08.09.16
Posted in Europe, Finance, Patents at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Benoît Battistelli is wasting money and is driving the EPO into a wall
And with the UK’s diminishing hopes of UPC, what would he have left to show for it?
Summary: Based on the latest financial statements of the EPO, Benoît Battistelli would have to declare bankruptcy if he wasn’t so unaccountable and dismissive of accounting
THE EPO does not appear to be doing too well under Battistelli’s management, even from a fiscal point of view. He made his contract a closely-guarded secret with some saying that he doubled (or more) his salary (a massive salary in the context of any public office in the EU), he is wasting millions of Euros on his ludicrous lobbying events, he hired PR agencies even from the US (over a million dollars on that alone for just one year), and he pretends all is well and the money flows in like water while many senior examiners take early retirement to escape him.
“Benoît Battistelli will surely be remembered as one who crashed the EPO as we once knew it, emitting lots of worthless patents in haste like Robert Mugabe printing lots of worthless banknotes…”Extensive surveillance (Control Risks) and militarised forces including unnecessary bodyguards that cost a fortune are among other ‘luxuries’ of Battistelli, even if some of these defy European laws. Then there are the massive contracts without tenders (even tens of millions of Euros for each contract), the terrible IT spendings that make it into a black hole, and other budgetary issues that we have covered here over the years.
Suffice to say, those who will pay the price are past and present (and maybe future) employees; none of that stuff, as listed above, is free/gratis after all. Battistelli runs the EPO like Bush ran the US (into debt, into totally avoidable war, and into the ground on grounds of credibility). Here is a comment that showed up today, claiming (with evidence) that “the EPO shows an operating loss (of EUR 145 million), largely due to an increase of over EUR 260 million in “Employee benefit expenses”.” Here is the full comment:
What do you mean by a surplus? I am no accountant, but it appears to me that the latest financial statement (for 2015) produced by the EPO shows an operating loss (of EUR 145 million), largely due to an increase of over EUR 260 million in “Employee benefit expenses”.
http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/6C4CC693A4FAA752C1257FE2004A2CE8/$File/financial_statements_2015_en.pdf
I know that the figures presented need to be taken with a pinch of salt, especially due to the lack of oversight in the preparation of the figures. However, even the “sanitised” figures show what appears to be a huge hole in the pension fund. That is, there are liabilities of EUR15,828 million relating to “defined benefits”, which completely dwarfs the EPO’s current equity of less than EUR8,000 million. It also dwarfs the current assets of the pension, which were reported as just under EUR6,600 million.
I would be keen to know what “Remeasurement defined benefit obligations” means, though. This is because the EPO appears to have found over EUR4,750 million down the back of the sofa in 2015 thanks to that little accounting trick.
This does raise an interesting question, though. Has BB been brought in to deal with the black hole in the pension fund? Can the major effects of his policies be understood as being aimed at maximising current operating profit and minimising pension liability? If so, it would appear that EPOnia is a microcosm of society at large, with current workers (and users of the system) effectively paying the price for the over-generous benefits awarded to the generation that preceded them.
A lot of these expenses are associated with early departures — something which, as we pointed out yesterday, happened a lot in the past two years because of Battistelli and his ‘reforms’.
Benoît Battistelli will surely be remembered as one who crashed the EPO as we once knew it, emitting lots of worthless patents in haste like Robert Mugabe printing lots of worthless banknotes (“231 million percent peak hyperinflation in 2008,” according to Wikipedia). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’ve been on a quest lately to add nano-Linux boards to steampunk projects. The effort has been pretty successful and it’s fun doing things like putting a Raspberry Pi into my “Conference Personality Identification Device,” which everyone recognizes as a name badge. The badge sports a 1.8-inch color TFT screen that plays little sepia toned promotional videos and an orbing tricolor LED “ozone tube.” I wear the badge to my conference tech talks and it tends to be a big hit.
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Windows 10 is back in the news and back up to their old tricks. The latest Windows 10 updates has been reported to delete Linux partitions without confirmation or even warning. Even pure Windows users have reported unbootable systems and Linux is the bad guy in a security question with Linux on Windows. Elsewhere, Lumina Desktop Environment hit milestone version 1.0.0 today and Linux Mint had an oopsy with their Firefox 48 update. New Bedrock Linux introduced a different approach to universal packaging and Christine Hall shared her top five favorite Linux distributions.
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Desktop
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London’s Metropolitan Police has missed its deadline to dump Windows XP, with tens of thousands of copper still running the risky OS.
The force, on the front line against terrorist threats and criminals in the capital city, is running Windows XP on around 27,000 PCs.
At last count, in May 2015, the Met had a total of 35,640 PCs, with 34,920 of them running XP. Policemen set themselves a deadline of March 2016 to finish migrating to Windows 8.1.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, however, has apparently now revealed that just 8,000 of the force’s PCs have moved to Windows 8.1 since last September. The target is for another 6,000 by the end of September 2016.
Khan provided the update in response to a question from Conservative Greater London Assembly member Andrew Boff.
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LONDON BOYS IN BLUE the Metropolitan Police may be armed with tasers and extendable batons, but they are backed up by Windows XP in a lot of cases, which is a really bad thing.
Windows XP no longer gets official security updates, and Microsoft sees it as the sort of thing that should be scraped off shoes before walking on the carpet.
The company will let people pay to keep using it, but only on a case-by-case basis. We do not know the police arrangement with Microsoft, but the Met needs to accelerate the updating of its computer systems as it puts Londoners’ information at risk, according to London Assembly member Andrew Boff.
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Server
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The Cloud Open Labs are part of the vendor’s All Cloud strategy to make it easier for telco operators to migrate their infrastructures to the cloud.
Huawei is unveiling an interconnected group of laboratories that are designed to help network operators more quickly and easily embrace and deploy cloud computing solutions in their environments.
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Sir Isaac Newton remains our favorite source for axiomatic laws of physics, despite giving us the language of calculus. Particularly relevant for today’s discussion is Newton’s third law as formally stated: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
In the cosmology of the data center, this existentially proves itself in the network whenever there are significant changes in application infrastructure and architectures. As evidence, consider the reaction to first, virtualization, and now, containerization, APIs, and microservice architectures.
These changes, while improving speed and agility of application development and delivery, have created greater mass in the data center, essentially changing the center of gravity and pulling many network services toward it. Application-focused services like load balancing and even web application security have been pulled toward the development environment as scale and security have become a necessary component of application architectures.
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Achieving the agility and speed necessary in the app network requires software — virtual or containerized — with APIs and programmatic methods of integration into the orchestration engines driving the build and release process. These components must also be scalable, but not of the same magnitude as the core network. Software solutions rule in this growing division in the data center.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The refereed talk deadline for Linux Plumbers Conference is only a few weeks off, September 1, 2016 at 11:59PM CET. So there is still some time to get your proposals in, but time is growing short.
Note that this year’s Plumbers is co-located with Linux Kernel Summit rather than LinuxCon, so the refereed track is all Plumbers this year. We are therefore looking forward to seeing your all-Plumbers refereed-track submission!
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Graphics Stack
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Just days after the Radeon RX 470 began shipping, the Radeon RX 460 is shipping this morning and the embargo concerning the RX 460 has expired.
This Polaris 11 graphics card has 14 compute units, 896 stream process, 1090MHz boost clock speed with 1200MHz boost clock speed, and is rated for up to 2.2 TFLOPS of compute power. The video memory is GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus. The TDP for this graphics card is less than 75 Watts.
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Earlier this year AMD made CodeXL 2.0 open-source as a developer tool with GUI centered around profiling/optimizing D3D, OpenGL, and Vulkan (since CodeXL 2.1) under Windows and Linux. Today marks the release of CodeXL 2.2.
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One of the latest initiatives worked on by Eric Anholt at Broadcom for the VC4 Gallium3D driver — the open-source driver used most famously by the Raspberry Pi hardware — is lower memory use.
Over the past week he’s been working on lowering the memory use for the VC4 open-source Linux driver stack. Eric ended up making various fixes and optimizations to reduce the memory consumption, which is important considering the limited RAM available on the Raspberry Pi boards.
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Applications
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Pitivi 0.97 was released today as the newest development release of this open-source non-linear video editing software followed quickly by a 0.97.1 point release just for a fix to show the correct version string.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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What’s new in this release:
Better 64-bit binary compatibility on macOS.
Performance improvements in JavaScript.
More progress towards the Direct3D command stream.
More shader instructions in Direct3D.
Performance improvements in GDI.
Various bug fixes.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Breeze Icons follow the colorscheme that’s not new but now the folder icons also follow the color scheme.
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This project of mine has been around for quite a while already. I’ve never much publicised it, however, and for the past year the code hasn’t seen any changes (until a few days ago, anyway). But related to my current job, I’ve found a new need for remote procedure calls, so I came back to the code after all.
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Qt developers are preparing for the feature-freeze of the upcoming Qt 5.8 tool-kit.
The branching of “dev” to “5.8″ is happening with developers preparing for Qt 5.8 to set out on its final course ahead of the official release later this year. The actual feature freeze is set to happen one week from today on 15 August.
Qt developers concerned about the logistics of the 5.8 branching can see this mailing list post.
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This post is a small synopsis of my experiences so far as a student in this years Summer of Code in Space, where I shall recount the whole adventure of integrating Sentinel-2 data into Marble Virtual Globe.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As per the Qualcomm boards, they run with the freedreno driver (by the way, props to Rob Clark for his amazing work on this driver) and I was able to run a GNOME on Wayland on them using the official Debian image, so they are more suitable if you want to focus on the upper layers of the stack.
I would like to reiterate my gratitude to Banana Pi and Qualcomm for their generosity for the hardware, as well as ARM and Codethink for the server side stuff that is already being used in our GNOME Continuous efforts.
And of course, I’m going to GUADEC! I’ll be taking the boards with me, so if you think you have something interesting to do with them and you are attending just find me around.
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This week is the annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (“GUADEC”). I’m sad that I am not able to attend this year. I was looking forward to being there.
As I’ve reported before, I have a few work conflicts this year. I started a new job in late December, as CIO in county government. The new position comes with new responsibilities and a new schedule.
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Yes, I know it has been a while since I did any update on my GSoC project with GNOME. The reasons being that, I was busy with my visa and travel documents for Germany (GUADEC). As this trip would mark my international travel debut (yay!), it took some time for me to get familiarize with the process of visa and required travel documents. I applied in Ahmedabad (where I live currently), but looks like visa granting people were not satisfied and they called for a personal interview at Mumbai.
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Is it a mic? Is it a speaker? No, it’s a … Well, actually GNOME doesn’t know either — but the open-source desktop is about to be smarter about finding out.
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Many thanks to David Henningsson for the original code, and his help integrating the functionality into GNOME, Bednet for providing hardware to test and maintain this functionality, and Allan, Florian and Rui for working on the UI notification part of the functionality, and wiring it all up after I abandoned them to go on holidays 
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Reviews
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I recently decided to do something different and, instead of reviewing one of the distributions in the DistroWatch database, I opted to select two projects at random from the waiting list. I was not sure what I would get when I spun the virtual roulette wheel, but I was eager to try something new.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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openSUSE.Asia Summit is a 2 day event hosted every year in different regions of Asia to promote openSUSE and open source. Hosting a variety of workshops, talks and a hackathon, openSUSE Asia summit is expecting over 400 participants. Attendees will learn how to use openSUSE and incorporate it in their personal as well as professional lives. They will also understand the dynamics of the openSUSE project and meet the openSUSE contributors and board.
In addition, we have chance to learn free and open technologies, to share experiences with each other, and most of all, have fun at the Summit, and, in beautiful tropical scene of Yogyakarta region (a travel guide for you coming soon). In previous years openSUSE.Asia Summit has been held in Beijing, China in 2014 and National Taipei University of Education,Taipei / Taiwan, Republic Of China 2015.
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Red Hat Family
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By now you may have heard of a three-year old tech startup called Docker, valued at over a billion dollars, and the new tech market it created called containers.
But what you may not realize is that the insane popularity of containers, a tech used by computer programmers, promises to completely change the multi-trillion-dollar enterprise software market, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst tells us.
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Open source is a big part of my life. So far, I’ve been the CEO of three open source companies. Red Hat is a superlative example of how to create revenue and maintain an organization through the monetization of open source technology via subscriptions and support. And yet, as the entire tech industry transforms with a dramatic shift toward the cloud, Red Hat will have to modify its business structure in order to stay ahead of the game. Their acquisition of 3scale shows that they’ve already identified this necessity, and are taking steps to address it.
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When one thinks of Red Hat, Linux emerges as the top of mind software application. The Red Hat Linux software solution paradigm represented, to many, a “crazy” business model in its early days. Prior to the emergence, the likes of Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc. had defined the software development, sales and support model narrative in a clear objectified manner. Organizations paid a monetized licencing fee, and monetized annual support. Modifications to core software were often reliant upon the vendor, based upon established pricing models. Also, core product upgrades were solely the responsibility of the provider.
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Finance
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Fedora
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The annual Flock was held last week in Poland. This year was much busier for me than last year. I’ve been on the team for well over a year now (my how time flies!) so I was more involved with everything.
I gave the annual kernel talk. This was mostly a status report/update. If you’ve been to Flock in the past, this talk will seem very familiar. One item I tried to emphasize this year was that we really wanted to get more people involved. Our policy is still ‘go upstream’ but we still want to build an active Fedora community of kernel participants as well. The distro is probably going to be most users first interaction with the kernel and we want the best experience possible. The slides are super boring but you can read them if you want.
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I was working on generating statistics for Flock this week. Bhagyashree (bee2502), my GSoC mentor, had delivered a talk on Fedora Contributors and Newcomers Onboarding and I was assigned the task of generating statistics of the whole Fedora Community. At first thought, this was a pretty hectic thing to do. To accomplish this, I will need data of all the contributors from the beginning of fedmsg -i.e from 2012. And, I will have to find when a user had signed up for a FAS account and track his/her activity. Phew!
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Sharma is a software engineer on the Red Hat product security team. He focuses on security of storage products such as Ceph and Gluster. He used to work as a software maintenance engineer at Red Hat, looking after the GNOME and KDE desktop packages. “I learned from the most talented people in the software security industry and still have a lot to learn,” said Sharma. He started using Linux in 2004 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, but later switched to Fedora Core 2.
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Today marks the Fedora 25 Alpha release that also means it’s time for the software string freeze and Bodhi activation point. If all goes well, Fedora 25 will be released three months from yesterday.
The various freezes are beginning to take place for Fedora 25 so it can hopefully be on target for its release on 8 November. Details on the various milestones hit today can be found via this mailing list post.
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Flock is the annual Fedora conference where you can find Fedora contributors as the main audience. This year the conference was held at the beautiful city Kraków, Poland from 2nd to 5th August. Being a schedule of 4 days, it was split into first 2 days of talks and later on workshops. Majority of talks were enriched with various Fedora related topics.
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Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one! In the past 2 weeks I’ve been traveling a lot: first to Westford, US for Design Team Fedora Activity Days 2016 and then to Krakow, Poland for Flock to Fedora 2016.
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Debian Family
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I’ve experimented with Next Thing’s Chip SBC, connected to a big screen TV via its composite video output, and controlled with a wireless keyboard/mousepad, for about a month now. It’s a nice little full-featured Linux machine that runs LibreOffice and other desktop applications reasonably well.
The Chip sports a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 based Allwinner R8 processor, accompanied by 512MB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC flash. The board’s built-in WiFi is convenient, and its $9 cost is easy on the wallet.
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Derivatives
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Emmabuntus Debian Edition is a nice distribution that works for the particular niche. It delivers Linux and computer enablement into remote areas of the world where computers are rare and Internet connection could be something exotic. That is why it contains “all you can eat” software in the same ISO image.
It is the reason of one of the issues I listed above as different applications may use different design styles.
However, there are some more issues mentioned above that could be solved if the team looked into the distribution polishing a bit more. Luckily, they are mostly in the design area, meaning they are very likely to be resolved in the next releases.
I remember the early version of Emmabuntus which had many similar issues at that time. Most of them are no longer in the system. Let’s hope that Emmabuntus DE will follow the case.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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You probably already know that elementary OS is built on top of Linux and every piece of software we write is open source, but you might not know that there’s a lot of other open source bits in between.
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Phones
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Android
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Android 7.0 is just around the corner. What should we expect from Google’s next major release, code-named Nougat, when it drops in the next few weeks?
For one, don’t expect earth-shattering updates. Android, like iOS, is a mature mobile operating system and platform with broad support, including massive development community. It’s definitely not 2009. Back then — Droid Does! — mobile and the smartphone tantalized us. Indeed, a brand new world. We were happily decommissioning our BlackBerrys and jumping into the new, exciting world of Android.
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A startup on a shoestring budget is working to clean up the Android security mess, and has even demonstrated results where other “secure” Android phones have failed, raising questions about Google’s willingness to address the widespread vulnerabilities that exist in the world’s most popular mobile operating system.
“Copperhead is probably the most exciting thing happening in the world of Android security today,” Chris Soghoian, principal technologist with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Ars. “But the enigma with Copperhead is why do they even exist? Why is it that a company as large as Google and with as much money as Google and with such a respected security team—why is it there’s anything left for Copperhead to do?”
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The headline act is its iris-scanning technology that supposedly makes the device more secure. It also supports high-dynamic range video, the industry’s latest attempt to make consumers excited about image quality. Then there’s a stylus that lets people write on their phone underwater, just because.
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Although open source software (OSS) has been around for decades, only within the past several years has there been a surge in its acceptance within the business world. Today, open source is perceived as a viable business alternative to commercial solutions, and is used by 64 percent of companies. Several factors have led to this shift in perception of OSS, including an evolving culture of software developers, undeniable business advantages, and, perhaps most importantly, the success of Linux—the leading open source operating system. The background of how and why the open source model has matured is also a key to understanding why organizations of all sizes continue to not only adopt OSS but to also actively support and contribute to open source projects.
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To win in today’s market, in which disruptive startups and nimble competitors are advancing on all sides, digitizing the enterprise to inject greater agility and promote innovation is critical. You need to transform your operating model and reinvent products, services, and business processes and business functions across the entire enterprise. Undeniably, software is a central part of this transformation. And open-source software is leading the way, because what the digital era needs are “connected economies of expertise” that can capitalize on the power of our collaborative imagination.
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Back in 1998 when I discovered Linux and open source, I never would have believed that I would make a career out of this. Back in those days I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted it to involve technology in some way.
Since those dim distant days filled with teenage inexperience and … well, hair … I have learned so many things about what works and what doesn’t in building a career in open source. So here are some broader principles I have learned that may be handy for those of you starting out on your journey. Irrespective of whether you want to be a programmer, community leader, documentation writer, entrepreneur, or something else, I think these principles will help in setting you up for success and differentiating you from the pack.
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Google today is announcing that it’s open-sourcing pre-trained models for parsing text in 40 languages. Think of it as an extension of Google’s decision in May to open-source the interestingly named Parsey McParseface English-language parser. The new parsers are available on GitHub under an open-source Apache license.
Parsing language might not sound like a big deal — it involves looking at a sentence and picking out the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. But Parsey McParseface works at Google scale, that is to say it is very good, good enough for machines to use it to understand users’ web search queries. Researchers can now take advantage of the technology in more languages without worrying about where they’ll get the data for teaching the models.http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/08/google-open-sources-parseys-cousins-a-set-of-parsers-for-40-more-languages/
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Events
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So, it was a sheer stroke of luck that I met Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn who works with Karen Sandler on Software Conservancy. While I wanted to be there for his presentation, it was just one of those days which doesn’t go as planned. However, as we met socially and over e-mail there were two basic questions which I asked him which also imbibes why we need to fight for software freedom in the court of law. Below is a re-wording of what he shared .
Q1. why do people think that GPL still needs to be challenged in the court of law while there are gpl-violations which has been more or less successfully defended in the court of law ?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google engineers today put out the first public beta of the upcoming Chrome/Chromium 53 web-browser update.
Chrome 53 brings support for version one of the Shadow DOM API, introduces a PaymentRequest API, Chrome on Android can now auto-play muted videos, notification improvements, experimental work on the Web Bluetooth API, support for the text-size-adjust property, deprecating HTTP/0.9 in favor of HTTP/1.0, and a variety of other improvements.
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Databases
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SQLite 3.14 is now available as the newest version of this popular, cross-platform, embed-able SQL database software.
New to SQLite 3.14 is CSV virtual table support, which allows reading comma-separated value files. The CSV virtual table can then be interacted with as if its rows/columns were a native SQL table.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Unix was first developed by Ken Thompson in the summer of 1969 on the DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. By 1979 Unix version 7 was making the rounds at universities all over the world. Bell Labs Unix has enormous importance: It was the basis for many operating systems that followed including BSD, and the template for Minix and Linux.
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After roughly four years of development, I am pleased to announce the first official release of the Lumina desktop environment! This release is an incredible realization of the initial idea of Lumina – a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment meant for users to configure to match their individual needs. I hope you all enjoy it, and I look forward to working with all of you on the next iterations of this desktop!
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Public Services/Government
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The White House has released its Federal Source Code policy that promotes reuse of new source code developed by government agencies across the federal government.
The new policy also sets up a pilot program “that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years,” Tony Scott, U.S. CIO and Anne E. Rung, chief acquisition officer, wrote in a memorandum to heads of departments and agencies on Monday.
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Consider government open source, don’t mandate it [Ed: Not everyone agrees with ACT. This one could be titled "government should be allowed to pay for back-doored binaries."]
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The Argentinian national domain registrar will use the Czech registration system FRED (Free Registry for ENUM and Domains) for the administration of its internet domains with the .AR extension. NIC Argentina currently administers around 530,000 domains and has used FRED for their administration since the beginning of July 2016. The FRED registration system was developed by the Czech national domain registrar, the CZ.NIC association, in 2007 and besides Argentina and the Czech Republic it is also used in Albania, Angola, Costa Rica, Macedonia, Malawi, Tanzania and the Faroe Islands.
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Licensing/Legal
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The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is organising a workshop on the conundrum between FRAND intellectual property rights (patents) and open source software. The organisation, one of the key players in European standardisation, also hopes to increase cooperation with open source communities.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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A year ago, we wrote about how TPP’s requirement for “data exclusivity” risked undermining one of science’s fundamental principles: that facts cannot be owned. Data exclusivity is just the latest attempt by Big Pharma to extend its monopoly over drugs, whether using patents or other means. To a certain extent, you might expect that: after all, companies are designed to maximize profits, and if it means more people suffer or die along the way, well, that’s regrettable but sort of beside the point. However, it’s surprising to see a group of medical researchers writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) calling for just the same kind of data exclusivity. The post is in response to an earlier NEJM article by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), entitled “Sharing Clinical Trial Data”…
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Programming/Development
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When I started using the vi text editor, I hated it. I thought it was the most painful and counter-intuitive editor ever designed. But I’d decided I had to learn the thing, because if you’re using Unix, vi was everywhere and was the only editor you were guaranteed to have access to. That was back in 1998, but it remains true today—vi is available, usually as part of the base install, on almost every Linux distribution in existence.
It took about a month before I could do anything with any proficiency in vi and I still didn’t love it, but by then I’d realized that there was an insanely powerful editor hiding behind this bizarre facade. So I stuck with it, and eventually found out that once you know what you’re doing, it’s an incredibly fast editor.
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devRant, an online community for developers, has released its data, revealing the most annoying programming languages. The developers with SQL in their profile skills rant +56.0 percent more than the average rate. On the contrary, Objective-C developers are the most content
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A new binary release of the ELLCC cross compilation tool chain is available. ELLCC is a pre-packaged set of tools designed to support cross compilation for a variety of target processors.
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Uber, the huge taxi service, is undoubtedly still reeling from its defeat in China. After investing $2 billion to get a foothold in the Chinese market, Uber sold out to its competitor, Didi Chuxing, and agreed to be a junior partner in China.
While this is a dramatic story that made headlines across the country, a less covered story could have a far more impact on Uber’s future. This is the story of Uber’s departure from Austin, Texas.
Uber, along with Lyft, stopped operating in Austin in early May after the city’s voters endorsed a requirement that drivers for these services had to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks. The companies complained that the requirement placed an onerous burden on them and instead said that they would just stop operating in the city.
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If we start reading Microsoft’s history, the MS-DOS chapter comes very early. The operating system acts as a foundation of the Microsoft Empire. Bill Gates got his big break in 1980 when he licensed this OS to IBM.
You might know that Microsoft didn’t develop this operating system in-house. Instead, it acquired another operating system named QDOS–Quick and Dirty Operating System. QDOS was developed by SCP’s Tim Paterson, who was later hired by Gates to modify QDOS into MS-DOS.
If you turn more pages of the history, you’ll come across another technology pioneer named the late Gary Kildall. He was the founder of DRI (Digital Research Inc.) and creator of an early PC OS named CP/M.
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A 22-year-old man has been arrested after he climbed over a security fence at Buckingham Palace, police have said.
The man from Croydon, south London, was arrested in the early hours after he was seen by officers who were monitoring CCTV cameras.
He was arrested at 04:15 BST within a security perimeter. He did not gain access to the palace.
The Met said the suspected intruder had been drinking and that the incident was not thought to be terrorism related.
The force added the man was not armed and no Taser was deployed by officers.
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Health/Nutrition
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Two years after Medicaid coverage was expanded under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their states, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, made fewer emergency departments visits, and reported higher quality care and improved health compared with low-income adults in Texas, which did not expand Medicaid, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The findings provide new evidence for states that are debating whether to expand or how to expand coverage to low-income adults.
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Bolstering the call for universal coverage and undercutting a key Republican talking point, a new study finds that Medicaid expansion in Arkansas and Kentucky resulted in better healthcare and improved health outcomes among low-income Americans.
The research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows that two years after Medicaid coverage was expanded under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their states, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, made fewer emergency room visits, had less trouble paying bills, and reported higher quality care and improved health compared with their counterparts in Texas, one of 19 states that did not expand Medicaid.
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Security
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If you attended Black Hat last week, the single biggest message I kept hearing over and over again is that what we do today in the security industry isn’t working. They say the first step is admitting you have a problem (and we have a big one). Of course it’s easy to proclaim this, if you just look at the numbers it’s pretty clear. The numbers haven’t really ever been in our favor though, we’ve mostly ignored them in the past, I think we’re taking real looks at them now.
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Todd Weaver, the Founder and CEO of Purism shows Leo Laporte and Aaron Newcomb the Librem line of secure Linux computers. They discuss PureOS the operating system based on Debian, and how the computers are sourced and built. Plus, he talks about their line of no-carrier, encrypted smartphone coming next year.
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When cybersecurity professionals converged in Las Vegas last week to expose vulnerabilities and swap hacking techniques at Black Hat and Defcon, a consistent theme emerged: the internet is broken, and if we don’t do something soon, we risk permanent damage to our economy.
“Half of all Americans are backing away from the net due to fears regarding security and privacy,” longtime tech security guru Dan Kaminsky said in his Black Hat keynote speech, citing a July 2015 study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “We need to go ahead and get the internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.”
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Volkswagen first ended up in this situation after it admitted to intentionally installing secret software in its 2.0-liter diesels. That software curtailed nitrogen oxide emissions in lab-testing environments, but once on the road, the diesels would pollute well in excess of legal limitations. It was allegedly used in response to ever-stricter emissions regulations.
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More specifically, here at bsdly.net we’ve been seeing attempts at logging in to the pop3 mail retrieval service using usernames that sound distinctively like Chinese names, and the attempts originate almost exclusively from Chinese networks.
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A previously unknown hacking group called Strider has been conducting cyber espionage against selected targets in Belgium, China, Russia and Sweden, according to Symantec.
The security firm suggested that the product of the espionage would be of interest to a nation state’s intelligence services.
Strider uses malware known as Remsec that appears primarily to have been designed for espionage, rather than as ransomware or any other nefarious software.
Symantec has linked Strider with a group called Flamer which uses similar attack techniques and malware.
The Lord of the Rings reference is deliberate as the Remsec stealth tool contains a reference to Sauron, the necromancer and main protagonist in a number of Tolkien’s stories.
“Strider has been active since at least October 2011. The group has maintained a low profile until now and its targets have been mainly organisations and individuals that would be of interest to a nation state’s intelligence services,” said Symantec in a blog post.
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A source who has provided reliable information in the past has informed us that the new MacBook Pro models, expected to be launched in the fall, will feature a Touch ID power button as well as the previously-reported OLED touch-sensitive function keys.
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It all starts with a bug report to LibreSSL that the openssl tool crashes when it tries to print NULL. This bug doesn’t manifest on OpenBSD because libc will convert NULL strings to ”(null)” when printing. However, this behavior is not required, and as observed, it’s not universal. When snprintf silently accepts NULL, that simply leads to propagating the error.
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Security experts have discovered a malware platform that’s so advanced in its design and execution that it could probably have been developed only with the active support of a nation-state.
The malware—known alternatively as “ProjectSauron” by researchers from Kaspersky Lab and “Remsec” by their counterparts from Symantec—has been active since at least 2011 and has been discovered on 30 or so targets. Its ability to operate undetected for five years is a testament to its creators, who clearly studied other state-sponsored hacking groups in an attempt to replicate their advances and avoid their mistakes. State-sponsored groups have been responsible for malware like the Stuxnet- or National Security Agency-linked Flame, Duqu, and Regin. Much of ProjectSauron resides solely in computer memory and was written in the form of Binary Large Objects, making it hard to detect using antivirus.
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Defence/Aggression
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In the early morning hours of July 28, Salvadoran police arrested 77 people in a nationwide raid of alleged members of a multimillion-dollar financial network run by El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha gang, known as MS-13. Among those arrested was Dany Balmore Romero García, a former member of MS-13 who for the past decade has served as the director of the OPERA Youth Group, a violence-prevention organization that works with former and current gang members.
At a hearing on August 1, the judge presented three formal charges against Romero: being a leader of a terrorist organization, conspiring to commit terrorist acts, and conspiring to commit homicide against someone with the code name “Meme,” who will serve as a key witness in the trial, according to a lawyer present for the proceedings. The judge announced that the investigation to substantiate the charges will last at least six months.
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The Defence White Paper released early this year signals that the Australian Government will spend $2 billion acquiring armed drones by the early 2020s. They will be used to assist the US in the ongoing “war on terror”. Before this investment is made, it is important the Australian public has a chance to debate the ethics of drone warfare. Is the use of armed drones ethically justifiable? Should our taxpayer dollars go on acquiring drones?
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As part of its implementation of the Rule Book, DOD released a Report on Congressional Notification of Sensitive Military Operations and Counterterrorism Operational Briefings (DOD released several related documents; CIA released nothing). Throughout the short document, it says the 2014 Defense Authorization (which was introduced after the Rule Book was signed but before DOD issued its Drone Rule Book implementation procedures and signed into law on December 23, 2013) and the PPG require Congress be informed of sensitive military operations. That’s the Executive Branch’s way of saying, “Congress has required we tell it what we’re doing but so has the President” as if they came up with the idea to do that additional reporting in the first place.
[...]
As I said, this is a fairly minor point. But it also suggests that even while the Executive was leaking wildly to get good press about this Drone Rule book, Congress was at the same time mandating specifically some of the things the Rule Book only nodded to in theory.
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In response to a court order in an ACLU lawsuit, the government late Friday evening (as is its wont) released five documents relating to its process for nominating terrorism suspects for kill or capture. Most notable was the “Presidential Policy Guidance,” a document particularly central to the government’s targeted killing program.
The release is important and illuminating, especially considering the backdrop of extreme secrecy surrounding the program since its inception. Before a 2013 ACLU victory in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the government had claimed that it could neither “confirm nor deny” that the program existed at all. But surprisingly, and disappointingly, the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) and other records released over the weekend do nothing to assuage concerns about the government’s standards governing who it decides to kill.
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Official Washington’s influential neocons continue to dream up new excuses for expanding U.S. military intervention in Syria, including why to bomb Syrian government forces and confront Russia, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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The time has come for Prime Minister Trudeau to allow American deserters who resisted the war begun in Iraq by the U.S. and the U.K. in 2003 to stay in Canada. During the election, he signalled this was where his moral instincts lay. Unfortunately, so far his Liberal government is not showing leadership on this issue.
I have a double worry about where a Trudeau government may be heading. One is that this government is prone to buying into certain Harper-era ‘moral’ and geopolitical arguments. A second worry is that factual confusion amongst Canadians who are against allowing these conscientious objectors to stay will be used as a political shield by the government.
Let’s start with this second worry. Letters to the Editor in the Star’s pages following a column by Bob Hepburn (“Trudeau should act on U.S. war resisters,” July 20, 2016) show some think they have a knock-down argument against the war resisters because the Vietnam analogy does not work. We are told that, when former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government gave sanctuary to war resisters, they were “draft dodgers” being compelled to fight whereas the current Iraq War resisters are “deserters” who volunteered.
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A suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than a hundred in Quetta, Pakistan, on Monday.
“There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister, to Reuters.
Many of those killed were lawyers who had gathered at the hospital “after the body of their colleague, prominent attorney Bilal Kasi was brought there,” Associated Press (AP) reports.
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Pakistani militants struck at the heart of the country’s legal profession on Monday, killing a prominent attorney and then bombing the hospital where dozens of other lawyers had gathered to mourn. The twin attacks killed at least 70 people, most of them lawyers, authorities said.
A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks in Quetta, the capital of restive Baluchistan province, which also wounded dozens of others.
In a statement, Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militant group, said its fighters killed Bilal Kasi, the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, then as dozens of lawyers gathered at the government-run Civil Hospital, a suicide bomber targeted the mourners.
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In a much-hailed if modestly problematic act of righteous revenge, an African-American inmate allegedly sucker-punched racist creep and murderer Dylann Roof – an act that sparked much online praise for the “vigilante hero,” a fundraiser for donations to his commissary account, and, finally, the posting of his $100,000 bond by a supporter. Roof is in protective custody at the Charleston County Detention Center for killing nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015; he was in the shower when Dwayne Stafford, a 26-year-old inmate reportedly doing time for either weed violations or strong arm burglary, allegedly got out of his cell, reached Roof, and landed a couple of punches to his face. The sheriff said Roof was attacked “for no reason,” which many would argue was less than accurate.
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Posters in Pulwama are threatening Kashmiri Hindus to exit the valley of Kashmir. The poster is allegedly been put up by Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI) militant.
This is not the first time that Kashmiri Hindus have been threatened. In mass rapes and killings in the 90’s, a genocide by Kashmiri Hidus, there was a mass exodus of Hindus from the valley. Initially the government provided security to the population, but the then governor asked the minority population to exit to safety.
The black and white poster flaunts the flag and the logo of the outfit. What has created a flutter is the flag that is similar to the Jamat-ud-dawa, the fountainhead of Lashkar-e-Taiba headed by Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed.
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The newly-published memoirs of the first chief of the KGB may shed light on the fate of a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust only to disappear in the final weeks of the Second World War.
Raoul Wallenberg is honoured around the world for rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis by issuing them with fake Swedish passports or housing them in diplomatic buildings.
But in January 1945 he vanished from the streets of Soviet-occupied Budapest and was never seen again.
His family has long suspected that he was kidnapped by the Soviet Union but have never received definitive proof of what happened to him.
Moscow’s story has changed over the decades. At first Russia claimed that Soviet intelligence had nothing to do with Wallenberg’s case, they later said he died of a heart attack in a prison camp.
Now, the memoirs of KGB chief Ivan Serov offer another explanation – he was executed at Stalin’s orders.
“I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947,” Serov wrote in his memoirs, according to the New York Times.
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The only thing worse than the new hero status of now-covert al-Qaeda operative Abu Muhammad al-Julani and his Army of Syrian Conquest (ASC) is the news that he plans to subject all of Aleppo.
Aleppo is Syria’s largest city, or at least it used to be, with some 2.5 million people. Some reporters who have been there think that although a lot of people have left, others have come flooding in from the countryside, so that its current population may be similar but rearranged. Many more people, perhaps 1.2 million, live in relatively well-off West Aleppo, still controlled by the Syrian regime, which by all accounts is still very popular among them. Some 250,000 live in slummy East Aleppo, ruled by a congeries of fundamentalist militias who are supported from the outside by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Julani.
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On August 9, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg The two leaders will discuss political developments following the recent coup-attempt in Turkey, tourism, and the launching of Turkstream, the natural gas pipeline that will transform Turkey into southern Europe’s biggest energy hub.. They are also expected to explore options for ending the fighting in Syria. Putin will insist that Erdogan make a concerted effort to stop Islamic militants from crossing back-and-forth into Syria, while Erdogan will demand that Putin do everything in his power to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on Turkey’s southern border. The meeting will end with the typical smiles and handshakes accompanied by a joint statement pledging to work together peacefully to resolve regional issues and to put an end to the proxy war that has left Syria in tatters.
All in all, the confab will seem like another public relations charade devoid of any larger meaning, but that’s certainly not the case. The fact is, the normalizing of relations between Russia and Turkey will foreshadow a bigger geopolitical shift that will link Ankara to Tehran, Damascus and other Russian allies across Eurasia. The alliance will alter the global chessboard in a way that eviscerates the imperial plan to control the flow of energy from Qatar to Europe, redraw the map of the Middle East and pivot to Asia. That strategy will either be decimated or suffer a severe setback. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious to anyone who can read a map. Turkey’s location makes it the indispensable state, the landbridge that connects the wealth and modernity of the EU with the vast resources and growing population of Asia. That vital connecting piece of the geopolitical puzzle is gradually slipping out of Washington’s orbit and into enemy territory. The July 15 coup is likely the final nail in the NWO coffin for reasons we will discuss later. Here’s a clip from Eric Draitser’s insightful piece titled “Erdogan’s Checkmate: CIA-Backed Coup in Turkey Fails, Upsets Global Chessboard” that summarizes what’s going on:
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This according to sources at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Judicial Council on which this observer served representing his State of Oregon many moons ago. One staffer reports that the Neocon-Zionist lobby has a Middle East Policy deal with the Clinton campaign as a linchpin of her pledge to “eternally cover Israel’s back.” The Clinton camp, which appears to be gaining adherents within the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon, believes that the Obama administration’s policy toward Russia and Syria is badly flawed partly because, so they claim, Obama wrongly assumes that Russia wants to limit its involvement in Syria. Clinton advisers claim that, on the contrary, Putin’s key objectives include demonstrating that Russia is winning in Syria, that the US has become a paper tiger in the region, and that the Arab states best follow Russia’s lead as it dramatically returns to the region a la the former USSR.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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With Ohio shaping up to once again be a battleground state for this year’s presidential election, contrasts on energy and climate policy could affect whether Democrats or Republicans win the state’s 18 votes in the Electoral College.
And while Republican nominee Donald Trump’s promises to revive the state’s coal industry may resonate with some voters, the party’s continued denial of climate science appears to be a growing political liability.
“Most people believe that climate change is happening,” Mercury political strategist Jai Chabria said at a panel in Cleveland last month, hosted during the Republican National Convention by Politico and sponsored by Vote4Energy, a project of the American Petroleum Institute. Chabria previously served as an advisor to Ohio Gov. John Kasich and helped launch his bid for the Republican nomination.
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Iowa gets 31% of its electricity from wind turbines, the highest percentage in the nation (though Texas generates more than twice as many megawatts from wind). But you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Some Iowa planners think that in only 14 years Iowa will be able to power its entire grid with wind and have some electrical generation capacity to spare, enabling it to supply other states, as well.
Trump has notoriously pronounced that the wind turbines kill all the birds. Actually as the turbines have gotten taller it has been found that the birds typically fly under them. But if Trump is so concerned about the birds, maybe he should take on the mighty house cat instead. According to the Nature Conservancy, house cats polish off 2.4 billion birds annually. Wind turbines? Only 500k a year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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*Five scientists from the Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in College Park, Maryland, give findings on the rate of climate change increase—“unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years”—and therefore the need for an accelerated response.
*To the now familiar melting of the Arctic ice packs—which the most recent study shows is likely to cause a sea level rise of “at least several meters”– should be added the equally if not more dangerous thawing of the permafrost, which means increasing emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. “Indeed,” Chris Mooney reports, “scientists have discovered a simple statistic that underscores the scale of the potential problem: There may be more than twice as much carbon contained in northern permafrost as there is in the atmosphere itself. That’s a staggering thought.” (Methane, by the way, seems to be the unsung villain: all the attention to carbon dioxide, Bill McKibben tells us in The Nation, detracts from methane’s equally potent heat trapping. Increased use of natural gas, plus fracking, are significantly increasing methane emissions in the U.S.)
*The world’s largest forest “carbon sink,” the Amazon basin, is losing its ability to soak up excess carbon dioxide, a British study reports. In a nutshell, growth—i.e., conversion of forest land to agriculture—is outpacing forest sustainability.
*Human expansion, such as in the Amazon basin, is imperiling the ecosystem itself. A study by European scientists finds that biodiversity levels have fallen below the point where the ecosystem can remain intact. Species decline of 10 percent, the scientists estimate, is dangerous; “but their study found that overall, across the globe, the average decline is already more like 15 percent. In other words, original species are only about 85 percent as abundant (84.6 percent to be precise) as they were before human land-use changes.” Climate change will add substantially to this sobering assessment.
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Earth Overshoot Day—the day on which people worldwide have officially used up more natural resources like air, food, and water than the planet can regenerate in a year—has come early.
The 2016 threshold was hit on Monday, making it the fastest pace yet, according to a new report by the Global Footprint Network, which measures the dubious milestone every year.
That’s five days earlier than last year, about five weeks earlier than in 2003, and months earlier than it was in 1987, when it fell on December 19. In 1961, the global population didn’t even use up 100 percent of the world’s natural resources, according to the network. But the next decade propelled the planet into an era of overconsumption, the group said.
“This is possible because we emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than our oceans and forests can absorb, and we deplete fisheries and harvest forests more quickly than they can reproduce and regrow,” Global Footprint Network said in a statement.
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As the Olympic Games officially opened last Friday, oil giant BP placed a two-third of a page advert in the global business newspaper, the Financial Times, featuring its sponsorship of Team GB, the British Olympic team.
“The dreaming. The training. The waiting. The hoping. The best of luck to Team GB. Its time to harness the #Energywithin,” ran the strap-line.
The hashtag #Energywithin is no co-incidence. BP, which is also an international partner of the International Paralympic Committee and the national Olympic committees of the US, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Trinidad & Tobago, is keen to make the comparison between Olympic excellence and the oil giant.
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Chevron Corp persuaded a federal appeals court on Monday to block enforcement in the United States of an $8.65 billion Ecuadorean pollution judgment that it said, and which the court agreed, was obtained through bribery and fraud.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a lower court ruling against the American lawyer Steven Donziger, who has spent more than two decades battling Chevron to hold it responsible for pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest.
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A U.S. appeals court on Monday “inexplicably” sided with oil giant Chevron in a massive case over its legacy of pollution in the Amazon.
Chevron persuaded the court to block enforcement of an $8.65 billion judgment delivered by Ecuador against the energy company for rainforest damage.
The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with a March 2014 ruling by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that found the judgment had been obtained through bribery, coercion, and fraud—a decision that astonished environmental rights activists following the case.
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This story originally appeared on the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A 12-year-old boy in the far north of Russia has died in an outbreak of anthrax that experts believe was triggered when unusually warm weather caused the release of the bacteria.
The boy was one of 72 nomadic herders, including 41 children, hospitalized in the town of Salekhard in the Arctic Circle, after reindeer began dying en masse from anthrax.
Five adults and two other children have been diagnosed with the disease, which is known as “Siberian plague” in Russian and was last seen in the region in 1941. More than 2,300 reindeer have died, and at least 63 people have been evacuated from a quarantine area around the site of the outbreak. “We literally fought for the life of each person, but the infection showed its cunning,” the Yamal governor, Dmitry Kobylkin, told the Russia-based Interfax news agency. “It returned after 75 years and took the life of a child.”
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Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) on Monday said his running mate, Donald Trump will not undermine the coal industry, should he become president.
“Donald Trump is going to end the war on coal on Day 1 of his administration,” he said during a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, on Monday evening. “We’re going to free up coal production in this country for the American people.”
Pence, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, said Trump is much more receptive to fossil fuels than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels. We’re going to have an all-of-the-above energy strategy under President Trump.”
Pence said Trump’s admiration for blue-collar voters guides the GOP presidential nominee’s economic agenda.
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We have brief reminders of this danger from time to time and passing acknowledgements to the extreme peril we face, yet we never have the courage to take the steps necessary to eliminate this threat. In a classic bullying posture we continue to threaten the use of these weapons, effectively holding the rest of the world hostage to our delusion of safety, akin to a smoker floating on a raft in a pool of gasoline. We now recognize the dangers posed by these weapons is much greater than we had previously thought. Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S. affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has scientifically shown that the detonation of “only” 100 nuclear warheads could kill two billion people from the devastating climate change and nuclear famine that would follow. There are currently more than 15,000 weapons on the planet. The United States and Russia have approximately 7,000 each.
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Finance
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As much of the developed world struggles to address the growth of income inequality, there has been emerging consideration of a guaranteed basic income. There are a number of variations, but the basic idea is that government would eliminate the various forms of social welfare that are currently in place, and would instead send each citizen an annual amount sufficient to cover basic living expenses.
Most of us understand that without economic freedom, guarantees of personal, political and religious freedom aren’t worth much. If your day-to-day existence is consumed with the struggle for survival, the fact that you have freedom of speech is small comfort.
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Trump’s tone-deafness was in full effect last week, when he announced his team of economic advisers in advance of what is being billed as “a major economic address” in Detroit on Monday.
Trump’s team isn’t just monochromatic and male. At least four, and perhaps as many six, of the men are billionaires. They range in age from 50 to 74 – or, from “younger old white guy” to “older old white guy.”
Five team members are named Steve – which means that eight of them are not. For diversity, that will have to do.
There are only two economists on the team – and one of them believes in the flat tax.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced his most detailed policy plan yet on Monday at the Detroit Economic Club, in a speech that was ostensibly targeted toward the working class but mostly outlined benefits for the wealthy.
The speech was also widely panned for lacking substance: New York Magazine editor Annie Lowrey commented on CNN that “it was self-contradictory word salad,” adding that “there was just not much detail here.”
Presumably channeling the advice of an economics policy team comprised of wealthy white men over age 50—five out of 13 are named “Steve”—Trump announced a hodgepodge of economic reforms that he promised would enrich the working class and “make America grow again.”
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There has always existed a fundamental tension between those who seek to amplify the voices of the oppressed and the vulnerable and those who paint a rosier picture, one that acknowledges superficial flaws but seeks, ultimately, to justify the prevailing order, economic or otherwise.
In January of 1963, Dwight Macdonald, in his famous essay reviewing Michael Harrington’s groundbreaking book The Other America, cast a light on this perpetual conflict.
“For a long time now,” Macdonald wrote, “almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and — more important — the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.”
Referring to John Kenneth Galbraith’s declaration in his 1958 work The Affluent Society that poverty “can no longer be presented as a universal or massive affliction,” Macdonald expressed dismay at the fact that such a “humane critic” as Galbraith could downplay (and, in some cases, overlook entirely) the tremendous suffering felt in marginalized communities — particularly in communities of color.
[...]
It is a party now dedicated to the trope that “America is already great,” a rhetorical flourish that provides both a shameful defense of the status quo and little comfort — much less material relief — to those victimized by American capitalism.
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When Naquasia LeGrand first got involved with the Fight for $15 workers’ movement, it was, she says, “underground.” No one, least of all her, knew how far the movement would spread in the four years since she helped launch the first fast-food workers’ strike, in New York City in November 2012. New York fast-food workers won their raise in 2015, though it won’t be fully phased in in the city until 2018.
Cities and states around the country have acted to raise wages since the movement began, and the battle has spilled over into the presidential election. Fast-food workers, including LeGrand, are demanding that the candidates endorse the $15 an hour wage. LeGrand is now in North Carolina and continues to organize her fellow workers in one of the least union-friendly states in the country, having become a national leader in the movement. We spoke about what’s changed—and what still needs changing—since the beginning of the Fight for $15.
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Let’s get one thing straight. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a disaster. It is essentially a £50 billion welfare system for the landed gentry and other big landowners across Europe. While people who genuinely need public funds find their benefits cut to the bone, these people get huge amounts of public money for doing absolutely nothing. It amounts to one of the most glaring transfers of money from poor to rich in the UK. The CAP has also been disastrous for people in the global south. For decades, Europe dumped excess agricultural produce into markets in the global south, ruining the livelihoods of local farmers who could not compete with the artificially cheap imports. But cleverly, through the WTO, rich countries have ensured that poor countries cannot raise equivalent subsidy programmes of their own. For example, India has been castigated for its food security policy that gives cheap food to the poor, while relatively rich EU farmers gets huge sums for doing not very much at all.
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There is little doubt that the global one percent is winning. In fact, a new study has found that the number of billionaires reached an all-time high in 2015 at the same time that their portfolios and piggy banks also continued to grow to record proportions.
According to the 2015-2016 Billionaire Census by international market research firm Wealth-X, which bills itself as “the global authority on wealth intelligence,” the billionaire population grew by 6.4 percent last year and now totals 2,473 people worldwide. The combined wealth of those individuals also increased by 5.4 percent, amounting to $7.7 trillion—which is more than every country’s gross domestic product (GDP), except the United States ($17.9 tr) and China ($11 tr).
Billionaires, defined as individuals with a net worth of $1 billion or above, are not all created equal. While North America trails Europe in the number of billionaires—628 compared with 806, respectively—they hold more wealth ($2,561 bn versus $2,330 bn) than their cross-Atlantic compatriots.
Wealth-X attributes the overall billionaire population growth largely to inherited wealth. According to the report, “billionaires with partially inherited wealth continue to be the fastest growing segment of this population, up 29.9% year on year, while responsible for nearly two thirds of total billionaire additions.”
Also, Wealth-X found that fear of a global market collapse has prompted many to liquidate their assets, further shoring up their wealth and adding to the overall rise in combined net worth.
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Trade policy in general—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in particular—has become a vital concern for Democrats up and down the ballot.
Just ask Wisconsin Congressman Ron Kind, one of the few congressional Democrats who continue to make arguments for agreements such as the TPP.
Kind, who has served almost two decades as the Democratic representative from farm and factory towns of western Wisconsin, did not receive a warm welcome from Wisconsin delegates to this month’s Democratic National Convention.
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Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa on Sunday denounced “fantasies of trickle-down theories” and said that it’s neoliberalism, not socialism that has failed his region.
Latin America has largely pursued “socialism of the 21st century,” TeleSUR reports the leftist leader as saying in an interview. Despite current external factors affecting his country’s economy—like the fall in the price of oil and trade partners’ economic slowdown—that model has helped the country weather the impacts far better compared to the situation in 1999 when the country was under conservative rule and “external shocks [...] made the economy crash.”
“Neoliberalism is what failed, not socialism of the 21st century; on the contrary, socialism of the 21st century is what has us firmly on our feet, withstanding all of these difficulties,” he said.
Correa also said, “Inequality in a poor country means misery,” and added that only the pursuit of the kind of growth “that favors the poor, growth with social justice, growth with equity,” was important.
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The Brexit vote was the reaping of years of deepening inequality, sown by the neoliberal policy programmes of successive governments.
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Cash-strapped working families in England are so “stretched to breaking point” that one in three could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage for more than a month if they lost their job, according to new figures.
The high cost of housing added to having little or no personal savings to fall back on, and means that three million working families could be just one pay cheque away from losing their home, the Shelter and YouGov study found.
The figures come from a July 2016 poll of 8,381 adults which included 1,581 working families with children. They were asked how long, if at all, did they think they could afford to pay their rent or mortgage from their savings if they lost their job and could not find work?
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Call it conspiracy theory, coincidence or just bad luck, but any time someone is in a position to bring down Hillary Clinton they wind up dead. In fact, as we noted previously, there’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts, with scores of people dying under mysterious circumstances. While Vince Foster remains the most infamous, the body count is starting to build ominously this election cycle – from the mysterious “crushing his own throat” death of a UN official to the latest death of an attorney who served the DNC with a fraud suit.
As GatewayPundit’s Jim Hoft reports, on July 3, 2016, Shawn Lucas and filmmaker Ricardo Villaba served the DNC Services Corp. and Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz at DNC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in the fraud class action suit against the Democrat Party on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters (this was before Wikileaks released documents proving the DNC was working against the Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary).
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Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael J Morell is the latest in a phalanx of senior US military-intelligence figures who are shedding any pretense of political neutrality and giving their full-throated endorsement to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Morell starkly backed Clinton as the most «highly qualified to be commander-in-chief… keeping our nation safe».
The ex-CIA chief’s op-ed piece also served as a blunt hatchet job on Republican presidential rival Donald J Trump. Morell said the New York billionaire-turned politician is «not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security».
The hoary, old scare-theme of «national security» is being rehabilitated as the criterion for electing Clinton. It also has the disturbing connotation of an increasingly militarized totalitarian regime that the United States is becoming.
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“Without a border, we just don’t have a country,“ Donald Trump says repeatedly. For him, the biggest threats to American sovereignty are three-dimensional items that cross our borders, such as unwanted imports and undocumented immigrants.
He’s wrong. The biggest threats to American sovereignty are invisible digital dollars wired into U.S. election campaigns from abroad.
Yet Trump seems to welcome foreign influence over our democracy.
Sovereignty is mainly about a government’s capacity to govern. A government not fully accountable to its citizens won’t pass laws that benefit and protect those citizens – not just laws about trade and immigration but about national security, the environment, labor standards, the economy, and all else.
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On Monday, a new GOP presidential contender threw their hat in the ring. Anti-Trump Republican Evan McMullin announced he’s running for president to offer voters a choice other than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in November. McMullin resigned from his position as the chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in order to run and previously worked as a CIA counterterrorism officer.
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Maine’s four-term Sen. Susan Collins, one of the last of a dying breed of moderate, occasionally coherent Republicans , has finally summoned the strength of character to announce she will not support Trump in the election, thus becoming one of the most high-profile GOP members to abandon their lunatic flag-bearer. After months of waffling and cautious criticism of Trump’s more outrageous stands, Collins announced her decision in a Washington Post op-ed, listing several excellent examples of Trump’s “unsuitability for office” – even at a Burger King. Those include his “lack of self-restraint,” “barrage of ill-informed comments,” and “disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics.” She adds, “Donald Trump does not reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.” You think? As Maine goes, so goes, hopefully, the nation.
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The progressive vision for 2020 is focused on the needs of average working people, on the strength of society rather than on winner-take-all individualism, on the cooperative efforts of underpaid people who have been forced out of the middle class.
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Surprisingly, though, despite all the handwringing about dysfunctional division, there is much that unites us — even on contentious topics. A 2014 study comparing red congressional districts and states to blue ones asked 388 questions on hot-topic issues ranging from abortion to gun control. In two-thirds of cases, researchers found “no statistical differences” in the answers between Republican and Democratic strongholds.
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Bernie Sanders has urged his supporters to back Hillary Clinton—a point he reiterated in an op-ed at the Los Angeles Times last week.
But a string of recent polls shows that about one-third of Sanders backers aren’t willing to do that, as political website FiveThirtyEight points out.
Harry Enten writes Monday that since the Democratic National Convention, Clinton has seen a boost in support from Sanders supporters. Looking at the average of four post-convention polls—CNN, Fox News, Marist, and YouGov—78 percent of Sanders backers said they’d vote for Clinton compared to nine percent for Donald Trump when presented with a two-way match-up. That’s up from about half of Sanders supporters ahead of the conventions, he writes.
But when given the option of third party candidates, the number drops, with the four polls showing an average of 63 percent of Sanders supporters saying they’d back Clinton.
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As Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign reaches out to Republicans alarmed by Donald Trump’s national security blunders, there’s a group of high-profile GOP hold-outs whose endorsement would be a major coup if the Democrat could win them over.
Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger are among a handful of so-called Republican “elders” with foreign policy and national security experience — people who have held Cabinet-level or otherwise high-ranking positions in past administrations — who have yet to come out for or against Trump.
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Hillary Clinton is reaching out to Republican elites—including fellow former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger—to support her campaign over Donald Trump’s, suggesting a growing alliance between Clinton and neoconservatives, according to Politico.
Clinton’s charm offensive comes amid a growing public rift between the Republican party and its own nominee. The backlash against Trump has seen numerous high-profile Republicans defecting to the Democrats and explicitly denouncing Trump’s suitability for office. At a fundraiser for ‘foreign policy professionals’ in July, prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan told attendees that “a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”
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In the 1930s in key countries, it was a Hitler in Germany, a Mussolini in Italy, a Stalin in the USSR, a Franco in Spain, et al. In our own time, it’s a Putin in Russia, an Erdogan in Turkey, a Xi in China, a Thaksin in Thailand, a Mugabe in Zimbabwe, a Duterte in the Philippines, an al-Sisi in Egypt — and, our own homegrown Mussolini in America, Donald J. Trump.
It must be understood that these authoritarians often differ widely in their origins (Erdogan, for example, assumed power through elections) and methods of operation, degree of brutality, etc. Every society has a multiplicity of forces affecting its manner of governance. There is no one template that explains the various expressions of authoritarianism across the globe.
But there are enough similarities to draw some tentative conclusions.
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This year, the Democratic National Convention mentioned the civil rights of Americans with disabilities. That this happened now, decades into a movement, speaks volumes about the priorities of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Hillary Clinton deserves credit for being the first United States presidential candidate from a major party to address the civil rights of these 56 million Americans.
Does Clinton assume that all those votes are going her way? Even after Clinton launched an ad focused on Donald Trump’s bullying of a reporter with a disability, the DNC balked at mentioning the Disability Integration Act in Philadelphia.
The DIA was introduced to the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., on Dec. 18, 2015, and into the House of Representatives by Christopher Gibson, R-N.Y., on July 8. According to DIA advocate Bruce Darling, “Democrats need to not take disabled voters for granted and support DIA like they support the [LGBTQ] Equality Act. It isn’t enough to say Trump made fun of a disabled journalist.”
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College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.
These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiment
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Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn announced a 10-point plan on Thursday designed to “rebuild and transform” the U.K. while undoing the damage wrought by privatization schemes and concerted attacks on the public good.
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Give the grown-ups back control of the Labour party. Wasn’t that supposed to be the idea? Yet with each fresh turn of events, the coup against Jeremy Corbyn looks less like an adult intervention, and more like a slapstick farce.
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Whatever happens this summer, Jeremy Corbyn leaves a major legacy. Most notable is the longterm leftwards shift in Labour’s centre of gravity. The party’s right in retreat, Corbyn’s challenger Owen Smith campaigns on an almost identical platform, Trident and the EU aside. Smith’s pitch is to present it better and add much-need policy heft. The course steered may need a new captain, but politically Corbyn binds Labour left for the foreseeable future.
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In Houston, Texas, Dr. Jill Stein formally accepted the Green Party’s nomination for president at the party’s convention over the weekend. Interest in the Green Party has jumped in recent weeks since Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, defeating Bernie Sanders. In 2012, Dr. Stein ran on the Green ticket and won less than 1 percent of the national vote. But according to CNN’s Poll of Polls, Stein is now polling at 5 percent. The same poll finds Clinton at 45 percent, Republican Donald Trump at 35 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson at 9 percent. Neither Stein nor Johnson will be invited to take part in this fall’s presidential debates, however, unless they top 15 percent in national polls. For more, we hear excerpts of Dr. Jill Stein speaking at the Green Party convention.
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Party politics is messy and often inefficient. And in today’s political climate, one filled with distrust and apathy, ensuring representation and active participation is more important than ever. Democrats Abroad serves as a very successful model for how other state parties can reinvigorate faith in the party.
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Progressives dedicated to protecting safety nets for seniors have pressured AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired People, to drop its dues-paying membership at ALEC, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, whose work includes drafting and promoting bills that would undermine and privatize Social Security and Medicare.
“After hearing from many of you, we’ve decided not to renew our membership to ALEC,” said a post on AARP’s Facebook page Friday. “We would never work against the interests of older Americans and our engagement with ALEC was NOT an endorsement of the organization’s policies, but an opportunity to engage with state legislators and advance our members’ priorities.”
“AARP is and always has been non-partisan,” the statement continued. “We meet with legislators from both sides of the aisle in order to do our job: fighting to improve the lives of people 50+. We will continue to explore ways to serve our diverse membership and fulfill our responsibility.”
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Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and despite his previous time as a Democrat and his Johnny-come-lately stances on many of the social conservative issues that the religious right has come to love, he has managed to get a myriad of Christian leaders to back him in his battle for the White House. Exactly what magical spell has he worked that has brought around the values voters and made them believe that a business mogul with multiple ex-wives is now the person who should lead their country?
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Anyone with confidence in the American people (and I have quite a lot of it) had to believe that Donald Trump’s unpreparedness, instability and just plain meanness would catch up with him eventually. This, as the polls show, is what happened over the last week or so. Simply by revealing who he really is, Trump sent millions of voters fleeing him in disgust.
But understanding what still attracts many voters to Trump is important, not only to those who want to prevent Trump from staging a comeback but also to anyone who wants to make our democracy thrive in the long run. Those of us who are horrified by Trump’s hideous lack of empathy need empathy ourselves.
It’s certainly true that Trump appeals to outright racists and nativists. He is, first and foremost, the product of a Republican Party that has exploited extremism since President Obama took office. GOP leaders should be called to account whenever they try to prettify Trump by ignoring his assaults on Mexican-Americans and Muslims or a checkered business record that belies his pretensions of being a friend to the working class.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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This is pretty ridiculous. First of all, much of the mocking was over the Tribune Company’s ridiculous rebranding as “tronc,” and specifically the absolutely ridiculous “tronc employee video” the company put together, that I still am partially convinced is a parody of the kind of idiocy big newspapers put out these days to pretend they get technology. “Artificial intelligence!” “The future of journalism!” “Tech startup culture!” “Evolving, changing — the fun part!” “Optimization group!” “Feed it into a funnel and then optimize it!” “Maximize all the time.” “Monetize video!” “The role of tronc is to transform journalism — from pixels to Pulitzers.”
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We’re so used to getting our news for free that we’ve forgotten what that means for journalism. And as “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver points out, the decades long financial battle newsrooms have been facing affects all of us. Think about local government reporting. While it’s not as clickbaity as puppies or a “raccoon cats,” it’s a crucial part of urban reform. But often, because it does not pay, good local civic reporting is the first thing to go.
“A study of over 200 papers found between 2003 and 2014, the number of full-time State House reporters declined by thirty-five percent,” Oliver pointed out. “And that’s not good because while there are some great web outlets some of which do cover local government there aren’t nearly enough to replace what has been lost.”
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Walter Fritz had been an East German museum director, a real estate agent, an auto-parts business executive, an Egyptology student, and an amateur pornographer.
But his most recent achievement might well be his most lasting and ignominious – his involvement in an audacious antiquity transaction, wherein a piece of papyrus made its way into the hands of Harvard scholar Karen King, who then declared before the Vatican that it showed Jesus may have been married.
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Federal health regulators have announced plans to crack down on nursing home employees who take demeaning photographs and videos of residents and post them on social media.
The move follows a series of ProPublica reports that have documented abuses in nursing homes and assisted living centers using social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. These include photos and videos of residents who were naked, covered in feces or even deceased. They also include images of abuse.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees nursing homes, said in a memo to state health departments on Friday that they should begin checking to make sure that all nursing homes have policies prohibiting staff from taking demeaning photographs of residents. The memo also calls on state officials to quickly investigate such complaints and report offending workers to state licensing agencies for investigation and possible discipline. State health departments help enforce nursing home rules for the federal government.
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Amplifying the growing crackdown on dissent and specifically the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, the Israeli government this weekend unveiled a new initiative to track and deport activists suspected of supporting the campaign.
Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan and Interior Minister Arye Dery on Sunday announced the creation of a new government task force charged with gathering intelligence on pro-Palestininian activists and organizations with the intent, as Haaretz put it, of collecting enough evidence to legally deport them from Israel or the occupied West Bank.
“We have the responsibility to do all we can to crush the boycott and say clearly that we will not allow the State of Israel to be harmed,” Dery said.
Later, Erdan took to Facebook to call on Israeli citizens to help by informing the government of suspicious activities.
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Venezuelan free software activist Luigino Bracci Roa has claimed that his Twitter account was closed down permanently by the US company without any prior warning, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) complained about videos he had posted on the micro-blogging service.
The @Lubrio account was popular: Bracci says that he tweeted 133,000 times since he created the account in 2008, and had garnered nearly 43,000 followers in that time.
On his blog, Bracci shared the letters of complaint sent by the IOC to Twitter, which show that the committee did not demand that his account be shut down, but instead asked Twitter to “immediately and permanently remove the material” from its website. That’s hardly surprising given the IOC’s attempts to impose strict controls on all media outlets and how they use material connected with the Olympics.
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Controversy over the cover of an Australian art magazine has resurrected a debate of the digital age: when, if ever, are nipples acceptable?
The latest issue of Vault, a quarterly art periodical, was distributed last week with round yellow stickers covering the nipples of a female nude in a painting on its cover.
Its editor, Neha Kale, told Guardian Australia the stickers were added at the request of its distributor, which feared its stockists would refuse to display the magazine.
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The latest issue of art periodical Vault Magazine is being censored in Australian newsagents because it features a Lisa Yuskavage painting of a nude pregnant woman on the front cover. What does this say about how Australia responds to women in art?
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Australian Census, which takes a snapshot of the demographics of the Australian population, is embroiled in a last minute furore around the mandatory collection of names and addresses.
South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon has declared he will not be providing his name and address. In doing so, he risks a A$180 fine for each day of “non-compliance”.
Xenophon argues that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has not made “a compelling case why names must be provided”. However, the rationale is actually quite simple.
With names and addresses, the Census data can be linked to other data sets where we have already allowed our name and address to be used. This includes health, education and other data. Together, they should help give a more complete and accurate picture of how the distribution of people in Australia matches present and future services.
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Police Scotland has been ordered to pay a journalist £10,000 in damages after it illegally intercepted his communications data in an investigation into a botched murder case.
The investigatory powers tribunal ruled the force had breached the human rights of Gerard Gallacher, a former police officer turned freelance journalist, who had spent 18 months investigating a cold murder case in which a prime suspect had been released without charge.
Gallacher said he suffered “invasion of privacy, familial strife, personal stress and strain and loss of long-standing friendships” after detectives accessed 32 days of his communications data, ignoring clear court rulings to protect journalists and their sources.
Police Scotland had been braced for an adverse ruling after Sir Stanley Burnton, the communications interception commissioner, ruled last November that the force had been reckless in its repeated abuse of its powers.
Detectives in an elite anti-corruption unit breached the law five times when they collected phone records for Gallacher and two police officers suspected of leaking information, Burnton said.
In its ruling on Monday on the cases of the six people affected – Gerard Gallacher and his wife Marjorie, the two officers David Moran and Steven Adams and a former officer and his wife named only as Mr and Mrs O – the tribunal agreed that the collection of their data breached the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights.
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The U.S. Marine Corps is testing a pocket-sized drone that can deliver live video feeds from three cameras and is small enough that it’s almost invisible from the ground.
The Black Hornet PD-100 can stay aloft for 25 minutes and has a range of 1.6 km (1 mile). That means Marines can use it for surveillance far beyond their current position.
It can fly missions guided by GPS yet fits in a pocket. The cable hanging out the back in this image is an antenna, not a cord for power or data.
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If the data that is collected in the Australian census in any way lacks integrity, then one man will have to bear the blame: the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch.
Remember, just a 5% non-response will screw up the whole works.
For the uninitiated, or those who have been living under a rock for the last two months, there has been an uncharacteristic amount of jaw about the census this time.
And all because an unelected bureaucrat suddenly decided to act like a mini-dictator and make changes in what was once a source of excellent detail about the population at large.
First, the ABS announced, in the quiet news period in December, that the names and addresses of Australians would be retained indefinitely in this year’s census.
And while the ABS had claimed all along that it was not retaining names and addresses and tying them to personal data, Kalisch revealed that this had been a big lie and since 2006, these personal details had indeed been retained for 18 months.
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Hi! I’m Rick Falkvinge, and during business hours, I’m Head of Privacy at the VPN company Private Internet Access, which ttobmk is the only VPN company to have court records prove we don’t keep any logs whatsoever. We love decentralization and privacy.
However, I’m more known for being the founder of the Pirate Party, an international collection of technopunk parties that have won elections to take office in the European Parliament and elsewhere. The Pirate Party in Iceland is currently the largest party in the polls there, leading to very interesting scenarios worldwide after the next election. (It only takes one country out of 196 to create a safe data haven and guarantee freedoms of speech and expression worldwide.)
I’ve also written a book, Swarmwise, that outlines how we were able to beat the establishment in the elections – their struggle for centralized power – despite having less than one percent of their campaign budget. Basically, it comes down to the tactical and strategic advantage of running an organization on decentralized voluntaryism.
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So after an extended period of inactivity, I’ve finally decided to jump back into working on SoylentNews and rehash (the code that powers the site). As such, I’ve decided to scratch some long-standing itches. The first (and easiest) to deploy was HSTS to SoylentNews. What is HSTS you may ask?
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It seems a simple enough proposition: Would you agree to receive marketing pitches in return for a discount on your high-speed Internet service?
Telecom heavyweight Comcast made just such a case last week in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The company defended what it called “a bargained-for exchange of information for service,” which it said “is a perfectly acceptable and widely used model throughout the U.S. economy.”
And that’s true. You can spend less on a Kindle e-reader from Amazon if you agree to see “special offers” when you turn on the device. Your free use of online search engines, email and other services is subsidized in part by an acceptance of marketers peeking at your browsing habits.
But privacy advocates are starting to worry about a society of privacy haves and have-nots. That is, keeping one’s personal info under wraps or avoiding incessant intrusions from advertisers would be a privilege enjoyed only by those who can afford it.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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As more details emerge about last week’s killing by Baltimore County police of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, activists have directed growing anger not only at local law enforcement but also at Facebook, the social media platform where Gaines posted parts of her five-hour standoff with police.
At the request of law enforcement, Facebook deleted Gaines’ account, as well her account on Instagram, which it also owns, during her confrontation with authorities. While many of her videos remain inaccessible, in one, which was re-uploaded to YouTube, an officer can be seen pointing a gun as he peers into a living room from behind a door, while a child’s voice is heard in the background. In another video, which remains on Instagram, Gaines can be heard speaking to her five-year-old son, who’s sitting on the floor wearing red pajamas.
“Who’s outside?” she asks him. “The police,” he replies timidly. “What are they trying to do?” “They trying to kill us.”
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I’m not watching the Olympics on NBC. I see more than enough of the events in my social media feed that I don’t need to turn on the television. This post is based on the observations and media content shared online, an indicator of just how much content there is about the Olympics, both corporate and personal.
And I am SO glad I haven’t bothered to watch based on the persistent anger in my timeline. NBC’s coverage has been a bunch of sexist and racist nonsense, framing female athletes not by their performance but by the men or white family members in their lives.
Like noting a particular athlete became a mother since her last competition — gee, how many of the male athletes became fathers? The narrative NBC built around each woman competitor sounds more like an observation of their performing femininity. “She’s turned in the best time and look, she can still clean house and wear a dress!” Obnoxious.
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For months, political parties and presidential candidates fight for the highest office in the land, where the job duties include protecting the consitutional rights of all Americans.
Few things illustrate the practice of our most basic rights—namely those of speech, assembly and petitioning our government— better than the run-up to the presidential election. Candidates stake out their turf and the public listens, discusses, and absorbs the constant 24-hour election media cycle, opposing and supporting candidates with friends and family, on Facebook and in the streets. The product of this constitutional civics lesson is our new national political leadership.
So it’s ironic that both parties’ showcases—their national conventions—have historically been constitutional black holes. In 2004, hundreds of protesters at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York were wrongly arrested and held in abysmal detention conditions. Of course, the ACLU was there for them—the New York Civil Liberties Union and others filed suit on behalf of protesters that resulted in a total victory and a nearly $18 million award for those wrongly arrested, detained and fingerprinted.
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Barack Obama is “responsible for the biggest escalation in the history of the one-sided war against Black America.” He increased militarization of local police 24-fold before banning some kinds of Pentagon weapons transfers, but is now preparing to send more battlefield weaponry to the streets of our cities. “Clinton or Trump will surely build on Obama’s lethal legacy.”
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Sumaya Awad explains how Israel uses access to the essential resource of water to impose horrific conditions on life for Palestinians in the West Bank.
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On this week’s episode of RT’s “On Contact,” Chris Hedges discusses mass incarceration with prison reform advocates Walter Fortson and Boris Franklin.
From the school-to-prison pipeline, to solitary confinement, to preventing recidivism, they reflect on their experiences to address how to fix one of today’s major civil rights issues. RT correspondent Anya Parampil also reports on the business of locking people up.
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It’s almost 50 years since the death of Lenny Bruce. The groundbreaking comedian died on Aug. 3, 1966 from an overdose of morphine while his New York obscenity conviction was still on appeal. On that same day he received a foreclosure notice at his Los Angeles home.
But his death was an overdose, not a suicide. In the kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling, and in his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word: “Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const” … constitutes what, I wonder?
Lenny was a subscriber to my satirical magazine, the Realist, and in 1959 we met for the first time in his Times Square hotel. He was amazed that I got away with publishing those profane words for which other periodicals used asterisks or dashes. He had been using euphemisms and asked, “Are you telling me this is legal to sell on the newsstands?” I replied, “The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity is that it has to be material which appeals to your prurient interest.”
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With Hillary Clinton now running as the Democratic Party’s official nominee, there has been much discussion about the glass ceiling finally shattering now that a woman is running for president on a major party ticket for the first time in US history.
“I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet,” she told the convention crowd in Philadelphia last month after she was introduced with shattering glass sound effects.
But this accolade needs to be qualified on a number of levels.
Firstly, Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to be nominated to run for president, at the 1964 Republican National Convention (she eventually lost out to Barry Goldwater).
And in 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democrat nomination. She also broke another barrier, that of being the first black politician to run for president for a major political party.
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Campaigner Vladimir Osechkin, who has exposed corruption and torture in Russian prisons, fled the country after being targeted by Russia’s secret police. But life outside Russia hasn’t been easy.
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Precisely how did Korryn Gaines die? We don’t know, and probably never will.
The Baltimore County, Maryland Police Department admits that one of its officers shot her dead on August 1. In fact, the department admits that the officer shot first and that Gaines then returned fire in self-defense and defense of her five-year-old son (no, the department does not use those terms) before being gunned down.
The police also admit that before forcing their way into Gaines’s apartment and killing her, they went out of their way to ensure their actions would be hidden from public view. The department contacted two social media services, Facebook and Instagram, asking that Gaines’s accounts be disabled so as to cut off her photo and video streams of what was happening. To their everlasting shame, the two firms complied with the request.
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Survivors of Torture and other refugees who came here for protection and a safe recovery environment now worry about their future in this country. For their sake, we need to use this time to work out what we want to fight for within the EU asylum acquis, and what we are willing or even happy to let go. We need to be clear on what trade-offs to support and which ones to prevent. And we need to be ready to exploit the opportunities that present themselves along the way. Only then will we be in a position to effectively influence the course and impact of a withdrawal from the EU to maximise protection for refugees.
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The Constitutional Court has ruled to annul a provision that punishes all sexual acts against children under the age of 15 as “sexual abuse,” stirring outrage from academics and women’s rights activists who warn that the decision will lead to cases of child abuse going unpunished.
The Constitutional Court discussed the issue upon an application from a district court, which complained that the current law does not discriminate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse and treats a 14-year-old as equal to a four-year-old.
The local court said the law does not provide legal consequences for the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim is from 12 to 15 years of age and able to understand the meaning of the sexual act. “This creates an imbalance between legal benefits and sanctions that should be preserved in crime and punishment,” the application stated.
With seven votes against six, the Constitutional Court agreed with the local court and decided to annul the provision. The decision will come into effect on Jan. 13, 2017.
The local court’s argument and the Constitutional Court’s endorsement have drawn a backlash from academic and human rights circles, which underlined that all individuals under the age of 18 are considered children according to international conventions to which Turkey is a party.
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The number of forced marriages involving minors has increased significantly in Switzerland, with a specialist Swiss website reporting 119 cases so far this year, compared with fewer than 60 for all of 2015.
According to zwangsheirat.ch (a website focused on forced marriages) of particular concern is that of the 119 cases, 26 were with girls under the age of 16, most of whom came from Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia. This figure is five times the total number reported between 2005 and 2015.
One case involved a ten-year-old Somali girl at a Swiss school where a social worker discovered that the girl was married, Anu Sivaganesan, president of zwangsheirat.ch, told the NZZ am Sonntag.
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A notorious torture expert and official of the mullahs’ regime has attempted to justify the executions in Iran of young adults, who were under 18 when they were charged.
On August 4, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, who in a bizarre twist is the secretary of the Iranian regime’s so-called Human Rights Council, told the regime-affiliated Tasnim News Agency that minors are not executed until they have reached the age of 18.
Indeed, he blamed Western criticism for bringing this to media attention and suggested that the United Nations take the mullahs’ so-called ‘Islamic laws’ into account when addressing the rights of children in legal cases. He attacked the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran for exposing the regime’s brutal intimidation tactics and bloody history of human rights abuses.
He said: “Ahmed Shaheed was the least successful choice in case of discussing our human rights. We have never authorized his position and we will not also accept the newly elected person for this position.”
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Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested last year after showing a home-made clock to a teacher at his high school, has filed a lawsuit against his former school district, its principal, and the city of Irving, Texas.
Mohamed’s lawsuit (PDF), filed earlier today, claims that the school district has a history of racial discrimination, and that the treatment he received violated both US civil rights laws and his 14th Amendment right to equal treatment under the law.
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Mass incarceration’s profile as a national issue appears to be on the wane. Throughout 2015, the nation’s over-reliance on imprisonment drew a constant spotlight, producing a plethora of bipartisan policy proposals and expressions of moral outrage in Beltway circles. In March last year, Newt Gingrich and Democrat stalwart Van Jones co-hosted an unprecedented Washington, D.C. conference of nearly 500 key role players billed as a “Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform.” The Koch Brothers Foundation teamed up with George Soros’ Open Society forces to sponsor it. Author and formerly incarcerated activist Shaka Senghor spoke, as did Georgia’s Republican governor Nathan Deal. At a moment of great congressional discord, people across the spectrum were finally agreeing on at least one thing: the U.S. was spending too much money on corrections and locking up too many people, especially black folks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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In the recent Tommy Hilfiger case, the CJEU said that market operators may be forced to stop sales of counterfeits by market traders. Nick Rose and Beverley Potts consider the implications for brand owners and intermediaries
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Copyrights
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There are two subjects we write about frequently on Techdirt that we didn’t think would ever have all that much overlap: copyright and people using their mobile phones to record events in real time. This can cover a lot of stuff, but lately it’s been getting extra attention in the world of police shootings and police protests. We didn’t necessarily think these two kinds of stories would overlap very often, but when you’ve got video, you’ve got copyright. Last year, for example, there was a bit of a copyright dustup when the guy who shot the infamous video of Walter Scott being shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager, started demanding to get paid. As we pointed out at the time, news programs using the video were almost certainly protected by fair use.
And that’s still true. But… eventually this is going to go to courts. And that’s especially true because of the new group of middlemen who are racing to buy up any viral video within hours (or minutes!) of it going viral, and then trying to license it everywhere. If you follow the space, you may have heard of some of these guys: Jukin Media is the most well-known, but there are others like ViralHog, ViralNova and Newsflare. And they don’t seem all that thrilled about this part of the law called fair use.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Under Battistelli, the European Patent Office (EPO) simply neglects examination and turns examiners into machine operators
Context: “The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars”
Summary: Benoît Battistelli is breaking to pieces the world’s leading patent system, which took decades to build and refine, in order to increase what he foolishly labels ‘production’ (a race to the bottom)
THE EPO, based on insider knowledge, is not just repeating the mistakes of the USPTO but becoming even worse than the USPTO. Patent quality, say workers, is declining to the point where things will become irreversibly grim. “Apparently,” one person wrote yesterday, “the EPO is quickly turning into a registration system,” which means that Battistelli has killed the EPO as an examination office. Do people high up in Europe even care? Do they realise how much damage this would cause? The PR drones are keeping Battistelli in house and calling, now on a daily basis (sometimes several times per day), for European Inventor Award 2017 nominations. It is a wasteful lobbying event which promises to do nothing but empty the EPO’s coffers for publicity points (scored by Battistelli himself, at the expense of the EPO). They are also propping up a dead forum and advertising an event organised in “close co-operation with” a think tank/lobbying group (warning: mouse-clicks can be spied on by EPO) that is in favour of software patents and is connected to the world’s largest trolls (like Intellectual Ventures). It’s the same IPO (not to be confused with UK-IPO) which was against patents in ACTA and is against Alice. “This high-level event is organised in close co-operation with the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO),” the EPO says. What does that tell us about the EPO’s neighbourhood now? Patent trolls, proponents of software patents, and US businesses that favour software patents? The EPO does not care about patent quality and scope anymore. All it cares about is so-called ‘production’, even if that means fudging the figures and throwing away quality control (including the appeal boards, which are being thrown overboard).
Sooner of later all this ‘cheapening’ of patents will result in garbage quality and people may start asking questions like, “was your EP a pre-Battistelli or post-Battistelli one?” (in other words, is it of high quality of just rubberstamped for quick and temporary gains?). As one person put it yesterday:
The private suepo web site can only be accessed from within the office, so I had no access during my holiday. Back to work, I checked the post from Berlin and can indeed confirm what “BoardMember” has cited.
Apparently, the EPO is quickly turning into a registration system…
Well, Battistelli has killed the old EPO and created a new kind of monster. Would people be willing to pay the high fees anymore? If so, for how much longer? Here are some more details from SUEPO Berlin, which resemble the vision of people replaced by primitive machines for vastly inferior prior art search and for corporate profits through outsourcing:
Back to work, I checked what people think about the future of the united patent. Apparently, management is still confident that they can push the UK to join before the end of the year.
How do they think they can achieve that, I do not know. But we have had so many surprises in the past year, that I would not take a bet either way.
Something else: there is a rumor that the EPO will change their examination ways. It is true. It is on the Berlin suepo website and there is a powerpoint around, which will be presented to the examiners. Basically, the examiners are supposed to run an automatic search, not object clarity, send one single communication to the applicant if there are doubts about novelty or inventive step, simply accept the response and grant. All this within a year. The other members are instructed not to check any more and they will get warnings if the granted file lingers too long. Management wants the complete backlog gone in 4 years.
There will also be an assessment center for recruiting new examiners (not sure about that, decision is not out yet). Apparently, some directors are refusing to recruit many candidates for lack of competence and recruitment cannot meet their targets. Therefore the responsibility of recruiting will be taken from the directors and put into the hands of the new assessment center.
It is a completely different Patent Office that is being created under our eyes. What I don’t understand is where the money will go: at present, the EPO is producing a plus of several hundred millions Euros a year (and that with the costs of a new building in the Hague). If we are suddenly producing many more patents a year, the surplus will shoot to the roof. That, and we are paying the new examiners a lot less and nudging the more expensive older ones to early retirement and retirement benefits will be cut massively. In 4 years, when we have no stock left, how much will the surplus be? A billion a year or more? Maybe that is how Battistelli plans to convince the UK to stay?
It sure looks as though patent examiners now share the same concerns we have (for a number of years now). Patent lawyers get their way by lowering the bar and as noted yesterday, a post by a Bristows employee (i.e. part of Team UPC which lobbies the British government along with Battistelli) said that “The Intellectual Property Office [the other IPO] responds to Brexit, highlighting that EU-derived protection is still in place while the UK remains a Member of the EU, and that the UK is looking into various post-Brexit options.”
This is about attempts to ratify the UPC in spite of Brexit and in spite of UPC being squarely against the interests of British citizens, not just British engineers.
There is a lot of nefarious stuff going on these days and the EU is piggybacked to advance the interests of few shadowy groups, essentially by legislative laundering. SUEPO, as of yesterday, expresses concern about revolving doors and systemic corruption in the EU. “The USF issued a Communiqué on 20 July 2016 in which they reproduce an open letter (EN, FR) sent to Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission about the Barroso case,” SUEPO wrote. Here is the original in full:
An open letter to: Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission
Re: The Barroso case
Mr Juncker, is the « last chance » you gave to this Commission being used up?
The recruitment of Mr Barroso by the sadly notorious Goldman Sachs investment bank sent a shock wave through European public opinion.
As several Press media have pointed out, this shameful move is further widening the gap between two worlds, of the elites on the one hand and the citizens on the other and is likely to strengthen and consolidate the persistent –and most recently highlighted by Brexit– blame thrown on the EU institutions: that of acting in collusion with global finance to the detriment of the European citizens’ interests.
According to Article 245 of the TFEU, the Members of the Commission give a solemn undertaking that, “both during and after their term of office, they will respect (…) the duty to behave with integrity and discretion as regards the acceptance, after they have ceased to hold office, of certain appointments or benefits”. The case of Mr Barroso is so blatant that no internal document, such as a ‘Code of Conduct’, besides introduced by Mr Barroso himself, can be relied upon to defeat a clear and unconditional Treaty provision.
Union Syndicale Fédérale1 requests President Juncker that his Commission –“the last-chance Commission”, to put it in his own words– proceed without delay to the preliminary acts in view to applying to the Court of Justice.
It will then be for the European Court to judge whether Mr Barroso, by accepting a position of responsibility with Goldman Sachs, has broken or not his “duty of discretion” required by the Treaty and to determine possible consequences (including loss of the right to a pension).
Bernd LOESCHER, president USF
Over the years we wrote quite a few articles about Goldman Sachs. If entities like these get access to EU corridors through the likes of Barroso, why wouldn’t US businesses be able to gain access to institutions like the EPO, where discriminatory practices are already rampant under Battistelli (after Microsoft pressured the EPO)?
The EPO is under attack. It’s under attack from Battistelli and his masters, who are evidently not European taxpayers or European SMEs. █
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08.08.16
Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Come on, Delta. If what you’ve been doing doesn’t work, stop beating your head against the wall. Switch to GNU/Linux like the stock-exchanges. They wanted stock-trades to take flight smoothly and reliably. GNU/Linux helps them do that. I wanted PCs to run reliably in schools. GNU/Linux helped that happen. PCs in my home have been running pretty well since we went completely GNU/Linux several years ago. This year we plan to get rid of Intel too for complete independence from Wintel. Try it. Make Delta great again by migrating to GNU/Linux. You and your passengers will like it.
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Desktop
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Kernel Space
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I’ve actually been distro-hopping for a long time, going back and forth between various Debian-derivatives, but the last couple of years I’ve been a fan of openSUSE. I like openSUSE’s way of doing things and that I have a choice between rock-solid (Leap) and bleeding edge (Tumbleweed). Right now, though, my computers are running a mix of openSUSE Leap, CentOS 7, and RHEL 7.
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It’s been two full weeks since the official release of Linux kernel 4.7, which is the latest and most advanced stable branch, and the time has come for Linus Torvalds to announce the first Release Candidate for the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.
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Later this month is the day traditionally used as the anniversary date for the Linux operating system, which got its public start with an August 25, 1991 post to the comp.os.minux newsgroup. This year, Linux will celebrate its 25th year of changing the world.
Linux has come a long way since those days in the latter half of 1991, and countless articles and books have been written about the impact of piece of software has had on the development of technology.
To get an idea of how fast Linux took off, think about the timeline of the first year of Linux’s existence.
Linus Torvalds’ now-famous announcement would soon be followed by the first Linux kernel release (0.01) on September 17, then a public release of the Linux kernel (0.02) on October 5.
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Benchmarks
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With Microsoft having recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary update I’ve been running some fresh Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons. The first of these comparisons for your viewing pleasure is looking at the latest Windows 10 build with the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while also comparing the performance when manually upgrading to the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev for delivering the latest OpenGL performance potential.
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Applications
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Historically, Linux media creation has gotten a bad rap. The reasons why vary, but usually it’s due to legacy applications from powerful media companies that sell expensive software. In this article, I’ll dive into the truth about Linux media creation. I’ll also focus on what software usually holds folks back and how they compare to their open source alternatives.
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Claws Mail 3.14.0 is the latest release of the lightweight GTK+ email client. Among its latest crop of changes is master passphrase support.
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This release has bug fixes for Wayland display, make dist and some of deprecated APIs.
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Museeks is a free download and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux distributions (as well as Windows and Mac OS X) from the project website. Downloads are provided as a pre-compiled binary — just extract and double-click on the ‘museeks’ file inside to run.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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It is possible to run Windows applications on Mac and Linux systems with the aid of software such as ‘Wine’, a compatibility layer that can run Windows applications on other OS. CodeWeaver CrossOver Linux is a similar option for Linux distributions. Also, virtual machines such as Oracle VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop for Mac also serve the purpose with full network connectivity.
Perhaps, the most flexible way to provide the same applications to users regardless of OS is to use Software as a Service (SaaS) option, offered in the form of Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 or Zoho Office. Everything is more generic when running out of a Web browser, and SaaS requires little time and effort from IT.
Third-party tools take away a lot of the sting associated with running Macs and Linux systems on a Microsoft-based enterprise network. Be sure to test-drive several tools in your own environment before deciding on the best approach.
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Wine 1.9.16 development release has been announced this past weekend for those who love living on the bleeding-edge, bringing more improvements and numerous bug fixes to various Windows apps and games.
A total of 43 issues reported by users were addressed in Wine 1.9.16, which ships with more shader instructions in Direct3D, performance improvements for GDI (Graphics Device Interface) and JavaScript, better 64-bit binary compatibility on the macOS operating system, and continues on the progress towards the Direct3D command stream implementation.
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Games
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Since my friends at GOG gifted me the original, I automatically gained a copy of this new version so I will be able to review it after release.
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The developer of Book of Demons has mentioned that the game will come to Linux after the full Windows release. It looks like a pretty cool take on the action RPG genre.
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Megamagic: Wizards of the Neon Age is an an RPG that claims it blends in RTS gameplay, it’s currently in Early Access and recently added Linux support.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The development of the next major release of KDE Applications 16.08, a software suite designed for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, continues with the Release Candidate build.
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Some of you are aware that I (Bruno) have a new “day” job and I don’t have time anymore to be active on GCompris. I created this project in 2000 and maintain it since then. So this release note is important to me because it will also be my last one. From now on, the releases will be handled by Johnny Jazeix.
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I’ve never been a distro hopper. Not at all. I started out with Mandrake back around 2002, and stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until 2010. When it became obvious that the distro was in serious financial dodo and wasn’t likely to be around much longer, I moved to PCLinuxOS. This move was made partly because the distro had started life as a fork of Mandrake/Mandriva, keeping me in familiar territory, but mostly because it was one of two distros I could find that supported the Wi-Fi on an old Dell laptop I was using at the time. In 2012 I moved to Bodhi Linux after falling in love with the simple elegance of the Enlightenment 17 desktop, and the next year switched over to Linux Mint Xfce edition when we finally got around to setting up a full time office for FOSS Force.
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Want the power of Gentoo but the packages of Arch and the display manager of Ubuntu, all in one distribution? An experimental distro could make that possible, if not exactly easy
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AI Linux is a Linux distribution that comes complete with artificial intelligence libraries, tool and languages. A proof of concept alpha version is now available, suitable for test-driving in a virtual environment such as VirtualBox.
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Solus developer Joshua Strobl proudly announced the 33rd installation of Solus Project’s This Week in Solus weekly newsletter to inform the community about the latest technologies and software releases implemented in the OS.
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Our development and bug tracking oriented infrastructure moved from Bugzilla to Phabricator a few days ago. Bugzilla simply didn’t offer us the flexibility we needed and has long been a bit of a sore tooth for us.
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New Releases
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It has been more than a year since we last heard something from the development team of the blackPanther OS GNU/Linux distribution, who had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the release of blackPanther OS 16.1.
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After more than a year of silence, the Wifislax development team is very happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Wifislax 4.12 GNU/Linux distribution.
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Apricity OS maintainer Alex Gajewski has proudly informed Softpedia about the availability of the first stable release of his gorgeous Arch Linux-based computer operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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I took this week to hack on this feature called Docs which gives you the ability to host documentation of your project in Pagure. I have never explored this feature before so I started to hack on it.
This feature is pretty straight forward to use. Once you have your project up and running you can go to Setting of the project and under Project Option click on Activate Documentation this will actually activate a Doc tab in the main project. This can be used to host your docs specifically now this is a little tricky because you need to clone and push to a different URL, the docs are maintain in a separate location this is due to security concerns. When you activate the Project option you are provided with a Doc specific URL, you need to push your document or static pages to that URL and automatically any page named as index will be taken as the first page.
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Debian Family
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Debian developer Emilio Pozuelo Monfort announced this past weekend the enablement of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6 compiler tools by default for Debian Unstable.
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Derivatives
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The Parsix GNU/Linux developers are informing us today, August 8, 2016, about the end-of-life development status of the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system, urging users to upgrade to the most recent release.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, through David Callé, has had the great pleasure of announcing new maintenance releases of the Snappy tools Snapcraft and Snapd, which bring new features and several enhancements.
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We’ve talked for years about the killer app that will take the Linux desktop to the mainstream. For some the killer app is a particular game. To illustrate, I’m still playing Civilization IV. I’ve spent about thirty minutes trying to get it working under Wine to no avail. I’m sure I just haven’t found the right tutorial yet. Until that happens, I can’t fully commit.
The next category of killer app usually comes from the productivity side of things. For some, it’s a video editor with the capacity and polish of Final Cut Pro X. For others, it’s a Microsoft product such as Visio or Project. For many, it’s Adobe’s Photoshop or, more accurately, their Creative Cloud suite of applications.
[...]
Ubuntu may have a great project on its hands from a technical level, but if it fails to continue the momentum of positive press, it’ll fail to get the widespread adoption it needs to make it successful. I’d expect for the next Snappy Sprint for Ubuntu to not only invite a wide spectrum of Open Source enthusiasts, but also the Linux press. Which outlets should be invited, should absolutely be a high priority topic for those planning the next event. Assuming the next sprint is already being planned, who would you like to see cover the event?
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Flavours and Variants
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Now it has been approximately a month since I’m using Linux Mint 18 “Sarah”. There is not doubt this distro is solid and newbie friendly. I always suggest Linux newbies start with Linux Mint as it makes easier for them to move around and learn Linux system. Sarah takes the same legacy forward with better look and user experience.
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On August 2, 2016, Mozilla deployed the latest version of Firefox, version 48. As is usual, updates take a few days to roll out to all Linux distributions as maintainers may need to do testing or alterations.
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It’s been a little over a month since Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton launched a crowdfunding campaign to build a free and open source modular PC system which includes an EOMA68 PC card (with a processor, memory, and storage) and a series of accessories including desktop and laptop docks.
The campaign has raised over $60,000 so far, which is less than half way to the goal of $150,000. But Leighton tells me that if he raises around $100,000 he expects to be able to begin production of the items people are ordering: the higher dollar amount was chosen under the assumption that more people would be making pledges for higher-priced items.
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Would-be backers of the open-source, modular EOMA68 PC card can now support the crowdfunding campaign by purchasing several new gadgets that work with the system.
Fund-raising for the ‘Easy-on-Mother-Earth’ EOMA68 PC began in July and have now reached $66,000, or just under half of the $150,000 targeted by the end of August.
The concept, from UK firm Rhombus Tech, is designed to demonstrate that computers can be easy and cheap to fix or upgrade with a standardized PC board and 3D printable housing and components. It also hopes the modular design can cut the mountains of e-waste produced by the tech industry.
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If this ~$100 CDN tiny box pleases TLW, it’s Good Enough. When a proper video driver gets into Linus’ mainline, say, with Wayland, and distros have all the usual applications working, these things will take over. It surely blows away her old VIA box with 8 core-gHz CPU, gigabit/s networking and 2gB RAM compared to 0.4 core-gHz, 100 mbits/s, and 0.25gB RAM. We’re using files over NFS so TLW will be able to use her old desktop environment on Beast III if she wants. Otherwise, she can use the Odroid-C2 as a thick client well enough. Cost for the old ones was ~$150 CDN delivered a decade ago, with real money, not this inflated stuff. Life is good.
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Phones
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Most small businesses refresh their desktops and laptops every three to five years, but that process brings up a thorny question: What should you do with the old equipment? Answer: learn how to repurpose old PCs and laptops.
But wait; why not donate those old PCs and laptops to a local school or charity that could use them? After all, the hardware is still functional, just a little slow. However, donating old PCs to charity often isn’t as easy as you might think.
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OSVR is an open source software platform and VR headset. Sensics and Razer launched OSVR 18 months ago with the intent of democratizing VR. Our goal is to provide an open alternative to walled-garden, single-device approaches.
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The maps didn’t exactly break, but the base maps that they were built on (served up by MapQuest as a “tile set”) had disappeared. After six years of hosting and maintaining this open base map of the world, MapQuest chose to retire it, releasing new and enhanced base maps in their place, which will require a MapQuest account and usage plan.
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CMS
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Be in Command of the Hidden Costs in Open Source Content Management [Ed: This article is very poor because everything it says about FOSS is applicable to proprietary too. When articles create a distinguishing factor like “Open” [sic] versus “Commercial” [sic] you know they’re not serious about a debate.]
The most widespread accusations leveled against open source systems are about their lack of robustness and security concerns. The Whitehouse’s official website is built upon an open source content management system. How about that for robustness and security? Though an open source CMS is more cost-effective than a commercial one, enterprises must be wary of some latent cost drivers such as custom development, maintenance, and employee training. These factors could drive up the cost of operating an open source CMS beyond that of commercial software products. However, the cost drivers can be kept in check with astute preparation and proper planning.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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We’ve reported before on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting “Monkey” cloud tools as part of its “simian army,” which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform. These utilities are notable because they have been tested and hardened at Netflix. The company has also recently open sourced some machine learning tools.
Now, in its latest open source move, Netflix is contribution what it calls a “traffic intuition tool” called Vizceral. This was previously called Flux, and here is more on it.
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Black Duck cooks up extra security sauce [Ed: Black Duck is more like a Microsoft proxy that exploits FOSS to sell proprietary software. Black Duck was created by a Microsoft marketing person and by its own admission in order to mock the GPL and warn about it (classic Microsoft modus). Black Duck is trying to rewrite its history to gain acceptance in the FOSS world that it is actually exploiting/attacking to sell proprietary software. Don’t feed Black Duck. It’s yet another Trojan horse.]
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Funding
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BSD
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After roughly four years of development, I am pleased to announce the first official release of the Lumina desktop environment! This release is an incredible realization of the initial idea of Lumina – a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment meant for users to configure to match their individual needs. I hope you all enjoy it, and I look forward to working with all of you on the next iterations of this desktop!
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Public Services/Government
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The White House released long-anticipated guidelines aimed at improving agency sharing of federally-developed software source code.
The memo, noted in an Aug. 8 blog post by Federal CIO Tony Scott, also incorporates a pilot program to release some custom-developed code used by federal agencies to the public. Scott is also looking to agencies for more public releases beyond the pilot. OMB also plans to launch a new website called Code.gov to make access even easier.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Openness has become the new standard for content and software across a variety of initiatives in higher education. Open source software, open education, open educational resources, open access publishing, open analytics, open data, open science, and open humanities have matured to challenge, even dominate, the global educational landscape.
Those of us working with open projects know how important it is to contribute experiences of best practice, develop common understanding, and share strategic direction, in order to better facilitate communication and synchronization across the emerging open landscape. To that end, the Apereo Foundation—an open source software community of over 100 institutions of higher education—along with the Open Source Initiative and Red Hat organized the first Open Summit.
The Summit was held at New York University in late May and included speakers from across a variety of open initiatives and communities: faculty teaching open source principles and practices; researchers creating open data and techniques to promote collaboration; campus staff developing open source projects in support of teaching and learning; librarians curating open educational resources; university administrators cultivating open governance models.
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Science
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When it comes to fully autonomous vehicles, no other company comes close to Google’s prowess or its commendable safety record (after millions of miles of driving, only one accident has been proven to be the fault of a Google car, and even that was a relatively minor incident). Unfortunately for Google, it has lost a person that has been instrumental in the ongoing success and spectacular achievements of the company’s AI-driven autonomous car initiative.
That person is Chris Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher that decided to jump aboard the fast-moving Google train back in 2009.
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Health/Nutrition
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A deeper look into Wikileaks’ dump of Democratic National Committee emails may prove an agenda against both Bernie Sanders and marijuana legalization.
While many major news outlets jumped on the obvious fact that DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and other officials were chained in an email questioning Bernie Sanders’ religion to undermine his support among voters, Marijuana.com’s Tom Angell dug deeper to find a daily e-newsletter sent to Capitol Hill insiders that included included a paid advertisement from the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) warning against the dangers of marijuana.
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Security
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3. Install Linux (free). One big decision making factor will be the age of your computer. If your hardware is old, you may well be better off replacing it with something new.
I mentioned Linux, which has a few advantages. Windows as you are familiar with, is susceptible to infections by malware (viruses, adware, spyware, etc.), whereas Linux is practically invulnerable to infection. Part of that is down to the dominance of Windows, making it a big fat target, but it is also down to the Linux architecture making it extremely hard to hack. Another advantage with Linux (from my experience using Ubuntu), is that updates are generally installed without having to restart your machine. When a restart is needed, it is nice and quick, unlike a certain other operating system that spends ages ‘configuring updates’.
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Once they’re in, the scammers allow the employee to continue with business as usual and discreetly monitor the account for potential financial transactions. As soon as they see that the employee is sending an invoice to a customer, they reroute it through their own email account and physically alter the account number and routing number before forwarding it on to the customer. The email address they use is often very similar to the original email address, so it’s easy to miss. Unlike spoofing, BEC techniques such as wire-wire rely on earning internal account access rather than externally impersonating a company account.
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After three years of planning and lead-up contests, the finals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) to show the best in autonomous computer security concluded with a win by the Mayhem system from the ForAllSecure team, which won the $2 million grand prize. The Xandra system finished in second place, winning $1 million, while the Mechaphish system placed third, claiming $750,000.
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Defence/Aggression
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So, Afghanistan. America’s longest and wackiest war will soon enter its 16th year, and is scheduled to run through the next administration, as no one can remember why the U.S. is fighting there anymore and so no one knows when this thing is over. Did we win yet? How would we know?
None of that matters of course, because plenty of American contractors are in their 16th year of getting filthy rich, thanks to extraordinary amounts of money being spent with no effective oversight by the Department of Defense. Let’s have the latest example.
Our friends at the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) are the poor b*stards charging with keeping track of all this waste. Once upon a time the point of an Inspector General was to point things out to upper management, like generals or Congress, so problems could be addressed. In 2016, the point of the Inspector General is to be ignored because no one in Washington actually care to fix anything.
Nonetheless, SIGAR has its job, and so has published an audit of America’s Afghan National Army Technical Equipment Maintenance Program, designed to maintain Afghan army vehicles at our expense and develop a vehicle maintenance capacity within the army.
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Hillary Clinton as of 2009 was praising Assad as a “reformer,” but in 2011 was ordering him out. In 2013 Obama was on the verge of a massive missile assault on Syria, to punish Assad for supposedly using sarin gas against his people (an unlikely prospect, since he was winning the war through conventional means). But Lavrov told Kerry that Russia believed that opposition forces were responsible. By some reports Obama soon became persuaded that Turkish intelligence in collusion with some opposition faction contrived a false flag incident hoping to induce the U.S. to topple Assad.
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Iran has executed an Iranian nuclear scientist detained in 2010 when he returned home from the United States, after a court convicted him of spying for Washington, a spokesman for the judiciary said on Sunday.
“Through his connection with the United States, (Shahram) Amiri gave vital information about the country to the enemy,” Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei told a weekly news conference, state news agency IRNA reported.
Mohseni Ejei said a court had sentenced Amiri to death and the sentence had been upheld by Iran’s Supreme court, IRNA said.
Amiri, a university researcher working for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, disappeared during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2009, and later surfaced in the United States. But he returned to Iran in 2010 and received a hero’s welcome before being arrested.
A U.S. official said in 2010 that Washington had received “useful information” from Amiri.
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“Torchbearer” stars Phil Robertson, the Duck Dynasty patriarch who became a folk hero in the right-wing war on “political correctness” when the show was temporarily suspended by A&E amid controversy over Robertson’s inflammatory remarks about homosexuality and black people in the pre-civil-rights-movement Louisiana. The movie was shown to distributors in Cannes and will be released in theaters in August.
The hour-long film is a collaboration between well-known right-wing groups. Bannon is executive chairman of Breitbart News; the script was written by a Breitbart editor, Rebecca Mansour. It was produced by Citizens United, the organization whose movie attacking Hillary Clinton was used by conservatives on the Supreme Court to gut regulation of political money in Citizens United the court ruling. Religious Right political operative Ralph Reed attended the premiere, and at a reception following the screening, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., took the opportunity to slam Clinton and praise the work of Citizens United.
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The U.S. has executed a handful of air kills against extremist groups like al-Qaida in Yemen since February, but the Saudi-led air war against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels also has U.S. assets contributing to a much quieter mission.
U.S. Air Force KC-135s and KC-10s are and have been prepositioned within the Central Command theater ready to “support partner nations and theater refueling requirements,” said Air Forces Central Command spokeswoman Kiley Dougherty.
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Finance
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Canada and the United States have taken a lot of flak from critics who’d like them to be more like the social democracies collectively known as the “Nordics”: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. Now a naturalized American from Finland has made the strongest case yet that the U.S. (and by implication Canada) really need to go Nordic.
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If you watched any part of the Democratic National Convention this week, you probably noticed a small but visible group of attendees protesting something called the “TPP.” Some held signs and banners. Some even heckled during various speeches, including President Obama’s address Wednesday night.
The focus of discontent is a massive trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a plan spearheaded by the Obama Administration that would set new trade rules between the United States and other eleven Pacific Rim nations. It has yet to be approved by Congress, and both major party nominees say they oppose the deal. The issue nevertheless has become a flashpoint in this year’s presidential campaign, particularly among some ardent supporters of former candidate Bernie Sanders, who remain suspicious of Hillary Clinton’s intentions.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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As a reality television star, Donald Trump has to know that what goes up in the realm of fame must eventually be torn down. Last week, several voices from the mass media achieved a rare consensus and made it clear that the laws of celebrity gravity were no longer operating in his favor.
In brief, Trump’s fortunes began to turn as some kind of critical mass was reached with regard to the press’ collective take on Donald Trump’s mental state. In the process, Trump’s insistence that “all press is good press” was also tested.
To review, a quick Google search—using the term “Donald Trump crazy”—of news articles published over the last seven or so days yielded pages of results. The stories typically referred to a heavily cited chain of events, including Trump’s protracted and relentlessly televised feud with the Khan family, his breezy appropriation of a supportive veteran’s Purple Heart and his confusing exchange with a disruptive baby.
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The enduring cliche of the 2016 election is a comment by Trump that provokes outrage, rebukes, and the declaration, “He’s gone too far.” This happened the moment Trump declared his presidential bid by denigrating Mexicans, then when he attacked veterans, women, the disabled, Muslims, and the judiciary among others, and most recently with his vendetta against Khizr and Ghazala Khan.
Trump’s attack on the Khans seems curious as he had nothing to gain. The couple grabbed the moral high ground at the Democratic National Convention by pointedly telling Trump, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” in reference to the death of their son as a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in 2004.
The self-inflicted wounds are unlikely to cause Trump permanent harm, however. The New York Times found his attacks on military members and families mainly affected the opinion of undecided veterans, a sliver of voters. Trump also recovered after a similar racist tirade against a U.S.-born judge overseeing lawsuits against the defunct Trump University. Republicans inside the Beltway freaked out in private over Trump’s antics, but in public they are loathe to break with him when polls show 81 percent of the party supports him along with 41 percent of the public overall.
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Though voters are told to see Hillary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils,” Jill Stein said voting that way is the “losing strategy.”
“Hillary Clinton is the problem, she is not the solution to Donald Trump,” Stein said Saturday in accepting the Green Party nomination at the party’s nominating convention in Houston, Texas. “We are the solution. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
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After obtaining a recent data dump of hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), WikiLeaks exposed the extreme unpopularity of the federal government’s Common Core State Standards … and how the average American voter sides with local — and not federal — control of education.
The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLSA) argues that the latest series of leaked communications between DNC strategists surfaces something that should have already been plain to see for the American public for some time — that the only champions of the Common Core is the federal government and others under its payroll who personally benefit from its implementation.
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Over the last few weeks, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts for who will win the presidential election transitioned from a virtual tie between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to Clinton now taking an 81.7 percent chance of victory compared to 18.3 percent for Trump. At the end of July, polls were bouncing back and forth between Clinton and Trump, but recent polls show Clinton with leads as high as 14 points.
No policy stances have changed in either the Trump or Clinton campaigns during the past two weeks. Trump has provoked negative publicity with boorish comments, but given his entire presidential campaign so far, this isn’t out of the ordinary. The seemingly impressionable voter base that falls in line behind mainstream reporting is alarming. The media’s impact on elections shouldn’t be underestimated. It does, however, illuminates the importance of objectivity and balance from the mainstream press, which has been particularly lacking this campaign season.
The July Wikileaks release of nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails validated the concerns of Bernie Sanders supporters that the DNC helped rig the primary election for Clinton. These emails provided a glimpse into how the DNC and the mainstream media work together in providing public relations support for the Democratic establishment.
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Global Elites want Assange and Wikileaks Silenced…
Wikileaks threw the DNC Convention into turmoil last month after the release of hacked DNC emails that revealed the Democrat Party rigged their primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.
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Most presidential election cycles are dispiriting for the Left. As the official campaign begins, however, the hangover of a Sanders-induced optimism has added to this despair.
America is about to choose a president from the two most unpopular politicians in modern history. The Democrats have chided the Left and the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd for still not being ‘with her’ in the existential struggle against fascism. But it is worth considering how liberalism’s anti-fascism covers a libidinal lack. That is, an inability to define or, in Lacanian terms, ‘enjoy’ their political identity but through this fascist threat. Liberals are clearly not principled anti-fascists, the geopolitical compromises are too numerous to count, and there is an obvious cynical PR/fundraising logic to the fascist threat: ‘Can you spare $5 to defeat fascism?’ However, liberals are emotionally invested in the idea that they are the ones who can beat back the scourge of fascism. They construct anti-fascism as a class project but self-identify as the class of elites and experts that fascism uses to obfuscate actual class struggle.
Trump’s fascism may lack the militancy of brown- and blackshirts organised against socialist forces but he masters its rhetorical indeterminacy. His acceptance howl at the Republican National Convention was interspersed with appeals to the working class, denunciations of corporate political influence, free-trade deals, and interventionist foreign policy in Iraq and Libya. With Trump opportunistically left-flanking Hillary on trade and militarism, the liberal media and political class has been oscillating between catching the vapours and declaring American liberalism an unbridled success. In the face of a volatile populist electorate the Democrats have chosen Reagan-esque optimism and the refrain that ‘America is already great’, the liberal equivalent of ‘Jeb!’
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The release of a cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee by WikiLeaks last month has raised a great many questions- so writes the New York Times in a piece penned by Alex Gibney.
The questions raised are however not what it means for US democracy that the democratic party elections were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton, or what it says about the journalistic integrity of The New York Times that Bernie Sanders was so easily dismissed and laughed at when he first complained of the fraud.
No, the questions posed to the readers of The New York Times are why they should collectively despise Assange, WikiLeak and myself. And don´t get me wrong, there may be many legitimate reasons for why both Alex Gibney and the New York Times despise us.
One good reason could be that we exposed (in the documentary film Mediastan) how The New York Times worked hand in glove with the State Department in censoring its own journalists and setting the news agenda to fit the presidential administration.
Another good reason could be that we exposed how the US State Department places orders for propaganda films in Hollywood, and taking these orders is incidentally what Alex Gibney does for a living. So yes, there are many reasons for why Gibney and the New York Times do not like us, but unfortunately they will not tell this to their audiences as they do not trust that they will reach the same conclusions, so instead they have resorted to lying.
Oh, and for the record, regarding Gibneys freshly invented and baseless allegation against myself- the only vilification campaign that I have ever engineered is against corrupt propagandists masquerading as journalists.
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A frequent weapon for Democrats in the 2016 election is to publicly malign those they regard as critics and adversaries as Russia sympathizers, Putin stooges, or outright agents of the Kremlin. To put it mildly, this is not a new tactic in U.S. political discourse, and it’s worth placing it in historical context. That’s particularly true given how many people have now been targeted with this attack.
Strongly insinuating that the GOP nominee, Donald Trump, has nefarious, possibly treasonous allegiances to Moscow has migrated from Clinton-loyal pundits into the principal theme of the Clinton campaign itself. “The depth of Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin is revealing itself by the day,” her website announced yesterday, and vital “questions” must be answered “about Trump’s cozy relationship with Russia.” The Clinton campaign this weekend released a 1-minute video that, over and over, insinuates Trump’s disloyalty in the form of “questions” – complete with menacing pictures of Red Square. Democrats cheered wildly, and really have not stopped cheering, ever since the ex-Acting CIA Director (who, undisclosed by the NYT, now works for a Clinton operative) went to The New York Times to claim “that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”
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This tweet is, to state it plainly, a lie. Stein simply did not “gush over Russian support for human rights.” To the contrary, in this very video, she criticized Russia for diverting scarce resources into military spending while its people suffered, and merely praised her fellow participants from around the world who attended an RT-sponsored conference. But no matter: Democratic operatives and journalists widely hailed it as proof that she, too, is some sort of Russia dupe or worse.
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Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, has ambitious plans for her first 100 days in office.
“First thing we do is cancel student debt, working with the Fed,” Stein told MintPress News in an exclusive interview. “We will be fighting for that from day one.”
Stein would also immediately begin to implement her “Green New Deal” to redirect resources from the military-industrial complex into an economy based on renewable energy. She hopes her plan would put a stop to America’s endless energy wars.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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When John Oliver skewered the economic realities of local journalism Sunday night, there was at least one person who wasn’t laughing: David Chavern, the president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.
The nonprofit (which represents nearly 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada) published a curt rebuttal Monday to the “Last Week Tonight” host, who spent nearly 20 minutes picking apart the financial woes afflicting newspapers this weekend.
In particular, Chavern and the association took issue with Oliver’s mockery of companies like Tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) that he says “are just trying to figure it out.”
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To avoid censorship, Korean game developer Somi is making an English-language game to criticize Korea’s anti-terror laws.
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Blocking websites is not a new thing for the governments; let alone for the Bangladeshi one.
In a crackdown on media, the Bangladesh government has recently blocked over 30 online portals and news websites, including some pro-opposition media. Interestingly, Bangladesh’s telecoms regulator simply told the media that the sites were shut down on government orders, without citing any reason for the action.
One justifiable reason that can give some sort of consolation to Bangladesh’s netizens who want to see the internet in its freest possible nature is that- as the country is waging a war against terrorism, the authorities have a free pass to close down sites and social media pages on security grounds.
Ironically, the Bangladesh government action came just after one week of United Nations Human Rights Council passing of a nonbinding resolution condemning countries that prevent or disrupt access to the internet.
That resolution was passed in line with the declaration which the United Nations made in 2011 that internet access is a fundamental human right.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The mega-hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, as exposed by Wikileaks last month, is one of the most politically consequential cyber-thefts of all time. Its revelations of shady deals have caused bad press for the Democrats in an election year and have led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, with three more top DNC officials following suit. More leaks are coming, and some Democrats now fear an “October surprise” designed to finish Hillary Clinton off just before the election.
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The magical, wonderful, oft-abused National Security Letters have been deemed Constitutional, thanks to the vague promise of reviews by courts and government agencies to determine whether or not the normally-indefinite gag orders accompanying them can stay in place.
The USA Freedom Act took away the “indefinite” part of the equation, stipulating that NSL gag orders must be justified by periodic reviews. Unfortunately, “periodic” was left open-ended. The language only specifies “appropriate intervals.” It does place the burden on the government to prove that a NSL’s gag order is still necessary, but makes no specific demands on how often the government should have to make these assertions.
The FISA court, however, has specified what a “periodic review” should entail — at least narrowing down what period “periodic” should mean.
In this order [PDF], a redacted company exercised its USA Freedom Act option to demand a review of gag orders connected to two NSLs it had received. After some in camera presentations to the FISA court, along with some discussion between the NSL recipient and the FBI, it was agreed that the gag orders could stay in place for the time being, but that the FBI should be given the burden of specifying a time frame for periodic reviews, rather than forcing the recipient to file petitions repeatedly until the gag orders were finally determined to be no longer necessary.
The order redacts the number of years these gag orders have been in place, but it’s safe to assume the number hidden behind the gray box is larger than one.
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Using end-to-end encryption would have prevented attackers from accessing the content of most of the emails they obtained. It wouldn’t have prevented any content from being accessed, but would have greatly mitigated the damage.
Unfortunately, there’s a very good chance the wrong lessons will be learned from this experience.
While it would seem obvious that the best way forward would be to encourage the use of strong encryption for everyone, it’s far more likely legislators and presidential candidates will continue to try to carve holes for law enforcement access and expand government powers to “hack back” or perform preemptive attacks. The proposed Rule 41 changes will likely slide on through at the end of this year, allowing the FBI to break into computers all over the world.
Another solution suggested by Hill is to move government communications to private platforms like Gmail where end-to-end encryption can be implemented and, more importantly, handled by professionals rather than, say, a bunch of lawyers with access to the spare bedroom.
Government officials may be wary of allowing private companies to handle (and store) government communications, but the public should be just as wary of any government agency that makes a private company its official communications platform. Private platforms used for public business tend to create lots of unnecessary FOIA litigation. Without legislation in place, or additional stipulations added to contracts with private entities, government agencies will not only be able to keep malicious hackers at bay, but also pesky members of the public demanding access to officials’ communications.
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Nearly a decade ago, we wrote about the fact that the BBC supposedly has a fleet of totally secret “detector” vans that drive around trying to figure out who was watching the BBC without paying for it. As you probably know, if you live in the UK, you’re forced to buy a BBC license if you have a TV or a TV turner card. And, for years, they’ve claimed to have had these magical detector vans. When we wrote about them in 2008, it was because a freedom of information request to find out about the vans was denied for the most ridiculous of reasons: revealing the details of the vans “would damage the public’s perception of the effectiveness of the TV detector vans.” In other words, the “vans” — if they exist at all — were more about scaring people into paying, rather than actually detecting those watching the BBC without a license.
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You may have heard that tomorrow is the official day for the Australian census to take place… and many people are planning to ignore it, because of massive security concerns and some incredibly stupid plans by the Aussie government to retain and make use of the data collected. Having an accurate population census is an extremely important tool for a wide range of government services, but especially in an age of increasing (and very legitimate) concerns about government overreach and surveillance, some are reasonably worried about what’s done with the data. In the US, it’s been made quite clear that census data absolutely must be kept secret and not connected to individuals or used for other purposes.
Over in Australia, they’ve apparently got some other ideas in mind. Late last year, the Australia Bureau of Statistics announced that for this year’s census it would, for the first time, retain all the names and addresses it collected. This has raised some pretty serious concerns, and some fairly weak claims from the government. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced that no one should worry because the government always protects people’s privacy. No, really.
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In order to oppose the advent of mass surveillance programs in the UK, an engineer named Gareth Llewelyn demonstrated his OnionDSL system design involving Tor. He plans to become an internet provider through his company Brass Horn Communications.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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He was a rarity in 1940: a successful African-American architect in Los Angeles. Paul Revere Williams built some of the city’s most famous structures—the Superior Court building downtown, the futuristic Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport—as well as private homes for celebrities including Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Sinatra.
Despite his success, he battled racism throughout his career, growing used to the surprised expression of new clients whose enthusiastic embrace became less so after finally meeting him face to face—clients like Clara Taylor, the right-winger at the center of “Blueprint for Paradise,” a play getting its world premiere at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood.
Based on one of the oddest chapters in Williams’ career—the time when he designed and built a compound for the Silver Legion of America, a Nazi group also known as the Silver Shirts—the play, by playwright Laurel M. Wetzork and director Laura Steinroeder, shrewdly incorporates real-life fascist movements with ideological components espoused by major public figures of the time. Based on fact and local legend, “Blueprint” is set in Rustic Canyon in Pacific Palisades, where, it was recently announced, the final remains of the 55-acre Murphy Ranch, including a power station, a buckled fuel tank, a collapsed shed and garden bed foundations, are to be demolished.
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BTS speaks with Tony Salvador on the perils of short-term contracts in the Philippines.
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Employers hire and fire the same worker again and again, or they seek employees provided by labour contractors, in order to avoid any of the responsibilities and costs that come with long-term formal employment.
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Signs have been daubed on doors to the shops in the capital Riyadh saying “unescorted women” are not allowed inside.
Dunkin’ Donuts is famous for its sugary treats and the American chain has outlets across the world.
Saudi Arabia has strict rules in place to separate men and women, many of whom wear full face veils.
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‘Bwisit ako dyan!’ Duterte takes swipe at US envoy [Ed: Bastos mass-murdering anti-journalism tax-evading Dutetre continues to act like Mafia Don, not President]
MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte has taken a swipe at United States Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg, calling the diplomat “bakla” during a speech before soldiers in Camp Lapu Lapu in Cebu City Friday night.
“Kaya nga sabi ko nung si Kerry, kasama kami ni Secretary, si Delfin (Lorenzana), kausap namin si (U.S. Secretary of State John) Kerry. Okay naman siya kasi, nag-away kami ng ambassador niya (Philip Goldberg). ‘Yung ambassador niyang bakla, p*****i**, buwisit ako diyan. Nakikisali doon sa election, giving [a] statement. You’re not supposed to do that,” Duterte said.
["Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and I talked to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He was okay. I had a rift with his ambassador (Philip Goldberg), his gay ambassador. He meddled during the elections, giving statements. You're not supposed to do that."]
Goldberg is the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Manila. He is set to leave his post in October.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Today, a coalition of more than 30 NGOs and civil liberties organisations from around the world sent an open letter to lawmakers in charge of telecoms regulation encouraging them to support the development and implementation of robust net neutrality rules alongside the deployment of high quality broadband and next-generation networks.
The letter is a response to the recently published “5G Manifesto” in which telecoms operators threaten to withhold 5G investment unless regulators water down European Union rules on net neutrality and other rules, including provisions on network access and privacy. This attack comes at a time when the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) is currently developing guidelines for the implementation of the adopted net neutrality rules.
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In 2011, Comcast agreed to pay $4.4 billion for exclusive US broadcast rights to air the Olympics through 2020. It shelled out another $7.75 billion for the rights for the games until 2032. To begin recouping the costs of this deal, Comcast/NBC was quick to brag about how it nabbed $1.2 billion in national advertising in the games. But lost in this conversation, as usual, was what paying customers actually wanted. What consumers repeatedly told NBC they wanted was less blathering, more live events, and a live broadcast of the opening ceremonies. They got none of those things.
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DRM
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Interesting move by Cory Doctorow and the EFF in sending some letters to the FTC making a strong case that DRM requires some “truth in labeling” details in order to make sure people know what they’re buying. We’ve been pointing out for years, that DRM often means that you don’t really own what you think you bought.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The case of the monkey selfie keeps getting weirder and weirder. I’m not going to rehash the whole damn story again — just click the monkey selfie link above and scroll through the posts. Here’s the super short version though: A British photographer named David Slater left his camera on the ground in an Indonesian jungle, where a macaque monkey (which we’re now, much later, told is named Naruto, though there’s some dispute over this) approached the camera and took a selfie. There were all sorts of debates online about whether or not there was any copyright in the photo and, if so, who owned it, with Slater repeatedly insisting that he did (and occasionally having representatives threaten us). A few years later, out of the blue came PETA, claiming that it represented the monkey (Naruto) and was suing Slater for copyright infringement for publishing a book with the photos. A judge, rightly, tossed out the lawsuit, pointing out (as we had argued from the very beginning) that a monkey has no right to a copyright, and the law only applies to human persons. PETA and its actually well-known and until now mostly respected law firm, Irell & Manella, have appealed the ruling.
And, now, believe it or not, PETA has gotten a primatologist and apparent “macaque expert” named Agustin Fuentes to file an amicus brief supporting the idea that a macaque monkey taking a selfie should hold the copyright in the image. Fuentes may be a macaque expert, but he’s not much of a copyright expert… and it shows. The brief mainly focuses on how smart macaque monkeys are, as evidence that being smart somehow means it deserves the copyright.
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Over the past few months, the legacy recording industry has coalesced around a new talking point — a so-called “value gap” between different kinds of music services. In particular, the phrase is used to attack YouTube and to claim that it’s somehow unfair that the ad rates and money made from the ad supported YouTube is much lower than purely subscription services. This has lead to the repeated false claim from the RIAA and others that revenue from vinyl records is more than from ad supported streaming.
Unfortunately, this value gap phrase has caught on in certain circles — including over in Europe where the European Commission has mentioned it as it puts in place plans for copyright reform. Tragically, and incorrectly, EU officials have started referring to reasonable intermediary liability protections and other things as a “loophole” within copyright law that somehow allows platforms to “unfairly benefit.” It allows them to claim that they’re just trying to “level the playing field” when that actually means tilting the playing field heavily in one direction.
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A recent extension of UK copyright for industrially manufactured artistic works represents “a direct assault on the 3D printing revolution,” says Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge. The UK government last month extended copyright for designs from 25 years to the life of the designer plus 70 years. In practice, this is likely to mean a copyright term of over 100 years for furniture and other designed objects.
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KickAss.cr, one of the main domains of KickassTorrents, has gone up for sale. Available via the SEDO marketplace for a minimum bid of $230, this domain name is registered with the Costa Rican registry, hence, away from the U.S. Government’s reach. If you are planning to buy this domain, don’t expect this sale to be a smooth one
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Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Willy/Guillaume Minnoye (VP1) was at one point rumoured to be on his way out, so maybe that is still the case
THE EPO is probably Europe’s most notorious institution these days (worse than FIFA). This isn’t the fault of patent examiners but of top-level management which decided to treat examiners like an enemy and impose unreasonable demands.
“For a person his age, it would not count as early retirement but as late retirement (he was never supposed to have this post in the first place).”Working for Battistelli is difficult enough as an examiner, but even for those working for him at top-level management it has become hard and stressful. Recently, as we wrote earlier this summer, Ciaran McGinley resigned (set to retire early). As Principal Director of Patent Administration, his departure is a very big deal, but he’s not alone. Many people are leaving the Office and there are ways for retrieving some statistics; there are staff changes published every month and anyone in the office can read them. Based on these, one can easily see the increase in retirements over the last couple of years (we don’t know if anybody has already done that) and some people told us that it is indeed the case. Several sources told us the same thing and some people wrote anonymous comments about it online.
Earlier this year we learned that Principal Directors were starting to scrabble around with an eye on the VP1 post (that would be Minnoye’s post, around the time he embarrassed himself on Dutch TV). It was premature at the time to circulate rumours that Minnoye might be leaving and in fact he did not leave*. Given his age (past retirement age), maybe it’s just a matter of time. For a person his age, it would not count as early retirement but as late retirement (he was never supposed to have this post in the first place). █
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* “Mrs Elodie Bergot has apparentlly [sic] resigned,” one person claimed at the time, but it turned out to be false. We never published this rumour; we refuted it.
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Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No transparency, no accountability (more greed and lawlessness)
Summary: Rumours about the amount of money Benoît Battistelli gets paid to ruin the European Patent Office (EPO), which has become more secretive and accordingly reckless
FOR a number of years now (not just months) people have wondered how much money Battistelli gets paid (money extracted from EPO budget without any proper oversight). Staff of the EPO does not trust Battistelli at all. Asking for transparency/details of Presidential salary should not be out of the ordinary as previous Presidents, a la Alison Brimelow (Battistelli’s predecessor at the Office), openly stated their salary and there was no confrontation about it. Battistelli is different because some say that Bergot, his friend’s wife (Elodie Bergot), increased his salary and/or bonus. We want to catch him in a lie right now, not because we have something against him personally but because the secrecy he brought to the EPO (definitely worse than in Brimelow’s days) hurts the credibility of the Office and damages — by extension — Europe’s reputation for accountability and relatively low corruption rates.
“Someone anonymous got told (a while back) that the salary was actually €42,000 a month (i.e. just over half a million Euros, a lot more than even national Presidents and EU heads receive), but that came through a friend via another friend, thus lacking any documentary evidence for it.”It is worth noting that Mr. Kongstad, Battistelli’s successor in the Council, knows Battistelli’s salary but cooperates in keeping the salary secret (as well as the contract which may include other forms of benefit/compensation). We are not going to go after Kongstad, however, because his role in this secrecy is at best intended to appease Battistelli’s will. Earlier this year we heard that Elodie Bergot gave Battistelli a raise (not years but months ago), so we assume her department too knows the salary but keeps quiet about it. Quite a few people out there know how much Battistelli gets paid, so why does he keep so quiet about it? Maybe because it contradicts what he said to the Dutch press?
Rumours about Battistelli’s salary/ies (contracts change over time) are out there in the wild. EPO workers speak about it, but few have actually seen a document confirming the hard facts. Someone anonymous got told (a while back) that the salary was actually €42,000 a month (i.e. just over half a million Euros, a lot more than even national Presidents and EU heads receive), but that came though a friend via another friend, thus lacking any documentary evidence for it. “The problem I have found,” told us this anonymous source, “is that almost everything I find out that I don’t actually see in a document has the risk of being false. That is what happens, I guess, when there is no transparency and people have to rely of rumors (very USSR). The most reliable rumors come from getting the IT people drunk in the EPO bar. They have access to everything.”
Half a million Euros annually (gross) contradicts other rumours we have come across, including some which say €1,000,000, €1.2m, or close to €1.5m.
What is the real salary? We may never know unless or until the contracts get leaked or Battistelli comes clean like his predecessor, Alison Brimelow. █
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Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 3:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Judge Raymond Chen has a track record of resisting § 101
Summary: The perception of correlation between the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) judge that is assigned to a software patent/s case and the outcome of the case gives room for speculation
THERE is a lot to be celebrated now that the USPTO hardly accepts (abstract) software patent applications and even when it does, boards or courts will overrule it down the road. We fought for this for over a decade and after Alice it gradually became a reality, lowering the overall number of patent lawsuits and patent trolls, as expected. The EPO currently moves in the opposite direction, due to its misguided President. As Benjamin Henrion put it yesterday, in relation to the UPC with its bogus 'expert' teams, “software dev[elopment] does not need patents. UPC is a back door.”
The US Supreme Court has not dealt with the subject of software patenting for several years, but the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) deals with it all the time and usually, in about 90% of cases, accepts the Alice ruling and tosses away software patents. It is worth keeping track of who inside CAFC has a track record of not obeying Alice and in fact defying/rejecting it. This subject is hardly explored anywhere. In his latest article about CAFC, for example, Professor Crouch focuses on Halo, Pulse, and Seagate in relation to willful infringement claims, which is another subject altogether, namely damages.
“In order to keep software patents at bay (and away) we need to at least name the judges.”Daniel Cole, a patent attorney with Bold IP, worries about Alice and says that “Removing Section 101 Won’t be Enough” (to restore software patenting). This was published yesterday (as in every Sunday) in the pro-software patents site of Watchtroll. Well, software patent proponents want it all and they know how they can get it, if only opponents of software patents don’t remain vigilant. “If section 101 of the patent act,” he explains, “is removed the Supreme Court is extremely likely to simply continue to rely on those two precedents and continue to find abstract ideas and natural phenomena unpatentable. As the “broad language” of section 101 would also be removed the Supreme Court might even assume congress is giving it broad authority to enact further limitations on patentability.”
Brian Watkins, in the mean time tells me that “[i]n real life, on the other hand, the CAFC—especially J Chen—is halfway to overturning Alice.” He added [1, 2] “DDR Holdings: copying color code out of HTML file is patent-eligible. Bascom: running IPtables on remote host eligible. The two biggest steps on the road to overturning Alice and Bilski and returning to State Street Bank, both by Chen.”
The Enfish judgment, by contrast, he says is “[b]y Hughes w/ Moore, Taranto on panel.”
Citing Watchtroll, a vocal proponent of software patents, he says the article “lays out exactly how the trolls are overturning Alice step by step.”
This is worth noting perhaps, and better late than never, as we never really bothered checking who issued which CAFC ruling/s and what the patterns of outcomes were. In order to keep software patents at bay (and away) we need to at least name the judges. In the past, specifically inside CAFC, some judges were crooked and were working closely with outside interests. Randall Ray Rader is a recent example which we mentioned here many times before. Watchtroll already has a ‘thing’ for Mr. Chen (4 out of the top 6 search results are Watchtroll articles; see for example Google images search). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Users are reporting that upgrading to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update renders their PCs unusable.
A lengthy Reddit thread explains the problem: the Anniversary Update installs just fine, but when users re-start their PCs after the upgrade … nothing happens.
Users report that their PCs simply hang on restart, sometimes losing even the ability to accept input from mice and keyboards and sometimes frustrating users by allowing input but not responding.
Some in the thread report that disabling Secure Boot removes the problem, others describe more elaborate workarounds.
Microsoft, for its part, has advised those in the thread to do a clean install of Windows and pointed those afflicted to USB media creation tools in order to facilitate that action.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Karl served on the board of the Open Source Initiative, which coined the term “open source”, and helped write Subversion, a popular version control system that predates Git. Karl also wrote a popular book on managing open source projects called Producing Open Source Software. He’s currently a partner at Open Tech Strategies, a firm that helps major organizations use open source to achieve their goals.
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Kernel Space
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Torvalds further says, “if you ignore the documentation format change, things look fairly regular, with about 60 percent of the non-documentation diffs being drivers (gpu, networking, media, sound, etc) and about 15 percent being arch updates (arm, powerpc and x86 dominate, but there’s mips and s390 too). The rest is spread out – core networking, tooling (mainly perf), include files, core kernel, vfs and low-level filesystems (xfs stands out)”.
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Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 4.8 of the Linux Kernel.
“This seems to be building up to be one of the bigger releases lately,” Torvalds wrote on the Kernel Mailing List, but rates the update “fairly regular, with about 60% of the non-documentation diffs being drivers (gpu, networking, media, sound, etc) and about 15% being arch updates (arm, powerpc and x86 dominate, but there’s mips and s390 too).”
Among the changes this time around are support for several touchscreen controllers, which contributors say will mean Linux can handle Microsoft’s Surface 3.
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Just like clockwork, the first release candidate / development version of the Linux 4.8 kernel is now available for testing.
As of writing, Linus Torvalds has yet to issue a formal release announcement for Linux 4.8-rc1. However, it’s been tagged in Git. For now at least, Linux 4.8 remains codenamed “Psychotic Stoned Sheep.”
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Graphics Stack
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AMD developer Marek Olšák continues leading their recent charge on looking to boost the performance potential out of Mesa / Gallium3D.
Aside from working on the remaining OGL4 extensions, longtime Mesa contributor Marek Olšák has been seeking to boost the performance of the open-source AMD OpenGL driver. He’s published a number of optimizations with the most impressive improvements being for a 23%+ performance improvement for RadeonSI with the BioShock Infinite game.
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Applications
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Linux users are notorious for our resilient pickiness when it comes to the software we use. It’s probably why we’re Linux users in the first place. Instead of submitting to oppressive operating systems and software with limited room for customization, we happily format our hard drives to purge them of Windows and OS X tyranny, instead opting for the freedom of choice that Linux provides. Not only can we control exactly how we want our systems to work, we can also control exactly how they look, which some would say is equally important.
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The second release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. It is still faster, and in my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on the OS X due yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet — the build system could be extended — see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers welcome!).
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Feed me cereal and call me a-maized: there’s a brand new version of Qt Twitter app Choqok on the way.
Choqok 1.6 Beta is the first update to the app in over a year and a half since the previous, and only the second, major update to the app in almost three years!
“We want to make this release more stable than ever and then we are going to release a beta today and the final version next month,” Choqok’s developers write in a recent blog post update.
Stability is going to be key for the app as the incumbent stable release is full of bugs caused, in part, by changes to the Twitter infrastructure that it hasn’t kept pace with.
As such the bulk of this beta update is made up of bug fixes, polish and updates to work with new Twitter functionality, like sending unlimited direct messages and quoting tweets.
Choqok 1.6 is also based on KDE Frameworks 5 and supports for the GNU Social network.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Exodemon is a recent discovery that I was about to write up and then the developer emailed me, how about those odds! The developer said they have just recently supported Linux and need some attention.
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Sadly, it’s another game to join the growing list of games that promised a Linux/SteamOS version to drop support at some point without telling anyone. I’ve tried to get in touch with the developer numerous times. It’s pleasing to get closure, but it took a long time to get it out of them.
They did at least stop taking any funding way before announcing SteamOS support, so if you purchased it once it released when there was still no sign of their previously promised support, well, you probably know by now not to pre-order.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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My GSoC Project has materialized quite a bit since the last blog post. In the previous blog post I discussed implementing a cache for persisting the query results from the owncloud grilo plugin. However, after some discussions with Felipe, we decided it’s better to proceed without the cache for now.
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Reviews
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These are just few reasons to think about Bodhi Linux. As it is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS it doesn’t lacks in case of applications. There is an alpha release of Bodhi Linux which is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This gives us another reason to think about Bodhi Linux. Try it out and make it permanent if you like it. In our next segment we will be introducing an independent Linux distribution. So stay tuned with us and don’t forget to have fun with Linux.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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TUG 2016 is over, and I have returned from a wonderful trip to Toronto and Maine. High time to release a new checkout of the TeX Live packages. After that I will probably need some time for another checkout, as there are a lot of plans on the table: upstream created a new collection, which means new package in Debian, which needs to go through NEW, and I am also planning to integrate tex4ht to give it an update. Help greatly appreciated here.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Papirus is one of the best Linux icon themes available right now so we’re pleased to hear that it’s been updated with support for a slew of new apps, many of which we’ve featured on our pages over the past month.
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Wifi signal strength can vary from room to room so knowing where the best spot to pitch up when snagging the latest 1.5GB Ubuntu .iso is valuable information. There are several apps available on Linux that can assist you in finding the most signal-drenched Wi-Fi location in your house or apartment.
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Bq say they “don’t have any plans” for new Ubuntu Phones — but is this reason to be worried? We don’t think so, and here’s why.
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Phones
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Tizen
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We are super excited (American term) for the launch of the Samsung Z2. This upcoming Tizen tech has had lots of information pointing to its release such as Wifi and Bluetooth certification as well as news that Samsung has already begun assembly of the device. The Z2 is also slated to be distributed in 8 countries that include: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
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Android
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Events
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How much though of what is being talked about around open is a case of preaching to the choir?
The believers, perhaps you’d even occasionally call them zealots, will like to think open everything is ushering in a new world of altruism.
But I’ve seen it enough that if individuals or corporations can turn a dollar by closing down people’s options rather than opening them up…then they tend to win.
OS//OS is operating on the premise of if we build it, they will come. They may be right – and certainly without people to champion such principles, and bring such thinking out of the interweb and into the physical world (such as this conference), then skeptics like me will remain that way.
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SaaS/Back End
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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With a new script, it’s possible to get Valve’s Steam Linux game client running relatively well on FreeBSD.
On FreeBSD in conjunction with its Linux binary compatibility layer it’s possible to run Steam for handling your favorite Steam Linux titles. If you are unfamiliar with FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, see FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?. That article has background information along with some Linux vs. FreeBSD gaming benchmarks I did five years ago… When FreeBSD 11.0 is out, I’ll try again to get it working to see how FreeBSD 11 performs for running Linux native games.
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The older KDE stuff — that is, KDE4, which is still the current official release for the desktop on FreeBSD — is also maintained, although (obviously) not much changes there. We did run into a neat C++-exceptions bug recently, which was kind of hard to trigger: running k3b (or ksoundconverter and some other similar ones) with a CD that is unknown to MusicBrainz would crash k3b. There’s not that many commercially-available CDs unknown to that database, so I initially brushed off the bug report as Works For Me.
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Project Releases
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Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, a longtime friend of hers revealed on Canadian radio.
Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81.
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Science
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Tim LaHaye died last week. He was 90. He was best known for co-writing the “Left Behind” series of novels about the battle of Armageddon, which fundamentalists believe will follow the Rapture of Christian believers from earth. The books have sold over 63 million copies—the version of the series for kids has sold 11 million copies alone—and the obituaries led with that. He helped found the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell and sat on its board, and in 1981 began the Council for National Policy, a secretive directorate for religious-right organizations that has been called “the most powerful conservative organization in America you’ve never heard of.” He was so fanatically devoted to what Christians call “the Great Commission”—Matthew 28:19–20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you”—that when he once ran into the Dalai Lama in Israel he shook hands with him and asked, “Sir, has anyone ever explained to you who Jesus Christ really is?”
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Health/Nutrition
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As the Government of India, along with other member states made promises at the UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS underway in New York, it intensified its persecution of civil society organisations in India. Recent instances brings the persecution to the doorstep of the HIV response in India.
In early June, Lawyers Collective, a civil society organisation that has been at the forefront of legal activism to ensure the rights of people living with HIV, LGBTI groups, sexworkers and injecting drug users in India, received a government order suspending its right to receive funds from foreign agencies. This had the potential to hamper all of Lawyers Collectives work with HIV organisations and the central and state governments in India.
Among other things, the organisation was accused of utilising foreign funds for raising awareness and conducting workshops/meetings/seminars on issues relating to HIV/AIDS and women’s empowerment. Further, they have been accused of spending foreign funds on advocacy with media and Members of Parliament for raising awareness on legal issues, including discrimination faced by people living with HIV and the need for legislative measures for redress. And also, they have been accused of spending foreign funds on organising protest rallies led by positive people’s networks.
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Flint’s interim water plant chief said the city is being forced to apply chemicals to the city’s drinking water supply without a written comprehensive strategy, and she is concerned residents could be negatively affected.
Interim Utilities Director JoLisa McDay wrote a letter, which was posted Thursday, Aug. 4, on the city’s website, to the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality claiming the city lacks direction on its water treatment processes.
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Lead-tainted water isn’t just a problem in Flint, Michigan.
This week in Pittsburgh, the city’s Water and Sewer Authority reportedly sent 81,000 customers a letter informing them of elevated lead levels in their water.
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If you’d rather not know about all the disgusting additives that may be lurking in your favorite Sauvignon blanc, read no further. Marissa A. Ross, wine editor of Bon Appétit magazine, is about to reveal some not-so-tasty secret ingredients in the third episode of her off-the-wall and eye-opening video series Drink Sustainably.
“So you know when people are like, is this wine vegan, and that sounds crazy?” Ross asks.
With so many dietary fads (gluten-free, low-carb and beyond) being debunked as soon as they’re popularized, it’s normal to approach vegan wine with skepticism. But Ross explains that vegan wine is “really not that crazy. What’s crazy is that there are plenty of wine companies out there that use these additives like egg whites and gelatins to make wine clearer.”
Gelatin—a protein made by boiling the skin, tendons, cartilage, ligaments and bones of animals, mostly cows or pigs—has been used as a clarifying agent in the winemaking process since ancient Roman times. To this delicious list of animal-derived fining agents is also added blood, marrow, crustacean shells and fish bladders (which not too long ago underwent scrutiny for being used as an ingredient in some popular beers).
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On July 29, President Obama signed bill S.764 into law, dealing a major blow to the movement to require GMO labeling. The new law, which food safety groups call the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” (DARK) Act, has at least three key parts that undermine Vermont’s popular GMO labeling bill and make it nearly impossible for Americans to know what’s in their food.
The law claims to set a federal labeling standard by requiring food producers to include either a QR barcode that can be scanned with a phone, or a 1-800 number that consumers can call to find out whether a product contains genetically modified ingredients.
But according to the Institute for Responsible Technology, this bill doesn’t require most processed foods to have a label, defines genetic engineering so narrowly most GMOs on the market don’t qualify, and gives the USDA two more years to come up with “additional criteria”—also known as “loopholes.”
This is disappointing for American consumers who honestly just want to know what their food contains, but the issue surrounding GMOs isn’t just about what these companies are putting into our food and stocking our stores with. What’s potentially more devastating for the planet is that genetically modified organisms developed by companies like Monsanto and DuPont can escape into our ecosystems and potentially wreak havoc before they are even tested or approved as safe.
That’s not wild-eyed conspiracy theory or speculation; it’s a matter of fact.
The same day Obama signed the DARK Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that a farmer found 22 experimental and unapproved wheat plants in one of his fields that had been genetically modified by Monsanto. The reactions to the finding have been swift, despite being ignored by the mainstream media.
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Security
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Houston, Texas police announced the arrest of two men accused of stealing about 30 Jeep and Dodge vehicles. Authorities say they did it by using a laptop computer.
Police tell KTRK they’ve been watching these guys for a while but were never able to catch them in the act stealing Jeeps – until last Friday.
Police say Michael Arce and Jesse Zelaya stole more than 30 Jeeps in the Houston area over the last six months.
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Some times ago, I have installed honeypot services on one of my servers, in order to see what happens in the real outside world. I especially installed the cowrie ssh honeypot which simulate a Linux shell and gather binaries that people want to install on the server (this tool is awesome, check here to install it).
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Lots of examples of random numbers failing, leading to cryptographic failure.
The always classic Debian, OpenSSL, and the year of the zero.
The time Sony signed Playstation code with the same nonce and leaked the keys.
Samy phpwned session IDS.
The Bitcoin app Blockchain used random.org for entropy. Bonus giggles for not following the HTTP redirect, but actually using “301 Moved Permanently” as a random number.
The paper Mining Your Ps and Qs has pretty extensive investigation into weak keys on network devices, many of which result from poor entropy.
Now here’s a question. How many of these vulnerabilities could have been prevented by plugging in some sort of “true random” USB gizmo of the sort that regularly appears on kickstarter? I’m going to go with not many. USB gizmos don’t prevent inopportune calls to memset. USB gizmos don’t prevent nonce reuse. USB gizmos don’t block utterly retarded HTTP requests.
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PLC-Blaster was designed to target Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 PLCs. Siemens is Europe’s biggest engineering company and a PLC market share leader. Siemens said in March shortly after the worm was unveiled at Black Hat Asia that the malware was not exploiting a vulnerability in Siemens gear. Maik Brüggemann, software developer and security engineer at OpenSource Security, said that worms like this one are a threat to any industrial network.
[...]
When OpenSource Security took its findings to Siemens, the researchers were told there were no flaws in its PLC platforms using its SIMATIC S7-1200 PLC. “We were told these were not vulnerabilities and that everything worked as expected,” Brüggemann said.
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From net-connected sex toys to smart light bulbs you can control via your phone, there’s no doubt that the internet of things is here to stay.
More and more people are finding that the devices forming this network of smart stuff can make their lives easier.
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A team led by Ang Cui (previously) — the guy who showed how he could take over your LAN by sending a print-job to your printer — have presented research at Defcon, showing that malware on your computer can poison your monitor’s firmware, creating nearly undetectable malware implants that can trick users by displaying fake information, and spy on the information being sent to the screen.
It’s a scarier, networked, pluripotent version of Van Eck phreaking that uses an incredibly sly backchannel to communicate with the in-device malware: attackers can blink a single pixel in a website to activate and send instructions to the screen’s malware.
What’s more, there’s no existing countermeasure for it, and most monitors appear to be vulnerable.
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We think of our monitors as passive entities. The computer sends them data, and they somehow—magically?—turn it into pixels which make words and pictures.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if hackers could hijack our monitors and turn them against us?
As it turns out, that’s possible. A group of researchers has found a way to hack directly into the tiny computer that controls your monitor without getting into your actual computer, and both see the pixels displayed on the monitor—effectively spying on you—and also manipulate the pixels to display different images.
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It took Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and one of his graduate students just minutes to hack into a voting machine still used in Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Politico reports.
Professor Andrew Appel purchased for $82 a Sequoia AVC Advantage, one of the oldest machines still in use. Within 7 seconds, he and his student, Alex Halderman, had picked the lock open. Within minutes, the duo had removed the device’s unsecured ROM chips with their own hardware that makes it easy to alter the machine’s results.
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Credit card companies for the most part have moved away from “swipe and signature” credit cards to chip and pin cards by this point; the technology known as EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) which is supposed to provide consumers with an added layer of security is beginning to see some wear, according to researchers.
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Defence/Aggression
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Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a very clear explanation of why the $400 million the US paid to Iran in January was not a ransom for hostages.
The fact is that the Obama administration dodged a likely ruling by an arbitration court against the United States that could have awarded Iran as much as $10 billion.
The Iranian government of the Shah had paid the US $400 million for fighter jets before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, the US froze Iranian assets, and after the hostage crisis had no representation in Iran. But by international law the US still owed Iran $400 mn because it never delivered the promised planes. Ultimately a special court was set up to arbitrate the dispute. Iran was asking for $10 billion because of inflation and because of aggravation. It began to look as though Iran might win the $10 bn.
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The Syrian War is nowhere near over, but the Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) episode may be drawing to an end. Alarabiya reports that the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is largely leftist Kurds of the YPG but includes a small Arab auxiliary faction, has taken almost all of the former Daesh stronghold of Manbij. The north Syrian city not so far from the Turkish border had been used by Daesh as a key logistics point in smuggling arms, men and supplies from Turkey down to its capital of al-Raqqa. Only a small number of fighters remain in the city, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The fall of Manbij signals a new phase in the struggle against Daesh, as SDF positions itself to blockade al-Raqqa.
Unfortunately for regional stability, that the Kurds of Syria’s northeast are extending their sway westward will make it look to Turkey as though the Syrian Kurds are consolidating a mini-state. Turkey’s elites are paranoid about secessionist tendencies among Turkey’s own Kurds, about 20% of its population and concentrated in the southwest near Syria.
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The island called Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. This fact means that the rights US citizens assume to be theirs do not necessarily apply to Puerto Ricans living on the island. The history of Puerto Rico since the United States military invaded it in 1898 makes this very clear. Whether one is taking a look at the economic relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the political relationship, or the military relationship, the blatant nature of the colonial relationship is foremost.
This becomes very clear in Nelson A. Denis’ 2015 history War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. Partially a biography of the Nationalist leader and hero Pedro Albizu Campos and partially a history of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement in the early and mid-twentieth century, this text tells a story more people in the United States should know. The racism and just plain disregard for human lives described in Denis’ narrative is a match for the very worst of humanity’s inhumanity to other humans. The fact that it continues in Washington’s current dealings with Puerto Rico is testament to the arrogance intrinsic to colonialism, no matter how it is dressed up.
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Three people were killed and more than 100 injured Friday after security forces opened fire on protesters in Indian Kashmir, bringing the death toll since clashes began in July to 55, Reuters reports.
Two protesters were killed in western Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir States, and one was killed in the north. The protests, which took place amid region-wide curfews, began after Friday prayers.
Violence first erupted last month following the death of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, a 22-year-old separatist militant credited with reviving militancy in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. He used his active following on social media to encourage youth to join the Hizbul Muhahideen.
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If your anger about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has lost its edge, Roy Scranton’s debut novel, War Porn, will help you recommit. It takes a while to appreciate the disjointed quality of the plot, which hopscotches back and forth through the lives of two U.S. soldiers, Specialist Wilson (identified only by his rank and last name), whose deployment to Iraq transforms him from a poet nice-guy into something else, and a National Guard military police officer, Aaron Stojanowski, who returns stateside jagged and dangerous. In writing War Porn, Scranton has produced a literary work that doesn’t just describe the outrages of the war, but punches them into the American gut.
We first meet Stojanowski at a Columbus Day barbecue in the fall of 2004, and watch as detached millennials ask questions about his service in Iraq. “That must have been intense,” one says. Eventually Stojanowski explodes, kicking a pet and harshing the party vibe. The novel then jumps through a set of disjointed scenes from Specialist Wilson’s time in Iraq, which illustrate in alternating fashion: the casual racism of military occupation; the boredom and routine of everyday violence; the sudden fragility of life; the unexpected, fleeting pleasures of the forward operating base.
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The United States returned to aerial bomb Libya. The target is Islamic State (IS) positions in the north-central city of Sirte. IS has held Sirte and its surrounding areas since last year. Sirte is the birthplace of Muammar Qaddafi, who was also killed there. After the fall of the Qaddafi government, this central Libyan town languished. It had become the playground of the Libyan Dawn – the militia of the town of Misrata, led by Salah Badi – and later the Libya Shield Force of Benghazi. The latter had close ties to al-Qaeda and is now part of the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries. When the Islamic State attacked Sirte last year, the various militias had little incentive to stay. They delivered the city to the Islamic State and withdrew to their own hometowns. Attempts to erode the Islamic State by other militias and armies have thus far failed.
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Bill Kristol is downright despondent after his failed search for an alternative to Donald Trump. Max Boot is indignant about his “stupid” party’s willingness to ride a bragging bull into a delicate China policy shop. And the leading light of the first family of military interventionism — Robert Kagan — is actually lining up neoconservatives behind the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
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The provocative notion of a “madman” somehow getting into the system and starting a war oversimplifies the reality of our situation, which is that any human being, not just a knowledge-averse demagogue like Mr. Trump, may have the capacity to go “mad” in the tensions leading up to the decision to launch. The historical record shows that past presidents of the U.S. had seriously considered using nuclear weapons, most distressingly Mr. Nixon when he realized we were losing in Vietnam. Even a “no-drama” Obama could be rendered almost psychotic with dread by evidence that missiles were apparently headed for our major cities. This is a situation that is far beyond the psychological endurance of even the sanest and most well-trained leader. Madness is relative in the nuclear world. We would certainly label mad an extremist who set off a nuclear weapon in a city. We do not apply the same label to the whole field of leaders and diplomats who seem to be more or less satisfied, or pretend they are, with a status quo that is patently insane.
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The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from al-Qaeda was designed to influence US policy, not to make the group any more independent of al-Qaeda.
[...]
Charles Lister, the British expert on Syrian jihadism who is now a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, observed in May that al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has acquired a huge political stake in Nusra Front’s success in dominating the war against the Assad regime, which it views as the jewel in the crown of its global operation, along with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s Yemeni franchise.
This was not the first time that the issue of possible independence from al-Qaeda had come up in the context of the international politics of the Syrian conflict. A year ago last spring, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the external sponsors of the Nusra Front-dominated military command that had taken over Idlib in April, were concerned about the possibility that the Obama administration would come down hard against their Nusra-based strategy.
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One thing Trump tweeted actually spoke to this point: he noted that it was actually Hillary Clinton who had voted for war, not him. That Senator Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq was obscured in the flag-waving theatrics, but it’s a crucial fact that the politician who has positioned herself as the Khans’ champion also helped send their son into battle. Clinton has since expressed regret over her vote, but she’s gained dubious redemption by embracing a young man’s “sacrifice” despite having played an indirect role in his avoidable death.
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Starting next week, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States, will begin receiving national security briefings from intelligence officials.
One senior intelligence official, speaking to the Washington Post on August 3 on the condition of anonymity, contended “he would decline to participate in any session with Trump…citing not only concern with Trump’s expressions of admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin but seeming uninterest in acquiring a deeper or more nuanced understanding of world events.”
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On September 24, 2002, the UK government published a fifty page dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which was discussed in Parliament on the same day. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood before a cramped House of Commons and claimed that the ‘…intelligence picture that [the dossier paints] is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes…’ Tony Blair had penned a foreword to that dossier in which he claimed that he believed the intelligence had ‘established beyond doubt’ that Saddam had continued to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Facing a disbelieving public, the PM went on a public charm offensive by doing a series of TV interviews and shows speaking directly to members of the audience.
Tony Blair eventually secured the votes to take the UK to war alongside the US and other coalition partners. Hundreds of thousands of lives and many more displaced families later, no WMD were found. The obvious failure of the intelligenc
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What ever happened to the inclusions of headers and footers in documents? It used to be, documents would ID what document you were reading on every page, which is really useful if one page walks or gets replaced with a new one. Now even life-and-death documents like the Drone Rule Book liberated by the ACLU lack real headers.
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Contrasting the congenial moment on the porch, the outside of the house is covered in bullet holes perpetrated by armed attackers known as ‘colonos’ (settlers). Miskitu communities on the frontier are living in constant fear of these recurring attacks on their villages, and are growing desperate watching their family and friends die or be ‘disappeared’, while many others feel forced to flee the region entirely. The illegal settler attacks are part of a strategic and organized attempt to violently seize control of resource rich, traditional Miskitu territory.
A popular consensus among some Miskitus is that the Ortega government is tempting the settlers with lucrative loans, enabling them to illegally purchase the land for raising cattle. Beyond all spiraling suspicion and blame, the stark reality remains: the Miskitu are currently victims of an ongoing, large-scale land grab of Nicaragua’s most resource rich, biodiverse – and disappearing – rainforest. The ongoing criminal activity is sure to be a harbinger of devastating, unfolding, environmental impacts to boot.
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Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who claimed to have been tortured and imprisoned by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was executed by the Iranian government for alleged espionage on behalf of the U.S..
State-controlled Iranian media confirmed the death on Sunday. “Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the enemy (US),” spokesperson Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie was quoted as saying by Mizan Online.
However, details of the allegations are murky as the scientist disappeared during a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia in spring of 2009 and claimed to have been subject to CIA extradition and torture.
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As of yet today, I haven’t seen any articles about children bombed in bits in pieces in the Middle East or elsewhere, but I’m sure there have been devastated parents somewhere, asking why.
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Not long ago, Obama openly leveled criticism against the political establishment in Cuba. He righteously decried a lack of democracy and political freedom there, indicting the Cuban government for its role in continuing an antidemocratic politics for far too long after the Cold War. Now, however, in the wake of the recent turmoil surrounding the fixed Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which can be described as anything but democratic or transparent, Obama’s shameless denunciations of Cuba have lost whatever paltry significance they maybe had. And thanks to despotic blemish that stains the Democrats in their march to the White House, the US edges closer to consummate totalitarianism under Obama’s chosen pawn, Hillary.
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Every election season, veterans and their families are used as political pawns. During the Democratic National Convention in Philly, the Khans, the mother and father of a Marine Captain who was killed in Iraq, conveniently filled the role for Hillary Clinton and the Neoliberals. At the Republican National Convention, Patricia Smith gladly took the stage for the Neofascists and talked about the death of her son and the non-scandal that is, Benghazi.
In the meantime, anyone who opposes U.S. Empire is shit-out-of-luck when it comes to presidential elections and the two major parties. Here, we should commend Gary Johnson and Jill Stein for remaining principled in their views surrounding foreign policy, militarism, torture and surveillance. They’re the last of a dying breed.
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The Gülen Movement, which has been labeled a shadowy organization for constructing parallel societies in various countries, was increasingly a topic in WikiLeaks documents. Diplomatic cables regarding the movement soared in the years between 2003 and 2013 as well as questions and concerns about the movement due to its ambiguous intentions
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The dosage of such reassurance has been increased by feeding the public the knowledge that a special team will operating to combat the next ISIS-inspired rampage. The Daily Mail does its bit to fan the enthusiasm about the Hollywood styled “C-Men”, those “600 awesomely armed (and masked) Counter-Terrorism firearms officers who hit the streets today in vans, boats and motorbikes.”
None of this is reassuring on two grounds, the first being the forecast by Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe that an attack was not a question of if but when. Having given ballast to the prospect of a decent protective barrier, he had to also express a view that it might not work. Expertise can always be found wanting.
The second relates to the frequency of knife attacks as a general point, which has been somehow muddled in the poorly made pie of confusion. Knifing incidents in London remain a serious and growing problem. Epidemic it may well be, but terrorism?
The less than rosy statistics suggest that knife attacks in England and Wales over 2015 increased by nine per cent, much of it assisted by an increase of dark web sales and types of weapons awash in youth circles. In September 2015, the Met Police claimed that knife crime in London had risen by 18 percent, with 10 youngsters being stabbed to death in the nine months prior.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Global warming could release radioactive waste stored in an abandoned Cold War-era U.S. military camp deep under Greenland’s ice caps if a thaw continues to spread in coming decades, scientists said on Friday.
Camp Century was built in northwest Greenland in 1959 as part of U.S. research into the feasibility of nuclear missile launch sites in the Arctic, the University of Zurich said in a statement.
Staff left gallons of fuel and an unknown amount of low-level radioactive coolant there when the base shut down in 1967 on the assumption it would be entombed forever, according to the university.
It is all currently about 35 meters (114.83 ft) down. But the part of the ice sheet covering the camp could start to melt by the end of the century on current trends, the scientists added.
“Climate change could remobilize the abandoned hazardous waste believed to be buried forever beneath the Greenland ice sheet,” the university said of findings published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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Residents affected by fracking could be paid some of the proceeds of shale gas projects, the government has suggested.
A shale wealth fund was unveiled in 2014 to set aside up to 10% of the tax proceeds from fracking to benefit communities in the UK hosting wells.
The PM is now considering paying the money directly to individual households instead of councils and local trusts.
But green campaigners say fracking carries environmental risks and people would not accept “bribes”.
The government’s plan is one option due to be outlined in a consultation on Monday.
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It’s no secret that the U.S. coal industry’s hopes of revival by exporting its product to Asia via West Coast ports—what Platts has called an “export or die” strategy—have been dashed by the structural decline in global coal markets.
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Every time Charles Koch indicates his distaste for Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, media types run with a story that says Trump will receive no help from the vast network of non-profits and political donors overseen by Koch and his brother, David.
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Finance
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The lead up to and aftermath of the Brexit vote was and is extremely concerning for multiple reasons, but one in particular has gone unnoticed. When Michael Gove, being interviewed by Faisal Islam, said that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, the first response was to laugh. It turns out, however, that he was right. And that’s terrifying.
While it’s easy to argue that the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, ECB, industry leaders and corporate heads who pleaded for a Remain vote merely represent an array of vested interests, that academics, charities, social activists, artists, and independent economists who were also overwhelmingly lined up against Leave shows that the weight of the ‘objective’ Brexit debate fell on the side of the Remain camp. That voters rejected these opinions signals more than a protesting frustration at political elitism or a so-called cosmopolitan condescension: it signals the first major British legitimisation of a dangerous anti-intellectualism.
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Concern for the health of the poor is one of the critical issues in development. Poverty cannot be defined solely in terms of low or no income. Lack of access to health services, safe water, adequate nutrition, and education are also essential components of poverty. Poverty and health are closely linked. Poverty is one of the most influential factors in ill health, and ill health can lead to poverty.
Poverty drains family savings. In addition, poor people are more exposed to several risks (poor sanitation, unhealthy food, violence, drug abuse and natural disasters) and less prepared to cope with them.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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At the Green Party national convention in Houston, Green Party candidate for senate Arn Menconi says he choose not to work within the Democratic party because of its record in enabling corporate power and disastrous foreign policy
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“It’s imperative that we understand the protracted nature of radical change in the most complex, bourgeois society on this planet,” Ajamu Baraka told teleSUR.
Joining presidential nominee Jill Stein’s at the top of the Green Party’s ticket, the revolutionary activist, organizer and writer Ajamu Baraka has far larger ambitions that merely winning the White House. What Baraka wants, he says, is nothing less than a reimagining of US democracy.
“People are beginning to understand they have been trapped in the dead-end politics of this fear-mongering,” Baraka said in an interview with teleSUR, “which every four years reduces the political choice to the lesser of two evils.”
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After the mis-prioritization of values and poor argumentation comes the dreaded observer effect where intellectuals worry how they will be perceived and liked as a result of their findings. They are acutely aware that the messenger is often shot and so begins the even-handed attempt to feign pragmatic conclusions to appear reasonable and avoid being pegged a radical, doom and gloomer, or utopian – What is left is milquetoast conclusions that talk big ideas on the outset and deliver the same results. And it is the capitulation towards desired popular acceptance that is the most damning part of intellectual commentary. The inauthenticity of it all leads to conclusions that are band aids while the populace fails to understand the systemic problems enough to reach the right conclusions on their own.
All this work done by the tenured and the credentialed to give that glossy polished feel to intellectual work telling us what we already know – We are broken. It’s no surprise we have cultivated a society that when presented with a new thought will quickly run to safety picking up their armaments labeled credentials, stats, and tradition so that they may light the sky ablaze in hellfire to down any foreign aircraft in their conformist skies. We have learned what real intellectual helplessness feels like, and we have accepted its confines.
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This week, rumors that Shawn Lucas, a Bernie Sanders supporter shown in a viral YouTube video serving the Democratic National Committee (DNC) with a lawsuit over the organization’s favoring of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, has died, according to a report.
According to Snopes, who spoke to the Washington D.C. Metro Police, Lucas died earlier in August of unknown causes.
Lucas’ death was “classified as a Death Report, pending the results of an autopsy,” police told the hoax-debunking website. Meanwhile, GoFundMe page was set up for Lucas’ funeral expenses.
On Reddit and elsewhere, there were rumors he died. Since then, there has been rampant speculation on Twitter about his cause of death, including murder.
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The greatest scoop of my journalism career started at a poker table with a tip from an agitated banker.
It was a Thursday night in late May 1990. I was a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who had written dozens of articles about Donald J. Trump’s business affairs. I was closing in on the biggest one of all — Mr. Trump was on the brink of financial ruin. He was quietly trying to unload his assets. His Atlantic City casinos were underperforming, and prices for his casino bonds were plummeting, suggesting that he would have trouble making interest payments.
“Donald Trump is driving 100 miles per hour toward a brick wall, and he has no brakes,” the banker told me. “He is meeting with all the banks right now.”
The next day, I called sources at the four banks I knew had large Trump exposures. The first three calls yielded “no comment,” but the fourth hit pay dirt, and I was invited to visit the bank late that afternoon.
Behind a large mahogany desk sat the bank’s chief lending officer. He explained that all of the banks would have to agree to a huge restructuring of Mr. Trump’s loans or Mr. Trump would have to declare personal bankruptcy. Unknown to the banks when each had lent him money, Mr. Trump ended up personally guaranteeing a staggering $830 million of loans, which was reckless of him, but even more so for the banks.
In a front-page Wall Street Journal article on June 4, 1990, I wrote: “Donald J. Trump’s cash shortage has become critical. The developer is now in intense negotiations with his main bank creditors that could force him to give up big chunks of his empire.” One banker said, “He will have to trim the fat; get rid of the boat, the mansions, the helicopter.”
Amid all the self-made myths about Donald Trump, none is more fantastic than Trump the moneymaker, the New York tycoon who has enjoyed a remarkably successful business career. In reality, Mr. Trump was a walking disaster as a businessman for much of his life. This is not just my opinion. Warren Buffett said as much this past week.
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The New York Times has shown a blatant bias against Russia and Vladimir Putin for years but it is now merging that animus with its contempt for Donald Trump, a stunningly unprofessional performance, notes John V. Walsh.
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As a reflection of the state of play of American politics, we should see this platform not a defeat but an acknowledgment that there has been a change. Change we made possible. We were able to impact the debate. In some instances, we were able to win changes in the platform and, even when we were not, we were able to force debate on critical issues of concern. That is why I was proud to be a part to be a part of the Sanders campaign and why I endorse his call to continue our forward march. We must remain a part of the progressive coalition working with our allies to elect Hillary Clinton, defeat Donald Trump, continue to transform the Democratic Party, and keep progressive ideas in the mainstream, and not on the fringes of American politics. Within this coalition we can continue to fight for progress. Outside of it, we run the risk of marginalizing ourselves and our issues.
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Imagine during Jim Crow a Canadian political party polled its members about pressing Ottawa to stop subsidizing US racism only to be smeared by an organization driving the discrimination. But, instead of relishing the attacks, party leaders sought to placate the racist group by inviting them to address their convention, which the said organization refused, claiming… discrimination.
This hard to fathom scenario mirrors the Jewish National Fund of Canada/Green Party scrimmage since members put forward a resolution calling for the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” In the first round of a multipronged voting process, 62% of party members green lighted the JNF resolution, 24% yellow lighted it and 15% red lighted it. (A similar number green lighted a concurrent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolution.)
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The Green Party officially nominated Jill Stein for president and human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate on Saturday, at a convention in Houston that attracted many disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.
Much of the three-day gathering was an explicit appeal to former backers of the Vermont senator to join their fold, and several speakers argued that Sanders had been treated unfairly by the Democratic Party.
“I want to thank Bernie Sanders supporters who refused to let the political revolution die,” Stein said in her acceptance speech. “We have a tremendous opportunity before us. The American people are longing for a change. They are ready to do something different, and we have to be the vehicle for that difference.”
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Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.
Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.
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The Green Party convention in Houston, Texas reached its climax late Saturday with presidential nominee Jill Stein calling on the American left to turn its back on the “two corporate parties” and “vote for our deeply held beliefs.”
Vying for the support of those who previously backed former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, Stein championed her vision of “an America and a world…that puts people, planet, and peace over profit.”
During her acceptance speech, Stein said she was excited “to be running in alliance with the Bernie Sanders movement that lives on outside the Democratic Party.”
“We owe you such a debt of gratitude, for getting the revolution going. And then for refusing to be shut down,” she said, prompting chants of “Jill not Hill!” from the crowd.
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For African Americans, the struggle to be recognized as human and to assert their rights as such has been a long-fought battle. When the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were adopted between 1865 and 1870, freeing enslaved Blacks and making them citizens, Blacks were officially humanized in a way that they had not been for hundreds of years in America.
Indeed, while other amendments would effectively grant groups the right to vote — women by the 19th Amendment, and 18- to 20-year-olds by the 26th — no other amendment enfranchised citizens quite like the 14th Amendment granting citizenship rights to former slaves, or the 15th Amendment giving Black men the right to vote. That’s because no other amendment covered a people who had previously been deemed subhuman and enslaved.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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It’s amazing to think that it’s ten years since I was arrested and charged with ‘insulting the dignity’ of the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was a mere Prime Minister back then in 2006, and I an English teacher at a private university in Istanbul, where I had been living for 20 years. Despite my antipathy to the state religion, nationalism, censorship, miltary conscription, insult laws, and the headscarf, I kept quiet and got along fine.
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Hundreds of people have been shot and that little girl is doing something with the crucifix that she’ll definitely regret, but God forbid that someone should utter a rude word.
Television has been “thinking of the children” for decades and sanitising – or Bowdlerising – movies for decades, but we’ve got to take our hats off to them and admit that they can get impressively creative at times. Here are our favourite dementedly weird edits.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The US government has a complicated relationship with Tor. While the US is the biggest funder of the non-profit that maintains the software, law enforcement bodies such as the FBI are exploiting Tor browser vulnerabilities on a huge scale to identify criminal suspects.
To add to that messy, nuanced mix, one Department of Justice official recently personally recommended Tor to a room of over a hundred federal judges.
Ovie Carroll, director for the Cybercrime Lab at the Department of Justice, urged the judges to “use the TOR [sic] network to protect their personal information on their computers, like work or home computers, against data breaches, and the like,” Judge Robert J. Bryan said in July, according to a hearing transcript released on Friday.
“I was surprised to hear him urge the federal judges present,” Bryan said. Bryan was talking during a hearing on two motions to withdraw guilty pleas in the FBI’s recent mass hacking campaign. In February 2015, the FBI took over a dark web child pornography site called Playpen, and deployed malware in an attempt to identify the site’s visitors. Bryan has resided over several resulting cases from that investigation.
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For the past few months, when they dare venture out to the supermarket, to church, or to a climate rally, Bill McKibben, Tom Steyer, and other climate activists are being stalked by a team of GOP-trained camera operators. The so-called “trackers” with the cameras are working for a group called America Rising Squared (aka America Rising Advanced Research or AR2), and publishing the occasional “embarrassing” display of alleged hypocrisy on a website called CoreNews.org.
DeSmog first covered this new “creepy” campaign back in May, and since then, the harrassment has only gotten worse, as Bill McKibben writes in Sunday’s New York Times. In his op-ed, “My Right Wing Stalkers” (the web headline is: “Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers”), McKibben describes what it’s like to live under surveillance, and the psychological toll that it takes on him and his family. (One particularly infuriating detail: McKibben’s daughter believes that she, too, is being filmed in public.)
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FBI Chief Calls for National Talk Over Encryption vs. Safety [Ed: It should be not “Encryption vs. Safety” but “Encryption FOR Safety”. Good luck doing any financial transactions without encryption…]
The FBI’s director says the agency is collecting data that he will present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement’s increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices.
Speaking on Friday at the American Bar Association conference in San Francisco, James Comey says the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months.
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As increasingly banal devices come online as the latest additions to the internet of things, it was inevitable that sex toys would get added into the mix. Known as teledildonics, the realm of internet connected sex toys has been heralded as the future of sex for years now, and as with all internet connected devices, these toys are liable to get hacked.
The legal and ethical risks posed by the internet of dildos was the subject of a presentation by two hackers from New Zealand at DEF CON on Friday, but they were less concerned with third party dildo exploits than the manufacturer settings that come built into the devices.
“When we started out with this research, we were wondering about the potential exploits and vulnerabilities that a third party hacker could take advantage of,” said one of the presenters, who goes by the name of follower. “But when we looked more closely, it actually turns out that you might be more concerned about what the manufacturer is doing [with your dildo data].”
Along with his colleague goldfisk, follower reversed engineered the We-Vibe 4 Plus, one of the most popular internet connected dildos on the market. What the duo found was surprising: not only was the device streaming temperature data back to the manufacturer once a minute, but it was also streaming the intensity settings of the device in real time.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Most Americans don’t care about the exorbitant phone charges that the nation’s 2.2 million prison inmates and their families are forced to endure just to stay in touch, a top federal communications regulator said Thursday.
Inmates in federal and state prisons across the country are forced to pay outrageously high costs for simply making phone calls to their loved ones, which is why the Federal Communications Commission has been trying to ease their financial burden.
Criminal justice reform advocates have been working to convince the federal government to crack down on exploitative prison phone practices for years, but the issue still receives too little notice on the national stage, according to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, who issued a scathing call to conscience during the agency’s monthly meeting on Thursday.
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The Xbox One S, Microsoft’s new, sleeker version of the Xbox One has one of the same problems as the original version: It has a tamper-resistant sticker on it designed to alert Microsoft if an owner has opened up the console. And just like with the original Xbox One, Microsoft uses this sticker to void warranties, a practice that is against federal law.
As I reported in June, electronics manufacturers who void warranties for the mere act of opening a machine are violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, which forbids manufacturers from forcing consumers to use certain parts or authorized repair professionals in order to maintain the warranty.
Microsoft’s Xbox One warranty states that it “does not apply” if the Xbox is “opened, modified, or tampered with,” or is “repaired by anyone other than Microsoft.” As seen in an iFixit teardown of the Xbox One S, Microsoft placed a sticker on the back of the console above a clip that holds two pieces of the machine together. The sticker must be removed to open the console.
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The public address systems of Mosques have been used time and again to raise anti India slogans in Jammu and Kashmir. Poems eulogizing, slain terrorist, Burhan Wani are also played out on several public address systems of Mosques. Going by the response filed by the Union Government in the Supreme Court, it becomes clear that the Mosques are clearly used in the state of J&K to spew venom and chant anti India slogans.
In the Supreme Court of India, the union government had filed a detailed response to the existing situation in J&K. In its reply filed through solicitor general, Ranjit Kumar, it is stated, ” inimical and anti social elements exploited the news of Wani’s death on the social media to inflame passions. Public address systems of some local Mosques were used to raise pro-freedom slogans and incite the youth to indulge in stone pelting,” the reply also read.
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So, feminists are aghast at male-only golf clubs — discrimination! — but see no problem with women-only study lounges.
So, feminism isn’t about equal treatment for all, but special treatment for women, under the guise of wanting equal treatment.
Got it.
Does anyone think this constant demand for women to be treated as fragile flowers might make people think they should hire a man, rather than one of these wilting lilies who surely can’t manage to be around male co-workers without suffering a mental health crisis?
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“A lot of people think I’m nuts to pursue this.”
The speaker is a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service.
She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed.
For this, she got very little public attention. Until now.
Meet Malia Litman. A retired lawyer and wife of noted Internet entrepreneur David Litman, founder of hotels.com and now CEO of getaroom.com.
She sits at her table in her North Dallas mansion during The Watchdog team visit.
Hors d’oeuvres were set out before we arrive — something my colleague Marina Trahan Martinez and I are not used to — cucumber slices, cookies, carrots, celery, hummus and pita bread. Her story is so riveting, we don’t touch the food.
When the first Secret Service sex scandals broke a few years ago, she grew curious. A former senior partner at Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas, she knew that federal law allows us to see government documents.
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A youth survey recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that when it comes to rates of teenage suicide attempts, young Latinas continue to outpace girls and boys of other ethnic or racial groups in the U.S.
Nearly 10 years ago, news stories told of this mostly overlooked national phenomenon among a misunderstood and endangered group but one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population.
Major city newspaper editorials called for more than research. They called for action.
We need action now more than ever. But more than that, we need sustained action.
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I arrived in Rio de Janeiro from my hometown in northern Brazil exactly one month before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, to help film a campaign about human rights defenders (HRDs) for Front Line Defenders. As I left the airport, welcome signs to the Olympics on a solid plastic wall effectively hid the poverty at the entrance to the city. This was my introduction to the efforts of the government to hide Rio’s problems from international tourists, athletes, and journalists visiting us this month.
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Chicago — Today is Day 17 of occupying Freedom Square, a block party protest in opposition to Homan Square, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) “black site” that is internationally infamous for illegal detention and torture. Set up in a lot adjacent to the Homan Square facility in the North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, the encampment includes an outdoor kitchen, tents to sleep in, a library, play areas, political education and organizing spaces and more.
On Day 9 of the occupation, the campsite — supplied and staffed entirely by donations and volunteers — experienced its first violent conflict. After a beautiful day including free bike repair workshops and craft projects, free food for the community, and ongoing political engagement, the occupation site devolved into chaos when adults intervened in a disagreement between kids about sharing bikes. Folks felt disrespected, and misunderstandings and continued transgressions raised tensions, even as Freedom Square organizers made their best efforts to de-escalate the situation. One woman emerged from the fight with a black eye, and several others nursed scrapes and bruises once the scuffle was finally calmed. Freedom Square’s medic bandaged folks up in the First Aid tent as I began to gather the 30 or so people at the camp into a circle to debrief about the conflict. We shared collective space with each other, discussing the harms that had occurred within our community. We talked through accountability steps (steps that could be taken to address those harms). Nobody called the police.
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“Miss Me With Your Equality” titles Arielle Newton’s striking response to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. Justices in the case split 5-4 to strike down core provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required certain states to obtain advance federal approval for any changes to their election laws. At the time many, including president Obama, expressed disappointment that this effectively opened the door for states to enact laws that could indirectly disenfranchise black voters. But Newton’s was a different voice with a stronger message.
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In a short satirical essay ‘A Presidential Candidate’ published in 1879, Mark Twain concludes his litany of transgressions in a pitch for votes by stating, “but I recommend myself as a safe man — a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.”
Reading Twain’s essay while immersed in the current political climate in the US, two things leap out. First, the national obsession with personal scandal makes Twain’s essay all the more comic from start to finish. Second, it practically yanks the reader into nostalgic reflection for a time when satire was, well, satire.
The bright side of the modern political circumstance is the funny part – for the past two decades the cultural landscape has experienced a comedic infusion into public discourse on a scale quite possibly unmatched in US history. We may in fact be living in a golden age of American humour. Like it or not the engagement of contemporary humourists in political and social dialogue has become central to the national conversation on essentially every policy matter of import.
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Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein hailed Julian Assange as a hero Saturday, saying the WikiLeaks founder’s disclosure of Democratic National Committee emails exposed the American electorate to important information.
Stein’s comments to CNN were made shortly before she was named the progressive party’s official 2016 presidential nominee, with human rights activist Ajamu Baraka tapped as her running mate.
“Any time that we have efforts to bring information to the American people, to the world, is something worth supporting,” Baraka said in a separate interview with CNN.
Last month, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails that appeared to show the committee favoring presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over progressive challenger Bernie Sanders — an admired figure among many Green Party supporters — during the primary season. The disclosure led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the ouster of several top DNC officials.
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Some months later I’m attending a book launch about Jeremy Corbyn and leftist politics in Britain. The panel this time consists of two men—the author of the book and a journalist. The author presents a brilliant and insightful analysis, but when the journalist asks him a difficult question about whether urban graduate leftist activists can know what the working class of Britain wants or thinks, he does something that really makes me cringe: he pulls class on the journalist.
Instead of acknowledging the difficulty of the question he replies something to the effect of ‘oh yeah, but I’m from a really working class background so who are you, as a toff who went to private school, to question me about the working class?’
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.
Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.
Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The UK has just changed its copyright-and-patent monopoly law to extend copyright to furniture and to extend the term of that copyright on furniture with about a century. This follows a decision in the European Union, where member states are required to adhere to such an order. This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century.
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