable of modification. These modifications are to add functionality, fix bugs in the original product (all too common in consumer devices), and improve performance. However, the new FCC rules as written place a complex technical burden on manufacturers to comply and the only way to comply cheaply, is for the manufacturer to lock down their products completely rather than just the wireless components.

  • TP-LINK WiFi Router Firmware Locked Down Due to New FCC Rules

    Last year the FCC rules issues new rules that would prevent installing OpenWRT, DDWRT, or other firmware, but it went viral, and finally the commission launched a consultation with the community which ended by the FCC issued a statement “Clearing the Air on Wi-Fi Software Updates” last November, making the rules more accurate saying that the rules were now “narrowly-focused on modifications that would take a device out of compliance”.

  • Reading comprehension is a big problem in open-source

    Houston, we have a problem. Linux users can’t read good [sic]. Zoolander reference. Word. What am I on about, and where can you buy some of the stuff, you be asking? You can’t, it’s all au naturale, Dedoimedo freerange extract.

    To be serious, this topic is about the flow of information in the Linux world. After having a rather horrible autumn season of distro testing, I happened to come across commentary about my reviews on various forums and portal. It’s always when the negative is being discussed, because articles that praise products never ever get any reaction from the wider community. To put it bluntly, the message was not coming across.

  • Telecoms Band Together to Virtualize and Open Source their Network Stacks

    A group of telecommunication companies and their software providers have come together to bring Network Functions Virtualization to their data centers. NFV is an industry-developed framework to virtualize telecom networks.

    The group, formed under the umbrella of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is called OSM, which stands for Open Source MANO. MANO, which stands for Management and Orchestration, is the part of the NFV framework consisting of orchestrator software, virtualized network functions manager (VNFM) and Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM).

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • BSD

    • BSDCan: OpenBSD presentations

      The event will be held on June 8-11th at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

    • The Release Of LLVM 3.8 Should Be Imminent

      While LLVM/Clang 3.8 was supposed to be released last week, its release got delayed but it looks like it should finally ship in the next few days.

      On Tuesday, LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the release of LLVM 3.8 Release Candidate 3. He mentioned, “If there are no regressions from previous release candidates, this will be the last release candidate before the final release.”

    • FreeBSD 10.3 Is Almost Ready For Release

      The third beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3 is now available for testing.

      FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 3 brings updated network drivers, improvements to the filemon device, Hyper-V fixes, a few new commands, and various other minor enhancements and corrections.

    • FreeBSD and ZFS

      For nearly seven years, FreeBSD has included a production quality ZFS implementation, making it one of the key features of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is a combined file system and volume manager. Decoupling physical media from logical volumes allows free space to be efficiently shared between all of the file systems. ZFS introduced unprecedented data integrity and reliability guarantees to storage on FreeBSD. ZFS supports varying levels of redundancy for tolerance of hardware failures and includes cryptographic checksums on all data to guard against corruption.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Cloud Explorer is back with v7.1

      Cloud Explorer is a open-source Amazon S3 client that works on any operating system. The program features a graphical or command line interface. Today I just released version 7.1 and hope that you give it a test drive. Feedback and uses cases are always encouraged.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Denmark to accelerate eHealth technology

      Danish public authorities are promoting the development and use of eHealth solutions. Increasing technology-use in healthcare, care for the elderly, social services and in education will “maintain or increase the quality of public welfare services while at the same time reducing public expenditure”, according to an English introduction to Denmark’s Strategy for Digital Welfare (2013-2020), published by the country’s Agency for Digitisation.

  • Licensing

    • Winning the copyleft fight

      Bradley Kuhn started off his linux.conf.au 2016 talk by stating a goal that, he hoped, he shared with the audience: a world where more (or most) software is free software. The community has one key strategy toward that goal: copyleft licensing. He was there to talk about whether that strategy is working, and what can be done to make it more effective; the picture he painted was not entirely rosy, but there is hope if software developers are willing to make some changes.

      Copyleft licensing is still an effective strategy, he said; that can be seen because we’ve had the chance to run a real-world parallel experiment — an opportunity that doesn’t come often. A lot of non-copyleft software has been written over the years; if proprietary forks of that software don’t exist, then it seems clear that there is no need for copyleft; we just have to look to see whether proprietary versions of non-copyleft software exist. But, he said, he has yet to find a non-trivial non-copyleft program that lacks proprietary forks; without copyleft, companies will indeed take free software and make it proprietary.

    • I’m Part of SFConservancy’s GPL Compliance Project for Linux

      I believe GPL enforcement in general, and specifically around the Linux kernel, is a good thing. Because of this, I am one of the Linux copyright holders who has signed an agreement for the Software Freedom Conservancy to enforce the GPL on my behalf. I’m also a financial supporter of Conservancy.

    • Welte: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing
    • Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

      Today, I took some time off to attend the court hearing in the GPL violation/infringement case that Christoph Hellwig has brought against VMware.

      I am not in any way legally involved in the lawsuit. However, as a fellow (former) Linux kernel developer myself, and a long-term Free Software community member who strongly believes in the copyleft model, I of course am very interested in this case – and of course in an outcome in favor of the plaintiff. Nevertheless, the below report tries to provide an un-biased account of what happened at the hearing today, and does not contain my own opinions on the matter. I can always write another blog post about that :)

      I blogged about this case before briefly, and there is a lot of information publicly discussed about the case, including the information published by the Software Freedom Conservancy (see the link above, the announcement and the associated FAQ.

    • I bought some awful light bulbs so you don’t have to

      Anyway. Next step was to start playing with the protocol, which meant finding the device on my network. I checked anything that had picked up a DHCP lease recently and nmapped them. The OS detection reported Linux, which wasn’t hugely surprising – there was no GPL notice or source code included with the box, but I’m way past the point of shock at that. It also reported that there was a telnet daemon running. I connected and got a login prompt. And then I typed admin as the username and admin as the password and got a root prompt. So, there’s that. The copy of Busybox included even came with tftp, so it was easy to get copies of tcpdump and strace on there to see what was up.

    • SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux
    • The Linux Kernel, CDDL and Related Issues

      The license terms on the Linux kernel are those of GPLv2. This is the unanimous consensus of the extensive community of copyright holders. No other terms, or modifications of those terms, are represented in any document as the consensus position of the relevant parties.

    • Conservancy’s Executive Director Testifies in Favor of NYC Free and Open Source Software Acts
    • Match Donation Extended until March 1st

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Java finally gets microservices tools

      Lightbend, formerly known as Typesafe, is bringing microservices-based architectures to Java with its Lagom platform.

      Due in early March, Lagom is a microservices framework that lightens the burden of developing these microservices in Java. Built on the Scala functional language, open source Lagom acts as a development environment for managing microservices. APIs initially are provided for Java services, with Scala to follow.

    • documentation first

      I write documentation first and code second. I’ve mentioned this from time to time (previously, previously) but a reader pointed out that I’ve never really explained why I work that way.

      It’s a way to make my thinking more concrete without diving all the way into the complexities of the code right away. So sometimes, what I write down is design documentation, and sometimes it’s notes on a bug report[1], but if what I’m working on is user-visible, I start by writing down the end user documentation.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • These Chicago teens can’t graduate until they learn some compsci

      The Chicago Public Schools district has become the first in the nation to make computer science training a requirement for high school graduation.

      The district, the third-largest in the US, says that starting with next year’s freshman class (graduating in 2020), all students will be required to complete one credit in a computer science class as a core subject alongside other fields such as science, English and mathematics.

      “Making sure that our students are exposed to STEM and computer science opportunities early on is critical in building a pipeline to both college and career,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

    • Kauppalehti: Finnish tire firm manipulated test results

      Finnish tire manufacturer Nokian Renkaat manipulated test results for years, according to a report on Friday in the business daily Kauppalehti. The company’s share price took a dive on the reports.

    • The left half – right half divide in human brains is a myth, scientist says

      The myth is thought to stem from social stigmatisation of left handed people and a misunderstood Noble Prize winning research project

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Friday’s security updates
    • Rewrite Everything In Rust

      I just read Dan Kaminsky’s post about the glibc DNS vulnerability and its terrifying implications. Unfortunately it’s just one of many, many, many critical software vulnerabilities that have made computer security a joke.

      It’s no secret that we have the technology to prevent most of these bugs. We have programming languages that practically guarantee important classes of bugs don’t happen. The problem is that so much of our software doesn’t use these languages. Until recently, there were good excuses for that; “safe” programming languages have generally been unsuitable for systems programming because they don’t give you complete control over resources, and they require complex runtime support that doesn’t fit in certain contexts (e.g. kernels).

      Rust is changing all that. We now have a language with desirable safety properties that offers the control you need for systems programming and does not impose a runtime. Its growing community shows that people enjoy programming in Rust. Servo shows that large, complex Rust applications can perform well.

    • Forthcoming OpenSSL releases
    • Improvements on Manjaro Security Updates
    • What is Glibc bug: Things To Know About It
    • IRS Cyberattack Total is More Than Twice Previously Disclosed

      Cyberattacks on taxpayer accounts affected more people than previously reported, the Internal Revenue Service said Friday.

      The IRS statement, originally reported by Dow Jones, revealed tax data for about 700,000 households might have been stolen: Specifically, a government review found potential access to about 390,000 more accounts than previously disclosed.

      In August, the IRS said that the number of potential victims stood at more than 334,000 — more than twice the initial estimate of more than 100,000.

    • Protect your file server from the Locky trojan
    • Google’s Project Shield defends small websites from DDoS bombardment

      If you want to apply, there’s an online form to fill in here which asks for the details of your site, and poses a few other questions about security and whether you’ve been hit by DDoS in the past. Note that you’ll need to set up a Google account if you don’t already have one.

    • 90 Percent of All SSL VPNs Use Insecure or Outdated Encryption

      Information security firm High-Tech Bridge has conducted a study of SSL VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and discovered that nine out of ten such servers don’t provide the security they should be offering, mainly because they are using insecure or outdated encryption.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Mini-World War Underway in Syria: The Players

      Various Kurdish forces working with Washington and/or Moscow are taking advantage of the chaos to extend Kurdish territories, in Syria, Iraq and odd bits of Turkey. The Islamic State has snatched land while all the focus was on the other groups, and still holds substantial territory in Syria and Iraq. The Saudis have threatened to invade Syria with ground troops, which the Iranians say they will respond to militarily.

    • Court Considers Releasing Key Documents Governing Secretive Targeted Killing Program

      Yesterday, in one of the three ACLU cases challenging the extreme secrecy shrouding the government’s targeted killing program, a federal judge in New York ordered the government to turn over, for the court’s review and possible release, three crucial documents containing the law and policy that govern the program. The full order is not yet public because, as the judge wrote, she is giving the government “time to vet opinions and orders for classification issues that might escape the notice of a reader of news media in which information that the Government considers to be classified routinely appears.”

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Chelsea Manning denied EFF articles because US Army cares about copyright

      Apparently the US Army is interested in a zealous interpretation of copyright protection, too.

      According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Chelsea Manning supporter recently attempted to mail Manning a series of printed EFF articles about prisoner rights. Those materials were withheld and not delivered to her because, according to the EFF, the correspondence contained “printed Internet materials, including email, of a volume exceeding five pages per day or the distribution of which may violate U.S. copyright laws.”

    • Did Twitter’s Exec Censor #WhichHillary in advance of Key Primaries? Twitter users speak out

      Considering the nature of Twitter’s algorithm, it may just be a coincidence that Twitter suspended activist account @GuerrillaDems, at the same time that its massively popular hashtags #WhichHillary & #WhichHillaryCensored were suddenly absent from many users’ trending lists. Twitter now says that the suspension of @GuerrillaDems was a mistake.

      It is entirely natural, and important, for users to be suspicious here. We don’t know whether it was intentional removal, or algorithmic coincidence. However, it is a fact that this past Sunday, Clinton held a political event headlined by Twitter CEO Omid Kordestani. It is also a fact that Clinton’s staff has exerted pressure on members of the media in the past, using its “muscular” influence to promote a certain narrative at the Atlantic, and suggesting experts to rebut Julian Assange during his interview with 60 Minutes. These relationships tend to be mutually beneficial — a journalist gets a scoop — a large media outlet gets favorable treatment by regulatory agencies — in exchange for promoting a certain narrative. It is also no secret that the Clintons have earned $153 million over the past 15 years in legal political graft, much of that coming from the same companies they helped deregulate in the 1990’s. If you would like to know why our media giants are grateful to the Clintons, read up on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

    • Zuckerberg on refugee crisis: ‘Hate speech has no place on Facebook’

      Speaking in Berlin, Facebook boss calls Germany’s handling of European refugee crisis ‘inspiring’ and says site must do more to tackle anti-migrant hate speech

    • Zuckerberg Vows to Police Hate Speech in German Charm Offensive

      Facebook Inc.Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg vowed to rid his site of hate speech against migrants and lauded Germany’s leadership in the refugee crisis as part of an effort to win over those critical of the social media site’s handling of the matter.

      “We’ve recognized how sensitive this is, especially with the migrant crisis here,” Zuckerberg said to thunderous applause at a town hall event in Berlin on Friday carried live on German cable news channels. “We hear the message loud and clear and we’re committed to doing better, there’s not a place for this kind of content on Facebook.”

    • Someone At UMich Reported A Snow Penis As A ‘Bias Incident’

      Big Member On Campus — is causing a flurry of controversy.

      A University of Michigan dorm official reported a snow penis as a bias incident, according to the student publication The Michigan Review.

      The frosty phallus was erected in a field this week outside a residence hall after a snowfall, apparently leaving the hall director cold. Hall directors are paid non-students who carry some authority.

    • Site-blocking will make internet access more expensive – little else

      oday Laurie has a guest post at iTWire and looks forward to your comments or those of the content creators and distributors. This posting does not necessarily represent the views of iTWire.

      Last week both Village Roadshow and Foxtel finally launched court actions under the eight months old Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act designed to deal with Internet “piracy”.

      The first thing that needs pointing out is that downloading video and audio content over the Internet is a not a crime as such. It is, however, in breach of the intellectual property rights of the producers and distributors.

  • Privacy

    • EFF Urges Appeals Court to Allow Wikimedia and Others to Fight NSA Surveillance

      San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Wednesday to permit Wikimedia and other groups to continue their lawsuit against the NSA over illegal Internet surveillance. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Wikimedia v. NSA would follow the lead of the Ninth Circuit, which allowed EFF’s Jewel v. NSA to go forward despite years of stalling attempts by the government.

    • The Government’s Decades-Long Battle for Backdoors in Encryption

      The FBI wants to crack open a mass shooter’s iPhone, and Apple has refused to cooperate. It’s a story for the 21st century, but the roots go back a whole generation earlier, to the 1990s when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were trying to curb the then-new encryption technologies and create back door access for themselves.

    • Finland to boost its information security industry

      The Finnish government should help to create a competitive information security industry, recommends a report by a task-force at the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The country should attract investments in this area, assess rules and regulations, and make information security a common digital component.

    • More GOP presidential hopefuls now side with the FBI in iPhone crypto fight

      The now five candidates vying for the GOP presidential nomination discussed everything from immigration, health care, and the Middle East during their latest debate, sponsored by CNN/Telemundo and held in Houston on Thursday evening. But what caught our attention was the candidates’ discourse about the Apple-FBI encryption legal fight.

      CNN moderators Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash actually initiated the topic. Blitzer first mentioned how Apple responded to the FBI’s court order earlier in the day with a formal motion to vacate. Bash then addressed the topic to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, referencing his defense of Apple last week during a GOP candidate town hall in South Carolina.

    • Tens of Thousands Protest Netflix’s Expanding VPN-Blockade

      Netflix is continuing to expand its VPN and proxy crackdown, affecting VPN ‘pirates’ but also those who use such services for privacy reasons. The VPN crackdown is meeting fierce resistance from privacy activists and concerned users, with tens of thousands calling upon the streaming service to reverse its broad VPN ban.

    • Netflix overblocking non-exit Tor relays

      tl;dr: Even paying customers sharing IPs with non-exit Tor relays are now
      blocked from accessing Netflix

      Hello everyone !

      After two very fruitless attempts to get the issue silently resolved through
      proper Netflix support channels, the time has come to make this public. As
      some of you have probably already read in the news, Netflix recently
      announced a crackdown on what they call “VPN Pirates” and what I call
      “paying customers using the same benefits of globalization that global
      companies like Netflix (ab)use for their taxes”.

    • Tor Project Accuses CloudFlare of Mass Surveillance, Sabotaging Tor Traffic

      Tensions are rising between Tor Project administrators and CloudFlare, a CDN and DDoS mitigation service that’s apparently making the life of Tor users a living hell.

      The issue, raised by a Tor Project member, revolves around a series of measures that CloudFlare implemented to fight malicious traffic coming from the Tor network. These measures are also affecting legitimate Tor users.

      The way CloudFlare deals with Tor users is by flagging Tor exit nodes and showing a CAPTCHA challenge before allowing them to continue to their desired website.

    • German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

  • Civil Rights

    • The U.S. has Gone F&*%ing Mad

      Do you know how a properly functioning society would react to an event like San Bernardino? I do — because I’ve had the misfortune of living through such an event. On the 28th of April, 1996, a gunman equipped with an AR-15 assault rifle — the same kind that the San Bernardino shooters used — opened fire in Port Arthur, in Australia. 35 people were killed and 23 were wounded. It remains one of the world’s deadliest shootings by a single person.

      Within months, the country’s governing party led a bipartisan effort to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

      They didn’t do it by focusing on creating backdoors into phones.

    • Liverpool police pelted with stones as right-wing ‘infidels’ clash with anti-fascists (PHOTOS)

      Members of an extreme right-wing group and a rival anti-fascist movement have brought chaos to the center of Liverpool, with Merseyside police forced to intervene in violent street skirmishes

    • Former CIA Director: Trump’s foreign policy “would be in violation of all international laws of armed combat”

      “Real Time” host Bill Maher interviewed former NSA and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

      Regarding his thoughts on a President Trump, Hayden said, “I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign.”

      Asked to elaborate on what he meant by “language,” Hayden cited Trump’s comments on “waterboarding and a whole lot more — because they deserve it” and killing the terrorists’ families.

      “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act,” Hayden added. “That would be in violation of all international laws of armed combat.”

    • Ex-CIA, NSA Head: If ‘President Trump’ Implements Certain Campaign Promises, U.S. Military ‘Would Refuse to Act’

      The former head of the CIA and NSA said that if Donald Trump is elected president and follows through on certain campaign promises, the U.S. military would “refuse to act.”

      “I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign,” Michael Hayden told “Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday night.

    • Stand Up For Whistleblowers — Our Liberty Depends On Them

      The inhumane criminal organization that goes under the name of the United States Government has violated its laws and international laws by refusing to punish torturers and war criminals, instead punishing only those who expose the evil and illegal deeds of the United States government.

      After blowing the whistle on torture and domestic surveillance by the George W. Bush administration, former CIA officer John Kiriakou and former NSA executive Thomas Drake were prosecuted under the Espionage Act — by the same Obama Justice Department that has refused to prosecute a single torturer or any official who ordered illegal mass surveillance.

    • Virginia Wisely Rejects Secret Police

      It’s a frightening, Orwellian scenario that some legislators in Virginia thought was a good idea. Fortunately, a state House of Delegates subcommittee blocked the bill on Thursday, which would have allowed even more government information to be hidden away under the state’s F-rated open government laws.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Germany to fund broadband for underserved areas

      Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is making available funds to bring fast Internet to underserved areas. Municipalities and rural districts (Landkreise) can initially apply for up to EUR 50,000 to plan expansion projects and to complete applications for federal funding of these projects. Approved projects will be funded up to a maximum of EUR 15 million.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Content ID and the Rise of the Machines

        In 2007, Google built Content ID, a technology that lets rightsholders submit large databases of video and audio fingerprints and have YouTube continually scan new uploads for potential matches to those fingerprints. Since then, a handful of other user-generated content platforms have implemented copyright bots of their own that scan uploads for potential matches.

      • Pirates Spend Much More Money on Music, Study Shows

        A new study has shown that music piracy is still rampant in the United States with 57 million people between the ages of 13 and 50 accessing music through unauthorized sources. Interestingly, however, these pirates also spend significantly more money on CDs and paid downloads, more than their counterparts who only consume legally.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/02/28/copyleft-fights/feed/ 0 Diseño de Patentes (Cerrojos) Se estan Convirtiendo en un Problema Como las mismas Patentes de Software. http://techrights.org/2016/01/07/como-las-mismas-patentes-de-software/ http://techrights.org/2016/01/07/como-las-mismas-patentes-de-software/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2016 10:21:33 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=88039 English/original

Publicado en America, Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 8:15 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

El copyright ya cubre muchos diseños, así que para qué extender la llamada protección al vasto ámbito de patentes?

Slide to unlock
Abre el Cerrojo: ponlo en una computer y aparentemente eres un genio, mereciendo una patente.

Sumario: Una fina demostracion de cuan estupidas se han convertido muchas patentes en los Estados Unidos, incluyendo el “diseño¨ de patentes que pertencen a lago abstracto en infórmatica (patentes de software)

EN ALGÚN sentido, muchas patentes de diseño son inherentemente patentes de software como esquemas diagramados para patentar las aplicaciones que a menudo sirven para demostrar. Personalmente he revisado algunas patentes, así que sé como algunos abogados particulares son — no los programadores — quienes intentan dar una ‘vida’ (o forma) a ALGORITMOS por dibujar cosas. Doodles No SON algoritmos*. Son a menudo un espurios presentaciones que intentan dar una forma física a algo cuál es INHERENTEMENTE ABSTRACTO. Pueda extraviar a examinadores y jueces, presumiblemente intencionalmente. Simplemente observen los muchos correo-Alicia artículos compuestos por abogados de patentes; observen simplemente en los consejos que se están dando a uno otro. Ellos se incriminan a si mismos.

“Doodles No SON algoritmos. Son a menudo un espurios presentaciones que intentan dar una forma física a algo cuál es INHERENTEMENTE ABSTRACTO.”Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols llamo al Microsoft ataque de patente de perfil más alto “guerras de patente del diseño” y dijo que la “Fundación de Frontera Electrónica ha declarado que la “Interfaz del Usuario para una Porción de Pantalla de Exhibición” ser la patente mas estúpida de este mes. Muestr qué esta realmente sucediendo en entre Microsoft y Corel por la ribbon patente de diseño de Ofice.”

Escribimos sobre este en la cobertura de última semana con respecto a Corel. “La FFE nombró la patente de diseño de Microsoft para un slider como su Patente Estúpida del Mes,” una persona escribió a nosotros, justo sobre una semana después de que él todo pasó. Pero de hecho, es más de una patente de software, o opaca línea/s entre diseño y software (como el elementos de interfaz).

“Simplemente porque uno toma algo de aquello ha existido por miles de años antes que los ordenadores (como el metal de una puerta/de valla o cerradura de madera) y dibujarlo encima un ordenador con algún callback función/s no (o tener que no) lo hace mágicamente digno de ser patentado, tan solo hacer algo “en el Internet” no hace ideas viejas y triviales patente-elegible.”Considere el punto de vista de los abogados de patentes [1, 2] Acerca de los ataques de Apple contra Samsung, los cuales incluyen la nefario patente de deslizamiento-para-abrir (slider otra vez, entre otras patentes). Y hablando de deslizamiento, qué sobre el “artículo de DERRUMBE” mencionado por Patently-O Today? “Y como asunto de política más grande,” dijo el autor, “es cuestionable si la disección de reclamación verbal es deseable o apropiado en el contexto de patentes de diseño. La aproximación mejor puede ser, cuando Chris Carani argumentó en el artículo de DERRUMBE mencionó encima, a sencillamente instruir jurados “que patentes de diseño sólo protegen el aspecto del diseño global descrito en los dibujos, y no atributos muy funcionales, los propósitos o las características encarnados en el diseño reclamado.””

Escribimos bastante acerca del llamado ¨diseño¨ de patentes de Apple (en principio patentes de software) más de mitad de una década cuándo la guerra de patentes de Apple contra Androide/de Linux empezó. Cuándo los autores mencionan terminos como “diseño de patentes” sólo sería justo de leer o interpretar esto como patentes de software, o una subclase particular de estas. Estas patentes no aluden a cualquier cosa física como una barra que desliza, sólo una abstracción del mismo. “Simplemente porque uno toma algo de aquello ha existido por miles de años antes que los ordenadores (como el metal de una puerta/de valla o cerradura de madera) y dibujarlo encima un ordenador con algún callback función/s no (o tener que no) lo hace mágicamente digno de ser patentado, tan solo hacer algo “en el Internet” no hace ideas viejas y triviales patente-elegible.” Entonces de nuevo, es lo que la Oficina De Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos (USPTO) trajo con su reíble control de calidad. █
____
* Soy un profesional de software con experiencia como programador así como investigador, habiendo revisado papeles para revistas internacionales superiores del mundo (incluso en mi veintes)), lo cual significó la necesidad de identificar arte previo (existente/búsqueda publicada) en a áreas como visión de ordenador y aprendizaje de máquina.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/01/07/como-las-mismas-patentes-de-software/feed/ 0 Design Patents (e.g. Sliders) Are Becoming as Much of a Problem as Software Patents http://techrights.org/2016/01/04/so-called-design-patents/ http://techrights.org/2016/01/04/so-called-design-patents/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2016 01:15:04 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=87981 Copyright already covers many designs, so why extend so-called ‘protection’ to the vastly broader domain of patents?

Slide to unlock
Slide to unlock: put it on a computer and you’re apparently a genius deserving a patent

Summary: A fine demonstration of how dumb a lot of patents in the United States have become, including so-called ‘design’ patents that pertain to an abstraction on a computer (hence software patents)

IN SOME sense, many design patents are inherently software patents, as schematics attached to patent applications often serve to show. I have personally reviewed some patents before, so I know how particular lawyers — not programmers — try to give a ‘life’ (or a form) to algorithms by drawing things*. Doodles are not algorithms. They’re often a spurious presentation that attempts to give a physical form to something which is inherently abstract. It can mislead examiners and judges, presumably by intention. Just look at the many post-Alice articles composed by patent lawyers; just look at the tips they’re giving to one another. They almost self-incriminate.

“Doodles are not algorithms. They’re often a spurious presentation that attempts to give a physical form to something which is inherently abstract.”Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols called Microsoft’s latest high-profile patent attack “design patent wars” and said that the “Electronic Frontier Foundation has declared “User Interface for a Portion of a Display Screen” to be this month’s stupid patent. Here’s what’s really going on between Microsoft and Corel over the Office ribbon design patent.”

We wrote about this in last week's coverage regarding Corel. “The EFF named Microsoft’s design patent for a slider as its Stupid Patent of the Month,” one person wrote to us, just over a week after it all happened. But actually, it’s more of a software patent, or something in the blurry line/s between design and software (like interface elements).

“Just because one takes something that has existed for thousands of years before computers (like a fence/gate’s metal or wooden lock) and draw it on a computer with some callback function/s doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make it magically patent-worthy, just as doing something “over the Internet” doesn’t make old and trivial ideas patent-eligible.”Consider today’s patent lawyers’ views [1, 2] about Apple’s attacks on Samsung, which include the infamous slide-to-unlock patent (slider again, amongst other patents). And speaking of sliding, how about the “LANDSLIDE article” mentioned by Patently-O today? “And as a larger policy issue,” said the author, “it’s questionable whether verbal claim dissection is either desirable or appropriate in the context of design patents. The better approach may be, as Chris Carani argued in the LANDSLIDE article mentioned above, to simply instruct juries “that design patents only protect the appearance of the overall design depicted in the drawings, and not any functional attributes, purposes or characteristics embodied in the claimed design.””

We wrote quite a lot about Apple’s so-called ‘design’ patents (in principle software patents) more than half a decade ago when Apple’s patent war against Linux/Android began. When authors mention terms like “design patents” it would only be fair to read or interpret this as software patents, or a particular subclass of these. These patents don’t allude to any physical thing like a bar that you slide, only an abstraction thereof. Just because one takes something that has existed for thousands of years before computers (like a fence/gate’s metal or wooden lock) and draw it on a computer with some callback function/s doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make it magically patent-worthy, just as doing something “over the Internet” doesn’t make old and trivial ideas patent-eligible. Then again, this is what the USPTO brought about with its laughable quality control. █
____
* I am a software professional with experience both as a programmer and a researcher, having reviewed papers for the world’s top international journals (even in my twenties), which meant I needed to identify prior art (existing/published research) in areas like computer vision and machine learning.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/01/04/so-called-design-patents/feed/ 0 Microsoft’s Latest Patent Aggression Comes Under Fire From the EFF, Former GNU/Linux Company the Patent’s Target http://techrights.org/2015/12/31/patent-aggression-against-corel/ http://techrights.org/2015/12/31/patent-aggression-against-corel/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2015 16:29:50 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=87887 The ‘new’ Microsoft…

Satya Ballmer
Satya Ballmer: different face, same strategy/policy

Summary: Microsoft continues its vicious patent war on anything resembling competition (however small), even the competition against which Microsoft previously committed competition abuses/crimes (subject of court cases) in order to attain total monopoly

MICROSOFT, which is connected to many patent trolls (including Intellectual Ventures, the world’s biggest), is still busy suing companies. Microsoft has a long history of patent aggression, including patent litigation against Linux (not just threats thereof). As longtime readers of this site may know, this and only this was the raison d’être of this Web site.

“…since winning a case for infringement of design patents can lead to a damage analysis based on “lost profits,” which can theoretically lead to a patent owner getting all of a defendant’s profits.”
      –Joe MullinAs we noted the other day, referring to the original from the EFF, Microsoft is now attacking a company that once dominated word processing. Microsoft allegedly engaged in competition crimes against this company, leading to decades of expensive litigation. This company also pioneered some important GNU/Linux efforts until Microsoft shut these down with a mysterious deal (which we wrote about on several occasions around 2007). Well, Microsoft is now trying to drive this company into bankruptcy, using patents.

What’s the name of this company? Corel. We have a whole category about Corel (with 51 articles, as well as leaked court documents). History is important here and it’s imperative that people properly study Corel to truly grasp how severe this situation really is.

Microsoft is now attacking Corel with what the EFF calls “Stupid Patent of the Month”. As noted by one good journalist (Joe Mullin), “it’s serious ammo, since winning a case for infringement of design patents can lead to a damage analysis based on “lost profits,” which can theoretically lead to a patent owner getting all of a defendant’s profits.”

“Remember the company called Novell? Yes, that company that pretty much vanished half a decade ago and whose patent/special deal with Microsoft (SUSE) will expire tomorrow (there are no signs of renewal or continuation).”In other words, expect layoffs, liquidation, bankruptcy, etc. Legal fees aren’t low, either. Remember the company called Novell? Yes, that company that pretty much vanished half a decade ago and whose patent/special deal with Microsoft (SUSE) will expire tomorrow (there are no signs of renewal or continuation). Other than the name being similar, Novell and Corel have a lot in common because both competed against Microsoft until signing some infamous deals with Microsoft, leading to their demise, as well as the demise of their ongoing court cases against Microsoft (for competition abuses/crimes). When Novell imploded Microsoft grabbed its patents. Sweet deal for Microsoft. Novell is virtually gone (devoured by another company) and its patents are in CPTN, which is a ‘conglomerate’ pool of Linux and Android foes such as Oracle and Apple.

“Microsoft is now using patents primarily against Android, which the company is at war against (don’t believe the pretenses and the “loves Linux” baloney).”We quite liked how Glyn Moody framed the situation in his article “If Microsoft Wins Its ‘Stupid Patent Of The Month’ Lawsuit, Expect A Plague Of Trolls To Move Into Design Patents”.

As if Microsoft itself is not somewhat of a massive troll itself (we wrote a lot about this before). Just look what the company has been doing with patents this past decade. “The recent Techdirt article about Microsoft’s design patent on a slider,” Moody wrote, “understandably focused on the absurdity of companies being forced to hand over all of the profits that derive from a product if it is found to have infringed on someone else’s design patent even in just a tiny portion of that product. But there’s another angle worth mentioning here that picks up on something Techdirt has written about several times before: the rise and threat of patent thickets. Back in 2012, it was estimated that 250,000 active patents impacted smartphones. That makes it impossible to build devices without licensing large numbers of patents, and even then, it’s likely that claims of infringement will still be brought.”

Microsoft is now using patents primarily against Android, which the company is at war against (don’t believe the pretenses and the "loves Linux" baloney).

“The EPO’s lawyers who currently deal with my case were also recently seen working from the same side as Microsoft on the patent front, based on Reuters.”Here is another new article about Microsoft’s “Stupid Patent of the Month”. “The design patent,” says Softpedia, “numbered D554,140, basically states that Microsoft is the owner of the slider you can see in the photo attached to the article. This is the very same slider that the company uses in its Office productivity suite to allow users to zoom in or out of documents, but it has also been implemented in a wide variety of Microsoft and non-Microsoft products.”

But when patent examiners are pressured to issue patents in bulk and/or do a rushed job (as in the EPO for example, with Microsoft being on the high-priority list), no wonder such nonsense gets granted, leaving European courts to sort out the mess at a huge expense to the defendants. It is worth noting again that only articles of mine which mentioned Microsoft were even the target of threatening legal letters from the EPO’s lawyers, which gives room for speculation. The EPO’s lawyers who currently deal with my case were also recently seen working from the same side as Microsoft on the patent front, based on Reuters. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/12/31/patent-aggression-against-corel/feed/ 0 Links 29/12/2015: SparkyLinux 4.2, Ian Murdock’s Rants http://techrights.org/2015/12/29/sparkylinux-4-2/ http://techrights.org/2015/12/29/sparkylinux-4-2/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2015 00:25:31 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=87865

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 10 projects to fork in 2016

    2015 was a year of many new open source projects hitting the scene with a splash. From enterprise solutions to home brewed open source concoctions, many of the projects released as open source software this year have made a huge impact on the world of computing in a very short amount of time. While flash stardom isn’t always the best predictor of longevity, we think these 10 projects just might have come onto the scene with enough momentum to continue their success in the new year.

  • 32C3: A Free and Open Source Verilog-to-Bitstream Flow for iCE40 FPGAs

    The toolchain, or “flow” as the FPGA kids like to call it, consists of three parts: Project IceStorm, a low-level tool that can build the bitstreams that flip individual bits inside the FPGA, Arachne-pnr, a place-and-route tool that turns a symbolic netlist into the physical stuff that IceStorm needs, and Yosys which synthesizes Verilog code into the netlists needed by Arachne. [Clifford] developed both IceStorm and Yosys, so he knows what he’s talking about.

  • Codes of Conduct

    What is the role of programmers in software development? The question is never far away in free and open source software (FOSS). Last month, however, the issues surrounding the question were emphasized by Robert C. Martin’s attempt to write a programmer’s oath that states best practices and the resulting discussion.

  • Enterprise startups: Open source may be your only hope

    No, not because second-tier developers wrote it. You probably have great developers. Instead, the real problem is that your developers are stuck building new code on top of old code. Over and over and over again.

    Ironically, this is a sign of success. But, it also creates problems.

    As professor Zeynep Tufekci describes it, “We are building skyscraper favelas in code—in earthquake zones.” While she’s referring to the security vulnerabilities inherent in such code development, the problem is actually broader.

  • Open Source Software’s Role in Breach Prevention and Detection

    Security professionals are increasingly acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: No network is secure from a sufficiently skilled and determined attacker. So while every effort should be made to prevent intruders getting on to the corporate network, it’s important that you can quickly spot an intrusion and minimize the damage that can result.

    Anton Chuvakin, a security expert at Gartner, points out that if hackers are made to work hard to find what they are after, intrusion prevention and detection systems have a far greater chance of spotting them before they can do too much damage.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Mesosphere Releases Datacenter Operating System Version 1.4

      Version 1.4 of the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is now generally available, featuring user interface updates, support for Marathon 0.13.0 and Chronos, and the Mesos 0.25.0 kernel.

    • A 2016 to do list for the OpenStack board

      One look around the airport waiting lounge or family living room will tell you everything you need to know about where the cloud is headed. Christmas carols drift on by thanks to Pandora, gifts come without having to stand in line at the mall, and those holiday snaps of the family will be stored on someone else’s server.

      In the next 12 months, software running on clouds will rule our world more than ever—but unfortunately not many of those clouds are powered by OpenStack.

      While we rightly raise a glass to celebrate the substantial gains OpenStack has achieved in 2015, it’s time to recognize the vast potential to gain new ground in 2016. So, let’s put those New Year’s resolutions to good use by rallying application developers to the cause. To win them over, we must make OpenStack a more inviting and immediately valuable solution to serve their needs.

    • How Docker and containers improved software development at eZ

      Docker sparked the trend in software containers less than two years ago. And since its modest presentation at PyCon in 2013, the startup has vaulted to a value of nearly one billion dollars, drawn 2,500 attendees to DockerCon, and its namesake technology has become a marketable skill to have, entering Hacker News’ top 20 most frequently requested job skills.

    • Apache Turns to Big Data Projects — Big Time

      Kylin. Meanwhile, the foundation has also just announced that Apache Kylin, an open source big data project born at eBay, has graduated to Top-Level status. Kylin is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide an SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, supporting extremely large datasets. It is widely used at eBay and at a few other organizations.

      “Apache Kylin’s incubation journey has demonstrated the value of Open Source governance at ASF and the power of building an open-source community and ecosystem around the project,” said Luke Han, Vice President of Apache Kylin. “Our community is engaging the world’s biggest local developer community in alignment with the Apache Way.”

    • 10 cool tools from the Docker community

      Looking back at 2015, there have been many projects created by the Docker community that have advanced the developer experience. Although choosing among all the great contributions is hard, here are 10 “cool tools” that you should be using if you are looking for ways to expand your knowledge and use of Docker.

    • Linux Containers – Benefits and Market Trends

      In April, Docker announced a $95 million series D round of funding. This is one of many events over the past year that has demonstrated how the industry has shifted towards the use of Linux containers (LXC) to deploy online services. Even giant cloud services companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Redhat, IBM and VMware, are pushing towards containerization. With the market leaning in the direction of containers, let’s take a deeper look at what they are, their history and current developments.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Getting LibreOffice to Do the Write Thing

      We install Linux on every one of our Reglue computers. Included in that installation is the entire suite of LibreOffice. Unfortunately, a number of Reglue Kids began complaining about homework assignments being rejected. Most times they were scolded and told to re-submit the assignment in the proper format…you know, that well known proprietary one. Sometimes students were given a lower grade for not following the submission instructions.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Rebases Its Intel Kernel Graphics Driver Against Linux 4.0

      DragonFlyBSD’s Francois Tigeot has done some more great work in allowing their open-source Intel graphics driver to be more featureful and comparable to the Linux i915 kernel DRM driver for which it is based.

      While DragonFly’s i915 DRM driver started out as woefully outdated compared to the upstream Linux kernel code, the work done by Tigeot and others is quite close to re-basing against the latest mainline code. With patches published recently, the DragonFlyBSD driver would now be comparable to what’s in the Linux 4.0 kernel.

    • FuguIta-5.8

  • Public Services/Government

    • 18F site facilitates open-source bargain hunting

      To facilitate this, the team launched a new website — Micropurchase.18F.gov — as place to post new projects for registered users to peruse and bid on.

      “Our goal is to enable parts of our own agency and the rest of the federal government to use this platform to ask the developer community to create open source code for their project,” 18F said in an email to companies that expressed interest in the original micro-purchase pilot. “We anticipate posting auctions for micro-purchase tasks throughout 2016.”

    • Estonia updates X-Road server

      The X-road update is financed in part by the European Regional Development Fund. Estonia’s secure document exchange system is developed as open source.

  • Licensing

    • Shining a spotlight on free software: the FSF’s Licensing & Compliance Lab’s interview series

      In August of 2012, the Licensing & Compliance Lab kicked off a series of interviews with developers of free software. With 2015 in the rear-view mirror, we take a moment to look back on the series and highlight these great projects once again.

      In August of 2012, the Licensing & Compliance Lab kicked off a series of interviews with developers of free software. These interviews were a chance to highlight cool free software projects, especially those using copyleft licenses, and learn more about why they are dedicated to free software. What started as a single interview has grown into a regular feature of the Licensing & Compliance Lab blog. With 2015 in the rear-view mirror, we take a moment to look back on the series and highlight these great projects once again.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Google, HP, Oracle Join RISC-V

      RISC-V is on the march as an open source alternative to ARM and Mips. Fifteen sponsors, including a handful of high tech giants, are queuing up to be the first members of its new trade group which will host next week its third workshop for the processor core.

      RISC V is the latest evolution of the original RISC core developed more than 25 years ago by Berkeley’s David Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessey. In August 2014, Patterson and colleagues launched an open source effort around the core as an enabler for a new class of processors and SoCs with small teams and volumes that can’t afford licensed cores or get the attention of their vendors.

    • An Open Source Reference Architecture For Real-Time Stock Prediction

      While this post does not cover the details of stock analysis, it does propose a way to solve the hard problem of real-time data analysis at scale, using open source tools in a highly scalable and extensible reference architecture. The architecture below is focused on financial trading, but it also applies to real-time use cases across virtually every industry. More information on the architecture covered in this article is also available online via The Linux Foundation, Slideshare, YouTube, and Pivotal Open Source Hub, where the components in this architecture can be downloaded.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Origins of the Irish down to mass migration, ancient DNA confirms

      Scientists from Dublin and Belfast have looked deep into Ireland’s early history to discover a still-familiar pattern of migration: of stone age settlers with origins in the Fertile Crescent, and bronze age economic migrants who began a journey somewhere in eastern Europe.

      The evidence has lain for more than 5,000 years in the bones of a woman farmer unearthed from a tomb in Ballynahatty, near Belfast, and in the remains of three men who lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago and were buried on Rathlin Island in County Antrim.

      Scientists at Trinity College Dublin used a technique called whole-genome analysis to “read” not the unique characteristics of each individual, but a wider a history of ancestral migration and settlement in the DNA from all four bodies.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • IDF admits spraying herbicides inside the Gaza Strip

      “The aerial spraying of herbicides and germination inhibitors was conducted in the area along the border fence last week in order to enable optimal and continuous security operations,” an IDF Spokesperson told +972 on Sunday.

      Palestinian Agricultural Ministry officials told Ma’an news that farmers said Israeli planes had been spraying their agricultural lands adjacent to the border fence for several days straight. Spinach, pea, parsley and bean crops were reportedly destroyed around the al-Qarrara area in eastern Khan Younis and the Wadi al-Salqa area in central Gaza, according to the report.

      The military spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question about the destruction of agricultural crops.

    • USDA Whistleblower Accuses Agency of Censorship of Pesticide Research

      Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, an expert on the risk assessment of pesticides and genetically modified crops, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research for more than a decade. But when his findings on the ill effects of systemic pesticides and RNAi (a biological process in which RNA molecules inhibit gene expression) on pollinators began to gain traction and visibility, the harassment and punishments did as well.

    • USDA whistleblower launches new bee research effort

      Scientist Jonathan Lundgren believes the USDA retaliated against him because of his research on neonicotinoid insecticides and potential effects on bees and butterflies.

      Neonicotinoids are among the most widely used pesticides. Some research shows they harm bees and butterflies, but the chemical industry disputes much of the research.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops

      Can we build trustworthy client systems on x86 hardware? What are the main challenges? What can we do about them, realistically? Is there anything we can?

    • Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key [Ed: yes, flawed by design]

      One of the excellent features of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key – which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk – to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt-out.

      During the “crypto wars” of the nineties, the National Security Agency developed an encryption backdoor technology – endorsed and promoted by the Clinton administration – called the Clipper chip, which they hoped telecom companies would use to sell backdoored crypto phones. Essentially, every phone with a Clipper chip would come with an encryption key, but the government would also get a copy of that key – this is known as key escrow – with the promise to only use it in response to a valid warrant. But due to public outcry and the availability of encryption tools like PGP, which the government didn’t control, the Clipper chip program ceased to be relevant by 1996. (Today, most phone calls still aren’t encrypted. You can use the free, open source, backdoorless Signal app to make encrypted calls.)

    • Chaos Computer Club: Europe’s biggest hackers’ congress underway in Hamburg

      Some 12,000 hackers are challenging the power of Google, Facebook and Youtube to filter information and shape users’ view of the world. One of them demonstrated how to hack into VW’s cheating software.

    • Password-less database ‘open-sources’ 191m US voter records on the web

      Austin-based Chris Vickery – who earlier this month found records on 3.3 million Hello Kitty users splashed online – says the wide-open system contains the full names, dates of birth, home addresses, and phone numbers of voters, as well as their likely political affiliation and which elections they have voted in since 2000.

    • The next wave of cybercrime will come through your smart TV

      Smart TVs are opening a new window of attack for cybercriminals, as their security defenses often lag far behind those of smartphones and desktop computers.

      Smart TVs are opening a new window of attack for cybercriminals, as the security defenses of the devices often lag far behind those of smartphones and desktop computers.

      Running mobile operating systems such as Android, smart TVs present a soft target due to how to manufacturers are emphasizing convenience for users over security, a trade-off that could have severe consequences.

    • Nemesis Bootkit Malware the new stealthy Payment Card.

      After I read many articles I got this infos about Nemesis Bootkit Malware:
      – suspected to originate from Russia;
      – infect PCs by loading before Windows starts
      – has ability to modify the legitimate volume boot record;
      – seam to be like another Windows rootkit named Alureon;
      – intercepts several system interrupts to pass boot process;
      – can steal payment data from anyone’s not just targeting financial institutions and retailers;
      – this malware hides between partitions and is also almost impossible to remove;

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Syria anti-Islamic State documentary maker ‘assassinated’ in Turkey

      A Syrian opposition film-maker was gunned down in broad daylight in the Turkish city of Gazientep on Sunday, apparently by Isil supporters.

      Friends said that Naji Jerf, 38, was shot twice in the head after being approached by an unknown car outside of a local restaurant.

    • Why Britishers left India in 1947? explains NSA Ajit Doval

      ncumbent National Security Advisor, had once said that the spark which Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose created within the Indian Army forced Britishers to quit India in 1947.

      In a video posted on Youtube, Doval has given a detailed explanation of the main reason as to why the mighty British Empire which, won the Second World War in 1945, decided to quit India in a hurry.

      On August 22, 1945, Tokyo Radio announced the ‘death’ of Netaji in an air crash in Formosa (now Taiwan) on August 18, 1945, en route to Japan.

      But the crash theory has been rejected by scores of Netaji’s followers and admirers and several claims of the revolutionary leader resurfacing continue to intrigue and divide Indians over the years.

    • Endless War, Undeclared and Undebated

      The Obama administration is waging war all over the world – without congressional authorization

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Saudi Arabia unveils record deficit as it succumbs to oil price rout

      A brutal sell-off in oil prices has forced Saudi Arabia’s government to post the largest budget deficit in its history, as the state’s revenues have crumbled.

      The country’s deficit rose to 367bn riyals (£66bn), after government spending rose 13pc above officials’ plans in the wake of declining oil prices and a war with Yemen. A Saudi official said that the deficit was “considered an acceptable figure” under the circumstances.

      Stock markets reacted positively to the government’s spending plans, as investors had feared far worse news was to come, anticipating an overshoot well in excess of 13pc. The total deficit stood at 16pc of the economy’s size, while analysts had expected a gap of 20pc. The Tadawul All Share Index made a daily gain of 0.7pc.

    • Here Are 58 Million Reasons to Care About California’s Drought

      The past four years of punishing drought have badly hurt California’s forests. Rain was scarce, the days were too hot, and this year’s wildfire season was the worst anyone has seen in years, burning up nearly 10 million acres across the West. For the first time, a team of researchers has measured the severity of the blow the drought dealt the trees, uncovering potential future destruction in the process. The resulting paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a rich visual testament to just how much California needs its trees and how close the state is to losing 58 million of them.

    • Fukushima Today

      Throughout the world, the name Fukushima has become synonymous with nuclear disaster and running for the hills. Yet, Fukushima may be one of the least understood disasters in modern times, as nobody knows how to fix neither the problem nor the true dimension of the damage. Thus, Fukushima is in uncharted territory, a total nuclear meltdown that dances to its own rhythm. Similar to an overly concerned parent, TEPCO merely monitors but makes big mistakes along the way.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Michael Moore just exploded the right’s biggest lie

      Michael Moore’s new film, “Where to Invade Next,” is sure to generate Oscar buzz. It is already on the short list of 15 documentaries from which the final five nominations will be announced on Jan. 14. But rather than wonder whether Moore will score a second Oscar (his first was for “Bowling for Columbine” in 2002), the question to ask is whether this film can spark a political revolution just in time for the 2016 election.

      “Where to Invade Next” has a wide release set for Feb. 12, which is also Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and the week of the New Hampshire primary. Coincidence? Definitely not.

    • Trump: Muslims Knew About San Bernardino Shooters But Didn’t Report Them

  • Censorship

    • How China Tries To Censor The Whole World
    • Time to take a re-look at Censor Board’s role: Arun Jaitley

      Having witnessed the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) getting embroiled in one controversy after the other through the past few months, the government is now considering taking a re-look at the body so as to make it “controversy free”.

    • Amid Censorship Flap, Steinmetz To Discontinue 81-Year-Old School Newspaper

      “School newspapers provide students with a powerful voice and a positive learning experience, and we are committed to providing journalism opportunities to our students,” CPS spokesman Michael Passman said. “Steinmetz High School will continue to offer journalism courses for the foreseeable future, and the Steinmetz Star will remain in operation as an online publication that will continue to serve as a valuable learning opportunity for students.”

    • Kremlin’s Censorship Of Shenderovich Interview Backfiring – OpEd

      But the Shenderovich case may provide the Putin regime with an object lesson because it is obvious that the Kremlin took this action because of Shenderovich’s criticism of Putin himself (openrussia.org/post/view/11565/) and because it is obvious that taking down the interview in one place won’t block the spread of the text.

    • China publisher pulls ‘racy’ Tagore poems translation

      A Chinese publisher has pulled a translation of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s poems after it sparked controversy for racy content.

      The translation of works from one of India’s most famous poets was by Chinese novelist Feng Tang.

      His publisher said on Monday that it was removing the work from sale following the “huge debate” in China’s literary and translation circles.

      Mr Feng has defended his translation, saying a previous version lacked style.

      Tagore, known as the Bard of Bengal and seen as a literary god in India, was the first non-European to win the Nobel prize for literature.

    • Five reasons why we must NOT censor ISIS propaganda

      First of all, censoring ISIS in this way is simply not feasible. We can very well demand that mainstream newspapers and TV news stations limit their coverage of these issues, but that would leave the entire field of discussion to the unregulated areas of the internet, the “blogosphere” and social media. ISIS would still dominate in these areas, except now we will have removed from the discourse those outlets that would be most capable to hold the ISIS narrative to scrutiny.

    • Orwellian model won’t keep the internet free

      Last week brought a positively Orwellian moment to the debate about Internet freedom.

      Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at a state-organised internet conference in Wuzhen, in Zhejiang province, where he was once party secretary. Xi declared, “As in the real world, freedom and order are both necessary in cyberspace.” He said, “Freedom is what order is meant for, and order is the guarantee of freedom.”

      These slogans are more than just propaganda from the leader of a country with the world’s largest internet censorship operation. Behind them lurks a dangerous ambition.

    • China Invokes UN Decree for Its Right to Censor the Internet

      China’s President Xi Jinping invoked “cyber sovereignty” to describe his country’s right to create its national cyber policy while giving the opening speech at the second World Internet Conference, held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang, on December 16.

      “We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber development, model of cyber regulation, and participate in international cyberspace governance on an equal footing,” said President Xi. “No country should pursue cyber hegemony, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs or engage in, connive at or support cyber activities that undermine other countries’ national security.”

    • Not allowing free speech on-campus is dangerous – universities need to defend their right to be offensive

      2015 has been an eventful year for freedom of speech. In January, #JeSuisCharlie was a global trend championing freedom of expression, lack of censorship, and the right to offend. Yet, as the year draws to a close, it seems the Facebook generation is becoming more and more suppressed.

      Once upon a time, universities were bastions of free speech, where world leaders would debate with fresh-faced 18-year-olds who were determined to save the planet. Once, just about anything could be discussed in the name of free speech. But, this year, there have been countless examples of speakers being banned, societies being stopped, and student media being censored, all in the name of “protecting students.”

    • Syria, France Deadliest Countries for Journalists

      The Committee to Protect Journalists says 2015 was one of the deadliest years on record for members of the press worldwide, with 69 journalists killed on-assignment. According to the CPJ, 2015 was the sixth year out of the last ten (and eighth since 1992) in which more than 60 journalists were killed in the line of duty—a figure that includes those targeted for their profession as well as those killed in combat, crossfire or while covering other assignments deemed dangerous.

    • Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote

      It was cowardly, disrespectful, and it isolated Aaron again in death. He was The Boy, a tragic waste, not a murdered comrade or a martyr. Saying he was misguided served as an excuse for not being at his side.

    • Does The US Really Want A North Korean Internet?

      With all of the news about the holidays, one story you might have missed yesterday is that China passed with little fanfare its new antiterrorism law that bears substantial resemblance to proposals currently under review in the US and UK that would require backdoors or other weakened measures to allow encrypted communications to be secretly monitored by governments.

      The Chinese law requires that “telecommunications and Internet service providers should provide technical interfaces and technical support and assistance in terms of decryption and other techniques to the public and national security agencies in the lawful conduct of terrorism prevention and investigation.” It is remarkably similar to the wording of a UK proposal that would require companies to offer the government “permanent interception capabilities … [including] the ability to remove any encryption” and similar to calls by US intelligence officials for the ability to decrypt civilian communication.

      On the surface such proposals seem highly desirable: the ability to monitor and disrupt terrorist and criminal communications in order to protect life and ensure national security. The problem, as I pointed out last week, is that there is no universal definition of “terrorism” or “national security threats.” In fact, one of the focal points of the Chinese online censorship apparatus is the removal of material relating to protests and mass organization, which the government views as a threat to the stability and well-being of the nation.

      [...]

      North Korea is one of the few countries to take this model of a safe and secure internet to its logical conclusion, creating its own walled-off private version of the internet where only a small number of approved websites are accessible. The government even created its own operating system called Red Star OS, designed for total government surveillance. Yesterday two German researchers offered the latest in-depth look at the functioning of this operating system custom built for the world of a surveillance state.

    • Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS

      In 2006 – years before ISIS replaced Al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain – Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights–using them as they once used passenger jets–to threaten and kill Americans.”

    • Chinese president Xi Jinping blogged for the first time—and 48,000 people commented

      China’s biggest microblogging site, Weibo, is not unfamiliar to foreign head of states. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, UK prime minister David Cameron, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—all have opened accounts on the site and have interacted with readers in Chinese. But China’s own leaders are more reluctant to engage with online audiences.

      Chinese president Xi Jinping’s limited number of social media contributions include a selfie with Cameron and Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero during Xi’s state visit to the UK in October, while Chinese premier Li Keqiang indulged Modi in a joint selfie, said to be Li’s first, at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven in May. Neither of these were posted by the Chinese leaders on Weibo. Instead, they surfaced on Twitter—a social media platform blocked by China’s elaborate censorship machine.

      But finally, on Dec. 25, during his visit to the headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army Daily—a mouthpiece newspaper of the Communist Party and the army—Xi crafted his first post on Weibo. It’s the first Weibo message from any of China’s senior officials, as far as we can tell. Xi wrote the message personally, according to state media.

    • Thai media decide junta chief no laughing matter

      Every New Year Thailand’s top political journalists traditionally come up with satirical nicknames for the government and senior ministers. But this year they will forego the pleasure, having decided the junta is no laughing matter.

      The occasion is usually a rare moment of light relief for reporters covering the febrile world of Thai politics, in a country which has witnessed a string of military coups, violent street protests and toppled governments – and where defamation is a criminal offence.

    • Was 2015 a Bad Year for Campus Free Speech? Let’s Ask the Experts

      Are easily-offended students and their allies within the university bureaucracy ushering in a new era of censorship on American college campuses? Even President Obama is worried that excessive political correctness is stifling legitimate debate at universities.

    • The militarization of the press in Syria

      Ahmed Abu al-Hamza, “Software” as he was known by his friends, stood behind the camera on November 6 as a gunman explained how rebel forces took Tel Sukayk, a strategic hilltop north of Hama, from government forces. Suddenly the camera’s sound recorder picked up the faint thud of a mortar shell firing in the distance. A few seconds of confusion then turned to horror as the shell exploded right in front of the camera, killing Abu al-Hamza and the rebel fighter and injuring several others.

    • Dr. Timaree: How to be mindful, ethical when it comes to porn

      Censorship, though, is not an effective way of fixing a social problem.

    • Why Latin America Needs PEN

      The Mexican way of death is unique, issuing from a symbiosis of indigenous beliefs and practices with Catholic rituals. To celebrate the return of the souls of the dead every November, Mexicans set up altars laden with the departed’s favorite food and drink and sugar skulls emblazoned with that person’s name, while images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints flank a photo of the deceased. Marigolds festoon the altars and the graves where relatives gather to share a meal and news of the past year with the visiting spirits.

      [...]

      Journalists are not only pursued by organized crime in all its forms, but also by local, state and federal governments, police forces, the military, and even by people whose job it is to impart justice. Not only must the federal government guarantee the safety of journalists, it must also resolve pending cases and punish the criminals, even if they work in government. Otherwise, as time passes most of the cases become enveloped in a tangle of conflicting lines of investigation where the real one is lost or the victim is morphed into the guilty party. A journalist friend recently told me about how when dealing with a notorious political crime, officials often present a new line of inquiry every once in a while which leads the investigation further away from reality, until it reaches a point where nobody knows anything for sure, a kind of legal shell game with the truth.

    • Pirate Bay’s Suspended Domain Names Spell Trouble for File-Sharing Sites

      Earlier in December, file-sharing site the Pirate Bay went down due to a problem regarding the registration of the thepiratebay.org domain — a seemingly innocuous hitch. But then, a week later, thepiratebay.com and several other of the site’s domain properties, including piratebrowser.com, piratebrowser.net, and piratebrowser.org — which link to the Pirate Bay’s TOR-based anti-censorship tool — also went down, suspended for similar violations of ICANN registration policy. And though thepiratebay.org was quickly restored after a transfer from EuroDNS to a new registrar, the other domains remain suspended.

    • YouTube dumps Holocaust memory

      “Why do I see beheadings and bestiality on YouTube, but the story of an aged Holocaust survivor must be removed? Is there an agenda going on? If so, what is it?” she asked. “This ministry is being targeted for some unexplainable reason. Is it because we tap in Michele Bachmann regularly? I do not hear of other ministries undergoing this kind of an exam and retribution.”

    • George Washington University apologizes for censorship of Palestinian flag

      Earlier this month, six weeks after receiving a “Warning Letter” for hanging a Palestinian flag out his dormitory window, George Washington University (GWU) student Ramie Abounaja obtained a formal apology from university president Steven Knapp for the attack on his free speech rights. The apology came after an implied threat of legal action against the university.

    • Silencing Students: The 8 Most Loathsome Campus Censors of 2015

      Every year brings new examples of ruthless college administrators trampling the free expression rights of students and faculty, and 2015 was no different. Here are eight of the most notable campus censors I wrote about this year.

    • Students of color frustrated with campus climate

      Multicultural student groups are calling for more inclusion at AU after a rash of anonymous social media posts and posters targeting minorities have appeared on and around campus.

      Yik Yak is a smartphone application that allows smartphone users to make posts anonymously and view posts made by those within close proximity to them. Racist posts on the platform prompted University forums last year and inspired an Undergraduate Senate discussion about race, the Eagle previously reported. In recent months, users have continued to write discriminatory comments in the the app around campus.

    • Chinese filmmaker claims victory in online film censorship lawsuit

      Beijing-based filmmaker Fan Popo, whose gay rights documentary was removed from Chinese video streaming websites, has claimed victory in a lawsuit over government censorship despite the courts ruling that regulators were not to blame.

      In its verdict released last week, Beijing’s No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court found censors had not ordered his documentary “Mama Rainbow” to be taken down from prominent streaming websites Youku, Tudou and 56.com.

    • Artists oppose Erdogan’s censorship

      Turkey welcomes private investors in the field of art and culture, but many artists feel oppressed by their government. Beyond censorship and commercial speculation, an alternative art scene offers some hope.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • DOJ’s Equitable Sharing Program Takes $1.2 Billion Hit, Much To Dismay Of Asset Forfeiture-Abusing Law Enforcement Agencies

      Good news (of sorts) on the asset forfeiture front: the same budget bill that delivered us into the hands of CISA also helped “rob” the nation’s highwaymen of $1.2 billion in equitable sharing funds.

    • Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause for a SWAT raid on your home

      In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun. The family was then held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the police searched their home. Though they claimed to be looking for evidence of a major marijuana growing operation, they later stated that they knew within about 20 minutes that they wouldn’t find any such operation. So they switched to search for evidence of “personal use.” They found no evidence of any criminal activity.

    • Italian president reduces sentences in CIA kidnapping case

      Italy’s president has shaved two years off the sentence of a former CIA base chief convicted in absentia in the 2003 extraordinary rendition abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect.

      With the decree, announced Wednesday night by the presidential palace, President Sergio Mattarella reduced to seven from nine years Robert Seldon Lady’s sentence. Mattarella also wiped out the three-year sentence handed down by a Milan court to another US defendant convicted in absentia, Betnie Medero.

    • Former CIA chief’s rendition sentence reduced in Italy
    • Italian president offers pardons in CIA rendition convictions

      Italy has partially pardoned the former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady who was convicted for his role in the kidnapping of an Egyptian Muslim cleric under the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” programme.

      Another U.S. citizen found guilty in the case, Betnie Medero, was also granted a pardon by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, his office said in a statement.

    • From the Shadows of the Cold War: the Rise of the CIA

      The longest running director of the CIA (1952-1961), Dulles helped coordinate extremely bloody coups throughout the world. Not surprisingly, he comes off as a nasty piece of work. He and his brother John Foster Dulles both worked with the prestigious Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which made a fortune representing cartels that were part of the Nazi war machine (John Foster Dulles went on to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State). The Dulles brothers were quite cozy with Nazi higher ups in the ’30s and remained staunch apologists for Hitler well into the the ’40s.

    • Sudanese security enjoys “good relations” with the CIA: NISS chief

      The director of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) Mohamed Atta said his agency maintains “good ties” with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

    • Trump praises Putin after being told he kills political opponents

      “I’m saying when you say a man has killed reporters, I’d like you to prove it”, Trump argued. But, in all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. In response, Trump said he appreciated “when people call you brilliant” and that “it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russian Federation”.

      McCain’s comments come after Putin complimented Trump last week, and Trump responded it was an “honor” to receive the compliment. “Not a bad thing”, Trump said. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports Russian journalists experience intimidation and censorship.

      “I think I’ll win the Hispanic vote”, Trump told reporters after touring the bridge.

    • Russia can only use the United States as an excuse for so long

      Sergei Guriev, Russia’s most prominent free market economist, left Moscow in 2013 for Paris, in fear of his liberty. He had publicly supported dissidents, criticized the administration’s policies, was an active and committed liberal, in politics as in economics. He produced, earlier this year, a 21st century equivalent of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince”: a blueprint of how the modern autocrat rules, and remains.

      Unlike the Florentine, though, Guriev isn’t recommending a course of action, he’s describing it; and he doesn’t believe it will be good for the state, but ruinous. If, in this and other writings and interviews, he’s right about the nature of Russia’s governance, his country is in for a bad crash. And when Russia in its present condition crashes, the world will shake.

    • Why Russia Can Only Go Backward

      The Public Opinion Foundation conducted a survey this month asking Russians two questions: “What was the main event of the year in Russia?” and “What was the main global event of the year?”

      Noteworthy is that fully 40 percent of the respondents had trouble answering either question. And the most brutal political murder in modern Russia — the assassination of my father — did not even figure in the responses. State-controlled television hardly mentions it, with the exception of the first few days after the killing, when commentators spoke of him in contemptuous tones.

    • How Fox News’ Primetime Lineup Demonized Black Lives Matter In 2015

      In 2015, Fox News’ three primetime hosts engaged in a smear campaign against the Black Lives Matter movement, fearmongering about the alleged threat they pose to law and order and hyping racist canards aimed at discrediting the movement’s calls for justice.

      The Black Lives Matter movement — which emerged after the 2013 shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin — became a regular news fixture in 2015 following the high-profile deaths of several unarmed black civilians at the hands of police officers. The movement brought national attention to the issues of police brutality and racial disparities in criminal justice. One group associated with the movement introduced a set of concrete policy solutions, and the movement as a whole became a politically relevant force amid the 2016 presidential race.

    • WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count

      “The kind of incidents that have ignited protests…represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings”: That sure sounds like an attempt to play down the number, doesn’t it? Particularly since the write-up never presents the raw number for fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in 2015—which is 37—or the more comprehensive number of all unarmed civilians shot and killed: 90. Those numbers can be found on a graphic that accompanied the story in the paper’s print edition, and in an interactive feature online–but are nowhere to be found in the Post‘s own article on its project. (“Just 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim,” a sidebar accompanying the graphic began—that word “just” indicating that we should read that as “not so many.”)

      And the Post‘s “meanwhile,” juxtaposed against “incidents that have ignited protests,” implies that the categories that follow would not inspire protest: those killed “wielding weapons,” who were “suicidal or mentally troubled,” or who “ran when officers told them to halt.”

    • Egypt’s censorship authority raid Merit Publishing house in Cairo

      Egypt’s censorship authority raided and searched on Tuesday afternoon Merit Publishing house in downtown Cairo without providing any reason, owner Mohamed Hashem wrote on his Facebook page.

      Staff member Mohamed Zein, 23, was arrested during the raid then released a few hours later.

    • Egypt Raids 2 Major Independent Cultural Institutions In 2 Days

      Egyptian authorities have raided two pillars of the independent arts and culture scene in Cairo over the past 48 hours.

    • TSA Says It Will Stop Accepting Driver’s Licenses From Nine States

      The last time we took notice of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), it was to inform you that the unpopular, expensive, and ineffectual outfit had decided it could force travelers on domestic airline flights to go through full-body scanners. Previously, TSA had allowed folks to submit instead to a full-body pat-down.

    • Who Needs A No-Fly List When You Can Just Ground 91 Million Citizens?

      For the residents of Alaska, California, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Minnesota and Washington (along with American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands), this means their ID cards are perfectly legal within those states, but only as long as they stay in those states. (And, apparently, never need to enter a government building — like, say, to acquire a new, compliant ID card).

    • Human Research Loopholes: Alive and Well

      In one of the darkest chapters in medical ethics, the United States government ran an experiment from the 1930s to the 1970s in which it withheld treatment and medical information from rural African-American men suffering from syphilis. The public uproar generated by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study eventually resulted in regulations restricting government-supported research testing on humans. These regulations are called the “Common Rule,” and they are right now up for their first full update.

      The Common Rule, also known as the “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects,” is supposed to affirmatively protect us from the abuses of the future. However, the proposed regulation is lousy with loopholes, including ones that could exempt tracking online behavior and experiments related to intelligence activities.

    • Hospital Refuses Pregnancy-Related Care Again Because of Religious Directives

      Today we filed a lawsuit challenging Dignity Health’s use of religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to its patients. Filed on behalf of patient Rebecca Chamorro and Physicians for Reproductive Health, the suit argues that withholding pregnancy-related care for reasons other than medical considerations is illegal in California.

    • Sadistic Cops Make K-9 Maul Unarmed Suicidal Teen – Caught Planning and Celebrating It in Texts

      Months after the Herald-Tribune exposed the North Port Police Department for routinely commanding their K-9 dogs to attack people without provocation, the department has done nothing to address the problem. In fact, it defends its officers even in the most egregious cases, including the mutilation of unarmed juveniles.

    • Extended Interview: Remembering Haskell Wexler, 93, Legendary Cinematographer & Activist

      In Part 2 of our look at the life and work of Haskell Wexler, we air clips from “Rebel Citizen,” a new documentary about his life, and speak to the film’s director, Pamela Yates. Wexler is perhaps best known for his 1969 film, “Medium Cool,” which captures the upheaval surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He won two Academy Awards for cinematography in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Bound for Glory,” about folk singer Woody Guthrie. His documentaries tackled political issues including the Southern Freedom Riders of the 1960s, the U.S. government’s destabilization of Nicaragua, U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, and torture under the U.S.-backed junta in Brazil.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Stupid Patent Of The Month: Microsoft’s Design Patent On A Slider

      For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design.

    • Trademarks

      • Canada Too Has An Issue With Abitrary Applications Of Morality In Trademark Applications

        In our recent discussion about the delightfully vulgar filing by the Washington Redskins in an effort to point out the arbitrary application of morality by the government to trademark law, the point in the filing was driven home by just how many similarly vulgar and offensive terms the USPTO has been happy to sanctify with a valid trademark. Perhaps some of you out there thought that this was a uniquely American problem, something resulting from our overabundance of political correctness. It’s not. A case in Canada over the trademark application for “Lucky Bastard Vodka” shows this quite well. It also shows the inherent problem in trying to have a government institution apply morality to business in this way.

      • Saskatoon distillery fights feds over ‘scandalous’ trademark

        A Saskatoon company’s attempt to trademark its flagship vodka has turned into a four-year battle with the federal government over the definition of “bastard.”

        In 2011, LB Distillers applied to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) to register “Lucky Bastard vodka” as a trademark. About eight months later, the agency responsible for trademarks, patents and copyright replied.

        “The examiner came back and said it was immoral, scandalous and obscene, and that the general population of Canada would agree that it was an immoral name,” LB Distillers co-owner Cary Bowman said.

    • Copyrights

      • The DMCA Has Delivered Us Into The Hands Of The Proprietary Internet Of Disconnected Things

        The phrase “Internet of Things” suggests connection. The problem is there’s nothing financially motivating about interconnectedness. Manufacturers of connected devices would prefer homogeneity, which leads to actions like Philips’ which recently pushed a firmware update that locked competitors’ bulbs out of its Hue “smart” lighting fixtures. Sure, it rolled back the update and (mostly) allowed owners to use bulbs they had already purchased, but it was also suggested in the same quasi-apology that the company would rather limit the options available to its purchasers in the future, funneling them through its “friends of Hue” program.

      • Book Publisher Has No Idea How Google Works But Pretty Sure It Could End Piracy If It Tried

        Here’s the stupidest thing on piracy you’re going to read today. Or this month. Maybe even this whole holiday season. Rudy Shur, of Square One Publishers, has a problem with piracy, which he thinks is actually a problem with Google.

      • 50 Cent Files Stupid, Hypocritical Lawsuit Over Another Rapper’s ‘Theft’ Of His Song In A Mixtape

        I can see why 50 Cent and his lawyers might feel this lawsuit is a good idea: 50 Cent is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings. On top of that, the rapper owes $7 million to the plaintiff in a sex tape lawsuit — one that also involves rival rap star, Rick Ross. (The woman in the sex tape is the mother of one of Ross’ children. 50 Cent can be heard taunting Ross in the recording.) 50 Cent is also engaged in a $75 million lawsuit against his former legal team, so there’s bills to be paid there as well.

        50 Cent’s lawsuit takes aim at the rap industry’s standard operating procedure: mixtapes. Rick Ross rapped over 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” in his latest mixtape, much as thousands of rappers have rapped over the beats of others on mixtapes since the early days of the genre. It’s an accepted — if quasi-illegal — practice. Everyone raps over everyone else’s beats on mixtapes, almost all of which are given away as promotional tools.

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/12/29/sparkylinux-4-2/feed/ 0 EPO a “European Institution Which Does Not Fall Under EU Law” http://techrights.org/2015/12/28/petition-regarding-epo/ http://techrights.org/2015/12/28/petition-regarding-epo/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2015 23:45:57 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=87856 Petition regarding EPO

Summary: Highlighting a soon-to-end petition which bemoans the bizarre state of affairs at today’s EPO and its controversial impact on Europe

THE previous post focused on today’s talk which led us to the following petition [PDF], sent to us by several people almost simultaneously. We wish to bring it to the attention of EPO examiners and generally, as so many people are affected by the EPO, any EU citizen who is eager to take action to defend Europe’s interests and the interests of science and technology, not conglomerates like Microsoft. Watch what kinds of patents Microsoft is getting and using aggressively, based on this latest rant from the EFF (just published). To quote the EFF:

For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design.

[...]
Microsoft’s patent claims against Corel are unsurprising in light of how much money is potentially at stake. If Corel is found to infringe even one of Microsoft’s design patents through even the smallest part of Corel Home Office, current Federal Circuit law entitles Microsoft to all of Corel’s profits for the entire product. Not the profits that can be attributed to the design. Not the value that the design adds to a product. All of the profit from Corel Home Office.

We previously wrote about the EPO’s special relationship with Microsoft, whereupon the EPO sent several threatening letters to me (all of them about Microsoft and the EPO). What are they so desperate to hide? They never withdrew these threats. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/12/28/petition-regarding-epo/feed/ 0 Links 12/12/2015: Mozilla Funds for FOSS, Rust 1.5 http://techrights.org/2015/12/12/mozilla-funds-for-foss/ http://techrights.org/2015/12/12/mozilla-funds-for-foss/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2015 15:59:17 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=87293

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Time has come for an ‘honorable retreat’ from Tokyo 2020 over Fukushima

    Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?

  • Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google’s cloud

    Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.

    Users of the Alphabet subsidiary’s Google Container Engine customers “could not create external load balancers for their services for a duration of 21 hours and 38 min” on December 8th and 9th.

  • On the unreasonable reality of “junior” developer interviews

    Let’s not torture our junior developers by forcing them to do the programming equivalent of making high school students studying the Catcher in the Rye and the Scarlet Letter. Let’s talk to them like humans who are writing software. Let’s find out whether or not they’re open to learning, good at communicating, and people we’d like to work with every day.

  • Cyberbullying: Chubb offers UK ‘troll’ insurance against digital threats

    Cyberbullying has been a long-standing problem in the online community. Wrapped under the guise of anonymity, some individuals will launch hate campaigns against others rather than confront them in the physical realm, whether it be Facebook messaging and posts, tweets or campaigns designed to smear their reputation.

  • Hardware

    • Virtually there: the hard reality of the Gear VR

      But when the holidays are over, what will happen to the Gear VR? Is the headset a novelty or, as many of its developers and fans suggest, the start of a new medium? Once you’ve given everyone you know five minutes of virtual reality, is there much left to do? I’m not sure there is yet — and I’m not sure when that will change.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GMO Toxins Endanger Human Health

      GMOs’ toxins put your health at risk, according to plant biologist Jonathan Latham. As Latham reports, many genetically modified plants are engineered to contain their own insecticides. These GMOs, which include maize, cotton and soybeans, are called Bt plants. Bt plants get their name because they incorporate a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin (usually called the Cry toxin) from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. (The term “cry toxin” comes from the crystal proteins that form the toxin.) Many Bt crops are “stacked,” meaning they contain a multiplicity of these Cry toxins. Bacillus thuringiensis is all but indistinguishable from the well known anthrax bacterium

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Petraeus Recommends Using Al Qaeda Fighters to Defeat ISIS

      The United States’ relationship with Al Qaeda could be closer than corporate media might lead you to believe. In August 2015 retired CIA chief David Petraeus openly called for recruiting so-called moderate members of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra to fight ISIS in Syria. Despite corporate media reiterating the message that Al Qaeda is an enemy terrorist group, the CIA and US military leadership continue to discuss using Al Qaeda as a tool for their own military objectives. As Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report, Petraeus called for recruiting members of the Nusra Front, which opposes the Syrian government, to help the US combat ISIS.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Indonesia’s forest fires: everything you need to know

      As satellite data of the fire hotspots shows, forest fires have affected the length and breadth of Indonesia. Among the worst hit areas are southern Kalimantan (Borneo) and western Sumatra. The fires have been raging since July, with efforts to extinguish them hampered by seasonal dry conditions exacerbated by the El Nino effect. As well as Indonesia, the acrid haze from the fires is engulfing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore and has reached as far as southern Thailand.

    • VIDEO: Here’s Why Fox News Is Wrong To Dismiss The Link Between Climate Change And Terrorism

      Fox News pundits have spent much of the past year mocking and dismissing comments by President Obama, Democratic presidential candidates and others who have described the connection that climate change has to terrorism and the rise of the jihadist group ISIS. But as world leaders strive for an ambitious agreement at the conclusion of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris — the site of horrific terrorist attacks by ISIS in November — it’s more important than ever that Americans and people around the world recognize the relationship between global warming and global security.

    • Fires in Indonesia: Perspective from the Ground

      I live in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan. We had some serious fires here, but it wasn’t as bad as in Central Kalimantan, which was basically the epicenter of the disaster. Breathing the smoke wasn’t pleasant, and I didn’t dare open a window or a door in my house because it would just permeate everything.

      The smoke also seriously disrupted some of my travel plans. There were no flights into or out of my town for at least a month, so we had to rely on boats or long-distance travel by car.

      The smoke also disrupted my work. I do lot in the community and in schools, but September and October were quiet months for us because the schools were not in session. It was too dangerous for students. Adults were not available to participate in our conservation activities and meetings because they either had to stay in the field and guard their crops from fire, or didn’t want to be outside more then necessary.

    • 6 locations where groundwater is vanishing

      Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.

  • Finance

    • Exposing One of the Largest Accounting Scandals in American History

      New Networks Institute just released two reports in a new series, “Fixing Telecommunications”. It is based on mostly public, but unexamined information that exposes one of the largest financial accounting scandals in American history. It impacts all wireline and wireless phone, broadband, Internet and even cable TV/video services, and it continues today with impunity.

      Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and other large telephone companies have been able to manipulate their financial accounting to make the local phone networks and services look unprofitable and have used this ‘fact’ in many public policy and regulatory decisions that benefited the incumbent telecommunications utilities.

      But the core of this scandal, which we dubbed the “FCC’s Big Freeze”, is so bizarre that no one would believe it if it was detailed in some thriller about financial chicanery. I’ll get to this in a moment.

    • Satoshi’s PGP Keys Are Probably Backdated and Point to a Hoax

      On Tuesday, both Wired and Gizmodo dropped a big bombshell: According to “leaked” (Wired) or “hacked” (Gizmodo) documents, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is…. Craig Steven Wright.

      Uh, who? one might ask. It’s a good question. Until now, Wright hasn’t pinged very many people’s radars as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, Wright is indeed considered an expert on Bitcoin—in fact, he appeared on a panel with other possible-Satoshi Nick Szabo this year at the Bitcoin Investor Conference.

      Both Wired and Gizmodo outline Wright’s qualifications and accomplishments in detail, aside from pointing to emails and other documents that seem to nail Wright as once-and-future Bitcoin king Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • CETA’s Festering Wound: Corporate Sovereignty

      Remember CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU? Even though the text was “celebrated” back in October 2014, it is still not ready to be presented for possible ratification. As Techdirt has been covering, it’s pretty clear that the problem area is the corporate sovereignty chapter, because of concerns about the huge power it grants to Canadian (and US) corporations. First there were hints that Angela Merkel wanted the so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanism changed. Then France said the same — twice. Most recently, the EU commissioner responsible for trade and trade agreements, Cecilia Malmström, indicated that it wouldn’t be possible re-open the corporate sovereignty chapter, or to move away from “classic” ISDS to the re-branded version known as the Investment Court System (ICS), which the European Commission is pushing in an attempt to head off growing opposition to the whole idea.

    • ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

      Janine Jackson: “The truth of the matter is this is a big deal,” says Simon King, the general manager of The Modern, a high-end restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He is referring to the decision by Danny Meyer, owner of The Modern and many other restaurants, to phase out what the New York Times called “the time-honored American practice” of tipping.

    • On-demand workers unite online to fight Uber and the gig economy

      IT WAS a strike, but not as we know it. At midnight on 1 December, about 100 workers in New York City logged out of the Uber app on their phones in protest over a pay cut at UberRUSH, a delivery service run by the ride-sharing giant. One post on the Facebook page they created to rally the strike and list their demands read: “All we are asking is that Uber treats us fairly.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • BBC Bias

      I am involved quite extensively in the making of what I believe to be a valuable independent documentary. It is based on George Ponsonby’s excellent book London Calling, and has the working title How the BBC Stole the Referendum. We have already done a few hours filming of my contribution.

    • Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Mock Media For Its Trump Coverage On The Late Show

      On the December 10 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert reunited to lament the media’s extensive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Colbert told Stewart that “the media won’t pay attention to anything … unless you are Donald Trump” and that if he wanted the media to pay attention to serious issues, he would have to “Trump it up.” Stewart appeared on the show to urge Congress to pass the Zadroga Act, which provides health care funding and compensation for the first responders to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Recently the media has been called out for its “wall-to-wall” Trump coverage, especially of his unconstitutional plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

    • After San Bernardino, Some Reporters ‘Poke Around’–While Others Follow the Money

      Some would say Columbia Journalism Review put it mildly, referring to the events of December 4 as an “unbecoming media frenzy in San Bernardino.” That was the sight of dozens of TV crew members from MSNBC and CNN trampling through the home of alleged killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, rifling through whatever they came across, holding it up for the camera and guessing about its meaning.

      Sample commentary from MSNBC‘s Kerry Sanders: “Come over here, you can see the baby’s toys. We have really quite a number of toys.” Sanders proceeded to show millions of viewers various photographs, we don’t know of whom, and for good measure, the driver’s license of Farook’s mother, including identifying information like her address.

  • Censorship

    • Citizens triumph in Nigerian digital rights battle

      This week the will of Nigerian citizens triumphed over a threat to the free and open Web. The recently proposed “Bill for an Act to Prohibit Frivolous Petitions and Other Matters Connected there-with”, popularly known as the “Social Media Bill”, sought to restrict free expression by making it illegal to start any type of petition without swearing an affidavit that the content is true in a court of law.

    • YouTube blocks Japanese contributors’ content for refusing to use its paid version

      Not everyone was sold. ESPN has pulled all of its content from YouTube due to what a YouTube spokesperson called “rights and legal issues.” At least EPSN got to choose. YouTube has said that companies that do not sign off on YouTube RED will find their videos unavailable to viewers. And it’s keeping that promise, blocking a huge swath of Japanese artists from U.S. fans.

    • Lucasfilm Uses DMCA to Kill Star Wars Toy Picture

      Star Wars: The Force Awakens has gone into an early and bizarre anti-piracy overdrive. Earlier this week a fansite posted an image of a ‘Rey’ action figure legally bought in Walmart but it was taken down by Facebook and Twitter following a DMCA notice. Meanwhile, webhosts are facing threats of legal action.

    • Couple takes pics of Star Wars figure they bought, gets DMCA notice from Lucasfilm

      or the last decade, Marjorie Carvalho and her husband have produced Star Wars Action News, a podcast dedicated to Star Wars collectibles of all sorts. Predictably, they’ve had a lot to talk about, as waves of action figures and other collectibles have been launched in the run-up to the much-anticipated release of Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens next week.

      On Tuesday, a Star Wars Action News staffer saw something he shouldn’t have—and bought it. A 3 3/4″ action figure of “Rey,” a female character from The Force Awakens, was on display in a Walmart in Iowa, apparently earlier than it should have been. The staff member bought it for $6.94 plus tax, no questions asked. The following day, he posted pictures of the Rey figure on Star Wars Action News’ Facebook page.

    • Disney drops—then doubles down on—DMCA claim over Star Wars figure pic

      A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent by the Walt Disney Company earlier this week seems to have truly awakened The Force, and now the company can’t seem to decide if it wants to be on the light side or the dark side.

      Marjorie and Arnie Carvalho run Star Wars Action News, a podcast about Star Wars collectibles. Earlier this week, SW Action News staffer Justin Kozisek purchased an action figure of “Rey” in an Iowa Walmart. The figure, which hasn’t been seen elsewhere, was presumably put on the shelves by accident ahead of its official release date. An image of the figure was posted on the SW Action News Facebook page—and promptly subjected to a wave of DMCA takedown demands by Lucasfilm. Many of those who had spread the image on social media were also subject to copyright claims.

    • Search Engines Need Regulating to Reduce Piracy, Russia Says

      Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor says it will create a working group to look into the regulation of search engine results. The move is part of a package of initiatives designed to make pirated content harder to find. Also on the table are discussions on how to make anti-piracy techniques less prone to circumvention.

    • Resistance to Wyoming’s Unconstitutional Data Trespass Law

      In March 2015, Wyoming legislators passed a law that makes it illegal to report environmental hazards to the general public or to state officials. Senate Bill 12, “Trespassing to Collect Data,” makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether the land is federal, state, or privately owned. As Justin Pidot and Deirdre Fulton reported, the controversial law protects the interests of private land owners by making it illegal for people to take photographs, sample soils, test water, or to take any kind of environmental data from any private, public or federal land outside of city limits.

  • Privacy

    • The Investigatory Powers Bill: PR myth list

      In the weeks since the Investigatory Powers Bill was officially released, we’ve seen a lot of Government PR. They are trying their best to assure us that we have nothing to be worried about, but we’re not convinced.

    • WaPo’s Excellent Explainer On Encryption Debunks WaPo’s Stupid Editorial In Favor Of Encryption Backdoors

      Washington Post reporter Andrea Peterson has put together a really excellent explainer piece on what you should know about encryption. Considering the source, it’s a good “general knowledge” explainer piece for people who really aren’t that aware of encryption or technically savvy. That’s important and useful, given how important this debate is and how many participants in it don’t seem to understand the first thing about encryption.

    • Driver Leaves Scene Of Accident, Gets Turned In By Her Car

      It’s no secret today’s vehicles collect tons of data. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be a secret. It certainly isn’t well-known, despite even some of the latest comers to the tech scene — legislators — having questioned automakers about their handling of driver data.

      More than one insurance company will offer you a discount if you allow them to track your driving habits. Employers have been known to utilize “black boxes” in company vehicles. These days, the tech is rarely even optional, although these “event data recorders” generally only report back to the manufacturers themselves. Consumer-oriented products like OnStar combine vehicle data with GPS location to contact law enforcement/medical personnel if something unexpected happens. Drivers can trigger this voluntarily to seek assistance when stranded on the road because of engine trouble, flat tires, etc.

    • FBI admits it uses stingrays, zero-day exploits

      The FBI’s secrecy surrounding stingrays has been well documented. And the controversy over the use of zero-days by governments has also generated its share of headlines. Both issues are controversial, in part because they have the potential to harm vast numbers of people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. That’s because stingrays generally intercept all cell phone communications in a given area, not just those of a drug or kidnapping suspect. Paying large sums of money to buy zero-days, meanwhile, creates powerful incentives for governments to keep the underlying vulnerabilities secret. FBI officials have long attempted to distance themselves from such topics. Today, they inched slightly closer.

    • On the CCA (in)security of MTProto

      Telegram is a popular messaging app which supports end-to-end encrypted communication. In Spring 2015 we performed an audit of Telegram’s source code. This short paper summarizes our findings.

      Our main discovery is that the symmetric encryption scheme used in Telegram — known as MTProto — is not IND-CCA secure, since it is possible to turn any ciphertext into a different ciphertext that decrypts to the same message.

      We stress that this is a theoretical attack on the definition of security and we do not see any way of turning the attack into a full plaintext-recovery attack. At the same time, we see no reason why one should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist.

      The take-home message (once again) is that well-studied, provably secure encryption schemes that achieve strong definitions of security (e.g., authenticated-encryption) are to be preferred to home-brewed encryption schemes.

    • FBI Admits To Using Zero Day Exploits To Hack Into Computers

      It’s been widely suspected for ages that both the NSA and the FBI made use of so-called “zero-day” exploits to hack into computers. Leaks from a few years ago (which may or may not have come from Snowden) exposed just how massive the NSA’s exploit operation was, and there have been plenty of stories of security companies selling exploits to the NSA, who would use them, rather than reveal them and get them patched — thereby putting the public at risk. Last year, the President told the NSA to get better at revealing these zero day exploits to companies to patch, rather than hoarding them for their own use. Just about a month ago, the NSA proudly announced that it now discloses vulnerabilities 90% of the time — but conveniently left out how long it uses them before disclosing them.

    • Lofgren questions DHS policy towards TOR Relays

      Today, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) released a letter expressing her concern with news reports indicating an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent enlisted local law enforcement to pressure a New Hampshire public library into disabling its Tor relay.

      The letter, addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, notes that the Tor network is used by journalists, activists, dissidents, intelligence sources, and other privacy concerned individuals to keep their web browsing private, and the network receives significant funding through government grants.

    • Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model”

      FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday called for tech companies currently offering end-to-end encryption to reconsider their business model, and instead adopt encryption techniques that allow them to intercept and turn over communications to law enforcement when necessary.

      End-to-end encryption, which is the state of the art in providing secure communications on the internet, has become increasingly common and desirable in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the government.

    • Obama to clarify his stance on encryption by the holidays

      The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays.

      Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.

    • Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users

      Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters

      Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.

      A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

    • Facebook for Work is almost upon us

      HUNGRY DATA HIPPO Facebook has promised to launch the work version of its time-wasting solution very soon.

      The firm reckons that the time blight will hit worker desktops in the next few months and will not be used for things like crushing candy or, presumably, assessing the global cat situation.

      Reuters is first with the news, hot from Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, who explained that the system is very much like the consumer version, except it is designed to make users more productive. This means no crap apps or gimmicky gewgaws but a lot of the other crap that you might have come to expect.

    • Tor Hires a New Leader to Help It Combat the War on Privacy

      The Tor Project is entering a crucial phase in its nearly 10-year existence. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, it has assumed a higher profile in the world of privacy and security than ever before. But it’s also come under increased attack by governments out to demonize it, and by law enforcement and intelligence agencies out to crack it and unmask its anonymous users.

    • FBI on Encryption: ‘It’s A Business Model Question’

      Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement.

    • Government, Can You Hear Me Now? Cell-site Simulators Aren’t Secret Anymore

      Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there’s no question that they’re a serious threat to privacy.

  • Civil Rights

    • NYT Rewrites Scalia to Make Him Sound Less Racist

      This is not a person talking about a subset of blacks with a particular kind of educational background; taking his words at face value, this is a person asserting that African-Americans as a whole belong in “lesser schools” that are not “too fast for them.” (Or that “there are those who contend” that that is the case, if you want to give Scalia credit for that circumlocution.)

      The fact that a Supreme Court justice justifies eliminating affirmative action on the basis of openly racist views ought to be big news. By sugarcoating what Scalia actually said, the New York Times disguises that news–making the ethnic cleansing of America’s top schools a more palatable possibility. Perhaps that shouldn’t make me gasp.

    • Global Refugee Crisis Reaches 60 Million

      According to the United Nations’ High Commission on Refugees Global Trends Report: World at War, published in June 2015, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. One in every 122 people is considered a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker. Those individuals come from almost every continent. Parts of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa all have massive numbers of people who are trying to flee. Millions of people are on the move or hiding in the fringes of society to keep from being persecuted and harmed.

    • Glenn Beck Compares Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban To Hitler
    • Is Donald Trump a 2016 Manchurian candidate?

      The Republican presidential hopeful’s views are getting more and more extreme. Perhaps, as Salman Rushdie suggested, there’s more going on than meets the eye

    • Court Says Constitutional Violations By Law Enforcement Are Perfectly Fine As Long As They Happen Quickly

      As long as the stop isn’t extended for too long (a wholly arbitrary length decided on a case-by-case basis during suppression hearings/civil rights lawsuits), cops are pretty much free to stop and search any driver for any reason. And even if they’re completely wrong every step of the way, there’s a good chance the “good faith exception” will excuse their misdeeds. (For everything else, there’s qualified immunity.)

    • Bassel Khartabil: fears for man who brought open internet to the Arab world

      Syria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Safadi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advance the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

      Writing to the vice president of the European commission in 2013, MEPs Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes summed up Khartabil’s contributions as “opening up the internet in Syria – a country with a notorious record of online censorship” and “vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people”. Among his awards included the 2013 Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award for using technology to promote an open and free internet.

    • Massive Sexting Case Shockingly Results In No Criminal Charges

      Given what we’ve seen in other (and much smaller) sexting cases — where sex offender laws have been twisted to cover consensual interactions between adolescents — the district attorney’s decision to put control of the situation back in parents’ hands is a surprise. It will no doubt be the exception that proves the rule.

      The instinctual reaction to bring law enforcement into the equation is understandable and, admittedly, there are aspects of sexting that may require this sort of scrutiny. The problem is that prosecutors often feel compelled to find something to charge sexting participants with, if only to justify the expenditure of law enforcement resources. This leads to preposterous (and potentially life-damaging) outcomes like teens being charged with exploiting themselves by taking photos of their own bodies and sharing them with others.

    • Twitter Told a Bunch of Users They May Be Targets of a ‘State Sponsored Attack’

      The attack is currently being investigated by Twitter. In their notice to users, Twitter said that the attack only impacted usernames, IP address, email addresses, and phone numbers if a phone number was associated with the account. Twitter did not say which state was implicated—it could have been China, Russia, or even the US.

      I spoke to a number of Twitter users who received the notice. A couple are engaged in activism and are connected to the Tor Project in some capacity. A few are located in Canada, and vaguely associated with the security community at large. However, I could not determine any common factors between all recipients. They all received the notice around the same time, between 5:15 and 5:16 PM EST.

    • Jamie Kalven on the Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

      This week on CounterSpin: There are calls for the resignation of Chicago Mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel—stemming from the city’s 13-month cover-up of video that belied the official story of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. That video, along with an autopsy that also showed police’s initial story to be false, eventually came to light through the work of journalists—but not mainstream journalists; it was independent reporters, including our guest, who stepped in to force the police department and the city to acknowledge not only what happened on the night of October 20, 2014—when officer Jason Van Dyke put 16 bullets into the body of a boy who posed him no harm—but what happened after, as institutional forces came together to keep the truth from the public.

    • Salvadoran Women Imprisoned for Miscarriages

      In El Salvador an unexpected pregnancy loss has been declared unconstitutional and criminal. The law that has been in place since 1998 prohibits abortions in the country regardless of the situation. The penal code does no take into account if the mother’s life or the baby’s life is in danger; it is all abortion. The purpose of this law is to give the embryonic human a right to life. If any expectant mother happens to break this law regardless of the situation, she can be sentenced to 2-8 years in prison, and the medical professionals assisting the women can serve 6-12 years in prison. In some more severe cases, a woman can be charged with aggravated homicide if it is believed that the fetus could have been able to reach life successfully.

    • Ingraham: “I’d Go Farther” Than Trump’s Plan To Ban Muslims From Entering The US And “Do A Pause On All Immigration”
    • New York Teens Often Isolated in Adult Prisons

      New York and North Carolina are the only two states in the US that prosecute sixteen and seventeen year old teenagers in the justice system as adults. This is a crucial issue because in other states these teens are sent to juvenile facilities where they are held in more appropriate environments, given their ages. Young teens in adult prisons are often forced into solitary confinement, which can be severely, psychologically and physically damaging.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • “The more bits you use, the more you pay”: Comcast CEO justifies data caps

      While Comcast doesn’t actually cut people off the Internet when they hit their 300GB-per-month data limits, customers do get charged an additional $10 for each 50GB used. Customers can also pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data, depending on where they live. Comcast, the nation’s largest home Internet provider, has implemented the data caps in many cities but hasn’t rolled them out to its entire territory yet. “We’re just trialling ways to have a balanced relationship,” Roberts said. “You can watch hundreds of shows and movies and other things before you hit these levels, many devices, but I don’t think it’s illogical or something people should be paranoid about… it’s not that different than other industries.”

    • Comcast CEO Defends Caps: Claims Broadband’s Like Gasoline

      Comcast CEO Brian Roberts was forced to defend the company’s expansion of usage caps this week at an industry conference. As most of you know, Comcast has been imposing usage caps of 300 GB on the company’s customers. Users then have the option of either paying $10 per every 50 GB consumed, or paying $30 to $35 to enjoy the same unlimited service many of these users literally enjoyed only just yesterday.

  • DRM

    • Ecuador Likely To Legalize DRM Circumvention In The Exercise Of Fair Use Rights — Something TPP Will Block

      Eighteen months ago, Mike wrote about the DMCA being abused to censor stories in an Ecuadorian newspaper that someone in the government there apparently didn’t want out in the open. But Boing Boing points us to a post by Andrés Delgado from a few weeks back which offers hope that some good things could be happening in Ecuador in the field of copyright.

    • Thirteen Year Legacy: Last.fm Downfall?

      Last.fm is a web service for users to track and share their music tastes with friends in an easy, simple way. A single play of a song is known as a “Scrobble”. Listening to music and recording the listen with Last.fm is known as “Scrobbling”. This is a service that has existed since 2002, originally under the name of Audioscrobbler. In 2015, Last.fm rolled out their new website beta, originally optional, but later forced upon all users.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • UK Throws A Copyright Crumb: Confirms That Digitized Copies Of Public Domain Images Are In The Public Domain

        A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a German museum suing Wikimedia over photos of public domain objects that were in its collection. We mentioned there was a related situation in the UK, where the National Portrait Gallery in London had threatened a Wikimedia developer for using photos of objects that were clearly in the public domain. Mike pointed out that in the US, the Bridgeman v. Corel case established that photographs of public domain images do not carry any copyright, since they do not add any new expression. In a rare bit of good news, noted by Communia, the UK Intelllectual Property Office has just announced officially that it takes the same view…

      • Canadian Govt Eyes VPN Pirates, Netflix Thieves and ISP Blocking

        New Government documents have shed some light on the future agenda points for online copyright enforcement. In a briefing for minister Mélanie Joly, officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage mention VPN pirates and website blocking as emerging issues and pressures.

      • On the Fringe: David Elston, Pirate Party UK

        Pirate Party UK is our first brave volunteer as we explore the fringe movements campaigning against the dominance of the Westminster parties in British politics.

        Speaking to the deputy leader David Elston, newly elected as part of a leadership change following the general election, we delve into what the Pirates stand for, why authenticity is a new force in campaigning, and what effect Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is having on smaller parties.

      • ‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright Case Reaches a Settlement

        After more than two years of litigation, “Happy Birthday to You” — often called the most popular song in the world, but one that has long been under copyright — is one step closer to joining the public domain.

      • Parties celebrate as ‘Happy Birthday’ copyright dispute settled

        A copyright lawsuit centring on the song “Happy Birthday to You” has been settled out of court.

        Music publisher Warner/Chappell and a group of documentary makers, who had been disputing ownership of the song for more than two years, settled the dispute yesterday, December 9.

        Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/12/12/mozilla-funds-for-foss/feed/ 0 Links 1/9/2015: Manjaro Linux 0.8.13, Netrunner 14.2 LTS http://techrights.org/2015/09/01/netrunner-14-2-lts/ http://techrights.org/2015/09/01/netrunner-14-2-lts/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2015 21:20:51 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=84777

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The new IT is all about the customer

    Open source code. GitHub and other cloud repositories enable developers to share and consume code for almost any purpose imaginable. This reflects today’s practical, non-ideological open source culture: Why code it yourself if someone else is offering it free under the most liberal license imaginable?

  • Events/Communities

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Was Key To Building Servers.Com

      When XBT Holding S.A. decided to simplify how its subsidiaries provided global hosting, network solutions, and web development they turned to the open source cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack. By consolidating the offerings under a single service provider, Servers.com, customers can more easily browse, mix, compare and choose the most suitable services.

    • ZeroStack Comes Out of Stealth, Focused on Private Clouds

      There is another OpenStack-focused startup on the scene, and you have to appreciate its creative name: ZeroStack. The cloud computing company has come out of stealth mode to introduce a private cloud solution that it claims is easier to configure, consume and manage than any other technology on the market.

    • Apache Ignite, a Big Data Tool, Graduates as a Top-Level Project

      Only a few days ago, Apache, which is the steward for and incubates more than 350 Open Source projects, announced that Apache Lens, an open source Big Data and analytics tool, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Now, the ASF has announced that Apache Ignite is to become a top-level project. It’s an open source effort to build an in-memory data fabric that was driven by GridGain Systems and WANdisco.

    • Funding the Cloud: Top VCs Aim for the Silver Lining
    • How Apache Spark Is Transforming Big Data Processing, Development

  • Databases

    • Accelerating Scientific Analysis with the SciDB Open Source Database System

      Science is swimming in data. And, the already daunting task of managing and analyzing this information will only become more difficult as scientific instruments — especially those capable of delivering more than a petabyte (that’s a quadrillion bytes) of information per day — come online.

      Tackling these extreme data challenges will require a system that is easy enough for any scientist to use, that can effectively harness the power of ever-more-powerful supercomputers, and that is unified and extendable. This is where the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) implementation of SciDB comes in.

  • CMS

    • PiwigoPress release 2.31

      I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates new features for the sidebar widget, and better interoperability with some Piwigo galleries.

  • Education

    • How to teach student sys admins

      Students spend the 16-week long course learning practical skills using real tools. To support their systems, students learn about using support tickets and documentation by using RT and MediaWiki. To deploy and maintain their systems, they learn about configuration management using Puppet, system monitoring using Nagios, and backup and recovery using Bacula. But the broad concepts are more important than the specific software packages I just mentioned. The point is to learn, for example, configuration management, not to be trained to use Puppet. The software used by Clark is used because it works for him, but the software is flexible and changeable.

  • Openwashing (Fake FOSS)

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD Is Getting Its Own Native Hypervisor

      The OpenBSD Foundation has been funding work on a project to provide OpenBSD with its own, native hypervisor.

      The hypervisor’s VMM is so far able to launch a kernel and ask for a root file-system, but beyond that, it’s been laying most of the hypervisor foundation up to this point.

    • Coming Soon to OpenBSD/amd64: A Native Hypervisor

      Earlier today, Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) published a teaser for something he’s been working on for a while.

    • the peculiar libretunnel situation

      The author of stunnel has (once, twice) asserted that stunnel may not be used with LibreSSL, only with OpenSSL. This is perhaps a strange thing for free software to do, and it creates the potential for some very weird consequences.

      First, some background. The OpenSSL license and the GPL are both free software licenses, but they are different flavors of freedom, meaning you can’t mix them. It would be like mixing savory and sweet. Can’t do it. Alright, so maybe technically you can do it, but you’re not supposed to. The flavor, er, freedom police will come get you. One workaround is for the GPL software to say, oh, but maybe wait, here’s an exception. (Does this make the software more or less free?) Here’s a longer explanation with sample exception.

    • FreeBSD on Beagle Bone Black (with X11)

      X11 clients on the Beagle Bone Black .. that’s X11 over the network, with the X Server elsewhere. No display as yet. The FreeBSD wiki notes that there’s no (mini) HDMI driver yet. So I built some X11 programs, xauth(1) and xmessage(1), and installed them on the Bone. Since I bought a blue case for the Bone, and it is the smallest computer in the house (discounting phones .. let’s call it the smallest hackable computer in the house) the kids decided to call it smurf. Here’s a screenshot of poudriere’s text console as it builds packages.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Schiphol Airport working on open innovation

      …open data and an open programming interface…

    • How open film project Cosmos Laundromat made Blender better

      If you’re not familiar with the string of open projects that the Blender Institute has kicked out over the years, you might not be familiar with the term “open movie.” Simply put, not only is Cosmos Laundromat produced using free and open source tools like Blender, GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape, but the film itself, and all of its assets—models, textures, character rigs, animations, all of it—are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Want to see what a production character rig looks like? Or know how that giant color tornado was created? How about actually using a character (or just a prop) in your own project? Maybe you even want to redo the entire film to your own tastes. It’s an open movie! You can!

    • Making strides in container integration, and more OpenStack news

  • Programming

    • The thin line between good and bad automation

      I don’t like automation — I love it. I whisper sweet nothings, come ’round with flowers, and buy milkshakes for automation. I’ve even stood outside the window with a boombox for automation. I will go out of my way to automate tasks that, while they are not terribly tedious, I don’t want to have to remember exactly how to do them somewhere down the road, when months have gone by since the last time I had to relearn them.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Breaking the Depleted Uranium Ceiling

      It is an astonishing fact that, despite near universal recognition now that the war in Iraq was a disaster, no major British social institution is headed by a single one of the majority of the population wo were opposed to the war.

      Every Cabinet Minister actively supported the war. Of the fifteen Tory MPs who rebelled and voted against the war, not one is a minister. Civil servants officially have no politics but privately their opinions are known. There is not one single Permanent Under Secretary of a UK government department who was known to be against the war and most were enthusiasts. Simon Fraser, PUS at the FCO, was an active Blairite enthusiast for the war. Though no Blairite, the Head of MI6 Alex Younger was also an enthusiast.

    • Missing From Reports of Yemeni Carnage: Washington’s Responsibility

      But that “huge role” often disappears when the the leading papers are discussing the carnage that results from the air attacks that the US is supporting and supplying. Thus when the Times‘ Rick Gladstone (8/22/15) reported that “Saudi-led airstrikes on a residential district in Yemen’s southwestern city of Taiz had killed more than 65 civilians, including 17 people from one family,” according to Doctors Without Borders, and that the death toll in the war included “hundreds of civilians killed in airstrikes,” Washington’s role in facilitating those deaths went unmentioned.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Obama can rename Mount McKinley Denali — but he can’t stop its loss of ice

      This Monday through Wednesday, President Obama will be in Alaska, visiting melting glaciers and remote towns and meeting with other Arctic leaders. On Sunday, the president made a major statement by officially renaming Mt. McKinley — the U.S.’s highest peak — Denali, its traditional native name.

      The trip’s purpose is to highlight climate change — and for Alaska in particular, the change has been dramatic.

  • Finance

    • Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything

      These Wall Street veterans all know who Blythe Masters is. She’s the wunderkind who made managing director at JPMorgan Chase at age 28, the financial engineer who helped develop the credit-default swap and bring to life a market that peaked at $58 trillion, in notional terms, in 2007. She’s the banker later vilified by pundits, unfairly some say, after those instruments compounded the damage wrought by the subprime mortgage crash in 2008. Now, one year after quitting JPMorgan amid another controversy, Blythe Masters is back. She isn’t pitching a newly minted derivative or trading stratagem to this room. She’s promoting something wilder: It’s called the blockchain, and it’s the digital ledger software code that powers bitcoin.

    • eBay Pledges Loyalty To PayPal — Bans Rivals

      eBay will soon be banning PayPal rivals, ProPay and Skrill, from offering payment services to sellers on its platform.

    • Police force could lose 22,000 jobs under new spending cuts

      Major reduction in funding could see number of police officers in England and Wales fall to 40-year low

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Muhammad cartoon editor gets Norway prize

      Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, who was behind the controversial 2005 publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons, is being honoured by a Norwegian free speech group.

  • Privacy

    • Don’t let Roanoke murderer’s arrest justify a license plate reader rise

      As someone who has been reporting on license plate readers (LPR) for some time now, it actually surprised me when I heard that Roanoke, Virginia, shooter Vester Lee Flanagan had been first located through the use of the scanning device. While the devices have been in use in Virginia for years, their effectiveness and efficiency there—and nationwide—is questionable.

      According to local media accounts, when Virginia State Police Trooper Pamela Neff received the suspect’s plate number over her radio last week, she punched it into her LPR system and got an alert that the car had passed by not three minutes earlier. Within 10 minutes, Neff and other officers converged on Flanagan’s location, finding that he had shot himself, ending the manhunt.

    • Fake EFF site serving espionage malware was likely active for 3+ weeks

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Introduces Rules Banning WiFi Router Firmware Modification

      For years we have been graced by cheap consumer electronics that are able to be upgraded through unofficial means. Your Nintendo DS is able to run unsigned code, your old XBox was a capable server for its time, your Android smartphone can be made better with CyanogenMod, and your wireless router could be expanded far beyond what it was originally designed to do thanks to the efforts of open source firmware creators. Now, this may change. In a proposed rule from the US Federal Communications Commission, devices with radios may be required to prevent modifications to firmware.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Yandex Demands Takedown of ‘Illegal’ Music Downloader

        Russian search giant Yandex has ordered U.S-based Github to take down a tool that allows downloading of MP3s from its music streaming service. Yandex, which has 60% of the local search market and has deals with Universal, Sony and Warner to offer a Spotify-like platform, says that the music downloader is illegal.

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/09/01/netrunner-14-2-lts/feed/ 0 Microsoft’s Patent Attacks on Free Software Intensify as Microsoft’s Mobile Ambitions Officially Dead and Vista 10 Failing http://techrights.org/2015/08/05/royalties-on-every-linux-device/ http://techrights.org/2015/08/05/royalties-on-every-linux-device/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:10:25 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=84387 Looking for royalties — no matter how minuscule — on every Linux device sold

Love of money

Summary: Microsoft is very desperate to extract money out of Linux (which has won major battles and billions of users), using software patents and royalty stacking with help from patent trolls

ONE MUST be deluded or seriously misinformed to actually believe that Microsoft is doing well, having just laid off many employees, admitted billions in losses, permanently ended many of its products, and then revealed a widely-loathed version of Windows which many people are simply unwilling to adopt. They won’t ‘upgrade’ to it, not even for ‘free’ (a false promise even for those who 'upgrade'). Our confidential sources inside Microsoft say that even Microsoft staff doesn’t like Vista 10.

At the same time that Vista 10 was released Bill Gates, who is officially back to Microsoft’s management team, dumped his Microsoft shares by the millions (see “Warning Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) optimists! William Gates just Unloaded 4,000,000 shares.”)

Useds [sic] of Vista 10 don’t like it, so they use other software and defect away from what Microsoft is offering. Based on silence from Microsoft, not many people even install Vista 10. In the first day, despite it being a ‘free’ upgrade, less than 1% of useds actually moved to it and Microsoft has been tight-lipped since then. Every other number has been unofficial, speculative, and patently false, for reasons that we explained here before.

We now see more hogwash from the trend-setting media. Referring to Microsoft’s losses, the author says this “was only the third loss in its history as a public company.”

Not really, as there is a long history of financial fraud (false reporting of revenue and income). The New York Times trusts Microsoft’s claims far too irresponsibly. It’s just gullible. It also promotes the illusion of Microsoft layoffs not being Microsoft’s fault. Remember that Nokia did much better before Microsoft hijacked the company, initially with a mole. Microsoft layoffs are not just a Nokia thing. See this video from a guy whom Microsoft laid off “after 15 years of service” (to use his own words).

IBTimes, another misleading publication (usually misleads in favour of big businesses), pretends that Microsoft was “third among global smartphones”.

“That’s a low bar,” explained iophk to us. “But the ibtimes lumps several categories together to boost appearances of Microsoft market share.” Yes, they make it seem like Microsoft had nearly 4% of the market. In reality it’s far lower than that. Microsoft will soon head down towards 1% or 0%, considering its abandonment — indefinitely — of Windows Phone/Mobile.

A few days ago many news sites (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4]) covered Nokia’s sale of HERE Maps for just over 3 billion dollars. Recall old articles such as “Nokia to Pay $8.1 Billion for Navteq”. “Contrast with sale price from a few days ago,” iophk wrote to us. It’s now down to less than half, so Microsoft’s damage to Nokia goes far beyond just the mobile business. German companies are eating Nokia’s remaining business, so Nokia will soon appear (and function) as nothing but a pile of patents, i.e. a patent troll.

Florian Müller, a German lobbyist who has worked for Microsoft, calls the sale of HERE Maps the “next stage of transformation into patent troll”. Remember that Microsoft already instructed Nokia to pass its patents to trolls such as MOSAID, i.e. trolls with a Linux-hostile track record. MOSAID has renamed itself since, but it’s the same evil entity with the same patents at hand. Microsoft armed MOSAID using Nokia’s patents. Sites like Groklaw didn’t miss that because of the huge number of patents involved. MOSAID is now known as “Conversant”, not to be confused with the Conservancy (pro-GPL).

“Remember that Microsoft already instructed Nokia to pass its patents to trolls such as MOSAID, i.e. trolls with a Linux-hostile track record.”Müller, incidentally, also wrote about Corel suing Microsoft using patents, perpetuating an unverified myth that “Microsoft has numerous patent cross-license agreements in place (including with dozens of smartphone, tablet and netbook manufacturers who pay Microsoft considerable amounts of royalties on devices powered by Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems)” (we do not know if Microsoft gets anything from these, except FUD and leverage). Remember that Microsoft’s goal is not to make Android its own cash cow but to make it uneconomic (not competitive in terms of price) because of many small royalties, aggregated/combined from many non-producing directions/vectors, to ultimately become huge numbers (patent stacking with help from Microsoft-leaning trolls, of which there can be thousands). Consider Intellectual Ventures, which was pretty much the creation of Microsoft and Bill Gates. It already has thousands of proxies (to litigate from) and 2 days ago this bizarre piece was grooming it (“Built By Industry Leading Companies” even though it is undeniably Microsoft connected). This revisionism and grooming of the world’s largest patent troll ought to worry everyone because in recent months Intellectual Ventures repeatedly used software patents to attack Android (we covered this at the time).

Putting aside the unverified claims from Müller (he has pro-Microsoft history and paychecks from Microsoft too), it is interesting to see Corel, which Microsoft destroyed like it later destroyed Novell and Nokia, taking Microsoft to court after all this time.

Another legal battle that made the news last week was to do with Motorola, a steward of Android (under Google) which Microsoft was extorting using patents. Google bought part of Motorola after Microsoft and other Android foes created CPTN and Rockstar, using patents from large companies that they bought. Those same Android foes wanted to buy Motorola’s patents (based on credible reports), so Google had to act fast and prevent that by bidding defensively, even overpaying by a huge margin. If Android foes tried to buy Motorola’s patents to weaponise them as well, having already used patents from companies like Novell and Nortel offensively, who can blame Google for buying Motorola’s patents? And watch what Microsoft is already doing with Nokia’s patents.

“Don’t think that a dying company like Microsoft will just drop dead without a last fight.”The Microsoft-Motorola situation quickly become a Microsoft-Google feud and some days ago Google lost this battle. To quote corporate media (Fortune): “The patent-fueled litigation frenzy among tech companies has finally subsided but, even as firms make nice with each other, there’s a lot of mopping up to do from the earlier fights that peaked around 2012. Take, for example, that time when Google GOOG bought Motorola and its patents in order to fight rivals, including Microsoft MSFT and Apple AAPL , who had ganged up to attack its Android devices.”

There is a lot more coverage in legal sites, legal chronicles, and legal blogs, not to mention Microsoft-friendly sites, pro-Microsoft sites (by design) [1, 2], and much of the corporate media [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], even some smaller news sites [1, 2, 3], some of which focus on law [1, 2]. These all serve to remind us that Microsoft is still attacking Android (and by extension Linux) using software patents. Don’t think that a dying company like Microsoft will just drop dead without a last fight. Secrecy has been Microsoft’s strongest weapon here; it’s a shame that many Linux-leaning sites have been ignoring or overlooking this. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/08/05/royalties-on-every-linux-device/feed/ 14 Microsoft Injects Its Proprietary Software Into Free Software Stacks and the Open Container Project http://techrights.org/2015/06/22/open-container-project-microsoft/ http://techrights.org/2015/06/22/open-container-project-microsoft/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2015 23:25:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=83598 “The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”

–Bruce Perens

Summary: The Microsoft plot to paint its proprietary software ‘open’ is largely successful, as even the Linux Foundation relents on defensive antagonism and gives up on software freedom

SEVERAL weeks ago we wrote about the openwashing of “Edge” (not to be confused with Ubuntu Edge), which is a Microsoft rebrand essentially, pretending that Microsoft embraces “Open Source” on the Web. Microsoft is still openwashing proprietary software by virtually googlebombing [1, 2, 3] “open source edge” etc. When searching for “open source windows” you might expect ReactOS, but that’s no longer the case, surely not after a misleading media blitz. Here is an example from a Microsoft propaganda site. It says: “Microsoft now makes all these feature demos available as open-course on GitHub, so that the developers can get them hands-on to learn more about it. The sole aim of presenting the Test Drive Site is to help developers play around with the new interface and its features and to get hands-on review and endways experience before the official launch of Windows 10 in July 29.”

“Are all these recent hires from Microsoft making the Linux Foundation unable to say “no” to Microsoft?”The kind of openwashing extends from Edge (proprietary) to Vista 10 (also proprietary and definitely not free, no matter how many times Microsoft lies about the cost [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). How can Microsoft get away with this? If people are passive enough, it might actually pass muster.

We have meanwhile found this new article titled “Install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on 32-bit Ubuntu Systems with Ubuntu Make 0.8.2″. It’s an article from a Linux site (Softpedia’s Linux section) which tactlessly helps Microsoft entrap GNU/Linux users. That’s the second time in about a month and once again, installing proprietary software from Microsoft is described as a reasonable thing to do (or worth doing, like installing Microsoft’s malware Skype on GNU/Linux). Visual Studio Code is proprietary and it may have malicious antifeatures that no audit can yet demonstrate. That’s aside from the fact that helping Microsoft is unwise. The editor promotes .NET and other Microsoft lock-in. GNU/Linux already had plenty of fantastic code editors, most of which are Free software and framework-neutral.

Speaking of helping Microsoft, watch the Linux Foundation’s Open Container Project — like others before it — getting infiltrated by Microsoft upon launch:

Microsoft and a bunch of its biggest competitors, including Google and Amazon, have joined forces for the Open Container Project, a non-profit organization housed under the Linux Foundation – the governing body of the Linux open source operating system, which Microsoft once considered its biggest competitor.

The Linux Foundation needs to watch out as it foolishly opens the lion’s mouth wide open yet again, as if just to look at what’s deep inside the lion’s throat (lots of carcasses of other prior fools like Corel, Yahoo!, Nokia, and Novell). Microsoft still wants to destroy GNU/Linux and its participation in the Open Container Project is about promoting Windows (containers greatly contribute to the obsolescence of Windows, according to a new Red Hat study). What was the Linux Foundation thinking in this case? Are all these recent hires from Microsoft making the Linux Foundation unable to say “no” to Microsoft? █

“We [Microsoft] believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

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