11.07.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
China has already made publicly known which patents Microsoft uses against Linux/Android
Context: 1972 Nixon visit to China [1, 2]
Summary: Criticism of Red Hat’s approach to dealing with Microsoft spreads to more sites, especially those that understand the impact of patents in this area
WE REALLY wanted to avoid further commentary on the Microsoft-Red Hat deal, but another shallow article has just come out, this time from Linux Insider (not necessarily a Linux-friendly site). The authur says nothing about patents, which is often what’s missing from all the puff pieces about this subject.
“Well, Richard Nixon was at least opening up to trade. In the case of Red Hat, it opens up other companies to potential patent lawsuits from Microsoft.”Over at FOSS Force, a pro-FOSS site, Larry Cafiero wrote: “Red Hat and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a partnership that will allow businesses to deploy Red Hat’s open source software on the Microsoft Azure cloud. From news reports, the deal makes Red Hat the “preferred choice” on Microsoft Azure, Redmond’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Make what you will of this. Me? If you know my distaste for what’s nebulously called “the cloud,” I’m just walking away from it, though the one comment I read in one story comparing this to Nixon going to China is probably the best comparison.”
Well, Richard Nixon was at least opening up to trade. In the case of Red Hat, it opens up other companies to potential patent lawsuits from Microsoft. We have already explained this in 5 articles, namely:
Florian Müller, who had worked as a patents spinner for Microsoft (for a while), was very hard on Red Hat. He wrote that “Red Hat hopes to leverage patents to cement its Linux market leadership [with the] Microsoft deal” and makes a claim similar to claims we have been making here for over half a decade. “I’ve been saying for years,” he wrote, “that Red Hat is utterly hypocritical when it comes to patents. It has a history of feeding patent trolls and fooling the open source community. There is, to put it mildly, no assurance that all of its related dealings actually comply with the GPL.”
This is exactly our concern and unless there is transparency from the “Open Organisation”, we don’t know for sure. The patent “standstill” does not extend to companies other than Red Hat, so where does that leave even CentOS users (Techrights uses CentOS)? “Red Hat now wants to tell Linux users,” Müller explains, “that the way to be protected with respect to patents is to use Red Hat Linux. “Reduce your exposure, buy from us.” That is a way of seeking to benefit from software patents.”
That’s similar to what Novell did, but secrecy makes it harder to know what really goes on here.
“If you know my distaste for what’s nebulously called “the cloud,” I’m just walking away from it, though the one comment I read in one story comparing this to Nixon going to China is probably the best comparison.”
–Larry Cafiero“I want to give Simon Phipps credit,” Müller wrote, “for distinguishing between the positive and not so positive ramifications of this partnership from an open source point of view. The Open Source Initiative is an organization on whose board Simon Phipps serves with, among others, a Red Hat lawyer.
“Without the Red Hat connection, Simon Phipps would presumably have criticized Red Hat clearly as opposed to just making it sound like Microsoft should do more. He says Microsoft should relinquish its patent rights because that’s how he defines “love” for Linux. However, he doesn’t talk about what Red Hat could have done. Red Hat could have challenged any Microsoft patents that allegedly infringe Linux: in court (declaratory judgment actions) and through reexamination requests. That course of action would have done free and open source software a greater service than a deal.”
In Twitter, Müller goes on and chastises the FSF, SFLC etc. for not criticising Red Hat (because of financial ties). This very much reminds us of the reluctance to criticise systemd, which is mostly Red Hat’s own creation. Red Hat’s clout in the community almost makes it immune to criticism.
“Google-Moto defended Linux against MSFT’s patent infringement allegations in court and won,” Müller wrote in Twitter, whereas “Red Hat decided to benefit from them.”
He said that “GPL enforcers like Harald Welte should sue Red Hat for alleged breach of the GPLv2 patent clause, arguing a covenant not to sue is a license” (we don’t know if there is such a covenant because the “Open Organisation” is still quite secretive about it).
“Android,” he says, “not Red Hat, is the #1 Linux distribution. Google, not Red Hat, is the #1 defender of Linux against Microsoft’s patents.”
As we said at the very start (hours after the Microsoft-Red Hat deal had been announced), Red Hat’s actions are defeatist and dangerous. They come at a time when, at least in the US, software patents rapidly lose their teeth anyway.
“”It’s one thing to be a Linux parasite. It’s another to be a Trojan horse. And the worst option is to be both at the same time.”
–Florian MüllerAccording to Patent Buddy, citing the Bilski Blog, “Sue L Robinson, the Patent Killer Judge, Has Not Held a Single Patent Valid under 101/Alice” and even at the capital of patent trolls, “E. Dist. Of TX has Alice / 101 Invalidity Rate of 34.8%” (that’s pretty high for such a corrupt district).
To quote the Bilski Blog: “There have been 34 district court decisions in the past two months, but the percentage of invalidity decision is holding constant at 70.5%. The number of patent claims invalidated is now over 11,000, but also holding steady at around 71%.
“There have been no new Federal Circuit Section 101 decisions, but we’re going to see a flurry of activity in the next couple of months, as the court has recently heard oral argument in a number of patent eligibility cases, and more are on calendar for November.
“Motions on the pleadings have soared, with 23 in the past two months alone, and the success rate is up a tick from 70.1% to 71.4%.
“PTAB is a bit mixed: the CBM institution rate is down from 86.2% 83.7%, but the final decision rate is still 100%, with 6 decisions in the past two months invalidating the patents in suit.”
Red Hat could make use of what Bilski Blog called #AliceStorm (referring to the avalanche of software patents) to basically invalidate a lot of Microsoft’s software patents. Instead, Red Hat reached a patent agreement with Microsoft.
Müller’s analysis ends with strong words that we don’t agree with but are worth quoting nonetheless: “It’s one thing to be a Linux parasite. It’s another to be a Trojan horse. And the worst option is to be both at the same time.” █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The dominance of Windows wanes even on desktops and laptops as large OEMs are evidently fed up with the latest version of Windows (while Chromebooks outsell Windows laptops)
In 1995 people queued up to BUY Windows 95. 20 years later, with Vista 10, people reject Windows even when it’s a gratis ‘upgrade’ (no buying necessary for existing Windows users), so Microsoft FORCE-FEEDS it, as we have shown here in numerous past articles, e.g. [1, 2, 3].
“Phone-support reps from Dell and HP told us they discourage users from upgrading to Windows 10.”
–Laptop MagAccording to this new (and apparently exclusive) report, “Microsoft may be gung-ho about upgrading your PC to Windows 10, but some of the company’s partners aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the new OS, at least if you ask their tech-support reps. While going undercover for our annual Tech Support Showdown — in which we test each laptop vendor’s phone, social and Web support — we spoke with several agents who either actively discouraged us from upgrading to Windows 10 or failed to understand core features of the new OS.
“Phone-support reps from Dell and HP told us they discourage users from upgrading to Windows 10. An HP rep even tried to help us roll back to Windows 8.1 during one of our support calls. A Lenovo rep had nothing negative to say about Windows 10, but was confused about how Cortana works.”
The word is already spreading and one news site says that “Laptop Mag has reported that tech-support reps are telling their clients to avoid Windows 10, or uninstall the operating system.”
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, at times a Microsoft apologist, is upset about privacy violations in Vista 10. “Microsoft is collecting telemetry from PCs running Windows,” he explained, “but what I’m not OK with is the fact that there’s no off switch. In fact, I can’t understand why Microsoft wants to get into a privacy brawl with Windows 10 users at such a critical time.”
Well, Microsoft is trying to turn users of Windows into products, to be sold in bulk perhaps (their data). ‘Free’ Windows will basically be like a ‘free’ Facebook account. Now is a great time to say goodbye to Microsoft and Windows (before the force-feeding becomes way over the top). █
“Gates had never been involved in any of the architectural design of Windows, nor had he ever been personally involved in writing such large amounts of code. Now, very late in the game, he was throwing out knee-jerk requests based on the competition. And he seemed totally oblivious to the fact that every such feature change radically screwed up Windows’s stability, testing, and ship date.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The sheer versatility of the Linux kernel truly knows no bounds. It can be found, literally, everywhere. From your local library to your local big box retailer, Linux is barely a stone’s throw away. There are very few places in the world that can be considered Linux-free. A small tribal village? Maybe. A shade tree mechanic? Possibly. A Prison? Well … not really. That’s right. It seems that Linux has been sent to the joint, and it poised to be there for a very long time.
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The technology has withstood the test of time by continuously evolving to meet the needs of financial traders – though until recently new features have been largely developed with in-house, proprietary code.
The way Bloomberg keeps up with users’ expectations is changing, however, McCracken writes. The company is adopting open source technologies such as Linux, Hadoop, and Solr and contributing code back upstream.
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Croatia’s Ministry of Veterans has published a manual on how to use Linux and LibreOffice. The document is part of a feasibility pilot in the Ministry. “The text is intended for public administrations, but can be useful to others interested in using these tools”, the Ministry writes in its announcement on 5 November.
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Kernel Space
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The HID driver updates were mailed in on Friday for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
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Takashi Iwai has lined up the sound driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.
Highlights in the sound/audio realm for Linux 4.4 include new device support for some Firewire sound devices along with MIDI functionality, more ASoC updates around the Intel Skylake support added to Linux 4.3, and Intel’s Lewisburg controller has been added to the HD Audio driver.
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Chris Mason sent in the pull request today for updating the Btrfs file-system for Linux 4.4.
The Btrfs file-system in Linux 4.4 has a number of sub-volume quota improvements, many code clean-ups, and a number of allocator fixes based upon their usage at Facebook. The allocator fixes should also help improve the RAID 5/6 performance when the file-system is mounted with ssd_spread as previously it hit some CPU bottlenecks.
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Dmitry Torokhov sent in the input driver updates today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
New input driver support with Linux 4.4 includes handling the remote controls for the Google Fiber TV Box, FocalTech FT6236 touchscreen controller support, ROHM BU21023/24 touchscreen controller.
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Besides the Btrfs pull request being sent in today for the Linux 4.4 merge window, the EXT4 updates were also sent in today by Ted Ts’o.
The EXT4 changes for Linux 4.4 largely come down to a smothering of bug-fixes for this stable Linxu file-system. In particular, there’s also fixes around the EXT4 encryption support and Ted is encouraging any EXT4 encrypted users to update their patches against Linux 4.4 to avoid a memory leak and file-system corruption bug.
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One more thing: You know how many of us in FOSS consider the whole Linus Torvalds rant thing as a in-family squabble? Well, thanks to our friends at the Washington Post, now it’s out there for everyone to see — “everyone” meaning the general public and, worse, the non-tech parrots who will now say Linux is insecure (as an operating system, not as an idea). The article also operates under the subtext that because security is not Linus’ main focus, somehow Linux may be lacking in the security department. Internally we know better. Externally this is what the public sees.
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The Washington Post has been doing a series on the vulnerabilities of the Internet. Part five of the series focuses on Linus Torvalds and the state of security in the Linux kernel. Does Linus need to focus more on security?
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The Linux Foundation has announced the Open API Initiative, and some mighty powerful backers are on board. Founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.
“The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs,” the announcement notes. The new open specification is targeted to allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of respective services without a lot of implementation logic. The Initiative is also aimed to promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard.
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Don’t send me feature requests. I’ve got more than enough ideas for stuff *I* want to implement. Diffs speak louder than words.
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Graphics Stack
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This CLRadeonExtender project has complete GCN assembler/disassembler support for all GCN GPUs from GCN 1.0 through GCN 1.2, including full Fiji support. The assembler supports the binary formats of the AMD Catalyst driver with OpenCL 1.2 as well as Gallium3D compute for using the RadeonSI open-source driver.
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Benchmarks
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This is a larger and more interesting comparison than the Linux distro comparison of September plus the fact that all stable Linux distributions are now in use thanks to a lot of distributions having put out their Q4 updates recently.
OpenSUSE 42.1, Fedora Workstation 23, Ubuntu 15.10, Antergos 2015.10-Rolling, Debian 8.2, CentOS 7, and Manjaro 15.11 were all cleanly installed on the same system and carried out a variety of benchmarks to measure their out-of-the-box performance across multiple subsystems.
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Applications
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As you may know, Rendera is an open-source painting and photo-retouching software for Linux,
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As you may know, PyCharm is a Python IDE, having some interesting functions like: code completion, error highlighting, customizable UI and key-bindings for VIM, VCS integrations or automated code refactorings and good navigation capabilities.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Frozenbyte has issued a content update for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power adding a free new level, as well as official support for SteamOS and Linux. Also included are various minor fixes and improvements, such as mid-level checkpoints for the Lost Page levels.
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at a Linux Kernel 4.1 update for SteamOS, Nvidia support for Vulkan, Objects in Space and open hardware, and more.
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Obviously, it’s been quite a while now since leaving beta and in just a few days (10 November) is when the Steam Machines are officially out and powered by Valve’s Debian-based SteamOS. Over the past three years we’ve seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG), Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2, seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, have tons more games available natively for Linux, they have been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API, they have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more.
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Left 4 Dead 2 looks like one I will be trying out soon when my Steam Controller arrives next week. Also great to see surround sound in more games!
It would be good to see Valve add native support for the Steam Controller to all of their games, but I am sure they are working on it bit by bit.
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A Story About My Uncle is a rather good looking first person adventure from Gone North Games and published by Coffee Stain Studios (think Sanctum 2 and Goat Simulator). It looks like it’s heading to Linux too, which is obviously awesome.
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Rise: Battle Lines is a quick and accessible multiplayer-focused battle game that delivers meaty strategy in a bite-size format. It’s just been released on Linux (via Steam) for the princely sum of $4.99/£3.99!
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The Rocket League developers recently did a reddit “ask me anything” and in it they stated the Linux port was almost ready.
This is really great news, as people seem to be falling over themselves playing this game. Checking on it today the peak player count was “26,428″, so it looks like it will still be just as popular when we get it.
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A fellow from Nordic Games has commenting about the disappearance of the announced Darksiders and Darksiders II Linux ports.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Last month our Wayland efforts made a huge step forward. In KWin we are now at a state where I think the big underlying work is finished, we entered the finishing line of the KWin Wayland porting. The whole system though still needs a little bit more work.
The big remaining task which I worked on last month was geometry handling. That is simplified: moving and resizing windows. Sounds relatively easy, but isn’t. Moving and resizing windows or in general the geometry handling is one of the core aspects of a window manager. It’s where our expertise is, the code which makes KWin such a good window manager. Naturally we don’t want to throw that code out and want to reuse it in a Wayland world.
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Packages for the release of KDE’s Applications and Platform 4.14.3 are available for Kubuntu 14.04.3. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
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For KDE users interested in the latest Wayland porting process, one of the big tasks currently being tackled is on Plasma’s screen management handling.
KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post about screen management in Wayland. The lengthy post goes over the good and bad of screen management in the Wayland world and how it’s going to be implemented within KDE Plasma’s Wayland support.
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KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a monthly status update concerning the state of KWin and KDE Plasma on Wayland.
The German open-source developer explained that most of the underlying work is finished as is most of the KWin Wayland porting, but the complete stack still needs more time to bake with Wayland. Much of October was spent working on the geometry handling with Wayland and still dealing with X11-specific KDE code.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Fashion retailers are constantly investing in new technologies to keep pace with the ever-changing market demand. Mahindra Retail, part of the $6.3 billion Mahindra Group that operates the Mom & Me chain of stores in India, was looking to grow its business. However, its existing ERP system was posing a major challenge. The Bangalore-based fashion retailer implemented SAP ERP, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system – a move that has helped them to lower operational costs and boost business productivity.
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Red Hat Family
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Mizuho reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report report published on Friday, AnalystRatings.Net reports. They currently have a $88.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.
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Fedora
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A few weeks ago, Lenovo came out with the Yoga 900, which was the successor to last years Yoga 3 pro and it in turn my Yoga 2 pro. The stats and early reviews looked pretty nice, so I ordered one.
I was hoping for a smooth Fedora experience, but sadly I ran into two issues right away after booting from a Fedora Live USB.
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This week was the release week for Fedora 23, and the Fedora Project has again worked together with the DigitalOcean team to make Fedora 23 available in their service. If you’re not familiar with DigitalOcean already, it is a dead simple cloud hosting platform which is great for developers.
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One of the things I like about windows is the way the windows snap as you move the actual windows to the left or right of the screen. By default Mate in Fedora 23 doesn’t have this enabled, but it’s an easy fix
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On Monday, the Fedora Developer Portal was released to the public. This is for developers using Fedora, not about developing Fedora itself. It’s a central hub for numerous resources to help both new and current developers set up their workspaces for new projects. Interested? Read more in the announcement post — and please share with your software developer friends!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week marks five years since Mark Shuttleworth shared with us Ubuntu intended to eventually switch to a Wayland-based environment for their Unity desktop rather than an X.Org Server… Most Phoronix readers know how that turned out.
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The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update continues to receive all kinds of new packages and fixes, and it looks like the developers have had a really busy week.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, code named Xenial Xerus will be the next big Ubuntu release, a lot of changes being scheduled for it.
Among the changes, there will be a brand new tool for writing ISO images to USB disks, the good old Startup Creator being completely redesigned. While the software has been ignored a lot lately, the developers are porting it to QML, in order to make it easier for them to maintain and update it.
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MYIR’s “MYC-C437x” and “MYD-C437X” COM and baseboard pair run Linux on TI’s Cortex-A9 Sitara AM437x SoC, and offer dual GbE ports and touchscreen options.
MYIR first tapped the Sitara AM437x SoC from Texas Instruments earlier this year with its Rico Board. While the Rico had an integrated SBC design, the new MYD-C437X development board is one of MYIR’s sandwich-style concoctions featuring a separately available MYC-C437X computer-on-module. Similarly, MYIR’s Zynq-based MYD-C7Z010/20 offers a sandwich-style alternative to its Z-turn Board SBC.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s latest version of Android, Marshmallow, only started rolling out last month. As such, it shouldn’t come as surprise to see that the current adoption numbers for it are extremely low.
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Google has not confirmed reports that it intended to merge Chrome OS and Android. Is the idea really that far-fetched? Here’s how the resulting products of such a marriage would be beneficial to users and the enterprise.
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LG’s new V10 smartphone is a compelling device that remains one of the last remaining modern smartphones with a removable battery and microSD card. There’s more for the road warrior too.
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The fall from grace of the Canadian technology firm BlackBerry has been well documented, but a new release on Friday featuring some Google-developed software has won over critics who are calling it the “best BlackBerry in a decade.”
Officially launched in the U.S and the U.K. Friday, industry websites have been beaming out favorable reviews for the new Blackberry Priv. Thenextweb.com called it probably one of the best Android phones it has ever used and the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper described it as “the comeback that gadget fans have been waiting for.” Technology website AndroidCentral stated that “BlackBerry can make one hell of an Android phone.”
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Google is hopeful that a shiny new phone will entice companies to give Android for Work a try. The first 3,000 companies to set up Android for Work with a participating enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution by December 31, 2015, will get a brand new Nexus 5X smartphone.
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The advantages of open source are well known: lower costs, the security and higher quality that arise from a large developer community and the absence of ties to one manufacturer are powerful arguments. In some areas open source products are already leaders in their field.
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As part of the company’s regular engagement with the wider coding community, Etsy engineers Maggie Zhou and Melissa Santos recently told an audience at O’Reilly’s OSCON open-source programming conference in Amsterdam exactly how Etsy successfully updates its technology to meet growing data demands.
[...]
The Etsy team uses open-source software and is committed to keeping its coding practices transparent.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack is finding its way into carriers and enterprise deployments around the world, but what about developers? At the recent OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan, developers gathered to discuss the Mitaka release of OpenStack, set to debut in 2016. One of the themes that is emerging in OpenStack is the idea of focusing on a developer story, according to Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski.
Mirantis is one of the largest contributors to OpenStack and has raised $200 million in equity to help fuel its efforts. Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski also sits on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, giving him particular insight into the open-source cloud project.
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Large funding rounds by Hadoop-focused startups seem to be par for the course these days, as the open source big data framework becomes more of an attraction for businesses everywhere. The concept of making Hadoop easier to use is also not new. We’ve reported on the new front-ends and connecting tools that are appearing for the platform.
Now, Cask Data, an open source software company that helps developers deliver enterprise-class Apache Hadoop solutions for simplifying its use, has announced that it’s raising a $20 million Series B financing round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and other existing investors.
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Databases
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Pretty much every name offers some possibility for being turned into a schoolyard taunt. But even though I’m an adult who left the schoolyard decades ago, my name still inspires giggles among the technologically minded. My last name is “Null,” and it comes preloaded with entertainment value. If you want to be cheeky, you will probably start with “Null and void.” If you’re a WIRED reader, you might move on to “Null set.” Down-the-rabbit-hole geeks prefer the classic “dev/null.”
As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.
But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it’s often rejected as input in a web form.
In other words: if lastname = null then… well, then try again with a lastname that isn’t “null.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Brescia explained that the Bitnami cloud launchpad is now available to Oracle Cloud users, providing over one hundred different open-source applications and development environments. Bitnami is no stranger to cloud deployments and is also available on the Google Cloud as well as other cloud environments. Bitnami’s core promise is that it enables users to rapidly deploy applications, which is a mission the company has been on since 2011.
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Business
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BSD
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pfSense® software version 2.2.5 is now available. This release includes a number of bug fixes and some security updates.
Today is also the 11 year birthday of the project. While work started in late summer 2004, the domains were registered and the project made public on November 5, 2004. Thanks to everyone that has helped make the project a great success for 11 years. Things just keep getting better, and the best is yet to come.
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Many moons ago, OpenBGPd was extensively used throughout the networking world as a Route Server. However, over the years, many have stopped using it and have migrated away to other implementations. Recently, I have been getting more involved with the networking community, so I decided to ask “why”. Almost exclusively, they told me “filter performance”.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In today’s Friday Free Software Directory IRC Meeting we started things off by getting some tips from Yaron Koren of WikiWorks related to improving our Approved Revisions process, which should be completed over the next week.
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Public Services/Government
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Italy’s Ministry of Defence is pioneering the use of open-source office productivity tools with the migration of 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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In a speech earlier this week, Matt Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, referred to data as being “no longer just a record” but a “mineable commodity, from which value can be extracted” and outlined how the UK government intends to improve its use of the information at its disposal and help others exploit the data too.
“Government data is no longer a forgotten filing cabinet, locked away in some dusty corner of Whitehall,” Hancock said. “It’s raw material, infinite possibility, waiting to be unleashed. No longer just a record of what’s happened, but a map of what might be.”
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Programming
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Eclipse IoT, a working group of the Eclipse Foundation, has launched a challenge to encourage IoT developers to create innovative IoT solutions based on open source and open standards.
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His statement came shortly after Blatter’s spokesman, Klaus Stoehlker, said the 79-year-old Swiss official was under “medical evaluation” for stress-related reasons and had been told by doctors to relax.
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Sepp Blatter has been ordered by doctors to take five days off work after having a medical evaluation for stress.
The 79-year-old, currently suspended from his role as Fifa president, consulted a doctor after feeling unwell, and although no underlying problem was discovered he has been ordered to rest.
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If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s, the name Ralph Bakshi got your blood pumping. His films were bold and profane, hysterical, politically incorrect, gothic and gorgeous to look at. They were shot through with a real sense of rock and roll and street smarts — see the dirty satire “Fritz the Cat” (a take on R. Crumb’s famously horny feline, which was the first animated film to be rated X).
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Health/Nutrition
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“Earlier this year, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead played sold-out ‘Fare Thee Well’ concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of their band,” says Ben Mark of Collectors Weekly. “But Jerry Garcia and company did not start using the name Grateful Dead until December of 1965. The exact date is surprisingly hard to pin down, as my story for Collectors Weekly reveals, but we do know that the Grateful Dead’s sound grew out of its experiences as the house band at the Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966, which were organized (if that’s even the right word…) by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
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Trying to write a definitive history of the Acid Tests, a series of multimedia happenings in 1965 and 1966, in which everyone in attendance was stoned on LSD, is like trying to organize an aquarium’s worth of electric eels into a nice neat row, sorted by length. You will never get the creatures to stop writhing, let alone straighten out, and if you touch them, well, they are electric eels.
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The DEA is a bloated, wasteful, scandal-ridden bureaucracy charged with the impossible task of keeping humans from doing something they’ve been doing for thousands of years – altering their consciousness. As states legalize marijuana, reform sentencing laws, and treat drug use more as a health issue and less as a criminal justice issue, the DEA must change with the times. Federal drug enforcement should focus on large cases that cross international and state boundaries, with an exclusive focus on violent traffickers and major crime syndicates. All other cases should be left to the states.
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Security
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ProtonMail is getting its first taste of life as an entity known to criminals looking for a quick, easy payday.
Throughout most of yesterday and through to this morning, the encrypted email service, set up by CERN scientists in Geneva last year to fight snooping by the likes of the NSA, was offline. The company had to use a WordPress blog to disclose what was happening to customers.
Its datacenter was effectively shut down by waves of traffic thanks to two separate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. One of the groups responsible for flooding the servers demanded ProtonMail cough up 15 Bitcoin (currently worth around $6,000), or the attack would continue.
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A newly discovered ransomware is attacking Linux Web servers, taking aim at Web development environments used to host websites or code repositories.
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A new bit of ransomware is now attacking Linux-based machines, specifically the folders associated with serving web pages. Called Linux.Encoder.1 the ransomware will encrypt your MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders. The system then asks for a single bitcoin to decrypt the files.
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A federal judge Tuesday indicated he will dismiss with leave to amend a class action claiming Ford, Toyota and General Motors made their cars vulnerable to hackers.
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Over the last several weeks, reporting has revealed a coordinated insider effort at Volkswagen to insert a malicious piece of software—a defeat device—into the car’s electronic control module. The device was able to sense when emission tests were being conducted by monitoring things like “speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the position of the steering wheel,” and triggered changes to the car’s operations to reduce emissions during the testing process so that those cars would pass the tests. When the malicious software remained dormant, the emission controls were disabled and the cars spewed up to 40 times the EPA-mandated emissions limits. Through the defeat device, Volkswagen was able to sell more than half a million diesel-fueled cars in the U.S. in violation of U.S. environmental laws.
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Digital technology is often seen as a curiosity in revolutionary politics, perhaps as a specialized skill set that is peripheral to the hard work of organizing. But the growing trend of “cyber-resistance” might hold more potential than we have given it credit for. Specifically, the popularized use of encryption gives us the ability to form a type of liberated space within the shifting maze of cables and servers that make up the Internet. The “web” is bound by the laws of math and physics before the laws of states, and in that cyberspace we may be able to birth a new revolutionary consciousness.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A U.S. warplane shot people trying to flee a burning hospital destroyed in airstrikes last month, according to the charity that ran the facility.
“Thirty of our patients and medical staff died [in the bombing],” Doctors Without Borders General Director Christopher Stokes said during a speech in Kabul unveiling a report on the incident. “Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building.”
The hospital in Kunduz was bombed on Oct. 3 as Afghan government forces fought to regain control of the city from Taliban insurgents.
After the U.S. gave shifting explanations for the incident — which Doctors Without Borders has called a war crime — President Barack Obama apologized to the charity. The U.S. and Afghan governments have launched three separate investigations but the charity, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is calling for an international inquiry.
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An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.
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The U.S. drone program creates more militants than it kills, according to the head of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the U.S. military unit that oversees that very program.
“When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” remarked Michael T. Flynn. The retired Army lieutenant general, who also served as the U.S. Central Command’s director of intelligence, says that “the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”
Not everyone accepts the assessment of the former JSOC intelligence chief, however. Still today, defenders of the U.S. drone program insist it does more good than harm. One scholar, Georgetown University professor Christine Fair, is particularly strident in her support.
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First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.
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Wednesday brought a veritable smorgasbord of “new” information about the Russian passenger jet which fell out of the sky above the Sinai Peninsula last weekend.
First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.
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David Cameron has said it is increasingly likely a “terrorist bomb” brought down the Airbus jet on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.
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The rocket which reportedly came “within 1,000ft” of a British aircraft as it approached Sharm el-Sheikh in August was fired by the Egyptian military during a routine training exercise, the Government has said.
The Thomson flight took evasive action after the pilot spotted the missile, The Daily Mail reported.
Their source said: “The first officer was in charge at the time but the pilot was in the cockpit and saw the rocket coming towards the plane.
“He ordered that the flight turn to the left to avoid the rocket, which was about 1,000ft away.”
They reportedly went on to say that the staff were offered the chance to stay in Egypt, but chose to head back to the UK on a flight which took off with no internal or external lights.
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Arik, 54, works in an Israeli communications company that operates in Africa. He had intended to travel on to Israel after landing in Addis Ababa.
“About 20 minutes before the plane started its descent the passenger sitting behind me identified me as Israeli and Jewish,” Arik told Ynet.
“He came up behind my seat and started to choke me with a lot of force,” he continued, “and at first I couldn’t get my voice out and call for help.
“He hit me over the head with a metal tray and shouted ‘Allah akbar’ and ‘I will slaughter the Jew.’ Only after a few seconds, just before I was about to lose consciousness, did I manage to call out and a flight attendant who saw what was happening summoned her colleagues,” Arik added.
According to Arik, most of the passengers on the half-empty flight refrained from getting involved. “After they pulled him off me he hit me and shouted in Arabic. Some of the flight staff took me to the rear section of the plane and two guarded the attacked during the last part of the flight.”
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The US military-intelligence complex is engaged in systematic preparations for World War III. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, a military conflict with China and/or Russia is inevitable, and this prospect has become the driving force of its tactical and strategic planning.
Three congressional hearings Tuesday demonstrated this reality. In the morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a lengthy hearing on cyberwarfare. In the afternoon, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee discussed the present size and deployment of the US fleet of aircraft carriers, while another subcommittee of the same panel discussed the modernization of US nuclear weapons.
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The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be.
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As part of a major overhaul of the U.S. government’s strategy against the Islamic State, President Barack Obama last week authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” U.S. special operations troops to northern Syria, where they will work with local forces in the fight against the militants, according to Military Times.
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When Cheney and Bush used the NSA to institute flagrantly, unabashedly unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens, I didn’t see you guys pulling out your side-arms. Were you protecting the constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly and redress of grievances against armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Ford Motor Company, despite its much-hyped commitment to the environment, has been quietly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group widely criticized for its promotion of climate change denial and for its opposition to the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.
A Ford spokesperson, Christin Baker, confirmed the ALEC grant to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch, but said that the funding was not intended to be used by ALEC to block action on climate change.
“Ford participates in a broad range of organizations that support our business needs, but no organization speaks for Ford on every issue. We do not engage with ALEC on climate change,” said Baker.
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And it gets worse. “From 1998 to 2005,” Egan writes, Exxon contributed “almost $16 million to organizations designed to muddy the scientific waters.” I suppose it isn’t shocking that a titan of the decaying industrial economy would seek to distort the science and profit from our collective predicament. What is shocking, however, is that such a campaign would be so successful.
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Today, three Iowa politicians signed a pledge calling for “a World War II-scale mobilization” to fight climate change. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Rep. Dan Kelley, and State Senator Rob Hogg, a leading candidate for US Senate, all Democrats, signed a document calling on the US government to reduce emissions 100 percent by 2025 by “enlisting” tens of millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects—creating full employment in the process.
It’s likely the most ambitious pledge to fight climate change put forward this election cycle, even if right now, it’s a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention to climate policy during the high season of presidential campaigning.
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The timing is accidental but impeccable. Just as governments are about to launch an unprecedented effort to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions, one of the biggest carbon-dioxide gushers ever known has erupted with record force. At times during the past several weeks, fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon as the entire U.S. economy, even as they have destroyed millions of acres of tropical forest, a natural carbon sink. Neighboring countries, along with economic giants such as the U.S., China and Europe, have to join forces to turn off this tap.
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Finance
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Discussions about changing the dynamic code that runs the Bitcoin blockchain should constantly be happening. Over the course of the past year, the talks of changing the block size have been an overwhelming topic of conversation. There have been some pretty stubborn people when it comes to changing the protocols code, and this is not to say that forking the code is the right step. There has been censorship and subsequently has created a rift between people who want to raise the block size and those that don’t. In time, other discussions may have to occur regarding the underlying hash functions involved with the Bitcoin protocol and to assume things will always stay the same may be naive.
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Of course, that confidence that the US government will kill the innovation is perhaps the biggest weakness of Dimon’s argument. We have no doubt that governments are already trying their damnedest to kill off innovation around cryptocurrencies, but the larger question is really whether or not that’s even really possible.
Here’s the problem for Dimon: should Bitcoin really reach the point at which Wall Street really views it as a true threat, then it’s probably too late for it to be stopped. That’s one of the (many) interesting parts about cryptocurrencies. The ability to stop them as they get more and more successful becomes significantly more difficult, to the point of reaching a near impossibility. But, it sure will lead to some amusing and ridiculous regulatory fights.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Israel “Izzy” Klein has left the Podesta Group for a small lobby shop, which is rebranding itself as Roberti Global: Irizarry-Klein-Roberti. He will serve as a managing partner at the firm, which has offices in Washington and New York. Prior to joining Podesta in 2009, Klein served as a senior aide to Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.).
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You hear a lot in the US media about a “clash of narratives” in the fighting between Palestinians and Israelis. But the truth is US news is shaped much more by one perspective than the other.
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Censorship
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In July this year, 16-year-old blogger was given a four-week backdated jail sentence after being found guilty of making offensive remarks against Christianity, and for circulating an obscene image.
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Well, well, well. It looks like there’s something perfect little Singapore is not excelling in: Freedom on the net.
We may be a powerhouse in a lot of areas — trade, commerce, economy, health, education and anti-corruption — but when it comes to freedom on the Internet, our results are pretty dismal. This was revealed in the report ‘Freedom on the Net 2015’, an annual study by the group Freedom House, an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.
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The level of Internet freedom in Singapore declined this year, according to an annual report by US-based NGO Freedom House.
Singapore scored 41 on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating the most free and 100 indicating the least, up from 40 last year.
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Myanmar, Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea all saw declines in internet freedom over the last year, according to a report by US-based think tank Freedom House released this week.
Despite the introduction of mobile carriers Telenor and Ooredoo to the market, Myanmar saw the biggest decline in internet freedom in the region, followed by Australia, which is considered to have the freest internet in Asia Pacific (New Zealand was not measured).
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Facebook has brought out the ban-hammer on its competitors in the past. Most notably, the social media giant banned advertisements from users for links to Google+, when that was still a thing. That said, the most recent example of Facebook banning what can be seen as a competitive product has gone even further, preventing users from linking to Tsu.co in status updates or on its messaging service.
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Privacy
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But, in response to Vaz, May apparently insisted that there was nothing at all in her records that anyone might find surprising — leading some to question whether this was May agreeing to release her phone and internet records. Apparently Chris Gilmour decided to find out for sure, and has filed a Freedom of Information request in the UK for a bunch of May’s records (found via Ryan Gallagher).
Dear Home Office,
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I hereby request the following information from and regarding the Rt Hon Theresa May MP (Con), Secretary of State for the Home Department (the “Home Secretary”):
1) The date, time, and recipient of every email sent by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
2) The date, time, and sender of every email received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
3) The date, time, and recipient of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) made by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
4) The date, time, and sender of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
5) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Gilmour
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In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s actually a perfect illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the US government’s position on the Edward Snowden disclosures.
Why do US officials allegedly have a “feeling” that ISIS was involved? According to multiple reports, US intelligence agencies have been intercepting ISIS communications discussing “something big” in the region last week.
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In an interview with Swedish media, whistleblower Edward Snowden opened up about CIA torture, ISIS, and mass surveillance. Two-and-a-half years after revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance tactics, he says he’s “very comfortable” with his choices.
The interview, conducted by journalists Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, took place at a Moscow hotel. Just as you might expect at the beginning of an interview, the two reporters began by asking Snowden how he’s doing.
“It’s hard for me to talk about what it’s like, because anything I say is going to be used by US critics. If I say good things about Russia, you know, like ‘it’s not hell,’ then they’ll be like ‘he fell in love with the Kremlin’ or something like that. If I say something terrible, then it’s the same thing. Then they’ll go ‘oh, he hates it in Russia, you know he’s miserable,’” Snowden told the journalists.
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The Nameless Coalition letter was signed by over 80 individuals and organizations. The signatories, which include US-based groups like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the ACLU as well as digital rights and human rights groups from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia such as the Internet Democracy Project, India, serve different populations and work on different issues. But we all agree on one thing: Facebook should get rid of its names policy altogether.
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In this post, I want to focus on a narrow slice of Charlie Savage’s much-anticipated book Power Wars (published today…go ahead, order it now!), one that might not generate as much attention as the material covering more recent national security law episodes. In particular, I want to highlight the book’s discussion of an area of NSA surveillance activity sometimes labeled “transit authority.” It is a very useful case study of the way in which legal and policy questions may be impacted by technological change (and also a handy illustration of why it is significant that the private sector owns telecommunications infrastructure in the United States).
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Antivirus and security firms that serve enterprise and government customers on occasion disclose their source code to acquire lucrative contracts.
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In Britain, allegedly, no one cares that the state is collecting vast data on all of us. In the US things are clearly very different.
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As Cold War tensions increased throughout the 1970s, the Soviets pulled out all the stops when it came to digging up information from US diplomats. This NSA memo from 2012 explains how several IBM Selectric typewriters used in the Moscow and Leningrad offices were successfully bugged with electromechanical devices that could possibly have been the world’s first keyloggers.
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Leading up to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, media buzzed with talk of an unprecedented cybersecurity agreement on par with previous governance around the creation and handling of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
But what was built up to be the first arms control accord for cyberspace actually turned out to be quite anticlimactic.
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Like millions of Americans, this past week I was sitting on my couch, drinking a cold beer, watching Game 1 of the World Series – professional baseball’s hallowed championship. Suddenly the satellite feed went out, the screen went dark. Naturally, as FOX Sports scrambled to get their live feed fixed, many of my fellow Americans took to twitter to speculate as to what had caused the outage. I was, sadly, unsurprised to see that the most common joke people were making was that China must have hacked the World Series.
On the one hand, it is understandable given the barrage of propaganda about Chinese hackers as a threat to corporate and national security; seemingly every week there is a new news item highlighting the great red cyber-menace. On the other hand, it is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and ignorant arrogance of Americans who, despite being citizens of unquestionably the most aggressive nation when it comes to both cyber espionage and surveillance, see fit to cast China as the real villain. It is a testament to the power of both propaganda and imperial triumphalism that a proposition so disconnected from reality, and bordering on Orwellian Doublethink, is not only accepted, but is ipso facto true.
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The TransPacific Partnership trade agreement has been released, and it goes way beyond resolving a few trade and tariff disputes. US and other trade negotiators leaped into a host of policy and legal matters, including the fight over when governments can demand access to encryption keys.
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Edward Snowden isn’t the only government leaker gunning to reform the nation’s surveillance laws: The former NSA contractor is credited with getting the USA Freedom Act passed earlier this year, but WikiLeaks source Pvt. Chelsea Manning now has a proposal of her own, which she revealed on Tuesday.
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Security seemed foolproof at the windowless vault in TRW corporation’s compound in Redondo, California. Understandably so – it was a core component of the Rhyolite eavesdropping satellite system that TRW built and operated for the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s. One of the vault’s key functions was to handle communications from the Rhyolite satellite ground station TRW operated under CIA guidance at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. But Redondo’s security measures did not stop Christopher Boyce, a young, dope-smoking, high school dropout, from stealing large quantities of classified information from the vault in 1975 and 1976, and selling it to the Soviet Union.
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FBI General Counsel James Baker today spoke about how encryption is making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance. While the FBI has previously argued in favor of backdoors that let authorities defeat encryption, Baker said the issue must ultimately be decided by the American people.
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An executive order may allow the collection of American electronic communications that routinely cross international borders, a panel of experts appeared to agree Friday. But what exactly is being done under Executive Order 12333? The experts wouldn’t say.
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When it comes to snooping and surveillance, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most vocal advocates of the dangers of such services. In fact up until 2014, the anti-NSA crusader wrote a column for the Guardian on the ‘vital issues of civil rights, freedom of information and justice’.
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Just as the United States is taking a first step toward placating European privacy concerns about U.S. surveillance, several European countries are passing laws dramatically expanding their own spy programs.
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GCHQ and the other five eyes agencies have a large array of tools, as disclosed through the Snowden and other leaks. They also have internally developed tools, with funny names like SWAMP DONKEY and ANGRY PIRATE. We don’t know exactly what GCHQ can and can’t do. But every time there’s a leak, the details are often both impressive and scary from a hacker’s perspective.
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Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of U.S. and U.K. surveillance, the U.S. Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data.
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In honour of Bonfire Night, The Huffington Post UK has imagined two possible outcomes if it came down to an epic battle between Guy Fawkes and Theresa May.
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Despite all this, Dropbox has been heavily criticised for its attitude to privacy. The company has Condeleezza Rice on its board of directors, regarded as one of the architects of the NSA PRISM snooping programme, leading whistleblower Edward Snowden to describe it as “hostile to privacy”.
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Timothy Libert, a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, has published a study that provides an analysis of the privacy compromises on one million popular websites. In his findings, the study adds that almost nine in ten websites leak user information to third-parties and claims that the “users are usually unaware of.” Further, the study suggested that over six websites in ten spawn third-party cookies and over eight in ten load Javascript code from an external party onto a user’s system.
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Exasperated by the widening chasm between security theatre and reality, they wondered if there was another way to resist the industrial spying/marketing/data-siphoning complex, one that didn’t require major policy or technology overhauls. The resulting book bills itself as “a user’s guide for privacy and protest”, and as an encyclopedia of the various ways people have covered their tracks, it’s both intriguing and instructive. But if you were looking for something “for dummies”, it falls somewhat short as many of its best exemplars are has-beens or never-weres.
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On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice invalidated “Safe Harbor”, a pact which for nearly fifteen years allowed United States companies to transfer electronic data from European companies and satisfy accompanying European privacy standards by self-certifying that the American companies do, in fact, offer adequate privacy protections. European Union prohibits data from being transferred and processed to parts of the world that do not provide “adequate” privacy protections.
Legal challenges to Safe Harbor came after Edward Snowden leaked details about the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) surveillance program known as the Prism, which allegedly resulted in NSA accessing, inter alia, Facebook data.
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The European Commission (EC) has effectively told the United States the ball is in their court regarding the future progress of the Safe Harbour data agreement.
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The 1995 EU Data Protection Directive sets out rules for transferring personal data from the EU to non-EU countries. Under these rules, the Commission may decide that a non-EU country ensures an “adequate level of protection”. These decisions are commonly referred to as “adequacy decisions”.
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Just a “handful” of senior cabinet ministers were aware the security services had powers to collect the phone records of British citizens in bulk, Nick Clegg has claimed.
Earlier, the Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that United Kingdom spy agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ secretly collected communications data for decades to protect “national security”.
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Home Secretary Theresa May has revealed the existence of an MI5 programme to collect vast amounts of data about UK phone calls – how and why was it kept secret?
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Journalists, not usually known for their computing skills, may be unsure how to go about familiarising themselves with the various techniques for encrypting their communications and data. This section, therefore, hopes to introduce a number of tools and concepts, together with resources for continued learning; hopefully, it can provide the basis for journalists to begin the journey.
All the tools detailed below, unless stated otherwise, are open-source and freely available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Given the high chance that Windows and Mac OS X are compromised, it is recommended to use Linux in situations where security is critical.
Naturally, as with all software, bugs and security problems are constantly being found (and hopefully fixed); it goes without saying that the latest (stable) version of all the following tools should always be used, and security warnings on the developers’ websites checked regularly.
For critical applications, one should already be familiar with the tools in question to avoid potential errors that could compromise security. Most of the tools described below provide comprehensive guides that should be studied carefully.
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In addition to encrypting communications, journalists will often need to encrypt documents they are working on, such as articles in progress or documents passed to them in confidence. Commonly used compression tools often provide encryption support; though commercial tools are potentially compromised and should not be trusted.
A reliable open source compression tool is 7zip, which supports the AES-256 encryption standard. As noted previously, the strength of the encryption will be compromised by a trivial password. The full set of US diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks was distributed as a 7zip-encrypted file; it was decrypted only after Guardian journalist David Leigh published the password in a book by mistake.
Another popular tool is Truecrypt (not strictly open-source, though the source code is available), which offers a wider range of cryptographic functions, such as encrypting entire file systems.
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If you were German, on the other hand, I’d adjust my expectations. There, I learned this week, it’s quite common for a suggested Skype video chat to founder on the discovery that your friend blocked up the little eye on their laptop long ago. Once it emerged, via Edward Snowden, that the snoopers of the National Security Agency had access to supposedly encrypted Skype calls, Germans reached for the duct tape. They wanted Big Brother to wear a blindfold.
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Do the British public, especially the younger generation, care about privacy? Are they apathetic, or is it that they just regard security in at time of Islamist threats as the overriding concern?
Polls suggest the UK, in contrast with countries such as the US or Germany, tends to be largely apathetic about privacy.
And yet the whistleblower Edward Snowden, sitting in exile in Russia, has attracted 1.6 million followers on Twitter, many of them from the UK. Scepticism about the pervasiveness of government surveillance has seeped into public conscious and culture, with people routinely joking about GCHQ or other agencies listening in on iPhones.
So privacy-v-secrecy has become a staple of in spy thrillers, from Homeland to Spectre. But there are big some big reasons to be concerned about the issue in real life.
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The former National Security Agency analyst said it had taken 30 years for Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, to shift from being described regularly as a traitor.
But not once in the debate had Snowden been referred to as a traitor.
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“When eventually I wanted to do something about it — I knew these programs were wrong and I was thinking about coming forward — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person,” he said, noting he revealed his reservations to colleagues.
“Everybody has their shop talks,” Snowden added. “It’s not like anybody at the NSA is a villain. No one’s sitting there thinking ‘how can I destroy democracy?’
“They’re good people doing bad things for what they believe is a good reason. They think the end justifies the means.”
Snowden said the policies of the U.S. government often end up creating unintentional harm.
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In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them.
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Former NSA contract worker and whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke about online surveillance and cybersecurity via Google Hangout to students and the public at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville on Tuesday.
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The talk runs from 6:30 pm to 8pm – doors open at 6pm – with a 45 minute keynote address by Snowden about the changing nature of surveillance and current state of espionage, followed by a 35 minute question period moderated by Dr. David Lyon of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s.
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Neurosurgeon, author, and new GOP frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson weighed in this week about the future of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
When ThinkProgress asked Carson during a book signing on Tuesday outside of Tampa whether he would be open to pardoning Snowden, he replied: “It would set a very bad precedent. There are appropriate ways to reveal things, and that was an inappropriate way, because it jeopardized our country.”
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WHEN former US spook Edward Snowden leaked masses of classified National Security Agency (NSA) data two years ago, he did something heroic.
This is not because leaking classified intelligence is inherently virtuous or even because of the huge personal sacrifices Snowden made — giving up his well-paid job and his relationship and being forced to live in exile.
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The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology firms about the most serious flaws it finds more than 90 percent of the time.
The re-assurances may be misleading, because the NSA often uses the vulnerabilities to make its own cyber-attacks first, according to current and former U.S. government officials. Only then does NSA disclose them to technology vendors so that they can fix the problems and ship updated programs to customers, the officials said.
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Britain is working to push through new laws that will effectively ban the use of strong encryption in the country, forcing companies to provide unscrambled content if served with a court warrant.
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Given the widespread abuse of RIPA by the police, and coppers then covering it up, this is a concerning attack on the most fundamental basics of press freedom. They’ll be entering newsrooms to smash up hard drives next…
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While the world was distracted by the UK Pry Minister’s ban-working-encryption, log-everything-online Investigatory Powers Bill, the civil service was urging government and enterprises to adopt better cryptography for voice calls.
CESG, “the information security arm of GCHQ, and the national technical authority for information assurance”, dropped new guidance (called “Secure voice at OFFICIAL”) about protecting voice calls, noting that the PSTN has been considered insecure (“suitable for UNCLASSIFIED calls only”) for some years.
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Today, the UK government will announce details of the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a piece of legislation that will propose sweeping surveillance powers for law enforcement. These are expected to include the retention of citizens’ internet browsing history, and restrictions on encryption.
The Telegraph reports the legislation will ban companies such as Apple from offering customers robust end-to-end encryption which results in communications not being accessible to law enforcement even when they have a warrant. Other reports suggest the idea of a ban will be walked back.
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“You can’t just uninvent encryption, so if this government stops innocent people using unbreakable encryption via legitimate businesses, the only people left using it will be the criminals.”
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The Investigatory Powers Bill could leave UK citizens at risk of data theft even though end-to-end encryption has not been banned.
Home Secretary Theresa May presented the proposed legislation, known colloquially as the Snooper’s Charter, to Parliament today, and if passed, it would require ISPs to store Internet Connection Records (ICRs – which domains people visit) for up to 12 months.
This includes details of which services a device has connected through, such as a website or instant messaging (IM) platform.
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Shami Chakrabarti, the Liberty director, has just been on BBC News making the same point David David Davis has been making. (See 4.20pm.) She said:
I’m hugely disappointed with this bill … I have to tell you there is no judicial authorisation for interception in this bill. At most, there is a very, very limited role for judges in a rubber-stamping exercise. It is not judicial sign-off, it is not acceptable in a modern democracy …
They have spun it as a double lock, but the second person, the judge, does not actually have a key.
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On Wednesday, the Investigatory Powers Bill was published in draft form, but it was in the wake of 9/11 that the UK government started its mass surveillance programs, spying on the online activities of British citizens. Under the guise of the 1984 Telecommunications Act, this surveillance was moved up a gear in 2005. Former deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says that very few politicians knew about it.
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Hacking powers, known officially as computer network exploitation, can involve anything from remotely hacking into servers, to localised systems like keyboard loggers, that record every key pressed.
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Perhaps the most profound change is that it requires all internet service providers (ISP) to retain a log of all customers’ internet usage for one year. So under the new rules, everything you do online will be accessible by the security services or the police should they want to take a look.
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While in the US modest attempts have been made to curb the NSA’s powers in the wake of the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations, the UK is going the other way.
The British government on Wednesday published draft legislation on surveillance, its response to the documents disclosed by Snowden to the Guardian two and a half years ago revealing the scale of snooping by the NSA and its British sister agency, GCHQ.
The UK’s draft bill not only consolidates in law bulk data collection but it adds even more intrusive powers. Privacy, according to polls, is less of a concern for the British than security.
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A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.
Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.
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A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.
Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.
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A group of engineers — myself among them — decided to create and fund open source hardware engine designs capable of strong and reliable encryption and decryption for email, plus public-private key encryption for digital signatures, DNSSEC, files and other uses.
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For the Bush-Cheney administration, the introduction of warrantless wiretapping outside the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) brought to fruition the aspirations that Vice President Dick Cheney had harbored from his time in the Ford administration. Savage explains that Cheney “wanted to refight the battles of the 1970s, reducing the power of Congress and the courts and restoring the power of the presidency” (page 43). The architects of the Bush-Cheney era shared a common goal — to leave the Presidency stronger than when they found it. The point was not whether the President already had the authority. To the contrary, the administration “was in the business of creating executive-power precedents” (page 46).
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Disclosing a ruling showing how the government proposed using data that the National Security Agency tapped from the “Internet’s backbone” could “reasonably be expected to cause grave damage to national security,” a federal judge ruled.
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In October, the European Union’s highest court struck down the “Safe Harbor” Privacy Principles, a provision that allowed for the sharing of European personal data between the EU and U.S. The verdict is meant to preserve EU citizens’ inherent right to privacy given the reality of U.S. national security laws, specifically The Patriot Act, which provide the NSA nearly unilateral access to data managed by U.S. companies.
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James Bridle’s new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance.
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With just over a year left in office, President Obama is running out of time to fulfill his longstanding promise to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo is one of several Bush-era policies that continue under Obama’s presidency. While Obama has shut down the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harshest of Bush’s torture methods, many others—the drone war, presidential secrecy, jailing whistleblowers and mass surveillance—either continue or have even grown. The story of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism legacy is told in the new book, “Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage.
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The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law heard testimony on the security risks posed by the multibillion-dollar data-broker industry that mines, analyzes and sells consumer information.
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The European Parliament voted on October 29 to drop all criminal charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and offer him asylum and protection from rendition from third parties, The Independent said that day.
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By urging EU members to stop the persecution of Edward Snowden, the European Parliament showed its independence from the United States, the chairman of the independent non-profit organization Workshop of Eurasian Ideas told Radio Sputnik.
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The EU Parliament has adopted a non-binding resolution calling on member states to give Edward Snowden asylum.
And Alternativet and Enhedslisten have drafted a resolution encouraging a vote to give Snowden residence.
PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen begs to differ.
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Reading news online, you could be forgiven for thinking that trolling is a synonym for “doing something on the internet.” Gamergaters are “trolling” women. Edward Snowden is “trolling” the NSA. President Obama is “trolling” Republicans — with a “hilarious ‘grumpy cat’ meme,” no less. You don’t even need to be online to troll: The Walking Dead is, apparently, “trolling” its audience.
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Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account).
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The web most of us use isn’t one built for privacy — the NSA aside, advertising is what makes the World Wide Web go ’round, and advertising often means marketers getting to know you better than you’d like. While most of us probably aren’t getting actively snooped on, maintaining high standards for privacy is good practice in general, and there are many activists worldwide who have good reason to think they’re being spied on. That’s why Tor exists — a system of web browsing that bounces server requests along several nodes to obscure the source of the request (that’s you). Until now, Tor has been used mostly for secure web browsing, but that technology has finally been extended to instant messaging, and it’s going to work for some services not exactly known for their sterling privacy records.
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The Federal Communications Commission said Friday that it can’t force Internet companies like Google, Facebook and ad providers from tracking users online. The commission had been petitioned by the privacy advocacy group Consumer Watchdog to make the “Do Not Track” setting in many browsers illegal to ignore.
“Do Not Track” was created by researchers as a standard signal browsers can send along with other data when visiting a website. When detected, it is supposed to limit the amount of data advertisers and other online tracking companies collect. That reduced collection, however, must be voluntary: The setting merely indicates a preference, it doesn’t obscure the user’s data the way encryption does.
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The Going Dark encryption debate surfaced again on Wednesday at a small security conference here, and as in previous iterations before larger technical audiences and even Congress, the issue continues to spin on a hamster wheel going nowhere.
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Civil Rights
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A veteran FBI agent who was caught on camera shoving a 15-year-old boy to the ground and threatening the teen with his gun has been found guilty of assault.
Gerald John Rogero, 45, was off-duty last December when he meddled into a Maryland family’s dispute over a child custody drop-off.
The agent, who knew one of the family members involved, was rebuking a man for being late to drop off his child when a teenager confronted him for intruding.
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“[S]ee what you can do without drawing attention. This involves family so I don’t want anyone to know.”
That’s what a North Carolina local judge told an FBI official in seeking the agent’s cooperation to get the text messages of two different phone numbers, according to the federal indictment (PDF) lodged against Wayne County Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones.
How much is that illegal, warrantless surveillance worth?
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About three weeks ago, a team of teenage hackers managed to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. In the process, they were not only able to access Brennan’s personal correspondence, but also sensitive security information regarding top-secret Intelligence matters.
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Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.
This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target—a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.
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A cybersecurity expert once told me something I’ll never forget: “don’t underestimate what bored teenagers can do.”
A group teenagers that call themselves “Crackas With Attitude” reminded me of those words when they were able to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. The teenagers, who described themselves as “stoners,” even had the guts to give multiple media interviews, boasting about their feats.
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A human rights group has criticised the “smokescreen” surrounding the ongoing probe into CIA rendition flights landing at Scottish airports.
Amnesty International’s Naomi McAuliffe said “excessive secrecy” was “fuelling the national security threat”.
Police Scotland is investigating claims airports were used as stop-offs for planes transferring suspected terrorists to secret jails overseas.
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A sneak peek of a soon-to-be-released documentary reveals mixed sentiments among former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on the United States’ use of torture.
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I joined the CIA in January 1990.
The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today.
One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions the agency has experienced over the past decade and a half — is its utter lack of ethics in intelligence operations.
It’s no secret that the CIA has gone through periods where violating U.S. law and basic ethics were standard operating procedure. During the Cold War, the agency assassinated foreign leaders, toppled governments, spied on American citizens, and conducted operations with no legal authority to do so. That’s an historical fact.
I liked to think that things had changed by the time I worked there. CIA officers, I believed, were taught about legal limits to their operations — they learned what was and wasn’t permitted by law.
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More than two dozen civic groups groups are asking why government agencies haven’t found somebody to respond to possible human rights violations within the agencies’ areas of responsibility — as required by a 1998 executive order.
The groups sent letters to six agencies on Wednesday — the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — echoing their past request for a point of contact who can respond to violations of international human rights treaties.
The authors of the letter, including government accountability, civil rights, and consumer advocate organizations, pointed to the recent decision by the EU Court of Justice — invalidating a free-flowing data-sharing pact between the U.S. and Europe out of privacy concerns — as a reason for urgency in filling the role.
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The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.
Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations.
General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security, frequently pushed very hard to “collect it all”; during my time as an intelligence analyst, I completely agreed with his mantra. So it’s not surprising that today’s intelligence community – as well as law enforcement at all levels of government – aggressively pursue an increasingly large and sophisticated wish list of intelligence tools regardless of whether appropriate oversight mechanisms are in place.
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The intelligence community’s top lawyer said Thursday that giving contractors whistleblower protection is “complicated.”
Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, said a contractor “isn’t working for the government,” and as a result, under current law: “The government doesn’t straight out have the authority to say whether that person can be fired; that’s up to the contractor.”
The lack of whistleblower protection for intelligence community contractors has become a central issue in the debate over whether Edward Snowden, then working at the National Security Agency as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, did the right thing in taking his concerns about surveillance programs — and a trove of documents — to journalists. Public figures including Hillary Clinton have incorrectly asserted that Snowden would have been protected from reprisal had he gone through proper channels.
Litt was correct in saying that whistleblowers who work as contractors for intelligence agencies can be fired, silenced, or otherwise retaliated against for blowing the whistle with almost no legal protections.
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Earlier this year, a hacking group broke into the personal email account of CIA director John Brenner and published a host of sensitive attachments that it got its hands on (yes, Brenner should not have been using his AOL email address for CIA business). Now, Wired reports the group has hit a much more sensitive and presumably secure target: a law enforcement portal that contains arrest records as well as tools for sharing info around terrorist events and active shooters. There’s even a real-time chat system built in for the FBI to communicate with other law enforcement groups around the US.
The group has since published a portion the data it collected to Pastebin and Cryptobin; apparently it released government, military, and police names, emails, and phone numbers. But the portal the hackers accessed held much more info. All told, they got their hands on a dozen different law enforcement tools, and Wired verified that a screenshot of the Joint Automated Booking System (JABS) provided by the hackers was legitimate. The JABS vulnerability is noteworthy because it means the hackers can view arrest records as they’re entered into the database — regardless of whether or not the arrests were under court seal. Typically, those arrests might not be made public for long periods of time as a way of keeping big investigations secret.
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New Zealand’s spy watchdog has launched an inquiry into her country’s links to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
Cheryl Gwyn, the inspector general for intelligence and security, said the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December 2014 named a number of countries that were involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees — “but the names of those countries have been redacted.”
That wasn’t OK with her.
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The government has rubbished calls for changes to the oversight of the country’s spy agencies as the Inspector General investigates any links between them and the CIA’s torture programmes.
A report revealed the SIS failed to provide the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn with copies of visual surveillance warrants as required by law.
Instead, the Inspector General discovered them during a warrant review process.
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Sabrina De Sousa is one of nearly two-dozen CIA officers who was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced by Italian courts in absentia in 2009 for the role she allegedly played in the rendition of a radical cleric named Abu Omar. It was the first and only criminal prosecution that has ever taken place related to the CIA’s rendition program, which involved more than 100 suspected terrorists and the assistance of dozens of European countries.
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Last week, it was written here that federal bureaucrats issued a burdensome judge-less subpoena to McDonald’s after the company took a position on the minimum wage contrary to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s. McDonald’s had already spent a million dollars to produce documents complying with a judge-less subpoena from the SEIU’s “partner” in government, the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB still wanted the emails of McDonald’s employees.
[...]
The 4th Amendment’s protections of the security of papers and effects were designed to prevent the political abuses now found in the use of administrative subpoenas. Administrative subpoenas, which are issued without approval by judges, are impossible to reconcile with the 4th Amendment. They are a bigger threat to liberty than the NSA’s warrantless collection of phone call metadata precisely because they are used to intimidate and silence political opponents.
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The same decades that saw the growth of national-security secrecy saw the rise of the public’s “right to know.”
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An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”
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No one reads those interminable terms of service agreements on Instagram, WhatsApp and their like. But they could make the difference between life and death, according to Rebecca MacKinnon.
“It may be about whether you get tortured for what you wrote on Facebook or not, or whether you get tried based on some of the stuff you had in your text messages or something you uploaded. They’re worth a lot to human beings,” said MacKinnon, the leader of a new project that hopes to show people just what they are signing away when they blindly click “agree”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The assertions by Australia and USTR that the ISDS provisions do not apply to intellectual property were efforts to spin and exaggerate the importance of several limited exceptions to the ISDS, most of which do not actually remove key decisions and policy from ISDS arbitration.
There is, as in earlier drafts, a limited exception for compulsory licenses or the “issuance, revocation, limitation or creation” of intellectual property rights, but only ” to the extent that the issuance, revocation, limitation or creation is consistent with Chapter 18 (Intellectual Property) and the TRIPS Agreement.” This means private investors will have the right to use the ISDS mechanism to interpret the IP chapter of the TPP and also the TRIPS agreement itself.
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The deal is long and complex: it stretches to 2,000 pages and is written in largely technical and legal language, making quick analysis difficult.
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President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he intends to agree to the massively controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate.
The letter, released just hours after the full text of the agreement became public after years of secret negotiations, is basically a formality. Still, it shows that Obama is serious about signing the TPP, and highlights the fight ahead.
Even if Obama is gung-ho on the deal, prominent fellow Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have strongly opposed the TPP as it currently stands. There’s no guarantee that Congress will approve of the agreement.
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Copyrights
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The RIAA is demanding a preliminary injunction to bring the downed Aurous music service to its knees. While Aurous is fighting back, the RIAA’s lawyers are giving their adversaries a legal beat down, using developer Andrew Sampson’s words against him and giving his legal team a mountain to climb. But with all that said, peace is now on the horizon.
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11.06.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the background and the professional track record of the Principal Director in charge of the EPO’s Investigative Unit
IN PREVIOUS parts of this series [1, 2, 3] we looked into the roots of the shady Investigative Unit, which people inside this misguided organisation call the 'gestapo'. The Investigative Unit has earned its notoriety because of its actions, not because of some personal grudges or made up scandals (the EPO’s management likes to pretend that it’s all made up or boils down to just one single person).
Today we wish to introduce John Martin, the current Principal Director (PD) 0.6, to our readers. Neither his successor nor him is as young as the rest of the Investigative Unit’s — ahem — “agents”.
The photo of John Martin is already publicly available in Flickr and we hope that it will help politicians or staff recognise his role inside the organisation. These people are definitely not friends. To them, job “demand” is people who are either misbehaving or falsely accused of misbehaving.
A source familiar with these matters has told us that “Mr. Martin was appointed as the Principal Director of Internal Audit and Oversight (PDIAO or PD 0.6) following the retirement of Florian Andres. Previously he held the position of Director of Internal Auditing and Investigations 0.6.1 which made him the hierarchical superior of the Investigative Unit.”
Before joining the EPO, Mr. Martin worked at Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation. The photo on the right (excepting people to the left of him) is from his time at Eurocontrol.
“As Director of Internal Auditing and Investigations 0.6.1, Mr. Martin was responsible for approving the controversial covert surveillance measures involving the use of keyloggers and other questionable techniques as reported by various blogs such as Techrights, IP Kat and FOSS Patents/Florian Müller (who helpfully enough published a leaked document related to this).”As far as our source is aware, “during his time at Eurocontrol Mr. Martin was the head of the Audit Unit. In this capacity, he gave a presentation at the 3rd Controlling Conference of International Public Organisations hosted by the European Court of Auditors on 8 and 9 June in Luxembourg. The conference brought together finance, resource and control managers from international and national public organisations.”
Quite ironically, for reasons we are about to explain, the subject of Mr. Martin’s presentation (still available online) on that occasion was “Audit Committees/Audit Boards/External Audit” and he explained the purpose of an Audit Committee in the following terms: “The purpose of an Audit Committee – as an independent advisory expert body – is primarily to assist the governing body, and the executive head of the [U.N.] entity and other multilateral institution as appropriate, in fulfilling their oversight and governance responsibilities, including the effectiveness of internal controls, risk management and governance processes. The audit committee must add value and must strengthen accountability and governance functions; not duplicate them.”
Given his extensive knowledge about the key role of Audit Committees in ensuring proper corporate governance, it seems rather ironic that Mr. Martin’s next career move was to join an organisation which had just decided to abolish its own recently-instituted Audit Committee as reported a year ago in Techrights.
“After his promotion to Principal Director PD 0.6, Internal Audit and Oversight, Mr. Martin’s main claim to fame (or should that be infamy?) at the EPO seems to have been the hiring of the London-based military-connected Control Risks Group to spy on EPO staff as reported inter alia in several of our past articles and in IP Kat.”As Director of Internal Auditing and Investigations 0.6.1, Mr. Martin was responsible for approving the controversial covert surveillance measures involving the use of keyloggers and other questionable techniques as reported by various blogs such as Techrights, IP Kat and FOSS Patents/Florian Müller (who helpfully enough published a leaked document related to this). Even the mainstream media covered this for quite some weeks (if not months) to come. It’s not even over yet because we believe there’s an ongoing investigation into it (no reports of cessation thereof exist, so German authorities still need to report about their findings).
After his promotion to Principal Director PD 0.6, Internal Audit and Oversight, Mr. Martin’s main claim to fame (or should that be infamy?) at the EPO seems to have been the hiring of the London-based military-connected Control Risks Group to spy on EPO staff as reported inter alia in several of our past articles and in IP Kat.
Having introduced our readers to the founder and the current head of the ‘gestapo’ (as the staff calls it), we invite readers to securely provide us with any more information they may have about it. Transparency is very important to Battistelli (warning: EPO can track the IP addresses of people who click this link), so let’s help him. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat at 2:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Analysis does require a closer look (because Red Hat doesn’t tell the full story)
Summary: A detailed record of what Red Hat has just done with Microsoft, as explained by Techrights and as (poorly) explained by unsuspecting corporate media
TECHRIGHTS has, over the past couple of days, prepared a comprehensive media survey (60+ article) about the Microsoft-Red Hat deal and their successful spin/cover-up (regarding patents). This was previously covered here in the following posts:
- Media Coverage of the Red Hat-Microsoft Deal Includes Microsoft Talking Points and Moles, No Discussion About Patent Aspects
- Red Hat’s Deal With Microsoft Resurrects Fears of Software Patents Against GNU/Linux and Introduces ‘Triple-Dipping’ of Fees
- More Information Emerges About the Microsoft-Red Hat Patent Agreement
- Red Hat Sells Out With a Microsoft Patent Deal
There are many links in there, along with some more links in the comments.
Red Hat’s latest deal with Microsoft definitely included a patent agreement, so this goes further than the 2009 virtualisation deal which was covered here in the following articles:
- Summary of the Red Hat-Microsoft Story
- Novell the Biggest Loser in New Red Hat-Microsoft Virtual Agreement
- Red Hat-Microsoft Agreement Not Malicious, But Was It Smart?
- Red Hat-Microsoft: Take III
Below is a complete list of what we were able to find in the media [2-64] yet haven’t cited (not until now anyway). None of it mentioned the patent aspects (unless it’s just hidden away in some distant sentence or paragraph), not because such aspects don’t exist but because Red Hat did a fine job hiding it (way to go, “Open Organisation”), or at least downplaying it. The criticism from Sam Varghese and yours truly got mentioned in [1] earlier today.
“The media framed this the same way it was told by Red Hat and Microsoft.”Journalism is supposed to involve independent analysis or an audit of events, not repetition of official narratives from companies that have so much to gain financially (that’s what the deal was all about, even at the expense of patent security in the Free software world). The media framed this the same way it was told by Red Hat and Microsoft. Almost nobody went further or delved any deeper. Red Hat’s culture of secrecy can also be seen when it comes to the company's patent settlements and special relationship with the NSA (they cooperate on code and the NSA is a huge client of Red Hat). We about this back in 2013 [1, 2, 3, 4], then saw the story resurfacing this year (because it turned out that illegal and unconstitutional mass surveillance is done using RHEL).
It is going to be interesting to see what happens to SUSE at the end of this year because its coupons/patent deal expires on January 1st (the press release said that “both vendors are also resolving intellectual property concerns”). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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However, Dr. Roy Schestowitz isn’t celebrating. In fact, he said the deal could very well put many distributions out of business (so to speak) and Red Hat users at risk. He said the deal involves patent agreements and data collection. It’s all about money according to Schestowitz who said, “At Red Hat money now matters more than freedom and ethics.” For Microsoft it’s about double and triple taxing users in addition to collecting and selling their data. Red Hat isn’t interested in defending GNU/Linux against patent trolls and instead pays out to settle cases and now signs a patent deal according to Schestowitz and his quoted and linked sources. Microsoft has and is continuing to pursue lawsuits against Open Source entities. Nasdaq.com said on the subject Microsoft is known for “aggressively seeking royalties from its software patents” then quoted Red Hat’s Paul Cormier saying, “We both know we have very different positions on software patents. We weren’t expecting each other to compromise.”We weren’t expecting each other to compromise.” So, at least one other site covered the patent situation, even if not in depth. Red Hat stock closed at $82.75 after the announcement Wednesday and finshed up today, Thursday, at 81.57.
Sam Varghese today asked, “With two companies — Microsoft and Red Hat — from opposite ends of the software spectrum linking arms in a deal overnight, the big question that remains is: what happens to the SUSE-Microsoft deal?” He suggests SUSE might not get the same level of assistance it once did now. But then again, he also speculated that the deal is “unlikely to earn any criticism from the open source community” as it SUSE did. I guess he hasn’t read Schestowitz lately.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Docker 1.9 is out this week, bringing new storage, scalability and clustering features to the open source container platform.
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Kernel Space
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This reactive approach is fine for a world where it’s possible to push out software updates without having to perform extensive testing first, a world where the only people hunting for interesting kernel vulnerabilities are nice people. This isn’t that world, and this approach isn’t fine.
Just as features like SELinux allow us to reduce the harm that can occur if a new userspace vulnerability is found, we can add features to the kernel that make it more difficult (or impossible) for attackers to turn a kernel bug into an exploitable vulnerability. The number of people using Linux systems is increasing every day, and many of these users depend on the security of these systems in critical ways. It’s vital that we do what we can to avoid their trust being misplaced.
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Intel’s Darren Hart has sent in the x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.
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Between the companies that recognize the critical nature of this work, and with Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative happy to start funding specific work in this area, I think we can really make a dent.
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Graphics Stack
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Peter Hutterer is back to working on tablet protocol and support for Wayland/Weston. In this context, it’s for drawing tablets like the popular Wacom hardware.
There’s been some work done before on a tablet protocol while published today was a largely redone version of this protocol. The protocol is largely new, Peter noted, “Too many changes from the last version (a year ago or so), so I won’t detail them, best to look at it with fresh eyes.”
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Applications
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The Calibre application, a complete solution to edit, view, and convert eBook files, has been upgraded once more, and it comes with a new and important tool for editors, named “Smart Comment,” and a fix for Amazon metadata.
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Some may describe it as their passion, while some may consider it as their stress reliever, some may consider it as a part of their daily life but in every form listening to music has become an undetachable part of our lives. Music plays different roles in our lives.
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Proprietary
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The keyboard features in Linux Virtual Desktop 1.0 had limited support for non-English input.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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November will be a very crowded month, and a lot of high-profile games are scheduled to launch, but it looks like the community forgot one of the biggest launches of all, the Steam Machines from Valve.
With all the excitement about November, the community forgot about the upcoming launch of the Steam Machines, but Valve is also to blame. The company hasn’t said anything in a long while, and it doesn’t seem to have any kind of marketing campaign in place.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The MATE desktop environment has been updated to version 1.12, and the new iteration brings quite a few improvements, the most notable being the support for GTK 3.18.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the bigger things that is in the works in Plasma’s Wayland support is screen management. In most cases, that is reasonably easy, there’s one screen and it has a certain resolution and refresh rate set. For mobile devices, this is almost always good enough. Only once we starting thinking about convergence and using the same codebase on different devices, we need to be able to configure the screens used for rendering. Especially on desktops and laptops, where we often find multi-monitor setups or connected projectors is where the user should be able to decide a bunch of things, relative position of the screens, resolution (“mode”) for each, etc.. Another thing that we haven’t touched yet is scaling of the rendering per display, which becomes increasingly important with a wider range of displays connected, just imagine a 4K laptop running north of 300 pixels per inch (PPI) connected to a projector which throws 1024*768 pixels on a wall sized 4x3m.
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A Minuet is a musical form (occasionally with an accompanying social dance for two people) originated in the 17th-century France, initially introduced to opera but later also to suites such some of those from Johann Sebastian Bach. Although composing a minuet for KDE wouldn’t be bad at all :), my musical skills don’t make me feel like doing so by no means and, therefore, this post is gonna be about – you know – software and KDE! But software for music 
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hello all,
Tarballs are due on 2015-11-09 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.18.2
stable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which
were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule
so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will
be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that
will probably be too late to get in 3.18.2. If you are not able to
make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late,
please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll
the tarball for you!
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CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is a Linux distribution specifically designed for digital forensics. It is based on Ubuntu.
The latest edition is CAINE 7, code-named DeepSpace. It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and, therefore, UEFI and Secure Boot ready.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Martin Jambor at SUSE is looking to begin mainlining the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler.
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Last year SUSE announced KGraft as a new form of live Linux kernel patching to reduce downtime by avoiding reboots when applying kernel security updates, etc. The initial combined infrastructure work of kGraft and Red Hat’s Kpatch was merged in Linux 4.0. Here’s how SUSE is showing off their live kernel patching method.
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Red Hat Family
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The first-ever systemd conference began today in Berlin and runs through Saturday.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT): 17 analysts have set the short term price target of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) at $85.06. The standard deviation of short term price target has been estimated at $5.09, implying that the actual price may fluctuate by this value. The higher and the lower price estimates are $ 92 and $72 respectively.
Research firm Zacks has rated Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) and has ranked it at 2, indicating that for the short term the shares are a buy. 18 Wall Street analysts have given the company an average rating of 1.44. The shares have received a hold rating based on the suggestion from 3 analysts in latest recommendations. Strong buy was given by 13 Wall Street Analysts. The shares had a buy rating from 2 analysts.
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Fedora
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Another major piece of engineering that I have covered that we did for Fedora Workstation 23 is the GTK3 port of LibreOffice. Those of you who follow Caolán McNamaras blog are probably aware of the details. The motivation for the port wasn’t improved look and feel integration, there was easier ways to achieve that, but to help us have LibreOffice deal well with a range of new technologies we are supporting in Fedora Workstation namely: Touch support, Wayland support and HiDPI.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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I can hardly believe that this month marks the fifth year I have been working on Bodhi Linux stuff. What started as a project to save me from having to compile EFL + E updates on six different Ubuntu computers every month has become so much more than that. I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to Bodhi Linux over the years. Without your code, forums posts, documentation, monetary donations, translations, and many other things I am sure I am forgetting – we would not still be here today. The power of the open source community continually impresses me and I am honored to be a part of it – giving back in whatever way I can.
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Mentor Graphics announced a Linux-ready IoT gateway System Design Kit (SysDK) as part of an IoT solution that offers cloud services and TrustZone security.
Mentor Graphics unveiled an end-to-end, hardware/software Internet of Things solution for wired and wireless edge device aggregation, featuring a System Design Kit (SysDK) for IoT gateways. The SysDK runs a version of Mentor Embedded Linux on a quad-core, Cortex-A9 based Freescale i.MX6 SoC, along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage.
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DJI is probably best known for its iconic Phantom drones, but the company’s lineup goes far beyond those consumer-facing gadgets. The firm offers some powerful technology to developers, and its latest product may be the most impressive yet.
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Phones
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Android
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Google is reportedly taking a page out of Apple’s playbook and expressing interest in co-developing Android chips based on its own designs, according to a report today from The Information. Similar to how the iPhone carries a Ax chip designed by Apple but manufactured by companies like Samsung, Google wants to bring its own expertise and consistency to the Android ecosystem. To do that, it would need to convince a company like Qualcomm, which produces some of the top Android smartphone chips today using its own technology, to sacrifice some of its competitive edge. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
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Intex, soon after launching the Aqua Young, has now introduced the Aqua Q7 smartphone. Priced at Rs. 3,777, the smartphone is now listed on the company website and can be expected to go on sale soon.
The dual-SIM Intex Aqua Q7 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, and features a 4.5-inch FWVGA (480×854 pixels) display with a pixel density of 320ppi. The new Intex smartphone is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Spreadtrum SC7731 SoC, coupled with 512MB of RAM.
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We’ve pointed out before that Android has a lot of somewhat questionable birthdays, but November 5th is arguably the birth of the platform. On this day in 2007 the Open Handset Alliance was formally announced, uniting Google, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola, and dozens of software companies, chip manufactures, and mobile carriers, in the cause of promoting Android. It was presented as an open-source alternative to then-dominant mobile operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, RIM’s BlackBerry, Nokia’s Symbian, and – at least at the time- the looming specter of the iPhone.
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Normally I just download the developer image tarball, verify the checksum and extract it, boot my phone to the bootloader (volume down and power buttons), install android-tools on Fedora and run “fastboot oem unlock“, then run the “flash-all.sh” script from the image tarball, followed by “fastboot oem lock” once I get back to the bootloader.
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In a bid to attract more organizations to sign up for its Android for Work service, Google is giving away a free Nexus 5X smartphone, allowing them to try out a handful of latest updates catered specifically to Google’s Marshmallow.
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Priv, which is pronounced “priv” as in privilege, represents the Google-ization of BlackBerry. You can bark out “OK, Google” to activate a voice search. You can take advantage of Google Now for predictive searches Google thinks you’ll be interested in. And in opening up Android to the BlackBerry loyalist — you’re still out there — devotees get access to the complete catalog of apps in the Google Play Store. On other recent BlackBerrys you could get apps from the BlackBerry World (which you cannot get to from this phone) or the Amazon App Store.
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Today, the Priv has to contend with the iPhone, and Apple’s own continued focus on security and privacy. That’s one of many reasons the Priv isn’t going to put BlackBerry back on top again. Still, it is a really good phone for people who want a keyboard and a more secure Android experience. And can spend $700 to get it.
For the first time in years, BlackBerry has a phone that can win back the hearts and dollars of people it lost years ago—at least enough that I’ll once again spot a BlackBerry owner or two among my friends and colleagues.
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Do you think that open source projects are less prone to accumulating technical debt? Or do they suffer from the same problems?
That’s a tricky question. Any project is capable of becoming burdened with technical debt. The difference is that it’s rare for an open source project to accumulate much debt once set into the wild. It’s only when you have a population of captive developers that are tasked with adding features to a code base with no choice in their participation that you can achieve the truly abysmal levels of code quality that is out there. When a project is open source, developers simply move on when it becomes too much to deal with and the project dies.
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LinuxCon 2015 brings together some of the brightest minds in technology today. What makes Linux attractive to such talent? Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO of Cloudsoft Corp., feels that Linux is playing a key role in the community’s ability to collaborate.
Johnston-Watt stopped by theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media, to speak with host Jeff Frick about the role Cloudsoft is playing within the community.
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Databases
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Open source products in the enterprise are becoming increasingly common. Five or six years ago they were seen as a nice idea in theory, but unrealistic in a world that requires strict SLAs and support to make things work. But times have changed and thanks to the likes of Facebook, Google and eBay publicly praising the benefits of adopting open source technologies at scale, everybody wants a piece of them.
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Education
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Raising awareness and training users bolster the free software policy of the Basque Country (Spain). The government of the autonomous region continues to expand its use of free software, according to SALE, the Basque Country’s free software resource centre.
The SALE resource centre is advising Basque government organisations such as IVAP, the Institute of Public Administration and SPRI, the Business Development Agency. It is also helping to other organizations providing free software courses to citizens and companies, and is involved in training the users of publicly accessible Internet access points across the Basque Country – all running free software.
Over 2,300 PCs in the network of 270 public Internet access points, KZgunea, are running KZnux, based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. KZgunea is providing training for free software to the about 100 KZgunea staff members. These centre’s are used by some 400,000 citizens per year.
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FUD/Openwashing
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360is has a new service available which provides a risk report on the open source software in use within an organisation.
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BSD
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Nicholas Marriott (nicm@) has replaced the aging version of less(1) in the OpenBSD base system with a more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D’Amore.
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Licensing
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As we pick through the secret, 2,000-page treaty, we’re learning an awful lot of awfulness, but this one is particularly terrible.
As software becomes more tightly integrated into cars and buildings and medical devices (and everything else), many governments have enacted procurement policies requiring contractors to disclose and/or publish the sourcecode of the products they supply to public bodies. For example, if Volkswagen were to supply a fleet of diesels to the National Parks Service, the government might tell them that they have to turn over their source-code so that it can be audited for “defeat devices,” or Chrysler might have to disclose source on their jeeps before they’re sold to the Army, which could result in them being made secure against over-the-Internet attacks on steering and brakes.
[...]
The article in question could well have been written by a Microsoft lobbyist.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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One of the more effective ways to advance an agenda is to attach requirements to grant funding. The U.S. Department of Education has an interest in broadening the impact of its grants, so it announced a notice of proposed rule making (NPRM) on October 29. The proposed rule would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials.
Under current regulations, creators of grant-funded work retain unlimited copyright and rights to royalty income. The Department of Education is granted a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable right to publish, use, and reproduce the work. This means that the public can request copies from the Department, however practice has shown that this rarely happens.
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Standards/Consortia
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Tomorrow the Japanese TeX User Meeting 2015 will be held in Tokyo. Since I have come to Japan I have attended more or less every year this meeting, and in 2013 we could get the (international) TeX User Group Meeting to Tokyo and had a joint conference TUG 2013, which was a great success.
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Science
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I’m commiserating with a friend who recently left the technology industry to return to entertainment. “I’m not a programmer,” he begins, explaining some of the frustrations of his former workplace, before correcting himself, “—oh, engineer, in tech-bro speak. Though to me, engineers are people who build bridges and follow pretty rigid processes for a reason.”
His indictment touches a nerve. In the Silicon Valley technology scene, it’s common to use the bare term “engineer” to describe technical workers. Somehow, everybody who isn’t in sales, marketing, or design became an engineer. “We’re hiring engineers,” read startup websites, which could mean anything from Javascript programmers to roboticists.
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Atlas, in Manchester, was one of the first supercomputers; it was said that when Atlas went down, the UK’s computing capacity was reduced by half. Today supercomputers are massively parallel and run at many, many times the speed of Atlas. (The fastest in the world is currently Tianhe-2, in Guangzhou, China, running at 33 petaflops, or over a thousand million times faster than Atlas.) But some of the basics of modern computers still owe something to the decisions made by the Atlas team when they were trying to build their ‘microsecond engine’.
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Health/Nutrition
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A Welsh MP will try to change the law today to allow doctors to prescribe life-saving and low-cost drugs that are currently unavailable but which could help a range of conditions such as breast cancer and MS.
The treatments known as ‘off-patent’ would be inexpensive to the NHS because their original patent has expired and which could be used to treat new conditions. But new treatments require new licenses that drugs companies are unwilling to apply for.
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The war on drugs is simply not working, according to a new report by Christian Aid.
Where old approaches to drugs treat the issue like a “malignant tumour”, apart from the whole body, the reality today is that this tumour “has become an almost necessary part of the whole body, rendering conventional treatments ineffective. Removal could cause certain organs to fail,” according to Eric Gutierrez, a senior advisor at Christian Aid.
The reality in many countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Mali and Tajikstan, is that the drugs trade is not a sub-sector of the economy that can be identified and retracted without huge implications for other parts of the economy and society.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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At the end of November, delegations from nearly 200 countries will convene in Paris for what is billed as the most important climate meeting ever held. Officially known as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the 1992 treaty that designated that phenomenon a threat to planetary health and human survival), the Paris summit will be focused on the adoption of measures that would limit global warming to less than catastrophic levels. If it fails, world temperatures in the coming decades are likely to exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), the maximum amount most scientists believe the Earth can endure without experiencing irreversible climate shocks, including soaring temperatures and a substantial rise in global sea levels.
A failure to cap carbon emissions guarantees another result as well, though one far less discussed. It will, in the long run, bring on not just climate shocks, but also worldwide instability, insurrection, and warfare. In this sense, COP-21 should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference — perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history.
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In the opening days of the month when National Geographic magazine is scheduled to be turned over to 21st Century Fox, the magazine’s employees were told to stand by their phones to wait for calls – one by one – to come to Human Resources to learn the fate of their jobs.
A memo sent to all staff on Monday from CEO Gary Knell told the magazine’s employees to return to Washington to Geographic’s headquarters if possible to wait for an eMail on Tuesday which would give them more information about their employment status.
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The memo went out, and November 3rd 2015 came to the National Geographic office. This was the day in which Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox took over National Geographic. The management of National Geographic sent out an email telling its staff, all of its staff, all to report to their headquarters, and wait by their phones. This pulled back every person who was in the field, every photographer, every reporter, even those on vacation had to show up on this fateful day.
As these phones rang, one by one National Geographic let go the award-winning staff, and the venerable institution was no more.
The name now belongs to Rupert Murdoch, and he has plans for it. The CEO of National Geographic Society, Greg Knell, tried to claim back in September that there “there won’t be an [editorial] turn in a direction that is different form the National Geographic heritage.” Murdoch’s move today only served to prove Knell’s words hollow, with hundreds of talented people now served their pink slips. And with the recognition that Murdoch’s other enterprises do not reflect the standards held by National Geographic, and with Murdoch’s history of changing the editorial direction of purchased properties, today’s move indicates that we can expect a similar shift for National Geographic.
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Ahead of its acquisition by 21st Century Fox, National Geographic is beginning to eliminate staff through a mix of voluntary buyouts and layoffs, POLITICO has learned.
About 180 employees, or nine percent of the total workforce, were subject to “involuntary separation” (i.e. layoffs) and an unspecified number of additional employees have been offered “voluntary separation agreements,” a spokesperson for the company confirmed.
The Fox acquisition, announced in September, is expected to close on Nov. 16.
Gary Knell, the president and CEO of National Geographic Society, sent an email to employees yesterday instructing them to be available today for individual consultations with human resources.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This week, two major Wisconsin employers sent shockwaves through the state when they announced plant closures and layoffs that could affect thousands of jobs.
The Republicans who control the Wisconsin state senate called an “extraordinary session” for Friday–not to address the loss of family-supporting jobs in Wisconsin, but to allow out-of-state billionaires to secretly pour even more money into state elections.
Rep. Terese Berceau, a Democrat, calls the bills nothing short of “an effort to create a permanent one-party state,” helping give job security to Republicans for years to come.
[...]
The press managed to connect political donations to WEDC grants because those donations were disclosed. Yet one of the bills being voted on this week would make it harder to connect those dots. Under the bill, a CEO seeking a WEDC grant could make a contribution to a politician’s dark money political operation with no requirement that it be publicly reported. The politician will know where their support comes from, but the public and press will not, making it impossible to determine whether those supporters later receive special treatment or taxpayer-funded loans or grants.
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Censorship
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The Kremlin on Friday angrily condemned France’s Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine for publishing political cartoons on the Egypt plane crash in which 224 people died, most of them Russian tourists.
“In our country we can sum this up in a single word: sacrilege,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
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Privacy
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The programme has been running for 10 years under a law described as “vague” by the government’s terror watchdog.
It emerged as Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled a draft bill governing spying on communications by the authorities.
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The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.
The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.
Earlier this week, the service was extorted by one group of attackers, then taken offline in a large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a second group that it suspects may be state sponsored.
ProtonMail offers a full, end-to-end encrypted email service. It raised more than US$500,000 last year after a blockbuster crowdfunding campaign that sought just $100,000.
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On Wednesday 4 November, the government published a draft of its Investigatory Powers Bill.
Amongst the many controversial measures announced in the bill were plans to require web and phone companies to store records of websites visited by every citizen for 12 months for access by police, security services and other public bodies.
The publication of the bill comes just weeks after the TalkTalk hack, which was simply the latest in a long line of high profile losses of personal information.
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Suddenly he opens the door. DN’s Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin had a unique meeting with the whistleblower who has fans all over the world but risks lifetime imprisonment in the home country he once tried to save.
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Civil Rights
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Quentin Tarantino appeared on “All In With Chris Hayes” Wednesday night to defend himself against allegations that he’s “anti-police.”
Police unions across the country have called for a boycott of the director’s work after he spoke at an anti-police brutality rally in New York last week. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “I’m doing here [sic] because I am a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
After being criticized by the presidents of the police unions in Philadelphia and New York City, Tarantino told The Los Angeles Times that he “never said” all cops are murderers. “I never said that. I never even implied that.”
“What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he added. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.”
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The NYPD is jerking around FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requesters again. Usually, the NYPD just pretends it’s the CIA (somewhat justified, considering its hiring of former government spooks) and claims everything is so very SECRET it couldn’t possibly be edged out between the multiple exemptions it cites in its refusals.
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Fox News co-host Eric Bolling dubiously claimed violence against police officers has been increasing, and attributed the supposed increase to the Black Lives Matter movement and criticism of police.
On the November 5 edition of Fox News’ The Five, the show’s hosts discussed recent comments from film director Quentin Tarantino regarding police officers and Drug Enforcement Administration head Chuck Rosenberg speculating that the “Ferguson effect” — the idea that increased scrutiny and criticism of police brutality is leading to increased violence, especially against police officers against police officers — was real and recent criticism of the police was leading to more violence.
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Condemnation came quickly when video surfaced on social media of a South Carolina police officer assaulting a female high school student in class in the process of arresting her for, according to reports, either not participating or refusing to put away a cell phone. But while demands to fire school resource officer Ben Fields, who had a history of racialized brutality, were answered, we still haven’t had a deep-going conversation as to why he was in the room in the first place.
The incident at Spring Valley High School is sadly reflective, too, of ways that black women and girls in particular encounter state violence on a daily basis. That’s the problem explored in the report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, produced by the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement may have been signed by the 12 countries involved but that doesn’t mean it is a done deal.
The parliaments of all 12 countries — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam — still have to ratify the deal in its entirety; there is no question of picking and choosing.
And that means there is still a role for the Labor Party to play. The big question is whether Labor wants to protect the interests of the people or not.
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Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have finally released all 30 chapters of the trade deal today, a month after announcing the conclusion of the deal in Atlanta. Some of the more dangerous threats to the public’s rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online are contained in the copyright provisions in the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter, which we analyzed based on the final version leaked by Wikileaks two weeks ago and which are unchanged in the final release. Now that the entire agreement is published, we can see how other chapters of the agreement contain further harmful rules that undermine our rights online and over our digital devices and content.
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A key U.S. senator said on Friday the Obama administration may have to renegotiate parts of a Pacific trade pact, heralding a tough battle to win support in Congress.
The administration notified lawmakers on Thursday it plans to sign the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, starting a countdown to a congressional vote that could come in the middle of next year’s election campaign.
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In the final days of the federal election, with the Liberals leapfrogging over the NDP on an ostensibly progressive platform, one question dogged Trudeau to the end: what was his position on the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP)? We still don’t quite know the answer, though we may soon enough.
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Trademarks
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We’ve already established that the University of Kentucky is sort of insane when it comes to overly restrictive trademark practices. We’ve also established that many other educational institutions are equally asshat-ish when it comes to trademark issues, in particular, for some reason, on any matter that in any way has to do with alcohol brands. The beer and liquor industries are dealing with their own trademark issues resulting from the explosion in craft brewing, but this is the story of how the University of Kentucky has managed to convince itself and, apparently, the USPTO that it has sole ownership of the very name of the state in which it is located for use on apparel.
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Copyrights
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Felines can often demonstrate great feats of stretchiness and overall flexibility, which can only be attributed to hard work at all-important cat yoga sessions. Whether you partake in yoga or any similar types of new age forms of exercise (in popularity, less so in origin), you cannot have been unaware of their growing popularity, especially among us Millennials. The classes aim to train the body and mind, each style of yoga doing so through different means and various poses. With this variety of styles, could one protect yoga poses through copyright?
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For several years YTS/YIFY has been one of Hollywood’s biggest arch-rivals but both sides came to an unprecedented agreement in recent weeks. Instead of going to trial over the alleged widespread piracy facilitated by the site, the MPAA signed a deal with its operator, ending a multi-million dollar lawsuit before it really got started.
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As Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing defense continues, the U.S. government has just asked the presiding judge to rule all of the Megaupload founder’s evidence inadmissible. However, Dotcom informs TorrentFreak that the effort failed. “The Judge has said he wants a fair extradition,” he said.
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There’s a chance that after four years Megaupload users may be reunited with their lost files. U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has asked several stakeholders to chime in on the possible return of the Megaupload servers, which also holds crucial evidence for Kim Dotcom’s defense.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I have no problem with G14. How can I oppose something that as far as I am concerned, does not exist?”
–Sepp Blatter
Summary: The EPO’s higher management is gradually ‘disappearing’ one of the last remaining points of supervision and outside scrutiny
The EPO is killing the boards. We already know why this is happening. It’s so easy to guess, having seen how the EPO’s management systematically destroyed anything that can possibly question the President’s authority and disrupt the tyranny. The numbers are rather telling, putting aside the absence of very high-profile/key people like Wim Van der Eijk. Merpel called it “the EPO Board of Appeal manpower shortage” because the cull is on and the boards are being shrunk, irrespective of the possible exile to a different German city (which will itself help get rid of much of the staff). “If Merpel’s arithmetic is right,” she wrote (referring to herself as a third person, “and assuming that no appointments are being made between now and the end of the year, this all means that there are seven legal, 14 technical and six chairs missing [not counting the one currently suspended member].” They’re probably not even hiring anyone; that’s one way to make an entity silently dissolve.
Yes, Blatterstelli — as Florian Müller called him (hence the picture above) — is surely quite determined to destroy the boards (illegal suspensions are in the books too), perhaps replacing them with something else (see Merpel’s analysis for details).
“They’re probably not even hiring anyone; that’s one way to make an entity silently dissolve.”Müller himself is still covering Apple v. Samsung, having recently shown that Apple evoked Alice to thwart software patents. The latest on this is that Apple still resorts to trying to shoot down software patents. As Müller recalls, “Apple brought a motion for summary judgment of invalidity against two Ericsson patents, based on the exclusion of abstract subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and its interpretation by the Supreme Court in the famous Alice case, in the declaratory judgment case in the Northern District of California. Ericsson’s opposition brief argues that there is so much technology involved in the operation of a wireless network, it’s just impossible to hold such patents to cover abstract subject matter, lest an extreme interpretation of Alice spell doom for patent law as a whole.”
Half a decade ago I wrote a detailed letter to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, pleading for them to stop the issuing of software patents by the EPO. That’s just the law. Back then they were like the last resort, even though other regulatory/auditory bodies existed (Blatterstelli squashed these years later). If Blatterstelli manages to crush the boards too, then he’ll have free (from supervision) reign that’s virtually impossible to undermine and software patents might become a norm in Europe.
Where are the European politicians? This is the hallmark of a coup, a junta, and of complete lawlessness. The EPO has turned into the Wild West. This simply cannot last. European politicians seem to be more concerned about football (FIFA) than the decades-old patent system. █
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Posted in Patents at 6:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: IP Dealmakers Forum, which describes itself as a groundbreaking event designed to connect investors with intellectual property information and opportunities, is lionising patent trolls
EARLIER this year we highlighted widespread complaints about Nathan Myhrvold, one of Bill Gates’ closest friends from Microsoft and now head of the world’s largest patent troll (Intellectual Ventures), being announced a prospective keynote speaker for UCLA's commencement ceremony.
Looking at IP Dealmakers Forum’s latest announcement (see official site) was very reminiscent of this. While the patent opportunists rejoice, rational people are somewhat shocked. When your keynote comes from the world’s largest patent troll, what does it say about your forum? To quote this press release, “Intellectual Ventures Founder and Chief Technology Officer Edward Jung to Keynote” (they can’t really have a technology officer because they have no products, there is no technology).
“Surely there is a problem with patent trolls in the US, but a lot of this stems from the introduction and expansion of software patents.”Speaking of patent trolls, we are seeing software patents being used by them again. An entity called Virtual Gaming Technologies, LLC has just filed three separate patent infringement complaints. As Forbes put it, “lawsuits against DraftKings and FanDuel keep piling up, with over 25 federal actions filed against each since the start of October. Now a new type of complaint has been submitted against the daily fantasy sports operators based on a claim of patent infringement, and Fox Sports has been added to the mix.”
Surely there is a problem with patent trolls in the US, but a lot of this stems from the introduction and expansion of software patents. We are now getting the same nuisance in Europe. The EPO is at least partly to blame for this. The EPO’s management doesn’t even seem to mind. █
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