02.18.13
Posted in Apple, Patents at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Samsung extends lead over Apple and Apple’s current CEO reportedly opposed suing Samsung (which is dumping Apple now)
The lawyers at a pro-FRAND blog “essential patent” write about Apple’s action in relation to Microsoft’s when they say “some of Apple’s arguments in its opposition raise some interesting questions about whether jurisdiction over this appeal will be consistent with past and potential future appeals of orders in the Microsoft-Motorola RAND case.”
Apple and Microsoft pretend to be victims in the FRAND case while they are the ones suing and giving standard-essential patents to trolls. Samsung complains that this whole litigation war it never started is hurting innovation — something which Apple hardly does any of (it also censors sites). Jobs’ good friend Larry Ellison is still suing Android:
Oracle has filed its appeal brief [PDF] in Oracle v. Google with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. I have it for you. Google must file its reply by March 28, according to the docket.
Android, in the mean time, leaves Apple well behind:
According to Thursday data from Canalys, Android smartphones made up 34 percent of global phone shipments during the fourth quarter, while iOS came in at 11 percent. Overall, smartphones represented 50 percent of the phones that shipped during the quarter
Reuters has this interesting new report and over at self-censoring CBS, Steven Musil cites Reuters as saying that “Tim Cook reportedly opposed patent suits against Samsung”, unlike Jobs. Samsung easily leads this market now.
Apple still has patents as a principal strategy, based on new reports like this:
Recently, there has been this trend. Blogs look for patents filed by companies and then report on each of them as if they are second coming of Jesus in technology. Especially if it is Apple who is doing the filings.
A few days ago, this new patent showed up about Apple’s “new wave approach to fighting malware” with the author giving up half-researched commentary on it.
I was intrigued by this news (if you can call it that), not because it’s something new but instead because process isolation is hardly a new concept. The author mentions “Qubes OS” as the one to be original inventor before Apple but in fact, it has been used for years (eg chrooting/containers in linux) and more popular recently in Android’s uid based approach. Even Qualcomm (and other SoC vendors) have stuff that helps in this space with Trustzone based isolation between processor entities at hardware level.
In other news, Apple is said to have secured another outrageous patent:
Apple has been awarded a design patent for the slide-to-unlock feature used in iOS since 2007, which has been the subject of several legal battles.
Focusing on patents and litigation surely will distract Apple and allow Android to move forward. Apple would be wise to try to innovate, not that this would ever occur. It never did. Apple is branding, not manufacturing or research. Apple relies on companies like Samsung for both. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
May BT go to Hell…
Summary: Microsoft’s partner BT got sued after it had attacked Android; Microsoft has got malicious plans against Android
T
HE duopoly, Microsoft and Apple, has been trying to make Android expensive through patent stacking, FRAND, and lawsuits, some by trolls the duopolists arm. In the mean time Microsoft tries against Android the same tactics it used against Linux servers; it tries to port applications from FOSS platforms to Windows. One
pundit says:
Could Android–a mobile operating system from Microsoft’s arch rival Google–actually be the key to solving Microsoft’s mobile problems? I suggested as much in early January in a post called “Why Microsoft’s Surface Team Should Warm Up to Android.” In that post, I suggested that Microsoft’s new Surface tablets could resolve problems with the dearth of apps available from Microsoft by beginning to run Android apps through BlueStacks App Player.
BlueStacks App Player has been available for some time for Windows users who want to run Android apps on PCs, and it’s available for Mac users. And now, sure enough, BlueStacks has released a free version that is optimized for Microsoft’s Surface Pro.
With control of Linux through UEFI Microsoft may be planning to make life harder for Android, not just GNU and Linux. To quote Pamela Jones: “This isn’t precisely news, in that Microsoft announced in January of 2012 that BlueStacks would be built into Windows 8. This is Steve Ballmer’s dream: that FOSS applications run on Microsoft’s kernel instead of on Linux. So, let me get this straight: first Microsoft insists vendors build in UEFI, so folks have a major struggle to dual boot or to install Linux instead of Windows, if they can at all, and now this. Coincidence? The article pretends this is about “freedom” but trust me, that is the very last thing this is about. Nor did the community produce BlueStacks.”
BT, the company which does not value customers (I’ve had a lot of problems with them over the past month), has been suing Android along with the duopoly and other allies of theirs. Google fights back now:
BT’s plan to make millions of dollars from licensing its patent portfolio by suing web giants including Google has run into a problem: Google and its phone subsidiary Motorola Mobility are countersuing it for patent infringement, calling the lawsuit filed in 2011 by BT “meritless” and accusing it of using shell companies to file other suits.
Shell companies as in trolls. Microsoft does that, with MOSAID as an obvious example Google already complained about. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Search, Security at 6:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is searching for new fear-mongering ideas as it loses online (services and servers)
The decline of Bing has been rapid and I now see it accounting for no more than 5% of search engine referrals in my sites (I manage about a dozen). Bing is dying, so Microsoft resorts to pathetic FUD. It resorts to FUD such as this Scroogled [1, 2] nonsense we covered here before while it is also lying and cheating with secret belated patches to daemonise Google’s server platform of choice. We still see Microsoft's partner Trustwave seeding Red Hat and Linux FUD, not noting that Microsoft even admits not disclosing patches. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichol has just written about this too:
Linux, Windows, and security FUD
It’s 2013. but the Linux FUD just keeps coming. In the most recent example, security firm Trustwave claimed that Linux kernel vulnerabilities went unpatched more than twice as long as it took to fix unpatched flaws in Windows. This assertion would be a lot more believable if it wasn’t coming from a Microsoft partner.
[...]
What no one seems to have bothered to do when they reported that Linux was far more lax about taking care of so-called zero-day flaws was to see where Trustwave was coming from. Had they bothered with even a simple Google search they would have found that the company had partnered with Microsoft to bring their application firewall to Internet Information Server (IIS). In particular, Trustwave made a point of boasting how they’d collaborated with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
[...]
In the meantime, Linux, which I freely admit isn’t completely secure—no operating system on the planet ever will be—continues to be be trusted by the world’s biggest Web sites, such as Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia and by such mission-critical sites as the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. Now, as it has been for decades, Linux remains more secure than Windows, and no FUD can refute this.
Watch out for Microsoft spin because a lot of it exists right now and we haven’t the capacity to track all of it anymore. Full-time job and family limit my ability to do this like I used to. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Depending on Microsoft
Summary: New *Ubuntu releases are due to Microsoft’s latest antitrust-violating/esque tactics
The new releases from Canonical (screenshots above are from DistroWatch on Friday) bring little more than UEFI-related changes that accommodate Microsoft control of hardware. Should Ubuntu users require permission from Microsoft to merely run on hardware that Microsoft does not own? As one article put it:
The Ubuntu developers at Canonical have released the second support release for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”. The update adds the ability to boot the Long Term Support (LTS) version on systems that are using UEFI firmware and have Secure Boot enabled. This means that there are now two versions of Ubuntu, 12.04 LTS and 12.10, that can be booted while using the protection mechanism.
Need the GNU and Linux world now bend over with special releases whose main purpose is to overcome Microsoft’s anticompetitive schemes? █
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02.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Microsoft should use a Linux base for an OS. Right, now I’ve got the awful part of saying it out the way I’ll go into detail about how and why I think this would be such a good idea. For everyone. Yes, including Microsoft.
OK, here goes. I’m not going to go into the ideals and fundamentals of open-source, freedom, free software and all the stuff that Linux represents, that’s everywhere else, and I really don’t have time. For this post I’m only interested in the ideals. Henceforth I present my case m’lud.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Steam for Linux has already garnered quite a few interesting games, but some of them will stand out due to their quality. We compiled a list of the most interesting titles that are working right now and have the most potential.
The list is not put together in any particular order, but it does respect one condition. All the games mentioned here are working and are not in Beta, with one guilty exception.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Phone has got a lot of people excited about it. I am also excited about Ubuntu Phone but having learned from Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android hype last year, I am being a bit careful this time.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Testing and even using not-ready-yet technology of tomorrow is something that characterizes almost any Gnome user out there.
Many of us want to see the new exciting changes that the 3.8 release will bring, test the new features and see how the new version our favorite DE is evolving in almost real time.
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This post is about two months late and just one day after IGNOME Valentine’s Day ..and is pure gossip
The girl on the left, is Karen Sandler and she is my personal favorite Gnomer for 2012!
This hasn’t to do anything about good or bad developers or how significant their contribution is in GNOME. Therefore I am not including people as Bastien Nocera, Matthias Clasen, Emmanuele Bassi, Florian Mullner and others. As a matter of fact I am including only people I have talked with. The order is totally random, with the exception of Karen and Jasper, which I place them in first position
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It’s been a while since I looked at Chakra, so I was thinking now might be a good time to do that. Plus, KDE 4.10 just came out with a whole bunch of new features and fixes, so I wanted to check that out too. So this is the subject of today’s review.
I’ve tried Chakra a number of times before. It was originally derived from Arch, but since a couple years ago it has been developed in a fully independent manner. It uses a “semi-rolling” release model, in which applications like Mozilla Firefox and other front-end features like KDE are updated on a rolling basis, while core system components are held to be more stable.
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New Releases
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The Zorin OS Team have released Zorin OS 6.2 Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users utilizing old or low-powered hardware. This release is based on Lubuntu 12.04.2 and uses the LXDE desktop environment to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-spec machines. This new release includes newly updated software out-of-the-box. We also include our innovative Zorin Look Changer, Zorin Internet Browser Manager, Zorin OS Lite Extra Software and other programs from our earlier versions in Zorin OS 6.2 Lite.
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Gentoo Family
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The 11′th iteration of Sabayon has been released, as Fabio Erculiani announced on the official Sabayon page, stating that “this is a release you cannot miss!”
Those who don’t know, Sabayon Linux is a Gentoo-based rolling-release Linux distribution created by Fabio Erculiani that pursues the “Out of the box” thinking that’s available in both x86 and x64 architectures. It comes in many flavours and is available for users of all the leading Desktop Enviroments like KDE, GNOME, MATE, XFCE, and others.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has announced the release of version 1.1 of OpenShift which brings a number of enhancements and updates. OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 features a fully supported developer console that enables application deployment via a web browser, in addition to OpenShift Enterprise’s CLI and Eclipse IDE interfaces.
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Fedora
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Valve gave the best Valentine Day gift to its fans (to be precise Linux fans) by launching the Steam for Linux client officially. The company is endorsing Ubuntu Linux at the moment as it finds easier to focus on one product when it is experimenting.
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I am usually quick to write an article or something on the latest Ubuntu or Fedora release. But for Red Hat’s new Fedora 18 operating system, I thought I’d hold off a little and read some other users opinions before I make my own final call of judgement. Reading others opinions and reviews prompted me to check it out for myself due to the mixed reactions that I read. To be blunt,
Fedora 18 is a horrible release. Let me explain the issues that I encountered with the latest update.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As was promised, enthusiasts and developers will be able to flash Ubuntu onto their Galaxy Nexus’ before the end of the month. Canonical has announced that the Developer Preview of the new operating system will be released on February 21st. The surprise, however, is that the company has added support for the Nexus 4, and users with the latest Nexus phone will be able to download and flash Ubuntu onto their devices on the 21st as well. Additionally, the source code for the operating system and the tools needed to flash phones will come out on that date.
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Canonical is working on creating a pleasant experience on Ubuntu Phone, which is expected to be released later this year. The company made a call for collaboration on core apps and according to Mika Meskanen of Canonical the response has been great. This response encouraged the team to help those developers and designer who are working on core apps.
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Canonical — the company behind the Ubuntu project — announced that the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be available for the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4 on Feb. 21, 2013.
Canonical says the Touch Developer Preview is designed for enthusiasts and developers — giving them a chance to “familiarize themselves with Ubuntu’s smartphone experience and develop applications on spare handsets.”
Even better, Canonical will install the new OS on the phones of developers who want it and are attending Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona Feb. 25-28.
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Flavours and Variants
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Remember the perfect grade that Fuduntu got in my earlier review? Well, it’s not gonna happen this time. There are three reasons for that. One, it’s too easy to enable the Testing repository and screw your system. Two, the package manager needs more rework, namely being more flexible and responsive, having fewer issues with the locking, allowing easier, friendlier and more robust search, and allowing a smooth, seamless installation of the graphics drivers without the user having to resort to any command line tricks and tweaks. Lastly, the Nvidia driver installation was not flawless.
At the end of the day, I was having a badass distro that was fast, light, beautiful, and modern, but the cost was some pain, several hours of time lost, and the knowledge that a pristine setup is impossible. Overall, Fuduntu 2013.1 did what I needed, and I had my Nvidia drivers in place. I do not regret my decision to include this distribution in my setup, and the decision stays. But there’s more work needed, especially under the hood, to make sure that nothing goes wrong in multi-boot setups, blessed with tons of proprietary drivers. All that said, Fuduntu 2013.1 is still an awesome product.
To conclude this review, yes, another revolution did happen. I am running a Fedora-based distribution in my setup. It’s bleeding edge, it’s fast, modern, light, elegant, and comes with a mighty punch of programs, including Steam and Netflix. That’s nothing you can sneeze at. Fuduntu 2013.1 promises to be a big player in the Linux arena, and it sure has the capability to stand alongside Ubuntu and friends without feeling antiquated or complex or anything of that sort. The ultimate question of long-term support and relevance remains, the ability to remain flexible and adapt to changes, as well as iron out all and any bugs in the user space that could lead to systems being unbootable, botched or both. If this can happen, then Fuduntu 2013.1 could very well become No.1 Linux distro. for now, with this test concluded, it gets 9/10. Almost perfect. So damn close.
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Phones
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I always had high hopes for the Palm WebOS. I even owned a Palm Pre briefly, but returned it when I found the signal at my house was too low. Even though the mobile operating system had fewer features, I always thought that WebOS was superior to Android, at least in terms of usability and design. I’m still jealous of how you could swipe up to view all open apps as “cards”, and swipe between them to choose your next app. Unfortunately, it is not always the best technology that wins the market, and now ZDNet is predicting that HP is dropping WebOS in favor of Android.
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Android
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According to screenshots unearthed by SlashGear from a Korean messageboard, Samsung looks like it is building a smartwatch, probably but not certainly on an Android foundation…
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MTV has partnered with mobile handset maker Swipe Telecom to release its first co-branded smartphone called the MTV Volt in India.
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The Computer History Museum has made available the source code of version 1.0.1 of Photoshop for non-commercial use. Adobe Photoshop is the magic software which redefined the image manipulation. This 20 year old software which was first written for Apple’s Mac in pascal has become a verb.
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A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to spend my days working with and talking about Open Source software. It was exhilarating while it lasted, but after a few years, I had to return to product-based professional services to make a living.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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If the arrival of Windows 8 opened new doors for Linux in the world of desktop operating systems last fall, then it seems fair to say that the recent arrival of Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365 has surely done something similar for free and open source office suites.
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Education
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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We’ve written a few times now about an important case involving fair use within university libraries and their “e-reserves.” It involves some academic publishers (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications) suing the Georgia State University for daring to allow professors to designate content such that it can be checked out electronically, just like they would with physical content. The publishers demand to be paid extra for such things, because the key to things going digital, to them, is the ability to get paid multiple times for what used to be free. The court eventually came out with a detailed and complex ruling that found most of the e-reserves to be fair use. We had some concerns about some seemingly arbitrary “tests” that the judge came up with, but on the whole were encouraged by the strong fair use support.
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Open Hardware
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In the underground world of robotic tentacle makers, there are two rules: 1) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making and 2) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making. Both of those rules have been shattered by Matthew Borgatti, a robotics designer who has created a life-like, 3D-printed tentacle that flails around quite disturbingly using Arduino boards and a set of mini air compressors.
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Standards/Consortia
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The article of Klimburg overlooks that ITU-T is a multistakeholder organisation and European players embark on a cybersovereignty approach, simply because the multistakeholderism of the US does not give them a fair share, still they cannot support an expansion of power for ITU world governance: In a world with more than 200 nations “world governance” leads to hypocrite political corruption, nurtures a political class that at best trickles down the “capacity building and technical assistance” in their nation.
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Science
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Security
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Kevin Mitnick, who once gained notoriety as America’s most wanted computer hacker, now heads a thriving Internet consultancy tasked with helping keep Sunday’s presidential elections in Ecuador secure.
“Eighteen years ago I was busted for hacking. I do the same thing today but with full authorization. How cool is that?” Mitnick wrote on his @kevinmitnick Twitter account on the eve of the vote.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Appearing on the radio Thursday with host Tavis Smiley, professor Cornel West argued that President Barack Obama is, like Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him, a “war criminal” uniquely responsible for the deaths of “over 200 children.”
West’s words were in response to a question about the administration’s seeming preference for killing terrorism suspects from the air rather than risking American lives to take them prisoner and hold them for an indefinite amount of time in military custody. A legal whitepaper obtained by NBC News recently exposed the Obama administration’s once-secret justification for the program, which authorizes a deadly airstrike if intelligence officials believe it may take out any “senior operational leaders” of al Qaeda or “associated forces,” even if that includes an American
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*Brian Bentley, 49, doesn’t agree with what Christopher Dorner — the ex-cop at center of a massive manhunt for the killings of three people—has done, but he certainly understands it.
As a former LAPD officer, Bentley, who is now an author, says that a Dorner-like situation was just a matter of time.
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Mary and Rick Todd were anxious about entering the apartment where their oldest son had lived and died. Late last June the couple had flown from Montana to Denver to Los Angeles to a colonial-era house in the Chinatown district of Singapore to try to make sense of an unthinkable loss: Shane Todd, a young engineer who had just wrapped up an 18-month stint with a government research institute known as IME, was dead – an apparent suicide, according to the Singapore police. Mrs Todd felt her heart pounding as she climbed the narrow staircase to his apartment and thought about what the police had told her a day earlier.
[...]
The Todds agree that Shane’s hard drive may be a critical piece of evidence in how he died and could shed fresh light on the vulnerabilities of technology safeguards. But they question how the Singapore police have so far investigated Shane’s death, so they won’t hand over the drive. They are offering, instead, to send a copy of the contents of the drive. In return, they want the Singapore police to send them a copy of all files on Shane’s laptops, which are still in police custody. And again, they are asking the Singapore authorities to invite the FBI to help investigate how their son died.
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With each hearing before the Guantanamo military commission, it becomes more evident that privileged legal communications defense attorneys are supposed to be able to have with their clients are being violated.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are all on trial for their alleged involvement in the September 11th attacks. Their lawyers have challenged alleged eavesdropping on communications during commission proceedings, in holding cells and in meeting facilities.
[...]
…FBI had installed listening devices in the facilities where they have been holding attorney-client meetings.
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The act of killing is an unnatural act for everyone.
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An MSNBC film, hosted by Rachel Maddow and based on Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book, finds new evidence that Bush scammed the nation into war.
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Three Libyan doctors, visiting Boston and Seattle to begin a health-care partnership with U.S. physicians, say they were detained and interrogated as soon as they arrived in the U.S.
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The administration of President Barack Obama refuses to acknowledge to a court that the CIA actually has a drone program that exists. This act is repellent in one respect because the administration’s nominee for CIA chief, John Brennan, sat before senators and answered questions about the program during his confirmation hearing. It is also detestable and fraudulent because President Obama continues to assert his administration is the most transparent and ethical administration in the history of the United States, even as it vigorously fights a major Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in court that would further reveal the legal basis for the administration’s claimed authority to target and execute persons abroad without charge or trial.
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A training document released in response to a civil liberties organization’s lawsuit and obtained by The Huffington Post reveals that the government considers an “analyst’s wisdom” the ultimate arbiter of whether data on American citizens can be classified as “terrorist information” and retained forever.
“Only a CT (counter-terrorism) analyst can determine whether data constitutes terrorism information,” the electronic training course for new National Counterterrorism Center analysts states. “There is no requirement that the analyst’s wisdom be rock solid or infallible.”
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Don’t Americans have “the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them”? As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., put it last week, you’d think that’s “not too much to ask.”
For three years now, thanks to Obama administration leaks, we’ve known that the president claims the right to summarily execute American citizens far from any battlefield. He even joked about it at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2010, telling the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters: “Two words for you: ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.” (Oh, Barack — you slay me.)
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The Congressional Research Service (CRS), which normally publishes stellar reports, just did one on Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information.
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The current gun control debate is focused, not surprisingly, on the carnage from rapid-firing assault weapons, like the one used in the Connecticut school massacre. But beneath the surface lies a disturbing reality: nearly two-thirds of the 30,000 gun deaths each year are not the work of deranged mass shooters but the suicides of troubled individuals with easy access to firearms, often in quiet family homes.
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John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, didn’t officially acknowledge the CIA’s role in the use of drones in the targeted killing of suspected terrorists overseas during his testimony last week, a Justice Department lawyer contended in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week.
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This is disingenuous. First of all, Obama is empowered to declassify anything that he likes. More to the point, even U.S. senators with direct oversight responsibility have complained about the White House’s failure to answer multiple, specific information requests, as the John Brennan hearings illustrated. The problem isn’t just that this information isn’t on the front page of the New York Times. For example, Senator Ron Wyden isn’t even permitted to know in how many countries America is killing people!
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Cablegate
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It is the degree of choice for the Westminster elite, claiming six cabinet members and three Labour leadership contenders among its alumni. Why does Oxford’s politics, philosophy and economics course dominate public life?
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The full cost to Scotland Yard of preventing Julian Assange from escaping from the Ecuador embassy was disclosed yesterday as £2.9 million.
The figure, released after a Freedom of Information Act request by The Times, includes £2.3 million diverted from normal policing duties and £600,000 in extra overtime.
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…campaigned against fracking and honored Julian Assange..
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The Evangelos Florakis Naval Base explosion in Mari occurred on 11 July 2011, when 98 containers of explosives that had been stored for 2½ years in the sun on the Evangelos Florakis Naval Base near Zygi self-detonated. The resulting explosion killed 13 people, and damaged all of the buildings in Zygi, the island’s largest power station, then responsible for supplying over half of Cyprus’ electricity.
The containers of explosives on the base had been seized by the US Navy in 2009 after it intercepted a Cypriot-flagged, Russian owned vessel, the MV Monchegorsk, travelling from Iran to Syria in the Red Sea. According to US diplomatic cables leaked through WikiLeaks, the US pressured Cyprus to confiscate the shipment, as it was apparently in violation of UN sanctions on Iran. [1] The Cyprus Navy was given responsibility for the explosives, and it moved them to the Evangelos Florakis a month later.
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British police have already spent some $4.5 million in patrolling for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, eight months into his confinement at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, Scotland Yard says.
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Sam Castro, the co-founder of the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance, spoke with the VOR’s John Robles about Julian Assange’s Australian Senate bid, internal Australian politics and the rules and current condition of Australian government policies, the public’s support of Mr. Assange and the soon-to-be-official WikiLeaks Party and what has happened to Australia and the Australian people since the United States of America pulled Australia into the endless “War on Terror”. Her viewpoint from the inside of Australia is both refreshing and informative as she details everything from surveillance to foreign policy.
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Finance
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Hedge fund star David Einhorn wants to force Apple Inc to share some of its huge cash reserves with investors, but his lawsuit rests on a U.S. securities rule that has little legal precedent.
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U.S. securities regulators filed suit on Friday against unknown traders in the options of ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co, alleging they traded on inside information before the company announced a deal to be acquired for $23 billion by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc and Brazil’s 3G Capital.
The suit, in federal court in Manhattan, cites “highly suspicious trading” in Heinz call options just prior to the Feb. 14 announcement of the deal. The regulator has frequently in past filed suit against unnamed individuals where it has evidence of wrongdoing, but is still trying to uncover the identities of those involved.
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But compare this rapid arrest of “small men” with the LIBOR scandal, where banks indisputably rigged, deliberately and repeatedly rigged, the basis of many trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions. It was deliberate dishonesty, fines on the banks have added up to billions, but not one of the fraudulent bankers who did it has been arrested – even though it is known who they are and there is a ton of documentary evidence. Not one arrest. Not one. Just as nobody has been arrested in this country for the fraudulent sub-prime packages and interest rate swaps that led ordinary, and even very poor, people to have to pay out huge proportions of their income to “bailout” the bankers.
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How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
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Someone drank too much coffee this morning before a Senate Banking Committee hearing and decided to “do the job we hired her for” and ask the question the rest of us have been “asking for years.” That someone is my new favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren. Someone go on another Starbucks run for her, pretty please?
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In our last episode of that ongoing Washington soap opera, “As the Door Revolves,” we introduced you to former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White, pursuer of drug lords and terrorists, who left government to become a hot shot Wall Street lawyer defending such corporate giants as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, General Electric and Microsoft. Oh yes — and former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, currently appealing his insider trading conviction.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Oxford Union has dubbed fake applause onto the videos of John Bolton’s address to the Union. It has not done this for any other speaker.
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Privacy
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This week, CISPA was reintroduced in the House of Representatives. EFF is joining groups like ACLU and Fight for the Future in combating this legislation.
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Yesterday the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office presented a proposal for the purchase of a drone in a public hearing with the Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee in Oakland, California. EFF joined the ACLU of Northern California and several other public interest groups in testifying against a drone purchase until the Sheriff’s Office adopts a substantive, binding privacy policy—with no loopholes—that protects citizens from undue surveillance.
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A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country. Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.
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For now, while journalists can take some steps to protect themselves and their sources, they are limited by the nature of their cellphones. At a panel in May, investigative journalist Matthew Cole, who works on U.S. national security and intelligence issues, demonstrated how he conducts his work using an elaborate protocol taught to him by digital security expert Chris Soghoian. Cole uses two cellphones; they are bought anonymously; they are never used together; and one always has its battery removed, to prevent it from accidentally being activated and to ensure the two numbers are never linked.
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The company, which makes the microchips found inside most personal computers, has launched an entirely new division, Intel Media, to make and market the Orwellian streaming-television product.
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Civil Rights
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Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher enforcement, said ICE “wouldn’t have to do a hail Mary to juice the numbers” if it hadn’t ordered its agents to halt efforts to deport some illegal immigrants.
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The past two weeks have brought us 3 bombshell exhibits on why the military commissions at Guantanamo are an utter faiure. First,we learned that the audio and video feeds at the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and 4 others mysteriously went out as the defense was presenting a motion, to the surprise of even the judge. (It turned out the “Original Classification Authority” (read: CIA) was the culprit.
Then we learned that the government has been eavesdropping on attorney-client privileged communications through a microphone disguised as a smoke detector.
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DRM
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Nearly seven million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners have cracked Apple’s restrictions on their devices…
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Macmillan agreed Friday to let retailers reduce the costs of its e-books, the Justice Department said, leaving Apple to face price-fixing charges at trial.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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ACTA and SOPA may have flopped, but minor setbacks like that won’t stop the onslaught of abuses from the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries looking to use the international treaty process to try to pressure everyone to keep ratcheting up protectionist laws concerning copyright, patents and trademarks. Obviously, we’ve been talking about the still worrisome TPP agreement involving a bunch of Pacific Rim countries, but it’s not stopping there. Back in October, we warned that the US and EU were preparing a new trade agreement as well, and the preliminary plans noted that it would include a “high level of intellectual property protection, including enforcement.”
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Copyrights
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02.15.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This just goes to show that GNU/Linux and FLOSS are sustainable choices for business. Ernie Ball saves money every time M$ pushes a new release on the world.
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If you’re a Linux user, and if you like tablets, it’s hard to say whether these are the best of times or the worst of times. While some initiatives to put Linux on tablets appear to be making steady progress, other open source projects in this vein have stagnated or disappeared. Read on for an update on where Linux currently stands in this niche, and the direction in which it might be headed.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel now includes everything that is needed to use 3D acceleration with all GeForce graphics chips. Drivers have also been added for a Wireless Gigabit chip and a PCIe WLAN chip from Realtek.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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No longer a pipe-dream or a beta, the Steam gaming client is now available for Ubuntu. What was that about there not being any games for Linux?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Aside from all the Phoronix video recordings of the X.Org and Wine development rooms during the FOSDEM 2013 meeting last weekend in Brussels, Vincent Untz went over the direction of GNOME and whether the GNOME community has gone crazy.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is rapidly moving ahead with its OpenStack-centric cloud computing plans and its OpenShift Enterprise offering–a platform-as-a-service solution. The company has just releasd OpenShift Enterprise 1.1, “an enterprise-ready PaaS product from Red Hat that is designed to be installed on-premise within customer datacenters or private, public or hybrid clouds.” The new version includes a graphical user interface, and is built on a stack of open source-based Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and OpenShift Origin. According to Red Hat, “the product enables customers to streamline and standardize developer workflows, facilitating increased IT service delivery velocity that can better support business demands.”
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is working on creating a pleasant experience on Ubuntu Phone, which is expected to be released later this year. The company made a call for collaboration on core apps and according to Mika Meskanen of Canonical the response has been great. This response encouraged the team to help those developers and designer who are working on core apps.
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An app that mimics the proposed Ubuntu operating system (OS) for smartphones has been developed for Android handsets.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu fans can now test the second alpha of 13.04 which comes with KDE SC 4.10. The testing image are available for download from this page.
The Alpha 2 Raring Ringtail snapshot includes a the 3.8.0-6.11 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the the upstream v3.8-rc6 Linux kernel. Notable changes include initial support for arm multiplatform support for TI omap3/4 and Freescale imx6, alx ethernet driver support, misc config updates and security fixes.
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As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has continued to attract developers and tinkerers, has its very own app store, and is showing up in multiple types of project and usage cases. The Raspberry Pi has become a very interesting story in a short amount of time, and there are also a number of notable guides and tutorials–many of them free and some of them video-based–that can help you get started with the Pi. Here are three excellent resources for getting started.
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Phones
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In a 2010 post here on OStatic, I asked this question: “Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?” And in a follow-up post a few weeks ago, I discussed the impending arrival of a slew of mobile phones based on Firefox OS and Ubuntu. Now, there are even more concrete signs that we are going to see heavy competition among open mobile operating systems this year. Not ony have Firefox OS-based phones arrived (seen above), but Ubuntu phones are coming faster than many people thought they would.
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Android
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I am going to an election party in the Ecuador Embassy on Sunday. I shall do so with no sense of guilt. Since Correa gave political asylum to Assange, many with no record of concern for human rights in Ecuador – and who still show absolutely no concern for human rights in Bahrain or Uzbekistan – are suddenly immensely critical of Correa’s human rights record. Many of the same people are suddenly concerned for the appalling plight of rape victims, despite no track record whatsoever of concern for women’s rights.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Between the tiny PC phenomenon and the growing number of PCs shipping with Linux preloaded over the past year, there’s been no shortage of hardware announcements for Linux fans.
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Then, too, there’s the “Vivaldi” tablet, which has been appearing off and on in the news for quite some time now.
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The French device company tries to introduce another noteworthy product to stand out in the tablet crowd.
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Recovery-as-a-Service in open cloud country is on the way.
Vision Solutions has taken its replication and disaster recovery services into sharper open computing territory by adding a Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) option to Apache CloudStack as well as Citrix CloudPlatform.
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Events
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Mark Hinkle works for Citrix as the Senior Director of Cloud Computing and will be speaking a couple times at SCALE11X. We had some time to talk to Mark about his talk at SCALE11X, Open Source, and Cloud.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla maintains a wide range of services which are secured using different solutions. For internal repositories, our Operations Security team has chosen to use the low-cost, open source and open hardware CryptoStick from the German Privacy Foundation.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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More developers with varying skills, yet better code? More iterations, yet greater stability? It’s happening with LibreOffice
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Public Services/Government
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Local business leaders can either issue a request using Github—which is an online location where developers house their open-source code—or they can email the Nooga Startups team to be included.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Today marks an historic step forward for public access to publicly funded research in the United States. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. FASTR requires federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to the research articles stemming from that funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Internet users around the world got a Valentine’s Day present yesterday in the form of new legislation that requires U.S. government agencies to improve public access to federally funded research.
The proposed mandate, called the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act, or FASTR (PDF), is simple. Agencies like the National Science Foundation, which invests millions of taxpayer dollars in scientific research every year, must design and implement a plan to facilitate public access to—and robust reuse of—the results of that investment. The contours of the plans are equally simple: researchers who receive funding from most federal agencies must submit a copy of any resulting journal articles to the funding agency, which will then make that research freely available to the world within six months.
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Programming
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PHP 5.5 is now in its development cycle, currently at the Alpha 4 release. According to the initial release roadmap for PHP 5.5, this is the point where the feature freeze was supposed to happen, but that’s not necessarily going to happen, as at least one key feature may yet still land.
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Security
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Cypherpunks — a quick, stirring, scary read — transcribes a wide-ranging conversation between Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks/Tor Project), Andy Müller-Maguhn (Chaos Computer Club) and Jérémie Zimmermann (La Quadrature Du Net).
Edited together in thematic chapters (The Militarization of Cyberspace, Fighting Total Surveillance With the Laws of Physics, Private Sector Spying), Cypherpunks exceeded my expectations. I know some of the book’s protagonists personally and know how smart and principled they are. But I was afraid, going into this, that what would emerge would be a kind of preaching-to-the-choir consensus, because all four of the participants are on the same side.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In the run up to the Iraq War, the New York Times (9/8/02) famously reported on an Iraqi scheme to procure special aluminum tubes that could only have one purpose: Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein was attempting to “buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes,” and the “diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program.” The claims were false–Iraq, as it turned out, had no nuclear program–but still hugely influential.
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While the 9/11 accused were in court, prison camp guards seized from their cells a banned copy of a former FBI agent’s memoirs, toilet paper with English words scrawled on it and a pen refill hidden inside the binding of a book belonging to alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a prison camps lawyer testified Thursday.
Guards also seized bins full of legal documents that will be returned shortly, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. George Massucco, the prison camps lawyer. These actions capped a week of testimony about whether the government has violated the confidentiality of the alleged terrorists’ communications with their lawyers — from the courthouse to meeting rooms and now inside the prison itself.
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An interim report to Senator Carr has reportedly advised that Australian intelligence agencies told DFAT officials about Mr Zygier’s detention shortly after his arrest in February 2010. However, officials were unclear whether then foreign minister Stephen Smith was briefed.
Senator Carr’s office declined to respond when asked about the government’s precise knowledge of Israeli allegations about Mr Zygier.
As no request for consular assistance was made by Mr Zygier or his family, the matter was left to be dealt with through intelligence channels. No consular contact was made with Mr Zygier. It became involved on his death in December 2010.
Mr Zygier’s detention came at an increasingly tense time in Australian-Israeli relations.
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Claims that suspected Australian Mossad operative Ben Zygier was secretly jailed before his death in prison have brought to a head years of resentment at the way Israel’s security services use court gag orders to suppress sensitive information from the media.
Israeli intelligence services were aware that our Foreign Correspondent story was airing last Tuesday. The promo was going viral on social media, and airing on ABC TV in Australia. A press release had gone out the previous week, mentioning “Prisoner X”.
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John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, didn’t officially acknowledge the CIA’s role in the use of drones in the targeted killing of suspected terrorists overseas during his testimony last week, a Justice Department lawyer contended in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week.
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If the president can order the killing of
American citizens abroad should he decide they are involved with Al Qaeda, can he assassinate suspected Al Qaeda–connected US citizens in London or Berlin? What about a suspect’s teenage son, a junior in a Canadian boarding school? If he can drop hellfire missiles on a house in northwestern Pakistan because he believes a terrorist cell is meeting inside, could he blow up a motel in Florida where supposed terrorists are staying and chalk up any dead vacationers as “collateral damage”? Of course not. Pakistan is completely different. Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a US citizen, but he was in Yemen, which is different too. As for his 16-year-old son, killed in Yemen in a drone attack some weeks later along with several other people, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put it well, if ungrammatically: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.” Unlike in the United States, in Yemen kids choose their parents.
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Different Senate committees are supposed to do oversight of different federal agencies. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to oversee the Department of Justice. The Senate Armed Services committee is supposed to do oversight of the Pentagon. And the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to do oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the CIA is conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and since this is, to say the least, a controversial policy, the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be doing oversight of that.
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While the service has not formally notified Capitol Hill, a congressional source was told unofficially of LEMV’s cancellation. The reason likely has to do with the program being behind schedule and over budget, the source told InsideDefense.com. The program has been funded through reprogrammings rather than through the normal budget since its inception, the source added, guessing that the funding “fell out of the fiscal year 2014 budget in order to pay other bills.”
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If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his administration. Whether an innocent young man just trying to get home, shot in the back after being racially profiled and slurred, or a man driven to his breaking point after being fired from a similar police force that operates according to its own warped morality and overarching objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose wick has gotten shorter due to decades of looking the other way.
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Now, Lew’s role in Benghazi briefings really won’t affect his job as Treasury Secretary. But Brennan’s role might, particularly if the Murdoch boosted eBook alleging he was running ops in Libya out of the White House is true (I’m not saying it is).
In any case, the persistence of the Benghazi truthers has introduced an interesting dynamic I didn’t expect. Of the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, only Susan Collins and possibly Tom Coburn are not full-on Benghazi truthers (and James Inhofe, who gets a vote if he wants one as Armed Services Committee Ranking member, could add another truther vote).
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North Korea is again at the center of international attention due to assertions that its leadership is pursuing a program of enriching uranium in order to add more nuclear weapons to its current stockpile. In the context of the United States’ military’s ongoing “Asia Pivot,” and the disquiet of North Korea’s neighbors at the prospect of a nuclear arms race in East Asia, gaining a strong understanding of North Korea and its society remains a top priority for international affairs professionals and the global public alike.
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Veterans have attacked a “boneheaded” new military medal for US drone pilots, arguing that it would unfairly outrank honours earned by soldiers serving on the front line.
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President Barack Obama’s use of drones to kill people, including Americans, in other countries is at a minimum a failure of his often-repeated but seldom-honored commitment to government transparency. We also know that had President George W. Bush used drones to the extent Obama has done, the howling would have been deafening.
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Yes, law enforcement drones are coming, but if Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has his way they won’t leave the ground without a judge okaying it first.
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Kurt Piehler is an Associate Professor of History at FSU and director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. He says that while drones are more sophisticated than air power in WWII, drones are no exception to the collateral damage that it air power creates.
“I think there’s a larger question among historians as to the effectiveness of air power and that there’s a danger in seeing it as a panacea,” said Piehler. “You sometimes really do need boots on the ground. Airpower has rarely won a war and so you will need other covert forces.”
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After Osama bin Laden was assassinated in 2011, there was perhaps no more hotly sought after document on the planet than a hypothetical photograph of bin Laden’s dead body, which had of course arrived at that sorry state as a result of the most tightly controlled and choreographed military operation in recent history. After some public hemming and hawing in response to an overwhelming cry for visual proof of the venture’s success, the Obama White House acknowledged the existence of such photos but refused to release them in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from various parties. So one would imagine that, given the intense interest in the images and the high-profile litigation surrounding them, the CIA would conduct a rigorous accounting of each such image, its provenance, and current location, right? No, of course not. In fact, they just found some under the couch.
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The recent leak of a Department of Justice white paper on the legal justification for the use of drones to execute American citizens abroad accused of terrorism raises some very important constitutional and moral issues. Politicians should not decide the crime and the punishment for American citizens here or abroad. A trial by jury with a judge is a right to be prized by American citizens.
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The industry that supplies military robots and unmanned aerial vehicles has launched a rebranding campaign.
Manufacturers of remotely piloted aircraft, particularly, worry that their products are known mostly for spying and killing and not for their beneficial attributes.
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R2P as a formal legal mechanism to justify intervention still requires the consent of the Security Council.
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Two years to the day after the anti-Gadhafi uprisings began in Benghazi, the populace has again taken to the streets. This time they are protesting the new authorities failures to bring economic development and its prerequisite, security. Over the last two years, wide swathes of Libyan territory have been transformed into a non-governed space has indirectly facilitated the Islamist takeover in Mali and the attack by Al-Qaeda affiliates on Algeria’s In Amenas gas facility. If Libya is the fabled ‘gateway to Africa’, then the gate has been left wide open.
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Here is the worst-kept secret in Washington: Instead of capturing and grilling suspected terrorists, as agents did during the 2000s, the United States now kills them from above. Yet where the morality of President Bush’s tactics chewed up years of public debate, Congress and the press seem less interested in the legitimacy of drone strikes than in the process (and secrecy) that surrounds them. Members questioned John Brennan, the CIA nominee who helped build the administration’s drone strategy, along exactly these lines. “[The debate] has really all been about the legality of targeting American citizens, not the overall moral issues raised by the drone program, or collateral casualties, or classifying any young men between a certain age-group default as terrorists,” says Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. In a CBS News poll last week, 71 percent of Americans said they support the strikes.
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In written answers to Senate Intelligence Committee questions released Friday, CIA director nominee John Brennan would not say whether the U.S. could conduct drone strikes inside the United States — only that it did not intend to do so.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has placed a hold on Brennan’s nomination pending an answer to the question of when the government can use lethal force to target a U.S. citizen within the United States. Brennan, as the top White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President Barack Obama, has guided administration policy on the use of drones on foreign battlefields.
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Senators including John McCain, the former presidential candidate, said they would not allow the approval of John Brennan until they receive more details about Mr Obama’s response to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last September.
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But we aren’t supposed to be bothered by this policy, because we are expected to have confidence in “our leaders,” at least as long as they are members of the right political party. Surely they would not abuse this terrifying power. At this point, any self-respecting American should be quoting Jefferson: “That confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.” It is intolerable that the president can autocratically send unpiloted aircraft into foreign countries to kill people. And it is appalling that the administration feels it owes the people no detailed explanation of where this authority comes from. (A Justice Department white paper ostensibly describing a secret legal memo was obtained by NBC News.)
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Cablegate
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The Minister of the Interior said this morning, in parliament, that he thought that the FBI wanted to use an Icelandic computer hacker as bait to get closer to Wikileaks. Ms. Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of parliament, said that the Icelandic police authorities had believed a fictional story told by two hackers.
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Reaction to the release was swift. Bivol was subject to a massive smearing campaign in the media and a recurring DDoS attack on the site. In response to threats made against its journalists, Bivol is now releasing this insurance file. The key will leak automatically if something happens to our staff.
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In response to last year’s undercover videotaping of a Wheatland hog farm,which rightfully sickened and outraged the public, state Rep. Sue Wallis, R-Recluse, drafted legislation which would outlaw the type of undercover investigation that led to arrests in the case.
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The Age reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has filed to run for a seat in the Australian senate as a member of the new WikiLeaks Party, which consists of a 10-member national council of Assange’s associates. Assange, a controversial international figure that has facilitated several embarrassments for the US government through whistleblower leaks, is currently in political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange has been an outspoken critic of the US in recent years, seeking to draw attention to the country’s use of drones and its justification for “targeted killings.”
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And as demonstration of the truth of that statement actual documents have been posted on Wikileaks that embarrass world governments, politicians, military organizations, Intelligence Agencies, and major corporations and banking institutions. These documents have motivated any number of those embarrassed to attempt to shut down the website claiming one form of harm or another that may come from the publication of the evidence against them. Presumably the main harm is “someone told our secrets!”
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Julian Assange, insists his legal confidante Jennifer Robinson, is terribly misunderstood.
The WikiLeaks founder, holed up in a London embassy to elude Swedish prosecutors can, she concedes, be difficult. But Assange needs to be hardnosed “to achieve the things he’s done,” asserts Robinson.
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Justice is one of the most important virtues of a healthy society. The basic idea is that when a wrong is committed, there is a system to help right that wrong in a way that is equitably applied. Marcus Tullius Cicero, orator and statesman of Ancient Rome once said, “Justice commands us to have mercy upon all men, to consult the interests of the whole human race, to give to every one his due.” Justice is a scale that does not give favor to one side or the other, but stays in balance equally for everyone.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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The Human Rights Foundation last week slammed Goldman Sachs for their ongoing relationship with the Russian government, saying the bulge bracket bank was basically aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise.
They argued for Goldman Sachs to cease accepting payments from Russia, payments that go towards helping the bank make Russia look good to potential investors and international rating agencies. Russian officials last month announced that they will pay the Wall Street firm $500,000 over the next three years to help the Putin regime lure foreign cash.
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Goldman Sachs says that in its new role it will seek to highlight Russia’s commitment to increasing government transparency. “But the truth is transparency and corruption won’t take hold as long as the regime flouts the rule of law and uses Russia’s financial system as its personal piggy bank,” Kasparov said. “Virtually every NGO warns that the human rights situation in Russia is at its worst since the fall of the Soviet Union over two decades ago. By doing business with Putin, Goldman Sachs is acting as an enemy of free enterprise and economic freedom.”
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Censorship
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A documentary about a Japanese photojournalist who shed light on the plight of atomic bomb victims and the oppressed during his nearly seven-decade career, has won three accolades in cinema.
“Japan Lies: The Photojournalism of Kikujiro Fukushima, Age 90″ has proved so popular that a Hiroshima theater is showing the film before previously scheduled screening events in the prefecture this spring.
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Privacy
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It’s official: The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was reintroduced in the House of Representatives yesterday. CISPA is the contentious bill civil liberties advocates fought last year, which would provide a poorly-defined “cybersecurity” exception to existing privacy law. CISPA offers broad immunities to companies who choose to share data with government agencies (including the private communications of users) in the name of cybersecurity. It also creates avenues for companies to share data with any federal agencies, including military intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA).
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The Obama Administration issued policy statements this week on critical infrastructure protection and cyber security, including measures to encourage information sharing with the private sector and other steps to improve policy coordination. Curiously, the Administration issued both an Executive order and a Presidential directive devoted to these topics.
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With the reintroduction of the much-maligned Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act scheduled for the day after the State of the Union, the House of Representatives may have hoped the President’s own cybersecurity initiative would divert some of the attention away from the controversial legislation known as CISPA.
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The controversy is around how Google auomatically shares detailed personal information of everyone who purchases a paid app with the app’s developer.2
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The State of Texas made millions of dollars selling your private information last year. We’re talking about your name, address, and even what kind of car you drive.
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House lawmakers have reintroduced a bill that civil liberties groups say would destroy the right to Internet privacy as we know it. An earlier version of the CYBER INTELLIGENCE SHARING AND PROTECTION ACT, OR CISPA (PDF), passed the House back in April 2012; it died quickly UNDER THREAT OF PRESIDENTIAL VETO and widespread PROTEST FROM INTERNET ACTIVISTS. But this week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland) brought it back. What’s going on?
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The latest Google privacy debacle comes courtesy of Dan Nolan, an Australian app-developer,who has found he’s being sent personal information – without users ever giving permission for him to have it.
Dan spotted the issue when he logged into his ‘merchant’ section of his Google Play account and saw how for every customer who bought the app on Google play, he knew exactly who. “If you bought the app on Google Play (even if you cancelled the order) I have your email address, your suburb, and in many instances your full name.”
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Civil Rights
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Bahraini security forces shot dead a teenager earlier today as pro-democracy activists marked the second anniversary of what has been described as the longest-running uprising of the Arab Spring. Since February 2011, at least 87 people have died at the hands of U.S.-backed security forces. We speak to Maryam Alkhawaja, daughter of imprisoned Bahraini human rights activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja. Maryam has served as the acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights ever since the group’s head, Nabeel Rajab, was arrested and jailed. The group has just published a new report titled “Two Years of Deaths and Detentions.” Maryam also serves as the co-director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights.
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Along an isolated stretch of Ethiopian desert, under a gray July sky, soldiers dragged journalist Martin Schibbye from a truck, stood him up, raised their Kalashnikovs, and fired. The shots whistled by his head. “I thought, just get it over with,” Schibbye said. “I’d given up.” By that time, he thought his colleague, photojournalist Johan Persson, was already dead. Soldiers had dragged Persson in a different direction and fired repeatedly. Those shots turned out to be near-misses as well, intended to intimidate and instill fear.
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Governments often interpret radical ideas that challenge the existing social and political orthodoxy as threatening, which is why they often attempt to suppress them. Our country’s founders recognized that ideas considered radical – like their own ideas about self-governance – were necessary for social progress and essential to a vibrant democracy, so they sought to protect them with the First Amendment.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is calling for help from companies in Europe to help with a trademark problem with a UK company. The PSF is the US-based non-profit charged with protecting the intellectual property surrounding the Python language. This is the first time that the PSF has engaged in any legal action regarding the Python name.
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Posted in Patents at 1:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Corporations-funded presidency continues to promote more of the same (if not worse) while publicly pretending to care for citizens’ plea
THERE IS no genuine intention of changing the USPTO, but the people at the USPTO sure put together a nice show. They have a ’roundtable’ — one that excludes key stakeholders. This has become a familiar sight, whether it’s a panel, a webcast of a panel, a series of articles, etc. The people who actually innovate just barely count.
The other day we saw President Obama, the person who advocates CISPA with an executive order*, putting together a nice show (at Google Plus) to save face on matters of so-called ‘IP’ (the Obama administration is heavily funded by the copyright lobby). Here is some coverage we found:
• President Obama Admits That Patent Trolls Just Try To ‘Extort’ Money; Reform Needed
As we noted yesterday, President Obama is holding a “Fireside Hangout” via Google Plus today. In a bit of a surprise turn, he took a question about patents and patent reforms, with a specific question about software patents. And, his response was surprising. He admitted that there was a problem, and that there were some companies who were clearly not doing anything other than trying to “extort” money from others. Furthermore, while he pointed to the patent reform bill that passed in 2011, he also admitted that it really only went “halfway” towards reforming the patent system as far as it needed to go. If you click on the video, this takes place around 43:30 in the video.
• Obama: We’re only halfway there on patent reform
• Obama nominates one insider, one outsider for top patent court
President Barack Obama has nominated two longtime government attorneys to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the nation’s top patent court. One of them, Raymond Chen, has been a lawyer at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 1998. The other, Todd Hughes, is more of a wildcard in the patent field. His background is doing commercial litigation at the Department of Justice, where he has been since 1994.
Chen has argued some of the key patent cases on behalf of the USPTO, including In re Bilksi, in which he more or less urged the Federal Circuit to dodge the issue of when computer and software-related inventions became too abstract to get patents.
That last report is telling. Coming from the man who claims to be all about transparency while criminalising and/or leading to deaths of whistleblowers (i.e. people who antagonise abuses), we ought to assume the above is keeping up appearances. Almost 5 years ago Obama said he would close Gitmo and recently, instead of closing Gitmo in an overly belated fashion, he shut down the group made responsible for shutting down Gitmo (articles already included in our daily links).
I am not a Republican and I don't dislike the US, but to be realistic here, the same president who boosts everything ‘IP’ should not be trusted when he merely makes promises. His track record is not good. █
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*Adding to FISA, NDAA, torture, assassinations and other abuses of the Constitution from this constitutional lawyer.
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Posted in Patents at 1:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Debates about software patents in the United States are still not permitting particular views’ representation
THE USPTO does not really want change. But the public is increasingly dissatisfied with the USPTO’s function, so USPTO executives need to save face. Recently we warned that the USPTO’s so-called debate on the subject of software patents was paralysed by design; the central question was not whether such patents should be valid but what ‘quality’ they have.
Not too shockingly, based on one who was apparently a witess, the roundtable is somewhat of a sham:
At the USPTO’s #swpat roundtable. So far everyone agrees that patents should be high quality. OK. I also support motherhood and apple pie.
Here is what a lawyers’ site wrote about this recent roundtable:
Law360, New York (February 12, 2013, 5:14 PM ET) — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office needs to more aggressively scrutinize software patent applications to ensure that it issues fewer broad, vague patents favored by so-called patent trolls, business leaders and computer programmers told the office at a forum Tuesday.
Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, a European activist against software patents, wrote:
Disclosing algorithms is good, but it is not THE solution…
The subject of software patents is quite hot in New Zealand at the moment and Dave Lane wrote about it as follows:
After stating support for #swpat exclusion, how does Minister Foss reconcile the fact that only the pro-patents lobby endorses his SOP120?
Here is the corresponding article about the “as such” loophole:
Has Craig Foss come good on software patents?
[...]
So there we have it: clear, emphatic assurances from the Minister in charge of the Patents Bill that following passage of the new law (as amended by Mr Foss), computer programs will no longer be patentable in New Zealand. Which is great, right? After all, isn’t this what New Zealand software developers have overwhelmingly demanded?
Well yes, but the problem is that Minister Foss’s latest assurances contradict his earlier comments that his “as such” amendment would create a legal “grey area“ and allow “hundreds of software patents” to continue to be granted in New Zealand. It also confirms that Minister Foss is squarely at odds with leading IP lawyers who have said that his “as such” amendment will allow software patents.
There seems to be no limit on the scope of patenting if lawyers and lawyers-turned-politicians call all the shots. Over in Australia, the steep decline continues in parallel to the US; the patent monopolies industrial complex spreads like cancer: [via]
More patents over human genetic material could be granted after a landmark ruling in the federal court in Sydney on Friday morning.
What a disaster. As we’ll show in the next post, the US is undergoing some kind of self-assessment/introspection when it comes to patents. That’s the sort of dynamics we need to strive for. Rigged roundtables won’t make a difference but perpetuate the status quo, so more people in the development community ought to get involved and become vocal. █
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