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08.08.16

Links 8/8/2016: Linux 4.8 RC1, Steam on FreeBSD

Posted in News Roundup at 3:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • So long, Marianne: Leonard Cohen writes to muse just before her death

    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.

  • Science

    • Tim LaHaye Is Gone, But His Gospel of Apocalyptic Christianity Will Plague America for Years to Come

      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?”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • HIV community condemns witch-hunt against civil society in India

      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.

    • Flint official says city lacks direction for water treatment

      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.

    • Pittsburgh Joins the List of US Cities with Lead in Drinking Water

      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.

    • There’s Quite Likely Something Fishy in Your Wine—Maybe Try a Vegan Vintage?

      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).

    • How One GMO Nearly Took Down the Planet

      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.

  • Security

    • Surveillance video shows a case of high-tech grand theft auto, more than 100 cars stolen [Ed: proprietary software, recall this about Jeep]

      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.

    • Openssh backdoor used on compromised Linux servers

      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).

    • random failures

      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.

    • PLC-Blaster Worm Targets Industrial Control Systems [Ed: Remember Stuxnet?]

      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.

    • Security Reseacher explains security issues related to Windows 10 Linux subsystem at Blackhat
    • Def Con: Do smart devices mean dumb security?

      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.

    • 1 billion computer monitors vulnerable to undetectable firmware attacks

      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.

    • Hackers Could Break Into Your Monitor To Spy on You and Manipulate Your Pixels

      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.

    • Computer Expert Hacks Into Common Voting Machine in Minutes to Reveal Shocking 2016 Election Threat

      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.

    • Researchers Bypass Chip-and-Pin Protections at Black Hat

      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.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama not only did not pay Iran Ransom, he denied Iran Billions it had Coming to It

      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.

    • Syria: Key ISIL Smuggling city, Manbij, falls to Kurd-Arab Force

      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.

    • Puerto Rico is a Colony, No Matter How Else You Dress it Up

      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.

    • The Rising Death Toll in Indian Kashmir

      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.

    • A Veteran Novel That Finds No Redemption in War

      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.

    • It’s Bombs Away for the USA in Libya

      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.

    • Why Neocons Can’t Stomach Trump

      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.

    • What’s Best for Children?

      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.

    • The Sham Rebrand of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front

      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.

    • From World War II to Iraq: Captain Khan and the Citizen Soldier

      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.

    • America’s Top Spies and Analysts Warn of Real Threat of a Trump Presidency: 5 Leaders Who Have Spoken out

      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.”

    • Lessons from the UK’s Chilcot Report for Turkey’s post-coup response

      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

    • Drone Rule Book, Working Thread

      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.

    • 20 Photos That Take You Behind the Miskitu Curtain

      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.

    • Execution of Iranian Scientist Uncovers Sad, Strange Tale of CIA Spy Games

      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.

    • Another Ordinary Day in the Empire

      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.

    • Still the Political Project Calls to Us

      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.

    • Liberal Antiwar Activism is the Problem

      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.

    • A decade of the Gülen Movement on WikiLeaks: More than meets the eye

      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

    • Meaningless Words: Terrorism, Mental Health and the London Knife Attack

      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.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Change Could Release Cold War-Era Radioactive Waste In Greenland

      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.

    • Households could get fracking payments under government plans

      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.

    • Wyoming’s ‘Clean Coal’ Plans Stir False Hopes

      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.

    • Kochs’ Ground Game in Election Will Support Trump No Matter What

      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.

  • Finance

    • Fighting the politics of confusion

      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.

    • The Critical Link Between Poverty and Health

      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.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Will the ‘Berniecrats’ Help Progressives Take Power in November?

      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

    • Injecting Radical Politics into the Machinery: Ajamu Baraka

      “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.”

    • Intellectualism Stymies Debate and Objective Ideation

      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.

    • Report: Shawn Lucas, Man Who Served DNC with Lawsuit, Found Dead

      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.

    • The New Arrangement on the Game Board of U.S. Politics
    • Trump, the Bad, Bad Businessman

      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.

    • The NYT’s Out-of-Control Bias

      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.

    • Platform and Politics: The Change We Made

      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.

    • Revoke Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Charitable Status

      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.)

    • Responding To Post Truth Politics
    • Jill Stein Wins Green Party Nomination, Courting Disaffected Sanders Supporters

      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.”

    • Jill Stein’s Radical Funding Solution

      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.

    • As Nominee, Stein Says She Wants to Assume Mantle of Sanders’ Revolution

      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.

    • The history of the voting rights struggle is still being written

      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.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • My 10 Years of Trouble With Tayyip Erdoğan

      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.

    • When censorship goes mad – 16 amazing TV edits of movie obscenities

      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.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Department of Justice Official Tells Hundred Federal Judges to Use Tor

      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.

    • How America Rising Ties the GOP Establishment to the Stalkers Harassing Bill McKibben and Tom Steyer

      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.)

    • 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.

    • The Internet of Dildos Is Watching You

      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.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Americans Don’t Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official

      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.

    • The Xbox One S Still Uses Microsoft’s Illegal Warranty-Void-if-Removed Sticker

      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.

    • How Mosques in J&K are used to spread hatred against India

      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.

    • If You Don’t Feel “Safe” Studying In A University Library Because There Are Men In It…

      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?

    • Watchdog: Dallas woman discovers new Secret Service sex scandals through public information requests

      “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.

    • We must stop suicide attempts among young Latinas

      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.

    • The exclusion games: Rio’s human rights deficit on the eve of the Olympics

      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.

    • At Freedom Square, the Revolution Lives in Brave Relationships

      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.

    • Black millennials are challenging everyone to “miss them”

      “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.

    • The rise of American fascism — and what humour can do to stop it

      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.

    • Jill Stein: ‘No question’ Julian Assange is a hero

      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.

    • Why allies are welcome to criticise social movements

      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?’

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Tired of Waiting for Corporate High-Speed Internet, Minnesota Farm Towns Build Their Own

      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.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • As 3D printers break through, EU expands copyright to furniture and extends term by a century

        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.

08.07.16

Links 7/8/2016: State of the GNOME Foundation, Let’s Encrypt and Firefox

Posted in News Roundup at 2:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source: Fuel Powering Innovation and Digital Transformation

    Open Source continues to make an impact on both IT and software development.

    Open source innovation has led to the development of new markets over ten times during the last twenty years, said David Senf, vice president at IDC Canada. The first major impact of Open Source was with the development of the Linux operating system. Next was the influence of the Apache web server, and then open source databases like MySQL came on the scene. After that, there has been a flood of open source software spanning many categories.

    Open source products include development tools, web browsers, the Android operating system, Hadoop for big data, and tools like Jenkins, Chef and Puppet for devops. Products like OpenStack are also taking on the cloud. And, in fact, much of the cloud today runs on Linux. Senf said that “open source is the platform that big data is built on. Without Hadoop and Spark, we wouldn’t have big data.”

  • ACT calls on government to support open source software

    It’s fair to say that NZ Rise co-chair Don Christie and ACT leader David Seymour don’t always see eye-to-eye.

    But Mr Christie today found some common ground, backing Mr Seyour’s call for the government to consider open source software.

    The Epsom MP says the government to take a new approach in its software procurement policies, allowing substantial savings to the taxpayer.

    “A substantial number of civil servants could generate the same output using open source software and open document formats, instead of proprietary software like Microsoft Office,” he says.

  • Web Browsers

Leftovers

  • Theresa May to end ban on new grammar schools

    Theresa May is planning to launch a new generation of grammar schools by scrapping the ban on them imposed almost 20 years ago, The Telegraph has learnt.

    In a move that will be cheered by Tory grassroots, the Prime Minister intends to pave the way for a new wave of selective schools.

    Mrs May is understood to see the reintroduction of grammar schools – banned by Tony Blair in 1998 – as a key part of her social cohesion agenda.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Russian Olympic doping scandal: McLaren Report ‘sexed up’, implicated clean athletes

      More evidence of deep divisions between the IOC and WADA over the Russian doping scandal have emerged in two articles in The Australian. One article, which is behind a paywall, derives from off-the-record conversations with IOC officials. The other article, which is open access, gives Professor McLaren’s side of the story. It alludes to the article behind the paywall and reproduces some of its material.

    • Amid Zika Scare, FDA Clears Way for GMO Mosquito Trial in Florida

      In a move that public health advocates are calling “irresponsible and frightening,” the U.S. Food and Drug Association on Friday cleared the experimental release of genetically modified mosquitoes in Key Haven, Florida.

      Pivoting off of the recent news that there is an outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus that has infected over a dozen people in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, the UK-based developers of the genetically modified organism (GMO) reportedly also called on the FDA to grant emergency authorization to release the insects in Miami.

      Oxitec, which produces other GMO products like “Arctic” apples and “AquaBounty” salmon, has developed what they describe as “self-limiting mosquitoes,” genetically engineered to die before reaching adulthood.

      As the company explains, Oxitec has genetically engineered male mosquitoes—known as OX513A males—which it will release into the wild to mate with native female Aedes aegypti, which bite and can potentially spread disease. Their offspring die off, reducing the population.

      “Releasing GMO mosquitoes into the environment without long term environmental impact studies is irresponsible and frightening,” said Zen Honeycutt, director of the anti-GMO group Moms Across America, in a statement on Saturday. “What about the creatures who eat the mosquitoes and all the life forms up the food chain? The impact could be irreversible… Allowing uncontrollable genetically altered life forms into the wild is not justified.”

  • Security

    • How Public Shame Might Force a Revolution in Computer Security

      The numbers are depressing. An estimated 700 million data records were stolen in 2015. But despite the billions spent on computer security, flaws that allow such attacks are fixed slowly. A June report found that financial companies, for example, take on average over five months to fix known online security vulnerabilities.

      “The security industry gets $75 billion every year to try to secure things, and what you get for that is everybody is hacked all the time,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at SentinelOne, speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

      Yet Grossman and some other veterans of the security industry have lately become more optimistic. They see a chance that companies will soon have much stronger financial incentives to invest in securing and maintaining software.

    • DefCon: How the Hacker Tracker Mobile App Stays Secure

      The DefCon hacker conference here at the Bally’s and Paris Hotels is a massive affair with many rooms, events and workshops spread across multiple times and days. While there is a paper schedule, many hackers now rely on Hacker Tracker, which has become the de facto mobile app of the DefCon conference.

      The Hacker Tracker was developed by two volunteers, Whitney Champion, systems engineer at SPARC, and Seth Law, chief security officer at nVisium. Champion built the Android version of the app while Law built the iOS version.

      In a video interview at DefCon, Law provided details on how Hacker Tracker is built and the steps he and Champion have taken to keep it and hacker data secure.

    • Windows 10 Linux Feature Brings Real, but Manageable Security Risks [Ed: Vista 10 is malware with intentional (baked in) back doors, Linux and GNU won’t make it any worse]

      The Bash shell support in the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 is a valuable tool for developers, but it needs to be used carefully because of potential security risks.

    • Linux Botnets Dominate the DDoS Landscape [Ed: Kaspersky marketing]
    • Desktop / Laptop privacy & security of web browsers on Linux part 1: concepts and theory
    • In DARPA challenge, smart machines compete to fend off cyberattacks

      The first all-machine hacking competition is taking place today in Las Vegas.

      Seven teams, each running a high-performance computer and autonomous systems, are going head-to-head to see which one can best detect, evaluate and patch software vulnerabilities before adversaries have a chance to exploit them.

      It’s the first event where machines – with no human involvement – are competing in a round of “capture the flag, according to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is sponsoring and running the event. DARPA is the research arm of the U.S. Defense Department.

      The teams are vying for a prize pool of $3.75 million, with the winning team receiving $2 million, the runner-up getting $1 million and the third-place team taking home $750,000. The winner will be announced Friday morning.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Al Qaeda’s Name Game in Syria

      Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has long seen Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front as a strategic ally in Syria – and now hopes a name change will protect it through President Obama’s last months, reports Gareth Porter.

    • Stalling Obama’s Overtures to Russia

      Washington’s foreign policy mavens are thwarting President Obama’s moves to work with Russia to resolve the Syrian war and reduce other tensions, so the new Cold War can proceed under Hillary Clinton, says ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

    • From Hiroshima to Trident: listening to the Hibakusha

      After two prototype atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the “Hibakusha” who survived launched an emotional appeal – “Never Again”. Having warned for years about the “hell on earth” they suffered, only to see nuclear armed states continue to develop and deploy further weapons, these Hibakusha are joining with humanitarian campaigners to demand that governments now negotiate a legally binding international treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.

      Setsuko was a 13-year old schoolgirl in Hiroshima when a huge fireball incinerated most of her friends and family on 6th August 1945. Nicknamed “Little Boy” by its makers, the uranium bomb that engulfed her city 70 years ago changed the world for all of us. Three days later, on 9th August , the Americans used a different design – a plutonium bomb they called “Fat Man” – to destroy the beautiful city of Nagasaki, renowned for Madam Butterfly and Japan’s oldest Cathedral, with many historic international connections.

      War is always bloody and cruel. What really shocked people was the massive power of the destruction that just two bombs wreaked. The huge blast, intense flash and heat that killed over 100,000 people instantly, flattening buildings, setting off uncontrollable fires, and leaving many more with terrible injuries and burns. Then news began to leak out about the silent killer – radiation from these new bombs that caused sickness, tumours and cancer, killing tens of thousands more over the next months and years. Unlike previous weapons, the atom bombs produced radioactivity that maimed unborn babies and also seeped into the eggs and sperm of people who were exposed, changing genes and harming the health of future generations. The nuclear age had begun.

      It was this awe-inducing power that excited some leaders, while making others fearful for the future. The UN General Assembly’s first ever resolution tried to address “the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy”. Some of the scientists who had contributed to designing and making the first bombs had begged President Harry Truman to demonstrate their power but not use them on people. After seeing the carnage wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many more scientists joined doctors and women’s organisations to argue for all nuclear weapons to be banned. They wanted to prevent more being built, and called for stringent controls on nuclear technologies to ensure that no-one would ever use them for weapons again.

    • Hiroshima, Presidential Campaigns and Our Nuclear Future

      Seventy-one years ago on August 6th and 9th the world entered the nuclear age with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and injuring in excess of 200,000 immediately and untold additional fatalities from lingering radiation effects.

      The first nuclear arms race followed, resulting in the ability to destroy civilizations and life as we know it on the planet. Under the pretense of Mutually Assured Destruction – M.A.D., where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. threatened to destroy each other if attacked– the myth of nuclear deterrence was born. This ultimately became the greatest driving force of the arms race because if one side had one nuclear weapon the other needed two and so on and so on until the global arsenals swelled to tens of thousands of weapons. We have lived with this threat hanging over us to the present day lulled into a state of psychic numbness, unaware and oblivious to our potential impending doom.

    • Hiroshima: do the British Members of Parliament remember?

      During the Trident debate on 18 July, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May emphatically declared “Yes” to the question of whether “she personally [is] prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill 100,000 innocent men, women and children”.

      Today, 6 August, is the 71st anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon. Over 140,000 people died when the code-named “Little Boy” uranium bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in 1945.

      In the House of Commons debate, Chris Law, one of the 56 Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs who voted against the government motion to replace Trident, noted that “no one in this House truly knows what it is like to experience the horror, shock, pain and loss, and the complete devastation, of a nuclear strike”.

      He recalled a survivor from the Hiroshima bombing, Setsuko Thurlow, who visited Scotland in May, after speaking at the United Nations Working Group on multilateral disarmament in Geneva. “She could be our mother, our grandmother, our aunt or our sister. She told us that in the final year of war in Japan, when she was 13 years old, the first thing she remembers of the bomb hitting was a blue-white light and her body being thrown up into the air. She was in a classroom of 14-year-olds, every one of whom died; she was the only survivor. As the dust settled and she crawled out of that building, she made out some figures walking towards her. She described them as walking ghosts, and when some of them fell to the ground, their stomachs, which were already expanded and full, fell out. Others had skin falling off them, and others still were carrying limbs. One was carrying their eyeballs in their hands. So when I hear the Prime Minister today say that she was would be satisfied to press the button on hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, I ask her to go and see Setsuko Thurlow—I am sure she would be delighted to have a discussion about what it is really like to experience a nuclear bomb. That in itself should be the complete reason why we do not replace Trident.”

    • How US Spies Secured the Hiroshima Uranium

      A dark secret behind the Hiroshima bomb is where the uranium came from, a spy-vs.-spy race to secure naturally enriched uranium from Congo to fuel the Manhattan Project and keep the rare mineral out of Nazi hands, reports Joe Lauria.

      Since the first use of a nuclear weapon in Hiroshima 71 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the story of where the uranium for the bomb came from and the covert operation the U.S. employed to secure it has been little known.

      That is until the publication next week in the United States of a new book, Spies in the Congo, by British researcher Susan Williams (Public Affairs Books, New York), which unveils for the first time the detailed story of the deep cover race between the Americans and the Nazis to get their hands on the deadliest metal on earth.

      [...]

      The link between Shinkolobwe and Hiroshima, where more than 200,000 people were killed, is still largely unknown in the West, in the Congo and even in Japan among the few survivors still alive. Another ignored link is the disastrous health effect on Congolese miners who handled the uranium as virtual slaves of the Belgium mining giant Union Minière, owners of Shinkolobwe in the then Belgian Congo.

    • U.S. Releases Drone Strike ‘Playbook’ in Response to ACLU Lawsuit

      In response to a court order in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Obama administration has released a redacted version of the White House document that sets out the government’s policy framework for drone strikes “outside the United States and areas of actual hostilities.”

      The Presidential Policy Guidance, once known as “the Playbook,” was issued by President Obama in May 2013 following promises of more transparency and stricter controls for the drone program. But while the administration released a short “fact sheet” describing the document, it did not release the PPG itself, or any part of it.

    • ACLU Forces US Government to Release Secret Drone Playbook

      Three years and thousands of deaths later, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama late Friday finally made public its guidelines for conducting lethal drone strikes.

      The release of the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG), also known as “the Playbook,” came in response to a lawsuit filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeking the framework—which Obama said at the time was created in the interest of greater transparency and oversight over the expansive targeted killing program.

      “For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power—or risk abusing it,” the president declared in May 2013 during a landmark foreign policy speech at National Defense University.

    • White House Finally Releases Its “Playbook” For Killing and Capturing Terror Suspects
    • Obama releases drone strike ‘playbook’

      President Barack Obama has to personally approve the killing of a U.S. citizen targeted for a lethal drone strike outside combat areas, according to a policy Obama adopted in 2013.

      The president also is called upon to approve drone strikes against permanent residents of the U.S. and when “there is a lack of consensus” among agency chiefs about whom to target, but in other cases he is simply “apprised” of the targeting decision, the newly-disclosed document shows.

      The presidential policy guidance on drone strikes, often called the drone “playbook,” was disclosed in an edited form Friday night in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

      When Obama approved the guidance in May 2013, the White House issued a fact sheet about the policy, but declined to release the document itself—even in a redacted form.

    • Say Hello to Southeast Asia’s New Silk Roads

      It’s not only China vs. the US in the South China Sea. Few in the West realize that two completely different, intersecting stories are developing in maritime and mainland Southeast Asia.
      The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague denied China’s historic rights to waters in the South China Sea within its nine-dash line; it also ruled that the Spratly Islands are not islands, but “rocks”; thus they cannot generate 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs).

    • ISIL Captures Thousands trying to flee it in Iraq, Executes a Dozen

      The Oman Daily’s Jabbar al-Rubaie reports that Iraqi security sources announced yesterday that Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) had executed a number of the residents of the city of Hawija near Kirkuk in northern Iraq because they attempted to escape the city, over which Daesh holds sway. Hawija is a largely Sunni Arab city in Diyala Province on the frontier with the Kurdish-speaking regions. Some of its elite families welcomed Daesh fighters in 2014 but they now have buyers’ remorse.

      The Iraqi army is gradually moving north, fighting Daesh in towns and villages around Mosul, the country’s second- or third-largest city, which is now the only major power base for Daesh in the country.

      The governor of Salahuddin Province, Ahmad al-Jabouri, announced that 120,000 people had fled Daesh territory and areas where the Iraqi army is advancing, going south to Tikrit and its environs just in the past couple of days.

      Hawijah, being close to the now largely Kurdish city of Kirkuk, was used by Daesh as a staging ground for attempted strikes into Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds have riposted with their own paramilitary force, the Peshmerga, who have besieged the town in the past year. It has also been subjected to allied bombing campaigns. Last January, as well, hundreds of residents made a break for it, attempting to flee.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘The Real Battle Is, Who’s Going to Own the Energy Supply?’

      When you think of impediments to fighting climate change, you might think of the power of the fossil fuel industry, or corporate globalization running roughshod over people’s effort to tend to their environments as they have, in some cases, for millennia. A recent New York Times article finds a different villain: renewable energy, or, in Times reporter Eduardo Porter’s words, “the United States’ infatuation with renewable energy.” It’s a puzzling assertion, even before you get to what Porter says is the most worrisome development–that renewables are pushing out nuclear power, which he describes repeatedly as producing “zero carbon” electricity.

    • Environmental licence for São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric dam denied

      Brazilian environmental agency rejects Tapajós River mega-dam, citing likely major impacts on Amazon’s indigenous people and the environment.

    • Wake Up: These Unneeded Instruments Can Wreak Mass Destruction

      New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has recently advanced a clean energy plan which mandates that New York transition half of its energy needs to renewables by 2030. By regressive contrast, New York’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved enormous subsidies for three aging nuclear power plants―Ginna, Nine Mile Point and FitzPatrick―located in Upstate New York. Estimates of the costs of these subsidies range from $59 million to $658 million by 2023, with specialists such as Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group predicting that costs could grow to $8 billion. New York consumers will be covering the tab via their utility bills.

      Ginna and Nine Mile Point are owned by the Exelon Corporation, and Exelon has plans to purchase the FitzPatrick plant. You can be sure that Exelon is frothing at the mouth for this huge bailout that was approved without adequate public scrutiny. Approval of this plan gives New York State the not-so-honorable distinction of being one of the first states to bailout the aging nuclear industry in our increasingly green energy age. The long-coddled nuclear industry is hoping that other states will follow suit.

    • Protected Is Not Conserved

      On the northwest Iberian peninsula, in Galicia, local communities manage more than 2,800 mountains. The Spanish coastline includes 230 cofradías: ancient, locally run governance systems that provide 83 percent of the country’s fishing employment and 95 percent of all Spanish ships. Iniciativa Communales estimates that roughly 60 percent of Spain falls under what international organizations call ICCAs: Indigenous Peoples and Community Conserved Territories and Areas. In Spain, these community-managed sites include forests, pastoral lands, Sociedades de Caza (hunting associations) and marine and coastal areas.

    • For Decades, the USDA Was Black Farmers’ Worst Enemy. Here’s How It Became an Ally

      In 1920, the number of Black-operated farms peaked at nearly a million, accounting for 15 million acres of farmland—the size of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey combined. They made up 14 percent of the country’s farmers.

      The height of Black farming didn’t last. Faced with the economic and social barriers of the time and decades of racist and discriminatory policies, Black farmers spent the next century in decline. By 1982, their numbers were down to about 30,000—just 2 percent of the nation’s total. That same year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights predicted that no Black farmers would remain by the year 2000.

      But today, the number of Black farmers in the United States is suddenly growing again. In 2012, there were more than 44,000 of them, up about 15 percent from 10 years earlier. Nationally, they were still less than 2 percent of the country’s farmers, but their growth is noteworthy after such an extensive decline. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida all show gains, while Texas takes the lead with a gain of more than 2,500 Black farmers.

    • Proof That Charging Customers for Plastic Bags Reduces Their Use

      England has cut its plastic bag use by 85 percent ever since a 5 pence (7 cent) charge was introduced last October, according to government figures.

      The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced that 6 billion fewer plastic bags were taken home by shoppers in England. The levy also resulted in a £29 million ($38 million) donated to charity and other good causes thanks to the charge.

    • India: The Deadly Global War For Sand

      The killers rolled slowly down the narrow alley, three men jammed onto a single motorcycle. It was a little after 11 am on July 31, 2013, the sun beating down on the low, modest residential buildings lining a back street in the Indian farming village of Raipur Khadar. Faint smells of cooking spices, dust, and sewage seasoned the air. The men stopped the bike in front of the orange door of a two-story brick-and-plaster house. Two of them dismounted, eased open the unlocked door, and slipped into the darkened bedroom on the other side. White kerchiefs covered their lower faces. One of them carried a pistol.

      Inside the bedroom Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old farmer, was napping after an early lunch. In the next room, his wife and daughter-in-law were cleaning up while Paleram’s son played with his 3-year-old nephew.

  • Finance

    • More than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election Outright

      Two billion dollars, the estimated cost of this year’s presidential election, is big money, but it is not huge money. Two billion is one-tenth of NASA’s annual budget, one-twentieth of the Harvard endowment, one-thirtieth of the personal wealth of Warren Buffett. Buffett is number two on the 2015 Forbes list of 106 Americans who hold personal fortunes of $5 billion or more, the Club of 106. These billionaires are rich enough to pay for the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and still have $3 billion left over.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • As Republicans Defect, Will Clinton Be Tempted To Tack Right?

      The sense of panic among elite Republicans is palpable. They’re beginning to understand that when they look at Donald Trump they’re staring into the orange-hued face of their party’s potential demise.

      The GOP defections to Team Hillary were already well underway by the time of last week’s Democratic National Convention, which featured endorsement speeches from billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg and other Republicans.

      Since then Hewlett-Packard executive and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has come out for Clinton. So has Republican-leaning hedge fund billionaire Seth Karman and Republican Congressman Richard Hanna. A CNN poll showed that nearly one in four self-identified conservative voters said they would support Clinton over Trump.

    • Big Money vs. Black Lives: Movement connects money in politics to racial justice

      This week, a coalition of more than 50 organizations connected to the Black Lives Matter movement released a highly-anticipated policy agenda document, “A Vision for Black Lives.”

      Rooted in the cause launched in 2013 to protest the killings of African Americans by police, the document began to take shape at a gathering in Cleveland last year. According to the coalition’s website, it aims to “articulate a common vision and agenda” for the movement.

      The detailed, in-depth platform focuses on six core planks: 1) ending the war on black people, focused on criminal justice; 2) reparations; 3) invest-divest, with proposals to redirect resources spent on criminal justice; 4) economic justice; 5) community control over decision-making; and 6) political power.

    • The Making of Donald Trump, As Told by a Journalistic Nemesis

      Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston isn’t happy with the way the press has been handling Donald Trump. “The coverage has been extremely poor in my opinion,” Johnston, who at 67 clearly still enjoys making trouble, pronounced at no less a lions’ den than the National Press Club on Thursday night in Washington.

      So Johnston, as he is wont to do when he sees something going wrong, decided to tackle the problem himself.

    • Democracy Debatable as Judge Rejects Third-Party Bid to Share Stage

      A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit by the Green and Libertarian parties seeking a space on the debate stage alongside the Democrat/Republican “duopoly.”

      The complaint, launched last fall, presented an anti-trust argument against the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying that a “cognizable political campaign market” is being corrupted by the commission’s rules, which bar a candidate from debating unless they are polling at 15 percent or higher.

      And while observers were not surprised that the court dismissed the challenge, the judge’s rationale raised some questions about the role that the media plays in crafting the current two-party system.

      “Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged a non-speculative injury traceable to the Commission,” wrote (pdf) U.S District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer, an appointee of former President George W. Bush.

    • What Julian Assange’s War on Hillary Clinton Says About WikiLeaks

      In recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.

      [...]

      This has puzzled some of the group’s supporters, and led to speculation that the site’s Australian founder, Julian Assange, had timed the release of emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to drive a wedge between supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The publication of emails that revealed an anti-Sanders agenda inside the Democratic party was certainly welcomed by the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

    • New York Times Could Kick Voter Suppression While It’s Still Up

      Big media are heralding a federal appeals court ruling striking down a North Carolina law that made it harder to vote. Harder for some, that is; the court noted that the restrictions—on things like early voting and same-day registration — targeted African-Americans with “almost surgical precision” — and, indeed, came in the wake of the state’s request for specific data on voting practices by race, which came in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder saying states with histories of discrimination no longer needed to get federal clearance for such changes.

      So it’s great to see the New York Times (7/29/16) excoriating North Carolina Republicans’ “scurrilous attempt” to “suppress the rising power of black voters.” In a better world, of course, such campaigns would not have enjoyed years of tailwind from media like the Times rhetorically “balancing” claims of potential voter fraud with evidence of actual voter suppression.

      And, mindful of the paper’s current note that court decisions like this one show the “bitter struggle for basic fairness beyond the national spotlight,” we will look for media to report this story out—with follow-up on how, for instance, North Carolina will address the inevitable confusion over the amended rules, given there’s no funding for public education, as Samantha Lachman notes at Huffington Post. Or on how, as The Nation‘s Ari Berman points out, this ruling poses a challenge to the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision, premised as it was on voter suppression as a thing of the past

    • Noam Chomsky’s 8-Point Rationale for Voting for the Lesser Evil Presidential Candidate

      Among the elements of the weak form of democracy enshrined in the constitution, presidential elections continue to pose a dilemma for the left in that any form of participation or non participation appears to impose a significant cost on our capacity to develop a serious opposition to the corporate agenda served by establishment politicians. The position outlined below is that which many regard as the most effective response to this quadrennial Hobson’s choice, namely the so-called “lesser evil” voting strategy or LEV. Simply put, LEV involves, where you can, i.e. in safe states, voting for the losing third party candidate you prefer, or not voting at all. In competitive “swing” states, where you must, one votes for the “lesser evil” Democrat.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Trump Can’t Stop Attacking the Press — He Still Thinks It Is a Reality Show He Controls

      Donald Trump has a pretty complicated relationship with the press. On one hand, the Republican nominee knows the value of free media; at least part of his meteoric rise to the top of the ticket can be attributed to the billions of dollars worth of free media he’s received throughout his campaign. On the other hand, he routinely bullies and berates journalists for pointing out his least favorite thing (the truth), and occasionally gets off mocking reporters with disabilities and/or vaginas.

      Given Trump’s troubling treatment of the press throughout the primaries (when he first floated the idea of “open[ing] up” libel laws to increase his ability to sue reporters), it’s no surprise that the relationship has grown even more turbulent since he became the official candidate of the Grand Old Party and brought on VP pick Mike Pence. Here are some of the more egregious attacks the Trump/Pence campaign has waged against the press.

    • Pan-dem candidate protests alleged censorship over ‘call me a HongKonger’ shirt

      Pan-democratic lawmaker Alvin Yeung Ngok-kiu staged a public demonstration on Thursday by wearing a t-shirt which reads “Call me a Hongkonger” in response to an incident in which a man claimed to be politically censored for wearing the same t-shirt near Yeung’s protest site.

      Two weeks ago, a man surnamed Tang was reported to have visited the Jubilee Garden estate in Shatin district to visit his friend, but alarmed the guard when registering at the estate’s atrium. Tang was later approached by two additional security guards who offered to escort him to his friend’s apartment, according to Apple Daily.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Medical Complicity in CIA Torture, Then and Now

      Unlike contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, OMS personnel did not design the torture program, nor did they personally waterboard detainees. But OMS personnel — including psychologists, physician’s assistants, and physicians — were nonetheless involved in the program from Abu Zubaydah’s “enhanced interrogation” sessions in 2002 onwards.

    • Philippines’ Duterte vows to keep ‘shoot-to-kill’ order

      Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to maintain his “shoot-to-kill” order against drug dealers while in office and says he “does not care about human rights”.

      About 800 people have been killed since Duterte won a landslide election in May, according to reports by the local press which has been tracking the maverick politician’s campaign pledge to kill tens of thousands of criminals.

      “This campaign (of) shoot-to-kill will remain until the last day of my term if I’m still alive by then,” the 71-year-old said at a news conference in his southern hometown of Davao.

    • Don’t blame the masses

      Whether or not the world is in an unusually bad state these days, it certainly seems so. Even Americans, famous for our lack of interest in world affairs, now closely follow news from far away. Much of it is frightening.

      Terror attacks are claiming innocent lives around the world. Syria is being torn apart. China and Russia boldly pursue their national interests and defy American dictates. Turkish democracy is evaporating. Iran and Saudi Arabia are at each other’s throats. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on interminably. The European Union is staggering, with Britain quitting and others perhaps to follow. Meanwhile, several European countries are drifting toward right-wing authoritarianism. Donald Trump’s campaign threatens to take the United States in the same direction.

      This is the opposite of what many Americans expected. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 set off a wave of triumphalism in the West. Americans welcomed the “end of history” and presumed that all countries would quickly adopt political and economic systems like ours. There was to be a “peace dividend” as tranquility settled over the globe. People would become more prosperous. Nations would cooperate. All would gratefully submit to America’s will.

    • Pentagon Tapping In to Social Science to Target Activist Movements

      According to its website, the Minerva Initiative, created by the secretary of Defense in 2008, seeks “to define and develop foundational knowledge about sources of present and future conflict with an eye toward better understanding of the political trajectories of key regions of the world.”

      Ahmed attempted to contact the initiative’s developers, but received either “bland” responses or no responses at all.

      One of the most startling aspects of the initiative is its conflation of peaceful activism with terrorism. “[S]upporters of political violence” are “different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves,” Ahmed explains. And although university researchers were told that the initiative was a “basic research effort” with no real application, Ahmed cites an email that clearly shows “that DoD is looking to ‘feed results’ into ‘applications.’ ”

      RT provides other examples of the Minerva Initiative’s university projects. The University of Washington received $2 million to study children involved in terrorist movements, resulting in a report titled “Understanding the Origin, Characteristics and Implications of Mass Political Movements.” Another project at the University of Denver seeks to understand “instability in middle-income countries” and “the Tunisias and the Libyas and the Ukraines.”

    • Yusra Mardini: Olympic Syrian refugee who swam for three hours in sea to push sinking boat carrying 20 to safety

      Almost every athlete at the 2016 Olympic Games will have an interesting backstory, but Yusra Mardini’s is more extraordinary than most.

      Mardini is in Rio to represent a team of 10 refugee Olympic athletes.

      While any other 18-year-old’s biggest achievements may be confined to the A-level results they leave school with, Mardini’s is almost incomprehensible.

      She and her sister are responsible for helping to save the lives of 20 people, including their own, after jumping off their sinking dinghy into the Aegean Sea and pushing their boat to land.

    • Five Star Movement: Italy’s populist progressives?

      Last week, a woman called Prima Pagina and asked: “Why were things that cost 50,000 liras priced at 50 euros and not 25, their supposed value?” She wondered why the spike in prices had never been rectified.

      The radio presenter Giorgio Meletti, a journalist from Il Fatto Quotidiano, replied that customers did lose money, but that was compensated by the fact that “each of us has a relative running a retail business who’s made a profit”. A baffling answer, yet it is typical of a major current in Italy’s national discourse, one often dismissive of left-right differences.

      In his view, nobody suffered significant losses – things evened themselves out. To drive his point home, Meletti went on to say that politics isn’t about left and right any more, but populism and non-populism instead.

08.06.16

Managing IP (MIP) Organises a UPC Event (European Patent ‘Reform’ Forum), the Largest Patent Microcosm/Corporate Players Dominate Through Fee Discrimination

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Entering corridors of Power (for connections and influence)

MIP event

Summary: The latest example of what’s so utterly wrong with a bunch of conglomerates and their patent lawyers steering public policy and meeting in private to shape the law in their own favour

THE Web site Managing IP (MIP) is nowhere as bad as IAM, the EPO‘s mouthpiece of choice which sets up events for the EPO (funded in part by the EPO’s truly malicious PR firm).

“Their fear is probably an informed public which is abreast of their protectionist schemes (like ISDS).”Patent ‘elites’ must heed the warning of populist rage against injustices like the UPC, but they don’t. They just try to keep things more of less secret or in the shadows. Their fear is probably an informed public which is abreast of their protectionist schemes (like ISDS).

Based on IP Kat‘s “Friday Fun” [sic], MIP sets up a dubious event (covering “UPC and Brexit”). It is encouraging the attendance of patent maximalists and, as usual, leaving critical voices shut out through prohibitive costs and no chance of a speaking position, impact etc. Here is the direct link and here is how IP Kat put it: “MIP European Patent Reform Forum. Managing IP’s upcoming European Patent Reform Forum will be taking place in Munich on September 6 and in Paris on September 8. There will be plenty to discuss this year, and with topics like the UPC and Brexit on the table the forum and dialogue promise to be exceptionally interesting. The programmes also offer presentations on FRAND terms, enforcement and evidence of infringement from an impressive selection of speakers, so this event is really not to be missed.

“In-house, patent and IP counsel can attend the Forum for free, and other private practice IPKat readers can attend for a discounted price of €820 + VAT (usually €1095). To register for Munich, it’s here – for Paris, here, or you can email or contact Managing IP.”

“It’s the kind of congregation that’s typically encouraging collusion and/or conspiracy against public interests and with fees so high (over a thousand pounds for just a little chair… for one day) don’t expect public interest groups to attend.”“Why is it that,” asked one person, an attendant “who works in-house in a multi-billion dollar global company, get to attend for free?” Well, Team UPC and others inside the patent microcosm wish to be of influence for big businesses and for big money (they are, after all, their biggest clients). These events are, in practice, primarily about making connections in corridors and behind closed doors. The fee lets one brush shoulders and make contracts/contacts with potential clients, partners, officials etc. That’s just how lobbying works, too. It’s the kind of congregation that’s typically encouraging collusion and/or conspiracy against public interests and with fees so high (over a thousand pounds for just a little chair… for one day) don’t expect public interest groups to attend. It’s worth noting that FRAND, which is against FOSS, will be discussed at the event. Will there be any opponents there? Opponents of FRAND? Unlikely. It’s an echo chamber.

Having mentioned Lucy Neville-Rolfe just a few days ago, it’s worth noting that the above from IP Kat takes note of her too. She is considered the person to influence (or lobby) right now.

MIP is not an evil site, but when it comes to business models (like firm endorsements and recommendations or even lobbying opportunities) it needs to be careful as it jeopardises its integrity. █

Francis Gurry — Like Benoît Battistelli — Compared to Sepp Blatter of FIFA

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Attacks on whistleblowers and/or on staff unions inside international organisations is not just an EPO thing

EPO meme

Summary: The actions of Francis Gurry discredit the UN and do a disservice to everyone in the same way that Battistelli’s terrible actions discredit Europe and threaten Europe’s industry

THE EPO‘s members of staff are having breaks this summer (there’s no shortage of those), so SUEPO has not been saying much in nearly a month. It would be hard to organise protests right now. Those who should be held accountable are probably not even at the Office.

This morning SUEPO mentioned USF [1, 2, 3] (yet again), having also caught up with AMBA’s response to Battistelli's persistent attacks, culminating in ‘exile’ (see this leaked message).

“Those who should be held accountable are probably not even at the Office.”No doubt we’ll return to covering the EPO affairs pretty soon (there’s a lot more in store). In the mean time, here is the bit about WIPO, whose staff's situation is in many ways similar to that of the EPO's staff (including Battistelli-Gurry overlaps).

“The USF published an article entitled “WIPO – Stop union-busting and stop retaliation against whistleblowers”,” SUEPO wrote today (there is also a French version). To quote the English-speaking page:

In September 2014 the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Francis Gurry, fired WIPO Staff Council President, Moncef Kateb, as he was about to reveal damaging information about fraud, wrongdoing, mismanagement and theft of staff DNA. Now Gurry is trying to close down the Staff Council and replace it with a new compliant, management-friendly model.

Gurry decided to set up his own WIPO Staff Council and is currently preparing illegal elections in order to dislodge the current duly elected Staff Council which is too critical for his liking. This will leave WIPO staff deprived of the last independent voice that is prepared to expose bad practices and abuse of power in this United Nations Specialized Agency.

It is a desperate move by Gurry at a time when attempts are being made to cover up and suppress an investigation report, apparently containing adverse findings on allegations made against him. It follows a public hearing at the US Congress at which he was compared to Sepp Blatter, the former President of FIFA, and a letter from the heads of several bipartisan sub-committees demanding his dismissal.

We need your support.

Please tell Gurry to stop retaliation against whistleblowers and the legally elected Staff Council. Please tell the WIPO Member States to call for Gurry’s resignation. The credibility of the Organization, its Member States and the entire UN system is at stake.

So even Gurry was “compared to Sepp Blatter, the former President of FIFA,” making Battistelli a little jealous perhaps (now they have competition, after Gurry beat Battistelli to the WIPO position). Who will be the first to end up like Blatter? Will it be Gurry or Battistelli? Will it eventually be both? █

How Low-Quality USPTO Patents Made the US Fertile Ground for Patent Trolling

Posted in America, Apple, Patents, Samsung at 2:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

And why EPO policies under Battistelli will emulate the worst aspects of the USPTO

HTC deviceSummary: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) explains that decline in patent quality in the US is responsible for a hostile environment which fosters litigation rather than innovation; BlackBerry the latest example of patent assertion firms (trolls) which would make phones ‘dumber’ (features like a mechanical keyboard removed or never added in the first place)

LAST month we wrote about GAO in relation to the EPO [1, 2], demonstrating that the US patent system has gone out of touch and increasingly disconnected from the raison d’être of patents.

A good but somewhat belated article from TechDirt covers this topic, citing the Government Accountability Office for support:

This shouldn’t be a surprise. All the way back in 2004, in Adam Jaffe’s and Josh Lerner’s excellent book about our dysfunctional patent system, Innovation and Its Discontents, one of the key problems they outlined with the system was the fact that there was strong incentives for patent examiners at the US Patent Office to approve shit patents. That’s because they were rewarded for how “productive” they were in terms of how many patent applications they completed processing. Now, you might think that shouldn’t encourage approvals — except that there’s no such thing as a true “final rejection” from the patent office (they have something called a final rejection, but it’s not — applicants can just make some changes and try again… forever). So rejecting a patent, inevitably, harms your productivity rates as an examiner. Approving a patent gets it off your plate and is considered “done.” Rejecting it means having to spend many more hours on that same patent when the inventor comes back to get another chance.

After Jaffe and Lerner made that criticism clear, it seemed like the Patent Office started to take the issue to heart and they actually started changing some of how examiners were rated. And, for a few years, it seemed like things were heading in the right direction. But then, once David Kappos took over, he noticed that a lot of patent holders were complaining that it took too long to get patents approved. Apparently ignoring all of the evidence that pushing examiners to review patents quickly ends up in disaster, Kappos put back in place an incentive structure to encourage examiners to approve more patents. He kept focusing on the need to get through the backlog and speed up the application process, rather than recognizing what a disaster it would be. Of course, some of us predicted it and were mocked in the comments by patent lawyers who insisted we were crazy to suggest that the USPTO would lower its standards.

Of course, an academic study a few years ago found that was absolutely happening and now, to make the point even clearer, the Government Accountability Office, which tends to do really fantastic work, has written a report that agrees. It blames the Patent Office’s focus on rapidly approving patents for the flood of low quality patents and the resulting patent trolling epidemic…

Noting that last part about a “trolling epidemic” (to the point where 90% of all technology lawsuits are filed by trolls), we wish to highlight the correlation between abstract software patents and software patent trolls. Since half a decade ago we have highlighted the strong correlation between patent trolls and software patents, so had the USPTO stopped granting patents on software, a lot of this “trolling epidemic” would go away almost entirely. It would not be a viable business model for reasons we explained here repeatedly over the years. Given an extraordinary number of patents granted to BlackBerry (far too many to be deemed high quality), this is relevant to the past week’s news. BlackBerry, which is rapidly becoming a troll (or PAE) down in Texas [1, 2], has generated more and more headlines in recent days, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. “Blackberry is now a troll,” wrote Benjamin Henrion (FFII). “Too bad NTP did not kill them 10 years ago.”

BlackBerry is one among many such companies. Apple, for example, having totally lost the plot to Android in India (where Android is now estimated to have 97% of the market; see daily links for details), is suing endlessly. Is there another Apple-Samsung patent war in the making? As one site notes right now: “Samsung filed a patent for a smartwatch with a detachable strap. Detachable band straps are already there. So, what’s the big deal? Their new smartwatch looks like the Apple’s iWatch. Now, that’s a big deal.

“Samsung is not eyeing another patent war with Apple, hopefully, they aren’t. Because, the last time when they did it, they had to suffer for it. A California court had ordered Samsung to pay 548 million dollars.”

“It would mean that phones must have features and parts removed from them.”Apple has been suing Android OEMs for more than 6 years, starting with HTC. We expect BlackBerry to do the same thing pretty soon. Does that mean more innovation? Quite the contrary. It would mean that phones must have features and parts removed from them. █

Links 6/8/2016: Wine 1.9.16, Tizen SDK 2.4 Rev8

Posted in News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Government must consider open-source software – ACT

    ACT Leader David Seymour today called on the Government to take a new approach in its software procurement policies, allowing substantial savings to the taxpayer.

    “A substantial number of civil servants could generate the same output using open source software and open document formats, instead of proprietary software like Microsoft Office,” said Mr Seymour.

    “Departments should see what functions government employees need in their software, then source software that fulfils those functions.

    “Countless private businesses already use open-source software to achieve efficiencies and savings. There’s no reason we shouldn’t expect the same from our Government.

  • The FCC just forced TP-Link to support open-source router firmware
  • FCC announces $200000 settlement with TP-Link
  • A new open source database, open source firmware on TP-Link routers, and more news
  • Upskill U Kicks Off Open Source Courses

    As service providers seek to rapidly implement virtualization, open source software is emerging as a crucial tool in both expediting the software development process and creating an agile virtualized network architecture. But, open source isn’t without its challenges and operators are pursuing open source strategies that strike a balance with traditional standards-based development processes, ensuring the software they use is both robust and secure.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 48.0 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu OSes, Solus and Arch Linux

        It took them a couple of days, but the maintainers of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions have pushed the final release of the Mozilla Firefox 48.0 web browser to the stable channels, for users to upgrade from Mozilla Firefox 47.0.1.

      • Let’s Encrypt Root to be Trusted by Mozilla

        The Let’s Encrypt root key (ISRG Root X1) will be trusted by default in Firefox 50, which is scheduled to ship in Q4 2016. Acceptance into the Mozilla root program is a major milestone as we aim to rely on our own root for trust and have greater independence as a certificate authority (CA).

        Public CAs need their certificates to be trusted by browsers and devices. CAs that want to issue independently under their own root accomplish this by either buying an existing trusted root, or by creating a new root and working to get it trusted. Let’s Encrypt chose to go the second route.

  • Databases

    • Graph Databases for Beginners: Graph Search Algorithm Basics

      As has been illustrated above, graph search algorithms are helpful in traversing a set of graph data and providing relevant information. However, they also have their limitations. We have seen that there are many varieties of search algorithms, ranging from the more basic breadth-first and depth-first to uninformed and informed searches to the Dijkstra’s and A* algorithms. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and no one type is better than another.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Review: LibreOffice 5.2 — solid, unpolished alternative

      LibreOffice is an office suite that rivals Microsoft Office yet costs nothing. There are versions for Windows, OS X and Linux along with a portable edition that works from a USB drive.

      If you’re on a tight budget and have a Windows PC, LibreOffice is by far the best alternative to Office. It is more complete than Google Apps and leaves Apache OpenOffice for dead.

      OS X users have a good alternative free option. Apple’s iWorks suite is free with new Macs. Even so, you might prefer LibreOffice because it has better Microsoft Office compatibility.

      LibreOffice looks and feels more like Microsoft Office than iWorks. If you know Microsoft Office, moving to LibreOffice will be less of a wrench. It also includes a database unlike either the OS X version of Microsoft Office or iWorks. If you need a simple database and have no budget, LibreOffice would be ideal.

      Some Linux distributions include LibreOffice either as standard or as an optional download. It’s a more straightforward choice than using a tool like Wine to run Microsoft Office.

    • Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 Review

      Every computer needs applications to do any work, and that means more money. Except for open-source software, like OpenOffice, which is free. In the case of OpenOffice, the free software looks and acts like Microsoft Office circa 2003, and includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator. Not only does OpenOffice look and feel like Office, but it also reads and writes Office files so well that most users could exchange files between the two suites and no one would know the difference.

    • Best Microsoft Office Alternatives 2016

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Has Been Pushed Back By One Week

      FreeBSD 11.0 has seen a very minor set-back in getting its release out the door.

      Due to a problem surrounding ZFS and VFS in 11.0, developers have decided to tack on an extra beta release and delay the branching and release candidates for FreeBSD 11.0.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The GNU C Library version 2.24 is now available
    • GCC 6.2 Is Coming Quite Soon

      Version 6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is expected to come quite soon.

      This is important as GCC 6.2 is the first point release to the stable GCC6 compiler under the versioning scheme they rolled out last year: GCC 6.0 was development, GCC 6.1 was the first stable release, and GCC 6.2 is now the first point release. That’s important since a number of distribution vendors tend to wait until around this first point release before incorporating a major new version of the GCC compiler.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016

        As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published a French and Norwegian translation of the classic Free Culture book by the founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations, using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative Commons is needed.

  • Programming/Development

    • Moving to GitLab! Yes, it’s worth it!

      I started evangelizing Git in 2007. It was a very tough sell to make at the time.

      Outside of the kernel development almost no one wanted to learn it and we had very worthy competitors, from Subversion, to Mercurial, to Bazaar, to Darcs, to Perforce, and so on. But those of use that dug deeper knew that Git had the edge and it was a matter of time.

      Then GitHub showed up in 2008 and the rest is history. For many years it was just “cool” to be in GitHub. The Ruby community drove GitHub up into the sky. Finally it became the status quo and the one real monopoly in information repositories – not just software source code, but everything.

      I always knew that we should have a “local” option, which is why I tried to contribute to Gitorious way back in 2009. Other options arose, but eventually GitLab appeared around 2011 and picked up steam in the last couple of years.

    • PHP 7.1 Beta 2 Released

      The second beta of the upcoming PHP 7.1 major release is now available for testing.

      The PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2 release has core fixes, various calendar / cURL / GD / PCRE / SPL / Streams fixes, and a variety of other bug fixes.

    • PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2 Released

      The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2. This release is the second beta for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

Leftovers

  • FTC to Crack Down on Paid Celebrity Posts That Aren’t Clear Ads

    Snapchat star DJ Khaled raves about Ciroc vodka. Fashion lifestyle blogger Cara Loren Van Brocklin posts a selfie with PCA Skin sunscreen. Internet personality iJustine posts Instagrams from an Intel event. Missing from their messages: any indication about whether they’ve been paid.

    This uptick in celebrities peddling brand messages on their personal accounts, light on explicit disclosure, has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. government. The Federal Trade Commission is planning to get tougher: Users need to be clear when they’re getting paid to promote something, and hashtags like #ad, #sp, #sponsored –common forms of identification– are not always enough. The agency will be putting the onus on the advertisers to make sure they comply, according to Michael Ostheimer, a deputy in the FTC’s Ad Practices Division. It’s a move that could make the posts seem less authentic, reducing their impact.

    “We’ve been interested in deceptive endorsements for decades and this is a new way in which they are appearing,” he said. “We believe consumers put stock in endorsements and we want to make sure they are not being deceived.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Dangerous Liaisons: ChemChina’s Bid for Syngenta

      Switzerland-based Syngenta AG is best known for its top-selling herbicide, atrazine; for trying to fool the world into thinking its genetically engineered Golden Rice will save the world; and for taking out pollinators with its neonicotinoid pesticides.

    • Olympic executives cash in on a ‘Movement’ that keeps athletes poor

      Its members call it, with an almost religious conviction, “the Olympic Movement,” or “the Movement” for short, always capitalized.

      At the very top of “the Movement” sits the International Olympic Committee, a nonprofit run by a “volunteer” president who gets an annual “allowance” of $251,000 and lives rent-free in a five-star hotel and spa in Switzerland.

      At the very bottom of “the Movement” — beneath the IOC members who travel first-class and get paid thousands of dollars just to attend the Olympics, beneath the executives who make hundreds of thousands to organize the Games, beneath the international sports federations, the national sport federations and the national Olympic committees and all of their employees — are the actual athletes whose moments of triumph and pain will flicker on television screens around the globe starting Friday.

    • Olympic Athletes Are About to Sail Through a Toxic Bay of Shit

      One of the first things Olympic Games tourists will notice in Rio de Janeiro is the toxic vista of Guanabara Bay. It’s the official site of the competition’s sailing races, but local residents know it as the country’s unofficial sewage dump.

      An estimated 70 percent of the coastal city’s trash—waste from 12 million people—flows untreated into Guanabara Bay from 55 dying, ecologically degraded rivers. As part of its bid to host the Olympics, Rio de Janeiro’s government promised to cleanup the polluted waterway, which now overflows with garbage, chemicals, and human excrement. But come August, environmental surveys reported viral and bacterial levels so high, that ingesting three teaspoons of water could cause brain inflammation, respiratory failure, and heart illnesses.

    • Rio’s real vs. unmet Olympic legacies: what they tell us about the future of cities?

      The heavily corporate city Rio has attempted to create, resulting in exacerbated urban problems of spatial, economic and social inequalities, is creating the conditions for Rio as the Singular City.

    • The $100,000-Per-Year Pill: How US Health Agencies Choose Pharma Over Patients

      Don Reichmuth survived prostate cancer once before, back in 2007, so his physician was concerned when tests recently revealed the cancer had returned. Reichmuth’s physician prescribed a drug called enzalutamide, marketed by the Japanese company Astellas Pharma, Inc. under the brand name Xtandi. But when the physician sent the prescription to the pharmacy, the managers of Reichmuth’s insurance plan sent back an immediate refusal to approve it.

      Reichmuth, a retired teacher who lives in Washington State, was puzzled by the logic. Then he learned the price of the Xtandi prescription: over $9,700 each month.

      Reichmuth is just one of millions of Americans who are experiencing prescription drug sticker shock. There are the extreme high-profile examples, like the former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli hiking the price of a critical toxoplasmosis drug by 5,000 percent overnight, or a new hepatitis C medicine costing over $1,000 a pill. But the issue extends beyond the headlines. Pharmaceutical corporations consistently set most of their prices hundreds of times higher than their manufacturing costs, then relentlessly raise those prices at rates far exceeding inflation. The result is breathtaking corporate profits as high as 42 percent annually. The industry’s average return on assets more than doubles that of the rest of the Fortune 500.

  • Security

    • Linux Botnets on a Rampage [Ed: Kaspersky marketing in essence]

      Linux-operated botnet Distributed Denial of Service attacks surged in this year’s second quarter, due to growing interest in targeting Chinese servers, according to a Kaspersky Lab report released this week. South Korea kept its top ranking for having the most command-and-control servers. Brazil, Italy and Israel ranked among the leaders behind South Korea for hosting C&C servers, according to Kaspersky Lab. DDoS attacks affected resources in 70 countries, with targets in China absorbing 77 percent of all attacks.

    • Machine-Learning Algorithm Combs the Darknet for Zero Day Exploits, and Finds Them

      In April, cybersecurity experts found an exploit based on this vulnerability for sale on a darknet marketplace where the seller was asking around $15,000. In July, the first malware appeared that used this vulnerability. This piece of malware, the Dyre Banking Trojan, targeted users all over the world and was designed to steal credit-card numbers from infected computers.

      The episode provided a key insight into the way malware evolves. In the space of just a few months, hackers had turned a vulnerability into an exploit, offered this for sale, and then saw it developed into malware that was released into the wild.

    • Frequent password changes are the enemy of security, FTC technologist says

      Shortly after Carnegie Mellon University professor Lorrie Cranor became chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission in January, she was surprised by an official agency tweet that echoed some oft-repeated security advice. It read: “Encourage your loved ones to change passwords often, making them long, strong, and unique.” Cranor wasted no time challenging it.

      The reasoning behind the advice is that an organization’s network may have attackers inside who have yet to be discovered. Frequent password changes lock them out. But to a university professor who focuses on security, Cranor found the advice problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, a growing body of research suggests that frequent password changes make security worse. As if repeating advice that’s based more on superstition than hard data wasn’t bad enough, the tweet was even more annoying because all six of the government passwords she used had to be changed every 60 days.

    • Managing Encrypted Backups in Linux, Part 2

      In part 1, we learned how to make simple automated unencrypted and encrypted backups. In this article, I will show you how to fine-tune your file selection, and how to backup your encryption keys.

    • Getting started with Tails, the encrypted, leave-no-trace operating system

      Tails, an encrypted and anonymous OS that bundles widely used open source privacy tools on a tiny device, is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. The Linux distribution rose to popularity when it was revealed Edward Snowden relied on Tails to secure his identity while sharing NSA secrets with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In the past half decade, Tails has been embraced as an essential security suite by journalists, hackers, and IT workers.

      Tails is an acronym for The Amnesic Incognito Live System. The OS runs Debian and is easy to run on Macs and PCs from a USB drive. Tails encrypts all local files, runs every internet connection through Tor and blocks all non-secure connections, and provides a suite of secure communication tools like the Tor browser, HTTPS Everywhere, OpenPGP, the Claws Mail client, I2P, an IP address overlay network, and a Windows 8 camouflage mode to deter over-the-shoulder snooping.

    • Never Trust a Found USB Drive, Black Hat Demo Shows Why [Ed: Windows autoruns stuff]

      Does dropping an infected USB drive in a parking work when it comes to a hacker luring its prey into a digital trap? The answer is a resounding yes.

      At Black Hat USA, security researcher Elie Bursztein shared the results of an experiment where he dropped 297 USB drives with phone-home capabilities on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. He also explained how an attacker might program and camouflage a malicious USB drive outfitted with a Teensy development board to take over a target’s computer within seconds after plugging the drive in.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • How to Hack an Election in 7 Minute

      When Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine, he didn’t try to mimic the Russian attackers who hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s database last month. He didn’t write malicious code, or linger near a polling place where the machines can go unguarded for days.

    • Apache OpenOffice and CVE-2016-1513

      The Apache OpenOffice (AOO) project has suffered from a lack of developers for some time now; releases are infrequent and development of new features is relatively slow. But a recent security advisory for CVE-2016-1513 is rather eye-opening in that it further shows that the project is in rough shape. Announcing a potential code execution vulnerability without quickly providing a new release of AOO may be putting users of the tool at more risk than they realize.

    • New attack steals SSNs, e-mail addresses, and more from HTTPS pages

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Two Belgian police hurt by machete-wielding assailant shouting ‘Allahu akbar’

      A machete-wielding man shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is the greatest) wounded two policewomen in the southern Belgian city of Charleroi on Saturday before being shot and injured, local police said.

      One of the policewomen was taken to hospital with “deep wounds to the face” while the other was slightly injured, Belga news agency said.

      The incident took place outside the main police station.

      Belgium has been on high security alert for months since suicide bombers hit Brussels airport and a subway station near the European Union’s institutions on March 22, killing 32 people.

    • Beijing sends bombers, fighter jets on combat patrols over contested S. China Sea

      China has said it carried out a combat air patrol over contested islands in the South China Sea. In a separate incident, roughly 230 Chinese fishing vessels and Coast Guard ships were spotted near East China Sea islets, triggering an angry response from Japan.

      Several Chinese aircraft, including H-6K long-range bombers and Su-30 fighter jets, went on patrol over two contested islands in the South China Sea, Senior Colonel Shen Jinke, a spokesperson for the Air Force said on Saturday, according to the Xinhua news agency.

      The warplanes were escorted by Airborne Early Warning Aircraft (AWACS) and flying tankers, which were part of “actual combat training to improve the Air Force’s response to security threats,” the Air Force said.

    • I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton. [Sharyl Attkisson: “..nothing against Morell, he’s an expert in many areas, but his employment at pro-Hillary PR firm is required disclosure (in my opinion).”]
    • CIA Director Entry Number 2: Mike Morell, Fabulist

      Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor in making political hay out of Trump’s call on Putin to hack Hillary, especially coming as it does from someone (unlike Jake Sullivan and Leon Panetta) without a known history of mishandling classified information.

      But that line? “recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation”? That’s all about the clicks, and it has been serving splendidly. Just like “Slam Dunk” was a nifty line.

      In a piece auditioning to be CIA Director, I’d prefer someone stick more rigorously to the truth. Trump is an apologist for Putin, undoubtedly, but there’s no more evidence Putin has recruited Trump (unwittingly) than there is, say, the Saudis have recruited Hillary. They’re all just picking the assholes they champion, with Hillary picking the assholes we’ve long championed.

      Then again, this is not the first time Morell has stretched the truth a bit — up to and including on torture, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the tactic.

    • Commentary: The world’s best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia

      National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers’ possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against the election campaigns — and the presidents — of even its closest allies.

      The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

      There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.

      In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

      Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.

      NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a “surge effort against one of Mexico’s leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates.” Peña won that election and is now Mexico’s president.

      The NSA identified Peña’s cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, “might find a needle in a haystack.” The analyst described it as “a repeatable and efficient” process.

      The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

    • Former South Sudan official says ‘total breakdown of law and order’ in country

      Carved out of Sudan following years of civil war and the Darfur genocide, South Sudan was originally touted as a U.S. foreign policy success story after a vote for independence in 2011, but in the five years since, the country has been overrun by an internal war that has resulted in mass murders, gang rapes and torture.

      After speaking to Fox News last year, former government official Joseph Bakosoro was arrested and jailed. He recently escaped to the United States and says America must help — and soon, or another genocide is imminent.

      “There are insecurities all over the country, there are gunmen all over. There is no rule of law in the country now,” he said. “Everybody’s above the law. Every individual has a gun and there is total breakdown of law and order.”

      There are more than 60 tribes within South Sudan, but the majority Dinka has held rule since the country’s inception. Other tribes claim to have endured mass killings, rapes and worse at the hands of the Dinka. In response, the second largest tribe, the Nuer, formed rebel forces and have gained ground in recent months.

    • ‘You can’t deny the people forever’. Kurdish voices in exile.

      Over baklava and sweet tea, openDemocracy hears about Turkey’s post-coup crackdown and the dreams of an independent Kurdistan.

    • Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson on A Vision for Black Lives, William Hartung on US Arms Trade

      This week on CounterSpin: The Movement for Black Lives has never relied on corporate media to get their message out. But the coalition’s newly released policy platform does provide an opportunity for journalists—sometimes given to ponder what black activists are for—to engage those ideas. We’ll hear about A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice from Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an organizer with Project South and with Concerned Citizens for Justice, and part of the policy table leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives.

    • Nixon says public defender maneuver not legal

      Naming Nixon as a public defender is not the only attempt by Barrett to recover the money Nixon is withholding. The commission last month filed a lawsuit seeking to force Nixon to release the money. An initial hearing on that case is set for Monday.

    • To Make a Point, Missouri’s Lead Public Defender Assigns a Case to Gov. Jay Nixon
    • Was America Great When It Burned Native Babies? (Audio)

      Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was exposed to the effects of colonization at an early age. “When I was a boy,” he explains, “my father was working with Karuk people, as a psychologist. … I was getting exposure to the ongoing conflicts between colonists—us—and the indigenous people of California.”

      Madley is the guest for this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” podcast. He joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to discuss this too-little-known aspect of California history. The two begin by talking about the label “genocide,” a term used by Madley in his book, “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846-1873.”

    • Behold, a Pale Horse and its Rider’s Name Was Death

      In Obama’s account, Washington is defeating ISIL in Iraq, but Russia and Assad are defeating the Syrian people in Syria. Obama denounced Russia and the Syrian government—but not ISIL—as barbaric. The message was clear: Washington still intends to overthrow Assad and turn Syria into another Libya and another Iraq, formerly stable and prosperous countries where war now rages continually.

      It sickens me to hear the President of the United States lie and construct a false reality, so I turned off the broadcast. I believe it was a press conference, and I am confident that no meaningful questions were asked.

    • Letting Saudi Arabia Off the 9/11 Hook [Ed: mentioned yesterday]

      The 9/11 attacks opened a bloody chapter of American history, “justifying” U.S. attacks on multiple countries but not on the one most connected to the terrorism, U.S. “ally,” Saudi Arabia. Why is that, asks Lawrence Davidson.

    • Is Hypocrisy The Silent Strategy of Western Democracy?

      The official reasons for the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003 were to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, end Saddam Hussein’s support of terrorism, and free the Iraqi people.

      However, immediately after the United States deposed and killed Iraq’s dictator and established a new authority to govern the country, a chaotic post-invasion environment surfaced, militias formed, inter-ethnic violence between Sunnis and Shias increased, and the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light.

      In the following years, communities have been displaced, terror attacks have increased, and the Islamic State has emerged. Since the beginning of the invasion by the US and its allies until the present day, 180’000 civilians have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a database by the Iraq Body Count.

    • US to Give Argentina Files on American Role in ‘Horror’ of Military Dictatorship

      In Buenos Aires on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he would hand over declassified documents relating to America’s role in the 1976-83 military coup and dictatorship in Argentina—often referred to as the “Dirty War”—during which tens of thousands of leftist activists and dissidents were murdered and imprisoned.

      “I want to note that the relationship between the United States and Argentina is an exciting, forward-looking one. But we’re also conscious of the lessons from the past,” Kerry said during a press conference.

      The move comes amid warming relations between the U.S. and Argentina, which elected neoliberal businessman Mauricio Macri as president in November, signaling a rightward shift for the country. President Barack Obama announced in March that the U.S. would release the files.

    • Dispatches: Obama in Argentina on 40th Anniversary of the ‘Dirty War’

      On March 24, United States President Barack Obama finishes a two-day visit to Argentina. The visit coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Argentine military coup, which ushered in an era of brutal attacks on people perceived as dissidents, including executions, torture, and the abduction of detainees’ babies. Obama’s pledge to declassify military, intelligence, and law enforcement records related to Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-1983) is a critical contribution to the country’s efforts to bring those responsible for these serious abuses to justice.

    • Afghanistan: The campaign’s forgotten war

      Although hardly news, it bears repeating that the Afghanistan War stands as the longest in all of United States history. By election day, it will have entered its 16th year. Our next president will surely inherit the war there, just as Barack Obama inherited it from George W. Bush. Here is a situation where the phrase “endless war” is not hyperbole; it accurately describes reality.

      Given this depressing fact, one might think that those aspiring to the office of commander in chief would have something to say about how they intend to win or at least curtail that conflict, or perhaps why the U.S. should persist in such a costly endeavor. But in their lengthy convention speeches, neither Donald Trump (who spoke for 75 minutes) nor Hillary Clinton (who spoke for 66) found the time to even mention Afghanistan.

    • Baby Teeth of Iraqi Children Tell Troubling Tale of War’s Toxic Impacts

      New study finds exposure to heavy metals and other toxins having severe impact on generation who have grown up amid endless bombings and violence

    • Ex-CIA Chief and Torture Defender Endorses Clinton—Why Are Democrats Cheering?

      Morell has in the past defended torture, most publicly in a book published as a retort to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program during George W. Bush’s presidency.

    • Malaysia confirms Flight 370 pilot plotted fatal route

      Malaysia acknowledged for the first time that one of the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had plotted a course on his home flight simulator to the southern Indian Ocean, where the missing jet is believed to have crashed.

      Australian officials overseeing the search for the plane last month said data recovered from Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s simulator included a flight path to the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian officials at the time refused to confirm the findings.

    • Zimbabwe’s army chief threatens to deal with anti-Mugabe protesters

      Zimbabwe’s army commander said on Friday that his soldiers will deal with threats from activists using social media to mobilise anti-government protests, the first time the military has commented on the demonstrations.

      Lieutenant-General Valerio Sibanda, the Zimbabwe National Army Commander, said in an interview with state-owned The Herald newspaper that social media activism was cyber warfare that the army would deal with.

      Neither the army, which has anchored President Robert Mugabe’s 36-year rule, nor the police force have been paid on time since June.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Melting Greenland Ice Cap Will Expose Military’s Cold War-Era Toxic Waste

      The rapidly warming climate will melt Greenland’s ice cap to such an extent that thousands of tons of hazardous waste left in the 1960s by a secret U.S. military base will be unearthed by the end of the century, new research finds.

      The biological, chemical, and radioactive waste will then seep into the ground and the sea, endangering humans and animals alike.

    • Melting Greenland ice sheet will soon unearth waste from long-forgotten Cold War-era military base

      In 1967, the U.S. decommissioned a military base that had been constructed underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. In doing so, the military removed a portable nuclear reactor that had helped power the 200-person base, but left the rest of the waste there, from gasoline to PCBs and nuclear coolant water.

      At the time, the U.S., along with their Danish partners who had authority over Greenland, assumed the waste would be entombed for eternity beneath a perpetually deepening snow cover.

      However, what once was buried, global warming is poised to unearth. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the melting ice sheet could begin spreading the hazardous waste across the surface of the ice sheet and into the ocean in as little as 75 years from now.

    • Largest Indonesian fires linked to El Nino events

      A team of researchers with NASA, several other U.S. institutions and one from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has found that large increases in Indonesian fire activity and the resulting smoke pollution that occur some years can be linked to El Niño events. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe their analysis of long-term satellite imagery, what it revealed and why they believe changes need to be made.

      Last year, fires in Indonesia drew headlines due to the massive amount of smoke generated and carried over long distances in the atmosphere. The fires were set by palm oil and other farmers in their fields as they sought to get rid of leftover debris—it is, according to the researchers, currently the most economic means for clearing fields. But the smoke is a form of pollution, irritating lungs and sending massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, adding to the amounts from other countries and contributing to global warming.

    • Louisiana Parish Hit by Third Oil Spill in Ten Days As Pressure Grows To Hold Oil and Gas Industry Accountable for Coastal Damage

      Yesterday, an estimated 4,200 gallons of crude oil was discharged from a well owned by the Texas Petroleum Investment Company into the mouth of the Mississippi River, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard and other state agencies are now responding to the third oil spill in two weeks.

      Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish coast was also hit with two oil spills last week. An estimated 4,200 gallons of crude oil attributed to oil and gas extraction company Hilcorp spilled in the marsh near Lake Grande Ecaille, part of Barataria Bay, on July 25. Three days later, 850 gallons were discharged by a Texas Petroleum Management flowline into marshland in the Southwest Pass.

    • Clinton Fundraises With Frackers

      Hillary Clinton is growing cozier with the hydraulic fracturing industry, just months after she promised to heavily regulate it.

      The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate attended a $50,000 per place fundraiser in Aspen, Colo. on Tuesday, hosted by fracking magnate Charif Souaki. The event raised $650,000 for the campaign.

      As the International Business Times reported, Souaki “amassed his fortune working for natural gas companies including one he founded last year, Tellurian Investments.” A subsidiary of Tellurian, Driftwood LNG, filed for a license in June with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to construct a natural gas export facility in Louisiana.

      Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—refers to a process by which energy, primarily natural gas, is extracted. It involves shooting millions of gallons of water and chemicals into underground shale rock formations, which releases hydrocarbons trapped inside.

      Fracking is heavily scrutinized due to concerns about the slurry of chemicals used in the process. The injection of the industrial mixtures into the earth may be contaminating nearby drinking water sources, critics say. Congress passed legislation in 2005 that shields the industry from having to report on the contents of their fracking fluids.

  • Finance

    • Joseph Stiglitz resigns from Panama Papers committee over ‘censorship’
    • Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Stiglitz Quits Panama Papers Probe
    • Panama Papers: Pieth says officials are in denial as he quits
    • Panama Papers leak: Joseph Stiglitz and Mark Pieth resign from investigation committee
    • Stiglitz quits Panama Papers clean-up committee
    • Stiglitz quits Panama Papers commission, cites lack of transparency
    • Panama Papers: Joseph Stiglitz quits as government adviser
    • Exclusive – Stiglitz quits Panama Papers probe, cites lack of transparency
    • Panama Papers Probe Faces Major Setback as Stiglitz Quits Team
    • Panama Papers scandal to get Hollywood movie treatment
    • Britain owes the EU £21bn, report claims – but is it true?

      A German magazine has claimed the UK owes the EU €25bn (£21.2bn) in unpaid debts, its share of €200bn owed by all member states to the bloc, and that any Brexit deal will be blocked until London settles up. The report in Wirtschaftswoche quoted an anonymous EU official who said: “A deal with Great Britain is unimaginable if the British do not pay their outstanding debt.”

    • ‘White Trash’ — The Original Underclass

      Waste people. Rubbish. Clay-eaters. Hillbillies. Two new books that reckon with the long, bleak history of the country’s white poor suggest their plight shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country off guard.

    • The IMF confesses it immolated Greece on behalf of the Eurogroup

      What good is it to have a mea culpa if those officials who imposed such disastrous, inhuman policies remain on board and are, in fact, promoted for their gross incompetence?

    • Four-Year Campaign Results In Historic-Win For Tax Whistleblowers
    • Union got Trump Taj Mahal casino workers to kill own jobs: Icahn

      Billionaire investor Carl Icahn wrote a letter Thursday to the soon-to-be unemployed workers of the Trump Taj Mahal casino, accusing their union of inciting them to destroy their own jobs by participating in the longest strike by Atlantic City’s main casino workers union.

      Icahn told the workers that officials of Local 54 of the Unite-HERE union knew that the company had made its final offer, but rejected it anyway, knowing a strike would result.

      The union has been on strike since July 1. The central issue has been restoration of health insurance and pension benefits that the previous owners got a bankruptcy court judge to terminate in October 2014.

      Icahn said the company’s final offer to restore health care, albeit at a lower level than what workers at Atlantic City’s other seven casinos, was negotiated with union president Bob McDevitt.

    • Employment Again Rises Sharply in July

      The Labor Department reported the economy added 255,000 jobs in July. With the June number revised up to 292,000, the average for the last three months now stands at 190,000. The household survey also showed a positive picture, with employment rising by 420,000. With new people entering the labor force, the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) edged up by 0.1 percentage point to 59.7 percent, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9 percent.

    • Another Phony Jobs Report

      As John Williams has made clear, the monthly payroll jobs number consists mainly of an add-on factor of 200,000 jobs. These jobs are a product of the assumption in the Birth-Death Model that new business ventures create more unreported new jobs than the unreported job losses from business failures. If we sustract out this made-up number, July saw a gain of 55,000 jobs, not enough to keep up with population growth. Even the 55,000 figure is overstated according to John Williams’ report: “The gimmicked, headline payroll gain of 255,000 more realistically should have come in below zero, net of built-in upside biases.”

    • Forget Clinton’s and Trump’s Plans for the Economy: It’s Time to Erase Debt and Create Jobs

      So far, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton has offered a credible plan to restart the long-stalled U.S. economy.

      Trump favors lowering taxes to spur demand, a reduction in the supply of illegal foreign labor to boost wages, and modifying trade policy to encourage investment in U.S. manufacturing and create better-paying jobs. He also touts an unspecified infrastructure investment. Some argue that this approach will not provide jobs in the magnitude required, and will likely increase the federal deficit.

      Clinton favors higher taxes on the wealthy and more spending for infrastructure. To keep the debt off the federal government balance sheet, she has specifically proposed so-called public-private partnerships. This is the Wall Street solution. Public guarantees will be used to attract private investors, who will finance, own and rent back to the people the entire public infrastructure of the United States.

      Neither program gets at the real problems: Americans—families, students, businesses, state and local governments, school districts, etc.—are drowning in debt, and there is not enough money in circulation for productive, job-creating purposes. Instead, it is eaten up paying off debt.

    • U.S. Attorney Asks Court to Reconsider Countrywide Loan Case

      In an unusual move, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan’s Southern District has asked a three-judge panel on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that overturned a verdict that found Countrywide Home Loans and a bank executive liable for fraud. The company made billions of dollars of home loans that defaulted after the 2008 global meltdown.

    • The Goldwater Girl and the Wall Street Girl

      They are one and the same in Hillary. The Goldwater girl is the one who rooted for Goldwater’s racism and is also now the Wall St. girl.

      It is said of Trump that what you see is what you get. With Hillary what you see is what you don’t get. Trump provides some clarity, albeit distasteful, but shows what America has been and still largely is. This may lead to conflict upon election which may lead to change, the 1960s again! Hillary is not what you see—she will lead to thousands of people killed in her illegal invasions abroad, as her history makes clear but she obfuscates today, all the more reason she is dangerous. She already the other day again said that she will get rid of President Assad. Yet she cries foul about her election here influenced by Russia.

    • Dave Zirin: Protests by Athletes and Displaced Rio Residents Accompany Opening of 2016 Olympic Games

      Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine, says protests highlighting racial and economic injustice are expected from athletes attending the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, such as tennis champion Serena Williams and players from the NBA, WNBA and other countries. Polls show more than 60 percent of Brazilians think hosting the Games will hurt their country. He says that ahead of today’s opening ceremony, residents of heavily policed and displaced neighborhoods plan a major march to Rio’s “Olympic City.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Surprise! There Isn’t a Single Woman on Trump’s New 15-Member Economic Advisory Council

      All things considered, it’s not terribly surprising that Trump would decline to name a female to his flashy new economic advisory council, considering she might be someone’s wife and that’s a “dangerous thing.” Still, one would hope Trump could name a single woman he’s willing to take advice from who’s not his daughter or the woman immediately in front of him. But alas, here we are.

    • Sorry Hillary, Voting for the Lesser of Two Evils is Textbook Blame-Shifting

      Of all the redundant and generally loathesome reasons for continuing to support the two-party duopoly that constitutes the electoral oligarchy upon which the global corporate empire we know and love maintains the most threadbare pretenses of democratic legitimacy, surely none are relied on more heavily than the old lesser-of-two-evils argument: which is to say, we must support the candidate we find the least hateful to reason and basic decency. As it happens, this is not only a repulsive line of thinking, it is also textbook blame shifting.

      Referring to the textbook, we find that blame shifting typically involve psychological strategies like playing the victim, victim blaming, demonizing our enemies, refusing to admit responsibility for wrongdoing, and articulating self-defenses in absolute terms, typically by refusing to acknowledge any difference between criticism of our behavior or policies and attacks on our person and rights. The latter most commonly manifests as the ‘with us or against us’ fallacy, which despite commonly being associated with former President George ‘Dubya’ Bush, is surprisingly common, as its repeated appearance in the Bible (eg. Matthew 12:30, Luke 9:50, Mark 9:40) seems to suggest.

      Social psychology classes this particular group of behaviors as ‘moral disengagement,’ or the subjective mechanisms we use to neutralize our conscience and reconstruct actions as just and morally legitimate that might be interpreted as unethical, immoral, harmful, dangerous, irresponsible or even criminal. This approach recognizes that we rarely reject the idea of morality out of hand, merely apply it selectively. Through selective application of principle on the basis of moral disengagement we retain the idea of ourselves as moral actors while finding various pretexts upon which to make exceptions to our principles for the sake of momentary expediency.

    • Roaming Charges: the Trump Conspiracy?

      here are real conspiracies, of course, like the CIA’s plots to kill Fidel Castro or the successful scheme to have Nelson Mandela arrested on terrorism charges. But most conspiracy theorists function to obscure and invalidate real conspiracies. Cockburn and I used to joke that the 9/11 conspiracists were, in fact, themselves a conspiracy seeded by the CIA to distract the Left from challenging the real objectives of the War of Terror. But that worked out much too well to have been a real CIA plot.

      Now, however, I feel myself slipping into the grip of a fever dream featuring Donald Trump as some kind of Manchurian Candidate designed to destroy the GOP and secure the election of the otherwise unelectable Mrs. Clinton.

    • Third-party candidates lose legal fight to get into presidential debates

      A long-shot lawsuit by the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for president has been tossed out by a federal judge, lowering the odds of a third-party candidate making it into this year’s televised debates.

      “We are exploring our options, with the firm resolve that this case and the larger issue of fair debates are too important to simply allow such an arbitrary dismissal,” said Ron Nielson, the campaign manager for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson.

      Late last year, the largest third parties teamed up to argue that the Commission on Presidential Debates protected a de facto monopoly. Bruce Fein, the lawyer who drafted the lawsuit, hoped that a judge would see the private CPD as a gatekeeper for millions of dollars in free publicity, and its 15 percent polling threshold as a threat to the First Amendment. That, thought plaintiffs Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, would distinguish their cause from previous failures to open the debates.

      [...]

      Since 1996, third-party candidates have tried and repeatedly failed to cross the CPD’s threshold — 15 percent support in an average of polls. Denied access, they have resorted to stunts. In 2000, Ralph Nader obtained a ticket to view one of the debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and made a fuss after he was denied entry. In 2012, Nader’s Green Party successor Jill Stein was arrested after a protest near the heavily-secured entrance of a debate site.

      [...]

      But Johnson has struggled to hit 15 percent in any poll. In an average of polls collected by RealClearPolitics, he enjoys 8 percent support, a function of voter frustration with the major party candidates, but far short of what he needs for entry, even as the CPD suggests that it will round up if a third-party candidate closes on the magic number.

    • Judge rejects third parties’ suit against debate commission

      A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit alleging that the Commission on Presidential Debates violated federal antitrust laws and the First Amendment by excluding third-party candidates.

      In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer dismissed a suit filed last year by the Libertarian and Green parties as well their respective 2012 presidential nominees, former New Mexico Republican Gov. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Each also happens to be his or her party’s presidential nominee again this year.

      Collyer’s ruling found little, if any, merit in the suit. She said antitrust law had no relevance to the situation and many of the ills the plaintiffs complained of were of their own making, not the debate commission.

      “Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged a non-speculative injury traceable to the Commission,” wrote Collyer, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. “Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are wholly speculative and are dependent entirely on media coverage decisions. The alleged injuries––failure to receive media coverage and to garner votes, federal matching funds, and campaign contributions—were caused by the lack of popular support of the candidates and their parties sufficient to attract media attention.”

    • Dr. Jill Stein’s Stiff Dose of Progressive Medicine

      I spoke to Dr. Jill Stein just days before she received the Green Party’s nomination for president. A Harvard-trained doctor, Stein also ran for the presidency in 2012, when she received about a half-million votes. Today, though, she hopes to pick up votes from many of the progressives who felt the Bern and have no interest in supporting Hillary Clinton, even though she’s running against Donald Trump. The following interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.

    • Protesters with pocket Constitutions removed from Trump rally

      A group of protesters at Donald Trump’s rally here on Thursday stood up silently during the Republican nominee’s speech and held up pocket copies of the Constitution.

      They were quickly ejected by campaign staffers and drew fierce boos and jeers from the roughly 1,800 Trump supporters packed into the auditorium, the capacity of the venue.

      [...]

      Moments later, as the man interrupted Trump’s speech with shouts, a campaign staffer tapped him on the shoulder and escorted him out of the venue.

      The Republican nominee focused much of this speech on attacking Clinton and President Barack Obama.

      He also disputed that there was any “fissure” between him and running mate Mike Pence, after Pence endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reelection, while Trump has declined to support the Speaker.

      “Paul Ryan’s a good guy, actually, so Mike called me and he said, ‘Would you mind if I endorsed? I won’t do that if it causes any complications.’ … I said, ‘Mike, you like him?’ Yes. ‘Go and do it.’”

    • Donald Trump Admits He Gets Confused and Makes Things Up After Watching Fox News

      In other words, he mistakenly thought grainy video images shown over and over on Fox News this week — of three Americans of Iranian descent getting off a plane in Geneva in January, after being freed from jail in a prisoner swap with the United States — showed money the United States has owed to Iran since 1979 being delivered the same night.

      [...]

      The transfer of $400 million to Iran by the Treasury Department has prompted outrage in the right-wing Twittersphere this week even though it was never secret. President Barack Obama announced it himself in January, calling the agreement to resolve a longstanding dispute over Iranian money held by Washington since the fall of the shah a side benefit of diplomatic ties renewed during talks over Iran’s nuclear energy program.

      An Iranian general boasted at the time that the money was a form of ransom paid to release the jailed Iranian-Americans, and this week the Wall Street Journal reported a new detail about the payment: that it was made in cash flown to Tehran on the same night the prisoners were freed. That led to renewed criticism of the deal from Republicans who argued, as they first did in January, that President Obama had paid ransom money to a state that held the American citizens as “hostages.”

    • Assange to speak to Green Party Convention via live feed

      Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the organization that recently posted thousands of the Democratic Party’s internal emails online, will speak via live stream at the Green Party national convention, party officials announced Friday.

      Assange is scheduled to speak at 11:45 a.m. Saturday over a live stream from the Embassy of Ecuador in London.

      He will speak on the third day of the progressive party’s national convention at the University of Houston, before the party nominates its 2016 presidential nominee, widely expected to be Jill Stein.

      Assange is expected to be interviewed by 2004 Green Party presidential nominee David Cobb, party officials said in a statement Friday.

    • Inside the DNC Walkouts

      The 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was the most contentious since 1968. Characterized by bold protests both inside and outside the convention, the U.S. and world watched a powerful challenge to the Democratic establishment take place over the course of the week. The events helped fuel an already rapid growth in support for Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, which is developing into the most significant left independent presidential run since Ralph Nader’s historic campaign in 2000.

      The political high point of the convention resistance was the Tuesday mass walkout of delegates. While exact numbers are unknown, the clearest evidence (including video and photography of vacated delegation seats) points towards a walkout of likely more than 700 Sanders delegates after the abbreviated conclusion of the roll call vote. The large and well organized Sanders delegations from California and Washington led supermajorities of their delegates outside, leaving a visible void of more than 200 seats between those two states alone.

    • The Elective Affinities of Hillary Clinton

      I’m raving, you say? This is the Age of Empire, and empire breeds monsters. We live with them now. Imperialism is our political and economic reality. Nothing material or substantial can be reformed within this colossal juggernaut. Yet, we continue to pretend that this has no bearing on our lives. In 2003 alone, the Iraq invasion cost $60 billion, three times the yearly budget for education, yet, we wonder why schools are starving for funds. When we clamor for reforms without mentioning imperialism, it is as if we were told we would be dead in three weeks and reacted by scheduling an appointment for a facelift.

    • Want a Third Party? Vote Hillary, Support Bernie

      Note that last line. America has a problem, and it isn’t Donald Trump. It is the simple fact that the nation claiming to be the largest most successful democracy in the world is run by two parties, both of which are held hostage to lobbyists and corporations.

    • Liberals Grow Hysterical Toward Those Who Plan To Break From Democratic Party

      Every four years, progressives are lectured and berated by left-leaning pundits, who have varying degrees of allegiance to the Democratic Party. Any consideration of a third-party candidate, especially the Green Party’s presidential candidate, is deemed reprehensible. Now that Hillary Clinton is officially the Democratic Party’s nominee, that moment in the election cycle is upon us.

      Some of the very same people behind the attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his supporters are behind the first volley of attacks on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, including the concerted effort to smear her as a crank who does not believe in vaccines.

      These commentators do not care whether an alternative to the Democratic Party is built in the United States. In fact, to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley, they treat us to their “excruciating orgasms of self-assertion” because they have a deep-seated contempt for those who dare to dissent and meaningfully challenge Democrats.

    • Could Third Party Candidates Prove Clinton’s Achilles Heel?

      The bad news: Two of those polls—and a chunk of others recently—show that when the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein are included in a theoretical match-up, Clinton’s lead drops, making, according to a headline in Politico, a potential “third-party headache” for the former secretary of state.

    • WikiLeaks: Alcohol Industry Encourages Congressional Concern About Cannabis

      Is the alcohol industry is spending money to get members of Congress to pay attention to the problem of “marijuana-impaired driving”? That’s the case being made on cannabis industry website Marijuana.com, where a blogger seems to have assiduously searched the famous WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails for any reference to our favorite herb.

    • Green VP pick powerhouse of human rights and racial justice

      In looking for a vice-presidential running mate, I sought a candidate who embodies the principles of equity and social justice underpinning our campaign, and who could inspire the millions of disaffected voters hungering for an alternative. In Ajamu Baraka, I found that candidate.

      Ajamu brings to the table an unwavering commitment to human rights and the interests of the dispossessed and disenfranchised that has been the hallmark of a career spanning more than 40 years of advocacy and activism.

      From his roots with the Voter Education Project and the Black Liberation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s and continuing with his groundbreaking work against the death penalty with Amnesty International and as founding director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, Ajamu has fought for social justice while challenging the stranglehold on power that economic and political elites have enjoyed for decades at the expense of the majority.

    • Following the money behind Tim Kaine

      Hillary Clinton has chosen her potential second-in-command if elected to the White House — Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. Kaine launched his career as a civil rights lawyer, and he’s no stranger to public service. He’s a former city councilman turned mayor turned lieutenant governor turned governor turned Democratic National Committee chairman turned senator turned newly minted vice presidential candidate. Throughout his time in politics, he’s certainly seen his share of campaign money — we examined the cash behind his extensive career.

      [...]

      Three years later, Kaine became governor of Virginia and a force within the Democratic party — raising $18 million in the process. His 2005 run for governor was buoyed by several special interest groups and big donors, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. These include:

      Washington Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis ($5,000)
      Universal Leaf Tobacco ($30,000)
      Comcast ($30,500)
      Sprint ($33,453)
      Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. ($35,000)
      Billionaire and Democratic megadonor George Soros ($40,000)
      Microsoft ($42,890)
      Altria tobacco ($50,000)
      Novelist John Grisham ($75,000)
      Billionaire Randall J. Kirk ($100,000); Kirk and his companies gave Kaine and his PACs nearly a million dollars between 2005-2012. Kaine later appointed Kirk to the Board of Visitors in Virginia.
      Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems ($188,463)
      Sheila C. Johnson, co-founder of BET ($392,490); Johnson also gave Kaine $2,500 in airfare to and from the 2008 DNC convention in Denver.

    • The Culture War and the 2016 Election

      The blistering criticism raised by Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, a distinguished Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, about Donald Trump has once-again ignited controversy over the real-estate developer con-man’s likely role as president. This only heightened the revelations in a recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer on Tony Schwartz, the author of Trump’s bestseller, The Art of the Deal, and makes it clear that the presidential candidate is an egomaniacal psychopath.

    • Standing Up ‘For The Greater Good’: MintPress Will Report From Green Party Convention

      As the Green Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention convenes in Houston, there’s renewed attention on the party’s presumptive nominee, Dr. Jill Stein, and increased interest in third-party alternatives to the American two-party duopoly.

      On Saturday, MintPress News will be at the University of Houston, where Stein and her running mate, human rights scholar and activist Ajamu Baraka, are expected to accept the Green Party’s nomination for president and vice president.

      Polls consistently show that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the political status quo. Just 9 percent of U.S. residents voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the primaries, according to The New York Times. In a poll conducted in May by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, some 90 percent of voters expressed a lack of confidence in the American political system, while 40 percent said that the two-party system is “seriously broken.”

    • Is The DNC Hacking A New Cold War… Or Just The Continuation Of What Every Intelligence Agency Does?

      But if there’s a high road to be had, the US government can’t really claim it. As James Bamford explains in his commentary piece for Reuters, US spy agencies haven’t exactly stayed out of world affairs, including local elections.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • YouTube’s Trolls Are Crying Censorship Over Cyberbullying Rules

      If internet history proves anything, it’s that not a day can pass without someone protesting about “free speech.” And while this theme is nothing new—as events like the Meow Wars, from 20 years ago, demonstrate—I suspect that free speech will be remembered as one of the defining questions of our era, the adolescent internet at its most audible and belligerent and angsty.

      Which is why the latest outcry on YouTube over censorship is hardly a surprise.

      Some background: One week ago, a video appeared titled “THE YOUTUBE RANT (I’m getting banned off YouTube).” Its creator was already infamous: the “commentary” channel Leafyishere.

      The video accuses YouTube of a selective approach to moderation, one where smaller channels are cautioned or shut down entirely for “roasting” and casual parody, while bigger channels (like Leafy’s own—he has well over 4 million subscribers) consistently get away with it. But now, Leafy argues, even bigger channels are being removed for minor infringements on community guidelines, which have been altered, he protests, to define even casually criticising another account in a video or comments as a form of cyberbullying.

    • Suicide Squad unlikely to secure Chinese release due to censorship laws

      China is now officially the second-largest marketplace for films in the world and has been responsible for saving more than a few underperforming blockbusters this summer. Warcraft and Independence Day: Resurgence both had strong takings in China, despite the fact both weren’t critically lauded or performed all that well in the US and European territories.

      Essentially, when studios talk about worldwide box office, they’re talking about the Chinese box-office. However, the issue with releasing in China is that the country has an incredibly strict censorship board that has a number of odd quirks compared to other countries. One of them is that China specifically bans any films that features or references ghosts.

    • Did You Catch All the Ways Hollywood Pandered to China This Year?
    • China, Hollywood, and the Global Future of Film Production
    • On Screen China: Summer Slump Sees July Drop 18% from A Year Earlier
    • Summer Blockbusters Attract Chinese Censorship
    • Sløtface Talks Feminism, Internet Censorship and “Take Me Dancing”
    • Minnesota Carpet Cleaning Business Sues US Olympic Committee Over Its Ridiculous Social Media Rules

      The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) must spend a majority of the four-year break between Olympics thinking up new, spectacularly petty demands to make of everyone when the next event rolls around. It’s always been overbearing and thuggish, but it seems determined to top itself with each new iteration of its sports-related boondoggle.

    • Facebook wants to stop clickbait. (And you won’t believe how they’re doing it)

      Facebook is escalating its war on “clickbait” headlines by instituting a new system on its newsfeed that will weed out misleading and exaggerated headlines the same way that email spam filters weed out fantastic offers to help Nigerian princes recover their lost fortunes.

      The tweaks to the algorithm, announced today in a blog post, will de-prioritize posts with headlines that “withhold information required to understand what the content of the article is and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations”.

      The blog post listed three examples of clickbait headlines: “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; and “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”

      The changes mark the second attempt by the social network to crack down on the much-reviled but nevertheless effective strategies publishers employ to coax readers to click on their content.

    • Asia Minute: China’s Online Population Grows, Along with Censorship

      Some 710 million Chinese now use the internet. For a little perspective, that’s more than double the entire population of the United States. That’s according to China’s government…which for these purposes defines an internet user as anyone who has gone online at least once in the past six months.

      The China Internet Network Information Center says the number of users is up more than 3% since December. The same study finds more than 90% of those on the internet in China get there by way of their mobile phones.The state-run China Daily highlighted a growing number of Chinese shopping and paying their bills on line…hailing taxis online…even ordering takeout food on line.

    • Yavuz Baydar: Turkey takes wife of journalist hostage

      Police in Erzurum raided the home of journalist Bülent Korucu and, in his absence, arrested his wife until he presents himself to the authorities.

    • Aditi Mittal, Ashutosh Dabke on performing adult comedy in the time of censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Thousands sign petition calling for Russian PM to resign

      More than 178,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s resignation after he suggested teachers wanting more pay should seek a different career, AFP reported Friday.

      When asked by a university lecturer at a public forum why teachers receive less money than policemen, the prime minister replied that “there is no need to compare, the issue is what you choose in life.”

      Teaching, he said, “is a vocation. If you want to earn money, there are a bunch of great places where you can do that quicker and better in business. And you didn’t go into business.”

    • Sheriff Uses Unconstitutional Law To Raid Home And Seize Electronics Belonging To Watchdog Blogger

      This suggests a bit of magistrate shopping by the Sheriff’s Office. Now that the warrant has been executed and devices seized, a motion to quash is in place. But that does little for Officer Wayne Anderson. Not only has he been suspended (with pay) by the Houma Police Department while this farce plays out, but the court is holding onto his computers and phones until a hearing on the motion can take place.

      The First Amendment implications of Sheriff Larpenter’s raid are clear. That the search warrant — in pursuit of bogus criminal defamation charges — has already been carried out means Sheriff Larpenter will be facing Fourth Amendment violations claims as well in the inevitable civil rights lawsuit that will follow this debacle. Sheriff Larpenter should have had no problem fighting speech he didn’t like with speech of his own — especially considering his position as a public figure who holds a powerful office. Instead, he has chosen to abuse his position and power to silence a critic, something that’s not exactly helping him look any less corrupt.

    • Pokemon Company Threatens Pokemon Go API Creator With CFAA Lawsuit

      Is there no goodwill that the Pokemon Company’s lawyers won’t step in and kill off? With the popularity of Pokemon Go, some third parties had started trying to develop some services to go with it, and as part of that, a few have tried to create Pokemon Go APIs. A user going by the name Mila432 had created an unofficial Pokemon Go API in Python, and posted it to GitHub.

    • 1968 ‘Black Power Salute’ Sparked Ongoing Miscarriage of Justice by U.S. Olympic Committee

      C. Robert “Bob” Paul Jr. was one of the most interesting sports figures you probably never heard of. He was born in 1918 and died near his home on Long Island in 2011. For much of his life, he was a publicist, first for his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and later for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC).

      In an obit for Paul released by the USOC, longtime spokesman Mike Moran wrote: “With his death goes an important cornerstone of a long ago USOC and its remarkable history.” Mr. Moran was right. There was a book in Paul, and it’s a terrible shame that he never got around to writing it.

      Eight years ago, I sought him out at a retirement home in the borough of Queens, N.Y., while researching what I regarded then and still regard as the most important unresolved issue in American Olympics history.

      “It was a story that should have made headlines for one day,” said Paul, who was the USOC’s publicist at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City. “If they had handled the whole affair right, with some reason, tolerance and common sense, it would have been something we could now look back on with pride. Instead, it’s the Olympics’ biggest ongoing shame.”

    • Israeli Company That Helped Build Gaza’s Wall Is Less Sure About Donald Trump’s

      An Israel-based security company that provided intrusion detection technology for the barrier between Israel and the Gaza Strip has offered to help Donald Trump secure the U.S. border — but suggests that building an actual wall along every section of the border is not the way to go.

      Sa’ar Koursh, the CEO of Magal Security Systems, told Bloomberg News that he would be happy to help Trump. “We would join forces with a major U.S. defense company that has experience with such projects worldwide,” he said. “We’ve done it in the past and we would definitely want to do it.”

      For Magal, border-wall building is a lucrative enterprise. It has installed perimeter detection systems between the Gaza Strip and Israel, and has deployed its surveillance and intrusion detection systems in the occupied West Bank.

    • The Intercept’s Olympics Guide for Identifying Brazil’s New Leaders

      With the 2016 Summer Olympics officially opening today in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s eyes will be on the nation of Brazil. Ever since the actual, legitimate, democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was suspended in April pending a final impeachment vote scheduled for later this month, there has been a new set of political leaders who rule the country — from the very same center and right-wing parties, and often the very same people, who were repeatedly rejected by voters as they sought to obtain the political power they now, without an election, are fortunate enough to wield.

      Beyond the anti-democratic means they used to seize power, Brazil’s new leaders — most of whom who were also key plotters in Rousseff’s removal — are themselves the targets of serious corruption investigations, drowning in all sorts of official allegations. Given that impeachment was justified based on the need to fight corruption, that is an ironic fact indeed (despite the high number of politicians in Dilma’s party implicated in these personal corruption scandals, including her predecessor Lula da Silva, she herself never has been). Thanks to the legal “privilege” high-level Brazilian officials have gifted themselves — whereby they can only be tried by the nation’s Supreme Court, which is so backlogged that it will be many, many years before that is remotely possible — most of these corruption scandals are unlikely to be legally adjudicated for some time, and in most cases they have denied their own guilt, though they are based in credible evidence.

    • Treat, don’t police

      Last week’s shocking treatment of migrants by employer Byron shows how government is seeking to create an army of informants – and they’re trying the same tactics in our NHS.

    • Whistleblower Retaliation Alive and Well at Hanford

      It’s getting real out at Hanford in eastern Washington, the site of the most expensive (and likely dangerous) environmental clean-up in the world. On July 21, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along with watchdog group Hanford Challenge and UA Local Union 598 Plumbers and Steamfitters, filed an emergency legal motion asking US Judge Thomas Rice to intervene and force the US Department of Energy and federal contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to protect their workers from toxic vapor exposure at the site.

      “[It’s] as serious as it gets,” Ferguson told King 5 News. “At Hanford there’s a culture of indifference by the federal government and their contractors. Frankly, we’re not going to put up with it anymore…. So right now we’re trying to get before the judge immediately asking for immediate steps required from the federal government to protect workers. That’s the bottom line.”

      Allegedly, that “culture of indifference” is what got Sandra Black, an employee concerns program manager (ECP), fired in January 2015. Black, who worked for DOE contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was in charge of hearing out grievances raised by workers who have safety concerns, such as those working at Hanford. Black claims that she was terminated after speaking to investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

      “I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do,” Black said at a news conference, where she, along with three US senators presented the GAO report. “My disclosures included describing numerous incidents in which an SRNS corporate lawyer interfered with an ECP investigation, directed an ECP investigator to change findings or substantiated retaliation to not substantiated.”

      SRNS strongly denies firing Black for her cooperation with the GAO. Nonetheless, the GAO report, which was released in July, was damning in what it revealed.

      The report claimed that the DOE had “taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment — in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable.”

      In other words, the buck stops with nobody.

      “Our problems are with the way the Energy Department allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is,” Diane LoFaro, who worked on the GAO report, told the Center for Public Integrity. “Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors’ cultures.”

      So what happens when over 100 workers are exposed to toxic vapors while working to remediate Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste? According to Dave Lee, an instrument technician at Hanford, when issues are raised that may help prevent such exposures, the DOE and their contractors fight back.

    • Crowdfund Aims To Help Ex-Muslim Atheist Girl Facing Threat Of Execution Escape To The West

      An ex-Muslim atheist girl from an Arab Gulf State who faces execution in her home country if her religious affiliation were to be discovered is, with the help of the internet, planning an escape to the west.

      The girl, known on the web under the pseudonym “Dee,” currently resides in a Gulf State country where atheism is punishable by death. According to the fundraiser, her parents are also fundamentalists, who “would not hesitate to turn her over or perform an honor killing themselves if her atheism was discovered.”

      Dee also goes by the pseudonym “Haram Girl” on Twitter, where she posts regular critiques of Islam and Muslim culture. She describes herself as an atheist, a classical liberal, and an egalitarian.

    • Clinton Scandal: Bill Took Millions From Group That Pushes Sharia Law

      Ethics: When it comes to the Clintons, the scandals never end. This week, it was revealed that Bill Clinton took millions in money from a special “educational foundation” that pushes Sharia law — the basic law of Islam — around the world.

      “Why would Bill Clinton be participating in programs that teach Sharia in foreign countries where that is the specific objective of the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and al-Qaida,” Stephen Coughlin, a counterterrorism expert, wondered in an interview with the Daily Caller, which first reported the story.

      It’s a good question. The former president took some $5.6 million total from 2012 through 2014 from Dubai-based GEMS Education, which runs 51 Sharia schools in the Mideast having some 250,000 students. It has schools in other countries and regions, including Asia, the United Kingdom, Africa and even Chicago, which has two schools. As the Daily Caller reports, GEM uses one-eighth of the proceeds of its schools “to fund Islamic Jihad.”

      Oh yes, and, the Daily Caller reports, GEMS also gave the Clinton Foundation millions of dollars.

    • Chicago releases video of police shooting Paul O’Neal, unarmed black teen (GRAPHIC VIDEO)

      Footage of the fatal encounter between Chicago police officers and unarmed black teenager Paul O’Neal has been released by the city. Police review agency chief described the video as “shocking,” while a family lawyer called it an “execution.”

      O’Neal was killed by CPD officers in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood on July 28, after crashing a Jaguar convertible that was reported stolen earlier in the day in Bolingbrook, a suburb to the west. The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed he was shot in the back.

      On Friday, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) posted dashboard and body camera footage from four of the officers involved in the shooting.

    • Why Are Police So Afraid of Bold, Black Women Like Korryn Gaines?

      The brutal death of a 23-year-old African-American woman named Korryn Gaines has sparked yet another much-needed conversation in the United States about the use of lethal force by police and its disproportionate impact on blacks.

      Gaines was killed in her Maryland home by Baltimore County police, who had issued a warrant for her arrest over charges stemming from a traffic violation and her failure to appear in court. The young mother was armed with a shotgun that she apparently pointed at police, although they fired first. She responded with a round of shots and then police fired back, killing her and injuring her 5-year-old son.

    • Black Lives Matter Groups Stage Protests Across the U.K. (Multimedia)

      The United States’ Black Lives Matter movement has been making headlines for its protests in response to recent killings by police, but many Americans don’t realize that the United Kingdom has its own growing Black Lives Matter movement.

      Five years ago, Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in London. His death prompted widespread riots throughout the U.K. In recognition of the anniversary of his death, BLMUK staged protests in five cities Friday.

      In the days leading up to the protests, BLMUK posted a video outlining its reasons for action. Speakers in the video name those killed by police in the past eight months. Many of their statements echo problems of racial injustice in the U.S. “Black people face far more severe sentencing than white people for the same offense,” one man notes.

    • A Lawyer Who Turned the Tables: Graphic Biography Immortalizes Leonard Weinglass

      Leonard Weinglass stands in the grand tradition of the legendary 20th century lawyers who themselves joined social justice movements and helped the popular forces to move history forward — including Clarence Darrow, Constance Baker Motley, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Kunstler, Florynce Kennedy, Arthur Kinoy, Lew Steele, Jeff Haas, Michael Ratner, Jan Susler, George Crockett, Conrad Lynn, Nancy Hollander, Dennis Cunningham, Lynn Stewart, Lani Guinier, Leonard Boudin, Flint Taylor, Ernest Goodman, Charles Garry, Joey Mogul, Michael J. Kennedy, Walter Riley and Jeff Adache — and he’s earned the exalted rank of “People’s Lawyer.”

    • White Police Officer Convicted of Manslaughter for Death of Unarmed Black Teen

      Former Portsmouth police officer Stephen Rankin faces up to 10 years in prison for the death of William Chapman, who was killed last April in a Walmart parking lot as Rankin attempted to apprehend the 18-year-old under suspicion the teen had shoplifted, Huffington Post reports. It is unclear whether Chapman actually stole anything from the store.

    • Judge Tosses 200 Hours Of Recordings From FBI’s Courthouse Bugs

      The fallout from the FBI’s surreptitious bugging of county courthouses in California has coalesced into two motions to suppress — with two very different outcomes. What makes this even more interesting is that both decisions were issued in the same judicial district.

      Judge Phyllis Hamilton denied a motion to suppress last week. While she had concerns about the location of the bugs used in the FBI’s investigation of property auction price fixing, she reached the conclusion that the recording of conversations that occurred in a public area did not violate the defendants’ expectation of privacy. The decision hinted Judge Hamilton would be hard pressed to find any conversation in public — no matter what attempts were made to prevent bystanders from listening in — worthy of an expectation of privacy.

      Judge Charles Breyer, however, has reached the opposite conclusion. Breyer dug deeper into the location of the recording devices and questioned whether the FBI was crossing a line by placing them in areas where privileged conversations might occur.

    • State Supreme Court Rolls Back Decision That Would Have Made Violating Company Computer Policies A Crime

      The Oregon Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that should help prevent the state’s computer crime laws from turning into a local level CFAA — something that can be easily abused by prosecutors to, say, toss someone in jail for two years for 40 minutes of headline altering at a news website.

      Caryn Nascimento was arrested for theft after using a convenience store’s lottery machine to print off thousands of dollars of tickets she never paid for. But rather than settle for the theft charges, the state chose to charge her with unauthorized use under Oregon’s broadly-interpreted computer crimes statute.

      The state appeals court upheld the conviction, prompting the EFF to intervene in her case when it headed to the state supreme court. The EFF pointed out that the appeals court decision would criminalize a lot of behavior normally only subject to companies’ internal disciplinary processes.

    • Frustrated Public Defender Appoints Governor — And Licensed Attorney — To Provide Indigent Defense

      Providing public defenders for criminal defendants may be Constitutional but it certainly isn’t popular. When states look for places to cut budgets, far too often they find trimming public funding for defense lawyers is an easy way to find extra money without suffering any significant public backlash. After all, this is just money being wasted defending guilty people, right? It’s just shady lawyers ensuring criminals are back on the street as swiftly as possible by exploiting loopholes in the system citing violations of their clients’ Constitutional rights. To many members of the public, this is money that could be better spent elsewhere — even as they enjoy the benefits of the Constitutional amendments (4th-6th, mostly), public defenders are constantly protecting from additional damage.

      So, a right guaranteed by the Constitution becomes a privilege extended by the grace of the state, subject to clawback and only offering defendants the promise that someone with an already-unmanageable caseload will try to fit them in somewhere. Meanwhile, defendants who can’t make bail get to sit around in a jail cell until someone from an underfunded public defender’s office can attempt to suss out the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case in between all the other cases they’re already falling behind on.

  • DRM

    • EFF to FTC: Online Retailers Must Label Products Sold with Digital Locks

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of consumer groups, content creators, and publishers asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today to require online retailers to label the ebooks, songs, games, and apps that come with digital locks restricting how consumers can use them.

      In a letter sent to the FTC today, the coalition said companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple have a duty to inform consumers if products for sale are locked with some kind of “digital rights management” or DRM. Companies use DRM to purportedly combat copyright infringement, but DRM locks can also block you from watching the movie you bought in New York when you go to Asia on vacation, or limit which devices can play the songs you purchased.

      “Without DRM labeling, it’s nearly impossible to figure out which products have digital locks and what restrictions these locks impose,” said EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow. “We know the public prefers DRM-free e-books and other electronic products, but right now buyers are in the dark about DRM locks when they go to make purchases online. Customers have a right to know about these restrictions before they part with their money, not after.”

    • DRM: You have the right to know what you’re buying!

      Today, the EFF and a coalition of organizations and individuals asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to explore fair labeling rules that would require retailers to warn you when the products you buy come locked down by DRM (“Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management”).

      These digital locks train your computerized devices to disobey you when you ask them to do things the manufacturer didn’t specifically authorize — even when those things are perfectly legal. Companies that put digital locks on their products — ebook, games and music publishers, video companies, companies that make hardware from printers to TVs to cat litter trays — insist that DRM benefits their customers, by allowing the companies to offer products at a lower price by taking away some of the value — you can “rent” an ebook or a movie, or get a printer at a price that only makes sense if you also have to buy expensive replacement ink.

      We don’t buy it. We think that the evidence is that customers don’t much care for DRM (when was the last time you woke up and said, “Gosh, I wish there was a way I could do less with my games?”). Studies agree.

      The FTC is in charge of making sure that Americans don’t get ripped off when they buy things. We’ve written the Commission a letter, drafted and signed by a diverse coalition of public interest groups, publishers, and rightholders, calling on the agency to instruct retailers to inform potential customers of the restrictions on the products they’re selling. In a separate letter, we detail the stories of 20 EFF supporters who unwittingly purchased DRM-encumbered products and later found themselves unable to enjoy their purchases (a travel guide that required a live internet connection to unlock, making it unreadable on holiday), or locked into an abusive relationship with their vendors (a cat litter box that only worked if resupplied with expensive perfume), or even had other equipment they owned rendered permanently inoperable by the DRM in a new purchase (for example, a game that “bricked” a customer’s DVD-R drive)

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Megaupload 2.0 Will Link File Transfers to Bitcoin Transactions

        Kim Dotcom is teasing fresh information about his Megaupload 2.0 project set to launch in January 2017. Noting that every file transfer will be linked to a bitcoin transaction, Dotcom says the new platform will take decentralization, anonymity & encryption “to the next level”.

      • Kim Dotcom dumps out a load of new Mega information

        NON-PUBLICITY SHY internet phenomenon Kim Dotcom is bursting at the seams with news about the new file storage system that he is developing to replace the one closed down with sledgehammers by the FBI and the one that he walked away from while grumbling.

      • Photographer Learns To Embrace The Public Domain… And Is Better Off For It

        There are constant debates over the value of the public domain. As you know, in the US, Congress has repeatedly expanded and extended copyright law to effectively wipe out the public domain. No new works have gone into the public domain because of copyright law (other than works by the Federal government) in many years, and that likely won’t change for many years either. The only way works go into the public domain these days are through some sort of public dedication, such as by using the Creative Commons CC0 license — though very careful lawyers may remind you that even this is not technically putting the work in the public domain. Under the current Copyright Act there really isn’t a way to officially put something in the public domain. A copyright holder can only make an effective promise that the work should be treated as if it’s in the public domain by declaring it so.

        The fact that the law is so hostile to the public domain is no accident. If you look at the history of the debates about copyright shows the legacy copyright industries being actively hostile to the public domain, and making a variety of silly, nonsensical (and flat out wrong) arguments about the public domain. They’ve argued that putting works in the public domain removes all value from the work. They’ve also claimed that putting works in the public domain will cause it to be over-utilized, since it’s free, thereby harming its value in a different way. The fact that these two arguments seem to conflict with each other was more or less ignored. And then you even have the extremely ridiculous claims that the public domain is theft of private property. Paul Heald has done some tremendous research on how all of the hyperbolic statements about how awful the public domain is simply aren’t true. But that’s looking at historical data.

      • DOJ Makes Smart Decision On Music Licensing… Music Publishers Completely Lose Their Shit

        For the past couple of years now, the Justice Department has been exploring the so-called “consent decree” around music publishing. This was an agreement, first made in 1941, and then reviewed in 2001, on how music performing rights organizations (mainly ASCAP and BMI) could operate without violating antitrust rules. Without such consent decrees, there was a quite reasonable fear that the performing rights organizations (PROs) would abuse their monopoly positions. This is not a theoretical argument. If you look around the globe, there are many, many, many, many, many stories of these organizations behaving badly.

        In this case, ASCAP and BMI had been whining that because of those darn internet companies not paying enough, they need to get rid of the consent decree, mainly so that they can do more to jack up rates (there’s more to it, but the end result is they want to be able to withhold rights to force rates up). Of course, in opening up this can of worms, they also got the DOJ to start looking more closely at other practices, including an exploration into so-called split works or “fractional licensing.” The details here can get confusing, but in short: when a work has multiple copyright holders, many have argued that you need to get a license and/or approval from every copyright holder. But if you look at the legislative history of the 1976 Copyright Act, legislators made it clear that under the act, they intended to make it clear that any copyright holder in a work with multiple authors had the right to license the whole work.

08.05.16

Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is Putting an End to Lots of Software Patents; Patent Microcosm Spins and Distracts From This

Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Still championing patent quality after a dark age of rubberstamping under David Kappos

PTAB

Summary: Hope for the US patent system as some of the most controversial abstract patents are declared invalid and thrown aside

THE ROLE of the PTAB, the scientific collective responsible for abolishing a lot of software patents by proactive action, is increasing. Things are changing very rapidly, but corporate media isn’t reporting (or misreporting) on it. This is good news for opponents of software patents anywhere in the world.

PTAB has enemies. Its enemies are people who profit from patents on software, notably patent lawyers. They are currently discrediting PTAB using the term/notion of “reverse patent trolls” (invalidating bad patents is trolling?!). MIP has had a decent series about PTAB this past week. The earlier part speaks of “authors of a new white paper [who] believe that almost 75% of pharmaceutical patent settlements at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board meet the criterion for inferring a strong likelihood of reverse payment settlement. The paper also suggests a rule to deter attempts to exploit the Board as a holdup device as well as discussing reverse patent trolls” (meaningful and inappropriate term).

“Things are changing very rapidly, but corporate media isn’t reporting (or misreporting) on it.”Lobbyist for software patents, David Kappos, also pushed out a so-called ‘white paper’ without disclosing who was paying him for all that (it’s pretty ugly and it definitely discredits the USPTO where he was previously a Director, the highest position and equivalent of President at the EPO).

Another installment from MIP then gave a detailed breakdown of law firms that profit from all this chaos of poor patent examination at the Patent Office. We recognise many of these firms. MIP said that “Sterne Kessler has become the first law firm to handle more than 500 AIA proceedings, with a particularly strong showing representing defendants. Fish & Richardson is the top law firm for challengers at the PTAB, breaking the 300 petition mark” (Fish & Richardson was mentioned here many times before.

The part which we didn’t quite appreciate was the one where Michael Loney of MIP was cherry-picking like climate change denialists, making it appear like PTAB was on the decline with the headline “July CBM petition filing slumps to lowest level since February 2013″ (skip to third paragraph for context).

PTAB staff may be taking their summer’s break and as Loney later noted, “PTAB Monthly Data and Analysis: July was the second-busiest month of 2016 for petition filing, but covered business method petitions fell to the lowest level since February 2013. Recent decisions from the Board include cancelling claims on a patent that had been used to sue more than 250 defendants” (CBMs are part of a broader picture).

“This is good news for opponents of software patents anywhere in the world.”To put things in perspective: “The month seems particularly strong when compared with that time of year in previous years. July in 2015 and 2014 was a relatively quiet month with both June and August of those years having at least 50 more petitions filed than the July figure.” Another article took note of 11% litigation decline last month, showing that the system was gradually correcting itself. To quote, “407 cases were filed in US district courts in July, with two new plaintiffs leading the way and entities such as Shipping and Transit, Uniloc, Sportbrain and Guyzar adding to their 2016 totals” (these are mostly patent trolls).

MIP looked more closely at one particular case and said: “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has invalidated all the claims of a patent owned by storage software company Boxbee in a post-grant review (PGR) proceeding brought by Netsirv and Local Motion. This is the third final written decision in a PGR, all of which have resulted in patents being invalidated.”

It is hardly surprising. PTAB typically demolishes the patents it looks into, leaving patent lawyers rather scared and bashful (in the face of their clients). A software patents lobbying site, for example, got so upset at PTAB that Gene, its founder, tried cursing at it (“impotence”). Here is a new take about PTAB in the “Post-Alice World”. It says: “Only 16% of the Board’s eligibility decisions fully reversed the eligibility rejections, and none of the other 84% of the applications have been allowed despite the effort and the expense of the appeal.”

“PTAB typically demolishes the patents it looks into, leaving patent lawyers rather scared and bashful (in the face of their clients).”Yes, so what? They’re obviously trying to discredit PTAB, a cornerstone of AIA. Here is one patent attorney leaning on Bascom, in spite of the case's old age (they’ll refer to it forever because they’re running low on supportive cases), saying it “turns this on its head by holding that the Patentee must proffer prior art to show 101 validity. Alice shifts burden of proof.” A sponsored “REPORT” (i.e. paid marketing) from IAM repeats this same talking point. They just can’t help it, can they? PTAB combined with Alice is a nightmare to them and all they can do it ridicule Justices, call PTAB “impotent” (low blow), and mislead clients into believing that nothing has changed.

“Lawyers are liars,” my wife told me years ago. She had heard that saying quite a lot. It certainly is the case when it comes to a lot of patent lawyers, at least those who are pushing their agenda into articles (self promotion disguised as ‘analyses’). █

The USPTO and Legal System Are Tightening Patent Scope, Which Means Virtually No Software Patents Anymore

Posted in America, Patents at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

…Not even if the algorithms are run on some “general purpose computer” (whatever that means!)

Time is tight

Summary: Software patents and lawyers who depend on them are running out of time and running low on spin/cherry-picking/excuses

YESTERDAY we wrote about video streaming patents and a notorious podcasting patent getting invalidated, with admission from the USPTO that it granted in error (prior art, not just Alice). Some software patenting proponents caught up with it and posted a link to the full decision: “Dist. Of DE Kills 2 Video Streaming Patents with Alice/ 101: http://assets.law360news.com/0824000/824998/04313306922.pdf …”

The word “kills” is intended to give this a negative connotation, just like “attacks” and “death squad” (same person uses these words a lot).

This wasn’t a CAFC decision and that’s actually noteworthy because nowadays the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is a lot more likely to invalidate/reject software patents based on Alice. Speaking of CAFC, a new article by Dennis Crouch speaks of scope limitation induced by “consisting of” inside patents. To quote:

Although our attention over the past few years has focused more on eligibility and definiteness issues, claim construction continues to befuddle the courts. In MultiLayer Stretch Cling Film v. Berry Plastics (Fed. Cir. 2016), the Federal Circuit has offered a split interpretation of the patent’s Markush group claim element.

The asserted cling-film claim requires “five identifiable inner layers with each layer being selected from the group consisting of LLDPE, VLDPE, ULDPE, and mLLDPE resins.”

So here we have another example of tightening patent scope, other than what’s related to Alice.

Speaking of Alice and CAFC, Troutman Sanders LLP wrote in the software patenting proponents’ site earlier today, noting that according to CAFC, “Software means plus function claims Indefinite for failure to disclose algorithm,” or in other words software patents are not “function [if you] then disclose a “general purpose computer” as the structure performing that function.”

This is noteworthy because efforts to pass/sneak in software patents in India, Europe and New Zealand have relied on attempts to ascribe physical properties to software by stating in the patent application that it runs on some machine (typically just some ordinary off-the-shelf PC or server). To quote the funnier part from the above: “The Court also affirmed that the this means-plus-function term was indefinite. In the case of computer-implemented functions, the specification must disclose an algorithm for performing the claimed function. The patents-in-suit did not disclose an operative algorithm for the claimed “symbol generator.” The function of generating symbols must be performed by some component of the patents, but the patents did not describe this component.”

So the patent/s did not even describe an algorithm, let alone pseudo-code!

It definitely looks as though patent lawyers are growing nervous, seeing year after year how more and more abstract patents get thrown down the toilet/wastebasket, essentially devaluing the remainder (those not tested in the court or in PTAB, which we shall write about next). █

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