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04.11.16

La Iglesia de EPO: ¿Como el Equipo de Battistelli Arregló El Despido de la Gente No lo Suficiéntemente Leales a Ellos? – Parte I

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Article as ODF

Publicadoen Europa, Patentes at 3:51 pm Por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

God Blatterstelli

Sumario: Una nueva serie que en retrospectiva mira como Battistelli apiló la cubierta no sólo al aplastar la vigilancia pero también al amasar instrumentos de coerción contra los empleados, con varios pretextos para despedirlos
Al final de la semana pasada compátimos una página de la CoC de la EPO. Hay mucho más que decir al respecto y este largo post dará ayudará a la EPO con transparencia, la que Battistelli ama tanto que presume de ello (sin hacer nada por el estilo).

Aquí es la página/hoja en su totalidad:

EPO CoC page

Como recordatorio, en palabras de un lector, un montón de esto se relaciona con las actividades antisindicales que hemos estado viendo desde finales de 2015 (que realmente se intensificaron en ese momento pero no empezaron allí). Esto es lo que Battistelli y col empujado a través de personal:

EPO on protecting staff

Lo de arriba fué una culminación de algo que él había estado cocinándo hace rato. Consideren el pleno CoC:

Europaisches Patentamt

European Patent Office

Office européen des brevets

Valores del servicio público de EPO

-El respeto por el individuo

-La integridad y la rendición de cuentas

-La imparcialidad y la objetividad

-El cumplimiento de las normas de derecho

-Calidad y profesionalismo

Los valores del servicio público de la Oficina Europea de Patentes son una guía para el comportamiento que debe promover el desarrollo de una cultura de respeto. Los valores son: el respeto por el individuo; integridad y rendición de cuentas; imparcialidad y objetividad; el cumplimiento de las normas de derecho; calidad y profesionalismo.
Estos valores, que son todos de igual rango, guían nuestras acciones, ya que apoyan la misión de la EPO, que es apoyar la innovación, la competitividad y el crecimiento económico en toda Europa a través de un compromiso de alta calidad y un servicio eficiente entregado en virtud del Convenio sobre la Patente Europea (EPC)
Estos valores se aplican a todas las personas que trabajan en y para la Oficina. Se espera que el personal con responsabilidades de gestión para promover estos valores por el liderazgo y el ejemplo.
Este documento no crear otro marco legal y se refiere a las regulaciones existentes de EPO que establecen las obligaciones formales de su personal. En el caso de cualquier conflicto entre el contenido de este código de conducta y obligaciones formales en virtud del Reglamento EPC o servicio, entonces esas obligaciones tienen prioridad.
Enfrentado a la infracción individual o colectiva de estos valores, todo el personal debe poder ejercer libremente y de buena fe su derecho a llamar la atención sobre ella sin temor a represalias. En particular, podrán pedir a su supervisor o compañero de Recursos Humanos, o la unidad responsable de Auditoría Interna y Control para el consejo. Me comprometo a respetar nuestros valores y asegurarse de que se respeten.
Benoît Battistelli

Presidente
Respeto Por El Individuo
Los servicios prestados por la Oficina son el resultado del trabajo realizado por los miembros del personal cualificado y motivado. Por consiguiente, la Oficina reconoce el valor individual de cada empleado. El respeto mutuo, la dignidad, el respeto de los derechos humanos, no discriminación y la promoción de la diversidad son nuestros principios rectores.
Nuestras Palabras Clave
• DIGNIDAD

• NO DISCRIMINACIÓN

• TOLERANCIA

• CONFIANZA Y LA FIABILIDAD

• ESCUCHAR Y COMPRENDER

• CORTESÍA

• APERTURA

• DIÁLOGO

• SALUD

• LA SEGURIDAD
Nuestro Enfoque
Compartimos el compromiso de la comunidad internacional de respetar los derechos humanos.
Nos esforzamos por crear un ambiente de trabajo marcado por el respeto mutuo.
El respeto mutuo, la confianza y la capacidad de escuchar son elementos indispensables en nuestras relaciones profesionales. habilidades y talentos de cada individuo merece ser reconocido.
Tomamos las medidas necesarias para proporcionar un entorno de trabajo seguro y saludable.
Buscamos promover la diversidad y la igualdad de oportunidades entre los empleados.
Nos hemos comprometido a no permitir que se den situaciones que podría ser perjudicial para la dignidad de nuestros colegas. Hacemos todo lo posible para evitar cualquier tipo de discriminación o acoso.
NTEGRIDAD Y RESPONSABILIDAD
La integridad es un criterio irrenunciable para nuestra conducta profesional. Implica actuar con responsabilidad, rendición de cuentas, la lealtad, discreción y sentido común. Nos resistimos a todas las formas de corrupción.
Nuestras Palabras Clave
• HONESTIDAD

• LEALTAD

• EQUIDAD

• CONFIDENCIALIDAD

• EJEMPLO
Nuestro enfoque
Actuamos con honestidad, responsabilidad y discreción.
Actuamos con lealtad y exclusivamente en interés de la Oficina. Llevamos a cabo nuestras tareas bajo la autoridad del Presidente de la Oficina, a excepción de las responsabilidades o funciones específicas expresamente establecidas en el Reglamento EPC o servicio.
Respetamos el ámbito de nuestras responsabilidades y de las tareas que se nos confían. Cuando la delegación de tareas, seguimos siendo responsables de su ejecución y resultados, y por lo tanto los administradores de ejercer la supervisión y el control adecuado.
Respetamos la confidencialidad de la información: no revelamos la información confidencial recibida en el curso de nuestro trabajo a personas no autorizadas, ni la usamos para nuestro propio beneficio o en detrimento de la Oficina.
Nuestro deber hacer nuestro trabajo a la mejor de nuestras capacidades también implica la obligación de compartir con nuestros colegas de la información necesaria para llevar a cabo sus propias funciones.
Estamos comprometidos con la lucha contra todo tipo de fraude.
Somos cuidadosos en nuestras comunicaciones externas y respetamos a nuestros deberes de tacto y discreción de la Oficina. En particular, nos abstendremos de hacer una declaración que podría ser perjudicial para él.
Imparcialidad y objetividad
La Oficina y su personal deben permanecer independiente de todos los gobiernos, las autoridades, organizaciones o personas ajenas a la organización. Nuestra conducta debe ser imparcial y reflejan que la independencia. Abordamos situaciones que pudieran afectar nuestra objetividad.
Nuestras Palabras Clave
• INDEPENDENCIA

• NEUTRALIDAD

• IGUALDAD DE TRATO

• INMUNIDAD
Nuestro enfoque
Buscamos asegurar que nada de lo que ocurre bajo nuestra responsabilidad es o podría parecer un acto directo o indirecto de apoyo preferente de un grupo político, económico, ideológico o religioso.
Nos abstendremos de hacer o decir cualquier cosa que pueda llamar a nuestra imparcialidad y objetividad en tela de juicio.
Nuestras acciones cuando se toman decisiones o se razonada proyectos principales.
Tenemos que ser imparcial y objetivo. Somos conscientes del riesgo de posibles conflictos de intereses, ya sea real o aparente. Siempre que sea posible, los evitamos; donde no, damos a conocer y administrarlas.
Regalos u otros favores podrían comprometer nuestra imparcialidad profesional. Por lo tanto no solicitamos ninguna. Y, sin el permiso del Presidente, no aceptamos ninguno?
CUMPLIMIENTO DE LAS NORMAS DE DERECHO
La Oficina tiene su propio sistema legal, que deben ser respetados.
La Oficina y su personal deben respetar las leyes nacionales aplicables del país en el que están y deben cumplir con sus obligaciones legales y financieras.
Nuestras palabras clave
• LEGALIDAD

• JUSTICIA

• DERECHOS Y OBLIGACIONES
Nuestro enfoque
Respetamos la letra y el espíritu de las normas y reglamentos de la Oficina.
Aplicamos estas reglas y regulaciones justa y de buena fe.
Actuamos con profesionalidad y sentido de la responsabilidad social en la observación de las leyes aplicables, y respetando las costumbres y tradiciones de los países en los que trabajamos, lo que contribuye de forma responsable para el bienestar de la sociedad.
Nuestros privilegios e inmunidades no nos impedirá el cumplimiento de nuestras obligaciones bajo las leyes nacionales aplicables.
Calidad y profesionalismo
La forma en que cada uno de nosotros hace nuestro trabajo se refleja en el rendimiento general de la Oficina. Nuestro compromiso con la alta calidad y el servicio público eficiente es una contribución a la innovación, la competitividad y el crecimiento económico en Europa.
Nuestras palabras clave
• INNOVACIÓN

• COMPETENCIA

• PROFESIONALIDAD

• FORMACIÓN

• EXCELENCIA

• EFICIENCIA
Nuestro enfoque
Le damos de nuestro mejor esfuerzo para lograr nuestros objetivos profesionales y para ofrecer un servicio público eficiente.
Trabajamos con colegas en un espíritu de trabajo en equipo y la cooperación.
Gestionamos recursos de la Oficina de manera adecuada y eficiente, en línea con los principios de economía y buena gestión financiera.
Nos esforzamos para mantener, adaptar y desarrollar habilidades en la Oficina. Con el objetivo de garantizar la sostenibilidad, actuamos de una perspectiva estratégica y de largo plazo, no en nuestros propios intereses inmediatos.
Hacemos todo lo posible para alcanzar altos estándares internacionales y las mejores prácticas

Lo de arriba se hizo available ampliamente lo que debería haberse publicado previamente. Ayuda por acountabilidad (para la gerencia, no sólo aquellos dirigidos por una gerencia abusiba).

Más adelante en la semana mostraremos como Battistelli esencialmente se las arregló para despedir aquellas personas a quienes vió como un obstáculo para su agenda (y la de sus jefes corpórativos). Sintonicenos para más.

Resumen de Patentes: Systema/Paisaje de Patentes de los EE.UU. Descalificado, Corrupto, Saturado Con Trolles de Patentes, y Financiado Por y Para Microsoft

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Article as ODF

Publicado en Apple, Microsoft, Patentes at 11:21 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Todavía metiéndo sus sucios dedos en muchos pasteles de patentes

HNBA Microsoft

Este artículo es un sumario de las reciéntes noticias de la USPTO. Es tan comprehensible como es posible and se enfoca, como es usual en patentes de software. Ellas son de mayor relevancia para nosotros.
“Cualquiera puede ver que la codicia de la USPTO (por ambos poder y dinero) esta yéndo muy, muy lejos.”
El Control de Cálidad Tirado por la Ventana

Patently-O, una fuente decente de información acerca de patentes (aunque un poco subjetiva a veces, lo que es entendible dado la audiencia a la que se dirige), miró reciéntes cambios al infringimiento e e invalidez de patentes. Este último artículo dice que “el tribunal de distrito rechazó la petición de vacatur – encontrando que la decisión la PTO no” desplaza a un juicio tribunal de distrito “y que sería” contrario al interés público permitir que un titular de patente para superar un juicio de nulidad simplemente por “la modificación de sus reivindicaciones no válidos.” [...] lo que está claro es que aquí el nivel de la reivindicación y preclusión que se aplicará en el futuro cuando Cardpool afirma la patente contra un tercero.”
“De lo que tratámos aqui es de un troll de patentes que dice ‘ser dueño’ de las actividades de scanning.”
Miren a lo que la USPTO está haciéndo. Básicamente como es usual, habiéndo visto que las Cortes invalidan muchas se sus falsas patentes (el mínimo control de cálidad tiene la culpa aquí), Ahora parece reforzar / mejorar su negocio haciendo una burla de la acción de la justicia. ¿Qué es esto, un país del tercer mundo? Cualquier persona puede ver que, probablemente, la codicia de USPTO (por ambos poder y dinero) va demasiado lejos. La USPTO es amigable a los demandante de usar porque ellos son sus “clientes” (solicitantes). La USPTO debe ser mantenida fuera del proceso legal completamente. Lo mismo va para la EPO (cada vez más abusiva al respecto bajo el régimen del Emperador Battistelli). Algunas personas están bombardeando el sistema de patentes con herramientas / los robots más automatizados (como las solicitudes de DMCA que son falsas y servidos por algoritmos, o la actividad comercial en los mercados de valores, también el uso de algoritmos). Ver este nuevo comunicado de prensa acerca de una “solicitud de patente de software patentado”. Estos tontas ayudas, inducir al error a los examinadores. Incluso dicen “proprietario” como un término de marketing. “Cada unidad sangrienta va a utilizar componentes de software propiedad celosamente guardados por las patentes”, dijo este artículo de hace 2 dias..
“Patently-O notó que en algunos casos particulares incluso se cuélan leyes antimonopolio.”
En otros nuevos posts de blogs Patently-O el troll de patentes MPHJ es revisado (que puede traído a Europa con ganchos por la UPC tal vez, para demandar a todo aquel que utiliza un escáner si todo sale Battistelli tiene planeado). “HP desafió la reivindicación 13, tanto en el terreno obviedad y anticipación”, señaló Patentemente-O, después de MPHJ ya había demandado a tantas personas que habitualmente utilizan un escáner en una empresa (y, a menudo extorsiónado “dinero de protección” sin reparos) . Lo que nos ocupamos aquí es un troll de patentes que afirma que “posee” actividad de análisisDe lo que tratámos aqui es de un troll de patentes que dice ‘ser dueño’ de las actividades de scanning.. Es realmente tan malo como suena. No se necesita ninguna exageración, por lo que resultó en un montón de cobertura de la prensa en los últimos años.

Corrupción Institucional en el Sistema de Patentes de los EE.UU.

Otro nuevo artículo de Patently-O trata de un“caso de patentes en que ambos acusado y acusador presentarón falsos testminio de expertos.”
“Cuando el sistema de patentes de una nación sirve principalmente para proteger a un gigante (y, a menudo un monopolio financiado por los contribuyentes-) la percepción de la corrupción aumentará inevitablemente.”

Sí, es agradable tener la “justicia” … el que tiene los bolsillos más (o menos que perder) tiende a ganar. Quién se beneficia de todo este caos? Patently-O señala que en algunos casos particulares, incluso se infiltran las leyes antimonopolio. Para citar este nuevo post acerca de GlaxoSmithKline (GSK): “La pregunta en el caso, ahora pendiente en la Corte Suprema de los EE.UU. Es si esa estructura licenciadora puede levantar un plausible reclamo anti-monopolio bajo F.T.C. v. Actavis, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2223 (2013).”

Cuando el sistema de patentes de una nación sirve principalmente para proteger a un gigante (y, a menudo un monopolio financiado por los contribuyentes-) la percepción de la corrupción aumentará inevitablemente. Quién está siendo servido aquí? ¿El público que en consecuencia será excesivamente sobrecargado y tendrá pocas (o ninguna) alternativas? Volviendo al falso testimonio, Patently-O escribió: “En el interrogatorio, de Rembrand el perito técnico Dr. Thomas Beebe” drásticamente “cambió su testimonio en cuanto a su metodología para comprobar si las lentes de contacto acusados eran “suaves”Después de ser llamado por el perito de la defensa el Dr. Christopher Bielawski, el jurado no encontró alguna infracción. Después del juicio, el tribunal de distrito se dobló para abajo concediendo también a J & Js propuesta de JMOL de no infracción. El testimonio de Bielawski puede haber sido particularmente dañina – con su declaración: “Usted no debe confiar en el doctor Beebe, y usted debe tirar su testimonio, no en parte, pero en su conjunto. Ustedes no deben confiar en el doctor Beebe.”
“Un sistema de patentes secretivo derrota el propósito verdadero (objetivo original) de el sitema de patentes.”
A juzgar cualquier caso en absoluto basado en testimonio oral/escrito es peligroso y equivocado. Es como usar las palabras de policías o algunos transeúntes errántes como prueba en los juicios penales. Cualquier “prueba” es la forma más débil de la evidencia porque no hay manera de determinar/verificar las afirmaciones. Por otra parte, las personas a menudo son corruptibles y cuando hay mucho en juego en un ensayo (no sólo la prisión, pero una gran cantidad de dinero) hay un montón de espacio para el abuso, como el soborno. Recuerda esos casos infames de Apple con el jefe de jurado Hogan? Probablemente mala conducta en el juicio. No olviden el caso de corruption en la Corte de Apelaciones por el Circuíto Federal (CAFC) tampoco.
Apresurándo el FEP celebra los avances en un caso de patentes en el que intervino en hace un año. Se dice que “ha puesto mucho tiempo y esfuerzo en conseguir este documento en un caso sin sellar. Por desgracia, es sólo uno de los innumerables documentos que se selló de forma rutinaria sin una buena razón en casos de patentes de todo el país. Apenas la semana pasada le preguntamos al tribunal en un caso de patentes diferentes para quitar el sello de documentos que es casi seguro que no debería haber sido ocultados por completo de la vista pública.”

“Vale la pena añadir que, si bien el número de demandas no disminuyerón demostrablemente eso no cuenta la historia completa por más de una razón única y hay que tener en general, con gran grado de precaución conclusiones que acompañan a esta, por ejemplo, que las cosas mejoran por sí mismos, por lo tanto, no es necesaria ninguna intervención.”

Con vistas a los trolls de patentes en Post-Alice Época
Un sistema de patentes secretivo derrota el propósito verdadero (objetivo original) de el sitema de patentes. Este tipo de secreto dA lugar a operaciones secretas clándestinas, tales como los hábituales de Intellectual Ventures, que cuenta con miles de empresas fantasmas. Este tipo de sistema (inexplicable y no reglamentado) está madura para el abuso de parte de los trolls.
“Los casos de patentes que se presentaron en los tribunales de los distritos de los EE.UU.se redujo en el primer trimestre”, escribió MIP, “una disminución del 39% en el cuarto trimestre y un 34% en el primer trimestre del año pasado, de acuerdo con las patentes unificadas. Un análisis del Distrito Este de Texas presentación revela un descenso desproporcionadamente grande en el distrito “(que es el resumen de un artículo del paywalled MIP).
Esto se hace eco en varios otros sitios web que hacen referencia a los mismos datos y concluyen que se trata de trolls y el Distrito Este de Texas. Esta es una visión un tanto simplista, porque en realidad, como hemos señalado el día antes de ayer, también hay asentamientos fuera de los tribunales y podría ser digno de mirar cuál es la proporción entre estas demandas de patentes implicase una especie de patentes de software, por lo tanto, la identificación de una correlación entre la escala y el alcance de los litigios de patentes en lugar de sede demanda, el modelo de negocio de un demandante y así sucesivamente. En realidad, algunas de estas encuestas son política o comercialmente motivados, o los han creado los académicos (o grupos de presión) para adaptarse a una narrativa particular y luego presionar por una especie particular de la reforma (por ejemplo, una “reforma” de aumentar la seguridad en torno a las patentes de software en los EE.UU. – cosa que Kappos hace cabildeándo con el dinero de los agresores de patentes, en este caso La Sagrada Familia: IBM, Microsoft y Apple entre otros).
Vale la pena añadir que, si bien el número de demandas no disminuyerón demostrablemente eso no cuenta la historia completa por más de una razón única y hay que tener en general, con gran grado de precaución conclusiones que acompañan a esta, por ejemplo, que las cosas mejoran por sí mismos, por lo tanto, no es necesaria ninguna intervención.
Como encontramos a principios de año, un veredicto a favor de un troll de patentes como VirnetX puede costar una gran cantidad de dinero. VirnetX, de acuerdo a Matt Levy de CCIA, ahora niega que es un troll de patentes, lo que por supuesto es algo rísible. “Un troll de patentes es,” Levy explica, “esenciálmente una compañíá que reclama que otra esta usando patentes que ella ha adquirido. (Por comparación el FTC dijo eso “El modelo de negocios [de esa compañías de aserción de patentes -leáse TROLLS] se enfoca en comprar y asertar esas patentes contra fabricantes usando esa tecnologíá, en ves de desarrollar y transferir esa tecnologíá.” Brian Kahin describe a los trolles de patentes como compañías cuyos negocios son infringidos y cuyo producto es la litigación.)”
Si uno pregunat al ‘magazine’ IAM, tal cosa no existe y difícil sorprende que grandes trolles de patentes están pagando a IAM.
Hablando de pagos, Oracle había pagado Florian Müller, así que no es demasiado sorprendente que se puso a favor de Oracle en su último artículo sobre la guerra de Oracle contra Android. Müller pasó gran parte de su vida haciendo campaña contra las patentes de software y esperamos que esto precederá el deseo de hacer dinero con el llamado contrato de ‘consulta’.
“El 22 de marzo de 2016,” dijo que este nuevo artículo, el Tribunal de Distrito para el Distrito de Delaware emitió un dictamen en un caso Memorando subtitulado caso Tree House Avatar LLC v. Válvula Corp., en la que las reivindicaciones de patentes de software sobrevivieron un reto la patentabilidad. ”
Alice no siempre mata a las patentes de software, pero lo hace la mayoría de las veces. Otro nuevo artículo habla del dictámen Mayo/Alice (ambas decisiónes de SCOTUS). Ahora que Scalia no está en SCOTUS alguna gente se pregunta que pasará con los casos de patentes. ¿La palabra “T” (trolles) saldrá también ent trascripciónes o incluso en dictámenes/determinaciones fomales? Aquellos que discuten en contra de la reforma contra los trolles de patentes están citados en este nuevo artículo que dice: “Jessica Sebeok, VP Asociado en la Association of American Universities, cree que las Universidades sufrirán las consecuencias si el Presidente Barack Obama tiene éxito en hacer difícil por dueños de patentes defender su propiedad intelectual.”

“Y alguna gente continúa diciéndo al mundo que Microsoft ha cambiado o que hay un‘nuevo’, más gentil Microsoft…”

Pues bien, las universidades que se comportan esencialmente como secuestradores de patentes o trolles de alimentación con sus patentes (nos dieron muchos ejemplos de ello anteriórmente) podrían sufrir. Y si es así, eso es una buena cosa. El artículo posterior dice: “coalición de negocios Unidas para la reforma de patentes – cuyos miembros incluyen aliados influyentes de la administración de Obama como Google, Amazon y General Motors – y otros partidarios de la HR 9 aspirar a impedir la pesca de arrastre de patente por lo que es más riesgoso para presentar demandas por infracción de patentes e imponiendo costos adicionales de los demandantes, pero AAU argumenta que esta medida represente una presión indebida sobre los legíimos titulares de patentes .”

Microsoft Licensing Sigue siendo un Activo TROLL de Patentes

En lo anterior, ninguno de los dos habla sobre el alcance de la patente. Para ellos es sólo una llamada “Turf War ‘entre entidades productoras y no productoras (por ejemplo, universidades). Una empresa como Microsoft es a la vez ambos porque mientras que una compañía produce cosas otra, llamada “Microsoft Licensing”, efectivamente es un troll de patentes y en base a esta nueva página, Microsoft no sólo financia a los grupos de fachada para las patentes de software y conferencias que promueven las patentes de software, ahora también pone su dedo en el pastel La “2016 Asociación Nacional de Abogados hispanos / Microsoft Instituto de Derecho IP”, donde Microsoft es el único financiador del programa.
Y alguna gente continúa diciéndo al mundo que Microsoft ha cambiado o que hay un‘nuevo’, más gentil Microsoft.
“Aparte de Bill Gates, no se de otro CEO de alta tecnología que se siente a revisar cartera de propiedad intelectual de la compañía”

-Marshall Phelps

Links 11/4/2016: Krita 3.0 Alpha, New Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • GNU/kWindows

    There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. I’d like to share my thoughts.

    [...]

    Free software is absolutely essential: it ensures that users, who are the most vulnerable, are in control of their computing—not software developers or corporations. Any program that denies users any one of their four freedoms is non-free (or proprietary)—that is, freedom-denying software. This means that any non-free software, no matter its features or performance, will always be inferior to free software that performs a similar task.

    Not everyone likes talking about freedom or the free software philosophy. This disagreement resulted in the “open source” development methodology, which exists to sell the benefits of free software to businesses without discussing the essential ideological considerations. Under the “open source” philosophy, if a non-free program provides better features or performance, then surely it must be “better”, because they have outperformed the “open source” development methodology; non-free software isn’t always considered to be a bad thing.

    [...]

    Secondly, when you see someone using a GNU/kWindows system, politely ask them why. Tell them that there is a better operating system out there—the GNU/Linux operating system—that not only provides those technical features, but also provides the feature of freedom! Tell them what free software is, and try to relate it to them so that they understand why it is important, and even practical.

    It’s good to see more people benefiting from GNU; but we can’t be happy when it is being sold as a means to draw users into an otherwise proprietary surveillance system, without so much as a mention of our name, or what it is that we stand for.

  • Good bye “open source”; hello “free software”

    Everyone has at least a good reason to prefer software freedom over non-free software products.

  • Rancher Labs Release Rancher 1.0, An Open Source Cross-Cloud Container Management Platform

    Rancher Labs have released version 1.0 of their open source Rancher container management platform, which allows the deployment of Docker containers via Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Rancher Labs’ Cattle across a range of underlying infrastructure. Rancher manages the underlying compute fabric, exposing control via a web-based UI that can be secured via RBAC/ACL, and can be deployed across a combination of multiple public cloud vendors, private virtualised clouds and bare metal. The platform also includes integrated load balancing and persistent storage services.

  • Events

    • OSCAL ’16 | Open Source Conference Albania 2016

      OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the major international tech conference in Albania organized by Open Labs Hackerspace, the open source and free software community in Albania. The conference promotes software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, global movements which originally started more than 30 years ago.

      The third edition of the the annual OSCAL conference will take place once again in Tirana on 14 & 15th of May and will gather more than 400 free libre open source technology enthusiasts, developers, students, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the idea that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone.

    • Document Freedom Day 2016: Singapore

      Document Freedom Day is a day where we celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. It is held annually, on the last Wednesday of March. However, this year, the Ambassadors in Singapore decided to celebrate it on 24 March, 2016.

    • KubeCon part 2: 1.3 and the CNCF

      In the “State of The Union”, David Aronchik, Kubenetes Project Manager for Google, brought folks up to date with what’s happened in the Kubernetes community and what’s ahead for version 1.3 and beyond.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Is your open source community optimized for contributors?

        Josh Matthews is a platform developer at Mozilla. He’s a programmer who writes Rust code and is active in the development of Firefox. His development experience has led him to enjoy mentoring new contributors in open source projects.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • What’s new in MySQL?

      This year at the Percona Live Data Performance Conference I’ll be talking about MySQL. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database, enabling the cost-effective delivery of reliable, high-performance and scalable web-based and embedded database applications, including all five of the top five websites.

      My interest in databases grew while working in banking in the late nineties. Back then I implemented back-end ATM servers using HP-UX and Sybase as the development platform. I remember we had an allowed maintenance window from 2am-5am, and struggled with finishing a blocking create index operation on our main table with 30 million rows. I remember thinking “Why can’t this be done while the database is online?”

    • Open Source Leader MariaDB Rockets into Analytics Market

  • Education

    • Mining for Education

      Students are not taught word processing, they are taught Microsoft Word. They are not taught presentation skills, they are taught Microsoft Powerpoint. They are required to present their work, be it essay, slideshow, or graph, in Microsoft-owned proprietary formats, recorded onto thumb-drives formatted with a Microsoft-patented file systems. Nothing else will do.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • MediPi open source telehealth kit piloted in NHS

      An open source telehealth kit built using a Raspberry Pi will be piloted with heart patients at a southern NHS trust this financial year.

      Richard Robinson, a technical integration specialist at HSCIC, developed the telehealth prototype called MediPi to prove that “telehealth is affordable at scale”.

      He said eight months ago his wife, who works for a charity helping socially isolated older people, was asked to find volunteers for a telehealth pilot.

      “She came home with the kit and it was all high-end tablets, 3G and Bluetooth enabled devices and I was really shocked by what I thought would cost,” explained Robinson.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • 6 steps to calculate ROI for an open hardware project

        Free and open source software advocates have courageously blazed a trail that is now being followed by those interested in open source for physical objects. It’s called free and open source hardware (FOSH), and we’re seeing an exponential rise in the number of free designs for hardware released under opensource licenses, Creative Commons licenses,or placed in the public domain.

  • Programming/Development

    • What’s awful about being a {software engineer, tech lead, manager}?

      I’ve been building software professionally for over 10 years now. I love what I do and I hope to be an old programmer someday. But along the way, I’ve encountered many terrible things that have made me hate my job. I wish that someone had given me a roadmap of what to expect earlier in my career, so when some new and unfortunate awfulness occurred that I wouldn’t have felt so alone and frustrated.

      This post is meant to be such a guide. I have three goals.

    • FAQ: Node.js

      We still have nightmares about GeoCities too, and yes, JavaScript has historically been used for things like that. It originated at Netscape in the mid 90s as a lightweight scripting language to add interactive properties to web pages, but it has come a long way since then. Sure, many programmers look down on JavaScript, and it’s massively overused on some websites, but it also has plenty of fans.

    • A single Node of failure

      The web-development community was briefly thrown into chaos in late March when a lone Node.js developer suddenly unpublished a short but widely used package from the Node Package Manager (npm) repository. The events leading up to that developer’s withdrawal are controversial in their own right, but the chaotic effects raise even more serious questions for the Node.js and npm user communities.

      npm itself is a module repository for Node.js code, akin to the Python Package Index or similar repositories for other languages and frameworks. Users can install a package with a simple npm install foo, but the service is also widely used by Node.js developers to automatically fetch and install dependencies: projects list their dependencies in the package.json file, and they are recursively fetched from npm and installed when the package is built. Using npm in this manner is standard operating procedure, allowing complex JavaScript applications to be written on top of multiple third-party frameworks in minimal lines of code. The service, however, is run by a private company called npm, Inc., rather than by the Node.js project.

Leftovers

  • Google Is Interested In Buying Its Rival Yahoo’s Web Business — Report
  • What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Negotiation

    The next president of the United States will need to be an extremely effective negotiator. Armed conflict, political deadlock, and diplomatic crises abound. The president will be called upon to resolve the war in Syria, manage complex relationships with Russia and Iran, handle hot spots such as North Korea, Libya, and Ukraine, navigate competitive tensions with China, and revive a modicum of bipartisanship in Congress. Ironically, the only presidential candidate who has been asserting his prowess as a great negotiator is someone who has precisely the wrong instincts and experience for the types of conflicts the president will face. The Donald Trump approach to negotiation would be not only ineffective but also disastrous — and there are clearly identifiable reasons for this.

  • Typing on a MacBook Could Soon Be as Awful as Typing on an iPad
  • Apple Patent Imagines a Keyboard without Keys
  • Apple patented a MacBook design that is all touchpad and no keys
  • Apple files patent for a ‘keyless’ touchpad keyboard

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Children Wrongfully put on ADHD Medication

      A recent study showed that 1 in every 4 children in preschool is taking medication for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The majority of kids that age have a tough time paying attention to extended periods of time because their brain and body is nowhere close to being fully developed. Medication shouldn’t be the first option when it comes to treating kids who have ADHD or who we think have ADHD.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Britain’s top secret kill list: How British police backed by GCHQ fed names of drug lords to a US assassination unit, which – under cover of the war on terror – wiped out an innocent family with a missile strike

      British law enforcement and intelligence services have helped draw up an extra-judicial ‘kill list’ to assassinate the world’s most wanted terrorists and drug smugglers in foreign countries.

      The sensational claims, which raise disturbing questions about Britain’s involvement in the targeting of aircraft and drone strikes, will be revealed in a 50-page report by the Reprieve human rights charity to be published tomorrow.

      It will state that the UK has been a key, long-standing partner in America’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, targeting not only alleged terrorists, but also supposed drug traffickers, and earmarking them for drone and missile strikes – often on the basis of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ which has never been tested in court.

      Although the top secret ‘kill list’ has been in existence for years and is continually revised, Britain’s contribution has never been sanctioned by Parliament.

      The startling evidence, drawn from leaked official documents, reveals the two agencies involved are the electronic eavesdropping organisation GCHQ, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA).

    • Top secret “28 pages” may hold clues about Saudi support for 9/11 hijackers

      Current and former members of Congress, U.S. officials, 9/11 Commissioners and the families of the attack’s victims want 28 top-secret pages of a congressional report released. Bob Graham, the former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and onetime chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the key section of a top secret report he helped author should be declassified to shed light on possible Saudi support for some of the 9/11 hijackers. Graham was co-chair of Congress’ bipartisan “Joint Inquiry” into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that issued the report in 2003. Graham speaks to Steve Kroft for 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, April 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

    • U.S. Bombs Were Used in Saudi-Led Attack on Market in Yemen, Rights Group Finds

      ONE OF THE deadliest airstrikes in Yemen since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began bombing the country used munitions supplied by the United States, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

      The March 15 attack targeted a crowded market in the village of Mastaba in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. HRW said it found remnants of a “GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, which consists of a U.S.-supplied MK-84 2,000-pound bomb mated with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also U.S.-supplied.” The group said it also reviewed evidence provided by British news channel ITV, which found remnants of an “MK-84 bomb paired with a Paveway laser guidance kit.”

      The report provides yet more evidence of U.S. complicity in the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen. The Obama administration has been a key military backer of Saudi Arabia in its yearlong campaign against a rebel movement in Yemen known as the Houthis. In addition to billions of dollars in arms sales, the Pentagon has provided the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. role may make it “jointly responsible” for war crimes.

    • GCHQ working on joint ‘shoot to kill list’

      According to the article in the paper, one Afghan family were killed by a missile strike after they were mistaken for a member of the Taliban.

    • Covering Up Hillary’s Libyan Fiasco

      Despite Libya’s bloodshed and chaos, ex-Secretary of State Clinton still defends her key role in the 2011 “regime change,” but her reasons don’t withstand scrutiny, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

    • Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military

      From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

      Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.

      In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

      The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

    • What Will Happen When Genetically Engineered Salmon Escape Into the Wild?

      In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.

      [...]

      Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.

  • Finance

    • Tory donor was trusted middleman for oil firm involved in bribes inquiry

      David Cameron’s troubles deepened on Saturday night as a Tory donor named in the Panama Papers was revealed as a trusted middleman for a company raided by the Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating what has been described as the world’s biggest bribery scandal.

      [...]

      Unaoil is at the centre of allegations that the business “systematically corrupted the global oil industry” by delivering millions in bribes on behalf of well-known multinationals to secure contracts.

      A week ago, authorities in Monaco raided the headquarters of the company, as well as the homes of some of its bosses, as part of a British-led investigation into a corruption scandal implicating businesses all over the world.

    • Still in the Dark on TTIP: Trade Agreement with the European Union Is a Black Box

      Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been concluded. Citizens now have access to the 30-chapter agreement that is several thousand pages long. The TPP has been opposed by four major presidential candidates, and faces criticism in Congress. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trade deal will get a vote sometime this year.

    • Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street

      As Hillary Clinton questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials – once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

      The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with Hillary finance chair Gary Gensler and Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

    • Texas nurses supersizing salaries for more money at McDonald’s

      “You know, you can start off at McDonald’s at $13-$14 an hour in some cases, you could certainly find easier jobs for more money and that’s a real problem when you’re trying to keep good people in your facilities,” said Scott Kibbe with the Texas Health Care Association.

    • Bitcoin and Ethereum are Driving Factors of Open Execution Initiative

      The Bitcoin network has been supporting the Open Execution principle for quite some time now, as services owners can’t run away with people’s bitcoins, and no one else can use your coins and send them to somebody else. Moreover, no additional money can be created out of thin air.

    • No, Bill Clinton, You Can’t Blame Welfare Reform’s Failures On Republicans

      While speaking to a crowd in Philadelphia on Thursday, former president Bill Clinton was interrupted by protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement carrying signs criticizing the crime bill and welfare reform bill that he signed into law in the 1990s.

      In response, Clinton gave a misleading defense of welfare reform. “They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty,” he said of the protesters. “Then why did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty when I was president?”

    • “Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First”

      For as long as people have yearned for more stuff, intellectuals have chastised them for that desire. Even Plato’s “Republic” followed the “decline of a virtuous, frugal city as it was corrupted by the lust for luxurious living,” Trentmann reminds readers. But his true nemesis is more recent: John Kenneth Galbraith, author of “The Affluent Society” (1958), in which the late economist argued that modern society seeks not only to fulfill our needs but also to create new ones, propelling us to live beyond our means, go into debt and thus strengthen the power of business. Though Trentmann acknowledges that the book has been enormously influential in cementing popular notions of consumerism, he dismisses it as “not a sober empirical study but a piece of advocacy to justify greater public spending.”

    • The Pillaging of America’s State Universities

      America’s great public research universities, which produce path-breaking discoveries and train some of the country’s most talented young students, are under siege. The result may be a significant weakening of the nation’s preeminence in higher education. Dramatic cuts in public spending for state flagship universities seem to be at odds with widespread public sentiment. Americans say they strongly believe in exceptional educational systems; they want their kids to attend excellent and selective colleges and to get good, well-paying, prestigious jobs. They also support university research. After 15 years of surveys, Research! America found in 2015 that 70 percent of American adults supported government-sponsored basic scientific research like that produced by public universities, while a significant plurality (44 percent) supported paying higher taxes for medical research designed to cure diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Nonetheless, many state legislators seem to be ignoring public opinion as they essentially starve some of the best universities—those that educate about two-thirds of American college students.

    • Wall Street Should Pay a Sales Tax, Too

      In case there was any doubt, the presidential election fight has confirmed that blasting Wall Street, even eight years after the financial crisis, is still a vote-getter.

      Hillary Clinton has said she’d like to jail more bankers. Donald Trump has skewered the hedge fund managers who are “getting away with murder.” And Bernie Sanders has made Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his campaign.

      Of course, financial industry lobbyists aren’t about to take this lying down. In recent weeks, they’ve turned up the heat on lawmakers to block one particular measure that Sanders has mentioned in nearly every stump speech: taxing Wall Street speculation.

      Americans are used to paying sales taxes on basic goods and services, like a spring jacket, a gallon of gas, or a restaurant meal. But when a Wall Street trader buys millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or derivatives, there’s no tax at all.

      Sanders has introduced a bill called the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would correct that imbalance by placing a small tax of just a fraction of a percent on all financial trades. It wouldn’t apply to ordinary consumer transactions such as ATM withdrawals or wire transfers.

    • NY Daily News Claims FDR Unfit to Be President: “No Concrete Plans, Only Platitudes”

      [The following is an imagined 1932 New York Daily News editorial board interview with Franklin Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. The Daily News comments below derive from the editorial board’s interview with Bernie Sanders on April 1, 2016. The Roosevelt statements are taken primarily from his 1933 inaugural address and his 1936 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.]

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders Takes 30-Point Bite out of Clinton Lead in NY

      A poll released Friday shows that Bernie Sanders has significantly narrowed the lead Hillary Clinton once claimed in New York.

      The new Emerson College poll (pdf) shows Clinton leading Sanders among Democratic primary voters in the state by 18 points—56 percent to 38 percent. That marks a significant drop in support for the former secretary of state since the same poll was taken less than one month ago.

    • GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, Now Slamming Sanders, Once Said It Was His “Task to Outsource”

      BACK IN 2014, in an interview with the magazine Chief Executive, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained that starting in the 1980s, “most of us” — i.e. GE executives — “saw it as our task to outsource manufacturing, to move it to low-cost countries. This continued through the 1990s and into the very early 2000s.”

      Immelt’s statement of the obvious is relevant because Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said essentially the same thing about GE this week, which triggered an angry response from Immelt.

      In a meeting on Monday with the New York Daily News editorial board, Sanders was asked to name a corporation that he believed was “destroying the fabric of our nation.” Sanders said that GE was a “good example” because it had shut down “many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. … That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. … The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty.”

    • Activists Launch Fight for Media Fairness for Sanders in Tight New York Primary
    • Grassroots revolt against Hillary: Occupy activists launch “Battle of New York” to fight Clinton machine, anti-Sanders bias in belly of beast

      “The corporate media and establishment keep counting us out, but we keep winning by large margins,” the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted triumphantly, after the Vermont senator won the Wisconsin primary by a large margin this week.

      Journalists and activists in New York — the site of what may be the most important primary in the election — have noticed. And they are organizing in response.

      Enter Operation Battle of New York.

      It is the name of a new campaign launched by the editorial groups of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, left-wing citizen journalist publications that have served as important voices for American social movements for more than a decade.

      “We can expect corporate media to do everything it can to prop up Clinton and ignore or mischaracterize Sanders and the increasingly broad and diverse movement that supports him,” Operation Battle of New York writes in the description accompanying its Indiegogo campaign.

    • We’re speeding toward a climate change catastrophe — and that makes 2016 the most important election in a generation

      Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apocalyptic language, “if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.”

    • Hillary’s Inability to Grapple With Inequality Is Making Her Vulnerable to Bernie in New York

      Establishment politicians running for high office live and breathe elaborate focus group-tested lines. In time, they become those lines. But every now and then, extreme political pressures can force a few unscripted words to slip through. And when that happens, we gain a rare glimpse of the candidate’s deeper understanding of their world and our world, and the gap between the two.

      Hillary Clinton suffered such a moment on Tuesday afternoon while speaking at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Before taking the podium she already knew from internal polling that Sanders was going to win handily in Wisconsin. That meant she would be a loser in six of the last seven states, and by landslides, no less. Her staff is telling her not to worry; all the math on her side. Her delegate lead is so large Sanders can’t possibly overtake her.

      But Hillary is not stupid. She saw Sanders draw 18,000 people in the Bronx, virtually all people of color, and that was before his latest Wisconsin victory. She knows that nothing is set in stone if your opponent is clobbering you in primary after primary. Political momentum is something to fear and could infect the big states like New York and California.

      On top of that, young people are giving Bernie more than 80% of their votes. Even large majorities of young black and Latino voters are flocking to Sanders. How can that be?

    • Sanders Catches Clinton

      Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton had 46 percent—a narrow gap that fell within the poll’s 2.5 percent margin of error. The national survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders erasing Clinton’s edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had a 20-point lead.

    • US government, Soros funded Panama Papers to attack Putin – WikiLeaks

      On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “which targets Russia and [the] former USSR.” The “Putin attack” was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government’s funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.

    • ‘Chalking’ officially a problem as pro-Trump messages set off new storms

      If three is officially a trend, chalking is now a trendy — and highly controversial — way for Donald Trump fans to show their love.

      This week, two schools — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — jumped into the chalking fray, joining the headlines made in March at Emory University with pro-Trump messages scrawled on campus grounds.

      Following a now-familiar timeline, the chalked messages appeared and the storms followed. At UTC, it hit the student government.

    • Paul Krugman Is Annoying

      Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • China’s “Panama” Censorship & The Implications For Encryption, Bitcoin

      The Panama Papers will have political and social fallout for months and years to come, much like the Libor scandal or the Edward Snowden leaks. A vote of no confidence for Iceland’s prime minister and Internet censorship in China are likely but the beginning.

    • Easier film censorship norms ahead?

      Is the government considering to relax the process of film certification? Also will filmmakers be able to get certification online instead of going through a long and winding process as is the case now?

    • When Pennsylvania was the censorship capital of America

      Can media affect behavior? Can a violent movie or video game provoke violence? Can visiting obscene, racist or misogynistic websites breed anti-social behavior? Should government step in to stop or regulate them?

      While the Internet now provides easy access to the darkest corners of the imagination, these concerns are not new. Even when the first films unspooled a century ago, authorities worried that the cinema would corrupt our communities. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law regulating motion pictures.

    • The architect of China’s Great Firewall embarrassed after needing to use VPN in front of live audience

      Fan Binxing, architect of the China’s infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page.

      On April 3 Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea’s own version of the system as a talking point.

    • Majome blasts censorship board

      Harare West legislator Jessie Majome says the censorship board is concerned with controlling political space, leaving information considered immoral and misappropriate finding its way into national radio and television.

    • The Naked Truth About Censorship In Uzbekistan

      Censorship was a key instrument for controlling the masses during Soviet times. These days Uzbekistan’s ageing President Islam Karimov — who served as the First Secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan’s Communist Party before independence — regularly rages against anything and everything connected to the old Union.

      Nevertheless, the system he has fashioned in the Central Asian country of 30 million remains remarkably similar to the one it emerged from in 1991.

    • Campuses are places for open minds – not where debate is closed down

      Last month, in the early hours, an act of traumatising racist violence occurred on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students woke up to find that someone had written, in chalk, the words “Trump 2016” on various pavements and walls around campus. “I think it was an act of violence,” said one student. “I legitimately feared for my life,” said another; “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus”. Dozens of students met the university president that day to demand that he take action to repudiate Trump and to find and punish the perpetrators. Writing political statements in chalk is a common practice on American college campuses and, judging from the public reaction to the Emory event, most Americans consider the writing to be an act of normal free speech during the national collective ritual of a presidential election. So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

    • A global guide to using Shakespeare to battle power

      Hitler was a Shakespeare fan; Stalin feared Hamlet; Othello broke ground in apartheid-era South Africa; and Brazil’s current political crisis can be reflected by Julius Caesar. Across the world different Shakespearean plays have different significance and power. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, a Shakespeare special to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, takes a global look at the playwright’s influence, explores how censors have dealt with his works and also how performances have been used to tackle subjects that might otherwise have been off limits. Below some of our writers talk about some of the most controversial performances and their consequences.

    • China Internet regulator says Web censorship not a trade barrier
    • China Internet Regulator Says Web Censorship Not a Trade Barrier

      China’s online censorship system protects national security and does not discriminate against foreign companies, the country’s Internet regulator said, after the United States labelled the blocking of websites by Beijing a trade barrier.

      The US Trade Representative (USTR) wrote in an annual report that over the past year China’s web censorship has worsened, presenting a significant burden to foreign firms and Internet users.

    • Blizzard Erases Gaming History By Axing a Fan-Made ‘World of Warcraft’ Server

      Last week attorneys representing Blizzard Entertainment sent a cease-and-desist letter to the administrators of Nostalrius Begins, a private “legacy” server that had been running a version of World of Warcraft as it existed between 2004 and 2005 since February 28 of 2015. As of last night a Change.org petition to Blizzard CEO and co-founder Michael Morhaime had garnered more than 55,000 signatures in protest, but the plea for survival went unanswered, and the server shuts down forever effective today.

      Blizzard, of course, is acting within its rights. Nostalrius’ existence essentially amounts to piracy (particularly since the game proper is still going strong), and such things are expressly forbidden by Blizzard’s own terms of use. In a sense, this was inevitable, and it’s frankly surprising that Blizzard let it thrive for so long without taking action.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Leaked Encryption Draft Bill ‘Ignores Economic, Security, and Technical Reality’

      “This bill makes effective cybersecurity illegal.”

    • Edward Snowden Shows How To Tweet Like A Boss After Panama Papers Leak

      In a short span of time, Edward Snowden has built an impeccable reputation on Twitter.

    • Surveillance Debate Gets a Needed Dose of Racial Perspective

      ALVARO BEDOYA HAS been working on surveillance, privacy, and technology in Washington for years now. Before founding Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, he served as chief counsel to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.

      But as surveillance became a major national issue thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bedoya saw something disturbing amid the Washington wonkery: a huge gulf between the discussions of government spying, on the one hand, and aggressive policing tactics in minority communities on the other.

    • The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret

      A year ago when the Internet of Shit account was spawned, it started as a personal joke: I was hearing a lot about internet-connected smart devices, but they all sounded like terrible ideas.

      In recent times, however, we’ve seen a new slew of devices pouring onto the market with no real specific purpose, as far as anyone can tell. At first I was just making jokes about these things, but the situation is worse than I initially thought.

      [...]

      The opportunities are delicious for bloated internet companies: now a software company could know how warm your home is, what times of day are noisy, whether you have a pet, when you turn on your lights or if you listen to music while having sex.

      Smart devices are sold as a way to improve your life — and in many ways, they do to an extent — but it also means those gadgets are incredible troves of data that could eventually turn into Software-as-a-Service money makers, just like Nespresso did to coffee.

    • A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control

      The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the “cashless society” is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views.

      Even if you like the idea of racists and jihadis and human traffickers being limited in their crowdfunding and financial ambitions, the power to control commerce at a fine-grained level, combined with the scale at which transactions flow, means that these restrictions end up being a dragnet, not a speargun. When you fish with a dragnet, you always catch some dolphins along with your tuna.

    • College Grad Looking For a Job? The NSA Wants YOU!

      If you want an indication as to how the surveillance state is growing, take a look at college recruitment by the National Security Agency (NSA). The agency routinely recruits students with internships and scholarships around the United States but now the NSA is looking for employees in the backyard of its controversial Utah Data Center.

    • Senate encryption bill draft mandates ‘technical assistance’

      A long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee encryption bill would force companies to provide “technical assistance” to government investigators seeking locked data, according to a discussion draft obtained by The Hill.

      The measure, from Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is a response to concerns that criminals are increasingly using encrypted devices to hide from authorities.

      While law enforcement has long pressed Congress for such legislation, the tech community and privacy advocates warn that it would undermine security and endanger online privacy.

    • Fierce legal battle over data retention in Sweden

      There is a rather interesting legal battle concerning data retention going on in Sweden. Parties are the ISP Bahnhof and the government oversight authority Post- & Telestyrelsen (PTS).

      Two years ago, to the day, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the EU data retention directive — stating that it is in violation of human rights, especially the right to privacy.

    • Facebook Opens The Floodgates to ‘Sponsored Content’

      That’s because Facebook has changed its rules around sponsored content. On Friday, the social network announced that it will now let publishers, celebrities, and brands post sponsored or branded content on their Facebook pages as long as they follow a couple of rules, including getting a verified by Facebook and using a special tag for each of these posts.

    • GCHQ wizards kept Harry Potter’s secret [Ed: grooming and whitewashing GCHQ for Sunday]
    • Defence Against the Dark Arts: British spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Defense Against the Dark Arts: UK spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Harry Potter and the Spooks of GCHQ: Bizarre story of how British spies battled to stop internet leak of JK Rowling book
    • How GCHQ was called in to keep Harry Potter under wraps
    • Harry Potter and the curious tale of GCHQ
    • Facebook Users Are Sharing Fewer Personal Updates and It’s a Big Problem

      If you haven’t posted anything personal on Facebook FB in awhile, you’re not alone. A damning report published by The Information on Thursday revealed that Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21% decline in “original sharing,” or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion monthly active users.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Innocent 60-year-old man free after 30 years in prison

      A man who spent more than three decades serving time for crimes he did not commit was finally released from a Virginia correctional facility.

      60-year-old Keith Allen Harward got his first taste of freedom Friday afternoon, thanking his lawyers, whom he called “heroes,” and lamented the fact that his parents could not see him walk free.

      “That’s the worst part about this, is my parents,” said Mr Harward, holding back tears as he addressed media outside the prison. “It killed them. It devastated them.” He added that he was not allowed to attend their funeral because of the sentence.

    • AP Analysis: Arab Democracies? Not So Fast, Say Some

      A new-old idea is rattling around the Middle East five years after the Arab Spring stirred democratic ambition: that restoring stability, especially if accompanied by some economic and political improvements, should be reform enough for the moment.

      This discourse appears to be taking front and center these days, most obviously in Egypt — the region’s most populous country and the one that raised the highest hopes for democracy advocates when the military in 2011 removed longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak as millions rallied against him and his Western support collapsed.

    • Canada’s Blackwater

      Last week students at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) disrupted a board meeting after learning administrators planned to sign a $50 million, seven-year, contract with security giant GardaWorld. Protesters are angry the administration has sought to expel student leaders and ramp up security at the politically active campus as they cut programs.

    • Convicted of a Crime That Never Happened: Why Won’t Texas Exonerate Fran and Dan Keller?

      THE 1992 PROSECUTION of Fran and Dan Keller was based on a trifecta of credulousness, hysteria, and bad evidence.

      The middle-aged couple was living quietly in Austin, Texas, where they ran a small drop-in day care out of their home, when the unimaginable happened: A little girl occasionally left in the Kellers’ care made a claim of abuse at the hands of the couple. At first, the allegation was simple: Dan Keller had spanked her, the 3-year-old told her mother in the summer of 1991. But rather quickly — in part due to repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist who had treated the girl for behavioral problems before she’d ever visited the Kellers — the allegation morphed into accusations far more lurid.

    • SCOTUS Declines Opportunity to Limit Random Border Patrol Stops

      Today the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to impose limits on a disturbing exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows random detention of motorists within 100 miles of a border—a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population. Since the rationale for these stops is immigration enforcement, they are supposed to be very brief. Yet in 2010 Richard Rynearson, an Air Force officer who brought the case that the Court today declined to hear, was detained at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Uvalde County, Texas, for a total of 34 minutes, even though there was no reason to believe he was an illegal alien or a criminal.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • (Legal) Moonshiner and University Battle Over Rights to ‘Kentucky’

        Moonshine packs a punch in this corner of Appalachia, where making hooch is steeped in local lore. But when Colin Fultz, the grandson of a bootlegger, opened a gourmet distillery here last fall, he ran afoul of a spirit even more potent than white lightning: University of Kentucky basketball.

        With his outlaw grandfather — who spent 18 years behind bars for smuggling — very much on his mind, Mr. Fultz, a businessman and onetime coal miner, set out to carry on his family’s tradition in a legal, and thoroughly modern, way.

        He tinkered with recipes, blending peaches and blackberries into mash brewed in his garage. He hired a lawyer — “My wife got on me, said I was going to get into trouble,” he said — and renovated an old car dealership, where he now distills and sells fruit-infused whiskey, serving it in thimble-size cups from an exposed-brick tasting bar.

    • Copyrights

      • Netflix Disappears From MPAA’s ‘Legal’ Movie Search Engine

        Less than two years ago the MPAA launched its search engine WhereToWatch, offering viewers a database of alternatives to piracy. However, those who try the search engine today will notice that results for Netflix, the largest entertainment platform in the United States, are no longer listed. Is there a feud going on behind the scenes?

      • UK government warns about piracy shakedown letters

        THE UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published information on what people should do if they receive one of those scary shakedown letters from firms accusing them of breaching piracy laws and owing money.

        Take them with a pinch of salt is the very short version of this, but the IPO has a bit more information.

        The organisation is alerting people to the sort of missives sent by companies like Goldeneye that have a very fishy smell and a bad reputation. The messages are sometimes described as speculative invoices.

      • BPI Buys Up ‘Pirate’ Domains To Foil Pro-Piracy Activists

        Internet pirates are a swarthy bunch that have been known to hijack anti-piracy projects to further their own aims. The BPI is aware of these kinds of efforts and has registered a whole heap of ‘pirate’ domains to avoid a similar fate befalling the UK’s Get it Right From a Genuine Site campaign.

04.10.16

What is Known (and Not Known) About Attacks on Croatian Portal That Exposed Željko Topić, the Notorious EPO Vice-President

Posted in Europe, Patents, Rumour at 5:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

People on a mission to destroy/crush and accumulate more power in the process

“I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

–Margaret Thatcher

Summary: Dnevno.hr, a popular news site which wrote many articles about Željko Topić (a locally-disgraced official), has encountered resistance and people from Croatia tell us more about it

THE problems at the EPO exacerbated after the HR department had foolishly hired Željko Topić. Maybe it didn’t do a proper background check, maybe he wasn’t honest enough about his background, or maybe the background was known all along but viewed as compatible with Battistelli’s iron-fisted monarchy-esque regime. Either way, Mr. Topić remains inside the EPO (for now) and it does nothing but discredit the Office (and by extension the entire Organisation).

“It’s hard to tell just how widespread this campaign of silencing really was.”The interesting thing about Željko Topić and other such goons is that they too (like the EPO) tried to take the articles down from a Croatian portal. We were told this by people close to the action and we previously saw what seemed like evidence that more than this one portal was targeted. It’s hard to tell just how widespread this campaign of silencing really was. Topić repeatedly lost a defamation case about it. See for instance some of the following articles (not a complete list):

What we know for a fact is that Topić actively suppresses criticism (by going directly after his critics). We are not sure if he is also behind DDOS attacks, as some people allege based on suspicion but not much more.

“We are not sure if he is also behind DDOS attacks, as some people allege based on suspicion but not much more.”A month ago someone from Croatia sent us an E-mail titled “Cyberattacks to web site Dnevno.hr” — an attack (or several attacks) which we already knew about because people told us about that more than a year ago. To quote just a portion, the “news portal dnevno.hr” had a “short conversation with” this messenger, who spoke to the portal’s “owner, Mr. Michael Ljubas and editor Mr. Drazen Boros.”

“In several topics for discussion,” we got told, “in one moment we open old cyberattack to web site dnevno.hr in period Dec 2014 to Jan 2015.”

“I have had a lot of issues such as the above (DDOS) since I started writing about Topić in 2014.”Based on the message, “there is a doubt/suspicion on the company Moscow Telecom Corp (COMCOR)” and we were advised to get in touch. As a reminder to those who haven’t been following this saga long enough, Techrights too came under DDOS attacks around that time and SUEPO suffered DDOS attacks. It submitted a formal complaint to Dutch authorities shortly thereafter, but nothing has been heard about it since.

We don’t want to relay rumours as nothing other than rumours or lay the blame without hard evidence, but another source of ours with other sources in Croatia suspected, based on what s/he had heard, that it could, in theory, be related to Topić. I have had a lot of issues such as the above (DDOS) since I started writing about Topić in 2014. I am eager to find out more about the correlation, if any, hence I attempted to contact people from Dnevno.hr. That was a month ago. The DDOS attacks against Dnevno.hr are not the subject which we deem news; rather, it was the attempt to convince the site to take articles about Topić offline (effectively deleting them). This reinforces suspicions because there is definitely motivation. Here is the message I sent to Dnevno.hr (with minor redactions), in spite of the likelihood that they don’t speak English:

Dear Dražen Boroš and Michael Ljubas (whose e-mail I don’t have),

I am contacting you regarding Mr. Topić, now EPO V-P and formerly a source of many Croatian scandals (with ongoing court cases). I occasionally post translations of your reports but I also became aware of attacks on your site. I understand that you spoke to [redacted] and were going to contact me too. I am trying to ascertain the details regarding cybergagging, which I heard about from numerous sources for over a year. My site too came under attacks, and only after I started publishing stuff that relates to Mr. Topić (not sure if timing was a pure coincidence and whether it’s Mr. Topić who drew ire).

My plan is to publish a report on the matter and I need further input before doing so.

Sadly, I have not heard back, but shortly afterwards another article about Topić was published in Dnevno.hr, citing Techrights twice. It’s good to see that not only Croatian media makes it into west Europe but also articles from west Europe make it back into Croatia, generally making people better aware of injustices. We published a German translation of the latest article (still no English version). Most EPO workers understand at least German, so this translation may still be helpful. Very few can grasp Croatian (even remotely). Article about the EPO should come out in greater numbers and more should be said about Željko Topić (of SIPO and EPO). There is a lot of information already out there, but it’s usually not accessible to most Europeans, not even 1% of them (Croatia is not a large country/population). We need more articles in English, French, Spanish and German translated from Croatian. One thing that the EPO and Željko Topić’s SIPO have in common is staff suicides, but how many people even know this? There are also WIPO suicides with some commonality to be found in causes. It’s about staff which speaks truth to power or rattles the status quo a little, even if for perfectly justifiable reasons. “The staff representatives,” we recently read about EPO staff representatives, “noted [they] did not share their [EPO's] vision of priority: the “house is burning” and the head of the HR department finds no more urgent things to talk with staff representatives than about their personal rewards? The staff representatives stressed that it was a wrong priority altogether: while there is indeed a large issue of resources of the Staff Representation altogether, and the administration should focus on the fact that many officials are threatened, investigated fired or sick…”

Or having committed suicide (see the WIPO and SIPO suicides). █

Avoiding the Vista 10 Trap and Rejecting Microsoft’s Attempt to ‘Jail’ GNU Inside Windows

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 4:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU behind bars and gates?

Embrace and Extend
Credit: unknown (Twitter)

Summary: Why Microsoft’s effort to “embrace” (or jail) GNU and Linux inside of Vista 10 should in no way lure people into this mass surveillance software (misleadingly marketed as operating system)

MR. TORVALDS, who wrote a good kernel and then licensed it under the terms of Stallman’s GPL, is still eager to take over the desktop, as a lot of this weekend’s coverage noted [1,2,3]. Given the disinterest in this goal at the Linux Foundation (which now receives money from Microsoft in all sorts of way), this is important. Don’t let Microsoft simply relegate GNU/Linux, making it an ‘app’ of Windows [4]. There’s keylogging and worse things in there. We need to strive for freedom [5] and Stallman has just published an article about the conundrum which is a Free (libre) environment entrapped in a proprietary one (with back doors in Microsoft’s case).

“Don’t let Microsoft simply relegate GNU/Linux, making it an ‘app’ of Windows.”Microsoft is now using Trump methods of associating GNU/Linux with Vista 10. This was a truly clever marketing strategy which dominated the media last week, courtesy of (for the most part) Microsoft boosters with their puff pieces, blurring the lines between freedom and mass surveillance.

Over the past week I’ve read several testimonials in Reddit and other forums from people who escape Windows because of lack of freedom. They move to GNU/Linux for idealogical reasons and practical reasons such as privacy and control. One sort of ‘testimonial’ also came to me personally and said:

I’m about to splurge and buy me a new laptop. I want to go for a slightly older model which won’t come with Windows 10 pre-installed. I now realise that I might just be able to make the jump to Linux as a native OS. The switch would be more for practical reasons than ideological ones. I now realise that I monitor software updates as closely as if they were spam malware attachments, as MS now tries to slip through a Win10 “upgrade” at least once a month. How many times must I say no for them to understand?

My few MS-specific software items would continue to run on the home “mainframe” (an older laptop that is too battered to take on the road, but which is a vast improvement over the ~2003 vintage desktop it replaced). Fortunately, there aren’t too many of them, and none are absolutely essential for mobile use, even though some of them would be really nice to have. I’m now far enough up the learning curve to be able work my way around.

We are likely to hear more such stories in the near future because a lot of people openly complain about Vista 10 and repeatedly say that they’re unwilling to ever accept its terms. Some already move away [6] and Microsoft tries to forcibly make people use it. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Torvalds prepared to spend next 25 years helping Linux conquer the desktop

    The phrase “year of the Linux desktop” has been around for well over a decade but has become more of a meme rather than a statement of fact. Without a doubt, Linux has seen much success on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, as well as servers, network appliances and the emerging “internet of things” device category. However, despite Microsoft stumbling with Windows Vista and Windows 8.x, Linux failed to capitalize on these moments of weakness.

  2. Linux can still beat Windows in the desktop war, and Linus Torvalds is ‘working on it’

    While Linux has lost many battles to Microsoft on the desktop, the war is not over. Torvalds pledges to dedicate the next 25 years of his life to usurping Windows. Will the open source kernel prove victorious on the desktop? It is totally possible. After all, time is not finite, and even the Roman Empire fell. If you follow history, nothing lasts forever and that should ring true for Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop.

  3. Linus Torvalds: “I’ll Spend Next 25 Years To Help Linux Beat Windows In Desktop War”

    While Linux and other open source technologies continue to rule the server and mobile markets, the desktop arena is still dominated by Windows operating systems. Linux creator Linus Torvalds knows this fact very well and expresses his commitment to work hard to make Linux a bigger force in the desktop war.

  4. GNU/kWindows

    There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. I’d like to share my thoughts.

    [...]

    Free software is absolutely essential: it ensures that users, who are the most vulnerable, are in control of their computing—not software developers or corporations. Any program that denies users any one of their four freedoms is non-free (or proprietary)—that is, freedom-denying software. This means that any non-free software, no matter its features or performance, will always be inferior to free software that performs a similar task.

    Not everyone likes talking about freedom or the free software philosophy. This disagreement resulted in the “open source” development methodology, which exists to sell the benefits of free software to businesses without discussing the essential ideological considerations. Under the “open source” philosophy, if a non-free program provides better features or performance, then surely it must be “better”, because they have outperformed the “open source” development methodology; non-free software isn’t always considered to be a bad thing.

    [...]

    Secondly, when you see someone using a GNU/kWindows system, politely ask them why. Tell them that there is a better operating system out there—the GNU/Linux operating system—that not only provides those technical features, but also provides the feature of freedom! Tell them what free software is, and try to relate it to them so that they understand why it is important, and even practical.

    It’s good to see more people benefiting from GNU; but we can’t be happy when it is being sold as a means to draw users into an otherwise proprietary surveillance system, without so much as a mention of our name, or what it is that we stand for.

  5. Good bye “open source”; hello “free software”

    Everyone has at least a good reason to prefer software freedom over non-free software products.

  6. Ecuador hospital runs on Linux Mint

    This is the type of Linux desktop deployments we all want to see more of. No drama, just regular users using Linux all day to get their job done.

Church of EPO: How Team Battistelli Engineered the Dismissal of People Not Sufficiently Loyal to Them – Part I

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

God Blatterstelli

Summary: A new series which looks back at how Battistelli stacked the deck not only by crushing oversight but also amassing instruments of coercion over staff, with various new pretexts for dismissal

AT THE end of last week we shared a single page from the EPO‘s CoC. There is a lot more to be said about it and this long post shall help the EPO with transparency that Battistelli loves so much to brag about (without actually doing anything to that effect).

Here is the page/leaf in full:

EPO CoC page

As a reminder, in the words of a reader, a lot of this relates to the union-busting activities we have been seeing since the end of 2015 (they truly intensified at that point but didn’t start then). Here is what Battistelli et al pushed through to staff:

EPO on protecting staff

The above was a culmination of something that had been cooking for a while. Consider the full CoC:

Europaisches Patentamt
European Patent Office
Office européen des brevets

CODE OF CONDUCT
FOR THE EPO

EPO’s PUBLIC SERVICE VALUES

- Respect for the individual
- Integrity and accountability
- Impartiality and objectivity
- Compliance with the rules of law
- Quality and professionalism

The European Patent Office’s public service values are a guide to behaviour which should promote the development of a culture of respect. The values are: respect for the individual; integrity and accountability; impartiality and objectivity; compliance with the rules of law; quality and professionalism.

These values, which are all of equal rank, guide our actions and underlie the EPO’s mission, which is to support innovation, competitiveness and economic growth across Europe through a commitment to high quality and efficient service delivered under the European Patent Convention (EPC).

These values apply to all persons working at and for the Office. Staff with managerial responsibilities are expected to promote these values by leadership and example.

This document does not create another legal framework and refers to the existing EPO regulations setting out the formal obligations of its staff. In the event of any conflict between the content of this code of conduct and formal obligations under the EPC or Service Regulations, then those obligations take precedence.

Confronted with an individual or collective breach of these values, all staff must be allowed to exercise freely and in good faith their right to draw attention to it without any fear of reprisal. They may in particular ask their line manager or Human Resources partner, or the responsible unit within Internal Audit and Oversight for advice. I undertake to respect our values and ensure that they are respected.

Benoît Battistelli

President

RESPECT FOR THE INDIVIDUAL

The services provided by the Office are the result of the work done by qualified and motivated staff members. The Office therefore recognises the individual value of each and every employee. Mutual respect, dignity, respect for human rights, nondiscrimination and the promotion of diversity are our guiding principles.

Our keywords

• DIGNITY
• NON-DISCRIMINATION
• TOLERANCE
• TRUST AND RELIABILITY
• LISTENING AND UNDERSTANDING
• POLITENESS
• OPENNESS
• DIALOGUE
• HEALTH
• SAFETY

Our approach

We share the international community’s commitment to respect human rights.

We strive to create a working environment marked by mutual respect.

Mutual respect, trust and the ability to listen are indispensable elements in our professional relations. Each individual’s abilities and talents deserve to be acknowledged.

We take the necessary steps to provide a safe and healthy working environment.

We seek to promote diversity and equal opportunities among employees.

We are committed to not allowing situations to arise which could be prejudicial to the dignity of our colleagues. We make every effort to prevent any form of discrimination or harassment.

INTEGRITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Integrity is an inalienable criterion for our professional conduct. It implies acting with responsibility, accountability, loyalty, discretion and common sense. We resist all forms of corruption.

Our keywords

• HONESTY
• LOYALTY
• FAIRNESS
• CONFIDENTIALITY
• EXAMPLE

Our approach

We act with honesty, responsibility and discretion.

We act with loyalty and solely in the interest of the Office. We perform our tasks under the authority of the President of the Office, except for the specific responsibilities or functions expressly laid down in the EPC or Service Regulations.

We respect the scope of our responsibilities and of the tasks entrusted to us. When delegating tasks, we remain accountable for their execution and results, and therefore managers exercise adequate supervision and control.

We respect the confidentiality of information: we do not disclose confidential information received in the course of our work to unauthorised persons, nor use it for our own benefit or to the detriment of the Office.

Our duty to do our work to the best of our abilities also implies an obligation to share with our colleagues the information necessary to perform their own duties.

We are committed to combating all types of fraud.

We are careful in our external communications and respect our duties of tact and discretion about the Office. In particular, we refrain from making any statement that could be detrimental to it.

IMPARTIALITY AND OBJECTIVITY

The Office and its staff must remain independent of all governments, authorities, organisations or persons outside the Organisation. Our conduct must be impartial and reflect that independence. We tackle situations which could impair our objectivity.

Our keywords

• INDEPENDENCE
• NEUTRALITY
• EQUAL TREATMENT
• IMMUNITY

Our approach

We seek to ensure that nothing which occurs under our responsibility is or could appear to be a direct or indirect act of preferential support for a political, economic, ideological or religious group.

We refrain from doing or saying anything that might call our impartiality and objectivity into question.

Our actions when taking decisions or leading projects are reasoned.

We need to be impartial and objective. We are aware of the risk of potential conflicts of interest, whether actual or apparent. Where possible, we avoid them; where not, we disclose and manage them.

Gifts or other favours might compromise our professional impartiality. Therefore we do not solicit any. And, without the President’s permission, we do not accept any either.

COMPLIANCE WITH THE RULES OF LAW

The Office has its own legal system, which must be respected.

The Office and its staff must also respect the applicable national laws of the country they are in and must meet their legal and financial obligations.

Our keywords

• LEGALITY
• JUSTICE
• RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

Our approach

We respect both the letter and spirit of the Office’s rules and regulations.

We apply these rules and regulations fairly and in good faith.

We act with professionalism and a sense of social responsibility in observing the applicable laws, and respecting customs and traditions of the countries in which we work, contributing responsibly to the welfare of society.

Our privileges and immunities do not prevent us from complying with our obligations under applicable national laws.

QUALITY AND PROFESSIONALISM

The way each of us does our job is reflected in the Office’s overall performance. Our commitment to high quality and efficient public service is a contribution to innovation, competitiveness and economic growth in Europe.

Our keywords

• INNOVATION
• COMPETENCE
• PROFESSIONALISM
• TRAINING
• EXCELLENCE
• EFFICIENCY

Our approach

We give of our best to achieve our professional goals and to offer an efficient public service.

We work with colleagues in a spirit of teamwork and co-operation.

We manage the Office’s resources appropriately and efficiently, in line with the principles of economy and sound financial management.

We strive to maintain, adapt and develop skills within the Office. With the aim of ensuring sustainability, we act in a strategic and long-term perspective, not in our own immediate interests.

We do our best to reach highest international standards and best practice.

The above makes widely available what should have been publicly available all along. It helps accountability (for management, not only those who are managed by abusive management).

Later this week we are going to show how Battistelli essentially engineered the sacking of people whom he viewed as obstruction for his (and his corporate bosses’) agenda. Stay tuned for more. █

With Software Patents in Autonomous Cars Few Giants Want a Monopoly on Driving, Not Just Physical Car Components

Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 2:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mobile car

Summary: How software patents can retard innovation in the autonomous cars space and why it’s the far east (Asia) that’s likely to exploit this obsession with patents

NOW that David Kappos lobbies for software patents after his USPTO career and Battistelli threatens to bring software patents to Europe through EPO/UPC, let’s consider what’s at stake and whether society should tolerate it. People have been driving for many years; there’s nothing novel about it.

Decades ago Martin Goetz had CAFC introduce software patents in the US (the first software patent ever to be granted relates to this) and right now a blog of software patents proponents writes about patents on autonomous cars.

“Media and Sonar Systems have the least number of patent filings with only 396 and 597 patents/patent applications respectively.”
      –Rahul VijhThis matters to me personally as I previously developed an Android app for computer vision on the dashboard (my research field at one time though I usually dealt with medical/biology). I did wonder how many software patents existed in this domain in the US, but I never bothered checking (it’s infeasible). According to the blog: “As with any new emerging technology, focus also shifts to patents and patent ownership trends on that technology. Research shows that technologies such as Adaptive Cruise Control and Anti-Collision Systems have the highest number of patents/patent applications filings, followed by Braking Control Mechanism and Communication Systems. Media and Sonar Systems have the least number of patent filings with only 396 and 597 patents/patent applications respectively.”

That’s a lot of patents. Many are on software. Tesla, which more or less gave up on patents in this domain, gets mentioned later: “Despite the small portfolio size, Tesla oft shares spotlight with Google – and has announced that the new Model 3 cars shipping in 2017 will be able to run in ‘Autopilot’ mode at least on freeways and to “Summon” itself out of its parking spot. But that’s not just why Tesla is dangerous for competition. Tesla’s product seems to be the most advanced commercially-viable implementation of autonomous car technology – seeing how the Model 3 is only expected to cost $35,000, which means the heat is really on for the other larger traditional automobile players (and also on Google and Apple) to commercialize their own autonomous car technology, and make it accessible to regular consumers, before Tesla takes the road from beneath their wheels.”

“That’s a lot of patents. Many are on software.”Looking at today’s news alone, one finds that the US is falling behind in this area, in spite (or maybe because) of patents. Too many patents on this domain (driving as ‘innovation’) hamper progress and new articles indicate that it’s a growing industry that has moved to the far east [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

Consider for a moment the fact that many of the methods described in such patents have nothing to do with mechanics and everything to do with computer programs (that’s just what autonomy is about). These are software patents on emulation of whatever drivers have been doing for about a century. What’s next? A flood of “on a car” patents? Like “over the Internet” or “on a computer” patents? █

04.09.16

Patents Roundup: US Patent System/Landscape Disqualified, Corrupted, Saturated With Patent Trolls, and Funded by Microsoft

Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Patents at 11:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Still sticking its dirty fingers in many patent pies

HNBA Microsoft

Summary: An all-encompassing (based on our admittedly limited breadth or scope of research) roundup of patent news pertaining to software in the US

THIS article is a summary of recent USPTO news. It’s as comprehensive as possible and it focuses, as usual, on software patents. Those are just most relevant to us.

“Anyone can probably see that USPTO greed (for both power and money) is going way too far.”

Quality Control Out the Window

Patently-O, a decent source of information on the subject of patents (albeit a little subjective at times, which is understandable given the audience it reaches), looked at recent changes related to infringement and invalidity of patents. The latter article said that “the district court rejected the plea for vacatur — finding that the PTO decision does not “displace a district court judgment” and that it would be “against the public interest” to allow a patentee to overcome an invalidity judgment simply by “amending its invalid claims.” [...] What is unclear here is the level of claim & issue preclusion that will apply going forward when Cardpool asserts the patent against some third party.”

“What we deal with here is a patent troll that claims it ‘owns’ scanning activity.”Watch what the USPTO is up to. Basically, as usual, having seen the courts invalidating many of its bogus patents (minimal quality control is to blame here), it now looks to bolster/improve its business by making a mockery of the course of justice. What is this, a third world country? Anyone can probably see that USPTO greed (for both power and money) is going way too far. The USPTO is very plaintiff-friendly because plaintiffs are its ‘clients’ (applicants). The USPTO must be kept out of the legal process altogether. The same goes for the EPO (increasingly abusive in that regard under Battistelli’s regime). Some people are now bombarding the patent system with more automated tools/robots (like DMCA requests that are bogus and served by algorithms, or trading activity in stock markets, also using algorithms). See this new press release about a “Proprietary Patent Application Software”. These help exhaust, fool, mislead examiners. They even say “proprietary” as if it’s some kind of marketing term. “Every bloody unit will be using proprietary software components jealously guarded by patents,” said this article from 2 days ago.

“Patently-O noted that in some particular cases even antitrust laws creep in.”In other new blog posts from Patently-O the MPHJ patent troll is revisited (it can come to Europe with UPC hooks perhaps, suing everyone who uses a scanner if all goes as Battistelli foresees). “HP challenged claim 13 on both obviousness and anticipation grounds,” noted Patently-O, after MPHJ had already sued so many people who habitually use a scanner at a business (and often retrieved ‘protection money’ without as much as a legal challenge). What we deal with here is a patent troll that claims it ‘owns’ scanning activity. It’s really about as bad as it sounds. No exaggeration is needed, hence it resulted in plenty of press coverage over the years.

Institutional Corruption in the US Patent System

Another new Patently-O article deals with a patent “case involving both plaintiffs and defendants presenting false expert testimony.”

“When a nation’s patent system mostly serves to protect one’s giant (and often taxpayers-funded) monopoly the perception of corruption will inevitably increase.”Yes, nice to have ‘justice’… whoever has the deeper pockets (or less to lose) tends to win. Who benefits from all this chaos? Patently-O noted that in some particular cases even antitrust laws creep in. To quote this new post about GlaxoSmithKline (GSK): “The question in the case, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether that license structure can raise a plausible antitrust claim under F.T.C. v. Actavis, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2223 (2013).”

When a nation’s patent system mostly serves to protect one’s giant (and often taxpayers-funded) monopoly the perception of corruption will inevitably increase. Who’s being served here? The public that will consequently be overcharged and have few (or none at all) alternatives? Going back to the false testimony, Patently-O wrote: “On cross-examination, Rembrand’s technical expert witness Dr. Thomas Beebe “drastically” changed his testimony regarding his methodology for testing whether the accused contact lenses were “soft.” After being called-out by the defense’s expert Dr. Christopher Bielawski, a jury found no-infringement. Post-trial, the district court doubled-down by also granting J&Js motion for JMOL of non-infringement. Bielawski’s testimony may have been particularly damaging – with his statement: “You should not trust Dr. Beebe, and you should throw out his testimony, not in part, but in whole. You should not trust Dr. Beebe.””

“A patent system of secrecy defeats the very purpose (original goal) of the patent system.”Judging any case at all based on written/oral testimony is dangerous and misguided. It’s like using the words of cops or some errand bystanders as evidence in criminal trials. Any such ‘evidence’ is the weakest form of evidence because there is no way to ascertain/verify claims. Moreover, people are often corruptible and when there’s much at stake in a trial (not just prison but a lot of money) there’s plenty of room for abuse, such as bribery. Remember those infamous cases of Apple with jury foreman Hogan? Probably trial misconduct. Don’t forget Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) corruption either.

Pressing on, the EFF celebrates progress in a patent case it intervened in one year ago. It says it “has put significant time and effort into getting this one document in one case unsealed. Unfortunately, it is just one of countless documents that are routinely sealed without good reason in patent cases around the country. Just last week we asked the court in a different patent case to unseal documents that almost surely should not have been completely hidden from public view.”

“It is worth adding that while the number of lawsuits did provably decline it does not tell the full story for more than a single reason and we should generally take with great degree of caution any conclusions that accompany this, e.g. that things are improving on their own, hence no intervention is needed at all.”

Overlooking Patent Trolls in Post-Alice Era

A patent system of secrecy defeats the very purpose (original goal) of the patent system. This kind of secrecy gave rise to shady, secretive operations such as Intellectual Ventures, which boasts thousands of shell companies. This whole kind of system (unaccountable and unregulated) is ripe for abuse by trolls.

“US patent case filing in district courts dropped in the first quarter,” MIP wrote, “down 39% on the fourth quarter and 34% on the first quarter last year, according to Unified Patents. An analysis of Eastern District of Texas filing reveals a disproportionately large drop in the district” (that’s the summary of a paywalled article from MIP).

This echoes several other Web sites which reference the same data and conclude that it’s all about trolls and the Eastern District of Texas. This is a somewhat simplistic view because in reality, as we pointed out the day before yesterday, there are also settlements outside the courts and it might be worth looking at what proportion among these patent lawsuits involved some kind of software patents, hence identifying a correlation between scale of litigation and patent scope rather than lawsuit venue, a plaintiff’s business model and so on. In reality, some of these surveys are politically or commercially motivated, or are set up by academics (or lobbyists) to suit a particular narrative and then push for some particular kind of reform (e.g. a ‘reform’ for more certainty around software patents in the US — something which Kappos lobbies for with money from patent aggressors such as IBM, Microsoft, and now Apple as well).

It is worth adding that while the number of lawsuits did provably decline it does not tell the full story for more than a single reason and we should generally take with great degree of caution any conclusions that accompany this, e.g. that things are improving on their own, hence no intervention is needed at all.

As we found out only earlier this year, one verdict in favour of a patent troll such as VirnetX can cost a great deal of money. VirnetX, according to CCIA’s Matt Levy, now denies that it’s a patent troll, which is of course somewhat laughable a thing to do. “A patent troll is,” Levy explains, “essentially, a company that makes its money by suing companies that it claims are using patents that it has acquired. (For comparison, the FTC said that “The business model of [patent assertion entities] focuses on purchasing and asserting patents against manufacturers already using the technology, rather than developing and transferring technology.” Brian Kahin describes patent trolls as companies whose business is being infringed and whose product is litigation.)”

If one asks IAM ‘magazine’, no such thing even exists and it hardly surprises us that several trolls are paying IAM.

Speaking of payments, Oracle had paid Florian Müller, so it’s not too shocking that he took Oracle’s side in his latest article about Oracle’s war on Android. Müller spent a lot of his life campaigning against software patents and we hope this will precede the desire to make cash with so-called ‘consulting’ contracts.

“On March 22, 2016,” said this new article, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware issued a Memorandum Opinion in a case captioned Treehouse Avatar LLC v. Valve Corp., in which software patent claims survived a patent eligibility challenge.”

Alice does not always kill software patents, but it does most of the time. Another new article speaks of the Mayo/Alice Rule (both SCOTUS decisions). Now that there’s no Scalia at SCOTUS some people wonder what will happen regarding patent cases. Will the “T” word (trolls) come up again in transcripts or even formal rulings/determinations? Those who argue against reform regarding trolls are quoted in this new article which says: “Jessica Sebeok, associate vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities, believes universities will suffer unintended consequences if President Barack Obama succeeds in making it tougher for patent holders to defend their intellectual property.”

“And some people keep telling the world that Microsoft has changed or that there’s a ‘new’, gentler Microsoft…”Well, universities that essentially behave like patent trolls or feed trolls with their patents (we gave many examples here before) might suffer. And if so, that’s a good thing. The article later says: “Business coalition United for Patent Reform – whose membership includes influential allies of the Obama Administration like Google, Amazon and General Motors – and other supporters of HR 9 seek to stop patent trolling by making it riskier to file patent infringement suits and imposing additional costs of plaintiffs, but AAU argues this would put undue pressure on legitimate patent holders.”

Microsoft Licensing Still an Active Patent Troll

In the above, neither side speaks about patent scope. To them it’s just a so-called ‘Turf War’ between producing and non-producing (e.g. universities) entities. A company like Microsoft is both because while one company produces things another one, called “Microsoft Licensing”, is effectively a patent troll and based on this new page, Microsoft not only funds front groups for software patents and conferences that promote software patents, it now also puts its finger in the “2016 Hispanic National Bar Association/Microsoft IP Law Institute” pie, where Microsoft is the sole program supporter.

And some people keep telling the world that Microsoft has changed or that there’s a ‘new’, gentler Microsoft… █

‘“Other than Bill Gates, I don’t know of any high tech CEO that sits down to review the company’s IP portfolio” —Marshall Phelps

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