08.04.16
Posted in America, EFF, Patents at 3:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The long and destructive tail of faulty or shoddy patent examination
Summary: A look at a highly destructive software patent (on podcasting) reaching a dead end only after the well-funded EFF stepped in and another new court decision which ruled a video streaming patent invalid
TECHRIGHTS spent many years writing about the infamous “podcasting patent” — a patent which was used to shake down many small businesses and even hobbyists. Not only was such a patent not justified to begin with; it deliberately targeted those without incentive to fight back in court (as it’s expensive).
The EFF stepped in some years back and two days ago it reported the latest in a press release by Daniel Nazer. It says:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal appeals court at a hearing Thursday to find that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) correctly invalidated key claims of a patent owned by Personal Audio, which had used the patent to threaten podcasters big and small.
EFF is defending a USPTO ruling it won last year in its petition challenging the validity of key claims of Personal Audio’s patent. EFF argued, and the USPTO agreed, that the claimed invention existed before Personal Audio filed its patent application.
So even the USPTO, which granted this patent in the first place, agreed/admitted/acknowledged that it had made an error. How many people and businesses have so far been harmed (financial impact, health impact etc.) by this terrible judgment? Who will be held accountable for it? There will never be proper compensation, let along a refund. Even without Alice — as the above clearly notes that it boils down to prior art — this patent should never have existed.
Looking elsewhere in the news, patent lawyers (as usual, Tyrus Cartwright from Seyfarth Shaw LLP in this case) only cover (or cherry-pick, or scrape the bottom of the barrel for) cases that end up in favour of software patents*, but if one looks a little further at the latest in the docket (patent lawsuits, not PTAB), “Video Streaming Patents [Are Found] Invalid Under 35 U.S.C. § 101″. To quote: “The court granted defendant’s motion for judgment on the pleadings because the asserted claims of plaintiff’s video streaming patents encompassed unpatentable subject matter and found that the claims were directed toward an abstract idea. “[T]he claims are directed to an abstract idea because the claims are not directed to an improvement in computer functionality, and the physical components of the claim merely provide a generic environment for carrying out the abstract idea. . . . The court is not persuaded that the claimed invention results in an improvement to computer functionality. [Plaintiff] did not invent the technology that converts video files into streaming format. . . . Moreover, [plaintiff] was not confronted with the problem of how to combine conversion technology and the Internet, or how to associate identification tags with video files. At most, the claims merely automate a sequence of known steps using conventional technology so that a human is not burdened with various manual steps. . . . The ordered arrangement of such conventional features provides no discernable benefits to computer functionality. This stands in stark contrast to claims which achieved such improvements to computing technology.””
Software patents die every week if not every day in the US (PTAB decisions are more frequent than court decisions). Things have gotten so out of hand for software patents proponents that they doubt Yahoo’s patent portfolio is worth much at all; today Forbes asks, “could Pokemon Go’s profit engine be derailed by challenges to the software patents underlying the game?”
Well, not really. Nintendo can afford going to court and since software patents typically die there, Nintendo will endure. In fact, post-Alice it’s unlikely that any firm (even patent troll) will bother suing. █
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* In this case [PDF], “patents-in-suit are directed to inventions that verify the delivery and integrity of electronic messages” as judged by PTAB, not actual courts. Not all avenues/means have been exhausted and the analysis is not as thorough as can be.
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 2:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Defeating the whole point or purpose of a patent (examination) system
Summary: A glance at some of the latest news and developments at the European Patent Office and what the US system serves to teach about the long-term effects
THE world’s patent systems have become a primary point of focus here. It’s not at all limited to the EPO and it never was.
SUEPO has not updated its public Web site in nearly a month (which is rather rare an infrequency), since around the time it had a hearing at The Hague. in Twitter, the EPO’s PR folks promote the EPO’s event in the US, next year’s lobbying event, and various courses, empty forums, etc. Basically nothing new. The media too is mostly silent and we are still working our way through ILO rulings, having recently explained how actions by Team Battistelli undermined the European Patent Convention (EPC). There are dozens of rulings to go through, so this may take some time (these cases are years old anyway, with only the outcomes/rulings being new).
“Will appeals even exist at the EPO under or after Battistelli?”After years of UPC promotion the editor of IAM, the EPO's mouthpiece, says that there is growing interest in Brexit’s impact. The UPC is a colossal threat to patent quality and a potential open door to patent trolls from abroad.
Quality control at the EPO is dying (Battistelli ended it using his utterly misguided policies) and judging by this new announcement [1, 2], it seems improbable that improper patent grants will be revoked fast enough or easily enough. Will appeals even exist at the EPO under or after Battistelli? The appeal boards are understaffed, they will soon be overpriced, and appeal windows will be narrowed (shortened time for appeals). It is already happening (effective a month ago, possibly to exacerbate in the near future).
Chloe Grover, writing in a sponsored “REPORT” (i.e. marketing) from a British law firm, Carpmaels & Ransford LLP, speaks about “designations of European patents where validity is also challenged”. Nowadays, as we pointed out before, it is harder to challenge validity because Battistelli does not wish for the weakness of examination to become apparent.
“The appeal boards are understaffed, they will soon be overpriced, and appeal windows will be narrowed (shortened time for appeals).”Europe is in growing need of a fix. There is a growing danger that low-quality patents will make it through to the point of attracting patent trolls (manifestation or fermentation of them). In the USPTO, as a cautionary tale, patent mazes/thickets and uncertainties accomplished what they’re supposedly there for: protectionism without studying the broader impact (facts-based cost analysis). But they also created a growing niche for patent trolls, to the point where nearly 90% of lawsuits there (in the technology sector) are filed by patent trolls, almost always with software patents. This means little of no progress in high-tech industry, as noted by Professor James Bessen the other day. One person says that it’s “because poor legalities like Patent Trolling [that can] destroy start up businesses” (this person is adamantly against software patents).
Even a new article by Professor Dennis Crouch complains about the USPTO this week. People are clearly not happy with the way things are run over there (the US) and Battistelli is rapidly emulating or copying all the mistakes made there. He brings neoliberalism to Europe, or patent liberalism in the quality sense (if in doubt, or under pressure of time/quota, grant liberally). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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After Linux took off (as GPL’d free software), I could see clearly how freedom worked because the means were there—not just for demonstrating it to everybody, but for developing more and more with it. I suspect the same could be true for promise-based financial dealings such as rent and buy.
So my request here is to help Kevin debug the case he makes for his ideas, while putting them to work.
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Nate will continue to contribute articles to LWN. But we suspect that the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention, meaning that we will be needing somebody to help fill his shoes. Thus, LWN is hiring. If you would like to write full-time for one of the most discriminating readerships in the world — but also one of the most interesting, engaged, and supportive readerships — we would like to hear from you. This is your chance to make your mark on one of the community’s oldest publications.
Speaking of “oldest,” the basic format of LWN’s Weekly Edition has changed little over the last 18 years. Some pages have come and gone (long-time readers will remember the desktop page, or the once-interesting “Linux in the News” page), but substantive changes have been few indeed. That format has served us well over the years; among other things, it helps us to ensure that each edition covers a wide range of topics. But it can also be somewhat limiting; it is a sort of treadmill of slots to be filled each week that makes it hard to focus on specific areas in response to what is happening in the community.
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Desktop
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This was sometime around 2008. I wasn’t even 20 years old. I didn’t know how to code (apart from basic HTML stuff), nor did I have any particular tech skills. However, I was part of a community radio station that was embedded in an open source culture. After a full year as a member of that community, I decided it was time to fully convert and decided to install a Linux-based OS on my first ever laptop.
My friends (and engineers-in-the-making) at Radio Zero were split between the recommended distributions, with some leaning towards Debian and others towards Ubuntu. After carefully listening to pros and cons and asking many times about whether I’d be able to actually work with any of them, I decided to go with Ubuntu.
I was determined to install an open source OS on my computer regardless of my Dad’s* warnings about possible compatibility issues. Despite not being a programmer, or anything even remotely related, I was incredibly excited about what Linux had to offer. The promise of an operating system that was designed and developed with accessibility for all in mind, that you can tweak and improve as you please, and that is developed by and for the community sounded like a dream coming true. On top of all this, it was free. So, what was there not to like?
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If you’re a Linux user who happens to dual-boot with Windows, you should exercise extreme caution when upgrading to the just-released Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Not long after Microsoft’s latest release, reports began to hit the Web concerning issues of hard drives having their data deleted. The issue has proven to have enough credence to push Ubuntu’s Community Manager Alan Pope to shoot out a warning…
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Microsoft hoped the Windows 10 Anniversary Update would literally be a revelation for all users, but shortly after installing the update, users encountered various issues. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to anticipate all the possible bugs, the list of complaints is getting longer every day.
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Server
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Networking professionals hear all the time that they need to learn new skills to keep up with a rapidly changing industry. On-the-job training would be a practical option, but if your company hasn’t plunged into software-defined networking – and plenty haven’t — how do you expand your knowledge when you’re mired in CLI?
As it turns out, the options for learning new approaches to networking are growing as SDN adoption gradually expands beyond hyper-scale Internet companies and service providers. This spring, the Linux Foundation rolled out a software-defined networking training course to address what the foundation described as a skills gap for networking pros. In launching the SDN training, the foundation said many network engineers lack experience with software virtualization.
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Kernel Space
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Isle of Man startup Credits has become the first to offer blockchain DLT to Britain’s public sector
Britain’s public sector can start experimenting with distributed ledger technology (DLT) for the first time after confirmation that blockchain-as-a-service startup Credits has been enrolled as part of the latest G-Cloud 8 framework agreement.
Credits is a small Isle of Man firm whose back story was recently covered in sister title Techworld but access to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) that comes with blockchain marks an important milestone for the G-Cloud Digital Marketplace and its public sector users.
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Graphics Stack
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It appears that Linux gamers running AMD Radeon graphics cards could soon be treated to long-awaited FreeSync support. Some eagle-eyed folks at reddit spotted interesting Kernel patches submitted yesterday that both requests the addition of a FreeSync ioctl device, and also the mechanism for activating and deactivating FreeSync with full-screen apps.
Because this patch would be implemented in the Linux kernel itself, the FreeSync mechanism should be able to work with both the open-source and proprietary drivers. I am unsure about the state of G-SYNC in the open-source Nouveau driver, but NVIDIA’s proprietary driver has supported G-SYNC for quite some time.
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Benchmarks
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I’ve been a bit behind on my file-system benchmarking the past few months but for your viewing pleasure today are some EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. F2FS file-system tests on an NVMe SSD when testing the Linux 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 kernels.
The three file-systems were each tested on the latest four stable kernel series. In the next week or so I will provide some complementary figures using Linux 4.8 Git once the merge window is over and the release candidates begin. All of the file-systems were tested with the Samsung 950 PRO M.2 NVM Express SSD.
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Applications
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The Tor Project is proud to announce the general availability of a new stable branch of the widely-used Tor software for anonymity online. The Tor 0.2.8 series is currently the most advanced one and build 0.2.8.6 is now ready for download.
According to the release notes, the Tor 0.2.8 stable branch has been in development for the past several months, during which the development team managed to implement over 300 changes. The biggest new features since Tor 0.2.7 are performance improvements to client bootstrapping, production-ready authority-side implementation for better identity keys for relays, as well as new security features for Linux OSes.
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Fotoxx developer Michael Cornelison announced a new monthly release of the open-source and free image editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems, version 16.08.
Fotoxx 16.08 is the August 2016 maintenance update of the popular software application, bringing numerous new features and improving existing ones. According to the release notes, there’s now support for removing multiple images just by clicking on their thumbnails in Albums, and users will be able to drag image thumbnails from a gallery or file manager directly into an album, and position them.
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The popular and widely-used NetworkManager open-source network connection management software for GNU/Linux operating systems has been updated today, August 3, 2016, to version 1.2.4.
NetworkManager 1.2.4 is the second maintenance update in the major 1.2 series of the application, and, according to the internal changelog that we’ve attached at the end of the article for your reading pleasure, it brings quite some nice additions and fixes for the most annoying issues reported by users since NetworkManager 1.2.2.
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Atom is a free, open source “hackable text editor for the 21st Century” developed by GitHub, available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. It features a built-in package manage that allows searching and installing new packages (and themes) from within Atom, smart autocompletion, file system browser, multiple panes, and more.
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In subuser 0.5 release cycle we’ve seen an overall trend towards the stabalization of the source tree, a reduction in bugs, and the beginning of work packaging subuser. Thanks to Stanislas Leduc, subuser is now in Debian sid and Ubuntu Yakkety! Packages for the RPM based distributions are in the works. You can find the packaging code here.
One of the major stepping stones on the way to subuser stability was the solidification of UTF-8 support. This meant that we had to drop support for Python 2.
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A few years ago, the hardware vendor Yubico made a bit of a splash when it introduced its YubiKey line of inexpensive hardware security tokens powered by open-source software. With its most recent product release, however, Yubico has dropped open source and started deploying only proprietary software in its devices. Consequently, many community members have started looking for a viable replacement that will adhere to open-source principles. At present, one of the leading contenders for Yubico’s departed customers is Nitrokey, which manufactures a line of hardware tokens capable of generating one-time passwords (OTPs), storing and using OpenPGP keys, and several other features. The devices made by Nitrokey run open-source software and are open hardware as well.
To recap, Yubico had produced YubiKey products for several years and, historically, released its own open-source software for working with the devices. The original devices focused on OTP, and they were popularized by their ability to support the Hash-based message authentication code (HMAC)-based One-Time Password (HOTP) and the Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) algorithms. HOTP and TOTP were already used in a number of two-factor authentication smartphone apps; the YubiKey’s ability to replace a smartphone with a small, lightweight, and nigh-indestructible hardware token was a selling point.
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Today marks one year since the initial commit of Sway. Over the year since, we’ve written 1,823 commits by 54 authors, totalling 16,601 lines of C (and 1,866 lines of header files). This was written over the course of 515 pull requests and 300 issues. Today, most i3 features are supported. In fact, as of last week, all of the features from the i3 configuration I used before I started working on Sway are now supported by Sway.
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I am sure everyone has tried to use ed at least once. And I’m also sure some people have read Ed, the standard text editor. Its cryptic error messages (just ? actually) and the lack of any user interface probably turns most people away from it. I have to admit, I tried to use it before without any success. I spent probably 15 seconds in it before kill -9‘ing the process. But the truth is, ed is actually really easy to use after doing about 3 minutes of reading.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The latest work on RAD Game Tools’ Oodle data compression with new compression codecs have it handily beating the open-source alternatives.
There’s been much interest in recent times around the open-source Google Brotli project as well as Zstd and others, but the latest work done by RAD Game Tools to their commercial and proprietary compression tech is now putting the open-source lossless compression alternatives further behind.
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It is the moment you have all been waiting for!…ish. I am sticking one toe in the water and putting out a very, very unpolished release of the very first version of the engine (the isometric engine, which differs from what I previously said I would release first, due to demand). Other versions are to follow. It was a fair amount of work to prep just this release, as unpolished as it is. And there are many things wrong, which I am mostly aware of (see the README.md). As noted, the point was not to make a perfect release, the point was to get the code in your hands as fast as possible (and I am sorry it has taken this long for me to get it out!).
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We already knew that Total War: WARHAMMER was coming to Linux, but we didn’t know when as it seemed like it was forgotten about. Now we know it’s being ported by Feral Interactive!
This is good news, as I’ve been pretty happy with Feral’s porting work and their support of their products has been top notch. Pleased to see them get more porting work to continue pushing our platform.
Hopefully I will be able to do my usual thing of giving it a run over before release, if not, I will try to after release.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Ark, the file archiver and compressor developed by KDE, has seen a lot of development for the upcoming 16.08 release. This blog post provides a summary of the most important changes.
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I was invited to the KDE Randa Sprint meeting this year, and started to develop the osm-simplify tool as part of my GSoC project. This will be used to style, cut and optimize the vector data which in the end will be downloaded and rendered by the Marble app. Instead of .png raster images, the tile data will be stored in a compressed vector format(.o5m), specially created for the OSM data.
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I Approached around 50 brazilian artists for this, I’m not sure how many of them will answer, but this was the first answer that I got. This konqui is made by André Noel, the Real Programmer, owner of the web comic strip “A Programmers Life”, which you can read here in portuguese or here in english.
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New Releases
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The developers of Toutou, a minimalist GNU/Linux distribution based on Puppy Linux, are continuing the development of the Toutou Linux 6.3.2 “SlaXen” release with a second Alpha milestone.
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Curtis Gedak and the GParted team have announced the release and general availability for download of the GParted Live 0.26.1-5 stable Live system for OS-independent disk partitioning operations.
Based on the latest Debian Sid software repository as of July 23, 2016, GParted Live 0.26.1-5 is here to patch a BIOS boot issue and missing window bars problem when running the Live system on the VirtualBox virtualization software, and improves support for FAT32 filesystems by patching the libparted library.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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The conundrum for many enterprise-level businesses is that the demand for data storage is significantly outpacing the shrinking price for storage. The upshot for many is that budgets for storage are growing faster than data demands. Fortunately SUSE wants to reduce your storage costs, which is why it released the new SUSE Enterprise Storage 3.
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Red Hat Family
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At Red Hat, we recognize this, and I want to share what we’ve learned about meritocracy…
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Finance
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system is currently in development, with a second Alpha build seeded to public testers at the end of July 2016.
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Canonical, though Martin Pitt, the systemd maintainer for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, announced recently plans to unify and clean up the networking configuration in Ubuntu via a new project called “netplan.”
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Instagraph is an unofficial Instagram app for Ubuntu Touch. The app is free, and supports photo uploads, commenting, liking and more.
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Flavours and Variants
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GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton has released a new version of his Ubuntu-based Exton|OS operating system, build 160728. The Exton|OS Light edition has been updated, which uses the Openbox window manager.
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Linux Mint 18 is a solid update and continues the slow but steady evolution of what may be the most popular Linux desktop out there. If you’re an existing Mint user, it’s definitely worth upgrading, though do bear in mind that this upgrade may be a bit more difficult compared to the very simple upgrade process for 17.x updates. As of this writing, Linux Mint has not published its usual upgrade guide, and I installed a clean copy, so I can’t comment on the upgrade process.
Mint 18 remains my recommendation both for anyone who’s new to Linux as well as seasoned Linux users who want a desktop that just works and gets out of the way. Thanks to its incremental development approach, its dedication to evolving features slowly, and its development of power user features and configuration options, Mint manages to serve both newcomers and Linux power users well.
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Canonical, through April Wang, is pleased to announce that the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices is now officially available for the Bubblegum-96 single-board computer (SBC).
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Phones
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This is my english version of the review on the Jolla C device from Techview Podcast.
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Android
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MIT App Inventor is a groundbreaking tool for developing Android applications without any prior programming and coding skills. Using this open source tool, one can convert his/her creative ideas into Android applications. As this utility is browser and cloud-based, you don’t need to download any software or store anything on your computer.
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In 2014, my colleague Jason Hibbets wrote up a great article based on an excellent talk from Mark Atwood on the skills necessary to get a job with open source.
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Starting in the last years of the last century, when Linux and free software were first making their mark on the world, a website called Slashdot was the king-hell news and discussion site for such things, along with a variety of other topics that interested the kind of people you might meet at a LUG meeting or in the CS department of your local university. The original Slashdot tagline (no longer visible on the site) was “News for nerds, stuff that matters.” And one of the people who worked on Slashdot during those heady days was Timothy Lord, who is such a devout Linux person that he has a Tux tattoo (which we forgot to have him show in the video, darn it).
FOSS was not the only news that interested nerds, and other stuff mattered, too, as the extensive Wikipedia Slashdot page explains. So let us go then, you and I, while FOSS Force is spread out, Prufrock-like, upon the monitor, to a distant land and time, with Timothy — and learn how things were in the days of yore, when Linux was still unknown to the masses and the people who cared about it, and about FOSS in general, were an interesting bunch we shall politely not call weirdos since many of them became our good friends over the years. But normal they were not, which was a large part of their charm — and what gave Slashdot its unique flavor.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Electrolysis is the project name for Mozilla’s efforts to split Firefox into multiple processes to improve responsiveness, stability, and security. The first phase of this work was to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.
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A Finagle inspired network application framework for Rust.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created – targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features.
At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users.
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The Document Foundation today announced the releases of LibreOffice 5.2 and 5.1.5. LibreOffice 5.2 is the latest in the Fresh branch of the popular office suite bringing a new document classification system that will help keep prying eyes out. Other improvements include a single line toolbar option, quicker access to Print to File, and several other goodies. Of course, they’re always tweaking the core code as well making for a faster and more stable experience. But wait, there’s even more…
As security concerns increase the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program is a public-private partnership formed to secure electronic communication primarily for defense contractors and government entities. They’ve laid out specifications and frameworks that allow for more secure shared documents over the Internet. LibreOffice 5.2 adheres to these document classification specifications so it can be deployed in more sensitive projects.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Ludovic Courtès reports for the GNU Guix project, an open-source package management system for the GNU system, on the availability of the Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) 0.11.0.
It appears that this is the first time we write here something about the Guix System Distribution, so we feel obliged to inform the reader about the fact that GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system powered by the Linux-libre kernel and using GNU Guix as default package manager, thus respecting user’s freedom.
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Hardware
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Q2 2016 saw Backblaze: introduce 8TB drives into our drive mix, kickoff a pod-to-vault migration of over 6.5 Petabytes of data, cross over 250 Petabytes of data stored, and deploy another 7,290 drives into the data center for a total of 68,813 spinning hard drives under management. With all the ins-and-outs let’s take a look at how our hard drives fared in Q2 2016.
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Health/Nutrition
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The school superintendent in Portland, Oregon, has resigned amid a widening scandal, after news broke that the district waited months to tell the public that drinking water at two elementary schools had tested positive for lead.
Even school employees only learned about the elevated lead levels at Creston and Rose City Park when a local newspaper ran an exposé.
“What set all of us off initially was the cover-up,” said Belinda Reagan, president of the union that represents school clerical staff. “They lied about it. They knew. That’s a notorious manner of handling things in this district. They are not forthcoming.”
The first two schools were just the tip of the iceberg. “Now we are finding out, as they are testing more schools, that all of them have the issues,” Reagan said.
The four unions representing teachers, custodians, and clerical employees quickly united to put pressure on the district—and to find out how this problem went unfixed for so long. They’re demanding testing of all schools, safety protection for students and employees, and a role in the plan to make schools safe by the fall.
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Security
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The security firm allocates $50,000 to pay security researchers for responsibly disclosing flaws in its security products.
Kaspersky Lab is no stranger to the world of vulnerability research, but the company is now opening up and enabling third-party security researchers to disclose vulnerabilities about Kaspersky’s own software.
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A series of scripts are created to do reproducible builds for Linux kernel with PaX/Grsecurity patch set.
Thanks to:
PaX/Grsecurity
Debian GNU/Linux Community
Shawn C[a.k.a “Citypw”]
Linux From Scratch
Without the contributions of the projects, community and people, the scripts cannot be accomplished.
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SECURITY RESEARCHERS have uncovered at least four flaws in the HTTP/2 protocol, the successor to HTTP that was launched properly only in May last year, after Google rolled up its SPDY project into HTTP/2 in February.
The flaws enable attackers to slow web servers by overwhelming them with seemingly innocent messages that carry a payload of gigabytes of data, putting them into infinite loops and even causing them to crash.
The HTTP/2 protocol can be divided into three layers: the transmission layer, including streams, frames and flow control; the HPACK binary encoding and compression protocol; and the semantic layer, which is an enhanced version of HTTP/1.1 enriched with server-push capabilities.
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Defence/Aggression
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What does the power struggle between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and powerful Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen mean for Turks who want democracy?
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A striking feature of the aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey are the mass gatherings and demonstrations that have been taking place on a nightly basis in towns across the country. But what has spurred people to take to the streets in such numbers? And how is the government’s narrative of traitors and infiltrators, in opposition to defenders of democracy, likely to shape future developments in Turkey?
Whereas significant incidents, such as the spate of recent terrorist attacks, have generally been met by an immediate media blackout in Turkey, this time the media clearly had a crucial role to play. It was in a live broadcast on CNN Turk that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan launched his appeal for people to take to the streets to ‘defend their democracy’, as the military coup attempt was unfolding on July 15th. The call was made via mobile application Facetime and was then widely disseminated via social media – an irony given Erdoğan’s well-known aversion to such platforms.
In what may have come as a surprise to those familiar Erdoğan’s polarising rhetoric, people across the country heeded the call in vast numbers. Zehra Aydogan, living in an area close to Istanbul’s main airport, reported that within an hour the streets of her neighbourhood were flooded with men and boys streaming towards the airport.
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The clandestine group’s goal was clear: Obtain the building blocks of a radioactive “dirty bomb” — capable of poisoning a major city for a year or more — by openly purchasing the raw ingredients from authorized sellers inside the United States.
It should have been hard. The purchase of lethal radioactive materials — even modestly dangerous ones — requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a measure meant to keep them away from terrorists. Applicants must demonstrate they have a legitimate need and understand the NRC’s safety standards, and pass an on-site inspection of their equipment and storage.
But this secret group of fewer than 10 people — formed in April 2014 in North Dakota, Texas and Michigan — discovered that getting a license and then ordering enough materials to make a dirty bomb was strikingly simple in one of their three tries. Sellers were preparing shipments that together were enough to poison a city center when the operation was shut down.
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More than 400 government documents have gone missing from the National Archives in the last four years.
They include Foreign Office files from the 1970s on “military and nuclear collaboration with Israel” and a 1947 letter from Winston Churchill.
One MP from the parliamentary group on official archives told the BBC he was “concerned” by their loss.
The National Archives said it was running a “robust” programme to locate the documents.
A response by officials to a Freedom of Information request from the BBC showed that 402 historical files remain unaccounted for since 1 January 2012.
They include more than 60 Foreign Office files, more than 40 from the Home Office and six from the official records of former prime ministers.
The National Archives in Kew, London, holds more than 11 million official documents, many of which have been transferred from government departments and are often opened as public records after 30 years.
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Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can’t use nuclear weapons, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.
“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said on his “Morning Joe” program.
Scarborough made the Trump comments 52 seconds into an interview with former Director of Central Intelligence and ex-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden.
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Olympic thieves have robbed Denmark’s team of mobile phones, clothes and sheets, and even had the cheek to deprive Morten Rodtwitt, the country’s Olympic boss of his iPad.
“It’s extremely irritating,” Morten Rodtwitt, Denmark’s chef de mission in Rio, told Berlingske.
“In connection with the many extra workers, cleaners and housekeepers who have been squeezed into the Olympic village because of our requirements and requests, we have been subjected to a series of thefts,” he told TV2.
The thefts come on top of a string of problems with the athletes rooms which have forced the Danish delegation to complain of no fewer than 150 issues with their 36 apartments.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Before a campaign stop at a boutique tie manufacturer in Denver and a rally, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton raised money from a deep-pocketed donor with a potential interest in one of the most controversial issues facing voters in Colorado this November.
Clinton attended an Aspen fundraiser Tuesday hosted by Charif Souki, who amassed his fortune working for natural gas companies including one he founded last year, Tellurian Investments. The debate about fracking is intensifying in Colorado. In recent months, activists in the swing state have been pushing ballot initiatives to limit the practice while the oil and gas industry has pushed back with a multimillion-dollar campaign.
Under Clinton, the U.S. State Department was a major proponent of fracking, and her campaign has benefited from millions of dollars from donors connected to the oil and gas industry, according to a recent report from Greenpeace. By some estimates, Clinton raised at least $650,000 at the fundraiser with Souki, based on the number of people in attendance and the price of admission.
During the primary season, Clinton refused to say that she would completely ban fracking as president but implied that with the various restrictions she supports, including the ones being fought for in Colorado, there wouldn’t be a lot of land left over for fracking developments.
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The Center for Biological Diversity today sued California regulators for supporting a so-called “aquifer exemption” plan to turn underground water in the Price Canyon area of San Luis Obispo County into a permanent disposal site for oil wastewater and other fluids. There are at least 100 water supply wells for drinking water and crop irrigation within a mile of this aquifer.
Today’s lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in San Luis Obispo, faults regulators for not analyzing the aquifer exemption plan’s risks as required by the California Environmental Quality Act. The suit asks the court to set aside the state’s approval of the aquifer exemption and halt oil company injection into this underground water until regulators have complied with CEQA.
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Finance
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Time Inc., which in recent weeks has undergone a major corporate reorganization and a retooling of its sales and marketing staff, is laying off an estimated 110 people across all areas of the company, according to people familiar with the situation.
As part of its reorganization efforts, Time Inc. has created new teams to focus on specific advertising categories in a bid to sell more advertising and advertising services to marketers across all its titles.
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When you woke up this morning, chances are your morning routine was touched in some way by a private equity firm. From the water you drink to the roads you drive to work, to the morning newspaper you read, Wall Street firms are playing an increasingly influential role in daily life. So says a compelling new article in The New York Times, “This Is Your Life, Brought to You by Private Equity.” For more, we speak with New York Times reporter Danielle Ivory, one of the contributors to the series as well as co-author of the recent article “When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers.”
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In uncertain economic times, austerity is oft prescribed as a panacea to a nation’s economic ills. International organisations, business groups, mainstream political parties and the media lead the cheer squad about nations needing to live within their means. To the person on the street, there is logic to it; in household finance, earning more than you spend is seen as prudent, therefore governments should follow the same formula.
The trouble is, if you have ever studied a reasonable mainstream version of economics, you would know that in uncertain economic times, governments need to go into deficit to sustain economic growth. Although the aforementioned groups would have you believe otherwise, this is not a radical notion. In fact, it is largely attributed to a stuffy product of the British establishment, the economist John Maynard Keynes and his concept of the circular flow of income.
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Britain’s central bank cut Thursday interest rates from 0.5 percent to 0.25 percent—their lowest levels ever since the Bank of England was established in 1694. The cut is also the first since March 2009, when the world was in the midst of the great recession.
The move Thursday is an attempt to boost the U.K.’s economy after the unease caused by the Brexit vote.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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CNN announced Wednesday it will host one of its town hall events with the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein and her presumptive running mate, Ajamu Baraka.
The hour-long event will be held on Wednesday, August 17 at 9:00 p.m. ET. The event will broadcast live on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Espanol and online via CNNgo.
Stein has consistently polled as the fourth-most popular option in the presidential race, after Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson. In the most recent CNN/ORC poll, Stein received 5% support nationwide, four points behind Johnson, her nearest competitor.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had a baby thrown out of his rally in Virginia Tuesday night. No, really, he did. “Don’t worry,” he said, “the mom’s running around, don’t worry about it. It’s young and beautiful and healthy, that’s what we want. Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking.”
You’re supposed to kiss the babies, jackass, not have them bodily removed. That was, by far and away, the least weird thing to happen on Planet Trump in the last 140 hours.
Khizr and Ghazala Khan’s tectonic appearance at last week’s Democratic National Convention transmuted Trump into a national punchline, again, for many prospective voters. He picked a fight with a Gold Star family and they ate his lunch on national television. The simple fact of the Khan family and the fallen soldier son they honor daggers home the lesson: Mess not with the righteous, lest you be shredded like cheese in the medium you thought you commanded.
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A new ad from Priorities USA isn’t relying on Democrats to make the case against Donald Trump. Instead, it’s a who’s who of Republican leaders, from Mitt Romney to former CIA Director Michael Hayden, all arguing that the Republican nominee is a “clear and present danger” to the United States.
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“What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer?”
The headlines from President Obama’s excoriation of Donald Trump on Tuesday rightly highlighted his flat declaration that the Republican nominee is “unfit to serve as president.” But the challenge to Republican leaders who fell in line behind Trump was even more devastating.
Obama was not simply condemning a man whose brutal cruelty finally came home to anyone with a heart after Trump’s attacks on a Gold Star family. The president was also indicting the entire GOP leadership for courting the extremism that led to Trump and for acquiescing in his nomination.
Let’s focus on the most revealing aspect of this week’s turmoil within a party now aghast over the unstable egotist at the top of its ticket.
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So, for decades Republicans were strategically pretending to be doofuses—Boot claims, for instance, that Dwight Eisenhower sometimes “resorted to gobbledygook in public…in order to preserve his political room to maneuver”—but have now been taken over by a real one. Ignoring for the moment the raw cynicism of this admission (consistent with the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism Leo Strauss’s theory of “the noble lie”), it’s important to note that “stupidity” in this context is simply a matter of marketing, not substance. Boot is right that Trump’s ignorance of the most basic facts is, on its own, disturbing, but what did the “thoughtful” GOP of the past get us?
Lamenting the lost reign of “Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will,” Boot offers, as exemplar of a remaining link to the party’s proud history in “the realm of ideas,” House Speaker “Paul Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party.” Never mind that the plan impresses by zeroing out government agencies wholesale while taking food from the mouths of the poor; or that Ryan mindlessly votes in favor of every war, and has spent every moment in Congress making life harder for the poor, people of color, LGBT and women. In Boot’s world, pandering to voters’ ignorance in order to make life harder for the most vulnerable is A-OK, but a politician actually being ignorant calls for outraged denunciation.
And what does it mean to be “stupid,” anyway? Boot, who presumably considers himself part of the right-wing intelligentsia, was a staunch advocate of the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of over a million people and directly resulted in ISIS. He defended the war as late as 2013. He called for war against both Iran and Syria in 2011. In October 2001, he made “the case for American empire.” If this is the deliberative thoughtfulness Trump is deviating from, then it’s simply a different kind of stupid, not an absence of it.
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Let this news, and the fact that it is news, sink in: Katrina Pierson, the former Tea Party activist who is now Donald Trump’s national spokeswoman, admitted on Wednesday that Barack Obama was not the president of the United States in 2004.
The reason it was considered necessary to extract this concession to reality from Pierson is that she had insisted, during an interview with CNN the night before, that President Obama was responsible for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan, an American soldier who was killed in Iraq five years before he became commander-in-chief.
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Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.
Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports a basic income guarantee; the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.
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If you supported Hillary Clinton, it probably won’t bother you that the Democratic National Committee is revealed in these documents to have essentially acted as an arm of the Clinton campaign during the contested primary season.
Most people guessed at this anyway. But it wasn’t until these documents were dumped last week under mysterious circumstances that the extent to which the party both advocated for Hillary and against her opponent Bernie Sanders was made plain.
Nowhere is the discrepancy on greater display than in an episode involving the DNC’s reaction to a May 2nd article by Politico reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf, which itself pointed at a backdoor advantage for the Clinton campaign.
The exchanges over this Politico story were barely mentioned in the wake of the DNC leak, except by right-wing media that shortsightedly dinged Vogel for submitting a draft of his piece of the DNC before publication, suggesting “collusion.”
Vogel maybe shouldn’t have sent a whole copy for review, but his intent wasn’t to give the DNC or Hillary a break – far from it. It seems pretty clear that he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss with a piece full of aggressive, original reporting that took on a very powerful target.
In the piece, headlined “Clinton fundraising leaves little for state parties,” Vogel and Arnsdorf discovered an anomaly in Federal Election Commission filings.
A joint fundraising committee called the Hillary Victory Fund, ostensibly designed to funnel money from rich donors to local party committees, had in fact been used as a cut-out to funnel money back to the national party and the Clinton campaign.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Enigma Software joined the long line of aggrieved companies who feel that legal threats and questionable lawsuits are the best form of reputation management. It sued BleepingComputer over a “defamatory review” — which was actually just a forum post by a member that detailed (with supporting links) its questionable SpyHunter software and its “rogue tactics” over the years.
In addition to the defamation claims, Enigma Software also argued that BleepingComputer only did this to steer site readers towards its own products, alleging a handful of Lanham Act violations.
Unfortunately, Enigma Software’s dubious claims have survived a motion to dismiss by BleepingComputer, thanks to some similarly dubious reasoning [PDF] by the judge presiding over the case. Not only are the Lanham Act claims given far too much credence (thanks to some twisted judicial analysis that assumes that because trademark is a part of the Lanham Act, false advertising claims under the Lanham Act are also intellectual property claims, exempt from Section 230 of the CDA), but the court’s decision to allow the lawsuit to process also punches a few more holes in Section 230 protections.
Because the author of the post was a third-party contributor, BleepingComputer should not have been held responsible for the content of the post. However, the court appears to be bothered that the user in question was referred to as a “staff member” by BleepingComputer, even if it was actually a volunteer administrative post and BleepingComputer did not directly control the content of the user’s contributions.
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Banning a bully is not political censorship [Ed: The Yorker calls Milo Yiannopoulos “a bully”. I think they attribute to HIM what OTHER people did.]
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Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
I’d like to share with you a very personal account of censorship in the digital age.
About a month ago, during the Gay Pride weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Annual NYC Dyke March, with its festive climax in one of my favorite Downtown spots, the Washington Square. Being an integral and proud part of the community of several thousand march participants and spectators, I documented the happy lesbians parading around and flashing their breasts in the fountain.
It was a cheerful, peaceful and liberating event, much-needed after a couple of dreadful weeks following the devastating news of the Orlando mass shooting. To commemorate this exciting moment, I posted a picture on my Instagram of one happy bull dyke with a cool hairdo wearing nothing but a patriotic American bikini — the ideal poster girl for this year’s NYC Dyke Pride.
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Dr Kambwili said although the public media had been given the authority to cover opposition political parties, it was important to censor the information that would be disseminated to the public to avoid raising alarm.
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The Palestinian Journalists’ Forum has denounced Google for deleting the name of Palestine from its maps and replacing it with Israel.
In a statement released yesterday, the forum said Google’s decision to remove Palestine from its maps on 25 July “is part of the Israeli scheme to establish its name as a legitimate state for generations to come and abolish Palestine once and for all.”
“The move is also designed to falsify history, geography as well as the Palestinian people’s right to their homeland, and a failed attempt to tamper with the memory of Palestinians and Arabs as well as the world.”
The forum said the move was “contrary to all international norms and conventions”, stressing that Google should back track on its actions.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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A new U.S.-European Union data-privacy accord that took hold this week could have been a reason to celebrate for Max Schrems, the 28-year-old whose successful landmark lawsuit against Facebook last year led to the new rules affecting more than 4,000 companies. Instead, he’s saying the new rules should be thrown out as well.
Schrems says the new framework is muddled, allowing mass amounts of data collected by American technology companies to continue making its way to U.S. national security agencies. He expects the new policy to be struck down again by courts, leaving global companies further in limbo. “Privacy Shield is the product of pressure by the U.S. and the IT industry – not of rational or reasonable considerations,” Schrems said in a statement after the rules, which began Aug. 1, were passed by European lawmakers last month. “It is very likely to fail again.”
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We’re all used to warnings and promos ahead of films, from candy-filled “let’s all go to the lobby” sequences to a polite-yet-firm reminder to power phones off. Sometimes, those sequences get a cute touch-up (my favorite is probably this wild, vulgar parody from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force film), but starting this week, moviegoers can expect something a little darker—as in, a harrowing warning that sounds like it might have been written by Edward Snowden.
It wasn’t, however. Instead, the message was written, and is delivered, by Snowden film director and script co-writer Oliver Stone.
The Oscar winner appears in the one-minute clip, seated in a lovely den—complete with decadent furniture and giant bottles of assumedly fine liquors—with a smartphone in his hand. He starts describing the many things “this amazing little device” can do, from mass communication to cat-video streaming (and we’re shown a few kitties briefly to make the point).
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While Tor Browser provides many security and privacy properties and features, not everyone around the world has the luxury to connect to use it. By default, Tor Browser makes all of its users look alike by spoofing UserAgent (and other methods) to avoid fingerprinting attacks. However, it doesn’t hide the fact you’re connecting to Tor, an open network where anyone can get the list of relays. This network transparency has many benefits, but also has a downside: Many repressive governments and authorities benefit from blocking their users from having free and open access to the internet. They can simply get the list of Tor relays and block them. This bars millions of people from access to free information, often including those who need it most. We at Tor care about freedom of access to information and strongly oppose censorship. This is why we’ve developed methods to connect to the network and bypass censorship. These methods are called Pluggable Transports (PTs).
Pluggable Transports are a type of bridge to the Tor network. They take advantage of various transports and make encrypted traffic to Tor look like not-interesting or garbage traffic. Unlike normal relays, bridge information is kept secret and distributed between users via BridgeDB. If you’re interested in helping censored users, you can become a bridge operator. And if you’re a developer and have interesting ideas on how to make new PTs or want to contribute code, we’ve some good documents to get you up to speed.
And finally, if you’re a censored user and want to take advantage of PTs, I’ve good news for you. They’re already included in Tor Browser and this how-to graphic should help you configure it to bypass censorship.
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Like a ton of people and companies, we’ve been using Slack here. While we saw some folks claim it was revolutionary, we found it to be a nice, but somewhat marginal, upgrade to our previous use of Skype chat rooms. But, over time, it has certainly gotten comfortable, and there have been some nice feature add-ons and integrations that have made it a pretty cool service overall — though if you really want to use it to its fullest extent and switch to the paid version, it can get pretty pricey, pretty quickly. I also am in a bunch of other group Slack chats, as it’s basically become the platform of choice for group discussions.
However, in these days where hacked emails are in the headlines, I can see why some might get nervous about using a tool like Slack. Not that there have been any known breaches of Slack that I’m aware of, and I’m sure that the company takes security very seriously (it would undermine its entire business if it failed on that front…), it’s been interesting to see other options start to pop up, which might be more appetizing for those who are extra security conscious.
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The NSA whistleblower posted a puzzling tweet on Aug 3. He said, “It’s time” and requested his former colleagues, probably who were working with NSA, to reconnect with him. Snowden also mentions the name of Barton Gellman.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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It’s not just FBI agents playing with Home-Grown Terrorist™ Erector Sets. It’s also Canada’s top law enforcement agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When there apparently aren’t enough actual terrorists to be found, agencies like these need to front the $40 at Wal-Mart for terrorist supplies, or dupe someone with an IQ of 51 into becoming the latest Indictment Du Jour.
Despite this, courts have largely gone along with the charade. It’s almost impossible for someone to successfully raise an entrapment defense, whether it’s a group of senior citizens who’ve been molded by undercover agents into an ad hoc terror unit or a bunch of easily-impressed thugs being hounded into stealing nonexistent drugs from fake stash houses.
Up in Canada, though, the law enforcement game may be played by the same rules, but one court isn’t willing to encourage the RCMP’s Build-a-Terrorist shenanigans.
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The FBI “terrorism” arrest of a Washington, D.C., Metro police officer making headlines all over the world on Wednesday actually involved a man who sent $245 worth of gift cards to an FBI informant he thought was his friend.
Nicholas Young, a 36-year-old Virginia man, had previously tried to dissuade the informant from joining ISIS, even as the informant spent years cultivating him and waiting for him to do something illegal.
Young was accused of attempting to provide material support to the militant group the Islamic State. News reports highlighted his job prominently and announced that he had been accused of “helping ISIS” — making it sound like he was about to blow up the subway.
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If we really care to defend the European project, it is completely unreasonable to start institutional revisions before having radically changed the policies that brought us to this multi-faced crisis, so similar to the one of the 30s, in the first place. And the root-cause is not only in the EU’s economic-financial make-up but also in its democratic failure, the disintegration of societies, and a loss of orientation and hope experienced collectively by European citizens.
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Last week, shocking footage depicting security personnel in a Northern Territory (NT) juvenile detention center teargasing and torturing indigenous detainees made headline news in Australia. In contrast to the uproar it has now engendered, this incident was actually first reported two years ago and attracted little outcry from a largely disinterested Australian public. Despite the tireless efforts of indigenous and social justice advocates, the vast majority of Australians remain reluctant to address the elephant in the room: that the use of mass incarceration among indigenous people in Australia is a tool of ongoing colonization.
It’s been 25 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made 339 recommendations on how the government could finally take action on the systematic discrimination and grave maltreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian justice system. One of the foremost recommendations was that incarceration should be used as a last resort.
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Stockholm syndrome: Feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.
In the 2016 Democratic primary, US labor unions overwhelmingly endorsed Hilary Clinton and invested millions of dollars in ensuring her nomination. Few eyebrows were raised, despite Clinton’s questionable record and platform towards workers. Why not? Organized labor’s support for political enemies of unions and workers is so common it has become expected. The labor movement suffers from a political Stockholm syndrome, embracing the very politicians who attack them. The embrace of Hillary Clinton, openly hostile to the current campaigns of some of the very unions who endorsed her, exposes the self-destructive absurdity of the situation. An intervention is needed or unions will be hard-pressed to reverse their current decline if they do not shake the Stockholm syndrome and adopt different political strategies.
Endorsing less-than-friendly politicians is nothing new for US unions but the widespread endorsement of Hilary Clinton is a reductio ad absurdum of the practice. Clinton, in addition to maintaining a general anti-labor slant, has opposed the principal campaigns of some of the very unions endorsing her.
For example, how did the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) respond to Clinton’s refusal to support a $15 minimum wage, something the SEIU has invested many years and untold millions of dollars into? By enthusiastically endorsing her, investing millions of dollars into her campaign (SEIU has already given her more than $2 million), and vigorously mobilizing its members to vote and volunteer for Hillary as their champion.
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In Chicago, the #LetUsBreathe Collective has transformed a lot adjacent to the Homan Square facility, exposed as a Chicago Police Department “black site” by The Guardian last year, into a beautiful organizing space aptly called Freedom Square. While the city continues to divest social resources from our communities, this site of torture has become a site of freedom and visionary love in a neighborhood that is over-policed and over-incarcerated. According to Million Dollar Blocks, North Lawndale committed nearly $241 million to incarceration in 2005-2009.
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Throughout our 96-year history, the Constitution has guided so much of what we do at the ACLU — we strive to help people understand and care about our founding document and show how it’s relevant in our everyday lives. And suddenly, during this year’s election cycle, the Constitution ended up being an especially hot topic.
After Khizr Khan’s speech urging Donald Trump to read the Constitution, we decided to offer our pocket Constitutions free of charge from ACLU’s online store. We received a more enthusiastic response than we ever could have imagined, with over 100,000 copies ordered in the span of a few days! Thanks to this unprecedented demand, we are officially sold out of pocket Constitutions.
We’re thrilled to discover so many fellow Constitution nerds.
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Was it meant as an epic parody or an insult to his audience’s intelligence? It was hard to tell.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to social media to apologise for last year’s notorious election-day comment, when he warned that “the Arabs are coming out to vote in droves” – a reference to the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian.
In videos released last week in English and Hebrew, Netanyahu urged Palestinian citizens to become more active in public life. They needed to “work in droves, study in droves, thrive in droves,” he said. “I am proud of the role Arabs play in Israel’s success”.
Pointedly, Ayman Odeh, head of the Palestinian-dominated Joint List party, noted that 100,000 Bedouin citizens could not watch the video because Israel denies their communities electricity, internet connections and all other services.
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A Chinese activist has been jailed for more than seven years for subversion, the second person jailed in two days in a crackdown on legal activism.
Hu Shigen pleaded guilty in Tianjin to “damaging national security and harming social stability”, said state media.
On Tuesday, Zhai Yanmin was found guilty of subversion and handed a three-year suspended jail sentence. Two more activists also face trial.
The cases have been widely seen as an attempt to silence government critics.
Around 300 lawyers and activists have been arrested since last year as part of the nationwide campaign. About 20 are still detained.
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When violence rocks a household, most often a woman bears the blows. But even if they’re just onlookers, children can become victims, too.
Some youngsters are amazingly resilient—after witnessing the horrors of domestic violence, they grow up without suffering from trauma.
In other cases, children don’t get over what they see at home. Their exposure to violence scars them mentally and emotionally, and the damage can last a lifetime.
As school starts in the United States this fall, an ambitious national campaign will address the effects of domestic violence on children. Its goal is to raise awareness among adults who work with them, including teachers, coaches and social workers. The campaign will complement existing programs that help young people build resilience.
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It’s the most unsettling memory of my childhood.
Watching my father physically drag my mom out of bed, her body thumping onto the floor, and him throwing clothes at her while screaming. Every few words, he would hurl an item of clothing at her.
For Christ’s sake Lois, get out of the *** ****** bed and take care of this ******* house. He stood over her, glaring while my mother curled into a fetal position and sobbed. He turned around and saw me in my doorway across from their bedroom. I quickly pulled my arms around myself in a protective posture and dropped my gaze to the floor. The hard slap to the side of my head never came.
He didn’t say a word to me. He left the bedroom, slamming the door behind him and stomped down the stairs and out the kitchen door. The glass in that outer kitchen door shattered violently as he slammed it for punctuation. I waited to even move until I heard the engine of his old truck fire to life and the sound of tires on gravel as he left our driveway onto the main road.
It wasn’t until I turned to go back into my bedroom, I realized I had urinated in my pajamas.
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Baltimore County police shot and killed Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, after an hours-long standoff on Monday — during which Facebook and Instagram, at police request, temporarily shut down Gaines’ accounts.
Gaines, who police say was armed with a shotgun, is the ninth black woman shot and killed by police so far this year, The Washington Post reports. Her 5-year-old son was wounded in the exchange of gunfire. The case has attracted a significant amount of attention on social media.
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In the midst of a five-hour standoff that turned deadly, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County Police Department to take offline the social media accounts belonging to a woman who wielded a shotgun at officers.
Baltimore County Police officers shot and killed Korryn Gaines, 23, after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her 5-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant.
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A mother who was involved in an armed stand-off with Maryland police had been posting live videos to social media before she was shot dead in a raid which also saw her five-year-old son wounded.
Korryn Gaines, 23, barricaded herself in her apartment for five hours and allegedly pointed a shotgun at officers who were trying to arrest her over a missed court appearance.
Videos posted to Facebook and Instagram showed Ms Gaines talking to armed police stood in the doorway to her home, as well as to her son.
And it has now emerged that Facebook granted an emergency request from police to have Ms Gaines’ profile shut down during the stand-off, amid fears public comments on her videos could undermine negotiators’ efforts.
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For many minorities, what happens in the community stays in the community.
But last winter, 17 Indian women from a tiny sect of Islam blew the lid off a guarded secret, spurring scrutiny, controversy, debate and vituperative abuse. Since then, online and off, they’ve been called sexually promiscuous, non-believers and traitors to their faith.
Their crime? They authored a petition asking the government of India to outlaw female circumcision.
Until the petition went public in December, many Indians didn’t know female genital mutilation — or FGM — happens in the country at all. In India, the Dawoodi Bohra Muslims are the only community that practices female genital mutilation in the form of circumcision, a practice they call khatna that dates back 1,400 years, according to the clergy. There are about a million Dawoodi Bohra Muslims globally; the majority live in India and some in Pakistan, with diaspora populations across the world.
“Nobody talked about it at all. It was never a part of conversation, ever. It was such a secret, such a top secret,” says Masooma Ranalvi, one of the women who spearheaded the petition. “Sexuality is not anything you talk about with anyone. What happened to me as a child, what part of me was cut or why was it cut, was never something I talked about with my mother or my sisters. My elder sisters had both been through it in a similar way — exactly the same procedure, my grandmother took them as well. We never communicated with each other, then or as adults. It remained between you and the grandmother that took you for it.”
Ranalvi, who runs a publishing house in Delhi, says she was in college when she realized what had been done to her.
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A “total ban” on Muslim state schools has been called for by Lisa Duffy, the Ukip leadership hopeful.
Ms Duffy, who is expected to be announced as once of the candidates in the party’s leadership race at noon today, has called for Islamic faith schools to be shut down in a bid to tackle radicalisation.
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Luton’s olympic swimming pool has began hosting gender-segregated swimming sessions because of “cultural” reasons, it has been alleged.
Users of the competitive pool at Inspire Sports Village in Stopsley – built with taxpayer-funded Olympic money – were given sudden notice that there would be men-only sessions on Friday evenings from July 29.
Women-only sessions will also take place on a Friday evening, but in the smaller community pool.
One outraged female swimmer told Luton News: “The Friday night session for everyone is now closed because of the listed men-only sessions.
“I have asked a team leader about it – as there are no managers at the weekend – and he said it was a ‘cultural thing’.”
Women who do not want to use the community pool are reportedly told to use Lea Manor or Lewsey Pools.
The woman added: “Why has one section of the community in Luton been allowed to dominate and take over the best pool in the borough?
“Why can’t they instead have booked Lea Manor or Lewsey pools?
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One of the most important prelates in the Catholic Church in Hungary has warned that the enormous waves of migrants rolling into Europe are due in no small part to a Muslim “will to conquer,” by expanding their territory into the continent.
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Corruption is on the up in Finland—and the private sector leads the way. That’s the main finding in a new report from the Police University College, which looked at how prevalent different forms of corruption are across business and the state sector.
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DRM
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LibreOffice 5.2, the newest version of the open source productivity suite, is aiming at becoming a tool of government and professional organizations, not merely a free substitute for Microsoft Office.
Most notably, Version 5.2 supports the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP) standards for document classification. These standards describe the sensitivity of the information in a document and how heavily its access should be restricted.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Apple, Google and Microsoft, are in an ideal position to deter piracy, according to a new report published by Black Market Watch and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. The controversial report opts for voluntary or mandatory blocking of pirated content on the operating system level.
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The lawyer of a 90-year-old woman, who mistakenly started filling in an art exhibit in the form of a crossword puzzle, claims that she holds the copyright of the “new” work. The 1977 creation by the 20th-century artist Arthur Köpcke was lent to Nuremberg’s Neues Museum by a private collector, and is said to be worth around £68,000.
The retired German dentist, Hannelore K.—her full name has not been released—visited the gallery along with other pensioners last month. During a half-hour interview with the local police following the discovery of her additions to Köpcke’s creation, the woman said that she started filling in the artwork’s crossword puzzle because it bore the phrases “Insert words” and “so it suits.”
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Send this to a friend
08.03.16
Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Yikes — if you plan on installing the Windows 10 Anniversary update on your PC you may want to be extra careful.
It seems that the latest version of Microsoft’s OS has attention issues. Not content with forcing itself on users who didn’t want it, it may be taking even more drastic steps of hosing other operating systems entirely!
A handful of reports surfacing on social media suggest, anecdotally, that the Windows 10 anniversary may interfere with, affect and even delete other partitions on the same disk.
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Not strictly gaming related, but we do cover other important or interesting things here and there. According to netmarketshare [Net Applications] for three months straight Linux marketshare has gone up.
2016
April: 1.65%
May : 1.79%
June : 2.02%
July : 2.33%
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Lots of container technology news is rolling in this week. Mesosphere announced support for the Confluent Platform for data streaming management, and heralded that “the time is now for Container 2.0.”
Meanwhile, many more users are taking to Docker’s recently unveiled version 1.12 of its core software-containerization system today, accompanied by the first full desktop editions of the software for development on Mac and Windows machines.
Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows have graduated from beta and are now stable and ready for production.
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The alsa-lib 1.1.2 release adds some improvements to the control API, thread safety to the PCM API, mixer and PCM API changes, topology API improvements, and a range of other changes. Alsa-utils 1.1.2 was also released and it mostly contains changes to its Basic Audio Tester (BAT).
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On Thursday I received an email from Eszter Szilva, a PR manager at Tresorit, which is an “end-to-end encrypted file sharing service.” She was offering an invitation to take a peek at the company’s just released client for GNU/Linux. I must admit I was a little excited by this, despite the fact that I already figured the service was also end-to-end proprietary. I was willing to ignore that, thinking it’s about time for companies to start treating Linux users with the same respect given to users of other operating systems.
A quick gander at the company website told me the service encrypts files client-side before uploading using AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The company uses servers located in Ireland and the Netherlands, which is an important plus for those trying to stay out of the long reach of the US government. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and user data is protected under Swiss privacy laws, which offer more protection than in the US or even the EU.
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Almost a year has passed since the last major syslog-ng release. The first beta of the upcoming 3.8 release was published last week. This brought many changes both in terms of new features and in packaging. To encourage testing I would like to highlight some of the most important new features. Most people prefer using packages, so I also collected what changed in packaging.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Recently Samsai and his band of misfits took you through some Moon Hunters on a GOL livestream while I was unwell, now I am better I gave it a shot and here’s some quick thoughts.
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Linux gaming has come a very long way from where it started, and Linux gamers have much to celebrate. But how many people use Linux as their main gaming operating system?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We are all happy users of GNOME here, and this is the first time we will be in GUADEC, so this is pretty exciting. Both Aryeom, the film director, and myself, Jehan, are sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to present our film, produced with FLOSS, in room 1, on Sunday, August 14. We will talk about the movie, its current status, about our work on GIMP too, how GNOME and Free Software works in a media creation workflow, and so on. So we hope you will be many to check this out if you are around!
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That’s it for now. As I said the last time I wrote about KaOS, if you are looking for a smaller Linux distribution, and KDE Plasma is your desktop of choice, and you don’t mind using QupZilla instead of Firefox or Chrome (or you don’t mind installing your browser of choice from the KaOS repositories), and you don’t mind using Calligra instead of LibreOffice (or you don’t mind installing LibreOffice), then KaOS is definitely worth a try. It’s a good distribution and it just keeps getting better and better. The KaOS developers have shown an admirable ability to maintain their focus on what they originally said they wanted to do.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Microsoft and Codenvy partnered recently to knock down another barrier to open collaboration through the launch of a new open source project called Language Server Protocol. Here’s what it means for the channel.
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The accelerator program for startups backed by Citrix, Red Hat and HQ Raleigh is returning, offering startup teams within those two companies as well as five other “external” ventures $10,000 grants and the possibility of landing another $50,000. But there have been some changes.
Applications for round three are now open.
In December, Citrix confirmed plans to shut down an accelerator program but said it was open to the idea of continuing support for the Innovators program in Raleigh. Red Hat had remained committed to it as had HQ Raleigh even as Citrix adjusted its startup efforts after a wave of budget cuts.
On Tuesday, HQ Raleigh said Innovators would continue with Red Hat and Citrix as sponsors – and with Nick O’Connor of Venture Toolkit running the program. His California-based firm works with clients to help grow startups “by using tools and techniques used by the most successful startups and enterprise companies in the world and designing custom programs based on your needs.”
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I’d love to show that Red Hat folks outside of the Fedora project are committed to the greater community. I’d also love to get folks up to speed on container security (the topic of my presentation).
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Finance
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Fedora
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There is something we all love, a good chat with friends, and that was the Diversity Panel at the Flock Krakow. In a really interesting panel filled with not only amazing people, but experienced, we discussed how can we improve our efforts into making everyone feel comfortable and encourage people to do what they like instead worrying about what people might think.
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Another year, another wonderful FLOCK! Thanks to everyone who put in the hard work to make this event a success. The first day and a half have been informative and fun, learning about what everyone in Fedora is up to, catching up with new and old friends and seeing some of beautiful Kraków. Just before I made my way here to Poland, I met up with the Fedora Design Team in Boston, MA, for a FAD. We tried out a new event for our team that was free to the public, an Inkscape and Fedora Badges Bootcamp, with success! So riding on the tail end of that I am excited to be here with the rest of the Fedora family and to continue working on Fedora Badges and getting people involved.
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Debian Family
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July marked the fifteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When most people think of smartphones, they think of Android and iOS. But there are alternatives to those two mobile platforms. Enter the Meizu Pro 5 phone, which runs Ubuntu Touch as its operating system.
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SolidRun launched an OpenWrt networking-focused ClearFog Base SBC with a Marvell Armada 38x dual-core -A9 SoC, dual GbE ports, SFP, and mikroBus expansion.
Last December when SolidRun launched its ClearFog Pro sandwich-style networking SBC featuring an Armada 38x-based computer-on-module, it also announced a lower-end ClearFog Base model that uses the same COM and was said to be “coming soon.” The ClearFog Base has finally arrived with a $90 price, down from $170 for the Pro. The price includes the cost of the COM, but not options including a microSD card, eMMC, or a power adapter.
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myDevices announced Arduino support for its web- and mobile-based, Raspberry Pi compatible “Cayenne” drag-and-drop IoT development and management platform.
Cayenne, with which developers, designers, and engineers can “quickly prototype and share their connected device projects,” has expanded support beyond the Raspberry Pi to Arduino boards, says myDevices. Billed as the world’s first drag-and-drop Internet-of-Things Project Builder, the currently free, still Beta-level Cayenne lets users remotely monitor and control IoT projects from the web, including via Android or iOS apps. According to myDevices, Cayenne has 40,000 users who have collectively tracked some 4 billion IoT events such as threshold alerts, sensor history items, and rules engine triggers.
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Phones
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Android
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As the final Android 7.0 Nougat release date is approaching, people are searching the web to know when their phone will get Nougat update. To answer your question, we have prepared a list of the popular brands, telling you about their plans to roll out the Android 7.0 Nougat update. While brands like Moto, Nexus, HTC, and LG are preparing for any early OTA update, other are likely to do the same in January-February 2017.
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I didn’t get to meet Pepper the humanoid Robot at Google I/O but I watched the video afterwards: A new development frontier: Android + Pepper the interactive robot. Love the robots’ dance! I was super excited to hear that Pepper will become available in the U.S. later this year, and Android developers can now program robots!
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While known for advanced and often niche fitness trackers, Polar isn’t afraid of the smartwatch market. Today, the company announced a new kind of fitness watch: the M600 is, in the words of Polar’s reps, a cross between an Android Wear smartwatch and the A360 fitness band, one of the company’s mid-tier devices. Polar reps told me the company wanted to combine the best parts of a smartwatch with the efficiency and features of a serious fitness device. The M600 is the first Android Wear fitness device to be made by a major fitness company, rather than a tech company.
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Polar is making a smartwatch for people who need more comprehensive fitness features than the basic step counting and heart rate monitoring you get with most Android Wear devices. The M600, priced at $329 and slated for release within the next few months, is an Android Wear watch just like those from Huawei, LG, Moto, Casio, and others. But Polar claims this one has been designed from the ground up with personal health in mind.
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A cyclist sustained third-degree burns after his iPhone exploded in his pocket.
Gareth Clear, 36, was cycling through Manly Dam, near Sydney on Sunday afternoon when his foot missed the pedal and he came off the bike.
The fall was minor, and he got up with only a few grazes, but noticed smoke coming from his leg and realised his iPhone had exploded.
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It’s August, and with an ever-increasing number of notable Android OEMs reaching maturity, we’ve seen more new handsets than usual launch this summer. The summer started off strong with the Moto Z and Moto Z Force (not shipping!), and most recently Samsung finally showed us its Galaxy Note 7 after many months of leaks. But which ones are the best buys?…
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This is very short list of projects in the DevOps space; many other projects are available, with each one catering to a certain use case. What’s most impressive is that all of these projects are fully open sourced. It’s more or less become a phenomenon. The success of the Linux development model has made even hard-core proprietary companies comfortable with the idea of open sourcing such projects.
When you talk about the DevOps movement, open source is the de facto development model. It has become so commonplace that no one even really mentions it. We have started to take it for granted that “it has to be open source.”
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Proprietary software developers beware: open source has become mainstream with non-tech brands like Nike rushing to prove their open source credentials by publishing open source projects and sharing code on GitHub.
Meanwhile, Facebook has just open sourced the spec for Surround 360, its 3D-360 hardware and software video capture system. It is therefore a small surprise that the 2016 annual ‘Future of Open Source‘ survey revealed that 65% of respondents have increased their use of open source software compared with 60% in 2015.
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As a developer I am constantly chasing new tools and enjoy learning new things. I read a lot of blog posts, tutorials, and documentation. And, I listen to podcasts and attend webinars as well. More and more I find that watching videos of conference and webinar presentations is great. But even better are shorter, focused videos that give you a chance to quickly learn something new.
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After the recent news, we are now back on stage and with this blog we want to point you to our open positions. Yes, we are hiring people to work on ownCloud. ownCloud is an open source project, yes, but ownCloud GmbH, the company behind the project, provides significant people’s power to expand the project to serve the needs for both the community and ownCloud GmbH’s customers. So if you ever dreamed of getting paid for work on open source, read on.
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A new wave of open source participation is growing among large traditional enterprises not normally considered technology developers, writes Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely. Companies like Capital One Financial Corp., Nike Inc., Deere & Co. and General Electric Co. are joining open source consortia both as users of and contributors to major initiatives.
They are doing this for the same basic reason that IT vendors such as IBM, Google and Intel have become major drivers of Apache open source projects – it allows them to participate with outside teams on developing software they need, creating better solutions to their needs faster and at less cost.
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Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving.
It might not seem like a lot, but in terms of comparative datasets for highway driving out there, it is. And it’s what Hotz used to build the initial successful self-driving demo used to ferry Bloomberg around for comma.ai’s big public debut.
“When I started this project, I didn’t want to have to put things in cars – I just wanted to play with the machine learning,” explained Hotz in an interview. “But I looked around and there was no good source of data to do that.”
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comma.ai CEO George Hotz recently praised Tesla, Google and Otto for being fairly opened about their self-driving car programs, but he is taking his own company a step further in openness with the release of a dataset of 7.25 hours of comma.ai’s prototype at work.
We’ve often discussed at Electrek how data will be extremely important in the race to create a fully self-driving car, and also in the race to get such a system approved by regulators, which is why comma.ai’s move here is particularly interesting.
Back in May, we talked about Tesla adding an impressive ~1 million miles of data every 10 hours due to its important fleet of about 100,000 cars equipped with Autopilot sensors. On the other hand, Google has just over 1 million miles of data since launching its program in 2009 due to its smaller fleet, but it’s arguably collecting more data per mile due to using more sensors than Tesla.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Today, August 3, 2016, The Document Foundation non-profit organization has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite software.
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LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still” announced, for enterprise class deployments
Berlin, August 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created – targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features.
At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users.
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Today we release LibreOffice 5.2.0, the next step in our journey, and what will become the base of the increasingly stable 5.2.x series. There is a fine suite of new features for people to enjoy – you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes, and a lot of work that is more technical than user-facing.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Funding
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Brendan Eich, formerly CEO of Mozilla, has been busy with Brave Software and the new Brave browser, which is getting a lot of notice as an open source browser that blocks online ads and other trackers. As TechCrunch noted: “Unlike traditional web browsers where ad-blocking takes place via a third-party add-on or extension, Brave’s browser has this technology built in, claiming not only to offer users more privacy, but also increased speed and performance – especially when surfing the mobile web.”
It’s also significant that the Brave browser is a blockchain-enabled browser with hardened security, enhanced speed and micropayment capabilities. Now, Brave Software has announced that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
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I’ve been funded for two years by the DataLad project to work on git-annex. This has been a super excellent gig; they provided funding and feedback on ways git-annex could be improved, and I had a large amount of flexability to decide what to work on in git-annex. Also plenty of spare time to work on new projects like propellor, concurrent-output, and scroll. It was an awesome way to spend the last two years of my twenty years of free software.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries.
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binutils-2.26.1
denemo-2.0.10
direvent-5.1
easejs-0.2.8
gnucash-2.6.13
gnupg-2.1.14
gnutls-3.5.2
guile-2.0.12
gworkspace-0.9.4
health-3.0.2
icecat-38.8.0
java-training-wheels-2.1
libgcrypt-1.7.2
libidn-1.33
linux-libre-4.7-gnu
octave-4.0.3
parallel-20160722
pspp-0.10.2
tramp-2.3.0
unifont-9.0.01
xorriso-1.4.4
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Many new free software projects got their start, and LibrePlanet launched to help bring users from around the world together. New threats to computer user freedom rose from the shadows and campaigns rose in turn to fight back and protect the privacy and security of users. With the 100th edition of the Free Software Supporter, we want to take a look back at some of the biggest events and popular articles we have covered over the years.
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Public Services/Government
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Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is nudging the country’s public administrations to share and reuse ICT solutions. In July the ministry published draft clauses for contracts and procurement, asking citizens to comment. The clauses do not explicitly stipulate the use of free and open source software licences. However, the ministry emphasises that when developing software, public administrations should own the code and have the right to share and redistribute it.
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Health/Nutrition
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A new legal opinion penned by two former Justice Department officials bolsters warnings that the proposed merger between agroindustrial giants Bayer and Monsanto “is a five-alarm threat to our food supply and to farmers around the world.”
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Security
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Kaspersky reveals DDoS attacks last longer in 2016 [Ed: names “Linux” in order to sell his snake oil proprietary malware; Before rushing to install proprietary software from Moscow (of Kaspersky and friends) because they say “Linux” read this]
The longest attack in the period lasted 12 days, beating the previous record by four days
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Defence/Aggression
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The prevailing view among punditry and the media, both Turkish and international, is that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has emerged much stronger from the July 15 coup attempt and is now empowered to steer the country as he likes.
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While the Democrat made the case for liberal militarism, the Republican attacked the interventionist status quo. “Yeah, I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s gotta be,’” he said, as if he’d read his Chomsky. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called ‘nation-building,’” he continued, lashing out at occupations that had killed U.S. troops and civilians alike. “I think what we need to do is convince the people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here.”
That was in 2000 and that Republican, George W. Bush, put America’s perceived interests first after winning the race for the White House—by ignoring effete international prohibitions against aggressive war, bypassing the United Nations, and unilaterally invading Iraq. Now, 13 years later, there is another Republican, Donald Trump, railing against the “arrogance” of U.S foreign policy in a race against a Democrat whose record is marked by support for war, including the one launched by the last conservative critic of liberals with bombs.
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The failed Turkish coup and President Erdogan’s harsh reprisals have left more questions than answers, including who was really behind the botched putsch and why, reports Joe Lauria.
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“Amid ‘Sacrifice’ Debate, a Look at How Trump Avoided War” (New York Times, August 1, 2016), attempts to cast doubt and suspicion on Trump’s motives as a student and young man when he successfully got out of military service during the Vietnam War. The article takes Trump’s statements about his health and deferments during that period and shows the inconsistencies in how Trump describes his history vis-a-vis the draft. But the problems here are twofold. Mr. Trump seems to have a problem in general with inconsistencies and outrageous statements in almost every policy pronouncement he makes on the campaign trail. In the case of Vietnam and the draft, however, he was doing what hundreds of thousands of other young men did during that unpopular war to get out of serving in the military. To judge Trump by the standards of 1968 or 1969 is to take the current views about war and apply them retroactively to that era.
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Citing the disastrous bombing campaign in 2011 that pushed the nation into political chaos and bloody violence, anti-war groups are calling for an immediate end to a new wave of airstrikes on Libya approved by U.S. President Barack Obama.
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Despite our unsuccessful local efforts, we do not wish be targets any more. We believe the millions of human beings who are tired of dreaming the nuclear nightmare need to be brought into the process. We are not alone in this goal. Mayors of 5300 cities across the world have asked that their cities not be targets any more—targets of national military decisions in which their communities have no voice or role. We are proposing the creation of an international campaign that stands up to say “We refuse to be targets”—to ask governments in the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and other countries having, or contemplating having nuclear weapons across the world, to cease and desist.
We need a new Nuclear Freeze and then systematic reductions with a protocol for controlling fissionable materials. Our suggestion would be that the campaign advocate for gradual reductions: first of 25% or more (which has at least been proposed for US/Russian bilateral reductions to follow-up the New START agreement), then of 50%, then of 75%, and finally of 95% both in nuclear warheads and in fissionable materials. This would require the creation of infrastructure for monitoring and verifying compliance with agreed reductions.
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On Monday, the same day the U.S. started its new campaign in Libya—a move one antiwar group said will only further “entrench divisions and intensify violence” in the region—the Khans gave an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Asked by host Chris Matthews, “What do you think when you, or feel, when you see us attack Iraq or go into Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden, or we go attack with bombs Libya? We’re bombing Syria now—all Islamic countries. What do you feel as an Islamic man?”
Khizr Khan replied, “As a Muslim-American, not just as Islamic man—as a Muslim American, I feel that these policies are not in the interest of United States of America, and we see the result of it. We are more vulnerable now. We have created a chaos and—for ourselves.”
“Well, you know you’re speaking to the choir,” Matthews responded. (In fact, “Matthews’ record isn’t entirely consistent” on being against either the war in Iraq or on avoiding a military approach to confronting ISIS, Norton notes.)
“I wish this country would have listened to Chris Matthews when he was talking, when he was preaching,” Khan said, “we could have saved ourselves from this quagmire.”
This section of the interview, Norton points out, “is not included in the isolated clips for the episode on MSNBC’s website. One has to watch the full episode to see it.”
The situation may remind some of how the corporate media chose to portray Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel laureate and children’s education advocate who was attacked by the Taliban. She met with President Barack Obama at the White House and told him that “drone attacks are fueling terrorism.” Yet, as Peter Hart wrote at FAIR in 2013, that “didn’t register in a corporate media that followed Malala’s visit, and her story, very closely.”
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A Trump adviser is trying to smear Khizr Khan, the Pakistani-American legal consultant who spoke at the DNC, as a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”
This ignorant discourse is only possible because people just have no idea what they are talking about. It wouldn’t fly if done about Western Christians. So for instance we would know that most Swedes are fairly liberal Lutherans and most Spanish are Catholic. Among far right wing Catholics in Spain you have the secretive cult, the Opus Dei. What the Trump people are doing is he equivalent of charging that a liberal Swedish Lutheran is an Opus Dei agent. That charge wouldn’t make any sense to anyone who knew about ethnicity and Christianity in the West. A liberal Swedish Lutheran couldn’t be Opus Dei.
I’m not sure it will do much good, but let me try to explain why a liberal Pakistani wouldn’t be Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood as a movement began in Egypt in 1928. It began as a reassertion of Arab Muslim values in the wake of the 1880-1922 direct British occupation of Egypt, and the subsequent British hidden hand in Egyptian affairs through 1956. The Brotherhood is vague about the kind of government they want, but when they had a chance in 2011-13, they supported democratic elections.
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According to the results of a recent Economist/YouGov poll, a majority of Americans believe that Islam, more than any other religion, encourages violence. Republicans are particularity anti-Muslim (74 percent shared these views) but a sizable number of Democrats (41 percent) hold such toxic ideas about Islam and its followers, as well.
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Senior Justice Department officials objected to sending a plane loaded with cash to Tehran at the same time that Iran released four imprisoned Americans, but their objections were overruled by the State Department, according to people familiar with the discussions.
After announcing the release of the Americans in January, President Barack Obama also said the U.S. would pay $1.7 billion to Iran to settle a failed arms deal dating back to 1979. What wasn’t disclosed at the time was that the first payment would be $400 million in cash, flown in as the prisoners were released, as The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Three months after record floods swept through Louisiana in March, the government officials in charge of disaster response set up a post-mortem with area Red Cross staffers.
The meeting’s purpose: Airing officials’ many complaints with the charity’s performance.
“Basically, during the Miss. River flooding and the recent severe weather events, most of the Parishes who reached out to the American Red Cross were not happy with the assistance they received or did not get some or any assistance that was requested from them,” a parish emergency manager wrote in an email eliciting the specifics of local officials’ experiences.
He compiled their responses into a page of talking points for the June 28 meeting. Among the most common gripes: That there had been so much turnover at the Red Cross that government emergency managers didn’t know who to call for assistance; that Red Cross staffers didn’t call emergency managers back; and that the Red Cross didn’t provide enough shelter support.
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Like your choices weren’t pitiable enough before, now some gas and oil industry pimps in Texas have launched a mock independent bid for the presidency on behalf of – wait for it – fracking. The stunt is part of FrackFeed.com, a new website by the “grassroots” (read astro-turf industry front) group North Texans for Natural Gas (NTNG), which with the support of four energy companies seeks to “give a voice to those who support natural gas.” Aimed at millennials and dedicated to the gonzo proposition that fracking brings you everything good in life – gas, A.C., housing, health care, vacations, burgers, Christmas, celebrity life styles and don’t forget clean water – the site uses laughable memes, quizzes, listicles and other fun stuff to “explain the benefits of fracking to a new generation of Americans.” “Energy is everywhere,” it exclaims, and if you look around you’ll find life itself on God’s green earth, including the toxic water, is “Brought To You By Fracking.”
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A federal judge on Tuesday night quietly slashed a potential $562 million fine against Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) for the privately owned, publicly regulated utility’s role in a 2010 deadly natural gas pipeline explosion near San Francisco.
The incident six years ago “sent a giant plume of fire into the air, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno,” the Associated Press recalls.
As Common Dreams noted at the time, “In the weeks before the catastrophe, residents had been reporting gas odors and had voiced fears about a leak. But this brought no action from the company. A state assemblyman from the San Bruno area noted that the torn pipeline was over 60 years old, having been installed in 1948. He criticized PG&E for its poor maintenance and lax response. After the explosion, it took the company almost three hours to shut off the gas supply.”
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Abruptly and without explanation, federal prosecutors slashed potential criminal penalties for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. from $562 million to $6 million Tuesday while a jury was considering whether the company violated safety laws both before and after the lethal 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.
The decision was made public in a court filing as both sides awaited the jury’s verdict in federal court in San Francisco.
Prosecutors had maintained, in filings before and during the trial, that California’s largest utility could be punished for any convictions with penalties equal to twice the amount it saved by shortcutting safety laws. They said those savings could be measured by the $281 million that PG&E estimated it would cost to comply with safety standards after the San Bruno explosion — leading to a potential fine of $562 million if the federal jury in San Francisco returned guilty verdicts.
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Missoula, Montana scored a major victory for community ownership of public resources when the state’s supreme court ruled 5-2 on Tuesday that the city’s use of its water system was “more necessary” than its use by a private company.
The city has been embroiled in a costly, years-long legal battle over control of its water supply. Missoula previously argued it has the right to use its powers of eminent domain to purchase Mountain Water Co. from then-owner the Carlyle Group—which has since sold the water company to Canada-based Liberty Utility—an argument which the Missoula County District Court agreed with last June.
Now, their argument has been vindicated, as the Montana Supreme Court on Tuesday found the lower court’s “detailed factual findings” supported the eminent domain decision.
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The city of Missoula won its eminent domain case to buy Mountain Water Co. in a 5-2 decision Tuesday from the Montana Supreme Court.
In the majority’s opinion, Justice Patricia Cotter said the state high court gave the record an “exhaustive review” and found the lower court’s “detailed factual findings” supported public ownership.
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Utilities are lobbying against the expansion of rooftop solar, and that’s no good for anyone.
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A renovation programme to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from buildings in Europe could create a million jobs, provide warmer homes, more comfortable factories and offices, reduce fuel bills across 28 countries, and cut imports of Russian gas, researchers say.
This is because buildings are currently the biggest single emitter of GHGs in Europe. Many have inefficient heating and cooling, combined with poor insulation.
But with existing technology and political will, they could be transformed into energy producers and become carbon-neutral, says a report produced by OpenEXP, an international group of experts helping policymakers to reach sustainable development goals.
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China has installed 20 gigawatts of new solar power just in the first half of this year. This achievement beats analysts’ expectations by a wide margin. China wants to add 20 GW of new solar every year for the next four, but apparently could do twice that. At the end of 2015, China had about 40 gigawatts of installed solar power, so in just six months it has added half again as much. It already surpasses the previous solar champ, Germany.
The Crescent Dunes “concentrating solar power” plant in Nevada, operated by a Santa Monica firm, is using molten salt as a battery so that it can generate electricity 24/7. It is the first such plant to use solar energy to melt the salt directly instead of via oil, e.g,, which is a huge advance in efficiency. All electricity plants are just a way to turn turbines using boiling water. If you can turn the turbines with molten salt heated hours ago by the sun, then you can make electricity all day and all night. The Crescent Dunes plant can power 75,000 homes. All those critics of solar power who maintain that it needs gas or nuclear for baseload generation when it is dark or very overcast can now find some other talking point. Solar can do it all. Concentrating solar power costs as little as 10 cents a kilowatt hour, making it competitive with nuclear both in cost and in non-intermittency. Photovoltaic cells plus battery storage may ultimately be cheaper but this means that at the very least we have a relatively inexpensive solar technology that isn’t intermittent.
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Finance
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The myth of the American Dream is the dominating factor in keeping people mostly complacent in the United States. You know it — work hard, and your life will improve. Well, maybe not your life, but your kids’, or at least your grandkids’. If that doesn’t work, it is the fault of the Irish immigrants, or the darn Chinese, or those welfare freeloaders. Ask Donald Trump how it all works.
The thing that makes the myth so powerful is that the tiny percent that is true sounds better than the 99 percent which is a lie. As long as near-constant growth could be assured, enough pieces would fall to the the lower and middle classes to make the Dream seem real. It helped that a kindly media would promote the heck out of every exception, whether it was the shoeshine boy in the late 19th century who went to college, or the plucky guys who invented some new tech in their garage and became billionaires. See, you can do it too, just like if we run hard enough, everyone can be in the Olympics. It’s just a matter of wanting it, believing in yourself, having passion and grit, right?
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Pramila Jayapal, one of the standard-bearers for Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution movement, won a decisive victory in the primary race for Washington’s 7th Congressional District Tuesday night and will advance to the November general election.
Jayapal, an Indian-born state senator who was endorsed by Sanders in April, won 38 percent of the vote. The Seattle Times reported late Tuesday that rivals Joe McDermott and Brady Walkinshaw were “neck and neck,” taking—by the latest count—21.5 percent and 20.9 percent respectively. The top two will advance to the fall election.
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Loudoun County is a suburban area with colonial roots, nestled about 45 miles northwest of the District of Columbia. It boasts the nation’s highest median household income at nearly $124,000 per year. It also has 14,000 residents who struggle with food insecurity, or a lack of reliable access to affordable and nutritious food.
Elizabeth and her daughter, Jennifer, are Loudon County residents that struggle with hunger. Both women once had full-time jobs, but Elizabeth was let go from her job as a car mechanic when she injured her wrist. Then, Jennifer had to quit her job to help care for Elizabeth’s four-year-old daughter.
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The mayor of Vancouver, B.C., announced late Tuesday that an empty lot, the site of a tent city of homeless residents and affordable housing activists, will be transformed into subsidized housing for seniors and people on welfare.
The announcement marked a rare progressive victory in a city marred by rapid gentrification, a years-long housing crunch, and an influx of foreign money that has transformed the coastal community into a “playground for the rich.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Polls indicate that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got a four-point bounce from the heavily scripted Democratic Party Convention. But it is hard to know the depth and intensity of support from Sanders activists passionate enough to earn themselves a place at the convention. Those are the kinds of activists that could help Clinton the most come November. Yet, an informal survey of dozens of Bernie delegates indicates a lack on enthusiasm for the Clinton cause. No doubt, the decision by prominent Bernie booster Cornel West to go for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won’t help.
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Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.
Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.
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The release by Wikileaks of a trove of emails from high-ranking Democratic Party officials has confirmed what many Americans – both progressive and conservative – have suspected throughout this election cycle: that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) actively conspired against Bernie Sanders in an attempt to ensure the nomination for Hillary Clinton.
But it wasn’t simply party apparatchiks like the disgraced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the recently resigned Chair of the DNC and close ally of Clinton, but also their trusted cronies in the corporate media who actively collaborated with DNC officials to ensure that nothing too critical of Hillary would make it into the Mighty Wurlitzer of contemptibly ‘respectable’ journalism. Indeed, what the Wikileaks revelations expose to the world is the fact that there’s nothing democratic about the Democratic Party, or America’s alleged democracy in general.
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Take one example. For years, the complaint by many outside China during the era of great enclosure under Mao Zedong was that the place was written about as though it were on another planet. People who managed to enter went to observe, maintaining an outsider’s distance as they gazed in at lives they perceived to be either suffering or deluded. In recent years, however, this example of outsider’s language has undergone a metamorphosis from pity to criticism. Martin Jacques, Frank Dikötter and others have examined how Chinese writings themselves contain deep strains of racial and cultural superiority vis-à-vis ‘the other’. But whilst Chinese mainstream discourse does convey a sense of superiority, that isn’t by any means the full story. Countering the notion of a proud, ancient continuous civilisation is an opposing sense of resentment and victimhood, born in the modern era and currently expressed in narratives of colonial oppression promoted by the Chinese government.
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How a Top GOP Lawyer Guided a Chinese-Owned Company Into U.S. Presidential Politics
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Meet the Chinese Husband-and-Wife Team Whose Company Spent $1.3 Million Trying to Make Jeb Bush President
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Three Paths Citizens United Created for Foreign Money to Pour Into U.S. Elections
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Gary Locke, While Obama’s Ambassador to China, Got a Chinese Tycoon to Buy His House
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Well, you can’t, in fact. Claiming that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary is like claiming Bush won the 2000 election. It’s one of those things that everyone will say, using it as shorthand, and repeating it until everyone forgets that the thing was stolen. So, let me rephrase: How can you get people to pretend en masse that you won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary despite lugging around the same baggage as 8 years before only now stuffed with putrid rotting flesh?
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Green Party presidential hopeful Dr. Jill Stein has tapped Ajamu Baraka as her vice presidential pick for the upcoming 2016 election.
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Dr. Jill Stein has repeatedly articulated her support for vaccinations in interviews and online. The online fact-checking website Snopes.com has debunked accusations claiming Dr. Stein opposes the use of vaccines. The conspiracy theory that Dr. Stein is “anti-science” is becoming a bizarre new counterpart of the “birther”controversy that hounded President Obama’s candidacy in 2008.
Stein noted, “Anyone who supports vaccinations and wishes to prevent dropping vaccination rates should be concerned about the erosion of public trust caused by the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry in regulatory agencies and government in general.”
Dr. Stein voices widely-shared concerns that the pharmaceutical industry exerts undue influence in our regulatory institutions – as well as on the politicians to whom they donate.
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When is Hillary Clinton going to hold that long-awaited news conference — the first of 2016? Whenever she feels like it.
This has always been true, of course. The media can’t force her into one. But the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign hasn’t been quite so blunt about it.
Until now.
“We’ll have a press conference when we want to have a press conference,” Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said on ABC News on Thursday evening.
Okay then. This is the Clinton campaign flaunting its control, reminding the media who calls the shots.
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Presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has named Ajamu Baraka, an international human rights scholar and activist, as her running mate.
“Ajamu Baraka is a powerful, eloquent spokesperson for the transformative, radical agenda whose time has come — an agenda of economic, social, racial, gender, climate, indigenous and immigrant justice,” Stein said in a statement Tuesday. “Ajamu’s life’s work has embodied the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Stein, a doctor, is expected to be formally nominated as the Green Party’s presidential candidate Saturday at its national convention in Houston.
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Peter and Mickey spend the hour in discussion with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor, author, and media critic. Their conversation included both critiques of corporate media’s recent performance (such as coverage of the presidential campaign), and ongoing developments that threaten freedom of the press and of thought.
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Virtually the entire political class has now united to defeat Donald Trump, with Morning Joe today staging a Michael Hayden appearance that served largely to allow Scarborough to tell the story of Trump asking three times in a foreign policy briefing why the US couldn’t use its nukes. As Dan Drezner pointed out on Twitter, Scarborough says the event happened months ago — when the primary was still going on — but has just now staged its telling.
Beating Donald Trump is important. He’s a racist who aims to win by promising white working class people they can resume persecuting people of color again, and he is dangerously inconsistent. That said, he does want to spend lots on infrastructure and protect workers from the ravages of globalization, something often forgotten in depictions of him as entirely policy free.
But the transpartisan obsession with beating Trump has largely applauded two developments that, for liberals, for democrats, for those who believe in peace, for progressives, should be a worry.
First, the Neocon establishment has come out in enthusiastic support for Clinton, with ideologue Eliot Cohen orchestrating serial efforts (one that even includes John Yoo!!) to oppose Trump. They point to Trump’s erratic nature and more recently the theories of Putin’s influence. They do so even in the face of a report that Paul Manafort, through whom any Putin influence would be managed, is checking out.
[...]
And even while the focus has been on Russia’s alleged influence with Trump, there has been no focus on Hillary’s unquestioning support of Saudi Arabia (the country that had ties to 9/11) and Israel. Or on Hillary’s equally troubling policy proposals, such as starting a No Fly Zone over Russian planes. As Will Bunch noted in a great column, Democrats have become the party that shuns people who chant No More War.
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“We” being the millions of young people, mad-as-hell working stiffs, independents, deep-rooted progressives, and other “outsiders” who felt The Bern and forged a new, game-changing, populist force of, by, and for grassroots Americans. True, this progressive-populist coalition did not win the White House on its first go ’round behind the feisty Sanders insurgency (which the the smug political establishment had literally laughed at when he began his run). But they are not laughing now, for even they can see the outsider revolt against the power elites won something even more momentous than the 2016 election: The future.
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The shake-up at the Democratic National Committee after an embarrassing breach of its email system continued Tuesday with the departure of three senior officials.
But purging the DNC of top officials won’t remedy the DNC’s problems. Those problems aren’t attributable to individuals who didn’t do their jobs. To the contrary, those individuals probably fulfilled their responsibilities exactly as those jobs were intended to be done.
The DNC’s problems are structural.
The Democratic National Committee – like the Republican National Committee – has become little more than a giant machine designed to suck up big money from wealthy individuals, lobbyists bundlers, and corporate and Wall Street PACs.
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It appears that nothing is holding her back now that Hillary Clinton has officially become the Democratic nominee for president. With “cash machine” Tim Kaine by her side, the Democratic ticket’s fundraising operation is in full swing, and the money—Big Money—is pouring in.
On Tuesday, the campaign announced a record take of $90 million last month for the candidate and the Democratic Party, not including that brought in by the Super PACs supporting her bid. Republican nominee Donald Trump raised a reported $80 million last month.
According to CNN, “Clinton will look to match her July haul with a series of August fundraisers, including star studded late-August events hosted by Oscar-winning actors and tech billionaires like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.”
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When newly minted vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine first showed his face in Philadelphia at the Democrats’ convention last week, it wasn’t on stage at the Wells Fargo Center. It was in the tony private suites high above the festivities, where he dropped in on a handful of the campaign’s highest-flying fundraisers.
That was no coincidence. Much has been made of the Virginia senator’s suburban dad-like mien and his Spanish-speaking skills as he’s started to attack Donald Trump, but Kaine also brings to Hillary Clinton’s ticket an under-appreciated resume point: his stealth status as one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful fundraisers.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Now, this is just one report on one dataset, and there may be a variety of other factors at play. But it certainly matches with our own experience here as well. The idea that people only act like jackasses because they’re anonymous just doesn’t fit with the pattern we’ve seen in the over 1 million comments we have on this site. Yes, sometimes there are anonymous jerks, just like there are sometimes named jerks. But on the whole, anonymity doesn’t seem to magically lead to worse comments.
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Actor John Abraham, whose latest release Dishoom could not release in Pakistan as the country’s censor board members failed to reach a unanimous decision on it, says he is neither disappointed nor surprised as he feels that the censor boards across both the countries have been “very myopic”.
Asked his opinion on the fate of Dishoom in Pakistan, John told IANS over phone from Mumbai: “Well, I think censorship generally across the board in both countries has been very myopic and consistently myopic. So, I am not disappointed, but I am also not surprised.”
John, who plays a police officer in the film, shared that Dishoom is neither biased nor an anti-country movie. It is all about entertainment.
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After locking horns with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) recently over ‘Udta Punjab’, Anurag Kashyap’s stock continues to rise. His take-no-prisoners stance on the ‘Udta Punjab’ issue has endeared him to young filmmakers and moviegoers alike. Known for making the right noise at crucial moments, the filmmaker has now been invited to conduct a masterclass on censorship and its impact on Indian cinema in Melbourne as he will be attending the Indian Film Festival there from August 11 to 21.
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Following last month’s failed coup, journalists in Turkey are facing the largest clampdown in its modern history. Journalists covering the events from abroad have not escaped unscathed, including a number in the Netherlands who have faced threats and attacks.
Unusually, the journalists of the Rotterdam-based Turkish newspaper Zaman Today welcomed the increased police presence. Long before the military coup that failed to remove Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power, the government had been targeting journalists. But today a Dutch police officer drops by frequently to check if Zaman’s journalists are alright. It makes journalist Huseyin Atasever, who has been working for the Dutch Zaman since 2014, feel safe. Or at least safer than he has felt in a while.
On the morning of Tuesday 19 July Atasever was on his way to Amsterdam when he received a phone call. A Turkish-Dutch individual had been abused by Erdogan supporters at a mosque in the city of Haarlem. Atasever decided to go there immediately.
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Okay, okay, I know that Canada doesn’t have a First Amendment like we do down here — even if people like to joke about it being the 51st state — but it still seems quite bizarre that comedian Mike Ward has been told to pay $42,000 for making an offensive joke about a singer named Jeremy Gabriel. Ward is planning to appeal, but the fact that he’s been found guilty of a “human rights” violation seems ridiculous enough.
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Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal has ruled that comedian Mike Ward must pay Jérémy Gabriel $35,000 for making jokes that violated his rights.
Ward has been ordered to pay the former child singer with disabilities $25,000 in moral damages and $10,000 in punitive damages.
He will also need to pay Sylvie Gabriel, Jérémy’s mother, a total of $5,000 for moral damages and $2,000 for punitive damages.
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Meanwhile, the trolls went after not only the movie, but its stars as well. Leslie Jones, a strong black actress and comedian from Saturday Night Live, complained to Twitter that she was being targeted by racist tweets that compared her to an ape and worse. It got so bad that Twitter finally rescinded the accounts of some of the trolls, including that of Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for the extremist, right wing, Trump-supporting Breitbart site.
Of course, Yiannopoulos complained that he was a victim of political correctness and left-wing censorship. Finally, Jones herself had enough and quit Twitter, saying, “I feel like I’m in a personal hell.” Leaping to her defense, original Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd called the trolls “losers” and “insignificant gnats,” adding: “I would say that you’re looking at obese white men between 50 and 60 who are active Klan members or members of the Aryan Nation, and there are millions of them.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Since Pokemon Go launched last month, we’ve seen an endless stream of players oddly forget that “augmented reality” doesn’t mean the rules of traditional reality no longer apply. Players have spent the last month playing the game in some admittedly “inappropriate” places, while wandering in and out of private property or unsafe areas in a quest to capture virtual monsters.
[...]
Apparently fed up with the phenomenon (or just looking for a payday), a New Jersey man last Friday filed a lawsuit in California federal court against Niantic Labs and Nintendo. The 16-page complaint is quick to play up complaints about Pokemon Go players catching monsters in places like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and says the game makers actively invited “unwanted incursions” on to private property when they populated reality with augmented reality monsters…
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So, just how tracked are you? Plenty, according to the largest, most detailed measurement of online tracking ever performed: Princeton University’s automated review of the world’s top 1,000,000 sites, as listed by Alexa.
But you probably knew there’s a whole lotta trackin’ goin’ on. What’s interesting (and sometimes surprising) are the details. Princeton’s Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan have captured the clearest picture of third-party web tracking that we’ve ever seen.
To begin, huge numbers of folks are trying to track you: 81,000+ third-party trackers appeared on at least two of the top million sites.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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For the CIA officials involved in torture, one thing was clear from the very beginning: The only way they would be forgiven for what they did was if they could show it had saved lives.
It was the heart of their rationale. It was vital to public acceptance. It was how they would avoid prosecution.
The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s grindingly exhaustive torture report released Tuesday indelibly captures CIA officials turning their back on human decency, and it all starts with a “novel” legal defense floated in November 2001 by CIA lawyers – and arguably prompted by their White House masters, lurking offstage – that the “CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”
Specifically, they pointed out: “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”
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If Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. presidential election in November, John Brennan would like to continue his post as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell me Brennan has signaled in private conversations that he loves the job and would like to keep it if she’s elected. Plus, Brennan does not want to be perceived as a lame-duck director, particularly as he leads an ambitious plan to restructure the agency.
At the same time, Brennan has all but taken himself out of consideration to serve in a Trump administration. Speaking last month at the Brookings Institution, he said he would not execute an order to torture captured terrorists or target the families of terrorists, as Trump has promised he would authorize if elected president.
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I thought maybe Brennan wanted to stick around to make sure he gets credit for bettering Allen Dulles’ record for regime change (after all, it’s not clear how the regime change conducted while Brennan was at the White House gets counted in these things).
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If you’d like some more evidence on how civil asset forfeiture has become legalized theft, you need only look at this investigative report by Curt Prendergast for Tuscon.com. Not only is it extremely easy for the government to claim assets are tied to criminal activity, but the obstacles placed in front of individuals to reclaim seized assets are numerous and expensive to navigate — sometimes outweighing the value of the items seized.
On top of that, even when the state loses, it still wins. Arizona residents who have seen their vehicles seized for extremely tenuous connections to criminal activity are still forced to pay an incredible amount of money to reclaim items the state has agreed to return to their owners.
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The fortunes of a local woman took a disastrous turn when she loaned her car to her son so he could take her granddaughter to school.
Her son was arrested on suspicion of credit-card fraud in Oro Valley and police seized the woman’s orange 2005 Mini Cooper, which she said in court documents she needed to drive to her $14-an-hour job at Red Lobster.
She hired a lawyer — the court does not provide lawyers in civil matters — to challenge the seizure and subsequent forfeiture proceedings. Authorities agreed on July 7 to return her car, but first she had to pay $2,000 into the Pima County Anti-Racketeering Fund, with $1,500 going to Oro Valley police and $500 to the County Attorney’s Office.
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Sting operations — in which an undercover agent or informant provides the means and opportunity to lure otherwise incapable people into committing a crime — have represented the default tactic for counterterrorism prosecutions since the 9/11 attacks.
Critics believe these stings amount to entrapment. Human Rights Watch, for instance, argues that law enforcement authorities in the U.S. have overstepped their role by “effectively participating in developing terrorism plots.” Nonetheless, U.S. courts have rejected entrapment defenses, no matter how hapless the defendants.
In Canada, however, the legal standing of counterterrorism stings has suddenly shifted. Last week, a high-ranking judge in British Columbia stayed the convictions of two alleged terrorists, ruling that they had been “skillfully manipulated” and entrapped by an elaborate sting operation organized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“The specter of the defendants serving a life sentence for a crime that the police manufactured by exploiting their vulnerabilities, by instilling fear that they would be killed if they backed out, and by quashing all doubts they had in the religious justifications for the crime, is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice,” the judge wrote. “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves.”
This is the first time that a counterterrorism sting — whose tactics were developed by the FBI through modifying those of undercover drug stings — has been thrown out of court whole cloth in Canada or the U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Catherine J. Bruce was ruling in the case of John Nuttall and his common-law wife, Amanda Korody, two drug addicts who lived on the streets in British Columbia. As part of sting operation in which the RCMP paid at least 200 officers a total of more than $900,000 Canadian in overtime, law-enforcement agents encouraged the couple to place pressure-cooker bombs at the British Columbia parliament building on Canada Day 2013.
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An 18-year-old recently arrested on terrorism charges in Arizona has the mental capacity of a child and had been in regular contact with the FBI for years before his arrest, according to family members, former teachers, and medical documents reviewed by The Intercept. Mahin Khan was arrested July 1 on charges of plotting to support the Taliban as well as the militant group the Islamic State and commit acts of terrorism in the local community.
People close to Khan say that he suffered from serious mental and emotional illnesses and that the FBI was aware of this, having met with him regularly since he was a young teenager. According to medical records and statements from family members, he was first referred to the FBI after sending a threatening email to one of his teachers at the age of 15. After an initial meeting with the FBI, he spent 45 days at an inpatient psychiatric facility for evaluation. His family says this stay at the facility was coordinated with FBI officials. Agents reportedly continued to meet with Khan regularly after he returned home and continued to do so up until the time of his arrest.
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In the midst of an election year in which issues of race and policing have often taken center stage, the most comprehensive and detailed policy platform on how to tackle them has come not from candidates or elected officials, but from a movement that found its voice on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities.
The Black Lives Matter movement erupted spontaneously in nationwide protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In its early days, it was propelled by pain and rage, with little organization, but in the weeks and months that followed it grew coordinated and strategic, while never losing the horizontal, inclusive quality that allowed it to scale up so rapidly.
As community organizations and individuals operating under the Black Lives Matter principle denounced police violence, racism, and lack of accountability, they also took on broader issues affecting black communities: mass incarceration, access to clean water, economic justice. While the number of mostly black and brown people killed by police continued to grow, street protests have been sporadic. But away from the spotlight, a movement that made its name by way of protest continued to organize, and this week released a comprehensive policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives,” that is at once an exhaustive indictment of the nation’s systemic racism and a clear-eyed presentation of concrete solutions to the problem.
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Since news emerged last week that imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning is facing new criminal charges and further punishment from the U.S. Army for attempting suicide, public outcry has been swift.
Civil liberties group Fight for the Future has received over 30,000 signatures on a petition that demands the new charges be dropped and that Manning be provided with adequate healthcare.
A separate petition demanding that Manning be spared solitary confinement garnered over 2,000 signatures in a matter of hours.
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It’s hard to imagine good news emerging from environmental chaos in Brazil and warfare around the globe, but a team of refugees competing at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this month stood in the spotlight on Tuesday, and took the opportunity to urge compassion for displaced people worldwide.
The 10 athletes on the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team (ROT) were given a standing ovation as they joined the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
“We are ambassadors for the other refugees. We cannot forget this chance that you gave us,” said Yiech Pur Biel, a track and field athlete originally from South Sudan. “We are not bad people. It’s only a name to be a refugee.”
Yusra Mardini, a Syrian swimmer, said this year’s games make clear that people displaced from their home countries can still contribute to society—countering an argument that has been waged by rightwing opponents of open borders.
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New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton has announced he is resigning next month. Bratton was a lead advocate of the so-called broken windows theory that called for officers to crack down on minor infractions in an attempt to decrease more violent crime. Over the past four decades, Bratton has served as New York police commissioner twice as well as the head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. Supporters of Bratton credit him with lowering crimes rates, but critics say broken windows policing unfairly targets communities of color. In a statement, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi told Democracy Now!, “William Bratton is the key architect of programs that have terrorized our communities for decades. His implementation of broken windows theory has wreaked havoc on communities from Los Angeles to New York City and beyond.” Bratton resigned just one day after hundreds of activists gathered outside New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department and his firing. Protests against William Bratton have been escalating ever since the police killing of Eric Garner two years ago. We speak to Trinity College professor Christina Heatherton, Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Nabil Hassein of Millions March NYC.
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On Tuesday, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton announced he is resigning next month. Bratton has served as the NYPD commissioner twice. He’s also served as head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. But Bratton’s resignation doesn’t mean he’s retiring. His next job will be at Teneo Holdings, a global private consulting firm with controversial ties to Hillary Clinton. Bratton will be the chairperson of a new branch of the company called Teneo Risk. For more, we speak with Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American studies at Trinity College. She’s co-editor of “Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.”
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Israel may not be Nazi, nor even a fascist state. Yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. Just consider these acts of evil perpetrated by the state…
After we’ve cited nationalism and racism, hatred and contempt for Arab life, the security cult and resistance to the occupation, victimhood and messianism, one more element must be added without which the behavior of the Israeli occupation regime cannot be explained: Evil. Pure evil. Sadistic evil. Evil for its own sake. Sometimes, it’s the only explanation.
Eva Illouz described its signs (“Evil now,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 30). Her essay, which challenges the idea of the banality of evil, considers the national group as the source of the evil. Using philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, she finds a “family resemblance” between the Israeli occupation and history’s evil regimes. This similarity does not mean that Israel is Nazi, nor even fascist. And yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. It’s a depressing and brilliant analysis.
The evil that Illouz attributes to Israel is not banal, it cannot happen anywhere, and it has political and social roots that are deeply embedded in Israeli society. Thus, Illouz joins Zeev Sternhell, who warned in his impressive and resounding essay about the cultural soil out of which fascism is now growing in Israel (“The birth of fascism,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 7).
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In an extraordinary judgment, the organization that hopes to take over running the top level of the internet later this year has been slammed by an independent review as at best incompetent and at worst deliberately mendacious.
The decision [PDF] by ICANN’s Independent Review Panel (IRP) over the organization’s decision to refuse “community” status for three applications covering business suffixes has exposed a level of double-dealing that many suspected occurred in the non-profit organization but has been difficult to prove.
The ICANN Board Governance Committee (BGC) in particular comes under fire for having repeatedly failed to carry out its duties.
Despite serious allegations being made against ICANN’s staff and the “independent” evaluator it had selected – the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) – the panel found that the BGC did not carry out any investigation. Instead it had relied solely on material supplied by ICANN’s legal team – the very people at the center of the complaints.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Martin says people who use only iPads for their computing do it because it’s a challenge. He says: “Figuring things out is part of the allure”. This, he says, is just like things were — maybe they still are — with desktop Linux.
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So while Martin is right about iPad-only pioneers doing it for the challenge, their curiosity and exploration isn’t a waste of time. iPads and other tablets are the future of personal computing, it may take years until they are the mainstream, but the pioneers will help us get there sooner.
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Desktop
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I have been seeing Linux get space in data centers. Some adventurous sysadmins start boxes to help in everyday tasks for monitoring and managing the infrastructure, and then Linux gets more space as DNS and DHCP servers, printer management, and file servers. There used to be lots of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and criticism about Linux for the enterprise: Who is the owner of it? Who supports it? Are there applications for it?
But nowadays it seems the revenge of Linux is everywhere! From developer’s PCs to huge enterprise servers; we can find it in smart phones, watches, and in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Raspberry Pi. Even Mac OS X has a kind of prompt with commands we are used to. Microsoft is making its own distribution, runs it at Azure, and then… Windows 10 is going to get Bash on it.
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It’s been a while since I cranked out a nice SVG… so I looked at GNU/Linux desktop OS usage according to StatCounter and found Uruguay is doing as usual but I zeroed in on Germany which has broken out above 3% share of page-views. That’s serious.
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Server
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The tech industry is notorious for its boys’ club history, problems with misogyny, and gaps in pay equality between men and women.
In San Antonio, cloud computing giant Rackspace is leading one effort to help turn around the persistent gender problem in tech. Three years ago, Rackspace opened a technical career school called Rackspace Open Cloud Academy, which offers a nine-week training program that is open to the public and meant to help people learn how to become computer system administrators or to work in network operations.
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Kernel Space
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The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent in today as the new feature work for Linux 4.8…
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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A new version of ownCloud community edition has been released, and it brings a number of important updates, new features and security improvements. The result is a more useful and safe environment for collaboration and cloud storage.
OwnCloud is an open-source alternative to commercial services like Dropbox and Google Drive. It offers complete control over the environment, and the only storage limit is the physical size your hard disk.
It’s extremely useful to organizations and individuals. Some people use it to manage files on their home network, but it scales effortlessly to handle large collaborative projects.
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Proprietary
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After releasing successful apps for Windows, iOS, and Android operating systems, ExpressVPN is pleased to announce its first app for Linux users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Signal From Tölva is the just announced game from Big Robot, the developers of Sir, You Are Being Hunted which supports Linux. Our platform was missing, so I reached out to them to ask what’s up.
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Near Death is an interesting attempt at a survival game that doesn’t class itself as one. After your plane crash-lands in Antarctica, you find yourself stranded and alone at an abandoned research facility in the midst of a deadly blizzard.
Note: Key provided by developer.
I love the mystery of the intro, as you hear you’re going down, but instead of an intro video it’s a voice-over as it shows you statistics like the temperature and wind chill. It was a very cool way to do it, to get you thinking right away.
It actually reminds me of The Long Dark quite a bit, similar sort of icy setting and the need to stay warm. This, however, is a finished game and not Early Access like TLD is.
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GOG recently added another DRM free Linux title to their digital shelves, this time it’s Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes a good looking point & click adventure.
Note: It’s 64bit only.
GOG sent in a copy for me to test out, so test away I did.
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Transport Fever certainly looks like it could be good fun, and this new trailer is certainly drumming up excitement within me. Building up a transport empire with trains, planes and more sounds fun.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE project has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the third of five maintenance releases for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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If you want to blog about GUADEC and tell everyone that you’re going or speaking there, you can find the badges (and the slide templates) on the website.
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With all the debate going on regarding the benefits of using Ubuntu vs Linux Mint, it’s easy to forget that there are other great distributions for newer users. In this article, I’ll be comparing two distros based on Fedora and OpenSUSE. The two distros I’ll be comparing today are known as GeckoLinux (I selected the OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 version built from Suse Studio) and Korora (based on Fedora 24).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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On August 2, 2016, the ROSA Labs was more than happy to inform us about the availability of the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 GNU/Linux operating system designed especially for Russian-speaking users.
Based on the latest ROSA 2014.1 platform, the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Linux distribution ships with no less than flavors featuring the KDE 4, KDE Plasma 5, GNOME, and MATE desktop environments, and two years of extended support, which means that you’ll receive software updates and security patches until Fall 2018.
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Gentoo Family
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The Pentoo Linux development team proudly announces today, August 2, 2016, the availability for download of the fifth Release Candidate (RC) build towards the Pentoo 2015.0 GNU/Linux operating system.
We don’t write so often about the Pentoo GNU/Linux operating system because new releases are being made available to the public online when a new DEF CON event (the world’s largest annual hacker convention) is taking place. So yes, it’s now a tradition to see a new Pentoo release around a DEF CON conference.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project, through Peter Palfrader, announced recently that its services and repositories for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system would be accessible through the Tor network.
To further enhance the anonymity and security of users when either accessing any of the Debian online services, such as the Debian website or Wiki, as well as when using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, the Debian Project partnership with the Tor Project to enable Tor onion services for many of their services.
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A new release, now at version number 0.6.10, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload.
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Derivatives
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Today, August 2, 2016, the development team behind Tails, the amnesic incognito live Linux operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux, proudly announced the release of Tails 2.5.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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So here’s the meat and potatoes of the situation – the problems you describe are most likely centered around an issue coming directly from Ubuntu. Still, the distros do indeed have distinct differences. In the included video, I’ll touch of some of these differences and provide you with a side-by-side comparison of core features and functionality.
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Clement Lefebvre today announced the release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce for users of that desktop environment. The other big story of the day was the release of Firefox 48 and its new multi-process operation. Elsewhere, Matt Hartley compared and contrasted Korora vs GeckoLinux and Mint MATE vs Ubuntu MATE. Also, Linux is becoming the more popular platform for botnet DDoS attacks.
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We reported the other day on the availability for download of the long-anticipated Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Xfce Edition operating system, and we told you that an official announcement would come shortly.
Well, it didn’t took long for the rest of the download mirrors to be synchronized with the main Linux Mint servers, and today, August 2, 2016, Clement Lefebvre informs the community about the official release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce, a special flavor of the Ubuntu-based distribution built around the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.
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Robotical’s hackable, Cortex-M4 based “Marty” educational robot has flexible legs, and can be upgraded with an onboard Raspberry Pi.
A startup called Robotical is seeking funds on Indiegogo for a 3D printable, mostly open source, walking robot called Marty. The WiFi-controlled bipedal bot has a 180MHz Cortex-M4 MCU, and is primarily designed to teach kids about programming using Scratch. It can also be programmed with Python or C++, and you can upgrade it with a Linux-driven Raspberry Pi or other small SBC.
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The runaway Kickstarter success CHIP computer is now shipping, both the computer motherboard itself and the neat Pocket CHIP handheld device. A thorough video review of the device was created by gadget reviewer Lon Seidman.
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DFI is sampling two Linux-friendly COM Express Compact Type 6 modules that use the same carrier: a 6th Gen Core based “SU968” and an Intel Braswell “BW968.” DFI has brought its line of 95 x 95mm COM Express Compact modules up to date with new Intel Skylake and Braswell models
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Adlink unveiled the first COM Express 3.0 module, debuting a server-oriented Type 7 pinout that replaces graphics with 10GbE ports. Adlink’s rugged, Linux-ready “Express-BD7” module with 14nm Xeon and Pentium CPUs is the first computer-on-module to use PICMG’s preliminary COM Express 3.0 spec with its new Type 7 pinout.
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Phones
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Android
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Shares of Amkor Technology popped about 13 percent on Tuesday as demand for Android phones boosted the semiconductor company’s earnings.
The company, which focuses on outsourced chip packaging and testing for companies such as Qualcomm, reported earnings per diluted share of 2 cents on net sales of $917 million, the company said. The company said it expects revenues to grow about 15 percent sequentially in the third quarter, thanks in part to the launch of some mobile devices and growth in automotive and China markets.
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Jide Technology informs Softpedia about the availability of an updated version of their Remix OS distribution for personal computers based on the open-source Android-x86 project.
The biggest new feature of the Remix OS update is that the entire operating system has been rebased on the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow technologies, marking the next step in the evolution of Remix OS for PCs and implementing most of the features requested by users for so long. With this major change in its infrastructure, Remix OS is now installable on almost all Intel-based desktop and laptops, as well as on Macs.
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Open source software (OSS) and the pace of change that it allows a developer to innovate and optimize their capabilities more than ever before. In addition, the move to mobile first and platform independent development practices cause businesses to rethink their development frameworks. I’m convinced that this, more than anything else has lead Cloud Native architectures to the forefront. Cloud Native is defined as the software architecture framework that consist of containers, Distributed Orchestration and Management, Micro-services Architecture.
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We’re all on the same team, and all working towards the same goal of making our open source software better. Your small contributions make a big impact.
How open source software is supported is just as important as how well it works. Given the choice between building awesome new features or carefully reading and responding to 10 bug reports, which would you choose? Which is more important? When you think of open source maintainers what do you see? I see issues. I see dozens of open bug reports that haven’t been responded to in days. I see a pile of feature requests waiting to be worked on. Now when I open those issues, I see maintainers spending most of their time trying to get the information they need. “What version are you using? Was it working before? Can you give me an example app?”
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Your organization probably relies on multiple open source projects. Using strategic design to understand the big picture problems your organization faces may allow you to improve the user experience and design of your IT systems.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 48 shipped today with two long-awaited new features designed to improve the stability and security of the browser.
After seven years of development, version 48 is at last enabling a multiprocess feature comparable to what Internet Explorer and Google Chrome have offered as stable features since 2009. By running their rendering engines in a separate process from the browser shell, IE and Chrome are more stable (a Web page crash does not take down the entire browser) and more secure (those separate processes can run with limited user privileges). In order to bring the same multiprocess capability to Firefox, Mozilla started the Electrolysis project in 2009. But the organization has taken substantially longer than Microsoft, Google, and Apple to ship this feature.
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Mozilla has finally debuted the long-awaited Firefox 48 web browser.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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DragonFly version 4.6 brings brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages.
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Today, August 2, 2016, the development team behind the BSD kernel-based DragonFly BSD operating system proudly announced the official availability of the DragonFly BSD 4.6.0 update.
DragonFly BSD 4.6.0 appears to be a major release that ends the development of the 4.4 series of the acclaimed BSD distribution and promises to introduce lots of goodies to users of this computer OS. Prominent features include initial UEFI support, in-house built support for NVMe SSD devices, as well as SMP and networking improvements.
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Public Services/Government
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It’s a textbook example of public administration software reuse. The city of Valencia (Spain) is one of the many users of Epoptes, software for managing school PC-labs, developed as open source in Greece since 2008. The software is improved by staff members of the city’s IT department, sharing their code publicly. Meanwhile in Greece, the future development of Epoptes is in limbo.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Virtual reality has many strengths. It’s immersive, powerful, engaging, and a seriously fun experience. However, as the industry continues to grow its weaknesses are also beginning to come to light as well. One of the most significant of these is the concept of locomotion mechanics, or physical navigation inside of a VR experience.
Recently, we featured some groups that have tried to bridge this gap by building systems that translate running in place into forward momentum in VR. There are also treadmills like the Virtuix Omni that provide a hardware solution to the issue. However, Electric Night Owl, LLC is working on their own solution as well.
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“We also implore members of Ukip and the electorate to request the publication of the NEC’s communications in order to determine whether the committee is guilty of conflicts of interest or even corruption.
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Science
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Asteroid impacts. Nuclear war. Unhinged climate change. These are all respectable, solid entries into the great pantheon of doomsday scenarios that could wipe out life on Earth.
But when it comes to sheer destructive flair, gamma ray bursts (GRBs) take the apocalyptic cake. Forged in catastrophic cosmic disruptions like supernovae and neutron star mergers, GRBs are the brightest phenomena in the universe. Capable of releasing more energy in a single second than the Sun will in its entire lifetime of ten billion years, these bursts are essentially the universe’s unique riff on projectile barfing.
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Arguing that an association with secret institutions like the C.I.A. would inevitably lead to “rot,” Humes advised Plimpton that, for the integrity of the magazine, he should make Matthiessen’s ties during the magazine’s founding public. Citing Edmund Burke’s line “that it is enough for evil to triumph that good men do nothing,” Humes wrote, “I have deeply believed in the Review and all that we hoped it stood for, but until this matter is righted I feel I have no honorable choice but to resolutely resign. Even if I have to split an infinitive to do it.” He went on to suggest that Matthiessen might ”laugh the matter off in print in a manner calculated to restore our tarnished escutcheon…” Under these circumstances, he would stay. Barring that, however, “I should like my name removed from the masthead. I’m sure it will not be missed.”
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Health/Nutrition
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The recent crisis in Flint, Michigan that left children and parents without safe tap water due to dangerous levels of lead from old pipes highlighted the significant lapses in basic U.S. infrastructure.
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It’s the Olympics: that time of year when we sit back and watch our finest, most glistening athletes run, jump, and throw their hearts out trying to convince the world that we don’t deserve to be the international shorthand for “childhood obesity.” However, while you might think that the worst thing that can happen to an Olympic athlete is having to raise the Kardashian kids, it turns out that the job comes with so much depressing baggage that Foxcatcher seems like a slapstick buddy comedy by comparison. What sort of baggage? Well …
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On Friday, President Obama signed bill S.764 into law, dealing a major blow to the movement to require GMO labeling. The new law, called the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” (DARK) Act by food safety groups, has at least three key parts in it that undermine Vermont’s popular GMO labeling bill and make it nearly impossible for you and me to know what’s in our food.
The law claims to set a federal labeling standard by requiring food producers to include either a QR bar code that can be scanned with a phone, or a 1-800 number that consumers can call to find out whether a product contains genetically modified ingredients.
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Security
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An issue in all Windows systems might leak the user’s Windows login and password information. This is especially critical if the user is using a Microsoft account because this is linked to a number of other services the user may be using.
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Security guru Bruce Schneier, the author of multiple encryption algorithms, founder of security company Counterpane, and former chief technology officer of BT Managed Security Solutions, has warned that the ‘craze’ for connecting devices to the internet with little thought about security will result in a major disaster.
Schneier warned that “integrity and availability threats” are much worse than “confidentiality threats” with devices connected to the internet.
“It’s one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped upon to know who is home. It’s another thing entirely if it can be hacked to allow a burglar to open the door – or prevent you from opening your door. A hacker who can deny you control of your car, or take over control, is much more dangerous than one who can eavesdrop on your conversations or track your car’s location,” Schneier wrote.
He continued: “With the advent of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in general, we’ve given the internet hands and feet: the ability to directly affect the physical world. What used to be attacks against data and information have become attacks against flesh, steel, and concrete.”
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Last week, President Obama issued a policy directive (PPD-41) on cyber-incident response coordination. The FBI is in charge, which is no surprise. Actually, there’s not much surprising in the document. I suppose it’s important to formalize this stuff, but I think it’s what happens now.
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Hackers believed to be working on behalf of Kazakhstan government officials tried to infect lawyers and other associates of exiled dissidents and publishers with spyware, according to a report to be presented at this week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
The hacking campaign was part of a complicated tale that also involved physical surveillance and threats of violence – a rare instance of cyber attacks coming alongside real-world crimes.
It is also unusual in that the campaign involved an Indian company that was apparently hired by the hackers, and it targeted Western lawyers along with alleged opponents of the Kazakh government.
A spokesman at the Kazakhstan embassy in Washington did not respond to emailed questions.
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THE CRAZE for connecting anything and everything and controlling it over the internet will result in a major disaster without better built-in security, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.
Furthermore, if secret services really are trying to influence elections by hacking the systems of political parties and releasing embarrassing emails, they will almost certainly attempt to hack into the increasing number of internet-connected voting machines for the same ends.
Schneier is the author of multiple encryption algorithms, founder of security company Counterpane, and former chief technology officer of BT Managed Security Solutions.
“It’s one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped on to know who is home. It’s another thing entirely if it can be hacked to allow a burglar to open the door or prevent you opening your door,” Schneier wrote in an article published by Motherboard.
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Iranian hackers have compromised more than a dozen accounts on the Telegram instant messaging service and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, the largest known breach of the encrypted communications system, cyber researchers told Reuters.
The attacks, which took place this year and have not been previously reported, jeopardized the communications of activists, journalists and other people in sensitive positions in Iran, where Telegram is used by some 20 million people, said independent cyber researcher Collin Anderson and Amnesty International technologist Claudio Guarnieri, who have been studying Iranian hacking groups for three years.
Telegram promotes itself as an ultra secure instant messaging system because all data is encrypted from start to finish, known in the industry as end-to-end encryption. A number of other messaging services, including Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp, say they have similar capabilities.
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Security researchers have always advised online users to create long, complex and different passwords for their various online accounts. So, if one site is breached, your other accounts on other websites are secure enough from being hacked.
Ideally, your strong password should be at least 16 characters long, should contain a combination of digits, symbols, uppercase letters and lowercase letters and most importantly the most secure password is one you don’t even know.
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Microsoft has issued a replacement for a buggy release of Windows Server Operating System MP, code that underpins efforts to proactively monitor Windows Server.
The last version – 6.0.7303.0 – should have been innocuous. But users quickly noticed lots of problems, especially regarding recognition of disk clusters, leading Microsoft itself to issue a recommendation that you not install the software.
That was back in late February 2016. On July 27th, Microsoft quietly released it’s completed version version 6.0.7316.0 and on August 2nd announced its existence to the wider world.
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Defence/Aggression
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Sunni Islamist radicals in Yemen have blown up a 16th century mosque housing the shrine of a revered Sufi scholar in the city of Taez, a local official said on Monday.
Gunmen led by a Salafist local chief known as Abu al-Abbas blew up the mosque of Sheikh Abdulhadi al-Sudi on Friday night, the official said, confirming media reports of the attack.
Yemen’s commission for antiquities and museums condemned the destruction of the site that is considered the most famous in Taez.
It said the mosque’s white dome was “one of the biggest domes in Yemen and one of the most beautiful religious sites in old Taez”.
Images of the site before destruction showed a white square-shaped, single-storey structure topped by a large central dome circled by smaller ones.
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Two months after the United Nations blacklisted a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition for killing children in Yemen, Riyadh has not provided enough proof that it should be permanently removed from the register, U.N. diplomatic sources said on Monday.
U.N. officials plan to travel to Riyadh to obtain more details on various issues, such as rules of engagement, one of the sources said.
A U.N. annual report on children and armed conflict said the coalition was responsible for 60 percent of child deaths and injuries in Yemen last year, killing 510 and wounding 667. The Saudi-led coalition includes United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Senegal and Sudan.
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The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
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Every Friday, just metres from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store.
The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi funds and blamed for spreading Wahhabism, the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia, in the 17 years since a United States-led intervention wrested Kosovo from Serbian oppression. Since then – much of that time under the watch of US officials – Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a fount of Islamic extremism.
Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. In the past two years, police have identified 314 Kosovars – including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children – who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That is the highest number per capita in Europe. They were radicalised and recruited, investigators said, by extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab Gulf states using an obscure network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.
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Hundreds of people plundered and burned down several Buddhist temples or vihara in Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra, on Friday evening. No fatalities or injuries occurred in the anarchic acts, which took place until early Saturday.
It is estimated that the attacks have caused billions of rupiah in losses.
North Sumatra Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Rina Sari Ginting said the riots began when a 41-year-old of Chinese descent, only identified as Meliana, reprimanded an administrator of the Al Maksum Mosque to lower its microphone volume.
Rina further said Meliana had previously conveyed similar warnings to the administrator, hence, the mosque’s congregation members visited her house following her complaint for the umpteenth time on Friday evening.
The meeting between Al Maksum congregation members and Meliana heated up, forcing Tanjung Balai Police officers to safeguard Meliana and her husband at the police station. Angry mobs continued to flock to Meliana’s house, however. Some had even attempted to burn down the house but it was prevented by people living in the neighbourhood.
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Someday, someone will write a history of the U.S. national security state in the twenty-first century and, if the first decade and a half are any yardstick, it will be called something like State of Failure. After all, almost 15 years after the U.S. invaded the Taliban’s Afghanistan, launching the second American Afghan War of the past half-century, U.S. troops are still there, their “withdrawal” halted, their rules of engagement once again widened to allow American troops and air power to accompany allied Afghan forces into battle, and the Taliban on the rise, having taken more territory (and briefly one northern provincial capital) than at any time since that movement was crushed in the invasion of 2001.
Thirteen years after George W. Bush and his top officials, dreaming of controlling the oil heartlands, launched the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (the second Iraq War of our era), Washington is now in the third iteration of the same, with 6,000 troops (and thousands of private contractors) back in that country and a vast air campaign underway to destroy the Islamic State. With modest numbers of special operations troops on the ground and another major air campaign, Washington is also now enmeshed in a complex and so far disastrous war in Syria. And if you haven’t been counting, that’s three wars gone wrong.
Then, of course, there was the American (and NATO) intervention in Libya in 2011, which cracked that autocratic country open and made way for the rise of Islamic extremist movements there, as well as the most powerful Islamic State franchise outside Syria and Iraq. Today, plans are evidently being drawn up for yet more air strikes, special operations raids, and the like there. Toss in as well Washington’s never-ending drone war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, its disastrous attempt to corral al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen (leading to a grim and horrifying Saudi-led, American-supported internecine conflict in that country), and the unending attempt to destroy al-Shabaab in Somalia, and you have at least seven wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, all about to be handed on by President Obama to the next president with no end in sight, no real successes, nothing. In these same years Islamic terror movements have only spread and grown stronger under the pressure of the American war machine.
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Against the wishes of her New York Democratic constituents, Hillary Clinton voted with Senate Republicans to invade Iraq. (It was a pivotal vote. Without Democratic support, George W. Bush’s request for this war of aggression would have failed.)
Humayun Khan, 27, was an army captain who got killed during that invasion.
Eight years later, the dead soldier’s parents appeared at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — not to protest, but in order to endorse one of the politicians responsible for his death: Hillary Clinton.
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At this point most people appear to know that something is terribly, terribly wrong in the United States of America. But like the proverbial blind man describing the elephant, Americans tend to characterize the problem according to their economic status, their education and interests, and the way that the problem is impacting their peer group. So we hear that the biggest crisis facing America today is:
Corruption
Immigration
Economic inequality
Climate change
Lack of respect for law enforcement
Institutionalized racism
Islamic terrorism
The greed and recklessness of Wall Street banks
Those damned far-right Republicans
Those damned liberal Democrats
Political polarization
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The war in the east, the rise of paramilitaries and polarised public opinion are feeding fears of a violent seizure of power in Kyiv. Could Ukraine follow in Turkey’s footsteps?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, scientists warned on Tuesday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its annual State of the Climate report with the dire warning that 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic milestones” in global temperature, sea level rise, and extreme weather.
“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Penn State, told the Guardian. “They are playing out before us, in real time. The 2015 numbers drive that home.”
Last year’s record heat was fueled by a combination of the effects of global warming and one of the strongest El Niño events on record since at least 1950, NOAA said.
“When we think about being climate resilient, both of these time scales are important to consider,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Last year’s El Niño was a clear reminder of how short-term events can amplify the relative influence and impacts stemming from longer-term global warming trends.”
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For several months last fall, Indonesia choked under a blanket of smog fueled by one of the worst fire seasons in its history. But smoldering peatlands didn’t limit their pollution to the island nation: they sent smoke halfway across the world.
“I’d never seen anything quite like this before,” Robert Field of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies told Gizmodo. Field is lead author on a new analysis of Indonesia’s 2015 fire season, which used data from five Earth-observing satellites to evaluate the total pollution from a spate of peat fires that were at one point emitting more carbon each day than the entire US economy.
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The media largely relegate the greatest challenge facing humanity to footnotes as industry and politicians hurtle us towards systemic collapse of the planet
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New York state’s Clean Energy Standard (CES), approved Monday, is being hailed as a “monumental step forward” toward a renewable energy future.
But it’s also generating controversy, as it props up the state’s faltering nuclear industry to the tune of about $500 million a year in subsidies—and potentially lays out a blueprint for other states to do the same.
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A state board unanimously approved a clean-energy plan Monday that will boost renewable energy use while rescuing upstate nuclear power plants with a multi-billion-dollar subsidy.
The state Public Service Commission voted 4-0 Monday to adopt the Clean Energy Standard, a three-tiered plan mandating the state’s long-held goal of getting 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and implementing a 40-percent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030.
Ratepayers will see their bills increase to cover the cost of the 12-year plan, which will require utilities to purchase electricity at an elevated rate from three upstate nuclear facilities, including the R.E. Nuclear Power Plant in Wayne County.
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The New York Public Service Commission voted today on a 50% renewable standard that officials say will reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030, ensure the state’s power mix is diverse, and attract billions in clean energy investment.
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The New York State Public Service Commission—in the face of strong opposition—this week approved a $7.6 billion bail-out of aging nuclear power plants in upstate New York which their owners have said are uneconomic to run without government support.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—who appoints the members of the PSC—has called for the continued operation of the nuclear plants in order to, he says, save jobs at them. The bail-out would be part of a “Clean Energy Standard” advanced by Cuomo. Under it, 50 percent of electricity used in New York by 2030 would come from “clean and renewable energy sources”with nuclear power considered clean and renewable.
“Nuclear energy is neither clean nor renewable,” testified Pauline Salotti, vice chair of the Green Party of Suffolk County, Long Island at a recent hearing on the plan.
“Without these subsidies, nuclear plants cannot compete with renewable energy and will close. But under the guise of ‘clean energy,’ the nuclear industry is about to get its hands on our money in order to save its own profits, at the expense of public health and safety,” declared a statement by Jessica Azulay, program director of Alliance for a Green Economy, based in upstate Syracuse with a chapter in New York City. Moreover, she emphasized, “Every dollar spent on nuclear subsidies is a dollar out of the pocket of New York’s electricity consumersresidents, businesses and municipalities” that should “instead” go towards backing “energy efficiency, renewable energy and a transition to a clean energy economy.”
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Finance
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While critics have begun to sound the death knell for the contentious Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), U.S. President Barack Obama doubled down his support for the corporate-backed trade agreement.
During a Tuesday press conference after meeting with the Prime Minister of Singapore—one of the 12 nations involved in the pact—Obama said that he is “reaffirming” his commitment to the TPP, declaring himself a “strong supporter” of the deal.
Eschewing criticisms that it would “leave many people behind,” Obama said the TPP provides an “opportunity to grow our economies and write the rules for trade in the 21st century in a way that is equitable. It gives us a chance to advance American leadership, reduce economic inequality, and support good paying jobs, all while strengthening critical strategic relationships in a vital region.”
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There are some Brixiteers who think Brexit is easy.
[...]
My view, for what it is worth, is that Brexit will not be easy.
But if the proponents of an easy Brexit are right, then the view that Brexit is hard will be disproved soon enough.
So there is no point arguing about it.
Like the wise adult of the story, perhaps one should just say to the proponents of an easy Brexit: have a go, and see what happens.
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The New Jersey State Senate has announced it will hold a hearing to examine the state’s student loan agency, which administers the largest state-based loan program in the country and one that employs aggressive and unforgiving collection practices.
A ProPublica and New York Times investigation has shown that New Jersey’s loan program charges higher interest rates than similar federal programs, and that its officials, armed with the power of the state, have garnished wages, rescinded tax refunds, and even sought repayment from families whose children have died. The state’s student loans now total $1.9 billion.
The hearing, set for Aug. 8, will be led by New Jersey state Sen. Robert Gordon, chairman of the Legislative Oversight Committee, and New Jersey state Sen. Sandra Cunningham, chairwoman of the Higher Education Committee.
“We need to be sure we are properly advising prospective borrowers and not aggressively targeting students and families that are having financial difficulties,” Gordon said in an emailed release. “The state should be supporting students and young workers in particular, not putting up additional barriers to their future success.”
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What does it mean to love your country? What does it mean to defend its sovereignty? For some of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, it means reducing the United Kingdom to a franchise of corporate capital, governed from head offices overseas. They will take us out of Europe to deliver us into the arms of other powers.
[...]
Fox looks to me like a corporate sleeper cell implanted in government. In 2011, he resigned his post as defence secretary in disgrace after his extracurricular interests were exposed. He had set up an organisation called Atlantic Bridge, financed in large part by a hedge fund owner. It formed a partnership with a corporate lobbying group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is funded by tobacco, pharmaceutical and oil companies. Before it was struck off by the Charity Commission, it began assembling a transatlantic conclave of people who wished to see public services privatised and corporations released from regulation.
He allowed a lobbyist to attend his official meetings, without government clearance. He made misleading statements about these meetings, which were later disproved. It seems extraordinary to me that a man with such a past could have been brought back into government, let alone given such a crucial and sensitive role. Most newspapers have brushed his inconvenient history under the political carpet. He is, after all, their man.
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Pope Francis surprised reporters on a flight from Krakow to the Vatican late Sunday when he blamed the “god of money” for extremist violence in Europe and the Middle East, saying that a ruthless global economy leads disenfranchised people to violence.
“Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person,” the pope told reporters, according to the Wall Street Journal. “This is fundamental terrorism, against all humanity.”
The pope was responding to a journalist’s question about whether there is a link between Islam and terrorism, particularly focusing on the fatal attack on a priest by Muslim extremists in France last week.
“I ask myself how many young people that we Europeans have left devoid of ideals, who do not have work. Then they turn to drugs and alcohol or enlist in [the Islamic State, or ISIS],” he said, Reuters reports.
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Just one subject was on most people’s lips – the Sanders delegates and how they could be controlled. Many of the people I met were interested in Jeremy Corbyn, who they saw as Britain’s answer to Sanders.
There are many similarities between Corbyn and Sanders. Both, having ploughed their own furrow in progressive politics for over 30 years, have suddenly found themselves at the centre of events. Sanders came within touching distance of getting his party’s nomination and defeating the mighty Clinton machine. Corbyn actually leads his party. But he is embroiled in open warfare with the Westminster elites – political, journalistic and those in the rarefied world of thinktanks.
Both are happy to call themselves socialist. Under New Labour that was the kiss of death for a political career. In the US, it is more dangerous still: in living memory, being accused of being a socialist was enough to get you witch-hunted out of public life.
Both have similar political programmes. Defending or arguing for a health service free at the point of use is vital for both – although Sanders can only dream of a US version of the NHS. Both believe in social justice. They campaign ferociously for the 99% versus the 1%. They battle the power of the big banks and financial institutions. Both believe in a higher minimum wage and investment in infrastructure. Both were early advocates of action on climate change. And it is also worth pointing out that both seem most comfortable when not wearing a tie.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Regardless of the outcome of November’s U.S. elections, what will count most is what happens in the streets. As Frederick Douglass put it plainly a century and a half ago, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”
All the advances of the 20th century (most of which are being steadily eroded in these early years of the 21st century) came about through organized movements, forcing elected officials to react.
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After returning home from the Democratic convention, I was shocked to learn that friends and family who followed the extravaganza had no idea that there were protests on the inside.
How was this possible? I was there. I witnessed the tension. Each day of the convention was marred by protests, with hundreds of Sanders delegates chanting, booing, walking out, and waving signs in defiance of Hillary Clinton’s coronation.
I reviewed the media coverage I missed while I was in the convention bubble.
After “a bruising primary season,” the Clinton and Sanders camps “pulled together and orchestrated a week relatively free of public controversy,” reported the Washington Post.
“It looks like a mess, but the Democratic Party is more unified than it seems,” blared Vox.
“[W]hat had been a raging boil on Monday was by Thursday morning just a simmer,” observed Politico, marveling at the DNC for “creating opportunities to publicly make peace between the party’s rival factions.”
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With less than a month before the Florida congressional primary on August 30, incumbent Debbie Wasserman Schultz is facing a potential Federal Elections Committee (FEC) complaint from progressive challenger and law professor Tim Canova.
Canova alleges that evidence in WikiLeaks’ release of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) show Wasserman Schultz using DNC resources to strategize against his congressional campaign. Wasserman Shultz resigned as party chair last month after the emails showed the DNC favoring Hillary Clinton’s campaign over Bernie Sanders’. The congresswoman now works for Clinton’s campaign.
“It’s very clear that Wasserman Schultz was using the DNC resources to monitor my campaign and to strategize on how to crush the campaign,” Canova said on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily” Monday.
“That’s a violation of federal law,” Canova added. He said he plans to file the FEC complaint soon.
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Outgoing Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s primary challenger is planning to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), alleging that she used DNC resources to target his campaign.
Tim Canova, a law professor, said his campaign’s lawyers have found evidence of this as they sift through the tens of thousands of stolen DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks, which showed top aides undercutting Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign in the Democratic presidential primary.
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The CEO of the Democratic National Committee and two other high-level staffers left the organization on Tuesday in the wake of the committee’s hacked email controversy.
Amy Dacey is the highest-ranking official at the DNC to step aside due to the matter, a senior Democratic official said. The DNC also announced the departure of CFO Brad Marshall and and Communications Director Luis Miranda in a press release Tuesday afternoon.
Dacey is well-respected by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC circle, a source familiar with the resignation said. But the committee is looking to clean house in the wake of leaked emails that appeared to show the committee favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the primary.
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Amy Dacey, the chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee, and two other top officials are leaving their positions, the party announced Tuesday. Their departures follow the uproar over hacked party emails that came to light ahead of last week’s Democratic convention
Luis Miranda, the party’s communications director, and Brad Marshall, chief financial officer, are also exiting the DNC.
The statement announcing the staff changes praises the outgoing aides and makes no mention of the email issue.
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Three top Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials have stepped down in the wake of the email scandal that has already forced the ouster of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda, and chief financial officer (CFO) Brad Marshall all resigned on Tuesday after facing scrutiny for emails that critics say showed favoritism toward Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the presidential primaries. Marshall was particularly criticized for suggesting questioning Sanders’ religion to sow dislike of him among the public.
Interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile apologized on Tuesday for what she called “insensitive and inappropriate emails.”
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With just three months until Election Day and the Democrats’ official party apparatus struggling to right itself from months of dysfunction and the scandal caused by the WikiLeaks email hack, interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile cleaned house Tuesday with the ouster of three top officials.
CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda and chief financial officer Brad Marshall are all leaving the organization, the DNC announced Tuesday afternoon, shortly after staffers were informed of the changes in a meeting. The announcement praised all three outgoing officials, but people familiar say the departures were heavily encouraged.
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On Sunday morning, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd (7/31/16) had on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to discuss his recent leaking of 20,000 emails from within the Democratic National Committee showing an institutional preference in favor of Hillary Clinton. Todd asked Assange a total of eight questions, all of which were about alleged foreign hacking of the DNC, never asking about the substance of the leaks.
Here are the questions in order:
“Are you concerned that if foreign government uses your entity that you have now seen WikiLeaks get weaponized?”
“The easiest way to clear this up, Mr. Assange, would you be able to say categorically that a foreign government did not hand you this material?”
“But it is helpful to know if a foreign government is involved, isn’t that crucial information to civilians?”
“Mr. Assange, you say you can’t go around speculating. Do you not know [if Russia leaked the documents to you]?”
“Let me ask you this. Do you, without revealing your source on this, do you accept information and leaked documents from foreign governments?”
“But isn’t the right of the public to know the motive also, to know the motive of the maker?”
“Does that not trouble you at all, if a foreign government is trying to meddle in the affairs of another foreign government?”
“That doesn’t bother you [foreign governments meddling in US elections]? That is not part of the WikiLeaks credo?”
[...]
Although it was clear Assange wouldn’t answer Todd’s question about WikiLeaks’ source—”We don’t give any material away as to who our sources are,” he repeatedly pointed out—Todd persisted again and again. Which would have been fine if he had followed up with the questions about the DNC leak itself and what other leaks Assange might have in store—but instead it was 100 percent Russia, 100 percent Cold War plot, 100 percent anything other than the substance of the leaks themselves.
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The Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz in fact served as the Hillary Clinton Coronation Organizing Committee, operating, step by step, to ensure that the front-runner would become the party’s nominee.
[...]
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who finally—after months of protests against her due to her (obvious) partiality while she insisted (looking guilty) that she was “neutral”—resigned as DNC chair in the wake of the email scandal, rewarded immediately (as though to deliberately further enrage the Sanderistas) with a post in her campaign, could perhaps now be tasked with building the case that Donald Trump is a Russian agent.
And the content of the emails? The suggestion that Sanders’ lack of religious belief could be used by the DNC to help Hillary? What difference does it make? Isn’t it obvious that the bigger question is Putin, and Russian expansionism, and the need to elect a woman strong enough to risk World War III?
The howls of indignation at Russian hacking of U.S. citizens” communications! Have whistle-blowers not made it known to us that the NSA maintains records on the phone calls and internet activity of virtually everybody, everywhere? That they have capacities unknown to the bad old KGB and Stasi? That they routinely monitor the communications of Angela Merkel, the pope, the UN Secretary General etc. without any sense of shame?
The rational person’s response has to be: What difference does it make who hacked those emails and made them public? What’s true is true. The whole U.S. political process is rigged. We need to grasp that.
The youth who drove the Sanders campaign have every reason to reject the rigged system itself. Millennials were just reaching adulthood when, in 2000, George W. Bush became president with a minority of the popular vote, when the Supreme Court intervened to prevent a vote recount in Florida. The unelected president went on to invade two countries and left office deeply unpopular, exposed as a liar and mass-murderer. Youth helped bring Obama into power as the progressive, peace candidate. But he turned out to be the Drone President, the president who incomprehensibly made the incomparably hawkish Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State.
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On the third night of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to tout his non-partisanship and call for a “sane, competent person” for president. It was a celebration of conservative centrism, and so was the establishment media’s reaction—to a politician who is also one of the nation’s most powerful media moguls.
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When Khizr Khan stood up to speak at the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, his family story was not widely known. Neither he nor his wife was a figure of public prominence, nor had he spoken at any major political events in the past. But, waving a copy of the United States constitution, Khan addressed Trump in evocative terms that resonated across the country, asking the GOP candidate if he had “ever even read the U.S. constitution” and telling Trump that he had “sacrificed nothing, and no one.”
The sacrifice that Khan was referring to was that of his son, Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed while stationed in Iraq in 2004. In the days since the DNC ended, Khan’s speech has dominated public discussion about the election campaign. He has promised to continue speaking out until the Republican Party leadership repudiates Trump for his proposed ban on Muslim immigration to the United States.
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On the campaign trail Donald Trump insulted the family of a dead US soldier and Hillary Clinton repeated claims that were debunked weeks ago by none other than the Director of the FBI.
The events capped off a weekend in an election characterized by sweeping discontent with the nominees of both major parties. Recent polls show growing numbers of Americans considering third party options.
First it was Trump’s turn to horrify the nation, with numerous attacks, in press interviews and tweets, against the parents of Humayan Khan, a US soldier and Muslim who died fighting in Iraq in 2004, and was posthumously decorated for valor.
Khan’s parents Khizr and Ghazala, were featured during last week’s Democratic National Convention. Khizr criticized Trump for not having made any sacrifices to the country, and questioned whether or not the GOP nominee had ever read the Constitution.
Trump responded by insinuating that Ghazala Khan, who stood by her husband as he addressed the convention, was prohibited from speaking.
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WIKILEAKS’ RELEASE of nearly 20,000 e-mails and more than 8,000 attachments from seven officials on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) just before the party’s convention meant a quick end for Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s position as DNC chair, after the e-mails revealed favoritism toward the Clinton campaign and organized hostility to rival Bernie Sanders.
But if the e-mails–and the convention itself–show anything, it’s the undemocratic nature of the whole Democratic Party, and firing one official won’t come close to fixing that.
The e-mails paint a picture of a party infrastructure that was not only rigged for the establishment choice in the presidential nomination race, but that trades lucrative donations for access on a daily basis.
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A report of how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign gave wealthy donors privileged seating and other special access at the Democratic National Convention can’t be dismissed by retorting that men have always done such things, too.
Of course, they have. When President Obama campaigned to become the nation’s first black president in 2008, many of us silently excused his decision to forgo public campaign financing and rely on wealthy donors. After all, white male presidential candidates had always done that, too.
Sure enough, upon being elected, Obama chose financial and economic advisors, such as Laurence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who helped him to rescue the wealthy more than to change the financial and economic system that favors them beyond all reason or justice.
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After spending countless millions fighting to protect unlimited secret money in elections, the Koch political network has adopted a surprising new approach: railing against the corrupting influence of money in politics.
New ads from the Koch-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund attack Democratic U.S. Senate candidates in Nevada and Virginia for allegedly supporting policies that benefited their campaign supporters, even as the Koch network fights to keep campaign spending secret.
“After taking $70,000 from taxi companies, [U.S. Senate candidate] Catherine Cortez Masto drove Uber out of Nevada,” says one ad, which reportedly cost $1.2 million to air. It comes on the heels of another $1.2 million ad buy in the race making similar claims and asserting that Cortez Masto “put campaign donors ahead of Nevadans and protected special interests instead of us.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The founder of a support group for victims of Islamic sexual grooming gangs has been banned from Facebook for 30 days after she posted a video calling out the media for focusing on Islamophobia in the wake of a wave of Islamic terrorist attacks.
Toni Bugle, founder of Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (MARIAS) has spent the last few years supporting the victims of Islamic persecution including gay apostates, women fleeing Islamic marriages, and girls dealing with years of abuse by sexual exploitation gangs.
Many of those she talks to have been turned away by social services and local authorities who don’t want to deal with the fall-out from Islamic persecution.
But after she posted a twenty-minute live video to her personal Facebook page last Wednesday she was banned from Facebook for 30 days, she believes following an accusation of Islamophobia.
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A Houston law firm has decided to make its mark on the world much in the same way a rogue house pet makes its mark on an expensive Oriental rug. The Tuan A. Khuu law firm has decided it has “no choice” but to sue a 20-year-old student suffering from two broken bones in her back following a collision with two vehicles — one of them being the drunk driver who started the chain reaction.
[...]
In addition to the inevitable Streisanding, the Khuu law firm has also jabbed a stick into a hornet’s nest of lawyers with low tolerance for bullying bullshit. So far, the law office’s decision to sue a student for $200,000 has already attracted offers of assistance from Popehat’s Ken White, First Amendment Badass (Texas Div.) Mark W. Bennett, and Scott Greenfield, whose undying curmudgeonliness (and undying AOL email address) are perfectly complemented by the number of fucks he gives about jabbing back at stupid attorneys. If this is just the initial response to the Khuu office legal threats, it’s time to invest heavily in popcorn futures.
The immediate good news is that Lan Cai is now represented, pro bono, by Houston attorney Michael Fleming. Fleming hopes to flip this bogus lawsuit back on the Khuu law firm by using Texas’ anti-SLAPP law — the Texas Citizens Participation Act — and extract $50,000 from the firm for the trouble it’s caused. He also points out that the firm’s reputation was pretty much an open sewage line well before Cai expressed her opinion, so it’s unlikely the office can prove yet another negative review caused any actual damage to the firm itself.
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The University of Houston Student Vice President is facing sanctions over a Facebook post in the immediate aftermath of the Dallas attack that read in part, “all lives matter”. As a result of this “controversy” she was temporarily suspended and must attend cultural sensitivity training. Harvey Silverglate, an expert on free speech issues, joins NightSide to give his take.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Offering a groundbreaking glimpse of the global surveillance industry—the tools it employs, the extent of its reach, and the accountability it largely evades—human rights watchdog organization Privacy International on Tuesday released a searchable database and accompanying report that track Big Brother worldwide.
The initiative “provides much needed information about a secretive industry which has grown to meet government demand for more surveillance power,” said Edin Omanovic, research officer at the U.K.-based Privacy International. “State surveillance is one of the most important and polarizing issues of our time, yet the secrecy around it means it’s a debate lacking reliable facts.”
The Surveillance Industry Index (SII), based on data collected by journalists, activists, and researchers across the world and co-developed with the pro-transparency software group Transparency Toolkit, aims to change that.
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Walls and wire fences are not all that’s being built at Europe’s borders. The European Commission and Security Companies dream of “smart borders”: a multitude of automated and interconnected files and control apparatuses able to follow each individual. The program’s objective? Counter-terrorism and keeping migrants out. But these structures — the effectiveness of which remains to be demonstrated — risk straining public finances, while threatening civil liberties and private life, should some states decide to pass from border control of each person to surveillance of everybody.
With respect to security policy, the least one may say is that the European Union and its member states do not lack for ideas. The European Union’s borders are governed by a plethora of measures and apparatuses with an equal number of obscure acronyms: SIS, the Schengen Information System, assembles data on wanted or disappeared persons; VIS is the information system concerning visa applications; EURODAC is a fingerprint database for the administrative management of asylum applications.
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The data was almost certainly obtained by using usernames and passwords first stolen from gaming website XSplit three years ago to log onto O2 accounts.
When the login details matched, the hackers could access O2 customer data in a process known as “credential stuffing”.
O2 says it has reported the case to police, and is helping the inquiry.
It is highly likely that this technique will have been used to log onto other companies’ accounts too.
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By now, hopefully, you already know about Moxie Marlinspike, the security researcher/encryption guru/creator of the important open source encrypted messaging protocol Signal. However, it’s still worth reading Andy Greenberg’s big profile on Moxie over at Wired (and, no, he still will not reveal his original name or much more about his history). The whole thing is a good read, but there’s one crazy part, where Greenberg asks an FBI official for their thoughts on the guy who is making encryption that he deliberately says he hopes will be used to keep the FBI from spying on certain conversations. The FBI, not surprisingly, is not a fan. But, still, it seems like quite a leap to then make an analogy with the KKK…
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A handful of FOIA documents [PDF] obtained by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) are shedding some new light on the FISA court and its relationship with the FBI. The good news is that the court is not quite the rubber stamp it’s often been portrayed as. Even though a vast majority of requests are improved, there appears to be a significant amount of modification happening behind the scenes.
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Hi, all! After months of work, a new Tor release series is finally stable.
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Ok, this is scary: tor browser on https://browserprint.info/test — “Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 8,440 tested so far. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 13.04 bits of identifying information.”
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A little-known web standard that lets site owners tell how much battery life a mobile device has left has been found to enable tracking online, a year after privacy researchers warned that it had the potential to do just that.
The battery status API was introduced in HTML5, the fifth version of the code used to lay out the majority of the web, and had already shipped in Firefox, Opera and Chrome by August 2015. It allows site owners to see the percentage of battery life left in a device, as well as the time it will take to discharge or the time it will take to charge, if connected to a power source.
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Asked about resistance to whistleblowers, Horowitz said, “A lot of the perception is that you keep your dirty laundry within the organization, which is why being a whistleblower takes courage.”
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Repressive regimes are now routinely acquiring powerful surveillance technology from private firms in democratic nations. In the United States, police bypass the security of private citizens’ cellphones using a handheld device produced more than 5,000 miles away in Israel.
It’s a tangled web—one that few truly have the bandwidth to explore.
That’s why this week, Privacy International (PI), alongside Transparency Toolkit, launched the Surveillance Industry Index (SII), a searchable database containing records on over 520 surveillance companies. Relying on various technical, governmental, and investigative reports, the database reportedly includes “over 600 reported individual exports of specific surveillance technologies.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that while a convenience store clerk was guilty of stealing lottery tickets through the store’s computer system, she did not violate the state’s anti-hacking law while doing so.
In the case, known as State v. Nascimento, Oregon’s highest court ruled late last month that a hacking conviction against the defendant should be overturned, and the court sent the case back down to the lower court for reconsideration. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which appeared on Caryn Nascimento’s behalf during the case as an amicus curae (friend of the court), announced the narrow victory on Tuesday.
According to the Supreme Court’s decision, the case dates back to 2007, when Nascimento began working at Tiger Mart, a small convenience store in Madras, Oregon, about 120 miles southeast of Portland. In late 2008 and early 2009, a company vice president began investigating what appeared to be cash shortages at that store, sometimes about $1,000 per day. After reviewing video recordings that correlated with Nascimento’s work schedule, this executive began to suspect that she was buying lottery tickets but not paying for them.
Eventually, Nascimento was charged not only with aggravated first-degree theft but also of violating the state’s computer crime law, which includes language that “any person who knowingly and without authorization uses, accesses or attempts to access any computer, computer system, computer network, or any computer software, program, documentation or data contained in such computer, computer system or computer network, commits computer crime.”
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An Ofsted inspection judged the unnamed school to be “inadequate” – the lowest rank available – and criticised it for segregating boys and girls.
Referred to as ‘school X’, inspectors from the Government body found the school stocked books containing negative views about women.
A judge revealed the school library had literature which “contained derogatory views about, and incited violence towards, women”.
The education establishment has now taken its battle to the High Court to stop the report being published.
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The abolition of the death penalty has been arguably the most symbolic result of Turkey’s EU accession process. To see it revoked would be a sad, backwards step for Turkey and for the EU.
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In a landmark decision (pdf), the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the state’s death penalty law is unconstitutional.
The majority found that the state’s death penalty violated the Sixth Amendment, as it allowed a judge to override a jury’s recommendation of a life sentence and impose a death sentence instead.
The ruling followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision in January that overturned portions of Florida’s death penalty statute for the same reason. That decision, Hurst v. Florida, found that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.”
In Tuesday’s ruling, Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo E. Strine Jr. wrote: “I am unable to discern in the Sixth Amendment any dividing line between the decision that someone is eligible for death and the decision that he should in fact die.”
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Texas is among five states that approve “actively” pursuing the death penalty for an accomplice who lacked intent to kill; the vast majority require intent as a prerequisite to seeking the death penalty against a party to a crime.
Put simply, Texas’s law is unjust, Been told supporters outside the governor’s mansion, because it “punishes affiliations” and not actions. “How does it get more unfair than that?” he asked the crowd, tearing up as he spoke. “My uncle is a victim of the Texas system. He is sentenced to be executed for a crime he did not — did not — commit.”
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Can you imagine being prosecuted for checking personal email while at work because your employer says you can only use your computer for “company business”? Of course not. Violating a company rule is not—and should not be—a computer crime. Prosecutors have tried to use the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and parallel state criminal laws to target violations of company rules, but courts are increasingly calling foul on the misuse of statutes intended to criminalize computer break-ins.
The Oregon Supreme Court is one of them, saying “no” to prosecutors who tried to hold Caryn Nascimento liable under Oregon’s computer crime law for a violation of her employer’s computer use policy. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case, State v. Nascimento, and the court specifically cited our argument that “the state’s reading of the statute—which arguably criminalizes any computer use in violation of an employer’s personnel or computer use policies—is unworkably broad because it gives private entities the power to decide what conduct in the workplace is criminal and what is not.”
Nascimento worked as a cashier at the deli counter of a convenience store. As part of her job, she was authorized to access a lottery terminal in the store to sell and validate lottery tickets for paying customers. Store policy prohibited employees from purchasing lottery tickets for themselves or validating their own lottery tickets while on duty. A store manager noticed a discrepancy in the receipts from the lottery terminal and discovered that Nascimento had printed lottery tickets for herself without paying for them. She was charged and convicted with not only first-degree theft, but also computer crime on the ground that she accessed the lottery terminal “without authorization.”
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On Monday, hundreds of activists gathered at New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department, the firing of New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and reparations for victims of police brutality. Democracy Now!’s Charina Nadura and Andre Lewis were at the park speaking to protesters.
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While all eyes have been on the Republican and Democratic platforms decided at the national conventions earlier this month, a broad coalition associated with the Black Lives Matter movement has released a platform of its own, demanding reparations and an “end to the wars against Black people.” The list of demands from the Movement for Black Lives platform also includes the abolition of the death penalty, legislation to recognize the impacts of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and employment programs. The publication comes just a week before the second anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked months of protests and catalyzed a national conversation about police killings of unarmed African-American men. For more, we speak with Ash-Lee Henderson, regional organizer for Project South and a member of the policy table leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives.
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Rama said she learned from the other women at the shelter that that was how many of them were brought to the house, some living there for four years. Their torture often consisted of being tied to a table that was set up like a crucifix, and beaten with a cable. If they fainted, they were shocked into consciousness with an electric prod.
The women, 29 of whom lived in Chez Maurice with the others in a nearby house, were forced to have sex as many as 10 times a day on weekdays. Rama said the number of customers often doubled on weekends.
She said women who had not yet lost their virginity when they arrived at the shelter had their hymens broken with a bottle.
Those who said no to customer requests, including for unprotected sex, had marks registered under their names by the female guards in the house, and would be punished with beatings. They had to collect at least $50 in tips from customers a day, and that money – as well as the hourly rate the brothel charged—was all confiscated from the women.
Rama said the women told each other in hushed tones the story of two other women who died in the house, and were buried in unmarked graves before she arrived. When [Imad al-] Rihawi, the network’s alleged enforcer [and a former interrogator in Syria’s feared air force intelligence service], heard them discussing the tale, he beat one of the women 95 times on her legs with a cable, she said.
She said the women who got pregnant after having unprotected sex with customers were taken to have abortions, which are illegal in Lebanon, often months into the actual pregnancy. Police officials have arrested the doctor responsible, who operated a clinic in the northern Beirut suburb of Dekwaneh, where investigators say he performed as many as 200 abortions on women enslaved in the network.
The women worked in two shifts between 9am and 6am the following day. Many had lost family members in war, or otherwise had nobody to look after them, Rama said. Some of the girls were as young as 18 and the oldest were in their mid-30s.
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Although this move might be seen as the Chinese authorities giving new powers to the people against the police, it’s probably better thought of as using the people to root out the bad apples of the kind mentioned in the SCMP piece. As such it’s of a piece with President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corrupt officials who abuse their power, seen most recently in the sentence of the top Chinese general Guo Boxiong, who was jailed for life for taking bribes.
In other words, while citizens use this new permission to aid Xi in his purge of unwanted elements in the system, they will be welcome to record the police as much as they like. However, if they start making life awkward for the authorities by passing around the “wrong” kind of recordings, we can probably expect this newfound power to be rescinded quite quickly.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Washington State has sued Comcast for, well, being Comcast. A new lawsuit filed by the state this week (pdf) accuses the cable giant of 1.8 million violations of Washington state’s Consumer Protection Act (CPA), including misrepresenting the scope of the company’s “Service Protection Plan,” charging customers improper service call fees and improper credit screening practices. More specifically, the lawsuit states that Comcast misled more than 500,000 Washington State customers by charging them $5 per month for this protection plan, then intentionally hitting them with fees for services the monthly fee should have covered.
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DRM
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Last weekend EFF took part in the Eleventh Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City and got to meet so many of our wonderful supporters. We’ve collected the HOPE talks given by EFF staff below, with the official program abstract, video, and where applicable, the original slides. Once you’re done watching those, you can also try your hand at our Capture The Flag competition—the challenges are still up at https://eff-ctf.org, even though the contest is over.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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We’ve talked surprisingly little about Whole Foods here at Techdirt. I suppose that the hipster’s grocery paradise has somehow evaded most of the trappings of intellectual property concerns. Good on them for that. Less good is the company’s recent simultaneous attempts to expand internationally while also applying for a trademark with the USPTO for “World’s Healthiest Grocery Store.” Neither are going very well, it seems, and it turns out they’re interrelated.
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Copyrights
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Forcing ISPs to block entire websites to tackle Internet piracy is justifiable, a court in India has ruled. The decision by the Delhi High Court means that copyright holders will not have to target specific URLs when attempting to stop infringement on sites that are involved in widespread piracy.
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Copyright and privacy cannot coexist. Society is at a crossroads where only one of these will exist in the future, and the copyright industry has been working hard to erode privacy to protect its obsolete business. It’s time to acknowledge the conflict and accept that copyright enforcement need to be actively prevented in order to safeguard fundamental rights.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Like the classic…
Summary: Despite her dubious public appearances with Benoît Battistelli, Lucy Neville-Rolfe is still unable to just simply ignore Brexit and rush the UPC through
THE UPC (Unitary Patent) has a lot to do with the unprecedented chaos at the EPO (see background to this), by the EPO’s very own admission. The UPC, created and pushed by Team UPC (not representatives of public interests at all, just a group of circling vultures), is just about as bad as those notorious ‘free’ ‘trade’ ‘deals’ (none of those things), such as TPP and TTIP. Secrecy was all along needed in order to keep everyone but the self-serving conspiracy in the dark, unable to weigh in, antagonise, and report wrongdoing.
Lucy Neville-Rolfe is being approached by Team UPC and organisations (or lobbies) whose memberships intersect/overlap Team UPC. UK IPO has just published a public statement (Tuesday) and MIP has a new article about it. “It remains unknown if the UK will ratify the UPC Agreement,” says the summary and here is the relevant part from the article’s body: “It seems we will have to wait until next year to know the UK government’s decision on UPC Agreement ratification. The IPO did not say anything on this, but it noted: “The UK remains a Contracting Member State of the Unified Patent Court at present. We will continue to attend and participate in UPC meetings in that capacity. There will be no immediate changes.””
The UPC boosters from Bristows (part of Team UPC) pretend that it’s business as usual after Brexit, but it’s not. To quote this new blog post:
Unlike many of the UK law firms [like Bristows] who quickly climbed on board the Brexit bandwagon, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office has been understandably and notably silent. For the past several weeks they have been in listening mode as they hear from stakeholders about their post-referendum concerns. Today, they have published a short guide called “IP and Brexit: The Facts” to dispel the speculation on the future of IP law following the referendum result. The main message is “The UK is still part of the EU so your EU-derived protections continue and we are considering various post-Brexit options”. Unsurprisingly, the brief is short given that the fate of EU-made rights will be determined by the ultimate relationship between the UK and EU.
On patents, the UK IPO confirmed that it was business as usual for UK businesses applying for patents at the EPO and that the referendum result will not impact the European Patent Convention (EPC).
Here is the direct statement from UK IPO: “The UK remains a Contracting Member State of the Unified Patent Court at present. We will continue to attend and participate in UPC meetings in that capacity. There will be no immediate changes.”
Well, UK IPO is sort of contradicting itself on UPC as noted in this comment which says:
One comment in IPO’s post Brexit communication says “The UK remains a Contracting Member State of the Unified Patent Court at present”.
According to the same statement: “There will be no immediate changes” does not give the impression that a quick ratification is on the tablets, as this would be an immediate change.
When considering the overall tone of the the statement, IPO’s first preoccupation seems to lie more in seeing how to leave the existing system of EU laws and regulations on IP matters so that the rights of UK IP owners are protected, rather than trying to add a further problem, UPC, on all the issues which will have to be settled. As far as patents are concerned, the way to the EPO is not changed by the Brexit. A strong enthusiasm for the UPC sounds differently.
When looking at the long list of duties of Baroness Neville-Rolfe, IP does not look as it will be at the top of her priorities.
May be something to reflect upon?
Someone is poking fun at Battistelli with an ode that spells out “BREXIT”. Surely they know that nothing would displease Battistelli more than the demise and possibly death of the UPC — a project he spent over half a decade promoting. Here is the ode/poem:
B eing as UPC stands for UP the creek without a Canoe
R eally not much else we can do
E PO Sun King and Grand Master
X claims it is an almighty disaster
I t is the one good thing to come out of the vote
T hat Batters now has a huge hole in his boat
As another person notes, echoing what we said several times last month, UPC is very low down in the list of British priorities right now:
I agree that the fact that the Baroness has been assigned more responsibilities does not suggest that a great deal of time and effort will be expended by the government upon IP issues (be they Brexit-related or otherwise).
This perhaps indicates that we can expect some delays in decision-making, including on the UPC. This may be compounded by the fact that there will be more pressing matters for the UK to resolve in connection with trade marks, designs and copyright.
These issues aside, I doubt that the IPO’s statement could be said to provide any hints one way or the other with regard to the UPC, which is likely to remain somewhat of a “complicated” issue in the coming months. So I guess that we will all just have to wait and see.
The following comment goes along the same lines:
I think some of these people need to remember that ministers have tended not to stay with IP for any period of time. The Baroness keeping the IP mandate is to be welcomed, even if she has further responsibilities. She knows the stakeholders and the issues, and can be a good ear even if she leaves some aspects to others.
Of course, the shape of the outcome is not really dependent upon IP – it will be shaped by other concerns, and IP will find a way. I guess if you are looking at unusual infringements of trade marks, start the action now whilst judges have to apply EU principles!
Well, as noted by the Bristows Kat: “In the meantime, Baroness Neville-Rolfe will continue as the minister for IP, but her full title is now Minister of State for Energy and Intellectual Property.”
It means more responsibilities. Well, Lucy is being asked to leap/jump through hoops after sucking up to the thug, Battistelli (more than once in recent months), but there would be a huge backlash if she attempted to do so.
This Kat’s colleague wrote: “Forget Brexit and Article 50, forget the Chilcot enquiry, forget whatever sports competition is concerning you at the moment, worry not about the UPC.”
Well, forgetting that isn’t an option, as the conspiracy of patent lawyers actively works behind the scenes lobbying Lucy to sneak the Trojan horse through the back door. We wrote about this before and presented evidence.
Another colleague, Merpel, is quoted in relation to the news about Lucy. Can Lucy be trusted? We doubt it, but she hasn’t much capacity right now to arrogantly ignore Brexit and do the unthinkable. It would be political suicide for her. As a comment put it this morning: “Has she [Lucy] actually stated, in the past, a long-term IP strategy beyond ‘we’re going to join the EU patent system’? That’s a measure rather than a policy so can be dropped as if it didn’t matter. By this I mean, does there exist an imperative to somehow achieve EU patent membership despite all other factors such as preparing for Brexit? If not, then surely this gets referred to the new Minister for Brexit? Alternatively, which vested interest can get to her first/more effectively??”
The Minister for Brexit is David Davis, who is a reasonably OK politician, based on his policies and stances in the areas of technology. He does listen to technology activists and sometimes sides with them, based on his long track record (covered here in passing). He ought to be wise enough to know that the UPC would be a disaster for technology companies in the UK, unlike perhaps patent lawyers from London. █
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08.02.16
Posted in News Roundup at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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But Windows dips below 50 per cent of all web traffic according to US gov data
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Academies
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Today, Linux Academy announces its new education membership pricing packages for current university-level students and professors to supplement classroom learning with hands-on training.
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Upskill U, a free online forum that focuses on delivering must-have education on the overall business transformation occurring in the telecommunications industry, is focusing its next round of lectures on the role of open source in communications network transformation. During these courses, lecturers from LinkedIn, OpenDaylight, Telstra and Heavy Reading will examine how telecom is addressing the challenges and opportunities service providers face as they seek to successfully implement open source software as the network moves more toward virtualization.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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There’s golden register setting updates available for newer GCN hardware on the AMDGPU kernel driver, but it’s not immediately clear if these changes will mean any performance or stability improvements for owners of Tonga, Iceland, Polaris, Carrizo, and Stoney hardware…
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Applications
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A first update for the recent RcppGetconf package for reading system configuration — not unlike getconf from the libc library — is now out. Almost immediately after I tweeted / blogged asking for help with OS X builds, fellow Rcpp hacker Qiang Kou created a clever pull request allowing for exactly that. So now we cover two POSIX systems that matter most these days — Linux and OS X — but as there are more out there, please do try, test and send those pull requests.
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In this article, we’ll take a look at some convenience add-ons to help you integrate Git comfortably into your everyday workflow.
I learned Git before many of these fancy interfaces existed, and my workflow is frequently text-based anyway, so most of the inbuilt conveniences of Git suit me pretty well. It is always best, in my opinion, to understand how Git works natively. However, it is always nice to have options, so these are some of the ways you can start using Git outside of the terminal.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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SteamOS and Steam Big Picture are still not included in the survey and it’s a manual survey, so you’re not included in it unless you get the pop-up asking you to submit your details.
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Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code.
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For those of you using the RadeonSI driver for AMD graphics cards, you may be interested to know that a developer named Marek has sent in patches to significantly improve performance for Bioshock Infinite.
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Faeria is the extremely cool card-based strategy game where you build the board to battle on as you go. The developers have stated the free to play launch will happen in September.
You can currently buy in for £5.99 or £17.99 (to get extra cards, avatars and so on).
I love the game, I think it’s a rather unique card-based strategy game and I am surprised more people aren’t playing it. I think it’s going to be a massive hit when they go free to play (which was always planned).
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Oolite 1.84 has recently been released and brings with it a new camera mode which will help make some awesome screenshots and other stuff too.
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Yes! You read right. As Linux is known for performance, stability and security but now it is also known for gaming. There are hundreds of games for Linux and so many Windows games have been ported for Linux. But we have so many Linux distros, specially developed for gaming. In this article, I’m going to list out 6 Best Linux for gaming. Hope you enjoy it!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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This week, I worked on the gnome client. I wanted to link my right click menu with the call view. That’s was difficult because the right click menu is called by a signal. So, I didn’t have access to the instance of the menu to send my own signal. I tried a lot of things to implement my signal, but it’s just impossible. Then I discovered the GAction. With this technique, I just needed to change the state of my action and connect it with my method in my view and it’s done!
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Red Hat Family
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Jeffrey Clarke notified co he has decided not to stand for re-election, informed co of his resignation from company’s board
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Jankowski joins IOMAXIS with more than 25 years of experience in the areas of military, federal and intelligence communities.
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Finance
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Fedora
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Flock is a Fedora-defining event of the year. In the lines below, a few speakers share what the conference means for them and what they’re looking forward to the most.
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So this is my first Fedora Project Flock conference. I arrived in Krakow yesterday from Austin Texas. The folks who put Flock together did a great job with this event. I have never been to Krakow before, and they clearly communicated how you get around, which buses / trains to take, how to buy tickets, everything. Kudos to that team. I had a few reasons to come to Flock, I wanted to put some faces to names that I have been working with over the years. I wanted to meet with the members of the Fedora Cloud group that I have been participating in, and I wanted to attend technical sessions and see what’s coming up in the distro.
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I’m unable to attend this Flock, but at some point I would like to watch all the sessions online, but this is only possible with the army of volunteers that are currently at the event. If you’re wanting to participate as a volunteer and either record or transcribe one of the sessions, then please visit this page
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A test case is a set of scenarios related to common software combinations or situations. The cases have steps to follow and replicate to see if you have issues or errors. Once you complete a test case, you can give a +1 or -1 karma to the test case in Bodhi. Test cases are important steps in the quality assurance process and help cover important use cases of the operating system.
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These days life doesn’t leave me time for much outside of work and family. It is funny how one’s priorities can shift so suddenly and drastically, all within the blink of an eye. But, hey, that’s life.
An interesting thing happened, though. In my almost-hiatus from FOSS and Fedora, the upstream for one of the packages I maintain … disappeared. I don’t mean became abandoned or unresponsive. I mean actually and completely disappeared.
See, this project was hosted on GitHub as a personal project and the original developer was the sole maintainer of this project. Which was fine, particularly since this individual was more responsive than even some large projects with a headcount that rivals most mid-sized companies.
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Debian Family
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After finally being able to fix Debian bug #794266 I want to thank those who made this possible:
Some time ago my colleague Bjørn offered an Arietta G25 to me. After Jochen, another colleague, helped me to solder pin headers on it, this machine served as host computer for my tests.
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For a few years I did not attempt any serious task on the Amazon cloud. It took me a bit of time to get back my automatisms and adapt myself to the changes. In particular, the cheapest instances, t2.nano, are only accessible via virtual private clouds (VPC), and it was a bit difficult for me to find how to create a simple one. Perhaps this is because all AWS accounts created after March 18, 2013, automatically have a default VPC, and everybody else who needed their own simple VPC have created it a long time ago already. In the end, this was not complicated at all. This is probably why I could not find a tutorial.
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The Tor project and the Debian project have teamed to provide Debian services and repositories over the Tor network. Debian has announced the existence of few such services in a blog post.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Hedera is a new Linux icon pack inspired by the past. Specifically, the Tango project.
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Nautilus 3.20, and a host of GNOME 3.20 apps, will ship by default in Ubuntu 16.10 ‘Yakkety Yak’, with new versions already available for testing.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 18 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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Phones
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Android
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James Ramey the president of CodeWeavers posted on his personal Facebook account earlier that a beta version of CrossOver Android could be released as soon as Monday August 1st 2016. CodeWeavers has been working on their Android and now Chromebook version of CrossOver for over a year now. The long wait is about over folks, if you ever dreamed of running Microsoft Windows Games or productivity application on your Android device it will soon be possible.
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IT’S AN EXCITING DAY for a very small number of people. After months of a not very reliable test environment in the dev channel for a few selected Chromebooks, Android apps are being made available from today for a few selected Chromebooks.
It’s still in developer preview, so expect a whole crock of bugs, but a beta release of Chrome OS (Chrome OS beta 53.0.2785.36 since you ask) is usually made stable the following month, so this should go to the masses soon.
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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Gionee has released a device with a dedicated encryption chip it calls “equivalent to a black box” that offers the “most advanced” mobile data protection to date.
Experts we asked were sceptical about the claims, which at minimum show that improved security is becoming a differentiator in the increasingly competitive higher-end Android smartphone marketplace.
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Remember when Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said that future Nexus devices would have a more prominent personality when it comes to software features, hinting they might not run vanilla Android like their predecessors? A new series of leaks indicates that Google is indeed working on a bunch of brand new features for the 2016 Nexus devices, including new Google apps and launcher experiences, as well as a new set of wallpapers.
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When IBM got involved with the Linux open source project in 1998, they were betting that giving their code and time to the community would be a worthwhile investment. Now, 18 years later, IBM is more involved than ever, with more than 62,000 employees trained and expected to contribute to open source projects, according to Todd Moore, Vice President of Open Technology at IBM, speaking at ApacheCon in May.
“It became apparent that open source could be the de facto standards we needed to be the engine to go out and drive things,” Moore said in his keynote at ApacheCon. “[The contributions] were bets; we didn’t know how this was going to come out, and we didn’t know if open source would grow, we knew there would be roadblocks and things we’d have to overcome along the way, but it had promise. We thought this would be the way of the future.”
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Is the closed-source system on its last legs? Maybe not just yet, but we’re pretty close to it. Consider the phenomenal growth in the last five years of new open source technologies and processes, such as containers, Hadoop and databases like MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Redis. An entirely new set of architectures, most of them open source, have sprung up, spawning fresh business models and robust ecosystems.
The open source stack and all that it engenders is driving the closed source, proprietary stack toward irrelevance and economic infeasibility. Take, for example, the great success of Docker with containers and its resulting ecosystem. Its popularity is largely a result of its open source model that reflects the ascendance of software engineers in the creation and deployment of software. And Docker is giving closed source VMware a headache as a result.
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That’s because one of the major attractions of open source software is that you’re not stuck with the features it comes with. Instead of paying a corporation a license fee for the product it chooses to offer you, you can pay a developer to take the open source code and add exactly the features you need so the result meets your requirements exactly.
That’s the theory anyway, but it’s important to remember that software choice is not always about features and there are certain applications for which open source software may be the wrong choice.
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Events
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It might well be that wireless networking recently made the transition from an ubiquitous networking technology to the dominant networking technology, at least from the viewpoint of end-user devices. Part of this trend is the use of wireless in automobiles, and this workshop will look at Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE), also know as IEEE 802.11p. In addition, the bufferbloat problem is starting to focus on the more difficult wireless environment, and to that end, this workshop will discuss FQ/Codel integration, testing, and development. As usual, the workshop will encompass the full 802.11 stack, not just the kernel portions, and therefore wpa_supplicant will also be on the agenda.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Following the release of Chrome 52 for desktop two weeks ago, Google last week also launched Chrome 52 for Android. For whatever reason, the company didn’t share what’s new until today. You can download the new version from Google Play.
Chrome 52 for Android makes video playback feel smoother, load faster, and consume less battery. More specifically, video playback has been improved for speed and power efficiency, meaning you should expect smoother playback and faster load times (so videos will start playing sooner, instead of pausing briefly before starting). Your Android device’s battery should also last longer if you consume a lot of video online.
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Mozilla
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Today we’re proud to announce the initial rollout of multi-process Firefox for Desktop to our general audience. With this, we’re taking a major step forward in improving Firefox for Desktop. Users should experience a Firefox that is less susceptible to freezing and is generally more responsive to input, while retaining the experience and features that users love.
In Firefox 48, we aim to slowly enable multi-process Firefox (also known as Electrolysis or e10s) for release users, starting with one percent and ramping up to nearly half the Firefox Release if things go as expected. e10s promises to offer a major improvement to your browsing experience by separating Web content and Firefox UI processes. This means when a web page is consuming a large part of your computer’s processing power, your tabs, buttons and menus won’t lock up. Wondering if your Firefox instance has enabled e10s? Type “about:support” into the URL bar. If e10s is active, you’ll see “1/1 (Enabled by default)” under the Multiprocess Windows line item.
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That’s why Ford Foundation and Mozilla launched the Open Web Fellows program two years ago: To empower a network of leaders capable of defending the open web. The Open Web Fellows program places bright technologists and activists on the front lines of the open internet movement. Last year, Ford and Mozilla placed six fellows at leading NGOs like Amnesty International and the ACLU, where they used their tech savvy to fight for issues like freedom of expression and gender equality online.
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Mozilla Firefox 48 features new security settings, improves WebRTC, and makes it easier to find bookmarked content from the Awesome bar.
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Firefox 48 takes the first Rust code into production within this web browser, Electrolysis is beginning to be turned on by default, a variety of WebRTC improvements, improved Linux Canvas support, various security improvements, enforcing that add-ons be signed/verified through Mozilla, and more.
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SaaS/Back End
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For as long as anyone in the networking world can remember, management of local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) has been distinctly different. LANs were primarily the responsibility of local IT departments, while WANs have been made up of MPLS and Internet connections controlled by carriers. Network virtualization (NV) is starting to blur the lines between the LAN and the WAN.
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Although many people have experience with the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence through applications in their pockets, such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, the scope of this technology extends well beyond the smartphone. H2O.ai, formerly known as Oxdata, has carved out a unique niche in the machine learning and artificial intelligence arena because its primary tools are free and open source, and because it is connecting its tools to other widely used data analytics tools. As a case in point, H2O.ai has now announced the availability of version 2.0 of its open Sparkling Water tool. Sparkling Water, H2O.ai’s API for Apache Spark, allows users of Spark to leverage very powerful machine learning intelligence.
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Convox might sound like a great name for an industrial toilet cleaner, except it isn’t. The name actually belongs to a piece of software (yes, it’s makers would like us to say ‘platform, but please don’t write in) designed to help with deploying, managing and monitoring applications in cloud infrastructures. But there are plenty of tools in that space — so, so what?
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Should the Docker container image format be completely standardized? Or should Docker not be held back from evolving the format ahead of the open specification? This was the topic of a heated Twitter tussle last week between Google evangelist Kelsey Hightower and the creator of the Docker itself, Solomon Hykes.
Hightower wants to see the Docker format image be completely standardized, so companies, including Docker, can build additional functionality atop of the specification. Hykes, however, balked at full standardization, asserting that the format is still too new and evolving too quickly.
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Databases
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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A Rs 38 crore mandate awarded by the Union HRD Ministry in June to an affiliate of Redmond-based Microsoft Corp for developing a flagship web-based education platform is coming under increasing fire in the academic circles — both for the manner in which the contract was handed out and on the choice of proprietary software over free open source options already being deployed by premier educational institutions in the country.
Microsoft was selected as the technical partner for the HRD ministry’s SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) platform based on the recommendations of a “technical committee”, presumably after the tendering process for selecting a system integrator for SWAYAM —a MOOC or massive open online courses platform — floated thrice through the e-procurement platform since November last year failed to elicit any response. While the Ministry of Human Resource Development has cited the decision of a “technical committee” behind its choice of proprietary software over open source software and that selecting Microsoft does not run foul of the rulebook, the deal has raised eyebrows over the lack of objective criterion on how the decisions were taken in the first place.
The choice of proprietary software, entailing costs of Rs 38 crore and more for tools such as SQL (structured query language), is being questioned on the grounds that the selection of proprietary software on payment basis was done despite a clear option of going in for open source platforms such as Open EdX. For instance, Open edX — an open-source, not-for profit platform floated by MIT and Harvard University that was released as open source in March 2013 to act as the WordPress for MOOC platforms — is used across at least 126 universities and organisations globally. Even more intriguing is the fact that an MoU is already in place between IIT Bombay and edX, under which edX released complete platform code in open source. The signing of the MoU in June 2013 was actually facilitated by the Ministry of HRD. Open source platforms such as Open edX allow users to use plug-ins to expand the core functionality, thereby imparting tremendous flexibility when it comes to scaling up the platform or modify it to suit the specific requirements of a particular college or university. Since January last year, IIT Bombay decided to opt for Open edX and launch a customised version called IITBX as an extended online educational services for the benefit of Indian learners and training workshops for teachers, wherein the premier engineering institute has added significant functionality to the Open edX platform to create and offer MOOCs. Similarly, IIT Madras had a Google-based Course Builder platform ported in their own computer infrastructure while IIT Kanpur had a homegrown platform called MOOKIT, based again on open source software.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Collaboration can seem intimidating at first. I get it. Thinking about having to collaborate with others on a project used to give me that same sinking feeling I got every time a teacher announced a group project. When not everyone is invested, the passionate people—the ones who understand the importance of the mission and are willing to give their time and effort—end up doing twice the amount of work as they carry everyone else along (and I always wanted good grades, so I did a lot of carrying).
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Disruption is a basic tenet of the Open Hardware movement. How can my innovative use of technology disrupt your dinosaur of an establishment to make something better? Whether it’s an open-source project chipping away at a monopoly or a commercial start-up upsetting an industry with a precarious business model based on past realities, we’ve become used to upstarts taking the limelight.
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Science
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Billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel said that he believes transfusions of blood from young people can reverse his aging process and allow him to live a vastly extended lifespan.
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Health/Nutrition
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Health officials in northern Mexico have refused to authorize an abortion for a 13-year-old girl who was raped by a family acquaintance after a judge downgraded the crime to a charge of sexual coercion.
Abortion is banned in Sonora, apart from in cases of rape. But human rights advocates say the decision violates federal health regulations introduced earlier this year which guarantee rape victims unrestricted access to safe abortion services – regardless of where they live and whether the crime was reported or not.
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For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a travel warning for a continental U.S. city, as Miami grapples with a burgeoning Zika outbreak.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced this week that an additional 10 people in the state have been diagnosed with the mosquito-borne virus, bringing the total to 14.
CDC Director Tom Frieden warned pregnant women against traveling to the “transmission area” and advised people already in the area to take extra precautions against mosquito bites.
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Federal health officials on Monday advised pregnant women to avoid a Miami neighborhood — marking the first time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned against travel to any area within the continental United States — as a Zika outbreak in South Florida has led to 10 more local cases spread by mosquitoes.
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Security
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Here’s How Linux Botnet is Crippling the Internet [Ed: Based on what Kaspersky is saying, this is just marketing (him trying to sell his snake oil 'antivirus'); Microsoft Windows botnets are at HUNDREDS of MILLIONS, but he conveniently ignores those to tap a growing niche]
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10 members of China’s largest hacking group WooYun, including its founder Fang Xiaodun, were arrested last week by Chinese authorities. As this white hat group reported the security flaws in companies for free, the reasons behind the arrest are yet to be disclosed. Interestingly, the arrest was preceded by the demise of the WooYun website.
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Defence/Aggression
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Bottom Line Up Front:
• On August 1, the U.S. conducted airstrikes against Islamic State targets in the Libyan city of Sirte.
• The airstrikes, requested by the Libyan Government of National Accord, appear to be the beginning of a sustained military campaign.
• The U.S. has long planned to increase direct military action in Libya to prevent the Islamic State from further entrenching itself along the coast.
• Libya does not present the same growth potential for the Islamic State as Iraq and Syria, though systemic extremism and lawlessness ensure the group will linger in Libya for years.
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The ad pierces your consciousness and catches you by surprise. Plastered on the side of King County Metro buses, it hurls you momentarily back in time, to a time when nuclear weapons were an imminent threat to our survival. Or did the era never end?
The ad — sponsored by activists from the Poulsbo-based Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action — reads: “20 miles west of Seattle is the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S.”
Behind this text is a map, depicting the proximity of Seattle to Naval Base Kitsap, located on the eastern shore of Hood Canal. An estimated 1,344 nuclear warheads are contained in this complex, according to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
This is arguably the biggest single concentration of nuclear warheads not only in the U.S., but in the world.
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The leftist Beirut newspaper al-Safir comments scathingly on the name-change of the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front led by Abu Muhammad al-Julani, to the Syria Conquest Front.
Here are some reasons that the name change isn’t going to work:
1. Al-Julani got permission from 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of old al-Qaeda, to sever public ties with him because, you know, being in a command line to al-Qaeda was a PR problem for the Syrian guerrilla opposition to the Syrian regime. But if you have to get permission from al-Qaeda to change your name, then guess what? You’re still al-Qaeda.
2. In the announcement of the name change, as al-Safir points out, there was no explicit renunciation of the ties between al-Julani and al-Qaeda or of the pledge of fealty al-Julani gave al-Zawahiri. (Or I might add, any apology for having hooked up with al-Qaeda, ). He just said that a new organization has been formed that has no relations with any foreign quarter.
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47 people were shot in Chicago last weekend without generating headlines elsewhere in the country.
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Just five years after bombing Libya to dispose of Muammar Gaddafi, the US is now officially bombing the country again, this time against alleged Isis terrorist strongholds that cropped up in the power vacuum created by the last bombing.
It’s yet another episode of the War on Terror Circle of Life, where the US bombs a country and then funnels weapons into the region, which leads to chaos and the opportunity for terrorist organizations, which then leads more US bombing.
Like usual in the Obama administration’s wars, there was no congressional vote on the latest airstrikes in Libya and no declaration of war, as required by the constitution. The administration is pinning the legal authority for this military incursion on the 2001 Authorization for Military Force that was meant for Afghanistan and the perpetrators of 9/11, al-Qaida. Isis, of course, didn’t exist until years later, and the two groups are now enemies, but those technicalities don’t seem to bother the Obama administration, which is continuing to expand US military presence abroad with little to no public input.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Federal officials are launching a criminal investigation into the 2015 Gold King Mine spill that sent millions of gallons of toxic waste into a Colorado waterway and memorably turned portions of the state’s 126-mile Animas River orange.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which caused the spill, made the announcement Monday as it sent letters to members of U.S. Congress to update them about the agency’s own analysis of the spill, according to the Denver Post.
EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said the probe, launched by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, part of the Department of Justice, was “based on requests from several members of the House and Senate.”
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Two of Colorado’s leading critics of natural gas drilling say they didn’t know much about fracking until it arrived in their towns.
“If you had asked me about community rights or fracking, you would have drawn a blank stare,” said Clifford Willmeng, board member of the Colorado Community Rights Network and a resident of Lafayette, a town just outside of Boulder.
Tricia Olson agrees. Founder and executive director of the grassroots group Coloradans Resisting Extreme Energy Development, Olson began looking into fracking when she learned that it was coming to her neighborhood. She didn’t like what she found.
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Finance
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Public service broadcasters are implicated in legitimising neoliberal policies in response to political and economic crisis. The coverage of RTÉ, for example, invited Irish viewers to cheer on the forces of technocratic fiscal responsibility.
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A Dublin court has sent three former senior banking executives to jail for committing “sham transactions” in an effort to deceive customers and shareholders during the 2008 financial crisis.
“The trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis,” as Reuters reports.
Former Anglo Irish Bank executive John Bowe got a two-year sentence, former Irish Life and Permanent chief executive Denis Casey was given a sentence of two years and nine months, and Bowe’s colleague and former Anglo executive Willie McAteer got three and a half years.
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Three former bankers were in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin last night after receiving jail sentences for their roles in a €7 billion fraud committed at the height of the banking crisis in 2008.
Judge Martin Nolan said the senior executives had taken part in a “dishonest, deceitful and corrupt” scheme to make Anglo Irish Bank’s finances look stronger than they were.
Former Anglo executive Willie McAteer (65) was sentenced to 3½ years while his ex-colleague John Bowe (52) received a two-year term. Denis Casey (56), the former group chief executive of Irish Life and Permanent, was jailed for two years and nine months.
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The long-abused cafeteria workers of the U.S. Senate, who risked their jobs to fight to earn a living wage only to have the private contractor that runs the cafeteria renege on an order to increase their pay, won a key victory this week.
The Labor Department declared that the contractor had engaged in wage theft from 674 of its workers, deliberately misclassifying them so that they would earn less than their actual work entitled them to earn. The contractor also forced employees to do unpaid work “off the clock.” As a result, the multinational conglomerate Restaurant Associates and a subsidiary will have to give the workers back pay totaling $1,008,302.
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At the Democratic convention we got some insights into the Clinton campaign’s line of attack on Donald Trump. While they rightfully intend to confront his racism, sexism and xenophobia, the Clinton campaign also seems prepared to attack Trump’s “budget-busting” tax cuts. This is an area where caution would be advised.
The basic story is that, in the usual Republican tradition, Trump wants to give huge tax cuts targeted primarily to the wealthy. According to calculations from the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, these tax cuts will cost $9.5 trillion in lost revenue over the next decade before accounting for interest.
Of course $9.5 trillion is a REALLY BIG NUMBER, and you can often scare people with really big numbers. But if we want to be serious about matters, we need to put this number in some context. The Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next decade, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be roughly $240 trillion. That means that the amount of revenue lost due to Donald Trump’s tax cuts plan will be just under 4 percent of GDP. Given that we now spend 3.5 percent of GDP on the military, this is real money.
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This essay documents Hillary Clinton’s history and record as an agent of Wall Street, war, racial violence and inequity, economic inequality and conservative ideology. While Clinton’s early Republican Party history is well documented, it is unfair to judge her (or anyone) based on the political views of her youth. Like Clinton, all people are heavily influenced by the beliefs and values of their parents, local communities, religion, cultural and social identities as well as U.S. dominant culture. Based on various factors, many people with conservative backgrounds are able to develop progressive and humanistic world views over time based on personal struggle, a capacity for empathy, and an expanded sense of consciousness through education and life experience. None of this appears to have happened for Hillary Clinton. Instead, she stayed the course as she and her husband pioneered the “New Democrat” (Centrist Democrats) movement and steered the party toward a neoliberal “Third Way” (dogmatic free-market and moderately liberal social policies). Yet, when it comes to the Clintons, many of their social policy positions are also distinctly conservative.
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The decline of independent nighttime venues in London threatens to render this £17 million project useless.
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Eight years after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the economy is doing much better in many important ways. We have now seen almost 80 straight months of job growth, unemployment is down below 5 percent and some numbers suggest that wages are ticking upwards, however slowly. But make no mistake: The next crash is coming. It’s not a question of “if.” It’s a question of “when.”
And that’s because the underlying cause of the 2008 crisis is still with us today — the economy is too financialized.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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They want to return to business as usual because many of them make their bread on that business – working for big corporations, Wall Street, or wealthy individuals as political consultants, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, government-relations specialists, public-relations specialists, trade association staff, and paid experts.
[...]
In a Gallup poll taken in mid-July, before the conventions, 82 percent said America was on the wrong track.
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Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate running for President against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, announced Monday that she has selected Ajamu Baraka, a human-rights activist and intellectual, as her prospective Vice President.
Stein, a doctor turned politician who also ran for the country’s highest office in 2012, described Baraka as an “activist, writer, intellectual and organizer with a powerful voice, vision, and lifelong commitment to building true political revolution” in a statement.
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Bernie Sanders may have endorsed Hillary Clinton, praised Hillary Clinton, and urged his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton, but it seems even the maverick Vermont senator has been unable to convince his fans, many of whom say they are planning to cast their ballot for the Green party candidate Jill Stein instead on 8 November.
Support for Stein, who won 469,501 votes as the Green party nominee in 2012, was impossible to escape at the Democratic national convention last week. Inside the Walls Fargo Center, some Sanders delegates dressed in green and wore Green party pins.
Outside the hall, hundreds of Sanders supporters – in Philadelphia to demonstrate against Clinton’s nomination – attended a Green party rally at which Stein accused the Democratic party of derailing Sanders’ campaign.
Vanessa Perez was among the protesters outside the Wells Fargo arena. Originally a Sanders supporter, she plans to vote for Stein in November and will canvass for the presumptive Green party nominee over the next three months.
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Ajamu Barakaan is an activist known for fighting for Black and Indigenous rights in the U.S. and abroad.
Presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein announced Monday that Ajamu Baraka will be her vice presidential running mate.
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Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has chosen human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate.
Baraka was founding executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network and coordinator of the U.S.-based Black Left Unity Network’s Committee on International Affairs.
He’s served on boards of several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International (USA) and the National Center for Human Rights Education. He’s also served on boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Africa Action; Latin American Caribbean Community Center; Diaspora Afrique and the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights.
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In his strongest denunciation of Donald J. Trump so far, President Obama on Tuesday said Mr. Trump was “unfit to serve as president” and urged the leaders of the Republican Party to withdraw their backing for his candidacy.
Mr. Obama said the Republican criticisms of Mr. Trump “ring hollow” if the party’s leaders continue to support his bid for the presidency this fall, particularly in light of Republican criticisms of Mr. Trump for his attacks on the Muslim parents of an American soldier, Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq.
“The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Mr. Obama said at a news conference at the White House.
Mr. Obama said that in addition to Mr. Trump’s comments about the Khan family, the Republican nominee had demonstrated that he was “woefully unprepared to do this job.” The president said Mr. Trump lacked knowledge about Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
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Last week at the Democratic National Convention, one of the most powerful speeches came from Khizr Khan, the father of a U.S. soldier who died serving in Iraq in 2004. Onstage in Philadelphia, Khan asked Donald Trump whether he’d ever read the U.S. Constitution, and he offered Trump his own copy. In response, Trump attacked Khizr’s wife, Ghazala Khan, who appeared onstage alongside her husband. Trump’s comments sparked widespread outrage—including from the Khans themselves, who denounced Donald Trump, saying he is “totally unfit for the leadership of this country.” For more, we speak with Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates.
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Presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has chosen her vice-presidential running mate: human rights scholar and activist Ajamu Baraka. Baraka is presently a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the founding executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network. The Green Party’s presidential convention begins on Thursday in Houston, Texas.
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For the fourth straight day of the Democratic convention, I’m sitting in the California delegate section, anxiously taking in the start of the final night’s program.
In a couple of hours, Hillary Clinton will finally accept her nomination as the first female presidential nominee, breaking the glass ceiling. It will be a historic exclamation point for women and the country at large; the red, white and blue balloons are in flag formation on the ceiling, ready to drop; the whole stadium is vibrating with excitement.
Just as I am settling in, I feel a nudge on my shoulder and then my neighbor, a 20-something, blond girl in jeans and a neon green Bernie Sanders “Enough is Enough” T-shirt, points to a newly installed, gray, speaker-type thing on the wall behind us. This contraption definitely wasn’t there yesterday. My fellow California Sanders delegate explains that it’s a white noise machine—installed last night to drown out our section’s chanting. “Wow,” I think, “I really am in the eye of the storm.” Yes indeed, there can’t be any more appropriate symbol of this choreographed and sanitized convention than the foreboding, dull-gray piece of supposed suppressive technology humming 10 feet above me.
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Hillary Clinton has been long enough in politics that she has her own independent track record, as secretary of state, as a warmonger and as a lobbyist-in-chief for big business and for multibillionaire interests. I don’t see how we can, in any honesty, expect a woman who takes, you know, a quarter of a million dollars for every speech that she makes to Goldman Sachs, you know, who has been a rapacious factor in the global economic crisis, as somebody who will represent the interests of ordinary people. But I think, you know, again, we need to move away from an individualized and personalized narrative of politics to the larger context in which all of this is happening. The real problem here is not just her, but the fact that the Democratic Party and the establishment that controls it has a long track record of a systematic betrayal of the interests of working people and, you know, not to mention war abroad.
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Once again, fear is being ramped up to manipulate progressive voters into voting for what they do not want, Hillary Clinton, instead of someone who represents their values. The fear of Trump is the card being played this year and to justify it people are being told that Gore lost to Bush in 2000 because of third party candidates. One of the most effective pieces of political propaganda in this century has been the Nader Myth, which says that Al Gore lost in 2000 because Ralph Nader ran for president.
This myth is repeated by many Democratic Party operatives and people in the media, who are essentially serving as Democratic Party spokespersons. Since the Democratic Party’s method of convincing people to vote for Hillary Clinton is fear of Trump, people should be prepared with the facts around the 2000 election so they can dispel the Nader Myth.
Ben Jealous Calls for the Facts, Then Ignores Them
One recent example was Ben Jealous, the former Sanders’ supporter who has endorsed Hillary Clinton and, as a result, got a spot on the stage at the Democratic National Convention. He debated Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, on Democracy Now and brought up the Nader Myth, saying:
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Censorship/Free Speech
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If you went to that website, for at least a little while, Remove Your Media was posting full details of people who filed counternotices to some of its DMCA takedowns. These postings made no effort whatsoever to redact personal information such as emails and phone numbers (TorrentFreak has an image where it redacted the info itself).
The “point” that Remove Your Media is so weakly trying to make is that there is a tiny group of copyright extremists who think that Lumen / Chilling Effects is itself a source of piracy because in posting DMCA notices, it leaves the links that copyright holders are demanding be taken down (it’s noteworthy that Lumen does redact personal information, though). Of course, these are apples to oranges differences. The reason that Lumen leaves up those links is because the whole point of Lumen is to act as a clearinghouse of data for people to understand how the DMCA is used. And, in fact, it’s been an invaluable tool for us and other researchers in finding examples of DMCA abuse. That would be significantly more difficult if the links in the notices were redacted. In fact, it would take away nearly all of the value of the database.
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The world has seen enough of Anurag Kashyap v/s Censorship battles. Anurag Kashyap’s films have faced Censor board’s axe a couple of times but he has always fought till the end to make sure that his films reflect his originality.
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Every couple of years as the Olympics gears up again, we end up posting a series of stories about massive bullshit overclaims by the Olympics concerning trademark law. And none of it is actually about what trademark law allows. It’s all about the Olympics’ weird infatuation with making sure no company that doesn’t give them a ton of money first can “associate” with the Olympics. Again, that’s not how trademark law actually works, but few companies are willing to stand up to the International Olympic Committee or the US Olympic Committee. This year, the crackdown seems even more ridiculous than usual, with letters being sent to companies who are helping and sponsoring athletes stating that, unless they’re official sponsors with the US Olympic Committee, they can’t even tweet anything mentioning the Olympics. Companies that had sponsored athletes were being forced to blur out or delete social media posts about their own athletes because their racing bibs said “Olympics” on them.
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The Opposition Bloc party has demanded the Ukrainian authorities heed conclusions made by the international community about corruption, justice system and freedom of speech in Ukraine and stop political prosecution of the opposition.
“Ukraine remains a non-free country dominated by corruption, censorship, and where there is no fair justice. High-profile murders of journalists and opposition figures still haven’t been properly investigated and resolved. Attacks of political radicals on the offices of mass media have become usual practice,” the party said in a statement published on Tuesday.
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Donald Trump has a pretty complicated relationship with the press. On one hand, the Republican nominee knows the value of free media; at least part of his meteoric rise to the top of the ticket can be attributed to the billions of dollars worth of free media he’s received throughout his campaign. On the other hand, he routinely bullies and berates journalists for pointing out his least favorite thing (the truth), and occasionally gets off mocking reporters with disabilities and/or vaginas.
Given Trump’s troubling treatment of the press throughout the primaries (when he first floated the idea of “open[ing] up” libel laws to increase his ability to sue reporters), it’s no surprise that the relationship has grown even more turbulent since he became the official candidate of the Grand Old Party and brought on VP pick Mike Pence. Here are some of the more egregious attacks the Trump/Pence campaign has waged against the press.
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Facebook has temporarily blocked talk-radio host Michael Savage from posting stories to his page after he put up a link to a story about a Muslim migrant killing a pregnant woman in Germany.
A message from the social media giant on Savage’s page said: “You recently posted something that violates Facebook policies, so you’re temporarily blocked from using this feature.”
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A mural of a scantily-clad Hillary Clinton created by an Australian artist was briefly changed into a Muslim woman dressed in a niqab, following a complaint by the local council. However, the latest makeover also left the authorities unimpressed.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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However a core principle of Wikileaks is that it should publish all information it receives without vetting its suitability.
The organization responded by suggesting that Snowden was trying to woo Hillary Clinton for an official pardon, (meaning he could return to the US,) arguing that “opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party clash flows.”
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Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, and NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly talk about the state of cybersecurity, the recent hacking into Democratic Party systems and ISIS strategy.
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In a move that sounds like something from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Disney World is developing new foot-tracking technology that would allow it to follow customers around its attractions.
The Walt Disney Company, owner of the Disney theme parks, has secured a patent for the system, which would scan and photograph customer’s shoes and allow park authorities to track punters through the Magic Kingdom.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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An algorithm is deciding certain criminal defendants should spend more time in prison. And that determination can’t be fully challenged because the code belongs to a private company which provides the software to the government.
Eric Loomis was determined to be a “high risk” defendant, based on something called a “COMPAS score.” COMPAS — Criminal Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions — cranks out Presentence Investigation Reports for use in the courtroom, utilizing a number of factors to generate a score that lets judges know how likely the defendant is to re-offend.
The problems with this system are numerous. For one, the code is proprietary, so defendants aren’t allowed to examine the factors that lead to this determination, unlike other sentencing guidelines created by the government, which are open to the public to examine.
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More than 50 organizations representing people of color across the United States on Monday put forth what they say is their “shared vision of the world we want to live in,” in the form of a comprehensive policy document that calls for nothing short of “a complete transformation of the current system.”
“In recent years we have taken to the streets, launched massive campaigns, and impacted elections, but our elected leaders have failed to address the legitimate demands of our Movement. We can no longer wait,” reads the platform, published by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which is a coalition of groups including Color of Change, Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter Network, Highlander Research and Education Center, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and many others.
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Voting rights advocates have won a number of major victories that could reshape the November election. Over the past 10 days, a series of court rulings have struck down new voting restrictions in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Texas. In North Carolina, judge Diana Motz wrote, “We cannot ignore the recent evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.” Meanwhile in Wisconsin, U.S. District Judge James Peterson also struck down a voting rights law, writing that the objective of the law was to “suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.” A week earlier, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down a Texas law which has been described as the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law. For more, we speak with Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation, where he covers voting rights. Berman’s recent piece for The Nation is called “The Country’s Worst Anti-Voting Law Was Just Struck Down in North Carolina.”
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The global watchdog organization Amnesty International says it has received “credible evidence” that the Turkish state under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is committing mass torture — including rape — in a crackdown following an alleged coup attempt.
“Amnesty International has credible reports that Turkish police in Ankara and Istanbul are holding detainees in stress positions for up to 48 hours, denying them food, water and medical treatment, and verbally abusing and threatening them,” the organization reported on Sunday. “In the worst cases some have been subjected to severe beatings and torture, including rape.”
Basing its findings on anonymous interviews with lawyers, doctors and “a person on duty in a detention facility,” Amnesty International continued: “Detainees are being arbitrarily held, including in informal places of detention. They have been denied access to lawyers and family members and have not been properly informed of the charges against them, undermining their right to a fair trial.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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If at first you don’t succeed, try to waste everybody’s time in perpetuity. That’s apparently the plan of the broadband industry, which has formally unveiled its latest attempt to kill U.S. net neutrality rules and the FCC’s reclassification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Telecom Act. As leaks had suggested, multiple broadband providers and trade organizations have requested an en banc review from the full 9-member DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the hopes of overturning last June’s massive FCC legal win.
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Posted in Deception, Patents at 9:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Some, including Adam Mossoff, are associated with Conservative think tanks [1, 2]
Summary: In the face of a system that is so abusive and unjust, the above academics oppose a reform that would limit the reach of Eastern District of Texas, capital of patent trolls
TITLES can be misleading. They don’t say much about a person’s affiliation or integrity and when universities are privately-owned and funded by large corporations it’s not enough to interpret the title “professor” as an instant legitimiser or indication of impartiality. There are still academics who promote GMOs, for example, but many are funded (one way or another, directly or indirectly) by the likes of Monsanto. It’s a lucrative business with billions of dollars at stake; throwing some corporate money at universities is ordinary practice, more so in the US than in Europe (where the EPO even pays academic publishers to print what EPO marketers write).
This week, Patently-O wrote about “28 Law Professors” (the term Professor does not mean in the US what it means in the rest of the world, some are just lecturers or RAs) and said they they sent a letter to politicians. “The new letter,” according to Professor Dennis Crouch (who does not agree with them), “argues that the venue limiting proposals are basically serving as a mechanism of weakening the power of patent holders: “The reality is that the major proponents of changing the venue rules are primarily large high-tech companies and retailers with an online presence sued in the Eastern District of Texas that would rather litigate in a small number of more defendant-friendly jurisdictions.””
Well, obviously. Put another way, those who oppose patent trolls want their cesspool, the Eastern District of Texas, to stop its madness. The Eastern District of Texas openly promotes its bias and hopes to promote litigation this way. This is not acceptable. It does not help innovators, it merely hurts them. What kind of academics support such a system? What does that say about such academics and the institutions that pay their salaries?
“The District of Massachusetts ruled that Limelight Networks did not infringe, but one decade later (and millions of dollars in legal fees) there is an outcome that has been favourable mostly to patent lawyers. How typical!”Blockstream, says a new article by Mike Masnick, “Promises Not To Abuse Patents” even though it hasn't got patents. “Over the years,” he writes, “we’ve discussed various examples of tech companies taking a stand against patent abuse. That is, in lieu of actual patent reform to fix a broken system, some companies are doing things on their own (we even had a podcast discussing a bunch of examples). One of my personal favorites was Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement which effectively lets the named inventors on the patent issue their own licenses to undermine trolls should the patents ever fall into trollish hands. Think of it as something of a poison pill to make the patents worth a lot less to pure trolls. One of the tricks though has been convincing smaller startups to take some of these steps — even the license on transfer network, which is sort of a no brainer for startups. So it’s good to see, as pointed out by EFF, that Blockstream, a fascinating company in the blockchain space that employs a ton of super smart people, take a big commitment to be a good player in the patent realm.”
Perhaps Blockstream has some impending patents and is preparing for backlash when the public finds out about it. Still, what happens if Blockstream gets bought by some hostile company along with its patents? Or worse: what is the patents are sold to trolls? Will the pledge still be applicable? It’s quite chaotic out there as one single company can be compelled to pay $54 million in ‘damages’ over one single patent, as per the Supreme Court‘s ruling in this case (Akamai v Limelight Networks). To quote MIP: “Limelight Networks has entered into a settlement agreement with Akamai Technologies to end the longstanding battle over a global hosting patent. The settlement converts the $51 million judgment into a $54 million license that will be paid in 12 equal quarterly installments starting August 1.”
Where does all of that money go? Surely not R&D. Limelight Networks is based in Arizona and the plaintiff/s included MIT, which produces no products and enjoys funding from taxpayers. The District of Massachusetts ruled that Limelight Networks did not infringe, but one decade later (and millions of dollars in legal fees) there is an outcome that has been favourable mostly to patent lawyers. How typical! █
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Further Recent Posts
- Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released
Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
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