10.30.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Popular British paper covers the EPO scandals and focuses on revelations from Techrights
FOR THOSE who are not British, Private Eye, to quote Wikipedia, “has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deems guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency, corruption, pomposity or self-importance and it has established itself as a thorn in the side of the British establishment.” It has a circulation of 228,264 people.
We were gratified to have found out that Private Eye, like Belgian TV for instance (also very mainstream, not some niche audience like a publication for technical readers or lawyers), decided to write about EPO abuses. It’s not very often that we find articles about these abuses in English, partly because EPO is centered around Holland and Germany (where the languages are different and rarely understood by British journalists).
“I’m not sure if you’ve seen this,” wrote a reader to us, “but Private Eye did a write up of the EPO showing favouritism to Microsoft in its latest issue.”
“A bit of a surprising neutral tone from the Eye and the opening line says they “are to be offered preferential treatment”. They already have been since April!”
Here is a camera copy of the article.
We have manually put that into textual form, as follows:
Patently Odious
A HANDFUL of global firms are to be offered preferential treatment by the European Patent Office (EPO) in an effort to improve the “epirit de service” on offer, according to leaked documents reported in German media.
Several of the big technology players have filed complaints against the EPO due to a backlog of hundreds of delayed applications at the office. Microsoft alone has around 600 separate applications in the pipeline and is one of the companies listed to be fast-tracked in the new pilot scheme as the EPO tries to repair its reputation with major applicants.
The EPO is run by the European Patent Organisation, an entity separate to the EU that has a wider membership including Turkey and Switzerland as well as the EU countries. The UK has been a member since 1977. the other companies being offered VIP treatment include Canon, Siemens, Fujitsu, BASF, Bayer, Ericsson, Qualcomm and Philips. The leaked documents suggest that Samsung and Huawei could join them, with other large firms being added if the pilot is successful. Thus Europe’s patent officers will be putting US or Far Eastern firms ahead of many European firms when dealing with patents.
Meanwhile, the EPO is in dispute with its own staff over various issues, including the hiring of British snooping firm Global Risk Consultants to investigate allegations of internal bullying and intimidation. There have been protests at the organisation’s offices in Munich and The Hague.
We are not sure what they mean by “Global Risk Consultants”, perhaps just another name for CRG or some kind of sub-division (or maybe an editorial error). It is described as a “British snooping firm”, which isn’t the description CRG publicly gives of itself, for obvious reasons. We wrote about CRG in some articles including the ones below. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![Siegfried Broß](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Siegfried-Bross.png)
Image courtesy: campact.de
Summary: Siegfried Broß explains why the discrediting allegations against the accused judge (a hard-working technical person) are just totally unacceptable
SUEPO has just shared this article from the Germany media. We are looking for someone who can provide an accurate translation of it. For now, however, we only have a partial translation, as published in SUEPO’s public pages. SUEPO says that it is an “interview with Siegfried Broß, a former judge of the German Constitutional Court, who considers that the European Patent Organisation suffers from structural deficiencies requiring a conference of the Ministers of its member states.” That’s an understatement; there are vastly bigger issues than structural deficiencies.
“The Unitary Patent is anything but necessary, yet the EPO actively promotes this because it’s an opportunity for more money and power. At whose expense?”SUEPO added the following excerpts from the article: “The disciplinary procedure against a member of the Boards of Appeal is unconstitutional [...] it does not respect presumption of innocence and [...] was initiated by the President of the EPO [...] The publication of discrediting allegations against the accused are totally unacceptable. [...] The Enlarged Boards of Appeal should refuse the request from the Administrative Council and stop the procedure in order to denounce the fundamental abuse. [...] An organisational separation of the Boards of Appeal from the management of the EPO should be seriously considered by the Administrative Council as it is necessary for the Unitary Patent.”
The Unitary Patent is anything but necessary, yet the EPO actively promotes this because it’s its opportunity for more money and power. At whose expense? It’s like like a continental ‘trade’ agreement, akin to TPP. It’s an organised passage of wealth from the already-impoverished (or small businesses) to few conglomerates and billionaires who tyrannically run them. By extension, in due course, this extends to foreign wealth holders and corporations. The Unitary Patent helps nobody except some bureaucrats, multi-national (or very large) corporations, and their lawyers. What’s in it for the public? Virtually nothing.
Not only SUEPO noticed the article above. One source sent us this very same interview with the former German Constitutional Court judge, quoting: “AC and Battistelli activities have no legal basis” (probably a direct quote/translation).
“You might be interested in this interview,” wrote the source, “with the former judge at the German Constitutional Court, Prof. Broß, on the EPO disciplinary case against the DG3 judge and the apparent lack of judicial independence, published yesterday on the website of the German legal magazine “Juve“.”
What we are hoping for right now is a full translation for future reference.
“So Benoît, who has been engaged in a “campaign of defamation”?”If someone could kindly provided us with a decent and complete translation promptly enough (it can be posted below in the comments section), that would be lovely. It helps reinforce what we already know — that what Benoît Battistelli does (potentially defaming board members he doesn't like, in cooperation with the media) is not just an embarrassment to the already-abusive EPO but also legally improper.
So Benoît, who has been engaged in a “campaign of defamation”? Team Battistelli, even complemented by new and professional PR placements, is going to have a difficult weekend, with even the International Labour Organisation on its tail. Historically, it has not been atypical for the criminal to accuse the accuser of being “criminal”. It’s projection and it’s the most desperate defence tactic. Team Battistelli should seriously consider stepping down (Battistelli reportedly threatened to resign), not continue this war that they simply can’t win. The longer this goes on, the more talented people this organisation will permanently lose. And that’s just bad for Europe in general. █
“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference”
–Bess Myerson
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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After 10 years of development, Melbourne open source company Cyber IT now has a fully mature prisoner interactive learning solution that is in use by four correctional institutions in the country.
Cyber IT chief executive Con Zymaris told iTWire that while the take-up so far had been only by public institutions, his company was speaking to private operators of prisons as well.
“But given the complex nature of each system, it will take at least three years to meet individual needs,” he said.
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Nonprofit Technology Resources wants to save a pile of laptops from the scrapyard.
The digital access nonprofit is leaving its headquarters near the Community College of Philadelphia because it’s too big for their needs, and they can’t bring all the hundreds of donated laptops they’ve collected over the years, said president Ed Cummings, who also goes by “bernieS” in hacker circles. So the group is having a “Linux Laptop Pizza Party,” where they’ll be selling the laptops for as cheap as $20 and helping people install Linux on them. NTR is also looking for volunteers to help get laptops ready to use and donate.
“Lots of Linux hackers will be on hand to answer questions and help participants choose an older laptop and a Linux distro that will run well on it,” Cummings wrote in an email.
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Desktop
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Buying a laptop can be a confusing affair. Of course you want something powerful, but looks matter too. In other words, the entire experience makes a difference; consumers want the entire package to be well-thought out in both design and execution.
System76 now has such a laptop; the all-new Ubuntu-powered Oryx Pro is absolutely gorgeous, featuring a black aluminum chassis. Inside, however, is is equally beautiful, with Skylake processors (Core i7 only), DDR4 memory and NVIDIA graphics by default. You can even opt for a cutting-edge G-SYNC display. Yes, keeping true to its Oryx name (a type of antelope) this laptop is a Linux beast!
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Xiaomi is best known for selling iPhone clones in the Chinese market. But now the company is getting ready to sell two models of Linux laptops.
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Xiaomi likes to dabble in pretty much anything tech-related. This China-based smartphone OEM has released a number of interesting gadgets this year, and quite a few smartphones as well. That being said, rumors have been saying that the company is getting ready to announce a laptop for quite some time now, and Inventec has basically confirmed that fact recently. The company has said that the first Xiaomi-branded laptop will arrive early next year, which, of course, meant that we’ll see a ton more rumors along the way.
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Google’s Chromebook Pixel is the ultimate Chromebook. It’s easily the most powerful, capable, and beautiful Chromebook. But at $999, it’s also an impractical product. Even if you’ve got the cash to burn, spending so much on a laptop that lives and dies by the web browser is a hard sell. I’ve got great news, though: other Chromebook makers are starting to approach the Pixel’s premium feel, and they’re doing it for way less money.
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Just days after Google added “Chell” to Coreboot as the new mainboard for some forthcoming Skylake-powered Chrome OS device, Google engineers have added another new Skylake product.
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System76, the American hardware manufacturer known for delivering the coolest and most powerful Ubuntu computers, is proud to announce the availability for a new laptop, called Oryx Pro.
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Server
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With last year’s September release of Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux, Oracle determined that only one release of a singular product was necessary, because updates every three months can be overwhelming for the market. Oracle recently announced the Kilo release, and OpenStack 2 will be based on Kilo. Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and visualization at Oracle, divulged that OpenStack 2 will also be released as a Docker container for ease of access.
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With vulnerabilities like last year’s Heartbleed and more recently VENOM, software that runs the modern Internet and cloud systems has never been more at risk and less secure. Many assume that to keep a system as secure as possible, you must eliminate any entry for an attacker. However, this is simply not the case. The key here is that IT teams really need to determine the probability that an attacker knows of an exploitable vulnerability.
Let’s examine this idea a little more closely through understanding the nature of risk as it relates to virtual and cloud environments. Once we have this framework, we’ll dive into putting this philosophy into practice.
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Kernel Space
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Renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed earlier the fact that the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel branch would be an LTS (Long-Term Support) one, maintained for a couple of years.
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I did my bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering, and embedded systems interested me a lot. Linux runs on millions of embedded devices and is a huge collaborative project — thanks to Linus Torvalds and the Linux community. I started following Linux in my college days.
When I actually started working on the Linux kernel, I saw some memory leaks in kernel code and observed that every contributor has a voice in the open source community. Therefore, I started sending small patches on LKML. I got great support from maintainers and, because of that, my interest was boosted.
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If you’ve ever wondered what a World Without Linux would mean to you, you know it’s a ridiculous notion. That’s what the current World Without Linux video series attempts to illustrate in a fun and entertaining way that also gives gratitude to the thousands of developers and companies that support the operating system.
Included in the series are hidden easter eggs that require some level of Linux expertise to identify; though, if you’re a newbie, the clues and easter eggs are done in such a way that you can also surface the answers, putting you in the spotlight among Linux aficionados. It’s also a chance to win fun prizes – t-shirts, tattoos, pins – but perhaps most importantly, street cred among fellow Linux history buffs.
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We’ve seen AMD already pushing open-source compiler patches for Zen and it seems they are ready to begin pushing Linux kernel changes too for their next-generation CPU architecture.
Aravind Gopalakrishnan of AMD posted two patches for Family 17h, a.k.a. Zen. The new feature patches can be found on the kernel mailing list until being mainlined. The patches are adding the CLZERO instruction so that it can be exposed via /proc/cpuinfo and adding the Scalable MCA cpuid bit.
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Applications
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Just a few moments ago, Kovid Goyal had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of Calibre 2.42 for all supported operating systems.
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Subsurface 4.5 (and Subsurface 4.5.1) just got released
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Proprietary
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Veeam’s new Backup for Linux is coming soon to deliver availability for Linux Servers in the Cloud and On Premises, and it’ll be free.
Veeam Software, the enterprise availability company, has announced Veeam Backup for Linux, a free standalone agent that delivers backup and recovery for Linux servers running in the public cloud, as well as for a few remaining physical Linux servers running on premises.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is the direct sequel to the excellent Sid Meier’s Civilization V and much more than that. We now take a closer look at the Linux version ported by Aspyr Media, along with the latest DLC, Rising Tide.
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Bundle Stars ( http://www.bundlestars.com ) has launched an all-encompassing new bundle that includes ten incredible Steam games that can played across Windows, Mac and Linux.
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The game has been through a bit of an iffy time, but hopefully all this extra time to polish it up will be worth it. I’ve seen one of the previous Batman games like this played, and it looked genuinely good to play, so I’m hopeful this will be a good one too.
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Batman: Arkham Knight was announced for SteamOS and Linux platforms a while back, with the promise of a fall release. As you would expect, that release of the game for these platforms has been delayed.
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GOG have launched a bunch of new (classic/retro) Dungeons & Dragons games, and they support Linux too which is great.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Acting like QGroupBox it allows you to hide some of the more advanced options out the way till the user expands the header revealing the rest. A common web pattern, but lacking in Qt or KF5.
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In three weeks the Plasma 5.5 freezes. So, time for a wallpaper contest. Most people love the default plasma wallpapers from Ken Vermette, but there are still some users how want to have more than one wallpaper available in plasma.
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This KDE bug is a WONTFIX, so no hope from KDE upstream.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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David King, maintainer of the GNOME Logs software, an open-source project that provides users with a graphical tool for viewing systemd journal logs, has announced the release of the first milestone towards version 3.20.
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New Releases
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The Solus Project is happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the Solus operating system.
We would like to thank all of our community members for helping make this release possible. Together we have discovered and resolved a plethora of bugs, improved software, and ensured that the user experience under Solus is better than it has ever been before.
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Now that the 0.24.0 version of the popular GParted partition editor software has been released, the time has come for various GParted-based Live CDs to integrate it and announce new stable builds.
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RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
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The guys over Solus, the independent OS that aims to change the way you think about GNU/Linux distributions, have just announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Solus 1.0 release.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Jos Poortvliet wrote at the home of the Geeko today that some major KDE updates have landed in Tumbleweed. Leap nears ever closer to release as the wiki is populated. Elsewhere, Italo Vignoli said upcoming LibreOffice 5.1 will start twice as fast as its predecessor and Hunter Banks has solved the mystery of the vanishing Linux games on Steam.
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Jos Poortvliet informs us that the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed GNU/Linux operating system has received a new snapshot that adds some of the hottest KDE technologies available to date.
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Slackware Family
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The ChangeLog.txt entry of “Thu Oct 29 20:12:14 UTC 2015” counts 448lines, and a little less than half of that number consists of updates to packages; the rest is rebuilds. A massive package recompilation occured because several core libraries got updated and Pat is quite conscientious in getting all the library dependency issues resolved properly.
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Red Hat Family
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The open source community has centralized its support for Ceph by forming an advisory board to guide the development of the popular software-defined storage platform.
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Instead of chasing venture capital dollars, companies competing around open source projects should instead take a more measured approach to earning customer dollars by selling enterprise value. It’s boring but, if Red Hat is any indication, it works.
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Red Hat Inc (RHT) Discloses Insider Transaction. James M Whitehurst , CEO & President of Red Hat Inc sold 3,930 shares on Oct 19, 2015. The Insider selling transaction was disclosed on Oct 20, 2015 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shares were sold at $77.25 per share for a total value of $303,592.50.
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Cowen and Company lowered shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from an outperform rating to a market perform rating in a research report sent to investors on Thursday morning, The Fly reports. Cowen and Company currently has $82.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock.
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Fedora
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So as we quickly approach the Fedora Workstation 23 release I been running Wayland exclusively for over a week now. Despite a few glitches it now works well enough for me to not have to switch back into the X11 session anymore.
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Fedora will be finishing up their System V to systemd unit migration in the months ahead.
When Fedora 24 is branched from Rawhide in February, any packages still relying upon System V init scripts rather than systemd unit files will be retired. Packagers who maintain packages still needing sysVinit scripts need to apply for delays now if you can’t migrate off System V before February.
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Red Hat’s Christian Schaller has written another status update concerning the state of Fedora Workstation 23 while also looking ahead to Fedora Workstation 24.
In regards to Fedora Workstation 23, Christian shares the GNOME Wayland experience is going well (he’s been running Wayland exclusively now for days), the system firmware update support is working its way out there, Google Drive support is present in GNOME’s Nautilus, ambient light sensor support is saving battery life for laptops, and XDG-APP is available in a tech preview form.
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At tonight’s Fedora 23 Final Go/No-Go meeting number two, it was decided that several proposed blockers wouldn’t delay the release, but one other issue did. Christian Schaller wrote of some of new and improved features coming in Fedora 23 and Matt Asay today said, “Red Hat is boring.” The Ubuntu 16.04 release schedule was posted and Sam Varghese reported today on Linux distribution PrisonPC.
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Debian Family
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Debian has switched to FFmpeg in testing in July but the work on the package did not stop at that point. After careful testing we can now provide official packages for Jessie users through jessie-backports. See installation instructions here. FFmpeg becoming available in jessie-backports also enabled us to provide Kodi from Debian in the same official repository.
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Derivatives
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Choosing between Ubuntu and Debian for building your business strategy depends on your using preferences regarding the platform support, level of user control, ease of use, and some other key issues.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The desktop edition of Ubuntu 15.10 now available to download and use, it was released on October 22. This update certainly has a very fresh desktop interface and excellent developer tools.
The update also comes with a preview of the combined smartphone, tablet and desktop experience that is very popular these day in the tech community. Here are some of the things that are new in Ubuntu 15.10.
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Midokura, the global innovator in software network virtualization, today announced the integration of its flagship Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) technology with Ubuntu OpenStack. Now, users can benefit from the power of an integrated cloud solution that combines industry-leading technology from Midokura with one of the most widely deployed commercial distributions of OpenStack.
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Ubuntu 15.10 has been out for a little while now, and the reviews have started to come in from various sites. But what are the critics saying about Ubuntu 15.10? Is it worth installing on your system?
I’ve included snippets from reviews from around the web below that should give you an idea of what Ubuntu 15.10 has to offer, and if it’s worth upgrading to on your Ubuntu system.
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The Ubuntu team is busy working on the OTA-8 update for mobile devices, and they are also preparing the terrain for an eventual rebase on the new Xenial Xerus.
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Remember when we told you, guys, that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, the world’s most popular free operating system, said that Snappy Ubuntu Core 16.04 LTS would support private snaps?
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Canonical has announced the first commercial endorsement of Snappy Ubuntu Core, the transactionally updated open source OS for the cloud and embedded devices. The platform will soon power network-control hardware from several vendors.
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After the short-term support release Ubuntu 15.10, the next long-term support release Ubuntu 16.04 has been opened for development. The release that is named “Xenial Xerus” has received initials packages. The final release of Ubuntu 16.04 is expected to come out in 30, April, 2016.
Ubuntu release cycle is pretty simple. There are two releases, short-term support and long-term support. The long-term support release comes after two years. LTS releases are announced with the support of five years so users can switch from one LTS to another LTS before their support of five years ends.
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The latest Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update is coming along, and some users are already testing the changes by using the RC proposed channel. The developers have also announced that they are targeting November 18 for the launch, but that hasn’t been decided just yet.
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Since PM Narendra Modi announced his Make in India initiative, a large number of smartphone companies have announced their plans to manufacture their products in the country. Joining this list is Canonical, which made its debut in India in August.
Canonical is the company behind the Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu. It launched two smartphones in India earlier this year – the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and the Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition.
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Canonical has announced that they’ll be sponsoring the upcoming TechCrunch Beijing 2015 Hackathon event that will take place next week, between November 2 and 3 in Beijing, China, held at Beijing Hi-Park.
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Flavours and Variants
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Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software, the company behind the well-known Black Lab Linux computer operating system, was happy to inform Softpedia earlier about the immediate availability for download and testing of Black Lab Linux 2015.10 RC4.
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Linux Mint was mainly developed and released by Clement Lefebvre in France in 2006. Clement is one of the software developers who are notoriously reluctant and reclusive to give interviews but at the same time, he has stressed repeatedly that he has an aim to modify Ubuntu and achieve elegance to it. Practically, that meant focusing on incorporating user feedback, ease of use, and also choosing pleasant color layouts and schemes.
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The subscription fee will give users unlimited, automatic cloud storage of their all of their Solu data. If a device is lost or broken, it’s OK, because everything is saved.
Solu runs on a Linux-based operating system called Solu OS.
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Element14 on Tuesday revealed an exclusive agreement to offer OEM customers bespoke designs based on the Raspberry Pi platform.
Raspberry Pi — which has seen success in the educational and maker fields — is targeting commercial manufacturers and the Internet of Things, signing up Premier Farnell through the latter’s element14 brand to customize its boards.
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Solu Machines will soon surpass its Kickstarter funding goal for a smartphone-like mini-PC with a Linux based, cloud oriented OS and a novel UI stack.
Kickstarter funding packages start at $388 for the Solu, which would join a fairly short list of mini-PCs with pre-installed Linux, and an even smaller group of ARM-based Linux mini-PCs. Solu is much more singular than that, however, in that it’s a battery-powered touchscreen device that can also drive a 4K display. It is not only replacing standard PC and phone paradigms with a fully cloud-based platform, but is also reinventing the user interface.
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CompuLab’s SODIMM-style “CL-SOM-iMX6UL” COM runs Linux on an i.MX6 UltraLite SoC, and offers up to 32GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and industrial temperature operation.
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Axiomtek’s fanless “CAPA848” SBC runs Linux on an Intel Bay Trail Celeron N2807 processor, and offers up to 8GB of onboard RAM and -20 to 70°C operation.
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Aaeon’s first SMARC module features quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, soldered RAM, eMMC, dual display outputs, PCIe expansion, and -40 to 80°C operation.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung Electronics is planning to merge its in-house developed operating system Tizen with its Internet of Things (IoT) platform IoTivity, looking to enhance the platform’s competitiveness, according to a Korean-language ChosunBiz report.
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Samsung, the Korean giant, has launched another Tizen powered smartphone in the Indian market. The Samsung Z3 is priced at INR 8490 and will be available in India from October in Gold, Black and Silver.
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Android
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Earlier this week, Verizon introduced what it calls the world’s first shatterproof phone with the Droid Turbo 2. What looked like a Verizon exclusive no longer is; at least outside of the U.S. where the rest of the world will get the same phone under the Moto X Force name.
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We also get a convenient rule of thumb now. iOS to Android installed base is now 1:4. So for every iPhone in use worldwide there now are 4 Android smartphones (this excluded tablets obviously where also Android leads but I don’t study such tiny markets as tablets or PCs, haha, mobile consumes all of my time in tech). Oh, if you want the ratio to include Windows? Then its 1:10:40 for every 1 Windows smartphone there are ten iPhones and for every 1 Windows smartphone owner you might find, there are 40 Android owners. Nobody makes Windows apps anymore…
Other than Android won these wars, iOS is a healthy niche market for wealthy customers, Tizen is hoping to pass Blackberry and Blackberry is switching to Android, there is one more obvious refrain for us all .Say it with me, readers: Windows Phone continues to remain dead (and Lumia unit shut-down watch is now to 18 months of life left) That the Q3 report. Tune in, in three months, for the Q4 and full year 2015 report.
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The OnePlus X is many things. It’s a 5-inch phone that feels like it should be $500, but costs only $249. It’s a device with the aesthetic quality you might expect from an established tech brand, but it’s made by a Chinese startup less than two years old. It’s also a shameless tribute to the design of older iPhones you can only buy with an invitation.
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BlackBerry is aiming to drum up more interest in its upcoming Android phone with a couple of new video ads.
Released Wednesday, the first ad is more technical as it spotlights a few of the key features in the Priv. The second one shoots for a kinder, gentler approach with a series of dreamlike images designed to convey the security built into the new phone.
The Priv represents a dramatic move for a company that once was king of the corporate smartphone market, but whose market share has dwindled to a fraction of a percent. It traditionally touted its BlackBerry software as the standard in security, but it’s now embracing Google’s Android software in an effort to give its customers wider access to apps and services.
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You probably want that shiny new Nexus 6P, and I can’t blame you — it’s an amazing phone. Just don’t think you’ll be doing any repairs on it yourself.
The teardown experts at iFixit — which previously awarded the new Nexus 5X a score of 7 out of 10 — have given the Nexus 6P a score of 2. If you’re not familiar with the scoring system, low scores are bad.
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It wasn’t too long ago that we put the major mobile operating systems head to head, but with big updates from both Google and Apple in the meantime, we think it’s worth another look at where they both stand. Is there a clear winner? Or are they barely distinguishable any more?
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Google’s two operating systems will soon be one. Chrome OS is going to be combined with Android, and the combined OS could be revealed as soon as next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that Chrome is essentially being folded into Android, because Android has emerged as the dominant operating system by quite a long stretch. Combining the two operating systems means setting up Android to run on laptops and desktop computers, which would require big changes, as well as supporting the Google Play Store. Chromebooks will reportedly receive a new name to reflect the new OS.
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The new Director of Community at GitHub, Jono Bacon, delivered a keynote at All Things Open this year titled: The new era of community. His talk was largely a call action to do better job of leading, guiding, and engaging in open source communities. Here’s how.
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The City and County of San Francisco joined Los Angeles County and Travis County, Texas, in their pursuit of open source voting systems, where the public can review the software code for evidence of ballot tampering.
The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) adopted a report titled “Study on Open Source Voting Systems” on Friday, recommending how the county can build its own in San Francisco.
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I’m rebuilding one my home server and decided to take a look at the FreedomBox project as the base for it.
The 0.6 version was recently released and I wasn’t aware of how advanced the project is already!
They have a virtualbox image ready for some quick test. It took me longer to download it than to start using it.
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Messaging is generally thought to be safer than PGP encrypted email because there aren’t emails sitting around for interested parties to decrypt at their leisure. Once a messaging session is over, the messages, if not logged, disappear.
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Greenplum Database, Pivotal’s data warehouse solution, has come full circle. Once derived from the open source PostgreSQL, Greenplum is open source once again.
Greenplum could be used to yank the rug out from under the stagnant legacy players in data warehousing and analytic RDBMSes, but Oracle, Impala, and Teradata alone aren’t the competition. Rather, cloud leaders are also at risk.
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Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!)
[...]
This isn’t necessarily intuitive for folks, I understand. But it is absolutely, vitally, necessary. Maybe, occasionally, a project is just so darn awesome that somebody happens to stumble on it via GitHub or whatever and word of mouth makes it a success – but typically, things get out into the world via consistent updates and communications to the right channels to get the word out.
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The anonymity network Tor has long been the paranoid standard for privacy online, and the Tor Browser that runs on it remains the best way to use the web while revealing the least identifying data. Now the non-profit Tor Project has officially released another piece of software that could bring that same level of privacy to instant messaging: a seamless and simple app that both encrypts the content of IMs and also makes it very difficult for an eavesdropper to identify the person sending them.
On Thursday the Tor Project launched its first beta version of Tor Messenger, its long-in-the-works, open source instant messenger client. The app, perhaps more than any other desktop instant messaging program, is designed for both simplicity and privacy by default: It integrates the “Off-the-Record” (OTR) protocol to encrypt messages and routes them over Tor just as seamlessly as the Tor Browser does for web data. It’s also compatible with the same XMPP or “Jabber” chat protocol used by millions of Facebook and Google accounts, as well as desktop clients like Adium for Mac and Pidgin for Windows. The result is that anyone can download the software and in seconds start sending messages to their pre-existing contacts that are not only strongly encrypted, but tunneled through Tor’s maze of volunteer computers around the world to hide the sender’s IP address.
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Tor Messenger is a cross-platform chat program that aims to be secure by default and sends all of its traffic over Tor. It supports a wide variety of transport networks, including Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Yahoo, and others; enables Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging automatically; and has an easy-to-use graphical user interface localized into multiple languages.
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Events
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Yesterday I conducted my presentation about “99.999% available OpenStack Cloud – A builder’s guide”. The room was full. If you could not join, you can find the slide deck on slideshare and the video is also already available online.
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LISA is an annual technical conference for IT operations professionals, organized by The USENIX Association. The first LISA was held back in 1986, and the event still has a reputation for delivering top-notch technical content and an exceptional hallway track. This year, Amy Rich (Mozilla Corporation) and Cory Lueninghoener (Los Alamos National Laboratory) co-chaired the conference.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Sets up internal platform as a service in partnership with systems integrator, NTT Data
Japanese brewer and drinks producer Kirin has built a platform as a service (Paas) using OpenStack as its private cloud platform, reducing operational IT costs by automating server test and deployment.
Kirin, which has almost 40,000 employees, is headquartered in Tokyo, and does around half of its business overseas.
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Crunchy announces that open source software pioneer Tom Lane has joined its team of elite PostgreSQL developers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Open Document Format (ODF) is one such format. ODF was specified by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an industry consortium which aims to produce standards for e-business.
Key players in OASIS include the tech giants Sun Microsystems (now part of the Oracle) and IBM. Sun has been one of the main drivers of the format as it grew out of the format used by its free OpenOffice application. In 2006 the Open Document Format was approved jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard for office software.
Sun promised not to enforce any of its patents against implementations using the OpenDocument standard, although there can be much uncertainty associated with patents.
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The first major point release for LibreOffice, the 5.1 branch, is being worked on this weekend during the 1st Bug Hunting Session. This promises to be an important upgrade that should really make a difference.
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Thanks to CIB, who sponsored the event with their office location, drinks and food, we again had a LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg on Saturday/Sunday October 24/25, and a get-together on Friday evening with the opportunity to meat also some long time colleagues from Sun and Star.
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Education
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The Lawrence school district is taking part in a new U.S. Department of Education campaign, #GoOpen, to encourage states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials.
The Lawrence school district is one of 10 districts nationwide that have taken up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the next year.
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Electronic Payments
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On October 28th, 2015, BitGo, a digital asset security platform, is set to launch the first-of-its kind automated, open source Key Recovery Service (KRS) software for provisioning cold backup keys. BitGo has stated that this new KRS offering is part of their commitment to providing the most secure digital asset vault in the world while also ensuring wallet users maintain control of their digital assets.
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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Video-streamer and junior filmed entertainment production house Netflix has updated its open source policies, with a notable change being a decision to release code pre-packaged in Docker’s container formats.
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BSD
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I started using OpenBSD in 1998 (version 2.3 or 2.4) to host a BBS that I was running. I switched from Slackware Linux to OpenBSD because of its focus on security and eventually stuck with it because of its simple design and ease of administration. The ports system was a big draw for me as well.
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I’m currently self-employed, with a focus on open source development and consulting for companies interacting with open source projects.
Besides OpenBSD, I have been contributing to Apache Subversion since 2007. One of my main jobs is to provide support, workshops, and consulting for Subversion, plus fixing bugs and working on new features. I am somewhat involved in the Apache Software Foundation as a whole, but at this point in time my contributions there are more symbolic in nature, mostly because of lack of time and focus.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On my 21st birthday in 1998, I received a phone call from Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF), to tell me the root password of the GNU Project’s web server.
I’d learned about something called UNIX a great many years prior, and in 1993, on a two-week language course in Swansea, Wales, I managed to up my storage quota on the university’s Pyramid system from 2MB to 4MB, enough to download Slackware from the University of Vaasa’s FTP server and bring it back home with me.
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Licensing
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The lawsuit continues to progress. VMware has filed a statement of defense, in which they assert arguments for the dismissal of the action. Christoph, with the assistance of his lawyer Till Jaeger, has filed his response to these arguments. Unfortunately, VMware has explicitly asked for the filings not to be published and, accordingly, Conservancy has not been able to review either document. With the guidance of counsel, Christoph was able to provide Conservancy with a high-level summary of the filings from which we are able to provide this update. VMware’s statement of defense primarily focuses on two issues. First, VMware questions Christoph’s copyright interest in the Linux kernel and his right to bring this action. Second, VMware claims vmklinux is an “interoperability module” which communicates through a stable interface called VMK API.
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Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.
SFC said that VMware had filed its defence against the suit brought by German kernel developer Christoph Hellwig back in March, which alleges VMware’s proprietary ESXi hypervisor products use portions of the code that Hellwig wrote for the Linux kernel, in violation of the terms of version 2 of the GPL.
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Openness/Sharing
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“Creating an open governance process requires a larger commitment and a more engaged dialogue between the government, civil society, citizens and the private sector. Having an efficient administration can drive a better communication between public institutions, civil servants, and other stakeholders,” according to an evaluation report published by the Romanian government, which will form the basis of its second OGP Action Plan (2014-2016).
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I’m fascinated by what the open community takes for granted. Outside FOSS, free and open source software, the idea that work needs to have a solid foundation before being released is deeply seeded. But, in open source communities we say, “Release early, release often,” a phrase I regularly substitute now for: “Throw it into the world as soon as you can formulate words around it.” Heck, even if you aren’t coherent, someone might still understand you. Go ahead and share!
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Open Hardware
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Our next choice had social repercussions. When you adopt a CPU/operating-system combination, you also adopt its developers. We decided against Google Android because it’s optimized for phones and tablets, its graphical display typically shows only one application at a time, and its touch-screen paradigm is too imprecise for computer-aided design work. Therefore, in order to create a system that our target market of developers and creators could use, we decided to run on our ARM chip a version of Linux called GNU/Linux. GNU, which authored both the OS libraries and the license that the Linux kernel uses, is a coder’s organization, right down to the self-referential acronym itself (it stands for “Gnu’s Not Unix”).
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Andrew “bunnie” Huang & Sean Cross tell, in great detail, how they created the Novena laptop, using solely open source software and hardware. For anyone familiar with or even interested in how computers really work, it’s quite a gripping tale. I believe their work could have lasting beneficial effects on the hobbyist computing and open source communities.
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The open-source robotic arm called Dobot that can be used by everyday consumers and experience makers alike has now raised over $430,000 on crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, with funds still rising.
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Programming
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Python is everywhere. These days, it seems it powers everything from major websites to desktop utilities to enterprise software. Python has been used to write all, or parts of, popular software projects like dnf/yum, OpenStack, OpenShot, Blender, Calibre, and even the original BitTorrent client.
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While DZone was at JavaOne 2015 this week, Azul Systems released an early access version of Zulu, which is a certified OpenJDK build / JVM, that supports the latest JDK 9 features.
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Hardware
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ORACLE HAS STARTED SHIPPING systems based on its latest Sparc M7 processor, which the firm said will go a long way to solving the world’s online security problems by building protection into the silicon.
The Sparc M7 chip was originally unveiled at last year’s Openworld show in San Francisco, and was touted at the time as a Heartbleed-prevention tool.
A year on, and Oracle announced the Oracle SuperCluster M7, along with Sparc T7 and M7 servers, at the show. The servers are all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor, which offers Security in Silicon for better intrusion protection and encryption, and SQL in Silicon for improved database efficiency.
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Security
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Back in summer I have read a new book published by one of the core Intel architects about the Management Engine (ME). I didn’t quite like what I read there. In fact I even found this a bit depressing, even though Intel ME wasn’t particular news to me as we, at the ITL, have already studied this topic quite in-depth, so to say, back in 2008… But, as you can see in the linked article, I believed we could use VT-d to protect the host OS from the potentially malicious ME-based rootkits (which we demonstrated back then).
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Researchers at Symantec say they have discovered a form of malware that attacks MySQL on Windows servers, using them to launch distributed denial of service attacks.
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Following our notification, Symantec published a report in response to our inquiries and disclosed that 23 test certificates had been issued without the domain owner’s knowledge covering five organizations, including Google and Opera.
However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research.
Symantec performed another audit and, on October 12th, announced that they had found an additional 164 certificates over 76 domains and 2,458 certificates issued for domains that were never registered.
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COOKING AND HEATING ENABLER British Gas has confessed to a data loss that has seen the details of many of its customers released online.
British Gas has written to affected customers to tell them that, while it may not have been hacked, the effect is the same. It has somehow managed to leak information that has found its way onto the internet and in the direction of ne-er-do-wells.
Reports have it that 2,399 email addresses and passwords have been leaked online. A package of emails and passwords is a pretty good haul for an online exploiter, particularly if the same details are used for access on other sites and services.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Some brave television figures refuse to go along with the established “norm”. It was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow who coined the phrase “poppy fascism” a few years ago when he was publicly berated by BBC journalists and other media outlets for refusing to don the flower during his nightly broadcasts. It remains to be seen if the Channel 4 news anchor will this year cave to public pressure – a pressure which seems to be growing every year.
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EVEN DEATH WON’T GET YOU OFF the U.S. terrorism watchlist. As of last July, over 3,500 suspected terrorists included in the U.S. government’s central terror database were “confirmed dead” and another 13,000 were “reportedly dead,” yet many of their names continued to be actively monitored in databases like the no-fly list, according to an intelligence assessment prepared by the Department of Homeland Security in August of this year.
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The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called for an end to the decades-long US embargo on Cuba in a resolution adopted by a near-unanimous vote, three months after US-Cuba diplomatic ties were restored.
The United States and Israel voted against the non-binding resolution, but a resounding 191 countries supported the measure in the 193-member assembly, the highest number ever.
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But we must face reality: The occupation has become permanent. Nearly half a century after the Six-Day War, Israel is settling into the apartheid-like regime against which many of its former leaders warned. The settler population in the West Bank has grown 30-fold, from about 12,000 in 1980 to 389,000 today. The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”
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Any day now, our Saudi Arabian allies may behead and crucify a young man named Ali al-Nimr.
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Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN has admitted a “mistake” was made when Riyadh-led coalition jets bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen, but says the medical charity provided incorrect geographic coordinates for the facility, leading to the incident.
MSF, as the organization is known by its French acronym, reported on Tuesday that a hospital they supported in Haydan district in the northern Saada province was hit by several airstrikes starting at around 10:30PM local time on Monday. Initial blasts occurred outside the building, and all staff and patients were able to flee before it was destroyed by subsequent airstrikes. One MSF employee suffered minor injuries.
In a statement, MSF said that the hospital’s GPS coordinates “were shared with Coalition forces. They are sent every week to the Coalition operations room, and the last time they were shared was on October 24.” The organization also said that it’s logo had been painted on the facility’s roof and was visible from the air.
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Airstrikes carried out late last night by the Saudi-led coalition in northern Yemen destroyed a hospital supported by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), MSF announced today.
The small hospital, in the Haydan District in Saada Province, was hit by several airstrikes beginning at 10:30 p.m. last night. Hospital staff and two patients managed to escape before subsequent airstrikes occurred over a two-hour period. One staff member was slightly injured while escaping. With the hospital destroyed, at least 200,000 people now have no access to lifesaving medical care.
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Lebanese security forces are interrogating a Saudi prince on charges of carrying drugs on his private plane after they allegedly retrieved 2 tons of narcotics from the aircraft, local media reported.
Abd al-Muhsen bin Walid bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud was detained on Monday in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport.
The prince was about to conduct a flight on his private plane to Saudi Arabia.
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Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz was caught in an airport in Lebanon on Monday with over two tons of drugs.
Lebanese security found 40 suitcases full of more than 4,000 pounds of amphetamine pills and cocaine on the prince’s private plane, which was on its way to Saudi capital city Riyadh. A security source told AFP that this was the largest smuggling operation ever foiled by Beirut International Airport security.
While this may seem like just another case of rich and powerful aristocrats going wild, the implications of this drug bust are much more insidious: In Saudi Arabia, people are executed over drugs. And not rarely — several times a month, on average.
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Hiramine’s NGO, Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, won special praise from the president for having demonstrated how a private charity could step in quickly in response to a crisis. “In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” read Hiramine’s citation, “HISG’s team launched a private sector operation center in Houston that mobilized over 1,500 volunteers into the disaster zone within one month after the hurricane.”
But as the evangelical Christian Hiramine crossed the stage to shake hands with President Bush and receive his award, he was hiding a key fact from those in attendance: He was a Pentagon spy whose NGO was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.
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Transparency Reporting
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This means that on the OBL raid, Donilon excluded the Attorney General in the same way Dick Cheney excluded John Ashcroft from key information about torture and wiretapping. I find that interesting enough, given hints that Holder raised concerns about the legal authority to kill Anwar al-Awlaki in the weeks after we missed him on December 24, 2009, which led to OLC writing two crappy memos authorizing that killing in ways that have never been all that convincing.
But Savage provides no explanation for why Krass was excluded, which is particularly interesting given that the month after OBL’s killing, Savage revealed that President Obama had blown off Krass’ advice on Libya (as I read it, the decision to blow off her advice would have happened after the OBL killing, though I am not certain on that point). The silence about Krass is also remarkable given that she was looped in on the initial Libya decision — and asked to write a really bizarre memo memorializing advice purportedly given after the fact.
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Highly sensitive personal details about the head of the CIA from his hacked emails have been leaked, including his phone number, home address, passport number and how he once consulted a mental health expert.
The emails, obtained by WikiLeaks, show that John Brennan had concerns about the US spying on its own citizens and called for ‘firm criteria’, warning that the activities ‘must be consistent with our laws and reflect the democratic principles and values of our Nation’.
The files also show how a security firm he established was accused of ‘disingenuous’ behavior by the CIA in its bid to win a government contract for a terrorist watch list.
In a further memo released by the anti-secrecy agency, Brennan takes a swipe at former President George W. Bush for his ‘gratuitous’ labeling of Iran as part of a worldwide ‘axis of evil’.
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On Twitter, Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked millions of documents about electronic surveillance by the United States government, called the vote a “game-changer.” But the resolution has no legal force and limited practical effect for Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia on a three-year residency permit.
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The EU Parliament has just approved a measure (by a narrow 285 to 281 vote) telling EU member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.” That’s pretty huge. Of course, as a resolution, it’s more symbolic than actually meaningful, because the member states may not follow through on the request. But it is an important step in the right direction.
At the same time, the EU Parliament reviewed some other issues concerning mass surveillance, including the whole EU-US safe harbor setup. As we noted, the EU Court of Justice recently tossed out that agreement, which is really creating a huge mess for the internet right now. The EU Parliament “welcomed” the ruling, and pushed for alternatives to the safe harbor agreement. As we noted, the safe harbor agreement was a bit of a mess, but it’s important to have something in place to allow the internet to function — and the real problem was the NSA surveillance program.
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The European Parliament voted on Thursday to call on its member states to welcome “human rights defender” Edward Snowden to Europe with open arms.
The member states should “drop any criminal charges against Edwards Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as a whistle-blower and international human rights defender,” read the resolution.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A predictive population model suggests that lion populations in West, Central, and East Africa are likely to be halved in the next 20 years.
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National park officials say 22 more elephants have been killed by cyanide in Zimbabwe, adding to a worrying poaching trend.
A source with knowledge of an investigation of the killings says 78 elephants have been poisoned in the country this month.
The elephants were found in the remote Sinamatella area of Hwange National Park on Monday, Zimbabwe national park officials say. The park received international attention in July as the site where American dentist Walter Palmer shot and killed Cecil the lion.
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Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz warns about the dangers of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” Stiglitz said. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so it’s all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”
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There is nothing as awe-inspiring as watching the brutal power of a lion capturing its prey. At close range, their throaty roars thump through your body, raising a cold sweat triggered by the fear of what these animals are capable of doing now, and what they once did to our ancestors. They are the most majestic animals left on our planet, and yet we are currently faced with the very real possibility that they will be functionally extinct within our lifetime.
In fact, lion populations throughout much of Africa are heading towards extinction more rapidly than previously thought, according to new research by Oxford biologist Hans Bauer and colleagues, published in PNAS. The team looked at 47 sites with credible and repeated lion surveys since 1990, and found they were declining everywhere in Africa aside from four countries: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
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I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
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At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
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IT’S the biggest environmental disaster in our region and Australia cannot avoid being affected by its enormous reach.
A sickening haze that has spread across southeast Asia is being described as a “crime against humanity” and has NASA warning of a disaster of its kind never before seen.
For more than two months, raging forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra have released vast plumes of smoke that has spread across neighbouring countries including Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Axel Springer’s war with ad-blocking firm Eyeo’s Adblock Plus continues to rage.
According to AdBlock Plus, the German publisher has tried to quash conversations about how to get around the wall that Axel Springer erected to keep ad block users from accessing its tabloid site Bild. Adblock Plus is claiming Axel Springer’s approach smacks of censorship.
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Worst of all, the march took place in a country that is one of the most hostile to free speech rights in the West, as France quickly demonstrated in the days after the march by rounding up and prosecuting Muslims and other anti-Israel activists for the political views they expressed. A great, best-selling book by French philosopher Emmanuel Todd released this year argues that these “free speech” marches were a “sham,” driven by many political sentiments — nativism, nationalism, anti-Muslim bigotry — that had nothing to do with free speech.
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ORG has responded to the Prime Minister’s calls for legislation that will implement filters for adult content. This follows the European’s Parliament vote for net neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement made between ISPs and the government to provide filters, which some providers switch on by default.
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The EU’s new net neutrality “protections” are largely deserving of the scare quotes, what with their myriad loopholes and built-in provisions that allow ISPs to throttle/manipulate traffic to prevent “congestion” — something that has yet to be the actual source of any ISP’s “traffic $haping” efforts.
But what the rules did do is throw off David Cameron’s ongoing plans for a porn-free UK. And, of course — considering Cameron has no idea how ISP-level filters work, much less aware of numerous logical fallacies “supporting” his claims this will actually prevent porn consumption by minors — the Prime Minister was the last to know.
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The Serbian government’s use of “soft” censorship remains a threat to press freedom, a report issued on Thursday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, WAN-IFRA, and the Center for International Media Assistance, CIMA, in Washington says.
The report, “Media reform stalled in the slow lane: Soft censorship in Serbia”, was published with the support of the Open Society Foundation while BIRN Serbia was a research partner.
The report noted that Serbia lacks a functional, vital and competitive media market.
“Taxpayers’ funds are now one of the most important sources for survival of media outlets. However, public monies are deployed with partisan intent,” the report said.
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The censorship of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has spread from sessions discussing the 1965 anti-communist massacres to other politically sensitive topics on the resort island.
A panel has now been scratched on the controversial reclamation of land in Benoa Bay in southern Bali for a massive luxury development that critics say will devastate the environment.
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Last week, the UWRF organizer, however, was forced to drop all sessions that were to look at the massacre of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s following pressure from local authorities.
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Panel sessions and a film on the 1965 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia were prohibited at an international literary festival in Bali due to a 1966 government regulation banning communism and Marxism-Leninism, according to a Balinese police chief.
Gianyar police chief Farman told Fairfax Media there was also a 1999 criminal code which made the spreading of communism, Marxism and Leninism in public a punishable offence with a maximum sentence of 12 years’ jail.
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The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.
I research and write about the massacres’ impact on Indonesia. I was to moderate one of the five events that were dropped from this week’s festival.
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A week ago I received a message from Janet DeNeefe, director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
“I just wanted to let you know that the UWRF is being censored this year, and we have been told to remove all programs to do with ‘1965’,” she wrote. “Or else next year they will not give us a permit to hold the festival.”
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Governments around the world are expanding censorship and surveillance of the internet as overall online freedom declined for the fifth consecutive year, according to a report from a group that tracks democracy and human rights.
Nearly half of 65 countries examined have seen online freedom weaken since June 2014, Freedom House said in an annual survey released on Wednesday.
One of the steepest declines occurred in France, which passed a law that many observers likened to the US Patriot Act in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks earlier this year, according to the report.
Ukraine, mired in a territorial conflict with Russia, and Libya also experienced sharp drops.
The report highlighted China as the country with the most severe restrictions on internet freedom, followed by Syria and Iran.
Sri Lanka and Zambia, both of which recently underwent changes in government leadership, were credited with making the biggest improvements in overall online freedom.
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The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.
Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.
The researchers found 61 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where criticism of the government, military or ruling family has been subject to censorship.
And 58 percent live in countries where bloggers or others were jailed for sharing content online on political, social and religious issues, according to the “Freedom on the Net 2015″ report.
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Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to counter a European Union ruling that branded his internet porn filters illegal. He reiterated his stance that children must be protected from adult material online.
The EU ruling states that information must be allowed to travel through the internet “without discrimination, restriction or interference.” The measures are intended to allow data companies to reduce roaming charges.
The British government says it will protect internet companies from the EU laws and make it a legal right for the firms to use porn filters.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Cameron said parents should be able to control the materials their children are exposed to.
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Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed today that the Tory government planned to legislate on smut filters, following yesterday’s net neutrality ruling in the European Union.
Cameron told MPs during PMQs that he had “spluttered over my cornflakes” when he read this morning that the EU measures would fail to think of the children by protecting their prying eyes from “indecent images”.
“I think it’s absolutely vitally important that we enable parents to have that protection for their children from this material on the internet,” he told the Palace of Westminster.
“We worked so hard to put in place these filters,” the PM added. “But I can reassure her [Conservative MP for Derby North, Amanda Solloway] because we actually secured an opt-out yesterday so we can keep our family-friendly filters to protect children.”
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This rather shows the bias inherent in the Independent’s editorial style, for these filters applied not just to porn sites, but to websites that dealt with topics and lifestyles that somehow made David Cameron and his government uncomfortable — such as those dealing with the Occult.
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Sometimes politicians make me mad enough to scream at my computer. Today is a great example of that as the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has restated his claim that he will block internet-based porn and adult content to “protect children”.
But this isn’t about protecting children at all, it’s about controlling the internet and stopping British people’s freedom to browse as they wish without having to subject themselves to a registration process in order to watch adult material. The whole idea of blocking porn to protect “children” is a fiction, you can’t protect children from porn – it’s impossible. And anyway “children” don’t watch porn, young adults do. Getting the government to understand the difference between a child and an adolescent is impossible though.
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The future of information suppression may be much harder to detect—and thus enormously more difficult to counteract. The digital censors of tomorrow will not require intimidation or force; instead, they can exploit the dark art of “shadow-censorship.”
Shadow-censorship is a way to control information by secretly limiting or obscuring the ways that people can access it. Rather than outright banning or removing problematic communications, shadow-censors can instead wall off social-media posts or users in inaccessible obscurity without the target’s knowledge. To an individual user, it just looks like no one is interested in his or her content. But behind the scenes, sharing algorithms are being covertly manipulated so that it’s extremely difficult for other users to view the blacklisted information.
In theory, there are a variety of ways that shadow-censorship could be applied on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users may be automatically unsubscribed from blacklisted feeds without notice. Social media analytics can be selectively edited after the fact to make some posts look more or less popular than they really were. Individual posts or users can be flagged so that they are shown in as few feeds as possible by default. Or provocative content that originally escaped selective filtering may be memory-holed after the fact, retrievable only by the eagle-eyed few who notice and care to draw attention to such curious antics.
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In a surprising development this past week, Russia has notified all scientists at Moscow State University (MSU) that they must submit their research papers to the state security service before they will be permitted to publish them. Nature News reports that Russia is imposing this policy on universities and research institutes throughout the country.
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The history of censorship in Russian media runs for pages and pages. There’s little point dealing with Soviet censorship here, but the 1990s, which many people remember as a time when press freedom prevailed, are different. Journalists of the time reminisce about how they used to push bureaucrats’ doors open, the public officials scared of them: bureaucrats and politicians had never been so vulnerable.
The media, however, was another part of the country’s terrain of political conflict—just as articles could be pulled, so could journalists. Take Dmitry Kholodov, for instance, a journalist for Moskovsky komsomolets who died as he collected a booby-trapped suitcase in 1994. Ministry of Defence officials weren’t pleased with Kholodov’s coverage of army corruption and, having asked their subordinates to ‘shut him up’, their subordinates took the order literally.
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South Korean journalists released a statement on Tuesday urging that the Ministry of Unification (MoU) demand that North Korea not interfere in their reporting during family reunions.
The journalists from 38 media outlets criticized North Korea for interfering in their reporting during the family reunions that finished Monday at Mount Kumgang, North Korea. North Korea examined the journalists’ computers and USB drives, they said, returning the devices a day later despite the journalists’ complaints.
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Zimbabwe should abolish the censorship board and other bodies censoring or regulating artistic expressions in order to comply with Zimbabwe’s new constitution. Instead a new classification board should be mandated to issue age recommendations to protect children. This was a recommendation made by arts practitioners, artists, journalists and human rights lawyers at a workshop on artistic freedom, held on 23-24 October 2015 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
[...]
It says the effects of art censorship or unjustified restrictions of the right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity deprive artists of means of expression and livelihood and generate important cultural, social and economic losses to society.
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Part of a major international exhibition planned for Melbourne has been thrown into doubt after toymaker, Lego, refused to supply building blocks for the project.
External Link: Ai Weiwei instagram
Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei said Lego refused his studio’s request for a bulk order of Lego to create an artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria.
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Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says Lego refused to sell him toy bricks for his artwork, calling it an “an act of censorship and discrimination.”
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An Australian gallery has set up a collection point for Lego for a work by artist Ai Weiwei, after the Danish company refused a bulk order from him.
The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) wants Australians to donate the toy bricks by pouring them through the sunroof of a car parked at the gallery.
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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has begun gathering the building blocks for his next artwork, asking fans from all over the world to donate their Lego pieces for use in his next project.
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There has been a recent development concerning the removal of critical channels from TV streaming platforms in which newly emerged video footage provides evidence that such movements are politically motivated, as the chief advisor of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is featured urging a minister to drop critical TV channels from the state-owned Turkish Satellite Communications Company (Türksat) — a move that has attracted widespread criticism.
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The United States has reiterated its concern over the hostile takeover of five media outlets in Turkey, saying that Turkey is not keeping with its own democratic values.
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Cops sprayed water cannon to disperse crowds in front of the offices of Kanalturk and Bugun TV in Istanbul, a live broadcast on Bugun’s website showed.
The media groups are owned by Koza Ipek Holding, which has links to Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen. The authorities on Tuesday took over 22 companies owned by Koza Ipek in an investigation of alleged financial irregularities, including whether it funded Gulen. The company denies wrongdoing.
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Vile comments and phenomena such as trolling are simply a small part of the avalanche of electronic detritus that we have to learn to cope with as the internet revolution progresses. Dubious and unethical practices have proliferated and yet, the only sustained attempt to moderate the internet, in China, is notable for its failures as Chinese internet users have quickly learnt how to dodge censors and spread news and opinions in flash comments reaching hundreds of millions.
Racist and violent comments can easily be identified, and then simply ignored. Many websites urge users “not to feed the trolls”, even with traffic signs. In Brazil, trolls are called pombos enxadristas (chess player pigeons), and the advice is not to play them, since all they can do is defecate on the board and knock over the pieces.
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Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque, aka Zunar, is facing nine simultaneous charges under the country’s Sedition Act and will appear in court on 6 November. He could be sentenced to 43 years in prison for drawing cartoons that mock Malaysia’s corrupt government officials.
Ahead of his court appearance, Zunar is coming to the UK to display a small selection of his work as part of the permanent exhibition at the Cartoon Museum and several other events.
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Repressive regimes have sought to quell the speech of dissidents throughout history, and long before the advent of the Internet. It therefore is not entirely surprising that attempted censorship by governments will continue in the online world. But, hopefully, the Internet will help to foster free speech and communication, and will not be a means of governmental surveillance on citizens.
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Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino exercised his First Amendment rights by speaking at a New York City protest against police brutality. At the October 24 event, he denounced “police terror,” and reportedly said this: “I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
In response, Patrick Lynch, the head of New York’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association union, called Tarantino a “cop-hater” and said that it was “time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.” A union affiliated with the Los Angeles Police Department has reportedly endorsed the boycott as well.
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The hullabaloo around the Thai film Arpat, which features a misbehaving young monk, is the latest example of problems caused by what some people in the film industry perceive as flaws in the Film and Video Act 2008.
Some of the controversial aspects of the law, which was passed by the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly, include the composition of the censor committees, and the measure that allows a film to be banned for national security reasons.
Also criticised were a conservative interpretation of the rules, and most importantly strict state control over film, compared to lighter regulation of other cheaper and more accessible media such as television and print.
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Kanu Behl, the debutant director of Titli which releases this Friday, October 30, along with producer Dibakar Banerjee, teamed up with TVF to make an episode on censorship in India. The fun video Censor Qtiyapa which released online on October 26, has gone viral and got more than two lakh views in less than 24 hours.
The video featuring eminent filmmakers Mahesh Bhatt, Sudhir Mishra, Hansal Mehta, Kamal Swaroop, Ajay Bahl, producer Guneet Monga, Vasan Bala along with the Titli director and producer is directed by Shlok Sharma (director of Haramkhor).
Excited about the tremendous response, the director Kanu Behl says, “The response to the video has been overwhelming. Close to 2 lakh hits in less than 24 hours, as we write this. It’s interesting to know that the audience across the board can bite in to the humour and get all the nuances of a film maker’s labour pains!”
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Copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 1,000,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in recent years. The remarkable milestone, reached this week, is at the center of an ongoing debate over how search engines are expected to deal with pirate sites.
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We recently wrote about some concerns about the new Data Protection Directive that is being set up in Europe. The law is driven by people with good intentions: looking to better protect the privacy of European citizens. Privacy protection is an important concept — but the current plans appear to be so focused on privacy protection that it gives very little regard for the unintended consequences of the way it’s been set up. As we wrote in our last post, Daphne Keller at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society is writing a series of blog posts raising concerns about how the new rules clash with basic concepts of free speech. She’s now written one about the immensely troubling setup of the “notice and takedown” rules included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For years, we’ve been concerned by problematic notice and takedown procedures — we’ve seen the DMCA frequently abused to stifle speech, rather than for genuine copyright challenges. But, for some reason, people often immediately leap to “notice and takedown solutions” for any kind of content they don’t like, they and the drafters of the GDPR are no different.
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Privacy
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The military surveillance blimp that broke free of its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground Wednesday morning has returned to Earth after a four-hour, 160-mile, power line-snapping odyssey, authorities said.
NORAD spokesman Michael Kucharek said the runaway aircraft was on the ground near Moreland Township, Pa. — 160 miles north of its mooring in Edgewood — and was deflating. The blimp had slowly been losing helium, he said, and appears to have drifted to the ground.
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Military officials scrambled Wednesday to retrieve an unmanned Army surveillance blimp that detached from its moorings in Maryland and drifted north over Pennsylvania.
Two American fighter jets tracked the blimp, military officials said, that had been tethered at Aberdeen Proving Ground and broke free around noon.
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In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.
And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.
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The most outspoken group opposing the bill, Fight For the Future, noted in a scathing statement that the vote would be one we one day look back at as being formative for the internet.
“This vote will go down in history as the moment that lawmakers decided not only what sort of Internet our children and our children’s children will have, but what sort of world they will live in,” the group wrote in an emailed statement. “Every Senator who voted for CISA has voted for a world without freedom of expression, a world without true democracy, a world without basic human rights.”
It may not be that simple, but then again, maybe it is. So here’s a list of who voted for CISA, who voted against it, and who abstained. Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Lindsey Graham are all in Denver for Wednesday’s debate. Paul is anti-CISA but didn’t think it was worth sticking around in Washington for the vote.
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Despite the promising, if difficult to verify, statistics, the program has not gone without complaints in India, the world’s largest democracy. Critics argue that by controlling which companies and individuals can offer services on Internet.org, Facebook is creating a walled-off kingdom in which it decides the beneficiaries of its initiative.
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Email was never designed to be private. When the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was first invented, it didn’t come with protections or ways to check that a message really came from where it claimed to. Those came later, with the addition of extensions like STARTTLS for encrypting communications and others for authenticating messages.
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The federal government has been fighting hard for years hide details about its use of so-called stingray surveillance technology from the public.
The surveillance devices simulate cell phone towers in order to trick nearby mobile phones into connecting to them and revealing the phones’ locations.
Now newly released documents confirm long-held suspicions that the controversial devices are also capable of recording numbers for a mobile phone’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as intercepting the content of voice and text communications. The documents also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug.”
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Researchers have devised a low-cost way to discover the precise location of smartphones using the latest LTE standard for mobile networks, a feat that shatters widely held perceptions that the standard is immune to the types of attacks that targeted earlier specifications.
The attacks target the LTE specification, which is expected to have a user base of about 1.37 billion people by the end of the year, and require about $1,400 worth of hardware that run freely available open source software. The equipment can cause all LTE-compliant phones to leak their location to within a 32- to 64-foot (about 10 to 20 meter) radius and in some cases their GPS coordinates, although such attacks may be detected by savvy phone users. A separate method that’s almost impossible to detect teases out locations to within an area of roughly one square mile in an urban setting.
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The European Union said on Monday it agreed in principle with the US on a new trans-Atlantic data transfer pact that’s still in the works, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, a European court invalidated Safe Harbor, a 15-year old agreement that included laws which allowed technology companies to move user data between data centers if they guaranteed it would receive an “adequate level” of protection.
The ruling came after Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland claiming that his privacy had been violated by the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Following the court’s decision, Irish authorities said last week that they plan to investigate the social network’s data transfers under the act.
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A new transatlantic data-sharing agreement is within reach after the “Safe Harbour” deal used by thousands of companies to comply with EU privacy law was struck down by the highest EU court this month, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said.
The so-called “Safe Harbour 2.0″ agreement currently being negotiated would meet European concerns about the transfer of data to the United States, Pritzker told journalists in Frankfurt on Thursday during a visit to Germany.
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The NSA’s blanket surveillance of Europeans will be subject to judicial review, according to EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová.
At a committee meeting of the European Parliament this week, Jourová provided details of the replacement to the struck-down safe harbor framework, which until this month allowed people’s personal information to flow across the Atlantic and into American servers.
She told the hearing the new agreement would move away from the previous self-regulatory approach to one that allows for “pro-active” enforcement and sanctions.
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Data protection authorities in Germany have announced that they will review the legality of internet giants’ data transfers from the EU to the US, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Europeans’ data isn’t safe from intelligence services on US-based servers.
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When word got out that both the US’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ were likely using purpose-built Regin malware for their spying campaigns, that raised more than a few alarm bells… including in the German government, apparently. The country’s prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into a report that Regin infected (and thus monitored) the laptop of a Chancellery division leader. Officials aren’t jumping to conclusions yet, but it’s easy to guess where their suspicions lie — the concern is that allies are hacking into the devices of multiple German higher-ups, not just its Chancellor. If the evidence holds up, it could worsen political relationships that have already turned a bit sour.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be the only high-ranking leader from that country to be spied on by the National Security Agency. According to a report published over the weekend, German authorities are investigating whether the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his laptop infected with Regin, a highly sophisticated suite of malware programs that has been linked to the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.
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State surveillance programs spell serious consequences for business — could Canada be next?
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As part of the campaign, which is called Intelexit, the group have sought to place billboards as close as possible to the intelligence agency’s buildings across the world.
A billboard posted near the NSA outpost and military base in Darmstadt, Germany, for example, said: “listen to your heart, not to private phone calls.”
The group is planning to place a billboard outside GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, UK. It is expected to read “the intelligence community needs a backdoor,” in a jibe at the UK and US governments, who are attempting to push through legislation allowing them to de-crypt all encrypted digital communications between their citizens.
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While nobody was watching, the Senate a couple of days ago passed something called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which passed at least partly because if you say “Cyber warfare, boogedy-boogedy!” around nervous legislators these days, they’ll pass a bill agreeing to have the NSA plant microchips in their spleens. The bill passed by one of those bipartisan majorities so beloved by Beltway pundits, 74-21. Now it goes to conference, and its final passage may be stalled because of the currently fluid state of the House Republican leadership.
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As a cybersecurity bill, CISA is a joke: It doesn’t address the security problems that create the conditions for hacks. What it will create a streamlined information pipeline for the NSA.
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Back in August, the NSA released an updated advisory that was at once interesting and expected: It said that the world had to prepare for the oncoming impact of quantum computers, and the possibility that these devices could render existing computer cryptography almost completely obsolete. They called for the cryptographic community to invest heavily in developing so-called post-quantum cryptographic solutions that could survive this hypothetical watershed invention. And, as you might imagine, this advisory has very nearly driven the internet insane. Now, two security researchers have published a paper compiling all the various theories surrounding this advisory, and trying to make sense of the situation.
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Global online freedom declined for a fifth consecutive year as governments around the world stepped up surveillance and censorship efforts, a study showed Wednesday.
The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.
Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.
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Too little has been done to safeguard citizens’ fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They urge the EU Commission to ensure that all data transfers to the US are subject to an “effective level of protection” and ask EU member states to grant protection to Edward Snowden, as a “human rights defender”. Parliament also raises concerns about surveillance laws in several EU countries.
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The UK government has said that it recognises the “essential role that strong encryption plays in enabling the protection of sensitive personal data and securing online communications and transactions,” and does not “advocate or require the provision of a back-door key or support arbitrarily weakening the security of internet applications and services.” However, speaking in the House of Lords, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Baroness Shields, went on to say: “This is not about creating back doors; this is about companies being able to access communications on their network when presented with a warrant.”
Shields singled out “an alarming movement towards end-to-end encrypted application” for criticism. She said that David Cameron “expressed concern that many companies are building end-to-end encrypted applications and services and not retaining the keys. The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that there cannot be a safe place for terrorists, criminals and paedophiles to operate freely, with impunity and beyond the reach of law.” For this reason, she claimed, “It is absolutely essential that these companies which understand and build those stacks of technology are able to decrypt that information and provide it to law enforcement in extremis.”
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UK police are lobbying the government to be given access to every UK Internet user’s Web browsing history as part of the new Snooper’s Charter—the Investigatory Powers Bill—which is expected to be published next week. According to The Guardian, the police want to revive the controversial plan for ISPs to store details about every website visited by customers for 12 months, an idea first mooted in the original Communications Data Bill, which was dropped after opposition from the Liberal Democrats when they were part of the previous coalition government.
Richard Berry, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman for data communications, is quoted as saying: “We essentially need the ‘who, where, when and what’ of any communication”—who initiated it, where were they and when did it happened. And a little bit of the ‘what’, were they on Facebook, or a banking site, or an illegal child-abuse image-sharing website?”
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Police are to get the power to view the web browsing history of everyone in the country.
Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the plans when she introduces the Government’s new surveillance bill in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
The Telegraph understands the new powers for the police will form part of the new bill.
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There are a few ways law enforcement agencies acquire cell tower spoofers. Very rarely do agencies pay for these expensive devices themselves. (Meaning with their funds drawn from their own departments. Obviously, no government agency is self-funded.) In most cases, funding in whole or in part is obtained from the DHS — something nearly any agency can obtain simply by checking [X] BECAUSE TERRORISM when applying for a Homeland Security grant.
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Techniques like Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering and a proper understanding of the Dark Web is the first step in combating the Internet’s dark places. With an understanding of how to use open source encrypted anonymity services safely, organisations can explore OSINT sources – which include web-based communities, user-generated content, social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and news sources – to investigate potential threats or analyse relevant information for business purposes.
Whether that’s using Deep and Dark web sites and directories to support intelligence gathering for investigation purposes, manage incidents or to combat cyber crime.
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You gotta love this twisted logic.
In May, a federal appeals court declared the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program illegal because it wasn’t authorized under the Patriot Act, as the Obama administration and its predecessor administration had maintained.
Then, in June, Congress semi-dismantled the program with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which President Obama signed on June 2. As part of the new act, Congress authorized a spying transition period of sorts where the old tactics could continue until new laws were in place.
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IronNet, a cybersecurity company founded by the former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, secured $32.5 million in a Series A funding round.
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Former US National Security Agency (NSA) director Keith Alexander’s cyber security start-up, IronNet Cybersecurity, said yesterday it had raised $32.5 million in a “Series A” funding round led by Trident Capital Cybersecurity.
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A former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor from Augusta has pleaded guilty to charges that he filed falsified time sheets.
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Previous investigations by the ACLU have shown that Stingrays are used by many government agencies—including the DEA, FBI, NSA, and local and state police—across many states. Their use is so widespread in part because they only require a relatively low-level court order for use, which makes them an enticing alternative to attempting to get actual cell tower records with a warrant.
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The American Civil Liberties Union suffered major defeats on Friday, when two of its cases involving clear violations of civil rights and civil liberties were dismissed, both undone by the judiciary’s deference to executive-branch secrecy.
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The court modeled its opinion on the US Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International [JURIST report] that on matters of unconstitutionality surrounding intelligence gathering, the court is to be particularly rigorous.
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Civil Rights
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Police have used special powers from the counter-terrorism laws in order to seize a laptop that belongs to a journalist from BBC Newsnight, it has emerged.
The BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the broadcaster’s flagship current affairs programme last year and has reported extensively on UK-born jihadis, were the target of an order officers obtained from a judge under the Terrorism Act.
Police sought the order to read communications between Kermani and a man in Syria who had publicly identified himself as a member of Islamic State and who had featured in Newsnight reports.
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Police have used powers under the Terrorism Act to seize the laptop of a young Newsnight journalist in a case that has shocked BBC colleagues and alarmed freedom of speech campaigners, The Independent can disclose.
Officers obtained an order from a judge that was served on the BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the flagship BBC2 news show early last year and has produced a series of reports on British-born jihadis.
The development has caused alarm among BBC journalists. The editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz said: “While we would not seek to obstruct any police investigation we are concerned that the use of the Terrorism Act to obtain communication between journalists and sources will make it very difficult for reporters to cover this issue of critical public interest.”
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Media figures defended a school resource officer who was seen on video violently “slamm[ing] to the ground” a student in South Carolina, and blamed the student for not showing the officer and her teachers respect.
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Niya Kenny, 18, is speaking out after she was taken into custody in her Spring Valley High School math class. She says she was standing up for her classmate who was being arrested by Student Resource Officer Ben Fields.
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Officer Ben Fields, the South Carolina deputy who slammed and then threw a female high school student across a classroom this week, has been fired after video of his physical assault went viral. While the young girl recovers from injuries she sustained from the attack, according to her lawyer, officials have refused to drop criminal charges of disrupting a classroom against her and now one of the few students who protested against her violent arrest is speaking out about the fired deputy’s longstanding reputation at Spring Valley High.
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United Nations police fired tear gas during clashes with ethnic Albanians protesting in the Kosovo capital yesterday against a UN plan on the fate of the breakaway Serbian province.
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Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War II risks triggering “tectonic changes”, a top EU official warned Tuesday, as figures showed more than 700,000 newcomers have reached the continent’s Mediterranean shores this year.
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The DC Appeals Court has just come to an unfortunate conclusion: because terrorism exists, your rights as a citizen will not be upheld if you travel outside of the United States. This summary of the case is from Lawfare’s David Ryan, whose article claims this is a “victory” for the DOJ, rather than a loss for the American public.
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The Department of Justice won a significant victory yesterday when the D.C. Circuit held in Meshal v. Higgenbotham that a plaintiff cannot state a cause of action under Bivens for alleged constitutional violations that occur during a terrorism investigation in a foreign country.
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Alaa is currently serving a five-year sentence for his role in a protest just two days after the passing of Egypt’s 2013 anti-protest law. While many others involved in the protest were pardoned after serving their first year, Alaa, along with Ahmed Abdel Rahman, has remained imprisoned. Since January 2011, when Egypt rose up against Hosni Mubarak, Alaa has spent more than 500 days in prison. His first arrest after the revolution coincided with his second trip to the United States, to attend RightsCon. He left San Francisco to fly directly back to Cairo, where he immediately faced a military prosecutor and a set of trumped-up charges that kept him in jail for 55 days. He has since been in and out of prison several times. He missed the birth of his first child, Khaled, and the death of his father last summer. He has undoubtedly missed so much more.
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I am a free speech absolutist. Free speech, however, does not protect criminality, or threats of violence.
Threats of violence must be taken seriously and prosecuted by law enforcement.
That’s why — like The Rebel — I’m watching the case of “Israel vs Facebook” very closely.
There’s no reason why companies such as Twitter or Facebook should be protected from legal actions when clear and present threats are being uploaded and circulated on their networks. As private companies, they can decide who is allowed to have an account or not, but they have a responsibility to existing criminal laws regarding threats of violence against general or specific targets.
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A senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture filed a whistleblower complaint on Wednesday accusing the federal agency of suppressing research findings that could call into question the use of a popular pesticide class that is a revenue powerhouse for the agrichemical industry.
Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist with the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service who has spent 11 years with the agency based in Brookings, S.D., said that retaliation and harassment from inside USDA started in April 2014, following media interviews he gave in March of that year regarding some of his research conclusions.
Lundgren’s work has included extensive examination of a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, which are widely used by U.S. farmers to control pest damage to corn and other crops, helping protect production. The insecticides are sold in forms that both are sprayed on plants or coated on seeds before they are planted. They are also used on plants sold by lawns and garden retailers.
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At the end of September, Brad Heath and Meghan Hoyer of USA Today published a DEA disciplinary log they’d obtained through an FOIA request. The document was obviously misnamed, as it showed plenty of misconduct by DEA agents, but not much in the way of discipline.
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This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be added to the control list. EFF and Access Now filed a brief joint statement with the DTAG urging this outcome and we applaud the DTAG’s decision.
There were a number of problems with the proposal to place “cyber products” on the U.S. Munitions List, but most importantly, no one knows how “cyber products” would be defined. As we’ve long argued in other contexts, trying to draw definitions around “defensive” and “offensive” tools is essentially impossible and any vagueness would have significant chilling effects on the security community. In essence, we think that the threshold problem of defining which “cyber products” are subject to control is likely an insurmountable obstacle to effective regulation.
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Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced last year to a decade in prison and 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks—a punishment that has been carried out once so far—for the crime of insulting Islam on his website. On Thursday, the European Parliament awarded Badawi the Sakharov Prize, its human-rights award.
“The conference of Presidents decided that the Sakharov Prize will go to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi,” Martin Schulz, the parliament’s president, said. “This man, who is an extremely good man and an exemplary good man, has had imposed on him one of the most gruesome penalties that exist in this country which can only be described as brutal torture.”
Schulz called on Saudi King Salman to release Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and initially sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison—a punishment that was increased to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison after an appeal. Badawi was accused of insulting Islam on his website Free Saudi Liberals, which served as a forum for debate.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Unfortunately, MEPs have created large loopholes and left ambiguity in much of the legislation. Net neutrality is the principle whereby Internet access providers treat internet traffic equally. Because of the vagueness of the new regulations, telecoms regulators in EU Member States will now have to decide whether telecoms companies in their country will be able to prioritise different categories of data.
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Wi-Fi is an incredible success story– carrying the majority of Internet traffic, responsible for over $90 billion in economic value for the United States in 2013 and a powerful force in closing the digital divide. The success of Wi-Fi demonstrates the power of unlicensed spectrum. But how did we get here? The story of how technologies like Wi-Fi have come to have such a significant impact on our lives will help us think about the future of unlicensed spectrum.
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For many years now, the General Accounting Office has warned the FCC that if it’s going to throw billions of dollars at giant ISPs, it might just want to track how that money is spent. GAO reports like this one from 2009 (pdf) noted that not only has the FCC historically done a dismal job at tracking subsidy spending, most government broadband policies have been based on flawed, incomplete or downright hallucinated data (just check out our $300 million US broadband map). In other words, for the better part of fifteen years our government not only didn’t really know where broadband funding was needed, it couldn’t be bothered to track if it was actually going there.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hit out at net neutrality advocates who claim that zero-rating – the practice of offering access to certain popular online services for free – should be prohibited.
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INTERNET providers will be barred from charging online businesses for “fast lanes”—that is, giving priority to their traffic—except for certain specialised services, such as videoconferencing or telesurgery. They also must not block or slow traffic other than reasonably to manage their networks, such as to avoid congestion.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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LEGOs. Yes, the basic building block of our youthful imagination also holds a rather ugly over-protective side, in which it uses whatever tool happens to be nearest by to smash up any use of its products that it doesn’t fully endorse. Which, when you think about it, is really weird for a company that makes products that are essentially all about imaginative uses. Children building their own colorful castle? Awesome! But an adult using LEGOs to create political art? Oh, no, no, no.
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Will IP matter? The question seems to arise in the wake of every new disruptive technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that it is being asked in connection with 3D printing, where digital content, easily distributed over the network, is married to the potential for making a myriad of objects in any location where a 3D printer can be operated (think: your home). If the concern a decade ago was how to regulate the downloading of a movie or a song, today it is how to regulate the downloading of a digital file containing all the instructions to make a perfect copy of a product, down to its trade mark. Recalling the discussion a decade or two ago regarding the downloading of digital songs and movies, suggestions are made for various technological solutions. More generally, calls are made for a cultural make-over, where the consumer will habitually come to prefer the genuine product, e.g., using authorized digital instructions and the correct product materials, within the context of 3D printing.
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Copyrights
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Efforts by Kim Dotcom’s legal team to have his extradition hearing thrown out have failed today. As a result the Megaupload founder will begin his defense next week, presenting legal argument that he hopes will stop New Zealand authorities sending him to the United States. Defiant, Dotcom insists that he “won’t be silenced by bullies!”
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Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers.
Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled article along with their email address in the hashtag—a riff on the infamous meme of a fluffy cat’s “I Can Has Cheezburger?” line. Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the file.
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Techdirt has been writing about open access for many years. The idea and practice are certainly spreading, but they’re spreading more slowly than many in the academic world had hoped. That’s particularly frustrating when you’re a researcher who can’t find a particular academic paper freely available as open access, and you really need it now. So it’s no surprise that people resort to other methods, like asking around if anyone has a copy they could send. The Internet being the Internet, it’s also no surprise that this ad-hoc practice has evolved into a formalized system, using Twitter and the hashtag #icanhazpdf to ask other researchers if they have a copy of the article in question. But what is surprising is that recently there have been two articles on mainstream sites that treat the approach as if it’s really quite a reasonable thing to do.
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New research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that Spotify has helped to reduce the level of piracy in the countries where it is available. The work also reveals that Spotify reduces the number of digital track sales, but that those losses are cancelled out by the licensing fees paid by Spotify.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The revolt against the Battistelli regime culminates with explicit denunciation of an unprecedented assault on truth-tellers within the organisation
AS MANY people already know (especially those who have been paying close enough attention), the EPO’s thuggish management has a notorious track record and villainous pattern of using threats and menacing letters to remove access to information, and that is why we have decided to make copies of the following documents just shared by SUEPO. Many people need to read this because it’s about Benoît Battistelli and his ilk trying to shoot down a technical judge for merely discussing truthful information. This was last year's culmination of Benoît Battistelli's war against truth-tellers and it deserves broader reach, even worldwide attention. Will mainstream media (e.g. the BBC) finally decide to give this coverage? It’s well overdue.
SUEPO has just put in public circulation an alarming statement. It is not alarmist as based on information we have (from multiple independent sources) it’s simply too factual. Techrights is more censorship-resistant than SUEPO because there is little in terms of threats that the EPO can legally do to us, hence we decided to make copies of the English [PDF]
French [PDF]
, German [PDF]
, and Dutch [PDF]
versions. Here is it in HTML form and as images below. Cracking our servers and/or DDOS attacks may be the only way for EPO to censor this information, as the EPO’s ringleaders have already banned our site (internally). █
![Dutch letter](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/dutch-letter.png)
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
EPO complaints of unprecedented proportions
Summary: The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is raising serious concerns about the situation at the EPO, where labour or workers’ rights are being gradually abolished and the number of complaints has gone through the roof
“The International Labour Organisation in Geneva,” told us a source, “considers that “a governance problem of broader dimensions” exists at the EPO.” We have looked at the report, which we decided to host locally in case it becomes unavailable [PDF]
. Our readers are probably well aware of the many abuses at the EPO, but this report look at a particular type of abuse and singles out EPO as an exceptional case study. As our source succinctly put it:
In a recent report, the International Labour Organisation in Geneva considers that the EPO suffers from “a governance problem of broader dimensions” and expresses concern that the number of staff complaints being filed by EPO staff with the Administrative Tribunal of the ILO “represent a challenge to its effective functioning”.
“It is the number of complaints filed against a single organization, the EPO, rather than the rise in the overall number of organizations having accepted its jurisdiction, that represents the main challenge for its effective functioning. The Tribunal further considers that all its efforts are being compromised by the continuing increasing trend of EPO-generated cases and also indicates that the complexity of the problem may require the attention of the Governing Body.”
The Governing Body plans to request the Director-General of the ILO “to initiate without delay discussions with the European Patent Organization (EPO), in consultation with the Tribunal as required, in order to identify a solution to the difficulties caused by the number of complaints generated within the EPO and which threaten the ability of the Tribunal to serve all other member organizations, and to report to the Governing Body at its next session”.
Paging through the report, the EPO isn’t mentioned until page 4, but in page 4 the report focuses on the EPO and singles it out. About a quarter of this whole report is a polite rant about the EPO. To quote:
3. The European Patent Organization (EPO) – A case apart
10. The largest member organization, employing approximately 8,800 staff, accepted the Tribunal’s jurisdiction in 1978. The EPO’s membership has always been marked by significant level of litigation. EPO-related complaints have generated, on average, 21 judgments per year, the lowest number being ten judgments in 1998 and the highest being 69 judgments in 2015. In its 37 years of Tribunal membership, the EPO has been concerned by 761 judgments out of a total of 3,560 judgments delivered by the Tribunal since its creation. By way of comparison, the Tribunal’s second oldest member organization – the World Health Organization – with similar staff numbers has been concerned by 447 judgments in 66 years of membership, that is an average of seven judgments per year (see the table below). In the last five years, whereas the EPO’s staff represents less than 16 per cent of all officials covered by the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, the number of cases filed annually against the EPO represented on average more than 30 per cent of all the cases received by the Tribunal, with peaks above 40 per cent of the overall annual Tribunal workload. This persisting pattern stretches the Tribunal’s resources and inevitably impacts on the processing time of complaints, including those filed against all other international organizations that have recognized its jurisdiction.
11. Despite the written exchanges between the ILO Director-General and the President of the EPO on this matter, and the measures taken internally by the EPO in recent years with a view to improve its internal remedies and reduce litigation, no progress has been registered so far to contain the number of labour disputes which give rise to cases referred to the Tribunal. In this regard, it should be noted that out of the 193 cases filed with the Tribunal from 1 January to 18 September 2015, 112 (or 56 per cent) originated from EPO officials, while the remaining 81 complaints were filed by officials of 23 different international organizations. In addition, following important reforms introduced in the EPO in the past two years, the number of internal individual grievances has grown exponentially, a situation that may reasonably be expected to give rise to an even larger number of EPO-related complaints with the Tribunal in the very near future.
4. Causes of increased caseload – The views of stakeholders
12. In order to present a balanced overview of the underlying reasons for the increase in the Tribunal’s caseload, the Office undertook broad consultations with the principal stakeholders, including the judges of the Tribunal as well as the administration and staff representatives of organizations having accepted the Tribunal’s jurisdiction.
4.1. The Tribunal’s assessment
13. According to the written reply provided by the Tribunal, the increase in the number of organizations is not a problem in itself as statistical data show that the organizations which recognized the Tribunal’s competence in the last ten years did not significantly increase the Tribunal’s workload4. It is the number of complaints filed against a single organization, the EPO, rather than the rise in the overall number of organizations having accepted its jurisdiction, that represents the main challenge for its effective functioning. The Tribunal further considers that all its efforts are being compromised by the continuing increasing trend of EPO-generated cases and also indicates that the complexity of the problem may require the attention of the Governing Body.
14. The Tribunal has made it clear that it has reached its limits in terms of output and that it could not be expected to increase it any further without compromising the quality of its services. This is probably also connected with the fact that the judges do no work for the Tribunal on a full-time basis, but usually sit only twice a year for three to four weeks each time, and that some of them have extremely busy schedules as they are still serving in the supreme courts of their respective countries.
15. The Tribunal also drew attention to the fact that administrative tribunals of much narrower coverage – geographical or other – have gradually come into existence which raises legitimate questions as to whether it can still be considered to be the “natural judge” to hear complaints against organizations operating, for instance, within the administrative framework of the Council of Europe or the European Union. While there is nothing in the Tribunal’s Statute to restrict admission on the basis of an organization’s coverage, it should be remembered that the original intention was to open up the Tribunal’s jurisdiction to truly global organizations which would be otherwise deprived from access to any international administrative jurisdiction.
16. Finally, the great diversity of staff rules of organizations under the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, the lack of internal means of redress in some organizations, the frequent challenges to normative acts of general application, especially by staff representatives, and the lack of employment stability of the Registry staff, were also identified as additional factors contributing to the Tribunal’s increasing caseload.
4.2. The views of member organizations
17. Based on written replies provided by seven organizations and the views expressed by representatives of 29 organizations during a one-day consultation meeting, it is generally recognized that the admission of small international organizations in recent years is neither at the origin of the rising backlog of the Tribunal nor likely to impact on the Tribunal’s caseload in any significant manner in the near future. However, the resulting diversity of legal frameworks governing employment relations of staff under the Tribunal’s jurisdiction may occasionally generate delays.
18. Member organizations expressed serious concern about the volume of complaints against the EPO, and most importantly about the fact that problems around the “litigation culture” and social dialogue in that organization are not conjunctural but are most likely to persist unabated for many years. The general sense is that, based on available information, the current situation is not sustainable and that measures such as the increase of the number of judges or the number of sessions will not have a lasting effect on, much less resolve, the current flow of complaints filed by EPO officials. While noting the explanations of EPO administration officials about their genuine efforts to improve the situation, member organizations agreed that this was a governance problem of broader dimensions which called for urgent action in the interest of preserving the Tribunal’s operation.
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4 According to these data, 15 organizations have recognized the competence of the Tribunal since 2005 and have generated 65 complaints out of a total of 1,863 complaints; among those organizations, six have not so far been the object of any complaint, four organizations have each generated one complaint, and one organization has been the object of two.
Put briefly and in very simple terms, the International Labour Organisation recognises that there is something uniquely rogue in the EPO that causes a massive number of complaints to come from workers. There are so many complaints in fact that the International Labour Organisation finds itself drowning in them. The real issue here seems to be the EPO’s governance (or administration, or management). They make recommendations accordingly.
Skipping quickly to page 7, the EPO is revisited as follows:
Part II. Analysis of the situation and possible way forward
1. Principal findings and proposed course of action
24. On the basis of the information presented in Part I above, and following the broad consultations undertaken by the Office of the Legal Adviser over the past three months, three main conclusions seem to emerge: firstly, it is difficult to see how the Tribunal could continue under its current configuration and arrangements to cope with both its accumulated backlog and increasing workload. Secondly, the recognition of the Tribunal’s jurisdiction by new international organizations does not affect in any significant manner the capacity of the Tribunal even though the diversity of legal rules and regulations may at times prove challenging. Thirdly, the introduction of further changes to those undertaken by the Tribunal to increase its capacity to deal effectively with the workload may well result in efficiency gains in specific areas of the Tribunal’s functioning but will not be sufficient for the Tribunal to cope with the growing volume of complaints filed against one single organization (the EPO).
25. Faced with such reality, the Office could explore three strands of action in order to find long-lasting solutions to address the current situation. Firstly, an urgent, practicable and time-bound solution needs to be found regarding the facilitation of the speedy adjudication of all EPO complaints in a manner that permits the Tribunal to fulfil its mandate and effectively serve all other organizations, which have recognized its jurisdiction.
The following part ensures that thugs who have run the EPO won’t have a pleasant weekend. They should expect the Tribunal to apply pressure:
Draft decision
33. The Governing Body requests the Director-General:
(a) to initiate without delay discussions with the European Patent Organization (EPO), in consultation with the Tribunal as required, in order to identify a solution to the difficulties caused by the number of complaints generated within the EPO and which threaten the ability of the Tribunal to serve all other member organizations, and to report to the Governing Body at its next session;
It sure looks like the management of the EPO stepped in a scandal of its own making. It will be interesting to see what develops of this in the coming weeks, months, or even a year (justice is notoriously slow at these high levels). █
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Posted in America, Apple, Europe, Patents at 4:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo source (Sarbakhsh): “IP Monetization”, New York (2015)
Summary: The bizarre ‘friend’ of Free/Open Source software (FOSS), IBM, is still trying to ensure patentability of software whereas Apple and SAP, based on new stories, surprisingly enough serve to crush or at least weaken some
THE IMPACT of the Alice case has been great. Everyone is happy about it. Unless one is a patent lawyer or a software monopolist…
The American Intellectual Property Law Association (with its dodgy Microsoft Windows site) is an echo chamber that has just regathered and congregated many stakeholders, excluding people who actually invent and create things. The audience profits from patents, so it’s not an unbiased event that’s open to the wider public or at least offers the public speaking opportunities.
Just like the UPC Forum Munich, which lobbies regarding courts and litigation (money to be made by lawyers), the American Intellectual Property Law Association thinks in a narrow-minded way.
Now, let’s talk about IBM, which is actively spreading (or trying to spread) software patents to even more countries. People who made a career out of cataloging the patent monopolies of massive corporations (that’s where the big money is) are pursuing as many of them as possible, even 50,000 for just one company. Small business with an infinitesimal number of patents hardly every become a bleep on the radar and lawyers who work for them do nothing but drive them closer to bankruptcy, without any obvious benefits. Remember that the EPO also discriminately deals with applicants, prioritising large corporations even when these are not European (prominent patent practitioners — to use a euphemism — are still discussing the impact of this).
According to this new report from LES 2015, the “lead IP attorney” at IBM (whatever that actually means) isn’t happy about Alice. Here are some quotes:
Legislation will ultimately be required to address the uncertainty created by the Alice Corp v CLS Bank ruling, a lawyer from IBM told the LES 2015 Annual Meeting.
Reza Sarbakhsh, who is lead IP attorney at the company, said the decision has provided little guidance on what is patentable in the computer software space.
“As with any other business, uncertainty is the enemy,” he said, asking whether legislation should be required.
While he admitted that “I don’t know if we can convince Congress to address problems from our perspective” in the short term, “eventually legislation is the answer”.
Sarbakhsh was speaking during a lively discussion on the impact of the US Supreme Court’s ruling from last June. The court said computer-implemented inventions are not eligible for patent protection.
Sarbakhsh does not explicitly say it, but knowing that he works for IBM, a booster and lobbyist for software patents, by clarity he means advocacy. To quote the author’s paraphrasing: “Sarbakhsh said some large corporations are still pursuing software patents because the costs of getting them issued and the subsequent maintenance fees have not increased, even if patent value might be lower.”
“It’s not a business, it’s protectionism. It ensures money continues to flow from the powerless to the powerful.”Sarbakhsh said (direct quote): “Simply because one or two patents have been invalidated doesn’t mean we’re getting out of the patent business.”
It’s not a business, it’s protectionism. It ensures money continues to flow from the powerless to the powerful.
The overall tone of this lawyers-led event is similarly saddening. Then see the article (paywalled) titled “AIPLA 2015: Don’t dump portfolios due to section 101, patentees told”. To quote the excerpt: “Software patent owners should not jettison their portfolios despite worries over the impact of Alice Corporation v CLS Bank and its application of section 101, an industry conference heard.”
Why not? Because it harms the profits of patent lawyers?
Alice is a very big deal.
Apple is trying to invalidate software patents using Alice, whereupon “Ericsson says Apple’s Alice motion against wireless patents threatens to swallow all of patent law,” to quote Florian Müller.
Well, if it swallows all of patent law, or software patents in this particular case, then all the better.
One person wrote to us, “so if Apple succeeds then that may be troublesome for many other patent holders on wireless communication.”
Separately, in Twitter and in his blog, Müller says that “Google-SAP cross-license agreement announced: is SAP once again critical of software patents?”
As we showed earlier this week, SAP is still trying to patent software in Europe, so we very much doubt a change of policy is in the making. However, with this cross-license pseudo-’peace’, one might assume that SAP won’t take any legal action against Android, and perhaps by extension GNU/Linux.
We’re living in interesting times as we are at the crossroad when it comes to software patents. Lose it, as IBM wishes, and software patents may expand to the entire world. If we win this battle, then maybe we can still contain this injustice, even put an end to it worldwide. Patent lawyers won’t give up and sit idly until everything, including life itself, becomes patentable (i.e. profitable to them). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Do what Microsoft says, or else…
Summary: Microsoft’s force-feeding of spyware is not an accident as Microsoft tried to frame it but probably a test run, ahead of Microsoft’s effort to impose installation of this spyware on everyone
“MICROSOFT IS ABOUT TO INCUR the wrath of loyal users once again,” The Inquirer wrote about yet another dead product (among many more), “after confirming that the company is to merge its popular Sunrise calendar app into Outlook, discontinuing the standalone version “down the line”.”
“Users are upset about it, but Microsoft doesn’t care what users think or feel. Computers are effectively being hijacked.”Microsoft is in a bad state, so no wonder many products get canceled, including some versions of Windows (especially for devices or mobile). What does Microsoft do? The usual: dirty tricks. It already annoys a lot of so-called 'customers' by forcing them to get Vista 10 and this new puff piece says that “Microsoft is planning to get a lot more aggressive about upgrading existing machines.” The puff piece repeats lies and fake figures from Microsoft, then quotes Microsoft spinners. They try market this unacceptable force-feeding (which Microsoft was trying to spin as an 'accident') as a good thing by saying things like “Microsoft is also making some changes designed to entice software pirates to upgrade.”
It even gets more like a marketing placement with statements like these: “This change in approach is all part of Microsoft’s overall effort to get 1 billion devices running Windows 10 within two or three years of its release. As long as Microsoft avoids nagging people to upgrade more than once, or forcibly updating Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, then this latest change won’t trigger a backlash.”
Nonsense.
They already downloads it without consent, turning computers into the world’s worst spying devices and turning users into ‘products’. Users are upset about it, but Microsoft doesn’t care what users think or feel. Computers are effectively being hijacked. It’s all about what Microsoft wants and it simply commandeers its botnet to impose use of Vista 10, fulfilling a false prophecy of Vista 10 ‘success’. How much more of this abuse are people willing to tolerate? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, GPL at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s war on Android surely a benefactor here
Summary: An essential Android tool, RoboVM, turns into proprietary software just shortly after Xamarin, which is financially assisted by Microsoft veterans, takes over it; time to fork?
LAST WEEK we wrote about Xamarin‘s disturbing takeover of RoboVM [1, 2], which was a threat to Microsoft’s monopoly and domination of APIs (especially on the desktop). Xamarin, for the uninitiated, creates proprietary software that strives to spread Microsoft’s .NET to mobile (including Android) devices.
“Following RoboVM’s acquisition by Xamarin, the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code.”
–Abel AvramIt has only been less than a week and now we learn from Abel Avram that “RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source”.
“Following RoboVM’s acquisition by Xamarin,” explains Avram, “the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code.”
“The community has wondered what would happen to RoboVM now that they have been acquired by Xamarin,” Avram noted. Well, now we know. Bye bye, community.
To quote further: “RoboVM is no longer providing the source code except to enterprise customers. [...] Several RoboVM components used to be made available under the Apache 2.0 license while the compiler was open sourced under the GPL license.”
It has gotten so bad that RoboVM might be forked. To quote Avram, “some developers consider that closing down the source code has to do with Xamarin’s acquisition. And some are discussing forking the project, perhaps starting with the sources v. 1.8 which will be pushed to GitHub this week, according to Zechner. It remains to see how successful they are in their endeavor considering that RoboVM is not a trivial piece of software.”
Xamarin and Mono were never about Free software and GNU/Linux; they were just a parasite trying to exploit Free software and GNU/Linux to spread .NET and now they serve to convert Free software into proprietary. Microsoft must love what Miguel de Icaza has been up to recently. █
“At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately [sic].”
–Miguel de Icaza
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