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07.30.16

Academic Discussion About Patents’ Harm and Good, Pushers of Software Patents Still Upset at Alice Decision

Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Those who haven’t chips in the game against those whose entire game is contingent upon them

Manchester UniversitySummary: In light of the Alice case, large monopolies and their messengers moan about patent quality control, whereas here in Manchester people have an open debate about the potential harms of over-patenting

THE world is becoming a safer place for software developers because business method/software patents are dying in their country of origin. According to one of the most pro-software patents sites out there (IAM), patent “application numbers [for Visa] are down post-Alice” and “[t]his may well reflect the much tougher environment that patent owners now face in the US thanks to the popularity of post-issuance reviews and the general uncertainty around patent eligible subject matter since the Supreme Court’s Alice decision was handed down.”

Later in the weekend we intend to report on other trends which suggest the same thing, in spite of endless FUD from patent lawyers who profit from software patents. “Patentism is a religion and should be treated as such,” Benjamin Henrion wrote the other day. “Only believers.” Henrion — like myself — is a software developer fed up with patent maximalism which expanded patent scope to just about anything in software, irrespective of any evidence that suggests it would speed up development. He responded to this new article about an event right here in Manchester and told them: “It is a religion and should be treated as such.”

The article or event was titled “The Great IP Debate: Do patents do more harm than good?” To quote:

Patents have been with us since the 17th century. In exchange for disclosing one’s invention, the state grants a limited, legal monopoly over exploitation. In theory, the system encourages more innovation, for the good of society. But recently, voices of dissent have been rising. Legal costs are high. Specialists game the system to their advantage. Life-saving innovations get priced beyond the means of the poor.

On July 26 in Manchester, UK, at Euroscience Open Forum, Europe’s biggest biennial science conference, Science|Business Editor-in-Chief Richard L. Hudson organised a formal pro- and anti-patent debate among four experts, moderated by Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester. Herewith, his paraphrase of the arguments, so you can judge for yourself.

I know some of the people in there and I very much doubt they can make compelling arguments about the problems with patent maximalist. The University (which is where I did my studies and also worked) is quite keen not only on patent maximalism but copyright maximalism as well.

Sadly, there’s a strong lobby for software patents out there and it comes through all sorts of media, including the above (IAM). Speaking of IAM, watch this pro-software patents site promoting not innovation but patent trades, composed by one who was “recognized as one of the world’s most foremost IP strategists by Intellectual Property Magazine (IAM),” i.e. sponsored nonsense.

The latest shameless self-promotion by patent lawyers comes even from India (“Patenting For Success” is the title and it is not objective at all; recall the situation in India) and MSF, in the mean time, expresses “patent opposition in March in India to prevent Pfizer from patenting a pneumonia drug” (to deny poor people access to essential generic drugs).

Techrights is NOT against patents but against patent maximalism or — put another way — in favour of patent quality. The patent industry (or microcosm) doesn’t care about quality; to them it’s just an obstruction to business (theirs) and, accordingly, we need to counter their selfish desires. █

Links 30/7/2016: Sysadmin Day, Stardew Valley on GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Student survey data shows Open Source training uptake amongst women and young people remains extreme

    Future Cert, the UK and Ireland representative for the LPI (Linux Professional Institute), is calling for more awareness of Open Source software training amongst the under 21s and especially women, which the industry is so desperately in need of.

    New figures from a recent Future Cert student survey reveals that the number of women and young people taking LPI Certification in Open Source computing remains extremely low.

    Of those questioned, 98% were male, and just 2% were female, taking an LPI exam. This figure is significantly less than an already low figure of around 15% to 17% of women in IT careers in general. It raises the question, what does the industry need to do to make an Open Source career attractive to women?

  • Quality in open source: testing CRIU

    Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace, or CRIU, is a software tool for Linux that allows freezing a running application (or part of it) and checkpointing it to disk as a collection of files. The files can then be used to restore and run the application from the point where it was frozen. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space.

    Back in 2012, when Andrew Morton accepted the first checkpoint/restore (C/R) patches to the Linux kernel, the idea to implement saving and restoring of running processes in user space seemed kind of crazy. Yet, four years later, not only is CRIU working, it has also attracted more and more attention. Before CRIU, there had been other attempts to implement checkpoint/restore in Linux (DMTCP, BLCR, OpenVZ, CKPT, and others), but none were merged into the mainline. Meanwhile CRIU survived, which attests to its viability. Some time ago, I implemented support for the Test Anything Protocol format into the CRIU test runner; creating that patch allowed me to better understand the nature of the CRIU testing process. Now I want to share this knowledge with LWN readers.

    [...]

    The CRIU tests are quite easy to use and available for everyone. Moreover, the CRIU team has a continuous-integration system that consists of Patchwork and Jenkins, which run the required test configurations per-patch and per-commit. Patchwork also allows the team to track the status of patch sets to make the maintainer’s work easier. The developers from the team always keep an eye on regressions. If a commit breaks a tree, the patches in question will not be accepted.

  • Open-source Wire messenger gets encrypted screen-sharing

    Chat app Wire has been rapidly adding feature as of late as it looks to gain some traction against the myriad of competitors out there. The latest trick in its arsenal is screen sharing.

    Now you can click on the new screen-sharing button to, well, share your screen during a call (if you’re on a desktop, that is). It works during group chats too and, as with all Wire communications, is encrypted end-to-end. Wire believes it’s the first messaging app to include end-to-end encryption.

  • SPI board election results are available

    Software in the Public Interest (SPI) has completed its 2016 board elections. There were two open seats on the board in addition to four board members whose terms were expiring. The six newly elected members of the board are Luca Filipozzi, Joerg Jaspert, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Andrew Tridgell, Valerie Young, and Martin Zobel-Helas. The full results, including voter statistics, are also available.

  • Events

    • SFK 2016 – Call for Speakers

      Software Freedom Kosova is an annual international conference in Kosovo organized to promote free/libre open source software, free culture and open knowledge, now in its 7th edition. It is organized by FLOSSK, a non governmental, not for profit organization, dedicated to promote software freedom and related philosophies.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for GIMP future

      So you may have heard the news: we recently released a new development version of GIMP, version 2.9.4 (as well as a bugfix release 2.8.18, but this is not as awesome).

  • Licensing/Legal

    • On the boundaries of GPL enforcement

      Last October, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) jointly published “The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement”. That document described what those organizations believe the goal of enforcement efforts should be and how those efforts should be carried out. Several other organizations endorsed the principles, including the netfilter project earlier this month. It was, perhaps, a bit puzzling that the project would make that endorsement at that time, but a July 19 SFC blog post sheds some light on the matter.

      There have been rumblings for some time about a kernel developer doing enforcement in Germany that might not be particularly “community-oriented”, but public information was scarce. Based on the blog post by Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler, though, it would seem that Patrick McHardy, who worked on netfilter, is the kernel developer in question. McHardy has also recently been suspended from the netfilter core team pending his reply to “severe allegations” with regard to “the style of his license enforcement activities”.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Big Food’s Win Over GMO Labeling Bill Shows Failure of Democracy

      In 2014, Vermont passed the first legislation in the U.S. to require labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients. A year earlier, Connecticut and Maine passed GMO labeling bills though these were dependent on several other states passing similar laws.

    • Did Their Backs Hurt Your Knives?

      For the first-time ever, the platform of a major political party includes an explicit call to repeal the Hyde Amendment, a federal law that has denied eligible poor and low-income women coverage for abortion care for nearly four decades. This has anti-abortion democrats saying they have been betrayed.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Finland beefs up arms exports to Middle East

      Over the last 18 months, Finland’s Ministry of Defence has awarded domestic companies 50 permits to sell weapons to countries in the Middle East. Finland is currently supplying arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, both of which have recently bombed civilian targets in Yemen.

    • U.S. Awards $1.7 Billion Contract to Buy Radios for Afghan Army

      I always found myself giggling during the Democratic debates when Hillary would ask Bernie how he was going to pay for things like healthcare or college tuition, and then Bernie stammering to find an answer.

    • Do Civilisations Really Have to Clash?

      We are living in a world when it is normal to think that civilisations are incompatible and have to clash with each other. But this is a perversion of the truth as Dr. Paul Craig Roberts points out.

    • Hillary Clinton and Her Hawks

      Focusing on domestic issues, Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech sidestepped the deep concerns anti-war Democrats have about her hawkish foreign policy, which is already taking shape in the shadows, reports Gareth Porter.

    • The Fallacy of ‘Regime Change’ Strategies

      “Regime change” or destabilizing sanctions are Official Washington’s policy options of choice in dealing with disfavored nations, but these aggressive strategies have proved harmful and counterproductive, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Intervention Fail: ISIS Makes Bloody Gains in Post ‘Liberation’ Afghanistan

      Shortly after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996 (their rise to power itself a result of the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan), we began to hear endless stories of the horrors of this student movement turned governing power. They ruled by Sharia law, they treated women badly, they even blew up ancient statues!

      The US rhetoric against the Taliban began long before the attacks of 9/11 (which were carried out largely by Saudis who trained in Afghanistan with the knowledge of the Taliban). But it was the 9/11 attacks that opened the door to a direct US intervention in Afghanistan.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • From Kalamazoo to Husky, Parallel Pipeline Disasters

      There are many parallels between last week’s heavy oil spill from a Husky Energy pipeline in Saskatchewan and the Enbridge pipeline rupture in Kalamazoo Michigan almost exactly six years ago.

      Both ruptures occurred while control room staff were restarting the flow in the pipelines.

      In both cases, “anomalies” were indicated by computers systems monitoring the pipelines.

      In both cases, the companies failed to interpret the “anomalies” as leaks.

      In both cases, significant periods of time elapsed before the companies were made aware of the leaks by members of the public seeing the oil floating down river. 17 hours for Enbridge, 14 hours for Husky.

      In both cases, diluents had been added to the pipeline to facilitate pumping.

      In both cases, emergency responses were inadequate to deal with the quantity spilled and the conditions on the rivers the spills flowed into.

    • David Perry on Disabilities and Police Violence, Harvey Wasserman on Nuclear vs. Renewables

  • Finance

    • Hedge-Fund Money: $48.5 Million for Hillary Clinton, $19,000 for Donald Trump

      Hedge funds are playing a far bigger role in 2016 than in past elections—and Hillary Clinton has been the single biggest beneficiary.

    • Facebook could face extra $5bn tax bill after US investigation

      Facebook could be liable to pay between $3 to $5bn in extra US tax after an extensive investigation by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) into the way the tech company transferred assets to Ireland.

      The tax agency has been exploring whether Facebook deliberately deployed complex financial processes designed to minimize the amount of US tax it paid.

    • Amazon boss Bezos becomes world’s third richest

      Strong earnings from Amazon and a boost to the company’s stock have made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the world’s third richest person, according to Forbes.

      Mr Bezos owns 18% of Amazon’s shares, which rose 2% in trading on Thursday. Forbes estimated his fortune to be $65.3bn (£49.5bn).

    • Why Make Something When Nothing Sells Just as Well?

      It’s a fundamental law of nature… or at least nature legislation: For every action that the government takes to protect the natural environment, there is a cleverly corrupt reaction. An investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek profiled an extraordinary case of fraud that exploited the Renewable Fuel Standard program, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2005. That’s what he gets for trying to lessen our dependence on foreign oil… sucker!

    • Challenges and opportunities of the unbanked and under-banked

      Talking about access to appropriate and affordable finance is one thing but what happens when people reject those banks? What happens if some consumers never feel banks can provide for them?

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jill Stein is not Ralph Nader 2.0; she is much, much better. She can win. Here’s why

      Progressives in America aren’t happy. In fact, for the first time in recent memory, progressives are finally good and angry at the political establishment. Leak after leak, lawsuit after lawsuit, the facts just keep rolling in like so many punches, again and again exposing how the DNC methodically shut out and shut down the first candidate many of them had gotten excited about in years. Thousands of man hours and millions of dollars, many of those dollars pinched from the tightest of household budgets, poured into what turned out to be a totally rigged election. Ouch.

    • Trump: A vote for the Green Party helps me
    • Democratic National Committee Claims That Wikileaks Has ‘Malware Embedded Throughout The Site’

      We’ve seen various organizations impacted by Wikileaks come up with all sorts of excuses and claims about why people shouldn’t use the site, but “the site is embedded with malware” is a new one. It also seems hellishly unlikely. It’s the kind of thing that someone would discover and it would destroy whatever credibility Wikileaks has left. I guess anything is possible, but this sounds like the DNC freaking out over the leaks and trying to spread bogus rumors in the hopes that it will get people to stop looking at their leaked files.

    • Julian Assange: We have more material on Clinton

      WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange speaks with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about his organization releasing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

    • Cool Catchphrase, Hillary, But Science Isn’t About Belief

      On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton made history when she became the first woman to lead a major presidential ticket. In a speech filled with reminders of her experience and her plans for reform, one remark stood out: “I believe in science!” she said, chuckling. “I believe climate change is real, and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good paying clean energy jobs.”

      Delegates filling the convention hall in Philadelphia roared in approval. Pockets of Twitter, too. Just as quickly, though, reactions turned cynical: How awful it is, in this day and age, that a presidential candidate must say she believes in science? In the retelling, Clinton’s laugh became a nod to the absurdity of the moment.

    • How a cooked Assange quote ended up media gospel

      Wikileaks, the clearing house for state secrets, seems more about founder Julian Assange’s grudges these days: especially the one for Hillary Clinton. Much fuss was made over a quote—that he had “enough evidence” to guarantee an indictment of her—that was widely attributed to him. It turns out, though, that the quote doesn’t check out: most point to a mangled interview on the UK’s ITV where it isn’t even said. Jesse Singal set out to track down a source that no-one bothered to verify. It’s a surprisingly tantalizing and teasing journey, but the tl;dr seems to be that the quote was originally fabricated by the blog Zero Hedge.

    • THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY NO LONGER EXISTS

      The Democratic Party that once was concerned with workers’ rights, the elderly, civil rights, and the constitutional protections of America liberty no longer exists. As the just completed Democratic presidential primaries and the Democratic presidential convention have clearly demonstrated, the United States now has two Republican parties in service to the One Percent.

      The organized Democrats–the Democratic National Committee–have shown themselves to be even more venal and corrupt than the Republicans. Leaked emails document that the Democratic National Committee conspired with the Hillary campaign in order to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. It is clear that Sanders was the choice of Democratic Party voters for president, but the nomination was stolen from him by vote fraud and dirty tricks.

      The DNC and the media whores have tried to discredit the incriminating emails by alleging that the leaked emails resulted from a plot by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in behalf of “Putin’s American agent,” Donald Trump. “A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin,” as the presstitute scum put it.

    • Obama Said Hillary will Continue His Legacy and Indeed She Will!

      Leading up to Monday’s Democratic Party convention, Hillary chose Blue Dog Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia as her VP. This was followed by the Wikileaks release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mail files showing it acting as the Clinton Campaign Committee even to the point of using the same lawyers as her own campaign to oppose Bernie Sanders.

      The response across the Democratic neocon spectrum, from Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post to red-baiting Paul Krugman and the Sunday talk shows it was suggested that behind the Wikileaks to release DNC e-mails was a Russian plot to help elect Trump as their agent. Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul lent his tattered reputation to claim that Putin must have sponsored the hackers who exposed the DNC dirty tricks against Bernie.

      The attack on Trump was of course aimed at Sanders. At first it didn’t take off. Enough delegates threatened to boo DNC head (and payday-loan lobbyist) Debbie Wasserman Schultz off stage if she showed her face at the podium to gavel the convention to order. The down-note would have threatened the “United Together” theme, so she was forced to resign. But Hillary rewarded her loyalty by naming her honorary chairman of her own presidential campaign! If you’re loyal, you get a pay-off. The DNC was doing what it was supposed to do. No reform seems likely.

    • Sheriff Arpaio Paved the Way for Trump

      Before there was Donald Trump and his promise of a “beautiful wall” across the U.S.-Mexican border there was Sheriff Joe Arpaio from Arizona who pushed cruel treatment of illegal immigrants and other Latinos, reports Dennis J Bernstein.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • How California’s Identity Fraud Law Has Been Interpreted To Criminalize Defamation, Publicity Rights Violations And More

      Eugene Volokh has a somewhat terrifying look at how very broad interpretations of California’s identity fraud law, California Penal Code § 530.5(a) has been so broadly interpreted by the courts that it, in effect, creates a crime out of things that were normally considered, at best, civil offenses. This includes defamation, publicity rights infringements and disclosure of private facts. He discusses a few cases, but focuses on a key one that we’ve mentioned: the state of California’s recent legal win over Kevin Bollaert, a revenge porn creep. In our writeup, we were mainly concerned with how the ruling seemed to run against Section 230′s protections, but as Volokh makes clear, it’s much, much worse than that.

    • The West Kowtows to China Through Self-Censorship

      Human rights lawyer Teng Biao was commisioned to write a book reflecting on his 11 years as a rights activist in China for the American Bar Association in 2014. Last year, the ABA informed Teng that they would not be publishing the book over “concern that we run the risk of upsetting the Chinese government.” The ABA subsequently denied that as the reason for the cancellation, leading to protest from the China-focused legal rights community.

    • Melbourne graffiti artist Lushsux’s Instagram account deleted in ‘politically-motivated censorship’

      MARIBRYNONG City Council has declared that a large mural depicting US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a skimpy stars and stripes bathing suit must go.

      The huge mural is on the side of the Mr Mobility store in Footscray.

      The owner is away but a friend looking after his small business, Mitch, said she strongly disagreed with the council’s stance.

      “It’s art,” she said.

      “I can’t see any problem with someone expressing themselves with art. I think it’s a wonderful thing.”

      Mitch said far more offensive images could be found on the streets, yet they were not removed.

      “I’m a woman and I’m not offended by it. It’s just a one piece bathing suit with large breasts but the nipples and private parts are covered.”

    • Removal of Repeal the Eighth mural shows that censorship cuts both ways
    • New Tool to Help Notify Users When Their Content is Taken Offline

      When user content is threatened with removal from the Internet, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to put up more of a fight than the user who uploaded it. That’s what makes it so critically important that the user is informed whenever an Internet intermediary is asked to remove their content from its platform, or decides to do so on its own account.

      Unfortunately this doesn’t consistently happen. In the case of content taken down for copyright infringement under the DMCA or its foreign equivalents, the law typically requires the user to be informed. But for content that allegedly infringes other laws (such as defamation, privacy, hate speech, or obscenity laws), or content that isn’t alleged to be illegal but merely against the intermediary’s terms of service, there is often no requirement that the user be informed, and some intermediaries don’t make a practice of doing so.

      Another problem is that even when intermediaries do pass on notices about allegedly illegal content to the user who uploaded it, this notice might be inaccurate or incomplete. This led to the situtation in Canada where ISPs were passing on misleading notices from US-based rightsholders, falsely threatening Canadian users with penalties that are not even applicable under Canadian law.

    • OPINION: Why Taylor Swift’s Instagram Censorship COULD Be A Problem For Free Speech

      But first, a caveat. The tweet was slightly misleading. It may have implied that Taylor Swift was herself somehow violating the law on free speech, which, I agree, would be odd and not really possible within our current legal system. But I said ‘violate free speech principles’ for a reason. Principles are not law. In this context, they are the idea behind a law, the reason that law exists, while not being legally enforceable themselves.

    • Te Bitcoin Subreddit Censorship Debate Reignited by Roger Ver?
    • Coinbase and Reddit CEOs Discuss Removal of Theymos as Moderator of Bitcoin Subreddit

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The RCMP Is Trying to Sneak Facial and Tattoo Recognition Into Canada

      In November of 2015, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had a problem.

      At the time, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had been using its massively controversial database of biometric information—photos of people’s faces, tattoos, iris scans, and more—at “full operational capacity” for about a year. The RCMP, on the other hand, was stuck with a national fingerprint database that didn’t allow officers to scan and search people’s faces or other body parts. Canada’s federal police force was falling behind its southern counterpart.

      The RCMP had “no authority” to support new capabilities for its nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, according to an internal presentation from November 24 of 2015 that Motherboard obtained through an access to information request. Still, the police felt a pressing need to improve “interoperability with international partner systems”—in other words, to make sure their system meshed with what police in other countries were doing—but lacked an opportunity to do so.

      Undeterred, the RCMP went ahead and began working to procure a new AFIS system that could analyze and capture faces, fingerprints, palm prints, tattoos, scars, and irises—all without clear authorization or approval by the country’s federal privacy watchdog, or even a plan to implement it.

      So, yeah, the RCMP is trying to bring biometric identification to Canada without anybody noticing.

    • How synced can (and should) NSA and CIA be on cyber? [Ed: Loaded headline from this Microsoft-connected propaganda network]
    • ExpressVPN protects your on-line anonymity and privacy

      This post reviews ExpressVPN, a hosted Virtual Private Network (VPN) service. A hosted VPN service is a paid subscription service. With a VPN, all your Internet communication is encrypted and passed through a secure proxy (the VPN server) before continuing to the intended destination. To the rest of the world, the Internet traffic appears to come from the VPN server, not your home computer.

    • Smartwatch Shipments Slipped in Q2 Amid Slowing Demand [Ed: mass surveillance/mass collection devices/facilitators]
    • Enterprise Wearables: 35 Top Picks
    • Smartphone Market Flattens Out
    • IoT Security and Privacy: An Afterthought?

      Security and privacy are widely identified as major concerns for the Internet of Things (IoT), but few people discuss them in any detail.

      An exception is Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwaves Systems, a provider of IoT software and services. Holding several IoT-related patents and a co-chair on the Internet of Things Consortium, he works regularly with the security and privacy concerns that are often acknowledged only in passing.

      While security and privacy are often discussed in the same breath, Hunter views them as at least partly separate. According to Hunter, security concerns center on how software and hardware are designed. Too often, security is an afterthought — or as Hunter puts it, “it’s not baked into the product, but is instead sprinkled on top.”

      By contrast, he says privacy problems exist “because of the ‘I’ in Iot. “When I put information into my web browser, it brings value to someone else — this is the way that the Internet runs and the agreement we have with it. By keeping ‘Internet’ in front of ‘Internet of Things, we’re enabling companies to think things will continue to work in the same way. Companies are taking your information to the cloud and then using it to make their product(s) better or selling it to other people. The mentality that your data doesn’t have value is where the problem exists.”

      Both security and privacy problems could have been foreseen, Hunter continues — and in some larger companies, they were. But smaller companies often overlook them. “The industry itself hasn’t really been educated to the importance of security,” he says, although he adds that “the tide is turning,” partly because of platforms that offer secure infrastructure, such as Parse on Facebook and Fabric on Twitter.

    • 75 Top IoT Devices
    • 20 Russian high-profile organizations attacked by spy malware in coordinated op – FSB

      Computer networks of some 20 Russian state, defense, scientific and other high-profile organizations have been infected with malware used for cyberespionage, the Russian Security Service (FSB) reported, describing it as a professionally coordinated operation.

      “The IT assets of government offices, scientific and military organizations, defense companies and other parts of the nation’s crucial infrastructure were infected,” the FSB said in a statement as cited by the Russian media.

      The security agency said that all the cases are linked and appear to be part of a well-coordinated attack requiring considerable expertise. The coding of the malware and vectors of attack are similar to those used in previous cyber-offensive operations against targets in Russia and other nations, the report stated.

    • NSA Whistleblower Skeptical of US-EU Privacy Shield to ‘Paper Over’ Spying

      NSA whistleblower Mark Klein said that the latest US-EU agreement aimed at protecting European data privacy standards may appear to be a reform, but will unlikely change expansive US surveillance practices.

    • British Spies Used a URL Shortener to Honeypot Arab Spring Dissidents [iophk: "url shorteners, sock-puppet Twitter accounts"]

      A shadowy unit of the British intelligence agency GCHQ tried to influence online activists during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests and the 2011 democratic uprisings largely known as the Arab Spring, as new evidence gathered from documents leaked by Edward Snowden shows.

      The GCHQ’s special unit, known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group or JTRIG, was first revealed in 2014, when leaked top secret documents showed it tried to infiltrate and manipulate—using “dirty trick” tactics such as honeypots—online communities including those of Anonymous hacktivists, among others.

      The group’s tactics against hacktivists have been previously reported, but its influence campaign in the Middle East has never been reported before. I was able to uncover it because I was myself targeted in the past, and was aware of a key detail, a URL shortening service, that was actually redacted in Snowden documents published in 2014.

    • LulzSec Member Reveals More Details About GCHQ Covert Operations

      Mustafa Al-Bassam, aka tFlow, co-founder of the LulzSec hacking crew, published today more details about how the GCHQ used the covert Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) to attack hacktivism crews, but also that they tried to influence elections in Iran and boost and help the Arab Spring uprising in Syria.

    • WhatsApp Forensic Artifacts: Chats Aren’t Being Deleted

      To test, I installed the app and started a few different threads. I then archived some, cleared, some, and deleted some threads. I made a second backup after running the “Clear All Chats” function in WhatsApp. None of these deletion or archival options made any difference in how deleted records were preserved. In all cases, the deleted SQLite records remained intact in the database.

      Just to be clear, WhatsApp is deleting the record (they don’t appear to be trying to intentionally preserve data), however the record itself is not being purged or erased from the database, leaving a forensic artifact that can be recovered and reconstructed back into its original form.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Attorney for Man With Autism Urges DOJ to Investigate North Miami Police Shooting

      An attorney for a man with autism who was placed in a psychiatric unit after witnessing another man get shot by a police officer is urging the Department of Justice to investigate the North Miami Police and state of Florida.

      Matthew Dietz, the attorney for Arnaldo Rios, wrote a letter Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that Rios was placed in a facility “inappropriate for his needs” after the shooting. The Arc, a national organization that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, sent a letter to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division on Thursday in support of Dietz’s request for an investigation. Arc said “it is vital that Mr. Rios secures an appropriate community placement as soon as possible.”

    • After Cracking Down On Tens Of Thousands Of Enemies, Erdogan Says He’s Dropping His 2000 Lawsuits Over Insults

      For the last few months we’ve poked fun at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has ridiculously thin skin. As we noted, he had filed upwards of 100 lawsuits per month against people for “insulting” him — and this included things as ridiculous as posting a meme on social media that compared Erdogan to Gollum.

      Of course, more recently (as you’ve heard) there was a coup attempt in Turkey, which failed, and Erdogan has spent the last few weeks basically using the coup as an excuse to crush all his enemies.

    • NYPD Dodges Another Legislative Attempt To Inject Accountability And Transparency Into Its Daily Work

      Law enforcement officers are pretty used to being able to stop nearly anyone and demand to know who they are and what they’re doing. Sure, there are plenty of laws that say they can’t actually do that, but the public is generally underinformed about their rights, and this works in cops’ favor. As a recent Appeals Court decision pointed out, citizens are “free to refuse to cooperate with police before a seizure.”

      Obviously, this perfectly legal act of noncompliance just won’t do, and it certainly won’t be cops pointing out to citizens the rights they have available to them. New York City legislators thought they could force this transparency on the NYPD.

    • Security Researchers Sued For Exposing Internet Filtering Company’s Sale Of Censorship Software To Blacklisted Country

      Rather than meet the situation head on, Netsweeper chose to hang back and lob a lawsuit at Citizen Lab after it published its report. Fortunately for the security researchers, Netsweeper has chosen to drop its lawsuit entirely, possibly because pursuing the questionable defamation claims would have put it up against Ontarios’s version of anti-SLAPP laws: the Protection of Public Participation Act.

      The world of security research is still a dangerous place. When researchers aren’t being arrested for reporting on their findings, they’re being sued for exposing security flaws and highly-questionable behavior. It’s a shame there aren’t more built-in protections for researchers, who tend to receive a lot of legal heat just for doing their job.

    • Yavuz Baydar: Tough times ahead for Turkey

      The latest journalist arrested in Turkey is Arda Akın, a young reporter with the Hürriyet daily, part of the “mainstream” Doğan Media Group. Arda was in the “first” arrest list, issued on Monday, which mainly consisted of investigative reporters. In May, he was among those who won the European Union Investigative Journalism Award 2016, a prestigious prize delivered every year in six Balkan countries and Turkey. In his award-winning article, Akın told of corruption related to ruling Justice and Development Party figures.

    • Body-camera video shows fatal police shooting in Ariz.

      Body-camera footage released by the city of Winslow on Wednesday shows the seconds leading up to the fatal shooting of a 27-year-old Navajo woman by a Winslow police officer, with the woman advancing toward the officer with a pair of silver scissors in her left hand.

      The video footage from March 27 shows the encounter between Loreal Tsingine and Officer Austin Shipley. Tsingine’s death on Easter Sunday drew an immediate outcry in the city and strained relations between the city and Native Americans. The Navajo Reservation borders Winslow.

      A shooting investigation was conducted by the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which was reviewed by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery. He announced Friday that no charges would be filed against Shipley.

      The footage released Wednesday does not have audio initially. It shows Shipley leaving his patrol vehicle to encounter Tsingine, who is a suspect in a convenience-store shoplifting that had occurred minutes before. His hand movements indicate that he is giving her orders to stop and to turn around.

      He attempts to grab her hands when she turns back to face him, and Shipley takes Tsingine to the ground. As she gets up, a pair of silver scissors can be seen in her left hand.

    • ‘It’s Been Harrowing’: Alleged Hacker Lauri Love Awaits Extradition Decision

      Early in the evening of 25 October 2013, a man dressed as a UPS delivery guy arrived at Lauri Love’s family home in Suffolk holding a box. When Love’s mum answered the door, she was told that only her son could sign for the delivery. She called him downstairs, and when he emerged wearing his dressing gown, he was told that the man was in fact an officer of the National Crime Agency, and that he was being arrested on suspicion of hacking into a long list of systems, including those controlled by the US Federal Reserve, NASA, and the FBI. Love asked if he still got to keep the box.

      Almost three years later, on 25 July 2016, 31-year-old Love and his parents were at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London for the final arguments in his extradition hearing. Judge Nina Tempia is hearing the case, and will rule on 16 September as to whether the UK will allow Love to be extradited to the US where he would face three separate trials in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.

      “It’s been harrowing, this whole process,” said Love, speaking to me a couple of days later. “The US didn’t even really make any arguments, they were just casting doubt on the evidence from us.”

    • YouTubers use FGM ‘cuts’ to help raise awareness

      There are at least 200 million women and girls alive today in 30 countries that have undergone female genital mutilation.

      44 million of those who have undergone the procedure, typically performed on children under the age of five, are still younger than 14.

      The procedure is rooted in patriarchal notions of purity, modesty and appearance; but health effects include infections, chronic pain, infertility, complications during menstruation and childbirth and potentially fatal vaginal bleeding.

      Only a third of British adults are aware of these long-term effects according to new research by ActionAid UK and ActionAid Kenya.

    • Mix and Match Cyber-Priorities Likely Elevates Gut Check To National Level

      The PPD integrates response to cyberattacks with the existing PPD on responding to physical incidents, which is necessary (actually, the hierarchy should probably be reversed, as our physical infrastructure is in shambles) but is also scary because there’s a whole lot of executive branch authority that gets asserted in such things.

      And the PPD sets out clear roles for responding to cyberattacks: “threat response” (investigating) is the FBI’s baby; “asset response” (seeing the bigger picture) is DHS’s baby; “intelligence support” (analysis) is ODNI’s baby, with lip service to the importance of keeping shit running, whether within or outside of the federal government.

    • When Black Lives Surely Didn’t Matter

      Many whites counter the Black Lives Matter movement with the rejoinder “all lives matter,” a way of ignoring the ugly American history of torturing, shooting and lynching blacks, as Gary G. Kohls recalls, citing two notorious cases.

    • We, The Heart of Our Democracy

      If you just couldn’t watch Hillary – and we get it – you might have missed the electrifying call by Rev. William Barber, head of North Carolina’s NAACP and leader of its Moral Mondays, to embrace “a moral revolution of values” and continue fighting for progressives causes. Barber urged his audience to take action to stop gun violence and police brutality, to support voting rights and Black Lives Matter, to make universal health care and a $15 minimum wage a reality for all. “Some issues are not left versus right or liberal versus conservative – they are right versus wrong,” he said. Pointedly citing Jesus, “a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew” – and only briefly referencing Clinton – Barber proclaimed, “We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with the power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all. We can’t give up on the heart of our democracy. Not now, not ever.” He left the crowd, lit up and on its exhilarated feet, with, “Lead with love…Find the glory.” Amen. And no, it’s not over.

    • Report: Fox News Allegedly Paid $3.15 Million Settlement to Woman Claiming Roger Ailes Sexually Harassed Her

      Over the course of the last three weeks, a steady stream of women have come forward detailing their accounts of alleged sexual harassment at the hands of former Fox News chief Roger Ailes. Ailes, who has firmly denied all allegations of wrongdoing, stepped down from his top position at the network last week, after longtime host Gretchen Carlson sued him for what she claimed was years of inappropriate behavior and retaliation for not complying with his advances.

      A number of women followed suit, sharing accounts of alleged interactions with Ailes that occurred over the span of the last half-century. Most notably, Fox News star Megyn Kelly reportedly told investigators hired by 21st Century Fox that Ailes had sexually harassed her a decade ago when she was just starting out (Ailes denied this, as well, saying that he helped her career tremendously).

      The most recent alleged account of sexual harassment by Ailes is particularly disturbing. On Friday afternoon, New York published a story about a former Fox News employee that details more than 20 years of what she called “psychological torture,” including allegations that Ailes paid her for sex, that he taped their encounters as a means of keeping her silent, and that he used promotions within Fox News as a way to keep their relationship secret.

      Laurie Luhn, who served as Fox News’s director of booking, told New York that she got in touch with the law firm conducting 21st Century Fox’s investigation, claiming that she had been harassed by Ailes since 1991 and that Fox News executives were not only aware of their relationship, but also helped cover it up.

    • ‘A Travesty’: Chelsea Manning Faces New Charges After Suicide Attempt

      U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning may face additional charges and solitary confinement relating to a suicide attempt earlier this month, according to her attorneys.

      The charges include “resisting the force cell move team,” “conduct which threatens,” and “prohibited property,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Thursday. If convicted, Manning could face an additional nine years on her sentence, indefinite solitary confinement, and placement back into maximum security. She may also lose any chances of parole.

      Manning is currently serving 35 years at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas military prison for helping WikiLeaks expose classified government and U.S. military documents in 2010. She confirmed her suicide attempt on July 8 after several days of being kept out of contact with her defense team.

    • Trump’s Bigotry Reminds US Media of Anywhere but Home

      Donald Trump is an objectively terrifying candidate. He’s a racist, a xenophobe and a misogynist (in a surprisingly underrated manner). He dabbles in antisemitism and mocks his opponents like a middle school bully.

      However, in their effort to critique Trump in a way that is “relatable” and generates clicks, corporate media all too often turn to lazy orientalist tropes and patriotic schlock to “other” him without having to do the messy work of ideological analysis, or running the risk of offending America’s nationalist sensibilities…

    • Technical Response to Northpointe

      Northpointe asserts that a software program it sells that predicts the likelihood a person will commit future crimes is equally fair to black and white defendants. We re-examined the data, considered the company’s criticisms, and stand by our conclusions.

    • ProPublica Responds to Company’s Critique of Machine Bias Story

      Northpointe asserts that a software program it sells that predicts the likelihood a person will commit future crimes is equally fair to black and white defendants. We re-examined the data, considered the company’s criticisms, and stand by our conclusions.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Comcast: The Economics Of Offering Cheaper, Better Streaming TV Service ‘Unproven’

      As cable operators consolidate and AT&T and Verizon continue to hang up on millions of unwanted DSL customers they don’t want to upgrade, cable’s monopoly control over the U.S. broadband market is actually stronger than ever. In most markets, cable broadband’s “competition” still consists of either a cash-strapped telco incapable of offering speeds greater than 6 Mbps, or no competition at all. That’s why we’ve seen Comcast rush to impose usage caps on many of these captive markets; an effort to protect legacy TV revenues from Internet video — a move only made possible by a lack of competition.

      Despite this lack of competition, Comcast has at least flirted with the idea of adapting to streaming competition and offering a cheaper, more flexible streaming TV option of its own. About a year ago the company launched a product creatively-dubbed “Stream,” which for $15 a month offers Comcast broadband customers access to its traditional cable service. But despite the company’s promise that every market would see this service by the end of 2016, the rollout of this product appears to have stalled, in large part because it appears Comcast only wanted to appear innovative.

    • Comcast’s Still Not Sure There’s Any Money In This Whole “Streaming” Thing

      You might have heard that it’s 2016, and streaming your TV via the internet is all the rage. And yet despite being just as susceptible to cord-cutters as anyone (everyone) else, Comcast is still not thinking the whole streaming-TV thing is a moneymaker.

      In the company’s quarterly investor call this week (transcript), Comcast executives faced many questions about over-the-top (broadband) TV. And they were… less than enthusiastic.

      Neil Smit, the CEO of Comcast Cable (as opposed to the whole Comcast company), told investors that, “We haven’t seen an OTT model that really is very profitable for us.”

    • Blizzard withdrawing support for IPv6?

      It seems that once again Blizzard have their IPv6 connectivity for World of Warcraft not working properly. I opened a ticket and explained the issue in detail. The connectivity issue is entirely in their network. My guess is, as they seem to be using SLAAC addresses, they have simply failed to update addresses when they changed hardware and MAC. That is only a guess though.

      The impact – I could not log in to play the game for several days. I assumed they had a fault or were busy and to be honest, given that I use IPv6 for almost everything I do (google, Facebook, all A&A web sites and internal systems) and have done for about 14 years, it did not even occur to me to check if turning off IPv6 would fix it for a while. These days I rarely play, but have been off ill for a few days and though I may have a game or two.

    • Mysterious firm pays £135m for .web domain

      A MYSTERY BUSINESS called Nu Dot Co has paid a rather sizeable $135m for the right to the .web generic top-level domain (gTLD).

      The firm beat off competition from the likes of Google and web registry firms Afilias, Radix and Donuts, so it clearly means business.

      The auction went ahead despite calls from others involved that the mystery surrounding Nu Dot Co meant that ICANN, the organisation selling the gTLD, could not satisfy the condition that it must know who, or what, controls the gTLD after auction.

      However, ICANN hurriedly dismissed the claim and proceeded with the auction.

      Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, explained that the auction process was the fairest way to allocate the domain.

      “New gTLD Program auctions are the community-established, last resort method to help determine which applicant will have the opportunity to operate a particular new gTLD when multiple entities vie for the same or confusingly similar domains,” he said.

      “We look forward to seeing the community’s recommendations for the use of these proceeds.”

    • First Aereo, Now FilmOn: Another Fight for Innovation and Competition in TV Technology

      For over four years, major TV producers like Comcast, Viacom, Fox, Time Warner, and Disney, along with TV station owners like Comcast, Fox, Disney, and Sinclair, and cable companies like–well, Comcast–have fought in court to shut down new services that deliver local broadcast TV via the Internet. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that one of those services, Aereo, performed a function that was so similar to a traditional cable system that, like a cable system, it needed permission from copyright holders for the TV programs it transmitted.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Mr Justice Arnold refers questions on Article 3(b) SPC Regulation to CJEU

      What do you do if your patent is about to expire, but despite notice that Member States have agreed to grant your marketing authorization (MA) under the decentralized procedure, a MS has not yet taken the step to actually grant it? You still make your SPC application, of course.

    • Trademarks

      • Book Review: Trade Secret Protection

        As Cook notes in the introduction, “Trade secrets have only grudgingly started to form an accepted part of the world intellectual property order since TRIPs.” I’m really pleased to see more work on trade secrets. Certainly this book will appeal to the reader eager to access synopses of trade secret protection in key jurisdictions, and in particular non-English speaking ones where information may be less readily accessible. There isn’t an index, which I would have liked to have seen as it would enable cross-country comparison. However, most readers will be looking for jurisdiction-specific information, and the book’s standard chapter format and organisation by country will satisfy that need.

    • Copyrights

      • BitTorrent is fifteen years old. What would a file sharing technology developed today look like?

        BitTorrent was developed in 2001: today’s file-sharing technology predates the launch of Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. In those fifteen years, surveillance and repression technologies have advanced massively. If we designed file sharing today to keep up with these developments, sharing technology would be an uncensorable, untrackable, and unidentifiable peer-to-peer mesh network between mobile devices.

        Ten years ago, activists argued that file sharing was unstoppable and would adapt to any threat using mobile transmissions. However, this innovation hasn’t taken place, maybe out of a lack of urgency. Let’s examine how such a technology could work.

      • Gotta catch ‘em all without infringing copyright: Pokémon and Freedom of Panorama

        Pokémon Go requires players to search for Pokémon in the real world, a revolutionary move in the gaming industry. Pokémon are randomly generated by the game software, using GPS tracking technology. When a player is near to a Pokémon, it will appear on her phone screen in camera mode and allow her to ‘throw’ a Pokéball at it to ‘catch’ it. The screen shows the Pokémon in the surrounding environment, making it a life-like experience. While photographs of the capture are not saved to the game, players have the option of saving the photos to their phone, thereby reproducing any surrounding works of architecture or sculptures.

      • The Selfie-Taking Monkey Who Has No Idea He Has Lawyers Has Appealed His Copyright Lawsuit

        Welp. Here we go again. For many, many years, we’ve been tracking the insane legal situation of the selfie-taking monkey, whose name we were told only recently is “Naruto.” Early on in this saga, back in 2011, our focus was on how the photographer whose camera was used, David Slater, had no legitimate claim to the copyright in the image, in large part because the copyright goes to whoever took the photo, and the copyright cannot go to a monkey, because copyright law is limited to “persons.” Every so often Slater would pop up somewhere or somehow and yell about this — twice representatives of his even threatened us with completely bogus legal action.

        However, things took a turn for the even more bizarre a year ago when PETA, an organization that sometimes appears to focus more on professional trolling rather than on the “ethical treatment of animals” as its name suggests, claimed to represent the monkey (Naruto!) and sued Slater himself for falsely claiming the copyright. While we agree that Slater doesn’t hold the copyright, neither does the monkey, because no one holds the copyright.

        Amazingly, PETA, claiming to represent the interests of an Indonesian monkey, somehow secured the services of a really big name law firm, Irell & Manella, whose name should always be associated with the fact that it took this insane case. Irell & Manella (again, somehow, this is considered a respected law firm) took the nutty position that there must be a copyright in the image, and thus the monkey deserves to get it. It completely ignores the fact that not everything gets a copyright. It’s as if the lawyers at Irell & Manella don’t even understand how copyright law works.

      • Sony Hack Results in Lawsuit Over Failure to Prevent Movie Piracy

        Movie distributors obviously don’t like piracy, but a new lawsuit raises the question of whether they have any obligation to curtail it.

        On Wednesday, Sony Pictures was hit with a complaint in Florida federal court by Possibility Pictures, the producer of To Write Love on Her Arms, starring Kat Dennings and Rupert Friend. The film, which had Justin Bieber’s mother Pattie Malette serving as an executive producer to help out with marketing, was based on a true story about the treatment of a teenager suffering from depression and addiction and the launch of a non-profit to help others similarly afflicted.

      • Irony: Sony Pictures Sued For Failing To Stop Piracy

        For many years now, the MPAA and the various studios that make it up have filed various lawsuits against various internet platforms for not waving a magic wand and making piracy disappear. This also appears to be their big complaint against Google, which has bent over backwards trying to appease the industry and it’s still not enough (of course, that may be because what the industry really wants from Google is money, not stopping piracy). But now the shoe is somewhat on the other foot as Sony Pictures is being sued for failing to stop piracy. Really.

        The case stems from the infamous Sony hack from a year and a half ago, where all of Sony Pictures’ emails were released onto the internet. Possibility Pictures is suing Sony claiming the hack created a breach of contract in its failure to stop piracy of its film, To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA), a 2012 movie starring Kat Dennings, based on the true story of the struggles a woman went through leading to the founding of her charity (which goes by the same name as the movie). While most people focus on the emails from the hack, it should be noted that before those emails were released, the hackers released some pre-release films… including TWLOHA. And that, Possibility claims, is a breach of Sony’s contract.

07.29.16

Links 29/7/2016: More Microsoft Problems and Layoffs, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Alpha Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Microsoft Watch

    • Microsoft to Cut 2,850 More Jobs in Exit From Phone Business [iophk: “and how many permatemps are also getting axed?” Ed: Lots of other layoffs for years now]

      Microsoft Corp. is more that doubling an earlier job cut plan, part of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s move to pare the company’s smartphone ambitions.

      Some 2,850 positions worldwide will be eliminated in fiscal 2017, the company said Thursday in a regulatory filing. That’s in addition to 1,850 job cuts, primarily in the smartphone hardware business and sales, announced in May.

    • Cortana removal will not be tolerated in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

      CORTANA IS taking over. The forthcoming Anniversary Update of Windows 10 has shown a new twist in Microsoft’s ‘do as we say’ attitude towards customers.

      It appears that the update, due for release on 2 August, just three days after the end of the free upgrade period for Windows 10, removes the ability to turn personal assistant bot Cortana off, reported PC World (not that one, the IDG one).

      In all fairness, the upshot of this is fairly minimal. Cortana butts into your computing only if it’s told to, and it’s very easy for it not to.

      However, the fact that it’s always on means that it’s always collecting metadata, and that might leave some people feeling a tad uncomfortable.

    • Microsoft faces two new lawsuits over aggressive Windows 10 upgrade tactics [Ed: more of the same, still…]

      Microsoft is facing two more lawsuits over the company’s questionable Windows 10 upgrade tactics. Both suits are seeking class-action status.

      The first suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Florida. It alleges that Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade prompts “violated laws governing unsolicited electronic advertisements,” as reported by The Seattle Times. The suit also says Microsoft’s tactics are against the Federal Trade Commission’s rules on deceptive and unfair practices.

      The second suit was filed in June in Haifa, Israel alleging that Microsoft installed Windows 10 on users’ computers without consent. Microsoft already paid out a $10,000 award in a previous U.S. suit over similar circumstances.

      Microsoft told the Seattle Times it believes the suits won’t succeed. The Times also reports that Microsoft said Windows 10 upgrades (the Times report called them “updates”) are a “choice, not a requirement.”

      The story behind the story: That’s quite a disingenuous statement considering that Microsoft violated the known behavior of the Windows interface to essentially trick people into upgrading.

    • Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

      As your humble HPC correspondent for The Register, I should probably be running Linux on the array of systems here at the home office suite. But I don’t. I’ve been a Microsoft guy since I bought my first computer way back in 1984.

      You, dear readers, can rip me for being a MStard, but it works worked well for my business and personal needs.

      I’ve had my ups and downs with the company, but I think I’ve received good value for my money and I’ve managed to solve every problem I’ve had over the years.

      Until yesterday, that is.

      Yesterday was the day that I marked on my calendar as “Upgrade to Windows 10 Day.” We currently have four systems in our arsenal here, two laptops and two desktops.

      The laptops are Lenovo R61 and W510 systems, and the desktops are a garden variety box based on an Asus P7P55D Pro motherboard. The other desktop is my beloved Hydra 2.0 liquid cooled, dual-processor, monster system based on the EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard. These details turn out to be important in our story.

  • Server

    • MicroBadger and the Awesome Power of Container Labels

      Containers have the power to change infrastructure architecture, making it more secure and more energy efficient. This is because containerized applications can be started, stopped or juggled from machine to machine in seconds — far faster than applications can be moved on VMs or bare metal. That speed opens up the world to intelligent container-aware tools that can control what’s running in a data center in near real time.

      Combined with clever tooling, containers could help make data centers less static and more like an organic body: re-assigning resources or repelling threats as and when required.

      But for this vision to come about, those clever tools of the future need information. They need to know things like: is a particular containerized image mission critical? Does it contain a security flaw? Can it be safely stopped? Who should be paged if it crashes?

    • 7 Tips for SysAdmins Considering a Linux Foundation Training Certification

      Open source is the new normal for startups and large enterprises looking to stay competitive in the digital economy. That means that open source is now also a viable long-term career path.

      “It is important to start thinking about the career road map, and the pathway that you can take and how Linux and open source in general can help you meet your career goals,” said Clyde Seepersad, general manager of training at The Linux Foundation, in a recent webinar.

    • 3 Unique Takes on the Linux Terminal at Your Command

      When I first started on my journey with Linux, back in the late 1990s, there was one inevitability: the terminal. You couldn’t escape it. The command line was a part of your daily interaction with the open source platform and that was that. Today’s Linux is a much different beast. New and seasoned users alike can work with the platform and never touch the command line or terminal.

      But, on the off-chance you do want to take advantage of the power that is the command line, it’s good to know there are numerous options available, some of which offer unique takes on the task. Those are the terminals I want to highlight today—the ones that offer more than just the ability to enter a command. If you’re looking for a far more efficient interaction with your terminal and OS, or you’re looking for more flexibility with your terminal, one of these will certainly fit your needs.

    • OpsDev Is Coming

      OpsDev means that the dependencies of the various application components must be understood and modeled first before the development process begins.

    • One DevOps tool for all clouds: Cloudify

      Who doesn’t want one program to run multiple clouds? I know I do. Cloudify, an open-source orchestration software company, now claims it can support all the top five public clouds and Azure, OpenStack, and VMware, with its latest release, Cloudify 3.4.

    • 5 sysadmin horror stories

      The job ain’t easy. There are constantly systems to update, bugs to fix, users to please, and on and on. A sysadmin’s job might even entail fixing the printer (sorry). To celebrate the hard work our sysadmins do for us, keeping our machines up and running, we’ve collected five horror stories that prove just how scary / difficult it can be.

    • A guide to scientific computing system administration

      When developing applications for science there are times when you need to move beyond the desktop, but a fast, single node system may also suffice. In my time as a researcher and scientific software developer I have had the opportunity to work on a vast array of different systems, from old systems churning through data to some of the largest supercomputers on the planet.

  • Kernel Space

    • Telco central offices could be in for open source makeover

      The CORD Summit, hosted by the Open Networking Lab (On.Lab) and The Linux Foundation, promotes the use of technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and the cloud “to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to service providers’ Central Office.” CORD is kind of an acronym for Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter, and is designed to benefit enterprise, residential and wireless networks. A mini version of this event was held in March as part of the broader Open Networking Summit.

    • Some of The Other Pull Requests Arriving For Linux 4.8 This Week

      I’ve already written more than a dozen various bits of information about the Linux 4.8 kernel this week covering the big pull requests / subsystem updates.

    • More Last Minute AMDGPU/Radeon Changes For Linux 4.8

      There already have been the main pull requests for the AMDGPU/Radeon DRM drivers for DRM-Next that in turn will land in Linux 4.8 next week.

    • Linux Kernel 3.14.74 LTS Has Updated Drivers, ARM, MIPS and x86 Improvements

      After informing the community about the availability of the Linux 4.6.5 and Linux 4.4.16 LTS kernel versions for GNU/Linux operating systems, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the seventy-fourth maintenance update for Linux 3.14 LTS.

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org Server 1.18.4 Brings over 60 Improvements to GNU/Linux Operating Systems

        A new maintenance update of the X.Org Server 1.18 display server software for GNU/Linux operating systems, version 1.18.4, has arrived with over 60 improvements.

        As usual, Adam Jackson was the one to make the announcement, and it looks like X.Org Server 1.18.4 comes approximately three and a half months after the release of the previous maintenance version, X.Org Server 1.18.3, promising to add lots of backports from the devel branch, primarily in XWayland, Glamor, and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS).

        However, looking at the internal changelog, we can notice that X.Org Server 1.18.4 introduces improvements for several other drivers and components, including, but not limited to, XQuartz, RandR, x86emu, XFree86, KDrive, xf86Crtc, EXA, GLX, DIX/PTraccel, XKB, as well as Xi.

      • Igalia’s Work On The Intel Mesa Driver The Past Year
      • DRM Text Mode Proposed As Alternative To FBDEV/FBCON

        There’s long been talk on killing FBDEV and getting rid of CONFIG_VT with a modern replacement making more use of DRM/KMS drivers, but so far none of those efforts have fully panned out.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Enlightenment

      • Bodhi 4.0.0 Distro Enters Development, Alpha Out Now Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

        Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland was proud to announce recently the release and general availability of the first Alpha milestone towards the Bodhi 4.0.0 operating system.

        Bodhi 4.0.0 Alpha is right on schedule, according to Mr. Hoogland, and it marks the start of the development cycle of the upcoming GNU/Linux distribution built around the lightweight and modern Moksha desktop environment, a continuation of the Enlightenment 17 window manager.

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Alpha released
      • Enlightenment 0.20.10 Is the Last in the Series, Users Urged to Upgrade to 0.21

        A new stable version of the Enlightenment 0.20 lightweight and modern desktop environment/window manager has arrived, Enlightenment 0.20.10, which is the last one in the series.

        Yes, you’re reading it right, the development cycle of the Enlightenment 0.20 series has come to an end, and if you’re still using this version on your GNU/Linux operating system, you are urged to either upgrade to the Enlightenment 0.20.10 maintenance release or move to the newest stable branch, Enlightenment 0.21.0.

    • New Releases

      • Homegrown Budgie Desktop Shows Off the Beauty – and Beastliness – of Solus Simplicity

        The Budgie desktop — and thus Solus itself — lacks the glitz and glitter found in more seasoned desktop environments. Animation is nonexistent. It also lacks any right-click menu finesse other than the ability to change background or settings.

        The Solus Project’s distro is very user-friendly, but experienced Linux users will need more optimized software and desktop functionality in the next release to be tempted to give up more advanced desktop flavors.

      • Parrot Security OS 3.1 Distro for Ethical Hackers Moves to Linux Kernel 4.6

        The guys over Parrot Security OS have announced that the first point release of the 3.x series of the Debian-based distribution designed for security professional and ethical hackers is now available for download.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Contributing with Debian Recommendation System

        Hi, my name is Luciano Prestes, I am participating in the program Google Summer of Code (GSoC), my mentor is Antonio Terceiro, and my co-mentor is Tassia Camoes, both are Debian Developers. The project that I am contributing is the AppRecommender, which is a package recommender for Debian systems, my goal is to add a new strategy of recommendation to AppRecommender, to make it recommend packages after the user installs a new package with ‘apt’.

        At principle AppRecommender has three recommendation strategies, being them, content-based, collaborative and hybrid. To my work on GSoC this text explains two of these strategies, content-based and collaborative. Content-based strategy get the user packages and analyzes yours descriptions to find another Debian packages that they are similar to the user packages, so AppRecommender uses the content of user packages to recommender similar packages to user. The collaborative strategy compare the user packages with the packages of another users, and then recommends packages that users with similar profile have, where a profile of user is your packages. On her work, Tassia Camoes uses the popularity-contest data to compare the users profiles on the collaborative strategy, the popularity-contest is an application that get the users packages into a submission and send to the popularity-contest server and generates statistical data analyzing the users packages.

      • Looking for the artwork for the next Debian release

        Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme, which is visible on the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper.

        Debian plans to release Stretch next year. As ever, we need your help in creating its theme! You have the opportunity to design a theme that will inspire thousands of people while working in their Debian systems.

      • Derivatives

        • SteamOS 2.87 Arrives with Support for Nvidia GTX 1080/1070, AMD “Bonaire” GPUs

          Today, July 29, 2016, Valve announced the availability for download of a new stable version of its Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system designed for gaming, SteamOS 2.87.

          After being in the Beta stages of the development for the past two months, SteamOS 2.87 is now the latest stable and most advanced version of the gaming OS developed by Valve for personal computers and Steam Machines. It comes as a replacement for the previous stable release, SteamOS 2.70, announced back in April 2016.

          Prominent new features of SteamOS 2.87 include the availability of updated Nvidia and AMD Radeon graphics drivers, version 367.27 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 respectively, which now offer support for the recently announced Nvidia GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs, as well as for the “Bonaire” GPUs.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Mint 18 Xfce Imminent, Gmane.org Shutting Down

            Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre today said that Mint 18 Xfce is “almost ready” but KDE users will have to continue to wait. The second alpha in the Ubuntu 16.10 developmental cycle is available to crash testers as of today in Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Kylin flavors only. In other news, the Gmane mailing list archive site is shutting down as the founder has grown weary with the hassles as well as a prolonged DDOS attack. Finally today, Carla Schroder shared her Linux story.

          • Chew on this: Ubuntu Core Linux comes to the uCRobotics Bubblegum-96 board

            Linux and other open source software have been in the news quite a bit lately. As more and more people are seeing, closed source is not the only way to make money. A company like Red Hat, for instance, is able to be profitable while focusing its business on open source.

            Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux-based operating systems, and it is not hard to see why. Not only is it easy to use and adaptable to much hardware (such as SoC boards), but there is a ton of free support online from the Ubuntu user community too. Today, Canonical announces a special Ubuntu Core image for the uCRobotics Bubblegum-96 board.

          • Willing To Experience Linux? Try Ubuntu Demo Right Now In Your Browser

            If you are new to the world of Linux, you might not be knowing about online Ubuntu Linux demo website. If you are planning to make a switch to Linux, you can head over to this website and get familiar with Ubuntu Linux.

          • Ubuntu Touch takes a huge step towards Convergence in OTA-12

            Ubuntu has a very ambitious goal with Ubuntu Touch. It proposed an operating system that could work equally on any capable device, a smartphone that can truly be your computer, no holds barred. That was the promise of Convergence, which we took for a spin with the Meizu PRO 5 smartphone and, before that, the bq Aquaris M10 tablet. The results back then where disappointing yet promising. Ubuntu Touch, as it was when we reviewed these devices, still lacked that punch that would make you truly go “wow!”. But, unlike other operating systems, Ubuntu is fast evolving, and the latest OTA-12 brings much needed improvements to bring us closer to true Convergence.

          • Yakkety Yak Alpha 2 Released
          • Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Available for System76 PCs, Ubuntu 15.10 Users Must Upgrade

            As reported by us last week, Canonical announced the first point release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and it looks like the guys over System76 were pretty quick to push the update to users’ computers.

            Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS is the latest, most advanced version of the Xenial Xerus operating system, and we recommend that you upgrade to it as soon as possible if you didn’t do it already. This is an important point release because it also opens up the upgrade path for users of the Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr) distribution.

          • A Reminder Of Why I Hate Ubuntu

            Yesterday I was reminded why I hate Ubuntu. I suddenly was unable to SSH into Odroid-C2. From Odroid-C2 I could do everything as normal. It turned out the IP address had changed despite my HOST declaration in Beast’s DHCP server and Odroid-C2 being set to use DHCP, or so I thought. Nope. There was a dhclient.conf file in Odroid-C2 which requested everything and the kitchen sink from DHCP, stuff I had no use of like netbios… The man page for the dhclient.conf file says it all: “The require statement lists options that must be sent in order for an offer to be accepted. Offers that do not contain all the listed options will be ignored. There is no default require list.”

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Hands-On: Upgrading Linux Mint 17.3 to 18

              The first thing to do is read through the tutorial very carefully – and preferably more than once. This is not a trivial GUI procedure like the Fedora upgrade was, or like many of the previous Mint upgrades have been. It requires use of CLI commands, and those commands produce positively scary amounts of text output. It takes a relatively long time to perform the complete upgrade by Linux standards (it’s done in a flash by Windows upgrade standards), and it is not entirely automated, so it will require manual intervention numerous times along the way.

            • [Mint] Monthly News – July 2016

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Interference Mitigation in the E5a Galileo Band Using an Open-Source Simulator
    • Access to vocational education reduces crime—new research

      The crime rate, especially drug crime, decreases significantly when more 16-44 year olds have access to affordable Vocational Education and Training, (VET) according to a new University of Melbourne report.

      Drug crime rate decreased 13 per cent when more people had access to a publicly-funded place in VET. The research also recorded a five percent and 11 per cent decrease in personal and property crime respectively, including assault, theft and burglary.

      Report author, Dr Cain Polidano from the Melbourne Institute found that the extra public funding of VET (TAFE and private colleges) reduced the costs of crime.

      “We found that for every extra dollar spent on VET, the community saved 18 cents in avoided crime costs, such as lost productivity, health and rehabilitation costs,” said Dr Polidano.

    • Man and Bird Chat While Honey Hunting

      The Yao people of Mozambique have cooperated with small birds called honeyguides for generations to find bees nests dripping with sweet, calorie-dense honey. Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge and South African institutions have found that the partnership is more complex than the human hunters simply following the birds to the hives. The team’s results, published last week (July 22) in Science, suggest that Yao hunters vocally communicate with the birds in order to recruit them into the quest for honey.

      The key to the mutually beneficial relationship—humans extract honey and leave exposed beeswax for the birds to eat—is a “brrrr-hm” sound that Yao hunters make when they’re on the hunt for honey. “They told us that the reason they make this ‘brrrr-hm’ sound, when they’re walking through the bush looking for bees’ nests, is that it’s the best way of attracting a honeyguide—and of maintaining a honeyguide’s attention once it starts guiding you,” study coauthor Claire Spottiswoode of Cambridge told BBC News. “In particular, we wanted to distinguish whether honeyguides responded to the specific information content of the ‘brrr-hm’ call—which, from a honeyguide’s point of view, effectively signals ‘I’m looking for bees’ nests’—or whether the call simply alerts honeyguides to the presence of humans in the environment.”

      Spottiswoode and colleagues made recordings of the “brrrr-hm” sound and other noises, including the Yao word for “honey” and the sounds of hunters shouting their own names. They then followed Yao honey gatherers on dozens of hunts playing these different sounds through a loudspeaker. The researchers found that hunts accompanied by the “brrrr-hm” call recruited a honeyguide more than 60 percent of the time. Hunts during which other sounds were played only recruited honeyguides about 25 percent of the time. Playing the “brrrr-hm” call also tripled the chances of successfully finding a beehive during these hunts.

      “This is an important paper which experimentally verifies what Yao honey hunters say is true: that honeyguides are attracted by the specialized calls honey-hunters use,” Brian Wood, an anthropologist at Yale University who was not involved in the work, told Smithsonian.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • When Is a Drug Not a ‘Drug of Any Kind’? When It Kills 16 Times More Often Than Opioid ODs

      It’s not mere pedantry to note that cigarettes are, obviously, a “drug of any kind.” They’re actually a drug that kills far more people in the US than opioid overdoses—480,000 per year, according to the CDC, vs. 28,647 for opioid ODs.

      And it’s not just because more people smoke cigarettes: With approximately 2.3 million people addicted to opioid painkillers and to heroin, 28,647 ODs produces an annual death rate of 1.2 percent—the same death rate you get from dividing 480,000 smoking-related deaths among 40 million smokers.

      Opioid addiction is certainly a serious problem. But in describing its heartbreaks, it’s irresponsible to present smoking, by contrast, as a mere bad habit—when that habit is responsible for 16 times as many of this country’s funerals every year.

    • Set It and Forget It: How Default Settings Rule the World

      In other countries such as Spain, Portugal and Austria, the default is that you’re an organ donor unless you explicitly choose not to be. And in many of those countries over 99 percent of the population is registered. A recent study found that countries with opt-out or “presumed consent” policies don’t just have more people who sign up to be donors, they also have consistently higher numbers of transplants.

    • Zika in the UK: Three cases of virus reported in Yorkshire

      At least three people have been found to be carrying the Zika virus in east Yorkshire.

      Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust said the patients were believed to have contracted the virus overseas.

      Zika has been declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

      The virus, which is mainly spread by the Aedes aegypt species of mosquito, typically causes only mild symptoms in adults but can cause a major birth defect called microcephaly in the babies of pregnant women who are infected.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • Please save GMane!
    • The End of Gmane?

      In 2002, I grew annoyed with not finding the obscure technical information I was looking for, so I started Gmane, the mailing list archive. All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces.

      The past few weeks, the Gmane machines (and more importantly, the company I work for, who are graciously hosting the servers) have been the target of a number of distributed denial of service attacks. Our upstream have been good about helping us filter out the DDoS traffic, but it’s meant serious downtime where we’ve been completely off the Internet.

    • Pwnie Express makes IoT, Android security arsenal open source

      Pwnie Express has given the keys to software used to secure the Internet of Things (IoT) and Android software to the open-source community.

      The Internet of Things (IoT), the emergence of devices ranging from lighting to fridges and embedded systems which are connected to the web, has paved an avenue for cyberattackers to exploit.

    • Pwnie Express Open Sources Tools to Lock Down IoT/Android Security

      Pwnie Express isn’t a name that everyone is familiar with, but in the security arena the company has a good reputation for its wired and wireless threat detection technologies. Now, the Boston-based firm has announced plans to open source key tools that it has used to secure the Internet of Things (IoT) and Android software.

      Blue Hydra is a Bluetooth utility that can detect Bluetooth devices, and also work as a sniffer to query devices it detects for threats. Meanwhile, the Android Open Pwn Project (AOPP), is an Android ROM built for security testers. It’s based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and community-developed ROMS — one of which is CyanogenMod. It lets developers on the Android front sniff out threats on mobile platforms.

    • The Software Supply Chain Is Bedeviled by Bad Open-Source Code [Ed: again, trace this back to FUD firms like Sonatype in this case]

      Open-source components play a key role in the software supply chain. By reducing the amount of code that development organizations need to write, open source enables companies to deliver software more efficiently — but not without significant risks, including defective and outdated components and security vulnerabilities.

    • Securing a Virtual World [Ed: paywall, undated (no year but reposted)]
    • Google tells Android’s Linux kernel to toughen up and fight off those horrible hacker bullies

      In a blog post, Jeff Vander Stoep of the mobile operating system’s security team said that in the next build of the OS, named Nougat, Google is going to be addressing two key areas of the Linux kernel that reside at the heart of most of the world’s smartphones: memory protection and reducing areas available for attack by hackers.

    • Friday’s security updates

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Killings of Tony Blair

      The film has been predictably lambasted by the mainstream media. But it does include some very essential first hand evidence – myself apart, two other British Ambassadors tell what they themselves witnessed, as do Cabinet members. Noam Chomsky adds some important perceptions. This cannot just be dismissed by cries of “Oh look! George Galloway’s in a hat!! Remember when he was on Big Brother!!” The mainstream media’s response to this film has been unanimously puerile.

    • Syrian refugee, 21, hacks PREGNANT woman to death with machete and injures two others before hero BMW driver runs him over in yet another attack in Germany

      A Syrian refugee wielding a machete has killed a pregnant woman and injured a man and another woman in Germany before being arrested by police after he was run over by a man driving a BMW.

      The attack happened in the south western city of Reutlingen near a doner kebab stand in a bus station at Listplatz Square in what has been described as a ‘crime of passion’.

      German media have been reporting that the motive for the attack in the city south of Stuttgart was unclear but the attacker and the 45-year-old Polish victim both worked at the same snack bar.

    • Putin’s Warning

      This candid conversation took place with representatives of various media outlets during the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, in June 2016. Putin urged journalists to report genuinely on the impending danger that is a nuclear arms race.

    • As the Syrian Government Tightens Its Noose, Aleppo’s Doctors Fear the Worst

      It was just before 4 p.m. local time last Friday in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo when Dr. Farida Almouslem picked up the phone. With bombs falling outside, the 37-year-old calmly described the chaos unfolding around her. “I’m at home and staying in the middle of my home, because airstrikes are hitting us now,” she said. “We are hiding inside our bathroom.”

      For four years now, Aleppo City, Almouslem’s hometown, has been a centerpiece in Syria’s brutal civil war, controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to the west and opposition forces to the east. The period has been marked by tragedy, bloodshed, and, for the more than 2 million people who called the city home when the fighting began, widespread collective trauma. The situation has now gone from bad to worse.

    • Coups Inside NATO: A Disturbing History

      The Turkish government’s strong suspicion that Washington sympathized with or covertly backed the recent failed military coup — even if completely unfounded — may seriously damage the Western alliance.

      After all, the preamble to the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty emphasizes the determination of the signing countries “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

    • Wild Turkey With H-Bombs: Failed Coup Heightens Calls for Denuclearization

      An explosive cocktail of political instability mixed with 90 U.S. H-bombs raises the specter of accidental or suicidal nuclear detonation in or near Turkey. This risk was brought into sharp relief by the attempted military coup there in mid-July.

      In June, I warned that the Pentagon’s 180 thermonuclear B61 gravity bombs deployed across Europe – 50 to 90 are at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey – are too dangerous deploy in the age of terrorism. Turkey’s B61s are 100 miles from Islamic State territory, a war zone. Now the Los Angeles Times, the Japan Times, Foreign Policy, the San Antonio Express News and other major papers see the Pentagon’s outsourced B61s in Turkey as a hot topic.

    • Will the 9/11 Defendants Ever Get a Fair Trial?

      The government has been accused of destroying evidence in the 9/11 military commission, which has spanned more than a decade.

      I spent last week in Guantánamo Bay, where I was supposed to be observing four days of pre-trial hearings in the military commission prosecution of the 9/11 defendants. But as is so often the case, on three of those days, the hearings were closed. On the single day of open hearings, the proceeding focused on the government’s destruction of key evidence in the case. This past weekend, defense lawyers confirmed that the evidence concerns a secret CIA black site abroad where the defendants and others were severely tortured.

      Almost 15 years have passed since the attacks of 9/11, and yet the Guantánamo military commissions are still muddling through pre-trial motions, with virtually the same confusion and lack of transparency that has characterized these proceedings for years. The dichotomy between the importance of the proceedings and their virtual absence from public discourse is astonishing.

      The proceedings that did take place last week focused on the government’s destruction of evidence, which may have been irreplaceable for the defense, and over which the judge had issued a protective order. Defense attorney David Nevin, who represents Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, referred to this evidence as “among the most important evidence of the case.” As Nevin argued, the government’s torture and mistreatment of the defendants is central to the question of whether they can lawfully be subject to the death penalty.

      This key issue has been percolating for some time.

    • Activist Shines Light on Clinton’s Dirty Foreign Policy in Honduras (Video)

      Sha Grogan Brown is a member of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, and alongside other activist coalitions, he participated in the movement to “Wall Off Trump” at the Republican National Convention last week. Now, Grogan Brown is in Philadelphia, after traveling from Cleveland in a van with other GGJA members.

      Truthdig contributor Sonali Kolhatkar spoke with Grogan Brown about both major-party candidates. After recounting the various protests held at the Republican convention in opposition to Donald Trump, Grogan Brown explains a key aspect of his presence at the Democratic convention. “Berta Cáceres was an internationally known organizer from Honduras,” he says. “She was an indigenous, environmentalist feminist, and she was assassinated in her home on March [3].” The GGJA has teamed up with Honduran activist forces to call for an investigation into Cáceres’ death.

    • U.S. Government Finally Pays Family of Italian Aid Worker Killed in Drone Strike

      The U.S. government has reached an agreement with the family of an Italian aid worker killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan, over a year after President Barack Obama acknowledged the operation and promised an investigation and compensation. The news comes as other victims of U.S. counterterrorism strikes are pushing for the administration to also acknowledge their cases under a new executive order signed by Obama this month.

      Lawyers for the family of the slain aid worker, 37-year-old Giovanni Lo Porto, confirmed to The Intercept that the U.S. government had provided a payment, but would not disclose the dollar amount, in keeping with the family’s wishes.

      In January 2015, a missile fired by a CIA drone struck an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan where Lo Porto and an American humanitarian worker, Warren Weinstein, were being held hostage. A few months later, Obama, in an unprecedented admission, took “full responsibility” for Lo Porto’s and Weinstein’s deaths. Despite hundreds of hours of surveillance, he said, the United States had not known that the hostages were present.

    • Dozens More Civilians Reportedly Killed in U.S.-Led Coalition Airstrikes in Syria

      On Wednesday, the U.S. military announced that it was pursuing a formal investigation into the July 19 airstrike in a northern Syrian city that observers estimate killed at least 73 civilians. A subsequent airstrike in the same city “may have resulted” in yet more civilian casualties, Centcom disclosed late Thursday.

      “U.S. Central Command initiated an assessment following internal operational reporting that a strike today near Manbij, Syria may have resulted in civilian casualties,” the military said in a statement. “We can confirm the Coalition conducted airstrikes in the area in the last 24 hours.”

      The airstrikes took place around the strategically-critical city of Manbij, where clashes between U.S.-backed Syrian militants and Islamic State fighters have dragged on for months. Local and outside activists described the horrific aftermath of a coalition bombing run against the village of Tokkhar, outside Manbij, earlier this week.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • An Oil Pipeline Nearly As Long As Keystone XL Has Been Fully Approved

      The pipeline will transport up to 570,000 barrels of sweet crude oil per day from North Dakota’s oil-rich Bakken Formation, to a market hub near Patoka, Illinois. Critics have long said the pipeline could severely harm thousands of miles of fertile farmland, forests, and rivers if a spill were to occur. Federal agencies have said the Bakken Pipeline avoids “critical habitat.”

      But Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, says it will use state-of-the-art monitoring equipment and shut-off valves. Personnel will be stationed along the more than 1,150-mile pipeline for further support. Yet U.S. pipelines spilled three times as much crude oil as trains over the period of 2004 to 2012, according to a recent study by the International Energy Agency. However, pipeline incidents happened much less frequently than oil train accidents.

    • Anthrax sickens 13 in western Siberia, and a thawed-out reindeer corpse may be to blame

      First a heatwave hit Siberia. Then came the anthrax.

      Temperatures have soared in western Russia’s Yamal tundra this summer. Across Siberia, some provinces warmed an additional 10 degrees Fahrenheit beyond normal. In the fields, large bubbles of vegetation appeared above the melting permafrost — strange pockets of methane or, more likely, water. Record fires blazed through dry Russian grassland.

    • Police need to explain halting investigation on forest fires: Lawmaker

      Deputy chairman of Commission III of the House of Representatives Benny K Harman said police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian has to give reason for halting investigation of cases of forest fires involving 15 companies in Riau.

      “The police chief has to openly give reasons for issuing order to halt investigations (SP3) of the forest fires,” Benny here on Tuesday.

      He also asked President Joko Widodo (Jokowi)to summon the police chief to explain the decision to issue SP3 as the cases have national and international dimension.

  • Finance

    • Can American Apparel’s CEO Mend Its Seams?

      But as we head toward the building’s corporate entrance, I realize something’s a little weird. I see gargantuan, tattooed men in blue shirts smile attentively near the doorway and I vaguely recognize one of them, which is implausible—I don’t live in L.A. It takes me a moment to realize that I saw his face earlier in the day, when I had met Schneider for breakfast in Little Tokyo. When we had gotten in her car afterward, she seemed to be waiting for the car behind us to pass (it didn’t), so I had looked through the rear window to find out what was going on. Now I realize that this man had been following us all along. The security guards accompany us on the ride up the elevator, past six factory levels to the top floor of the building, where another guard greets us and uses his key card to let us through to the company’s offices. The percussive hum of textile machinery below fades as the heavy door closes behind us.

    • Scotland has four EU options – but which are realistic?

      Everyone is trying to figure out what Brexit means. Theresa May says Brexit means Brexit and is for the whole UK – but doesn’t mean a border (or not a hard one) with Ireland. Brexit minister, David Davies says the UK will start to negotiate dozens of trade deals in the next two years. And in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon sets out key criteria (ranging from democracy to solidarity to voice) that any EU option for Scotland should include.

      In Brussels and EU capitals, politicians and officials consider what their red lines will be in the upcoming talks while waiting for the UK to tell them what it wants Brexit to mean. Meanwhile individual businesses, financial and other markets, EU citizens in the UK, and UK citizens elsewhere in the EU start to make their own choices – with UK economic indicators pointing towards likely recession.

    • New Jersey Student Loan Agency to Staff: Don’t Tell Borrowers About Help Unless They Ask

      Some restaurants have secret menus, special items that you can only get if you know to ask. New Jersey’s student loan program has secret options, too — borrowers may be able to get help from the agency, but only if they know to ask.

      New Jersey has the largest state-based student loan program in the country, with particularly stringent terms that can lead to financial ruin, as ProPublica and the New York Times recently detailed. The agency overseeing the program says it has a policy to help some families if the children who were supposed to benefit from the loans die.

      But internal emails show that staffers at the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, or HESAA, have been instructed not to tell families that they may qualify for help unless they explicitly ask.

    • Yen jumps against dollar as Japan keeps rates on hold

      The Japanese yen has climbed by more than 2% against the US dollar, after the Bank of Japan decided to keep interest rates on hold after its two-day meeting.

      The BoJ also kept its target for government bond buying unchanged.

      But the central bank said it would double its annual purchase of exchange traded funds to 6tn yen ($57bn; £43bn) from the current 3.3tn yen.

    • It’s time to disband the ‘Tribe of the 48%’

      Britain’s surprise vote to leave the EU, with Leave’s narrow but decisive win by a margin of over a million votes, led to a surprising outpouring of emotion on the Remain side of the referendum. It was surprising because there had been precious little emotion over the previous weeks of a campaign, which had been entirely focused on the pocketbook economic risks of leaving the EU. Indeed, there had been precious little emotion across the previous four decades of British engagement in the European club, largely seen as a transactional economic relationship, joining a common market without ever being entirely comfortable with the political idea of ‘ever closer union’ that animated the founders of the European project.

    • Brexit diary – UK’s six tasks, and the need for French lessons

      And, in the meantime, it seems Michel Barnier is not going to make it easy for the UK.

    • Yanis Varoufakis’s Greek Tragedy

      Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece’s radical left government during that heady summer of 2015. He got famous first for his flair: open shirt, shaved head, and motorcycle jacket—but then really famous for playing chicken with his nations’ creditors in Brussels and Berlin.

      His line was that Greece could not and should not be forced to take on huge new loans to pay off bad old ones as a price of staying in the European Union. “Fiscal waterboarding” he called it: periods of intense austerity that crippled the Greek economy in exchange for bailout money that went to big banks.

    • London’s tourism bonanza after Brexit vote

      London is enjoying a remarkable “Brexit boom” in tourism as visitors flock to the capital in record numbers to take advantage of the pound’s fall in value.

      The sudden 13 per cent currency depreciation triggered by the Leave vote left sterling at its lowest level against the dollar for more than 30 years at one stage — turning the capital into a “bargain destination” for millions of travellers, according to tourism chiefs.

      Hotels, airlines and attractions all reported a dramatic spike for London bookings in July, with British “staycation” visitors put off travelling abroad by the increased cost of holidays on the Continent also contributing to the surge.

    • Clinton Friend, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe Now Pretends Hillary Never Supported TPP

      Except, of course, she has supported it, quite clearly in the past. And almost certainly still is. I understand the political calculations here. Historically, Democrats (especially the progressive wing) have generally been against free trade. So these agreements (even when they’re actually good!) are usually a tough sell to Democratic voters. But this is a weird year. Because while these agreements have almost universally been supported by Republicans, this year Donald Trump suddenly hates them — not for all the legitimate reasons to hate them, but mainly because he doesn’t understand how international trade works.

      But wouldn’t it be nice if Clinton could just come out and say what she really thought about the TPP and have an open conversation about it, rather than playing this “wink wink nod nod” game where basically everyone knows her true position, but she won’t say it?

    • Patreon Ends Payments Discrimination Against Adult Content

      Pornography helped usher in the early era of digital payment processing—but not long after that grand debut, the forces of smut and commerce had something of a falling out. Visa/MasterCard declared adult content to be a high risk for fraud and chargebacks, slapped significant fees on anyone wishing to accept credit card payments for XXX sites or merchandise, and instantly transformed the online payment ecosystem, not just for pornographers, but for X-rated artists, sex toy merchants, and even sex workers trying to raise funds for their medical expenses.

      In the decade plus since Visa/MasterCard’s decision, things have been a little tricky for anyone hoping to make a living selling sex online. Most mainstream payment processors—think PayPal, Stripe, and WePay, to name a few—decided to avoid dealing with those pesky additional fees by creating a total ban on anything adult.

    • Oracle just bought a company Larry Ellison mostly owns, entitling him to $3.5 billion in cash

      In perhaps the least shocking acquisition news in software history, Oracle has agreed to buy NetSuite for $109 a share, or about $9.3 billion.

      Larry Ellison already owned about 40% of NetSuite, so the deal will net him about $3.5 billion.

      Rumors had been recently circulating that Oracle would buy NetSuite.

    • Facebook Tax Bill Over Ireland Move Could Cost $5 Billion

      Facebook said in the filing that the liability “could have a material adverse impact” on its finances, results or cash flows. “In addition, the determination of our worldwide provision for income taxes and other tax liabilities requires significant judgment by management, and there are many transactions where the ultimate tax determination is uncertain.”

      The IRS on Monday asked a federal magistrate judge in California to force the company to turn over detailed internal corporate records related to the value of the assets moved to Ireland. They included all operations outside the U.S. and Canada.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Clinton resists deposition to ask who urged using private server
    • Does Julian Assange Really Have an Email That Will Get Hillary Clinton Tossed in Prison?
    • Barbarians at the Gates

      WikiLeaks have once again done the world a great service by publishing smoking gun evidence that the Democratic National Committee – which was supposed to be a neutral body overseeing the Democrats primary election – was doing everything possible to tilt the field against Bernie Sanders. Just one of the ways that was done was by secretly promoting to the media the idea that Sanders’ supporters were violent, misogynist and intimidatory thugs.

      [...]

      It is important to say that there is a lot of other video evidence available. This is the clearest I can find. No evidence appears anywhere online which bears out the stories of violence, abuse and spitting – which is quite astonishing given that the entire mainstream media carried and promoted those stories.

      The Labour Party constituency meeting at Brighton gives us a precise analogy to the Nevada Democrats meeting. Again claims were made of violent intimidation, swearing and spitting. Again, in this age where everybody has a video camera in their pocket, there is absolutely zero objective evidence of this behaviour and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. It appears the real sin of the Brighton Labour Party members was to elect pro-Corbyn officers. That election has now been annulled. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party is playing precisely the role against Corbyn that the NDC played against Sanders.

    • The Other Factor in the DNC Hack: WikiLeaks’ Personal War with Hillary Clinton

      Since yesterday, both Jack Goldsmith and Peter Singer have had offered some interesting perspective on the alleged Russian hack of the DNC.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Nomination Met With Joy From Many Women at DNC, But Disenchantment From Others

      As the Democratic Party formally announced its nominee on Tuesday night, the gigantic screen at the Wells Fargo Center showed images of the last 44 U.S. presidents until, with a great shattering sound, Hillary Clinton appeared from behind virtual glass shards.

      It was not subtle. Some found it emotional; others found it corny. And in a week that’s been defined by profound divisions inside the convention hall — and greater ones between the convention and the streets outside –- the significance of Clinton’s breaking of a gender barrier also elicited a split response.

      As Clinton became the first woman to receive the presidential nomination of a major party, there were those who celebrated her achievement — and those whose deep disenchantment with her and the Democratic leadership remained unaffected by her gender.

      Among women, in particular, Clinton’s nomination only seemed to accentuate gaping divisions.

      At a DNC women’s caucus meeting on Thursday morning, the crowd was jubilant and running high on the emotions of the week. Hundreds of women of all ages decked out in “I’m with her” gear and pink Planned Parenthood shirts filled the room, as inspirational videos of little girls saying they wanted to be president played in the background.

      “My sisters, we have made history here in Philadelphia,” convention CEO Leah Daughtry told a roaring crowd. “Just think that less than 100 years ago, a woman was not even guaranteed the right to vote, and just think that a little over 50 years ago, an African-American woman, Fannie Lou Hamer, was not even permitted to be seated at our convention. And now, we have nominated our first woman to be president at a convention run by an African-American woman.”

    • The Content of Donald Trump’s Character

      Though some anti-war Americans see hope that Donald Trump would pull back from foreign wars, they also must face his undeniable record of racial and sexist bigotry, writes Marjorie Cohn.

    • Democrats Adopt a More Progressive Tone

      Instead, we witnessed an evening of progressive rhetoric and thoughtfulness unseen on a big political stage since the days of William Jennings Bryan, Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette, the Happy Warrior Al Smith and the crusaders of FDR’s New Deal. Not to mention Hubert Humphrey, Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, and a host of others who though history kept beating the drums for ordinary people against the organized might of Big Money.

    • Jill Stein Joins Forces with Berner Rebellion Inside and Outside DNC To Bring Powerful New Critical Mass to Political Revolution

      Dr. Jill Stein, presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, joined forces with thousands of Sanders delegates who took to the streets outside the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday to show their outrage at the DNC’s callous, backstabbing treatment of the Bernie Sanders campaign during the primary race – as evidenced by recent email leaks – and of Sanders delegates during the convention itself.

    • Greenwald Explains What Out-of-Touch Media Doesn’t Get About Trump, Russia, and US Electorate

      Donald Trump poses “extreme dangers” to the United States and the world, journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald says in a new interview published at Slate.

      But to stop the GOP presidential nominee from getting elected, “U.S. media and U.S. elites” must take a lesson from the recent Brexit debacle, he warns—and bending over backwards to link Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t the right approach.

      “U.K. elites were uniform, uniform, in their contempt for the Brexit case, other than the right-wing Murdochian tabloids,” Greenwald told Slate contributor Isaac Chotiner by phone.

      “They all sat on Twitter all day long, from the left to the right, and all reinforced each other about how smart and how sophisticated they were in scorning and [being snide] about [U.K. Independent party] and Boris Johnson and all of the Brexit leaders, and they were convinced that they had made their case,” he said. “Everyone they were talking to—which is themselves—agreed with them. It was constant reinforcement, and anyone who raised even a peep of dissent or questioned the claims they were making was instantly castigated as somebody who was endangering the future of the U.K. because they were endorsing—or at least impeding—the effort to stop Brexit. This is what’s happening now.”

    • Poverty Protests at RNC/DNC Conventions

      True concern about the plight of America’s poor and disenfranchised has been low on the priority lists of both the Republican and Democratic parties for many years, a challenge that Cheri Honkala, a long-time warrior for the poor and disenfranchised, has taken to the two conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia.

      As National Coordinator of the Poor Peoples’ Economic Human Rights Campaign and the founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, Honkala participated a Poor People’s March through the streets of Cleveland at the Republican National Convention and, from her home base in Philadelphia, sought to bring the same issues to the Democratic National Convention.

    • The Fear of Hillary’s Foreign Policy

      Hillary Clinton’s nominating convention has focused on domestic issues, but her foreign policy has many anti-war Democrats worried, as she surrounds herself with neocons and liberal hawks, writes James W Carden from Philadelphia.

    • Politician Speak at the DNC

      None are more adept at the fake-progressive sales job than Bill Clinton. Taking your Hillary history from the Big Creep (as Monica Lewinsky used to call Mr. Clinton) during his “I Met a Girl” speech two nights ago, you’d think he’d never engaged in epic levels of philandering while he’s been married to the noble and selfless liberal idealist Hillary Clinton. You’d never imagine that his wife: worked at a vile corporate law firm like Rose Law; sat on the board of the viciously anti-worker and globalist retail giant Wal-Mart; voted for authorizing George W. Bush to arch-criminally invade Iraq if he wanted to (he did); applauded her co-president husband’s malicious and calamitous elimination of disproportionately Black poor mothers’ and children’s entitlement to basic federal family cash assistance; pushed Bill to criminally bomb Serbian children; backed and protected a right wing coup in Honduras as Secretary of State; led the way in the U.S.-led Western destruction of Libya and Syria; joined Bill in cozying up to vicious authoritarian rulers like Rwanda’s President-for-Life Paul Kagame and the decrepit kings of arch-reactionary ad absolutist Saudi Arabia; joined Bill in helping engineer the full corporate-neoliberal Wall Street takeover of the Democratic Party during the last quarter of the last century.

    • Digital democracy meets the oligarchs uptown

      The Blairites in his party were outraged by this off-message opinion that seemed to them like the blunder of an amateur. Yet, it was precisely this admission of the EU’s deficiencies combined with a rejection of Brexit which marked out Jeremy Corbyn as a thoughtful and sincere politician to those on the Left who voted for his Remain and reform position on June 23. As we’re all now discovering to our cost, complex problems can’t be fixed by simple solutions.

    • Bill Clinton’s Convention Speech About Hillary Clinton Was Filled With Inaccuracies (Video)

      Rule No. 1 in journalism: Check the facts. With politicians, multiply that rule by 10 to 1,000, depending on the politician.

      On Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, former U.S. President Bill Clinton gave a speech about his wife, Hillary Clinton, soon after she was pronounced the official Democratic Party nominee. The speech was glowing and filled with inaccuracies.

      Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) co-founder Jeff Cohen spoke with Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatkar about how the media failed to dissect Clinton’s speech.

      “Every time he talked about policy, it was either inaccurate—180 degrees wrong—or it was completely cherry-picked,” said Cohen. “He made it seem like, you’ll remember how Hillary Clinton made climate change the central feature of our foreign policy. That’s virtually word for word. ‘When Hillary was secretary of state, she made,’ well, everyone knows, you can read it in Mother Jones, that she was pushing fracking and U.S. fracking interests all over the world. You cannot simultaneously push fracking all over the world and be making climate change a centerpiece of your foreign policy.”

    • On Responsible Sourcing for DNC Hack Stories
    • Trump as the Reagan Reboot

      The conventional wisdom says Donald Trump has turned presidential politics into a reality show. It’s an understandable diagnosis, particularly given his intentionally brassy persona and the professional wrestling-style antics he used to dispatch a motley crew of also-rans on this way to victory. Both were on display in Cleveland where — with the name “Trump” towering over him — the sole survivor triumphantly claimed the ultimate prize at the end of a year-long series

    • DNC insiders detail months of escalating dysfunction

      Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn’t supposed to ask Joe Biden to come to her daughter’s bat mitzvah.

      Democratic National Committee staff had sent the chair to the vice president armed with four specific requests for getting him involved in raising money for the party.

    • Clinton Writes Off the Left

      When Donald Trump presented his vice presidential running mate to the world, he was forthright with the rationale for selecting the relatively dull Mike Pence—a man who may perfectly embody the notion of a “generic Republican.” At the unveiling press conference, Trump declared in his characteristically unvarnished manner: “I think if you look at one of the big reasons that I chose Mike … one of the reasons is party unity.”

      It doesn’t take much analytical heavy lifting to identify what picking Pence added to Trump’s prospectus. The GOP primary season made clear that ideological movement conservatives, who adhere dogmatically to the classic Reagan-derived “fusionist” brand of Republican politics, are a small, outnumbered faction of the party’s membership. But they still exist and vote at high rates, and a failure to court them would have had a real, adverse electoral impact. Crucially, they also wield disproportionate influence at the elite level. Thus, as Trump readily admitted, Pence serves to mollify these disaffected elements of the GOP coalition, which had been the faction of the party most hostile to Trump. Since the Pence announcement and the conclusion of the Cleveland convention last week, Trump’s favorability rating among GOP voters has risen by several percentage points.

    • The Hacking of the 2016 Election – Did I Write the Script? [Ed: too much of Microsoft]

      One of the big political stories this week is that experts believe that Russia has hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers in an effort to help Trump win the presidential election. Today, security expert Bruce Schneier went further, in an editorial in the Washington Post, suggesting that Putin’s next move may be to exploit the woefully inadequate security of US voting machines to hack the election itself.

    • Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context [Ed: Satire]

      Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. “The corrupt news media is constantly taking the things I say and putting them within the larger context of politics and global events—it’s absolutely sickening what they do,” said Trump, adding that many of the comments he has made—including his call yesterday for Russia to hack into the emails of his presidential opponent Hillary Clinton and publish the contents—had been repeatedly and unfairly contextualized with relevant facts about the world and pertinent information about the situation in which they were stated. “It’s completely shameful to take words I’ve spoken or written and try to connect them to some kind of objective reality. I say something, and the next thing I know, a crooked reporter is telling everyone what I said along with a fact-based explanation of what its implications are and why it matters. It’s ridiculous, and it has to stop.” Trump added that he would not hesitate to ban any news organization from his campaign that continued to twist his statements by implying they held any specific meaning about or relation to the world we inhabit.

    • 10 reasons why #DemExit is serious: Getting rid of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not enough

      Shortly after Bernie Sanders publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton a new hashtag trended on Twitter: #DemExit. The hashtag offered Sanders supporters a chance to vent their frustrations with the Democratic Party and with the sense that their candidate had been pressured into an endorsement. Rather than reach out to these disaffected voters, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ignored them. Understood within the larger narrative that Sanders supporters were just whining brats who refused to concede and move on, #DemExit was dismissed as just more sour milk.

      But now that the latest leak of DNC emails proves that Sanders supporters have a legitimate right to feel cheated, #DemExit increasingly seems like an appropriate response to a rigged system.

      The new leak shows that the DNC never took the Sanders campaign seriously, even when he was winning state after state. Rather than recognize that Sanders was attracting new voters to the party, members of the DNC chose to mock them and close ranks around Clinton.

    • “The Two-Party System Is the Worst Case Scenario” – An Interview With the Green Party’s Jill Stein

      As the Democratic convention in Philadelphia progressed, and hopes of a revolution on the floor quickly faded for the thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters, support for another figure began to emerge on the streets: Green Party candidate Jill Stein. By the end of the week, Vote Jill signs where everywhere in the city, her name often scribbled directly over old Sanders posters and T-shirts. Bernie’s revolution had taken an unexpected turn, and as more protesters and delegates called for a “Demexit,” talk of a third-party option suddenly gained ground at a major party convention. On Thursday, as Clinton prepared to accept her party’s nomination, The Intercept spoke with Stein at an improvised South Philly campaign headquarters.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Judge Tosses Out Defamation Lawsuit Filed Against ProPublica, CIR

      A federal district judge in Phoenix threw out a lawsuit on Monday that accused ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting of defaming a government contractor who helped a Chinese national gain access to a counterterrorism center.

      The lawsuit stemmed from an August 2014 story published by the two nonprofit newsrooms that revealed an apparent security breach at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, an intelligence center set up by state and local authorities after the 9/11 terror attacks. A Chinese national worked at the facility as a computer programmer for five months in 2007, allowing him access to the Arizona driver’s license database and potentially to a roster of intelligence analysts and investigators.

      The contract employee then suddenly returned home to Beijing, taking two laptops and additional hard drives with him. The possible breach, which could have affected as many as 5 million Arizona residents, was not reported to the state’s attorney general.

    • Twitter’s caught between a rock and a censorship place

      Twitter posted another set of bummer quarterly results this week: basically flat growth, a loss of over $100 million, and a still-fuzzy plan to turn things around and define itself.

      The company’s new branding effort at least makes an attempt at the latter: it emphasizes that Twitter is a destination for news, video, conversation and analysis in real time. The company says it will work on improving engagement by improving its core product — you know, Twitter itself.

      So, that’s a start. But the most telling part of the investor call this week was the amount of time CEO Jack Dorsey had to spend defending the fact that Twitter is often, simply put, not a nice place to be.

    • The West kowtows to China through self-censorship
    • Old Comedians Mistake Criticism for Censorship in Whiny Doc

      Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences. The film and all of its subjects — including Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, Jim Norton and Gilbert Gottfried — persistently conflate criticism with censorship. They don’t just want “freedom of speech”; they want total silence from anyone who disagrees with them, free speech for themselves and nobody else.

    • Internet trolls are even more hostile when they’re using their real names, a study finds

      Anonymity, we often assume, is the breeding ground for bad behavior on the internet. Among the gatekeepers of comment sections and social media sites, the conventional wisdom is that anonymity empowers bullies to voice hateful opinions without consequence. When unmasked by real-name policies, the theory goes, these trolls will slink back to their caves, taking the vitriol from Twitter, Facebook and other social media with them.

      Not true, says Lea Stahel, a sociology researcher at the University of Zurich.

      Stahel and a team at the university’s Institute of Sociology wanted to know whether anonymity really encouraged the worst kind of behavior seen in online “firestorms.” These are moments when a public figure or group evokes the ire of commentators, who direct thousands or millions of negative messages at their subjects. The harassment of women in the video-gaming community, known as “Gamergate,” and the recent attack on the Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones are just two examples.

      [...]

      Pfeffer cautioned against generalizing the findings too broadly. Anonymity may lower the threshold for aggression in some cases, and encourage the use of bots, automated “users” that amplify trending topics (Twitter has admitted that about 8.5% of its users may be bots).

    • Maribyrnong Council demands small business remove ‘offensive’ Hillary Clinton mural
    • Melbourne graffiti artist Lushsux’s Instagram account deleted in ‘politically-motivated censorship’ after risque murals
    • Melbourne street artist behind racy Hillary Clinton mural has Instagram account deleted
    • Street artist Lushsux suspects bias after Instagram account deleted
    • Costs of ISP blocking injunctions: is there really an EU rule?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Baidu uses millions of users’ location data to make predictions

      BAIDU, China’s internet giant, has shown what you can learn when you have access to enough location data.

      The firm’s Big Data Lab in Beijing has used billions of location records from its 600 million users as a lens to view the Chinese economy. It has tracked the flux of people around offices and shops as a proxy measurement for employment and consumption activity. The lab even used the data to predict Apple’s second quarter revenue in China.

      Location data has already proved useful for purposes such as keeping tabs on population movements and the spread of disease. This is the first time that a company the size of Baidu – similar to Facebook or Google – has shown what it is capable of doing with the data from their huge user bases, giving these firms enormous power and insight that they don’t typically talk about.

      The researchers hand-labelled thousands of areas of interest – offices, shopping centres and industrial zones – across China. Then they studied location data from the end of 2014 to the middle of 2016 to see how many people were at those places at each time, and how that changed through the year.

    • Use a VPN or proxy in the United Arab Emirates, risk a £400K fine or prison

      Anyone using a VPN to visit illegal sites or dodge a ban on using unauthorised voice over IP (VoIP) service faces a £400,000 fine or prison under a new law brought in by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

      The text of the new legislation says: “Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery, shall be punished by temporary imprisonment and a fine of no less than Dh500,000 [£100,000] and not exceeding Dh2,000,000 [£400,000], or either of these two penalties.”

      However, as the Privacy Online News blog explains, the definition of crime in the UAE includes apparently trivial online actions: “crimes include accessing blocked services or websites, which can only be done with a VPN or proxy, use that the UAE considers fraudulent use of an IP address.”

    • NSA certifies KG-350 encryption system
    • NSA Certifies Raytheon’s New KG-350 Ethernet Encryption System
    • New Law In Illinois Restricts Stingray Use, Requires Court Orders For Deployment

      Roughly eight years after information about law enforcement use of Stingray devices began slowly making its way into the public sphere, positive changes are being made. While the government has often argued it can be the “Third Party” in “Third Party Doctrine” by inserting itself warrantlessly between people’s cell phones and their carriers’ towers, its assertions are being met with increased judicial skepticism.

      Two judges — one state, one federal — have reached the same conclusion in recent months: using a cell tower spoofer to locate suspects by dragging information out of their phones is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Warrants are required.

      A few state legislatures have gotten into the act as well, proposing laws that create a warrant requirement for Stingray deployment. Illinois is the latest to do so (and the law actually passed), creating a new set of guidelines for law enforcement Stingray device use, including limits on data retention. It doesn’t go quite so far as to mandate warrant acquisition, but it does force law enforcement to specify the equipment used in their applications, which also serves to create a paper trail that can be examined by defendants and members of the public.

    • Your Email Is Never Going to Be Safe

      Unless you secure everything you will go on the Internet to move some things around. That means there are still other ways for the government to get the data even in-house.

      That material is all discoverable by capturing the ISP streams. Your protection is extended with various virtual private networks but these systems leak when people email outside the umbrella of the VPN.

      Assume that whatever you do on email will be forwarded or cut-and-pasted and get into the wild, somehow. That is exactly what happened to the DNC (Democratic National Committee) with 20,000 emails sent to Wikileaks. While various pundits are trying to blame Russian hackers, it is more likely an inside job by a disgruntled employee.

    • ISIS’ 4 Terabyte Cache of Un- or Badly Encrypted Data

      This retreat is happening as we speak. That means that US forces were able to exploit the data almost immediately on seizing it. And that, in turn, either means it is not encrypted, it is badly encrypted, or the US also got passwords for encrypted files along with the rest of the stash.

      Perhaps this can put to rest the calls to weaken encryption because ISIS is using it to great effect?

    • The Secret Rules That Allow the FBI to Spy on Journalists

      The bones of our democracy — the core elements that separate that way of life from others — lie in the First Amendment to the Constitution, specifically the rights to free speech and a free press.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets

      To count and characterise injuries resulting from legal intervention by US law enforcement personnel and injury ratios per 10 000 arrests or police stops, thus expanding discussion of excessive force by police beyond fatalities.

    • Black Lives Matter in Our Courtrooms Too

      Attorney Andrea Burton didn’t walk into a local Youngstown courtroom with a large banner or poster — she simply had a small metal button with the words “Black Lives Matter” on her lapel. That was enough for Judge Robert Milich to sentence her to five days in the Mahoning County Jail because she refused to remove the pin. While judges may have a great deal of discretion about what happens in their courtroom, this raises some significant questions and continues to highlight the need for a sustained movement for Black lives.

    • The ugly and violent death of gender conformity

      Thanks to an upsurge in diverse gender images in the media, gender progressive public conversations and growing parental awareness, millions of our beautiful children are gracefully and elegantly exploring the inbetween spaces of gender; pushing the boundaries of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ in ways both large and small as a natural part of their self expression.

    • Chelsea Manning Could Face Additional Punishment for Her Suicide Attempt

      U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself on July 5 in her cell at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Now, military officials are considering filing charges in connection to the suicide attempt that could make the terms of her imprisonment much more punitive — possibly including indefinite solitary confinement — while possibily losing any chance of receiving parole.

      According to a charge sheet posted by the ACLU, Manning was informed by military officials on Thursday that she is under investigation for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.” In the weeks following her suicide attempt, she has been active on social media, thanking her followers for their moral support.

      Manning’s treatment in prison since her 2010 arrest has repeatedly generated outrage among civil liberties advocates. The punitive tactics that have been employed against her include stripping her naked in her cell on a nightly basis, extended solitary confinement and denial of medical necessities like eyeglasses. In 2011, then-State Department spokesman P.J Crowley publicly described Manning’s treatment in prison as “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.”

    • The Long Cruel Reach of Indonesia’s Death Penalty

      On July 25, in the Indonesian port town of Cilacap, a 52-year-old Pakistani man was placed in an ambulance and transferred to Nusa Kambangan, otherwise known as “execution island.” Zulfiqar Ali, a textile worker, was arrested for possessing heroin in 2004; like many caught with drugs in Indonesia, he was convicted and sentenced to die. Human rights activists denounced his case; Ali had been tortured into signing a confession, they said, and his primary accuser had retracted his statements at trial. Nonetheless, on Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, while Ali recovered from stomach and kidney surgery, government officials came for him at the hospital. Three days later, he would be dead, executed by firing squad in the middle of the night.

      Ali would not die alone. Earlier this year, the Indonesian government announced it would soon execute more than a dozen unnamed prisoners, the third round of executions following a four-year moratorium on capital punishment. The announcement — part of a zero-tolerance drug policy implemented under President Joko Widodo in 2013 — sparked grim speculation about who might be next to die. There were the three drug offenders transferred to Nusa Kambangan from Batam, a different island prison, in early May, as reported by the Jakarta Post. Or four “black-skinned people from Nigeria,” in the words of the sentencing judge in the case of Humphrey “Jeff” Ejike Eleweke, who was targeted for surveillance because of his nationality — and who swore he was innocent. By Thursday, newspapers reported, coffins were being ferried to Nusa Kambangan, while family members and spiritual advisers were given name tags for their final visits — “an indication that executions were imminent.”

      But one prisoner was spared from the firing squad. In late June, thousands of miles from Nusa Kambangan, a diminutive Filipino woman spoke from a stage at the Oslo Opera House, a sleek white building on the harbor of Norway’s capital city. “My name is Celia Veloso,” she said in her native Tagalog. “I am the mother of Mary Jane Veloso, who is on death row in Indonesia.” Arrested at the Java airport with heroin in her suitcase, Mary Jane was nearly executed in April 2015 alongside eight other drug convicts, but was spared at the last second. The hasty reprieve was so unexpected that people in the Philippines awoke the next day to inaccurate headlines reporting her death.

    • Checking up on Border Patrol Checkpoints to Stop Racial Profiling

      Where are you going? Why are you going there? When did you purchase your vehicle? Can I search your car? Do you have a body in the trunk?

      These are some of the questions agents ask me when I cross through a Border Patrol checkpoint. Before I moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to teach, I had no idea such military-style checkpoints existed within the United States. To be clear, I’m not talking about something you encounter at the U.S.-Mexican border; these checkpoints are in an American town. Border Patrol operates checkpoints located upwards of 100 miles into the U.S. This “100-mile zone,” where roughly 200 million people in the U.S. live, sometimes feels like occupied territory.

    • Beyond #BlackLivesMatter: police reform must be bolstered by legal action

      Something is missing from the debate over police reform. Though police killings of black men have sparked a nationwide movement to stop police violence, the police can fairly ask whether they deserve all of the blame.

      That’s not because current levels of police violence are warranted (they aren’t), or because policing is race neutral (it isn’t). It’s because the chief architects of American policing are not police departments; they’re courts. The movement for police reform should be joined by an equally ambitious movement for court reform.

    • Patients Deserve Their Doctor’s Best Medical Judgment, But Texas Bureaucrats Think They Know Better

      The doctor-patient relationship is the cornerstone of medical practice, and the foundation of that relationship is trust. Doctors have the privilege of helping people through some of the most important and challenging moments of their lives. We earn patients’ trust by giving them our best medical judgment based on science. That’s why I became a doctor.

      Now, as I enter my third year of medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern, I am beginning to understand all the ways Texas politicians are working to corrode this trust by interfering in the doctor-patient relationship.

      Quality, peer-reviewed information is what should be disseminated to our patients rather than politically charged and biased pseudo-science.

    • “Say Our Children’s Names” – Victims of Police Violence Honored on Stage and Off at Democratic Convention

      One of the most poignant moments of the Democratic National Convention came on Tuesday night, as Geneva Reed-Veal took the stage. “One year ago yesterday, I lived the worst nightmare anyone could imagine,” she said. “I watched as my daughter, Sandra Bland, was lowered into the ground in a coffin.”

      Bland was found “hanging in a jail cell after an unlawful traffic stop and an unlawful arrest,” she continued. Six other women died in custody that same month, she then added, before reciting their rarely heard names one by one. “I’m here with Hillary Clinton because she is a leader and a mother who will say our children’s names.”

      “Saying the names” of those killed by police, in custody, or in acts of racist violence, has become a ritual since the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, whose mothers were also on stage at the DNC, together with Reed-Veal and six other women — the “mothers of the movement,” as they have been called.

    • Falun Gong advocates protest against organ harvesting in China during stop at Peterborough City Hall
    • Falun Gong practitioners ask support to stop organ pillaging in China
    • Falun Gong in Collingwood to raise awareness of human rights abuses by Chinese government
    • Bringing her protest to North Bay Friday
    • Subordinates of Disgraced Former Chinese Leader Aide Continue to Fall
    • Petition in Northeast Chinese City Shows Broad Support for Legal Action Against Former Party Leader
    • A Chinese Spiritual Way Which Ended In Brutal ‘Torturing’ Of The Chinese!
    • ‘I was three, making the journey alone’: Ursula Kantorowicz travels on the Kindertransport, 1939

      I was born in July 1935 in Reichenbach, Germany, into a wealthy family. The family textile firm, Cohn Gebrüder, was established in 1876 by my great-grandfather, Herman and his brother Arnold. They had a huge factory in town; we lived opposite, in the Red Villa. It had parquet floors, stained-glass windows and central heating, which was a luxury back then.

      The day after Kristallnacht, on 9 November 1938, my father and grandfather – along with other Jewish men in the town – were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. My mother got them out by bribing officials with her jewellery. They returned with shaven heads and no shoelaces. At that point, the camps weren’t as final as they became.

      My family spent the next weeks getting together permits and visas. The idea was to send me to England on the Kindertransport to live with my uncle, Helmut Kantorowicz, his wife Berta, known as Putti, and his mother Regina – and for my parents to join me. My uncle emigrated in 1933; my father stayed behind as he didn’t want to leave the family firm.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Wireless Industry To Request En Banc Appeal Hearing On Net Neutrality Rules

      After months of anticipation, last June the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s Open Internet Order, an indisputably-massive win for net neutrality advocates. Not too surprisingly, net neutrality opponents have been engaged in histrionics ever since, with ISP loyal allies in Congress doing their best to punish the FCC with a series of senseless, taxpayer funded “accountability hearings” designed specifically to shame the agency for daring to stand up to large, incumbent ISPs. That’s when they’re not busy trying to gut FCC funding and authority via a rotating crop of sneaky bill riders.

      As Mike and I noted in a recent Techdirt podcast on net neutrality, most of these efforts are just lawmakers barking for their campaign contributions. There are really only a few ways for ISPs to effectively kill the rules, one of which being the election of a President who’ll restock the FCC with revolving door regulators who’ll either try to roll back the rules, or (more likely) will just refuse to enforce them whatsoever.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Olympic Games: Trademark Revenues Are High Stakes

        With a budget of over 2 US$ billion, the Brazilian Olympics rely heavily on commercial sponsors and licensing for revenue. Protecting the Olympic symbols is thus an imperative for the games with stringent rules on the use of those symbols and related signs. However, the fame of the event also draws covetousness from a variety of commercial actors seeking free rides, which is a dangerous endeavour, according to legal sources. Brazil adopted special rules for the occasion, while in the United States the protection is particularly stringent.

    • Copyrights

      • Brexit Could Have Broad Impact On UK Audiovisual Sector

        It is too soon to say precisely what impact the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union might have on Britain’s audiovisual sector, but among other things, Brexit could bring changes to the scope of copyright law and protections, rights clearance, online AV services and content creation, lawyers said.

      • Movie Studios Teamed Up And Removed KAT.am From The Internet

        The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) has taken serious measures to get rid of the new KAT.am domain that appeared online a few days ago. After sending a warning email to the operator, MPA has managed to get the website deleted by taking the help of the Armenian registry.

Links 28/7/2016: CORD as Linux Foundation Project, Wine 1.9.15 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google acquires LaunchKit to make life easier for Android developers
  • LaunchKit team heads to Google and open-sources its tools for helping devs launch their apps

    The team behind LaunchKit, a set of tools that helps developers launch their apps, is heading to Google and joining the Developer Product Group.

    It doesn’t look like LaunchKit’s products are moving over to Google, so the team decided to open-source its products and make them available on GitHub. LaunchKit’s hosted services will be available for the next 12 months. After that, they will be discontinued.

    LaunchKit currently offers four tools and developers will now be able to take them and run them themselves: Screenshot Builder for easily creating annotated screenshots for Apple’s and Google’s store, App Website Builder for creating responsive landing pages for new apps, Review Monitor for — well… — tracking reviews in Apple’s App Store, and Sales Reporter for keeping track of sales. The team has also written a couple of how-to guides for developers, too.

  • Fork YOU! Sure, take the code. Then what?

    There’s an old adage in the open source world – if you don’t like it, fork it. This advice, often given in a flippant manner, makes it seem like forking a piece of software is not a big deal.

    Indeed, forking a small project you find on GitHub is not a big deal. There’s even a handy button to make it easy to fork it. Unlike many things in programming though, that interaction model, that simplicity of forking, does not scale. There is no button next to Debian that says Fork it!

    Thinking that all you need to do to make a project yours is to fork it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what large free/open source projects are – at their hearts, they are communities. One does not simply walk into Debian and fork it.

    One can, on the other hand, walk out of a project, bring all the other core developers along, and essentially leave the original an empty husk.

    This is what happened when LibreOffice forked away from the once-mighty OpenOffice; it’s what happened when MariaDB split from MySQL; and it’s what happened more recently when the core developers behind ownCloud left the company and forked the code to start their own project, Nextcloud. They also, thankfully, dropped the silly lowercase first letter thing.

    Nextcloud consists of the core developers who built ownCloud, but who were not, and, judging by the very public way this happened, had not been, in control of the direction of the product for some time.

  • Apache Graduates Another Big Data Project to Top Level

    For the past year, we’ve taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support.

    Only days ago, the foundation announced that Apache Kudu has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Kudu is an open source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines. And now, Apache Twill has graduated as well. Twill is an abstraction over Apache Hadoop YARN that reduces the complexity of developing distributed Hadoop applications, allowing developers to focus more on their application logic.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Spark 2.0 takes an all-in-one approach to big data

      Apache Spark, the in-memory processing system that’s fast become a centerpiece of modern big data frameworks, has officially released its long-awaited version 2.0.

      Aside from some major usability and performance improvements, Spark 2.0′s mission is to become a total solution for streaming and real-time data. This comes as a number of other projects — including others from the Apache Foundation — provide their own ways to boost real-time and in-memory processing.

  • Databases

    • Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

      The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence. Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms. Specifically, in many of the cases where we previously used Postgres, we now use Schemaless, a novel database sharding layer built on top of MySQL. In this article, we’ll explore some of the drawbacks we found with Postgres and explain the decision to build Schemaless and other backend services on top of MySQL.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Q2’2016: EFI Improvements, Prepping For FreeBSD 11.0, Package Updates

      For FreeBSD fans not closely following its development on a daily basis, the FreeBSD project has released their Q2’2016 quarterly status report that covers various activities going on around this BSD operating system project.

    • EuroBSDCon 2016 schedule has been released

      The EuroBSDCon 2016 talks and schedule have been released, and oh are we in for a treat!

      All three major BSD’s have a “how we made the network go fast” talk, nearly every single timeslot has a networking related talk, and most of the non-networking talks look fantastic as well.

    • OPNsense 16.7 released
    • pfSense/m0n0wall-Forked OPNsense 16.7 Released

      The latest major release is out of OPNsense, a BSD open-source firewall OS project derived from pfSense and m0n0wall.

      OPNsense 16.7 brings NetFlow-based reporting and export, trafic shaping support, two-factor authentication, HTTPS and ICAP support in the proxy server, and UEFI boot and installation modes.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hyperbole 6.0.1 for Emacs 24.4 to 25 is released

      GNU Hyperbole (pronounced Ga-new Hi-per-bo-lee), or just Hyperbole, is an amazing programmable hypertextual information management system implemented as a GNU Emacs package. This is the first public release in 2016. Hyperbole has been greatly expanded and modernized for use with the latest Emacs 25 releases; it supports GNU Emacs 24.4 or above. It contains an extensive set of improvements that can greatly boost your day-to-day productivity with Emacs and your ability to manage information stored across many different machines on the internet. People who get used to Hyperbole find it helps them so much that they prefer never to use Emacs without it.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Belgium mulls reuse of banking mobile eID app

      The Belgium government wants to reuse ‘Belgian Mobile ID’ a smartphone app for electronic identification, developed by banks and telecom providers in the country. The eID app could be used for eGovernment services, and the federal IT service agency, Fedict, is working on the app’s integration.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Water resilience that flows: Open source technologies keep an eye on the water flow

      Communities around the world are familiar with the devastation brought on by floods and droughts. Scientists are concerned that, in light of global climate change, these events will only become more frequent and intense. Water variability, at its worst, can threaten the lives and well-beings of countless people. Sadly, humans cannot control the weather to protect themselves. But according to Silja Hund, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, communities can build resilience to water resource stress.

      Hund studies the occurrence and behavior of water. In particular, she studies rivers and streams. These have features (like water volume) that can change quickly. According to Hund, it is essential for communities to understand local water systems. Knowledge of water resources is helpful in developing effective water strategies. And one of the best ways to understand dynamic water bodies like rivers is to collect lots of data.

  • Programming/Development

    • Why open source programming languages are crushing proprietary peers

      It’s no secret that open source now dominates big data infrastructure. From Kubernetes to Hadoop to MongoDB, “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form,” as Cloudera chief strategy officer Mike Olson reminded us.

    • JavaScript keeps its spot atop programming language rankings

      U.K.-based technology analyst firm RedMonk just released the latest version of its biannual rankings of programming languages, and once again JavaScript tops the list, followed by Java and PHP.

      Those are same three languages that topped RedMonk’s list in January. In fact, the entire top 10 remains the same as it was it was six months ago. Perhaps the biggest surprise in Redmonk’s list—compiling the “performance of programming languages relative to one another on GitHub and Stack Overflow”—is that there are so few surprises, at least in the top 10.

    • Plenty of fish in the C, IEEE finds in language popularity contest

      It’s no surprise that C and Java share the top two spots in the IEEE Spectrum’s latest Interactive Top Programming Languages survey, but R at number five? That’s a surprise.

      This month’s raking from TIOBE put Java at number one and C at number two, while the IEEE reverses those two, and the IEEE doesn’t rank assembly as a top-ten language like TIOBE does.

      It’s worth noting however that the IEEE’s sources are extremely diverse: the index comprises search results from Google, Twitter, GitHub, StackOverflow, Reddit, Hacker News, CareerBuilder, Dice, and the institute’s own eXplore Digital Library.

      Even then, there are some oddities in the 48 programming environments assessed: several commenters to the index have already remarked that “Arduino” shouldn’t be considered a language, because code for the teeny breadboard is written in C or C++.

Leftovers

  • Oh Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Where did it all go wrong?

    Name and shame those who follow lots of people one week, fishing for follow backs, who then unfollow you the next. You all know who you are…Twitter influencers my arse.

  • Twitter must remember its mission if it wants to unlock new growth opportunity

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Denationalise the Olympics to really stamp out cheating

      Where is the justice in this? The Russian athlete, Yuliya Stepanova, risks death by revealing the extent of Russian doping in her Olympic sport. She has to flee her country with her family, live in hiding and train in secret. She is told that, provided she is “clean”, she may compete in the Rio Olympics next week, but “as a neutral”. She is then told she cannot compete. Instead the International Olympic Committee offers her a free ticket to the Games, so she can eat her heart out watching her compatriots perform in front of her. It is the Snowden moral: any whistleblower against any sort of power will be ostracised and humiliated.

    • US Senate Judiciary Chairman Questions High Cost Of Medicare Drug Coverage

      United States Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has demanded answers from the government Medicare programme regarding the rapid rise in costs of coverage of Americans’ prescription drugs. The demand follows a press report showing an extremely high climb in costs for the so-called “catastrophic coverage” program.

    • Florida regulators OK plan to increase toxins in water

      Despite the objection of environmental groups, state environmental regulators voted Tuesday to approve new standards that will increase the amount of cancer-causing toxins allowed in Florida’s rivers and streams under a plan the state says will protect more Floridians than current standards.

      The Environmental Regulation Commission voted 3-2 to approve a proposal that would increase the number of regulated chemicals from 54 to 92 allowed in rivers, streams and other sources of drinking water, news media outlets reported. The final vote came after hours of discussion, protests and emotional testimony.

    • Office workers must exercise for an hour a day to counter death risk

      Office workers must exercise for one hour a day to combat the deadly risk of modern working lifestyles, a major Lancet study has found.

      Research on more than one million adults found that sitting for at least eight hours a day could increase the risk of premature death by up to 60 per cent.

      Scientists said sedentary lifestyles were now posing as great a threat to public health as smoking, and were causing more deaths than obesity.

      They urged anyone spending hours at their desk to change their daily routine to take a five minute break every hour, as well as exercise at lunchtimes and evenings.

    • Details Of September UN High-Level Meeting On Antimicrobial Resistance

      Details of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) are coming clear after the preparation of a text laying out the specifics.

  • Security

    • Linux Security Automation at Scale in the Cloud

      Ten years ago it didn’t seem like Linux growth could increase any faster. Then, in 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS). Linux growth went from linear to exponential. AWS competitors sprang up and were acquired by IBM, Microsoft, and other big players, accelerating Linux expansion even more.

      Linux became the platform of choice for the private cloud. But this movement wasn’t confined to the cloud. A rush to create Linux applications and services spilled over to traditional on premises. Linux had evolved from that obscure thing people ran web servers on to the backbone operating system of the majority of IT.

    • Don’t want to get hacked? Close your laptop.

      My friends often leave their computers open and unlocked. I tell them they should probably get in the habit of locking their computers, but they don’t listen to me. So I’ve created a simple project to hack my friends and show them the importance of computer security.

      All I need to do is wait for them to leave their computer unlocked for a few seconds, open up their terminal, and type a single, short command.

    • Citibank IT guy deliberately wiped routers, shut down 90% of firm’s networks across America

      It was just after 6pm on December 23, 2013, and Lennon Ray Brown, a computer engineer at the Citibank Regents Campus in Irving, Texas, was out for revenge.

      Earlier in the day, Brown – who was responsible for the bank’s IT systems – had attended a work performance review with his supervisor.

      It hadn’t gone well.

      Brown was now a ticking time bomb inside the organisation, waiting for his opportunity to strike. And with the insider privileges given to him by the company, he had more of an opportunity to wreak havoc than any external hacker.

    • Explo-Xen! Bunker buster bug breaks out guests from hypervisor

      A super-bug in the Xen hypervisor may allow privileged code running in guests to escape to the underlying host.

      This means, on vulnerable systems, malicious administrators within virtual machines can potentially break out of their confines and start interfering with the host server and other guests. This could be really bad news for shared environments.

      All versions of open-source Xen are affected (CVE-2016-6258, XSA-182) although it is only potentially exploitable on x86 hardware running paravirtualized (PV) guests. The bug was discovered by Jérémie Boutoille of Quarkslab, and publicly patched on Tuesday for Xen versions 4.3 to 4.7 and the latest bleeding-edge code.

    • Intel Puts Numbers on the Security Talent Shortage

      The cybersecurity shortfall in the workforce remains a critical vulnerability for companies and nations, according to an Intel Security report being issued today.

      Eighty-two percent of surveyed respondents reported a shortage of security skills, and respondents in every country said that cybersecurity education is deficient.

    • NIST declares the age of SMS-based 2-factor authentication over

      2-factor authentication is a great thing to have, and more and more services are making it a standard feature. But one of the go-to methods for sending 2FA notifications, SMS, is being left in the dust by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

    • 10 Best Password Cracking Tools Of 2016 | Windows, Linux, OS X
    • By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines

      Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Horrific pictures: 300 dead in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s national drug crackdown

      RODRIGO “The Punisher” Duterte vowed to eliminate drug crime via state sanctioned murder and he’s fulfilling that promise with chilling efficiency.

      The official death toll since the Philippine president’s call on authorities and citizens last month to kill drug users and dealers on sight is almost 300 but the true figure is certain to be higher.

      The victims nobody reported missing, or cared enough about to identify, are unlikely to have made anyone’s list.

      Now the horrific results of Duterte’s crackdown have been illustrated in an extraordinary series of photographs by Getty’s Dondi Tawatao.

      According to police data, 293 suspected users and pushers were killed during police operations between July 1 and July 24. Human rights groups say this figure does not include countless people murdered by vigilantes in street executions.

    • Watchdog to Kerry: Tell Duterte to probe killings

      The watchdog group Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday, July 26, to tell Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to investigate the recent killings of suspected drug dealers in the Philippines.

      Kerry is set to arrive in the Philippines on Tuesday for a two-day trip that includes a meeting with Duterte.

      In a statement, HRW Asia deputy director Phelim Kine said Kerry should air his concern about Duterte’s war against illegal drugs.

    • In a massive attempt to stop the spread of terror, French media are no longer publishing photos of terrorists

      After a spate of violent attacks in France, several French media organizations have vowed to no longer publish the names or images of terrorists.

      In an editorial published yesterday (July 27), after the killing of a priest by knife-wielding men in a Normandy church, newspaper Le Monde said (link in French) that it would stop publishing images of perpetrators. The paper said the decision was necessary to defeat the “strategy of hatred” facing France.

    • North Korea: U.S. declared war with sanctions
    • North Korea: U.S. “crossed the red line,” effectively declared war

      North Korea’s top diplomat for U.S. affairs told The Associated Press on Thursday that Washington “crossed the red line” and effectively declared war by putting leader Kim Jong Un on its list of sanctioned individuals, and said a vicious showdown could erupt if the U.S. and South Korea hold annual war games as planned next month.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Are we ready for the gold rush on the sea floor?

      THE submersible Alvin encountered its first “black smoker” 2000 metres deep off the coast of the Galapagos Islands. It was 1977, and the realisation that life could survive in pitch darkness next to deep sea hydrothermal vents was about to stun the world. Now we are returning to those vents, this time on the other side of the Pacific – and armed with diggers.

      The hot water shooting out of these vents contains all sorts of dissolved precious metals. On contact with the cold ocean water, these immediately precipitate out, showering the vicinity with gold, silver, copper and more (see diagram). Some want to tap into this booty, arguing that deep sea mining is not only lucrative, but also a more sustainable alternative to mineral extraction on land. But not everyone is convinced we can exploit the deep without damaging it.

    • The Ocean Could Be the New Gold Rush

      The bottom of the world’s ocean contains vast supplies of precious metals and other resources, including gold, diamonds, and cobalt. Now, as the first deep-sea mining project ramps up, nations are trying to hammer out guidelines to ensure this new “gold rush” doesn’t wreck the oceans.

      People have dreamed of harvesting riches from the seafloor for decades. A project off Papua New Guinea could begin as early as 2018, serving as a test case for an industry that could be highly lucrative. If it proves successful, it could kick off a boom of deep-sea mining around the world.

      In response, representatives of many nations, the mining industry, and environmental groups are meeting this week in Kingston, Jamaica, at an annual session of the International Seabed Authority. The purpose is to agree on safeguards and operating procedures for deep-sea mining, especially in the high seas. Under international jurisdiction, the high seas represent roughly two-thirds of the world’s oceans.

    • A Fracking Pipeline Puts Tim Kaine’s Fossil Fuel Industry Ties to the Test

      Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine is facing pressure from landowners in his home state of Virginia to stand against the planned Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry fracked gas from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia to mid-Atlantic markets.

      He’s made some moves in that direction: He’s held private meetings with landowners in the pipeline’s pathway; he’s asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to strengthen the consultation process for residents; and he introduced an amendment to a federal energy bill that would encourage regulators to carry out a review of the cumulative impact of the region’s four planned pipelines.

  • Finance

    • HMRC cleaners striking over pay: ‘They’ve treated us appallingly’

      When George Osborne announced a new “national living wage” (NLW) to boost low-paid workers’ income and help people off welfare, cleaner Maria Hill looked forward to the modest rise the extra 50p per hour would bring her. Hill, 54, has cleaned the Liverpool offices of HM Revenue and Customs for more than 15 years.

      “Things are tight, really tight to be honest,” she says. When you are earning £201.60 a week “every bit helps”. It never occurred to her that she would be left much worse off and would end up on strike.

      As the April deadline for bringing in the NLW approached, ISS, the company that employs the HMRC cleaners in a complex subcontracting chain, told staff that it could not afford the mandatory rise. It informed them that it intended to claw back any increase in hourly pay by cutting each worker’s number of hours so that their overall wages stayed the same.

    • Clinton Friend Admits What Everyone Knows Is True: Clinton Still Supports TPP & Will Back It

      If you’ve followed the whole TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) thing at all, and/or the Presidential election this year, you probably already know that Hillary Clinton famously flip-flopped on TPP. She was for it, before she was against it (and tried to rewrite history to hide her support of it). Of course, basically everyone recognized that her newfound concerns about TPP were made up, as a response to (at the time) surging support for Bernie Sanders, who was vocally against the agreement. But, of course, as tons of people have been saying all along, everyone expects that after the election she’ll magically flip flop back to supporting TPP.

    • Anglo American cuts net debt to $11.7 billion, on track for less than $10 billion
    • Anglo’s Year of the Turnaround Puts Debt Targets Within Reach
    • Lloyds to cut 3,000 jobs, close more branches after Brexit shock

      Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY.L) said on Thursday it would step up its cost cutting plans to help to offset a more testing economic environment caused by Britain’s vote to quit the European Union.

      Britain’s largest retail bank aims to save 400 million pounds ($528.56 million) by end-2017 by axing a further 3,000 jobs and closing an additional 200 branches to protect its earnings and dividends against the effects of lower-for-longer interest rates.

      Lloyds, rescued in a 20.5 billion pound taxpayer bail-out during the financial crisis, is the first major British bank to report results since the referendum and is the most exposed to any downturn in the British economy.

      Chief Executive Officer Antonio Horta-Osório is searching for ways to prop up Lloyds’ dividend, one of its key attractions, and sustain profit growth in its main UK consumer and commercial lending market, still reeling from the Brexit result on June 24.

    • Lloyds cuts a further 3,000 jobs and doubles branch closure plan

      Lloyds has ramped-up its job-cutting scheme, axing a further 3,000 roles, even as it reported a 101% increase in pre-tax profits.

      The bank also doubled its planned branch closures, with 200 more set to vanish from the UK’s high-streets by the end of 2017.

      The cuts are in addition to the 9,000 job and 200 branch closures Lloyds announced in 2014.

      Lloyds reported a £2.5bn pre-tax profit for the half year to the end of June.

      In the same period last year, it made £1.2bn.

    • Not Just In The US: TPP Meeting More Resistance In Australia And Japan, Too

      It’s remarkable how TPP, a previously obscure trade deal known only to a few specialists — and to enlightened Techdirt readers, of course — has suddenly become one of the hottest issues in the US Presidential contest. But it’s important to remember that TPP is still a live issue in many of the other participating countries too. Malaysia seems to be the furthest along in the ratification process, and Peru is also moving forward. But there are signs that resistance could be growing, rather than diminishing, in some key nations.

    • Ford considers closing factories and raising prices in Europe in wake of Brexit

      Ford has warned it is considering closing factories and raising prices in the UK and Europe in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

      Announcing disappointing results on Thursday, the motor company forecast that the referendum decision could cost the company $1bn over the next two years.

      Ford is the largest car brand in the UK and Bob Shanks, Ford’s chief financial officer, warned price rises would be necessary there in order to offset currency fluctuations in the wake of Brexit. The pound has crashed 11% against the dollar since the Brexit vote on 23 June.

    • Clinton-Kaine Campaign Should Support TPP, Says CTA

      The following statement is attributed to Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, Consumer Technology Association (CTA)™, regarding the Clinton-Kaine campaign’s “evolving” position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP):

      “As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, the Trans-Pacific Partnership ‘holds great economic opportunities to all participating nations.’ As recently as last Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine reiterated his support for granting President Obama ‘fast-track’ authority to negotiate the trade deal. We can only hope the politics of the moment are driving the Clinton-Kaine campaign’s evolving rhetoric on TPP, not the substance of the deal.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Can Facts Slow The DNC Breach Runaway Train?

      Yesterday, Professor Thomas Rid (Kings College London) published his narrative of the DNC breach and strongly condemned the lack of action by the U.S. government against Russia.

      Susan Hennessey, a Harvard-educated lawyer who used to work at the Office of the General Counsel at NSA called the evidence “about as close to a smoking gun as can be expected where a sophisticated nation state is involved.”

      Then late Monday evening, the New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the DNC breach.

      It’s hard to beat a good narrative “when explanations take such a dreadful time” as Lewis Carroll pointed out. And the odds are that nothing that I write will change the momentum that’s rapidly building against the Russian government.

    • NSA could hold ‘smoking gun’ in DNC leak
    • Donald Trump Just Asked Russia To Hack The US Government

      Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump urged Russia to hack into the US government servers, releasing the personal emails of Hillary Clinton when she was the secretary of State.

    • Can Jill Stein Lead a Revolution?

      Jill Stein takes public transportation to the Democratic National Convention. On the day after Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to win a major party presidential nomination, the Green Party presidential candidate is on the subway en route to the Wells Fargo Center. Adoring fans spot her on the way over and demand selfies. A heavily tattooed woman complains to Stein: “It’s been a Hillary party the whole time. It’s like brainwash, like waterboarding. It’s awful.”

      Stein is in high demand. The populist progressive tells me that after Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton two weeks ago, effectively ending his insurgent campaign for president, a lot more people started paying attention to her campaign. “The floodgates opened,” Stein says. “I almost feel like a social-worker, being out there talking to the Bernie supporters. They are broken-hearted. They feel really abused, and misled, largely by the Democratic Party.”

    • Is the Elite Media Failing to Reach Trump Voters?

      The release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails last week was followed on Wednesday by Donald Trump’s invitation to Russia to find and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Trump has since claimed that he was being “sarcastic,” but some believe that he is all too happy to rely on hacked materials to further his campaign for the White House—and doesn’t appreciate the national security implications of Russian intelligence’s alleged breach of DNC servers. Others believe that Trump’s more isolationist foreign policy ideas, such as retreating from NATO, should be discussed rationally and that the DNC hack is being used as a cudgel with which to attack anyone who isn’t sufficiently hawkish on Russia. The hack, and its political and geopolitical implications, has also occasioned a debate about whether and how the media ought to cover leaked—or in this case stolen—information.

    • DNC insiders detail months of escalating dysfunctio

      First, she asked Biden to do a fundraiser for her own reelection to her House seat in Florida in the primary challenge she’s facing next month. He agreed.

      The second was to get down to Boca Raton for the bat mitzvah.

      Biden’s staff balked. They offered to tape a video message from him instead, hoping that would satisfy her.

      Wasserman Schultz eagerly said yes. They played it for everyone who came.

      The meeting with Biden was symptomatic of the way the DNC was veering off the rails just as the presidential election was heating up. More than a dozen people inside the party apparatus, speaking in the wake of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation on Sunday, describe an internal culture in which few felt they could challenge an increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions.

      Last week’s WikiLeaks dump, releasing thousands of emails showing DNC officials sparring with Bernie Sanders supporters and with one another, was what finally got Hillary Clinton’s top aides to force her out Sunday on the eve of the convention.

    • Latest from the DNC: Bernie loyalists plan prime-time protest

      Members of the group — Caitlin Glidewell, 20, an alternate delegate from Colorado, North Carolina delegate Joshua “Fox” Brown, 34, and Tennessee delegate Katie Cowley, 39, — tell USA TODAY that they are fed up with the Democratic Party’s treatment of Sanders and they signaled they would be part of a sort of Democratic tea party movement, agitating for more progressive policies going forward.

      They want everyone to read the nearly 20,000 hacked emails released last weekend by WikiLeaks showing some DNC officials have been biased toward Clinton all along and attempted to undermine Sanders by proposing to push stories in the media saying his campaign was a mess and questioning his religious beliefs.

    • Democratic Convention Targets Delegates Holding Signs Which Stray From Party Line

      Democratic Party personnel at the national convention are ejecting any Bernie Sanders delegates, who hold up hand-made signs or signs not officially produced by the party. There are whips walking aisles of the arena or sitting in seats engaged in monitoring the actions of delegates they believe will act out independently and stray from approved party messaging.

      Bryce Hill, a twenty-five year-old delegate from California, watched a number of Secret Service agents eject a delegate after he argued with them about whether the sign he made was dangerous to the convention.

      “They’ve told us not to make any signs,” Hill explained. “They will just warn us if we hold any hand-made or outside signs. We have ‘Ban Fracking’ signs that were brought in and ‘No TPP’ signs. And they say they won’t take them. They’ll just ask us to leave if we hold them up.”

      Democratic National Convention personnel have informed delegates they will receive one warning and then their credentials will be revoked.

    • Don’t blame Bernie’s #NeverHillary voters if Trump beats Clinton

      After the glowing testimonials, the gracious concession by Bernie Sanders, and the star power of the current president and an ever-popular past president, Hillary Clinton is sure to get a bounce in the polls from this week’s Democratic convention.

      With virtually the same certainty, however, the other woman running for president this year, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, will also get a bounce coming out of the Philadelphia convention.

      Even though Sanders urged his supporters to back Clinton, a stubborn #NeverHillary faction are poised to flock to Stein, potentially draining votes from Clinton that may — in the headline of the Washington Post’s print edition — “rob” the former first lady of the election.

    • Bernie Sanders Announces He Is Leaving The Democratic Party

      He revealed this week that he is resuming his status as a political independent and leaving the Democratic Party when he goes back to work in the U.S. Senate.

      The Vermont senator, a self-described socialist and runner-up to Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary sweepstakes, ran for president as a Democrat.

      Last November, when filing his paperwork for the New Hampshire primary, Sanders said “I am running as a Democrat obviously, I am a Democrat now,” the Burlington Free Press reported. “Sanders says he’ll run as a Democrat in future elections,” the Free Press added.

      On Tuesday, Sanders seemed to change his tune about his party affiliation. During the Bloomberg Politics breakfast in Philadelphia, he declared that “I was elected as an independent; I’ll stay two years more as an independent,” the Wall Street Journal detailed.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • ‘Pearls Before Swine’ Cartoon Mocking NSA Wiretapping Censored

      The comic strip “Pearls Before Swine” is no stranger to controversy and is well-known for pushing the envelope. Apparently, yesterday’s scheduled strip went a bit too far, and was not published in newspapers. Pearls Before Swine’s cartoonist Stephan Pastis tweeted it out anyways, saying that he thought the strip was “harmless” and that the censorship was unnecessary.

    • Comic Strip Pulled Over ISIS Reference

      Cartoonist Stephen Pastis, creator of the popular comic Pearls Before Swine, announced on his Facebook yesterday that his July 27 strip was pulled by syndicators and newspapers for being overly offensive.

      Pearls Before Swine is a daily comic strip that runs in over 750 newspapers. Its main characters are the sarcastic, narcissistic, beer-loving Rat and his roommate, the blissfully ignorant Pig. Other main characters include Goat, an arrogant intellectual; Zebra, who seeks to avoid the incompetent fraternity of imbecilic crocodiles next door; and Guard Duck, a violent and delusional veteran. Pearls Before Swine won the National Cartoonists’ Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 2003 and 2006 and the 2015 Reuben Award for Best Newspaper Comic. It is beloved for its dark humor, violence, foul language, and infamously elaborate puns.

    • Trump Shows the Flaws of NSA Surveillance
    • Donald Trump’s most chilling comment on the DNC hack had nothing to do with Russia
    • Democrats Seem to Want to Forget Obama’s Role in Our Surveillance State

      Anti-war Democrats found their voices again, albeit briefly, when former CIA Director Leon Panetta spoke on behalf of Hillary Clinton at the convention last night. A large pack of delegates (likely Bernie Sanders’ supporters) attempted to drown out part of Panetta’s speech—which attempted to present Clinton as the choice to take on terrorists—with chants of “No More War.”

    • Dentist Sues Another Unhappy Patient; Offers To Let Journalist See Patients’ Private Files To Dispute Claims

      Yelp — both a frequent target of misguided lawsuits and the host of many, many targets of similarly-misguided lawsuits — has instituted a nifty new flag that lets readers and reviewers know which businesses are issuing legal threats or filing lawsuits over negative reviews. The warning — pictured below — first showed up in May after Prestigious Pets went legal over a review it didn’t care for.

    • NSA Surveillance Compliance Reports Show Typos, Lack Of Communication Resulting In Erroneous Targeting And Collection

      The Director of National Intelligence’s office (ODNI) has just released three Section 702 compliance reports covering December 2012 – May 2014. Considering the six-month lag time between the period covered and the reports’ release, this is very likely as up to date as it can be at this point.

    • Get ready to use your fingerprints to make bank withdrawals

      USING a PIN for cash withdrawals and credit card transactions will soon seem as old-fashioned as signing your name.

      The Payments Association of SA has announced a new standard for biometric authentication‚ which will mean fingerprints‚ palms‚ voices‚ irises and even faces can be used to identify cardholders at any bank or shop.

      But the association says it has no plans to force businesses to use the technology‚ and none of the big banks has plans to use biometrics.

      Association CEO Walter Volker said the new standard meant biometric systems would not be limited to individual vendors.

    • Tor Project says it has confirmed sexual misconduct by developer Jacob Appelbaum

      The Tor Project, a nonprofit known for its online anonymity software, says it has verified claims that former employee Jacob Appelbaum engaged in “sexually aggressive behavior” with people inside and outside of its organization. “We have confirmed that the events did take place as reported,” Shari Steele, Tor’s executive director, tells The Verge.

      In a blog post today, Steele says that Tor began an investigation into Appelbaum’s behavior after several people came forward with allegations of misconduct in late May. “Many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied, and frightened by Jacob, and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him,” Steele writes. Steele says the investigation found additional people, beyond those making public accusations, who experienced similar “incidents.”

    • What Can a Hacker Do with Your Genetic Information?

      Learning about the genetic markers stored in your DNA can be an illuminating experience, even a life-altering one. Now that direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies such as 23andMe have made these tests more accessible and affordable, it’s no wonder that more than 1 million people have shipped their spit off to be genotyped, and have all their genetic information catalogued (and sold) in the process.

      When a massive cache of private information is all stored in one place, it will naturally be a target for hackers. Though there hasn’t been a hack of any consumer genetic testing company yet, it may just a matter of time before someone breaches one of these sites and gains access to not just your credit card, but also your genetic markers.

      So how concerned should we be, and what might happen if a hacker ever did get his or her hands on your DNA?

    • ‘Wish I Had The Power’ To Hack Enemies’ Emails, Says Man Very Close To Having Such Power

      This weird presidential election continues to get weirder. Donald Trump, perhaps upset about being overshadowed this week by the Democratic Convention, held a press conference on Wednesday morning where he said a whole bunch of completely nutty stuff. A lot of the attention is being placed on his weird possibly half-joking request that Russia hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails and reveal the 33,000 that were deleted (or maybe just give them to the FBI, as he later said in a tweet). That was bizarre on a number of levels, including coming right after denying he had any connection to Russia and the possibility that they had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer system.

    • Court Says Bugs The FBI Planted Around California Courthouses Did Not Violate Anyone’s Expectation Of Privacy

      The FBI’s surreptitious recording devices — scattered around three California courthouses — raised a few eyebrows when the recordings were submitted as evidence. The defense lawyers wondered whether the devices violated the conversants’ expectation of privacy, admittedly a high bar to reach considering their location near the courthouse steps — by every definition a public area.

      The defense team cited a Supreme Court decision involving phone booths, hoping to equate their clients’ “hushed tones” with closing a phone booth door. Small steps like these — used by everyone — are attempts to create privacy in public areas, but courts are very hesitant to join defendants in erecting privacy expectations in public places.

    • As surveillance gets smart, hackers get smarter

      There is an escalating technological arms race underway between governments and hacktivists. As governments step up their surveillance, the hacktivists find new ways to subvert it.

    • The Phone Case To Protect You From Prying Eyes, Designed By Edward Snowden
    • Edward Snowden Designs Device To Detect iPhone Snooping
    • Federal Prosecutors Use All Writs Order To Compel Suspect To Unlock Phone With His Fingerprint

      While courts generally agree that a fingerprint is non-testimonial — despite its ability to unlock all sorts of testimonial stuff — there aren’t too many courts willing to extend that coverage to passwords. There are exceptions, of course, but items held in someone’s mind are given a bit more deference than those at their literal fingertips.

      And that’s likely why the All Writs-compelled fingerprint access hasn’t allowed the ATF inside Keys’ phone. The feds can force Keys to place his finger on the iPhone screen all they want, but it likely won’t unlock the device. Apple’s security requires a passcode as well as a fingerprint if it’s been more than 48 hours since the phone was last unlocked. The time elapsed between when the phone was seized and the order obtained for Keys’ fingerprint added another layer of security to the phone — one not so easily defeated with All Writs orders.

      Keys is no one’s idea of a sympathetic party. He allegedly forced two teen girls, aged 14 and 15, to have sex with men for several hours a day by drugging them into submission. Whether or not his phone contained more evidence is unknown. It’s unclear from the recently unsealed documents whether federal investigators found another way into the device after the application of Keys’ fingerprint failed to unlock the phone.

    • In Secret Battle, Surveillance Court Reined in FBI Use of Information Obtained From Phone Calls

      Beginning over a decade ago, the country’s surveillance court intervened to limit the FBI’s ability to act on some sensitive information that it collected while monitoring phone calls.

      The wrangling between the FBI and the secret court is contained in previously undisclosed documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. The documents, part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, were shared with The Intercept.

      The documents reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) told the FBI several times between 2005 and 2007 that using some incidental information it collected while monitoring communications in an investigation — specifically, numbers people punch into their phones after they’ve placed a call — would require an explicit authorization from the court, even in an emergency.

      “The newly obtained summaries are significant because they show the power that the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] has to limit expansive FBI surveillance practices,” Alan Butler, an attorney for EPIC, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

    • Raytheon Gets NSA Certification for Ethernet Encryption Tool; John Droge Comments
    • Raytheon launches NSA-certified, next-generation Ethernet encryption system
    • Raytheon launches NSA-approved ethernet encryption system

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Protesters clash with police in South Korea as Japan-funded ‘comfort women’ foundation opens in Seoul

      South Korean protesters clashed with the police on Thursday (July 28) as they tried to disrupt the opening in Seoul of a Tokyo-funded foundation for women forced to work in Japanese wartime brothels.

      Last December, the two nations reached a “final and irreversible” agreement, under which Tokyo offered an apology and a 1 billion yen to open the foundation for the dwindling number of so-called “comfort women” who are still alive. But the deal was condemned by some of the women and South Korean activists, who took issue with Japan’s refusal to accept formal legal responsibility.

      “You can’t silence the victims with money!” scores of protesters chanted at Thursday’s opening event, which they picketed with banners reading: “This is not what the comfort women want!”

      Several college students forced their way into the venue where foundation officials were due to hold a press conference, and had to be forcibly removed by police.

    • Yes, democracy is under huge threat; not from Trump or Brexit voters, but liberals

      Sounds like an exaggeration? This is precisely the argument British blogger Andrew Sullivan put forward in his 8,000-word op-ed against Donald Trump, “Democracies end when they are too democratic.” Democracies, argued Sullivan, often drift into passionate excesses, and super smart people must come to their rescue. “Elites matter in a democracy..”, because they are “the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.”

      The liberal position is an open challenge to the century-old struggle that the world has emerged from in recognising people’s power. It is quite often that the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are interchanged. But there is a difference between the two. Democracy presents the architecture for freedom. Through a set of ideas, principles, set of practices and procedures that have been moulded through a long, arduous history, it institutionalises freedom. Voting is a precious right.

      If Brexit and Trump and the rise of far right in Europe present a challenge, it will take much more agile thinking than merely putting forth cosmetic, superfluous and reckless arguments.

    • People smugglers ‘making a mockery’ of UK borders: Damning evidence shows how easy it is for criminals to avoid penalties after a third of fines are never paid

      People smugglers are making a ‘laughing stock’ of Britain’s porous borders, a withering report concludes today.

      Damning evidence shows the Home Office’s failure to crack down on immigration abuse, as well as how easy it is for rule-breakers to avoid penalties.

      In the latest example, it was revealed that more than a third of fines issued to lorry drivers for carrying illegal immigrants into Britain are never paid.

    • ‘I am not an extremist’: What ISIS priest murderer told French judges who released him with an electronic tag that only worked after lunch time

      The known ISIS terrorist who murdered a Catholic priest in northern France had told judges ‘I am not an extremist’ before being freed from prison to kill, it emerged today.

      Shocking details about the lax manner with which 19-year-old Adel Kermiche was treated emerged following the slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel, 86, in Normandy.

      Kermich was wearing an electronic tag, after serving part of his sentence for a range of terrorist offences including trying to join ISIS in Syria, and then being released in March.

    • I am a Muslim doctor. I saved a Christian in Pakistan and it nearly cost me my life

      I am a Pakistani medical doctor, currently receiving political asylum in the US for the past year and a half. I sought refuge here after having to go through much humiliation and outright hatred for trying to practice ethical medicine and for belonging to a religious minority in my own motherland.

      A while back, my father retired from a reputed local bank in Pakistan and moved to the US, along with the rest of my family. I continued to live in Pakistan: I was a fresh medical graduate pursuing the dream of post-graduate education in nephrology.

      Life seemed well on track until one night while working an ER shift, when I received a patient needing urgent dialysis. Unattended and disheveled as he was, there was no one with him to get him the medicine he needed. Fearing he might die, I instinctually grabbed the emergency medicine donated via zakaat, an Islamic system of alms-giving, and performed the life-saving hemodialysis.

    • Senate to probe drug killings

      The Senate is set to investigate the rising incidence of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug pushers even as President Duterte has vowed there will be no letup in his anti-drug campaign.

      The inquiry will be spearheaded by the Senate committee on justice and human rights, chaired by Sen. Leila de Lima, along with Sen. Panfilo Lacson as chairman of the committee on public order and dangerous drugs.

      De Lima earlier filed Resolution No. 9 seeking an investigation into “recent rampant extrajudicial killings and summary executions of suspected criminals to strengthen the mechanisms of accountability of law enforcers and to institute corrective legislative measures to ensure full respect of basic human rights, especially the right to life.”

    • We need the Obamas to keep reminding us that America was built by slaves

      It was easily one of the most moving moments of the convention thus far, playing and replaying on various broadcasters throughout the following day. It also inspired some rather predictable blowback from the right, with Rush Limbaugh demanding the First Lady “get over” America’s slaving past, and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly delivering perhaps the most egregious “but-actually” with a screed on how not all the laborers who built the White House were slaves, and that those who were were “well fed.”

      Her husband, president Barack Obama, was obviously unconcerned by such objections, adding his own acknowledgement of the legacy of slavery in his own DNC speech, delivered Wednesday (July 28). Speaking to the values of “hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility, helping each other out,” he noted, “My grandparents knew these values weren’t reserved for one race. They could be passed down to a half-Kenyan grandson, or a half-Asian granddaughter. In fact, they were the same values Michelle’s parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids, living in a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago.”

    • Texas Cop Says He Was Threatened For Trying To Tell The Truth About Sandra Bland

      Over a year after Sandra Bland died in police custody, an officer involved in the case is giving the world a glimpse into how the “blue wall of silence” works inside the law enforcement industry.

      Prairie View, TX, police officer Michael Kelley says that a local prosecutor and police officials suppressed facts about Bland’s initial arrest while investigating Brian Encinia, the man who actually cuffed and booked Bland. Encinia was eventually charged, but only with perjury — a decision that sparked further outrage.

      Kelley got to the scene too late to see exactly what happened between Encinia and Bland during the key moments off a dash-cam video where the two are out of frame and Bland says he’s knocked her head against the pavement. But Encinia said he didn’t know what he was arresting Bland for but would come up with something, Kelley says. “She had a large mark on her head. Maybe she fell when she was in handcuffs. Maybe she got kicked,” he told the Huffington Post’s Michael McLaughlin.

    • Inside the CIA’s Penal Colonies

      In June 2006, President George W. Bush told Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Michael Hayden that he was worried. The subject of Bush’s concern was a picture of a CIA detainee chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper. This came almost five years into the agency’s detention and interrogation program, four years since it began waterboarding prisoners, three years after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, two years after a top-secret report had condemned the agency’s “inhumane and undocumented techniques,” and a year after the Washington Post reported the existence of the CIA’s “covert prison system” — but now President Bush was concerned.

      The public knows this because the CIA recently released fifty previously classified documents — 821 pages in all. Among them is a two-page memorandum from June 7, 2006, consisting of nothing but redactions, save one sentence in which Hayden passed along the president’s concern.

    • Government Continues to Deny Manning Access to Health Care

      Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning received a document from Army officials today informing her that she is being investigated for serious new charges related to her July 5th attempt to take her own life.

      If convicted of these “administrative offenses,” she could be placed in indefinite solitary confinement for the remainder of her decades-long sentence.

      “It is deeply troubling that Chelsea is now being subjected to an investigation and possible punishment for her attempt to take her life. The government has long been aware of Chelsea’s distress associated with the denial of medical care related to her gender transition and yet delayed and denied the treatment recognized as necessary,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Chase Strangio. “Now, while Chelsea is suffering the darkest depression she has experienced since her arrest, the government is taking actions to punish her for that pain. It is unconscionable and we hope that the investigation is immediately ended and that she is given the health care that she needs to recover.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • How The EU Might Keep Internet Access Open To The Public

      Earlier this summer, the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) took in around a half million public comments on its draft guidelines for member states on implementing end user protections for fixed and mobile Internet connections. The largest telecoms in Europe are lobbying hard for weakened interpretations of the so-called “net neutrality” Regulation passed late last year, which also covers data roaming and the EU Digital Single Market.

      A few weeks ago, the largest telecom ISPs issued a 5G Manifesto in which they threatened not to invest in 5G wireless networks unless BEREC waters down its guidelines for enforcement of open Internet access.

      Fortunately for American consumers, startup entrepreneurs and small businesses, the FCC was not swayed by similar ISP threats about how common carrier law would kill network investment here. And so even with U.S. open Internet law now firmly in place after a recent court decision, Verizon has announced significant continued investment in 5G networks and field testing in multiple locations.

      But carriers in Europe, that don’t face competition from cable broadband providers like American phone company ISPs do, enjoy even stronger market dominance that allows them to intimidate regulators attempting to defend end user rights. The current generation of online startups needs to be able to count on the same open Internet connectivity that the most popular global platforms enjoyed in their infancy a decade or two ago. Only now it’s a battle against corporate lobbyists to get it.

    • Slovakia to extend reach of broadband network

      The government of Slovakia wants to extend the country’s broadband Internet infrastructure to small villages and communities. In a video speech on 27 June, Deputy Prime Minister for Digitisation Peter Pellegrini said that it is the state’s responsibility to connect the country’s remote areas.

      The country is about to start the construction of broadband infrastructure, and is organising a public consultation to determine which regions and municipalities should be connected first, the Deputy Prime Minister’s office explains in a statement.

    • After Ripping Off Cities, States For Years, Verizon Makes Some Familiar Broadband Promises To Boston

      We’ve long discussed how Verizon has a bit of a pattern of getting billions in tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for fiber broadband it only half deploys. State after state, city after city, Verizon gets politicians to sign off on cozy deals that effectively give Verizon everything it wants — in exchange for promises of “full” city or state fiber broadband deployment. Except time, and time, and time again, cities that signed these sweetheart, loophole filled deals then stand around with a dopey look on their face when they realize they’ve been had.

    • United Arab Emirates Makes Using A VPN A Crime… To Protect The Local Telcos From VoIP Competition

      The PIA article does point out that there is an “approved” VPN from the two state approved telcos, Etisiat and du, but that it blocks lots of services itself and is prohibitively expensive. And while the natural assumption about any attempt to ban VPNs is that it’s for surveillance purposes, that may just be a side benefit here. The key focus does appear to be very much about blocking access to VoIP services to prop up the two official telcos. In other countries, the concern about net neutrality was always that telcos would do things like block VoIP. In the UAE, the government goes so far as to not just support such blocking, but actively work to criminalize the use of a VPN to get around such blocks.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • MSF Hearing On Opposition To Pfizer Pneumonia Patent In India

      Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) filed a patent opposition in March in India to prevent Pfizer from patenting a pneumonia drug and will defend its position in a hearing tomorrow at the Indian Patent Office.

    • Intellectual Property Fun: Is Comedy Central Claiming It Owns The Character Stephen Colbert?

      For years, when Stephen Colbert was on Comedy Central, he actually would discuss intellectual property issues with surprising frequency, including taking on SOPA back when it was a thing. Perhaps this is because he has a brother who is an intellectual property lawyer (who apparently works for the Olympics, which is not very encouraging). So it’s interesting to see that Colbert is now claiming that a lawyer from Comedy Central or Viacom (he’s not entirely clear) has contacted CBS to say that it holds the rights to the “character” of Stephen Colbert.

      If you’re not at all familiar with Colbert, this will take some unpacking. For many years, Colbert hosted a TV show on Comedy Central (owned by Viacom) called The Colbert Report, in which he played a pompous/clueless TV news blowhard… also named Stephen Colbert. A big part of the conceit was that this was a character, quite different than the actual Stephen Colbert in real life. More recently, Colbert ended that show, to move to network TV to take over David Letterman’s old slot, where it’s now the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Importantly, on the Late Show, Colbert insisted that he was leaving “the character” of Stephen Colbert behind and would actually be himself, Stephen Colbert. Got that?

    • Copyrights

      • TPB Founder Peter Sunde — “I’ve Been Saying For Years That I Want The Pirate Bay To Shut Down”

        Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, talked about the decentralization of the torrent ecosystem on TorrentFreak’s audio podcast series Steal The Show. Sunde said that relying on a limited number of torrent websites is not a good idea. These bigger websites lack innovation and thus, become vulnerable.

      • Kim Dotcom’s lawyer will also represent alleged KickassTorrents founder

        Just over a week ago, federal authorities announced the arrest of a Ukrainian man that they say is the mastermind of KickassTorrents (KAT), which, until recently, was the world’s largest BitTorrent search site.

        Now, the suspect, Artem Vaulin, 30, has retained Ira Rothken, the California lawyer who has successfully kept Kim Dotcom out of custody in New Zealand since 2012.

        Rothken serves as Dotcom’s lead global counsel—his client still faces criminal charges over alleged massive copyright infringement on his now-shuttered site, Megaupload. American prosecutors have failed to get Dotcom extradited to the United States.

        Vaulin was charged last week in Chicago federal court with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

      • Photographer Sues Getty Images For $1 Billion For Claiming Copyright On Photos She Donated To The Public

        Getty Images has a bit of a well-deserved reputation as a giant copyright troll, sending all kinds of nasty threat letters to people who use the images that Getty licenses. And even though it’s showed some signs of adapting to the modern internet world, it hasn’t given up on its standard trolling practices. It’s also famously bad at it, often sending absolutely ridiculous threat letters.

        But it may have sent one so stupid that it could potentially cost Getty itself a lot of money. That’s because it sent a threat letter to famed photographer Carol Highsmith… demanding she pay up for posting her own damn photo. That would be bad enough on its own… but it’s actually much, much worse. You see, Highsmith is such a wonderful person that she donated a massive collection of her photographs to the Library of Congress — over 100,000 of them, for them to be released royalty free for the public to use. She didn’t put them fully into the public domain, though, instead saying that anyone could use them so long as they gave credit back to her. It was basically a very early kind of version of what’s now known as the Creative Commons Attribution License (which didn’t exist at the time she made that agreement with the Library of Congress).

      • Photographer sues Getty Images for selling photos she donated to public

        A well-known American photographer has now sued Getty Images and other related companies—she claims they have been wrongly been selling copyright license for over 18,000 of her photos that she had already donated to the public for free, via the Library of Congress.

        The photographer, Carol Highsmith, is widely considered to be a modern-day successor to her photographic idols, Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange, who were famous for capturing images of American life in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectfully.

        Inspired by the fact that Johnston donated her life’s work to the Library of Congress for public use in the 1930s, Highsmith wanted to follow suit and began donating her work “to the public, including copyrights throughout the world,” as early as 1988.

      • Sometimes The Good Guys Win

        Many of the issues discussed here involve abuse of copyright by some to enslave the many. Chuckle… This is a classic example of an extremum. Getty Images threatened to sue a photographer for use of an image which the photographer had taken, and donated to the public domain. That ticked her off enough to sue the bastards and I expect she will win. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I wonder how many other instances of such abuse there is in Getty’s collection.

      • Photographer Files $1bn Copyright Claim Against Getty Images

        When Getty Images sent photographer Carol Highsmith a $120 settlement demand for using one of ‘their’ images without permission, things were about to get messy. The image in question was actually Highsmith’s own work, displayed on her own website. Highsmith has now responded with a $1bn lawsuit.

      • Whose Copyright Office?

        In 2013, in a lecture at Columbia University, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante announced an ambitious vision for the “Next Great Copyright Act.” That vision appropriately included a prominent role for the Copyright Office in helping policy makers work through some difficult issues relating to copyright and evolving technologies. The Register closed her lecture by stating that a revised Copyright Act “[m]ost importantly…would serve the public interest.” For those of us in the copyright world who believe that balance in the system between the interests of right holders and the interests of the public is structurally and substantively critical to good copyright policy, the Register’s words were greatly reassuring. Some recent developments raise questions, however, about the extent to which the Copyright Office is demonstrating genuine commitment to balanced copyright policy in the public’s interest.

        One such development came last month, when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Capitol Records v. Vimeo sharply criticized a Copyright Office report which concluded that the DMCA safe harbors do not apply to infringement claims involving pre-1972 sound recordings. The Office’s report supported the record label plaintiffs’ position in the litigation. In its opinion, the court engaged in an extended deconstruction of the Office’s argument, concluding that it was “flawed in several respects” and that it “substantially overstated, and misapplied, what the Supreme Court said.” In a blog post at the time, I pointed out how unusual it is for a court to speak in such strong terms about shortcomings in the legal analysis of an expert government agency on a matter within its domain of expertise. Had the court accepted what it concluded was the Office’s highly problematic analysis of the safe harbor eligibility question, the recording labels would have been handed a significant windfall, and Vimeo (and similarly situated online service providers) would have suffered a commensurate loss.

      • Libraries, Groups Welcome WIPO Copyright Appointment, With Hope

        A range of highly active groups at the World Intellectual Property Organization representing libraries, archives, and digital civil liberties this week welcomed the appointment of a copyright industry lobbyist to lead WIPO copyright issues. But they have voiced their hope that the appointee, Sylvie Forbin of France, will quickly show leadership on the promotion and support of the cultural heritage sector as it relates to copyright.

07.28.16

EPO Loses More Than 80% of Cases at the International Labour Organisation (ILO)

Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EPO management would rather see staff keeping their eyes shut in the face of it

Battistelli eyes shut

Summary: The International Labour Organisation (or Organization) helps show just to what degree the European Patent Office (EPO) violates the rights of workers

THE EPO is facing a hard time at ILO right now, having abolished or demolished labour rights. “Better late than never,” goes to saying, even if justice comes many years late and many receive no justice for purely clerical reasons (more than anything else).

Someone who follows the ILOAT judgments has taken a closer look at what goes on there. Having gone through the EPO cases for the last session, that person gave us some statistics about it. Most EPO workers haven’t heard of ILO for months, but a lot is going on there. While people are in holiday…

“Most EPO workers haven’t heard of ILO for months, but a lot is going on there.”“As usual,” we got told, “most of the cases were dismissed on formal grounds. 21 cases, 10 were irretrievable (internal remedies not exhausted, etc). Of the eleven remaining, the EPO basically lost 9.”

That’s more than 80% of all cases lose by EPO!

“Check the cases out,” we were told, “you can Google it, the cases are all public, but I think it is pretty interesting. There is such a long delay to get to the ILOAT that it is only now that the “Battistelli cases” are starting to cone through. And the ILOAT doesn’t seem very impressed.”

“That’s more than 80% of all cases lose by EPO!”Over at IP Kat somebody wrote about a particular case: “The judgment 3694 of the ILO administrative tribunal is very interesting. It confirms that the EPO does not follow the rules of law.”

Here is a response to that:

Interesting indeed, because it confirms that by excluding the two members appointed by the Staff Committee, the Appeal Committee was improperly composed.

Also interesting, the decision of the Tribunal took less than 4 years.

In the meantime, how many decisions have been taken by the Appeal Committee in this faulty composition?

Techrights intends to publish and comment on outcomes of these rulings. This might take a while, but there is no lack of time. As it takes nearly half a decade for outcomes to be reached, a few extra weeks or months aren’t that huge a lag/latency.

In related news, we recently learned about labour abuses at WIPO as well. “While I don’t have time for WIPO stories,” one reader told us, “I know you’ve commented on that crooked organization’s dealings before…”

For those wishing to express solidarity or help WIPO workers (where Mr. Battistelli tried to become head but lost to Mr. Gurry), here are some details about a new WIPO petition titled “Stop union-busting and stop retaliation against whistleblowers at WIPO”. We reproduce the text below for future reference:

In September 2014 the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Francis Gurry, fired WIPO Staff Council President, Moncef Kateb, as he was about to reveal damaging information about fraud, wrongdoing, mismanagement and theft of staff DNA. Now Gurry is trying to close down the Staff Council and replace it with a new compliant, management-friendly model.

Gurry decided to set up his own WIPO Staff Council and is currently preparing illegal elections in order to dislodge the current duly elected Staff Council which is too critical for his liking. This will leave WIPO staff deprived of the last independent voice that is prepared to expose bad practices and abuse of power in this United Nations Specialized Agency.

It is a desperate move by Gurry at a time when attempts are being made to cover up and suppress an investigation report, apparently containing adverse findings on allegations made against him. It follows a public hearing at the US Congress at which he was compared to Sepp Blatter, the former President of FIFA, and a letter from the heads of several bipartisan sub-committees demanding his dismissal.

We need your support.

Please tell Gurry to stop retaliation against whistleblowers and the legally elected Staff Council. Please tell the WIPO Member States to call for Gurry’s resignation. The credibility of the Organization, its Member States and the entire UN system is at stake.

“Staff all over the world are kindly invited to demonstrate their support for the duly elected WIPO Staff Council by electronically signing the petition using the following link,” said a concerned person, possibly a WIPO insider. We already explained some of the similarities between what happens at WIPO and at the EPO. We recently learned from a reliable source that there may also be fraud at the EPO, albeit those who have the evidence are afraid to come out with it (due to fear). █

To Understand What Battistelli Has Turned the EPO Into Look at Turkey and China

Posted in Asia, Europe, Patents at 9:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Not just in terms of human rights, potentially patent quality as well

Erdoğan and EPO
Original photo: Erdoğan, 2012

Summary: Battistelli and his notorious Vice-President from SIPO (Croatia) turn the European Patent Office, once the pride of Europe, into a human rights cesspool with SIPO (China) connections

Battistelli is dangerous. He destroys the Office (EPO) having already repelled and driven away a lot of the top talent. There’s no way to attract these workers back and the EPO, based on the hard facts (not Bergot's lies), is unable to attract skilled workers. Maybe that’s what Battistelli wants. A bunch of young workers would be more obedient (also cheaper as per the salaries scale) and they would fail to identify or understand prior art, thus approve a lot more applications erroneously. Battistelli sure doesn’t stand any judges (maybe “penis envy” as per the psychological theory, metaphorically alluding to intelligence), not even the ones who rule against him in high courts at The Hague. Remember who has just suspended literally thousands of judges (among people in other ranks). It was Erdoğan.

“Remember who has just suspended literally thousands of judges (among people in other ranks).”In many ways, Battistelli is not just a French republican (he is a politician) but somewhat of a Maoist Chinese ruler or Sultan like Erdoğan. AMBA, which represents the broads of appeal that Battistelli has been busy attacking lately, issues a statement in the front page of its Web site. The statement (noted in this comment) says: “Much depends on the how the BoAC and the President of the BoA choose to act. This could lead either to an increase in independence, or the opposite. For 40 years, the President of the Office and the Vice President of DG3 have enjoyed broad discretionary powers. The BoAC and the President of the BoA have similar powers, and their decisions could lead to problems similar to those underlying R19/12. The reform, rather than transferring the problem, should rather have set new guarantees in the written text of the law (albeit secondary law).”

Well, since the President of the BoA is elected in part by Battistelli himself, we can safely assume that he or she will either be a Battistelli crony or somewhat afraid enough of Battistelli (no independence) to simply appease Battistelli at every turn. How is that improved independence?

EPLAW, which represents patent law firms, commented on this ‘extrajudicial killing’ of the appeals processes at the EPO (that’s pretty much what the systematic attacks on the boards boil down to), citing AMBA and saying: “Eventually, the perception of independence has turned out to be the guidance for the structural reform, not independence in substance. The EBA’s decision R 19/12 continues to show its consequences.”

“Whatever remains of the EPO after DG3 is priced out of reach and understaffed even further in tiny overcrowded out-of-Munich offices, it will never be the same.”Battistelli is killing one of the cornerstones of the EPO as per the EPC, namely the appeals process. “Killing it softly” as the song goes… and “the trickle approach of undermining DG3 until it becomes untenable,” this one new comment noted. The full comment says: “My sympathies from DG1. Decisions made openly and for a logical reason, however personally painful, can be borne and normally solutions would be sought. In this case , it’s plotting and playing with people’s lives for no clearly stated reason. As you say, it’s the trickle approach of undermining DG3 until it becomes untenable – no replacement of members leads to an inevitable running down of DG3′s effectiveness. A normal consideration, if this were to be inevitable,would be to manage this and to involve staff in preparing both the office and their careers for the future. The current situation could not be further from this. You don’t deserve this. Nobody does. Again, my sympathies.”

Whatever remains of the EPO after DG3 is priced out of reach and understaffed even further in tiny overcrowded out-of-Munich offices, it will never be the same. Talented judges are likely to seek employment elsewhere and this is probably what Battistelli wants. He wants to dim down the lights and make life rather hard so as to induce a ‘natural death’. This is something he has already done to SUEPO (only with limited success because blowback comes from the entire staff).

The EPO now shares more than just disregard for human rights with China. It also adopts the low(er) patent quality which China is notorious for. AFD China Intellectual Property Law Office has just said that “SIPO and the European Patent Office (EPO) decided to renew the MOU on beefing up patent classification cooperation for another 6 years.”

“Turkey is a member of the EPO, don’t forget that, and Battistelli already meets similar types of rulers (if not much worse)…”Oh, look, another MoU. The original page (in English) is dated two weeks ago. Is this something which Battistelli can really brag about? Becoming more like China?

The country is ranked very low (boding poorly) on human rights in many areas and Western think tank (or propaganda mill) “Freedom House rates China as a 6 (the second lowest possible rank) in political freedoms.”

Team Battistelli sent me several legal threats for my reporting, even after I had gotten a high-profile solicitor on my side. Erdoğan would be proud of Battistelli; have they met yet? Turkey is a member of the EPO, don’t forget that, and Battistelli already meets similar types of rulers (if not much worse)… █

07.27.16

Patent Lawyers Move Closer to Battistelli’s Rubber-stamping Office While the Appeal Boards Pushed Away as Collective Punishment Which Masks Decline in Patent Quality

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

‘Pesky’ quality control cannot coexist with Battistelli and middlemen who are paid to trick examiners

Urgent

Summary: Urgently sending appeal boards away and urgently granting applicants patents without proper examination will be Battistelli’s sorrow legacy at the European Patent Office

TODAY’S EPO is not the EPO which existed decades ago or even a decade ago (before Battistelli). It is so ruthless an employer that critical thinking is simply disallowed or better kept to oneself (because thoughtcrime is impossible to prove/enforce/incriminate).

One judge who allegedly spoke out (anonymously) was not only ousted but also defamed thereafter (in an effort to rationalise the illegal ousting). Now there is collective punishment for those who defended him or simply insisted on a fair trial, justice, and proper (legally-acquired) evidence, not defamatory-yet-unchallengeable claims. “It is not about taking decisions that make sense,” one person wrote the other day about Battistelli’s methods. “It is about punishing…”

One can soon see the similarities to Turkey.

“I know that the president and his cronies will be furiously spinning the “reforms” as being fully justified.”
      –AnonymousEarlier today the EPO wrote about a page titled “Boards of appeal and key decisions 2016″. How much more of the boards of appeal would Battistelli allow to exist/vanish? He already punishes them like never before. The boards of appeal are the one thing Battistelli is killing faster than anything else (even SUEPO); it helps him lower patent quality without this decline being measurably noticed in the short term (while his term as President continues). Low occupational capacity means that year-to-year figures would not be comparable, never mind the imminent rise in costs (self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to demand for appeals).

One person wrote to us earlier this week (in relation to the ‘exile’ of the appeal boards) that: “To add insult to injury, the office space available to the Board members and chairmen will be reduced by 36% when moving to Haar (even although office space in Haar is substantially cheaper than in Munich). To put it into perspective: a Board chairman will get less space than an examiner, even although he or she has the same grade as a principal director!”

Another deliberate attack by Battistelli against appeal judges? Incentive to leave/resign/retire? Against those who threaten to show that quality control under his administration has been severely compromised? Battistelli’s “focus upon punishing the Boards of Appeal has led him to a situation that makes no sense,” one person wrote the other day. Here is the full comment:

I know that it is about punishing. That much is blindingly obvious from the plain facts.

The point that I was making is that BB’s [Battistelli] focus upon punishing the Boards of Appeal has led him to a situation that makes no sense from any other perspective.

For example, the Boards have:
been “reformed” in a manner that (according to the perception of many users and AMBA) actually reduces their independence;
been moved, against the express wishes of the users (who argued that physical location had little to do with (the perception of) independence of the Boards); and
had the fees for their services substantially increased, which was directly against the interests of the users and has no objective justification whatsoever (as, for example: there is certainly no shortfall in the EPO’s funding under the current fee structure; and being “subsidised” by renewal fees certainly has no bearing upon independence if the there is no “outside” interference in the setting of the budget of the Boards).

Thus, by any objective measure, BB has failed to achieve his stated objective and has acted against the express wishes of the users. I know that the president and his cronies will be furiously spinning the “reforms” as being fully justified. However, I now wonder whether sanity can be restored by the emergence of a sufficient groundswell of opinion that, contrary to the EPO management’s line, is based upon a credible interpretation of the facts.

“The move may not influence where Oral Proceedings before the BoA will take place,” one person wrote in response. “Does anyone know if just the offices of the BoA members will been moved, or whether also future invitations to Oral Proceedings will be for the “new” building?”

One response to that said: The intention is for oral proceedings also to take place in the Haar building. It is however apparent that only a limited number of o.p. rooms are foreseen, and that it will be necessary to use the same trick which airlines already use, i.e. “overbooking”. If on a particular day all oral proceedings for which summons were issued actually take place and not enough rooms are available, the participants for one or more of those proceedings would be sent home.”

“Battistelli policy is not simple retribution,” said another person. “The aim is to get rid of the board of appeal” (because of the UPC, in our humble assessment). Here is the full comment:

Battistelli policy is not simple retribution. The aim is to get rid of the board of appeal and it is a war of attrition. Let me list the facts:
-the boards have been understaffed for the past 3 years. Members who retired have simply not been replaced, we miss about 30% people.
-as the recent events discussed here show, boards members can be removed from their post at will. They just still get 50% pay till their 5 years contract runs out.
-the new fees make appeal extremely expensive and therefore unattractive.

From talks in the corridors of the Isar building, I would say that most board members recognise the writing on the wall. It is just that they have nowhere to go, they will be prevented to work for 2 years. A large amount of members will simply retire this or next year. What else is there to do? The planned removal to Haar will probably take place with a much smaller DG3.

Furthermore, as the event listed here shows, the Council agrees.

Whatever is happening in Munich right now, it’s not good. Battistelli and his ilk are opportunistically unifying officials around mass shootings today (classic political trick) and this new article shows patent law firms trying to reside in the EPO’s back yard — so to speak — for quicker access if not fast lanes (there are other strategic moves being reported today). “The move aims to strengthen the firm’s European presence and provide a “convenient” meeting place for its clients who appear before the European Patent Office (EPO), which is based in Munich,” says the article. They can even have lunch in some lobby together with examiners, or choose office space in the same building as the judges. And at the same time the boards of appeals are being repelled and pushing out of Munich? Sure, that makes a lot of sense! █

Software Patents a Dying Breed, But Patent Lawyers in Denial Over it and Notorious Judge Rodney Gilstrap Ignores Alice (Supreme Court)

Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 6:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The trolls’ best friend, Mr. Gilstrap

Rodney Gilstrap

Summary: A look at what law and practice are saying about software patents, contrasted or contradicted by the patent industry and trolls-friendly courts (which make business out of or together with patent aggressors)

TECHRIGHTS spent a lot of time writing about Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo. Microsoft took everything it wanted from Yahoo and left a dead company to rot, as usual (that’s Microsoft’s modus operandi as one can see in Corel, Novell, Nokia et cetera).

Now that Yahoo is sold (and journalists don’t bother mentioning how Microsoft killed Yahoo) the think tank which is IAM says: “While that deal will involve the bulk of Yahoo!’s traditional business, it does not involve the Excalibur patent portfolio, a stockpile of around 2,700 assets that the company has spun out into a separate vehicle to be sold separately.”

“Microsoft took everything it wanted from Yahoo and left a dead company to rot, as usual (that’s Microsoft’s modus operandi as one can see in Corel, Novell, Nokia et cetera).”We always sensed the danger that Yahoo would give its software patents to some hostile entity or a Microsoft-made entity like CPTN. Yahoo has a lot of software patents, but they’re quite worthless after Alice and some are nearing their expiry. The good news is, one single decision at the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) had supreme impact and this lowers the risk to software developers everywhere in the world (if they trade within the US or export to the US).

A lot of patent lawyers/attorneys keep pondering/assessing tricks for portraying software patents as non-abstract (even though they always are), in light of Alice whose impact was incredibly profound.

As expected all along, Bascom is exploited by software patents proponents including Watchtroll’s site (patent attorney John M. Rogitz in this case). He says that the case of “DDR begins with Mayo step 1 analysis without definitively declaring whether the claims are or are not abstract. Instead, the opinion observes what the claims are not: they are not a mathematical algorithm or a fundamental economic or longstanding commercial practice, but instead address a business challenge (retaining website visitors), a challenge particular to the Internet. Instead of declaring this not to be “abstract”, however, Judge Chen simply points out that identifying the precise nature of the abstract idea is not as straightforward as in Alice given the various varying formulations of the underlying abstract idea presented by the infringer and by the dissent.”

Unless Judge Chen actually wrote a computer program, it is likely that understanding of abstractness of algorithms would be deficient. Watch the very latest pro-software patents lobbying/promotion from Shelston IP [1, 2]. They’re preying on ignorance and looking for exceptional court decisions not only to preserve software patents in the US/Australia but also bring them elsewhere (like Australia’s neighbours and in particular a defiant New Zealand).

“Unless Judge Chen actually wrote a computer program, it is likely that understanding of abstractness of algorithms would be deficient.”Speaking of judges, Rodney Gilstrap is a villain, not a judge (recall his track record in East Texas [1, 2, 3, 4]). He deals with an enormous number of troll cases where software patents are treated favourably and practicing businesses are forced to pay parasitic trolls. As it turns out, he also publishes documents in Microsoft Word format (maybe a clerical error). He is publishing in formats that only Microsoft customers can properly access, much like the EPO (see today’s tweet which mostly matters to people who are using Microsoft Windows, not anything else).

“Section 101 is a powerful tool for patent defendants, if they can get heard,” Joe Mullin says in his summary and here is the beginning of the article “East Texas judge backs off restrictive “abstract” patent motion rules”:

US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas hears more patent cases than any other federal judge. Last year, he installed a set of controversial rules for those cases, leading to rare public criticism. Changes to Gilstrap’s order (Word file), dated last week, suggest some of those rules have been withdrawn.

Section 101 of the US patent laws is what the Supreme Court has deemed bans overly abstract patents. Since the high court decided Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, Section 101 has become more important, since courts have been reading it as banning many software patents that recite basic processes.

Last year, the patent rules for Gilstrap’s court held that defendants seeking to file a motion under Section 101 “may do so only upon a grant of leave from the Court after a showing of good cause, which shall be presented through the letter briefing process.”

Gilstrap is out of control. More people need to speak about it. CAFC too had such a judge, but he was ejected for misconduct.

Patent trolls are going after small companies if they don’t wish the claims to be challenged or for trials to be concluded. It’s a rogue system, so in addition to ending sofwtare patents it would be useful to prevent venue shifting to Rodney Gilstrap with his bogus Texan ‘court’ (whose district openly advertises itself as being friendly towards trolls). What a mess of a system! This needs to be tackled immediately. █

“There`s no present. There`s only the immediate future and the recent past.”

–George Carlin

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