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10.01.15

The Microsoft Botnet Goes Bonkers and ATMs Running Windows Spew Out Cash

Posted in GNU/Linux, Security, Vista 10, Vista 7, Windows at 5:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Mission-critical” and “Windows” are not possible to mention in the same sentence

Manchester Airport

Summary: The terrible security (by design) of Microsoft Windows is causing all sorts of very serious and collectively expensive issues

NOW that Rianne and I are back from vacation (Manchester Airport is shown above) we are amused to see even Dan Goodin, a selective basher of Free software, covering this latest blunder from Microsoft (affecting Vista 7). Sosumi dropped this pointer last night in the #techrights IRC channel and since then the word has been spreading rather quickly. Dan Goodin finally writes about the Microsoft Windows botnet (Windows Update, for a change) and Microsoft rushes to do ‘damage control’ by going after journalists. To quote Goodin:

“Microsoft said a highly suspicious Windows update that was delivered to customers around the world was the result of a test that wasn’t correctly implemented.

“We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Ars. The message included no other information.”

Yeah, whatever. It’s hard to refute something like that, but it may as well be a lie. It would be hard to prove what actually happened unless someone from the inside (like a whistleblower) got contacted. It’s all secretive and proprietary. Here is what the British media (Goodin’s former employer) wrote: “The Register poked Microsoft about the issue, and a spokesman told us: “We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it.”

“How that sort of thing happens, though, we’re not totally clear on. The bizarre update has certainly confused a load of Windows users, who hit the support forums in search of answers.

“Beginning with Windows 10, Microsoft has begun touting a new strategy of “Windows as a service,” where updates are continuous and automatic, and only enterprise customers are given the option of refusing them.”

When the Microsoft botnet (commandeered by the NSA and not just Microsoft, which grants the NSA access) goes awry we should all be reminded of the importance of software freedom. Windows Update, with automatic invocation in particular, is a truly terrible thing (even in Free software). Not only state-sanction spies but crackers too can exploit it, through back doors for example.

The monopolist knows that people are increasingly worried about all this remote control-like functionality. Microsoft Peter now comments [1] on mass surveillance (even on keystrokes) in Vista 10 after Microsoft admitted that mass surveillance is very much intentional, not a glitch. People inside Microsoft told me that it’s only getting worse (at development stages) and bound to get worse by the next release of Windows.

In other news, proprietary Windows and proprietary RAR now facilitate remote access by secret agencies (see this discussion). To quote Net Security: “A critical vulnerability has been found in the latest version of WinRAR, the popular file archiver and compressor utility for Windows, and can be exploited by remote attackers to compromise a machine on which the software is installed.”

The press hardly covered this. Instead it got obsessed with “XOR DDOS”. Weak passwords are to blame, not GNU/Linux, but all the headlines name “Linux”. There are finally some decent articles about it, not FUD from Microsoft boosters and insecurity firms (looking to sell their services).

Another bit of FUD came from The Inquirer last week (mentioned in our daily links). The Inquirer changed the headline after falsely accusing/blaming Linux, merely because the acronym XFS was mentioned (purely Windows in this case, not related to the Linux file system). Here are some articles about it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. In short, lots of ATMs are being exploited not because of Linux but because they don’t use Linux. This is because of Windows. What kind of company STILL uses Windows in ATMs and banking in general? This is a platform of botnets and back doors, it’s simply unfit for purpose. Guess who pays the price for clueless technologists who put Windows in banks (which can receive bailout from taxpayers)? Just imagine where we would be if airplanes ran Windows… █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Microsoft reaffirms privacy commitment, but Windows will keep collecting data

    The second category is personalization data, the things Windows—and especially Cortana—knows regarding what your handwriting looks like, what your voice sounds like, which sports teams you follow, and so on. Nothing is changing here. Microsoft says that users are in control, but our own testing suggests that the situation is murkier. Even when set to use the most private settings, there is unexpected communication between Windows 10 and Microsoft. We continue to advocate settings that are both clearer and stricter in their effect.

Black Duck Continues to Pile FUD on Free/Libre Software

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A FUD mill, just like many national newspapers

Daily Express building

Summary: Having spent nearly a decade promoting the fear of Free software licensing, Black Duck now does the same regarding Free software security

Black Duck, the company that virtually came from Microsoft (or a Microsoft veteran), is badmouthing security of Free/libre software again, obviously in order to sell its proprietary software but perhaps to also help proprietary software companies (like Microsoft).

“Black Duck is not part of the Free/Open Source software community but a parasite within it.”Black Duck’s CEO, according to CRN, “spoke on a panel at the MassTLC Security Conference this week, said open-source components are frequently and easily breached.

““If you want to know how to exploit open-source [projects], just go to YouTube and you’ll see how to do it. It’s that easy,” he said.”

Unlike proprietary software? Are there no YouTube videos about how to exploit or take advantage of holes in proprietary software? Nonsense. Over the years I came across quite a few, including nearly a dozen about Novell’s proprietary software (while researching Novell back in the days). The same can be said about the licensing FUD that comes out of Black Duck. Why won’t they ever speak of the BSA with its devastating effects that can sometimes bankrupt a business? Black Duck is not part of the Free/Open Source software community but a parasite within it. █

09.30.15

Links 30/9/2015: New Kernels, Nexus Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 key trends in open source

    Open source’s technology leadership, along with an exponential increase in the sheer number of projects, leads to a final, somewhat ironic observation: It’s still tough to be an independent vendor of open source software. Those few vendors who stick to the traditional pay-for-support-only model tend to struggle, whereas an increasing number of “commercial open source” companies offer multi-tiered subscriptions that recall the proprietary world. In the latter case, less capable community versions sometimes remind you of old-fashioned “free trial” software.

  • Exclusive Interview: Emby Founder Luke Pulverenti

    Before Emby, I had limited open source experience. I submitted small bug fixes here and there to different projects that I took an interest in. The Media Browser project was always fully open source, and with the re-branding to Emby we felt that was the best way for the project to continue moving forward.

  • FCC Rules Endanger Open Source Wireless Router Firmware

    Open source wireless router firmware may become tougher to install in the United States, if not illegal. That’s if device manufacturers interpret new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules involving radio frequencies to mean that user-modified software should be banned.

  • Bromium Makes Open Source Security Research Tool Available

    The open source community generally hasn’t produced many security analysis tools. For the most part, the tools required to do malware research are available only under a commercial license from security vendors that sell security software and hardware.

  • An inside look at open source at Twitter

    Twitter has about a couple thousand engineers across the company working on a variety of technologies, from as deep as the Linux kernel to front-end Javascript libraries. It’s hard to pick anything in particular, but recently we have graduated Apache Parquet from the Apache incubator and are working on adding stateful service primitives to the Apache Mesos project so we can run MySQL in a Mesos cluster.

  • Maintaining momentum in an open-source community

    Building an open-source community takes dedication, hard work and no small number of late nights. As a community gets started there is generally a sense of momentum, ownership and deep commitment. But what happens once your community becomes established and successful? Inevitably volunteers are going to cycle in and out. As a community leader, you need to consider methods to bring in new members, spread the workload and communicate where and when the project could use help. How can you maximize growth and maintain your momentum?

  • Doors opening for open source data visualization tools

    Open source data visualization technologies have matured to the point where users say the available tools can handle large amounts of their visualization workloads.

  • Personal, Corporate, and In-Between Fraud
  • How Would Software Freedom Have Helped With VW?

    Would software-related scandals, such as Volkswagen’s use of proprietary software to lie to emissions inspectors, cease if software freedom were universal? Likely so, as I wrote last week. In a world where regulations mandate distribution of source code for all the software in all devices, and where no one ever cheats on that rule, VW would need means other than software to hide their treachery.

    Universal software freedom is my lifelong goal, but I realized years ago that I won’t live to see it. I suspect that generations of software users will need to repeatedly rediscover and face the harms of proprietary software before a groundswell of support demands universal software freedom. In the meantime, our community has invented semi-permanent strategies, such as copyleft, to maximize software freedom for users in our current mixed proprietary and Free Software world.

  • Noteworthy Open Source Projects: Bitcoin to Storage

    The volume of new open source projects is staggering. In years past, it was sometimes difficult to find enough quality projects to fill a lenghthy list, but this year there were more than enough—so many, in fact, that it’s likely we overlooked some deserving projects.

  • HashiCorp Unveils Otto Open-Source App Delivery Tool

    In addition to Otto, HashiCorp launched Nomad, an open-source scheduler for deployment and resource maximization.

  • How open source can help businesses reclaim control of IT

    In an age where data availability and visibility is crucial, many organisations have found that their existing infrastructure has severely limited their options. Sometimes this is down to poor system design that prevents interoperability, but in others the intention is deliberate – a practice known as ‘vendor lock-in’.

  • Dropbox open sources Zulip chat app

    File hosting service Dropbox, Inc has released its Zulip chat application under an open source Apache Foundation licence.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla creates web tools and practices for open science

        Mozilla’s mission is to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the web.

        The Science Lab represents an important community of practice where we can model training around open data and open source, project-based learning, and offer fellowships and mentorship programs to further leadership development around these areas.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Five years of LibreOffice

      LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity of community project leaders. At the time it was a brave – although necessary – decision, because it was rather clear to everyone that OpenOffice.org was not going to survive for a long time under Oracle stewardship.

      In fact, the group of 16 founders launched an independent free software project under the stewardship of The Document Foundation, to fulfil the promise made by Sun ten years before – at the time of the first announcement of OpenOffice.org – of an independent free software foundation capable of pushing forward the free office suite to the next level.

    • Celebrating 5 years of LibreOffice
    • LibreOffice Celebrates Its Fifth Birthday as the Sole Microsoft Office Contender
    • Five years of LibreOffice
    • Coming soon… Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

      A new OpenOffice update, version 4.1.2, has been in preparation for a while. Born as a simple bugfix release, it became an occasion for some deep restructuring in the project: several processes have now been streamlined (and some are still in the works), new people are on board and infrastructure has been improved.

      Now the wait is almost over, and we are approaching the final phases before the 4.1.2 release. But we still need help with some non-development tasks, like QA and final preparations (press release, release notes and their translation).

    • LibreOffice Conference Brings Updated 5.0.2

      The second minor release to the milestone 5.0 branch was announced at the start of this year’s LibreOffice Conference, taking place in Aarhus, Denmark. Italo Vignoli posted to the Document Foundation blog of the latest LibreOffice release saying, “The LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever.” Today’s update brings over 110 fixes in several key areas.

    • LibreOffice Celebrates Five Years

      In two lengths, the book begins with those who initially announced the news of the fork. Charles Schulz, Leif Lodahi, and Micheal Meeks are among those included. Available in two lengths, the PDF book begins September 28, 2010 and ends with Lodahi’s template pitfalls post from Saturday. The full-length version contains 1227 pages verses the 668 of the shorter.

    • Templates – Avoid the pitfalls
    • OpenOffice Ain’t Dead Yet and TDF Conference

      The last release of OpenOffice, 4.1.1, was released almost one year ago and most folks have written the project off as dead or on life support. But Bruce Byfield today said it’s not dead yet and, in fact, may have made it over the hump. Meanwhile, The Document Foundation has been planning upcoming conferences and analyzing their success. In other news, some new goodies are in the pipeline for Mint Xfce and MATE users and Bryan Lunduke said the System 76 Serval Linux laptop is “ideal.”

  • CMS

    • Acquia Funding Tops $173M as Drupal 8 Release Nears

      While the open source Drupal content management system (CMS) is freely available, there is money to be made in support and services. This is where Acquia, the lead commercial vendor behind Drupal, comes into play.

      Acquia today announced a new $55 million Series G equity financing round, with investors Centerview Capital Technology, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Split Rock Partners.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Nasty DataBasin bug fixed

      DataBasin’s Select-Identify, an invaluable tool for many working with salesforce.com, showed erratic behaviour: extremely hard to reproduce even by sometimes re-running the same query on the same data set, the operation would just stop without any error in the console log, trapped exception or else.

      After extensive debugging I found the problem in the queryMore method of the API implementation in DataBasinKit. If queryMore had to return just one record, it would malfunction.
      Technically this happened because the size reported by Salesforce.com in the queryMore is not the size of the objects of the queryMore, but of the original query.

    • so I heard GNU turns 30 !
    • Interview with Noah Swartz of Privacy Badger

      We conducted an email-based interview with Noah Swartz of Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that detects and blocks third party tracking. If Privacy Badger notices a third party site that it thinks is attempting to track your browsing around the web it blocks it and prevents it from writing or reading cookies and other identifying information about your browser. Additionally Privacy Badger works with EFF’s newly drafted Do Not Track policy which aims to make user opt-out of online tracking a reality.

  • Public Services/Government

    • ‘German law mandates vendor-neutral ICT standards’

      Germany’s constitution makes the use of vendor-neutral ICT standards mandatory, according to the PhD thesis of Felix Greve, a German lawyer. The constitution demands minimum requirements for interoperability standards, Greve argues. The current lack of interoperability rules are a major barrier to the country’s uptake of free and open source software, in public administration and elsewhere.

    • Interoperability woes keep Hungary locked-in

      A multitude of interoperability problems is threatening Hungary’s central government use of free and open source office applications. Many of the government’s software solutions fail to take open document standards into account, stretching the office project’s support resources. The team is also finding it difficult to sustain support from IT management.

      [...]

      Last week, at the LibreOffice annual conference in Aarhus (Denmark), Kelemen spoke about the department’s implementation of the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools. The project started in 2013, and will end in October this year.

    • EC survey on ICT standards Digital Single Market

      The European Commission has launched a public consultation on Standards for the Digital Single Market. The EC is asking for priorities for standards in important technology areas critical to achieving the single market.

    • Madrid participation portal opens for discussion, voting to follow

      The portal is built on the Consul participation application, which is published by the City as open source software.

  • Licensing

    • Future Software Supply Chain Thoughts

      If you have thoughts on how to help make this automatable tracking of security, licensing, and copyright information available to the supply chain, ideas are most welcome. We’ll be having a Supply Chain Mini-Summit [8] in Dublin on Oct. 8th, and those interested in exploring this further are welcome to attend.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Syria and the Law

      The legal position is perfectly clear. Syria has a recognised government, that of President Assad, represented at the United Nations. That government is legally entitled to call on Russian military assistance. Russian military action against ISIL is therefore legal.

    • Total Bollocks From MI5

      In the last decade, now 7/7 has dropped out of this statistic, only one person has been killed in the UK by an Islamic terrorist attack. Let me repeat that. In the last decade, one person has been killed in the UK by an Islamic terrorist attack. That unfortunate death was Lee Rigby.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • VW scandal could prompt agreement on new tests

      The Volkswagen emissions testing scandal may speed up stalled EU talks on more accurate tests, as the shock waves of the scandal continue to reverberate in Europe.

      [...]

      In 1998, Swedish researcher Per Kageson already wrote about the technologies that allow cars to pass the emission test without having lower pollution levels in the real world. He told the New York Times that nothing was done to “make it much more difficult for manufacturers to beat the tests”.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Walker’s Partisans Poised to Raze Nonpartisan Government Accountability Board

      Stung by the campaign finance probe into potentially illegal coordination between Governor Scott Walker and independent campaign finance groups, the Wisconsin GOP is on the warpath. Governor Walker called for “dismantling” of the Government Accountability Board (GAB), the nonpartisan, independent agency that oversees Wisconsin elections, campaign finance and ethics laws.

    • Donald Trump Is Proud of Not Breaking the Law?

      In Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate, Donald Trump boasted proudly about rejecting a $5 million check–but really, he was boasting about not flagrantly breaking the law.

    • Why Is Rick Berman Attacking Chipotle?

      The PR man 60 Minutes dubbed “Dr. Evil”–Rick Berman–launched a new ad campaign this month against Chipotle.

      The profits of the fast food Mexican-style burrito company–which promotes whole foods over heavily processed factory food-type products–have surged while competitors like McDonalds and Burger King have tumbled. Chipotle has drawn a line in the sand on GMOs with its “G-M-Over It” campaign, as Americans’ concerns about genetically modified foods are growing.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Facebook Goes Down for the Second Time in a Week

      For the second time in a week Facebook users received an error message when trying to access their accounts on Monday afternoon. When reached via email, a Facebook spokesperson said the outages were caused by a configuration issue. Service was restored by early evening.

    • Lenovo, Again
    • Yet another pre-installed spyware app discovered on Lenovo computers

      A factory refurbished Thinkpad shipped with Windows 7 and a scheduler app that ran once a day, collecting usage data about what you do with your computer and exfiltrating it to an analytics company.

      The fact that this was taking place was buried deep in the user “agreement” that came with the machine.

      This is the third preloaded spyware scandal to hit Lenovo this year: first it was caught installing Superfish, which grossly compromised user security by installing a man-in-the-middle certificate into the operating system; then it got caught loading immortal, self-reinstalling crapware into part of the BIOS reserved for custom drivers.

    • Exile — ExBerliner Article

      So, being an exile effectively means that you have angered the power structures of your home country to such an extent that other countries feel compelled to give you refuge, partly for legal or principled reasons, but also for political expediency. The current most famous exile in the world is, of course, Edward Snowden, stranded by chance in Russia en route to political asylum in Ecuador.

    • Karma Police

      His opinion changed drastically over the summer of ’97 after we had blown the whistle on a series of crimes committed by the UK’s spy agencies. As a result of our actions — the first reports appeared in the British media on 24 July 1997 — we had fled the country and gone on the run around Europe for a month. At the end of this surreal backpacking holiday I returned to the UK to face arrest, pack up our ransacked home, and try to comfort our traumatised families who had known nothing of our whistleblowing plans.

    • Snowden joins Twitter and follows the NSA
    • Raytheon says new U.S. civilian cyber contract worth about $1 billion

      Raytheon Co on Monday said a new five-year contract it won from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help more than 100 civilian agencies manage their computer security could be worth $1 billion, a key win for the company.

      Raytheon said DHS selected it to be the prime contractor and systems integrator for the agency’s Network Security Deployment (NSD) division, and its National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS). The contract runs for five years, but some orders could be extended for up to an additional 24 months, it said.

    • How GCHQ Tracks Internet Users

      Lots more in the article. The Intercept also published 28 new top secret NSA and GCHQ documents.

    • From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities

      Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.

    • New Jersey Supreme Court OKs Warrantless Searches Of Vehicles

      We’ve written before about how limited the Fourth Amendment is when applied to drivers and their vehicles. A number of court decisions — along with continually-reinforced exceptions — have allowed police to pull over motorists for any reason imaginable. Once they have someone pulled over, it’s just a matter of obtaining consent from the driver or, failing that, coming up with a reasonable approximation of probable cause. (Drug dogs are a favorite.) After that, no warrant is needed to search the vehicle, along with the contents of any container found within it.

    • Carly Fiorina fesses to cosy HP/US intelligence agencies relationship

      PRESIDENTIAL POTENTIAL CARLY FIORINA has spoken of a time when HP made efforts to appease a data-hungry and terror-aware government with the speedy delivery of some servers.

      Fiorina, HP and the entire technology industry is under scrutiny and inspection concerning links between terrorism, terror tracking and technology. Her candid confession is a big one, and comes to us via The Register and its take on an article by an investigative reporter named Michael Isikoff.

    • Ed Snowden joins Twitter, follows only the NSA

      Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose leaked documents opened a worldwide discussion about government surveillance, joined Twitter this morning. So far, he’s amassed more than 400,000 followers, but he follows only one account: @NSAGov.

    • The Fundamentals of US Surveillance: What Edward Snowden Never Told Us?

      Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations rocked the world. According to his detailed reports, the US had launched massive spying programs and was scrutinizing the communications of American citizens in a manner which could only be described as extreme and intense.

    • China Pressures U.S. Companies to Buckle on Strong Encryption and Surveillance

      Before Chinese President Xi Jinping visits President Obama, he and Chinese executives have some business in Seattle: pressing U.S. tech companies, hungry for the Chinese market, to comply with the country’s new stringent and suppressive Internet policies.

      The New York Times reported last week that Chinese authorities sent a letter to some U.S. tech firms seeking a promise they would not harm China’s national security.

    • Hackers Prove Fingerprints Are Not Secure, Now What?

      The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently revealed that an estimated 5.6 million government employees were affected by the hack; and not 1.1 million as previously assumed.

    • NSA head: We need bulk collection

      The head of the National Security Agency on Thursday told Senate lawmakers that preventing his agency from collecting Americans’ information in bulk would make it harder to do its job.

      Under questioning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Adm. Michael Rogers agreed that ending bulk collection would “significantly reduce [his] operational capabilities.”

      “Right now, bulk collection gives us the ability … to generate insights as to what’s going on,” Rogers told the committee.

    • Wikipedia takes feds to court over spying

      The foundation behind Wikipedia is suing the U.S. government over spying that it says violates core provisions of the Constitution.

      The Wikimedia Foundation joined forces on Tuesday with a slew of human rights groups, The Nation magazine and other organizations in a lawsuit accusing the National Security Agency (NSA) and Justice Department of violating the constitutional protections for freedom of speech and privacy.

    • Data Protection: Unambiguous is Ambiguous

      The main pending issues for the European Data Protection Regulation will be discussed on 16th and 17th September during the coming trialogue meeting. The latest proposals from the Council visibly aim at limiting the guarantees provided to the users in favor of private lobbies.

    • International Surveillance: A New French Bill to Collect Data Worldwide!

      After the French Constitutional Council censored measures on international surveillance in the Surveillance Law voted last June, the government fires back with a bill that will be discussed at the end of September in the National Assembly. La Quadrature du Net strongly rejects the unacceptable clauses which would launch an “intelligence war” against our European and international partners.

    • Episode V: The Snooper’s Charter Strikes Back!

      After the huge success of a packed out hustings the Open Rights Group have two great events in one fantastic evening for our October Manchester Meetup.
      Please spread the word.

    • Episode V: The Snooper’s Charter Strikes Back!
    • French-American Lawyers to Refer to French Surveillance Watchdog against International Surveillance

      After yesterday’s announcement by the French government that the bill on International Surveillance will be discussed on a fast track procedure, the bill was adopted this morning at the Defence Committee by the French Lower Chamber in only twenty minutes and without almost any debate. An association of French-American lawyers and attorneys has just legally challenged the National Commission of Control of Security Interceptions (CNCIS, French Surveillance Watchdog) regarding the secret implementing decree of 2008. Could it be that the French government is worried about opening up its surveillance practices?

    • US surveillance makes ‘Safe Harbour’ data treaty with EU invalid, European court adviser says

      15-year-old ‘Safe Harbour’ agreement between the US and EU should not stop data transfers being suspended, legal counsel says

    • Safe Harbor Suspension by EU Court of Justice Is an Essential First Step

      The Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) published on 23rd September his conclusions in the case “Maximilian Schrems against Data Protection Commissioner”. The Advocate General, Yves Bot, recommends an invalidation of the Safe Harbor agreement which regulates the transfer of personal data of European citizens by online services like Facebook, to the United States. The Advocate General considers that the surveillance carried out by US intelligence services hinders fundamental rights of European citizens. La Quadrature du Net welcomes these clear and protective conclusions, and hopes that the EU Court of Justice will have the courage to follow him in challenging Safe Harbor as demanded by civil society since the first Snowden revelations. Additionally, putting Safe Harbour aside, his analysis of the NSA’s practices should also apply to mass surveillance by European governments, such as France.

    • Strategic Initiative Technology: We Unveil the BND Plans to Upgrade its Surveillance Technology for 300 Million Euros

      Fiberglass tapping, real-time Internet traffic analysis, encryption cracking, computer hacking: Germany’s foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is massively expanding its Internet surveillance capabilities. We publish its secret 300 million Euro investment programme „Strategische Initiative Technik“. Members of Parliament and civil society criticise the agency’s new powers and demand an end of the whopping armament programme.

    • Civil rights groups condemn draft mass surveillance bill to be adopted in France

      The undersigned civil and human rights organisations call on French parliamentarians to reject the draft law on surveillance measures for international electronic communications (Proposition de loi relative aux mesures de surveillance des communications électroniques internationales). The bill fails to defend and protect the right to privacy of individuals worldwide.

    • MI5′s first live interview

      Last week was the first time someone from MI5 has given a live public interview.

    • Dropping Privacy and Civil Liberties Board highlights need for judicial authorisation

      Open Rights Group has responded to the announcement in today’s Terrorism Acts report that plans for a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board have been dropped.

    • Microsoft reaffirms privacy commitment, but Windows will keep collecting data

      The second category is personalization data, the things Windows—and especially Cortana—knows regarding what your handwriting looks like, what your voice sounds like, which sports teams you follow, and so on. Nothing is changing here. Microsoft says that users are in control, but our own testing suggests that the situation is murkier. Even when set to use the most private settings, there is unexpected communication between Windows 10 and Microsoft. We continue to advocate settings that are both clearer and stricter in their effect.

  • Civil Rights

    • The ex-Muslim Britons who are persecuted for being atheists

      Like other ex-Muslims, she says the importance of being true to herself outweighs the very real loneliness of being disowned and the guilt placed on her.

      “When I came out to my family my auntie told me my brothers and sisters wouldn’t be able to get married because their honour would be tarnished. And it would all be my fault.”

      The fear is constant too. “I used to live in Bradford for a time and I’d be very quiet about it because there are Muslims everywhere. I still have this innate fear, it’s hard to explain. You just want to keep quiet about it. It’s just safe to stay quiet.”

    • Court Smacks Prosecutors For Refiling Identical Charges In Hopes Of Keeping Evidence From Being Suppressed

      Prosecutors hate losing — so much so that they’re willing to color outside the legal lines for a chance at a win. Plenty of prosecutorial misbehavior has been uncovered over the years, most of it tied to the withholding of exonerating evidence.

    • Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Wants to Make the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Even Easier to Abuse

      This summer, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse introduced an amendment to the flawed Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA) that would make it even worse, by expanding the broken Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). EFF has proposed common sense changes to this federal anti-hacking law, many of which were included in “Aaron’s law,” recently reintroduced. While CISA was delayed by strong grassroots opposition over the summer, it looks likely to move soon—bad amendments and all. That’s why we’re urging people to take action and tell the Senate to vote no on this and any other dangerous CFAA changes.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Buying Rights to Profit from Wrongs

      The media has been publically shaming Martin Shkreli, a Big Pharma (Turing Pharmaceuticals.) CEO who hyped the HIV drug price by 5455% (from $13.50 to $750 per tablet) and is reported to have hyped a cystinura drug by almost 2000%. This is a perfect example of why Piracy, or sharing should not be considered a crime and why our clear policy on the NHS handling drug research is again shown to be a viable option to prevent drug prices from harming patients.

    • Copyrights

      • Letter from AmeriKat: Remember fair use before issuing DMCA notices, warns Ninth Circuit

        In yesterday’s decision United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reminded rights owners of the need to assess whether their material is being used legally (in that it is fair use) before dishing out Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. At issue in Lenz v Universal Music is a 29 second video of the plaintiff, Stephanie Lenz’s young children dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”. The 2007 clip shows primarily her toddler, hands grasped on a child’s toy stroller, grooving to Prince’s 1984 hit which plays loudly, but not particularly clearly, in the background. Like many a doting parent, Lenz recorded the video to show her friends and family that one of her children was learning how to walk. Lenz uploaded the clip to YouTube which managed to incur 200 hits before Universal issued a DMCA take down notice. Lenz twice appealed the takedown notice with the result that the clip was reposted on YouTube. It now has over 1.4 million views.

      • The “Happy Birthday” saga: when it may have been better not to have sued?

        Warner-Chappell Music in the song—Happy Birthday- has been rejected on the technical but legally dispositive ground that the necessary chain of title in the hoary song had not been proven. For this Kat, the really interesting question that emerges from this decision is why there seems to be such a widespread sense of satisfaction in the ultimate result. It is not simply that justice has been served; after all, a lot of copyright decisions have been resolved on the finding that the moving party failed to show good title. Moreover, the general public seldom gets excited by the nitty-gritty of copyright transfers.

      • Happy Birthday to everyone: candles blown out on infamous royalty claim
      • The final curtain in the GOLDBEAR saga

        Haribo’s suit against Lindt’s golden chocolate bear has provided the trade mark community with a lot to digest (see IPKat posts here, here and here). The premise is interesting: Haribo sued Lindt based on an alleged infringement of its word mark GOLDBEAR – undoubtedly very well known in Germany – by Lindt’s three-dimensional golden chocolate bear.

      • Rightscorp’s Copyright Trolling Phone Script Tells Innocent People They Need To Give Their Computers To Police

        We already wrote about the various filings in the Rightscorp-by-proxy lawsuit against Cox Communications. However, mixed in with all the filings are some interesting tidbits and exhibits. One that caught my eye was an exhibit revealing the “script” that Rightscorp gives its agents to use when people call in after receiving a notice. Cox Communications filed this in showing that the actual plaintiffs (BMG and Round Hill Music) “turned a blind eye” to Rightscorp’s misconduct. The script is quite something, with a few ridiculous statements. The most ridiculous, however, is the following.

09.28.15

Links 28/9/2015: Last News Catchup Before Resumption

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Being smart about open source: 5 practical tips for government use

    There is much written about the pros and cons of using open source software, generally with more emphasis on the pros. Open source evangelists have even convinced foreign governments (India and the United Kingdom, to name a few) to go so far as mandating the use of open source software. To make smart decisions, however, government agencies must carefully consider the project in question. Here are five tips for making sure important questions are not overlooked.

  • Github Open Sources a Tool That Will Teach Students to Code

    John Britton is Github’s “education liaison”, which means that he assists in bringing Github to schools and college campuses. The sweeping online service in the last few years have changed the way the way coders build software across Silicon Valley and beyond. According to Britton, it’s transforming the way that teachers teach coding now. In the end, Github is all about collaborating on code together.

  • Adblock Fast: A free and open source ad blocker for iOS 9
  • Adblock Fast is a free and open source way to banish ads in iOS 9
  • Open Source and Haiti: A Story of Care
  • Dropbox open-sources Zulip, the group chat app it acquired last year

    Dropbox has released Zulip, a group chat app, under an open-source Apache license. The move, announced today, comes after Dropbox acquired Zulip in March 2014.

    The client and server code is available on GitHub. You can download the client for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android here.

  • Study Reveals Insights About Enterprise Use of Open Source

    How is open source used in the large enterprise environment? A recent study from WIPRO and Oxford Economics titled “The Open Source Era” provided insights into that question. The report revealed that 21 percent of enterprises use open source software and 25 percent have deployed it in a business unit. However, 54 percent are in the planning phase of open source adoption.

  • Latest Brocade ODL controller, apps ease use of open source in cloud

    An OVSDB interface lets the Brocade controller direct a virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) topology, which is an overlay network on existing Layer 3 infrastructure. VXLAN technology makes it easier for network engineers to scale out a cloud-computing environment.

  • Google, Twitter Reportedly Developing Open Source Instant Article Solution
  • Facebook Open Sources React Native For Android So Devs Can Reuse Code Across Web And iOS
  • Pinterest open-sources Terrapin, a tool for serving data from Hadoop

    Pinterest today announced the availability of Terrapin, a new piece of open-source software that’s designed to more efficiently push data out of the Hadoop open-source big data software and make it available for other systems to use.

    Engineers at Pinterest designed Terrapin as a replacement for the open-source HBase NoSQL database for this particular process, because HBase had proven slow and didn’t perform well beyond 100GB of data. The company looked at open-source key-value store ElephantDB as a possible alternative, but that wasn’t perfect, either.

  • DreamFactory: Building a better backend for your apps

    A free, open source solution for connecting mobile, IoT, or Web apps to backend server data and services

  • Could VW scandal lead to open-source software for better automobile cybersecurity?

    Could fallout from Volkswagen’s cheating lead to vehicle manufacturers open-sourcing millions of lines of code for the sake of enhanced automobile cybersecurity?

  • Price – One Measure Of Lock-in

    For many, ignorance is the key lock-in. Folks born and raised as slaves may not appreciate there is any other life. Slaves may feel any competition to their slave-master is a threat to their way of life. Education is key. Students exposed to FLOSS at school will certainly know there is another way, a better way to do IT. Students I taught even knew how to install GNU/Linux and applications like LibreOffice. Today, there are many more retail shelves bearing GNU/Linux and LibreOffice than the bad old days. The stats show it. LibreOffice has over 100 million users. GNU/Linux as the classic desktop and Chrome OS are slowly but surely taking share in the world. Android/Linux is kicking butt.

  • Dropbox releases its chat app Zulip under an open-source license
  • Google Launches “Brotli” Compression Algorithm For The Web
  • Mycroft Aims to Be the First Truly Open AI That Belongs to Everyone

    Mycroft is a very successful project defined as an AI and home automation system, but its makers are hoping that it’s going be a lot more than just that.

  • Mycroft AI Home Automation Needs a Mascot, Competition Organized

    The Mycroft AI home automation system has been gathering quite a following, especially after it completed a Kickstarter campaign. Now, its makers are looking to find a fitting mascot for the Mycroft.

  • Events

    • My Dance Card for “All Things Open”

      Systemv Startup vs systemd: With all the continuing brouhaha surrounding systemd, this is a must on my list. From the abstract on this talk, it appears as if this will be a positive take on systemd — pragmatic, since it seems to be here to stay, like it or not 00 and will seek to explain not only how it works and how to configure it, but to explain why its development was deemed necessary. This one is being conducted by open source software and Linux advocate David Both, who’s byline has appeared on OS/2 Magazine, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, and OpenSource.com.

    • FUDCon Cordoba 2015
    • FUDCon LATAM 2015 – Cordoba

      FUDCon LATAM 2015 was held in Córdoba Argentina, and hosted by Valentin Basel, Matias Maceira and Laura Fontanesi, and all the local volunteers that helped make the event could happen.

    • DjangoGirls workshop in Pune

      During FUDCon, I heard that later in the year we might get a Django Girls workshop in Pune. If you never heard about Django Girls before, here is a quote from the website:

    • Dronecode workshop to be held at LinuxCon/ELCE in Dublin

      In a nod to the proliferation of Linux in drones, the Dronecode Project will host a workshop in conjunction with LinuxCon and the ELC in Dublin next month.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • How WebGL Works In Chromium

        If you’ve been curious how WebGL works in Chromium or other modern web browsers prior to hitting the graphics driver, here’s a lengthy explanation.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 41 Released With Many Small Improvements
      • Mozilla Releases SeaMonkey 2.38

        It’s not too often these days that we hear about SeaMonkey, Mozilla’s all-in-one Internet Suite, but an update to it is available this weekend.

        SeaMonkey continues to come equippped with email, IRC, HTML editing. and web browsing functionality and is powered by the latest Gecko engine release from Firefox. It was just earlier this week that Firefox 41 was released.

      • Firefox OS post-mortem

        So, it happened. My Flame stopped working, it just doesn’t react to anything (power off switch, power cable), and of course being a weird unknown China-only thing, no local repair shop would touch it. I probably could ask somebody at Mozilla for another one, but I already knew I wouldn’t. Let me write couple of words why I gave up on Firefox OS (not on Firefox or Mozilla!).

      • Mozilla’s Project Candle Aiming To Improve Firefox’s Power Efficiency
      • Webconverger Kiosk Devs Found Out Firefox Is Leaking Info

        “Prompted by the disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 and an inquiry whether Webconverger leaked any intranet information, we reviewed Firefox defaults. This review was accomplished with Wireshark, a tool that allows us to analyse every packet leaving and entering a Webconverger instance. Strictly speaking these Firefox defaults don’t leak any private information and elements like safe browsing should give an extra layer of malware protection, but in practice the network noise generated by these services are too risky for security,” reads the official announcement.

      • Rust 1.3 Further Stabilizes The API, More Efficient Substring Matcher

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Building enterprise data applications with open source components

      I first found myself having to learn Scala when I started using Spark (version 0.5). Prior to Spark, I’d peruse books on Scala but just never found an excuse to delve into it. In the early days of Spark, Scala was a necessity — I quickly came to appreciate it and have continued to use it enthusiastically.

    • Survey shows huge popularity spike for Apache Spark

      One popular number often noted by the Spark community is that its roughly 600 contributors make it the most active project in the entire Apache Software Foundation, a major governing body for open source software, in terms of number of contributors. That’s no small feat considering the number of popular enterprise database and infrastructure projects currently governed by Apache.

      And new numbers released this week as part of survey from Databricks, a software startup founded by the creators of Spark, shed some new light on just how popular the technology has become. One of the standout statistics has to do with attendance at user conferences, which are usually a good sign of interest in a technology and who’s using it. In 2015, attendance at Spark Summit events grew 156% to nearly 3,000, and the number of companies represented grew 152% to more than 1,100.

    • Ossipee

      OpenStack is a big distributed system. FreeIPA is designed for security in distributed system. In order to develop and test each of them, separately or together, I need a distributed system. Virtualization has been a key technology for making this kind of work possible. OpenStack is great of managing virtualization. Added to that is the benefits found when one “Fly our own airplanes.” Thus, I am using OpenStack to develop OpenStack.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Making the case for Free Software at Universities

      Delivering this talk represented a challenge for me. My audience are freshman, that have been in college for all of three to four weeks. Your regular presentation is not going to work. My audience have left home, making new friends, and enjoying new freedoms, making adult decisions. For most freshman, their journey is just beginning and if I were to use my own experience, constantly evolving. Where you started out might be completely different and that could be said to continue even in your adult life. We are after all works in progress. The other challenge is that perception of Free Software / Open Source is applicable only to computer science. That is of course patently untrue, considering how this concept has now spread to so many other sectors. Creating something requires a wide range of skillsets and its just not about coding.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • AArch64 desktop: day one

      Nowadays if you are lucky you can even have AArch64 hardware. The problem is that there is no desktop class one still. Mustang and Seattle are server boards, Juno is development platform, Hikey is out of stock, Dragonboard 410c has 1GB of memory (same as Hikey) and rest of “publicly available” AArch64 hardware is in Android or iOS devices.

    • AArch64 desktop: day two
    • AArch64 desktop — last day

  • Health/Nutrition

    • U.S. drug company sues Canada for trying to lower cost of $700K-a-year drug

      A U.S. drug company is taking the Canadian government to court for its attempt to lower the price of what has been called the world’s most expensive drug.

      Alexion Pharmaceuticals has filed a motion in Federal Court, arguing that Canada’s drug price watchdog has no authority to force the company to lower its price for Soliris.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jeremy Corbyn loses the battle on Trident after trade unionists side with Labour MPs to block the move

      Jeremy Corbyn will avoid a divisive vote on the Labour party’s policy on Britain’s nuclear deterrent at its conference this week after major unions said they would block the new leader’s attempts to adopt an anti-Trident stance.

      Labour party delegates were expected to vote on whether to renew Trident nuclear weapons or scrap them as party policy on 30 September, but the motion failed to win the support needed from activists in a ballot selecting which topics the party will debate at its conference in Brighton.

    • Labour party torpedoes Trident debate in blow to Jeremy Corbyn

      Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was handed an embarrassing defeat yesterday afternoon, as his own party members voted against debating the renewal of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system.

      Corbyn has long campaigned against replacing Trident, and it had widely been expected that delegates at the Labour party’s annual conference in Brighton this week would vote on a motion backing the newly elected leader’s views.

    • Jeremy Corbyn suffers blow as Trident vote rejected at conference

  • Finance

    • Opinion: Secret Trade Negotiations Threaten Sustainable Development Goals

      Yet as the United Nations announce goals to be achieved by 2030, a crucial but secret trade meeting is taking place to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will set the economic rules for 40 percent of the world economy, and threatens to undermine the U.N. goals before they have even begun.

      The Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, are made up of 17 general goals with 169 targets, including an end to extreme poverty and hunger, providing universal access to clean water and protecting the world’s oceans. The initiative is supported by 193 countries, the United Nations, the World Bank and countless non-profits, and establishes the international development agenda for the next 15 years.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Traveling to North Korea – 15 Myths You Shouldn’t Believe

      There is probably no other place on this planet which receives so much negative press as North Korea. Given the totalitarian nature of DPRK’s government and the country’s isolation, one can easily understood why the country receives so little love. However, what’s really worrying though is that a lot of media outlets do not even make the slightest effort to really understand the country and its people or even pay a visit to the Hermit Kingdom to see how the country looks from inside.

      As a result, there are a lot of myths circulating around the web concerning traveling to North Korea. Some of them are totally ridiculous, others make a bit more sense. When I visited North Korea in August 2015, I had the unique opportunity to challenge some of the misconceptions about tourism in DPRK. As usual, I did my best to keep the mind open and at least for the time being, forget a lot what I had heard about traveling to North Korea before.

  • Privacy

    • RFC: Using video conferencing for GPG key signing events

      I have a geographically-diverse team that uses GPG to provide integrity of their messages. Usually, a team like this would all huddle together and do a formal key-signing event. With several large bodies of water separating many of the team members, however, it’s unlikely that we could even make that work.

    • Purism Librem 13 Funded, But Will Likely Fail To Provide Freedom & Privacy

      This known backdoor, the Intel Management Engine, is signed by Intel. This means that you can’t run your own version without Intel’s permission. Purism claims to be working on unlocking it (presumably to remove these nasty features), but customers who previously bought a librem (hundreds of librem 15 customers, myself included, and the hundreds of people that bought the librem 13) will be stuck with a locked Management Engine. If Purism is successful in unlocking the ME to run unsigned modified versions, that will only affect newer laptops shipped by the company, not older ones that were sold previously.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Hey FCC, Don’t Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers

      On the coastal edge of Tunisia, a signal bounces between 11 rooftops and 12 routers, forming an invisible net that covers 70 percent of the city of Sayada. Strategically placed, the routers link together community centers–from the main street to the marketplace. Not long ago, the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali government censored access to the Internet. The regime is gone now. And this free network gives the community unfettered access to thousands of books, secure chat and file sharing applications, street maps, and more.

09.26.15

Links 25/9/2015: GNU/Linux in Indian Government, NeoKylin in China

Posted in News Roundup at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Box, LinkedIn and WhatsApp share open source advice
  • AT&T’s Chiosi: Open source is critical to integrated cloud architecture

    The telecom industry needs to be wary of different versions of open source platforms taking hold in the industry as it moves to the new IP. That was the message from Margaret Chiosi, a distinguished network architect at AT&T Labs (NYSE: T) and president of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), at the NFV Everywhere event in Dallas last week.

  • MemSQL makes it easier to hook up to Apache Spark

    Apache Spark may be the fastest data processing engine around for big data, but unless you are conversant in Scala or Java, this cluster computing framework can be a pain to set up and manage.

  • Tectonic Preview is now open to the public

    Tectonic is an enterprise platform that provides out-of-the-box Kubernetes clusters on CoreOS Linux.

    Kubernetes is a Google-sponsored platform for managing clusters of Linux containers, while CoreOS Linux is a container-native operating system for containers, one of several container-native operating systems in active development.

  • World finally ready for USB-bootable OS/2

    eComStation, the Dutch-owned company that offers a PC operating system based on IBM’s OS/2, has floated the idea of a USB-bootable version of the OS.

    The firm keeps the OS/2 torch burning by offering a PC OS that lets users run OS/2 apps. The outfit claims the likes of Boeing, Whirlpool Corporation and VMware use its software, usually in applications where they can upgrade PCs but still need to run OS/2 code.

  • Apache Big Data Preview: Q&A with IBM’s Anjul Bhambhri

    As a preview to the upcoming Apache Big Data Europe conference, we spoke with with Anjul Bhambhri, Vice President, Big Data and Analytics, IBM Silicon Valley Lab, who will be giving a keynote presentation titled, “Apache Spark — Making the Unthinkable Possible.” We talked with Bhambhri about IBM’s involvement with open source and what Big Data really means.

  • Google Launches Service for Managing Hadoop, Spark Clusters

    Cloud Dataproc will make it easier to administer and manage clusters, the company says.
    Big data analytics technologies such as Hadoop and Spark can help organizations extract business value from massive data sets, but they can be very complex to administer and to manage.

    Hoping to help reduce some of that complexity, Google Wednesday announced the launch of a new service dubbed Cloud Dataproc for customers of its cloud platform. The service is currently available only in beta and is designed to minimize the time businesses spend on administering and managing computing clusters in Hadoop and Spark environments.

  • Cloudera is building a new open-source storage engine called Kudu, sources say

    The storage engine, Kudu, is meant as an alternative to the widely used Hadoop Distributed File System and the Hadoop-oriented HBase NoSQL database, borrowing characteristics from both, according to a copy of a slide deck on Kudu’s design goals that VentureBeat has obtained. The technology will be released as Apache-licensed open-source software, the slides show.

  • Inside The GitHub Systems Where Open Source Lives

    Sometimes the best way to cope with scale is to keep things simple and do everything you can to avoid it. This is the approach that GitHub, the repository service for the popular Git source version control tool created by Linus Torvalds a decade ago, has taken as it has grown explosively and become one of the centers of gravity for open source software development.

  • GitHub Open Sources a Tool That Teaches Students to Code

    GitHub is a way for software engineers to share, shape, and collaborate on code. And it’s also a good way of teaching people to do the same thing.

  • Get ready to meet Kudu, a new, open-source storage engine from Cloudera
  • Dronecode Hosts Workshop As Open Source Drones Proliferate

    The Linux Foundation’s Dronecode Project is hosting a workshop in Dublin, Ireland on Oct. 5, as well as a Flight Day event at a nearby airport on Oct. 8, to showcase open source Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology. These events bookend LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which is being held Oct. 5-7 at Conference Centre Dublin.

  • Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet
  • Introducing Lemur
  • The Volkswagen Scandal Is Just the Beginning

    Last week, the EPA revealed that it had trusted Volkswagen’s diesel cars, without checking to see where they kept their brains. It sent a letter to the carmaker detailing how VW programmed about 500,000 cars over half a decade to cheat on its emissions tests. (The worldwide total, VW has revealed, is now 11 million.) It’s a story of massive corporate fraud but also an object lesson in everything that’s terrifying about a world in which cars and other things can think for themselves.

  • 8 key open source software foundations (and what makes them key)

    Open source software foundations are proliferating: Every month it seems that a new one is announced — Open Contain Initiative (OCI) and Cloud Native Container Foundation (CNCF) are just two of the more recent launches.

  • First look: Facebook’s open source React library
  • Facebook takes Relay JavaScript framework open source
  • What CIOs can learn from Facebook’s use of open source
  • Google’s open source attempt to undercut Facebook

    As much as we like to talk about the open-source community, it might be more accurate to describe it as an open-source club. No, not the kind you join, but rather something you use to pummel someone.

  • Bossies 2015: The Best of Open Source Software Awards

    Whenever you hear someone complain about developer productivity, just slap them. Having slogged through hundreds of open source projects each year for the past several years, I can assure you that developers are extremely productive. Every time we put together this package — InfoWorld’s annual Best of Open Source Awards, aka the Bossies — I end up wishing developers were just a little less on the ball.

  • Pumpiverse community update

    Earlier this week, pump.io creator Evan Prodromou announced that, due to budget and time pressures, he was looking to move pump.io into a community-governed project structure. “Ideally, what I’d like to do is transfer the copyrights, domains and data to a non-profit that could collect donations to keep the servers running. Budget-wise, it’s about $5K/year, including servers, domain registration, and SSL certs. It’d also be great if some of the people who have been sending in pull requests could start working on the software directly. There are a lot of PRs backed up.”

  • Events

    • IT industry: Moot highlights role of open source technologies

      Speakers at a conference have emphasised the importance of developing an annual plan for the promotion and advocacy of open source technologies to reduce the import of licensed software worth millions of dollars.

      A day-long conference was organised by the Open Source Foundation of Pakistan, in collaboration with the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Zong Pakistan, Pakistan Software Export Board, NADRA Technologies Limited and others. Leaders of the industry shared their expertise and shed light on how to use and develop open source technologies. HEC Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmed underlined the need of measuring the progress according to the target set in the annual plan. “HEC, on behalf of universities, is always available to extend all kind of support to promote open source technologies in the country,” he said. He added open source had resulted in a paradigm shift which created a lot of opportunities for youth.

    • Enter for a chance to win a free pass to All Things Open 2015
    • The DevConf.cz 2016 Call For Participation is now open
    • Software Freedom Day 2015 Phnom Penh

      Saturday the 19. September was Software Freedom Day, an worldwide organized day full with events on various places. I participated in the event in Phnom Penh, which was hold at the National Institute of Posts, Telecommunications and ICT (NIPTICT). It was the second time this event was hold in Phnom Penh and at this place and it begins to grow. There was around 100 participants. The event started in the afternoon and was just a single track with various talks. Fedora was presented by Leap Sok who hold an talk “Understanding Software Virtualization” and me with “Fedora.next And Beyond – Fedora For Everybody”. We also distributed arround 100 DVD to the audience, we met also some people who already use Fedora on their computer.

    • SFD Phnom Penh 2015 roundup

      It’s the second time I organize Software Freedom Day in Phnom Penh! I would like to thank everyone who volunteered, joined and/or presented yesterday. We had a great event and a nice turnout. It seems we managed to have a better focus on our audience this year.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • How safe and secure is open-source OpenStack?

      Last month we explored the pros and cons of open-source OpenStack, a platform I admittedly love, but which is not meant for everyone (for reasons laid out in that post). Today the topic shifts to OpenStack security. Why security? Because security is not only a hot media topic, but also one that automatically forces the CIO/CTO to analyze his or her own security situation within the organization. Is your open-source OpenStack network secure?

    • The return of TryStack, life as a PTL, and more OpenStack news
    • 5 new guides for working with OpenStack

      Cloud computing is an immensely complicated subject, and it can be hard to keep pace with the speed of development. When you look at a large collaborative project like OpenStack, it can be easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of pieces of the puzzle you need to be able to put together. But don’t worry! There are lots of resources out there to help you, including the official documentation, various OpenStack training and certification programs, as well as tutorials from the community members themselves.

    • Tesora Enterprise 1.5 Expands OpenStack Database as a Service

      New features in Tesora Enterprise 1.5 include several from the upcoming OpenStack Liberty release, providing improved MongoDB and Reddis database support.
      OpenStack database-as-a-service (DBaaS) vendor Tesora released version 1.5 of Tesora Enterprise 1.5 today, providing users with new features including several that are part of the upcoming OpenStack Liberty release.

      Tesora is a venture-backed vendor that has raised $14.5 million in funding to date, including a $5.8 million round announced on Aug. 13. The company is one of the leading contributors to the OpenStack Trove DBaaS project, which is part of the OpenStack Liberty milestone that is set to officially debut on Oct. 15. Among the new updates in Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition 1.5 that come from OpenStack Liberty are improved MongoDB and Reddis database support.

    • The official user survey, visualizing your cloud, and more OpenStack news
    • HP Launches New HP Vertica For Big Data Open Source Adoption

      HP has ramped up efforts in the open source big data and analytics space, adding extensive support to open source technologies in the latest release of its HP Vertica analytics engine.

    • Apache Big Data Preview: Q&A with Pivotal’s Roman Shaposhnik

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Always be shippable

      Drupal will soon be 15 years old, and 5 of that will be spent on building Drupal 8 — a third of Drupal’s life. We started work on Drupal early in 2011 and targeted December 1, 2012 as the original code freeze date. Now almost three years later, we still haven’t released Drupal 8. While we are close to the release of Drupal 8, I’m sure many many of you are wondering why it took 3 years to stabilize. It is not like we didn’t work hard or that we aren’t smart people. Quite the contrary, the Drupal community has some of the most dedicated, hardest working and smartest people I know. Many spent evenings and weekends pushing to get Drupal 8 across the finish line. No one individual or group is to blame for the delay — except maybe me as the project lead for not having learned fast enough from previous release cycles.

    • The keenness of a higher ed Drupal devotee
    • Eloquently coding in Drupal, one line at a time

      For going on two years, Hussain Abbas has been consistently achieving at Axelerant—an India-based, open source incubator—where he holds the title of technical architect. His experience runs the gamut from x86 assembly and C#, to modern PHP-based platforms, to mainly Drupal these days. Hussain happened to be in the middle of a community summit at DrupalCon Los Angeles this year when we began talking about his dedication to the project he contributes to nonstop.

  • Education

    • Getting started with open source machine learning

      What is machine learning? It is the use of both historical and current data to make predictions, organize content, and learn patterns about data without being explicitly programmed to do so. This is typically done using statistical techniques that look for significant events like co-occurrences and anomalies in the data and then factoring in their likelihood into a model that is queried at a later time to provide a prediction for some new piece of data.

    • 6 open source tools to help educators stay organized

      The number of universities and schools that have opted for open source alternatives of popular properties solutions has significantly increased over the last years. We often hear about adopting OpenOffice or LibreOffice as alternatives to Microsoft Office or about replacing Windows with Linux. Nevertheless, the amount of open source software designed specially for teachers still remains limited. Here are some tips on how to make the school life easier with the help of the commonly used open source software.

  • Business

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Universal Permissive License added to license list

      We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Universal Permissive License (UPL). The UPL is a lax, non-copyleft license that is compatible with the GNU GPL. The UPL contains provisions dealing explicitly with the grant of patent licenses, whereas many other simple lax licenses only have an implicit grant. While making the grant perfectly clear is a reasonable goal, we still recommend using Apache 2.0 for simple programs that don’t require copyleft. For more extensive programs, a copyleft license like the GNU GPL should be used to ensure that all users can enjoy software freedom.

    • September 2015 GNU Toolchain Update
    • GNU Autoconf Archive – News: Noteworthy changes in release 2015.09.25

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Munich app increases political transparency

      A group of volunteers, consisting of OKF (Open Knowledge Foundation) members and developers, has built an alternative web application to the official website of the Munich City Council, the goal of which is to increase the transparency of local political life.

    • Madrid launches eParticipation portal
    • Eco-geeks hold open source alternative to UN climate talks

      Divided by borders, assembled in hierarchies and motivated by the kind of competitive ideology shared by the neoliberal business class, this meeting embodies the self-interested conventions of the old world. Unsurprisingly, the context has resulted in a failure of shameful proportions.

    • Welcome to the era of open source cars

      Even if they’ve been longtime partners, the tech sector’s influence on the automotive industry has never been stronger. OEMs in Detroit, Stuttgart, Seoul, and elsewhere are continually transforming cars to meet the demands of consumers now conditioned to smartphones (and their 18-month refresh cycle). Much of this is being driven by cheap and rugged hardware that can finally cope with the harsh environment (compared to your pocket or an air-conditioned office) that a car needs to be able to handle. Wireless modems, sensors, processors, and displays are all essential to a new car in 2015, but don’t let this visible impact fool you. The tech industry is having a broader influence on the automobile. Hardware is important, but we’re now starting to see larger tech philosophies adopted—like the open source car.

    • Open Data

  • Programming

    • APIs, not apps: What the future will be like when everyone can code

      A couple of decades ago, if you spent every day in chat rooms with your friends, you were a nerd. Today if you do the same thing, you’re just the average Facebook user. And so it’s no surprise there’s a gold rush mentality in the learn-to-code movement. With the tech industry booming and its products so pervasive in our lives, the allure of six-figure tech salaries make plenty of people pack up and head West (literally).

Leftovers

  • FIFA President Sepp Blatter Facing Criminal Proceedings In Switzerland

    FIFA President Sepp Blatter has been the target of U.S. and Swiss corruption probes for months, and allegations of wrongdoing have swirled around him for even longer. Even as criminal probes resulted in the arrest of 14 FIFA officials in May and claimed his right hand man earlier this month, Blatter has largely remained above the fray.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Cannabis ‘forest’ discovered in south-west London

      A cannabis “forest” has been discovered by police officers in a wealthy borough of south-west London.

      Scores of marijuana plants can be seen surrounded by native plant life in images posted on social media by officers from Kingston upon Thames.

    • Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history

      Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals. Even tens of thousands of years ago, our stone age ancestors were already responsible for a series of ecological disasters. When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet’s ecosystem. It was not the last.

      About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of Homo sapiens. In scene two, humans appear, evidenced by a fossilised bone, a spear point, or perhaps a campfire. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre-stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, have gone. Altogether, sapiens drove to extinction about 50% of all the large terrestrial mammals of the planet before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

    • GM Mustard in India: a Case of Monumental Fraud and Unremitting Regulatory Delinquency

      The approval and planting of large-scale field trials of genetically modified (GM) mustard in India is currently taking place. According to environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues, this is completely unconscionable. It is occurring even as the Supreme Court-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Report awaits adjudication in India’s Supreme Court, which expressly recommends a bar on herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops. As a result, Rodrigues is mounting a legal challenge as the lead petitioner in a Public Interest Litigation.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Microsoft puts a bullet in blundering D-Link’s leaked key that made malware VIPs on PCs

      Microsoft has finally revoked D-Link’s leaked code-signing key, which gave malware the red carpet treatment on millions of Windows PCs.

      Last week, it emerged that, for six months between February and September, D-Link exposed its private code-signing key to the world in a firmware download. Anyone who stumbled upon this key could use it to dress up malware as a legit-looking D-Link application, tricking Windows and users into trusting it.

      The key expired at the start of this month, meaning it cannot be used to digitally sign new malware. But any software nasties signed using the key earlier in the year would still be trusted and run by Windows PCs.

    • Filling in the holes in Linux boot chain measurement, and the TPM measurement log

      When I wrote about TPM attestation via 2FA, I mentioned that you needed a bootloader that actually performed measurement. I’ve now written some patches for Shim and Grub that do so.

      The Shim code does a couple of things. The obvious one is to measure the second-stage bootloader into PCR 9. The perhaps less expected one is to measure the contents of the MokList and MokSBState UEFI variables into PCR 14. This means that if you’re happy simply running a system with your own set of signing keys and just want to ensure that your secure boot configuration hasn’t been compromised, you can simply seal to PCR 7 (which will contain the UEFI Secure Boot state as defined by the UEFI spec) and PCR 14 (which will contain the additional state used by Shim) and ignore all the others.

    • Would you trust Intel, Vodafone, Siemens et al with Internet of Things security? You’ll have to

      A new non-profit foundation dedicated to improving security in the “internet of things” launched on Wednesday.

      More than 30 companies including Intel, Vodafone, Siemens, and BT are the founding members of the foundation, whose mission is to “make the Internet of Things secure, to aid its adoption, and maximize its benefits.”

      The IoTSF will focus on best practices and knowledge sharing. It will host a conference in London in December on IoT security.

    • Security wares like Kaspersky AV can make you more vulnerable to attacks
    • Friday’s security updates
    • Encryption back doors: Is there more to this debate?

      As the the encryption access debate heats up in the United States and abroad, statements like the one above have become commonplace.

      But this is not just another expert giving an opinion. Rather, it’s the potent observation of Michael Chertoff, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, former Federal Appeals Court judge, ex-Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and, for almost a decade, a prosecutor.

      Speaking at a conference this summer, Chertoff crystallized what he sees as the risks of heading down such a path (that could likely prevent use of certain kinds of encryption). First, there is increased vulnerability. “You’re basically making things less secure for ordinary people,” he said.

    • Patch Bugzilla! Anyone can access your private bugs – including your security vulns

      That’s because someone’s found a way to easily access private bugs in your codebase – such as critical security holes you’re still working on to fix. An attacker must be able to register for a normal account via email, before exploiting a programming blunder to gain extra access.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • EU-US data flows using “Safe Harbour” may be illegal because of NSA spying

      The “Safe Harbour” framework—which is supposed to ensure data transfers from the EU to the US are legal under European data privacy laws—does not satisfy the EU’s Data Protection Directive as a result of the “mass, indiscriminate surveillance” carried out by the NSA. That’s the opinion of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) Advocate General Yves Bot, whose views are generally followed by the CJEU when it hands down its final rulings.

    • Mapping How Tor’s Anonymity Network Spread Around the World

      Online privacy projects come and go. But as the anonymity software Tor approaches its tenth year online, it’s grown into a powerful, deeply-rooted privacy network overlaid across the internet. And a new real-time map of that network illustrates just how widespread and global that network has become.

    • Tor becomes extra secure as .onion becomes Special-Use Domain Name

      The dark web browser Tor has now become extra secure as the .onion url has now been assigned special-use status. The Engineering Task Force (IETF) along with Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, part of ICANN, has granted formal recognition to the .onion domain, adding it to the list of Special-Use Domain Names.

    • A key signing party keyserver as a Tor hidden service

      Key signing parties are a pain and hopefully, one day, we will have better ways to authentication keys than reading hexadecimal strings out loud.

      The Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol makes them much more bearable already by having only one single hexadecimal string read out loud. That string is the cryptographic hash of a document given to every participant listing all participants and their fingerprints. If everyone has the same hash, then we assume that everyone has the same document. Then, participants in turn will confirm that they fully recognize the fingerprint listed in the document.

      Alexander Wirt wrote a small key server dedicated to receive keys from the participants. There is also a script that will generate the document from the submitted keys and a ready-to-use keyring. The latter can be run automatically using inoticoming when a new key arrives. Finally, it would be nice if participants could confirm that their key has been properly added to the document, e.g. by making the list available on a web server.

    • Video: Spy Agency’s Open Source Mapping Tool Helps First Responders Save Lives

      GeoQ organizes geospatial data from multiple sources, which prevents redundancy and determines where help is most needed.

      Project leader Raymond Bauer, with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, recently won Nextgov’s 2015 People’s Choice Bold Award for his efforts in spearheading GeoQ.

      It’s the first NGA project to leverage open source code-sharing site GitHub.

  • Civil Rights

    • Nigel Farage blames immigrants for Ukip being unpopular in London

      Newly arrived migrants are responsible for Ukip’s underwhelming electoral performance in inner London, the party’s leader has said.

      Nigel Farage argued that it was difficult for his party to beat Labour in the capital because of the city centre’s high proportion of foreign-born residents.

    • Ukip civil war re-erupts as Nigel Farage accuses Douglas Carswell of ‘residual loyalty’ to Tories

      Ukip infighting has broken out again in a row over which campaign the Eurosceptic party has decided to side with ahead of the EU referendum. Nigel Farage accused Douglas Carswell, the Conservative defector and Ukip’s only MP, of “residual loyalty” to his old party for not backing Arron Banks’s Leave.EU organisation.

    • Ukip conference: Farage and Carswell in battle over rival anti-EU campaigns

      Ukip is embroiled in a new civil war over the EU referendum at its annual conference, with Nigel Farage accusing his only MP Douglas Carswell of still having residual loyalties to the Conservatives.

      Farage made the comments amid discontent among some senior Ukip figures about his decision to officially endorse the grassroots Leave.EU campaign, which is being bankrolled by millionaire donor Arron Banks.

    • Nigel Farage mocks David Cameron with ‘piggy in the middle’ jibe

      Nigel Farage has mocked David Cameron over claims he put his genitals in a dead pig’s mouth while at university, referring to the Prime Minister as “piggy in the middle”.

      The prime minister is alleged to have placed “a private part of his anatomy into a dead pig’s mouth” as part of an initiation ceremony, according to a book published by former Conservative party treasurer Lord Ashcroft.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Jeb Bush Proudly Promises To Axe Net Neutrality If Elected

      The Jeb Bush campaign this week unveiled a major part of the candidate’s technology platform, and it likely includes taking a hatchet to net neutrality rules. The new policy outline on Bush’s website spends some time butchering the very definition of net neutrality as well, parroting several long-standing incumbent ISP narratives that net neutrality is somehow about content companies not paying their fair share, or that modernization of existing rules is somehow “antiquated.”

    • Why you should share your Internet connection

      uProxy is a browser extension that lets you share your Internet connection with people living in repressive societies. Much of the world lives in countries that severely censor and restrict Internet access. uProxy makes it a little easier to bring the free and open Internet to some of the darkest corners of the world.

      How does it work? Find out in this interview with Lucy He, Raymond Cheng, and Salome Vakhtangadze.

    • North America’s IPv4 address supply runs dry

      For the first time, the body responsible for allocating IP addresses in North America says its free pool of IPv4 numerical labels is exhausted.

    • FCC: Open source router software is still legal—under certain conditions

      With the Federal Communications Commission being criticized for rules that may limit a user’s right to install open source firmware on wireless routers, we’ve been trying to get more specifics from the FCC about its intentions.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pow! Appeals court assigns copyright to the Batmobile

        “Holy copyright law, Batman!” So goes a line in the first paragraph of a federal appeals court ruling announcing that the iconic Batmobile is a character protected by copyright.

        The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with DC Comics in its copyright infringement suit against Mark Towle, the operator of Gotham Garage, the maker of Batmobile modification kits.

      • Big, Confusing Mess Of A Fair Use Decision Over DMCA Takedowns

        Some potentially good news this morning — which may be undermined by the fine print. After many years of back and forth, the 9th Circuit appeals court has ruled that Universal Music may have violated the DMCA in not taking fair use into account before issuing a DMCA takedown request on a now famous YouTube video of Stephanie Lenz’s infant dancing to less than 30 seconds of a Prince song playing in the background. Because of this, there can now be a trial over whether or not Universal actually had a good faith belief that the video was not fair use.

      • EPA opposed DMCA exemptions that could have revealed Volkswagen Fraud

        We have written previously about the organizations and individuals who opposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions. These drones oppose the rights of users to backup, modify, and study the software and devices that we own. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions create legal penalties for simply accessing your software under your own terms, and raises those penalties even higher should you dare to share the tools needed to do so. It creates real penalties for anyone who wants to avoid Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) controls. The granting of exemptions to these totalitarian rules is a broken and half-hearted attempt to limit the damage these rules bring, granting for 3 years a reprieve for certain specified devices and software.

      • Appeals court strikes a blow for fair use in long-awaited copyright ruling

        The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit today issued a ruling that could change the contours of fair use and copyright takedown notices.

      • Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

        More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid.

        The result could undo Warner/Chappell’s lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

      • Happy Birthday Is Finally Public Domain, China’s Official Linux Distro…[Tech News Digest]

        The song “Happy Birthday” finally enters the public domain, a look at the Linux distro the Chinese government is hoping to replace Windows with, people are watching fewer season premiers this year, Pebble’s got an attractive new watch, and a cat that is absolutely up to no good.

09.25.15

Süddeutsche Zeitung Explains Imminent Federal Scrutiny Against Battistelli’s EPO in Germany

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Summary: The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals that actions by the German government may be imminent against the EPO’s cliquish management, including its ringleader Benoît Battistelli

ONE of the papers that most frequently cover the EPO scandals is Süddeutsche Zeitung (recall for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). There is a new article there and it explains that the EPO’s serious privacy infringements are going to come under federal scrutiny, with findings to soon be revealed and probably entail yet more media negative coverage. Using classic diversion techniques, the EPO is still trying to defect and mislead journalists; among the tricks we see fallacies of definition (e.g. “investigation”, “monitoring”, and “filtering” for abusive interrogation that can lead to suicides, mass surveillance and censorship, respectively), circular reasoning, victim-blaming (painting staff protests as the core issue, or characterising these protests as motivated by greed), misuse of the "racism" label (or personification of very broad issues) regarding 'poor' Željko Topić, and construction of one abuse in an effort to cover up previous abuses (recursive, as it leads to an endless chain of abuses that never end). This sort of comedy of errors is guaranteed to end with serious consequences, not just staff suicides but probably high-level staff resignations (saving face before layoffs/firings and/or criminal charges).

“The Süddeutsche Zeitung comments on the lack of supervision of data protection a the European Patent Office,” SUEPO explains, quoting: “The Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Andrea Vosshoff, is seriously concerned about data protection at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, and has made her views known to the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Bundestag. At the end of September the Federal Government will be issuing a report in committee. This has been prompted by a specific case: In June it became known that spyware had been installed on a computer in an area which was accessible to visitors.”

“Translations in English, French, and Dutch are available by scrolling through the document,” SUEPO added, enclosing this document of which we have made a local copy [PDF], just in case the EPO decides to once again intimidate SUEPO into self-censorship. Here is the English translation of the article:

English translation

European Patent Office Data Protection Commissioner calls for Supervision for Patent Office

17 September 2015, 18:47 hours

European Patent Office Data Protection Commissioner calls for Supervision for Patent Office

By Katja RIEDEL

The Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Andrea Vosshoff, is seriously concerned about data protection at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, and has made her views known to the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Bundestag. At the end of September the Federal Government will be issuing a report in committee. This has been prompted by a specific case: In June it became known that spyware had been installed on a computer in an area which was accessible to visitors. The background is the deep division between the management of the Office and parts of the staff body, with the involvement of their representative organization, the Suepo Union.

Persons unknown have been distributing communications attacking the President Benoît Battistelli and other high-ranking EPO representatives, and the purpose of the software is supposed to help identify the perpetrators. One patent judge was banned from his post immediately, and critics have viewed this as an impermissible intrusion and exceeding of authority. The incident aroused anger, just as the putative spying campaign did. Critics make the point that the risk of parties not involved at all – staff members, patent judges, or members of the Administrative Council – all have reason to be concerned about the security of their data.

The Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner, Thomas Petri, also sees the need for action. He has called for an independent external data protection supervisory body to be established for the Office. This is an issue involving sensitive and economically valuable data, and intellectual property. Petri has approached the Federal Commissioner Vosshoff. The problem is that the European Patent Organization is a state within a state, with its own laws, and the President has far-reaching rights and powers. The only legal supervisory body to which he has to answer is the Administrative Council, on which the 38 Member States sit. Critics complain that basic rules which apply in Germany cannot be imposed on the EPO. Data Protection Commissioner Vosshoff is demanding that the legal basis of the Patent Organization, the Patent Convention, should be supplemented by an external supervisory arrangement. She has made this proposal to the Ministry of Justice in the letter to the Committee on Legal Affairs, which is in the possession of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. So far, however, the Ministry has rejected the idea on the grounds that the Convention cannot be supplemented without the agreement of all the Member States.

Meanwhile, there is still no peace at the Patent Office. Last week EPO staff were again on the march in Munich, this time to the Labour Inspectorate. The reconciliation procedure which was ordered in the early part of the year, and which began with discussions, appears to have stalled in the interim. The Munich-based Chair of the Union is currently fearful of severe disciplinary measures. Without the approval of the Office management, she made it publicly known in an Internet blog that she was being informed on, internally; this is apparently being viewed as contravention of her obligation to maintain confidentiality. Up to Thursday afternoon, the EPO was making no comment.

There has been a reckless accusation and a shallow presumption about the source of the leak. If people pass things around among colleagues or external entities other than media (sometimes out of necessity, e.g. in the case of lawyers, legal advisers, family and so on), it is possible for the leaker to become someone other than the original recipient of some piece of information. The very fact that the EPO’s management is bullying a person under false pretenses or totally made-up assumptions (reinforced through ferocious repetition in Battistelli's and Bergot's echo chamber) just serves to show the utterly poor investigative skills, even with the addition of ‘British Blackwater’ (CRG) to the team, owing to Battistelli’s signing of the CRG deal, at taxpayers’ expense. The naked emperor has done a good job proving the Streisand Effect and he shows no signs of stopping.

The EPO (meaning its management) is a very rogue, revengeful, misguided body that is willing to even bully innocent people rather than interrogate members of the management, who are themselves facilitators of serious crimes, thankfully (for them) managing to break and/or dodge European laws at nearly every turn.

We do need an investigative unit. It needs to investigate EPO management and it must be completely external/independent from the EPO, which has been systematically subverted from the inside as if the EPO is a private company with just one shareholder, Mr. Battistelli. █

“That’s why I am president!” –Benoît Battistelli arrogantly exclaimed

09.24.15

EPO Managers, Patent Lawyers, Commissioners and Other Non-Technical Personnel Tackle Democracy, Alter Laws in Bulk and in Secret

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The will of the 1% is gradually becoming European law

Brittania Hotel

Summary: The reckless assault on European democracies and long-established laws across Europe are now lucidly demonstrated when it comes to patents

“EPO and OHIM study was saying that 90% of SMEs don’t use patents or trademark,” Benjamin Henrion wrote the other day, “but EPO did not want to put his name on the study” (lies by omission). The EPO is a nasty organisation whose goal is not to provide a service to the public or even to businesses in Europe. Its goal at the moment is to suck up to large corporations from all around the world in an effort to gain more power, or domination, in exchange for favours. The EPO is devouring Europe’s creativity and competitiveness. It’s an institution of occupation. 7 years ago Richard Stallman said that “the European Patent Office is a corrupt, malicious organisation which should not exist.” Now more than ever it should be rather self-evident. This issue is broader than just the EPO itself.

“What the hell,” wrote a TTIP opposer to the European Parliament a few days ago, “they want to create a new court exclusively for big business and you clap? Is democracy a joke to you?”

This was a rant about the likes of the UPC, which the EPO is supporting. “Seriously,” continued this rant, “now they want to create a special court paid by taxpayers exclusively for business to challenge democratic decisions?”

We are disturbed but not surprised to see patent lawyers and patent boosters celebrating and lobbying for the UPC. As Henrion put it, “Finland is ratifying Unitary Patent, I hope Effi can help to challenge it at their Constitutional court” (bullying and blackmail from central European authorities would likely ensue, as seen before in Mediterranean countries which opposed the Unitary Patent in its previous incarnation). Over at IP Magazine, a patents boosters’ site, it is said that “Finland & Lithuania [are] likely to ratify #UPC in coming months. Greece & Ireland in no hurry [...] momentum is building on #UPC. Generally accepted it is when not if the regime will happen” (source).

Boosters of patents, who profit from them without creating anything, are still fast-tracking it all. Lawyers from London say that London is putting the carriage before the horse, vainly assuming that UPC is already a reality and then preparing for it (self-fulfilling prophecies which raise the overall cost of revocation). To quote IP Kat: “After wringing the London rain from her whiskers and tail in the lobby of Aldgate Tower last Wednesday, the AmeriKat bounced up to the 8th floor where she was greeted by a bevy of UPC glitterati who were gathered, at the invitation of Baroness Neville-Rolfe (UK Intellectual Property Minister), to see the site of the UK’s Central Division and local division hosted in London (see previous posts here and here). The space felt cavernous but as soon as the walls are up as per the plan (see below) there won’t be too much room to swing a cat (not that you would ever do that, of course).”

We took note of this disturbing move before and Henrion too is upset that the “UK [is] presenting the building of the future patent court, already ignoring the option that the UK could do a Brexit” (there was not even a democratic process or a public discussion about it).

Dr. Glyn Moody, who is based on London, responded by saying that the “question is whether an ancillary agreement could allow UK to continue with UPC outside EU…”

Henrion then replied, “you mean the obligation to ratify because of the “sincere cooperation”? This was thrown out by the ECJ out of the AG opinion” (to which Moody added that he “was mis-remembering how much the EU’s structure were embedded in UPC; does indeed look a problem for brexit…”).

Linking to this page from the European Commission’s site, Henrion demonstrates that the Commission is now acting more like an agent of corporate power, not European citizens. “Enforcement of IPRs: follow the money,” as he put it.

It is going to be interesting to watch how European bureaucrats like Commissioners and EPO managers handle the ‘burden’ or the ‘nuisance’ of democracy. At the moment it sure looks like their agenda is everything but a public service. We saw that in ACTA some years ago and now we see it in so-called ‘trade’ agreements and ludicrous, gross overwrites of European law, as per the UPC for instance (making software patents legal and widely nforceable).

European law is being changed in secret, against any spirit of public participation, and obviously without a democratic process. Part of this we have seen in the way the EPO treats its employees (violating workers’ basic rights and ignoring court rulings that compel or enforce changes). The problem has broadened well beyond this and probably predates Battistelli’s days. █

Europe’s Acceptance of and Resistance to Software Patents, Courtesy of Corporate Front Groups and Courtrooms Respectively

Posted in Courtroom, Europe, IBM, Patents at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Printworks

Summary: A snapshot of recent developments and upcoming developments in Europe, regarding software patents in particular

EARLIER this week we chastised IBM for implicitly promoting software patents in India, just as it had done to promote software patents in Europe. Multinationals generally want to have these patents everywhere, especially if these multinationals are vast monopolies that deal with software. They want to crush competition using patents.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and a front group of IBM et al want to make software patents and Linux co-exist using so-called “non-aggression” pacts, which in practice barely work at all, not just because they cannot retaliate against patent trolls (see how Oracle sued Google over Android, despite their role in OIN). To quote their statement: “The Free Software Foundation Europe and Open Invention Network, with the participation of the Legal Network and the Asian Legal Network, are presenting two round table events with presentations and panel discussion of industry and community speakers, titled “Open Source and Software Patent Non-Aggression, European Context”. The events will be held in Berlin, Germany on October 21 and in Warsaw, Poland on October 22.”

This was also mentioned here and the FFII’s President reacted much like we did, stating: “Probably those 2 associations are doing nothing to prevent swpatv3, or the unitary patent” (more on that in our next post).

“Someone should tell Battistelli, who is a Frenchman, that the EPO must obey the laws of France and many other countries where software patents are not legal.”Some people seem to have grasped the important role which software patents play in the field of operating systems like Android. Free software is probably harmed the most because software patents are a stab at the heart of free distribution. See this new article titled “Apple, Samsung, Phones and Software Patents” for example. It is gratifying to see that more people now attribute the problem and lay the blame on software patents.

Recently, thankfully enough, April wrote about a decision that was widely overlooked in Europe. 6 days ago it stated that “[o]n June 18th, 2015, the Paris High Court (tribunal de grande instance — TGI) issued a ruling in the Orange versus Free case [fr] (both French ISPs); this ruling was published [fr] on September 1st, 2015. On this occasion, the court reaffirmed that software patents are illegal in Europe under the European Patent Convention (EPC). While this reaffirmation is good news, it nevertheless testifies to the possibility of filing software patent applications today in Europe.”

Someone should tell Battistelli, who is a Frenchman, that the EPO must obey the laws of France and many other countries where software patents are not legal. As we shall show in our next post, the EPO is helping member nations and corporations that operate in them bypass the law and patent software, using for the most part a secretive and undemocratic transition into the UPC. █

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