11.20.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Accountability at the EPO takes two steps forward (two new ILO cases) and one step backward (Transparency International going more or less defunct in Germany), but workers continue to speak out and demand change
“EXCEPTIONAL public delivery” from the ILO is expected very soon (later this month). This was mentioned here about a week ago and a few days ago this news from ILO came out, specifying exactly which cases were set apart to be published separately, probably because they are more important. To quote the news:
The Tribunal will exceptionally deliver in public four judgments adopted at its 123rd Session separately and earlier than the remaining 93 judgments adopted at the same session.
The four judgments are:
- No. 3723: Atil No. 2 v. WMO (application for execution of Judgment 3348)
- No. 3750: Mngola v. Global Fund
- No. 3785: Fritz No. 2 v. EPO
- No. 3796: Vermeulen v. EPO
Those judgments will be announced in public on Wednesday, 30 November 2016 at 3 pm at the ILO (Room XI, floor R2).
They will be published on the Tribunal’s website (ilo.org/trib) shortly after the delivery.
Geneva, 15 November 2016
Dražen Petrović, Registrar
These two EPO cases (third and fourth above) are probably of high impact and more profound than, e.g. the van Breda case which SUEPO is pressing on [PDF] (more to do with finance and illness, less with human rights), but we shall know for sure at the end of this month.
“Put simply, the EPO hires some of the potential overseers/critics, which is a common technique that only the affluent can afford to pull off (oil companies habitually do this in countries that they pollute).”Making the EPO wholly accountable or holding particular managers accountable where they deserve it has gotten rather difficult not just because of impunity/immunity (with ILO being years behind, drowning in additional EPO complaints) but also entryism. Put simply, the EPO hires some of the potential overseers/critics, which is a common technique that only the affluent can afford to pull off (oil companies habitually do this in countries that they pollute).
Transparency International (TI) ‘merger’ or overlap with the EPO was noted here before, giving as a prominent example Jana Mittermaier, ex-Transparency International worker and now PR person for the EPO (or “Mittermaier the Liar” as I cautiously called her the other day, after she had relayed the management's lies about its union-busting activity).
“TI, say what?”
That’s what one reader told us about them.
“TI is in crisis, too,” this readers added. “Have you read the very bad news about recent Transparency International “issues”?”
We were actually not aware of it, but it’s very fresh news (days old in the press, as recent as a couple of days ago, i.e. Friday). “Read Stuttgarter Zeitung (in German),” our reader told us, “and perhaps better to understand read in English” the following:
Transparency International is in crisis. The organization needs to cut costs and restructure its international secretariat in Berlin. At the same time, Transparency is fighting against its workers’ council in the local courts. In a bid to ease tensions, Transparency has also now made changes to its leadership.
[...]
The current court case in the Berlin labour court highlights the difficulties Transparency has in dealing with its own staff. The organisation is currently restructuring its Berlin-based international secretariat. The secretariat is the backbone of the global organisation, supporting the national chapters in their work. But over time, a number of well-paid executives have assembled near the top during the tenure of managing director Cobus de Swardt, who has been at the helm of Transparency for nearly a decade. This week, the South African national has lost some of his responsibilities to a newly-appointed second managing director, according to information obtained by correctiv.org.
To cut costs, Transparency sought to flatten hierarchies and cut staff. The organisation’s workers council attempted to strengthen employee rights by establishing a so-called finance committee (German: Wirtschaftsausschuss). Such a committee can for example demand management to disclose certain financial information. Transparency’s management is trying to prevent the formation of this committee, even filing a legal case against it.
This bodes negatively not just for the EPO but also for Germany. And it’s not all that much better in The Hague, where a Dutch speaker (speaking on behalf of the EPO) got away with saying on Dutch television that he would snub the highest court in the country!
“A disaster for the whole European Patent system is on its way, watch the soon upcoming decisions of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht on its constitutionaly [sic].”
–AnonymousNeanderthal standards in the Netherlands towards journalists and bloggers too can be tolerated? Remember that the EPO threatens me over my writings about the EPO and it also banned/blocked IP Kat to suppress access/publication. Where were Dutch politicians when the EPO threatened publishers and around the same time spoon-fed Dutch ‘journalists’ some libel to spread (publish) about an accused judge whom Battistelli does not like?
What on Earth has the EPO become and how is it allowed to get away with these actions in supposedly civilised nations that sport international courts? Many EPO insiders keep asking those same kinds of questions. In Merpel’s latest writings there is an implicit/subtle call for outside intervention. There are 20+ comments in that first comment thread (about the accused judge), but to quote a little selectively (there’s some noise among the signal there), this is “so sad” and “disaster for the whole European Patent system is on its way, watch the soon upcoming” (link to comment). The full comment says: “This is all so sad. The mere fact that the members of the boards of appeal just carry dealing with their cases instead of loudly protesting against this incredible situation demonstrates how little remains of their independence and judicial status. A disaster for the whole European Patent system is on its way, watch the soon upcoming decisions of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht on its constitutionaly [sic].”
“In case it is decided to ignore your suggestions at the next administrative council we will have all our answers and better get ready for the end of the EPO.”
–AnonymousIn reply to that latter part one person wrote: “Please note that – different from what had been envisaged in the court’s outlook for 2016 – a decision (unfortunately) does not seem to be “soon upcoming” at all. This does not change by frequently claiming that the opposite was the case. Apart from that, bearing in mind the possible political impact of the decision and the manner the German Constitutional Court recently dealt with similar matters, I would be rather sceptical that any meaningful guidance can be expected, let alone a convincing solution.”
There are also some pro-Battistelli comments there (however few) and these take up a lot time and energy from the on-topic discussions.
“How many months more before your already widely dysfunctional institutions will descend into chaos?”
–Anonymous“Thank you so much Merpel,” one reader wrote. “A most accurate and detailed summary of the deeply sad situation under this president. I hope (I am sure) that this analysis will circulate to all interested parties. In case it is decided to ignore your suggestions at the next administrative council we will have all our answers and better get ready for the end of the EPO.”
Experience suggests that politicians care about these scandals only if/when they have something to politically gain from them. Some people now compare this to US politics (and election), noting that “the 24/7 freak show doing business under the brand of “US politics” hardly gives you any ground for gloating. How many months more before your already widely dysfunctional institutions will descend into chaos?”
“Maybe someone in the new US Administration will set their sights on the EPO.”
–AnonymousOne reply to this said: “Maybe someone in the new US Administration will set their sights on the EPO. The failure to provide a truly independent judicial review instance could arguably count as a breach of TRIPS. Grounds for an action against the EPO contracting states? Let’s see…”
We sure hope that some outside intervention (ILO is too slow and TI is virtually defunct) will save the EPO. If often seems like the Office and the supine Organisation cannot be saved anymore (as it’s too late, they’ve been rendered dysfunctional from the inside, compromising the very core structure as envisioned in the EPC). █
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Posted in Africa, Asia, Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Winning by knocking others over?
Summary: Assessment of patent systems based on litigation (or “enforcement”) still a misguided yardstick but a glorified theme in the news sites controlled by (and for) the patent ‘industry’
“BEWARE,” AntiSoftwarePat[ents] wrote the other day, “Patent Trolls pretending to be ‘Inventors’ https://www.cta.tech/Policy/Issues/Patent-Reform/Urge-Congress-to-Support-Patent-Reform.aspx … #FixPatents because #PatentsMatter pic.twitter.com/qcdWnTA8v0″
The death of software patents may be already upon us, but now we need to ensure that these patents don’t cross the Atlantic and spawn new patent trolls in Europe. They have already crossed the Pacific and are growingly an issue (even an epidemic) in east Asia. We wrote more about this over the weekend and last weekend; in fact, this has been a recurring theme* here since about 2 months ago. It seems like a runaway issue as while it’s gradually dying out in the US the same symptoms can not been seen elsewhere and the EPO under Battistelli implements or emulates some of the worst aspects of the USPTO, including software patents in Europe.
Managing IP (MIP), in the face of strides against software patents in the US, sets up an event that seems to be promoting a case that helps patent trolls (Halo). To quote this new post about a so-called ‘webinar’ (usually dialogue/monologue with some programme): “Federal Circuit and district court rulings interpreting the Supreme Court’s Halo opinion on enhanced damages were analysed in a webinar presented by Managing IP and Fitzpatrick” (we can envision the content based on the presenters**).
These “enhanced damages” would be mostly applicable to patent trolls (or serial patent tax collectors) and this decision will, without a doubt, embolden some of them to make them more demanding/aggressive in courts. They can broaden the number of victims and the ‘protection money’ extracted from each.
On to a similar topic, Florian Müller revisits FRAND — a subject he used to habitually cover back in his Android-hostile days. This time it’s about automotive companies, namely Daimler and Hyundai. To quote:
About four to five years ago, there was a time when “FRAND Patents” would have been a more suitable name for this blog than “FOSS Patents”: the pursuit of sales and important bans over standard-essential patents (in violation of pledges to license them to all comers on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms), royalty demands far out of the FRAND ballpark and exorbitant damages claims were the three most important symptoms of a huge underlying problem, and I did what I could to shed some light on what was going on and going wrong.
While I’m glad that some of the worst potential consequences were avoided at the time, I have realized that there is some unfinished business in that area. Antitrust settlements and court decisions were helpful. Some of them, such as Judge Posner’s 2012 Apple v. Motorola ruling, were really great. But attempts to abuse FRAND-pledged SEPs are still rampant. Various SEP owners are still seeking injunctions (not in all jurisdictions but definitely in some). Royalty demands and damages claims still appear to be out of line in too many cases.
These patents are problematic for many reasons, especially for Free/Open Source software. To see automotive companies joining this wave is troubling to say the least and now that automotive companies are also patenting the act of driving cars we find this new article which speaks of “Patents Driving Autonomous Car Technology”. To quote a portion: “Autonomous cars is a new Technological leap in the field of transportation. Imagine millions of cars, heavy duty vehicles, ships etc. being driven without drivers which will save a lot of human labor. Also, if such technology makes commuting safe and makes you reach your destination in time with 100% safety, it will save many innocent lives which are lost every year due to human carelessness or negligence while driving.”
There are already some patent trolls in this area, if not the dashboard level (e.g. navigation) then AI.
We continue to worry about patent trolls, about FRAND (or RAND, or SEPs) and of course about software patents, but at the core of these issues we have patent maximalism, or the belief that the more patents exist and are actively enforced against most entities, the better off society will be. See this new article (behind paywall) from IP Watch to witness a symptom of this disease. Called the “Online [Patent] Enforcement Index,” what we have here is “Konstantinos Alexiou [who] created the Index Of Patent Systems Strength, which ranks the effectiveness and efficiency of the patent systems of 49 countries.”
Are people serious about this? Is this what it boils down to? Ranking countries based on patent activity, as if the more means merrier? Totally misguided and dangerously so! █
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* Days ago IAM wrote about patent trolls which now operate in Korea, notably “Intellectual Discovery”. To quote somewhat of a background that’s appended to the article: “Intellectual Discovery, on the other hand, saw its CEO Kwang-Jun Kim quit last month amid what he claimed to be a budget crisis at the SPF. Quoted in a feature in the most recent issue of IAM, Kim suggested that Intellectual Discovery would become a fully privately held entity, and that hook-ups with other patent monetisation companies may well be on the cards. “Going private means we would have a little more freedom – we would be able to broaden our horizons, perhaps working with non-Korean operating companies and partnering with other NPEs, if those scenarios are consistent with our strategy and goals,” he told me. The DSS transaction seems to fit this picture pretty well; but it is likely to be one of the last deals to have been done largely on Kim’s watch. Whether the person who steps into his shoes continues along this course remains to be seen.”
** MIP is very pro-plaintiff, as one might expect the messenger of patent law firms to be. Here is its new article about how “Philips and Masimo have ended their long-running dispute over blood oxygen measurement patents” and here is an update from the Eastern District of Texas, where “Medtronic has been ordered to pay $20.4m in damages by an Eastern District of Texas jury for infringing a doctor’s patents related to idiopathic scoliosis treatment” (guess who pockets a lot of this money other than the plaintiff).
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Here is a personal ‘portrait’ artwork. A bit unusual compare to my previous portraits and probably a bit more ‘digital’ than ‘painting’ this time. But it’s a concept I had in mind since a long time and wanted to paint it on this rainy Sunday afternoon at home.
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Desktop
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Finally, some good news for Apple fans who crashed System76 website a few days back. Apple makes a good laptop. However, they lack the option to add additional RAM or ports or graphics card. The new System76 Oryx laptop has a 4K HiDPI display. If you are a sysadmin, DevOps, or developer, give it a try to System76.
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Server
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Linux may have just 2% in the desktop market share, but when it comes to supercomputers, Linux is simply ruling it with over 99% of the share.
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Kernel Space
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In the refereed track of the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference, Lennart Poettering presented a new type of service for systemd that he calls a “portable system service”. It is a relatively new idea that he had not talked about publicly until the systemd.conf in late September. Portable system services borrow some ideas from various container managers and projects like Docker, but are targeting a more secure environment than most services (and containers) run in today.
There is no real agreement on what a “container” is, Poettering said, but most accept that they combine a way to bundle up resources and to isolate the programs in the bundle from the rest of the system. There is also typically a delivery mechanism for getting those bundles running in various locations. There may be wildly different implementations, but they generally share those traits.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the day worth remembering. The long outstanding problem with the disconnects on a variety of Realtek Wireless devices, my RTL8723BE included, which has shown problems time and again in pretty much every single distro out there, has been finally resolved. Word.
A reader emailed me a few days back and said the new kernel 4.8.7 fixes the issue. I decided to test this, and completed a long and arduous set of checks in Manjaro 16.10, which has the kernel 4.8.7 available in its repos. One of the perks of bleeding-edge Arch-based distros. The Manjaro review is still a few weeks away, but we can at least focus on this burning issue. Let me proudly and happily elaborate.
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The result of all this work is WiFi latencies that are less than 40ms, down from a peak of 1-2 seconds before they started, and much better handling of multiple stations running at full rate. Before the changes, a test involving 100 flows all starting together collapsed entirely, with at most five flows getting going; all the rest failed due to TCP timeouts caused by excessive buffering latency. Afterward, all 100 could start and run with reasonable latency and bandwidth. All this work, in the end, comes down to a patch that removes a net 200 lines of code.
There are some open issues, of course. The elimination of the queuing discipline layer took away a number of useful network statistics. Some of these have been replaced with information in the debugfs filesystem. There is, he said, some sort of unfortunate interaction with TCP small queues; Eric Dumazet has some ideas for fixing this problem, which only arises in single-station tests. There is an opportunity to add better air-time fairness to keep slow stations from using too much transmission time. Some future improvements, he said, might come at a cost: latency improvements might reduce the peak bandwidth slightly. But latency is what almost all users actually care about, so that bandwidth will not be missed — except by Ham the monkey.
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Red Hat has been working on a new statx system call for the Linux kernel to provide “enhanced” file information.
This new statx() system call would be able to return the file’s creation time, data version number, and other new attributes not currently provided. These new attributes wouldn’t work for all file-systems, but would work for a subset of them such as CIFS, NFS, and others that track such information.
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Graphics Stack
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Building off the input attachments work earlier this week for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver (covered in More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending), there are now patches up for review to implement support for fast clears.
Jason Ekstrand at the Intel Open-Source Technology Center who has been leading the “ANV” Vulkan driver effort wrote this Saturday, “This little series builds on top of the input attachment series I sent out earlier this week and adds support for fast clears in Vulkan. I’ve tested it on both Sky Lake and Haswell and it has no regressions over the input attachments series.”
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Applications
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Past March we announced that v17 would feature a brand new default skin called Estuary and since then it has been included in every build we have released. During this period our developers kept improving on how it looked, behaved and made use of the latest features that got included from what is shaping up to be the final release of v17. Since more and more users also started to use these development builds we started to receive a lot of feedback, where most was positive there was also some negative or at least constructive comments. As we are not deaf to these comments and try to create the best experience, our skin developer phil65 went back to the drawing board and rethought on how to incorporate this feedback into wat should become the final skin. With some help from ryanmah for the mockups, ichabod-fletchman for helping out this didn’t resulted in a total rewrite but simply reworking some parts of how the skin looks and behaves. The underlying skin code still remains the same for a very large part except for the parts where a smarter way of doing this magic was found. The visual top layer what you will see should still feel quite familiar if you have used any past v17 builds as not everything was redone.
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Boot-Repair is around from quite sometime, released under license GNU-GPL and it is great tool to fix the issues with your Grub and Boot, it repair frequent boot issues you may encounter in Ubuntu like when you can’t boot Ubuntu after installing Windows or another Linux distribution, or when you can’t boot Windows after installing Ubuntu, or when GRUB is not displayed anymore, some upgrade breaks GRUB, etc. Boot-Repair lets you fix these issues with a simple click, which (generally re-installs GRUB and) restores access to the operating systems you had installed before the issue.
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Sayonara is a simple, lightweight and quite fast audio player only for Linux which is written in C++, it also supportet by Qt framework. For audio backend it uses gstreamer. It carries a lot of feature to manage big audio collections. While developing this program they focused on it’s performance, it consumes very low CPU and memory.
One of Sayonara’s goals are intuitive and easy usability never leading to the impression you are using an unnecessary bloated program therefore it should be able to compete with the most popular music players. It has a lot of features like a library, id3 tag editor, equalizer, lastfm radio, lastfm scrobbler, stream recorder and so on..
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The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence v6.4.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
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Alkasir is a free, open source website censorship circumvention tool, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Android and iOS versions are “main objectives for 2016″. For now it only works with Google Chrome.
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ANGRYsearch is a simple and lightweight tool to find files/folders from your mounted drives quickly and easily, it is written in Pythong and inspired from “Everything” which is available for Windows. It displays results as you type the name of the file/folder you are looking for.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s worth noting that their previous game, ‘Ultimate General: Gettysburg’ also supports Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Let us draw the verdict. It’s a strange one. Oddly, this is probably the best Kubuntu that I’ve tested in a long time. Sadly, that’s like saying losing one finger in a freak chainsaw accident is better than losing two fingers. Not the best measure stick. Not something to be proud of. There are many, many problems in Yakkety Yak Plasma, including but not limited to the application stack, stability, performance, package management, and the ability to customize. That’s not a happy list.
Brave face on, we also have a lot of goodies to focus on. A very decent – and FIRST for Plasma – smartphone support stack and multimedia playback as they should be. Lots of old bugs have been fixed. If only we had Samba printing support out of the box, and the network card driver was given a little bit of love, this might be a reasonable distro.
Kubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak is nothing to be proud of, but it is an okay Plasma release that has redeemed a whole generation of failed distributions in the past year or so. It’s funny how it’s gone from being my favorite to a pariah, and now it’s slowly recovering. Such a waste of effort. And why? There was really no need for this whole regression saga. Anyhow, the road to success is still a long and perilous one. It will take a lot more before Kubuntu becomes a recommended household item again. But at the very least, 16.10 is showing a little of that promise. 7/10, if I’m being generous, more like 6/10, but you might want to give it a spin and see what gives. QED.
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Everything starts with a good idea or a bug report. Someone asked for an app icon for claws mail (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371914) and Jens Reuterberg make one. As I don’t think that every application need an breeze specific app icon, I’m look more for a consistent look of the applications so I made an claws breeze icon theme. You can download the icon pack from the claws webpage and dont’t forget to give me feedback cause I don’t use claws.
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Right on my first blog post about Cutelyst users asked me about more “realistic” benchmarks and mentioned TechEmpower benchmarks. Though it was a sort of easy task to build the tests at that time it didn’t seem to be useful to waste time as Cutelyst was moving target.
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This year, on March 31st, KDE’s advanced text editor Kate had its 15th birthday. 15 years are a long time in the software world, and during this time Kate won the hearts of many users and developers. As text editing component, Kate uses the KTextEditor framework, which is used also by applications such as KDevelop or Kile.
The KTextEditor framework essentially is an embeddable text editing component. It ships everything from painting the line numbers, the background color, the text lines with syntax highlighting, the blinking cursor to code completion and many more features. One major feature is its very powerful syntax highlighting engine, enabling us to properly highlight around 275 languages.
Each syntax highlighting is defined in terms of an xml file (many examples), as described in Kate’s documentation. These xml files are read by KTextEditor and the context based highlighting rules in these files are then used to highlight the file contents.
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Less than a month from the release 2.7.0, KStars v2.7.2 for Windows 64bit is now available for download on KStars website! Get it now and give it a go.
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I have 3 monitors, and on each monitor, I have a Plasma panel at the bottom. When any notification pops up, I get 3 notifications on each monitor. I have a full fledged panel on each monitor with everything including task bar and system tray.
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I love the professionality of Krita. It really does not need to hide behind the big guys in business. You can use your photoshop or whatever brushes and formats and many more, there is no “Meh, that brush is not made by us, you can’t use it!“. The user interface is smart and chic, the brushes work smooth and I never had any problems with my hardware. It simply combines everything I need, without the need to check a manual too often. It feels effortless to use it! And also it is nice to find other Krita artists randomly on the internet, it is always a nice way to start a conversation.
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Yesterday was the feature freeze for KDE Applications 16.12 and that’s the time where you look forward for all the new awesome features will land at users devices at 15th December. As for the Minuet land, I’d like to disappointingly let you know no new features are coming but that doesn’t mean things are not progressing. After some days of quite intense work ‒ trying to find some spare time between daily job, my fluffy 10 month old baby love, and the work on the KDE e.V. board ‒ I’m right now enjoying some booze while writing these words about recent advances in Minuet.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 46 commits, with 1541 lines added and 3471 lines removed.
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We recently announced our partnership with Unixstickers to provide high-quality Solus stickers for our community and fans. If you have yet to read about it, click here.
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The Solus project is happy to announce a partnership with Unixstickers, providers of high quality apparel and accessories for operating systems, programming languages, and software. This quality craftsmanship and their continuous support of the open source community made it the obvious choice for us while determining the best provider for Solus-related merchandise.
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Reviews
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A phrase I find myself repeating over and over, to family, friends and clients is “Make backups of your data.” If a file is not backed up then it is one electrical storm, hardware failure or accidental key press away from no longer existing. This naturally leads people to wonder where copies of their data should be stored. There are any number of solutions from optical media to external hard drives, cloud storage to backup tapes. This week I want to talk about a network attached storage (NAS) solution which uses the NAS4Free operating system to manage disks.
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Most of the NAS operating systems I have used in the past were built around useful features. Some focused on making storage easy to set up and manage, others focused on services, such as making files available over multiple protocols or managing torrents. Some strive to be very easy to set up. NAS4Free does pretty well in each of the above categories. It may not be the easiest platform to set up, but it’s probably a close second. It may not have the prettiest interface for managing settings, but it is quite easy to navigate. NAS4Free may not have the most add-on services and access protocols, but I suspect there are more than enough of both for most people.
Where NAS4Free does better than most other solutions I have looked at is security. I don’t think the project’s website or documentation particularly focuses on security as a feature, but there are plenty of little security features that I liked. NAS4Free makes it very easy to lock the text console, which is good because we do not all keep our NAS boxes behind locked doors. The system is fairly easy to upgrade and appears to publish regular security updates in the form of new firmware. NAS4Free makes it fairly easy to set up user accounts, handle permissions and manage home directories. It’s also pretty straight forward to switch from HTTP to HTTPS and to block people not on the local network from accessing the NAS’s web interface.
All in all, I like NAS4Free. It’s a good, general purpose NAS operating system. While I did not feel the project did anything really amazing in any one category, nor did I run into any serious issues. The NAS ran as expected, was fairly straight forward to set up and easy to manage. This strikes me as an especially good platform for home or small business users who want an easy set up, some basic security and a solid collection of features.
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Arch Family
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With KDE Freamework 5.28.0 for example syntax-highlighting got introduced. Also the Wayland support got enhanced with this framework update. For our xorg-stack we updated libdrm and pushed some more updated haskell packages out. Since we are on the move to use alpm hooks also for our kernels, we updated grub to do the same. Additionally we have a lot of rebuilds, some newer kernels, updated Mesa, php and Eric plus the latest Firefox to check out.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Slackware Family
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Many people who have a need for Java, will already have switched to Java 8. Nevertheless there are still many places where Java 7 is preferred or even required. So, I am riding on the Q4 security updates for OpenJDK and used the recently released icedtea 2.6.8 to compile OpenJDK 7u121_b00 or “Java 7 Update 121 Build 00”. As always, there is a JDK and a JRE package.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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The Fedora Change to retire the synaptics driver was approved by FESCO. This will apply to Fedora 26 and is part of a cleanup to, ironically, make the synaptics driver easier to install.
Since Fedora 22, xorg-x11-drv-libinput is the preferred input driver. For historical reasons, almost all users have the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package installed. But to actually use the synaptics driver over xorg-x11-drv-libinput requires a manually dropped xorg.conf.d snippet. And that’s just not ideal. Unfortunately, in DNF/RPM we cannot just say “replace the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package with xorg-x11-drv-libinput on update but still allow users to install xorg-x11-drv-synaptics after that”.
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And talking about Fedora/RISC-V, it took a month, but the mass-rebuild of all Fedora packages completed, and now we’ve got about ⅔rds of all Fedora packages available for RISC-V. That’s quite a lot:
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FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is an important event in the world of free software that is held in different parts of the world organized by Fedora Organization. The FUDCon comprised of sessions, talks, workshops and hackfest in which project participants worked on specific initiatives. FUDCon Phnom Penh was conducted at Norton University, Phnom Penh along Barcamp ASEAN. Around 50 speakers from around the world gave talks related to entrepreneurship and open source software. I was traveling with one my friends, Abhinand N, who also got selected to deliver a talk on Mediawiki. Looked like, we were the only two undergrads who were invited to deliver talks.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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On November 8, 2016, the proto_v2 schematics were updated to the current version. We finished the last few improvements and our layouter is scheduling the layout to start in one week. We repeat our invitation to give the schematics a peer review: it’s your last chance to peel your eyes on these schematics and be picky about details that our engineering team might have missed.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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WindowSpy is a new Unity AppIndicator that allows displaying a small live (well, almost) preview of a window on another workspace.
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Recent Notifications is an Ubuntu Indicator that collects desktop notifications, displaying them in its menu. This is useful if you missed some important notification for various reasons, like being away from the computer, etc.
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Now that Ubuntu Core has been officially released, it might be a good time to get your snaps into the Store!
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MacBuntu (Macbuntu Yosemite/El Capitan) transformation pack is ready to take off and land on your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. It offers two themes for GTK (which supports: Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce), one theme for Gnome Shell, one for Cinnamon, two icon packs, and cursors. Unlike last time we are not sharing boot/splash for macbuntu and theme for lightdm-webkit because there are some issues within the Ubuntu 16.10. Slingscold which is known as launchpad, it does work on some desktops but it may don’t work for some users and you may see blank launcher. We are using and recommending Plank dock with this pack because it is lightweight and works with all desktops without any issues. Also credit goes to Jared for helping us with this transformation pack. By following these instructions you can change look of your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety to look like Mac. In previous packs we used LightDM webkit theme which looks quite similar to Mac OS X login screen, this time we aren’t offering, because we experienced a lot of issues after installing it (like: not able to login/blank screen). Also Bootscreen has some issues.
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Flavours and Variants
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The open source desktop landscape is complicated. There are many distros, many desktop environments, and so many things to know about each of them. We often see folks fall into some of the same pieces of misinformation when reporting on or commenting about elementary OS. So here’s a look at some of the major myths around elementary OS and what the actual facts are.
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A new device called Nodio has been recently announced that can run multiple decentralized applications (dApps), a Tor node, and other functionalities. Nodio is a blockchain router that aims to give users a chance to create decentralized solutions.
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Packet.net, a bare-metal cloud aimed at developers, has flicked the switch on cloud-running servers powered by a pair of Cavium’s 48-core ARMv8-A ThunderX processors.
CEO Zachary Smith told The Register that the company’s cooked up the cloud for a few reasons. Price is one: Packet will offer ARM cores at a tenth of the price it charges for Intel cores, at US$0.50 per hour per server, or $0.005 per core per hour. Smith thinks that will be a head-turner by itself.
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Phones
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Tizen
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In the first half of 2014, Samsung released the Samsung Gear S2 smart watch running on Tizen, an open source, Linux-based operating system. Early in 2015, Samsung released the Samsung Z1 smartphone, which also ran on Tizen, in India for approximately $127. It was followed by the Z3 that got rolled out in Oct. 2015.
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Android
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Everyone benefits in some way when a new operating system comes out, especially when that operating system is open source. Minoca OS is a case of just that, and what’s more is that it has been written entirely from the ground up, further contributing to the software landscape.
Evan Green is the CEO of Minoca Corp, the organization currently maintaining Minoca OS, as well as a co-founder and engineer of Minoca OS. Evan has was kind enough to answer some questions about Minoca OS for us.
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One of the things that people using open source often wish loudly for (via) is software that’s stable and only gets bug fixes, including security updates, with no other changes at all. Oh, and they want this for free as part of an open source project.
As you may have guessed, there is a fundamental problem with this. Indeed it is a classical fundamental problem in software development in general, namely that doing only maintenance is boring and very few people want to do it (especially for free, such as with open source software). This is why it’s really quite hard to find anyone who does a good job of maintenance, especially over the long term and most especially for free. There are people who will provide you with well maintained systems that stay carefully stable for years, but generally they want money (often a fair amount of it).
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There are so many websites, planets, or blogs related to Free Software/Open Source (FLOSS) and GNU/Linux in English. It is difficult for someone to grabs many of their RSS feeds one by one. To solve this, I try to collect many URL of RSS feeds of them here. This is not complete by now (November 15th 2016) but I planned to complete the missing links below as soon as possible. I hope this list helps anyone in free software community worldwide.
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Databases
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MySQL is a free-to-use, open-source database that facilitates effective management of databases by connecting them to the software. It is a stable, reliable and powerful solution with advanced features like the following…
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Microsoft ‘Loves’ Linux
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The latest trend in Europe and developing countries was to ditch proprietary Microsoft Office and adopt an Open Source solution such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The move was more concerned with cost saving than for the love of Open Source. Whatever may be the reason, at least several government organizations have started to look beyond Microsoft.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Programming/Development
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We’ve often heard that you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car, but you can bet that professional race car drivers know. By analogy, you can build lots of systems with off-the-shelf boards like Raspberry Pis and program that using Python or some other high-level abstraction. The most competent hackers, though, know what’s going on inside that Pi and what Python is doing under the hood down to some low level.
If you’ve been using Linux “under the hood” often means understanding what happens inside the kernel–the heart of the Linux OS that manages and controls everything. It can be a bit daunting; the kernel is simple in concept, but has grown over the years and is now a big chunk of software to approach.
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A step by step guide that will show you how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub, one of the most popular and used git repository hosting services.
GitHub is the home of many popular open source projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Docker, Go and many others.
The way people (usually) contribute to an open source project on GitHub is using pull requests. A pull request is basically a patch which includes more information and allows members to discuss it on the website.
This tutorial will guide you through the whole process to generate a pull request for a project.
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The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.
Since that day, I always try to think twice about the effects of my code before I write it. I hope that you will too.
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The problem with technical positions such as programmers or system administrators is that there is an actual difference between knowing an algorithm/programming language/software and actually implementing it. For instance, Johnny found it hard to differentiate between someone who said he knows about Apache web server and someone who can actually administer it. Johnny said ( this later became our headline):
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Standards/Consortia
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Between SVG 1.1 W3C Recommendation and SVG 2 in its current form, people have raised kids and sent them off to the college. And yet SVG 2 might arrive sometime in the future without quite a few useful features that have been already developed and tested. What’s up with that?
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The ruling upheld a previous decision by the Copenhagen City Court that was thought to be a death blow to the popular ride-sharing service.
The Danish courts have ruled that that Uber’s profit motive means it is not a true ridesharing programme but instead is akin to an illegal taxi service.
Six Uber drivers were found guilt by Copenhagen City Court in July and Friday marked the first decision against divers who appealed against the initial ruling.
The High Court’s decision against the 28-year-old male driver now paves the way for the Copenhagen Public Prosecutor Office (Statsadvokaten) to bring a case against the San Francisco based company.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Government is to privatise the NHS’s in-house, publicly-owned provider of agency staff, ministers have announced.
NHS Professionals, the health service’s main staffing agency, provides 90,000 health workers to around a quarter of NHS trusts, covering two million shifts a year.
In a written statement issued on Thursday as most MPs headed back to their constituencies, the Government announced it would sell off a majority stake in the orgnaisation to the private sector with the aim of “creating a profitable business model”.
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Security
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At SSL Labs, we have a major review of our grading criteria about once a year. As the security of the ecosystem matures, our goal is to push forward and make the requirements [for a good grade] stricter. In many ways, this process of continuous improvement is what really matters to us.
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64-bit is not exactly new anymore, but many codebases which started out as 32-bit have been ported to 64-bit. In this study, Wressnegger et al. reveal how a codebase originally written for 32-bit, and which is perfectly secure on 32-bit platforms, can have new vulnerabilities simply by compiling it for 64-bit systems. Beginning with a theoretical analysis of how such vulnerabilities might be introduced, the team then go and look for such vulnerabilities in the wild…
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Defence/Aggression
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War has been a buzzword for some time on both sides of the frontier between Russia and the Baltic states. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and as relations between Moscow and Washington deteriorated—over the annexation of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine, the catastrophe in Syria, and charges the Kremlin tried to influence the U.S. election—these three small countries found themselves caught in the middle.
But now there’s a different reason for worry. Campaign proclamations by Donald Trump that NATO states must pay more for defense, his ambivalence about Crimea, and allusions to how America may not defend members against Russian military action had already unnerved many before Nov. 8. Now that this self-professed fan of Vladimir Putin is headed for the White House, the wonder on both sides of the border is what happens next.
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Behind much of the Middle East’s chaos — the wars in Syria and Yemen, the political upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon and Bahrain — there is another conflict.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a struggle for dominance that has turned much of the Middle East into their battlefield. Rather than fighting directly, they wield and in that way worsen the region’s direst problems: dictatorship, militia violence and religious extremism.
The history of their rivalry tracks — and helps to explain — the Middle East’s disintegration, particularly the Sunni-Shiite sectarianism both powers have found useful to cultivate. It is a story in which the United States has been a supporting but constant player, most recently by backing the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians. These dynamics, scholars warn, point toward a future of civil wars, divided societies and unstable governments.
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Finance
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I know which I’d bet on. Next, imagine what would have happened if, as a result of that narrow win for remain, a gaping hole in the public finances had opened up as the economy reeled, and even leading remainers admitted the machinery of state could barely cope. Farage and the rest would have denounced the chaos, boasting that this proved they had been right all along, that the voters had been misled and therefore must be given another say.
As we all know, reality did not work out this way. Next week the chancellor will deliver an autumn statement anchored in the admission that, as the Financial Times put it, “the UK faces a £100bn bill for Brexit within five years”. Thanks to the 23 June vote, the forecast is for “slower growth and lower-than-expected investment”.
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Leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership nations are openly considering going it alone, without the United States, in a so-called ‘TPP minus one’ in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.
The 12 countries are meeting on the margins of the 21-strong Apec meeting in Lima, Peru.
Talking to reporters shortly after arriving in the Peruvian capital, Prime Minister John Key made it clear the grouping faced a critical crossroads with Trump’s election.
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The social network’s board has approved a plan to buyback as much as $6 billion of its stock starting in the first quarter of next year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
“The timing and actual number of shares repurchased will depend on a variety of factors, including price, general business and market conditions, and alternative investment opportunities,” the company said in its filing.
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Facebook Inc. said it will buy back as much as $6 billion in shares, its first repurchase program, in a bid to appease shareholders awaiting the results of big investments in potentially risky new growth areas.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Wasserman Schultz stepped down as party leader during the Democratic National Convention, where she was booed by angry Sanders supporters. She was replaced by Donna Brazile, who is serving on an interim basis, until March, when an election for a new party chairman will take place.
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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Breitbart News emerged as a haven for far-right factions that actively pushed for the election of Donald Trump. Its executive editor, Steve Bannon, played an instrumental role as CEO of the Trump campaign, and was recently appointed chief strategist for the president-elect’s administration. Now, the controversial news site is turning its attention to France, where the far-right politician Marine Le Pen hopes to pull off a Trump-like upset in next year’s presidential election.
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By the time last week’s presidential election was finally called for Donald Trump during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the initial disbelief felt by the millions of Americans who had been assured of a Clinton victory by the media had turned into shock and panic — if not yet full-blown despair. As pollsters collectively changed their predictions and news pundits started to resemble confused and dejected children, the fight-or-flight response kicked in for countless viewers. Hearts pounded, stomachs turned and some of the more privileged liberals started seriously considering whether to flee the country in the face of a national nightmare that had just become a reality (privileged, because the average American doesn’t have the resources to just pack up and run at will).
The surreal night concluded with Canada’s immigration website crashing from too much traffic, as if every alt-right Twitter troll’s fantasy had come true.
Although the instinct to flee from a Trump presidency is understandable, it reveals a great deal about the impotence of modern liberalism and its monumental failure to stop an unhinged and thoroughly unqualified demagogue like Trump.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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We had an “upfront deal” with Twitter, which is a common setup where we commit to spending a certain amount on advertising and in exchange receive discounts, perks, and custom solutions.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new steps to counter fake news on the platform on Saturday, marking a departure from his skepticism that online misinformation is, as Barack Obama said this week, a threat to democratic institutions.
“We take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Saturday. “We know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.”
Zuckerberg said that the company has “relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not”, citing a tool to report false links and shared material from fact-checking sites. “Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize [misinformation] in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread,” he wrote.
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Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will develop “stronger detection” for fake news
In a post late Friday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a bevy of new initiatives to crack down on fake or misleading news. Facebook has faced intense criticism in the wake of the November 9th election, primarily from left-leaning critics arguing that huge volumes of false news spread on the site influenced the electorate, perhaps contributing to Donald Trump’s victory.
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I’ve long suspected that Mark Zuckerberg, who often refers to himself as the “leader” of Facebook, has dreams of high office.
This week, a taster of what that might be like has been knocking at his door in the wake of the US election result.
While Donald Trump’s visit to the White House was an apparently sobering experience about the level of responsibility he’d soon inherit, Zuckerberg has had a brutal political awakening of his own.
Facebook’s “fake news” crisis has had the normally stoic 32-year-old visibly irritated, and that’s because for the first time he is being treated like a politician, rather than just a tech CEO.
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I am a self-identified feminist, liberal, pro-immigration left-leaning alumna of City University’s journalism department.
And today, I read the news that City University’s student union – an institution renowned for its media courses – voted to ban certain right-wing newspapers with frustration and dismay.
Let me say right off the bat – when those students argue that papers like the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Sun demonise refugees and minorities, or fan a frenzy of Islamophobia, or are “inherently sexist”, I agree.
But because I believe this, I take those papers very, very seriously. I would advise all other City journalists in the making to do the same.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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This week a law was passed that silently rips privacy from the modern world. It’s called the Investigatory Powers Act.
Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the British state has achieved totalitarian-style surveillance powers – the most intrusive system of any democracy in history. It now has the ability to indiscriminately hack, intercept, record, and monitor the communications and internet use of the entire population.
The hundreds of chilling mass surveillance programmes revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 were – we assumed – the result of a failure of the democratic process. Snowden’s bravery finally gave Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise this industrial-scale spying and bring the state back into check.
But, in an environment of devastatingly poor political opposition, the Government has actually extended state spying powers beyond those exposed by Snowden – setting a “world-leading” precedent.
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A top law enforcement official wants to turn back the clock on iPhone security.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple’s encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant.
“Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement,” Vance said on Thursday. “Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside.”
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Most Canadians feel strongly about their right to privacy online, but a new poll shows the vast majority are willing to grant police new powers to track suspects in the digital realm — so long as the courts oversee the cops.
Nearly half of the respondents to an Abacus Data survey of 2,500 Canadians agreed that citizens should have a right to complete digital privacy. But many appeared to change their mind when asked if an individual suspected of committing a serious crime should have the same right to keep their identity hidden from police.
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The heads of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have recommended to President Barack Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, be removed from his position, sources familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
The recommendation by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, first reported by The Washington Post, was delivered to the White House last month.
[...]
U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a Republican, said later on Saturday he had written to Carter and Clapper asking them to testify to the committee about the matter.
The Obama administration wants to split leadership at the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, arguing that the job of leading two agencies with differing missions is too much for one person.
But some members of Congress, led by Republican Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, oppose that plan, saying that Cyber Command needs access to the NSA’s resources to do its job effectively.
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A potential structural change to the US surveillance apparatus has thrown the tenure of the National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, into doubt and increased the likelihood that Donald Trump will have a chance to substantially reshape the US intelligence agencies.
Even before Trump’s presidential victory, which Rogers last week said followed efforts by “a nation-state” to influence the electoral outcome, US intelligence was roiled by FBI director James Comey’s unprecedented interference in the election. US intelligence is experiencing internal turmoil just as Trump is placing hardliners in key national security roles.
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U.S. National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers is the leading candidate to become President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter.
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The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.
Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.
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Thousands have protested in Istanbul in Turkey against a bill that would let off men who assaulted underage girls if they marry their victims.
The government insists the legislation is aimed at dealing with the widespread custom of child marriage, but critics say that it will legitimise child rape.
Protesters clapped and chanted: “We will not shut up. We will not obey. Withdraw the bill immediately!”
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A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs.
The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim.
Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.
Violence against women in Turkey has increased in the past decade – 40% of women report sexual or physical abuse.
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Turkey’s ruling AK Party has been widely condemned for a proposal that would, critics say, legalise rape in some cases.
The suggested law would see people who have been convicted on charges of sexual abuse against girls have their sentences indefinitely postponed if they agree to marry the victim.
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A disabled vet with PTSD accidentally called a suicide prevention hotline when intending to dial the Veterans Crisis Line. Within hours, he was dealing with DC Metro’s finest, dispatched to handle an attempted suicide. This brief quote from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals opinion [PDF] — part of veteran Matthew Corrigan’s first conversation with responding officers — sets the tone for the next several hours of Constitutional violations.
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A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.
The Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.
The security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a single substantial concession to the privacy lobby.
US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
Snowden in 2013 revealed the scale of mass surveillance – or bulk data collection as the security agencies prefer to describe it – by the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ, which work in tandem.
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Ms Stirling added that she personally would not report a rape in the UAE, saying: “There’s so much manipulation when it comes to criminal accusations over there – I wouldn’t report a rape there if I were raped myself.”
After posting an online appeal for help, the woman’s mother wrote: “Please help my daughter. She was raped while on holiday. She reported this to the police and now she is being held on the grounds of sexual activity outside marriage.
“We are not a rich family and cannot afford to pay for the defense she so desperately needs. I am going out of my mind with worry.”
A Foreign Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said: “We are supporting a British woman in relation to this case and will remain in contact with her family.”
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Travellers from Finland heading to the US via Stockholm may experience delays in the future owing to a new agreement between Sweden and US that will see US Customs and Border Protection pre-clearance operations at Arlanda Airport. As for Finnish airport authority Finavia, it says that after previewing pre-clearance formalities, it’s not keen on introducing the system at Helsinki Airport.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Four years ago the FBI took down several pirate Android app ‘stores’ and later arrested several people connected to the sites. This week one of the SnappzMarket operators, Joshua Taylor, was found guilty. During a bench trial, Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr. convicted Taylor for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. .
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Rightscorp’s dream of turning piracy into profit continues to be a nightmare. In its latest quarterly filing the anti-piracy outfit reports revenue down 35% over the same period last year, alongside a loss of $385,433. Year to date, the company has lost almost $1.4m and only has enough money to last until December.
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11.19.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Belatedly (after a lot of unjust suffering and half a dozen suicides), having taken a closer look at some of the latest terrible policies from Battistelli and his goons, the press along with politicians and bloggers chastise the EPO and call for immediate remedial action
THE EPO is rotting and along with it the reputation and demand for its services. Will the European economy be so thoroughly damaged by it? Unless Battistelli and fellow thugs of his are removed, everyone will suffer, not just patent examiners but also attorneys, applicants, grantees, large European corporations and of course the European public. We need to sort out this mess before it’s too late!
Yesterday we mentioned beer ingredient patents and New Europe now has this new article about it. To quote:
NGOs urge Carlsberg to rethink beer ingredient patents
The European Patent Office in Munich and the Carlsberg company were criticised on November 17 in an open letter by campaigners opposed to the patenting of plants and animals.
No Patents on Seeds, an alliance including Greenpeace, the Catholic charity Misereor, and globally networked small-scale farmers, called on the Danish brewer to voluntarily relinquish three patents it received earlier this year from the European Patent Office.
As reported by Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, documents published by the EPO also list Heineken of the Netherlands as a patent proprietor.
On several occasions last week, including last night, we wrote about growing concerns in Dutch Parliament. Remember that the latest staff representative to be sacked by Battistelli was a Frenchman working at The Hague. According to what’s typically a very pro-EPO (and pro-UPC) blog, there is a “debate in Dutch Parliament about deteriorating social climate at European Patent Office” and here is a fragment from this very long blog post:
MP Sharon Gesthuizen of the socialist SP received support for her request from a majority of the MPs earlier this week. They have asked Secretary of Economic Affairs Martijn van Dam for a government letter on the developments at the EPO, which has one of its main offices in The Hague.
John Kerstens of the social democrat PvdA, who gave a speech last month during a demonstration of 350 EPO workers in The Hague, stated they deserve ‘attention for the reign of terror – this is how I call it – at the EPO.’ Esther Ouwehand of the Animal Party said she is very concerned and wants to know how the EPO can be brought under democratic control, despite the legal immunity the institution has according to the Dutch government.
The dismissal of SUEPO secretary Laurent Prunier, also a member of the EPO’s Central Staff Committee, was the latest development in years of turmoil, protests and conflicts between EPO employees and the authoritarian president Benoit Battistelli, who is accused of creating a climate of fear, putting workers under intolerable pressure and ignoring the organization’s own rules.
In reaction to a critical article on the IAM blog about the dismissal of the union leader, Battistelli explained in a letter that Prunier had been harassing an EPO colleague. In an ensuing letter of Prunier, he denied the allegations and asked for transparency: ‘The easiest solution for the public to assess the truth vs. story-telling is for Mr Battistelli to lift the confidentiality he imposes on me and I will gladly publish all the documents.’
What’s noteworthy here is not just the news from the Parliament but also the fact that pro-EPO blogs are quickly turning against Battistelli. Even IAM is showing more and more signs of dissent. And remember IP Kat? The blog which used to be critical of the EPO until the EPO threatened it with sanctions? Well, Merpel is back and she has very detailed reports about the Boards of Appeal of the EPO. The latest report from her is a multi-part series on the EPO’s “house ban”, issued under Battistelli’s orders (his massive ego is even bigger than the EPC!). To quote some key parts from this good article:
Remember the House Ban? How two years flies past
[...]
It is almost two years since Mr Battistelli illegally suspended a member of the BoA, confiscated the computer belonging to the Board member, and imposed a “house ban” to prevent access to the premises of the EPO. As readers of the blog will know, the Administrative Council subsequently tried to regularise the suspension, and suspended the member on full salary until March 31, 2015 (yes, more than 18 months ago, it’s not a typo).
Three attempts have been made, all spectacularly unsuccessful, to petition the Enlarged Board of Appeal to remove the member from office. Along the way, Mr Battistelli forcefully told the AC that it should ignore the rule of law and the Enlarged Board, told the Enlarged Board he would refuse to authorise any witnesses to attend its hearings, and demanded the Enlarged Board to provide an assurance that it would neither hear the case in public nor call any EPO witnesses. All of which was rather presumptuous on his part when he was not even a party to the Enlarged Board proceedings (despite which it was EPO employees presenting the case on behalf of the Administrative Council, not independent lawyers appointed by the AC).
[...]
The Enlarged Board has issued three decisions in the House Ban proceedings. In each of these decisions, the Board has ordered the European Patent Office to publish the decision, but the Office has flagrantly ignored those binding orders.
In the third such decision, the Enlarged Board noted that the Office had failed to comply with both of its previous orders, repeated that the earlier decisions should be published and made a formal order to publish the third decision as well. And … nothing happened. The Official Journal continues to be published on schedule with such important matters as the accession of Djibouti to the PCT, but curiously omitting the mandatory publication of these fundamentally important decisions on judicial independence and the relationship between the Boards, the AC and the President.
[...]
For the AC’s credibility to be restored at this very late stage, certain actions seem to be required.
1. The Board Member at the centre of the House Ban affair should be reinstated without further delay. The legal path has been followed and its outcome is clear. Suspension for an extended period at the insistence of management is incompatible with the requirement of judicial independence.
2. A clear signal should be given in the minutes of the next AC meeting that the actions of Mr Battistelli vis-a-vis the Enlarged Board are unacceptable, in terms of his instruction to the AC to ignore the Enlarged Board, and the actions which the Enlarged Board interpreted as threats to its operation and independence.
3. It should instruct Mr Battistelli to reinstate the recently dismissed Mr Prunier – after all, that was the standing instruction which he ignored by continuing to pursue and target the union leadership.
4. It should order that the next edition of the EPO Official Journal contains the approved texts for publication of the three “Article 23″ Enlarged Board decisions. If Mr Battistelli can’t find them for the publishers, the ever-helpful Merpel reminds all involved that they can be found here: No. 1, No. 2 and No 3.
“Please don’t forget the reinstatement of Liz Hardon and Ion Brumme and of course Malika Weaver (after degradation),” one person added in relation to action 3 and “under Action 3,” added another person, “please do not forget Aurélien Pétiaud, Michael Lund both unfairly downgraded for having done their job as staff representatives in the Internal Committee and Laurent Prunier having just been fired who dared to take courageous positions in front of Battistelli at several occasions on several highly sensitive files (eg. New Main building worth 250 Mio EUR; suicides at the workplace etc.)”
“The President of the EPO wants to move the Boards of Appeal to Haar,” Merpel noted in a followup (part 2). We believe that Battistelli plans to ultimately deprecate them, under the assumption that UPC can someone be made a reality (he gave false predictions and timeframe estimates time after time). To quote Merpel:
The President of the EPO wants to move the Boards of Appeal to Haar. “Where?” Merpel hears you ask. Precisely. Haar is a municipality on the outskirts of Munich, most famous (not that it is famous at all) for housing the largest mental hospital in Germany. Is this just a sick joke on the part of M Battistelli? Because there is nothing else that could justify this – excuse Merpel – insane idea, which is to the detriment of applicants and patentees, opponents, professional representatives, and the Board of Appeal members themselves.
The official justification for the move is to increase the perception of independence of the Boards of Appeal. But in the consultation of users carried out by the EPO itself, the geographical location of the Boards was overwhelmingly not considered an important factor to their independence. An earlier proposal to move the Boards to another city or country completely (which would have destroyed the Boards as we know them) has thankfully been dropped.
The idea put forward that members of the Boards of Appeal might be influenced in their decisions by the possibility that they might encounter in the canteen an examiner disgruntled because they have been over-ruled is ludicrous in principle, and not borne out by the actual experience of the EPO over the last four decades, even when first instance examiners worked in the same building as the Boards of Appeal. They no longer do. First instance divisions are located in other buildings in Munich, or in The Hague, or in Berlin. The person who does however share the Isar building with the Boards of Appeal is, of course, the President of the EPO, and Merpel gets the impression that he wants those pesky Board members as far away from his domain as possible.
Some new information emerges also in the many (and growing number of) anonymous comments there, but we shall get around to highlighting some of them in the next few days, depending on relevance to the latest developments. Susan Pickin has told me and told the EPO that “We could have them [the boards] in the UK [...] UK could offer to have them here…”
Heck, how about opening a whole branch of the EPO here in the UK and actually ensure that staff enjoys human rights? As a reminder, the EPO has been highly discriminatory against British workers as of late. And later it wonders why the UK won’t ratify the UPC? █
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Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Shutting their ears when they lose the argument
Summary: Although patent lawyers want us to believe that software patents are just fine (citing cases fewer than the fingers of one hand), the reality is rather grim for them and we explain why
SOFTWARE patents are a dying breed of patents (or patent family) in the United States. They might still be enjoying somewhat of a legacy or inertia (until expiry), but there’s not much of a future for them as long as Alice is upheld by SCOTUS (hopefully — and there’s absolutely no guarantee here — Trump’s Conservative Justices won’t reverse/override this decision/precedent).
“Over the past week we saw the predators bemoaning the state of software patents in the US.”FOSS-centric companies don't bother with such patents or simply give up on any prospect of lawsuits (defensive/retaliatory purposes only). This new article asks in its headline, “Is a Blockchain Patent Still Possible?”
Even if such a patent was granted, in the area/domain of financial software patents there’s probably the worst success rate (in the courts). Some estimate the success rate to be 10% or lower. “But regardless of whether a viable bitcoin patent exists,” says the article, “both Nakamoto’s 2008 article describing the bitcoin system and the bitcoin network in operation since 2009 qualify as “prior art” against any new attempt to patent a blockchain system.”
In simple terms, prior art in the Internet and especially post-World Wide Web era (1990s onwards) makes it hard to defend software patents, even if they have been granted in error by the USPTO.
“Imagine the reaction if accountants openly advertised methods for dodging/evading tax. Imagine if they did so on their own Web sites…”Over the past week we saw the predators bemoaning the state of software patents in the US. Haynes and Boone LLP bemoaned the scarcity of “Patent-Eligible Software Claims” (post-Alice) and later noted that such patents can barely withstand courts’ scrutiny. Just watch Haynes and Boone LLP moaning and sobbing because the US hardly tolerates software patents these days. They’re partly in denial over it and they latch onto few exceptional cases to make it seem as though things might be improving (cherry-picking tactics that piggyback particular Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit cases).
Other such dishonest firms are openly trying to work out new ways by which to patent software, even when software patents are semi-officially not acceptable. Who are these people kidding? Courts of the highest level repeatedly say “no” to software patents, but Watchtroll tries to tell people how to fool the courts and get software patents anyway. How very typical from him.
“Where are the real journalists and why are news feeds dominated by pure marketing, composed by those who try to attract business by misleading claims (bias by omission)?”Imagine the reaction if accountants openly advertised methods for dodging/evading tax. Imagine if they did so on their own Web sites…
Another law firm was pushing the software patents agenda a few days ago. Rather than be frank with clients and acknowledge that Alice made such patents not worth pursuing they just add question marks (twice in the headline alone) and then name-drop the aforementioned cherry-picked CAFC cases.
Here we have another example of a patent law firm spreading this spin about software patents, again by cherry-picking CAFC decisions to suit their agenda.
Where are the real journalists and why are news feeds dominated by pure marketing, composed by those who try to attract business by misleading claims (bias by omission)? What ever happened to investigative reporting and well-funded newspapers? It’s all PR now.
Taking old decisions that somehow suit their narrative, patent law firms tried to tell us software patents were fine also (another example here). They suggested ways of ‘tricking’ CAFC. Here is another new example of that, courtesy of Husch Blackwell LLP.
“They only keep track of (or a record of) the “wins” and none of the defeats, in order to construct a false, misleading picture, then present that to clients under the guise of “advice” or even “news”.”When will we see an equal (or greater) number of articles that were not actually written by those who try to sell something? Imagine what war journalism would look like if 90% of it was composed directly by companies that sell arms…
Based on what we have been able to gather, all the latest cases yielded nothing but bad news for software patents. “US Pat 9,083,997,” said one attorney the other say, was “Killed by Twitter @ Dist. Ct w/Alice/101″ and Versata’s software patents came under scrutiny from Ford, as the following good news site put it:
Ford Motor Co. returned to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board on Friday to challenge three Versata software patents involved in a trade secrets and infringement case, just over a month after the board declined the auto maker’s request that the PTAB institute America Invents Act reviews.
In separate petitions, Ford argued various claims in the Versata Development Group Inc. patents are invalid because they are obvious. The patents cover automotive configuration manager software that Versata has accused Ford of stealing.
As we noted in our previous post, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board is the most prolific eliminator of software patents. As for Versata, we wrote dozens of articles about it in past years. We predict that its patents are now on the chopping block, but don’t expect patent law firms to pay attention to any of this. They only keep track of (or a record of) the “wins” and none of the defeats, in order to construct a false, misleading picture, then present that to clients under the guise of “advice” or even “news”. █
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Posted in America, Patents at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent trolls and the meta-industry which creates nothing but lawsuits is growingly afraid of boards that ascertain patent quality at the USPTO
THE Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is probably AIA’s best outcome. It helps eliminate software patents by the thousands, i.e. a lot more rapidly than courts do, and it erodes confidence in software patents — enough to discourage some new patent applications and even more so patent lawsuits (these have become too risky for the plaintiff).
As one might expect, the patent ‘industry’ (mostly patent law firms) is up in arms and some resorted to insulting PTAB. Others complained to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), but it didn’t get them anywhere. CAFC has done nothing to stop or even slow down PTAB.
“CAFC has done nothing to stop or even slow down PTAB.”Here we have one of the more strident patent maximalists’ sites moaning to CAFC about PTAB, for PTAB is throwing away bad patents without giving assignees the benefit of the doubt. To quote the author: “The Federal Circuit remanded a final written decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB” or “Board”) because the Board invalidated certain claims in a patent without providing adequate notice or opportunity to the patentee to respond to an assertion about a prior art reference. Interestingly, in the In re NuVasive, Inc. opinion decided on November 9, 2016, the Federal Circuit reviewed the outcome of two IPR proceedings related to the same patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,187,334, directed to implants for spinal fusion surgery.”
Another one of those sites (albeit a lot more polite and usually professional/academic) wrote about PTAB and also about “non-reviewable decisions”, i.e. decisions without proper oversight:
Arbitrator as Arbitrary: Non-reviewable decisions (whether by the USPTO or by an arbitrator) are generally troubling because they create the potential for arbitrary awards that depart from both the law and facts.
The case was originally denied hearing by the Texas Supreme Court. On rehearing request, the Court has showed some interest by requesting further briefing from Jenner & Block and two amicus filings have supported the petition. Because it is a Federal Law (the FAA) that has prevented judicial review thus far, the case will be appealable directly to the U.S. Supreme Court once Texas gives its final word.
The US granted literally hundreds of thousands of software patents in just over a decade. In order to clean up this mess, which is basically a big chunk of invalid patents (clogging up the system), something like PTAB is not only useful but also necessary if not imperative. The reaction to PTAB from patent maximalists has been rather revealing. They just want more and more patents on just about everything someone does or thinks. It’s them who are the radicals or extremists, not reformers who remind them — as we habitually do — that the patent system was originally created to give incentive for publication and disseminate knowledge (or increase overall innovation), not to feed a newly-created collective of parasites who assume that more than 10 million patents should be filed and most patent applications be accepted by the examiners (and later by nontechnical judges).
The US is still floating in a swamp of bad patents and a popular phrase in the US right now is, “drain the swamp!” █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I’ve heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons “royalty payments”…”
–Matt Asay, April 21st, 2008
Summary: In order to maintain the order of “Linux patent tax” Microsoft and its proxies (patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures) keep pursuing patent policy that is friendly towards software patenting
A FEW days ago we became aware of the Microsoft-friendly IAM with its latest/upcoming event (as usual, with patent maximalists as sponsors). It is an IAM event, so basically IAM agenda, including software patents promotion. They are hoping to shape patent policy (see “Programme”) and as Benjamin Henrion put it, it is “Microsoft and others writing swpat [software patents] law: “Key topics for legislators to consider: a solution for 101 uncertainty”…”
“As a reminder, earlier this year software patents from Intellectual Ventures were aimed at Linux devices (in the courtroom) and recently a failed case of Intellectual Ventures led to the potential death of all software patents in the US.”Longtime readers of ours probably don’t need to be convinced that Microsoft is still an enemy of GNU/Linux, at the very least by virtue of promoting software patents (there’s a lot more than that). Sites like Phoronix may have fallen in line with the “LOVES LINUX” nonsense (a PR campaign), but judging by the company’s actions — not mere words — it is still a vicious opponent that cannot be trusted.
The largest patent troll of Microsoft (which attacks Linux with software patents) still fights for software patents. Yes, Intellectual Ventures is just one among many Microsoft-connected trolls that prey on Linux. Here is one new report about it: “Earlier this week, Intellectual Ventures (IV) petitioned the full Federal Circuit to review the panel opinion inIntellectual Ventures v. Symantec, which invalidated two of its patents under section 101. Both patents—the ’050 and the ’610—are directed to filtering email or file content. (IV does not challenge the invalidation of a third patent, which was directed to receiving, screening, and distributing email.) The petition echoes concerns raised by clients, courts, and the patent bar about the growing uncertainty about what is—and what is not—patent eligible, especially in the area of software patents. Identifying two emerging fault lines in the court’s evolving section 101 jurisprudence, IV urges the full court to bring much needed doctrinal clarity and methodological consistency to the patent eligibility analysis.”
This was also covered in another report (partly behind paywall) which says “Intellectual Ventures asked the full Federal Circuit on Tuesday to review a panel decision that invalidated two of its patents on detecting spam and viruses for claiming only abstract ideas, saying the ruling “directly conflicts” with other decisions on patent-eligibility.”
“It would be nice if we did not have to mention Microsoft at all, but it just keeps interfering with (and trying to undermine) Free software, so it’s impossible to ignore this company.”As a reminder, earlier this year software patents from Intellectual Ventures were aimed at Linux devices (in the courtroom) and recently a failed case of Intellectual Ventures led to the potential death of all software patents in the US. It’s clear that Intellectual Ventures intends to keep fighting that decision. It wants to keep extorting all sorts of companies, extracting patent payments (settlements from them). Intellectual Ventures is closely connected not just to Microsoft but to Bill Gates personally.
IAM’s apologists of trolls had the cheekiness to say the other day that “as you know, a lot of infringement goes uncontested because of the cost of litigating in the US.”
That’s nonsense. “A lot of patent bullying goes unchallenged (‘protection money’ paid) because of the cost of litigation everywhere,” I told them and “seen it personally,” added the former lawyer of Samba, Carlo Piana. As Benjamin Henrion (FFII) put it, “politicians don’t care about small companies.”
“I thought big companies were the targets of litigation,” said Jamie Love (Knowledge Ecology International, or KEI for short), probably joking about this myth.
The matter of fact is, Microsoft and its patent trolls continue to lobby pretty hard for software patents, yet the Linux Foundation somehow found it appropriate to join Microsoft and help Microsoft spread its lies (e.g. that .NET is open even though it’s not and SQL Server comes to GNU/Linux even though technically it will run on top of a Windows kernel, which in turn sits on GNU/Linux).
I had a lot more to say about the Linux Foundation joining Microsoft (yes, it certainly feels like the suitable way to put it), but I wrote it succinctly in Diaspora* and other such sites as I wish to focus all energy and time on the patent systems, not on Microsoft specifically. It would be nice if we did not have to mention Microsoft at all, but it just keeps interfering with (and trying to undermine) Free software, so it’s impossible to ignore this company. █
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Posted in America, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 2:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Michelle Lee (below on the left) wanted patent reform, but Donald Trump will quite likely crush it
Summary: Another signal that whatever progress was made at the USPTO (tightening patent scope among other improvements) could soon be crushed by a Republican administration
THE US patent, copyright, trademark etc. system is likely to change under the new President. He has some rather notorious experience trying to tilt the trade marks system to his own advantage, being a reckless billionaire who was born very rich and privileged. Protectionism (perpetuating might, power, and money) comes naturally for Trump.
An opportunity to advise the USPTO is reportedly being given, but megacorporations and their lobbyists (and/or lawyers) will surely dominate the proposals and ensure that virtually nothing changes for the better.
“Protectionism (perpetuating might, power, and money) comes naturally for Trump.”As expected, the new President will herald an era for billionaires (like Donald Trump) and their copyright/trademark/patent monopolies. IAM thinks that patent reform will be put on hold. Here is why: “In her keynote speech USPTO Director Michelle Lee predicted that once patent reform did come back on the agenda it would be more targeted than previous, more comprehensive proposals.”
According to this article from IP Watch: “Now in her final weeks in office, United States Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee today looked back over the Obama administration’s work on patents and made predictions for the next administration due to take over in January. She hailed the outgoing administration’s successes and said to expect a continued focus on a strong IP system, legislative changes on hot button issues but not right away, and continued engagement around the world.”
Here is what Wall Street’s media said: “President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Patent and Trademark Office will likely be very different from Director Michelle K. Lee, who was Google’s top patent attorney before heading the PTO.”
“Under Kappos’ leadership the USPTO granted terrible patents and led to a mess that only in recent years (post Alice, Mayo and AIA) started to improve a bit.”Whoever is picked next, it hopefully won’t be yet another corporate lobbyist turncoat like David Kappos. Under Kappos’ leadership the USPTO granted terrible patents and led to a mess that only the recent years (post Alice, Mayo and AIA) started to improve a bit.
Found via Patently-O prior to all the above was this publication from the USPTO itself (directy).
MIP is meanwhile chatting with the commissioner for trademarks at USPTO. It doesn’t seem like she too will be removed from her position. █
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