06.15.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Ion Brumme’s alleged ‘crime’ is that he invited people to join the staff union
Summary: Staff representative gives details in an intervention, offering a personal testimony about the work of the “investigation/investigative unit” (IU) at the EPO
THE EPO, or Eponia which acts as though it’s a state with ‘intelligence agencies’, ‘courts’ and ‘security’ personnel (private bodyguards who are grossly overpaid), operates a secretive (mental) torture chamber called the Investigative Unit. We wrote about it last year [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and explained how it had come into existence before Battistelli turned it into something to be expected from East Germany under Soviet occupation.
Here is a recent statement about what happens inside the Investigative Unit and what it did to Ion Brumme (above) among others because they ‘dared’ to sign people up for SUEPO, the Staff Union of the EPO. In French (original):
« Je ne cesse d’entendre que nous ne sommes pas là aujourd’hui pour discuter de cas individuels. Les cas de Ion Brumme et Malika Weaver sont pourtant exemplaires. Ce sont des représentants du personnel, sanctionnés dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions de représentants du personnel. Cela concerne tout le personnel. Le personnel a le droit de savoir. Si je suis dans cette salle aujourd’hui, ce n’est que contraint et forcé. Mon collègue Ion Brumme a été licencié et, ma collègue Malika Weaver ne pouvait être là aujourd’hui. Elle est fortement atteinte pas sa sanction de rétrogradation. Je la remplace.
La plupart d’entre vous assis en face de moi n’ont jamais vu comment se déroule un interrogatoire de l’unité d’investigation. Vous ne savez pas. Nous, à la représentation du personnel, on a vu, on a subi, on sait. C’est un traumatisme. Cela ruine la santé, voire la famille également. Le texte des Circulaires 341 et 342 qui est sous nos yeux aujourd’hui donne encore plus de pouvoir à cette unité d’investigation. Plus de pouvoir, ne veut pas dire, plus d’indépendance, bien au contraire. A l’heure où le Board 28 cherche à calmer la situation sociale, l’administration de l’office propose un texte aujourd’hui encore plus répressif.
J’aimerais attirer votre attention sur l’article 2 définissant le misconduct. Je vois que l’élément (n) qualifie de misconduct le fait d’enfreindre de manière manifestement intentionelle ou négligente une loi nationale. Je ne peux m’empêcher de penser à un membre du personnel de l’office, qui, sans doute avec la collusion de plusieurs, a ignoré un jugement de la Cour d’Appel de La Haye – l’intéressé allant jusqu’à dire que “les juges ont commis une erreur”. Naturellement, l’intéressé bénéficie de l’immunité de l’office et de plus, c’est maintenant écrit, ne peut faire l’objet d’une enquête par l’unité d’investigation. Cette caractéristique du texte symbolise en somme tout le cynisme de la démarche de l’administration de l’office. Cynisme qui s’est encore manifesté vendredi dernier.
Le Board 28 avait pourtant demandé à l’administration de l’office de calmer la situation sociale. Et vendredi dernier, on apprend que mon collègue Ion Brumme voit son licenciement confirmé, et ma collègue Malika Weaver, reste rétrogradée.
Je pense à eux. Je pense beaucoup à eux. Et aujourd’hui c’est le lieu pour en parler. »
Here is an automated translation:
“I keep hearing that we’re not here today to discuss individual cases. The case of Ion Brumme and Malika Weaver are copies. They are representatives, sanctioned in the performance of their duties staff representatives. This concerns all staff. The staff has the right to know. If I am in this room today, it is only under duress. My colleague Ion Brumme was dismissed and my colleague Malika Weaver could not be here today. It is strongly not reached his demotion penalty. I replaced.
Most of you sitting in front of me have never seen what happens during an examination of the investigative unit. You do not know. We, the staff representation, we saw, we suffered, we know. It’s trauma. This will ruin the health or even the family. The text Circulars 341 and 342 that is before us today still gives more power to the investigative unit. More power, not to say, more independence, quite the contrary. At a time when the Board 28 seeks to ease the social situation, the administration of the office offers a text even more repressive today.
I would like to draw your attention to Article 2 defines the misconduct. I see that the element (n) refers to the fact misconduct violate grossly negligent or intentional way a national law. I cannot help thinking of a member of the office staff, which, no doubt with many of collusion, ignored a judgment of the Court of Appeal Hague – the person up to say that “the judges made a mistake.” Naturally, the person enjoys immunity from office and more, it is now written, cannot be investigated by the investigation unit. This feature of the text symbolizes in short all the cynicism of the process of the administration of the office. Cynicism that has yet appeared last Friday.
The Board 28 had however asked the administration of the office to calm the social situation. And last Friday, we learned that my colleague Ion Brumme confirmed sees his dismissal, and my colleague Malika Weaver, left demoted.
I think of them. I think a lot of them. And today it is the place to discuss it.”
Accompanying text described the above as: “Intervention made by an elected Staff representative during the GCC of the 13.06.2106, dealing with Review of the disciplinary procedures framework and of Articles 52 and 53 ServRegs and the Revision of Investigation framework called Standards of conduct and administrative “fact findings” – while a spontaneous Staff Demonstration was taking place simultaneously outside against the President decision to confirm the disciplinary measures against Malika Weaver and Ion Brumme, former high ranking officials from SUEPO Munich.”
“Battistelli fancies himself a judge (and accuser, jury, and executioner) against a real judge, making up a ‘legal’ process (never-ending series of tiring show ‘trials’) and fabricating evidence to defame a judge who actually used legitimate evidence and is being punished for it.”It is worth noting that we have heard about the impact on the judge’s wife (the one who is on ‘house ban’) and we previously wrote about the spouse of Jesus getting affected (in relation to the attack on staff representatives at The Hague). This is totally unacceptable. It’s quite obviously a breach of human rights (though a human rights lawyer would be needed to lay out the specifics). It’s outrageous, but the EPO (or Eponia) does not care what the law says. It would even disregard the highest courts at The Hague (not obeying judges’ orders), by its very own admission. A later article will deal with the judge’s case.
Battistelli fancies himself a judge (and accuser, jury, and executioner) against a real judge, making up a ‘legal’ process (never-ending series of tiring show 'trials') and fabricating evidence to defame a judge who actually used legitimate evidence and is being punished for it. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Emptying the EPO’s savings/coffers in a desperate effort to control (and distort) the message stakeholders receive
Summary: British media (the largest online publication about technology) criticises an article that the Financial Times (influencer of the rich) published in order to promote the UPC, just shortly after becoming a ‘media partner’ of the EPO
THE TRUE DEPTHS of the scandals at the EPO are yet unexplored. Benoît Battistelli never ceases to amaze, having just broadened his secret PR contracts. To make matters worse, Battistelli’s EPO is now buying the media. How long before this blows up both in the face of the media and in the face of Battistelli? There’s moral/ethical breach here. It’s sometimes considered to be journalistic misconduct.
“It’s institutions like the EPO (once run and ruined by Battistelli) which discredit the EU (even if non-EU an institution) and thus jeopardise European unity.”Put in simple terms and quite bluntly, the EPO has truly corrupted the media. This in itself should be a massive scandal which everyone should speak about. Unlike propagandists from the Financial Times (FT) and other EPO ‘media partners’ (i.e. Battistelli puppets/mouthpieces), I never make money from EPO reports. I just do this because it’s the right thing to do.
Battistelli’s puff pieces and recent campaigns at the Financial Times (of London) should raise many questions both inside and outside the EPO. It’s institutions like the EPO (once run and ruined by Battistelli) which discredit the EU (even if non-EU an institution) and thus jeopardise European unity.
Earlier today we found this new article (modified screenshot above). It seems like Battistelli’s Kool-Aid is hard for people to drink/swallow, even if they don’t realise that the EPO PAID the FT for propaganda. I quite safely assumed that they (most probably) didn’t know this, so I told them after they had published this article.
For those who don’t know what the EPO and FT conspired to achieve, see last week’s articles. All the gory details are in an article we published 5 days ago as well as a few articles from around that time regarding the EPO’s PR campaign with FT (including “FT Reports”, which magically enough started “following” me in Twitter a couple of days ago, having not enjoyed the attention).
Andrew Fentem from The Register wrote:
In 2017, the EU is going to open the Unified Patent Court. This court will make it much easier for patent trolls and corporations in the US – armed with dodgy patent applications and IP attorneys – to reach into the UK and strangle your startup at birth. Think about it.
Last week the Financial Times reported )that two-thirds of patent cases in the US are now brought by “patent trolls”. In the last five years this has cost US startups more than $20bn in VC investment.
Patent trolls don’t innovate or build anything, but specialise in suing legitimate innovative businesses. This activity is primarily enabled by the US’s massively dysfunctional patent system, a system that will rubber-stamp patent applications often with minimal vetting – resulting in a system choked with applications ranging from the spurious to the wildly ludicrous. Patent trolls then tour the world, armed with these “patents”, extorting money out of honest innovators and engineers.
Although patent trolling is now increasing rapidly in Germany, Professor James Bessen of Boston University School of Law says that it is not currently a major problem in the UK – where fewer software patents and a “loser pays” litigation costs regime are real disincentives for that sort of “opportunistic behaviour”.
However, the EU’s new Unified Patent Court will, according a German law expert, “increase patent trolling in Europe” and open the UK up to patent trolling because “a judgment from the UPC will … cover the territory of all participating member states… This significantly increases the business risk.”
We kindly ask patent attorneys, examiners etc. to pay careful attention to these arguments against the UPC. Like many arguments in favour of the UK remaining in the EU, these ones are based on logic and facts, thorough analysis rather than Battistelli propaganda, promises and fiction for those too lazy to examine it for themselves. In spite of the UPC, I am against Brexit, which probably helps demonstrate that my opposition to UPC is principled but not blind.
We urge all EPO workers to study the real impact of the UPC on their jobs and on European interests. Don’t believe a word which comes out of Battistelli, his ‘communications’ staff, and his ‘media partners’. Remember who Battistelli, an ENA graduate, really works for [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Also check who desperately wants the UPC (hint: the same kind of people or corporations that strive to ram TPP down Europe’s throat and incidentally some of those who want Brexit, as per today’s article at Corporate Europe Observatory). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Do you have some old hardware collecting dust in the basement, attic, or garage? Don’t let it go to waste just because it’s not powerful enough to run modern operating systems. Linux can breathe new life into such machines. I have revived many old PCs in this way. For example, I use one as my main file server, another as a family laptop in the living room for quick browsing, and third one as a media center in the kids’ room. Additionally, I have donated two revived laptops to a cause.
So, don’t let good hardware die of old age.
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Desktop
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This seems like a great idea for anyone already confident in their use of GNU/Linux. Liberate the Chromebook from the straight-jacket of Chrome OS. It is a GNU/Linux OS but anchored to the browser. This procedure should permit full use of the hardware to run general applications. Amen.
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Server
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It’s impressive that IBM was founded more than a century ago with decades of research, technologies, and products behind it. But even more impressive is that the company continues to evolve and embrace emerging technologies. It’s done so, in part, due to its continued involvement with Linux and open source through The Linux Foundation.
“IBM has a long history with The Linux Foundation,” says Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology at IBM. “We’ve been one of the bedrock members of The Linux Foundation since its inception.” And, more generally, says Moore, “We have a long history of doing open source projects throughout many communities.”
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The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project unveiled its seventh release targeting a software-defined networking operating system, dubbed “Goldeneye.”
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Kernel Space
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As we’ve reported, if you ask some people, they’ll tell you that the concept of the Blockchain is as dramatic as the creation of the Internet. A continuously growing group of top technology and finance companies including IBM, Wells Fargo and the London Stock Exchange Group is partnering and working with The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology, which is central to how many businesses process transactions.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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This is sad to see. A new benchmark video for Windows and Linux using Dota 2 actually shows Windows doing quite a lot better than Linux.
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Now that my Linux reviews of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 have been published, next on my agenda this week are running some fresh Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks with these Pascal graphics cards.
I’m planning on making this a rather interesting comparison and will include our first Vulkan benchmarks under both operating systems too. Still deciding the complete set of graphics/game tests being run under Windows and Linux, besides our usual cross-platform compatible test profiles.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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I’m a free and open software lover, but the free I appreciate is the free as in freedom and not the free as in beer.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Let’s have fun with Linux Terminal today. Also, if you are a developer, let’s reduce one context switch that you perform while development; switching to browser for solution in StackOverflow. It’s well-known fact, less context switch, less distraction and more productivity. In this article, we’ll explore two fun and useful things that you can do right through terminal without opening browser that you would do normally.
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Games
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This is awesome news. We Happy Few a fantastic looking action/adventure game is due to get a Linux version during Early Access.
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I’ve been looking forward to giving Nation Red a go, as it is a few years old but still highly rated by a lot of people.
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Probably one of the bleakest DLC around, This War of Mine – The Little Ones DLC is a big expansion to the depressing (but good) survival game This War of Mine.
Honestly, I hadn’t played this game for many many months until this DLC came out, and now I am wondering why I’ve left it so long to play more of it. Bleak as it is, it’s actually a very good survival game.
Not only is it a good game, but the performance is fantastic on Linux. There was a time when it was broken for a while, but they fixed it and it runs perfectly again.
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Yes, Nuclear Dawn is still alive and still being updated. I’m actually shocked, but impressed at this. The new version will make the Linux and Mac versions a bit better too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A quick update from the GTK+ hackfest. I don’t really want to talk about the versioning discussion, except for two points:
First, I want to apologize to Allison for encouraging her to post about this – I really didn’t anticipate the amount of uninformed, unreasonable and hateful reactions that we received.
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Linux Lite 3.0 offers a great deal of flexibility and usability for both recent Microsoft Windows expatriots and seasoned Linux users. A new user application puts all of the needed information for using the distro in one spot. Just click on the topic and automatically view the information in a Web browser display.
All of the system controls and settings are located in the Settings option within the main menu display. Windows users will find a close similarity to the Control Panel in that OS. Even recent Linux newcomers will not need much exploring or head-scratching to navigate their way around Linux Lite.
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New Releases
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Antergos’ Dustin Falgout announced just a few minutes ago, June 15, 2016, that the latest ISO images for the Arch Linux-based operating system are now available for download.
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We’ve reported earlier on the release of the GParted 0.26.1 open-source partition editor, as well the GParted Live 0.26.1-1 distrolette that lets you use the latest GParted release on any personal computer.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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We’ve promised to introduce you, guys, to more PCLinuxOS editions as soon as we are in possession of the needed information, so today, June 15, 2016, we’re presenting the PCLinuxOS Trinity Community Edition.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Today, June 15, 2016, the openSUSE Tumbleweed maintainers have informed the community that the long-anticipated GCC 6 compiler is imminent for the rolling operating system.
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A new GNU Compiler Collection for openSUSE‘s rolling release Tumbleweed is scheduled to arrive soon.
Tumbleweed 20160613 snapshot will be the last snapshot to be based on GCC 5, according to the openSUSE Project’s Dominique Leuenberger.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Ever wondered what it’s like being involved with the Fedora Project? There are many different roles and types of people that help make Fedora what it is. One common form of contributing is packaging. This is when someone takes software, “packages” it in the RPM format, and publishes the RPM to the Fedora repositories. There’s some steps along the way to being a packager. In this article, Fedora packager James Hogarth, responsible for ownCloud, Certbot (formerly LetsEncrypt), and more, details a day in the life of what it’s like being a Fedora Packager.
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For some a computer wallpaper is not thought about and the default wallpaper stays for the live of their computer, others they like to pick a soothing scene of peace and serenity. At time I like The Serenity, but I usually like to rotate my wallpaper on a semi-monthly basis. While search the web for a new wallpaper I stumbled across a Legends of Zelda Logo wallpaper that I liked the look of. Not a fan of the Legend of Zelda I wanted to do something similar for Fedora.
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Debian Family
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The first, very-alpha release of reprotest is now out at PyPi. It should hit Debian experimental later this week. While it only builds on an existing system (as I’m still working on support for virtualization), it can now check its own reproducibility, which it does in its own tests, both using setuptools and debuild. Unfortunately, setuptools seems to generate file-order-dependent binaries, meaning python setup.py bdist creates unreproducible binaries. With debuild, reprotest probably would be reproducible with the modified packages from the Reproducible Builds project, though I haven’t tested that yet. It tests ‘captures_environment’, ‘fileordering’ (renamed from ‘filesystem’), ‘home’, ‘kernel’, ‘locales’, ‘path’, ‘time’, ‘timezone’, and ‘umask’. The other variations require superuser privileges and modifications that would be unsafe to make to a running system, so they will only be enabled in the containers.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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GNU/Linux developer Björn Michaelsen reported on June 14, 2016, managing to package the latest Beta build of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.2 office suite as a Snap package for various GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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Who is the main audience of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE? From my point of view, these are people who started their Linux life a long time ago when GNOME 2 was one of few desktop environments available for Linux distributions. Since then, we have gotten a lot more players and forks on the “market”.
Yes, MATE is better looking than GNOME 2 was a few years ago. But other desktop environments also did not stay the same during this time.
I used the Cinnamon desktop environment on Linux Mint for some time a year or so ago. For me, it was a much more convenient desktop environment than I found MATE to be in Ubuntu realization of it.
I also faced some crashes of different applications during my Live run of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE.
It all means that MATE team still has room for improvement.
Will I try Ubuntu MATE sometime in the future? Maybe. Let’s see where history takes us.
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In browsing around the UUGear web page I saw that they have a variety of other boards, such as a 7-port USB Hub designed for the “standard-sized” Raspberry Pi models and an acrylic case to fit that assembly.
One last thing. There have been a number of comments about two things that some people think the Raspberry Pi is “missing” – a real-time clock and a complete power-off at shutdown capability. UUGear offers another board called the Witty Pi which incorporates both of those. They also have an acrylic case for this assembly, and even a larger case for the Pi, 7-port USB Hub and Witty Pi all together. Good stuff.
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I decided to really put the ‘micro’ into ‘microservices’, so I prepared a system of Raspberry Pis and pcDuinos. WebSphere Liberty is so lightweight that it can easily run on a Pi, and it’s so small and cheap that I can easily build up a collection of computers. I called it the ‘data center in a handbag.’ Because each machine really is a machine, the topology is more obvious.
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Phones
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Android
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If you’ve purchased an unlocked Nextbit Robin, you’ll want to take advantage of the impressive Smart Storage feature. Jack Wallen shows you how.
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Bucking its usual trend, Google has been treating us to Developer Preview versions of its next mobile operating system, Android N. While its name is still yet to be officially decided, following Google I/O you’re now able to try out Developer Preview 3, which Google is describing as the first beta-quality candidate.
As such, if you were sat on the fence as to whether or not to try it out on your main phone or tablet, now might be the time to jump in and get among the Beta fun. If you’re already on the Beta, an OTA update should be rolling out to get you to the latest version. If you’re looking to do a fresh install, instructions are below.
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Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android and jump-started Google’s robotics efforts, imagines a future where artificial intelligence is so powerful that it powers every connected device. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech Conference in San Francisco today, Rubin said a combination of quantum computing and AI advancements could yield a conscious intelligence that would underpin every piece of technology. “If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one,” Rubin says. “It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious.”
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Hyve Mobility, a new technology startup has announced its first two smartphones. The Buzz and Storm smartphones will run pure Android.
Hyve Buzz and Storm smartphones run stock Android 5.1 Lollipop, although an Android Marshmallow update is being promised soon.
The focus here is not the devices itself, but the pure Android experience. However, apart from pure Android, Hyve Mobility’s Buzz and Storm are just like any other smartphone in the market.
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Thanks to the growing wave of first-time smartphone buyers, Android is expanding its market share lead over Apple’s iOS.
That conclusion was part of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech’s latest smartphone report.
Kantar found that for the three months ending April 2016, Android grabbed 76 percent of smartphone sales in Europe’s five largest markets, up 5.8 percent from the 70.2 percent it had for the same three months a year ago. (Those five markets: Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.)
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With the advent of free software for non-programmers, users ran into a licensing dilemma in a world of proprietary fonts.
Most Linux users soon hear of the influence of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in the development of free software. However, fewer have heard of the influence of the SIL Font License, although it is as important for design as the GPL has been for software. Just as the GPL is responsible for the development of free software, so the SIL Font License has enabled the rise of the free font movement, making Linux a practical choice for designers and artists. Today, it is the most popular free license for fonts, although few know its story.
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Events
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Our writer goes to the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Instead of having a good time, however, the trip turned into a nightmare — but the fault lies with Econo Lodge, not with SELF.
What a great time I had during the day I spent at this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest. Those of you who read Friday’s Week-in-Review know that I had planned to stick around for the full three days of festivities at my favorite community oriented Linux and open source conference on the East Coast, but alas that wasn’t meant to be. But what a blast I had during the day I was there.
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SaaS/Back End
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Healthcare
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It added that Lockheed Martin will help support the work that is underway in Leeds for the benefit of frontline health and care staff. Leeds, which has the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) – soon to be renamed NHS Digital – based in the city, as well as the second largest teaching hospital in Europe, is regarded as one of the best cities for health and well being. At the same time, facing continuing austerity, the city council sees its role as one of leadership, facilitation and commissioning.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Released GnuTLS 3.5.1 a feature update release in the next stable branche.
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Public Services/Government
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Tertiary education institutes (hochschule and university college) and ICT training specialists from across Europe are creating a course to train students to help small and medium-sized enterprises select and use open source cloud services. The course will be tested on Spanish and British exchange students working for SMEs in the two countries.
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Programming/Development
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You might be familiarized with the top programming languages like C++, Java, Python, JavaScript etc., but there exists a vast pool of programming languages that you need to know about. All these languages have different strengths and applications that should be studied before learning them. Here, we are sharing a list of the top 100 most popular programming languages of 2016.
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Chris Prather never metaphor he didn’t like.
That’s what he tells developers, at any rate. And on stage at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC, Prather explained how a deep understanding of metaphor—and the critical role it plays in cognitive function—can improve an open source software developer’s work. He delivered his presentation, “I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: How Cognitive Linguistics Can Help You Be A (More) Bad-ass Developer,” last Friday.
Metaphors “are more than just flowery language, even though that’s how they’re taught to us in gradeschool and college,” said Prather, CEO of Tamarou, a boutique Perl development shop.
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Microsoft had a bold vision for its Xbox One console that involved its Kinect accessory. While the Kinect for Xbox 360 was one of the most popular game console accessories of all time, a bundled Kinect with the Xbox One introduced a $100 price premium over the PS4 competition. Despite switching course and unbundling the Kinect, Microsoft hasn’t recovered yet in the games console battle, with reports suggesting it has sold 20 million Xbox One consoles vs. Sony’s 40 million PS4 shipments.
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Science
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Last year, a group of federal scientists was debating whether as many as 2,100 Air Force veterans should qualify for cash benefits for ailments they claimed stemmed from flying aircraft contaminated by Agent Orange.
An outside panel of experts had already determined that the scientific evidence showed the vets were likely exposed to the toxic herbicide.
The scientists within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs agreed the airmen had a strong case. But they had a more calculated concern: If the VA doled out cash to these veterans, others might want it too, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot.
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Security
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Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
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The COZY BEAR intrusion relied primarily on the SeaDaddy implant developed in Python and compiled with py2exe and another Powershell backdoor with persistence accomplished via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) system, which allowed the adversary to launch malicious code automatically after a specified period of system uptime or on a specific schedule. The Powershell backdoor is ingenious in its simplicity and power. It consists of a single obfuscated command setup to run persistently, such as…
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Big data will fix internet security … eventually [Ed: Microsoft’s Grimes says mass surveillance (‘big data’) will fix Internet security eventually]
I’ve always thought that improved computer security controls would “fix” the internet and stop persistent criminality — turns out it might be big data analytics instead.
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Symantec will pay US$4.65 billion in an all-cash deal to buy privately-held Blue Coat to ramp up its enterprise security offerings.
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Using the typosquatting technique, a German college student tricked more than 17,000 people from cybersecurity and programming community into clicking his fake software packages. More than half the time his code ran with administrative rights, affecting government and military organizations.
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Defence/Aggression
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Four people were shot in downtown Oakland early Tuesday evening — leaving one dead, according to police.
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America’s mass shootings, especially those linked to Islamic terrorism like the slaughter in Orlando, Florida, prompt a reflex of responses, but some reactions are particularly unhelpful, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says he be may be “open” to placing new gun controls on law-abiding citizens following the terror attack on Pulse Orlando.
According to CBS News’s Steven Portnoy, McConnell has a meeting with FBI director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday. Portnoy Tweeted that McConnell has signaled he may be willing to consider new gun controls after that meeting.
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We American value efficiency. We like to “get to it.” So why do we have to write and read pretty much the same articles, and do the same stuff, every time another mass slaughter occurs?
So to help out, here’s your one-size-fits-all article. I hope you bookmark it, and refer back to it when the next act takes place. And a request– for those commenting, please try and keep your remarks as generic as possible as well in the spirit of things.
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To call it that is to forget the last hundred years of U.S. history of mass violence fueled by racial hatred and homophobia. Although precise numbers of deaths are impossible to specify, at least 100 African Americans were killed in East St. Louis, Ill., in one bloody night in July 1917; anywhere from 55 to 300 blacks were massacred in Tulsa, Okla., in 16 hours in June 1921; and dozens more were killed in Rosewood, Fla., in January 1923. And of course, more recently, 32 died in the 1973 bombing of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans.
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Muhammad Ali angered much of America by declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong” and refusing to fight in Vietnam, but his principled stand was vindicated by history and is a lesson for today, says Ivan Eland.
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The FBI first discovered Omar Mateen, the man who would kill 49 and injure more than 50 others at a gay nightclub, when he boasted of a friendship with terrorists.
Mateen told one of his co-workers at a private security firm in 2013 that he knew Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Mateen’s co-worker reported that information to the FBI.
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After the most recent mass shooting in Orlando, Florida – the worst in U.S. history – one might ask how the FBI was able to investigate the perpetrator, twice, without deciding to take any further action. This question is further confounded by the fact the perpetrator was, according to his wife, an abusive, unstable man suffering from bipolar disorder.
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As the first details about the massacre in Orlando trickled out on Sunday, Ali H. Soufan, a former counterterrorism agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, watched the media coverage unfold in a familiar way.
Soufan, who now runs a consulting firm, told The Intercept that before it became known that the killer, in a call to the police during the attack, had dedicated his rampage to the leader of the Islamic State militant group, news reports focused on the timing and location of the shooting spree. An attack on an LGBT club during a month dedicated to expressing pride in that community — and the gunman’s personal profile — seemed strongly suggestive of a hate crime.
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News coverage over the past 48 hours of the Orlando nightclub attacks has shown how corporate media use specific vocabulary to manipulate public perceptions and perpetuate harmful stereotypes and xenophobia.
In the early hours of June 12, as reports poured in about a shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, news outlets were reluctant to characterize the incident beyond calling it an act of violence.
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The man who shot over 100 people and killed 49 in an Orlando nightclub Saturday worked at a retirement home as a security guard for G4S – a giant, often controversial global contracting corporation that provides mercenary forces, prison guards and security services. G4S is one of the world’s largest private security companies, with more than 620,000 employees and a presence in over 100 countries.
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“A man on TV is trying to make political capital out of the mass murder of innocent people.”
“This is the scariest political speech I have ever seen in America.”
“As a woman, and daughter of immigrants with an Arabic last name, this is probably the most frightening Trump speech I’ve heard.”
Those were just a sampling of responses to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s fear-mongering and fallacy-ridden speech, delivered Monday afternoon in New Hampshire as a response to the mass shooting in Orlando.
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A strange thing happened a few months ago. I got a news alert that my photo project, Just Me and Allah, which documents queer Muslims and their diverse experiences, had been mentioned in a major LGBT magazine website.
I didn’t recall having done an interview with them, so I clicked on the article. The piece was about a 17-year-old Muslim girl in North Dakota allegedly having had a gun pointed at her head by her father after he discovered that she was a lesbian. In the piece, I was cited as proof of the existence of pro-LGBT Muslims – as if that were an anomaly. I wondered whether some random LGBT Christian would’ve been mentioned had the story involved an evangelical father and his daughter.
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Tear gas has been used against football fans in Lille amid reports of renewed clashes at Euro 2016.
It has not been been made clear which team’s fans were involved. England and Wales fans have been gathering in Lille ahead of their match in nearby Lens.
Russian and Slovakian supporters are also in Lille, after their match at the city’s Stade Pierre-Mauroy.
There are also reports that hundreds of England fans have been surrounded by riot police in the city’s main square.
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On June 9, the defense ministers of Russia, Syria and Iran met in Tehran to discuss counter-terrorism activities and security initiatives that would prevent jihadists from conducting wider operations in the region. Russian Defense Ministry statement said the talks were focused on «priority measures in reinforcing the cooperation» in the fight with Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra terrorist groups.
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China has lodged diplomatic representations with the United States over a planned meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama at the White House on Wednesday saying it would damage Chinese-U.S. ties, the Foreign Ministry said.
China considers the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader a dangerous separatist, and ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing the meeting would encourage “separatist forces”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Indonesia insisted Monday Singapore cannot take legal action against its citizens over the haze that choked Southeast Asia last year after the city-state sought to question the director of an Indonesian company.
Forest fires in Indonesia produced acrid smog that shrouded Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of the region for weeks, pushing air quality to unhealthy levels, causing many to fall ill and disrupting air travel.
The blazes are an annual occurrence during the dry season as land is cleared using slash-and-burn methods but they were the worst for years in 2015, with Singapore particularly angered at what it said was Jakarta’s failure to take action.
Tempers have frayed again after Singapore last month attempted to call in the director of an Indonesian company suspected of being linked to the haze for questioning, Singaporean media reported, citing the National Environment Agency.
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With the home solar panel industry and the electric utility industry at war, you might expect a liberal Democratic congresswoman from New York City to support the solar side. But that’s not what happened recently when Rep. Yvette Clarke decided to wade into this fight. Instead, she signed her name to a letter apparently written by utility lobbyists that warns about the risk of solar companies duping consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is holding a workshop on June 21 to learn about the booming rooftop solar market and how it’s affecting consumers. There are concerns on both pro- and anti-solar sides: The solar industry is hoping that the FTC will look into what they consider to be anti-competitive practices by the electric utility industry, intended to stymie the growth of solar. The utilities hope to prod the FTC to investigate allegedly unscrupulous solar companies, in the name of protecting consumers.
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Turning their backs on climate science and the consensus of governments and civil society across the globe, the world’s biggest banks are dangerously advancing the climate crisis by pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s most polluting fossil fuel industries, according to a new report published Tuesday.
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Finance
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Engineering giant Rolls Royce has written to employees saying it wants the UK to stay in the European Union.
Brexit would “limit any company’s ability to plan and budget for the future,” the firm said.
Meanwhile, the CBI has said a vote to Leave would “put British businesses out in the cold”.
But Leave campaigners said the CBI does not represent British business and is “the voice of Brussels”.
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And as his candidacy’s political purpose became clearer, corporate media criticism of his intention to stay in the race has become sharper. After the June 7 primaries, when it became mathematically impossible for Sanders to win a majority of the pledged delegates, much of the media circled the wagons, insisting Sanders drop out in the interest of “party unity” and “stopping Trump”—something Sanders himself has pledged to work toward.
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With this one sentence, the New York Times not only embraced a right-wing canard that’s been peddled by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the neoliberal Urban Institute, it also contradicted its previous editorial stance on the issue. In 2013, the Times (9/29/13) presented universal healthcare as a widespread standard that the US ought to meet…
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One major change was in the official policy position of the Democratic Party. While universal healthcare was once a broad goal of putative liberals, the Democrats’ soon-to-be leader, Hillary Clinton, says that single-payer healthcare will “never, ever happen.” New York Times Clinton partisan and leading center-left economist Paul Krugman insisted in January that single-payer was “a distraction.” Adam Gaffney of the New Republic wrote in March, “Republicans are no longer afraid of the menace of single-payer, for a perfectly good reason: The mainstream of the Democratic Party has largely abandoned it.”
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The financial sector has used the threat of Brexit via the UK referendum on EU membership to promote its deregulatory agenda since 2013, according to a new study (1) by Corporate Europe Observatory.
“How Cameron’s referendum delivered victories to Big Finance” tells the story of how, from the day a ballot on UK membership was first announced by David Cameron three years ago, the financial sector has sought and won significant lobbying victories thanks to a complicit UK government and EU efforts to keep the City of London happy.
The appointment of Jonathan Hill as European commissioner for financial services, the deregulation agenda of the so-called “Capital Markets Union”, the impending roll-backs on rules to protect against financial instability, and special decision-making privileges for the UK should the interests of banks come under attack, are all highlighted as the key triumphs of the sector and its allies in the UK government since the prospect of Brexit was raised as a serious possibility.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Bernie Sanders held a press conference on Tuesday calling for reform of the Democratic party—starting with the ouster of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz—and said he would remain in the presidential race until the end.
Speaking ahead of a planned meeting with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Sanders said, “The time is now—in fact, the time is long overdue, for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic party.”
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Conspiracy theories – suspicions without evidence – have become a bane of modern life, but Donald Trump seeks to make them a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, as Todd Gitlin describes.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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While I do not ascribe to any of his points of views, I view him as nothing more than a teenager trying to find his way in the world. As a fellow citizen, I am of the opinion that we should nurture his intelligence rather than alienate him. It is painfully obvious that he isn’t some kind of violent criminal. Nor has he incited anyone to violence. All he has done is mouthed off on religion and the late Mr Lee. Now, I am not suggesting that he is a respectful child. But since when has disrespect become a crime?
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Earlier this week we noted that Peter Thiel’s legal vendetta against Gawker went way beyond just the Hulk Hogan case. In fact, it appeared that Thiel not only paid the lawyer, Charles Harder, to set up his own legal practice (without revealing to Holder who was really paying the bills), but basically sought to help pay the bills of lots of folks pushing legal claims on Gawker, no matter how tenuous. That included a questionable labor dispute (where even the plaintiff said he felt used by the lawyer) and a weird defamation case in which the court easily tossed out the defamation claim against Gawker, but the plaintiff, Meanith Huon, settled the claim against Above The Law (where his argument was marginally stronger), but appealed the ruling against Gawker, telling the court that he wasn’t concerned about the appeal because he was “getting support from Hulk Hogan’s lawyers in California.” The deeper you look at the Huon case, the more ridiculous it seems.
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We see these kinds of notices all the time, and know that you absolutely can republish such threat letters without fear of actual infringement, but as Gawker’s reporter rightly notes, doing so might only give Harder yet another opportunity to pile on a questionable lawsuit. After some consideration, however, Gawker changed its mind and posted the letter. It’s as ridiculous as you’d expect. It lists out 19 specific statements from the original article, which it claims are false and defamatory. At the very least, that’s more advanced than most purely bogus threats that don’t highlight exact statements.
Still, the key statements that Harder claims are defamatory are taken directly from other lawsuits against Ivari, and there’s what’s known as fair reporting privilege, which allows you to quote what’s found in a lawsuit and not be liable as if you’d said it yourself. Many of the other statements are minor issues that hardly rise to the level of defamation in any sense of the term, let alone hitting the necessary standards of being done recklessly with malicious intent, as would be necessary for a defamation claim to succeed. Incredibly, in the very first item, Harder even changes a word to misrepresent what Gawker’s article said.
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Donald Trump says he is “revoking” the Washington Post’s press access at his campaign events because the newspaper is “phony and dishonest.”
In a Facebook post, the presumptive GOP nominee attributed the decision to the newspaper’s “incredibly inaccurate coverage” of him.
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Two years ago, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the morality police who work for Google’s AdSense team threatened to kill our account because they saw that their ads were being displayed on this page, which has a story (from 2012) about a publicity rights claim involving a music video using footage of a porn star without her permission. The story was quite clearly about the intellectual property issues at play, but the AdSense team insisted that since the still image displayed from the embedded video showed a (clothed) woman pole dancing, it violated their policies on “adult or mature content.” We protested and AdSense rejected our protest, insisting that the still image of the pole dancing violated their policies. Never mind the fact that the same exact video was hosted on Google-owned YouTube where it had Google’s ads enabled…
For what it’s worth, this happened just months after we had started using Google AdSense, after representatives from that team put together a big effort to get us switch from the other ad provider we’d been using at the time.
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‘Udta Punjab’ is in the news for the wrong reasons. After a wrung-out battle with the CBFC, the film is set to hit the screens soon. Here is a quiz on other such movies that have run into trouble due to their content.
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For two short years, before I wormed my way into PR, I worked as a personal trainer – and, slight dip since starting a business aside – still like to look after myself.
What does that have to do with anything? Well, some of you will have read that, from next month, London’s new mayor Sadiq Khan is moving to ban ads promoting an ‘unhealthy’ or ‘unrealistic’ body image from appearing on London’s transport network – and I’d like to look at this logically, knowing what I know and having worked with hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes.
As per an election promise, Khan’s going to issue a total ban on ad campaigns that could “pressurise people” (don’t get me started on pressurise – since when was ‘pressure’ not good enough?) to conform to idealised body standards.
In his statement, Khan said that he was going after the kind of advertising that can demean people and make them feel ashamed of their bodies – noting, as the father of two teenage girls, that women were often particularly affected by this.
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It’s an understandable reaction to tragedy. When faced with the unthinkable — like the death of a loved one in a terrorist attack — people tend to make bad decisions. We saw this recently when the widow of a man killed in an ISIS raid sued Twitter for “providing material support to terrorists.” Twitter’s involvement was nothing more than the unavoidable outcome of providing a social media platform: it was (and is) used by terrorist organizations to communicate and recruit new members.
That doesn’t mean Twitter somehow supports terrorism, though. Like most social media platforms, Twitter proactively works to eliminate accounts linked with terrorists. But there’s only so much that can be done when all that’s needed to create an account is an email address.
As difficult as it may be to accept, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. are not the problem. Like any, mostly-open social platform, they can be used by terrible people to do terrible things. But they are not responsible for individual users’ actions, nor should they be expected to assume this responsibility.
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“Twilight Over Burma,” a film about the real-life story of an Austrian woman, Inge Sargent, who became royalty when she married Sao Kya Seng, an ethnic Shan prince, was banned from premiering in Burma at the annual Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival that started on Tuesday. A film censorship board member told The Irrawaddy that the film was under review because it could allegedly damage ethnic unity in the country.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The bodies from Sunday’s Orlando massacre are not yet buried, but that hasn’t stopped John Cornyn from trying to use their deaths to expand surveillance that would not have stopped the attack.
Cornyn told reporters yesterday he will use the attack to push to include Electronic Communications Transaction Records in the things FBI can obtain with a National Security Letter.
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La Quadrature du Net is participating at the panel “Encryption and Human Rights” organised at the United Nations by the Committee Justice and Peace of the Dominican Order. This conference will talk about the right to encryption and to privacy in a time where in Europe, those rights are at regularly at risk. The video of this conference will be available on the Mediakit of La Quadrature du Net.
Right to encryption is one of the essential condition to the existence of the right to privacy and to freedom of speech.
Individuals and civil society are regularly subject to intrusions and restrictions of those rights by State, when those are asked to respect privacy of their citizens. The development of mass surveillance technologies and their legalisation in the name of the fight against terrorism act as a barrier to the application of those rights and seriously infringe a large number of civil liberties. Encryption has increasingly become a major breaking point and appear as a essential barrier against the demolition of our liberties in the digital era.
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A bill reforming the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is on its way to the president right now. It makes clearer the presumption of disclosure and centralizes requests for information from the feds. The Obama White House has arguably the worst record of finding records following FOIA requests of any administration, according to the AP. One advantage to keeping records locked up is that it helps to remove any sense that lower echelon public servants close to a given issue have doubts about political leaders’ chosen course of action.
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One word in one document has been bugging us ever since: “corporate.”
An NSA writer used the word in a newsletter story about its Legislative Affairs and Intelligence Security Issues office. That office watches budgets, answers questions from elected officials and vets all communication between NSA staff and Congress. As the newsletter article put it, if a staffer needs to communicate with a legislator, the office “will assist you in analyzing the request, providing background and context to the responsible action office, and reviewing the responses to ensure that they meet the five Cs (candid, complete, correct, consistent and corporate) for dealing with Congress.”
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By acquiring the world’s largest professional social network, Microsoft gets immediate access to data from more than 433 million LinkedIn members. Microsoft fills out the “social graph” and “interests” circles.
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At the same time, I expect that many free tech advocates will begin abandoning LinkedIn as much as possible as soon as the site begins to push users to take advantage of features requiring the use of Microsoft products, if not before. As one member of an email list I’m on commented upon hearing the news, “Anybody recommend a good alternative to LinkedIn?”
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In recent years, Linkedin has perceivably become a rather important part of the modern business world. People use this social network to search for jobs, advertise jobs, and get their own work-related resume out there into the spotlight. Which is why I always get a funny look when people ask me to add them on Linkedin, and I tell them, I don’t have one.
The same why I told you why you should not be using Facebook back in 2010, and the arguments still hold valid, I would like to tell you why you might want to entertain the idea of not having a business profile on a social media site, and why this could actually be good for your career. To wit, let us philosophize.
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Since attaining a $10 billion valuation from investors in 2014, Dropbox Inc. has become a symbol of unicorn startup exuberance. But several shareholders have recently written down the value of their investments in the cloud storage company while it cut costs and focused on generating more revenue.
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A working group on cyber security has submitted a list of proposals to Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, aimed to improve Finland’s cyber surveillance, according to newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
The proposals, drawn up by a joint group from the Ministry of the Interior, the Security Intelligence Service, the National Bureau of Investigation and a police task force, include the recruitment of 101 new cyber crime police officers.
According to the paper group also suggests changing laws to broaden law enforcement’s capabilities of monitoring telephone communications.
Additionally, the group proposes increased training in computer crime of police.
The group’s report also point out laws on the books that they say hampers police work, the paper writes.
The report states that even though identity theft was criminalised in Finland last autumn, the majority of cases are never reported to the police and many cases that are reported are often left unresolved.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Fearing a terrorist plot, an Alabama police officer snatched a camera from a man who was video recording a police station from across the street, turning the man’s camera off to keep it from recording.
However, the man had a back-up body camera that was live streaming.
“I don’t care about your First Amendment rights,” said the Wetumpka police officer, who has been identified as Charles Shannon.
“I don’t know if you’re a terrorist or not, trying to film our building.”
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One day after PINAC posted a video showing an Alabama cop snatching a camera from a man recording a police station, sparking a call flood from hundreds of angry readers, that same police department retaliated by having the man arrested on felony charges.
Wetumpka police claim that Keith Golden aka Bama Cameradisrupted their emergency phone lines by posting their non-emergency phone number in his video, which we then reposted in our article.
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Farrokh Sekaleshfar preached in Orlando in March but no evidence he influenced Omar Mateen who killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando
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Various reports indicate that the death toll from the jihadist attack overnight at a popular gay club in Orlando may exceed 50 people, with more than 50 others wounded. The terrorist’s identity has been reported: He is Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American citizen and devout Muslim from Fort Pierce, Fla., the son of immigrants from Afghanistan.
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It is hard to know what to make of Freud owning a holiday villa close to where Madeleine McCann disappeared. Clement was apparently not in Portugal at the time. When you add in the fact that the McCanns’ sleazy “spokesman”, Clarence Mitchell, works for Freud’s son Matthew, the coincidences do add up. I am not jumping to any conclusions at present. But I found the following fascinating.
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In the SSCI Torture Report, it has two references to how press people were leaking details of the the torture program to the press even while lawyers were claiming that the program was top secret. In this document, someone notes “our Glomar fig leaf is getting pretty thin.” In this one, a lawyer admits the declaration he had just written “about the secrecy of the interrogation program” was “a work of fiction.”
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The title was part of some smart CYA on the part of George Tenet. When things started to go south with the torture program in 2003, he wrote this document, ostensibly putting order to the torture program, but also making it clear the whole thing operated on Presidential authority. (The document, which should have been released to David Passaro in his criminal trial for torturing a detainee who subsequently died, was withheld, which prevented him from pointing out anything he did, he did with Presidential approval, so Tenet’s CYA didn’t help him at all.)
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At a time when Democrats and Republicans in Congress can’t agree on just about anything, there is one issue that unites them: the urgent need for criminal justice reform.
A Senate bill on the issue has attracted an impressive 37 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has gained support from figures as politically diverse as the Koch brothers and President Obama for its goals of reforming mandatory minimum sentences, reducing prison populations, and rehabilitating prisoners.
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EFF’s team of fearless lawyers defends your rights on the frontlines of technology and the law, from police stops on the street to arguments in the courtroom to the halls of government where policies are ground out. EFF’s latest hire, Criminal Defense Staff Attorney Stephanie Lacambra, is a fierce and accomplished public defender who will lend her unique expertise to our ongoing and emerging battles against law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach.
I sat down with Stephanie to learn more about her story up until now and where she hopes this new endeavor will take her.
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We discuss the seemingly-inexorable transformation of the USA into a police state
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In a crucial win for Internet users, today a federal appeals court upheld [PDF] clear net neutrality rules that will let us all use and enjoy the Internet without unfair interference from Internet service providers. The rules will keep providers from blocking or slowing traffic, or speeding up traffic for those who pay.
Last year, EFF and other advocacy groups, along with millions of Americans, called on the FCC to do its part to defend Internet expression and innovation. We urged them to adopt focused rules based on a legal framework that would finally stand up to the inevitable legal challenge, but also limit their own authority in order to help prevent a future FCC from abusing its regulatory power. The FCC responded with an Open Internet Order that largely did just that.
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We’ve been talking for weeks about how the cable industry has dramatically ramped up lobbying in an attempt to kill the FCC’s plan to bring some competition to the set top box market. The cable industry opposes the idea for two reasons: competition would dramatically reduce the $21 billion the sector makes each year off of rental fees, but the flood of new, cheaper boxes would also likely direct users — historically locked behind cable’s walled gardens — to a huge variety of streaming video alternatives.
But the cable industry can’t just come out and admit that they’re terrified of competition — so they’ve been attacking the FCC’s plan with a two pronged approach. One, pay for an absolute torrent of hysterically-misleading editorials that claim set top competition will hurt consumers, scare the children, ramp up piracy, and knock the planet off of its orbital axis. The other prong of their attack involves a lobbying mainstay: throwing money at politicians to take positions they don’t have the slightest actual understanding of.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A new set of guidelines for pharmaceutical patent examination has been published by the United Nations Development Programme that seek to help reduce poor quality patents and ensure efficient market entry of generic products.
The guidelines, written by a well-known advocate of access to medicines, aim at advising patent examiners in assessing the patentability requirements of applications relating to pharmaceutical products and processes.
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Doors to a global medical harmonisation organisation opened to the generic and biosimilar industry, which described it as an historical moment for them. The industry will now be able to sit on the assembly of the international body that joins regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.
At issue is the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). According to a press release, the ICH‘s General Assembly today approved the International Generic and Biosimilar Medicines Association (IGBA) as an ICH assembly member. ICH is a Geneva-based organisation that brings together regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry.
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The quest of balance between encouraging medical innovation and the imperative of broad access to medicines has so far been elusive. Two Harvard University programmes jointly organised a workshop this week with the aim of encouraging a conversation between global health actors and see if some “outside the box” thinking is possible.
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Trademarks
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Many have tried to answer the question of whether there is a trademark bullying problem–also known as trademark enforcement abuse. First, there have been anecdotal accounts of trademark holders making overreaching claims against persons or entities with less resources. In the United States, these claims are particularly troublesome when First Amendment values, such as free speech, are implicated or when fair competition may be threatened. One of the first trademark “bully” accounts that received substantial attention involved Monster Energy drinks and its enforcement of its trademark against a small brewery offering a beer called, “Vermonster.” However, my favorite trademark “bully” story involves Louis Vuitton who sent a cease and desist letter to the IP student group at University of Pennsylvania Law School directing them to stop using some of Louis Vuitton’s trademarks in an advertisement for a law school symposium. Anecdotal examples abound.
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Copyrights
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It’s really not clear how that could be done in practice. Maybe by allocating a tiny tax rebate to companies by way of “reimbursement” for the copyright levy payment made from the state budget. But that would add yet another layer of complexity to the tax system, hardly a welcome outcome. It would be far simpler just to get rid of the unwieldy and anachronistic copyright levy system altogether. It’s time to recognize that everybody has a fundamental right to make copies of stuff they own, and that the “fair compensation” for doing that is a big, fat nothing.
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The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is going after two anonymous Usenet uploaders, who shared more than 2,000 books in total. The group requested the personal details of the users from their providers, but they refused to hand them over citing privacy concerns. As a result, BREIN is now taking the matter to court.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
FTI Consulting is hired when powerful people need to whitewash (or greenwash) truly evil things like fracking
FTI Consulting for fracking. From FTI Consulting’s own brochure [PDF], bragging about helping to poison British people on behalf of big clients.
Summary: Shedding light on what happens to EPO budget and how it’s put “to work” under Battistelli’s unprecedented tyranny (Eponia) right at the very heart of Europe
MANAGEMENT at the EPO has turned worse than nasty and malicious. It is now an existential threat to the Office and the whole Organisation, having wasted a lot of money buying positive publicity and earning utterly negative publicity (which is mostly definitely deserved). This reputation-laundering exercise may help determine if Battistelli and his thugs survive with their miserable careers.
Based on this morning’s Twitter activity (they have changed their tune somewhat since yesterday), the EPO’s lobbying of delegates is imminent, shortly after EIA2016 (a lobbying opportunity) and before the Administrative Council’s meeting: “In Tirana this week we’ll be discussing with EPO member states how to improve services for businesses & inventors. Stay tuned for updates!” (yesterday’s tweet was a lot more revealing as there is budget at stake)
“What we wish to draw attention to right now is the distraction and diversion campaign that portrays EPO staff as violent, armed, and dangerous.”This is another opportunity to grease up delegates and their nations before a vote that ought to sack Battistelli. “Keep on dreaming,” told us one person about this prospect, “Battistelli will never ever be sacked by the AC! Kongstad and Battistelli are close friends.”
Moreover, he appears to be 'buying' votes. What we wish to draw attention to right now is the distraction and diversion campaign that portrays EPO staff as violent, armed, and dangerous. It helps Battistelli surround himself with six bodyguards which are grossly overpriced (and raise questions about the very legitimacy of the secret contract). It turns out that Battistelli’s friend’s wife, a short French lady, is also strutting around with bodyguards (yes, plural!) these days and the sky is the limit in Napoleon’s EPO. Moreover, the PR contracts (i.e. manipulation of the media) are on the rise and they are expanding, broadening the reach of obnoxious PR people who also tried to push fracking into the Manchester area. These people have business objectives; they don’t have ethics.
Recall some of the awful strategies used by HBGary on behalf of corporate clients against Wikileaks, against journalists, and against the public. These are the tactics EPO workers ought to expect from EPO management right now. EPO management sent threats my way only weeks after signing the FTI Consulting deal and that’s about the same time when EPO used German and Dutch media to defame a falsely-accused (of fictitious things) judge whose 'trial' ended in his favour yesterday (for the third time).
There are truly nasty tactics being employed by the EPO at the moment. Those who are not aware of it must not have paid sufficient attention. These attempts to anonymously defame the judge, as we noted the other day, came right after the contract with FTI Consulting. Guess what EPO management is doing. Will it shy away and end the FTI Consulting contract? No, it broadens it, offering financial awards for what sank the EPO into an unprecedented crisis. In the following text which we received, note the part about the bodyguards as well:
The EPO is very secretive about its finances. Hence the few documents that it publishes – internally only – are worth reading. Someone recently drew our attention to the very last entry in CA/F 6/16 that refers to “close protection” (i.e. bodyguards) and concerns 6 contracts with 6 individuals, at a total of €550.000 for a fixed period of 6 months. Over a year this makes 1.1 million Euros, just to protect Mr. Battistelli (4 bodyguards) and Ms. Bergot (2 bodyguards) from what seem to be largely imaginary dangers. As far as we know the Office never made “awards” of this kind to individuals, but only to companies. It is not clear why this time things are different. We also wonder how the individuals concerned were selected. Could they be old friends of one of our newly recruited managers? There are more pearls to be found in CA/F 6/16, e.g. we note a contract worth €280.200 for FTI consulting – already graced with some €870.000 at the end of last year – for “EPO’s position campaign for Germany, the Netherlands and France”. That makes more than 1.1 million Euro purely for propagating the Office’s story telling, on top of the European Inventor of the Year award, estimated to cost several million Euros. There is also a contract of almost €800.000 for Lenz & Staehelin, lawyers in Geneva, for “legal support for EPO cases at ILOAT”, i.e. for the Organisation to fight its staff. To that the sum paid to ILOAT (estimated at 20-25k per case) must be added. The President and VP4 nevertheless continue to provoke ILOAT cases, among others by refusing even modest compensations e.g. for excessive delays awarded by the Internal Appeals Committee – for the results see herein further below.
No wonder EPO staff is up in arms. Look how the Office is run. It’s madness. If it was a private company, it would have folded long ago. Paying publishers for UPC propaganda events in the US is small potatoes when the budget is as incredible as more than a million dollars per year (to a US-based PR firm).
Using PR and purchases of press contracts (media ‘partnership’), which is a growing trend, the EPO management is trying to maintain the illusion that everything is going well. It’s appalling to watch such an expensive charade going unpunished, with zero accountability in fact (no matter if people’s money goes down the drain). Last year the EPO did publicity stunts for a fraud which is responsible for many deaths. When EPO management is making “entertainment” out of frauds and crooks like Elizabeth Holmes, for example, what does that say about EPO management? Regarding this one examples (Holmes), one reader asked us, “did you notice they are making a blockbuster film about Elizabeth Holmes with her being played by Jennifer Lawrence? I really hope that someone catches onto the idea of “the corrupt world of patents” and does a bit of digging…”
“This ‘article’ says “King Battistelli” but does not properly explain that it’s a cynical label for Battistelli because he’s a megalomaniac tyrant and infamous thug.”This is about that dumb European Inventor Award ceremony, which is called a “Eurovision for” Battistelli (they say “Hot Patent Talent”) by this new puff piece that EPO links to (as of last night, shortly after it got published). After waste and abuse (purchasing of media) we cannot quite understand how it really came about; maybe FTI Consulting contacted Etan Smallman or someone else at Vice? And at what cost? At whose expense?
This ‘article’ says “King Battistelli” but does not properly explain that it’s a cynical label for Battistelli because he’s a megalomaniac tyrant and infamous thug. Instead they attribute it to extravagant tendencies as follows:
It is the flagship event of the European Patent Office (EPO), a quango that employs 7,000 people and has been embroiled in a peculiar amount of publicity and controversy of late. While the inventors themselves are invariably modest to a fault, the same can’t be said for the EPO’s president, Benoît Battistelli, recently referred to rather scathingly as “King Battistelli” by one tech website. His face receives a whole page in the event’s brochure and each year he insists on mounting the stage—with accompanying introduction from the glamorous host—for the announcement of every single category.
The reason he’s called “King Battistelli” is that he does not obey the law. He doesn’t even obey ServRegs. Battistelli is breaking his own rules. As one person put it last night:
Mr. Battistelli sent a threatening message to the Enlarged Board of Appeal
If true, then according to the Guidelines for Investigation, everyone concerned has a DUTY to report Mr. B. to the investigative unit. According to what had been presented as his contract, he is after all submitted to the same staff regulations as every one else…
When Mr. Battistelli leaves service in one way or another, will he be submitted to the whim of his successor before applying to a new job?
And if there is a vacancy at the top, does this mean that no one can leave the EPO anymore?
As one person noted, Battistelli “is appointed by the AC so it is they who would decide his future employment? But if he leaves within 10 years is his pension still retained by the EPO?”
More comments on this topic (but another thread) were as follows:
The EBoA was right in considering that its independence was threatened. Mr Battistelli has just put a document for the June session of the AC which defines Standards of Conduct applying to everyone including the BoA. All EPO employees must act solely in the interests of the organisation. Nothing is said about the interests of the users of the patent system and the public. And its the EPO Stasi, the Investigative Unit which will track those deviating from the standards.
Is that the end of it before the EBA with regard to this ‘case’ (number 3) or did the EBA just suspend procedures? If ended, who will rid BB [Battistelli] of these troublesome judges? Will there be legal advice (VP5?) that the EPO judiciary is out of control and not acting correctly? Surely now the AC will have to resolve the big issue – BB v DG3. They either decide to overrule DG3 or they overrule BB, it’s difficult to see any form of co-existence.
Amazing. A new low for the EPO.
I’m confused, and trying to make sense of the bigger picture. Does anyone have any insight into why the EPO has descended into such farce? The common narrative seems to be that, once Battistelli realised he was above national law, and could change internal regulations at will, and was answerable only to a disparate bunch of spineless bureaucrats, he decided to give the EPO a good shake-up – either for ideological reasons (ENA-style) or because he’s simply a nasty piece of work, depending on whose narrative you read.
But isn’t it more likely that the AC gave Battistelli specific objectives, such as improving productivity, and that he was simply not able enough to deliver on these without causing all a whole lot of collateral damage to the office and its reputation?
And whose idea was it to set Battistelli these objectives anyway? Was change really needed? What was the motivation for the changes? Fear of the UPC? The TTIP?
Whatever the reasons, there needs to be some transparency and public accountability. The current situation is not only farcical but also a touch sinister – is it really a good idea to entrust important national legal and economic issues to an organisation with no effective accountability?
What we’re seeing right now at the EPO is beyond words. It is a lot worse than anything we saw in FIFA. It’s a lot more similar to the Watergate Scandal, but this one is lasting years and there’s still no resolution, not even a resignation. Eponia is one heck of a crazy place run by crazy people, where managers needlessly waste millions of Euros on bodyguards, millions of Euros on PR firms whose role is to lie to the media, and even give millions of dollars to media companies in order to compare the EPO to “Eurovision”, whereupon the EPO’s PR team links to that as ‘proof’ that Battistelli is an awesome king whose haters are just utterly jealous. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I received a comment at the bottom of one of my articles which expressed bemusement about all of the acronyms and terms used within my reviews.
I am therefore writing this guide to explain as much of the jargon in my own words as possible.
I will pin this to the top bar for future reference.
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Even for Linux, you have to consider the platform. In my case, I’m using a 64-bit Intel/AMD PC. But you might be using a 32-bit version or running on ARM (or any other CPU Linux supports). There is even a 32-bit interface for 64-bit Linux (x32), if you are interested in that. The second order of business, then, is to figure out what the CPU architecture looks like.
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Desktop
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Trusting Microsoft’s words, he went ahead and tried to upgrade it to Windows 10. Yes, that was a big mistake.
The tiny netbook, of course, was lost in what we can call the computer equivalent to a coma. Apparently, he attempted to revert the process only to discover that the Windows 10 logo simply wanted to stay as the perpetual image on the screen.
So, I took the machine with me and ran the Mageia 5 i586 install DVD. Apparently, Windows 10 butchered the MBR. I had to wipe out everything.
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Server
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Start small and don’t get overwhelmed. Two principles of DevOps you’ll hear over and over is incremental change and continuous improvement. The DevOps space is so large these days that newcomers can easily get lost. Find a small area where you can make a change, learn from it, and iterate over those learnings to improve.
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Cloud computing has paved the way for programmable infrastructure, which brought extreme automation into software development lifecycle. The ability to provision resources, configuring them on the fly, deploying applications, and monitoring the entire process led to the DevOps culture where developers and the operators are collaborating throughout the application lifecycle. While provisioning and configuration are best left to tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, one open source software that became the cornerstone of DevOps is Jenkins.
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In the days leading up to DockerCon, it seems like storage is taking its turn at being the hot topic in containers, with CoreOS and EMC recently announcing container-storage projects.
Today, Portworx is up. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup released a developer version of its container storage platform last year, and it’s now launching an enterprise version called PX-Enterprise.
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After watching a year’s worth of conference presentations, it is easy to become inured by the hype around products that orchestrate containers. Yet, there still confusion in the broader tech community about what functionality is involved with orchestrating containers. The New Stack ran a survey that was able to target users of container management technology, with 70 percent of respondents using containers to some degree. We found that there is indeed uncertainty about what it means to manage and orchestrate containers. There is also a developing consensus that scheduling, cluster management and service discovery are necessary to orchestrate the use of containers in production.
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Kernel Space
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On June 13, Linux kernel developer Willy Tarreau announced the immediate availability for download of the one-hundred-second maintenance release for the Linux 3.10 LTS series.
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The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration advancing the Internet of Things (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced seven new members, rapid growth of the AllJoyn User Group program (AUG), and details for the summer AllJoyn Developer Tour Asia.
AllSeen Alliance new members represent a diverse group comprising three smart home companies and an academic institution, all committed to advancing an open and interoperable IoT.
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Henrik Austad of Cisco has published very early code for implementing a TSN core driver in the Linux kernel. TSN is short for Time Sensitive Networking and was formerly known as Audio/Video Bridging (AVB).
TSN is designed for establishing low-latency, jitter-free, guaranteed-bandwidth links over a LAN by reserving a path on the network. In order to support TSN, the NIC and the network itself must be compatible.
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Graphics Stack
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Today, June 13, 2016, Nvidia has had the great pleasure of releasing a new long-lived graphics driver for Unix platforms, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems.
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It appears that Intel’s Vulkan open-source Linux driver is finally in good enough shape for being able to handle Valve’s Dota 2 game.
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If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I’ve been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here’s the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.
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Yesterday NVIDIA released the 367.27 long-lived driver release to succeed the earlier 367 betas. That driver arrived too late for my initial round of GeForce GTX 1070 / 1080 Linux testing with that GTX 1070 review published this morning.
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Applications
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The Git development team is proud to announce the general availability of the 2.9 series of their widely used open-source distributed version control system for all supported platforms.
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The latest feature release Git v2.9.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 497 non-merge commits since v2.8.0, contributed by 75 people, 28 of which are new faces.
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Git 2.9.0 was announced today by Junio Hamano as the latest stable version of this distributed revision control system.
Git 2.9 adds git-multimail to its contrib area: git-multimail has been around independently for a while as a way for offering email notifications on Git pushes. Git 2.9 also has some Git merge changes, improvements to Git pull, and various other sub-command changes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Having a proper WWII shooter on Linux is going to be pretty awesome.
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For those of you using Unreal Engine 4 on Linux, you may be interested to know about the d3d4linux project. The d3d4linux project allows developers to compile HLSL shaders on Linux using the Microsoft DirectX compiler DLL.
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Always nice to see games that promise Linux support get fully funded. Moonlighter is an Action RPG with shopkeeping elements and it has been over-funded.
Sitting pretty at over $70K againt a target of $40K, it looks pretty set to come for Linux which was included in the initial goal. It still has 18 days left to hit some of their stretch goals, will be interesting to see what else they have planned for it.
Personally, I think the game is utterly beautiful and I will certainly be picking up a copy when it comes out (if I don’t get a review copy).
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Dungeon Defenders has been out of date on Linux for a long time and the developers need a Linux developer to help get it updated.
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Hardware upgrades, including faster GPUs and CPUs, are poised to improve Linux gaming. The latest gaming titles will come to Linux much faster with Vulkan, a graphics technology that should drive gaming forward on the OS.
At E3 this week, Dell announced new Linux-based Alienware Steam Machines gaming PCs with Intel’s latest Skylake CPUs and Nvidia GTX 960 GPUs. The catalog of top-line titles — also called AAA titles — for the Linux-based SteamOS will grow by the end of the year, said Chris Sutphen, senior marketing manager at Alienware.
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Dell had high hopes for the Alienware Steam Machine after its delayed release last year, but it did not become as popular as its twin, Alienware Alpha, a Windows-based PC gaming console.
The viability of Steam Machines, a family of Linux-based PC gaming consoles with SteamOS, has been questioned, but Dell isn’t giving up yet. With better hardware and an expanding list of gaming titles, Dell is hoping that interest in Alienware Steam Machines will grow.
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I love the first level of Tiny & Big. It’s a massive sandbox 3D platformer area where you get to use tools to slice through and toss around the terrain in order to explore and find secrets. The game quickly gets more action oriented though, and I unfortunately lost interest long before I finished it. Love, Hate & the other ones also looked interesting to me, and I bought and played a couple of the first areas of it. It’s a puzzler with interesting mechanics, but it didn’t really hook me, and I never wound up playing much of it. That first level of Tiny & Big though had a big impact on me, and I wish I could play a whole game of just that. And it’s the creativity and sense of design that went into that one level that made me eager to try the new game the developers have been cooking up since I first heard about it last year.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today, June 13, 2016, KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of this month’s KDE Frameworks 5 maintenance update, version 5.23.0.
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Today, June 14, 2016, KDE has released the fifth and last maintenance update of the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment series.
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Today, June 14, 2016, KDE has announced the general availability of the second point release for its KDE Applications 16.04 series of the software suite used for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
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KDE is a free software community full of diversity and, as such, we foster several meetings and welcome people from all over the world. The 4th Latin-America KDE Summit (LaKademy 2016) took place from 26-29 May at Federal University of State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil. Since 2014, LaKademy has become a yearly meeting (it happened every two years since 2010) and that has proven to be a quite important step to create a “sprint culture”, narrow the ties with the global community, and better support newcomers. In every new edition, old LaKademy participants are more experienced about how sprints work and, therefore, more skillful in the task of guiding newcomers through their way into the Free Software world.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Historically, GTK has aimed to keep compatible within a major version, where major versions are rather far apart (GTK 1 in 1998, GTK 2 in 2002, GTK 3 in 2011, GTK 4 somewhere in the future). Meanwhile, fixing bugs, improving performance and introducing new features sometimes results in major changes behind the scenes. In an ideal world, these behind-the-scenes changes would never break applications; however, the world isn’t ideal. (The Debian analogy here is that as much as we aspire to having the upgrade from one stable release to the next not break anything at all, I don’t think we’ve ever achieved that in practice – we still ask users to read the release notes, even though ideally that wouldn’t be necessary.)
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The last post explained the new version policy that we hope to use for the future of Gtk. This post aims to explain some of the benefits of that system, and also why we considered, but ultimately rejected some other options.
The first major takeaway from the new system (and the part that people have been most enthusiastic about) is the fact that this gives many application authors and desktop environments something that they have been asking for for a long time: a versions of Gtk that has the features of Gtk 3, but the stability of Gtk 2. Under the proposed scheme, that version of Gtk 3 will be here in about a year. Gtk version (let’s say) 3.26 will be permanently stable, with all of the nice new features that have been added to Gtk 3 over the last 5+ years.
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Coming out yesterday from the start of GNOME’s latest GTK+ hackfest were details on GTK+ 4.0 and future releases whereby they would change how they enforce API stability and how frequently they do major stable releases of the toolkit.
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The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the Call for Participation in Libre Application Summit — hosted by GNOME (LAS GNOME). The conference will be held from September 19 – 23 in Portland, Oregon, and brings together developers, entrepreneurs, and FOSS enthusiasts for discussion and debate of the future of Linux apps.
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Reviews
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When I first started using BunsenLabs Linux I did not enjoy the experience. At first, it felt like installing Debian with a depressing theme and fewer features. The initial installation and configuration steps felt overly long and complicated. The Openbox environment lacked the features of fuller desktop environments while, at the same time, offering unwanted distractions such as Conky and extra virtual desktops. It would be fair to say the first two or three hours with Bunsen were unpleasant for me.
However, there was definitely a turning point during my trial. Around the start of the second day — once I had a more colourful theme in place, the Conky packages had been banished and I had got into the habit of installing software I wanted from the application menu — there was a point where I began to enjoy Bunsen. The distribution’s hardware and multimedia support were top notch, performance and the interface’s responsiveness were excellent and the applications available all worked properly. Openbox has enough configuration tools to make it flexible without being overwhelming. What really sold me on the distribution though was the way Openbox stayed out of my way, a feature I feel Debian’s default desktop does not offer.
At the end of my trial, I still had some mixed feelings. As much as Bunsen grew on me, I couldn’t help but feel the experience felt very much like installing Debian and adding the Openbox window manager as a session option. While Bunsen takes care of that step for us, it also adds several extra steps during the initial configuration that made me feel like going with plain Debian and installing Openbox might have been faster and easier.
In the end, I did grow to like Bunsen with its clean, fast user interface. I like the distribution’s tweaks to Debian such as adding sudo and providing application menu installers. I think the initial welcome script should probably either be automated or ask all its questions up front and then go to work in the background. It took a while for me to get the interface looking the way I wanted it to and less like the inside of a mine shaft, but once I did the distribution provided a good set of default applications and desktop functionality.
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New Releases
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Today, June 14, 2016, the developers behind the Debian-based antiX Linux operating system have published a brief announcement to inform the community about the availability of the Release Candidate build of antiX 16.
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The GParted team is pleased to announce a new stable release of GParted Live.
This release includes GParted 0.26.1, patches for libparted for FAT file system operations, and other improvements.
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GParted developer Curtis Gedak has announced the availability of the first point release for the GParted 0.26 open-source partition editor utility announced back in April 2016.
Launched on April 26, GParted 0.26.0 introduced some exciting new features and improvements, among which we can mention read-only support for encrypted filesystems with the LUKS method, as well as the implementation of a progress bar for file system copy methods supporting EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, and NTFS.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Red Hat Family
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The team of developers behind the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Baruwa Enterprise Edition commercial operating system, popularly known as BaruwaOS, announced the general availability of BaruwaOS 6.8.
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Red Hat is now in the processing of developing a refined approach to how it builds and productizes its OpenStack Platform releases.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP) was first announced back in June 2013 as a fully-supported commercial solution from Red Hat for the cloud. Since then, Red Hat has updated OSP multiple times, with the most recent milestone, OSP 8, released in April of this year.
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Finance
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Fedora
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The upcoming release of Fedora 24 isn’t shipping with PHP 7.0 but for Fedora 25 later in the year is when they plan to migrate to PHP7 for its speed improvements and more.
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Debian Family
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The developers of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system have announced today, June 15, 2016, that new security fixes are available for Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik.”
Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” is the stable version of the desktop-oriented operating system, based on Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series, which means that it has most likely received all the security fixes that landed as part of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 update.
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Maru OS lets phones run both Android and Debian Linux, and now, months after being in private beta mode, all Nexus 5 users can put the operating system on their device. Their phone will run like a Linux desktop when it’s connected to an external display, mouse, and keyboard. It’s very similar to the Continuum feature Microsoft introduced in Windows 10 for phones last year. That desktop state will still be preserved after the phone is disconnected from its keyboard and monitor.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Aside from the amazing wireless convergence (and it truly is game-changing), the most important aspect of an update is simple…did the update improve the experience? After all, every developer wants their platform to always be improving. So, what’s the end result with OTA-11? To the casual user, it might seem like the latest Ubuntu Touch image really didn’t do much. However, the truth is much more telling than that. With the release of OTA-11, Ubuntu Touch now runs much smoother; apps are faster to open, animations are cleaner, and there’s much less wait involved with regular usage. That doesn’t mean Ubuntu Touch has been perfected. It’s still not on par with the speed and efficiency of either Android or iOS, but it has made amazing leaps forward with OTA-11 and is closing the gap faster than anyone would have deemed possible.
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Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the Debian-based Linux distribution that many of us know as ‘probably’ (arguably, not necessarily if you’re a purist) the best Linux operating system for a personal PC.
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Today, June 14, 2016, Canonical informed us that they’ve been working for some time with developers from various major GNU/Linux distributions to make the Snap package format universal for all OSes.
As many of you who are using Ubuntu might know already, Snap is a secure, easy to install, and confined package format that lets developers distribute the latest versions of their software applications as soon as they’re out. For Ubuntu, it is an alternative packaging format for Debian’s .deb binary packages.
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Docker’s container-style approach to distributing and running apps on any platform has been a big boost to helping patch up some of the fragmentation in the world of Linux. Now, a new package format hopes to have the same effect for smaller apps that need to speak to each other, or simply get updated. Snaps — a packaging format Canonical introduced earlier this year to help install apps in Ubuntu — is now available for multiple Linux distributions to work across desktops, servers, clouds and devices.
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Ubuntu’s “snappy” new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, among others.
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Today, June 14, 2016, Softpedia was informed by Logic Supply about the general availability of CL100, the tiny, fanless, and ventless industrial PC that promises to offer more than meets than eye.
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The quick booting time and swift usage of the operating system, however, fades away pretty quickly compared to the others. It can be quickly brought back to its previous speed with these simple and quick fixes.
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Flavours and Variants
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elementary co-founder Cassidy James Blaede announced earlier, June 13, 2016, the immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” operating system.
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There are a lot of Linux-based desktop operating systems nowadays. Understandably, it can be hard to pick one. Many Linux users end up being distro-jumpers, constantly trying many, yet never settling.
One popular Linux distro is vying for your attention, hopefully making you feel at home — no jumping needed. Called elementary OS, it uses an Ubuntu base for stability and software compatibility. The developers put a high value on the user experience — the interface is both gorgeous and intuitive. Today, the much anticipated 0.4 version — code-named ‘Loki’ — sees Beta release.
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Elementary OS is an Ubuntu variant that features the custom developed Pantheon desktop environment. The latest release that is coming down the pipeline will be Elementary OS 0.4. This week, however, the first beta of the upcoming release, nicknamed “Loki” was made available to the public and we thought we’d dive in to see what all of the fuss was about.
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Adlink’s MVP-6000 is a “value” embedded PC with 6th Gen Intel Core “Skylake” CPUs, three GbE ports, six USB ports, four video ports, and PCI/PCIe expansion.
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Commell’s 3.5-inch “LE-37F” SBC supports Intel Braswell processors, and offers a pair each of SATA, GbE, and mini-PCIe connections plus four USB 3.0 ports.
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The Sequitur Labs port of Linaro’s OP-TEE environment to the Raspberry Pi 3 aims to encourage prototyping of ARM TrustZone hardware security on IoT devices.
Linaro’s three-year old OP-TEE open source port of the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) for ARM TrustZone security is now available on the lowest-cost platform yet: the Raspberry Pi 3. Sequitur Labs has worked with the ARM-backed not-for-profit development firm Linaro and its Linaro Security Working Group (SWG) to provide the technology to Pi 3 developers so they can learn about ARM TrustZone and begin developing trusted applications for it.
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Qualcomm announced a pre-integrated suite of automotive hardware components including LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, tuners, CAN, and VSX technology.
In conjunction with last week’s TU-Automotive Detroit conference, Qualcomm unveiled a Connected Car Reference Platform that offers a pre-integrated lineup of the chipmaker’s wireless and telematics solutions. The reference platform even includes DSRC for enabling V2X (vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to infrastructure) technology.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The largest Android smartphone manufacturer Samsung is considering a shift from Google’s Android mobile operating system. According to a report, the South Korean tech giant is planning to expand its homegrown Tizen OS to all of its devices in future.
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Android
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The ads are enticing: The promise of “Free TV” and the chance to “Say goodbye to cable bills forever.”
So it’s no surprise Canada’s cable giants are targeting upstart dealers selling loaded Android TV boxes. The devices enable users to access pirated content with ease for a one-time fee.
Bell Media, Rogers Communications and Quebec’s Videotron have taken legal action in Federal Court against five Canadian vendors.
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The OnePlus 3 is practically perfect, save for expandable storage, waterproofing, fast wireless charging and a QuadHD display. To be honest, I could live without any of these.
OnePlus has really outdone itself and its competitors this year. I dare you to find a better Android phone for $400.
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Microsoft’s recent decision to offer FreeBSD images in the Azure cloud is a reminder that GNU/Linux is not the only game in town when it comes to alternative operating systems.
Here’s a look at lesser-known operating systems. Some are serious, production-quality systems. Others are whimsical or half-baked platforms. All present alternative options for people who want to experiment with something other than Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
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We have been living through another cold war. Not geo-political — digital. Open-source software versus commercial software has long been on the brink of going nuclear, fought in the shadows with enormous stakes and conflicting ideologies. But suddenly… perestroika! The wall quietly fell. It did not end in absolute victory, or a stalemate; convergence is a more apt term.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is inviting open source developers to write and contribute code to The Machine project, an effort to juice up its ambitious plan to reinvent computing. During my reporting on that news I had the opportunity to talk with a real veteran of the Open Source Wars. (Not officially a thing, I know, but it should be.)
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Well ahead of the early July promise, today Nextcloud makes available Nextcloud 9. With this release we also announce to release all enterprise functionality as open source. Building on top of the open source ownCloud core and adding functionality and fixes, this release provides a solid base for users to migrate to. All enterprise functionality users and customers need will be made available over the coming weeks, fully developed in the open and under the AGPL license.
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When Frank Karlitschek, co-founder and former CTO of ownCloud, forked ownCloud into Nextcloud , I expected it to do well. I didn’t expect it to have its first major release less than two weeks after the company opened its doors. Well, the first Nextcloud release is out now.
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Less than two weeks after ownCloud was forked into Nextcloud, the project today did their version 9 release.
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Resin-based SLA printers need a different slicing algorithm from “normal” melted-plastic printers. Following their latest hackathon, [Matt Keeter] and [Martin Galese] from Formlabs have polished off an open source slicer, and this one runs in your browser. It’s Javascript, so you can go test it out on their webpage.
Figuring out whether or not the voxel is inside or outside the model at every layer is harder for SLA printers, which have to take explicit account of the interior “empty” space inside the model. [Matt] and [Martin]’s software calculates this on the fly as the software is slicing. To do this, [Matt] devised a clever algorithm that leverages existing hardware to quickly accumulate the inside-or-out state of voxels during the slicing.
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Capital One is one of the nation’s largest banks. It started as a credit card company, really as a startup in the late 1980s. Its founder, Richard Fairbank, is still its CEO today. Fairbank’s idea was to build a better financial services company by using information and data to make better decisions and build better products and services for customers—making Capital One an early “big data” company. The company launched around the notion of an information-based strategy, which in that era was a pretty novel concept.
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News this morning from storage vendor Scality that the company is announcing the general availability of its S3 Server Software. The offering is an open source version of Scality’s S3 API and allows developers to code to Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage API on a local machine.
Packaged as a Docker container (what else!) the idea is that developers can local build applications that thereafter can be deployed on premises, on AWS or some combination of the above.
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21 Inc. has made its software free, ‘turning any computer into a bitcoin computer’, the company announced on Medium. Once a computer has installed the software, the user can get bitcoin using any device nearly anywhere without a bank account or credit cards.
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Events
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There’s an upcoming GNU/Linux conference for those living in the Seattle area, and it promises to be a starting point for anyone interested in switching to a free and open source operating system for their personal computers.
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Open Source Bridge is an annual conference focused on building open source community and citizenship through four days of technical talks, hacking sessions, and collaboration opportunities. Prior to this year’s event, I caught up with one of the speakers, Lindsey Bieda, who will give a talk called Hardware, Hula Hoops, and Flow.
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The conference overall drew nearly 2,000 open-source enthusiasts, setting yet another record for the event! All the openSUSE sessions were well attended, and that gave our team some excellent feedback for future sessions. We were pleasantly suprised to find that “Q&A with openSUSE board members (plus another guy)” was a standing-room-only event, with the audience providing plenty of thoughtful questions for us to answer. “Make the Leap from Dev to Production with openSUSE Leap“, co-presented by Richard Brown and James Mason, provided a thoughtful developer-oriented talk to another full room. Richard also showed some cross-distribution love for openSUSE tooling, co-presenting “openQA – Avoiding Disasters of Biblical Proportions” with Fedora’s Adam Williamson.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In a post earlier this month, I mentioned the importance of building a network of people who can help us identify and recruit potential Board level contributors and senior advisors. We are also currently working to expand both the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Boards.
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SaaS/Back End
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As the OpenStack cloud computing arena grows, a whole ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, familiar to many as the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, has focused very heavily on Database-as-a-Service tools for OpenStack deployments.
Now, Tesora has announced a promising partnership with OpenStack heavy-hitter Miranti
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Ken Rugg, CEO of Tesora, discusses the latest innovations in the OpenStack Trove project and what’s coming in the Newton release cycle.
The OpenStack Mitaka release debuted back in April of this year and with it came a series of updated open source projects, including the Trove database-as-a-service effort.
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Habitat
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Cost
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The change from using a dedicated build server to running builds in a virtual machine probably will not change much for Slax users, but the post does highlight a common thread I have been seeing in recent years. Many open source projects are regularly in need of funding. Back in 2009, the OpenBSD project reported it was in “dire need” of infrastructure upgrades and needed funds. This call for donations was echoed by the OpenBSD team again around the end of 2013 which resulted in a lot of public attention and, ultimately, more money flowing into the project. More recently, the HardenedBSD project has asked for help maintaining the infrastructure of the security-oriented project. Last year the NTPD project, a critical piece of software for most Internet-connected computers, was almost abandoned due to a lack of funding. The previous year, OpenSSL’s Heartbleed bug highlighted how little support the critical security software had been receiving from its many users.
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Healthcare
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Even if the Department of Veterans Affairs were to switch from its Vista system, the basis of Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR, Medsphere would continue to thrive, Irv Lichtenwald said.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Patches are landing in LLVM Clang to improve the compiler’s support for musl libc as an alternative to glibc on Linux-based systems.
LLVM has added Musl to the triple and work in Clang to enable the compiler to support targets such as x86_64-pc-linux-musl for building binaries against this alternative libc implementation. The later patch explains, “This make it easy for clang to work on some musl-based systems like Alpine Linux and certain flavors of Gentoo.”
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Public Services/Government
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Repositories for software and services developed by and for public administrations have multiple advantages, emphasises Elena Muñoz Salinero, head of Spain’s technology transfer centre (Centro de Transferencia de Technologica, CTT). Repositories make it easier to find suitable solutions, reduce costs, and let users share best practices.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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We already know that open source gives us better and more secure software. But with the advent of 3D printing, the open source model shows even more meaningful promise in areas like open source bionics.
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Recently while reading a tweet from the Blowing Things Up Lab, I learned about Emily Daub, a maker and college student who designed a running shirt that helps runners be more visible to motorists—my daughter is a runner so this sounds like a great idea to me.
The shirt is photosensitive which cause the light intensity of the fabric to change in ambient light. According to Emily Daub, “If you run at night, this is for you. This lights up as it gets darker outside on two independent photocells and no microcontroller!” In this interview, I ask Emily more about this fantastic invention.
Fun fact: Blowing Things Up (BTU) lab is located at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Emily is a student of Alicia Gibb’s, the executive director of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), who I wrote about last year and contributed to our 2015 Open Source Yearbook.
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Open Data
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New Open Government National Action Plan includes Crown Commercial Service in lead role and further developments of GOV.UK
The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is to implement a standard for open data in contracting later this year as a first step towards its wider use in government.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Gaming hardware and peripheral maker Razer Inc has announced the new HDK2, a VR device that is part of its Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) initiative, whose goal is “to create a universal open source VR ecosystem for technologies across different brands and companies.”
The new headset is still considered a developer kit that is not ready for mass production, but at $400, it offers a number of high end features that put it on par with its much more expensive competition, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. HDK2 offers a 2160 x 1200 dual display resolution, which is 1080 X 1200 for each eye. It also offers a frame rate or 90 frames per second, as well as a front-facing infrared camera and a number of other features.
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Programming/Development
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An 11-year-old asks her grandfather how computer games are made and he tells her they’re created by programmers “using complex mathematical code.” The next thing he knows, she’s learning Python on her own, and getting her chums involved too.
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In the early 1970s, at Silicon Valley’s Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells that could communicate via simple messages. Each cell would perform its own discrete task. But in communicating with the rest, it would form a more complex whole. “This is an almost foolproof way of operating,” Kay once told me. Computer programmers could build something large by focusing on something small. That’s a simpler task, and in the end, the thing you build is stronger and more efficient.
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Political commentator Robert Peston sums up reaction: ‘Rupert Murdoch does not typically back the loser – and this is his call’
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Both the latter two papers – owned respectively by Mr Murdoch and billionaire brothers Sir David and Frederick Barclay – have arguably shown support for the Leave campaigns as led by right-wingers Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, John Whittingdale and others.
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Amazon faces a $350,000 fine from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after shipping a corrosive chemical by air, in violation of federal law. It’s the 25th time the company has been found to violate hazardous chemical shipping regulations in two and a half years.
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News wire Thomson Reuters is to scale down its Chinese-language news site, according to an internal email obtained by HKFP on Tuesday.
“We are reorganizing our Beijing editorial consumer operation to deploy more translation and editing resources to our professional news products from Reuters.cn,” the email from Digital Executive Editor Dan Colarusso said.
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Security
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Security is likely to rise to the top for many enterprises, and these concerns could have an impact on which kinds of applications enterprises end up trusting. All the data rolling in points to the fact that application security concerns are significantly rising at enterprises, not falling.
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Releases of new ransomware grew 24 per cent quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2016 as relatively low-skilled criminals continued to harness exploit kits for slinging file-encrypting malware at their marks.
The latest quarterly study by Intel Security also revealed that Mac OS malware grew quickly in Q1, primarily due to an increase in VSearch adware. Mobile malware also increased 17 per cent quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2016.
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Two new reports out by The Hill and Vice are both showing that the NSA used programmable Word Macro shortcuts, which are considered a potential security risk by Microsoft.
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Local media report deputy Communications Minister Aleksei Sokolov is discussing a possible bug bounty with the Russian tech sector.
The implications of such a bounty are being considered including staffing requirements for bug triage and validation, and the need to find a way to force developers to develop and apply patches for affected software.
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Defence/Aggression
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A man who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group stabbed a senior French police officer to death on Monday night before he was killed in a dramatic police operation, officials have said.
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The slaughter of 49 people in a night club in Orlando in the US state of Florida is another expression of the growing problem of mass violence in American society that cannot solely be attributed to Islamic extremism, NSA whistleblower Mark Klein told Sputnik.
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The ugly scenes came just hours after Uefa bosses warned Russia would be kicked out of the tournament if the violence continued.
England fans came under attack following the 1-1 draw at the Stade Velodrome, with images showing Russian thugs chasing supporters inside the stadium.
Uefa said Russia have been given a suspended disqualification from the tournament and a 150,000 euro (£120,000) fine after the crowd disorder.
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Going back in time, the U.S. government inadvertently created al Qaeda by encouraging, funding, and arming radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union in faraway Afghanistan during the 1980s. After the 9/11 attacks by that group, the U.S. government, by conducting an unrelated invasion of Iraq, then unintentionally created an even more brutal group called al Qaeda in Iraq, which pledged allegiance to the main al Qaeda group in Pakistan, and eventually morphed into the even more vicious ISIS. ISIS then took over large parts of Iraq and Syria, but began to attack Western targets only after a U.S.-led coalition began bombing the group in those countries.
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Shortly before noon on Sunday (6/12/16), during NPR’s national coverage of the horrific shooting in Orlando, NPR “counter-terrorism correspondent” Dina Temple-Raston made a critical false claim that deserves an on-air correction.
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The floundering inquiry into who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 has relied heavily on a Ukrainian intelligence agency that recently stopped U.N. investigators from probing its alleged role in torture, reports Robert Parry.
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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people. Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
“We have generals that feel we can win this thing so fast and so strong, but we have to be furious for a short period of time, and we’re not doing it!” Trump complained on Fox & Friends Monday morning.
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The Orlando mass murderer, Omar Mateen, worked for G4S, one of the largest private security employers in the world. G4S has some 625,000 employees spanning five continents in more than 120 countries. As a private security company it provides services for both governments as well as corporations. Some of its well-known contractors are with the British Government, the United States, Israel, Australia and many more. G4S providers a range of services in the areas of corrections, policing, and security of important facilities. In the corporate sector it has worked with such well-known companies such as Chrysler, Amtrak, Apple, and the Bank of America.
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Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange warns more information will be published about Hillary Clinton, enough to indict her if the US government is courageous enough to do so, in what he predicts will be “a very big year” for the whistleblowing website.
Expressing concerns in an ITV interview about the Democratic presidential candidate, who he claims is monitoring him, Assange described Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump as an “unpredictable phenomenon”, but predictably, given their divergent political views, didn’t say if he preferred the billionaire to be president.
He was not asked if he supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein, even though she said she would immediately pardon Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning if elected.
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As the U.S. and NATO mount provocative military maneuvers on Russia’s border, the West is oblivious to how these threatening gestures ratchet up prospects of thermonuclear war that could extinguish civilization, says Gilbert Doctorow.
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A new report in the Wall Street Journal reveals emails in which then-Secretary of State Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations in Pakistan from her unsecured Blackberry.
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Some vaguely worded messages from U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and Washington used a less-secure communications system
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The Force Awakens didn’t deal with the fact that the US has become (if it wasn’t already, in 1977) The Empire; the movie shied away from contemplating that fact.
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A search is on to find a 2-year-old boy who was attacked by an alligator and dragged away at a Disney hotel near Orlando, authorities said.
The incident happened while the family relaxed at a sandy area near the Seven Seas Lagoon on the property.
The child was “wading just in the water along the lake’s edge at the time that the alligator attacked,” Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said.
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The boy’s father saw the animal – reportedly between 4-7ft long – take his son, and entered the water to wrestle him from its jaws.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Congress has passed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, which EFF hopes signals the beginning of a larger overhaul of the transparency law that will mark its 50th birthday in July.
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Finance
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Techdirt has been writing about investor-state-dispute settlement (ISDS), aka corporate sovereignty, for more than three years now. During that time, we’ve published well over a hundred articles on the topic. Increasing numbers of people have become aware of the threat that ISDS represents to democracy because of the privileged access it grants companies to a parallel legal system. Now, it seems, it’s beginning to enter the political mainstream around the world.
[...]
In other words, this is yet another “ratchet” clause that ensures changes only ever move in one direction — to the benefit of companies, and against the interests of the public. It’s yet another reason never to include corporate sovereignty chapters in these so-called trade deals.
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Labor is promising to review three of the major free trade agreements signed by the Abbott and Turnbull governments in the hope of removing a controversial clause that allows foreign corporations to sue the Australian government.
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The department store chain announced it is beginning negotiations with unions over plans to cut 380 non-sales jobs from its payroll. Although profits grew this year, acting CEO Lauri Veijalainen said the group’s sales performance has not met expectations.
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A lead analyst at Forrester shares her views on blockchain technology, the risks it poses to enterprise customers and how they can eventually reap the rewards of the distributed ledger technology.
As more and more companies invest in the much-hyped blockchain technology, outside observers could be forgiven for thinking that the technology has arrived. The potential for the distributed ledger to transform key business processes has been spoken about but, like any cutting edge technology, blockchain comes with risks for businesses.
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The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.
Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.
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I’ve seen plenty of nonfiction books that add some amount of content in the process from the original hard cover release to the eventual paperback release. But apparently Hillary Clinton went the other direction and conveniently excised all of the stuff about her support of the TPP. It’s no secret that, while facing a considerable challenge from Bernie Sanders in the primary contest, Clinton’s views of the TPP flip flopped from supporting it to being against it. She did try to explain away the flip flop by saying that it was about the details, but still, if you’re going to actually change your position, you should own it. Instead, it looks like Clinton and her campaign are simply trying to rewrite history. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) first noticed a series of big changes in the paperback edition of Clinton’s book, including excising the support of the TPP — such as two full pages about a conference in El Salvador where she spoke in favor of the agreement.
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Cracks are finally emerging in the grossly imbalanced, plurilateral talks on a Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) being pursued by 23 countries, after the European Union and several other members voiced concern about the overall quality of the latest revised offers and the exclusion of Mode 4, maritime transport, and sub-federal categories among other sectors, several trade envoys told the SUNS.
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The EU and Mexico launch negotiations for a ‘modernised’ Free Trade Agreement. A key feature is the investment protection chapter which grants major multinational companies in Mexico and the EU the exclusive right to challenge democratic decisions taken by States, even when they were taken in the public interest. The report outlines six reasons of major concern.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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A January 2016 poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa found that 43 percent described themselves as “socialist.” Fully 56 percent of registered Democrats, including 52 percent of Clinton supporters, view socialism favorably according to a recent NY Times/CBS News poll.
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There was a fair bit of coverage on Monday of the news that the Donald Trump campaign had removed the press credentials from the Washington Post because the campaign was upset with the Washington Post’s coverage of the campaign. While it got a lot of attention, it was quickly pointed out that Trump has revoked or barred at least six other news outlets from receiving press passes, including Politico, the Huffington Post, the National Review, Buzzfeed and the Daily Beast. This issue is being discussed in lots of media circles. But what interested me much more was buried deeper in the full two paragraph statement that the Trump campaign later released. It included a weird and basically confused attack on Jeff Bezos, that again raises some serious questions about how Trump may use the Presidency to “settle scores.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Privacy/Surveillance
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One of the challenges Apple has faced in making its services truly personal and proactive is its focus on privacy. While Google unashamedly collects masses of data about its users, even going to far as to scan emails for boarding passes and restaurant reservations in order to provide automated reminders, Apple has been extremely conservative in the amount of data it collects.
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A company founded by three ex-National Security Agency analysts says it can predict where hackers may strike next – up to a year before it even happens.
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Privacy organizations and various technology professionals have been warning us for years about the destructive influence of the internet on our privacy. Trivial things like search results are liable to be used against us, they repeatedly warn us. But who believes them?
Well, a new site that has spread widely, thanks to r/InternetIsBeautiful surfers on Reddit, guarantees to ruin you search history in a way that is sure to put you on the blacklist of the next date that picks through your browser’s history (and it’s just as well. Who wants a date like that?) It also promises problems with Google, the NSA, the FBI, the Illuminati and perhaps some agencies fighting aliens.
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The script for what to do following a tragedy like the one in Orlando over the weekend is now quite clear: politicians want to appear “serious” about the issue, and thus they say stuff to appease people, even if what they say makes no sense. There was a lot of senseless rhetoric going around, of course, and we’ll leave the usual debates about issues we don’t cover on Techdirt to lots of other sites. But an issue we do cover is surveillance and bogus ideas like “watch lists” where a mere accusation leads to basic rights being taken away. And, unfortunately, it appears that both major Presidential candidates are advocating for greater surveillance and denial of civil liberties as a response to someone shooting up a nightclub and killing dozens of people.
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“Intelligence agencies such as GCHQ need to enter the public debate about privacy. I think we have a good story to tell.” – Robert Hannigan, Director of GCHQ
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The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was passed by the House of Commons last week, will effectively give the police and other authorities the same powers of surveillance that are currently enjoyed by GCHQ.
That’s according to Raegan MacDonald, senior policy manager EU principal at Mozilla.
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HE SNOOPERS’ CHARTER will give UK police the same powers of surveillance over web use and telephone communications that are currently available to GCHQ, according to Mozilla.
Raegan MacDonald, senior policy manager and EU principal at Mozilla, made the claim during a Mozilla Privacy Lab event in London yesterday.
Rather than clarifying surveillance powers, the real effect of the Snoopers’ Charter, or Investigatory Powers Bill, is to legitimise current practice and bring in ideas from other areas, such as a police database.
“It’s about legally justifying the previously secret practices of GCHQ and allowing those powers to go to all levels of law enforcement,” she said.
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Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger warned this morning editors will “betray future generations of journalists” if they don’t “push back hard” against the so-called snooper’s charter.
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Just as we’re learning of law enforcement’s bold new plan to take travelers’ prepaid debit cards down to a $0 balance without ever leaving the highway, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals comes along [PDF] to remind us that swiping (not as in “taking”) a credit card to determine its legitimacy is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. (via Ars Technica)
The court notes a couple of obvious things about the search that isn’t. First, it can’t be a physical search because swiping the card does nothing more than (if it’s legit) return the same information that’s printed on the front of the card.
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Recently released National Security Agency (NSA) emails show that the top digital spying group uses Word macros, widely considered a security risk.
Word macros, programmable shortcuts in Microsoft Word, have been used in recent years to distribute ransomware, to launch attacks on credit card systems and even to black out the power grid of the Ukraine.
Emails released by a Freedom of Information Act request by Vice show that as recently as 2012, the NSA was using Word macros.
Attacks using Word Macros have gone in and out of vogue since the 1990s. In March, Microsoft released a feature for Word to block certain high-risk macros. It came at the end of a massive upswing in macro malware between 2014 and 2015. Intel estimated year-over-year growth of such attacks at 350 percent.
While attacks on Word macros were not as common in 2012 as they are today, dangerous vulnerabilities were still being announced around that time.
Vice uncovered the use of macros after requesting emails sent by Edward Snowden, the former government employee who leaked classified NSA information. In one, Snowden provides tech support for a proprietary macro embedded in NSA Hawaii documents that was incompatible with Washington, D.C., offices.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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There’s no universal law enforcement “best practices” for searches and seizures, but simply respecting the Fourth Amendment would seem to be a good base guideline. However, that baseline is rarely used. Far too often, searches and seizures seem to be officers seeing what they can get away with — and expecting the legal system to assist in applying “good faith” to unconstitutional searches after the fact.
Ethan Moore landed at the Dillingham, Alaska airport, where he was met by two police officers. According to the officers, informants claimed Moore was transporting marijuana. They seized his luggage and took it to the local police station while they sought a search warrant.
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TURKEY is threatening to release “millions” more migrants from refugee camps if Britain does not grant more than one million Turks visa-free travel, leaked documents have sensationally claimed.
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At this morning’s press conference announcing the departure of Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent, Mayor Libby Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth told a room full of reporters that Whent was resigning for “personal reasons.” The mayor said it had nothing to do with a scandal involving rookie police officers who sexually exploited a minor, or the suspicious death of a police officer’s wife and his subsequent suicide.
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The Home Office is refusing to reveal how many detainees have been sexually assaulted or raped inside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire in case the information becoming public knowledge harms the “commercial interests” of private companies that are involved in running it, The Independent can reveal.
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At 6:30am on Tuesday, May 24, someone began banging on the front door of Justin Shafer’s home in North Richland Hills, Texas. When Shafer and his wife answered the door, they found a dozen FBI agents with guns drawn. Shafer, 36, still in his boxer shorts, was allegedly handcuffed, according to a Daily Dot report. The agents seized all of Shafer’s computers and digital devices, and pushed him into a car.
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The most prominent advocacy group for orthodox radical Islam in the United States threatened Friday to have a Breitbart reporter arrested if he did not leave its soon-to-start public press conference about the bloody Pulse massacre of at least 50 gay Americans by an American Muslim.
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Update: On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had not waived HIPAA in Orlando after all because it was not necessary—the mayor’s original remarks were the result of some miscommunication. WIRED’s original story, about why a HIPAA waiver would not have been necessary, is below.
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But the Cupertino giant does not always come down on the side of those who use its products as is evident from its attempts to block bids by US states to make repair of Apple devices cheaper.
According to a published report, Apple is fighting “right to repair” amendments being considered by the US states of Minnesota, Nebraska, Massachusetts and New York.
Given the difficulty in gaining access to the innards of most current Apple devices, these amendments would make it mandatory for Apple to provide unofficial repair shops with the necessary information needed to fix broken devices.
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It is such cases that give the United Nations a bad name. And if heads and decay say something about the rest of the body, Ban Ki-Moon says all too much in his role as UN Secretary General. Always inconspicuous, barely visible in the global media, his presence scarcely warrants a footnote. This has been a point of much relief for various powers who have tended to see the UN as a parking space for ceremony and manipulation rather than concrete policy.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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As we’ve noted a few times, there’s really only two ways the telecom sector can successfully destroy U.S. net neutrality rules. Broadband providers could prevail on part or all of their multi-headed lawsuit against the FCC, a decision on which is expected any day now. Or the rules could be dismantled by the next President, who could repopulate the FCC with the usual assortment of revolving-door sector sycophants, reverting the agency back to its more consistent, historical role as a dumbly nodding enabler of broadband sector dysfunction.
Every other attempt to kill the rules is just politicians barking loudly for their campaign contribution dinners — though that’s not to say the barking doesn’t get very loud from time to time.
The latest example is the House Appropriations Committee’s 29-17 vote to approve an FCC appropriations bill (pdf), part of a larger Financial Services Bill determining the 2017 budgets for multiple agencies. The bill was passed last week with amendment language intended to hobble the FCC’s net neutrality rules — and its quest to bring competition to the cable set top box. More specifically, the bill prohibits the FCC from enforcing its net neutrality rules until the ongoing court case is settled. But it also would relegate the FCC’s attempt to bring competition to the cable box to committee purgatory.
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After months of anticipation on all sides, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld the FCC’s Open Internet Order, a notably huge win for net neutrality advocates. The full court ruling (pdf) supports the FCC’s arguments across the board, including the FCC’s decision to classify internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. That’s not only big for net neutrality, but it solidifies the FCC’s authority as it looks to move forward on other pro-consumer initiatives such as the exploration of some relatively basic new privacy protections for broadband users.
Historically the DC Appeals court has been a mixed bag for the FCC, but in this instance the court declared the FCC’s neutrality protections rest on solid legal ground from beginning to end, dismantling arguments by the likes of US Telecom, AT&T, and advocacy groups like TechFreedom from stem to stern. That includes industry attempts to prevent the rules from being applied to wireless networks (a split decision whereby fixed-line services were covered by wireless was not was something that had worried many telecom sector consumer advocates).
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As part of the conditions attached to Charter’s $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, the FCC imposed a requirement that Charter expand broadband service to another two million locations, one million of which must already be served by an ISP delivering speeds of 25 Mbps or greater. Unfortunately these kinds of conditions historically don’t mean much; merger broadband expansion promises are almost always volunteered by the ISPs themselves, who already planned the expansion regardless of their merger plans.
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The web we have works incredibly well. Its feature set has enabled users to write billions of web pages. The technology is standardised and there are many mature implementations.
HTML is still a medium where some things are easy and some things are not. We should not lose sight of how HTML will affect how we communicate. Instead, we should pillage the ideas of the past to make the best use of our content today.
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Is it time to rebuild the Web? That’s what Tim Berners-Lee and other Internet pioneers are now saying in response to concerns about censorship, electronic spying and excessive centralization on the Web.
Last week, Berners-Lee, the guy who played a leading role in creating the Web in 1989, held a conference with other computer scientists in San Francisco at the Decentralized Web Summit. Attendees also included the likes of Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla, and Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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There are a surprising number of really dumb trademark disputes involving professional sports, what with athletes jumping at the chance to trademark their nicknames and phrases, and that really dumb 12th Man thing. But even this cynical writer was taken aback at the news that Dr. Pepper had stepped in to block the Denver Broncos from trademarking the term “Orange Crush”, the nickname for the team’s defensive squad spanning nearly half a century.
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The Denver Broncos might have had the Orange Crush defense, but the team shouldn’t be allowed to trademark the term, at least according to Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which owns the Crush soda brand, whose most popular flavor is orange.
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Copyrights
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We’ve written plenty of times about ridiculous European plans to create a so-called “snippet tax” which is more officially referred to as “ancillary rights” (and is really just about creating a tax on Google). The basic concept is that some old school newspapers are so lazy and have so failed to adapt to the internet — and so want to blame Google for their own failures — that they want to tax any aggregator (e.g., Google) that links to their works with a snippet, that doesn’t pay for the privilege of sending those publishers traffic. As you may remember, Germany has been pushing for such a thing for many, many years, and Austria has been exploring it as well. But perhaps the most attention grabbing move was the one in Spain, which not only included a snippet tax, but made it mandatory. That is, even if you wanted Google News to link to you for free, you couldn’t get that. In response, Google took the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain. A study showed that this law has actually done much to harm Spanish publishers, but the EU pushes on, ridiculously.
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Dutch film producer Klaas de Jong has filed a police report against four local ISPs, holding them accountable for tens of millions of euros in piracy related losses. The producer says that the ISPs are responsible for the actions of pirating subscribers, since they fail to block torrent sites and other download portals.
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06.14.16
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Distraction and diversion phase at the expense of millions of Euros (EPO budget)
Reference: Watergate scandal
Summary: Despite Battistelli being the high-profile employee who ‘sabotaged’ the EPO, Team Battistelli would rather have people question the integrity of staff representatives who speak out about such serious issues
THE EPO has a huge (and growing) PR budget, putting aside all the money it spends ‘buying’ the media. It’s truly despicable. It’s obscene! Battistelli is breaking the piggybank and if external accounting professionals/experts were to visit the Office, who knows what they would find… Christoph Ernst might be in a position to know.
It is not paranoid and it is not unreasable to expect AstroTurfing. I have written about the subject for many years, usually in relation to Microsoft with its extensive network of PR agencies. That’s just how this industry operates. Recall what the EPO's PR agency has already done for fracking companies, i.e. for those who pollute people’s air, water, etc.
The judge whose ‘trial’ took place today (see our latest post for details) was thoroughly demonised by Dutch and German media just weeks after the EPO had signed the FTI Consulting contract (PR deal). They basically defamed him and he might sue. Later this week we shall show how the FTI Consulting arrangement was in fact secretly expanded, specifically in Germany and the Netherlands. They are trying to tame the media, not just plant puff pieces in it. Journalistic misconduct is small potatoes given some of the truly serious abuses that can be attributed to Battistelli and his gang. They hope to cover it all up or drown out the signal with noise (like EIA2016 puff pieces).
Over the past week, especially after IP Kat censorship backfired, we have noticed a rather sharp rise in the number silly and at times immature comments at IP Kat (we go through all the comments via RSS feeds). Responding to provocative comments that blame everything on SUEPO, here is what one person wrote about the demonisation of SUEPO, reinforcing the EPO management’s characterisation of SUEPO as ‘bullies’ (see the bogus ‘trial’ against Hardon):
“Afraid of SUEPO’s bullying”? Seriously? Nah. SUEPO were fairly clownish by union standards,and of course there were a couple of hotheads, but telling them to get lost was inconsequential.
However,and however irritating they could be, they still held the management to account, and it was the management’s fault that they never really engaged with SUEPO.
But SUEPO, and especially some individuals within it, have stepped up to the plate and deserve respect for the way they have behaved in the face of BB’s determined authoritarianism, nepotism,and dismantling of the EPO. And employees support them because of this stand,and the recognition that SUEPO is being targetted because they are tellingthe truth. No bullying required.
Given what SUEPO has gone through and the sheer abuse it has been subjected to (both individually and institutionally), all its leaders have been extremely restrained and kept their composure. To call them bullies is basically a case of projection. It’s not hard to see that the bullies are Battistelli and the thugs who surround him. They have a long track record, not just in Eponia.
“To call them bullies is basically a case of projection. It’s not hard to see that the bullies are Battistelli and the thugs who surround him.”SUEPO does a terrific job looking after staff’s interests and given the dodgy involvement by Wellkom in the OHSRA [1, 2, 3], it’s not hard to see why SUEPO has grown weary and concerned about the motivations of Battistelli, especially after breaking German law to spy on staff and visitors.
The “EPO OHSRA,” according to SUEPO, is “not what it should be” because it resorted to tracking of people who took the survey, it included questions about one’s sex life (good subject for potential blackmail in the future), etc. Here is how SUEPO put it not too long ago:
The staff representation has for years been asking the administration to do an Occupational Health & Safety Risk Assessment (OHSRA) in order to provide the EPO with a rational basis for its Occupational Health Policy. The administration has until recently been dragging its feet, obviously not wanting to know what is wrong in the Office. A survey has now finally been done. But even if we kindly overlook the technical difficulties and the fact that the survey initially contained a series of tracking links, the questionnaire itself was surprising. For those who were invited to take part (and those who did not manage to get to the end of it) we reproduce the questions. There are surprisingly few questions about aspects of the working conditions that are likely to contribute to staff ill health in the EPO. Instead there are many questions about “life-style” and well-being, including five questions asking whether you spend a “significant” amount of money on health-related products, read wellness articles in the press, read health magazines, watch health-related television programs or use the internet to learn about wellness. There are also several very personal questions about issues that should not be of the employers concern such as whether you are satisfied with your family, with your physical appearance, and whether you have sexual problems. We wonder what our management will do with the answers. Offer after-work “well-being” courses and marriage counseling as a means to cope with the stress in the Office?
Notice how they might be trying to blame people’s family for depression and/or health issues, just as they did when people committed suicide and the suicides were either (flabbergastingly) blamed on SUEPO or some external factor, until the brother of one victim told Bavarian television that the last straw was the EPO’s Investigative Unit.
There are a couple of quoteworthy comments today in IP Kat and they appear to have come from the same person. Here it is with some minor spelling corrections:
The EPO was founded many years ago when there was still a sense of moral obligation and integrity even with politicians, managers and corporations. Being sincere and moral this is why those who founded the EPO could not conceive that this could/would change, because for that they would need to think in an immoral way.
Now all those in charge of the EPO care about is how I can I keep my present position, how can I make myself look good and maybe even work my way up the ladder, with no respect for anyone but maybe their betters (at least butt-kiss in public). Any suffering is just collateral damage to the bigger cause. Those disadvantaged shouldn’t take it personally.
Facts are distorted by management saying that their intentions are good. But there is a saying; the way to hell is paved with good intentions. And that is exactly where the EPO is going.
The real issue is acquired rights.
When examiners joined the EPO many years ago they signed a contract. They were given a Codex where the rights and obligations of both parties were fixed. For an examiner this meant working to examine patents with a 40 hr work week. In return for this the examiner was given a certain salary with incremental increases in pay being promised, at least within the grade. Promotion from A1 to A2 to A3 to A4 was not a right but could be expected with reasonable performance. If you performed very well you were promoted faster if you did very badly you could be blocked for promotion. This is the same in National systems.
The reason for this is to try and keep officials happy with a good pay package so as not to be tempted to cede to corruption. With the new system the incremental steps have been unilaterally abolished without agreement with staff representation. The admin council agreed and as such is complicit.
The new system pitches one examiner against another for production. Only the best get promoted. Although this sounds reasonable, it is not. There are ways to rig the system to make you look good. In effect promotion or a step increase is basically a bonus for being a high producer (considering quality is in the eye of the beholder). Look what bonuses did for the banking system. Is this really what the Admin Council want for the EPO?
Also employees were forced on signing their contract to agree to a pay into the system of social security and invalidity, with the promise of certain rights. The EPO has unilaterally reduced or scrapped certain benefits, basically retroactively changing the contract, without agreement from the staff and without any compensation. At the same time they have changed the internal medical systems, which has even had the gall to question external doctors certificates. The office has given itself the right to check whether you are really sick. To this end during your whole period of illness you are obliged to stay at home at certain times (which can be counterproductive to improving health. But who cares.)
The only reason that the EPO can do this is because management is not checked by the Admin Council. For whatever reason. The admin council lets itself be bamboozled by BB stating that they believe that this is legal, and then to go along with it.
Does the admin council forget that there are nationals of their own countries working at the EPO, who as citizens of their respective countries are used to certain human rights which they are denied, by virtue of having joined an organization serving their respective countries by examining patents and protecting the European public from undeserved monopolies.
And how are they rewarded? ……
Thank you very much Admin council.
Please take your respective responsibility and do what is right and not what is in your own interest. Treat us as human beings and not cash cows.
If you have bothered to read this far thank you for your attention.
Disillusioned but stupidly still hopeful me
The bottom line is that the Administration Council must not fall for the illusion that SUEPO is the problem, that staff is aggressive, that depression is not the fault of the management and so on. These seem to be, potentially, PR tactics. Battistelli needs to be sacked this month, but it’s not unthinkable that FTI Consulting would resort to AstroTurfing if not appalling puff pieces to convince delegates that everything is alright (this is why other people need to contact the delegates). That’s the type of things these PR agents are paid millions of Euros (of EPO budget) for. Don’t underestimate their behind-the-scenes impact. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Fair trial at the EPO is an oxymoron under Battistelli's regime
Summary: The widely-defamed (but unnamed in public) judge is off the hook again and Team Battistelli managed to suppress public participation which is passive (observers) by locking everyone out at the last minute
WHEN we wrote about today’s ‘trial’ as early as last night we could mostly speculate about what would happen, based on information available to us last night. This morning and this afternoon we released some actual information from the inside and now there’s a report from IP Kat, which probably needs to be careful with its words because of the recent warning shot from the EPO‘s management. We now have available to us some more details and background from Merpel. Everything she wrote was pretty much in alignment with/concurring with what we had published, including this bit:
Clearly, then, the EBA had decided to make the Oral Proceedings public. Merpel can only surmise that this must have been with the agreement of the Board of Appeal member concerned.
Now, Merpel has heard a couple of reports of what happened today. Apparently, despite the notices, in fact for the beginning of the hearing the the public was in fact excluded. Merpel understands that the reason was that the President had written to the Enlarged Board in an attempt to stop them from making the proceedings public. Merpel is then told that the proceedings continued in public – the EBA stated that they had received a threatening letter from a non-party to the procedure (presumably the President), and asked the “the petitioner in its quality of the members’ appointing authority to distance itself from the threats in that letter” (see comment here at 17:54 today). Merpel understands this to mean that the EBA was asking the employees of the EPO presenting the disciplinary case, acting not in their usual capacity as agents of their own appointing authority, the President, but in their specific capacity in the present proceedings as agents of the Administrative Council, the appointing authority of Board of Appeal members (and the petitioner in the present case), to distance themselves from the President’s letter. This the employees presenting the disciplinary case failed to do to the EBA’s satisfaction.
Merpel then understands that the EBA considered that it could not continue under these circumstances and closed the case without proposing removal from office of the Board member concerned.
Will this be the end of the disciplinary case? Merpel does not know. She presumes that any semblance of due process does not allow an unlimited number of attempts to prosecute the same matter, and three seems quite a lot. But as ever in the EPO at the moment, who can say?
“Further rumor has it that the EBA has forwarded the president’s threat to the chairman of the Administrative Council,” one comment added. This is actually a confirmed fact.
“We tend to hear from people who spoke to other people, who earlier spoke to other people.”We have some further information and corrections to IP Kat. Not many people are aware of what happened because not many people were actually there and word of mouth is not sufficiently reliable. We tend to hear from people who spoke to other people, who earlier spoke to other people. Sometimes we hear similar and overlapping stories from multiple sources, which helps contribute to confidence and assure relative accuracy. Below is a summary that’s based on various sources (second hand).
One who was actually at the ‘trial’ called it a “crazy day”. The public was only allowed in for the first two minutes (at 09:00) and the last five minutes (at 17:10). One could certainly get the impression that it was a final decision, as many people definitely seemed to think that. Everyone was then thrown out and then costs (presumably) were discussed. Someone actually heard people mentioning that they all had to sign in (list of names, signatures) and there was a piece of paper to go through; they all had to write their names and then sign to confirm/promise they wouldn’t record the session, so someone must have read Techrights.
“Someone actually heard people mentioning that they all had to sign in (list of names, signatures) and there was a piece of paper to go through; they all had to write their names and then sign to confirm/promise they wouldn’t record the session, so someone must have read Techrights.”We heard that a couple of bits are wrong in the IP Kat article, namely that the EBoA actually said that they did not recommend the removal of the judge, which is, in reality, much stronger than how it is stated in the IP Kat article. Additionally, it wasn’t the “employees of the EPO” who presented the case, but the Administrative Council itself. They were the “petitioner”. Put another way, they were represented by the employees. One can sort of see what Merpel is saying, but it is a bit confusing as it stands.
The important thing, which is missed out in the article, is that the Administrative Council itself, in the form of Kongstad was contacted twice today, in order to clarify whether they would distance themselves from the President’s letter. His answers were apparently so wishy-washy that the EBoA were not reassured that their independence was protected. Hence they could not continue because of the “threat” to their independence. The word “threat” was actually used.
We hope that people generally find this information useful. Having watched and assessed these things very closely today, we believe it’s an accurate representation of what happened.
Someone wrote about us as though we have a record of inaccuracy, even though we have historically gotten the facts right. It says:
According to a source cited by Techrights – always to be taken with a pinch of salt, still Techrights was the first to disclose the threats of Battistelli to the EBA:
“inside sources say that Mr. Battistelli sent a threatening message to the Enlarged Board of Appeal dealing with the case, to the effect that they should not let the public be present during the hearing. The EBA is said to take this very seriously and to have forwarded the president’s threat to the chairman of the Administrative Council.”
Here is another comment on this subject:
At the end of today´s public oral proceedings in relation to a petition by the AC of the EPO to the Enlarged Board of Appeal to remove a judge from office, the EBA announced
1. that its members had received a threatening letter from “an authority which is not a party to the procedure”
2. that it had requested the petitioner in its quality of the members´ appointing authority to distance itself from the threats in that letter
3. that in its response the petitioner did not adequately distance itself from the received letter
4. that the EBK could not in the circumstances pursue the procedure, which accordingly was terminated without the EBA proposing removal from office of the respondent.
“Finally,” replied one person, “Battistelli is showing to everybody his true face.” That’s what we wrote this morning. It is important to give outsiders an accurate account of this whole embarrassing display of megalomania (if not paranoia) from Battistelli. █
Update: Kongstad’s role is now reaffirmed by a new comment that says: “As I understand the information given, the Enlarged Board contacted Mr. Kongstad, the Chairman of the Administrative Council, and asked whether the Council distanced itself from the allegedly threatening letter. Since the answer received was not considered satisfactory, the Enlarged Board decided that they could not continue with the case and did not propose removal of the member from Office.”
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Waving EPO budget, but at whose expense?
Summary: Gifts from EPO (money) offered conditionally (under review) days before countries send their delegates to potentially fire Battistelli, as they most certainly should, and updates from today’s ‘trial’ of a judge suggest that Battistelli is determined to destroy the boards with help from these delegates
THIS morning we wrote about the latest threats from Battistelli. The EPO is a battle zone because of Battistelli and his atrocious behaviour. It’s painful to watch.
Words “from an unconfirmed source,” one person said, is that the “EBA [Enlarged Board of Appeal] has decided it cannot continue and will not recommend dismissal [of the truth-telling judge] because the plaintiff did not distance itself from the president’s letter [...] The board had no choice, but the president provoked and in wanted this.”
“The EPO is a battle zone because of Battistelli and his atrocious behaviour. It’s painful to watch.”Regarding “Battistelli’s plot to destroy the boards,” continued this source: “Find someone who has something that clearly requires dismissal. If needed, make it up. Mess up procedure so, board cannot possible recommend dismissal.”
Referring to it as the “BoA trial” (Board of Appeal), the source said: “Make sure it is messy and annoying for long time. [it has already gone on for a year and a half] Argue at the Administrative Council meeting by the end of June that boards must be made under control.”
Well, this brings us to the Administrative Council whose delegates Battistelli is either intimidating and punishing or rewarding. He controls them using EPO budget, as some people explained before. Battistelli already resorts to all sorts of truly nefarious tricks to ensure he doesn’t get sacked; details were covered here several times last month.
Watch UK-IPO sucking up to Battistelli today. His UPC mates in London help promote Battistelli and Thursday’s lobbying and PR stunt, soon to be retweeted by the EPO’s Twitter account. The person from UK-IPO wrote: “The President of the EPO, Benoit Battistelli, made a good speech.”
He never makes a good speech. He just reads some text while looking awkward and totally unnatural. Watch how Battistelli sucked up to Portugal: “Portugal was historically famous for its explorers and, Mr. Battistelli pointed out that it was appropriate to be celebrating this year’s Awards in Lisbon because inventors are the explorers of the modern world.”
If it sounds like Battistelli is about to ‘buy’ some more nations’ representatives before the AC meeting, then it’s probably indeed the case. To quote this new tweet: “The EPO will meet most of its member states in Tirana on 16-17 June to review the co-operation roadmap. Updates to follow.”
“Battistelli already resorts to all sorts of truly nefarious tricks to ensure he doesn’t get sacked; details were covered here several times last month.”Talk about timing! Battistelli is distributing other people’s money, so who will be ‘brave’ enough to put at risk this money (and risk losing the delegation position)? Some rumours from last month suggested that Battistelli had lobbied countries to remove delegates not supportive of him.
These tricks are causing serious reputation issues for the Office (even a "crisis"), epecially if they allow him to stay for longer and deepen the impact of his damage. █
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