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09.28.16

Cementing Autocracy: The European Patent Office Against Democracy, Against Media, and Against the Rule of Law

Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Rule of law
Reference: Rule of law

Summary: The European Patent Office (EPO) actively undermines democracy in Europe, it undermines the freedom of the press (by paying it for puff pieces), and it undermines the rule of law by giving one single tyrant total power in Eponia and immunity from outside Eponia (even when he breaks his own rules)

THE situation at the EPO has gotten so bad that the EPO is now buying the media for some Milan spin (among other spin) to help sell the UPC to the gullible public officials. This culmination in lobbying demonstrates the moral depravity to which Battistelli and his goons are willing to sink.

The UPC is an assault on EU democracy (and in the UK what we are seeing in that regard is total disregard for the referendum), which is effectively being stolen by lobbyists and patent lawyers of large corporations. The “UPC [is] on the Council agenda of this Friday,” Benjamin Henrion wrote, “I told you so. Italian minister seems to lobby for Milan without even a discussion in Parliament.”

We first wrote about it last night. Italians should protest that day, along with their media (already covered UPC).

Was the public consulted on this? Why does the media, which was paid by the EPO, support this with some puff pieces that involve Team UPC? How corrupt can things get and when will European politician start to genuinely care? And not just because they perceive it as an opportunity to promote their political party, e.g. in France…

The Battistelli regime has gotten so oppressive recently that SUEPO is silent (not a single word for three weeks) and the attack on the appeal boards intensifies behind closed doors (the secretive Board 28). “This Office has really become a banana republic,” one comment says today. “Looks like a last, desperate attempt of Battistelli and his henchmen to avoid that at the next AC the disciplinary case is closed,” this person notes, in relation to the news about Battistelli trying to prevent the scapegoat from getting his job back (or basically return to work before the end of his term). Here is another new comment about it:

If the matter were not so serious for the accused (or should that be former accused and/or victim?), this Wile E Coyote-esque persistence would draw a chuckle.
As one person has pointed out, late filed submissions are required to be prima facie relevant and OK, maybe, if you can give us another reasoning because the one you have come with isn’t good enough, isn’t normally the procedure to follow.
I note that, in the Social Study (?), PWC have found that the office’s actions have met the requirement of the EPO’s legal framework. The mind boggles about what wouldn’t.

We wrote about the PWC 'study' just after its release on Friday. It’s hogwash. It’s just ammunition for lobbying in next month’s Administrative Council’s meeting (there are also court rulings from the Netherlands coming up very soon).

One person added that “there is no “Res Judicata” at the EPO, nor does ILO-AT require this of its member organisations (and the EPO is not a member of ILO-AT).”

Another person remarked on “the issue of res judicata” as follows:

They would not go for the same accusations.

Actually, rumors were circulating around the last meeting of the AC that the president had a completely new strategy to deal with the suspended member of the AC, since the first one did not work.

A new accusation would have been made according to which the suspended member had discussed with an external IP lawyer a case in front of the BoA, thus contravening the requirement of confidentiality for anyone working at the office.

That would have been considered as “misconduct” – the punishment for which we all know is dismissal.

I have no further details – such as “when did this discussion take place”, “was at an informal meeting”, “which proof did they have”, “did the office require the Lawyer to testify” or anything else.

I understand the defense of the suspended member was aware of these rumors.

We shall be keeping a close eye on this. If anyone out there has access to internal affairs of Board 28, please consider getting in touch with us. Information lapses and secrecy currently achieve nothing but harm staff. This also harms the EPO as a whole by making redemption improbable. █

Links 28/9/2016: New Red Hat Offices, Fedora 25 ‘Frozen’

Posted in News Roundup at 6:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Users v Windows Users, Debian Mourns Another

    The Debian project today shared the news of the passing of a long time contributor on September 17. In other news, the Linux Journal offered a free digital copy of their September 2016 magazine. Bruce Byfield compared Linux users to Windows users and My Linux Rig spoke to elementary OS founder Daniel Foré about his “Linux Setup.”

  • Asian Penguins turn failed program into a Linux success

    The Community School of Excellence (CSE) Asian Penguins are the world’s first and only Linux user group based in a Hmong charter school. A failed Windows laptop program at the school was turned by the Asian Penguins into a Linux success.

    Stu Keroff is the technology coordinator at the Community School of Excellence, a middle school located in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a licensed elementary education and middle school social studies teacher, and a long-time Linux enthusiast. Stu founded and advises the Asian Penguins.

  • Free Today: September Issue of Linux Journal (Retail value: $5.99)

  • Desktop

    • 7 Ways Linux Users Differ from Windows Users

      To casual users, one person at a keyboard looks much the same as any other. Watch for a while, however, and the differences start to emerge — and whether they are using Linux or Windows is the least of them.

      The fact is, Linux users are different from Windows users in attitude as much as their choice of operating system. Originating as a Unix-type operating system and in opposition to Windows, Linux has developed an expectation and a philosophy in direct opposition to those promoted by Windows. Although many new Linux users have come directly from Windows, average Linux users simply do not react in the same way as Windows users.

    • Microsoft paid me $650 to scrub Windows 10 from my grandpa’s PC, says man

      Microsoft has paid the relative of an Alzheimer’s patient for having to scrub his PC clean of Windows 10.

      Jesse Worley said he’d received a cheque for $650 from Microsoft – seen by The Register – which he told us he’d received after threatening the giant with court action over an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade.

      Tech consultant Worley sought payment from the vendor for the 10 hours it took to rebuild his grandfather’s custom-build PC, re-installing Windows 7 to resemble Windows XP, in order to banish Windows 10.

      However, Worley – inspired by the case of a Californian woman over the unauthorised upgrade of her PC to Windows 10 – told The Reg he wasn’t interested in the money.

      He’d wanted to Microsoft to acknowledge it had slipped up with its notorious Get Windows 10 (GWX) nagware notifications, which he branded “deliberately misleading”.

      “Had Microsoft not gone out of their way to be deceptive, my grandfather pretty clearly wouldn’t have been updated to Windows 10,” he said.

    • Why kid hackers should have a Linux computer

      Kids these days are quite amazing in how fast they learn how to use computers. And what better system for a young hacker than a Linux computer? A writer at Medium recently shared the story of how his young nephew got his very own Linux computer.

  • Server

    • ​Kubernetes 1.4: One DevOps tool to rule all the containers
    • Kubernetes 1.4 promises to make container orchestration easier, more powerful
    • Canonical Releases ‘Core’ Kubernetes Container Distribution
    • Canonical launches Kubernetes public beta distribution
    • Canonical steps up enterprise courtship with Kubernetes bundle
    • Kubernetes 1.4 makes container orchestration bigger — and simpler
    • Canonical Expands Enterprise Container Portfolio with Commercially Supported Distribution of Kubernetes
    • Strategies for Running Stateful Applications in Kubernetes: Volumes

      Mesosphere DC/OS emphasizes running transactional workloads alongside cloud-native applications. Robin Systems, one of the container management companies, is aiming to containerize Oracle and other enterprise databases. The Kubernetes container orchestration engine is gearing up to run stateful workloads through a new concept called Pet Sets, which is a pod of stateful containers. Pet Sets was introduced as an alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.3, released in July.

      Kubernetes abstracts the underlying infrastructure building blocks into compute, storage and networking. When developers and operations teams get started with Kubernetes, they typically get exposed to objects such as pods, labels, services, deployments and replica sets, which provide a mechanism to deal with compute and networking. When it comes to persistence in Kubernetes, users should get familiar with the concepts of volumes, persistent volumes, persistent volume claims (PVC) and the upcoming Pet Sets.

      This article will be a first in a series that discusses the strategies and use cases for each of the storage choices available in Kubernetes. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at volumes, that provide the easiest migration path to Kubernetes.

    • Docker Doubles Down on Microsoft Windows Server [Ed: recall “DockerCon 2015 Infiltrated by Microsoft”]

      Docker for Windows debuts alongside a new commercial support relationship with Microsoft.
      For the most part, the Docker container phenomenon has been about Linux, with the majority of all deployments on Linux servers. But that could soon be changing as Docker Inc. today is announcing the general availability of Docker Engine on Windows Server 2016, alongside a new commercial support and distribution agreement with Microsoft.

      Docker containers rely on the host operating system for certain isolation and process elements in order to run. On Linux, those elements have always been present as part of the operating system, but the same was not true for Windows, which has required several years of joint engineering effort between Docker Inc. and Microsoft.

    • Hadoop Sandboxes and Trials Spread Out

      We all know that there is a skills gap when it comes to Hadoop in the Big Data market. In fact, Gartner Inc.’s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties in implementing Hadoop, including hardship in finding skilled Hadoop professionals.

    • Use models to measure cloud performance

      When I was young, I made three plastic models. One was of a car—a ’57 Chevy. Another was of a plane—a Spitfire. And a third was of the Darth Vader TIE Fighter. I was so proud of them. Each one was just like the real thing. The wheels turned on the car, and the plane’s propeller moved when you blew on it. And of course, the TIE Fighter had Darth Vader inside.

      When I went to work on the internet, I had to measure things. As I discussed in my last post, Measure cloud performance like a customer, when you measure on the internet you need to measure in ways that are representative of your customers’ experiences. This affects how you measure in two ways. The first is the perspective you take when measuring, which I talked about last time. The second way is the techniques you use to perform those measurements. And those techniques are, in effect, how you make a model of what you want to know. Those childhood plastic models turn out to offer some solid guidance after all.

    • ODPi Adds Apache Hive to Runtime Specification 2.0

      Today, ODPi announced that the ODPi Runtime Specification 2.0 will add Apache Hive and Hadoop Compatible File System support (HCFS). These components join YARN, MapReduce and HDFS from ODPi Runtime Specification 1.0

      With the addition of Apache Hive to the Runtime specification, I thought it would be a good time to share why we added Apache Hive and how we are strategically expanding the Runtime specification.

    • Ubuntu’s OpenStack on IBM’s Big Iron

      If I were Red Hat I would be looking over my shoulder right now; it appears that Ubuntu might be gaining. In just a few years the Linux distribution has gone from being non-existent in the enterprise to being a powerhouse. This is especially true in the cloud, where it’s a dominant force on both sides of the aisle. Not only is it the most deployed operating system on public clouds, its version of OpenStack accounts for over half of OpenStack cloud deployments, used by the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Bloomberg and Time Warner Cable.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Linux and Open Source Hardware for IoT

      Most of the new 21 open source software projects for IoT that we examined last week listed Linux hacker boards as their prime development platforms. This week, we’ll look at open source and developer-friendly Linux hardware for building Internet of Things devices, from simple microcontroller-based technology to Linux-based boards.

      In recent years, it’s become hard to find an embedded board that isn’t marketing with the IoT label. Yet, the overused term is best suited for boards with low prices, small footprints, low power consumption, and support for wireless communications and industrial interfaces. Camera support is useful for some IoT applications, but high-end multimedia is usually counterproductive to attributes like low cost and power consumption.

    • nginx

      Case in point: I’ve been using the Apache HTTP server for many years now. Indeed, you could say that I’ve been using Apache since before it was even called “Apache”—what started as the original NCSA HTTP server, and then the patched server that some enterprising open-source developers distributed, and finally the Apache Foundation-backed open-source colossus that everyone recognizes, and even relies on, today—doing much more than just producing HTTP servers.

      Apache’s genius was its modularity. You could, with minimal effort, configure Apache to use a custom configuration of modules. If you wanted to have a full-featured server with tons of debugging and diagnostics, you could do that. If you wanted to have high-level languages, such as Perl and Tcl, embedded inside your server for high-speed Web applications, you could do that. If you needed the ability to match, analyze and rewrite every part of an HTTP transaction, you could do that, with mod_rewrite. And of course, there were third-party modules as well.

    • Etcher Image Writer Is Now Better Than Ever

      Back in may we spotlighted Etcher, a stylish open-source USB image writer app for Windows, macOS and Linux.

      In the months since our feature the app has released a over 10 small beta updates, with Etcher 1.5 Beta being the most recent release at the time of writing.

    • Audacious 3.8 released

      Audacious 3.8 was released on September 21, 2016.

    • New Version of Audacious Music Player Released

      A new version of Audacious, a popular lightweight audio player, is now available for download.

      Audacious 3.8 introduces a small set of features, including the ability to run more than one instance of the app at the same time. Quite why… no idea.

      New audtool commands have been added, including stream recording toggles, and cue sheet support is said to be “more seamless”.

    • Rambox Puts All Your Favorite Messaging Services In One App

      Rambox is a free, open-source messaging and email app that groups all your favourite web apps into one easy-to-manage window.

      Sound familiar?

      We’ve highlighted apps like Rambox before, with Franz and the Gmail-specific Wmail being but two.

    • Stylish Markdown Editor ‘Typora’ Is Now Available for Ubuntu

      In the market for a desktop markdown editor for Linux? You may have helped but notice that you’re rather spoilt for choice. From Abricotine and Scratch to Simplenote, Springseed and Remarkable. Even Gedit can render markdown with the right plugin! With so much choice it can be difficult to know which app to pick.

    • YoutPlayer Floats Your Fave YouTube Videos on The Desktop [Ed: just an Electron app]

      Looking for a neat-o way to play YouTube playlists on your desktop, outside your browser? Take a looksie at Yout, an Electron app that lets you add and watch YouTube playlists on your desktop, floating window stylee. Yout is not the most user-friendly of apps.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Avoid the pile-up in ‘Clustertruck’, a first-person platformer with day-1 Linux support, it’s great

        We have been steadily getting more 3D “beat the timer” games where you’re up against others times, which is great because they really can be fun. I do love getting competitive in certain games, especially with some of my Steam friends and friends in the wider community. Games like this recently have been something I’ve been repeatedly going back to for a break from life.

        Clustertruck is not only about beating the times of other people, but it’s also a “the floor is lava” game, so if you touch the floor you have to start again. The really funny thing is that the safe pads are moving trucks you have to keep up with. You can at least grab onto the back of a truck if you just about touch it, so it’s not always instant death.

      • Fusion 3, the next generation game engine and editor from Clickteam will support Linux

        The difference between their tools and others, is the event system. Instead of needing to program every single line, you can stack up events and link them together to create a game. It works quite well and I’m pretty excited to give Fusion 3 a go on Linux myself to see what random games I can create for fun.

      • SteamOS 2.93 Brewmaster Beta Adds New Security Fixes from Debian GNU/Linux 8.6

        Valve’s SteamOS 2 gaming operating system is still getting goodies, and it looks like a new Beta update has been pushed on September 26, 2016, to the brewmaster_beta channel for public beta testers.

        That’s right, SteamOS 2.93 Brewmaster Beta is here to replace the previous build announced earlier this month, SteamOS 2.91 Brewmaster Beta, and add the latest security fixes and updates from upstream. This means that SteamOS is now officially based on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” operating system.

        “SteamOS brewmaster update 2.93 pushed to brewmaster_beta. Corrects a build issue where the last kernel updates were not actually included. Also updates from the Debian 8.6 release[www.debian.org] and the usual security fixes,” says John Vert, Valve engineer, in the release announcement.

      • There Are Around 2,000 Steam Linux Games Available
      • Steam now has above 2,500 Linux & SteamOS games available

        I’ve seen some posts on reddit and across the wider net about Steam hitting around 2,000 games for Linux. The truth is the number is actually quite a lot higher.

        People seem to be using SteamDB numbers which aren’t up to date. The problem here is that SteamDB is unofficial and a manual process for people to let them know a game works. So you need to own the game and manually tell them, which makes their numbers rather different to the reality.
        Note: SteamDB do truly excellent work, this isn’t a bash attempt, but to let people know how they work and how their list is different.

        The other problem is that the Steam Search when filtering only for Games and only for Linux is still incorrect. It actually lists games that are due soon, or due this month and haven’t released yet. It also still lists games that haven’t updated their release date that were supposed to release before today, but didn’t actually release yet.

      • ‘Farabel’, a turn based strategy game is officially coming to Linux after a days work

        The developers of Farabel [Official Site, Steam, itch] sent word that their game is now officially coming to Linux. They asked for testers and in a single day got the game working properly on Linux and it’s now official.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Can Now Correctly Render Talos Principle
      • The Talos Principle now renders correctly in ‘radv’, the open source AMD Vulkan driver

        Good news for Vulkan and AMD GPU fans, as David Airlie has put up a new blog post letting us know that The Talos Principle now renders correctly in this new open source AMD Vulkan driver.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3.22 Supports Flatpak Cross-Linux Distribution Framework

        GNOME 3.22, the second major update this year to the GNOME desktop environment, debuted Sept. 21—and since then, has made its way into the repositories of Linux distributions, including Fedora and openSUSE. Much as was the case with the GNOME 3.20 update earlier this year, many of the changes in the latest iteration of the popular open-source desktop environment are incremental. Among the most significant capabilities in GNOME 3.22 is support for the Flatpak framework, which is designed to allow an application to be installed on various Linux distributions. The GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) can now also be used by developers to build Flatpak-compatible applications. Flatpak is an alternative approach to Snappy, which provides similar capabilities and was originally developed by Ubuntu. The GNOME Files application continues to evolve and, in this release, adds new capabilities that enable users to open compressed files automatically. Files also enables users to compress files easily in common compression formats. Additionally, Files gained the ability to batch rename files and folders on a user’s system. Here’s a look at the key features of the GNOME 3.20 desktop update.

      • [GNOME Maps:] Planning a trip

  • Distributions

    • The Linux Setup – Daniel Foré, elementary OS

      Daniel is the founder of elementary OS, the distribution that’s famous for its own look. Daniel came to Linux through a love of customizing Windows XP, so it’s no surprise he also came to appreciate the flexibility of Linux. Interestingly, especially given the strong visual aesthetic of elementary, Daniel’s favorite app is the Scratch text editor!

    • New Releases

      • Solus Gets MATE 1.16 Desktop Environment and Linux Kernel 4.7.5, Up-to-Date Apps

        Joshua Strobl from the Solus Project published a new installation of the distribution’s weekly newsletter, This Week in Solus 36, to inform Solus users about the latest software updates and other important changes in the Linux OS.

      • Proxmox VE 4.3 released

        Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH today announced the general availability of Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.3. The hyper-converged open source server virtualization solution enables users to create and manage LXC containers and KVM virtual machines on the same host, and makes it easy to set up highly available clusters as well as to manage network and storage via an integrated web-based management interface.

        The new version of Proxmox VE 4.3 comes with a completely new comprehensive reference documentation. The new docu framework allows a global as well as contextual help function. Proxmox users can access and download the technical documentation via the central help-button (available in various formats like html, pdf and epub). A main asset of the new documentation is that it is always version specific to the current user’s software version. Opposed to the global help, the contextual help-button shows the user the documentation part he currently needs.

      • Proxmox VE 4.3 Officially Released with New Reference Documentation, Updated GUI

        Today, September 27, 2016, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH proudly announced the immediate availability of the Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) 4.3 open source, Linux-based hyper-converged server virtualization solution.

        The biggest new feature of the Proxmox VE 4.3 release appears to be a new reference documentation that users can download in various formats, including as EPUB, PDF or HTML, helping newcomers get started with Proxmox much faster. However, it looks like it is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating systems, running LXC 2.0 and Linux kernel 4.4 LTS.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • How Red Hat is making money on the public cloud with a hybrid approach

        Red Hat hasn’t traditionally played much of a part in public clouds, a fact its CEO Jim Whitehurst underscored in Red Hat’s recent earnings call. Though the company is now dabbling in a true elastic/consumption-based delivery and pricing model via OpenShift, Red Hat remains a primarily on-premises business that only feints toward a true cloud model in terms of service delivery.

        Ironically, the hybrid cloud may be the trend that gets Red Hat fully planted in the public cloud.

      • Red Hat Software Adding Fort Point Offices

        The new location will include an immersive briefing center for visiting executives, the first East Coast location for the company’s innovation labs and a new engineering lab, which will augment Red Hat’s 175,000-square-foot engineering and product headquarters in Westford. The engineering lab will provide collaborative space to take advantage of Boston’s tech ecosystem, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat said in a statement.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Join meetings to begin this week

          We’ve had the Fedora Join SIG around for a bit now, but we haven’t been very active. Recently we’ve seen an increase in community members willing to participate in the SIG, and in combination with the work that CommOps is doing to improve the “joining experience” for newbies, we thought that it’s a good time to gain some traction.

        • Fedora 25 Alpha and processing.

          Is simple to use. You can used with java also with python and android mode.
          Come with many examples and tutorials.
          Today I tested with Fedora 25 alpha.

        • Fedora 24 — The Best Distro for DevOps?

          If you have been to any DevOps-focused conferences — whether it’s OpenStack Summit or DockerCon — you will see a sea of MacBooks. Thanks to its UNIX base, availability of Terminal app and Homebrew, Apple hardware is extremely popular among DevOps professionals.

          What about Linux? Can it be used as a platform by developers, operations, and DevOps pros? Absolutely, says Major Hayden, Principal Architect at Rackspace, who used to be a Mac OS user and has switched to Fedora. Hayden used Mac OS for everything: software development and operations. Mac OS has all the bells and whistles that you need on a consumer operating system; it also allows software professionals to get the job done. But developers are not the target audience of Mac OS. They have to make compromises. “It seemed like I had to have one app that would do one little thing and this other app would do another little thing,” said Hayden.

        • Fedora 25 Goes Into Beta Freeze Today, New Features Need To Be Completed

          Today is a big day along the Fedora 25 schedule and stepping towards its official debut in November.

          The Fedora 25 Beta freeze is today ahead of the planned beta release on 11 October. Also very important is today’s the 100% code complete deadline for Fedora 25 changes.

        • Fedora 25 Beta Freeze
        • Fedora 25 Linux Beta Might Land on October 11, 2016, Beta Freeze Now in Effect

          Fedora Project’s Mohan Boddu announced on September 26, 2016, that the upcoming Fedora 25 Beta milestone, which is scheduled for release next month on the 11th, is now officially in freeze stage.

          Fedora 25 is the next major release of the Red Hat-sponsored computer operating system for power users and anyone else who wants a well-designed Linux-based OS. It has been in development since July 2016, and the Alpha snapshot has hit the streets on August 30, after being delayed by a week due to some nasty regressions and bugs that have been patched quickly.

          The next stop in the Fedora 25 Linux development cycle is the Beta, which, according to the official release schedule, is now in freeze state. The Beta Freeze stage means that developers won’t be allowed to add any other features to the upcoming Beta release, but only to fix blockers and other annoyances that might not offer users a quality product.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project mourns the loss of Kristoffer H. Rose

        Kristoffer was a Debian contributor from the very early days of the project, and the upstream author of several packages that are still in the Debian archive nowadays, such as the LaTeX package Xy-pic and FlexML. On his return to the project after several years’ absence, many of us had the pleasure of meeting Kristoffer during DebConf15 in Heidelberg.

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” to Reach End of Life on September 30, 2016

          The Parsix GNU/Linux developers announced that the end-of-life status is approaching fast for the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system, urging users to upgrade to the latest release immediately.

          Dubbed Atticus and based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” operating system, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 was unveiled seven months ago, on February 14, 2016. Running the long-term supported Linux 4.1.17 kernel injected with TuxOnIce 3.3 and BFS patches, it was built around the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment with the GNOME Shell 3.18.3 user interface.

          The end of life (EOL) will be officially reached on September 30, 2016, which means that users of the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system will no longer receive security and software updates. Therefore, they are urged today to upgrade to the latest, most recent version of the Debian-based distribution, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik.”

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 16.10 Final Beta Officially Released with Linux Kernel 4.8, Download Now

            Delayed six days, the Final Beta release of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system launched today, September 28, 2016, as the final development snapshot in the series.

            Today’s Final Beta is in fact the first Beta pre-release version of Ubuntu 16.10, and the only development milestone that you’ll be able to test if you want to see what’s coming to the next major release of Ubuntu Linux. However, we can tell you that it is powered by Linux kernel 4.8, contains up-to-date applications, and still uses the Unity 7 UI.

            “The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 16.10 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed “Yakkety Yak”, 16.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs,” reads the announcement.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • GitHub open-sources internal load-balancing software

    GitHub will release as open source the GitHub Load Balancer (GLB), its internally developed load balancer.

    GLB was originally built to accommodate GitHub’s need to serve billions of HTTP, Git, and SSH connections daily. Now the company will release components of GLB via open source, and it will share design details.

  • GE, Bosch and open source could bring more IoT tools

    Partnerships that could shape the internet of things for years are being forged just as enterprises fit IoT into their long-term plans.

    A majority of organizations have included IoT as part of their strategic plans for the next two to three years, IDC said last week. No one vendor can meet the diverse IoT needs of all those users, so they’re joining forces and also trying to foster broader ecosystems. General Electric and Germany’s Bosch did both on Monday.

    The two companies, both big players in industrial IoT, said they will establish a core IoT software stack based on open-source software. They plan to integrate parts of GE’s Predix operating system with the Bosch IoT Suite in ways that will make complementary software services from each available on the other.

  • Industrial IoT leaders work towards interoperability and open source collaboration
  • GE and Bosch Sign Agreement for Interoperability and Open Source Collaboration
  • Free PPMP from Bosch makes Industry 4.0 open for all
  • Open source tools can help small businesses cut costs and save time

    Imagine if there was a global community of tech experts who were independently building and improving digital tools that you could use for free. Tools that could help you provide a service for, and communicate with, your customers.

    Well, there is. The open source community is made up of amateur and professional computer coders who work on publicly available computer code. Businesses can then take these lines of code from websites such as Github, to use in their software, products and services.

    Open source projects are helping small businesses all over the world to save time and money.

  • OPNFV Colorado platform bolsters open source NFV efforts

    The Linux Foundation’s Open Platform for NFV project claims its third platform release targets accelerating development of NFV apps and services

    The telecom market’s continued move towards integrating network functions virtualization received a boost as the Linux Foundation’s Open Platform for NFV project released its latest Colorado platform release, the third from the open source-based organization.

  • Open-source NFV Project delivers third platform release

    The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing today announced the availability of OPNFV Colorado, the project’s third platform release.

  • Inocybe Technologies Launches Community Version of their Open Networking Platform
  • Open Source Getting on My Nerves

    Open source people are generally not dirt dishers, however. Take Phil Robb of OpenDaylight , where he is senior technical director. Robb was on that MANO panel in Denver, and he spoke to me shortly afterward in an interview on ODL’s new Boron software release. I specifically asked him about the “messy MANO situation” right now.

    His response was frustratingly calm. “I would equate the MANO space with where the controller space was three years ago,” he says. “One of the great things about open source is that real code is going to be up, going to be used, stuff will work or it will fall over. But we’ll fail fast and move on.” (See Carriers Driving ODL’s Boron Release.)

    So having multiple versions in process isn’t a bad thing, Robb says, because it might be that one approach works better for a set of use cases than another. What the industry will come around to “sooner rather than later” is that one approach likely addresses the broadest set of use cases and will be more widely adopted, while others address niches and either are used alongside the major approach or incorporated into it.

  • GENIVI Alliance launches new open source vehicle simulator project
  • Choosing the right metrics for your project

    Last month we discussed setting goals for your community metrics program. These goals serve as a constant reminder of what you want to achieve in the program and should be used as metrics themselves when deciding exactly what you are going to measure.

    This month we’ll document a basic strategy for deciding what to measure, and give examples of specific community metrics we’ve used in practice. Using our knowledge of our community and the goals we previously came up with, we’ll make sure the metrics we choose are relevant.

  • An Open Source Shopping Cart Can Boost Your Online Commerce Efforts
  • Open Source Projects Must Work Together to Survive

    Open source software is in danger of being beaten at its own game by upstart services that are tightly integrated, less complex, and easier to use. That message was at the heart of the cautionary tale told by Stephen O’Grady in his keynote at this year’s ApacheCon North America in May.

    O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Cofounder of RedMonk, recalled his years as a systems integrator, pointing out that open source software took a big bite out of the enterprise software market when it became more accessible and easier to use.

  • Contributing to an Open Source Project

    If you’re interested gaining some tips and insights into how to contribute to open source, this video of a presentation given on September 19 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco by Gunnar Wagenknecht, a software engineer at Salesforce, and Wayne Beaton, director at the Eclipse Foundation, might be useful to you.

  • Facebook Debuts Open Source Detection Tool for Windows

    Facebook debuted the open source tool in 2014 as cross-platform, but for the last two years it was only supported on Ubuntu, CentOS, and Mac OS X operating systems. Facebook isn’t the biggest Windows shop, but the company confirmed in March that because so many users were asking for it, it was building a version of the tool for Windows 10.

  • Events

    • Report for Software Freedom Day 2016 – China Academy Science

      This year I am asked to present SFD in China Academy Science by the company, so unlucky I am not proper to deliver a Fedora talk then. I bring some DVDs and stickers there, as well as a roll up poster. However there are people asking questions about Fedora so finally I still do some Q&A after the event.

      SFD in China Academy Science this year is hold in Huairou Campus, suburbs of Beijing. So with another Red Hatter, Shiyang, we took train there. Their campus is not easy to find and by the time we arrived at the event it’s 10 minutes before the start of the event.

      Talks started on 2:00 PM. After the hostess introduced the event, Shiyang is the first to talk. He introduces the basic usage of Git and Github. During the Q&A part of his talk, I found that in fact most students not paying much attention to distributions already. They are just users of Linux.

    • OpenDaylight Symposium 2016
    • Keynote: Join or Die! – Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Cofounder, RedMonk

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • B2G OS and Gecko Annoucement from Ari Jaaksi & David Bryant

        In the spring and summer of 2016 the Connected Devices team dug deeper into opportunities for Firefox OS. They concluded that Firefox OS TV was a project to be run by our commercial partner and not a project to be led by Mozilla. Further, Firefox OS was determined to not be sufficiently useful for ongoing Connected Devices work to justify the effort to maintain it. This meant that development of the Firefox OS stack was no longer a part of Connected Devices, or Mozilla at all. Firefox OS 2.6 would be the last release from Mozilla. Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch.

      • Firefox 53 Will Drop Support for Windows XP and Windows Vista

        Software companies are one by one giving up on Windows XP support for their products, and now it appears that it’s Mozilla’s turn to switch the focus to newer versions of Windows.

        Firefox 53 will be the first version of the browser which will no longer support Windows XP and Windows Vista, so users who haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 7 or newer will have to either stick with Firefox 52 or move to a different browser.

      • Boot 2 Gecko Being Stripped From Mozilla’s Codebase

        At the end of 2015 Mozilla effectively put an end to Firefox OS / Boot 2 Gecko by concluding things weren’t working out for Mozilla Corp and their commercial partners to ship Firefox OS smartphones. All commercial development around it has since stopped and they are now preparing to strip B2G from the mozilla-central code-base.

        The news to report on now is that Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant have announced, “Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch.”

  • SaaS/Back End

  • CMS

    • Open source application portal adds new ITS applications for download

      The Open Source Application Development Portal (OSADP) web-based portal provides access to and supports the collaboration, development, and use of open-source ITS-related applications. The OSADP has added a number of new ITS-related applications that are available free to the public, including:

  • Public Services/Government

    • Wyoming’s open source enterprise code library a secret no more

      Wyoming’s 250-person Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) group knew it had a good thing in its Enterprise Extensible Code Library, but it chose to keep things under wraps outside of the state until last week when members of that team attended an annual confab for state government CIOs.

      It was at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) convention in Orlando that the ETS code library project was honored with a Recognition Award for Enterprise IT Management Initiatives, and the inquiries from other states and organizations started streaming in.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Inside the Drone Journalism Lab’s open source operations manual

      Across the world, journalists are increasingly using drone technology to augment their reporting at a fairly inexpensive price.

      In order to help journalists become more adept drone users, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Drone Journalism Lab recently released a free operations manual online.

      The manual, produced by Matt Waite, founder of the Drone Journalism Lab, is open source and Creative Commons licensed.

    • Open Source Malaria’s First Paper

      Open Source Malaria (OSM) publishes its first paper today. The project was a real thrill, because of the contributors. I’d like to thank them.

      Skepticism about open source research is often based on assumptions: that people will be too busy or insufficiently motivated to participate, or that there will be a cacophony of garbage contributions if a project is open to anyone. I’m not sure where such assumptions come from – perhaps people look first for ways that things might fail. We can draw upon many experiences of the open source software movement that would suggest such assumptions are poor. We can draw on successful examples of open collaboration in other areas of science, such as the Human Genome Project and the projects it has spawned, as well as examples in mathematics and astrophysics. This OSM paper addresses open source as applied to drug discovery, i.e. experimental, wet lab science in an area where we normally expect to need secrecy, for patents. It is based on the experience of 4-5 years of work and describes the first series examined by OSM.

    • Open Access/Content

Leftovers

  • Video claiming drilling into iPhone 7 will reveal hidden headphone port goes viral

    A video claiming that users can add a headphone socket to the iPhone 7, which only has a Lightning port, by drilling into the bottom of their phone has been watched almost 10m times.

    The prank video shows a man drilling a 3.5mm hole into the bottom left edge of the iPhone 7 held in a vice. It points to the row of small holes on the left side that replaced the headphone socket present on the iPhone 6S and claims that drilling into the second hole on the left reveals a hidden socket.

    Once the hole has been drilled the video shows an iPhone 7 playing music, although the sound comes out of the speakers, not the white headphones now inserted in the DIY hole.

  • Tempers flare in Venice as angry protesters block cruise ships

    Hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the water in Venice to protest against visiting cruise ships, as relations between tourists and locals reach a new nadir.

    Flare-waving protestors used gondolas and small boats to prevent cruise ships, including a vessel belonging to Thomson, from passing through the lagoon on Sunday.

    During peak season some 30,000 cruise ship passengers disembark in Venice every day, which locals claim is ruining their city, both environmentally and culturally.

  • Disney Is Working With an Adviser on Potential Twitter Bid

    Walt Disney Co. is working with a financial adviser to evaluate a possible bid for Twitter Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

    After receiving interest in discussing a deal, Twitter has started a process to evaluate a potential sale. Salesforce.com Inc. is also considering a bid and is working with Bank of America on the process, according to other people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.

    Representatives for Twitter and Disney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    Speculation that Twitter will be sold has been gathering steam in recent months, including last week’s news of Salesforce’s interest, given the social-media company’s slumping stock and difficulties in attracting new users and advertising revenue. Disney, the owner of ABC and ESPN, could obtain a new online outlet for entertainment, sports and news. Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer of Twitter, is on the board of Disney.

  • Science

    • Archaelogists discover 200-year-old underground pub in Manchester

      Archaelogists have discovered a 200-year-old underground pub during building work on a office building in central Manchester.

      Excavators discovered untouched bottles full of of brandy and crockery branded with the 18th-century landlord of the Astley Arms.

      Archaelogists were brought to the site of a future 13-storey skyscraper as part the planning process and found the remains of houses as well as the pub.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • New Open Source Linux Ransomware Divides Infosec Community

      Following our investigation into this matter, and seeing the vitriol-filled reaction from some people in the infosec community, Zaitsev has told Softpedia that he decided to remove the project from GitHub, shortly after this article’s publication. The original, unedited article is below.

    • Fax machines’ custom Linux allows dial-up hack

      Party like it’s 1999, phreakers: a bug in Epson multifunction printer firmware creates a vector to networks that don’t have their own Internet connection.

      The exploit requirements are that an attacker can trick the victim into installing malicious firmware, and that the victim is using the device’s fax line.

      The firmware is custom Linux, giving the printers a familiar networking environment for bad actors looking to exploit the fax line as an attack vector. Once they’re in that ancient environment, it’s possible to then move onto the network to which the the printer’s connected.

      Yves-Noel Weweler, Ralf Spenneberg and Hendrik Schwartke of Open Source Training in Germany discovered the bug, which occurs because Epson WorkForce multifunction printers don’t demand signed firmware images.

    • Google just saved the journalist who was hit by a ‘record’ cyberattack

      Google just stepped in with its massive server infrastructure to run interference for journalist Brian Krebs.

      Last week, Krebs’ site, Krebs On Security, was hit by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that took it offline, the likes of which was a “record” that was nearly double the traffic his host Akamai had previously seen in cyberattacks.

      Now just days later, Krebs is back online behind the protection of Google, which offers a little-known program called Project Shield to help protect independent journalists and activists’ websites from censorship. And in the case of Krebs, the DDoS attack was certainly that: The attempt to take his site down was in response to his recent reporting on a website called vDOS, a service allegedly created by two Israeli men that would carry out cyberattacks on behalf of paying customers.

    • Krebs DDoS aftermath: industry in shock at size, depth and complexity of attack

      “This attack didn’t stop, it came in wave after wave, hundreds of millions of packets per second,” says Josh Shaul, Akamai’s vice president of product management, when Techworld spoke to him.

      “This was different from anything we’ve ever seen before in our history of DDoS attacks. They hit our systems pretty hard.”

      Clearly still a bit stunned, Shaul describes the Krebs DDoS as unprecedented. Unlike previous large DDoS attacks such as the infamous one carried out on cyber-campaign group Spamhaus in 2013, this one did not use fancy amplification or reflection to muster its traffic. It was straight packet assault from the old school.

    • iOS 10 makes it easier to crack iPhone back-ups, says security firm

      INSECURITY FIRM Elcomsoft has measured the security of iOS 10 and found that the software is easier to hack than ever before.

      Elcomsoft is not doing Apple any favours here. The fruity firm has just launched the iPhone 7, which has as many problems as it has good things. Of course, there are no circumstances when vulnerable software is a good thing, but when you have just launched that version of the software, it is really bad timing.

      Don’t hate the player, though, as this is what Elcomsoft, and what Apple, are supposed to be doing right.

      “We discovered a major security flaw in the iOS 10 back-up protection mechanism. This security flaw allowed us to develop a new attack that is able to bypass certain security checks when enumerating passwords protecting local (iTunes) back-ups made by iOS 10 devices,” said Elcomsoft’s Oleg Afonin in a blog post.

    • After Tesla: why cybersecurity is central to the car industry’s future

      The news that a Tesla car was hacked from 12 miles away tells us that the explosive growth in automotive connectivity may be rapidly outpacing automotive security.

      This story is illustrative of two persistent problems afflicting many connected industries: the continuing proliferation of vulnerabilities in new software, and the misguided view that cybersecurity is separate from concept, design, engineering and production.

      This leads to a ‘fire brigade approach’ to cybersecurity where security is not baked in at the design stage for either hardware or software but added in after vulnerabilities are discovered by cybersecurity specialists once the product is already on the market.

    • Sloppy programming leads to OpenSSL woes
    • OpenSSL Fixes Critical Bug Introduced by Latest Update

      OpenSSL today released an emergency security update after a patch in its most recent update issued last week introduced a critical vulnerability in the cryptographic library.

    • The Internet Of Poorly Secured Things Is Fueling Unprecedented, Massive New DDoS Attacks

      Last week, an absolutely mammoth distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack brought down the website of security researcher Brian Krebs. His website, hosted by Akamai pro bono, was pulled offline after it was inundated with 620Gbps of malicious traffic, nearly double the size of the biggest attack Akamai (which tracks such things via their quarterly state of the internet report) has ever recorded. Krebs was ultimately able to get his website back online after Google stepped in to provide DDoS mitigation through its Project Shield service.

    • Trump Offers More Insight On His Cybersecurity Plans: 10-Year-Old Relatives Vs. 400-lb Bedroom Dwellers

      Look, anyone who refers to cybersecurity or cyberwarfare as “the cyber” is probably better off not discussing this. But Donald Trump, in last night’s debate, felt compelled to further prove why he’s in no position to be offering guidance on technological issues. And anyone who feels compelled to portray hackers as 400-lb bedroom dwellers probably shouldn’t be opening their mouth in public at all.

      With this mindset, discussions about what “the Google” and “the Facebook” are doing about trimming back ISIS’s social media presence can’t be far behind. Trump did note that ISIS is “beating us at our game” when it comes to utilizing social media. Fair enough.

    • New, stronger crypto standard lacks backward compatibility

      The Internet Engineering Task Force is on the verge of approving a new standard for encrypted internet traffic that will make the web a safer place to shop, bank and browse — but it could also break a lot of stuff for people who don’t update their browsers. Transport Layer Security, or TLS, is an encryption protocol that works with web browsers. It’s the math, and the shared standards, that underlie the green padlock users see — the symbol which gives users the confidence that they are connected to the right site and is private enough to share personal or financial data. TLS supersedes SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer — a protocol dating back to 1995 that has proven to be thoroughly broken. But the latest TLS version was finalized in 2008 and in recent years has been the subject of many high profile attacks and newly discovered bugs.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Duterte ‘about to cross the Rubicon’ with US, wants alliances with Russia & China

      Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has reiterated his intention to distance his country from the US, its former colonial master, saying he is about to pass “the point of no return” with the US.

      “I am about to cross the Rubicon between me and the US,” the controversial Pacific leader told reporters, without elaborating.

      Duterte reiterated that the Philippines would seek closer ties with Russia and China, the two nations that challenged American ambition for global leadership. But, he added, the ties with the US would not be broken completely, only driven to a point that would allow Manila to have an independent policy.

    • Carter: Afghanistan War Supplemental Request Coming in November

      Defense Secretary Ash Carter plans to present Congress with a request for a supplemental spending measure to fund US troops in Afghanistan come November, he said Monday.

      However, Carter would not give a sense of how large the monetary request may be, saying only that there is a “range” that the department’s budgetary experts are considering.

    • Jordanian writer on trial for ‘anti-Islam’ cartoon shot dead outside court

      A gunman on Sunday killed prominent Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar outside a court where he was facing charges for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam, state news agency Petra reported.

      Hattar was struck by three bullets before the assailant was arrested, said Petra. Witnesses told AFP that a man had opened fire in front of the court in Amman’s Abdali district.

      The 56-year-old Christian was arrested on August 13 after posting a cartoon mocking jihadists on his Facebook account.

      He was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam before being released on bail in early September.

    • Writer Charged With Insulting Islam Is Killed as Extremism Boils Over in Jordan

      Some of the most extreme elements in Jordan made clear in recent weeks that Nahed Hattar should pay for a provocative cartoon he posted online depicting a bearded man in bed with two women ordering God to bring him cashews and wine.

      So when Mr. Hattar, 56, a prominent writer from a Christian family, showed up at a court on Sunday to face criminal charges of insulting Islam, at least one man with a gun decided a trial was not enough. As three bullets ripped through the writer in front of the courthouse, Jordan’s simmering tensions boiled over.

    • France: What Is Hidden Behind the “Burkini Ban”

      In Sisco, Corsica, on August 13, a group of Muslim men arrived on a beach in the company of women wearing “burkinis” (full-body bathing costumes). The Muslim men firmly asked the tourists on the beach to leave and posted signs saying “No Entry”. When a few teenagers resisted, the Muslim men responded with a harpoon and baseball bats. The police intervened — but it was just the beginning.

      In the following days, on beaches all over France, Muslim men showed up, accompanied by women in burkinis, and asking beachgoers to leave. Tourists packed up and fled. Several mayors of seaside resorts decided to ban the bathing costume, and the “burkini ban” scandal was born.

      Some politicians said that banning the burkini “stigmatized” Muslims and infringed on their “human rights” to wear whatever they liked. Other politicians, including Prime Minister Manuel Valls and former President Nicolas Sarkozy, called the burkini a “provocation”, and asked for a law to ban it. The Council of State, the highest legal institution, eventually declared that banning the burkini was against the law; the ban was lifted.

      What is important to explain is what lies behind the “burkini ban.”

      Thirty years ago, France was a country where Islam was present but where Islamic demands were virtually absent and Islamic veils were rare.

      Then, in September, 1989, in a northern suburb of Paris, three female students decided to attend high school with their heads covered by a scarf. When the dean refused, the parents, with the support of newly created Muslim associations, filed a complaint. The parents won.

    • One dead and three injured in Malmo shooting as bomb found outside primary school

      Witnesses reported hearing 20 gunshots fired in bursts of three during a football derby at around 7pm local time between Malmö FF and Helsingborgs IF on Sunday.

      One eyewitness claimed the shots were fired by people in an Audi which drove off at high speed.

      Police found shell casings at the scene in Censorgatan and say the suspects may have escaped by moped – four people were injured, including one who was shot in the head.

    • Liberals’ MP hit by hate messages
    • India Says Pakistan Believes Terror Will Bring Territory

      Pakistan continues to believe terrorist attacks will allow it to obtain territory it covets in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s foreign minister said Monday.

      In her speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Sushma Swaraj also rejected accusations made by Pakistan’s prime minister from the same podium last week that India violates human rights, calling them “baseless.”

      She said India has a man in custody “whose confession is a living proof of Pakistan’s complicity in cross-border terror. But when confronted with such evidence, Pakistan remains in denial.”

      “It persists in the belief that such attacks will enable it to obtain the territory it covets,” Swaraj said. “My firm advice to Pakistan is: abandon this dream. Let me state unequivocally that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and will always remain so.”

    • Pakistani journalist suing US for killing his son, brother in drone attack

      A Pakistani journalist has sued the United States government in Pakistani courts alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had killed his brother and a son in a drone strike in the tribal region of the country in 2009.

      According to Karim Khan, his brother and the son were innocent and had no terror links at all. His brother Asif Iqbal had Masters degree in Modern Languages and was a teacher at a local school. The 16-year-old son, Zahinullah, was a student of grade 10.

      In an interview with Al Jazeera, Khan vowed to pursue the case against the CIA and the US government. “We would show their tyrannous face to the whole world…that’s all. They cannot bring back my brother or my son…but I will fight against them as far as I can,” he said.

      Since 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency has conducted over 400 drone attacks in Pakistan, killing about 3,000 people. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that at least 966 civilians, including 207 children were also among those killed by the drones.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years

      Reconstructions of Earth’s past climate strongly influence our understanding of the dynamics and sensitivity of the climate system. Yet global temperature has been reconstructed for only a few isolated windows of time, and continuous reconstructions across glacial cycles remain elusive. Here I present a spatially weighted proxy reconstruction of global temperature over the past 2 million years estimated from a multi-proxy database of over 20,000 sea surface temperature point reconstructions. Global temperature gradually cooled until roughly 1.2 million years ago and cooling then stalled until the present. The cooling trend probably stalled before the beginning of the mid-Pleistocene transition3, and pre-dated the increase in the maximum size of ice sheets around 0.9 million years ago. Thus, global cooling may have been a pre-condition for, but probably is not the sole causal mechanism of, the shift to quasi-100,000-year glacial cycles at the mid-Pleistocene transition. Over the past 800,000 years, polar amplification (the amplification of temperature change at the poles relative to global temperature change) has been stable over time, and global temperature and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have been closely coupled across glacial cycles. A comparison of the new temperature reconstruction with radiative forcing from greenhouse gases estimates an Earth system sensitivity of 9 degrees Celsius (range 7 to 13 degrees Celsius, 95 per cent credible interval) change in global average surface temperature per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide over millennium timescales. This result suggests that stabilization at today’s greenhouse gas levels may already commit Earth to an eventual total warming of 5 degrees Celsius (range 3 to 7 degrees Celsius, 95 per cent credible interval) over the next few millennia as ice sheets, vegetation and atmospheric dust continue to respond to global warming.

    • Singaporeans are choking on smoke floating over from Indonesia – here’s why this is happening

      Every year, forest fires from Indonesia choke a swathe of Southeast Asia with a smoky haze for weeks. This phenomenon harms the planet and angers neighbors. It is also a health hazard.

      So what is fueling this? The world’s desire for palm oil.

      The edible oil is used in cookies, noodles and other packaged foods as well as soaps, shampoos, lipsticks and many other consumer goods.

      Farmers in Indonesia, the world’s biggest supplier of the commodity, often illegally burn the world’s oldest rainforest or use fire to clear old oil palms on existing plantations, and the smoke from the flames drifts across Singapore and Malaysia.

  • Finance

    • Dingell seeks transparency in trade deal negotiations

      Automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler oppose the deal, in part because it doesn’t go far enough in addressing currency manipulation by other nations. Michigan lawmakers have suggested the state has lost tens of thousands of jobs in part because of currency manipulation by China, Japan and other countries.

      The office of U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman declined to comment on Dingell’s bill.

      Froman’s office has highlighted its transparency efforts regarding TPP, including the publication of detailed summaries of U.S. objectives in negotiating the agreement; the solicitation of public input on negotiating priorities; and the holding of public hearings to gather input on the negotiations.

    • TTIP: Negotiations ‘in the void’

      Negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are forging ahead, despite opposition from a number of countries. And the American elections are almost certain to compromise the deal. EurActiv France reports.

      Despite attempts by citizens and several governments to derail TTIP, EU member states have confirmed their aim of finalising the free trade deal with Canada (CETA) and pushing ahead with talks with the United States, despite the approaching elections.

    • Ministers aim to wrap up services trade deal in early December

      Countries negotiating an international agreement on trade in services plan to meet in early December to try to finalize the deal, U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization Michael Punke told reporters on Monday.

      The Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which would provide stronger international rules for sectors such as communications and banking, is being negotiated among 23 WTO members, including the 28-country European Union, that account for 70 percent of global services trade.

      “The TiSA ambassadors met today and agreed to a ministers’ meeting on Dec. 5 and 6 in Geneva to conclude TiSA,” Punke said, adding: “Establishing 21st century trade rules for services, for 70 percent of the globe’s services economy, is a big deal.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press

      On the eve of the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I thought I would write down some of the precepts and maxims I have used to understand press behavior during this long and startling campaign season. If I have done this right, you should be able to test the usefulness of my list in the final six weeks of the U.S. election. (And during coverage of the debates!)

      A word on how I came up with this list. I’ve been a close reader and critic of campaign coverage American-style since 1988. That’s eight “cycles,” as people in the industry say. After I started PressThink in 2003, I could write about the gatekeepers without their permission — hurray for blogging! — and so my pace increased during the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. This year I have done a little less at my blog (eight pieces since May 2015, plus one for the Washington Post) and put more into the real time conversation on Twitter, which includes most of the people doing campaign coverage, as well as the heaviest users of it.

    • Fact Check: Has Trump declared bankruptcy four or six times?

      Trump’s companies have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which means a company can remain in business while wiping away many of its debts. The bankruptcy court ultimately approves a corporate budget and a plan to repay remaining debts; often shareholders lose much of their equity.

      Trump’s Taj Mahal opened in April 1990 in Atlantic City, but six months later, “defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin,” The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow found. In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy. He could not keep up with debts on two other Atlantic City casinos, and those two properties declared bankruptcy in 1992. A fourth property, the Plaza Hotel in New York, declared bankruptcy in 1992 after amassing debt.

      PolitiFact uncovered two more bankruptcies filed after 1992, totaling six. Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004, after accruing about $1.8 billion in debt. Trump Entertainment Resorts also declared bankruptcy in 2009, after being hit hard during the 2008 recession.

    • 24 Arrested Outside Hofstra University While Demanding An Open Presidential Debate

      Hundreds protested the exclusion of alternative ideas and candidates from the first presidential debate

    • Colin Kaepernick: ‘Embarrassing’ that Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton are candidates

      Colin Kaepernick watched “a little bit” of Monday’s presidential debate, and he didn’t come away impressed with either candidate.

      [...]

      “It was embarrassing to watch that these are our two candidates,” Kaepernick told reporters Tuesday. “Both are proven liars and it almost seems like they’re trying to debate who’s less racist.

      “And at this point … you have to pick the lesser of two evils. But in the end, it’s still evil.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • When cyber gets physical: why we need the NSA [Ed: This shallow article (must enable JS) conflates cyberdefence with mass surveillance (which is what NSA does)]
    • Kuwait lawyers fight world’s first mandatory DNA sampling law

      Lawyers in Kuwait have issued a legal challenge to the only law in the world forcing citizens and visitors to give samples of their DNA to the government.

      The Kuwait government has said that the law is needed to combat terrorism. DNA testing is reportedly due to begin within weeks.

      When the law was passed in July last year, Adel AbdulHadi of the Kuwaiti law firm Adel AbdulHadi & Partners and his colleagues began researching and drafting their challenge to it. Their principal argument is that the law violates privacy and human rights provisions in the country’s own constitution, as well as those enshrined in international treaties to which Kuwait is a signatory.

    • Local Lawyers Challenge New Kuwaiti Law Creating Mandatory DNA Database Of All Citizens And Visitors
    • Snowden movie ‘preposterous’, says former NSA deputy director

      The former deputy director of the National Security Agency has taken issue with Oliver Stone’s biopic of one-time NSA employee Edward Snowden.

      Speaking to National Public Radio, Chris Inglis, who retired in 2014 after 28 years at the agency, said the film’s narrative “was a gross mischaracterisation of what NSA’s purposes are. And a gross exaggeration of Edward Snowden’s own particular role in that. To the point where you could come away from looking at that movie, saying, ‘Why are 50,000 people at the NSA dead wrong? And one is absolutely correct?’”

      An NSA deputy director does feature in the film, played by Patrick Joseph Byrnes, and commissions Snowden to lead an important project in Hawaii.

    • Military pressing for broader surveillance mandate

      New legislation is being prepared at the Ministry of Defense for inclusion in a broader package of laws aimed at upgrading surveillance by security officials that would include the possibility of monitoring data carried by cables crossing the country.

      At present, Finland does not have a law providing the military with a mandate to carry out these kinds of intelligence operations. The new legislation in the works will include this, and spell out oversight of intelligence gathering and the division of duties among various officials and agencies.

      The Finnish military has a signals intelligence unit known as the Finnish Intelligence Research Establishment which organizationally falls under the Air Force.

      The head of Finnish military intelligence services, Major General Harri Ohra-aho told Yle that operations are not only concerned with information gathering about the military picture in the region, but also with assessing social developments.

      “We don’t count tanks, rather create a broad analysis of the situation in our vicinity. Technological advances are changing the security environment,” said Ohra-aho.

    • Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

      Swiss voters have given a strong approval to a law on new surveillance powers for the intelligence agencies.

      The new law would allow the authorities to tap phones, snoop on email and deploy hidden cameras and bugs.

      It would help Switzerland catch up with other countries, supporters say.

      Opponents have feared it could erode civil liberties and put Swiss neutrality at risk by requiring closer co-operation with foreign intelligence agencies.

      Some 65.5% of voters agreed to accept the proposal. It will allow the Federal Intelligence Service and other agencies to put suspects under electronic surveillance if authorised by a court, the defence ministry and the cabinet.

    • Microsoft goes AI crazy: Now Office 365 can track what you really get up to in meetings

      At its annual Ignite conference this week in Atlanta, GA, Microsoft is showing off new AI features across its core products for the enterprise. According to CEO Satya Nadella, this AI-everywhere strategy amounts to Microsoft “democratizing AI” for everyone to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.

      “To do this, we’re infusing intelligence into everything we deliver, from the agent to applications, services and infrastructure,” said Nadella.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A New Intelligence Award for “Reporting Wrongdoing” [Ed: this is a trap]

      Professional integrity may be welcome everywhere, but “speaking truth to power” is rarely welcomed by “power.” Often it is not even acknowledged as “truth.” (Apparently, the IC envisions itself here as the domain of truth, and not of power. Or will those who challenge the IC leadership itself be eligible for the new award?) Meanwhile, “reporting wrongdoing” often seems to end badly for the reporter, as the frequency of whistleblower reprisal claims indicates.

    • House Intelligence Panel Gets Dozens of Whistleblower Complaints Every Year

      Critics of leakers have often argued that whistleblowers have legitimate channels through which they can report their grievances, but in the murky world of intelligence, it’s hard to know how many complaints are filed, and what, if anything, happens as a result. Now, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence says it sees “dozens” of such complaints every year.

      The committee will not disclose details on individual cases, however.

      “We receive whistleblower-type complaints both through the [Intelligence Community inspector general] — which includes complaints filed through the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act — and via individuals who approach the committee directly,” said Jack Langer, communications director for Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. Those complaints number in the “dozens” each year, he added.

      The legal process for whistleblowing has been at the center of renewed debate following public disclosures made by Edward Snowden in 2013. Snowden, who worked as an NSA contractor, insists he tried to raise complaints internally, but eventually gave up on the system, for fear of reprisal or dismissal.

    • Torture and False Testimony Leaves Mexico on a Journey to Nowhere

      For many in Mexico, the disappearance of 43 young students from the Ayotzinapa teaching college two years ago remains a painful emblem of a profound national failure—the failure of the state to protect its own people. Among other things, the case highlighted collusion among drug gangs, local politicians, and police, the failure of federal authorities to carry out a credible investigation, and—glaringly—the degree to which torture remains part of the standard operating procedure of criminal investigation.

      Take the case of Patricio Reyes Landa, an alleged member of the Guerrero Unidos criminal gang. Two years ago, Mexico’s attorney general called a press conference and showed a video in which Reyes Landa and three other suspects demonstrated how they supposedly threw the students’ ashes in a river, after incinerating their bodies at a garbage dump. Now, Reyes Landa and some 90 other suspects detained during the investigation say they were tortured into making false confessions about what they did or saw.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Verizon Claims Nobody Wants Unlimited Data, Wouldn’t Be Profitable Anyway

      Back in 2011, Verizon and AT&T eliminated unlimited wireless data plans, instead pushing users toward share data allotments and overage fees as high as $15 per gigabyte. And while the companies did “grandfather” many of these unlimited users at the time, both companies have made at art form out of harassing or otherwise annoying these customers until they convert to costlier shared plans. And despite the fact that such overage-fee-based plans confuse the living hell out of most customers (who have no idea what a gigabyte is), both companies continue to insist that customers don’t actually want unlimited data.

  • DRM

    • EFF calls on HP to disable printer ink self-destruct sequence

      HP Inc. should apologize to customers and restore the ability of printers to use third-party ink cartridges, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a letter to the company’s CEO yesterday.

      HP has been sabotaging OfficeJet printers with firmware that prevents use of non-HP ink cartridges and even HP cartridges that have been refilled, forcing customers to buy more expensive ink directly from HP. The self-destruct mechanism informs customers that their ink cartridges are “damaged” and must be replaced.

    • Demand that HP make amends for its self-destructing printers [SIGN AND SHARE!]

      I’ve written an open letter to HP CEO Dion Weisler on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, asking him to make amends for his company’s bizarre decision to hide a self-destruct sequence in a printer update that went off earlier this month, breaking them so that they would no longer use third-party ink cartridges.

      The letter points out that this is bad business — and it’s also bad for security. HP printers have previously been shown to be vulnerable to malware that spreads through sneaky codes in documents you print, that can steal your private data, raid your network, and become part of website-killing botnets.

      HP hid its self-destruct sequence in a software update, making future updates — like those that patch this kind of defect — suspect, and decreasing the likelihood that HP’s customers will install them.

      Worse still: HP can use Section 1201 of the DMCA to threaten security researchers who reveal similar defects, and to attack competitors who restore full functionality to your printer.

    • Capcom Releases DRM For Street Fighter 5, Promptly Rolls It Back When It Screws Legitimate Customers

      It should be quite clear by now that DRM is a fantastic way for video game makers to keep people from playing their games. Not pirates, though. No, those folks can play games with DRM just fine, because DRM doesn’t actually keep piracy from being a thing. No, I’m talking about legitimate buyers of games, who in example after example after example suddenly find that the games they bought are unplayable thanks to DRM tools that work about as well as the American political system. And yet DRM still exists for some reason, as game makers look for some kind of holy grail piece of software that will turn every past pirate into a future dollar sign.

      This search for the perfect DRM continues, as we have just the latest story of DRM gone wrong. This story of the Street Fighter V DRM, though, is a special kind of stupid because it was put in place via a software update release, meaning that a game that worked perfectly one day was bricked the next.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Theft Is Grounds For Deportation, Board Says
      • Immigration Board Says You Can Be Deported For Copyright Infringement

        While we still wait to see if Kim Dotcom can be taken against his will from another country into the US for “copyright infringement” claims, apparently the DOJ has also decided that it can work the other way. The Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals has said that people can be deported for copyright infringement. Apparently the law (the Immigration and Nationality Act) says that non-citizens can be deported if they commit crimes “involving moral turpitude” but had never weighed in on whether or not copyright infringement counted.

        [...]

        To be fair, this was a case of criminal copyright infringement, and not civil copyright infringement — and the board noted that because criminal copyright infringement requires the showing of “willfulness,” it suffices for the “moral turpitude” question. The person in question, Raul Zaragoza-Vaquero, had been arrested for selling 800 copied CDs to an RIAA investigator. He received 33 months in prison and had to pay $36,000… and was then told he had to leave the country.

      • EFF White Paper Hopes To Educate Cops On The Difference Between An IP Address And A Person

        Judges have pointed out to copyright trolls on multiple occasions that an IP address is not a person. Trolls still labor under this convenient misconception because they have little else in the way of “proof” of someone’s alleged infringement.

        Unfortunately, law enforcement agencies also seem to feel an IP address is a person — or at least a good indicator of where this person might be found. This assumption leads to blunders like ICE raiding a Tor exit node because it thought an IP address was some sort of unique identifier. After having IP addresses explained to it by the EFF, ICE returned the seized hard drives and promised to make the same mistake in the future.

        In another case, the Seattle PD raided a Tor exit node in search of a person downloading child porn. It didn’t find the target it was looking for, but went ahead and demanded passwords so it could search files and logs at the unfortunate citizen’s home before realizing it had the wrong person.

        The EFF is kind of sick of having to explain the difference between an IP address and a person to government entities. It has put together a white paper [PDF] that should be required reading anywhere government employees feel compelled to act on “evidence” as useless as IP addresses.

      • The EU’s Proposed Copyright Directive Is Likely To Be A Wonderful Gift — For US Internet Giants

        Even if the Copyright Directive manages to pass through the EU legislative system without any changes — which seems unlikely — Google would be in a strong position, because it already has the content ID technology in place that will allow it to comply. Although McNamee suggests that as a result Google would be “uniquely placed to license such software to European internet providers,” it’s more likely that it would keep it for its own exclusive use. However, the US company Audible Magic would doubtless be more than happy to license its widely-used content identification system as an alternative. And irrespective of whether it’s based on technology from Google or from Audible Magic, it’s hard to see how this outcome helps the European tech industry.

09.27.16

Team Battistelli Intensifies the Attack on the Boards of Appeal Again

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

While publicly stating to the media that they have gained independence (which is a lie)

Soviet emblem
Back to East German standards in Munich

Summary: The lawless state of the EPO, where the rule of law is basically reducible to Battistelli’s ego and insecurities, is again demonstrated with an escalation and perhaps another fake ‘trial’ in the making (after guilt repeatedly fails to be established)

THE EPO has become a rogue institution under Battistelli. It not only abolished quality control but also started attacking anyone who dares talk about it.

According to this, the “EPO does not even invite critics of swpats [software patents] when it makes an event, looks like an echo chamber for patentees” (links to an event that was mentioned here in another article from this morning).

Jesper Lund responded by saying that the “EPO has even stopped saying computer implemented inventions instead of #swpat” (software patents).

“Remember that Battistelli, who cooked up several fake ‘trials’ (internally, no oversight), relied on a USB device as ‘evidence’ and then spread some defamation in the Dutch and German media regarding the claims made by the accuser (himself).”They just keep changing the words they use to dodge the negative connotation. See how they say UPC instead of EU Patent and Community Patent, among other names for the same bad scheme. The EPO used to speak of “computer-implemented inventions,” a euphemism for software patents. They used to do this in their older Web pages (in the old site) and sometimes said CII, as we showed earlier this year. So basically, our fears of software patents under Battistelli are justified and insiders tell us that they do in fact grant software patents.

Who can stop this madness? Usually the boards of appeal. They already contributed to narrowing of scope in the past (to prevent frivolous litigation*). This morning we published a post that mentioned Board 28 and the latest stunt from Battistelli. He is quietly putting up the fire on the boards — all this while the media is supposed to believe that the 'exile' in Haar is an improvement (Wim Van der Eijk, Chairman of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA), is already on his way out).

Remember that Battistelli, who cooked up several fake ‘trials’ (internally, no oversight), relied on a USB device as ‘evidence’ and then spread some defamation in the Dutch and German media regarding the claims made by the accuser (himself). Here is the latest on this:

yeah, just saw it too.
How can there be new material NOW?
Or did one of the newly hired guys find new evidence somewhere in the stack of material on the famous USB-storage element?

Incredible.
The most important thing hammered to me in the EPO-academy for examiners-to-be, was that every single communication should be as complete as possible, including ALL objections.
We should not create new cases every time with new objections based on grounds previously known or foreseeable, but not formulated. We should not be lazy. Writing all down is procedurally efficient and gives better legal certainty to the party concerned and the public.
Maybe we should politely ask the administration representatives to join the academy, so that they do learn this important element of procedure.
It also causes one to reflect a bit more when hearing/reading something, before jumping to conclusion and action.

One might be led to the “conclusion that the AC and the President are colluding to subvert the provisions of the EPC,” one person asserted today. Here is the full comment:

So there are “new elements of information” on the suspended member of the Boards of Appeal. So what? The sole disciplinary authority for that member has closed the case against him. The charges have effectively been dismissed.

Some time ago, I posed the question of what the AC would do in the light of the disciplinary case being closed. I guess that we now have our answer: an “excuse” has been found for not immediately following the only legally sound course of action open to the AC, namely reinstatement (and appropriate compensation) of the member in question.

Do I take it that the member (and his legal tem) has been fully informed of the “new elements of information” and has been provided with an opportunity to comment upon them (as well as the issue of res judicata)? Or is there not even a pretence at formal investigation / disciplinary proceedings here?

If this carries on, then it will become impossible to avoid the conclusion that the AC and the President are colluding to subvert the provisions of the EPC. Whilst the immunities afforded to him mean that President can afford to be sanguine about the possible consequences of this, the members of the AC would do well to remember that their immunities are much more limited.

As we pointed out before, the attacks on the staff continue to escalate and become more severe. Staff in at least three EPO sites is said to be affected (the Dutch branch and apparently the Berlin branch also).

We are still curious as to why SUEPO has said nothing for so long; maybe SUEPO just hopes that the EPO’s union-busting agenda will slow down a bit if they say little or nothing to the general public.

The EPO is in shambles and Battistelli does everything to ensure it stays that way. No wonder staff is leaving in droves and it is difficult to recruit suitable people. █
_____
* There is this new report today (actually a press release) about an EPO patent coming under fire, EP1575758B. It’s likely to happen a lot more after Battistelli’s regime has led to the issuance of many bogus patents and has damaged the appeal process.

After the EPO Paid the Financial Times to Produce Propaganda the Newspaper Continues to Produce UPC Puff Pieces, Just Ahead of EU Council Meeting

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Remember what they did right before Brexit?

Financial Times on UPC

Summary: How the media, including the Financial Times, has been used (and even paid!) by the EPO in exchange for self-serving (to the EPO) messages and articles

THE EPO gives over a million Euros per year to a US-based and rather notorious PR firm. The EPO is essentially corrupting the European media at the expense of EPO budget, i.e. taxpayers and/or fee payers.

A very core part (if not flag bearer) of Team UPC, Bird & Bird, gets a platform or gets embedded in a new article (behind paywall) and then brags about it by saying: “Our @twobirdsIP partner, Rob Williams, speaks to the @FT about the effect of Brexit on the Unitary Patent Court” (“speaks to” means it’s a puff piece in the form of an interview, like those puff pieces that Managing IP has been doing with Battistelli, after prefiltering questions based on what some other journalists told us the EPO likes to do — a form of sanitisation).

The Financial Times was paid (one might even say bribed) by the EPO for UPC puff pieces several months ago, with a huge budget at Battistelli's disposal derived or extracted for lobbying purposes. The EPO gave money to media companies including the Financial Times and it even did this at a strategic time, almost certainly in order to influence the British referendum. Political meddling from such an institution should, in its own right, be a major scandal.

Regarding the piece itself (behind a paywall, so we must go by clues), based on the headline it’s once again the Milan fantasies, pretending that Milan can magically become London. It’s utter nonsense.

A more realistic take on the UPC came today from Dr. Glyn Moody. Unfortunately, his main citation points to CIPA, which has been working closely with the EPO on this (to undermine/steal democracy). Here is a portion of his article, which links to IP Kat:

It will still be possible for the UK to participate in the pan-EU Unified Patent Court (UPC) system after Brexit, according to a new legal opinion, but only if the UK is willing to “submit itself to the supremacy of EU law in the field of patent disputes.” Once established, the UPC will rule on cases involving unitary patents, which proponents say will reduce the costs of using and litigating patents in the EU.

Before the Brexit referendum, the UK was one of the main supporters of the idea of setting up the UPC. The UK government has already signed a lease for the London section of the Central Division and the UK Local Division of the new court system. Whether or not it can still participate in the UPC is therefore a crucial question.

A post on the IPKat blog explains that the legal opinion was put together for the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA). The institute has been “lobbying for positive participation in the UPC after putting in so much work in advance of preparing the system,” and therefore is keen for the UK to remain a part of the UPC system even post-Brexit.

Benjamin Henrion already told him, “too bad you did not mention Stjerna paper. And Council meeting in 2 days.”

Based on Bristows of Team UPC (update today): “The UPC Preparatory Committee is meeting on 10 October 2016 in Paris. Regarding the Competitiveness Council, as the UPC is an ‘AOB’ item for this week’s meeting there is not likely to be any substantive discussion; the Council’s next meeting is on 28/29 November 2016.”

The “EU Council [is] to meet this Thursday, 29 September to discuss UPC and unitary patent,” they noted separately. As a reminder, Bristows of Team UPC is scheming to undermine both British and EU democracy. All it cares about are its own selfish interests. More patent litigation would mean more business for Bristows and its ilk (companies like Bird & Bird)

Here, incidentally, is a person in favour of the UPC saying that the UK should not ratify and explains why. The following comment was published today (“Meldrew” seems to be a British patent attorney):

I agree with Meldrew that it is better to be in the system than out – but otherwise disagree. Ratifying now creates problems we do not currently have (and we have plenty as it is) – it could lead to the UPC and UP commencing when it is uncertain whether the UK can or will remain in the project. If it can’t, but the UK has ratified in the meantime and the system commences, the situation for UPs covering the UK, the existence and locations of the UK local division and central division branch, the position of the UK judges and the enforceability of UPC judgments handed down pre Brexit are all unclear. None of these are sensible uncertainties to create in the hope that it will all be sorted out through some pragmatic political discussion. Nor do I believe the remaining EU member states will somehow reward the UK for being neighbourly in allowing the UPC to commence without delay, or punish us for not doing so – it is likely to be an irrelevance in the overall negotiations.

This doesn’t even touch on whether ratification now of what is a treaty between EU member states (even if technically not an EU instrument), which requires recognising the supremacy of EU law (in general, not expressly limited to patent law), is politically possible. It is impossible in my view to reconcile ratification with the referendum vote (which went the wrong way, as far as I am concerned), at least until the Brexit terms are known and agreed (and are such that it is politically consistent to ratify).

I am a realist. And sadly, the pragmatic – and sensible – thing to do is simply not to ratify, then wrap the whole UP/UPC/UK discussion in with general Brexit negotiations. This of course means delay since it is difficult to see how the remaining member states can actually proceed without the UK while it remains an EU member state and a signatory to the UPC Agreement. If we end up out, then the UPC can go ahead without the UK at that point, if the momentum remains. If we are in, so much the better, though I see dragons and lions in the path there.

And for what it’s worth, I am a supporter of the UPC/UP system even though I do not believe it to be quite as good or as “necessary for industry” as many have said it is.

Don’t be fooled by the UPC fantasies. The UPC isn’t happening, but Team UPC wants us to think otherwise so that guards are taken down and opposition reverts back to defeatism. █

Beware the Patent Law Firms Insinuating That Software Patents Are Back Because of McRO

Posted in America, Patents at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Drop
McRO at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is just a drop in the ocean

Summary: By repeatedly claiming (and then generalising) that CAFC accepted a software patent the patent microcosm (meta-industry) hopes to convince us that we should continue to pursue software patents in the US, i.e. pay them a lot more money for something of little/no value

THE PREVIOUS post, a short article regarding SCOTUS, mentioned the legacy of Alice. It’s a living nightmare for patent law firms, some of which reportedly went out of business (we covered one high-profile example exactly a month ago).

“It’s a living nightmare for patent law firms, some of which reportedly went out of business…”“Once a patent is deemed to be directed to an abstract idea, the burden appears to shift against the patentee,” Patently-O wrote yesterday in relation to Alice step 2 (the abstractness test), noting also that “Enfish substantially increased the overlap between Steps One and Two of the eligibility analysis. Typically, if a claim includes an eligible inventive concept then it will not be deemed directed to an abstract idea in the first place.”

Enfish hardly changed anything at all, but patent law firms kept talking about it and shoving it into the media for about a month! They were hoping to change policy and practice by means of selective emphasis. It’s a politician’s foreign policy trick, e.g. misleading chronology or selective coverage of just one side’s agony.

Take the area of digital payment patents. They’re basically as dead as can be and statistics associated with failure/success rate are undermining Patently German‘s case when he says that “Mining giant BHP Billiton introduces Ethereum-based file sharing sys to improve suppl chain. Pioneering non-financial #blockchain application” (Accenture is trying to get patents in this area, as we noted earlier this week).

“They were hoping to change policy and practice by means of selective emphasis.”Thankfully, with Alice as a precedent, software patents in this area are very much buried (about 90% of those being tested in a court or an appeal board get invalidated).

In relation to this new article, one patent attorney asks: “Will there be a war for Blockchain patents? No, because Alice is killing most all the patent applications” (well, good).

The EPO may be going in the opposite direction, but in the US there are more appeals right now and patents are being crushed in this area a lot more often than they are being upheld. It’s too risky to even file a lawsuit with such patents. In fact, it’s dangerous to even assume that once granted a patent, not to ever be asserted in a court of law, this patent would somehow be safe. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) changed a lot of this by introducing inter partes reviews (IPRs).

“Referring to the headline,” Patently-O wrote about inter partes reviews (PTAB appeals), “The PTAB (acting on behalf of the PTO Director) held that traditional equitable defenses do not apply to IPR proceedings. Because this holding was made as part of an IPR institution decision, the appeal was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.”

“In fact, it’s dangerous to even assume that once granted a patent, not to ever be asserted in a court of law, this patent would somehow be safe.”So in this particular case, PTAB was not effective for clerical or bureaucratic reasons rather than technical reasons.

Speaking of the above-mentioned PTO Director, the previous one, David Kappos, who was responsible for a lot of the mess including a surge in patent trolling and software patents, is now in the lobbying industry. He is trying to use his previously-acquired connections to influence the law on behalf of massive corporate clients such as Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. He wants to marginalise Alice, under the guise of “clarity”. He is not alone, either. The patent microcosm backs him and here we have a couple of patent law firms putting forth their interests through Watchtroll — a site which cannot stop attacking the Supreme Court’s judgement because it wants software patents (profit). “Is it Time To Amend 101?” says their headline. But why? It’s fine. Unless one is a patent lawyer that strives to patent everything…

Jonas Bosson from FFII Sweden told us about McRO, stating that “the decision is bad. Have you seen any good analysis of the effects?”

“I’d like EFF or TechDirt to put some attention to this, as it seems software patent proponents are playing this big.”
      –Jonas Bosson“I have seen dozens,” I told him. “Same as in Enfish, lots of noise, no profound effect. SCOTUS won’t revisit software patents any time soon.”

“I’d like EFF or TechDirt” he responded, “to put some attention to this, as it seems software patent proponents are playing this big.”

Yes, software patents proponents like Microsoft and patent law firms can’t stop hyping up McRO, as if they want us to forget that CAFC broadly rejects software patents. Here is Bilski Blog (proponent of software patents) coming up with “More Lessons from McRo” (later reposted in some sites of patent lawyers). The site says “there are a couple of issues that McRo should have addressed but did not. First, the court could have further clarified that the preemption analysis should be from the perspective of a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA), and not a lay court. Using POSITA makes the analysis objective, technology neutral, and adaptive to changes in technology over time. POSITA is the only objective framework in the patent law and is already employed for claim construction, enablement, written description, obviousness, and the doctrine of equivalents. My partner Dan Brownstone and I set forth this theory, what we called Objective Preemption, in our amicus brief in Alice.”

“Well, such is the nature of selling agenda (and one’s own services)…”One does not need to look too far to realise what they pushed for in Alice, and the same goes for Bilski. Software patents profiteers can’t stop lobbying for change and even more than 2 weeks after McRO we still see propaganda in the form of ‘analysis’ [1, 2] or “Free Webinar”. One example we found yesterday was published by Gunnar Leinberg and Bryan Smith from LeClairRyan. “Federal Circuit Provides Additional Support to Software Patents” was their misleading headline. How come they never wrote anything about any of the decisions where CAFC looked into software patents and found them invalid? Well, such is the nature of selling agenda (and one’s own services)… █

The US Supreme Court Might Soon Tighten Patent Scope in the United States Even Further, the USPTO Produces Patent Maximalism Propaganda

Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Interesting timing as the USPTO has just come under criticism from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for issuing far too many patents

GAO logo

Summary: A struggle brewing between the patent ‘industry’ (profiting from irrational saturation) and the highest US court, as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO)

The Supreme Court in the US (SCOTUS) has contributed a lot to woes for patent lawyers and a relief to software developers. It is abundantly clear that Mayo and Alice are being taken quite seriously by lower courts, especially the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC).

“In short, this is just self-serving USPTO propaganda, serving perhaps to distract from the recent GAO report which chastised the USPTO for patent maximalism.”It is not hard to see that patent lawyers are frightened and mortified by SCOTUS and CAFC, both of which have been limiting patent scope more so than district courts and the USPTO (trying to just maximise its own income rather than provide a service*). Design patents may be next to be axed by the US Supreme Court, as we noted earlier this year (in summertime) and various maximalists of patents speak about it, including Watchtroll [1, 2] (the Kool-Aid of patent law firms if not somewhat of a lobbying site).

“USPTO publishes new estimates of “IP-Intensive” industries, spin results,” according to KEI (very good Web site by the way). “We have seen same spin in Europe,” Benjamin Henrion wrote. To quote all the key points about this think tank-esque activity:

USPTO has just published its new estimates of “IP-intensive” jobs for the US economy. The report is titled: Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: 2016 Update, and is available as a PDF file here. USPTO press release here:

I took a quick look at the report, and below are some initial bullet points:

1. In the new USPTO study of “IP-intensive” jobs, 85 percent are included because of trademarks.

2. Just 14 percent of the “IP-intensive” jobs involve patents.

3. 20 percent of so called “IP-intensive” jobs involve copyright industries.

4. Just 2 percent of the “IP-intensive” jobs involving patents are in the pharmaceuticals sector.

5. According to USPTO, less than 1 percent of all “IP-intensive” jobs are in the pharmaceutical sector.

6. USPTO’s top three “IP-intensive” industries are:

Grocery stores: 2.6 million jobs
Computer systems design: 1.8 million jobs
Management consulting: 1.4 million jobs

7. According to USPTO, a “majority of patenting firms are in the services and wholesale sectors.”

8. According to USPTO, the “Sound recording Industries” only provide 23.5 thousand jobs which is 0.0008 of all “ip-intensive” jobs.

9 Almost none of USPTO’s copyright sector jobs benefit from long copyright terms.

In short, this is just self-serving USPTO propaganda, serving perhaps to distract from the recent GAO report which chastised the USPTO for patent maximalism. Our next post will look more closely at the software patents lobby. █
___
* This new blog post from a patent maximalist (and longtime proponent of software patents for Bristows) says that there is “presumption of validity under US patent law,” but patent validity for pre-Alice patents is a joke because USPTO approved almost every application and by some standards it's estimated that as much as 92% of applications eventually led to a grant. To quote the maximalist, writing about ChIPs Global Summit: “The panel also noted that the presumption of validity under US patent law assists the patentee in showing that they have something of real value and that the burden of proving that the patent is invalid falls on the other side. However, in reality if we took a poll, many would comment that there are a lot of weak patents out there. It was suggested that perhaps the focus therefore should be on patent quality so that the presumption of validity and the standard of evidence to rebut that presumption (clear and convincing) is actually appropriate. Just because a patent has survived one patent challenge does not mean that the patent is necessarily stronger. If the patent has survived a challenge in front of a really good judge, then the panel noted that that may deter opponents. However, in reality, that decision is not binding on anyone who is not party to that case. Those parties will try a different tactic before different judges in a different forum. This is of course correct – it is not fair to an absent party to be faced with the bias of a decision in a case they had no right to participate in. There cannot be a time bar for bringing a challenge to a patent in district court as potential litigants and controversy may not be in existence at the time of the first action.”

Patent Trolling a Growing Problem in East Asia (Software Patents Also), Whereas in the US the Problem Goes Away Along With Software Patents

Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 9:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Section 101 is like patent reform 101

Korea software patents

Summary: A look at two contrasting stories, one in Asia where patent litigation and hype are on the rise (same in Europe due to the EPO) and another in the US where a lot of patents face growing uncertainty and a high invalidation rate

AS SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS often insist, copyrights are enough for them. These protect against misuse, plagiarism and so on. Software patents, given the inability to inspect binary files and properly study them, don’t add any more protection.

A patent law firm from South Korea (i.e. parasites that make no actual software) started the week by trying to make a case for software patents (see the above screenshot). Here is the opening part which speaks of rejection of such patents:

In recent years, there has been substantial interest in changing existing law and practice in order to expand the protection for computer program inventions. The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) sought to enact such a change by officially releasing its revised Examination Guidelines for Computer-Related Inventions on July 1 2014. Three months later, an amendment bill to the Patent Act was submitted to the National Assembly, which attempted to broaden the scope of protection for computer-related inventions (eg, by opening up the possibility of patentees bringing infringement claims against online sellers of an allegedly infringing computer program, something which would not be subject to infringement liability under the guidelines). The National Assembly seemed to recognise that the proposed amendments could have profound effects on the software industry and thus rejected them, noting that more opinions from the industry were needed to gain a consensus on this issue.

As we have already seen in the case of LG and Samsung, Microsoft utilises software patents so as to extort OEMs in South Korea and this month it is pursuing even more money, in essence trying to tax Linux (we wrote about that twice last week). In addition to that, Microsoft creates and arms patent trolls that go after Linux and/or Android. We gave many examples of that in the past and earlier this month we warned that patent trolling was becoming commonplace in China and other countries in east Asia. IAM ‘magazine’ does not quite see what the problem is and today it has this new article about a silent passage of patents to Oppo, after concerns about the US ITC targeting companies in Taiwan (where many products are actually made) without even a proper trial, imposing massive sanctions that are absolute and ruinous. When companies such as Microsoft use the US ITC in an attempt to simply embargo the competition, using patents that are often dubious (USPTO does a shoddy job), everybody loses. Regarding the problem of trolls in Asia, we see more and more articles from IAM. In the US, says IAM, trolling activity has gone down and Joff Wild finally uses the T word (troll):

The week before last I hosted a webinar for IAM Market entitled Readying a Patent Portfolio for Sale: What You Need to Know to Be Successful. Over 350 people signed up to get the materials and the recording, while close to 200 listened live as presenter Kent Richardson, a partner at Silicon Valley-based Richardson Oliver Law Group, talked through his slides and then answered questions from me and from attendees. It was a fascinating hour, which my colleague Jack Ellis has written up in a blog for the IAM Market knowledge centre (where there are also details about how you can get hold of the presentation, talk and interview).

This week I am in Gothenburg for the CIP Forum and yesterday at a session about defensive patent aggregation something that Kent (who is also here and took part in the session) said during the webinar came back to me. As a firm that does a lot of transaction-based work, ROL closely monitors activity in the patents sales market, in particular packages being offered by brokers. IAM subscribers will know that each year ROL produces an update for us about the activity it is seeing in areas such as pricing, sales rates, package sizes and so on – the next one will be published in issue 81 of IAM, which comes out at the end of November. One of the things it is set to show, Kent stated in our conversation, is that prices finally seem to have stabilised, essentially because they probably could not go any lower, and that for the first time it looks like operating companies are buying more than NPEs are.

Coming from a trolls denialist, the above is interesting. If it’s true that trolls have shrunk somewhat (in terms of activity like litigation and acquisitions), then we suspect it has a lot to do with the demise of software patents, as we foresaw all along. Later today we’ll show how the US patent microcosm tries to change things for the worse again. █

The EPO’s Continued Push for Software Patents, Marginalisation of Appeals (Reassessment), and Deviation From the EPC

Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Quality control is just a theoretical concept in Battistelli’s EPO, where the goose is being slaughtered for a golden egg

Summary: A roundup of new developments at the EPO, where things further exacerbate and patent quality continues its downward spiral

THE scandals at the EPO are an endless saga and a bottomless pit. Board 28 needs to act fast because the Administrative Council sure behaves like it does not care or like it’s trying to save face for Battistelli.

“Patent scope (limitation) seems to be viewed as a nuisance at the upper echelon/top floors of the EPO’s building in Munich.”“According to the minutes of the last meeting of Board 28,” one person wrote, “the president provided “new elements of information [...] on the disciplinary case of a Council appointee. Following an exchange of views, [the Board] indicated that it would reflect on the information, pending receipt of a legal note from the President.”” the thing about the Board is, it previously said Battistelli's regime had caused an EPO "crisis". We are planning to revisit this subject pretty soon. Has the Board said anything about the decline in quality and loss of stakeholders' interest which is very apparent? Therein lies a crisis as big as the social crisis. The EPO cannot survive without a reputation. It won’t attract applicants or even highly-qualified staff.

Watch this new tweet from the EPO, which links to the EPO’s own site and says: “From today, you can register for the Indo-European conference on Industry 4.0 and patents” (Industry 4.0 is just a meaningless buzzword).

Not too shockingly, software patents (in Europe) have been interjected into it (the fourth time we see it this month alone!). To quote the page (emphasis ours): “The consequences for the patent system are potentially tremendous, and they challenge some of the fundamental concepts of the system, such as the definition of “industry” and “inventor”. There will be a greater overlap and interplay between the types of rights, and as software pervades through all technologies a greater debate on the patentability of software.”

Patent scope (limitation) seems to be viewed as a nuisance at the upper echelon/top floors of the EPO’s building in Munich. These guys are nuts; they’re neither scientists nor good managers. They’re mostly old buddies of Battistelli, loyal to him and telling him mostly what he wants to hear. They attack everything which voices criticism as though it’s an enemy, including the independent (in principle) boards of appeal.

“We understand from correspondence with the EPO that this change in practice has been made following investigations by the Legal Division resulting in an acknowledgement that the current procedures for recording an assignment are not consistent with Article 72 EPC.”
      –Lexology“The EPO to bring opposition proceedings in standard cases down from 25,8 months to 15 months,” Nordic Patent (Kongstad-connected) says, citing “Heli Philajamaa from EPO” (the EPO has just retweeted this).

Here is a simple translation for those who believe the lie that the appeals are still taken seriously (rather than gradually crushed): The EPO does not want oppositions. It wants to make them harder, more expensive, etc. It suppresses them. Heck, it does not even want patent quality anymore.

The EPO’s “current procedures for recording an assignment are not consistent with Article 72 EPC,” says this new report, but it’s not as though the EPC ever bothered Battistelli. He ignores it at every turn and corner, as we noted earlier this year. The thugs at Eponia basically declared a state of emergency and are now just doing whatever they please, even when that’s against national and international laws. Here is what contributors to Lexology said:

However, we have been made aware that, with immediate effect, the EPO will only record an assignment if it is signed by all parties to the agreement. An assignment signed by the assignor(s) only will be considered to be deficient. We understand from correspondence with the EPO that this change in practice has been made following investigations by the Legal Division resulting in an acknowledgement that the current procedures for recording an assignment are not consistent with Article 72 EPC.

This change in practice has not yet been publicly announced by the EPO. However we are aware from practical experience that the new practice is already in effect and have been informed that the Guidelines for Examination will be updated shortly. There is no indication that the EPO plans to revisit assignments already recorded under the previous practice.

At this stage it seems almost as though it’s too late to save the EPO. It’s too hard to save something whose top management does not want it to be saved (they just try to save their own career, not the Office, or simply save face). █

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