02.18.16
Posted in Site News at 2:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Central Staff Committee of the European Patent Office refuses to be intimidated by Battistelli’s inner circle and insists on the right of staff to go on strike next month
TWISTING the law in its own favour isn't atypical a practice at Battistelli’s EPO (the high-level management). The man revels in autocracy. One person asked me today: “Is there any truth in rumours that the big man has gone?” Rumours that Battistelli has been sacked or resigned (sounds familiar) are most likely false. As one person put it, “the place is bristling with rumours following yesterday’s B28 meeting.
“There is something going on, but I can’t separate the wheat from the chaff.
“All I can say is that it appears to have been a very rough meeting.”
One thing we do know is that as of yesterday, there was a fight over staff's intent/thoughts of going on strike. The following letter is self-explanatory as context is included/alluded to:
European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Ms Elodie Bergot
PD Human Resources
Isar – R 718
Interlocutor and representatives to the ballot committee
Dear Ms Bergot,
We refer to your e-mails of Friday 12 February 2016, one addressed to us and one addressed to the colleagues who signed a recent call for strike in accordance with Circular No. 347, initiated and organised by staff (Annex 1).
In the above-mentioned mails you acknowledge that the quorum of 10% of staff has been reached and confirm that the Office will organise a ballot within one month, i.e. on 9 March at the latest.
The call for strike designates an external lawyer as the contact person representing the undersigned. In the e-mail to the petitioners, you state that “strike shall be a means of last report and the time of preparation of the ballot should be used to discuss the claims presented in the call for strike.”
According to your mail “external attorneys cannot be considered as social partners to engage into meaningful discussions regarding to EPO’s internal matters.” The petitioners are therefore invited to designate representatives from among active EPO staff members.
We wish to point out the following:
- There is no basis in law or in reason to reject any given person as an interlocutor. Specifically, there is no rule dictating that the European Patent Office
interlocutor must be an active EPO staff member.
- It is not clear how the petitioners could designate their representatives. The petitioners do not know each other and in any case cannot send e-mails to more than 50 persons with their EPO e-mail account.
- The petition concerns central staff matters. The CSC is the elected staff representation responsible for central matters.
In order to avoid endangering the strike ballot, the external lawyer has asked the CSC to accept delegation of his mandate for any further process or action with regard to the upcoming procedural steps foreseen by the EPO administration. We intend to accept this delegation.
Concerning the mail addressed to us, we designate the following representatives to the ballot committee:
Stéphane Écolivet
Ansgar Wansing
Yours sincerely,
The Central Staff Committee
We confirm that this letter was legitimately decided and produced by the Central Staff Committee1.
__________
1 Pursuant to Article 35(3) ServRegs, the Central Staff Committee shall consist of ten full and ten alternate members.
The CSC presently consists of 17 members, because two have resigned in Dec 2014 and one has been dismissed in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee).
One full member of the CSC has been downgraded in Jan 2016 (against the recommendation of the Disciplinary Committee). In fact, the Office has launched investigations and disciplinary procedures against other Staff representatives as well, affecting negatively their health.
Here is the original with all the signatures included:
Stay tuned as there’s more on the way. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Germany, careful not to reveal its bias and gross nepotism (not to mention self interest) in this matter, is starting to push for the Unitary Patent Court (UPC), which would potentially destroy Europe’s wealth by passing a lot of it to very few (already affluent and usually non-European) actors
THERE is an increasingly urgent and incredibly big EPO scandal that many EPO insiders haven't been paying enough attention to (or were thoroughly misinformed on, as part of the secretive and expensive PR campaign for UPC, let aside the internal censorship). Dr. Glyn Moody wrote about it earlier this month and the EPO's official responses to him only served to reinforce beliefs that the UPC is quite a scandal (against democracy) in the making. The vast majority of European citizens know nothing at all about the UPC, probably by intention — as obscurity serves the UPC's architects and lobbyists. The UPC is not for Europeans. It’s steered by scope maximalists, as FOSDEM recently explained (Stallman too spoke about it).
“The vast majority of European citizens know nothing at all about the UPC, probably by intention — as obscurity serves the UPC’s architects and lobbyists.”“Breaking news is that Germany has produced draft bills for implementing the UPC,” wrote this new commenter, who spreads terrible news that we have been dreading for months (EPO-funded media repeatedly pressured Germany — even by shaming — to do this).
“BMJ is financed with EPO fees,” Benjamin Henrion correctly noted, “and they do have a bad record with the swpat [software patents] directive, where they trumped the econ ministry” (we previously wrote about this role of nepotism in UPC promotion inside Germany, putting the country’s justice system/ministry to great shame, having led the way in software patents promotion). Spain shows the better way forward and explains the reasons.
Here is the comment in question in its entirety:
Breaking news is that Germany has produced draft bills for implementing the UPC.
https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokumente/RefE_Uebereinkommen_EinheitlichesPatentgericht.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2
https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokumente/RefE_Begleitgesetz_EuropaeischePatentreform.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3
My German may be a little rusty, but I cannot see anything in the two published documents that indicates how German national law will be amended in the light of the substantive provisions of the unitary patent package.
Can anyone shed any light on this situation? I would have thought that at least some modifications of national patent law would be necessary.
“The document of your second link,” added another commenter, “proposes all necessary amendments of German Law, particularly for the international patent act and the patent act. But the first link is the more interesting…”
“UPC is a cash cow for patent lawyers in Germany.”According to this morning’s post from IP Kat: “In its proposal for the legislation implementing the Unified Patent Package in Germany, the German Ministry of Justice suggests a compromise: double patenting vis-a-vis unitary patents is not prohibited, but if an action regarding a unitary patent for the same invention is pending before the Unified Patent Court or is made pending during the national proceeding or has been finally adjudicated by the UPC, then the German court will dismiss the action brought based on the national patent insofar as the patents concern the same invention, provided that the defendant raises the objection before the beginning of the oral hearing (see proposed Article 18 Gesetz über internationale Patentübereinkommen, p. 6 of the linked PDF).”
UPC is a cash cow for patent lawyers in Germany. They would make a lot of money from it, and guess at whose expense…
No wonder it’s mostly patent lawyers who are pushing for the UPC, usually behind closed doors. It’s an attack on democracy. It is a coup. The UPC is yet another rogue project, maybe on par with (or along with) efforts such as TPP. They are hoping to bypass the European public and covertly impose the 1%’s wishes on all who live inside Europe. Deception, propaganda etc. come into play as soon as the public begins to discover what’s going on, whereupon it antagonises. That’s when they start pretending that it’s good for European SMEs and perpetually spread other such myths.
“BristowsUPC”, an LLP rebranded for UPC marketing, has just written about the above. Longtime UPC booster Annsley Merelle Ward (also of IP Kat) said: “The German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) yesterday published the first draft of legislation that will make it possible for Germany to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement. The draft bill was published, together with a second draft bill to implement the Unitary patent system into German law. After a period of consultation, it is anticipated that final draft bills will be introduced into the German parliament before summer 2016. These will then pass through the legislative process in parliament for debate, any amendment, and then a final vote.”
“The EPO’s autocracy is now expanding onto other European institutions.”Only patent lawyers (and their media) rejoice right now (see the positivity, with optimistic phrases like “A significant development for the #UPC.”) while the rest of the public is totally unaware. It is an unacceptable attack on European democracy. “DE, UK & 2 more need to ratify for #UPC to begin,” said the patent maximalists (MIP in this case). As Henrion put it last night: “There should be a call to abolish fiscal priviledges for royalties over any type of IP right, and tax it as the same level as labour #fraud”
The EPO’s autocracy is now expanding onto other European institutions. This too is a cause for alarm. They don’t care what the public thinks; they just do whatever the heck they decided is good for Europe (or for themselves and their mates). It’s like with the EPO the EU is increasingly shadowing the worst practices of the Kremlin; oh, lo and behold whose hands Battistelli is now shaking (warning: epo.org
link). To quote the latest puff piece showing Battistelli in Russia: “On the occasion of a visit to the EPO in Munich by Grigory Petrovich Ivliev, the new Director General of Rospatent (the Russian Federal Service for IP), the two institutions have committed to further strengthen their co-operation.”
That was published yesterday. It’s self-serving propaganda disguised as ‘news’ (and Google News indexes it as such).
“While the EPO says (right there on national television) that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to obey the highest court at The Hague it sure feels comfortable to do its patent brainwashing right there at The Hague.”Congratulations, Mr. Battistelli. Having just collaborated with Cubans (who parked Russian nukes just a short distance away from your American masters), you now go visit their old masters in Moscow. Having refused to obey orders from The Hague (renowned for international criminal justice), your obedient PR bunnies now set up shop in The Hague. Irony is not dead yet. While the EPO says (right there on national television) that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to obey the highest court at The Hague it sure feels comfortable to do its patent brainwashing right there at The Hague.
The EPO is officially a rogue institution out of control. The UPC is its latest project and the main threat to this project is European democracy (meaning, people actually becoming aware of what’s going on and then voting on it, i.e. against it). █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As if this patent institute is totally unchallengeable, like immigration law in Merkel’s Germany
Summary: The latest information from and about the European Patent Office/Organisation, where there has just been a major protest (in Munich), albeit nobody would know it based on or due to the silence of the media
THE Administrative Council (AC) of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) is led by a Dane and some rumours suggest that it may be pursuing (or at least exploring) removal of Battistelli and his team, who have become a disgrace and source of great shame to the Organisation. Karen Melchior, a rather popular (on the Web) Danish diplomat/lawyer*, has just said “Shame on @EPOorg” (European Patent Organisation, led by a Dane), the context being software patents in Europe (context about the EPO in general can be found in our corresponding Wiki).
“Willy Minnoye, as head of internal services was in fact promoted after being found guilty of breaching fundamental rights several years ago when he confiscated private union mail (see ILO judgment 1547).”
–AnonymousThankfully we have many sources (more than before, especially after the EPO foolishly chose to censor and threaten us), both outside and inside the EPO. “Willy Minnoye,” told us a source privately, “as head of internal services was in fact promoted after being found guilty of breaching fundamental rights several years ago when he confiscated private union mail (see ILO judgment 1547).” It sure looks like Battistelli and his team have quickly become a massive liability for the Organisation as a whole. “Dear Roy,” wrote to us a person, “thanks for the great work.” But it’s becoming harder to do such work without further input from readers. A partial media blackout in the whole of Europe prevents people from finding out what really goes on inside the EPO. EPO members of staff find themselves fearing communication even with their colleagues and German media might not want to remark negatively about the EPO for reasons we explained here before [1, 2]. All we know so far about the protest and surrounding developments comes from this comment:
Latest news from The Staff Committee is that they have informed the AC that they no longer support the planned Social Survey. Their version is that while BB invited them to nominate an observer for the organising committee, the nominee then wasn’t invited to any meetings and was given the results at the last minute as a fait accompli. The SC consider that their nominee is just a fig leaf to show that BB had dealt with them but that this was not bona fide consultation. Also it seems that no AC members are part of this either so that it is all being organised by BB. Quelle surprise!
In his 4th Feb speech to staff, BB gave the impression that his door was open but that the SC kept refusing to come on in! I wonder how he’ll organise an independent study if no staff will speak to the survey.
Meanwhile, SUEPO is organising a follow-up to a survey from a couple of years ago. Should be revealing but I presume BB’s PR gurus are already writing their rebuttals…
If anyone can please send us material which is related to the protest or the second Board 28 meeting of this year, that will help a great deal and enable dissemination of information. This is the worst nightmare of the abusers: a flow of reliable information, not Battistelli-led propaganda. The pressure on Mr. Kongstad has grown over the years because of letters (including from Transparency International), protests, and so on. Will he listen more carefully if fellow Danes speak speak out?
“Danish is not an official EPO language,” Benjamin Henrion pointed out yesterday. “And DK companies won’t get a legally binding translation.”
“Only about 10% of European patents get validated in DK [Denmark] currently. Polish gov’t report made similar observation.”
–Jesper LundThere’s a reason why some of last year’s protests targeted the Danish Consulate (this actually received press coverage from several Danish newspapers), and it’s not just Mr. Kongstad’s complicity by silence (letting Battistelli totally off the hook and helping Battistelli hide his salary from the European public).
Jesper Lund, who is Danish, responded to Henrion by saying “we happily swallowed the EPO pill in 2014 and accepted a 10-fold increase in patents valid in DK
[...] That’s “over time”. Only about 10% of European patents get validated in DK [Denmark] currently. Polish gov’t report made similar observation.”
“The 10x increase is not there yet? With the UPC many countries will see drastic patent warming,” Henrion added.
In order to keep this concise, we shall cover these matters in a separate post about the UPC.
Despite the fact that we are now better equipped to quickly capture any morsel of information about the EPO, we are still not seeing anything about yesterday’s protest, so input from readers is sorely needed right now. Here is how to get in touch. █
______
* Melchior prefers “Danish radikale politician.” According to her Web site, she is “a foreign policy professional with an academic background in law [who] worked more than 7 years in the political systems of the EU, Denmark, UK and France.” She attended “Transparency International Summer School on Integrity 2014,” which brings back memories of the EPO’s relation (good and bad, implicating the Danish AC Chairman and Control Risks Group) to Transparency International.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado en Bill Gates, Microsoft at 7:06 am por Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Parte de un ampli esquema implicado a Microsoft en CORRUPCIÓN SISTEMÁTICA, transformando escuelas y universidades en puestos de Microsoft a cuesta de los contribuyentes
Sumario: La universidad de elección de Gates sobre la cuál todavía saca ventaja, se vuelve una agencia personal de Microsoft para INDOCTRINAR, convirtiéndose parte de su asistida por el gobierno conquista de la educación de Ciencias de la Computacion en los Estados Unidos.
BILL GATES nunca se graduó de Harvard (grados honorarios en realidad no cuentán para nada, virtualmente están a la venta). Abandonó su educación. Sin embargo Gates tomó control de Harvard así como otras universidades en los Estados Unidos (y en un menor grado en el extranjero también). Al ´donar´ dinero bajo falsas pretensiones SECUESTRÓ la agenda/curricula de su Ciencias de la Computación (echándola a su favor) e incluso nombró instalaciones como a sí mismo. Algo realmente anti-academico de hacer. Es lo anti-ético a la noción de educación.
Después de sobornar oficiales para asegurarse contratos SOBREVALORADOS (como cubrimos anoche)) Microsoft ahora se apodera de universidades, no sólo escuelas. Como lo puso Slashdot ayer:
¨¿Supo usted que Microsoft ha apoyado a Harvard en crear una nueva versión (de su muy popular CS50 curso) llamado CS50 AP, designado especialmente para educadores de secundaria?¨ preguntó una publicación Aprenda a Blogear Microsoft. Si le gustaría enseñar CS50 AP (y en turno Principios de AP CS) en su salón de clases este año,¨ Harvard informa a posibles profesores, ¨estan cordialmente invitados a unirse a nosotros en uno de nuestros entrenamientos para profesores workshops a llevarse a cabo en varias partes alrededor del país y el mundo!¨ Pero antes de matricularse están requeridos a responder a lo siguiente y Harvard no aceptará un NO como respuesta: ¨Nuestros AMIGOS en Microsoft nos están ayudando a distribuir materiales de apoyo para los profesores para esta versión de CS50 para profesores y estudiantes de educación secundaria. Al chequear la cajita de abajo, ustedes están de acuerdo que podamos ´compartir´ los datos que usted sometió a traves de esta forma como parte del proceso de planificación.¨ Microsoft esta DIRIGIENDO a la educación secundaria estos días – carajo, la Casa Blanca incluso deja al presidente de Microsoft Brad Smith reunir a periodistas y relatarles sus planes de gastar $4 B de impuestos en una nueva CS para toda iniciativa secundaria antes de que el Presidente lo anuncie a los contribuyentes. A propósito, la CS50 AP Wiki contiene una forma de autorización y deslindación por la cual, entre otras cosas, requiere a estudiantes tímidos estar sentados en una zona de ¨no cámaras/film¨ sin protestar si no quieren sus fotos o videos usados por Harvard para promover un curso promovido por Microsoft.¨
Cubrimos la nata acerca de Brad Smith a principios de mes.
Para citar las palabras nauseabundas: ¨Nuestros amigos de Microsoft nos están ´ayudando´ a distribuir los materiales para apoyo del maestro de esta versiond de CS50 para profesores y estudiantes de secundaria. Al chequear la cajita de abajo, ustedes están de acuerdo que podamos ´compartir´ los datos que usted sometió a traves de esta forma como parte del proceso de planificación. [...] Esto es requerido, por favor entre un valor.¨
“Harvard ahora es MIERDA,” nos dijo un lector que solía trabajar para una univesidad grande estadounidense. “Que VERGUENZA para ellos y para los Estados Unidos en general.”
“Esto parece sembrar un montón de preguntas,” una persona me dijo esta mañana en Twitter, “ética, legalmente, y acerca de integridad – en los Estados Unidos, Microsoft, UE, Romania etc.”
Microsoft es todavía un cáncer en la educación. Sobre todo es acerca de convertir a la gente joven DEPENDIENTE (encerrádo dentro) de código secreto con puertas traseras. Harvard debería avergonzarse de sí misma. Ocasionalmente invitaba a un famoso CRIMINAL, Bill Gates, a dar discursos allí, como si esto fuese un ejemplo a seguir por los estudiantes. UCLA también hace lo mismo con el más grande TROLL DE PATENTES [1, 2], quien es amigo personal de la rata Bill Gates. Todo se resume a corrupcción y política podrida. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Fraud, Microsoft at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Publicado in Fraude, Microsoft at 1:53 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Pero no esperen que alguien de Microsoft sea sentenciado a pasar unos años en prisión (alas, es notorio)
Sumario: La epidemia de CORRUPCIÓN DE Microsoft es resaltada en una corte de leyes, pero ya que Microsoft es un moustrou bien conectado políticamente no esperamos castigo por tal comportamiento CRIMINAL
EL año pasado Microsoft fue atrapado chantajeando políticos Británicos [1, 2] y días atras escribimos acerca de su extorsión y chantaje (con patentes) contra Android OEMs.
El último fin de semana un lector nos hizo enterar de un viejo artículo que sobrepasamos al momento. Después de reportajes acerca de muchos casos de SOBORNO por parte de Microsoft (lo que lo trajo bajo una prueba en los Estados Unidos) escuchamos muy poco, como sí la investigación no era más investigada. Recuerden que el Presidente Obama fue ya pagado (algunos dicen sobornado) por Microsoft, which rápidamente uno de sus más altos contribuyentes antes de las elecciónes, como bien dijo Bill Gates, su esposa, Steve Ballmer y su esposa también. Haciéndo su influencia en le gobierno estadounidense pegajosa (vea nuestra página Wiki titulada ¨La influencia de Microsoft sobre el gobierno Estadounidense¨) seguramente que vale la pena.
Aquí esta el reporte de noticias titulado ¨Antiguo Ministro Rumano admite haber recibido un soborno de €4mn bribe in un caso de Microsoft” (recordándonos que Microsoft todavía es una COMPAÑÍA CRIMINAL). Dice:
El previo Ministro de Comunicaciones Rumano Gabriel Sandu admitió en una audiencia ante una corte el pasado Octubre 12 que recibió un soborno de €4mn en el llamado caso de Microsoft. Otros ocho previos ministros también estan bajo investigación en el caso, pero Sandu es el único en haber sido acusado por el momento.
Las implicaciones del caso permanecen inpredecibles, ya que envuelve ministros de tres gobiernos de varias orientaciones políticas. Fue instigada por el Primer Ministro Victor Ponta del Partido de Centro-Izquierda de Social Demócratas (PSD) quienes desearon una investigación sobre los contratos firmados bajo su predecesor y rival político Emil Boc durante el 2009-2012. Pero abrió la puerta a una más ancho escándalo que ha arrastrado a políticos de ambos partidos.
El Directorado Nacional Anticorrupción (DNA) empezó investigaciones sobre la venta de licensias de software para las escuelas Rumanas en Septiembre del 2014. Los nueve antiguos ministros son sospechosos de RECIBIR SOBORNOS A CAMBIO DE FIRMAR Y LUEGO EXTENDER CONTRATOS PARA LICENCIAR SOFTWARE DE mICROSOFT A PRECIOS MÁS ALTOS QUE EN EL MERCADO.
Sandu fué el primer previos ministro en dar su testimonio delante de la corte. Afirmó haber contribuído los €4mn de soborno que recibió al Partido de Centro-Derecha Demócratico Liberal (PNL) para su campaña electoral y la de Traian Basescu, el exitóso candidateo de las elecciones presidenciales del 2009.
“Eso es Rumania,” nos dijo un lector, ¨¿qué acerca de Rusia y los otros? ¿Cuál es el status?¨ Bueno, previamente escribimos acerca de Rumania en:
Todavía esperamos por el resultado de las investigación de los Estados Unidos contra Microsoft (por corrupcción), pero permanecemos escépticos hasta que veamos la luz del dia. Microsoft tiene a MUCHOS CABILDEADORES E INCLUSOS POLÍTICOS EN SUS BOLSILLOS, como hemos cubierto a traves de los años extensivamente.
Rumania es simplemente uno de varios países donde Microsoft debería someterse a una extensiva examinación, incluso la EVASION DE IMPUESTOS que esperamos que el IRS finalmente lo tome más seriamente. En algunos de los articulos de arriba ya hemos discutido los trucos de contabilidad de Microsoft en Rumania.
Cuando leemos algo de lo de arriba se hace más evidente que Microsoft está básicamente ARRIBA DE LA LEY, rodeado de POLÍTICOS CORRUPTOS quienes están muy asustados (or envaselinados) para realmente hacer algo al respecto, sin mencionar sus socios que hacen mucho de su trabajo sucio (como fue el caso en los días de OOXML con elecciones ARREGLADAS). ¿Cuál es el ruido acerca de este ´nuevo´ Microsoft de todas maneras? Nada más que una sobreusada campaña de mercadeo y relaciones públicas, alrededor de las lineas: ¨Microsoft ama a Linux.¨
A la gente no le gusta Microsoft porque es bueno. A la gente típicamente le disgusta Microsoft por que ellos entienden la historia y saben que Microsoft es… bien, especial. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
-
Desktop
-
The Ovid-Elsie school district sits an hour west of Flint, Michigan, the city now notorious for being poisoned by its own penny-pinching administrators. The district, which serves roughly 1,600 students, is one of the poorer areas in the state, with a per capita income of just over $15,000. “We’re looking at close to three-quarters of our kids [who] are classified as economically disadvantaged here,” said Kris Kirby, the district’s assistant superintendent. So when it came time to find computer equipment for every classroom, Ovid-Elsie had to get creative.
The school was eager to experiment with Google Chromebooks, which have been sweeping the education market. But even those machines cost several hundred dollars each, far too much for Ovid-Elsie to afford one for every student. Dan Davenport, the director of technology for the area schools, had looked into using Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome operating system, but was stymied by the complexity of supporting a range of different drivers on a mishmash of old computers.
-
Server
-
One such distribution is Alpine Linux. Alpine is a very minimal distro, weighing in at only 4.8MB. Although it’s tiny, it’s able to support a wide range of the applications and services that comprise a modern cloud app.
Docker is switching to Alpine as its default OS image. The reduced size will reduce its network traffic massively, and it means smaller and faster containers for cloud applications.
Docker’s future may well lie in the direction of Unikernels, but they are a very new technology, and they require a change of perspective for developers. With Alpine images, programmers still can work with a complete (but minimal) Linux system.
-
Is blockchain — the distributed database behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — ready for prime time? IBM clearly thinks so. This week, the company announced new Blockchain-as-a-Service offerings in the cloud, a move that follows its recent contribution of 44,000 lines of open source code to the Hyperledger project.
-
IBM is continuing its push to reinvent the mainframe for the modern era of computing needs with the announcement today of the z13s.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.2 kernel.
All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
thanks,
greg k-h
-
-
Future innovation in the world of blockchain technology lies just ahead, as more and more companies see the value of initiatives such as the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project. This collaborative effort to bring more use cases to the exciting world of blockchain technology welcomes Ribbit.me as their latest partner. This loyalty solutions startup will bring their expertise and development team to The Linux Foundation, which will spur future innovation in the distributed ledger industry.
-
-
Ribbit.me, a universal loyalty solution built on blockchain technology, announced today that it has joined the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger project.
-
-
After announcing the release of the long-term supported Linux 4.1.18 and Linux 3.12.54 kernels on February 16, 2016, Sasha Levin also informed the Linux world about the availability of the twenty-seventh maintenance build of Linux 3.18.
-
-
-
-
Linus Torvalds Works in His Bathrobe [Ed: “Linus Torvalds Works in His Bathrobe (headline) […] “I don’t really love other people.”” – how Microsoft propagandists cover Linux. Microsoft’s worst propagandist (in the CBS days) Ina Fried was the one speaking to Torvalds. Clearly a misfit. The main problem with TED is that Bill Gates bribed it enough to essentially, in many cases, have turned it into his for-profit think tank.]
-
Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually not a people person. I don’t really love other people, but I do love other people who get involved in my project.
I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of my work, but those people were really lovely people. They used open source in ways I did not want to go. It works beautifully together. You need to have the people people, the communicators, the warm people.
-
-
-
-
-
Computer service provider ElasticHosts offers insight into the underlying Linux Kernel technologies used by Docker, LXC and lmctfy
The last two years have seen an explosion of interest in Linux Containers, with many tools emerging, including Docker, LXC, lmctfy, Kubernetes and more.
These tools provide different management interfaces, but in all cases the Linux Containers that they run are powered by two underlying Linux Kernel technologies: cgroups and namespaces. When namespaces matured around Linux 3.8, these were the two key pieces of underlying technology which made modern Linux Containers possible.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
Considering AMD are in the middle of producing a brand new driver for Linux, it’s not surprising they don’t have Vulkan ready for Linux right from day one. Still, a shame for anyone on AMD hoping to test things out.
-
The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux is a cool little tool that gives users access to the latest graphics and video drivers from Intel, but only for a couple of major Linux distributions.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
On February 17, 2016, Bryce Harrington proudly informed the GNU/Linux community about the official release and immediate availability for download of the final bits of the next-generation Wayland 1.10 display server.
Almost daily we encounter open-source software projects, such as those from the GNOME Stack, showing their love for the Wayland display server, and there are a handful of GNU/Linux distributions that promise to switch to Wayland by default soon.
-
Applications
-
Addons are the most interesting part which makes this music player much more awesome
there are good number of addons you can install it from their official website
-
LilyPond is a free, mature music-typesetting program, similar in flavor to LaTeX. The software is part of the GNU Project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The authors originally developed LilyPond because they felt that computer-generated scores were, to their eyes, “soulless.” They designed LilyPond to follow the traditions laid down in older engraved scores. The desire for “beautiful” music is what drives the community of people who still work on LilyPond, even after more than a decade.
Version 2.19.36 was released at the end of January, but 2.18 is still considered the stable version. Downloading and installing LilyPond is super easy.
-
Proprietary
-
Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, has announced the promotion of the Opera 37.0 web browser to the Developer channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Along with the launch of the Vulkan 1.0 specifications by the Khronos Group, Valve’s boss Gabe Newell made some comments in which he takes another jab at Windows and DirectX 12.
It’s no secret that Valve’s founder and boss doesn’t like the gaming monopoly of Microsoft and Windows. Ever since Microsoft announced its intentions of releasing games through the Windows Store, a few years back, Gabe has been working towards building some proper competition.
-
The Talos Principle amazing puzzle game from Croteam prides itself with being the first game that can showcase the new Vulkan 1.0 in action although many more are set to follow.
In per the folks at Croteam’s words, Vulkan is a portable low-level graphics API that is built to work across many GPU vendors and operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Android. This makes it better, in many ways, than the current APIs like DirectX and OpenGL.
-
-
Darkest Dungeon, a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG that’s very popular should arrive on Linux in March.
-
Mad Max the open world survival game from Avalanche Studios looks even more likely to be coming to Linux. We shared with you at the start of February details that it might be coming to Linux, and now it looks quite likely.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
The Plasma theme system had a feature (since many years, actually) in which SVG elements done in a certain way can be recolored with colors coming from a theme file.
The Breeze Plasma theme (and now all the monochrome Breeze icons too) was all done in this way, in part to prepare what I’m, presenting today.
-
-
Last week I wrote a little article about something that I felt was a truly terrible idea – the KDE project’s announcement of their own Linux Distro… dubbed “KDE Neon.”
The reaction, by portions of the KDE community, to that article would be best described as “a bit intense.” People were angry with me for writing something that was so negative towards a KDE project. People were angry with the KDE community for allowing such a project to exist. People were… angry.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Rygel 0.30 is on track for the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment release in late March, so its developers are releasing new milestones to patch various issues, as well as to implement new features.
-
A new milestone towards the GTK+ 3.20 open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit has been released earlier, February 17, 2016, advancing the development cycle of the software.
-
The GNOME Project is about to release the first Beta build of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment to public testers, so we’ve spotted some important updates for this cycle.
-
This was a very productive cycle for GNOME Calendar, and this release is the result of a hardworked cycle. First of all, the bad news: no DnD support, no Week View, no, no, no!
But why, Mr. Feaneron?
The reason is simple. Sanity.
-
It’s no secret that one of the main features I wanted to land this cycle was introductory support for Xdg-App. There really was quite a bit to do to make that happen, including all sorts of seemingly unrelated plumbing.
-
-
A while back we introduced the idea of Kali Linux Customisation by demonstrating the Kali Linux ISO of Doom. Our scenario covered the installation of a custom Kali configuration that contained select tools required for a remote vulnerability assessment. The customised Kali ISO would undergo an unattended autoinstall in a remote client site and automatically connect back to our OpenVPN server over TCP port 443. The OpenVPN connection would then bridge the remote and local networks, allowing us full “layer 3” access to the internal network from our remote location. The resulting custom ISO could then be sent to the client who would just pop it into a virtual machine template and the whole setup would happen automagically with no intervention – as depicted in the image below.
-
Reviews
-
Makulu 10 Xfce edition continues developer Jacque Raymer’s track record of pushing the limits with useful and innovative features to keep his distro line a step ahead of the crowd.
He released Makulu 10 Xfce this week after more than 12 months in the making. The focus on this build is stability, speed and social integration. After spending several frustrating days chasing away glitches, I found that the Xfce edition can claim success with two of those three goals.
-
New Releases
-
Softpedia received earlier an email from Arne Exton where he informs us that a new build of his AndEX Live CD is available for free for those who already purchased it to update.
-
Arch Family
-
While Manjaro Linux has been available for desktop Linux environments for a few years now, it has not been available for ARM devices. This past week marked a huge turning point for Raspberry Pi users, as the Manjaro Arm project marked its first alpha release. The reason this is such big news is that many Raspberry Pi users did not have a great entryway into Arch Linux prior to the Manjaro Arm Project. Arch has always been available for the Raspberry Pi, through either a direct download or using NOOBS, but neither is as user friendly as most other Raspberry Pi distros. This is where Manjaro Linux comes into the picture. Manjaro provides a more user-friendly approach to Arch with the goal of getting users into the Arch space who found either the installation or documentation a bit overwhelming.
-
Ballnux/SUSE
-
The openSUSE Conference will return to Nuremberg June 22 – 26 and have its conference at a cultural center in the heart of the Bavarian city.
This year’s oSC will take place at the Z Bau, which was a former military barracks before being converted into a cultural center in 2014.
-
Built openSUSE Leap based Sugar test images on SUSE Studio, get it from here.
-
openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed goes through automated tests before a snapshot is released and heavily relies on openQA for the process of Tumbleweed to create regular snapshots.
[...]
The automated testing of openQA is currently running with only two workers left instead of the usual 10. The remaining workers are largely overloaded and can’t cope with the workload to produce new snapshots.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Internet of Things represents big opportunities businesses need to make the most of, according to Red Hat.
The company says the growing ecosystem of web-connected devices and platforms has the potential to effect major changes in many industries.
Analyst firm Gartner forecasts 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020.
-
-
One of my objectives for 2016 is to pass the RHCSA exam. One of the problems of this is cost, while I can’t afford to take a course I some how need to create myself a lab where I can install multiple copies of the OS to play with. I’m lucky enough to have subscribed to the RH Developer program so I have access to RHEL but don’t currently have the hardware.
-
In other news, I’m now an Emeritus Member of the GNOME Foundation. This means that I’m quite a few time without substantial contributions to the project. Sad
. The good news is that working at Red Hat I’m closer than ever to contribute to Open Source projects! I hope to be back to the game soon
-
-
-
-
One of the S&P 500’s big winners for Wednesday February 17 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT) as the company’s stock climbed 4.12% to $66.47 on volume of 1.67 million shares.
-
Analysts of Wall Street have released an interim price target of $N/A on shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). This estimate is as per N/A experts that participated in Zacks group poll.
-
-
-
-
-
Fedora
-
It has been quite some time since I last wrote about Korora Linux (Korora 20 – Peach) and I think that is a mistake on my part, because Korora is a good distribution that deserves consideration. I think of Korora as being “Fedora++”. They start from the Fedora distribution, and then add in (or put back) all sorts of interesting and useful things that the Fedora developers can’t (or won’t, or didn’t) include. They also configure and customize several different desktops, making them much more useful than the default desktops.
-
So my time at FOSDEM was pretty much the following. Walk into the hall where the Fedora/CentOS tables were. Get met by someone who worked on or in EPEL. Try to have a conversation and find that it was too packed and loud there. Walk over to the coffee area and buy the person a coffee and listen. Finish conversation and walk back over to the table.. [take a break every now and then to use the restroom from drinking a 16 oz tea every 30 minutes.] This was a lot of conversations and they did all blur together after a while. [Using a technique I learned from Centos' Karanbir Singh at FOSDEM, I will bring a small notebook to the next conference and write down a problem per page per person. Then I can go back the next year and see if the problems are still there.]
-
I don’t think anything above is new to people who have been contributing to EPEL in the last ~10 years. A lot of the problems are ones that were brought up in the beginning as we tried to square the circle of differing use cases. However, I wanted to catalogue them here and then make a promise that I will do my best to figure out ways to solve them by FOSDEM 2017 in some form or another.
-
-
Compared to my other kernel teammates, I’m a relative newcomer to how the kernel is packaged and prepared. They’ve been amazing at helping me understand how the Fedora kernel comes together. Much of the packaging scripts and tools for the kernel have grown organically and some of the knowledge is a bit tribal. I’ve tried to do my part by updating the kernel wiki. Even so, there’s many parts of the kernel package which could use improvement.
-
Debian Family
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical and Meizu have just revealed that Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition will be available for pre-order during Mobile World Congress 2016.
-
-
-
Earlier today, February 17, 2016, Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, informs us about the latest preparations for upcoming OTA updates for Ubuntu Phones.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
In the run up to Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, Canonical has released details of its next Ubuntu OS smartphone to come to market, and it offers the highest spec of any phone running the platform so far.
-
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is going to integrate full support in Mir for the latest Vulkan 1.0 specifications.
Vulkan is stealing all the headline in the Linux world and with good reason. It’s an incredible leap forward for the open source platform, even if Vulkan is technically aimed at all the major operating systems, including Windows, Android, and even Tizen.
-
The new BQ Aquaris M10 is the first ever Ubuntu powered tablet. This has gone under the radar of many, especially in a time where tablets aren’t getting the same attention they were receiving three quarters ago. Ubuntu is also quite foreign to the mass market. For those who don’t know, it’s a completely different operating system, sitting alongside the Windows and Mac systems of the world. A lot of techies, or computer wizards, are fond of playing around with Ubuntu because of its open-source availability to numerous developers who love customising their personal PCs.
-
The top story today must be the new Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu phone as the announcement was picked up by almost everyone. Running a close second is the news that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now be run on Microsoft’s Azure. In other news, Linus Torvalds gave a talk at TED and Bryan Lunduke suffered the backlash of an angry Neon crowd after last week’s opinion of the project. Finally, Jamie Watson tested recently released Korora 23.
-
With Vulkan now being public, Canonical developer Stephen Webb has confirmed they are planning to have Vulkan platform support ready for Mir by Ubuntu 16.04.
Vulkan is designed to support Mir alongside Wayland and X11 on Linux while according to this Google+ post by Webb, they are hoping to have the Mir server bits done in time for the Ubuntu 16.04 release in April.
-
-
-
-
Is there a way to get systemd to not throw away… stderr? This is driving us nuts when we have about six hundred Ubuntu servers, and simple problems are harder to solve because stderr is not displayed in the terminal or saved in the journal.
-
-
The core of the Firepower NGFW is a new Linux operating system distribution. Harrell explained that Cisco is calling its new Linux powered operating system FXOS (Firepower eXtensible Operating System). The new FXOS introduces service-chaining capabilities that can help to enable a security inspection and remediation workflow.
-
-
Phones
-
Tizen
-
The Samsung Open Source Group released a Tizen 3.0 beta for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, underscoring the broad OS support for the world’s favorite hacker SBC.
Last week’s news that Tizen 3.0 has been ported to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the latest example of how the year-old ARMv7 version of the Pi is attracting ports from more powerful Linux distributions, most notably Fedora, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Snappy Core. The Samsung Open Source Group’s Tizen for Pi project has been underway for several years, achieving several beta releases, and now the effort has shifted to the new Tizen 3.0. It’s still in beta, but now you can create builds for the Pi 2 using tools from the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded project.
-
Samsung holds much hope for their upcoming flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, and in-line with the usual new flagship frenzy we have had several leaks of the devices, all being just ahead of their February 21 unveiling at Mobile World Congress (MWC). One of the leaked pictures is reportedly a press release render of the devices, and this is the one that is Intrguing to us here at Tizen Experts. Now the S7 will launch with Android, that is pretty much a given, but the thing of Interest is the graphics that is being shown displayed over both Smartphones.
-
Android
-
Plug a phone or tablet running Windows 10 or Android into the NexPad, and you have a more productivity-oriented environment, with the mobile device serving as a secondary screen. (According to NexDock, you could also connect the shell to a Raspberry Pi or something like the Intel Compute Stick, or to an iPhone via a display connector.) The NexPad doesn’t contain a processor, memory, or storage; all that has to be provided by your small computing device.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Every mugger and pickpocket in the world knows that your smartphone represents hundreds of dollars in hardware and information. Here’s how to protect that asset.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Bell ID, a company that develops token management software for mobile payments, has announced that it is adding support for Android Pay.
-
-
-
We’ve often been asked the question, ‘which smartphone do I buy?’ And to arrive at the most optimal solution, we go on to enquire the use patterns. All in the bid to understand which feature could be lifted up higher in the order of priority. Then comes the most important question – budget!
-
-
No, that’s not a typo in the title. An unknown Indian company by the name Ringing Bells has introduced what’s probably the cheapest Android smartphone for just Rs 251 which is less than USD 4 (actually $3.65 at present rates). What’s even more surprising is the looks and specs of Freedom 251. Take a deep breath and have a look at this.
-
-
-
I’m always surprised when users wish that Microsoft Office or PhotoShop would be ported to Linux. Probably, some just want to be able to use standard industry software on their favorite operating system. But so far as I am concerned, applications like LibreOffice Writer or Krita are not just substitutions — even without my ideals, I would choose them as the highest quality software available for my needs.
-
So let’s take a look at four excellent choices for managing bugs and issues, all open source and all easy to download and host yourself. To be clear, there’s no way we could possibly list every issue tracking tool here; instead, these are four of our favorites, based on feature richness and the size of the community behind the project. There are others, to be sure, and if you’ve got a good case for your favorite not listed here, be sure to let us know which is your favorite tool and what makes it stand out to you, in the comments below.
-
Open source development and collaboration takes place online, in places made of information. From individual commit messages to project websites and even larger digital structures, each piece of information we create is part of a mess. This is not a slight against open source; all human endeavors are messy, because that is just the way we are as human beings. We all bring our own strengths and failings, wisdom and ignorance, to everything we do.
-
The embrace of the OpenDaylight SDN controller follows the support of the ONOS controller in the first release of the Atrium software last year.
Open Networking Foundation officials are hoping to accelerate the adoption of network virtualization by including support for the OpenDaylight SDN controller in the latest release of its open-source Atrium software distribution.
-
The Wikimedia Foundation has rejected the media reports that claimed that the non-profit is working on some search engine that will be a one-click replacement of Google.
-
-
The developers of ReactOS have been working to develop an open source operating system capable of running Windows software since 1998.
It’s been slow going: version 0.3.0 was released in 2006. Nearly 10 years later, ReactOS 0.4.0 is available for download.
-
-
Bottle Rocket has stepped out from behind its proprietary code and expanded its reach into the open-source market.
The Addison-based company, which creates custom mobile applications for business customers, has released its first few pieces of code for Android and plans to build on the code it has shared with the development community.
-
-
Putting limits on what the Internet of Things can do to transform everything from in-store retail operations to multinational logistics is a great way to hamstring a potentially revolutionary technology. So too is keeping the way IoT apps and services are developed locked away behind the closed doors of intellectual property laws.
Fortunately, IBM has seen the light of publicly supported solutions and is releasing a new open-source IoT development tool by the name of Quarks. Supported by the IBM Streams platform that specializes in compiling and analyzing gigabytes of live data in real time, Quarks might be used alternatively by hospitals to share designs for vitals monitoring apps that can be used with wearables and by industrial companies outfitting their workers’ uniforms with safety sensors, TechCrunch reported.
-
IBM has open sourced new technology called Quarks to push Internet of Things (IoT) analytics from centralized systems out to the actual edge devices that are collecting and spewing out vast amounts of data.
-
Flow-Based Programming (FBP) is a software development paradigm where applications are built by “wiring together” various reusable components inside a graph.
Since running into the concept in 2011, I’ve built the NoFlo environment, which brings Flow-Based Programming to the universal runtime of JavaScript, allowing flows to be run on both Node.js and the browser.
-
-
-
-
-
Google has released TensorFlow Serving to the open-source community, a fresh addition to computer learning software for large-scale modeling projects.
-
Events
-
As a fresh start of 2016, I got a chance to be part of Devconf – an annual conference which takes place in the beautiful Brno city of Czech Republic. From past three years, its been happening in February month’s first Friday to Sunday and hence this year it was from 5th to 7th February.
-
Hundreds of people from around the world will meet at LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System, March 19-20, 2016 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. This year’s conference program will examine how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free replacements, and is the foundation of a philosophy of freedom, sharing, and change. Sessions like “Yes, the FCC might ban your operating system” and “GNU/Linux and Chill: Free software on a college campus” will offer insights about how to resist the dominance of proprietary software, which is often built in to university policies and government regulations.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Hadoop, Spark and Kafka have already had a defining influence on the world of big data, and now there’s yet another Apache project with the potential to shape the landscape even further: Apache Arrow.
The Apache Software Foundation on Wednesday launched Arrow as a top-level project designed to provide a high-performance data layer for columnar in-memory analytics across disparate systems.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Before we wrap up this series on securing Hadoop databases, I am happy to announce that Vormetric has asked to license this content, and Hortonworks is also evaluating a license as well. It’s community support that allows us to bring you this research free of charge. Also, I’ve received a couple email and twitter responses to the content; if you have more input to offer, now is the time to send it along to be evaluated with the rest of the feedback as we will assembled the final paper in the coming week. And with that, onto the recommendations.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
The Document Foundation (TDF) released LibreOffice 5.1 on Feb. 10, providing users with a new milestone update of the popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice originated as a fork of the open-source OpenOffice suite in 2011 and has been downloaded more than 120 million times since then. LibreOffice includes Writer document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, Base database and Draw drawing programs as part of the integrated suite. In the LibreOffice 5.1 update, a key area of improvement is the user interface throughout the suite’s programs, which all benefit from a reorganization as well as menu additions. With the 5.1 update, the office suite’s integrated programs can now load and save files from remote locations directly through menu dialog box. LibreOffice is the default standard office suite in many mainstream Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and Ubuntu. LibreOffice is also available for both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the new LibreOffice 5.1 release.
-
Last year LibreOffice made much progress in receiving GTK3 support that it also began running on Wayland. The battle though is not over and more GTK3 improvements are still forthcoming.
-
Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
-
-
In addition to being closed source, there was another catch: in order to use it, you need the Spotify premium subscription. Speaking from my own experience supporting a project integrating with Spotify for the last six years: lots of end users upgraded to premium in order to use the projects built on top of libspotify.
-
Public Services/Government
-
Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
The Benjamin Franklin Award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatis.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
-
Open Data
-
Two geography students have started a Maptime chapter in State College to support community cartography and teach people how to use and create maps. The endeavor is co-sponsored by The Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach in Penn State’s Department of Geography.
“I really want to put State College on the map—literally,” geography graduate student Carolyn Fish said. “So much open-source mapping is centered in large cities, such as New York, Washington and San Francisco.”
-
Open Access/Content
-
Sci-Hub describes itself as the first pirate website in the world that provides public access to millions of research paper to the masses.
-
Open Hardware
-
Montana-based startup CowTech launched an affordable 3D scanner kit on Kickstarter and they easily breezed past their funding goal in the first 24 hours. The CowTech Ciclop is a $99 3D laser scanner kit that was designed specifically with owners of 3D printers in mind. The buyer can print most of the scanner parts out on their own 3D printer and the parts were designed to fit on virtually any desktop 3D printer with a print bed volume of 115 x 110 x 65 mm (4.5 x 4.3 x 2.6 in) or higher. Once all of the components have been printed, the assembly process is quick and simple, and the Ciclop can start scanning in less than 30 minutes.
-
Programming
-
Today we release Go version 1.6, the seventh major stable release of Go. You can grab it right now from the download page. Although the release of Go 1.5 six months ago contained dramatic implementation changes, this release is more incremental.
The most significant change is support for HTTP/2 in the net/http package. HTTP/2 is a new protocol, a follow-on to HTTP that has already seen widespread adoption by browser vendors and major websites. In Go 1.6, support for HTTP/2 is enabled by default for both servers and clients when using HTTPS, bringing the benefits of the new protocol to a wide range of Go projects, such as the popular Caddy web server.
-
-
Woman may be more competent than men at writing code but still there is evidence that they are discriminated against in open source communities because they are women.
-
A recent study conducted by researchers from the computer science departments at Cal Poly, San Luis, Obispo and North Carolina State University reports that women write better code than men.
-
-
Sure it is easy I hear you say – well it may do you some good not to be a slave to Facebook etc., and you can help youth charity Whitelion.
Whitelion , is challenging everyone to put down those phones, back away from technology and try living in the ‘real world’ for 48 hours by signing up to ‘Social Lockout’, agreeing to lock themselves out of their social media channels for 48 hours, whilst raising money and awareness for disconnected youth.
Even five years ago, this wouldn’t have seemed like such a big ask, but nowadays people are ‘joined at the hip’ to their social media networks and in some cases this can genuinely create FOMO, particularly for our youth, leading to higher levels of depression and anxiety. (APS Stress & Wellbeing in Australia Survey 2015).
-
MICROSOFT HAS announced the retirement of a number of courses in its Certification programme which may have a direct effect on those studying for particular qualifications.
The Microsoft website explained: “As technology changes, we add new exams and revise or retire older exams. Our goal is to provide at least six months’ notice prior to retirement to give you an opportunity to finish earning your certification.”
Redmond is keen to point out that, if you have taken the course, it is still valid towards your overall qualification even if it is retired. But if one of the retired courses is core, you must take it before the retirement date and preferably allow time for retakes in case of failure, unless you’re feeling very cocky.
-
Science
-
Ocean Cleanup array, an idea of Boyan Slat, consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms. These booms and platforms can be dispatched to the garbage patches around the world.
This cleanup array would act as a giant funnel spanning over an area of a particular radius. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Russia’s food safety regulator Rosselkhoznadzor just announced a complete ban starting February 15 on all US corn and soy imports. This is a huge blow to organic and GM farmers alike, though the ban will be instated due to genetically modified crop and microbial contamination.
-
The panel was convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in December (IPW, Public Health, 16 December 2015) with a deadline of June 2016. Its objective is “to review and assess proposals and recommend solutions for remedying the policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors, international human rights law, trade rules and public health in the context of health technologies.”
-
Some developed countries are saying that a mandatory disclosure requirement would introduce uncertainty into the patent system, and would complicate the implementation of benefit sharing. Most developing countries insist that the disclosure requirement should be mandatory and should apply to various IP instruments, not only patents.
-
In response to the concerns about industry lobbying voiced by civil society recently at a symposium on agricultural biotechnologies, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) director general insists on the UN agency’s neutrality.
“Let me reassure you that FAO does not support transnational corporations. FAO is a neutral forum and we stand by our mandate to eradicate hunger and malnutrition,” FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva was quoted as saying in a release today.
-
The World Health Organization today issued its strategic response framework and joint operations and research plan, which lays out a strategy until June, to investigate and respond to the medical complications linked to the spreading Zika virus.
Zika is suspected to have a role in microcephaly (babies born with small heads), and neurological conditions.
-
Watch our full 49-minute report featuring voices from the front lines of Michigan’s water wars. Lead contamination in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, has forced residents to drink, cook with and even bathe in bottled water while still paying some of the highest water bills in the country. In this Democracy Now! special report, we go from Flint to Mecosta County, Michigan, where Nestlé, the world’s largest water bottling company, is pumping millions of gallons of water from aquifers that feed Lake Michigan.
-
RESIDENTS OF FLINT, MICHIGAN, who drank lead in their water may also have been exposed to perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, according to a report from the Michigan Department of Community Health.
The May 2015 report showed elevated levels of PFCs in the Flint River — including PFOA, also known as C8, the chemical that spread into drinking water around a DuPont plant in West Virginia and led to a landmark class-action lawsuit. In addition to C8 and PFOS, a similar molecule that’s also based on a chain of eight carbon atoms, scientists found 11 other PFCs in the Flint River — more than in any of the other water sources tested around the state.
-
Security
-
-
-
-
-
-
Since 2007 Pawn Storm has targeted governmental, security and military organizations from NATO member countries, as well as defence contractors and media organizations.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times. At its height, planning for the program involved thousands of US military and intelligence personnel, tens of millions of dollars in expenditures, and the placing of electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to ensure the operation targeting critical infrastructure would work at a moment’s notice.
Another piece of the plan involved using a computer worm to destroy computer systems at the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which was built deep inside a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. It had long been considered one of the hardest Iranian targets to disable and was intended to be a follow-up to “Olympic Games,” the code name of the plan Stuxnet fell under.
-
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
“The corporation is now fundamentally more powerful than the nation-state,” writes journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new book “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe.”
“Many ongoing crises seem to have been sustained by businesses to fuel industries in which they have a financial stake,” he explains. “Companies that entrench a crisis and then sell themselves as the only ones who can resolve it.”
Loewenstein, a columnist for the Guardian, traveled the world in order to understand just how multinational corporations profit off of such chaos. The Australian-born yet decidedly cosmopolitan journalist devotes the meticulous and daring tome to reporting on the foreign exploitation he witnessed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and the destructive mining boom in Papua New Guinea, along with seemingly dystopian prison privatization in the U.S., predatory for-profit detention centers for refugees in Australia and ruthless austerity in Greece.
-
The National Security Agency’s SKYNET program, which uses metadata and learning algorithms to select targets for drone strikes, may be targeting thousands of innocent people.
-
Thousands of innocents may have been killed by Hellfire and other missiles fired by Predator drones because the algorithm for tracking these people might have been horribly wrong. Unlike the SKYNET in the Terminator series which turns against humans when it gains intelligence, NSA’s SKYNET may have actually cost hundreds of innocent lives due to a faulty programming.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
The report, dated 29 January 2016, is written by the Operation Commander, Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy, for the European Union Military Committee and the Political and Security Committee of the EU. It gives refugee flow statistics and outlines the performed and planned operation phases (1, 2A, 2B and 3), the corresponding activities of the joint EU forces operating in the Mediterranean and the future strategies for the operation.
One of the main elements within the report is the planned, but still pending transition from Phase 2A (operating in High Seas) to Phase 2B (operating in Libyan Territorial Waters) due to the volatile government situation in Libya, where the building of a ‘Government of National Accord’ (GNA) is still under way.
-
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs does not believe a United Nations panel’s ruling that Julian Assange is being “arbitrarily detained” is legally binding.
Nor has it made any representations to the British or Swedish governments about the ruling.
Department official Jon Philp told a Senate Estimates hearing in Canberra that no representations have been made to Sweden about Assange’s case since December 2011.
-
FOIA reform is (yet) again working its way through the bowels of Congress. Unfortunatley, the FOIA process is resistant to fixing because there’s very little in it for the government. Agencies are supposed to err on the side of openness and transparency, but a stack of broadly-written exemptions makes it’s far too easy for them to operate in opacity.
One of the major problems with the FOIA process is that it takes a lawyer on retainer and lots of money to get the most out of it. For most FOIA filers, an agency’s refusal to respond in a timely fashion or release requested information is the end of the line. Unless they’re working in conjunction with a major journalistic enterprise, the FOIA ball is completely in the government’s court.
-
Florida’s “Sunshine Law” is widely regarded as one of the best state-level open records laws in the nation. Unfortunately, the Florida legislature is now trying to eliminate one of the key components—a measure allowing successful plaintiffs in public records lawsuits to recover attorney’s fees. Currently, reimbursement is mandatory when the plaintiff prevails, but the proposed law would make this a discretionary choice by the judge.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The Saudis said this morning that the Kingdom is willing to freeze production at January levels of output, alongside Russia, Qatar and Venezuela in order to support the international oil price. “Freezing now at the January level is adequate for the market, we believe” said Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister. “We recognise today the supply is going down because of current prices. We also recognise that demand is on the rise.” But what’s really going on?
-
British Gas said gas usage rose by 5% despite the warmest December on record, as 2015 had more normal temperatures compared with a very mild 2014.
-
Finance
-
IKEA cheating EU governments out of massive tax revenue according to new research
-
As an economist, it is a mystery to me how any economist can think that a population that does not produce the larger part of the goods that it consumes can afford to purchase the goods that it consumes. Where does the income come from to pay for imports when imports are swollen by the products of offshored production?
We were told that the income would come from better-paid replacement jobs provided by the “New Economy,” but neither the payroll jobs reports or the US Labor Departments’s projections of future jobs show any sign of this mythical “New Economy.”
There is no “New Economy.” The “New Economy” is like the neoconservatives’ promise that the Iraq war would be a six-week “cake walk” paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, not a $3 trillion dollar expense to American taxpayers (according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and a war that has lasted the entirely of the 21st century to date and is getting more dangerous.
-
The dangers of corporate sovereignty chapters in so-called “free trade” agreements are increasingly well-known. That’s especially the case for Techdirt readers, since we’ve been warning about this parallel legal system, which puts corporations above national laws, for well over three years. Now that the general issues of these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are widely understood, people are starting to explore more specific problems.
-
Censorship
-
Having trouble keeping your secure website secure? Why not try a DMCA takedown request?
Of all the things DMCA takedowns have been used for (mainly removing infringing material, censorship), I’ve yet to see one deployed as an ad hoc extension of a cop shop’s IT department.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Minister, why don’t you, your fellow cabinet members and party members practise democracy, respecting our constitution and rakyat’s voice and rights, telling the truth, respecting the laws, and honesty, for a start?
-
Website shut down amidst crackdown on sites with graphic content
Indonesian officials have banned Tumblr from the country because of its pornographic content. The shutdown came as the government shut down almost 500 sites in total.
An official in Indonesia’s Information Ministry said the site was shut down without informing the Yahoo-owned company first, the BBC reports. Other websites that have been blocked in the country due to their content include Vimeo and Netflix.
-
Indonesia has banned the blogging platform Tumblr, saying that the site distributes pornographic content.
Azhar Hasyim, e-business director at Indonesia’s Information Ministry, told the BBC the decision had been made without consultation with the New York-based company, which is owned by Yahoo.
“We must ban the site first, and tell them later,” Mr Hasyim said.
-
Privacy
-
It’s taken more than a decade, but a critical oversight board tasked with advising the president on the privacy and civil liberties implications of the NSA’s surveillance programs is finally getting a technology adviser who understands how the government’s surveillance tools actually work.
The government announced last week that respected Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin has been appointed the first technology scholar for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—the board that gained notoriety in 2014 after it condemned the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program (.pdf) but found little wrong with its court-ordered bulk collection of data from ISPs like Google and Yahoo.
Until now, the five-member PCLOB has consisted primarily of lawyers, three of whom are former attorneys with the US Department of Justice and only one of whom has a civil liberties background—James X. Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
-
Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that broadband services didn’t need additional consumer privacy protections because “public shame” would keep the broadband industry honest. But in late 2014, Verizon found itself at the center of a privacy scandal after security researchers discovered the company was embedding stealth tracking technology in every packet sent by the company’s wireless users. These “stealth cookies” were being used by Verizon for two years before they were even discovered, and it took another six months of public and press outrage for Verizon to let users opt out.
-
All citizens agree the government should be able to have certain information for investigations, like the data of a dead violent criminal. But it is in moments like this when the government can exploit consensus to obtain power the government does not and should not have.
-
-
-
Analysts and lawmakers warn FBI that ramifications over its demand that Apple unlock San Bernardino killer’s iPhone ‘could snowball around the world’
-
Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoins to a hacker who seized control of the hospital’s computer systems and would give back access only when the money was paid, the hospital’s chief executive said Wednesday.
-
Martin Gottesfeld, the alleged Anonymous hacker responsible for 2014’s hacking attack at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been arrested by the FBI. Martin’s co-workers and relatives contacted the security agency after he went missing, only to be rescued by a Disney Cruise ship.
-
“Tor is essential,” Shari Steele says over the phone. “Tor is so critically important. We can’t afford to not have Tor.”
That’s the kind of thing someone might say when all hell is about to break loose, but Steele sounds downright ecstatic. Over her career, she has taken on United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She built the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) into an international powerhouse for protecting online rights.
Today, she has a new mission, perhaps her heaviest challenge yet: Take the Internet’s most powerful privacy tool mainstream.
-
THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH has revealed the names, addresses, signatures, dates of birth and mobile phone numbers of hundreds of students on its public website in a breach of the Data Protection Act.
The posting of the details, all belonging to research students, was reported to the BBC by one of those affected after they found that their personal information could be viewed by a simple Google search.
The university insisted that the details have been removed and has released a statement explaining that Louise Nadal, the institution’s secretary, is “sorry” about the incident.
-
Personal details about hundreds of London-based research students were posted online in an apparent breach of data privacy laws.
The University of Greenwich has apologised and said it is in the process of contacting those affected.
The matter was brought to the BBC’s attention by one of the students, who discovered the information could be found via a Google search.
They also flagged the matter to the UK’s data watchdog.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has confirmed that an investigation is under way.
-
Do you have a teen driver in your household and want to know every time they get a little overzealous with the accelerator? Or maybe you’re pretty sure your spouse’s frequent trips to “the office” are not so innocent? If so, then an upcoming update for Verizon’s “hum” in-car smart device might be just what you’re looking for.
-
-
Bureaucracy simulators received a new lease on life thanks to Papers, Please, which tasked players with deciding, via a bunch of paperwork, whether citizens were fit to cross a border or not. Need to Know takes that template in an interesting new direction, placing you as an agent with the Department of Liberty, an organisation that monitors personal data in order to determine whether someone is dangerous or not.
-
-
-
-
-
Laura Poitras—the Academy and Pulitzer Prize Award-winning documentary filmmaker behind CITIZENFOUR—has a brand new show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
-
Last year’s deadly attacks in Paris “would not have happened” without the use of encrypted communications to enable the perpetrators to avoid detection, the NSA chief said in an interview.
-
In an interview with Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff published today, National Security Agency director Michael Rogers declared that the terrorists involved in last November’s attacks in Paris used at least some encrypted communications to plan their actions, preventing NSA from being able to warn French officials in advance. Because of encrypted communications, he said, “we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
UK Home Secretary Theresa May has echoed the sentiments of the FBI, GCHQ and the Obama administration that strong end-to-end encryption should not be allowed to interfere with police investigations.
“The British government believes encryption plays a valuable role in today’s society. It helps keep people’s personal data and intellectual property safe from theft by cyber criminals. It helps our economy grow and prosper. But as President Obama has said, we cannot be in a situation where technology is also used by terrorists and criminals to escape justice,” she said during a recent Five Country Ministerial meeting in Washington DC.
“The government has a responsibility to protect national security and ensure public safety. Communications service providers have a responsibility to their customers to ensure their privacy. Together we can find a way that achieves both.”
-
But, really, the main thing that gets me about this report is that we keep seeing Congress and the President going on and on and on about cybersecurity threats against the US — and yet basically the only significant examples all seem to be the US attacking other countries. The inbound attacks — such as the OPM hack or even the Sony hack — actually seem fairly minor in comparison. Those are just hacks to get at data, not to actually break stuff. Yes, it’s possible that US officials are freaking out because now they really understand the depth of what can be done thanks to the NSA doing it first, but maybe we should be thinking about dealing with that fact and shoring up our defenses (and not giving reasons to others to emulate us), rather than creating faux moral panics.
-
-
-
-
Last night, we wrote about a judge’s order commanding Apple to help the FBI effectively decrypt the contents of Syed Farook’s iPhone 5C. Farook, of course, along with his wife, was responsible for the San Bernardino attacks a few months ago. Many of the initial reports about the order suggested that it simply ordered Apple to break the encryption — which made many people scoff. However, as we noted, that was not accurate. Instead, it was ordering something much more specific: that Apple create a special firmware that would disable two distinct security features within iOS — one that would effectively wipe the encrypted contents following 10 failed attempts at entering the unlocking PIN (by throwing away the stored decryption key) and a second one that would progressively slow down the amount of time between repeated attempts at entering the PIN.
-
-
Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, says he disagrees with FBI Director James Comey that the government should have backdoor access to encrypted files.
-
-
The Secure Chorus Group is announced to support and promote interoperable, secure communications for enterprise and government.
Secure Chorus is an independent, not-for-profit group with founding members including Armour Communications, BT, CESG, Cryptify, Cyber Y, Finmeccanica, Samsung, SQR Systems and Vodafone. Further members will be announced soon.
-
It’s not often that UK organisations have banded together to create a security standard with global significance but that is what appears to be happening with a new GCHQ-backed initiative called Secure Chorus, announced on 15 February 2016 at the Mobile World Congress (MWC).
The website outlining Secure Chorus is still pretty sparse when it comes to technical explanation so we thought we’d look a little deeper at what it is being proposed and what influence it might come to have on
-
A federal judge’s order directing Apple to help the FBI break into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone effectively “forces private-sector companies like Apple to be used as an arm of law enforcement,” one of the most prominent pro-encryption voices in Congress said Tuesday night.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer-science graduate, wondered where the use of the All Writs Act—on which the magistrate judge based her ruling—might lead.
-
Civil Rights
-
This seems like a good, solid arrangement—if the goal is to produce the most bloated, corrupt, criminal, warmongering, terrorist-coddling, bankrupt government the Earth has ever known—it is, indeed, all of these things. But it has just one tiny flaw: getting people to vote for you by teaching them to hate the other side is effective, but it’s purely negative. To introduce a positive, aspirational element, it is necessary to somehow make people feel that it is possible to bring about political change by voting for someone within the Democratic or the Republican party. Of course, this is sheer nonsense, because the only people pulling the strings are the ones who write the checks, and you don’t get to vote for any of them. But people don’t want to believe that they are completely powerless, and the same people who fell for it in thinking that they could bring about change by voting for Obama are now falling for it again, thinking that they can bring about change by voting for Bernie. No, you can’t possibly ever change things by voting for the Democratic/Republican duopoly. Oh, and you can’t possibly ever change things by voting against it either. Sorry, Jill Stein.
-
His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.
-
But in spite of these rights, experience has taught me that — on the basis of my faith alone — some people will never treat me as a fellow American. Last fall, I was denied service at a commercial gun range in my home state of Oklahoma as a result of the prejudice and misinformation that caused this business to declare itself a “Muslim-free establishment.” Working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, I filed a federal lawsuit alleging that my civil rights were violated that day.
-
The Court of Appeal has declared that Government changes to the rules which allow victims of domestic abuse to obtain legal aid are legally flawed.
Campaigners welcomed the ruling and said it was an important recognition of “women’s real life experiences of domestic violence”.
The changes were made in 2013 by former lord chancellor and justice secretary Chris Grayling and were introduced as part of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (2012).
-
France is set to give all workers the “right to disconnect” from work emails as the scale of “burn-out” among employees draws government concern.
Hidden hours of work outside France’s well-known 35 hour week has led the country’s labour ministry to want to preserve the sanctity of their private life in law.
Myriam El Khomri, the labour minister, is still thrashing out the details of an idea first put forward in a report by Bruno Mettling, director general of mobile giant Orange, in a new raft of labour laws to emerge soon.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that no spectrum will be given for free, even as telecom operators have demanded a cut in the proposed auction price for airwaves. The minister was talking to ET, when he highlighted how the public sector is busy combining infrastructure and leveraging the expertise of BSNL and the postal department so that the government plays is in a situation for a competitive battle with private players.
-
Over the last five years GoGo has effectively cornered about 80% of the in-flight broadband market, allowing the company to lag a little bit when it comes to giving a damn about customer satisfaction. And while the 3 Mbps per plane is starting to grow a little long in the tooth, the company has been raising prices for the service slowly but dramatically (though filters, throttling, and fake SSL certs are still free of charge).
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
When the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was first released in November last year, it included provisions dictating the kinds of penalties that should be available in cases of copyright infringement.
-
Can there be a more challenging IP issue than the copyright-design law overlap? Former Guest Kat, Valentina Torelli, has reported on the recent decision by the Supreme Court of Italy in this regard.
-
The hit show ‘Frozen’ has delighted children around the world since 2013 but there will be no ice-based fun in the UK this holiday week. Following a licensing mix up and threats from Disney, a tribute show planned to begin tomorrow has been canceled, leaving around 1,000 kids with melting dreams.
-
We already wrote about how CBS fucked up internet streaming of the Grammy’s on Monday night, but a few folks have sent in the various stories about how Grammy’s boss Neil Portnow did his now annual whine about how evil tech companies don’t pay musicians enough, and how if we don’t start giving musicians more money ISIS will win and the 12 year old who just performed on piano might starve or something.
-
We’ve argued at great length over the importance of the preamble of that section, “to promote the progress,” but many people are confused about the terms “science” and “useful arts.” In fact, many people not well-versed in the issue often get the two backwards and think that “science” refers to inventions, and thus enables a patent system, while “useful arts” refers to “artistic works” and thus enables the copyright system. The opposite is actually the case. “Science” at the time the Constitution was written was actually synonymous with “learning” and “education” (while “useful arts” was a term meaning invention and new productivity tools).
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.17.16
Posted in Patents at 9:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When your income comes from (in)famous patent trolls
Summary: Critique of the ‘content’ and angle from sites for (and by) patent maximalists, notably IAM ‘magazine’
THE EPO and EPO-funded media are not a source of information but they are often the target of criticism or ridicule. Now that the EPO promotes monopolies on plants (to increase the number of granted patents, irrespective of the overall impact on society) we wish to highlight CEVA et al with their pro-GMO (i.e. patent monopoly) agenda, as covered in IP Watch the other day [1]. This is a fantastic example of the harms of patent maximalism — something that EPO-funded sites sure love and even take pride in. Let’s look at IAM ‘magazine’, based on the past few days’ articles.
“It glorifies what the site profits from, but at whose expense?”“IP Hall of Fame” is a term like that’s being used by IAM right now. Like “Monopoly of fame” or “Protectionism of the year”, one has to be pretty brainwashed to really ‘dig’ into that. Then again, what can be expected from a site which targets ‘IP’ lawyers? It glorifies what the site profits from, but at whose expense?
According to this article, the patent troll of Ericsson still attacks Android OEMs (impacting Linux, by extension). To quote: “The IPKat has been aware for some time that the Patents Court, in the person of Mr Justice Birss, has been devoting considerable time to a series of cases concerning mobile phone technology (Unwired Planet v Huawei and Samsung).”
“BlackBerry, despite its embrace of Android, will quite likely troll other Android OEMs with patents.”According to IAM, BlackBerry is now acting somewhat like a troll, much as we foresaw and predicted. But IAM uses terms like “monetisation”, which are effectively euphemisms (how about “corporate foodchain” as a euphemism?). To quote: “When BlackBerry concluded a cross-licensing agreement with Cisco last June, with a provision for the Californian company to pay an on-going royalty, this blog stated that the deal could mark the start of the Canadian telecoms and wireless business becoming a major player in the patent monetisation space.”
BlackBerry, despite its embrace of Android, will quite likely troll other Android OEMs with patents. Microsoft, according to this IAM report, is hoarding LG patents that it can later use to extort (or tax) Android devices more than it already does. To quote IAM, “20 US assets covering mobile telecoms assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC; also 44 assets on 9th April.”
“…there is already patent trolling in China, but the opaque court system changes all the risk equations…”
– James SalsmanThe euphemism “monetisation” again appeared in IAM around the same time, in relation to China’s SIPO. The lenient patent system in China (like USPTO in the US) could bring in the trolls; maybe that’s what what “monetisation” now means in IAM (if not NPE). As Jack Ellis put it, in order to sell the “monetisation” (trolls) agenda in China (shaming tactics): “Protectionist, biased, anti-foreigner: those are kinds of labels that are often attached to China’s IP enforcement system by rights holders from outside of the country.”
As James Salsman put it when asked, “there is already patent trolling in China, but the opaque court system changes all the risk equations [...] I lived in Shanghai working at @EFLabs where patents prevented pronunciation intelligibility remediation software improvements” (the latter, with context, can be found here).
The bottom line is, the Web continues to be saturated with coverage about patent matters composed by people who profit from it. Some even receive money from patent offices. Therein exists a real, profound problem. Public interests are ignored at best and habitually trampled. It’s everyone’s ethical imperative to change that, or else very few people will hoard all the wealth and many productive human activities (such as sharing, trade, invention and manufacturing) will effectively be banned except when permitted by those few wealth hoarders. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
At issue, according to a joint press release (Via Campesina, Grain, and ETC Group), is the agenda, which they find unbalanced as it includes speakers from industry such as, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, CropLife International, and CEVA among others, which they say are promoting GMOs, while they found only one speaker openly critical of GMOs.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Patents at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![Ink](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ink-price.jpg)
See original article
Summary: A review of press coverage regarding the Lexmark patent case, where gross overpricing of ink was defended by the Federal Circuit
THE news has been dominated, to some degree, by reports about the Federal Circuit doing a disservice to society (yet again).
As the EFF put it this week: “The Federal Circuit’s rule privileges patent owners over consumers, and helps ensure even less competition in the resale market. We hope the Supreme Court takes a hard look at this case, and restores consumers’ rights in products they purchase.”
“The Federal Circuit’s rule privileges patent owners over consumers, and helps ensure even less competition in the resale market.”
–EFFWithout a doubt, many lawyers’ firms and lawyers’ sites are writing about it right now, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14].
Worth noting is the fact that legal sites wrote like 10 times more articles than general news sites (or technology sites) about this case, e.g. [1, 2]. A lot of people don’t ‘get’ patents; neither do journalists. They’d use silly phrases like “invent patents” or “make patents”. The propaganda worked on them.
“Here, the court held that this type of restriction is enforceable for Lexmark, but only because Lexmark’s product is covered by patent rights.”
–Dennis CrouchHere is the best report we’ve found on this subject (so far). TechDirt, which has covered this subject for over a decade (going back to 2004 if not earlier), wrote: “if you fail to block competition with one kind, apparently you can try, try again with another kind — and eventually you’ll end up in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who will mess everything up and kill off the competition. Printer company Lexmark has been at war with alternative suppliers of ink for well over a decade. As you may be aware, printer ink is sold at a ridiculously high markup, such that one estimate (from over a decade ago) noted that in order to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with printer ink, it would cost you $5.9 billion (yes, with a “b”) at the checkout counter of your local office-supply retailer. The printer makers have notably taken a “give away cheap crappy printers at a low cost, and make it up in seriously overpricing the ink” strategy to their businesses. This kind of thing works great until someone tries to step in and sell competing ink.”
Suffice to say, this case is about keeping the prices artificially high (higher by several orders of magnitude than the production cost). A response posted by Dennis Crouch said: “I was surprised at the en banc Federal Circuit’s decision in Lexmark to re-affirm Mallinckrodt — giving a seller power to block future resale and reuse of a patented product. My surprise is grounded in the longstanding tradition in American property law of promoting the free-flow of commerce by refusing to enforce servitudes that limit the alienation or use of goods. To be clear, courts have often enforced contracts between willing parties to this end, but those same courts have refused to allow restrictive covenants to cling to the good and bind any subsequent purchaser. Here, the court held that this type of restriction is enforceable for Lexmark, but only because Lexmark’s product is covered by patent rights.”
“Remember that CAFC is responsible for many other equally tactless decisions.”It was not the first time that Crouch’s blog covered this case in recent days (we mentioned this a few times in last week’s posts). Basically, Lexmark twists and bends the law for price-fixing/price hikes. Other companies, such as HP, would no doubt benefit from this, at the expense of the public. To quote Crouch’s blog: “The presumptions are of some importance for those operating on the ground. Here, the US court will presume that foreign sales of a product do not exhaust the US patent right. Thus, an importer must obtain a release/license of those rights to avoid liability (assuming a valid and otherwise infringed patent). Of course, that license right may be implied based upon providing notice of the importation intent. In addition, depending upon the location of sale, UCC 2-312 (or its foreign equivalent) may create a presumption of license depending upon the situation.”
When laws are being passed to protect the business models or large corporations at the expense of the public, are the laws at all legitimate? Should we not feel free to challenge them or better yet, engage in civil disobedience? Remember that CAFC is responsible for many other equally tactless decisions. It was also CAFC that got software patents started, not just in the US but in the whole world. In the past we showed evidence of institutional corruption inside CAFC. █
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
–Oscar Wilde
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Further Recent Posts
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)