07.24.16
Posted in Site News at 5:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
EPO Martial Law?
Summary: A look at some of the latest moves at the European Patent Office (EPO), following Battistelli’s successful coup d’état which brought the EPO into a perpetual state of emergency that perpetuates Battistelli’s totalitarian powers
THE EPO is in a state of deepening crisis and the other day we mentioned Haar as the likely location for the new site of the Boards of Appeal, following the exile/purge. Shortly thereafter the staff of the Boards of Appeal received the following confirmatory message:
To all members of DG3
Following a decision taken by the Administrative Council in June, the President has instructed PD44 to implement the relocation of the Board of Appeals.
PD44 has visited eleven locations in order to find a building that would best suit the requirements of staff and business partners of the BoA. The principles for the search were:
· Modern building with highly professional accommodation standards
· In the area of the European School
· Very good access to public transport
· Short distance to the city centre and Munich airport
Having considered the above factors, the relocation will take place to Richard-Reitzner-Allee 8 in Haar in the South-East of Munich.
“It is no longer a rumour,” one person told us, as “DG3 was sent an email on Friday.” Another person wrote: “It is no longer simply a rumour that the Boards of Appeal will be sent to Haar. A note was sent to all DG3 staff yesterday late afternoon, informing them that the Boards will move to the office building at Richard-Reitzner-Allee 8 in Haar. The rent contract will be signed after the Budget and Finance Committee approves the plan in October. The goal is to start the move in July 2017. It should be stressed that neither the Boards nor the stakeholders were consulted or even informed beforehand, just like no meaningful consultation took place on any other part of the reform proposal that was submitted to the Administrative Council. Being in DG3 myself, I can say that the current atmosphere is not very positive.”
Around the same time as the Munich shootings (which no doubt Battistelli will exploit to the fullest tomorrow) somebody responded with: “I wonder if any attention has been paid to the security aspects of the proposed new site …”
Quite a few people have mentioned this to us. Another asked, “did you hear the latest about Haar?”
“The building reserved for the BoA is supposed to be in Vaterstetten, which is near Haar (just a bit farther),” told us another person. “If they are really going to move there I would regard it as a total waste of EPO money. A sign of further erdoganization of what was once a respectable European organization fallen prey today to the megalomaniac ambitions of a ruthless president.”
That note about “erdoganization” of the EPO is timely as we have made this kind of comparison for about a year now.
“Interesting article about Erdoğan,” one reader told us about this one from the time of the coup. “Same problem with Battistelli…”
To quote: “You’d be wrong. Instead, the order came down from Erdogan’s thousand room palace that one Binali Yildirim — and only Yildarim — would replace Davutoglu as leader of the AKP and as Turkey’s new prime minister. Yildirim has been part of Erdogan’s inner circle for decades, an absolute loyalist certain to do his bidding. In a display of party discipline that would have made Lenin proud, more than 1,400 AKP delegates thereupon saluted smartly, sang paeans of praise and obedience to their great “chief” Erdogan, and voted unanimously to confirm his chosen candidate.”
“Sounds like the AC,” told us this reader, referring to the Administrative Council that has been reduced into a bunch of Battistelli lapdogs — those who recently helped him send the Boards of Appeal to exile near Haar.
Speaking of Erdoğan, coups and sovereignty/security (in light of Friday’s shootings), there is further militarisation going on at the EPO where the coup plotter is actually Battistelli and his ‘troops’ (so he is, in some sense, on the opposite side of Erdoğan, who was actually elected unlike the Turkish military).
“To better understand why people are treated so badly inside the EPO (and even outside of it, e.g. bloggers who are critics) look closely to what happened in Turkey over the past 10 days or less.”Writing about “who is who [at the] EPO,” one reader told us: “I know we both ***love*** FB. Here an interesting page of one recently-promoted BB’s [Battistelli] pet. Even more interesting [is] one of her “friends”: Perhaps a next director?”
This alludes to Jean-Baptiste Deprecq (photo above is from his account), who is connected to the recently-promoted Nadja Merdaci-Lefèvre.
“This give a lot to think about the saying “you chose your friends not you family”,” added our reader.
To better understand why people are treated so badly inside the EPO (and even outside of it, e.g. bloggers who are critics) look closely to what happened in Turkey over the past 10 days or less. Collective punishment at the hands of a megalomaniac isn’t so extraordinary. One might call it Martial Law. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some analysis of the input from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with focus on the EPO and software patents
Regarding the “EPO and USPTO,” one reader told us over the weekend, there is some curious text which is worth examining/scrutinising further. Just before the weekend we wrote about GAO's input, which mostly chastised the USPTO over patent quality. A closer look reveals even more about the subject.
“This helps highlight existing problems and there is a lot that the EPO can learn from this.”Here are direct links to the report/s [1, 2]. One reader asked us, “did you get these documents?” These were mentioned very quickly by good blogs like Patently-O, so we noticed them very promptly and commented on these based on concise coverage, not based on a thorough reading of the entire text. “The EPO had no comments on the draft,” our reader told us. “In GAO-16-490,” for example “see e.g. p.25-28 on quality / time, effect of “corridors” (high grades -> higher production), also GAO-16-479: see p.21-22…”
To quote from the text: “The Government Accountability Office has released two reports: one suggesting the USPTO should define quality, reassess incentives and improve clarity; the other suggesting the USPTO should strengthen search capabilities and better monitor examiners’ work…”
This helps highlight existing problems and there is a lot that the EPO can learn from this. To quote one new comment about the EPO: “Some weeks ago the Central Staff Committee [CSC] published a paper about overcapacity and reducing stocks, they also mentioned the contracts for examiners. I heard that a director in The Hague sent a mail to his examiners in which he disproved all the numbers as given by the CSC, showing that their publication was misleading. Does anyone have a copy of this mail? Some facts would be useful for this discussion!”
If anyone has a copy, please send it to us. There is a growing (and legitimate) concern about patent quality at the EPO, especially after Battistelli took over and derailed various processes, not just oversight, appeals, etc.
“With PTAB and Alice there has already been a turn for the better, but not every outcome is positive.”Based on WIPR‘s coverage of the GAO report, “most patent cases involve software-related inventions [...] that are easy to “unintentionally infringe” (this does not surprise us as we have been arguing this for years).
IAM too (an EPO mouthpiece) responded to these findings regarding USPTO patent quality being so low, reaffirming what we have said for a decade or more.
To quote IAM: “The recent report on USPTO patent quality by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would not have made for easy reading at the agency. That said, its leadership presumably knew what was coming long before they saw a draft of the report prior to its general release. The office knows it has a problem with quality – raising the standard of grants wouldn’t have become such a banner issue of Director Michelle Lee’s time in charge if it didn’t.”
“They want to keep their cake (software patents) and eat it too.”With PTAB and Alice there has already been a turn for the better, but not every outcome is positive. Watch this new article by Ricardo Ochoa of PretiFlaherty. Weeks later, well after the Bascom case, patent law firms still exploit an exceptional case for software patents promotion. If they wish to be honest, they will admit that software patents are neither justified nor easy to defend in a court, as per evidence which exists everywhere.
WatchTroll, the most vocal proponent of software patents out there, wrote today about Alice. Here is a key sentence: “Those who have been involved in patent prosecution going back 12-15 years will recall that after the initial rush of business method patents began, in about 2002, the Patent Office instituted what they referred to as “second pair of eyes” review. Under no circumstances could a patent be issued on anything that related to a computer-implemented invention unless and until it had been approved by two separate patent examiners. It certainly sounds like that is what is happening once again.”
It’s about time too. They would not grant a “computer-implemented invention [CII is another term or euphemism for software patents] unless and until it had been approved by two separate patent examiners,” but still, what guidelines would these examiners follow? The USPTO has not been exactly enthusiastic about altering the rules in lieu with Alice. We wrote about the latest changes a week ago and these probably give too much weight to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is where software patents came from in the first place.
As Benjamin Henrion (FFII) put it earlier today, “why should programmers respect patent law? we should benefit from free speech, not patent censorship.”
As Deb Nicholson from the Open Invention Network (OIN) put it not too long ago, as per this report about her talk (“The state of software patents after the Alice decision”):
Combating software patents—and other abuses of the patent system, like design patents—is a long-term process, Nicholson reminded the audience. OIN runs several programs it hopes will protect free-software developers from the ills of bad patents, such as its Linux patent pool, the License On Transfer Network, and Defensive Publications.
But Nicholson told the crowd there are other ways they can help improve the patent landscape in the long term, too. They can contribute to the campaigns run by non-profit organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, she said. Both are working to oppose the software-oriented provisions in the TPP, for example, among their other activities.
Individuals can also be powerful advocates for change within their own companies, pushing them to embrace a defensive, rather than offensive, approach to patents. And they can support the pending patent-reform legislation to lawmakers. Finally, they can continue to advocate for free and open-source software. The more we collaborate together, Nicholson said, the less we’ll want to sue each other.
The problem is though, as we last noted just over week ago, OIN does virtually nothing to stop software patents. Given the companies that formed it and steer this massive aggregate, it’s not hard to see why. They want to keep their cake (software patents) and eat it too. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Asia, Europe, Patents, Samsung at 4:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville
Summary: Highlighting some of the differences between the US patent system and other patent systems
THE most notable deficiency at the USPTO right now pertains to overly broad patent scope and poor patent quality (the same direction which the EPO takes under Battistelli) and this leads to a lot of litigation by patent trolls. Startups (sometimes known here as SMEs) suffer the most and we rarely hear their stories because they must settle in secret and pay ‘protection money’ to non-practising entities. This clearly does not promote innovation. A lot of this activity, perhaps more than 90% of it (on a global scale), happens in the United States.
“It says a lot about what the USPTO fosters and why the EPO must not follow the same footsteps.”As of days ago, Ericsson’s case (via a patent troll it increasing uses inside Europe) against Apple found momentum at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), home of software patents, according to this short report and BlackBerry has just beaten Mobile Telecommunications LLC, after this apparent troll (whose whole public existence revolves around this lawsuit) started a high-profile patent case in the US (BlackBerry is Canadian, but it can be dragged down south).
Leading Android OEMs are also embroiled in a patent war in the far east (Asia) and there are lots of articles about it [1, 2, 3, 4] (many hundreds in English alone, so they should not be hard to find even several years down the line).
What’s worth noting here is that in Asia, where a lot of the world’s phones are actually being made, patent trolls are hardly even a topic, whereas in the US patent trolls have become an epidemic. They are sometimes proxies of large companies such as Ericsson. In the case of Nokia, Microsoft has already created or armed trolls using its patents.
It is important to realise the difference between two manufacturing Android giants like Samsung (Kroea’s domain leader) and Huawei (China’s domain leader) having patent disputes and some random LLC du jour trying to tax large companies as well as small ones (these latter cases rarely make any headlines). It says a lot about what the USPTO fosters and why the EPO must not follow the same footsteps. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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If you Google “Why Linux is Better Than Windows,” you’ll be able to go 20 pages deep and still find articles from tech blogs and news sites alike proclaiming reasons for Linux’s superiority. While most of these articles are just rehashing the same points, they are valid points nevertheless. And with all this ruckus over Linux, it begs the question: if Linux is so much better, why is it not competing for users at the same level that Windows is?
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Server
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DockerCon 2016, held in Seattle in June, included many new feature and product announcements from Docker Inc. and the Docker project. The main keynote of DockerCon [YouTube] featured Docker Inc. staff announcing and demonstrating the features of Docker 1.12, currently in its release-candidate phase. As with the prior 1.11 release, the new version includes major changes in the Docker architecture and tooling. Among the new features are an integrated orchestration stack, new encryption support, integrated cluster networking, and better Mac support.
The conference hosted 4000 attendees, including vendors like Microsoft, CoreOS, HashiCorp, and Red Hat, as well as staff from Docker-using companies like Capital One, ADP, and Cisco. While there were many technical and marketing sessions at DockerCon, the main feature announcements were given in the keynotes.
As with other articles on Docker, the project and product are referred to as “Docker,” while the company is “Docker Inc.”
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Wow, where to begin. Caddy 0.9 is the biggest update yet. We completely overhauled the core design and TLS features, renovated addons into a new plugin model, added experimental QUIC support, fixed bugs, upgraded the Caddyfile, and made a significant number of other improvements and changes. I’ll try to cover them all in this post and talk about what’s coming next and in the future. Sorry (not sorry) for the long post!
For those finding Caddy for the first time: Caddy is an easy-to-use HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS—not HTTP—by default. With this release, we’re bringing that TLS magic to more than just HTTP. We’re also the first to usher in QUIC support.
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EncryptPad is a free and open source text editor for sensitive information, which protects files with passwords, key files, or both, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The app can also be used to encrypt binary files, such as images, videos, and so on.
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Cumulus is a Yahoo! Weather Powered Desktop Weather App for Linux. It has a friendly user interface and is easy to setup. Cumulus is a small and light weight app that does not take up much space on your desktop window or system. No real Linux Experience required to install or configure Cumulus. Cumulus is written in Python so it can run on any Linux distribution.
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Recently, I wrote an article covering the 6 Best Email Clients you can use on Linux Desktop, all of the email clients in that list where graphical user interface (GUI) programs, but sometimes, users prefer to deal with email directly from the command-line.
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According to its description, the main reason behind creating this application is to allow using your favorite video player, like VLC, Totem, mpv, and others to watch Twitch.tv streams (the app even allows watching multiple streams at once) instead of Flash.
That’s because while Twitch.tv now uses HTML5 for the video controls, it still uses Flash for the video itself, which can be pretty resource-heavy.
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But sometimes, we find it difficult to choose which terminal emulator to work with, depending on our preferences. In this overview, we shall cover one exciting terminal emulator for Linux called Terminix.
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The Min browser project has picked up a new update. Version 1.4 of the open-source, cross-platform web browser adds browser actions and full-text search.
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Proprietary
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Instead we will continue to develop Seafile independently in Germany and Europe for the Seafile Professional Edition based on version 5.1.8. The same applies for the Seafile Community Edition. We have already assembled a team to continue the development.
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Developed by Eion Robb, the Skype4Pidgin developer, SkypeWeb Plugin for Pidgin has a major advantage over the old Skype4Pidgin plugin: it doesn’t require Skype to run in the background.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In addition to my own thoughts, the article includes insights from a number of other Linux game porters including Leszek Godlewski (Painkiller Hell & Damnation, Deadfall Adventures), Ryan “icculus” Gordon (StarBreak, Left 4 Dead 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Another World, Cogs, Goat Simulator), David Gow (Keen Dreams, Multiwinia), Ethan Lee (Salt & Sanctuary, Hiden in Plain Sight, HackNet, Waveform, Dust: An Elysian Tail) and Aaron Melcher (Outland, La-Mulana, Hyper Light Drifter, Darkest Dungeon). Betweem them, they offer a great range of attitudes and approaches that support and provide counterpoint to my own experiences.
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Boasting one of the most star-studded game line-ups ever seen in an indie bundle, the brand new and exclusive Indie Legends 4 Bundle is here.
Bundle Stars has pulled 8 incredible Steam games out of the bag for just $3.49 – that’s a saving of more than $100, and a discount of more than 95%.
So just how good are the games? Games like Party Hard and Door Kickers are award winners, and the average Steam user score is a stunning 91%, across nearly 30,000 reviews!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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MATE Dock Applet was updated to version 0.73 recently, getting support for rearranging dock icons via drag and drop (only for the GTK3 version), updated window list design and more.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I Have a few favorites kde conventions that I really love to participate.
Randa and Lakademy are always awesome, both are focused on hacking, and I surely do love to hack.
On LaKademy I spend my days working on subsurface, reworking on the interface, trying to make it more pleasant to the eye,
In Randa I worked on KDevelop and Marble, but oh my…
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You might remember that I spoke about Plasma’s Publictransport applet getting some reworking during the summer. It’s been over a month since I made that announcement on my blog and while ideally, I’d have liked to have blogged every week about my work, I haven’t really been able to. This is largely down to the fact that I was occupied with work on a project back at my university and I shifted back to home from my hostel as well, after finishing four years of undergraduate studies.
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That’s why the KDE Irc channel now has a bot that will forward all messages to our Telegram Channel and vice-versa, this way all the new cool kids can talk to all the old geeks around and continue to make the KDE awesome in their platform of choice.
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Tears followed by joy and happiness, discussions followed by great moments all together, problems followed by their solution and enthusiasm. Am I talking about my family? More or less, because actually I am talking about a family: the WikiToLearn community!
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The first point release update to our LTS release 16.04 is out now. This contains all the bugfixes added to 16.04 since its first release in April. Users of 16.04 can run the normal update procedure to get these bugfixes.
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KDStateMachineEditor is a Qt-based framework for creating Qt State Machine metacode using a graphical user interface. It works on all major platforms and is now available as part of the Qt Auto suite.
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The star of Qt 5.7 is the first stable release of Qt 3D 2.0. The new version of Qt 3D is a total redesign of its architecture into a modern and streamlined 3D engine, exploiting modern design patterns such as entity-component systems, and capable to scale due to the heavily threaded design. This important milestone was the result of a massive effort done by KDAB in coordination with The Qt Company.
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Because of unforeseen circumstances, we had to rejig our release schedule, there was no release last week. Still, we wanted to bring you a foretaste of some of the goodies that are going to be in the 3.0.1 release, which is now planned for September 5th. There’s lots to play with, here, from bug fixes (the double dot in file names is gone, the crash with cheap tablets is gone, a big issue with memory leaks in the graphics card is solved), to features (soft-proofing, among others). There may also be new bugs, and not all new features may be working correctly. Export to animated gif or video clips is still in development, and probably will not work well outside the developers’ computer.
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My talk was the next. Its title was “20 anos de KDE: de Desktop a Guarda-Chuva de Projetos” (20 years of KDE: From Desktop to Project Umbrella). I presented the evolution process of our community, which led it from a desktop project to a incubator community. For those who did not attend the event the talk was recorded and it is available here. Below I also make available the slides of my presentation:
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Less then four months after the last release and after a lot of activity in our repository during this time, we’re happy to announce the next release of LabPlot with a lot of new features. So, be prepared for a long post.
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Version 5.0.0 of the digiKam image-management application was released on July 5. In many respects, the road from the 4.x series to the new 5.0 release consisted of patches and rewrites to internal components that users are not likely to notice at first glance. But the effort places digiKam in a better position for future development, and despite the lack of glamorous new features, some of the changes will make users’ lives easier as well.
For context, digiKam 4.0 was released in May of 2014, meaning it has been over two full years since the last major version-number bump. While every free-software project is different, it was a long development cycle for digiKam, which (for example) had released 4.0 just one year after 3.0.
The big hurdle for the 5.0 development cycle was porting the code to Qt5. While migrating to a new release of a toolkit always poses challenges, the digiKam team decided to take the opportunity to move away from dependencies on KDE libraries. In many cases, that effort meant refactoring the code or changing internal APIs to directly use Qt interfaces rather than their KDE equivalents. But, in a few instances, it meant reimplementing functionality directly in digiKam.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Just a few seconds ago the initial release of Hamster-GTK, version 0.10.0, has been uploaded to the cheese shop. That means that after the rewritten backend codebase hamster-lib has been out in the wild for a few days by now you can now have a first look at a reimplementation of the original hamster 2.0 GUI. It will come as no surprise that this current early version is rather unpolished and leaves a lot to be desired. However, if you are familiar with legacy hamster 2.0 aka hamster-time-tracker you will surely see some major resemblance.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Week 29 brought us, as usual, 4 snapshots. Those were 0715, 0716, 0718 and 0720. The most spectacular update was in 0715, but the entire week is noteworthy as Tumbleweed brought you those updates:
Plasma 5.7.0
KDE Framework 5.24.0
KDE Applications 16.04.3
Freetype 2.6.5
Kernel 4.6.4
The Live images again contain an installer option – now based on NET install
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Slackware Family
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I released a Slackware Live ISO containing Plasma 5.7.0 a few weeks ago, but did not make a fuss out of it – in other words, I did not write any communication about it on this blog. The Live ISO was made upon request of the KDE developers who wanted to show off the new Plasma 5.7 on Live Editions of as many distro’s as possible.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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At first Kororra was used to make Gentoo Linux installation easier but in November 2007 this project was discontinued. In 2010 Korora project was continued as a Fedora based distribution. It was also renamed to Korora from Kororra. First major release of Korora distro was in 2013. Since then Korora is providing a simplified and beautiful experience of Fedora to users. For this topic We are using latest Korora 24 in Mate flavor. Why Mate? because, we never tried this flavor before. Let’s see some important things that we experienced while using it.
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Debian Family
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.7.1
This new version includes:
Audacity (audio wave editor) included by default
Timezone detection improved
Detector of systems improved and updated to detect last windows installed systems
Linux Kernel updated with a lot of new patches for new hardware, bugfixes and improvements
Google Voice search on internet using your microphone
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Ubuntu and Debian (and thus other Debian-based distributions too) have abandoned the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver for all recent generations of Intel graphics hardware and instead makes use of the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver in its place.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So when Ubuntu and Canonical revealed they were partnering with actual, big manufacturers for Ubuntu mobile devices, a spark of hope was rekindled in my heart. Let it be clear, I am by no means an Ubuntu user, not even a fan. I left the fold nearly a decade ago, after having spent quite some time using and contributing to Kubuntu (to the point of becoming a certified “member” even, though I never ascended to the Council). In terms of loyalties and usage, I am a KDE user (and “helper”) foremost. I use Fedora because it just works for me, for now. So, yes, an Ubuntu Touch device would be another compromise for me, but it would be the smallest one. Or so I hoped.
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So when Ubuntu and Canonical revealed they were partnering with actual, big manufacturers for Ubuntu mobile devices, a spark of hope was rekindled in my heart. Let it be clear, I am by no means an Ubuntu user, not even a fan. I left the fold nearly a decade ago, after having spent quite some time using and contributing to Kubuntu (to the point of becoming a certified “member” even, though I never ascended to the Council). In terms of loyalties and usage, I am a KDE user (and “helper”) foremost. I use Fedora because it just works for me, for now. So, yes, an Ubuntu Touch device would be another compromise for me, but it would be the smallest one. Or so I hoped.
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This week I was a guest on the Snappy Sprint in Heidelberg, hosted by Canonical, because I’m the maintainer of snaps packages on Arch Linux.
Actually with official packages on Arch Linux, you can only use snaps without confinement (aka you can only install packages in devmode) and this is bad for security since any snap is not confined and it can do (almost) anything it want.
The reason is that snap for confinement uses the ubuntu-patched version of apparmor not available in mainline kernel yet.
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Distributing apps as packages (deb, rpm, etc) is problematic. For example, the Pitivi package depends on the GTK package and Pitivi 0.95 broke in the distributions which updated to GTK version 3.20, because of the incorrect way we were using a virtual method. This is not the first time something like this happens. To avoid the slippery dependencies problem, two years ago we started making universal daily builds. They allowed everybody to run the latest Pitivi easily by downloading a large binary containing the app and all the dependencies.
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The latest release candidate of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.2.0 feature release is available for installation from the snap store. This makes it very easy to install this prerelease of LibreOffice for testing out new features (an incomplete glimpse on what to look forward for can be found on the LibreOffice 5.2 release notes page, which is still under construction, go on #libreoffice-qa if you want to help with testing).
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Canonical has announced the first point release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, finally allowing users of Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr) to upgrade their installations.
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After a long wait, Canonical has finally decided that it was time to upgrade the Mozilla Thunderbird software on all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, where it is used as the default email and news client.
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Flavours and Variants
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It all took approximately one month, but the Xfce community edition of the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” operating system is now available for download, as a public Beta release for 64-bit and 32-bit computers.
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The Omega 2, a $5 Linux Module concentrated on ease of use and accessibility, managed to surpass its Kickstarter funding goal in just a few hours after being published.
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Phones
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Android
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The second half of 2016 took off with some exciting launches from notable manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, Xiaomi and others. With so many smartphones being launched on a near-daily basis by brands both big and small, it gets quite difficult to keep track of them.
To help our readers in making their purchase decisions, here is a list of the 15 top Android smartphones we reviewed recently. Take a look.
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Once upon a time FOSS was about Freedom. It was about exposing equality within source code. It allowed everyone equal rights and equal access to the technology they were using. An idea that if you were capable, you could fix code or pay someone to fix code. An ideology that there was something greater than yourself and that there was an inherent right built into what it is to be human with software.
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Once upon a time in IT, using open source simply meant Linux instead of Windows, or maybe MySQL instead of Oracle.
Now, there is such a huge diversity of open source tools, and almost every leading digital business and tech startup is making extensive use of them. It’s been a remarkable turnaround for open source over the last 10 years, placing the trend firmly at the heart of the digital revolution.
The explosive growth of e-commerce, mobile and social media has completely altered the customer’s lifestyle and buying habits. Today, organizations are expected to engage with customers in Omni-channel environment. They need to create a customer journey. This is the driver of digital transformation.
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Please note that while we think of ourselves as an open source company it would be more accurate to call it an open core company since we ship both the open source GitLab Community Edition and the close source GitLab Enterprise Edition. Thanks to paxcoder for pointing this out on Hacker News.
GitLab began as a labor of love from Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov, who built the first version together in 2011. Like many open source authors, they were only able to work on the project part time. Sid Sijbrandij joined forces a year later and created GitLab.com, the first SaaS offering and first experiment with monetization.
Today GitLab is a model for open source sustainability and stewardship. It is being used in over 100,000 organizations including RedHat, NASA, Intel, Uber, and VMWare, to name just a few. Large organizations buy enterprise licenses, sustaining and growing both the company and the free open source project. GitLab now has over 90 employees, including Sid and Dmitriy who serve as CEO and CTO, respectively.
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Interview with Wire CTO and co-founder Alan Duric about open source.
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Clearly, open source marketing apps have their place. These days, marketing departments are responsible for a sizable percentage of enterprise application purchases and deployment decisions. In fact, Gartner has predicted that by 2017 chief marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more on IT than chief information officers (CIOs) do.
While the accuracy of that forecast is open to debate, marketing teams are certainly becoming more involved in the selection of software. The marketing automation industry alone is now worth an estimated $1.62 billion per year, and many marketing teams are also involved in choosing content management systems, customer relationship management, ecommerce software and other solutions.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In Firefox 48, Mozilla will enable a new Firefox plug-in blocklist by default. Initially the blocklist will be small, mostly containing URLs of Flash SWF files that have been identified by Mozilla as supercookies (i.e. cookies that are very hard to shake off) or fingerprinting files (i.e. they scan your system and create a unique fingerprint, again usually for tracking purposes).
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Mozilla yesterday said it will follow other browser markers by curtailing use of Flash in Firefox next month.
The open-source developer added that in 2017 it will dramatically expand the anti-Flash restrictions: Firefox will require users to explicitly approve the use of Flash for any reason by any website.
As have its rivals, Mozilla cast the limitations (this year) and elimination (next year) as victories for Firefox users, citing improved security, longer battery life on laptops and faster web page rendering.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
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Science
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A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.
The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.
The material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting medical implants, they say.
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When Dolly the sheep died of lung disease and severe arthritis in 2003 after a relatively short seven year life, many scientists speculated that perhaps cloning had something to do with it. Could cloning an adult mammal, they wondered, make the clone adult-like right from birth. Maybe clones were not meant to live very long.
It appears that is not the case.
Scientists at the UK’s University of Nottingham just released a study showing that clones can lead long, healthy lives after all. It is the first long-term study of the health effects of cloning in a large animal. As the video above shows, the scientists followed the lives of 13 cloned sheep, four of which were actually cloned from the very same cells that Dolly came from.
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In 1995, if you had told Toby Spribille that he’d eventually overthrow a scientific idea that’s been the stuff of textbooks for 150 years, he would have laughed at you. Back then, his life seemed constrained to a very different path. He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.
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Health/Nutrition
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By 2020 average income earners will be forced to buy private health insurance or pay extra tax after the government quietly extended a freeze in the threshold for the Medicare Levy Surcharge.
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Russia will not receive a blanket ban from Rio 2016 following the country’s doping scandal.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will leave it up to individual sports’ governing bodies to decide if Russian competitors are clean and should be allowed to take part.
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I was in my kitchen getting my children ready for the school run when my phone pinged. I glanced at my friend’s message: “Maybe of interest…!” I paused on seeing the news report she’d sent – a High Court ruling against a Muslim father’s wish that his two young sons be circumcised. The children in the case were to decide for themselves when they were old enough to do so. I felt stunned. Like the mother in the case, I’m from the UK, with a background in which male circumcision is no longer routine. Like the father, my ex-partner is Muslim and wished to have our sons circumcised according to his cultural and religious beliefs. The boys in the High Court case were a similar age to our sons, too – mine are now seven and five. The court’s decision felt extremely close to home.
I took the children to school. On returning home, I sat down to re-read the all-too-brief news report. I cried tears of sadness, relief and remaining fears. While our family has managed to avoid taking our conflict over circumcision to court, the issue has been a major factor in the break-up of our marriage. It also remains alive for us as we negotiate the upbringing of our children. It is something I never imagined would affect me – I’m not Jewish or Muslim and think most parents in the UK don’t for a moment consider circumcising their sons. When you know it is not medically necessary, that it is painful and that there is no other reason to, why would you?
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Security
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Pornhub’s bug bounty program and its relatively high rewards on Hackerone caught our attention. That’s why we have taken the perspective of an advanced attacker with the full intent to get as deep as possible into the system, focusing on one main goal: gaining remote code execution capabilities. Thus, we left no stone unturned and attacked what Pornhub is built upon: PHP.
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The attack also abused DNSSEC because, the criminals have cleverly fathomed, the DNS security protocol generates larger responses and can therefore be used to boost DNS amplification still further. Akamai has mentioned such tactics in several of its traffic reports during 2015 and 2016 but it is ironic that a security standard should end up being manipulated in this way.
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Defence/Aggression
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A survey conducted by FAIR of US media coverage of ISIS or ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the Middle East reveals a disparity of coverage, showing that European deaths are roughly 1,800 percent more newsworthy than deaths in the Middle East.
For the purposes of this survey, both articles and video reports were included. We chose the three most-circulated “traditional media” newspapers and Buzzfeed, one of the most popular newsites for “Millennials,” to get another perspective. The list was compiled using a combination of the Nexis news database and Google.
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The idea of using lethal drones to kill “bad guys” on the other side of the planet is offensive to many people on moral grounds, but a new study suggests that it is also ineffective in reducing terrorism, observes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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The recent attacks on Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are just the most recent examples of the horrific terrorist acts taking place around the world. The Islamic State’s recent bombing in Baghdad killed 250 people and wounded hundreds. The uptick of ISIS murderous attacks is likely due to the would-be caliphate’s loss of territories in Iraq and Syria.
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The political crisis in Turkey, after a failed coup and mass arrests, sees President Erdogan consolidating his power and blaming his troubles on a Turkish exile living in Pennsylvania, as ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller explains.
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ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack in the Afghan capital, calling it a planned attack on a “gathering of Shi’ites,” though it can be difficult to independently verify ISIS’ level of involvement. If the bombing was carried out by ISIS, it could “signal its first deliberate effort to target Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, which it views as infidel,” according to the Washington Post’s reporting.
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At least 80 people were killed, and more than 230 wounded, in Kabul on Saturday by suicide bombers who targeted a peaceful protest march by ethnic Hazaras, a minority Shia group in Afghanistan.
“We were holding a peaceful demonstration when I heard a bang and then everyone was escaping and yelling,” Sabira Jan, a protestor who witnessed the attack and saw bloodied bodies strewn across the ground, told Reuters. “There was no one to help.”
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The war in Syria, now in its sixth year with no end in sight, has killed more than 280,000 people. It is as if the only real question to be decided is if the West will run out of ammunition, or Syria out of people, first
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Certainly none has a peaceful past. The United States, Russia, and China have a long history of expansion at the expense of neighboring countries and territories, often through military conquest. Those nations on their borders today, including some that have wrenched themselves free from their imperial control, continue to fear and distrust them. Just ask Latin Americans, East Europeans, or Asians what they think of their powerful neighbors.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Writing up articles on climate change is difficult these days. Last week alone, 46 new papers and reports were published. I am certain that there are many more. The figure only refers to the sources I usually consult. I try to read all abstracts and all articles I find interesting, but sometimes I shy away from it: it is just too depressing. According to Naomi Oreskes, a great number of climate change scientists (she interviewed most of the top 200 climate change scientists in the US) suffer from some sort of mood imbalance or mild or serious depression. It is easy to understand why: we see the climate change taking the planet apart right in front of our eyes. We also clearly see, right in front of us, what urgently needs to done to stave off global disaster on an unprecedented scale. We need carbon taxes and the reconversion of industry and energy towards zero CO2 emissions systems. This route is without any doubt technically and economically feasible, but politically it seems to be permanently locked. If we do not unlock it, the future looks bleak, not to say hopeless, for humankind.
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Humans’ appetite for gnawing away at the fabric of the Earth itself is growing prodigiously. According to a new UN report, the amount of the planet’s natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in 40 years.
A report produced by the International Resource Panel (IRP), part of the UN Environment Programme, says rising consumption driven by a growing middle class has seen resources extraction increase from 22 billion tonnes in 1970 to 70 billon tonnes in 2010.
It refers to natural resources as primary materials, and includes under this heading biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and non-metallic minerals.
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The United States is far behind other wealthy countries when it comes to sustainable development, a new report found this week, meaning the country is “seriously far” from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ratified by United Nations member states in September 2015.
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Australia’s new climate change minister is an MP once dubbed “Mr Coal” who believes the climate polluting fossil fuel is the secret to lifting the world’s poorest countries out of poverty.
Re-elected conservative Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put Liberal Party MP Josh Frydenberg, the former resources minister, in charge of the country’s climate policy.
Frydenberg replaces MP Greg Hunt who, as environment and climate change minister, was responsible for approving the largest coal mine in Australian history — the giant Adani Carmichael mine in the country’s Galilee Basin.
The burning of coal is the world’s single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
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Finance
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Donald Trump has claimed that the European Union was created to “beat the United States when it comes to making money” in an interview with NBC News.
Speaking to Chuck Todd, whom the Republican nominee has repeatedly berated as “sleepy-eyed”, Trump also said of the EU “the reason that it got together was like a consortium so that it could compete with the United States”.
The European Union was founded as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 in an effort to promote strong cross-border ties in Europe and avoid future wars. It has since evolved to a customs union and eventually to the transnational entity devoted to removing internal trade barriers, building a common market and a fiscal union. Its development and growth has been repeatedly supported by the United States under presidents of both parties.
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Britain just got its first concrete sign that the British exit from the European Union, or Brexit, will crush the nation’s economy after a grim set of PMI data released by Markit on Friday morning showed a “dramatic deterioration” in the economy since the UK voted to leave the EU.
Markit’s flash PMI readings for the UK’s economy showed that composite output fell to its lowest level since March 2009, during the tail end of the global financial crisis.
Here is the scoreboard:
Services PMI — 47.4, down from 52.3 in June and at an 87-month low. The figure was well below the 49.2 forecast.
Manufacturing PMI — 49.1, a 44-month low, and well below the expected 50 reading.
Composite PMI — 47.7, a drop from 52.4 in June, and at an 87-month low.
The PMI, or purchasing managers index, figures from Markit are given as a number between 0 and 100.
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Hillary Clinton’s VP pick is a well-regarded senior Democrat, but he has split with labor on the TPP, banking regulation, and even “right-to-work” laws.
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With word that Britain’s economy is shrinking following the Brexit vote, the UK’s finance minister Philip Hammond is promising a “reset” of government policy if the weakness continues.
Hammond – in China for a meeting of finance ministers from the G20 top economies – tried to counter business surveys indicating Britain is heading for recession.
He said they show businesses’ confidence had been “dented”, but it is the government’s job to restore confidence by progressing trade talks with the European Union and other countries, including China.
Also in Beijing, the head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde repeated her call for Europe to quickly resolve questions over Brexit: “Our first and immediate recommendation is for this uncertainty surrounding the terms of Brexit to be removed as quickly as possible.
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Ruth Sinclair-Jones said: “We face a sad moment of uncertainty, after 30 years of this enrichment of so many lives.”
Worryingly, the end to British participation in the scheme could hit the wallets of UK universities.
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British politics has never seen a purer example of the Overton window than the referendum on membership of the EU. In 1994, the billionaire James Goldsmith founded a political party whose sole purpose was to advocate a referendum. The Referendum Party was a long, long way outside the political mainstream, and a significant number of its members were openly mad. The party’s one moment of – ‘success’ is the wrong word – mainstream attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a better-ordered society, making up things like that wins you the Prix Goncourt. Goldsmith did poorly, coming fourth with 1518 votes, but Mellor lost anyway. At the declaration of the result, Goldsmith and his supporters chanted ‘Out! Out! Out!’ while Mellor was making his concession speech, the words sounding a lot like ‘Raus! Raus! Raus!’ and providing one of the 1997 election’s most memorably ugly moments. The Referendum Party contested 547 seats and lost all of them.
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Lester Thurow, almost alone among mainstream economists as near as I can tell, recognizes this potentially fatal contradiction of capitalism — even though he is no anti-capitalist and wrote the book from which this excerpt is drawn in the hopes of finding a future for capitalism. Until very recently the standard economics textbooks ignored the problem of the environment altogether. Even today, the standard Econ 101 textbooks of Barro, Mankiv and so on, contain almost no mention of environment or ecology and virtually no serious consideration of the problem. This reflects the increasingly rightward drift of the discipline since the seventies. The American economics profession has long-since abandoned the practice of critical scientific thought to seriously dissenting views. Today, a neo-totalitarian “neoliberal” religious dogma rules the discipline. Keynesianism, liberalism, to say nothing of Marxism, are all dismissed as hopelessly antiquated, ecological economics is suspect, and the prudent graduate student would be well advised to steer clear of such interests if he or she wants to find a job. As Francis Fukuyama put it back in the 90s after communism collapsed, history has reached its apogee in free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. The science of economics, Fukuyama pronounced, was “settled” with Adam Smith’s accomplishment. The future would bring no more than “endless technical adjustments” and no further theoretical thought is required or need be solicited.
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Verizon and Yahoo are set to announce that they are striking an acquisition deal, according to sources close to the situation. The news is expected by Monday, although it could come earlier or later.
But Yahoo told other bidders this afternoon — those interested in buying Yahoo have included private equity firm TPG and a group led by Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert — that the telco giant was the winner of the four-month process, said sources.
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Sometimes corporations don’t get what they want. That was the case earlier this month when a World Bank arbitration tribunal ruled against tobacco giant Philip Morris in its suit against Uruguay. In a split decision, a majority of two arbitrators sided with the Latin American sovereign’s right to regulate, while a dissenting arbitrator sided partly with the corporation (which had appointed him to the panel).
Philip Morris launched the case in 2010, after Uruguay introduced a set of cigarette labeling policies to deter smoking. First, all cigarette packages were required to have graphic warning labels on 80 percent of their surface area. Second, each cigarette brand family could have only one design presentation. (Uruguay argued that tobacco companies used different color and design schemes to suggest certain variants were healthier than others.) These policies were driven by the administration of Tabaré Vázquez, a left-leaning oncologist first elected president in 2005. Although Philip Morris is headquartered in the U.S.—and although the U.S. and Uruguay have a bilateral investment treaty, or BIT—the tobacco company used its Swiss subsidiary and a Switzerland-Uruguay BIT to bring the case, as it is permitted to do.
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Perhaps the fact that the people of Europe endured the loss of more than 150 million people in World War II is what causes them to be so suspicious and fearful of oligarchs and super-powerful corporations, banks and entities, that they insist that their governments indeed do something about the multiple transgressions of these multinational companies and organizations whenever they engage in any activity which the people find to be oppressive, repulsive, impinging on their freedoms, or in any other way threatening them with the yoke of financial debt slavery and austerity programs.
It appears that the same fervor that Americans have for their Second Amendment rights and guns, is emulated and mirrored in their European counterparts in trusting that their government (in this case the European Union, hitherto ‘EC’ or ‘EU’ in this article) will aggressively go after those super-rich entities to bring them down a notch or two, or perhaps three.
But ironically, Americans, even though they are armed to the teeth, and bray constantly about the constant criminal transgressions of multi-national corporations and banks, are remarkably sedate when it comes to demanding that their federal, state and local governments, in the forms of the 3 branches (legislature, executive, and judicial) go after these international monied scoundrels, choosing instead to complain about it vociferously on FaceBook, Twitter, or other social media outlets, with the practical effect that nothing ever changes.
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A prospect far more threatening than Brexit is emerging: a reasonable deal for the UK. Reports from Brussels suggest a compromise is doing the rounds under which it would be given continued access to the single market plus concessions on freedom of movement. This would be a grave mistake. If Britain comes out of this looking anything less than severely diminished it will be devastating for the EU.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Third parties are not new to American politics. The Anti-Masonic Party emerged in the 1820s to campaign against the Freemasons, which its members viewed as a corrupt. The Free Soil Party opposed the expansion of slavery in the years before the Civil War. Others throughout history have emerged to champion various causes, like the Know-Nothings, the Progressives, the Prohibition Party, the Reform Party and many others.
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Among members of the liberal press, the reaction to Donald Trump’s RNC acceptance speech has been almost unanimous. It was, they say, “grim,” “angry,” and “dark.” Trump painted a “Mad Max” picture of the United States, as a nation is crisis, beset by crime, terrorism, unemployment, and despair.
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Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein once again welcomed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) into her party, suggesting in a series of tweets that he could leave the party that “betrayed” him.
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Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not speak at or preside over the party’s convention this week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced that raised questions about the committee’s impartiality during the Democratic primary.
The DNC Rules Committee on Saturday named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session to order and will gavel each session closed.
“She’s been quarantined,” another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz, following a meeting Saturday night.
Wasserman Schultz faced intense pressure Sunday to resign her post as head of the Democratic National Committee, several party leaders told CNN, urging her to quell a growing controversy threatening to disrupt Hillary Clinton’s nominating convention.
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Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the attempt by the Bernie Sanders campaign to moderate the party’s stance on Israel “disturbing.”
A top DNC official also noted that the Hillary Clinton campaign used Israel “to marginalize Bernie.”
This is according to an email released by Wikileaks. The whistleblowing journalism organization released approximately 20,000 DNC emails on Friday.
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Amid furor over an email leak that revealed a bias against Bernie Sanders inside the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out as chair of the convention.
In an email to NPR, the office of Rep. Marcia Fudge said she “has been named permanent chair of the Democratic National Convention.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he will still support Hillary Clinton for president, despite leaked emails that showed Democratic Party leaders privately planned to undermine his presidential campaign.
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Bernie Sanders may be out of the running in the race to the White House, but he’s just shown he can still pack a punch when it comes to fighting the establishment.
Debbie Wassermann Schultz will not speak or preside over daily functions at the Democratic Convention next week, CNN reports. It is a move that comes directly after Sanders called for her to step down as Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. Sanders’ call was a response to a Wikileaks hack late last week that made tens of thousands of DNC emails public and gave weight to his longtime accusation that the party establishment was helping to support Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign while undermining his own.
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Over the past two days, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press have all reported that Tim Kaine is emerging as a (if not the) favorite to become Hillary Clinton’s running mate. On Wednesday night, the Times reported that Bill Clinton is privately lobbying for the Virginia senator’s selection.
It’s not hard to see why the Clintons’ might be feeling the Kaine: The former governor of Virginia and current member of the Senate Armed Services Committee boasts both executive and foreign-policy experience, speaks fluent Spanish, has ties to a swing state, and is a known quantity, having been vetted by Democratic nominees in cycles past. In a race where most polls show Clinton with a solid lead, picking a moderate, experienced white man makes some tactical sense.
[...]
This week, Kaine provided left Democrats with two fresh reasons to see his selection as a repudiation of their agenda. On Monday, the senator added his name to two letters urging the federal government to scale back regulations on community and regional banks.
In a letter co-signed by 15 other Senate Democrats — and every Senate Republican — Kaine asked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to exempt community banks and credit unions from many of its regulatory requirements. In justifying these exemptions, the letter suggests that these regulations would make it more difficult for these small banks to continue “spurring economic growth” and that such rules are unnecessary, anyhow, since community banks “were not the primary cause of the financial crisis.”
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Top officials at the Democratic National Committee criticized and mocked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during the primary campaign, even though the organization publicly insisted that it was neutral in the race, according to committee emails made public on Friday by WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks posted almost 20,000 emails sent or received by a handful of top committee officials and provided an online tool to search through them. While WikiLeaks did not reveal the source of the leak, the committee said last month that Russian hackers had penetrated its computer system.
Among the emails released on Friday were several embarrassing messages that suggest the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, and other officials favored Hillary Clinton over Mr. Sanders — a claim the senator made repeatedly during the primaries.
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The online poll finds that among those who say they back Labour, 54% support Corbyn against just 22% who would prefer Smith. Some 20% say they are undecided and 4% say they do not intend to vote.
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Twitter noticed how Donald Trump patted his daughter Ivanka last night. Not in a good way.
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The 2016 Republican National Convention began in the immediate shadow of a highly publicized death spiral involving police and black civilians in Dallas, Falcon Heights, and Baton Rouge. Against this backdrop, the Trump campaign seemed to choose the legacy of Richard Nixon rather than Ronald Reagan as the party’s patron saint. Indeed, 1968 has functioned as myth and symbol throughout the Trump campaign, as they have leaned on racially-charged Nixonian phrases like ‘law and order’, ‘Silent Majority’ and ‘forgotten Americans.’ It might be more accurate to say that Trump has bundled Nixon together with George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor whose independent campaign for president that year was more openly racist and confrontational, but who with Nixon defined the Republican Party’s white populist turn.
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The last time I saw Jeremy Corbyn address Labour members here was a year ago.
It was the start of July and he was speaking at a Unison hustings at the Renaissance hotel in Manchester city centre , near the start of the leadership campaign. The audience was, as you would expect, appreciative of his standpoint.
So he got a warm reception, certainly warmer than Liz Kendall and from recollection warmer than the others too, but there were no fireworks. He ended on a Tony Benn quote.
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Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism
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A WikiLeaks release of nearly 20,000 emails from top Democratic National Committee staffers is sparking controversy just days before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Philadelphia.
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The push to abolish the “antidemocratic superdelegate system” within the Democratic National Committee is at its apex ahead of a DNC Rules Committee meeting on Saturday, at which an amendment to minimize the influence of those party insiders will be considered.
Superdelegates, which only exist within the Democratic Party, are unpledged elected officials or party elites who may back the candidate of their choosing at the convention, regardless of how their state voted in a presidential primary or caucus. The vast majority lined up behind Hillary Clinton before the 2016 primary race even began.
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The rule-making body of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday defeated an amendment brought by Bernie Sanders delegates to abolish superdelegates — the unelected party elites who make up 15 percent of all delegates and are allowed to cast a vote for the presidential candidate of their choice, unbound by the popular vote. But the rules committee did approve a compromise measure that binds some superdelegates to the results of their state primaries.
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After several rounds of voting Saturday afternoon, an effort by progressive Democrats to abolish what they see as the anti-democratic superdelegate process was defeated.
The amendment, co-sponsored by 52 members of the Democratic Party Rules Committee, was defeated when 108 members voted against and just 58 voted in favor.
Though a stinging defeat for those who campaigned in favor of the rule change, spearheaded largely by Bernie Sanders delegates and progressive advocacy groups, supporters took solace that because more than one-quarter of the committee voted ‘yes’ they will able to introduce a minority report during the full convention next week and demand a floor vote.
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Before we explore these issues, let’s get some perspective here. Tim Kaine is not a right wing zealot. He’s backed expanding payroll taxes to cover a broader range of income to increase Social Security’s solvency. He’s supported some limited expansion of gun control in a state that loves its guns. He’s got a reasonably good record on LGBT rights (after “evolving” a bit). He’s got a mixed record on climate and energy, banning some but not all fracking when governor of Virginia, and supporting the use of fossil fuels as a “bridge” to clean energy (including support for clean coal); but at least he acknowledges the science on climate change. He’s suggested that waging war against ISIL requires congressional authorization, and he called for withdrawing from Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
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More than 15,000 journalists descended on Cleveland to cover the Republican National Convention. But it was an unemployed TV reporter sitting in a Starbucks in Los Angeles, 2,345 miles away, who broke the biggest story of the week.
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So as we move on to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, let’s be clear: The great tragedy of the moment is not rooted in the Republican Party’s self-cannibalization. It’s with a Democratic Party that “successfully” suffocated responsible answers to the crises consuming our world. Indeed, as Hillary Clinton’s selection of the milquetoast Tim Kaine as her vice president shows, the Dems have put forward a candidate who embodies an establishment widely recognized as having betrayed the majority of the American public.
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Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.
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By picking Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton has revealed her true preferences and shown that her move to the left on policy issues during the primaries was simply a tactical move to defeat Bernie Sanders. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. Clinton can talk about caring about the U.S. public, but this choice cuts through the rhetoric.
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If Bernie Sanders sounded one of the very few authentic notes in recent U.S. politics, it was in his call for political revolution. We need a political revolution not just against Donald Trump but also against the repulsively corrupt likes of Hillary Clinton. Because of the former secretary of state’s veiled but solid-as-granite lackey service to the 1 percent, she is probably just as responsible for sustaining Trump’s thuggish, scapegoating brand of populism as is the real estate mogul himself.
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There is an adage, based on Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: “Know your enemy.” After watching Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, I wonder just how well Democrats really know Trump and his strategy.
It is easy to paint the businessman-turned-politician as a “racist” and “misogynist.” He is all those things and more. In fact, those descriptors are part of his political strategy. Pointing them out without seeing the larger picture of how he is planning on winning the November election is a recipe for failure.
I knew that if I watched Trump give his speech, I would be so enraged by his loathsome manner and disgusting rhetoric that it might blind me to his bigger plan. When I read the transcript later, I still felt rage, but the topics appeared to be a confusing mess, with Trump jumping from domestic to foreign policy with no apparent coherence. But then a pattern emerged.
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When New York Magazine broke the news two weeks ago that Gretchen Carlson was suing her former boss, Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, alleging sexual harassment, Kellie Boyle knew what she had to do. She had to speak up. The Virginia communications consultant called Carlson’s lawyer to share her story of how, in 1989, Ailes had sexually harassed her, then retaliated against her.
“I just couldn’t not come forward. I knew what kind of abuse Gretchen was going to get,” Boyle said. “I wanted to support her.”
But then a funny thing happened. Unlike the public trashing that other women have gotten when accusing powerful men in the past—think Anita Hill, called “nutty” and “slutty” in 1991 or the long line of Bill Cosby accusers who, until very recently, were dismissed as gold diggers—Carlson’s claims that Ailes ogled her and forced her out when she rebuffed him were taken seriously, listened to, and investigated.
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Jon Stewart, former host of “The Daily Show,” briefly took over Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on Thursday to expose the hypocrisy of conservative pundits who support Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who embodies much of what they claimed to despise about President Obama.
“Here’s where we are,” Stewart said after reviewing a number of the pundits’ statements. “Either Lumpy [Fox News host Sean Hannity] and his friends are lying about being bothered by thin-skinned, authoritarian, less-than-Christian readers-of-prompter being president, or they don’t care, as long as it’s their thin-skinned, prompter, authoritarian, tyrant narcissist.”
“You just want that person to give you your country back because you feel that you’re this country’s rightful owners. There’s only one problem with that: This country isn’t yours. You don’t own it. It never was. There is no real American. You don’t own it. You don’t own patriotism. You don’t own Christianity. You sure as hell don’t own respect for the bravery and sacrifice of military, police and firefighters.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Director Oliver Stone told fans at Comic-Con that every major movie studio turned down his narrative film about Edward Snowden because of censorship from their corporate leaders.
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It was the largest data leak in United States history, fueling a firestorm over the issue of mass surveillance that resonated with Americans and ignited around the world.
Oliver Stone’s hotly-anticipated “Snowden” tells the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in dramatic form for the first time — but the movie almost never made it to theaters.
“Frankly, it was turned down by every major studio. The script was good, the budget was good, the cast was good. It was definitely… self-censorship,” Stone, 69, told San Diego fan convention Comic-Con International on Thursday.
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No matter which you believe, the epic story of why he did it, who he left behind, and how he pulled it off makes for one of the most compelling films of the year. He made that accusation at Comic-Con International, the annual four-day celebration of comics and other arts and culture.
The biographical drama, which was produced by Moritz Borman, Eric Kopeloff and Philip Schulz-Deyle, is set to be released in theaters nationwide on September 16. (“I’m not an actor”, reminded Snowden, who appeared at the sci-fi convention via Google Hangout; Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him in the film). At the very least, Snowden, who is reportedly hiding out in an undisclosed location in Russian Federation, would prefer not to have his location tracked. Stone met with him a number of times in Moscow, trying to gain his trust and decide whether to take on the project. Written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald and based on recent books about the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Conservative Twitter users erupted on Friday after the social media platform torpedoed #DNCLeaks from its trending-news feed after Wikileaks released 20,000 emails by Democratic National Committee staff members.
Embarrassing emails sent and received by DNC members had enough momentum to propel the story to Twitter’s top “trending” news feed on Friday afternoon. The #DNCLeaks entry vanished in the evening, but returned 20 minutes later after users cried foul.
The story had 250,000 tweets at the time it was pulled. The Washington Examiner then aggregated a stream of angry feedback.
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Nearly every time someone wants attention from social media they accuse Twitter of shutting down their cause, both left and right, but in this case there seems to be some real evidence that they’re suppressing info from a release by Wikileaks that can damage the Democrats.
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Twitter banning Milo Yiannopolous is a story with interesting dimensions.
Yiannopolous is very entertaining. He’s got some points. And he often provokes some interesting reactions.
Yiannopolous also is a loudmouth and a troll. He doesn’t really give a shit. And sometimes his opinions are rather disturbing.
The banning might very well have marked a »Peak Twitter« moment.
The party is over. I think this might cause immense damage to Twitters image and trademark. Twitter just isn’t as exciting anymore.
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The Film Censorship Board of Malaysia said Rajinikanth’s ‘Kabali’ will have a different ending in that country simply to spread this particular message to the wider public: ‘crime does not pay’. The authorities have ordered these words to be superimposed at the very climax. However, for all intents and purposes, original climax scene in Kabali has given way to a final conclusive one that may spoil the storyline for many fans. The censor board had effected several cuts in the film of about five minutes duration, but insisted the storyline was intact.
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Malay Mail Online quotes Abdul Halim as saying, “We asked the producer to put in a caption…. This was to send a message that the law cannot be taken into your own hands.” What may have swung the authorities into action so late in the day after the release of the movie is the extreme popularity of the film with thousands of people lining up since early morning to watch it – Rajni mania has gripped Malaysia as much as it did in Tamil Nadu or Kerala.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Pokémon Go heralds a new dystopian age that we should all be fretting about, film director Oliver Stone has warned.
Speaking at Comic Con on Thursday to promote his new movie about US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Stone described the data-slurping tactics of the freakishly successful game as “a new level of invasion.”
The panel—also featuring Snowden stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, and Zachary Quinto—was asked about the surveillance potential of the game.
Quinto, of Star Trek and Heroes fame, replied: “I feel as long as you can find a balance in that, and limit your Pokémon Go time, then I’m all for it. Have at it.” He joked that Comic Con was probably “crawling with Pokémon,” but a stony-faced Stone cut in: “It’s not really funny.”
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The project, according to the draft statement, calls for the construction of approximately 2.9 million square feet of new operations and headquarters space in five buildings and the demolition of 1.9 million square feet of buildings and infrastructure.
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Microsoft has been told to reduce the data Windows 10 collects about users and tighten up the OS security or risk facing sanction for breaching data protection rules.
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Film director Oliver Stone has branded the popular gaming app Pokemon Go a new level of invasion of privacy that could lead to totalitarianism and “robot society”.
The American reportedly voiced concerns over the game as he promoted his new movie about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden at Comic Con International.
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And they have invested a huge amount of money into, what surveillance is, data mining. They’re data mining every single person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what you like, above all, your behavior.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Coming amid a number of other high-profile decisions, the Supreme Court’s 4-to-4 deadlock blocking Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration may not have gotten the attention it deserved. The measures would have expanded eligibility for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, as well as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program, programs that shield people from deportation, at least temporarily. Who is affected by the ruling, and where does it fit on the bigger road to truly humane immigration policy?
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Promoting Enduring Peace, founded in 1952 with the goal of promoting world peace and environmental sustainability, announced the recipients of next year’s Gandhi Peace Award on Friday. It will be presented jointly to consumer activist Ralph Nader and to Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human rights defender.
The award, given since 1960, “comes with a cash prize and a medallion made of ‘peace bronze,’ metal fashioned from recycled copper from disarmed nuclear missile systems,” according to the organization’s news release.
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While the US and the Soviet Union were in a proxy war, Americans were also fighting an internal ideological war, believing themselves defenders of liberal American thought in the face of communist evils.
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A national study found that lesbian, gay and bisexual youth in grades 7-12 were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide as their heterosexual peers. The numbers for transgender youth are believed to be even higher, with one study finding that out of 55 transgender young people, 25 percent reported suicide attempts.
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As the Republican National Convention unfolded in Cleveland this week with the Republican Party officially calling for measures to make it harder for people to vote, two different courts across the country issued rulings easing those restrictions.
Federal judges this week ruled against voter identification laws in Wisconsin and then Texas, finding that they disproportionately impact minority voters and violate the Voting Rights Act. Those photo ID laws, which have become more prevalent across the country in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013, are formally included in the GOP platform.
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An Indiana appeals court dropped feticide charges Friday against a woman who used abortion medication to induce her own abortion. The court unanimously ruled that Indiana’s feticide law was not intended to apply to abortions, and that 35-year-old Purvi Patel was not an exception to the rule.
Patel’s case, the first of its kind in the United States, was initially based on contradicting claims.
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When President Barack Obama last year banned the federal government from selling certain military equipment to police departments, civil liberties advocates cautiously welcomed the move as a positive development in curtailing militarized police forces.
In announcing the step on May 18, 2015, Obama said, “We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people the feeling like there’s an occupied force, as opposed to a force that is part of that community it is protecting and serving.”
But according to two of the law enforcement leaders who met with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden days after a gunman shot dead five Dallas police officers, the welcome may be short-lived, as Obama has “agreed to review each banned item,” Reuters exclusively reported Thursday.
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Throughout the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, protesters have kept issues of poverty, racism and systemic police violence in the spotlight, even as Republicans attending the convention attempted to swerve the national debate on these issues toward the right.
On Wednesday, hundreds of immigrants’ rights protesters from across the US erected a wall with several fence- and wall-like banners that stretched for several blocks outside the Quicken Loans Arena, where the RNC is taking place. The “Wall Off Trump” action was an effort to rebuff the Republican nominee’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, as well as his many bigoted comments against Mexican immigrants and other marginalized groups. The protesters first demonstrated at Cleveland’s Public Square, and then marched from the square to the inside of the secure perimeter just outside the convention center.
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We’re witnessing accelerating advantages for the affluent and compounding disadvantages for everyone else.
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As part of a global action proclaiming “Freedom Now,” Black Lives Matter groups shut down police operations around the country on July 20. From Oakland to Washington, DC, New York City to Chicago and Detroit, these bold and creative acts of civil disobedience issued a demand to “Fund Black Futures.” Protests in New York shut down the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association while those in DC closed the National Fraternal Order of Police office for the day.
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As the new Republican platform has been described as “the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history,” we get reaction from Charles Moran, board member with the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents LGBT conservatives and allies. He is a delegate to the Republican National Convention from California. We also speak with Alana Jochum, executive director of Equality Ohio, about how the platform opposes same-sex marriage, appears to endorse so-called conversion therapy and criticizes the Department of Education’s recommendation that schools allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.
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When he officially accepts the 2016 Republican nomination for president Thursday night, Donald Trump will do so as a different kind of Republican.
Or so the thinking goes.
A Trump presidency would be just like every other Republican presidency, arguably even worse.
We now know this for fact.
According to a story out today in the New York Times Magazine, when Donald Trump was looking for a running mate, he initially offered the job to one of his former opponents, Ohio Governor John Kasich.
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The Republican National Convention is underway just a few miles from the park where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by police in November of 2014 while he was playing with a toy pellet gun. We speak with Rev. Dr. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, the pastor of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, which is one of the largest African-American congregations in Cleveland, about how city officials and activists responded to the killing. He was recently profiled in a Politico report titled “The Preacher Who Took on the Police.”
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Donald Trump is not the first authoritarian demagogue who could take power and undermine constitutional government in the US or Europe. Right-wing authoritarian populists have often grabbed power during economic crises, particularly in Western societies suffering national decline and severe racial divisions or culture wars.
The classic example is Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Nazis were one of many far-right movements in Weimar — and Hitler was only one of many hyper-nationalist demagogues stoking the flames of economic discontent and promising to restore Aryan racial supremacy and make Germany great again.
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How did Trump respond? He became Thor in the wasteland of an imagined apocalypse, vowing to wield his mighty hammer and smash anyone who did not eat at Arby’s or protested police violence. “Law and Order” went the refrain, over and over in a lightning-bright flashback to authoritarian, racially coded Republican campaign tactics of old.
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The rhetoric that surrounds Donald Trump’s convention triumph signals a new phase in the intertwined history of fascism and populism.
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For nearly the first three years, I was denied a television or radio. Thus, I spent every waking hour reading, writing, cleaning, or working out in order to try to maintain my sanity. Still, by year five, I was experiencing auditory hallucinations (thinking I heard someone calling my name), extreme anxiety, erratic heart palpitations, and severe bouts of depression. All of these conditions were a direct consequence of long-term solitary confinement, and would become worse as the years wore on.
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Amnesty International has gathered credible evidence that detainees in Turkey are being subjected to beatings and torture, including rape, in official and unofficial detention centres in the country.
The organization is calling for independent monitors to be given immediate access to detainees in all facilities in the wake of the coup attempt, which include police headquarters, sports centres and courthouses. More than 10,000 people have been detained since the failed coup.
Amnesty International has credible reports that Turkish police in Ankara and Istanbul are holding detainees in stress positions for up to 48 hours, denying them food, water and medical treatment, and verbally abusing and threatening them. In the worst cases some have been subjected to severe beatings and torture, including rape.
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It is the duty of the Muslims to propagate the only one true faith, Islam, throughout the world. It is the duty of the Muslim to invade, by force, to the lands of the infidels. Should the infidels refuse to embrace Islam, jihad is the means to vanquish them. These are the three main arms of Islam, the Muslims use at will and according to the circumstances.
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It was announced in April 1966 that Valenti would be leaving his White House position to take up the vacant job as head of the MPAA, so why was he simultaneously being granted a Top Secret security clearance? Valenti began his new job in June so he was a consultant to the State Department in the early months of his new job at the MPAA.
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DRM
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Microsoft made the news last week when it announced that its Edge Web browser could deliver a better Netflix streaming experience than the other three most popular browsers. On Windows 10, Edge is the only one that can play Netflix’s video streams — which are encumbered with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) — in 1080p high definition. A PCWorld article confirmed the claim, but no one writing online has been able to give a clear explanation for the discrepancy. Following the tone of Microsoft’s announcement, most writers seem content to imply that Edge’s “edge” in Netflix playback on Windows derives from technical superiority, and that intelligent Netflix users should switch to Edge.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just filed a lawsuit that challenges the Constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, the “Digital Rights Management” provision of the law, a notoriously overbroad law that bans activities that bypass or weaken copyright access-control systems, including reconfiguring software-enabled devices (making sure your IoT light-socket will accept third-party lightbulbs; tapping into diagnostic info in your car or tractor to allow an independent party to repair it) and reporting security vulnerabilities in these devices.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The operator of the torrent site KickassTorrents has been arrested in Poland on an extradition request from Hollywood, and the domains seized. This action, while deplorable, shows that the copyright industry is still some fifty years behind reality in its thinking: there are no central chokepoints you can control on the Internet, and the net reacts to any censorship like this with antifragility – hardening and decentralizing the damaged part.
The old monopolized copyright industry is thinking in terms of central chokepoints, just like the Catholic Church was 500 years ago when trying to crush the printing press and its users. But just like the printing press, the Internet is decentralized, so it’s easy to circumvent chokepoints – and this has been predictable for a long time.
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