05.04.16
Posted in News Roundup at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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It used to be a clear sign of geekiness. People who were into Linux would rave about its benefits and flexibility…as long as you knew how to install your own OS, dig around for the hardware drivers you needed, and be a master of command-line instructions. For a world building technical literacy through more user-friendly front-end systems, Linux was a niche reserved for technology enthusiasts.
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Server
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In an exclusive video interview with Enterprise Networking Planet, Rivers details why he decided to transition into the new role and what it means for the company. He also provides some insight into what’s next on the product roadmap, including a new version of Cumulus Linux. The new Cumulus Linux 3 is a rebasing to the latest Debian Linux release, with the addition of the Btrfs filesystem providing powerful snapshotting and rollback capabilities.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Several Git branches were pulled in the past few hours into DRM-Next as preparation work for having the Direct Rendering Manager feature updates ready for the Linux 4.7 merge window later this month.
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The first alpha is now available of Wayland 1.11 along with the adjoining Weston 1.11 reference compositor. This also marks the feature freeze for the Wayland/Weston 1.11 series.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine Staging team has announced the release and immediate availability for download of Wine Staging 1.9.9, which comes hot on the heels of Wine 1.9.9, a development snapshot released last week.
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Wine Staging 1.9.9 was released yesterday. This updates brings some smaller improvements.
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Wine Staging, a playground for experimental Wine patches not yet ready to be accepted to the mainline tree, is out with their newest release that’s powered off last week’s official Wine 1.9.9 release.
Over the past two weeks, Wine-Staging developers spent time cleaning up some of the patches they were carrying in and got them merged to mainline. For v1.9.9, they were able to mainline more than thirty of their patches that they’ll no longer need to carry in this experimental tree. They also dropped their libcef system call workaround for Steam now that there’s a command-line switch to workaround the CEF sandboxing.
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Games
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Dear Linux gamers, we have the great pleasure to inform you today about a new games bundle from the famous Humble Bundle initiative, which includes five beautiful games for your GNU/Linux gaming rig.
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I have to say I had not heard of Anima Gate of Memories until today thanks to our Discord chat. I’ve checked it out and I think it looks awesome.
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I was sent a key to Darkest Dungeon by the developer as I was itching to give it a go. I’ve been playing quite a bit of it and found out just how brutal it is.
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Jack Nicklaus Perfect Golf has just launched with full Linux support and it actually looks pretty good.
I find golf games to be incredibly boring myself, it’s one of the few things I actually prefer to just go out with a few friends and play for real. I doubt everyone has a golf course within walking distance though, so like everything it will have plenty of fans.
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New Releases
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The guys over at Simplicity Linux, a simple and beautiful GNU/Linux desktop-oriented operating system, have had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Simplicity Linux 16.04.
Simplicity Linux 16.04 is distributed in three main editions, namely Desktop, X, and Mini. The distribution has been in development for the past three months, since February, when it was initially released as Simplicity Linux 16.01.
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The CoreOS developers have released a new version of the Linux kernel-based operating system engineered for massive server deployments, CoreOS 899.17.0.
Powered by Linux kernel 4.3.6, CoreOS 899.17.0 arrived on May 3, 2016, as an upgrade to the previous release of the GNU/Linux operating system, which system administrators can use for creating and maintaining open-source projects for Linux Containers, version 899.15.0.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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The openSUSE Project today, May 4, 2016, published details about the latest major open-source components that landed in the main software repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed distro recently.
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After an entire full rebuild last week, openSUSE Tumbleweed is shifting its focus to another area.
Tumbleweed is planning to switch the compiler to GCC 6, and if all goes well, according to Dominique Leuenberger, it might be available in a few weeks, but will certainly trigger another full rebuild.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As you may know (or not), the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) is taking place these days, between May 3 and May 5, on the Ubuntu On Air channel, where the Ubuntu devs are laying down plans for the future.
We’ve already reported the other day that the next major release of the popular Linux kernel-based operating system, Ubuntu 16.10, which has been dubbed by Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth as Yakkety Yak, won’t ship with the long-anticipated Unity 8 desktop interface as the default session.
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I am still not about to run Unity as the main desktop environment on my workstation, not when KDE is available. However, seeing Unity run in the environment it was designed for does eliminate my distaste for it.
Thanks to Unity, the Aquaris M10 offers an experience that my Samsung Galaxy Tab2 cannot possibly compete with. I have already done productive work on it, and plan on taking it with me the next time I travel. Far from being just a piece of hardware to review, it has become my tablet of choice.
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More news out of the Ubuntu developers summit headlines today’s Linux news. OMG!Ubuntu! reported today that “Yakkety Yak will ship the tired and dusty Unity 7 desktop.” In other news Michael Larabel posted today of the developers’ discussion surrounding FESCo’s decision not to rebuild the full codebase for Fedora 25 and The Var Guy listed five reasons Linux is on the rise.
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The creator and maintainer of the once popular Ubuntu Tweak utility, Tualatrix Chou, announced a few minutes ago that its project is no longer under maintenance starting May 2, 2016.
Ubuntu Tweak was one of the most downloaded applications that could have allowed Ubuntu users to tweak every single component of their GNU/Linux operating systems, making their lives much easier while using Ubuntu.
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Unity 8 will not ship as the default desktop in Ubuntu 16.10, the Ubuntu desktop team has said.
Yakkety Yak will ship the tried and trusty — or tired and dusty, depending on your point of view — Unity 7 desktop as the default desktop environment.
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Ubuntu 16.04 is a long-term supported (LTS) version of the popular GNU/Linux operating system from Canonical, which was officially launched on April 21, 2016. Dubbed as Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the 24th release of Ubuntu, which will be supported with critical security patches and software updates for the next five years, that is until 2021.
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Ubuntu is a tricky distribution. As much as I love it on my home server, my desktop is a different ballgame. In my experience, releases between LTS versions have many new technologies that may or may not survive in the next LTS. There were many technologies or features that Canonical thought were ambitious — HUD, experimenting with menus, online dash search, Ubuntu Software Center, etc. — but they were abandoned. So, if I were to use Ubuntu on my desktop, I would still choose LTS.
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Flavours and Variants
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A few moments ago, Softpedia has been informed by Black Lab Software about the general availability of the sixth DP (Developer Preview) build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 8 OS.
Sporting a new kernel from the Linux kernel from the 4.2 series, Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 8 Developer Preview 6 arrives today for early adopters and public beta testers with real-time kernel patching, which means that you won’t have to reboot your Black Lab Linux Enterprise OS after kernel upgrades.
“DP6 offers you a window into what’s new and whats coming when Black Lab Enterprise Desktop and Black Lab Enterprise Desktop for Education is released. As with our other developer previews it also aids in porting your applications to the new environment,” said Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO, Black Lab Software.
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Lubuntu 16.04 LTS was officially released as part of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Official Flavors. This release ships with the latest build of LXDE Desktop Environment and powered by long-term suported of Linux kernel Series 4.4.
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The development environment requires a PC running 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS or 16.04 LTS system, with Python 3 or higher.
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Phones
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Android
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For those curious about the performance out of the sub-$100 USD “Chinese netbooks” using the low-priced Wondermedia SoCs, here are some benchmarks.
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The technology industry is changing fast – much faster than we’ve seen in the past – due to the proliferation of high quality, free and open source software, said Stephen O’Grady, co-founder and principal analyst at RedMonk, in his keynote talk at Collaboration Summit in March. Developers have access to open source technologies without asking for permission.
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Planned Death [Ed: Pieter Hintjens has terminal cancer]
A planned death is not a moment in time, like a car accident or a fatal stroke. It is a process. A social process that involves hundreds of people, each doing their part, grieving their loss, accepting their own mortality.
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…its enterprise and consumer mobile app development platform, is now released to open source under the MIT License.
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Events
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Every software project has moments where they have “a bit of spinach in their teeth”—that is, a simple problem that they just can’t see.
To address this, Deb Nicholson started SpinachCon, an informal workshop that brings free and open source software projects and volunteers together to identify and fix little problems that can pose big obstacles.
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SaaS/Back End
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Databases
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NoSQL databases have emerged as a key tool for organizations battling the data deluge. What does NoSQL actually mean, and which advantages does it deliver for data storage needs? Here’s everything you need to know about NoSQL.
For starters, let’s make clear that NoSQL is not a specific database product. It’s a term that refers to a general category of database, which different vendors have implemented in different ways.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Softpedia has been informed by The Document Foundation’s Mike Saunders about a new campaign which aims to credit every single contributor to the open-source LibreOffice office suite.
Dubbed Month of LibreOffice, the new campaign kicks off on the first day of May 2016, awarding some of the LibreOffice contributors with a barnstar via a special wiki page. The campaign has just started, so you won’t see many entries there, as they need to be added by members of The Document Foundation in time, depending on the task they did.
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CMS
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Meet Greg Anderson, an open source contributor at Pantheon and co-maintainer of Drush. If you’ve used Drush before, you’ve probably saved a bunch of time on repetitive tasks. If you haven’t used it yet, what are you waiting for?
Greg Anderson is all about boosting productivity and improving development workflows. He shared some of his insights in this interview. We also found out how he got involved with Drupal and got a preview of his session at DrupalCon NOLA on command line tools for Drupal 8 modules.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Not only is it great to hear that companies are giving back to the project, but also that OpenBSD was nominated by DDG users. A big thanks to them and their community!
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Public Services/Government
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As for the implications of this interim report, Matthias Kirschner, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), said its assessment of Accenture’s findings is that the problems don’t lie with the PC clients themselves but with the way they are managed and their associated backend infrastructure.
“The study does not mention any concrete problems with the PC clients (neither GNU/Linux nor proprietary). It highlights, that IT security, especially at the client level, is perceived as bad for getting things done.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Hardware/Modding
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[Matthew] is working on an Open Source Lead Tester for his entry into the 2016 Hackaday Prize.
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“In the history of betting, certainly since it was legalised in 1961, a [single event] winner with odds of 5,000-1 has never happened,” says Simon Clare from the betting firm Coral. “Every bookmaker is crying out in pain.
“That’s a barometer of what Leicester have done and just how amazing this win is.”
Jessica Bridges from rival Ladbrokes agrees.
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Science
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Implicit biases are incredibly powerful. Unconscious stereotypes affect how we evaluate who is running for political office, who we promote at work, who we encourage academically, and, perhaps most devastatingly, who we regard and react to as threats.
A huge body of research shows that black Americans are perceived to be more threatening than white Americans, and are stereotyped as more likely to be involved in criminal behavior. During split-second decisions, those biases can have devastating consequences — particularly when it comes to policing and the justice system. In 2015, young black men were nine times as likely to be killed by the police as other Americans, even though about 25 percent of them were unarmed, according to reporting by the Guardian.
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One early morning in March 2011, Albert Chretien and his wife, Rita, loaded their Chevrolet Astro van and drove away from their home in Penticton, British Columbia. Their destination was Las Vegas, where Albert planned to attend a trade show. They crossed the border and, somewhere in northern Oregon, they picked up Interstate 84.
The straightest route would be to take I-84 to Twin Falls, Idaho, near the Nevada border, and then follow US Route 93 all the way to Vegas. Although US 93 would take them through Jackpot, Nevada, the town near the Idaho state line where they planned to spend the first night, they looked at a roadmap and decided to exit I-84 before that junction. They would choose a scenic road less traveled, Idaho State Highway 51, which heads due south away from the I-84 corridor, crossing the border several miles to the west. The Chretiens figured there had to be a turnoff from Idaho 51 that would lead them east to US 93.
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Health/Nutrition
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After heart disease and cancer, medical errors kill more Americans than anything else, claiming a quarter of a million lives a year, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
If bungles and safety lapses in the hospital were accounted for as deaths from disease and injury are, they would be the third most common cause of death in the U.S., leading to more fatalities than respiratory disease, the report in the British Medical Journal argues.
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In America’s never-ending pursuit to be number one in all things, it has achieved top billing in a number of troubling areas, including where overmedication is concerned. We are the most pill-popping country on earth, with an astounding 70 percent of us regularly taking one prescription drug and about half of us taking two. A quarter of us take five or more prescription medications, according to the Mayo Clinic, which for the record, is a whole lot.
What goes into our bodies ultimately must come out, and that’s as true for meds as it is for anything else. Without getting into the elephant in the room (what does it mean when a good portion of the population is taking enough drugs to kill said elephant?), let’s turn to another issue. That is, when some of those pharmaceuticals are excreted—meaning peed out by users—they generally end up in our toilet water. From there, they enter our waterways and recycled water supplies, the latter of which are used to irrigate food crops. Ultimately, new research finds, those drugs can unwittingly be re-absorbed both by humans and by fish who never signed up for a prescription.
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As a consequence, the right to control their reproductive health has become increasingly illusory for many women, particularly the poor.
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The $10,000-a-month cancer drug has become the new normal, to the dismay of physicians and patients who increasingly face the burden of financial toxicity. A pair of new studies illustrate just how recently that pricing model has come into vogue and pull back the curtain on the strange market forces that push prices steadily higher in the years after the treatments are launched.
The first study, published in JAMA Oncology, examined 32 cancer medications given in pill form and found that their initial launch list prices have steadily increased over the years — even after adjusting for inflation. The average monthly amount insurers and patients paid for a new cancer drug was less than $2,000 in the year 2000 but soared to $11,325 in 2014.
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A year ago, Gov. Rick Snyder was stoking rumors of a presidential bid as a metrics-driven Republican whose ability to run government like a business transformed a troubled state.
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According to the press release, the CJEU ruled that Article 13, as well as the other provisions regarding “the integrity of health warnings after the packet has been opened, to the position and minimum dimensions of the health warnings and to the shape of unit packets of cigarettes, the minimum number of cigarettes per unit packet” and “health warnings covering 65% of the external front and back surface of each unit packet” are proportionate and well-compliant with the principle of subsidiarity, due to the overriding interest of public-health protection that the Directive intends to pursue.
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The Flint water crisis is now two years old — and the water still isn’t safe to drink. There have been civil and criminal investigations, two congressional hearings and extensive reporting, particularly during the presidential primary in Michigan. Gov. Rick Snyder appointed a special task force. Yet only 33 pipes — 3 of every thousand — have been replaced.
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The Justice Department, which has been trying to shut down Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the country, since 2012, is backing down. Yesterday Oakland officials, who have supported the dispensary all along, announced that the feds had agreed to let it stay open.
“We celebrate the release from federal prosecution,” said Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. “We believe in compassion. We believe in health.”
The announcement comes a few weeks after the DOJ abandoned its efforts to enforce an injunction against another California dispensary, the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana (MAMM). In allowing MAMM to reopen, the feds let stand a ruling that said such enforcement actions against state-legal dispensaries violate a spending rider known as the Rohrabacher/Farr amendment, which prohibits the DOJ from using appropriated funds to prevent states from implementing their medical marijuana laws.
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Detroit’s Water and Sewerage Department is set to begin Tuesday shutting off service to customers who haven’t paid their bills.
Linda Clark, a spokeswoman for the department, said they initially planned to begin the process Monday, but the water department’s director, Gary Brown, delayed it one day.
“We want to give our customers every opportunity to schedule arrangements,” Clark said. “We wanted to give them another day.”
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Security
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ImageMagick, an open source suite of tools for working with graphic images used by a large number of websites, has been found to contain a serious security vulnerability that puts sites using the software at risk for malicious code to be executed onsite. Security experts consider exploitation to be so easy they’re calling it “trivial,” and exploits are already circulating in the wild. The biggest risk is to sites that allows users to upload their own image files.
Information about the vulnerability was made public Tuesday afternoon by Ryan Huber, a developer and security researcher, who wrote that he had little choice but to post about the exploit.
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A large number of websites are vulnerable to a simple attack that allows hackers to execute malicious code hidden inside booby-trapped images.
The vulnerability resides in ImageMagick, a widely used image-processing library that’s supported by PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, Python, and about a dozen other languages. Many social media and blogging sites, as well as a large number of content management systems, directly or indirectly rely on ImageMagick-based processing so they can resize images uploaded by end users.
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A wildly popular software tool used by websites to process people’s photos can be exploited to execute malicious code on servers and leak server-side files.
Security bugs in the software are apparently being exploited in the wild right now to compromise at-risk systems. Patches to address the vulnerabilities are available in the latest source code – but are incomplete and have not been officially released, we’re told.
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Samples of booby-trapped image files that exploit ImageMagick to compromise servers and other computers are well and truly out in the open now.
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Yep. This is one of those widely used FLOSS tools that has big holes in security. It’s again one of those vulnerabilities where images are treated as code with no checking/sanitizing.
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Defence/Aggression
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How many Western leaders are honestly interested in terrorists’ motives?
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The temporary takeover of the Iraqi parliament building and other facilities in the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr was a demonstration not only of current fractures in Iraqi politics but also of a recurring American misconception about the application of military force on behalf of political objectives.
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Get ready for the new cold war, which will no doubt turn hot if Hillary Clinton gets into the White House: NATO has just announced it is “considering” the addition of 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Poland and the Baltic states, i.e. right on Russia’s western border. The Washington Post helpfully informs us that this is being done “to deter future Russian aggression” – as if there’s any real possibility that Putin will order the Russian army to take Warsaw or march on Estonia.
What this is is another NATO provocation aimed at showing Putin who’s really in charge in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. They’re hoping the Russian leader will respond in kind. But he’s too smart for that: instead, Putin will retaliate in a different theater, perhaps in Syria or Armenia, where the fight with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh is in full swing.
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The next time you get fed up with the partisan politics of the United States Congress, take a look back at the Turkish parliamentary session on Monday night, which ended in a huge fight.
A committee within the Turkish Parliament passed a bill that, if approved, would remove legislators’ immunity and potentially trigger investigations of certain Parliament members. Members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party believe the bill “is designed to target them and suppress dissent,” Reuters reports.
Shortly before the bill was approved by the committee, a fight broke out between members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party and the AK Party, which currently holds power.
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Breaking his pledge, Obama issued the monsters a “get out of jail free” card. There wouldn’t even be an investigation, much less indictments. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he said. The new president traveled to Langley to reassure the torturers everything would be cool. (“I will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are vigorous in protecting the American people.”) He even cooperated with the Republicans who approved of torture to pressure other countries not to file charges against U.S. torturers.
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Sanctions on North Korea have failed.
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Foremost among the obstacles to an effective North Korea sanctions regime is smuggling along the China-DPRK (North Korea) border. Military items disguised as ordinary goods seem easily able to evade detection thanks to inconsistent inspection by border guards, bribery, false declarations, and North Korean firms based in China that actually belong to military-run trading companies. Since these practices are surely well known to the Chinese authorities, it seems fair to assume they have no strong interest in preventing or at least substantially reducing it—something they could accomplish with a more intensive border inspection process. That China is not doing so no doubt reflects its oft-stated position that the North Korean nuclear issue is the result of other countries’ policies, not China’s, hence that resolving it is others’ responsibility, mainly the US.
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The gun business, as a business, remains invisible, a secret in the closet of the gun culture.
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There were corporate benefits for the US along the way, of course. Eight NATO countries bought hundreds of F-16s and all the add-ons, for example, and “NATO Standardization” was military code for “Buy American.” The State Department is barefaced about this. Its head of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Andrew J Shapiro, proudly declared that “We view the American defense industry as an integral part of our efforts to advance US national security and foreign policy.” You can’t be more open than that.
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It is difficult to predict what kind of government misstep can seriously tarnish a government’s reputation. Some mistakes have legs and others, inexplicably, seem not to. But the stunningly stupid decision to go ahead with a $15 billion sale of light armoured vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia has the potential to expose Justin ‘Canada is back’ Trudeau as a phony. Indeed you could hardly design an issue so perfectly fitted to reveal a government with a progressive public face contradicted by a ruthless disregard for human rights. It begs the question as to whether the spin doctors simply misjudged how widespread the public revulsion would be or whether there is something deeper going on. Is it really just about jobs or is there a hard-nosed commitment, inherited from the Conservatives, to a backward Middle East foreign policy?
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After a terror attack, Western governments react – or overreact – to show they’re doing something, but often make matters worse, as Belgium’s new layer of security outside Zaventem airport shows, writes Gilbert Doctorow.
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David Cameron has been accused of misleading MPs, breaking the ministerial code and smearing a British Muslim by accusing him of supporting Islamic State.
The Prime Minister accused Imam Suliman Gani of being a supporter of Islamic State during PMQs last month.
He used the claim to launch a crude and blistering attack on Sadiq Khan , whom he said “shared a platform with him” on nine occasions.
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David Cameron has struggled with football teams, historically.
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Muslim fundamentalist rebels, including al-Qaeda, took revenge Tuesday on West Aleppo for the heavy government bombardment of East Aleppo that has killed dozens in the past week, including at a hospital run by Doctors without Borders. At the same time that the government was bombarding the slums of the east into yet more rubble, the rebels were lobbing mortar shells over on to the upscale West, also killing dozens over the past week (though probably fewer dozens than the government did).
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Is Russia really a military threat to the United States and its neighbors? Is it seriously trying to “revenge” itself for the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union? Is it actively trying to rebuild the old Soviet empire? The answers to these questions are critical, because, for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, several nuclear-armed powers are on the edge of a military conflict with fewer safeguards than existed 50 years ago.
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Perhaps you have never heard of German colonialism; it is less commonly spoken about than other colonialisms. The most common reasoning for this is that Germany lost its colonies too early for them to be of any significance (by 1918). It is often argued that the empire was short lived, and that it detracts attention from the crimes of the Second World War to discuss it.
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By now it is old news that there is a coup afoot in Brazil and that the right-wing is using extraordinary political measures to overthrow of Dilma Rousseff.
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Even with support from the thousands that pack his speaking engagements, pundits continue to count Bernie Sanders out once the 2016 Democratic National Convention rolls around in July. This rhetoric should not be taken lightly. History reveals how candidates, who are unpopular with their own establishment, have been taken down by the powers-at-be even as they gained popularity in the polls. Green Party presidential frontrunner Dr. Jill Stein noted how this occurred with Dennis Kucinich, who was redistricted out of an election, with Jessie Jackson, who was branded an anti-Semite, and with Howard Dean, who was taken down by a public relations campaign. Despite the back talking, Sanders’ delegate count is the primary predictor of his success in the 2016 primary races. Sanders is trailing in pledged delegates and he must win nearly 95 percent of the remaining delegates to get the democratic nomination. Despite these nail biting odds, Sanders’ supporters have an alternative choice if he falters.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Yesterday, Steven Aftergood noted that, rather than prosecute leakers, the Intelligence Community is instead taking administrative measures against people who leak information. We’ve know they were moving in that direction for some time (largely through Aftergood’s efforts). But he posts classified testimony obtained via FOIA that Bob Litt gave in 2012 explaining the change.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Recently it was reported in the Livingston Enterprise that visitors to Yellowstone National Park contributed $493.6 million in spending in communities near the park. That spending supported 7,737 jobs.
And this research does not include all the jobs and income resulting from those with footloose businesses and/or retirement that they bring to communities like Livingston, in part, because people want to live near protected lands like Yellowstone.
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Instagram snaps of celebrities including Paris Hilton and James Rodriguez posing with apes in the Gulf are damaging efforts to clamp down on wildlife trafficking and endangering the survival of some species, a UN body has warned.
New research by the UN’s great apes survival partnership (Grasp) points to an alarming rise in trafficking of orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos stolen from the wild, mostly to feed demand from a boom in macabre Chinese circuses.
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After sweating through the second straight year that earned the title of hottest year on record, new research from the Center for American Progress Action Fund finds that 24 governors and attorneys general publicly deny the reality of climate change. It also gives a comprehensive summary of their records and public views on climate change and energy issues. The 21 governors publicly confirmed as climate deniers is an increase from previous years.
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Scientists in the US have identified a new hazard in a world in which the climates change and the oceans warm: measurable stretches of the seas could become sapped of oxygen.
They say that parts of the southern Indian Ocean, the eastern tropical Pacific and the Atlantic are already less oxygen-rich because of global warming. And oxygen deprivation could become increasingly widespread across large regions of ocean between 2030 and 2040.
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The original Hanford Project, which manufactured plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb and over its forty years of operation produced 63 short tons of plutonium, is now home to the largest environmental clean-up in the country. The place is literally steaming with radioactivity. 56 million gallons of nuclear sludge currently sit in double-walled underground tanks built in the 1970s. This waste is awaiting a plant to be built, known as the Hanford Vit Plant, that can turn the nasty gunk into glass rods. The Vit Plant, to be constructed by Bechtel, continues to run way over its initial budget estimates and keeps being delayed. The plant, if it’s ever completed, will end up costing taxpayers over $30 billion. Meanwhile, those old holding tanks aren’t fail-safe. They continue to be a colossal problem for the environment and workers alike.
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When things go wrong — especially if they go really, historically wrong — people tend to look for answers. So when California entered the fourth year of one of the worst droughts the state had ever seen, everyone — the media, politicians, scientists — wanted to know what had gone wrong.
In the process, a number of things were set upon the altar of public opinion as scapegoats for the drought: lawns, golf courses, wealthy Californians taking more than their fair share of the state’s dwindling resources, climate change. But none provoked the maelstrom that surrounded the almond, which seemingly transformed overnight from a healthy snack to the evil source of California’s water woes.
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Finance
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A senior partner in the global accounting giant KPMG, which has been accused of being behind a tax avoidance scheme in the Isle of Man, says a lot of international tax rules “are broken” — and they need to be fixed.
Gregory Wiebe, speaking before the House of Commons finance committee on Tuesday, addressed concerns about the “disconnects” between Canada’s tax system and those Canadians may encounter elsewhere. Speaking in the wake of both the Isle of Man reports and the “Panama Papers” revelations, Wiebe said the public has come to question the fairness of global tax systems.
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For example, the deal calls for the felonious bank to put a quarter-billion dollars into affordable housing, but generous federal negotiators put incentives and credits in the fine print that will let Goldman escape with paying out less than a third of that. Also, about $2.5 billion of the settlement is to be paid to consumers hurt by the financial crisis. But the deal lets the bank deduct almost a billion of this payout from its corporate taxes – meaning you and I will subsidize Goldman’s payment. As a bank reform advocate puts it, the problem with these settlements “is that they are carefully crafted more to conceal than to reveal to the American public what really happened here.”
Also, notice that the $5 billion punishment is applied to Goldman Sachs, not the “Goldman Sackers.” The bank’s shareholders have to cough up the penalty, rather than the executives who did the bad deeds. Goldman Sachs’ CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, just awarded himself a $23 million paycheck for his work last year. That work essentially amounted to negotiating the deal with the government that makes shareholders pay for the bankers’ wrongdoings — while he and other top executives keep their jobs and pocket millions. Remember, banks don’t commit crimes — bankers do.
One more reason Wall Street bankers privately wink and grin at these seemingly huge punishments is that even paying the full $5 billion would only be relatively painful. To you and me, that sounds like a crushing number — but Goldman Sachs raked in $33 billion in revenue last year, so it’s a reasonable cost of doing business. After all, Goldman sold tens of billions of dollars in the fraudulent investment packages leading to the settlement, so the bottom line is that crime can actually pay — if it’s big enough.
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Could things get any worse for TTIP? On Monday the hugely damaging leak of consolidated texts confirmed exactly what everyone had feared about the deal, with all its massively pro-corporate provisions on display for everyone to see. And then the following day the French government launched one of the most high profile attacks on TTIP that’s ever been seen.
Whether TTIP survives these body blows is debateable, but it is almost fatally wounded.
Francois Hollande, the French president, is lagging in the polls and his threat to block TTIP could be seen as a gambit to shore up some votes. But it is a reflection of the popular mood in the country, where the media’s negative reporting on TTIP has soared in the past fortnight. Hollande said at a conference that he could not accept “the undermining of the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets.”
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Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament’s important trade committee, has indicated that he now expects the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations will probably fail, following a major leak of confidential documents from the talks.
Greenpeace Netherlands has released half of the entire TTIP draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US, which reveal US demands in detail for the first time.
Although the EU has improved transparency recently, and routinely publishes its offers for each TTIP chapter, the US has consistently refused to do so. Even MEPs and MPs have faced extreme restrictions on what they are allowed to look at, copy, or even say when it comes to the US position. The new leak by an unknown whistleblower represents a major blow to US attempts to keep its negotiating demands confidential, and provides important information to the both the EU and US public for the first time.
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We’ve written plenty of stories about the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership) agreement being worked on between the US and the EU. Think of it as the companion to the TPP, which covers the US and a variety of countries around the Pacific ocean. Like the TPP, the US has demanded extreme levels of secrecy around the negotiations (in the past, the US negotiating body, the USTR, has admitted that the more the public is aware of the details, the less likely they are to support the agreement). And while there have been reports out of the EU arguing that negotiators there are more willing to be more open about the negotiations, so far, the US has not allowed it. This has resulted in some crazy situations including secretive “reading rooms” where politicians are carefully guarded if they look at the current drafts — and where they’re not allowed to bring any device or copy anything from the documents.
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Greenpeace has done that part of the world whose representatives are so corrupt or so stupid as to sign on to the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic “partnerships” a great service. Greenpeace secured and leaked the secret TTIP documents that Washington and global corporations are pushing on Europe. The official documents prove that my description of these “partnerships” when they first appeared in the news is totally correct.
These so-called “free trade agreements” are not trade agreements. The purpose of the “partnerships,” which were drafted by global corporations, is to make corporations immune to the laws of soverign countries in which they do business. Any country’s sovereign law whether social, environmental, food safety, labor protections—any law or regulation—that impacts a corporation’s profits is labeled a “restraint on trade.” The “partnerships” permit corporations to file a suit that overturns the law or regulation and also awards the corporation damages paid by the taxpayers of the country that tried to protect its environment or the safety of its food and workers.
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But the Times noted another interesting and crucial point, one that is seldom discussed: Namely, the issue of what is often called corporate welfare.
While the conservative right is content to shame poor mothers for receiving federal assistance, rarely do they dare call, say, General Electric or Walmart “welfare queens,” despite the fact that they receive enormous direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies year after year.
This is true for McDonald’s, as well: The Times observes, “Through it all, taxpayers continue to pick up the difference between what fast-food workers earn and what they need to survive. An estimated $1.2 billion a year in taxpayer dollars goes toward public aid to help people who work at McDonald’s.”
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Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Janet Yellen, released a proposal for reform of the Federal Reserve Board’s governing structure in a press call sponsored by the Fed Up campaign. The proposal has a number of important features, but the main point is to make the Fed more accountable to democratically elected officials and to reduce the power of the banking industry in monetary policy.
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In Greece, the Syriza-led coalition government is now set to agree to new rounds of cuts and privatizations demanded by the country’s lenders. Prior to its initial election in January 2015, Syriza had promised to abolish the country’s loan agreements and austerity policies. Now, unemployment remains at record levels, and the young and educated continue to leave the country, while recent large-scale privatizations such as the sell-off of the port of Piraeus have been pushed through.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former undersecretary of the US Treasury and former Wall Street Journal editor, agreed to share his thoughts on the recent developments in Greece. The author of over a dozen books and numerous journal articles, Roberts regularly analyzes global economic conditions and geopolitics in his writing. In this interview, which has been lightly edited, he discusses how countries are indebted and forced to accept austerity, as well as current US economic conditions and the presidential election.
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Has the U.S. economy therefore come to a halt the past three months? If so, what are the consequences for a global economy already progressively slowing? What will an apparently stagnating US economy mean for Japan, already experiencing its fifth recession since 2008? For Europe, stuck in a long term chronic stagnation? And for emerging market economies, struggling with collapsing commodity prices and currencies, rising unemployment, and long term capital flight trends? Once heralded as the only bright spot in the global economy, the US economy now appears to have joined the slowing global trend.
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Hedge funds make big returns by manipulating markets in ways that are illegal for small investors. Remind us: Why are they permitted?
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German companies are known for paying some of the heftiest dividends among world stocks, one reason U.S. investment giants such as BlackRock and Vanguard are among the biggest holders of German shares.
But Wall Street has figured out a way to squeeze some extra income from these stocks. And German taxpayers pay for it.
A cache of confidential documents obtained by ProPublica and analyzed in collaboration with The Washington Post, German broadcaster ARD and the Handelsblatt newspaper in Düsseldorf details how Wall Street puts together complex stock-lending deals that drain an estimated $1 billion a year from the German treasury.
Similar deals extend beyond Germany, siphoning revenue from at least 20 other countries across four continents, according to the documents, which show how “dividend-arbitrage” transactions — known in the trade as “div-arb” — are structured and marketed as tax-avoidance vehicles.
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Republicans have long sung the praises of trickle-down economics: Just cut taxes, and the economy will flourish as companies and individuals use the windfall to boost investment and create jobs. But a grand experiment in implementing those policies at the state level has revealed a far less rosy reality—and the consequences are threatening to spark a civil war among Republicans.
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Describing China as “raping” the US economy embraces inaccuracy and distaste. This has not bothered him before and it is unlikely that he will lose any sleep over it. But shrugging our shoulders and rolling our eyes upward at yet another example of his crassness seems a totally inadequate response.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Despite the furore that Channel 4’s investigation has created, there has been virtually no other coverage from the mainstream media of this deeply undemocratic scandal. And Twitter was rightly outraged at the lack of coverage.
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The Tories have been accused of trying to “fix” the next election after new figures show millions of people have fallen off the electoral register.
In some constituencies, nearly half those eligible to vote are no longer on the electoral roll, the House of Commons Library has found.
But the Government is pushing through boundary changes as it cuts the number of MPs from 650 to 600 based on the number on the register, not those eligible to vote.
The library figures show the majority of those who have fallen off the electoral roll are in Labour areas.
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Notts Police ask to see records of Tory by-election expenses declaration & returns following our investigation into undisclosed spending across three by-elections and a key General Election marginal.
Evidence obtained by Channel 4 News appears to show that the Conservatives racked up tens of thousands of pounds in undisclosed spending across three by-elections in 2014.
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Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential race today after badly losing Indiana, a state that he staked his campaign on, to Donald Trump.
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Sanders continues to run strong with younger voters — 72 percent of 17 to 29 year olds support him. Clinton performs well among older voters — 60 percent of people over the age of 65.
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But Tuesday’s win means Sanders is likely to keep trekking on, at least until California votes on June 7. His campaign has outpaced Clinton in donations in recent months, so he has the funds to keep things going until the end of the process. The longer he sticks around, the more leverage he might gain for extracting concessions from Clinton to include his pet policies in the party platform at this summer’s Democratic convention.
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During previous primary night speeches, Donald Trump called the media “disgusting,” was flanked by fringe right-wing figures who are mostly remembered for saying ridiculous and offensive things, and broadsided Hillary Clinton with sexist attacks.
But on Tuesday, fresh off a dominating victory in Indiana that prompted Ted Cruz to suspend his campaign and all but sealed that Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, the billionaire toned things down a bit.
While he did make up the word “bigly” and elicited groans by saying, “I love winning with women,” for the most part Trump steered clear of controversy and attempted to portray himself as a magnanimous winner. For instance, just hours after calling Ted Cruz a “wacko” on Twitter, Trump had kind words for his defeated rival, describing him as “one hell of a competitor” who has a “beautiful family.” (In March, Trump retweeted a meme suggesting Cruz’s wife Heidi isn’t attractive.)
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Proving that U.S. voters are still energenized to go to the polls to voice their support for “political revolution,” Bernie Sanders won the Indiana primary on Tuesday night – besting rival Hillary Clinton and notching a much-needed victory as the corporate media and political class continues to discount his chances and downplay the accomplishments of the campaign.
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Sanders was already looking strong in Oregon, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Dakota, and California, but given that he’s within single digits in New Jersey (where Trump is very popular) and performed incredibly well with nonwhite voters in Indiana (meaning New Mexico could be in play), it’s not unthinkable that Hillary Clinton could lose all of the remaining primaries and caucuses and therefore as many as thirteen or fourteen contests in a row to finish the Democratic primary season.
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“They jailed me, sued me, made me a bankrupt, but I’m still standing,” he said.
Before ending the speech, he told the crowd he had walked with his head held high, and that he had grown stronger with every attack.
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Debate about the BBC’s Charter Review has been dominated by leaks and rumours that ultimately play into the hands of commercial lobbyists. Where are the voices of licence-fee payers?
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Sometime between now and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, there will almost certainly be a deal between the Sanders forces and the Clinton forces. The $64,000 question is: What are the forces of progress going to get out of the deal?
Here’s what I hope will be in the deal: a set of agreements to make the Democratic Party more democratic — in particular, to make the party more transparent and accountable to the public.
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The main victim is the Republican Party; Hillary Clinton expects a blowout victory. Her husband won against a fractured Republican Party with 43% of the votes in 1992 and 68% of the Electoral College. Ross Perot had 19,743,821 votes—18.91% and NO electoral votes. Having Bernie Sanders run as a Green Party candidate would represent a radical change. Suddenly, the Democrats would be the party in trouble.
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British Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for his description of Donald Trump as “divisive, stupid and wrong,” said an adviser to the presidential hopeful.
The call came as the billionaire businessman all but clinched the Republican U.S. presidential nomination after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz bowed out of the race after a defeat in Indiana.
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Unfortunately, the pundits are right about the mathematics. Sanders would need more than 64% of remaining delegates to take the lead. It would require a political bombshell to turn things around, especially with so many closed primaries where independents are shut out of this rigged process. And even with a majority, Bernie would still face the undemocratic brick wall of the establishment’s hand-picked crew of superdelegates.
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Confident that she has the Democratic nomination pretty much locked down and turning toward a general election contest against Donald Trump, Secretary Clinton’s surrogates and paid Internet trolls are targeting Sanders devotees via email and seeding comment threads on political websites with a low-key sales pitch.
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Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist insurgent, won Indiana convincingly Tuesday night – 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent – over Hillary Clinton, the establishment moderate. This is a remarkable victory, a statement of the extent and scope of the Sanders surge.
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Bernie Sanders’ defeats in the East Coast primaries have triggered a flurry of conversation about what the 25 to 35% of Sanders supporters who’ve told pollsters they will not vote for Hillary Clinton will do instead. Socialist Alternative, led by Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, and others have called for Sanders to found an independent left party for the 99% and run as an independent, or to appeal to Jill Stein and the Green Party to join their ticket, despite his oft repeated promise to endorse the Democrats’ nominee.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Whether it’s about Syrian refugees, Syria or Iraq, the truth is sometimes better left unsaid. It all depends on the country in which it is said. One thing is certain: In these troubled times, censorship and self-censorship are thriving.
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Newsrooms attacked with grenades in Burundi, journalists getting fired over a tweet in Turkey, heavy propaganda in China, Russia, Eritrea, a blogger sentenced to prison and whipping in a public place in Saudi Arabia, and there’s even some being sent to military camps for journalists in Thailand. Scary stuff. We need more awareness like this, but we also need a way to do something about it. What this campaign has going for it is the fact it was created in France where they have the freedom. The question becomes how do you make sure people in the oppressed countries also see it. Solidarity is sometimes as important as awareness. I also think it could be a better idea if you managed to get people in the countries where press is restricted to actually see something like this.
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China’s vaguely-defined web content rules and inconsistent censorship enforcement work the same way as the fog near a cliff: since people can’t see exactly where the edge is, they’re more likely to stay far away from it, just in case. There’s no toeing the line, because nobody knows exactly where the line is. So instead of pushing the envelope, many people choose to censor themselves.
In order to ensure that margin of safety, people will tend to censor themselves more than is necessary according to the stated rules. If the line in the sand were well defined, they could step right up to it, fairly secure that they will be safe provided they don’t cross. In effect, by introducing an unnerving element of uncertainty into its actions, China obtains a more stringent self-censorship on the part of its citizens than it would from formally applying well-defined rules through official channels.
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Self-censorship is the most effective route to protecting youthful innocence. Content makers are aware of their audiences; they should have the decency to keep content clean if it is likely to be seen or heard by children. However, content dealing with mature subject matter shouldn’t be cleansed of curse words while still retaining information on adult subjects. It’s a half-measure which ultimately is ineffective.
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Artist/self-proclaimed troll Karim Boumjimar is the creative force behind the BeigeType Instagram, a bizarrely beautiful collection of off-kilter, visceral visuals and digitally-altered nudes that take the practice of self-portraiture to a whole new level. Exploring the union between the mind and the body through the use of materials as disparate as blood oranges to used cigarette butts, we were instantly enamored with his eccentric, polarizing approach to depictions of the body on such a public platform. As such, we spoke to Boumjimar himself about everything from Internet narcissism to Instagram censorship, and, of course, how hater drama makes everything a little more interesting.
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Themes of the seminar included the impact of aggressive online discussion on press freedom, the impact of internet “trolling” on targeted journalists, and the spread of crowd censorship and the potential threat it poses to freedom of speech and democracy.
Jessikka Aro discussed how her investigation into the phenomenon of pro-Russian online trolling quickly found her a target of online attacks and abuse herself, including international harassment, smear campaigns, and dissemination of her personal information.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Police were waiting for Deon Batty when he stepped off a Baltimore City bus traveling along a commercial strip near the public Douglass Homes on Valentine’s Day three years ago.
When authorities asked Batty to empty his pockets, he pulled out a cell phone and handed it over.
An officer dialed the number of a 77-year-old woman who had been robbed of her phone and other items at gunpoint the night before. The phone in the officer’s hand rang.
The seamless chain of events baffled Batty’s public defender, Janine Meckler. How did police know he was on that particular bus? Why had they stopped him without a warrant? How did they know he had the woman’s phone?
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Welcome to the inaugural OnionScan Report. The aim of these reports is to provide an accurate and up-to-date analysis of how anonymity networks are being used in the real world.
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Up to 1.6 million patients have had their private medical files passed on to Google without their permission, it was revealed today
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The US National Security Agency aims to keep a tab on its own staff and their personal computers when out of working hours to ensure they are not participating in illegal activities, including downloading child pornography, or leaking classified information.
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A U.S. appeals court has declared illegal the National Security Agency program that collects data on the landline calling records of nearly every American. The ruling Thursday, the first of its kind by an appeals court, comes as Congress considers whether to continue, end or overhaul the program before June 1, when the legal provisions authorizing it expire.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Whether they like it or not, state and local police do not have the authority to enforce immigration law. And that’s a good thing, because when cops try to act like Border Patrol agents, civil rights violations are almost inevitable. An ever expanding number of lawsuits across the country bear that out.
This issue gained national notoriety in 2007 in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio instructed police officers to conduct immigration checks during traffic stops, specifically targeting Latinos. The ACLU sued, and Arpaio’s department was found liable for widespread rights violations.
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What are you really agreeing to when you select “I agree” on a click-through contract? Whether you know it or not, you’re often agreeing to waive a host of fundamental rights. Want to buy a new mobile device? Click on an agreement that says you won’t modify the software on it. Going to the dentist? Sign a contract waiving your right to leave negative reviews online.
While these contracts are unfair to customers in virtually any context, they’re particularly appalling when we’re talking about basic needs like Internet access. You shouldn’t have to waive your rights just to get online, but virtually every telecommunications provider includes a clause in its customer agreement forbidding you from exercising one of the most basic constitutional rights: the right to take them to court.
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The Church Committee Report reveals the lengths the government was willing to go in order to crush grassroots activism and spy on American citizens.
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Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one of the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we’re already in (it’s generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed an act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with them.
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Five hunger strikers – angered by new police murders of Black and brown people – have been occupying half the sidewalk in front of Mission Police Station since April 21. It’s Day 11 of their liquid-only fast and they’re losing weight, but they vow to keep it up until SF Police Chief Greg Suhr resigns or is fired.
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The internet has always been a place where racists can go to register their hatred while bravely hiding behind a cloak of digital anonymity. That’s been extra true over the last 48 hours, as racist trolls—self-loathing sacks of shit who live in perpetual fear of their own inferiority—have logged on to share their reactions to news and images involving black people. Unsurprisingly, Fox News is involved.
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The city council of San Antonio on the island of Ibiza has banned all drinking on the street. Council members say the move is aimed at deterring people from drinking alcohol and causing problems. But the ban applies to all liquids, since authorities say police can’t just look at a glass and tell what’s in it.
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Aluf Benn’s proposal for Israel’s left to establish a base of domestic support for its positions is hopeless considering the brainwashing and increasing extremism of our society.
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In case you missed it, April 21 was officially Kindergarten Day. This obscure holiday honors the birth of Friedrich Frobel, who started the first Children’s Garden in Germany in 1837. Of course, life has changed tremendously in the 179 years since Frobel created his play-based, socialization program to transition young children from home to school — and so, too, has school itself. But what hasn’t changed in all this time, not one iota, is the developmental trajectory of the preschoolers Frobel was thinking about when he created what we now call kindergarten.
Frobel, a German teacher, strongly believed that children learn through play and by using open-ended materials like blocks, which he called “gifts.” His approach was a radical departure from the way children were viewed and taught at the time. Prior to Frobel, children were thought of as mini-adults who were educated through lectures and rote recitation. How ironic that today kindergarteners, and even preschoolers, are once again being subjected to these inappropriate methods of instruction. This despite all we have learned about child development in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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The Freedom Riders drew inspiration from the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947, led by Bayard Rustin and George Houser. The Freedom Rides campaigns followed on the heels of the highly visible lunch counter sit-in campaigns that began in 1960. Diane Nash, a veteran of the Nashville, Tennessee, campaign, was one of the lead organizers of the Freedom Rides, and it was at her urging that the demonstrators persevered through the extreme violence, carrying on to success despite life-threatening situations.
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Innocent until proven guilty? Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination? Hah! Not if you forget your passwords, in Post-Constitutional America.
Former Philadelphia Police Sergeant Francis Rawls, above, has spent the past seven months in solitary confinement without conviction because passwords he entered for investigators failed to decrypt his hard drives, seized in connection with a child porn investigation. Rawls says he’s forgotten the correct passwords and so can’t decrypt the drives and provide the cops with evidence that he possessed child porn.
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The United States is locking up and dehumanizing its people at extraordinary rates. Just over 4 percent of the world’s population lives in the U.S., yet we hold captive within our borders a whopping 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This gives the U.S. the largest prisoner population in the world. And that population is growing, though not for any noble reason, like “crime is on the rise” (au contraire). It’s growing because of the same sleaze that’s behind most of our country’s problems: giant corporations are incentivizing, and profiting from the expansion of the prisons industry.
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In 2007, after white students hung nooses on a tree the day after a black student sat beneath it, racial tensions boiled over at Jena High School in Louisiana. Soon after the incident, a white student was beaten by a group of black students dubbed the Jena 6 — all of whom were arrested and charged with attempted murder instead of assault.
Theodore Shaw was one of the Jena 6, but he always maintained his innocence. As a 17-year-old at the time, he was locked up with adult criminals for seven months because his family couldn’t afford his bail. And throughout the duration of his incarceration, he fought hard to convince himself that he wasn’t a criminal.
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Several of the officials charged with regulating Texas’s prison labor program, wherein thousands of workers behind bars are compelled to produce goods and provide services for free, are connected to some of the richest and most powerful institutions and people in the state.
The Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which oversees Texas Correctional Industries (TCI), the prison industry division within the state’s Department of Criminal Justice, has authority over how much compensation inmates working for the state receive for their labor. Currently, inmates working for TCI are not paid for the work done while serving their time; the only inmates who are paid anything are the small fraction who are employed by TCI’s private sector prison industries program.
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Security lines at airports are getting longer — much longer — and wait times could reach epidemic levels when air travel peaks this summer, according to airlines, airports and federal officials.
A combination of fewer Transportation Security Administration screeners, tighter budgets, new checkpoint procedures and growing numbers of passengers is already creating a mess at airports around the country.
While federal security officials say they are hiring and training hundreds of additional screening officers, matters are not expected to improve anytime soon.
Airline and airport officials have said they fear that the current slowdown will last through the year, and could cause a summer travel meltdown when more than 220 million passengers are expected to fly during the peak travel months of July and August.
“This is going to be a rough summer; there is no doubt about it,” said Gary Rasicot, who was recently appointed to a newly created position as the T.S.A.’s chief of operations. “We are probably not at the staffing level we would like to be to address the volume. This is why we are talking about people getting to the airport a little earlier than planned.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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A political deal to make public sector websites more accessible—particularly to those with disabilities—was agreed by the three European Union institutions on Tuesday.
In a late night deal, the parliament, council, and commission backed Europe-wide rules to make public bodies’ websites and mobile apps more user-friendly for the blind, the deaf, and the hard of hearing.
At present, around 80 million people in the EU are affected by a disability, according to the commission. But that figure is expected to rise to 120 million by 2020 due to an ageing population.
The Internet has become an essential method of communication, so the deal aims to make sure that citizens of all capabilities can access public administrations, including courts, police departments, public hospitals, universities, schools, and libraries.
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As we’ve been discussing, the FCC is cooking up a plan to bring much-needed competition to the cable set top box market. As a fact sheet being circulated by the agency (pdf) notes, the FCC hopes to force cable operators to offer their existing cable lineups to third party hardware — without the need of a pesky CableCARD. This would obviously disrupt the $21 billion in annual, captive set top rental fees enjoyed by the industry, and the competitive set top box market that emerges would likely drive more users than ever to alternative streaming options.
As such, the cable industry has been having a monumental hissy fit. This has ranged from threatening lawsuits to publishing an absolute ocean of misleading editorials in news outets nationwide, claiming the FCC’s plan would destroy consumer privacy, increase piracy, hurt programming diversity, and make little children cry.
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DRM
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Everybody knows that the digital locks of DRM on the digital media you own is a big problem. If you’ve bought a digital book, album, or movie, you should be able to do what you want with it—whether that’s enjoying it wherever you want to, or making it more accessible by changing the font size or adding subtitles, or loaning or giving it to a friend when you’re done. We intuitively recognize that digital media should be more flexible than its analog forebears, not less, and that DRM shouldn’t take away rights that copyright was never intended to restrict.
But while it may not be as intuitive yet, DRM on digital media that you don’t own is also a major threat. Whether it’s books from the public library, streaming songs from Spotify, or TV shows from Netflix, wrapping media in DRM software—especially when it brings with it a cloud of legal uncertainty—is not just a bad way to enforce license contracts; it’s also a danger to our rights and our security.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Mylan filed two separate ANDAs with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) seeking permission to market generic versions of unrelated pharmaceutical products marketed by Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. and AstraZeneca AB under the statutory scheme outlined in the Hatch-Waxman Act (the “Act”). As permitted under the Act, Mylan certified that the patents of the brand name drug companies listed in the FDA’s Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations (“the Orange Book”) were either invalid or would not be infringed by Mylan’s marketing of its proposed generic versions of the drugs. Each certification is deemed an artificial act of infringement under the Act, and permits the brand name drug companies to sue the generic drug company. Acorda and AstraZeneca sued Mylan for patent infringement in separate lawsuits filed in Delaware. Mylan moved to dismiss in both cases, arguing that it was not subject to either general or specific personal jurisdiction.[4]
[...]
Regardless of the Federal Circuit’s final ruling, the losing party may very well file a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court seeking review of the Federal Circuit’s decision. That Acorda and Mylan were represented at the Federal Circuit by former Solicitor Generals (Theodore Olson for Acorda and Paul Clement for Mylan), while AstraZeneca was represented by another Supreme Court veteran (Kannon Shanmugam), shows that each party considers this case to be important and that they are likely preparing to ask the Supreme Court to consider the matter. So the panel decision in Acorda appears to be merely the beginning of the appellate proceedings. Given these expected actions it will be interesting to see if the brand name drug companies continue to file suits in both the brand name drug company’s preferred jurisdiction as well as where the generic drug company is incorporated or has its principal place of business until all the Acorda appellate proceedings are concluded.
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WIPO Director General Francis Gurry was investigated after charges were levelled by a deputy director that he wrongfully ordered DNA samples to be taken from several unknowing staff members, and that he improperly influenced a WIPO contract to steer it toward a particular businessman. The congressional members said Gurry is “engaging in a lobbying effort to prevent disclosure of the report or to have the report heavily redacted.” Redacted means sections are blacked out.
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Trademarks
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Almost three years ago, a team of pro bono attorneys (D. Gill Sperlein, Paul Alan Levy, Gary Krupkin and Neal Hoffman) took up the defense of Jeffrey DeShong, an HIV-positive blogger who had been served a bogus trademark infringement lawsuit by Clark Baker, a retired LAPD officer who spends his free time defending people who have hidden their HIV-positive status from sexual partners.
Baker had no legal basis for his claims, but was obviously hoping airy claims of Lanham Act violations based on URL similarities would be all that was needed to shut up a vocal critic. He was wrong. The lawsuit was tossed in the pleading stages by the district court and that decision was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court.
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Copyrights
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After disrupting the entertainment industry with The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde now hopes to do the same with the advertisement business. Today, Sunde’s micropayment service Flattr teamed up with Adblock Plus, offering publishers a way to get paid without having to show annoying ads.
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Remember Hadopi? Back when the legacy copyright players were totally focused on kicking individuals off the internet via a “three strikes” program, France and its former President Nicolas Sarkozy, married to a musician, was the first to embrace the idea of kicking casual file sharers off the internet (we’ll leave aside the fact that Sarkozy was a mass infringer himslef). The program that was built up around the plan was eventually called Hadopi, and created a big bureaucracy to send out threat notices. The program turned out to be a complete disaster. It issued many notices, but really had to massage the numbers to make its activities look reasonable. Even when people did lose their internet access, there were problems. A detailed academic study of Hadopi found that it was a miserable failure that actually resulted in an increase in infringement.
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05.03.16
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Server
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There are other important benefits. Linux containers package just about any type of server application to run everywhere – on your desktop, in a cloud, or anywhere Linux is available – regardless of kernel version or Linux distribution. Containers also can have a considerably smaller footprint than VMs, which means your systems can see higher densities and run more cost effectively with containers than with VMs on the same host.
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For Solomon Hykes, founder and CEO of Docker, IT plumbing functions best if it is worked on by the entire community of its users, with developers modifying it however they wish and submitting the results back to the repository. While some organizations shy away from making their code open source, Docker embraces all contributions — Regardless of the fact that some of the resulting creations could one day become its competition.
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HPE’s cloud story remains complicated. While the company has left the public cloud behind, it will continue to offer its OpenStack-based Helion 3.0 as a private cloud.
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Kernel Space
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While news is spreading around today about an updated attack against the Linux kernel’s BPF JIT that works around the random offset it applies to the start of the JITted code, I wanted to share our perspective on this, why everyone should have already seen this coming (as we did), and why these JIT spraying attacks have been irrelevant in grsecurity for many years and especially now with the release of RAP.
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In this brief training video from the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds shares why he’s passionate about Linux and open source software.
Back in 1991, a Finnish graduate student had an itch he needed to scratch — and Linux was thereby born. Hear how Linus Torvalds today feels about the range of careers available to people working in open source.
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The VC4 kernel DRM driver for the Raspberry Pi has seen a few more features primed in time for the Linux 4.7 merge window.
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Graphics Stack
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Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group, presented at the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) last month in Vienna about the state of the union for OpenCL.
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Applications
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If you are a newcomer to Linux you may not even have an idea what Ndiswrapper is even though it was very much used a number of years ago, but nevertheless, Ndiswrapper 1.60 has been released.
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Proprietary
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Last week, we reported on the release of the first maintenance version of the stable Vivaldi 1.0 web browser, build 1.1, which has been rebased on the Chromium 50 open-source project.
We’ve been informed by Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard that Vivaldi 1.1.453.52-1 stable update is now available for all platforms, bringing the latest security fixes from upstream, which means that the web browser has been upgraded to Chromium 50.0.2661.94.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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This latest data puts the overall Linux market-share at 0.90%, which they indicate as a +0.06% compared to the month prior. Well, back in March, Steam on Linux dropped by 0.06% compared to February, so it’s basically the same level as back then.
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Are you a fan of multiplayer games? Well it looks like The Ship: Remasted (that’s not a typo!) is heading to Linux and it could even be soon. It sounds pretty hilarious too, really want to try it with a few of you.
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If you’re a fan of games like Risk you might want to have a look into the free to play Age of Conquest IV (Steam, official website) which recently released.
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I hadn’t heard of Corpse Party myself until a few days ago, but it seems this popular series is getting a Linux entry. Corpse Party is currently being ported to Linux!
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Oh boy, not long after the release of Tomb Raider and Feral Interactive have started teasing a new port again.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We have met some really helpful while putting together this bid, both at the Manchester Metropolitan University, which is our proposed venue, and at the Marketing Manchester conference bureau, who have helped make the bid document. Thanks to both.
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While the OpenWRT project is a very well known embedded Linux distribution primarily for network devices, a number of their own developers have decided to fork away from the project.
In what appears to be a move to have new project leaders, a group of OpenWRT developers announced LEDE, their fork of the project. LEDE considers itself a spin-off of OpenWRT with many of the same goals. LEDE is short for the Linux Embedded Development Environment.
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Reviews
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ChaletOS, which “came from the style of the mountain houses in Switzerland” is a beautifully-crafted Linux distro that aims to ease the transition of users from other operating systems (specifically Windows) to Linux.
While this concept is not new, it has been one of the things that drives the Linux industry towards usability, user-friendliness and perfection.
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New Releases
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The development team behind the IPFire software have announced the general availability of the Core Update 101 of the IPFire 2.19 Linux kernel-based firewall distribution.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 101 is here to patch a cross-site-scripting vulnerability, as well as a remote code execution issue in the web-based user interface, which have been discovered recently by Yann Cam, an independent security researcher. These security vulnerabilities could be used by an attacker under certain circumstances.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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With FESCo having decided not to schedule a mass rebuild for Fedora 25 due out at the end of the year, some developers are unhappy and feel its sacrificing quality over trying to push out a release on time.
It was decided earlier this year not to schedule in a mass rebuild of all packages for Fedora 25 since it’s a time consuming process and the developers aim to ship Fedora 25 before the end-of-year holidays without having to drag out the release into the new year. As such, any changes that would necessitate a rebuild of all F25 RPMs should be diverted to Fedora 26.
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Couple of years back we moved dgplug into a static website. But still there are requirements when we do want to update parts of the site in a timely manner. We also wanted to track the changes. We tried to maintain a sphinx based docs, but somehow we never managed to do well in that case.
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Debian Family
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I handled a new LTS sponsor that wanted to see wheezy keep supporting armel and armhf. This was not part of our initial plans (set during last Debconf) and I thus mailed all teams that were impacted if we were to collectively decide that it was OK to support those architectures. While I was hoping to get a clear answer rather quickly, it turns out that we never managed to get an answer to the question from all parties. Instead the discussion drifted on the more general topic of how we handle sponsorship/funding in the LTS project.
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Derivatives
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After two years in development, a beta release of the Devuan distro has made it into the world (Devuan is a registered trademark of the Dyne.org foundation). Devuan is a very Debian-ish distro. In fact, it basically is Debian, with one notable absence. Devuan doesn’t use systemd. In fact, that’s its main claim to fame. Devuan was created to offer an alternative to Debian fans who were alienated by the controversial switch to systemd.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today in Linux news Microsoft’s market share has dipped below 90% and Mac is disappearing from Linux conventions. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in an interview today that security and encryption are a commitment of Ubuntu’s. Jesse Smith reviewed the latest version of Ubuntu and OMG!Ubuntu! shared some glimpses of Ubuntu in the wild. Bryan Lunduke listed 12 “Linux geeks” all users should follow on social media and Sandra Gittlen highlighted six colleges that “immerse students in Open Source.”
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The Ubuntu Online Summit started just a few moments ago, and you can watch the Ubuntu Engineering team live right now talking about the features planned for the next Ubuntu release.
We reported last week that the development of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system had begun, with daily live ISO images being made available for early adopters and public testers who want to track the development cycle of the upcoming Ubuntu release.
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Today, May 3, 2016, Canonical has issued a new Ubuntu security notice to inform the community about the availability of new OpenSSL versions that patch various vulnerabilities discovered upstream by various developers.
The OpenSSL security notice is valid for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). It details a total of five security issues that have been fixed in OpenSSL, which contains the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) cryptographic library and tools.
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You might not have noticed, but it’s been a wee while since we last featured an ‘Ubuntu in the Wild’ spot (excusing my little editorial last month).
The gap isn’t because Ubuntu isn’t being spotlighted in projects. It was more that a couple of readers were vocal in telling us such articles were trivial and didn’t call for a post. So, for the past year or two we’ve been tweeting the odd Ubuntu in the Wild spot rather than posting a blog post about it.
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Expect to see a larger Ubuntu desktop installation image size by the time the Yakkety Yak is released later this year.
Ubuntu Developers are currently discussing a new size limit for the main distribution image, as well those of the distribution’s official flavours.
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Beyond the announcement that Ubuntu 16.10 won’t ship with Mir and Unity 8 by default, many other items were discussed for the Ubuntu 16.10 release due out in October.
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Well, another setback for Unity 8 and Mir. Kicking off the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 16.10, it’s been confirmed that the Unity 8 desktop and Mir display server will not be the default for the desktop spin.
Similar to the current situation with existing Ubuntu releases, Unity 8 and Mir will be available as an opt-in feature for users wanting to upgrade their desktop, but Unity 7 and the faithful X.Org Server is planned to be the default for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak.
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Flavours and Variants
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Xubuntu 16.04 felt very polished, snappy and easy for me. There were no issues or bugs that I noticed while running it in a Live mode.
The only downside that I would like to mention is the set of applications. It is minimalistic, if not barebones. Many useful tools should be installed by the user from the repositories. Of course, it’s not a problem if you know the applications you need. Otherwise, you need to search first. That makes me think that Xubuntu 16.04 is not oriented to the Linux beginners.
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Phones
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Finnish mobile startup Jolla, the maker of Sailfish OS, has secured $12m in funding which should keep the firm afloat until the end of the year.
The company announced the new round today, which will alleviate some of the financial troubles that have caused it to abandon the Jolla tablet, lay off staff, and apply for debt restructuring in Finland. The company split its hardware and software businesses last July.
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Android
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As we approach Google I/O 2016, where we’ll learn more about Android N, Marshmallow continues its steady rise and is now on 7.5% of all devices.
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Intrinsyc’s Automotive Development Platform S820A runs Android 6.0 on a Snapdragon 820A, and offers a 4K touchscreen, plus WiFi, BT, GPS, and optional LTE.
Last December, Intrinsyc launched three Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” dev kits in phone, tablet, and embedded board form factors for Qualcomm’s 14nm Snapdragon 820 SoC. Now, the company has announced a Marshmallow kit for automotive applications running the similar, automotive focused Snapdragon 820A SoC. The Intrinsyc Snapdragon Automotive Development Platform (ADP) S820A kit is aimed at automotive OEMs, Tier1s, and ecosystem partners building in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
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Huawei’s promised to bring a “flagship” phone to the US this year. The Chinese company built the Nexus 6P, Google’s current flagship, but the name “Huawei” won’t be familiar to most US consumers, judging their Android phone options. In the meantime, Huawei is boosting its Stateside credibility with two new Android Wear watches: the Jewel (pictured above) and the Elegant (below), both aimed at women.
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We’re nearing the end of the first half of 2016, and that means a lot of new Android smartphones have been announced. Starting off the year was the Huawei Mate 8 and Honor 5X at CES in January, of course followed later by Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 edge as well as the LG G5 in February at Mobile World Congress. But which ones are the best buys? Keep reading to find out…
Whether you like a pocket-sized phone that offers more in terms of raw features, or a phablet-sized phone that sticks to stock Android, you’re sure to find something to fit your preference when you go with Android. The platform can be found on more than 80% of smartphones on the planet, and there’s a reason for that.
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With open source, you’re expanding the sphere of people who might potentially care a lot about your code. You find others who have similar problems, and who can leverage your work and maybe even extend it. The knowledge that you’ve helped someone avoid “rebuilding the wheel” is really gratifying, and it’s amplified when those people actually start getting so involved that they give you contributions of code or ideas. The project picks up steam, and you might even get unforeseen help tackling those issues you didn’t have bandwidth to tackle yourself. Really, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
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So, how come 90%-98% of all open source code is thrown away after 12 months?
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A few moments ago, May 3, 2016, ownCloud Inc. announced the general availability of multiple maintenance releases for all of its supported branches of the ownCloud self-hosting cloud server.
ownCloud 9.0.2, 8.2.4, 8.1.7, 8.0.12, and 7.0.14 were made available for download for existing users, who are urged to update their installations to these new versions as soon as possible. Thus, they are bringing fixes for reported bugs, as well as various lower-severity security patches and hardenings.
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Last year was a big year for open source. As Wired put it, 2015 was the year open source software “went nuclear”. More people than ever seem to realize the power of open—not just as a programming methodology, but as a better way to accomplish just about anything.
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DuckDuckGo is a search engine known for putting privacy first for users. So, when we passed 3 billion annual searches last year, we knew it was critical that we continue to serve users without sacrificing their privacy. The key, we realized, was open source.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, May 3, Mozilla has pushed the first point release of the recently launched Firefox 46.0 web browser to all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 46.0 on April 26, 2016, bringing the long-anticipated GTK3 integration for the GNU/Linux platform. Other interesting features are enhanced security for the JavaScript JIT (Just In Time) compiler and improvements to the screen reader behavior with blank spaces for Google Docs.
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SaaS/Back End
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At a regular cadence, startups focusing on Apache Spark are getting significant funding. The latest startup to benefit is SnappyData, based in Oregon, and its investors are heavy hitters too. The company announced that it has secured $3.65 million in Series A funding, led by Pivotal, GE Digital and GTD Capital.
SnappyData bills itself as “developers of the world’s first in-memory hybrid transactional analytics database built on Apache Spark.” Officials say the funding will allow the company to further invest in engineering and sales. The SnappyData leadership team includes, Richard Lamb, Jags Ramnarayanan and Sudhir Menon, who worked together during their time at Pivotal to build Pivotal GemFire into a widely adopted in-memory data grid product.
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CMS
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A veteran of the web publishing and sports media industries, Jeff Diecks leads professional services and client delivery at Mediacurrent and is an active member of the Drupal community. Jeff also organizes events for his local Louisiana Drupal Users Group and Drupalcamp New Orleans.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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pfSense developer Chris Buechler announced the availability of a small update for the stable pfSense 2.3 open-source firewall platform based on the FreeBSD operating system.
Introduced as pfSense 2.3 Update 1, this is a small patch that only fixes the recently discovered security issues in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) packages, upgrading them from version 4.2.8p6 to 4.2.8p7, and it shouldn’t be confused with pfSense 2.3.1, which will be released in the coming weeks as the first maintenance build.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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It’s a rather sad state of affairs when publishing concerns and patents are getting in the way of producing treatments and cures for serious human diseases that could improve the lives of millions of people. Protecting crops from wheat blast is, of course, welcome, but is it really the best we can do?
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Open Data
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The International Open Data Day brings together citizens and developers in major cities around the world to develop tools and applications based on Open Data. In 2016, Open Data Day took place on the 5-6 March.
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Dutch government organisations are generally unable to process requests under the new ‘Law for re-use of government information’ in a timely and correct manner. According to inventories made by the Open State Foundation and Open Archives, government at all levels took months to decide on the requests, had problems providing the information in an open and machine-readable format, and failed to forward requests that should be handled by other organisations.
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The issue was brought before Péterfalvi Attila, President of the National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, by Tóth Bertalan, Deputy Faction Leader for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Tóth argued that citizens are restricted in exercising their right of access to public information if an agency asks that much money for its data.
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Programming/Development
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Version 2.0 of Jenkins, the open source automation server and continuous delivery software development platform, was released last week, a decade after it began life as Hudson, a Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) project.
With the rising popularity of DevOps as a software development and delivery methodology, its community has been focused on making Jenkins easier to use, support delivery pipelines as code, and making it simpler to select and manage the many plugins that are a central part of the Jenkins ecosystem. These changes, the developers insist, are sufficiently large to merit a new version badge – although they are keen to point out that version 2.0 is completely backwards compatible with earlier iterations.
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Health/Nutrition
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Was Prince addicted to painkillers, and is that what killed him? That’s one of the latest issues surrounding Prince’s sudden and surprising death (along with his failure to have a will). TMZ has tracked down a lot of circumstantial evidence for the possibility, but we probably won’t know Prince’s actual cause of death for a few more weeks.
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Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.
But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.
Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.
Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.
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INFLUENTIAL DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS, some of whom work for the Super PACs backing Hillary Clinton, have signed up to fight a bold initiative to create a state-based single-payer system in Colorado, according to a state filing posted Monday.
Coloradans for Coloradans, an ad-hoc group opposing single payer in Colorado, revealed that it raised $1 million over the first five months of this year. The group was formed to defeat Amendment 69, the ballot measure before voters this year that would change the Colorado constitution and permit a system that would automatically cover every state resident’s health care.
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So far, only a few pawns have been sacrificed, and one minor knight has fallen, in the Machiavellian chessboard game that is being played with the lives of thousands who were poisoned by the water in Flint, Michigan. Governor Rick Snyder has not even been question by state or federal prosecutors. “It will only be through political activism and unrelenting protest that the actual political players will be charged and held accountable.”
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Last year I wrote about a paper that looked at the relationship between childhood lead poisoning and violent crime rates in a whole new way. James Feigenbaum and Christopher Muller compared cities from the early 20th century that installed lead water pipes with those that installed iron pipes, and found that cities with lead pipes had higher homicide rates.
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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 450 samples. The average for the past week was 5.50.
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Nor is this the first time that the EPA has been caught using biased research to approve of dangerous chemicals. Last November, the Intercept’s Sharon Lerner reported that the agency used Monsanto’s own research to determine that there was “no convincing evidence” glyphosate was an endocrine disruptor.
An EPA spokesperson said Friday that the document was posted to the website prematurely and was removed “because our assessment is not final,” and that the agency would release a completed, peer-reviewed analysis by the end of 2016.
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Security
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The Linux Foundation has released the first round of CII Best Practices badges as part of a program designed to improve the quality and security of open-source software.
Announced on Tuesday, the non-profit said the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project which brings tech firms, developers and stakeholders together to create best practice specifications and improve the security of critical open-source projects, has now entered a new stage with the issue of CII badges to a select number of open-source software.
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Today, May 3, 2016, Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Linux and open source projects, has announced the general availability of its free badge program.
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The best way to establish how vulnerable your network is to a hacker attack is to subject it to a penetration test carried out by outside experts. (You must get a qualified third party to help with penetration testing, of course, and eSecurity Planet recently published an article on finding the right penetration testing company.)
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In May last year, a new attack on the Diffie Hellman algorithm was released, called Logjam. At the time, I was working on a security team, so it was our responsiblity to check that none of our servers would be affected. We ran through our TLS config and decided it was safe, but also needed to check that our SSH config was too. That confused me – where in SSH is Diffie Hellman? In fact, come to think of it, how does SSH work at all? As a fun side project, I decided to answer that question by writing a very basic SSH client of my own.
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Maintainers of the OpenSSL cryptographic library have patched high-severity holes that could make it possible for attackers to decrypt login credentials or execute malicious code on Web servers.
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Defence/Aggression
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The website for the film explains that, “The film unravels a number of the world’s largest and most corrupt arms deals through those involved in perpetrating and investigating them. It illustrates why this trade accounts for almost 40 percent of all corruption in global trade, and how it operates in a parallel legal universe, in which the national security elite who drive it are seldom prosecuted for their often illegal actions.”
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Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969. He was the first to report the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, back in 2004.
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Five years after his fake vaccination programme helped the CIA track and kill Osama bin Laden, Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi languishes in jail, abandoned by the US, say supporters, in its bid to smooth troubled relations with Islamabad.
Afridi, believed to be in his mid-50s, has no access to a lawyer, and his appeal against a 23-year prison sentence has stalled.
“I have no hope of meeting him, no expectation for justice,” his elder brother Jamil told AFP.
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The Mukami panchayat of Deshvaliyan community of Sarwar block of the district issued fatwa against two families and imposed fine of Rs 1,51,000 for denying to part with their land for a ‘social cause’. The fatwa was issued when these families denied to give their one hectare land to the madrasa society. The community went a step ahead and restricted these families from even participating in the mass marriage celebration on May 20 and 21 at Sarwar, and published posters stating the same.
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Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton wrote an opinion piece last week in USAToday, trying to “temper” feelings surrounding the release of “the 28 pages.”
Kean and Hamilton wrote, “The 28 pages have generated a lot of public speculation over the years and have been described as a ‘smoking gun’ implicating the Saudi government in the deadliest terrorist attack carried out on U.S. soil.”
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Think about how much has changed since that momentous day. In 2011 the U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the threat of a vicious global terror organization that had already killed Americans. Oh, wait, that looks just like 2016, only now we are also at war in Syria, too, still at war in Afghanistan (16 years in!) and back at war in Iraq. And al Qaeda is known as ISIS, and the Homeland remains a jittery mess on the verge of electing either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, both of whom have enthusiastically endorsed lots more war in the Middle East.
It’s as if Nothing. Has. Changed.
Anyway, the CIA’s anniversary tweets open up the idea of live tweeting other American victories. How about a minute-by-minute live tweet of a waterboarding session? Or maybe, for a really special date, a live tweet on August 6 of the Hiroshima bombing?
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Baghdad is under a state of emergency on Sunday a day after members of the Sadr Trend stormed the Green Zone and invaded the parliament building, briefly imprisoning parliamentarians in the chamber (and some in a basement) before letting them go. Some apparently were beaten as they left. Most of the protesters, though, were relatively peaceful and had been ordered to avoid violence by their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. As at Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, of which the invasion of the Green Zone was a distant echo, they chanted “peacefully, peacefully” ( silmiyyah, silmiyyah).
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On October 22, 1967, Berrigan was arrested for the first time with hundreds of students protesting the war at the Pentagon. “For the first time,” he wrote in his journal in the D.C. Jail, “I put on the prison blue jeans and denim shirt; a clerical attire I highly recommend for a new church.” In February, 1968, he traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn to receive three U.S. Air Force personnel who were being released. While they awaited their meeting with the VietCong, they took cover in a Hanoi shelter as U.S. bombs fell around him. His diary of his trip to North Vietnam, “Night Flight to Hanoi” was published later that year.
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Father Daniel Berrigan, who has died at age 94, was a beautiful man with a beautiful vision that he made real by engaging in radical acts of conscience that sought not merely to end wars but to achieve the justice that has always been essential to peacemaking. Born on the Minnesota Iron Range into a family of trade unionists, he and his brother Philip (who died in 2002) brought to the slowly opening national discourse of the 1960s a deep understanding of the linkages between militarism and imperialism abroad and racism and poverty at home. As they came to prominence as fierce opponents of the Vietnam War, the Berrigan brothers taught generations of Americans to identify intersections of injustice and to get clear of them.
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Western Europe wants to see the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad unseated, because it is a seedy one-party state and guilty of massive war crimes. Merkel was speaking for many in the EU in this regard, but not all. Czechia, for instance, sees the Syrian opposition as, if not al-Qaeda, the next thing to al-Qaeda, and so is supporting al-Assad.
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Paddy Ashdown has accused the government of acting dishonourably in the case of an Afghan interpreter who reportedly killed himself while facing deportation from Britain.
Nangyalai Dawoodzai is understood to have worked for the British army in Afghanistan for three years, before fleeing the country after receiving death threats from the Taliban.
The 29-year-old, who paid people smugglers to reach the UK, was told his request for asylum in Britain had been rejected when it was found he had been fingerprinted in Italy on arrival in Europe, according to the Daily Mail.
Under the EU’s Dublin regulation, aimed at preventing multiple asylum claims by individuals, Dawoodzai had to pursue his claim in the first country he applied in.
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Once the Nazi holocaust became the cultural referent, then, if you wanted to touch a nerve regarding Palestinian suffering, you had to make the analogy with the Nazis, because that was the only thing that resonated for Jews. If you compared the Palestinians to Native Americans, nobody would give a darn. In 1982, when I and a handful of other Jews took to the streets of New York to protest Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (up to 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed, overwhelmingly civilians), I held a sign saying, ‘This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Auschwitz, Maijdenek will not be silent: Israeli Nazis – Stop the Holocaust in Lebanon!’. (After my mother died, I found a picture of me holding that sign in a drawer among her keepsakes). I remember, as the cars drove past, one of the guys protesting with me kept saying, ‘hold the sign higher!’ (And I kept replying, ‘easy for you to say!’).
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Bernie’s politics, however, are a revival of FDR’s New Deal. He seeks to empower poor and working people (regardless of so-called “race”) to participate in the process of freeing our society from the control of the big rich by voting for a candidate of the Democratic Party. Whether he can do this from inside that Wall Street-dominated party is questionable. Even if by some miracle he overcame the power of Wall Street and the corporate media to become president, he would have to work within the institutions established in our history to ensure the rule of capital and its minions.
Meanwhile, on the right, the Republican Party has been using its “Southern Strategy” since Richard Nixon to divide people by making veiled racist appeals, coupled with reactionary “culture wars” ideas and attacks on abortion and women’s rights; they continue to deny global warming while promulgating policies that de-regulate any governmental oversight of corporate power and hand over large tax cuts to the already wealthy. Recently we are also seeing a more open revival of the kind of racist and fascist movements that have always lurked beneath the surface in the post-Civil War U.S. Older organizations like the Ku Klux Klan are now being joined by Neo-Nazis—both with long histories of racist murder and genocide. And for this election, the Republicans have fielded a candidate in Donald Trump who has put aside the usual veiled racist appeals and is openly signaling his affinity with these white supremacist organizations.
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The world’s youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011 and just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting President Salva Kiir, a member of the country’s largest tribe, the Dinka, against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in July 2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir’s forces in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar’s men took their revenge on Dinkas and other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread, splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar’s recent return to the government has been unable to halt.
The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target: civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery, assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of local populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the wholesale destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
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Donald Trump’s formal foreign policy address last week hurled a stick into the hive of the foreign policy establishment. Republican and Democrat foreign policy mavens erupted and buzzed around to attack the intruder. Anyone not reading the text would think it was a contradictory spewing of nonsense, another in the long line of Trump outrages. In fact, the reaction to the speech was far more revealing than Trump’s address itself.
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No war crime, despite the U.S. military having full knowledge of the hospital’s location before the bombing. No war crime, despite desperate hospital staffers calling military liaison officers while the rampage was underway. No war crime, despite their calls being routed without response through layers of lethal bureaucracy for an hour or more as the deadly bombing continued.
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As the Obama administration prepares to release for the first time the number of people it believes it has killed in drone strikes in countries that lie outside of conventional war zones, we look at a new book out today that paints a very different picture of the U.S. drone program. “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program” is written by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, and based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. The documents undermine government claims that drone strikes have been precise. Part of the book looks at a program called Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan. During one five-month period, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The book is based on articles published by The Intercept last year. It also includes new contributions from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and The Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. We speak with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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We must keep up the pressure on decision-makers to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
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Campaigning in Appalachia on Monday, Hillary Clinton claimed she “misspoke” when previously declaring her opposition to coal, telling voters that as president she would work to ensure that the dirtiest of the fossil fuels will “continue to be sold and continue to be mined.”
Arriving in Williamson, West Virginia—the heart of coal country—the Democratic frontrunner was greeted by a wall of protesters who were angry over remarks she made in March foretelling the end of the coal industry.
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Hundreds of climate activists shut down the UK’s largest open-cast coal mine on Tuesday morning—the first of a wave of peaceful direct actions spanning six continents and 12 days, targeting the world’s most dangerous fossil fuel projects.
Mining work has now been halted at the Ffos-y-fran mine in south Wales, where the mass civil trespass by climate action network Reclaim the Power began at 5:30am local time. Hundreds of demonstrators wearing red boiler suits used their bodies to form a massive red line across the mine, while nine individuals are locked to each other, blocking road access to the controversial facility.
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On Monday evening’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the ABC late-night host tackled something that isn’t in your average topical monologue: the scientific consensus on climate change. And he made a video featuring real climate scientists responding to climate denial in a fashion one doesn’t see in the National Academy of Sciences.
The catalyst involved a climate denier-produced movie, “Climate Hustle,” which has been called “amateurish” and “not very watchable.” Specifically what Kimmel seized on were comments former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gave last month while promoting the movie.
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When it comes to climate change — and climate-denying politicians — California Gov. Jerry Brown doesn’t mince words.
Brown sent a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott Monday, in time for Scott’s visit to California — a trip in which Scott aims to convince West Coast businesses to consider moving to Florida. But Brown had some business advice of his own for Scott, who’s long been known for his climate-denying, anti-clean energy record.
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One year after India experienced the fifth-deadliest heat wave ever recorded, temperatures are again soaring to deadly extremes. Local governments are scrambling to address rising death tolls and dwindling water supplies.
The drought and blistering heat, some 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, has claimed 300 lives since early April. Towns on India’s eastern side have been hit with record-setting temperatures — 119.3 degrees in the town of Titlagarh, Orissa, which is the highest temperature ever recorded in that state during April.
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This was the hottest four-month start (January to April) of any year on record, according to newly-released satellite data.
The Arctic continues its multi-month trend of off-the-charts warmth. So it’s no surprise that Arctic sea ice continues to melt at a record pace. New research, however, finds that warming-driven Arctic sea ice loss causes high-pressure systems to get stuck in places like Greenland, leading to accelerated melt of the land-locked ice that drives sea level rise worldwide.
Let’s start with the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite data, which show that the lowest part of the atmosphere (the lower troposphere) was an impressive 1.3°F (0.71°C) above the historical (1981-2010) average — a baseline that is itself 0.8°F (0.45°C) hotter than pre-industrial levels.
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The growing rallying cry of the climate movement, to keep fossil fuels in the ground, is taking hold, and not just in the form of chants and headlines, but in the form of cancelled gas pipelines, rejected LNG terminals, shelved lease sales – all of which would’ve perpetuated the fossil fuel status quo, but which faced mounting and unprecedented public opposition. Emboldened by the successful campaign against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and motivated by the growing scientific consensus that we must keep at least 80% of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we hope to avoid a climate disaster, communities are increasingly pushing back against fossil fuel projects that would not only threaten their backyards, their water, and their health, but threaten our very ability to maintain a livable planet.
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Global water shortages, exacerbated by human-caused climate change, are likely to spur conflict and migration across the Middle East, central Asia, and Africa—all while negatively impacting regional economies, according to a new World Bank report published Tuesday.
Rising demand combined with increasingly “erratic and uncertain” supply could reduce water availability in cities by as much as two thirds by 2050, compared to 2015 levels, the report warns. Meanwhile, “food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame latent conflicts and drive migration,” a World Bank press statement reads.
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It’s impossible to overestimate how critical the oceans are to the overall health of life on Earth. For one thing, tiny marine plants called phytoplankton provide up to 85 percent of the world’s oxygen, according to EarthSky.org. But the oceans don’t just give us good stuff like oxygen; they take away bad stuff, like carbon dioxide. A 2011 international study led by the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, estimated that the oceans absorb 27 percent of the CO2 produced by the fossil fuel combustion.
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Finance
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While the European Commission claims to be very transparent in its reports, the public receives a non-complete state of play after each round of negotiations. The leak is a real, internal state of play on the negotiations, clearly reflecting the lobbying efforts of certain parts of industry from both sides of the Atlantic.
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The most recent TTIP leak provides ample proof of one core fact: The contradictions between the official positions of both sides are far greater than the European Commission has ever publicly acknowledged. To insist under these circumstances as the Commission does – that the negotiations should be finalized by the end of this year – either signals a belief in political miracles or an implicit willingness to cave in. The Commission has some explaining to do.
Every single publicly voiced suspicion concerning the lack of transparency in these TTIP negotiations has been justified by the revelations stemming from the leak. If the Commission had the intention to really stand up for the interests of European consumers, European manufacturing industries and in particular small and medium-sized enterprises, they should welcome critical contributions from many NGOs and the broader public in general. But instead, by keeping the public ignorant about the truth of the negotiations they only manage to weaken the European negotiating position. Obviously, the Commission cannot be trusted to be a good steward for European interests in the political battle over TTIP. Not on ISDS, not on regulatory cooperation, not on good protection standards.
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Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has publicly identified himself as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
His admission follows years of speculation about who came up with the original ideas underlying the digital cash system.
Mr Wright has provided technical proof to back up his claim using coins known to be owned by Bitcoin’s creator.
Prominent members of the Bitcoin community and its core development team say they have confirmed his claims.
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A U.S. Senate panel is examining whether a global aid group funded partly by billionaire Bill Gates and rock star Bono misled U.S. officials about its anti-corruption practices to retain government funding.
The inquiry stems from the handling of allegations of corruption that surfaced four years ago at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a multibillion-dollar charity with private and public support. Seth Faison, a Global Fund spokesman, categorically rejected any implication that the aid organization had engaged in misconduct.
In the Senate, the staff of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently questioned at least one former official of the Global Fund, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The questions relate to the firing of an inspector general for the charity who published reports alleging corruption and to subsequent affirmations by the charity that it had an independent inspector general.
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A red Ferrari with the top down swerved past on the winding dirt road, heading to what looked like a small Mars encampment. Helicopters landed on the side of the road and greeters darted across. At a farmers’ market with overflowing baskets full of raspberries, watermelons, and focaccia, I asked for a mango, and the farmer started cutting it in half for me: “That’ll be $7.”
This weekend, outside Las Vegas, a group of Burning Man veterans put on a festival called Further Future, now in its second year. Across 49 acres of Native American land over three days, with around 5,000 attendees, the event was the epitome of a new trend of so-called “transformational festivals” that are drawing technologists for what’s billed as a mix of fun and education. While tickets started at $350, many attendees opted for upgrades to fully staffed accommodation and fine dining.
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Once upon a time, International Franchise Association v. City of Seattle was going to be an epic showdown over government’s ability to regulate employers. The case presented a series of arguments against Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage ordinance that ranged from ambitious to an outright assault on lawmakers’ power over businesses. One of the plaintiffs’ arguments, for example, suggested that the minimum wage violates the First Amendment because it forces companies to spend money on wages that could otherwise be spent on advertising.
Really. We’re not making that up. That was an actual argument advanced by top lawyers in a federal court.
On Monday, however, the Supreme Court announced that it will not hear an appeal from a federal circuit court’s decision refusing to halt Seattle’s minimum wage. That doesn’t end this lawsuit altogether, but it is only the latest in a series of embarrassments for the plaintiffs in this case. And it most likely means that this effort to undermine Seattle’s protections for low-income workers will gain no traction in federal court.
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With the Supreme Court’s decision Monday not to hear the fast food industry’s lawsuit against Seattle, the nation’s first $15 minimum wage law is safe – and opponents of higher pay floors for U.S. workers are running low on options.
The decision upholds two previous rulings that Seattle’s law does not discriminate against franchise firms like McDonald’s. The case was the most prominent legal challenge to a large minimum wage hike in recent years, and one of several to fail.
But while the hugely profitable industries that oppose Fight for $15 workers and their allies aren’t making much progress on the legal front, they’re far from done fighting. The minimum wage battleground reaches far beyond the legal arguments that have failed in Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C.
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Encryption
The text states (p. 16): “The EU and the US continued to discuss conformity assessment principles for ICT products that use cryptography. The discussion was based on the TPP text, which the US linked to the World Semiconductor Council (WSC) principles.
The EU noted the sensitivities of Member States, which are competent in this area and which would not like to see its right to regulate curtailed in a security-related area. The EU went on to present a set of questions, derived from previous contacts with Member States. As the US was not ready to provide a reply on the spot, the EU will be sending the set of follow up questions in written form.
Given the complexity of the subject, both sides agreed on the need to further deepen the issue on both policy and technical aspects before the next TTIP round.”
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That’s why I was so excited when I heard that Greenpeace Netherlands was releasing to the public secret documents from the United States’ current trade negotiations with the European Union. The deal is called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP for short) and once it’s agreed upon it will govern the U.S.-European economic relationship for years.
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We don’t need to bridge the class divide — we need to end it.
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Stealing food if you are hungry and poor is not a crime, Italy’s highest appeals court ruled on Monday.
Judges with the Supreme Court of Cassation overturned a theft conviction against a Ukrainian man who stole $4.50 (€4.07) of sausage and cheese from a supermarket in Genoa in 2011, finding that he had taken the food “in the face of immediate and essential need for nourishment.”
In 2015, the man, Roman Ostriakov, was sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to pay a $115 (€100) fine.
“The condition of the defendant and the circumstances in which the merchandise theft took place prove that he took possession of that small amount of food in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment, acting therefore in a state of need,” the court ruled on Monday. For that reason, the theft “does not constitute a crime.”
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At a surreal meeting in Bermuda, the AFL-CIO convinced 40 percent of Lazard shareholders to support a ban on golden parachutes for bank executives who go to work for financial regulators.
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Four years ago, student loan debt in America topped $1 trillion. Today, that number has swelled even further, with some 43 million Americans feeling the enduring gravity of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.
While student debt may not intuitively register as something that plagues the poor, student debt delinquency and defaults are concentrated in low-income areas, even though lower-income borrowers also tend to have much smaller debts. Defaults and delinquencies among low-income Americans escalated following the Great Recession of 2008, a period when many states disinvested from public colleges and universities. The result was higher costs of college, which has led to larger loans.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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More importantly, though, Klein is also a expert on smearing Democratic politicians — particularly the party’s current presidential frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. After relatively respectable stints at New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, Klein essentially turned into a gossip columnist with a vendetta, writing negative and often salacious books on both Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the Kennedy family. Most of his books’ more controversial claims are based on quotes from anonymous sources, causing both conservative and liberal writers alike to raise serious questions about his credibility.
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Let us place the Green party’s reach in the proper perspective: Not being on the ballot in 25 states is the important statistic. This shows how seriously Green Party leadership appears to take electoral success. The RepubLicans of 1860, though they had been at it less than a decade, were far more electorally entrenched.
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As the presidential nominating contests enter their final stretch, a troubling new trend has developed for Democratic voters as recent polling indicates that Hillary Clinton may be losing her lead over Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.
In a hypothetical matchup, the New York billionaire would defeat the former secretary of state 41 to 39 percent, according to the new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, which was released on Monday.
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The negative reactions to Donald Trump’s campaign range from nausea, fear and anxiety to an increase in celebrities threatening to move to Canada. For those of us aghast and despairing that America has lost its collective marbles as he continues to win primaries, fear not: there is a silver lining. Artists have found delightful ways to protest the Donald. Read on for six examples of how artists, musicians and even sex-toy makers have subverted the image and message of the bewildering candidate.
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The Donald Trump rampage—still hard to believe, after nearly a year—is a symptom of something deeper and more profound: the Republican Party’s slide into complete incoherence.
Rarely has a major party’s establishment been so out of touch with its voting base. Rarely have so many experienced politicians (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry et al.) been so thoroughly embarrassed, and so cruelly dispatched, by a political neophyte. Rarely have feelings been so raw that one leading Republican (John Boehner) would publicly describe another (Ted Cruz) as “Lucifer in the flesh.”
What does the GOP believe in? There was a time when anyone with a passing interest in politics could have answered that question. Today, who knows?
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STOP ME IF you’ve heard this one: an outsider politician who owes his station in life to the hundreds of millions he inherited from his father is running a failing campaign for office based on stoking fear of Muslims.
The word “failing” — as in 20 points down in the polls days before the election — is a clue that we are speaking about someone other than Donald Trump.
In this case, the politician’s name is Zac Goldsmith, and he is the millionaire scion of a prominent British family. He was thought of, until recently, as a mild-mannered Conservative member of Parliament, known mainly for his environmentalism and his sister’s friendship with the late Princess Diana.
For the past two months, however, he has generated waves of disgust and, polls suggest, not much sympathy, by pursuing a mayoral campaign filled with racially divisive innuendo about the supposed danger of electing his Labour Party rival, Sadiq Khan, a son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants.
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After serving for months as punching bags for Republican candidates, Latinos may ultimately decide the outcome of the race. An upcoming report from two GOP consulting firms argues that Latino votes in California could prove decisive in 11 of the state’s 53 congressional districts—a swath that confers more delegates than 20 other states combined. “If Trump is going to be held under 1,237″—the number of delegates needed to avoid a contested convention—”it will largely be the result of Latino Republicans voting against his candidacy,” says Mike Madrid, whose firm, Grassroots Lab, co-authored the report with the GOP analytics firm Murphy Nasica.
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Yes of course, one has to acknowledge it. Barring an indictment, or the surfacing of some extremely embarrassing Goldman Sachs speech transcripts before July, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and Bernie Sanders a historical footnote of yet indeterminate significance.
Then—unless scandal hits her between July and November (which Trump could exploit mercilessly), or her cell phone electrocutes her in the shower—Hillary will become the next Commander-in-Chief. People should of course ask themselves and others what that will mean to them and the world. Here are some suggestions about what may be in store.
Hillary sells herself to the electorate first and foremost as a woman, whose time has come. The first woman president to follow the first Black president. A woman who has fought for women, girls, children and families—including especially people of color—all her life. That’s her brand. As required she identifies as liberal and progressive, and she has campaigned as these in the contest with Sanders.
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George Carlin would have had a field day with the 2016 United States presidential election if he were alive today. The comedian and social critic died on June 22, 2008, but his spirit and wisdom remains eternal.
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Some 4 million Indiana voters are expected to head to the polls today in record numbers, as the state takes an unexpected spotlight in a primary where candidates in both parties are fighting it out until the bitter end. The state has already seen extremely high turnout in early voting; over 50 percent more people have cast early ballots than when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went head-to-head in 2008.
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The majority of left-leaning voters want Bernie Sanders to stay in the presidential race, a new poll reveals.
Just as the Vermont senator is promising to take his candidacy all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July—and contest the delegate allocation if necessary—voters around the country are expressing just how much they believe in him and what his candidacy represents.
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Somewhere between childhood and early middle age, Britain’s Channel 4 lost sight of the importance of giving its indie producers free rein. Today’s leaders could learn a lot from the legacy of the channel’s founder, Jeremy Isaacs.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Veteran journalist Shahzada Zulfiqar is almost mid-way through his third stint as president at the Quetta Press Club in a province where it is preferable to stay silent to remain alive.
In Balochistan, a good story is not one that is well-documented by local reporters. Instead, it is one that mitigates risk. Local journalists think twice about doing stories likely to infuriate state and non-state actors, making self-censorship the norm.
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After an injunction made by former Papua New Guinea politician Carol Kidu, who is featured in the documentary The Opposition, sections of the documentary have been censored to avoid her appearing or speaking in the film.
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Actress Sarah Snook has come to the rescue of a controversial documentary after legal action forced its makers to cut 15 minutes of footage before the world premiere.
The star of The Dressmaker and The Beautiful Lie will narrate over a black screen during Hollie Fifer’s The Opposition, which has its first screening at North America’s biggest documentary festival, Toronto’s Hot Docs, this week.
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With conditions worsening on a daily basis, Turkey now risks total blackout on public debate.
Punitive measures and harsh restrictions have diminished the domain for free and independent journalism, and media pluralism is showing strong signs of total collapse.
As Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project highlights in its latest quarterly report, the country experienced a large number of media freedom violations.
“Over half of the arrests [in the first quarter of 2016] occurred in Turkey when journalists were reporting on violence or protests in the country,” the report said. “The data indicates a pattern where arrests are launched on terror charges or taking place during anti-terror operations.”
In its latest World Press Freedom Index, scrutinising media in 180 countries, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Turkey as #151, marking yet another fall, this time by two positions.
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Among the victims of the terrorist campaign waged by Zionist militia groups in Palestine between 1946-48 were British soldiers deployed to Palestine during the Mandatory period. This point is important to bear in mind when we consider the staunch defense of Zionism that we have seen being mounted by various high profile voices within the British establishment over the course of this media firestorm and crisis within the Labour Party.
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A series of ghastly attacks on bloggers in recent months has showcased the deteriorating state of freedom of expression in the country. Experts say people are now feeling more threatened to express their views online.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Back in late 2014, we wrote about Twitter suing the US government over whether or not it was allowed to publish just how many National Security Letters and FISA Court orders it receives in its transparency report. This came after a bunch of other tech companies had settled a similar lawsuit with an agreement that they could reveal certain “bands” of numbers, rather than the specific number. It still boggles the mind that merely revealing the number of NSLs and/or FISC orders received would create any problem for national security, but the government seems hellbent on keeping that information secret. Probably because they don’t want the public to understand how widely this system is used to obtain info.
We had mentioned this case just a few weeks ago, noting that a bunch of companies had filed an amicus brief pointing out that it’s unclear if they can even admit that they’ve never received such a request (i.e., it’s possible that warrant canaries are illegal).
Meanwhile, the DOJ has been trying to get the entire case thrown out because that’s what the DOJ does. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has now given a mixed ruling denying some of the DOJ’s motion, but granting a key part concerning Twitter’s First Amendment claim. The good news, though, is that the issue there is at least partially procedural, allowing Twitter to try again.
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The thing is that while people may voluntarily agree to hand over certain information to service providers (and it’s safe to say the “agreement” is anything but “voluntary”), they do not naturally assume the service provider will share this — no questions asked or warrants demanded — with anyone else who comes asking for it. That’s where the reliance on Smith v. Maryland fails. “Choose to disclose” is much different than “forced to disclose.” And it’s not as if it can truly be said phone users relinquish all ownership of that data. It’s specifically tied to them and they “share” it with service providers — which if that’s how Litt wants to interpret the interaction, he should at least be honest and give both parties some sort of ownership, along with the privacy expectations that go with it.
A lot of the rest of it is given over to Litt’s displeasure that courts have even granted plaintiffs standing in bulk metadata program lawsuits. Whatever the Third Party Doctrine doesn’t shut down, the plaintiffs’ inability to claim anything more than theoretical rights violations by programs the government refused to discuss publicly should have seen the cases tossed immediately. He agrees the framework is there for massive violations of privacy but these actually damaging acts simply never occurred. But abuses did occur and were covered up by the NSA, nearly resulting in the program being shut down back in 2008 by FISC Judge Reggie Walton.
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Your eligibility to perform secret government work could one day be decided by a number that looks like a credit score, and factors in your social media activities.
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A National Security Agency official is seeking the ability to track employees on their personal computers, as well as at office workstations, to ensure they are not participating in illegal activities, including downloading child pornography, or leaking state secrets.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a secret court that hears warrant requests from America’s spy agencies when they want to wiretap people in the USA.
The court — which is non-adversarial, hearing only from the spies, and not from anyone representing those they wish to spy upon — is supposed to serve as a check upon uncontrolled secret powers.
A document released by the DoJ this week shows that the FBI and NSA made 1,457 warrant requests to the court.
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Today, if you go on Twitter, you can find the NSA tweeting about its commitment to recycling, or the CIA joking about still not knowing the whereabouts of Tupac. Why are these once-sinister and little-known spy agencies so eager to put on a friendly face for us? The answer can be traced back to the Church Committee of 1975-76, which forever changed the way Americans looked at the intelligence agencies meant to serve them.
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FROM 2013 to 2015, the NSA and CIA doubled the number of warrantless searches they conducted for Americans’ data in a massive NSA database ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence purposes, according to a new intelligence community transparency report.
The estimated number of search terms “concerning a known U.S. person” to get contents of communications within what is known as the 702 database was 4,672—more than double the 2013 figure.
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a new study has found that the “Internet of Things” may bring some added convenience, but at the high price of severe security vulnerabilities. Researchers at the University of Michigan say they’ve uncovered (pdf) some major new vulnerabilities in Samsung’s SmartThings platform that could allow an attacker to unlock doors, modify home access codes, create false smoke detector alarms, or put security and automation devices into vacation mode. Researchers say this can be done by tricking users into either installing a malicious app from the SmartThings store, or by clicking a malicious link.
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Twitter, compared to Facebook, Google, and even Yahoo, really isn’t very good for driving referral traffic. This is at least the case when it comes to news publishers as new data from Parse.ly finds.
This week, Nieman Lab shared data from the company, which looked at 200 of its client websites. These include Upworthy, Slate, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider. While Twitter’s value for breaking news is certainly acknowledged, it concludes that Twitter is a small source of traffic for most publishers with less than 5% of referrals coming from Twitter in January and February.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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This week commemorates the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, International Workers’ Day, and the claimed birthday of Mother Mary Harris Jones. While the United States’ official Labor Day falls in September, the international community celebrates workers and workers rights on May 1st, in recognition of actions taken by Americans in 1886, and the events that led up to the Haymarket Massacre.
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One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.
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This administration has made it clear whistleblowing isn’t tolerated. It has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined. It’s even planning a “Welcome Home” prosecution for the nation’s most famous whistleblower — Edward Snowden — should he ever decide to return to the US.
Officials, of course, claim to love whistleblowing. That seems to be the main objection raised to Snowden’s activities: “If only he’d gone through the proper channels, we wouldn’t be seeking to jail him the moment he returns to American soil (or the soil of any country with a favorable extradition policy).”
But there are no official channels — or, at least, no channels whistleblowers feel safe using.
Foreign Policy has the story of another NSA whistleblower the agency has chosen to make miserable rather than investigate the source of her complaints. It started with an FBI raid of her house — something she found out via a phone call from an FBI agent already in her house. From there, it got worse.
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In the US, you can be given a gun and a chance to catch bullets for your country at age 18. Three years after that, the US government will finally allow you to purchase your own alcohol. At 21, you can finally be the “adult” in “adult beverages.” Except in some states. Some states tie booze purchases to morality. (I mean, even more so. It’s subject everywhere to “sin taxes.”)
As we covered here earlier, the state of Idaho says adults can drink booze and watch movies meant for mature audiences, but not always simultaneously. In Idaho, state police have been busting theaters for showing certain movies while serving alcohol, thanks to statutes that say it’s illegal to serve up both booze and “simulated sexual acts.”
In Idaho, theaters are trying to get the law ruled unconstitutional — pointing out that the law is only selectively enforced (cops raid theaters showing “Fifty Shades of Gray” rather than “American Sniper,” even though both contain depictions of sexual acts) and allows the state to use liquor statutes to regulate speech.
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On 10 May 2016, a UK judge will make a decision that will have serious implications for journalists, advocates, activists, whistleblowers, members of the legal profession and other groups who handle sensitive communications or other data. At 10am on that date, British student Lauri Love returns to Westminster Magistrates’ Court for Judge Tempia’s ruling. Tempia will decide whether Love should be ordered to surrender his encryption keys to the National Crime Agency, following oral arguments presented on 12 April. Should Judge Tempia rule in the NCA’s favour, this will give the police new powers to compel people to decrypt their electronic devices, even if they are not suspected of a crime.
Love’s computers were seized in October 2013 in connection with an NCA investigation, which was eventually dropped. Love, who is now facing extradition requests from three separate US court districts, has taken the NCA to court to try to get five of his items returned to him. The NCA says that some of these items contain encrypted files that they have not been able to read.
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The United Nations Committee Against Torture questioned an Israeli delegation over the country’s prevalent use of solitary confinement, particularly against Palestinian prisoners, after reports that the number of cases in Israeli jails nearly doubled from 2012 to 2014.
Solitary confinement, which is regularly used against Palestinian prisoners, including children, is likened to a form of torture by the UN, with many experts calling to “ban the solitary confinement of prisoners except in very exceptional circumstances and for as short a time as possible, with an absolute prohibition in the case of juveniles and people with mental disabilities.”
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Is Osborn a serial sexual predator, or deviant? Not exactly. The sum total of his criminal activities is this: he exposed himself, very briefly—and almost imperceptibly—in a football team photo for the high school yearbook.
He did so on a dare, according to ABC15. Just before the photo was taken, Osborn pulled his pants down, ever-so-slightly exposing his privates. Photos of the photo are now blurring at Osborn’s midsection, but people who saw it claimed the crime was barely noticeable. School staff didn’t even notice until after the yearbook had been distributed to 250 people. But a parent took notice, informed the school, and then the police were called.
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Without widespread approval from its student leaders, regents, or police, Tennessee empowered full-time staff and faculty to carry firearms at public universities and colleges. On Monday, following months of heated debate about how to keep schools safe, Gov. Bill Haslam allowed Tennessee’s General Assembly to expand campus gun rights without his signature. pparently Melisandre ain’t the only one that got some advanced aging issues cuz Bran look like he’s gotten a couple of kids, a mortgage and a divorce since the last time we saw him.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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One controversial issue from early days of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) could come to final closure ten years later: the decoupling from US oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which manages the central root zone for the domain name system. Meanwhile, the next round of new internet domains is being teed up, but is a few years out, the head of the domain name system oversight body has said.
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Besides much applause for the convening of the WSIS Forum and much optimism on next steps, there were also some voices calling for more concrete steps and some who warned against a deteriorating situation of human rights violations.
The head of the Polish Telecom Regulatory Body, Magdalena Gaj, underlined that 60 percent of people are still offline and many countries still struggle with basic challenges. She challenged the represented administrations on longstanding commitments unfulfilled, for example with regard to gender equality.
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Three weeks after roughly 40,000 Verizon workers began a historic work stoppage to protest the “corporate greed” of the telecom company, the union behind the strike joined pubic interest groups in charging Verizon with “systematically deceiving customers” as part of its push to transfer users from copper telephone wires to fiber service.
The informal complaint (pdf) to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was filed Tuesday by Common Cause, Public Knowledge, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and several other groups.
It charges that the internal Verizon policy known as “Fiber Is the Only Fix” both deceives customers and constitutes “unjust and unreasonable practices” that violate federal law. It also alleges that Verizon has been giving retail customers as little as 15 days notice before ending their copper service, when FCC rules say they must be given at least 90 days notice.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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By longstanding tradition, US courts are open, transparent in proceedings, and transparent in judgment. The FISA courts that I cover in my internet law course are so controversial because they are so contrary to that tradition. Courts are also sensitive to the disclosure of trade secrets and, in the past, have liberally allowed parties to file documents under seal to avoid destroying those rights. Most recently, for instance, the Supreme Court permitted Shukh to file redacted public briefs to avoid discussing secret information regarding his invention rights. See Supreme Court Rule 5.2.
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Following the unusually swift and bipartisan passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act through Congress, the US is only a presidential signature away from a wide variety of civil trade secrets cases being litigated in federal courts for the first time. This comes just as the European Parliament has voted in favour of the European Union’s first-ever trade secrets directive, which sets minimum standards of protection across all member states of the EU.
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Trademarks
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Another week, another story about the abuse of intellectual property. This one, like many, involve the “estate” of a famous, but deceased, creator. In this case, it’s the estate of Frank Zappa, which apparently is managed by two of his four children: Ahmet and Diva. The other two children are beneficiaries of the estate, but not trustees. The issue here is that one of the other siblings, Dweezil Zappa, wanted to go out on tour under the name “Zappa Plays Zappa” in which he plays songs by Frank Zappa. Sounds reasonable… and, in fact, he’s been playing under that moniker for a while. Except, this time, Ahmet has said that it’s not allowed and forced Dweezil to change the name to “Dweezil Zappa Plays Frank Zappa” which is not nearly as catchy.
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Copyrights
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This Kat hates long-haul flights, but is grateful that airlines have improved entertainment packages in an effort to make the journey less dull. She recently learnt that this in-flight entertainment is not just a source of boredom relief, but also, copyright contention. A group of record companies and music publishers brought a claim for copyright infringement against IFP, a producer of these entertainment packages. The plaintiffs, which included UMG Recordings, Capitol Records and Universal Music Publishing Group, claimed that IFP infringed copyright in numerous works by failing to secure appropriate copyright licences. The court’s tentative ruling which granted the plaintiffs summary judgment was subsequently adopted as the final judgment.
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The French three-strikes anti-piracy law “Hadopi” is heralded by copyright holders as an effective way to curb piracy. However, in France the legislation has often been criticized and in a surprise move against the will of the Government, the National Assembly has now voted to dismantle it in a few years.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna’s latest paper
Summary: A detailed academic analysis of the Unitary (or Unified) Patent Court reveals/concludes/asserts that it is being marketed or promoted using a misleading premise and promise
“Unitary patent” and court system – A poisoned gift for SMEs is the title of a new paper from Dr. Ingve Björn Stjerna, whom we mentioned here before because he closely studied the UPC for a long time (even before it was known as “UPC”). Based on the paper’s PDF (permission granted for us to host a copy), there is a big gap between truth/reality and promotional claims (advertising). The SMEs are often being exploited by proponents of the UPC, who sort of ‘hijack’ the voice and SMEs and claim to speak on their behalf when they say that the UPC would better serve SMEs, not large corporations that often come from outside Europe.
As the paper states in relation to Europe, “SME are by far the largest employers, their problems are always the problems of their employees and thus of a large number of European citizens. For this reason alone, this matter deserves a broad discussion in the national Parliaments of the affected EU member states. Of the 25 member states having signed the UPCA, so far nine have ratified – of 13 necessary for its entry into force –, 16 ratifications are still open. Insofar, any interested citizen should bring the matter to the attention of the MEP competent for his/her constituency and demand that, prior to its ratification, a broad Parliamentary discussion on pros and cons of the “patent package” should be held. If it is to enter into force in the present form, especially SMEs will have to live with it, this will usually not be to their advantage.”
We already wrote several posts here on why the UPC has nothing to offer to European SMEs and should thus be rejected. There are no pros that we can see, only cons. It’s a con. When patent lawyers and their media assert that UPC would serve SMEs one needs to stop and wonder what kind of clients they have (maybe potential patent trolls or their victims).
To quote the abstract of the paper:
On 16 February 2016, the German Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection presented two pieces of draft legislation for the ratification of the international Agreement on the Unified Patent Court. After the fees for the “unitary patent” have been fixed and a proposal for the court fees and the limits of reimbursable representation costs at the Unified Patent Court has been provided, the political promise that the new system would support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can be judged against the realities. It does not come as a surprise that it is not being fulfilled. Most recently, even the European Commission declared that cost risk would be so significant that SMEs required an insurance to cover it, while admitting at the same time that currently no such insurance is available. An overview on desire and reality as to the costs of the “unitary patent” and the Unified Patent Court.
In the face of EPO lobbying for the UPC (even a month ago in the UK) it is important for European citizens to speak out and to help stop the UPC, which is an unprecedented injustice much like TTIP and TPP. It’s not at all for the interests of European; au contraire. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
English/Original
Article as ODF
Publicado en Europe, Patents at 1:15 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sumario: Todavía hay trabajo político que está siendo hecho — aunque discretamente — contra Battistelli y sus chácales en la alta gerencia de la Oficina Europea de Patentes
A veces tenemos la impresión de derrotismo dentro de los empleados de la EPO. Algunos encontrarían difícil de creer que Battistelli renuciará y que los empleados despedidos retornen a sus puestos de trabajo, aunque trabajo todavía esta siendo hecho (usualmente más discreto que antes) para ese fin.
“Acerca de la situación de la EPO,” una persona nos informó acerca de un insider, “ella/el no espera que cambie mucho para mejoría, dado la reticencia del Consejo Administrativo para hacer otra cosa, que apoyar al presidente. Ella/el parece estar muy frustado/a por la falta de acción de los gobiernos nacionales, incluyendo nuestro ministro de (in)justicia en Alemania, quien es en mi opinión un chiste triste.”
“Los Países Bajos están cada vez más preocupados así como Francia.”
Alemania, por las razones que he explicado aquí varias veces antes, está cómodo haciendose de la vista gorda porque se beneficia económicamente de la EPO. Pero eso no significa que otros países también elijan la inacción. Los Países Bajos son cada vez más preocupados así como Francia. La dirección predominantemente francesa alrededor de Battistelli (sus amigos y sus familiares) se están convirtiendo en una vergüenza nacional que promueve la percepción de corrupción sistémica.
“El diputado Francés Philip Cordery,” escribió a la SUEPO el día de hoy “, informó en un blog fecha 25 de abril el año 2016 sobre una carta conjunta (escrito con otros parlamentarios franceses: Pierre-Yves Le Borgn ‘, Richard Yung, Claudine Lepage, Jean-Yves Leconte y Hélène Conway-Mouret), de 21 de abril de 2016, a la ministra francesa de Economía Emmanuel Macron. La carta fue enviada “con el fin de exigir una vez más que Francia tome medidas hacia una reforma de la gestión de esta organización internacional” “.
El PDF link/original en Francés [PDF] sugiere trabajo contínuo ‘detrás de las escenas’, para decir así, no por primera vez por el Sr. Cordery [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Cordery de todas maneras sabe que Battistelli se ha convertido en fuente de gran vergüenza al pueblo Francés.
Una traducción del blog post[PDF]
(original) y unatraducción de la carta[PDF]
fue publicada en Ingles y publicada por la SUEPO y aquí va:
EPO: Mantengan la presión para reformar la gerencia
Después de la última reunión del Consejo de Administración de la Oficina Europea de Patentes, que, junto con un número de mis colegas que representan a los ciudadanos franceses establecidos fuera de Francia, pidió a la ministra de Economía, Emmanuel Macron, con el fin de exigir una vez más a Francia que adoptara acción hacia una reforma de la gestión de esta organización internacional.
Y la carta acompañante:
París, 21 de Abril el año 2016
Ref .: PC / AF / 169
Ministro,
Deseamos llamar su atención sobre la importancia de las decisiones adoptadas en la última reunión del Consejo de Administración de la Oficina Europea de Patentes.
Nos complace observar que la resolución fue votada a través, como resultado de un compromiso con el fin de obtener una mayoría. Por ello, ha sido posible centrarse en el conflicto social y la imposición de sanciones y procedimientos disciplinarios contra miembros del personal de EPO. Damos la bienvenida a la función desempeñada por Francia, que, por su mediación, ha aceptado sus responsabilidades y movilizado a sus socios con respecto a estas cuestiones.
Ahora estamos llamando a la mayor vigilancia de su parte con respecto a la aplicación efectiva de las medidas derivadas de la presente resolución. En nuestra opinión, es esencial que las personas interesadas se les da la oportunidad de hacer recurrir rápidamente a una autoridad externa para volver a examinar los problemas y actuar en el arbitraje con respecto a las sanciones que han sido impuestas sobre ellos, y que esto se ponen en vigor sin más demora.
La presente inmunidad de la gestión de la EPO con respecto a la gestión del personal y la elección de las actitudes estratégicas adoptadas por la Oficina es un asunto de gran preocupación. Se suscita preocupación en relación con el futuro de esta organización, y el desarrollo de la innovación en Europa. La nacionalidad y el estado como un ejecutivo francés del Presidente imponen una responsabilidad particular en nuestro país en la situación actual. Es por esta razón que, en nuestra opinión, es imperativo que Francia, a través de su representante oficial en el Consejo de Administración, actúa de tal manera que un cambio importante en la gestión de la Oficina pueda entrar en vigor rápidamente.
En la actualidad, los dos representantes del Sindicato que fueron despedidos en Munich no han sido reintegrados, y los abusos degradantes de los estatutos de la Oficina de continuar. Algunos
miembros del personal de la Haya están todavía bajo investigación. Uno de ellos en particular, ha sido privado de cualquier tratamiento como consecuencia de la falta de consideración de su trabajo parar debido a una enfermedad, dando lugar al temor de un posible despido. Por tanto, creemos que es esencial que nuestros propios ciudadanos, que son víctimas por igual con los otros miembros del personal de la política de gestión represiva adoptada por el Presidente de la Oficina, serán totalmente compatibles y continuamente durante esta prueba.
Estamos a su disposición para discutir estos asuntos con usted. Más que nunca, estamos convencidos de que una importante reforma de la gestión de la EPO es esencial, y que están deseosos de que nuestra
país debería comprometerse con este fin, sin ningún tipo de limitaciones.
Seguimos siendo, ministro, Atentamente
Philip Cordery
Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’
Richard Yung
Claudine Lepage
Jean-Yves Leconte
Hélène Conway-Mouret
Emmanuel MACRON
Minister of the Economy, Industry, and the Digital Sector
139, rue de Bercy
75572 Paris Cedex 12
Copy to Yves LAPIERRE
Director General
National Institute of Industrial Property
Assemblée Nationale – 126 rue de l’Université 75007 PARIS
pcordery@assemblee-nationale.fr – 01 40 63 06 58
Hay acción adiciónal de los estados miembros de la EU contra la EPO, pero detalles relevantes a ello podrían comprometer las acciones potencialmente. La saga de la EPO no se ha acabado, a pesar de la calma relativa. No se dejen engañar. Battistelli fue aconsejado a mantener un bajo perfil por alguna razón. Es una masiva operación de lavado de reputación.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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When most people think of “Linux nerds,” the first phrase that comes to mind typically isn’t “super-duper social.” But it should be. If you’ve ever been to a Linux convention, you’ve seen these social Linux butterflies firsthand. And that social nature extends to social media as well.
What follows is a carefully crafted cross section of some incredibly interesting Linux nerds from the various social networks. These are not companies or projects; we’re talking about actual people, speaking for themselves, who are uniquely relevant in the Linux world.
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In past years, the vast ocean of Apple logos really undercut any statement of “Linux is great.” People would, inevitably, retort with, “Then why are all the ‘Linux People’ using Macs?” Admittedly, that was a great point and has been a source of shame for many of us for a very long time.
But now things are different. The Apple logos are (mostly) gone from Linux conferences. This may be an unscientific observation from one person attending a few conferences in North America. Regardless, it’s a great feeling.
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Windows 10′s business push may be slowing, at least according to data gathered from visits to United States government web sites.
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Social media isn’t my cup of tea, but many Linux users like it and use it. And there are certainly Linux geeks worth following on various social media networks. A writer at Network World has a list of Linux notables that are worth following, and his article includes links to their social media pages.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the lineup of early keynote speakers for LinuxCon and ContainerCon North America, which take place August 22-24 in Toronto, Canada. This year’s event will mark the 25th anniversary of Linux and will host a celebration of the open source community. The story of Linux is important to informing how we manage and support professional open source projects into the future.
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Graphics Stack
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The Khronos Group announced the release this Monday morning of the OpenVX 1.1 specification for computer vision acceleration.
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Applications
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VideoLAN released a new maintenance build for the stable 2.2 series of their popular, cross-platform, and open-source VLC Media Player software, version 2.2.3, for all supported platforms.
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Static code analysis just got even easier!
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Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.
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Eve is short for the Efficient Video Encoder and reportedly offers much better results than existing video encoders for Google’s VP9 format.
GNOME developer Ronald Bultje has written about their work on developing Eve at Two Orioles, a video technology consulting business around VP9/WebM and other technologies.
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Proprietary
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MetaTrader 4 (MT4) is the industry standard for Forex trading platforms and for good reason. It is the most advanced, user-friendly, highly-functional trading platform out there. However, there has always been one lacking. MT4 is a Windows application only, and users of Linux have had to struggle to access it. But MetaTrader 4 for Linux is finally available through Admiral Markets.
While Linux users have been able to work around this problem using Wine and other such interfaces, these are unstable and unreliable, and not recommended by the MT4 website. Which is why MetaTrader 4 for Linux is such an important addition.
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Instructionals/Technical
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9 new Krita tutorials came out since the last time I made a news post here. And so did my shoulder. Out of its socket. Ouch!
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Games
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Gamers and Linux users that have been patiently waiting for the availability of the open source DragonBox Pyra handheld games console and pocket PC, will be pleased to know that it is now available to preorder priced from €330 upwards. After pre-orders you will receive a voucher for that amount off the full retail price.
Once the DragonBox Pyra officially launches it will be prices will start at around €500 exc VAT and the system will be powered by a TI OMAP 5 dual-core ARM COrtex-A15 processor supported by 2GB or 4GB of RAM.
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We have had to wait a little while for this, but it seems Atari Vault for Linux isn’t too far away now. The developers are taking on closed beta testers.
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Now that the monthly Steam statistics are out again, we can see that the result has increased slightly from last month, we are back up to 0.90% from 0.85%. While that is a positive sign, we are again looking at a number below 1% this month.
As has been previously pointed out there are a few flaws with the Steam statistics, such as that users of the Big Picture Mode do not get the survey at all. There are also likely a few flaws we don’t know about. Still, we can safely assume that the Steam Hardware Survey isn’t completely lying either: Linux usage might be off by a bit, but if it says below 1%, it is rather unlikely that the real numbers are for example above 2%. It is a statistic, and we have to treat it like a statistic, that gives us an indication of the Linux market share on Steam. An increase likely means a larger market share and a decrease a smaller market share.
A fair point that has been made, however, that the amount of Steam users has been increasing over time. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume the number of Linux Steam users has increased as well. The question is: How did Steam grow?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Reviews
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In our look at Xubuntu 16.04, we find it to be stable, quick and intuitive. It’s a distro that makes our short list of recommendations for those wishing to move from Windows to GNU/Linux.
For a look at Ubuntu’s new LTS release, 16.04 or Xenial Xerus, I decided to forgo “Ubuntu prime” in favor of one of the officially sanctioned “baby *buntus,” choosing Xubuntu, the distro’s Xfce implementation. We use Xfce on Mint on nearly all of the computers here at FOSS Force’s office, so I figured this would put me in familiar territory, especially since Mint is also a Ubuntu based distro.
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New Releases
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This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 101. This update contains various security fixes and bug fixes.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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The wait is over, the report of the latest Scrum sprint of the YaST Team is here! In the previous post we promised that after this sprint we would have much more to show… and now we do. This sprint was quite productive, so let’s go straight to the most interesting bits.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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Sugar’s design principles are anything but the one-level computer interface found in preschool toys. Rather, it’s suitable for inexperienced users as well as more advanced or older users.
While Sugar is simple to use, that does not mean it’s lacking real user features. The interface limits settings and controls to those needed for the task at hand, and the design avoids bloated interface syndrome.
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Debian Family
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While the creation of Debian packages is abundantly documented, most tutorials are targeted to packages implementing the Debian policy. Moreover, Debian packaging has a reputation of being unnecessarily difficult and many people prefer to use less constrained tools like fpm or CheckInstall.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UBUNTU 16.04 or Xenial Xerus, the latest upgrade of the popular Linux distribution, became available as a free download last month, and early reviews have been favorable. Instead of upgrading my existing Ubuntu 15.10 system, this time I opted for a fresh install. I also decided to give the improved Unity 7 desktop a go, instead of installing my preferred alternative XFCE.
The installation process was trouble-free, but because I started from scratch, I had quite a bit to add and tweak after the OS itself was installed.
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VIDEO: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, discusses what might be coming in Ubuntu 16.10 later this year and why security is something he will never compromise.
Ubuntu developers are gathering this week for the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS), which runs from May 3-5, to discuss development plans for the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 Linux distribution release, code-named “Yakkety Yak.”
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With Ubuntu’s install images continuing to be oversized with pushing 1.4GB on recent releases, Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek has raised the new limit for Ubuntu desktop images to 2GB. Other Ubuntu flavors are also following in this move.
Langasek has raised the size limit for images now to 2GB for being able to accomodate the current oversized images plus still having room to grow.
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Canonical has been talking up Snaps, a new type of package format featured in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. “Users can install a snap without having to worry whether it will have an impact on their other apps or their system,” reads Canonical’s announcement. But this isn’t true, as prominent free software developer Matthew Garrett recently pointed out.
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The open source, $299 “LimeSDR” board runs Snappy Ubuntu Core on a Cyclone V, and supports user-defined radios ranging from ZigBee to LTE.
UK-based Lime Microsystems, which develops field programmable RF (FPRF) transceivers for wireless broadband systems, has launched an open source software defined radio (SDR) board on CrowdSupply. Like other Linux-based SDR systems we’ve seen, the LimeSDR uses an FPGA to help orchestrate wireless communications that can be tuned, manipulated, and reconfigured to different wireless standards via software.
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Axiomtek’s rugged, Atom E3815-based “ICO300-MI” IoT gateway features Wind River Intelligent Device Platform XT v3.1, and operates over -20 to 70°C.
We missed Axiomtek’s ICO300-MI gateway the first time around, but the company has now relaunched the product to promote the addition of Intel IoT Gateway Technology and the Linux-based Wind River Intelligent Device Platform XT v3.1. The latter is a middleware stack based on Wind River Linux that offers secure IoT device management and data aggregation services.
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Connect Tech released two more carrier boards for Nvidia’s Linux-driven Jetson TX1 COM: the basic Oribtty and more feature-rich, mini-PCIe enabled Elroy.
A month ago, Connect Tech launched its Astro carrier board built around Nvidia’s Jetson TX1 computer-on-module, as well as a rugged “Rosie” embedded computer based on the Astro. Shortly afterward, the Ontario-based company released a stripped down version called the “Elroy,” and it has now followed up with an even more basic “Orbitty” board.
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Phones
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Android
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We’ve talked about the Fairphone 2 before. It’s probably the most ethical smartphone you can buy off the market – built from “conflict-free” minerals and raw materials, and designed with ecological balance in mind. Now the developers are looking into making even the software monopoly-free and open source, of course. They have just released their own version of Android, one that is free from Google services.
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One of the persistent tragedies of Android, Google’s globe-conquering mobile-operating system, is that it continues to be better in theory than in reality.
The search company has spent more than a decade perfecting its software, and in the abstract, Android is now just as pristinely well-conceived as Apple’s iOS.
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Yet the European charges miss the messy reality of life on Android, which is clear to anyone who studies the mobile-software business: Android phones come teeming with non-Google apps, often to the point of frustration for users. The search company appears powerless to keep many of them off people’s devices.
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Overall smartphone share of the global handsets market is slowing as mobile phone (or feature phone) sales show some resilience through local brands in emerging markets. While ABI Research, the leader in transformative technology innovation market intelligence, finds major Chinese vendors are continuing to witness solid volume growth, the market region could be on the cusp of a change as Google Android regains momentum and fights back against AOSP (Android Open Source Project) devices. ABI Research estimates that AOSPs’ share of the global smartphone market fell to 14% by end of 2015, while Android improved to a commanding 67%.
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We analyzed the perceptions of professional software developers as manifested in the LinkedIn online community, and used the theoretical lens of prejudice theory to interpret their answers in a broader context.
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The electrical grid, water, roads and bridges—the infrastructure we take for granted—is seldom noticed until it’s unavailable. The burgeoning open source software movement is taking steps to help rebuild crumbling U.S. civil infrastructure while capitalizing on expansion in emerging markets by providing software building blocks to help develop interoperable and secure transportation, electric power, oil and gas as well as the healthcare infrastructure.
Under a program launched in April called the Civil Infrastructure Platform, the Linux Foundation said the initiative would provide “an open source base layer of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks for civil infrastructure.”
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Josh Bernstein, EMC’s new VP of technical strategy, sat down with Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World to talk about the value open source brings to EMC.
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Bootstrap is a framework to help you design websites faster and easier. It includes HTML and CSS based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, tables, navigation, modals, image carousels, etc. It also gives you support for JavaScript plugins.
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For the last year, Lauren Cooney has been running open source strategy for the Chief Technology and Architecture Office at Cisco. Cooney’s career includes time spent at some of the biggest IT vendors in the world, including Microsoft as well as rival networking vendor Juniper, but the Cisco experience for her is a bit different, especially in terms of open source.
In a video interview, Cooney discusses why Cisco is investing in open source and how it determines whether a project can work on Github alone, or if it needs a broad foundation to support it.
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Mention the words “open source” and all kinds ideas probably come to mind such as “free”, “agility”, and “speed”. However, with any IT project, it is important to look at business benefits vs. costs in a manner that goes beyond generalizations. One method for benefit-cost analysis for open source big data projects is Net Present Value (NPV).
It’s not unusual to find the IT community excited about the possibilities of open source. And with good reason as adoption of open source big data technologies may provide companies flexibility in charting their own path, ability to innovate faster and move at the speed of business. And yet, it is sage advice to temper some of the frenzy in adopting open source with a financial analysis.
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Over the past couple of years, software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a strong alternative to traditional networking approaches in the areas of WAN, data center networks, and network overlay solutions. The primary benefit realized from SDN, besides open networking, is the ability to accelerate service deployments. SDN solutions using OpenFlow tackle complex problems, including dynamic provisioning, interconnection, and fault management. Although the functionality of SDN has evolved and matured, the scalability of SDNs based on OpenFlow has been limited by OpenFlow’s ties to ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM). OpenFlow by design was implemented in the TCAM.
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This week, Fallout 4 players will finally be able to experience post-apocalyptic Boston firsthand, thanks to the VR capabilities of the Oculus Rift. However, this isn’t an official patch released by Bethesda; instead, the functionality is being offered up by a third-party, open-source project called Vireio Perception.
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Blockchain
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SaaS/Back End
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BSD
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The FreeBSD project issued their quarterly status report concerning the state of various projects happening for this BSD operating system. It was another busy three months for the FreeBSD crew!
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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As part of this mission UPsat is equipped with a specialized scientific instrument (mNLP) designed for its mission needs. Every other component of the satellite is designed from scratch, built, tested and integrated by engineers, scientists and developers of the University of Patras and Libre Space Foundation. That includes the structural framework, the on board mission control computer, the telecommunications system, the power management system and the software that runs across all different subsystems.
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Programming/Development
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We, as engineers, always wanted to simplify and automate things. This is something in our nature. That’s how our brains work. That’s how procedural programming was born. After some time, the next level of evolution was object oriented programming.
The idea was always the same. Take something big and try to split it into isolated abstractions with hidden implementations. It is much easier to think about complex system using abstractions. It is way more efficient to develop isolated blocks.
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But other students have a very different story. Some high schoolers — who are on average whiter and wealthier than their peers — are provided with a unique privilege in the college admissions process simply because they were born to the right family. This privilege is known as the legacy preference.
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Nearly 30 people were this afternoon stuck dangling from a roller coaster that broke down at Alton Towers.
The passengers were heard screaming and shouting for help when they got stuck on the first hill.
Air Galactica came to a halt at 2pm this afternoon before the ride was eventually re-started. It is believed to have been affected by flooding.
A member of staff was seen climbing up to reassure the people on the ride which only re-opened in March after being refurbished.
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In a darkened room on the backstreets of London’s red light district, Mike McGee stared at a screen. Surrounded by a thick wall of cigarette smoke and impatient chain-smoking clients, he swiped a pen across the table, his movement replicated with surprising accuracy as a pixel-perfect line on the screen above. The clients—TV producers from the BBC—were impressed. In just a few short minutes, McGee had transformed a single frame of video into the beginnings of a title sequence. In a world where labour-intensive optical effects and manual rotoscoping were the norm, this was a revelation.
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Hardware
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Broxton was to be Intel’s 2016 Atom SoC platform for phones and tablets. Broxton was to be using 14nm Goldmont CPU cores and Skylake graphics, but now it’s no more.
For those that didn’t hear yet, it’s been confirmed that Intel is cancelling the Broxton platform and also letting go of their SoFIA platforms. With Intel failing to make inroads with high-end smartphones and tablets while ARM continues to dominate, Intel is letting go of these platforms and instead focusing upon other more profitable areas where they have greater success.
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Health/Nutrition
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The new law may also require pregnant women who have miscarriages to bury or cremate their fetal remains.
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So close to the July 1 deadline for complying with Vermont’s GMO labeling law, and still no court ruling to overturn Vermont’s law. Still no federal legislation to preempt Vermont’s law.
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There is a dangerous radiological threat to the West Coast of the United States that puts the health of millions of Americans at risk. It includes dangers to public health, dangers to the food supply, and dangers to future generations from long-lived radionuclides, including some of the most toxic material in the world. It is not Fukushima, it is Hanford. While radiation from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns is reaching the West Coast, carried across the ocean from Japan, the radiation from Hanford is already there, has been there for 70 years, and is in serious risk of catastrophe that could dwarf the effects of Fukushima even on Japan.
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Part of the issue, the plaintiffs argue, stems from poor training at the managerial level. In the prior state investigation, officials found that staff members were not trained on how to document a resident’s physical injuries or health abnormalities — or on how to handle any behavioral issues. Without proper training, staff turned to abuse when faced with a challenge. Many often gave residents the wrong medication, falsified their medical documents, and failed to schedule necessary doctors’ appointments.
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The second key error of CRISPR boosters is to assume that, even if we had complete precision, this would allow control over the consequences for the resulting organism.
Suppose, as a non-Chinese speaker, I were to precisely remove from a Chinese text one character, one line, or one page. I would have one hundred percent precision, but zero control over the change in meaning. Precision, therefore, is only as useful as the understanding that underlies it, and surely no DNA biologist would propose we understand DNA–or else why are we studying it?
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Once again, decisions are being made about Flint’s tainted water system with no public announcement or conversation.
Flint residents, whose longstanding complaints about water quality fell on deaf ears to disastrous effect, are experiencing some déjà vu over the next steps out of the city’s water crisis.
The city has quietly started seeking bids from private water companies. City residents say they only discovered the move when a researcher at the consumer watchdog group Food & Water Watch unearthed a request for proposal (RFP) in a Global Water Intelligence report.
The RFP is for an analysis of the city’s water system, which, thanks to officials who neglected to add corrosion control chemicals to the water coming in from the Flint River, has been leaching dangerously high levels of lead into residents’ drinking water. The analysis would give recommendations for how the system needs to be upgraded to bring it into line with best practices and address the Environmental Protection Agency’s order to take corrective measures. This particular contract wouldn’t make Flint’s public water system private on its own.
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Security
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One of the major drawbacks to purchasing a CA signature is that it isn’t cheap: the CAs (with the exception of Let’s Encrypt) are out there to make money. When you’re developing a new application, you’re going to want to test that everything works with encryption, but you probably aren’t going to want to shell out cash for every test server and virtual machine that you create.
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Defence/Aggression
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On Sunday, former CIA Riyadh Station Chief John Brennan had a remarkable appearance on Meet the Press. A big part of it — the second to last thing he and Chuck Todd discussed — was Brennan’s argument against the release of the 28 pages (“so-called,” Brennan calls them) showing that 9/11 was facilitated by at least one Saudi operative.
Brennan opposes their release in three ways. First, he falsely suggested that the 9/11 Commission investigated all the leads implicating the Saudis (and also pretends the “so-called 28 pages” got withheld for sources and methods and not to protect our buddies).
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Yes, the Vietnam War is remembered as a debacle and a defeat, but not as the moral sin it was and that Berrigan bravely protested. The war is described as misguided and by the right wing as poorly led and even prematurely ended. But it was profoundly immoral, an act of prolonged violence stoked by unconscionable arrogance, ignorance, lies and manipulation by political leaders. Phony theories of “falling dominoes” and of a unified and insatiable world communist movement were kept alive mainly because of electoral politics, especially the fears held by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon of hardliners who could not countenance losing a war, despite the fact that the war was without merit and should never have been fought.
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In so many ways we mourn the indomitable poet, priest and activist Daniel Berrigan, who died at age 94 on the 41st anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War he decried and defied for years, starting with his famous 1968 burning – with homemade napalm – of Catonsville draft files with his brother Philip and other pacifists. “Our apologies, good friends,” he wrote in his play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, “for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.” Father Berrigan got three years in federal prison for the action; when the appeals ran out, he refused to show up, spent four years opposing the war from underground, and went on to assemble an impressive rap sheet of arrests and convictions for protesting war, weaponry, nuclear power and the world’s other unholy ills. Thus did Kurt Vonnegut crown him, “Jesus as a poet.”
Known for his fearless insights, Berrigan’s mantra was to, “Know where you stand, and stand there.” He remained true to it in a much-criticized 1973 speech to the Association of Arab University Graduates, where he denounced an Israel that had become “a criminal Jewish community” and, alongside a South Africa under apartheid and a U.S. embroiled in Vietnam, “a settler state (seeking) a Biblical justification for crimes against humanity.” He lamented the tragedy of Jews who after enduring the Holocaust “arose like warriors, armed to the teeth, (who) entered the imperial adventure and spread abroad the imperial deceptions,” going from slaves to masters who created slaves of “the people it has crushed”- Palestinians. Finally, he cites the “savage triumph” of a “model (that) is not the kingdom of peace; it is an Orwellian transplant, taken bodily from Big Brother’s bloody heart.” After the speech raised a furor, he defended it as “an act of outraged love.” At his passing, Berrigan’s family quotes his belief that, “Peacemaking is tough, unfinished, blood-ridden. We walk our hope and that’s the only way of keeping it going.” Today, they add, no one person can pick up his burden, but there is enough work for us all: “His spirit is free, it is alive in the world, and it is waiting for you.”
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We continue our interview with close friends and the niece of the legendary antiwar priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, as we remember his life and legacy. He died on Saturday, just short of his 95th birthday. Berrigan was a poet, pacifist, educator, social activist, playwright and lifelong resister to what he called “American military imperialism.” Along with his late brother Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the antiwar and antidraft movement during the late 1960s, as well as the movement against nuclear weapons. He was the first Catholic priest to land on the FBI’s most wanted list. In early 1968, Father Daniel Berrigan made international headlines when he traveled to North Vietnam with historian Howard Zinn to bring home three U.S. prisoners of war. Later that year, Father Dan Berrigan, his brother Phil and seven others took 378 draft files from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. Then, in the parking lot of the draft board office, the activists set the draft records on fire, using homemade napalm, to protest the Vietnam War. They became known as the Catonsville Nine and invigorated the antiwar movement by inspiring over 100 similar acts of protest. It also shook the foundation of the tradition-bound Catholic Church. Then, in 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six others began the Plowshares Movement when they broke into the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, hammered nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files. They were arrested and charged with over 10 different felony and misdemeanor counts, and became known as the Plowshares Eight.
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was pilloried on Sunday for its decision to mark the 5th anniversary of the 2011 raid and killing of Osama bin Laden by “live-tweeting” the operation “as if it were happening today.”
Beginning at 1:25 EDT, using the hashtag #UBLRaid (referring to the alternate spelling, “Usama”), the CIA reiterated its account of the May 2 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan.
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Syria’s largest city, Aleppo has seen a worrying outbreak of violence in the past week that could fatally undermine the cessation of hostilities that had held between most Free Syrian Army units and the Syrian Arab Army.
The ceasefire did not extend to al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), however, and it appears to be al-Qaeda that led the renewed fighting south of the city and mortar strikes from the rebel-held east on the Government-held west.
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He also showed himself in love with authoritarians abroad, perhaps seeing people like Vladimir Putin as soul mates.
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This manufactured “extraordinary threat” serves as the Obama regime’s excuse for overthrowing President Maduro in Venezuela. It is a Washington tradition to overthrow elected Latin American governments that try to represent the interest of the people, and not the interest of US corporations and banks.
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Thousands more US-led NATO forces are being provocatively deployed near Russia’s borders.
Interviewed by Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter broadsheet, Sergey Lavrov accused NATO of “inching closer and closer to Russia’s borders. But when Russia takes action to ensure its security, we are told that Russia is engaging in dangerous maneuvers near NATO borders. In fact, NATO borders are getting closer to Russia, not the opposite.”
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Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have lined up to quietly kill a cost estimate of the Pentagon’s three-decade nuclear modernization program, which experts predict will exceed $1 trillion. The vote was mentioned briefly in Politico’s morning briefing list last week but otherwise received no media coverage.
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USA Today revealed on April 19th that U.S. air forces have been operating under looser rules of engagement in Iraq and Syria since last fall. The war commander, Lt Gen McFarland, now orders air strikes that are expected to kill up to 10 civilians without prior approval from U.S. Central Command, and U.S. officials acknowledge that air strikes are killing more civilians under the new rules.
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Friday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work announced that 4,000 NATO troops, including two U.S. battalions, will be moved into Poland and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s border.
“The Russians have been doing a lot of snap exercises right up against the border with a lot of troops,” says Work, who calls this “extraordinarily provocative behavior.”
But how are Russian troops deploying inside Russia “provocative,” while U.S. troops on Russia’s front porch are not? And before we ride this escalator up to a clash, we had best check our hole card.
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Comedian Larry Wilmore took real shots at President Obama, the media, various politicians and almost all the attendees at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.
Often getting booed, or a response of silence, Wilmore used the comedic opportunity to address real issues in a manner resembling Stephen Colbert back in 2006. He started fiercely within the first three minutes and had this to say (among much else):
“It’s great, it looks like you’re really enjoying the last year of your presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors. That was cool, that was cool. Yeah. You know it kinda makes sense too because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances, right? Yeah. It’s true. What? Am I wrong? What? Speaking of drones, how is Wolf Blitzer still on television? Ask a follow-up question. Hey Wolf, I’m ready to project tonight’s winner: anyone that isn’t watching ‘The Situation Room.’ ”
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And Why Does Washington Hate Him So Much?
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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On March 3, assassins entered the home of Berta Caceres, leader of Honduras’ environmental and indigenous movement. They shot her friend Gustavo Castro Soto, the director of Friends of the Earth Mexico. He pretended to be dead, and so is the only witness of what came next. The assassins found Berta Caceres in another room and shot her in the chest, the stomach and the arms. When the assassins left the house, Castro went to Berta Caceres, who died in his arms.
Investigation into the death of Berta Caceres is unlikely to be conducted with seriousness. The Honduran government suggested swiftly that it was likely that Castro had killed Berta Caceres and made false statements about assassins. That he had no motive to kill his friend and political ally seemed irrelevant. Castro has taken refuge in the Mexican embassy in Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa. He continues to fear for his life.
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Authorities have arrested four suspects in the assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres, the Honduran attorney general announced on Monday.
Adding credence to suspicions that Cáceres’ killing was politically-motivated, among those arrested were Honduran military officials as well as an employee of Desarrollos Energéticos (or DESA), the private energy company behind the Agua Zarca dam, which Cáceres fiercely opposed.
Central American-based freelance journalist Sandra Cuffe reported Monday that the arrests included Mariano Díaz Chávez and Edilson Atilio Duarte Meza. Cuffe wrote, “Honduran Armed Forces spokesperson identified Díaz as a major and Duarte as a former member of the military.”
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Recent flooding in Houston has sent crude oil and toxic chemicals into Texas waterways, and residents and experts say regulators are not doing enough to address the threat to public health and the environment.
Photographs taken by emergency management officials show oil slicks and other evidence of toxins spreading through the Sabine River on the Texas-Louisiana border from flooding in March, and new evidence is mounting that spills from oil wells and fracking sites increase when water levels rise.
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The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Monday that state law trumps two cities’ attempts to stem the domestic fracking boom, issuing “a severe slap in the face” to Coloradans and local democracy alike.
The court heard cases from Longmont, where voters banned the oil and gas drilling practice in 2012, and Fort Collins, where voters approved a 5-year moratorium in 2013. The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group that brought the suits against both cities, argued that the fossil fuel-friendly state clearly regulates fracking, and the cities can’t forbid a practice that the state allows.
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Bill Gates keeps saying confused and confusing things about climate policy and clean energy.
Gates has positioned himself as a major player and spokesman in this arena with his “Breakthrough Energy Coalition,” a $2 billion effort he is spearheading to research and develop breakthrough “energy miracles.” That means his confused — and often simply wrong — pronouncements could have serious consequences in the public debate and are worth exploring in detail.
Gates’ latest bizarre position, as as one media headline explained, is to dismiss a carbon tax — “Bill Gates: Carbon tax not right for the US.”
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Each month as I write these dispatches, I shake my head in disbelief at the rapidity at which anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is occurring. It’s as though each month I think, “It can’t possibly keep happening at this incredible pace.”
But it does.
By late April, the Mauna Loa Observatory, which monitors atmospheric carbon dioxide, recorded an incredible daily reading: 409.3 parts per million. That is a range of atmospheric carbon dioxide content that this planet has not seen for the last 15 million years, and 2016 is poised to see these levels only continue to increase.
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In the case of kids concerned about climate change versus the federal government, the kids keep racking up historic wins.
On Friday, a group of children suing the government for inaction on climate change scored a major victory, as a judge ruled that the Washington State Department of Ecology must deliver an emissions reduction rule by the end of this year. That decision follows another major win in mid-April, when an Oregon judge ruled that a similar lawsuit could go forward despite opposition from the fossil fuel industry.
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From creating transparent wood for solar panels or windows to turning carbon dioxide and plant waste into plastic bottles, scientists are finding ingenious ways to sidestep fossil fuels.
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Finance
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In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom; but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.
The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015 it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.
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Marissa Mayer tells us a lot about why Americans are so angry, and why anti-establishment fury has become the biggest single force in American politics today.
Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Yahoo’s stock lost about a third of its value last year, as the company went from making $7.5 billion in 2014 to losing $4.4 billion in 2015. Yet Mayer raked in $36 million in compensation.
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In May 2014, Senator Elizabeth Warren talked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. “From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the deal in the upcoming trade talks. So the question is: Why are the trade talks secret? You’ll love this answer. Boy, the things you learn on Capitol Hill. I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me, ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.’”
[...]
If you aren’t already concerned about a deal being negotiated on behalf of giant corporations at the public’s expense, consider the following. One chapter in the deal, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system, threatens democracy and the sovereignty of governments.
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The windy city’s political donor class is disproportionately and overwhelmingly made up of rich white men with a penchant for austerity and budget cuts, according to the first-ever municipal-level study of race, class and gender disparities in buying elections.
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There’s something to this, but I suspect culture has a lot more to do with it. Most of these folks have spent their lives marinating in social liberalism, and being situated in the Bay Area just adds to that. So they start out with a visceral loathing of conservative social policies that pushes them in the direction of the Democratic Party. From there, tribalism does most of the additional work: once you’ve chosen a team, you tend to adopt all of the team’s views.
Beyond that, yes, I imagine that tech zillionaires are more than normally aware of how much they rely on government: for basic research, for standards setting, for regulation that protects them from getting crushed by old-school dinosaurs, and so forth. And let’s be honest: most of the really rich ones have their wealth tied up almost entirely in capital gains, which doesn’t get taxed much anyway. So endorsing candidates who happen to favor higher tax rates on ordinary income (which they probably won’t get anyway) doesn’t really cost them much.
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This is the fourth in a series of blogs on the EU-Canada trade agreement (CETA) and data protection.
In earlier blogs we saw that under the CETA text Canada can give our personal data related to financial services, transfered to Canada, a lower protection than under the standard set by the Court of Justice of the EU in the Safe Harbour ruling. This is relevant as Canada is a member of the “Five Eyes”, a group of countries committed to (suspicionless) mass surveillance. We also saw that CETA does not allow data protection measures based on a higher data protection standard than agreed in CETA.
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oday the draft text of the U.S.-Europe free trade agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), was leaked by Greenpeace Netherlands. The leak reveals for the first time the current state of the text of 15 chapters and annexes, along with a confidential commentary from the European Union.
There’s not much concerning digital rights issues in the current text, because text on most of those issues has not been tabled yet. The closest that we have is the Electronic communications/Telecommunications chapter, which despite its broader-seeming title, is almost entirely about the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, and raises few obvious concerns.
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By now, most in the environmental community know that there are major environmental and climate change concerns surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — that it could empower corporations to sue governments over environmental decisions and policies, for instance. But another trade deal, one being forged between the United States and European Union, has gotten less attention — until now.
On Monday, Greenpeace Netherlands leaked documents from negotiations surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The 248 pages of documents — which account for about a third of the total text — illustrate four major environmental concerns, Greenpeace says.
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EU standards on the environment and public health risk being undermined by compromises with the US, Greenpeace has warned, citing leaked documents.
The environmental group obtained 248 pages of classified documents from the TTIP trade talks, aimed at clinching a far-reaching EU-US free trade deal.
Secrecy surrounding the talks has fuelled fears that US corporations may erode Europe’s consumer protections.
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“It’s disgraceful that despite the fact TTIP would have such a profound impact on the lives of people across Europe, the only way that people get to know about these disturbing details is through leaks like these. TTIP is being cooked up behind closed doors because when ordinary people find out about the threat it poses to democracy and consumer protections, they are of course opposed to it.
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The documents represent roughly two-thirds of the latest negotiating text, according to Greenpeace, and on some topics offer for the first time the position of the United States.
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Wealth inequality is even more of a problem than income inequality. That’s because you have to have enough savings from income to begin to accumulate wealth – buying a house or investing in stocks and bonds, or saving up to send a child to college.
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“The 2016 presidential election,” Diana Johnstone recently wrote, “is shaping up as a contest between the two most hated people in America.” Bernie Sanders has called it quits. That’s what it means when your campaign says, as Bernie’s did two nights ago, that it looks forward to going to the Democratic National Convention to fight over the party’s platform, not over its presidential nomination. There’ll be no contested convention on the Democratic side. So what if Hillary Clinton is a “right wing fanatic” (Arun Gupta), a close friend of Wall Street, a backer of so-called free trade deals, and a spine-chilling war monger?
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For generations, African Americans have faced unique barriers to owning a home — and enjoying the wealth it brings. In Atlanta, where predominantly black neighborhoods are still waiting for the recovery, the link between race and real estate fortune is stark.
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Nearly every public school in Detroit was shut down on Monday as teachers city-wide held a “sickout” over news that the embattled district would not be able to pay them past June 30.
The protest kept 94 out of 97 schools closed after the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) announced the action on Sunday. Detroit Public Schools (DPS) emergency manager Judge Steven Rhodes told the union over the weekend that without additional funding from the legislature, the district would not have enough money to pay its 2,600 teachers’ already-earned salaries.
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Teachers across Detroit called in sick to work on Monday — a “sick-out” protest that ultimately shut down all but three public schools in the city because there weren’t enough teachers in class.
The coordinated protest, which was organized by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, came soon after the school district’s emergency manager, Judge Steven Rhodes, announced that there won’t be enough money to pay teachers after June 30.
“Detroit teachers deserve to be paid fairly for their work like every other working person… But Detroit Public Schools has just informed us that it cannot guarantee to pay these dedicated men and women for their work. This isn’t right. It isn’t fair,” the president of the teachers union, Ivy Bailey, told the Detroit News.
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KIPP also asked the Office of Innovation and Improvement to redact the amounts of funding provided to KIPP by foundations that wrote letters of support for KIPP to receive federal taxpayer money under the grant.
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On his farewell tour, President Barack Obama has stirred the pot ahead of the June referendum in Britain on whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union or leave. His warning to leavers that Britain cannot expect a trade agreement with the United States any time soon if it withdraws from the EU has infuriated leaders of the Brexit campaign, and delighted those who want to remain, including Prime Minister David Cameron. Obama’s message to Britain was that it should remain in the EU, and that it was in America’s interest, too.
Some of the comments made by leading Brexit figures in the governing Conservative Party in retaliation to Obama’s intervention have been described as borderline racist.
In a particularly outspoken jibe, London mayor and a member of the British cabinet, Boris Johnson, accused the American president of interfering in British politics. Johnson went on to say that after entering the House House Obama had ordered the removal a bust of the British wartime leader, Winston Churchill, from the Oval Office. Furthermore, he suggested that this might be because of Obama’s “part Kenyan ancestral dislike of the British empire.”
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Voters should know the president’s priorities in filling these positions. It will hugely affect their ability to carry through their economic agenda. Pretending the Fed does not exist is not serious economic policy. The public has a right to expect better.
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KCEG’s report partially demonstrates from one economic perspective why such a view of the world, when actualized into public policy, doesn’t work, except for those at the top of the financial food chain. KCEG rightly points out that the tax revenues devoted to state-provided services, such as transportation infrastructure, public education and healthcare, to name a few, are in actuality investments in some very “powerful economic development tools” available to Kansas (and other states).
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Class warfare is on display in stark terms at Verizon Communications, and although such direct terms are avoided by the corporate media, there is much talk of the strike against Verizon by the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as “labor’s last stand.” That might be a little hyperbolic, or it might be wishful thinking, as such talk of last stands is often intertwined with juxtaposing unionized older sectors with non-unionized sectors that are promoted as “new” and “vibrant.”
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IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with USA Today, Phil Knight, the co-founder and chair of Nike, expressed puzzlement over Americans’ anger about trade agreements like NAFTA, and concern that this anger is having an effect on the presidential race.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Sanders campaign lambastes Clinton for ‘looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign.’
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Fake news stories are a scourge. Something different from parody news folks such as The Onion, there are outfits out there that produce false news stories simply to get clickthroughs and generate advertising revenue. And it isn’t just a couple of your Facebook friends and that weird uncle of yours that gets fooled by these things, even incredibly handsome and massively-intelligent writers such as myself are capable of getting completely misled into believing that a bullshit news story is real.
Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how’d that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.
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When the US and NATO war of aggression was launched against Syria, Dr Nabil Antaki could have abandoned Aleppo to ensure his own safety. Instead he decided to remain and to serve the besieged people of his City, working with various local charities. Above all, he wanted to bear witness to the destruction caused by Western support for the foreign armed groups who have been systematically destroying Syria and terrorising its people for the last 5 years.
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As US and NATO propaganda reaches another crescendo in Aleppo, it is important to remind ourselves of a few salient facts. First and foremost we need to understand that the prevailing force occupying Aleppo and terrorising civilians is US and NATO backed Al Nusra in the city itself and ISIS in Northern and Eastern outlying areas.
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Meet Joni Ernst. Could she be Donald Trump’s choice for Vice President?
The main attributes of a vice president are to balance the ticket, help raise money and then step back for four/eight years until it is her turn to run. You want someone good, but not too good, especially if you have an ego the size of Trump’s.
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On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that the best response to a young protester who yelled “you suck” during a campaign rally in Indiana would be a good spanking. It’s the second time the Republican presidential candidate has brought up the controversial form of physical punishment on the campaign trail.
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After decisively losing in 2012 because of their inability to build bridges with people of color, Republicans were at an impasse. The question was: would they reach out to people of color and attempt to bring them into the fold . . . or would they continue their free-market assault and ignore that their voting bloc was shrinking? They choose door number three.
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Take heart, Sanders supporters. We’re down, but we’re not out.
Bernie’s difficult path to the nomination just got a little rockier, but it’s still three months to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years in presidential politics, it is to expect the unexpected, and that three months is an eternity in a political campaign. Anything can happen.
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Now, however, Bernie Sanders is facing the verdict of closed primaries in many states which bar independent voters from voting for any of the Democratic or Republican candidates. Pointedly, Senator Sanders won only one of the five states with primaries on April 26, 2016: Rhode Island. Why? Because that state has an open primary allowing independent voters, heavily pro-Sanders, to carry him to victory.
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The New York Times Real Estate section is written for the rich by writers who are either themselves rich or very good at faking it. The tone is one of “oh, what inequality?” matter-of-factness, where $2 million loft purchases are thrown around like Seamless thai food orders. It’s a style of journalism where the writer uncritically adopts the class and corporate tone and verbiage of those they cover: the affluent and the cottage industries that emerge to suit their whims.
[...]
The author went on to refer to one of the wealthy brownstone-seekers, Matthew Trebek (son of Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, naturally), as engaging in “explorations” of Harlem, as if it were an undiscovered wilderness.
It may seem like PC parsing, but this type of language helps normalize a racist mindset in an already racist industry. A 2012 report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development found that discrimination and redlining, while more subtle than in decades past, is still rampant in the real estate business. Racially loaded terms like “pioneer” and “exploration” help reinforce the notion that long-existing communities of color are untamed frontiers needing to be settled.
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Too bad for Roger Stone that the internet remembers. This time it’s his sleazy red-baiting. These days, the notorious, nefarious Stone—opposition researcher, all-around dirty trickster, organizer of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 Florida recount, rumor-monger of the Michelle Obama “whitey” tape, and general political hitman for the GOP—remains an ally of Donald Trump (even though he quit last year as Trump’s campaign manager). He is also chief of a Trump SuperPac, the Committee to Restore America’s Greatness. What specific consultations consultant Stone may be whispering into the billionaire’s ear can only be deduced by listening to what crawls out of Trump’s mouth.
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Speaking at the National Press Club Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders told reporters his campaign would take the fight for the candidacy all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
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The ongoing presidential race in the United States has revealed a number of phenomena that seem to have been brewing under the surface of neoliberal austerity economics for years. For one thing, it has shown a widespread popular discontent with the status quo. For another, it has revealed that the American public is no longer averse to socialistic ideas.
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But it took more than just humour for Russia to gain the confidence of Chinese travellers.
There are two key reasons why Chinese tourists have edged out those from Germany and the UK from the list of top visitors: a relaxed visa regime and the growing success of the China Friendly International Project by Russia’s tourism industry stakeholders last year that was engineered to create and facilitate initiatives for healthy and comfortable hospitality for tourists from China.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Screaming matches with whiny social-justice warriors may go viral on social media, but hosting forums for genuine dialogue is a better way to fight campus censorship.
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Canadian scientists are now allowed to speak out about their work — and the government policy that had restricted communications.
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Editor, I was a soldier of the struggle for a free press during the 1970s to 1992 and the restoration of democratic rule. I became a columnist at the Chronicle in 1993 after the free press was restored. After a few columns, then editor Sharief Khan informed me that he received heat from the government about my columns, and asked me to soften my position on certain issues. I opted to resign from the columns rather than compromise my values; unlike other columnists I didn’t compromise my integrity and independence and I don’t grovel for supper. Newspapers should not censor views, especially when supported by facts.
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Before Friday, a Louisiana bookstore might have feared prosecution for allowing a teenager to browse a book like “The Catcher in the Rye” on its website.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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To check and see if it was completely secure, I had my son solve the cube a few times and it never fell out. Additionally, the tile remained secure after the cube was dropped a few times. All in all, I was surprised. While I’m sure this particular scene was a bit of ‘hollywood embellishment,’ especially considering that cube wasn’t released until 2013, I still thought this was an interesting method of hiding data.
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Law enforcement agencies around the world are having trouble in their investigations as they cannot access data found in increasingly encrypted devices. Apple’s argument in refusing a court order demanding access is that creating a backdoor for just one phone could threaten the security and privacy of all its customers.
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The big news here is a 200% plus increase, either in the reporting or the actual back door searches of US person data collected under Section 702. And remember, this doesn’t include the FBI at all.
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A string of aborted federal prosecutions of alleged “traitors” has the DOJ rethinking its national security strategies. The DOJ went after National Weather Service employee Sherry Chen, who shared public web links about reservoir water funding with a senior Chinese official, who also happened to be Chen’s friend. It went after Temple University’s physics department head Xi Xiaoxang for allegedly sharing secret semiconductor blueprints with Chinese scientists. The case fell apart once the DOJ was informed by actual experts in the field that the shared blueprints weren’t for the item the DOJ claimed they were for. Finally, it went after Robin Raphael, a State Department advisor, who it believed was passing on state secrets to Pakistani officials. At this point, the DOJ’s case has dissolved into little more than an accusation that Raphael kept classified documents in her home, something others like Hillary Clinton and General Petraeus have managed to walk from unscathed.
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Just one day before a parliamentary commission is expected to recommend making such measures an explicit and permanent part of Brazilian law, Brazilians are getting a taste of what it feels like when ISPs can be ordered to block Internet sites and services.
In an echo of an earlier dispute from last December, a Brazilian judge from the state of Sergipe has ordered the five main Internet service providers in the country to block access to the WhatsApp messaging service for 72 hours starting today at 2:00 pm local time. ISPs that don’t block WhatsApp may be liable to a fine of approximately US$142,000 per day. This decision affects millions of innocent Brazilians who rely on WhatsApp as a messaging service. It’s disturbing to see the court issuing a decision that trample over users’ freedom to communicate securely and the role of the Internet as a place for free expression.
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Brazilian judges are apparently not very big fans of the popular messaging app Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook (but run independently). Judge Marcel Montalvao has ordered the app blocked entirely across Brazil, because Whatsapp has refused to provide data (which it likely does not have) to help out with a drug investigation. Any phone companies that don’t block Whatsapp will be fined about $143,000 per day.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we went through this back in December in another case with another judge. And, of course, in March a Facebook (not Whatsapp) exec was arrested over a similar issue in a different case. When Whatsapp again refused to turn over information, because it could not, the judge had the exec arrested (another judge freed the exec pretty quickly).
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There has been much talk about the chilling effect of mass surveillance. The problem isn’t that anyone is actively watching everyone. The problem is that algorithms and search tools are doing the watching, meaning everything eventually receives some level of scrutiny if it’s deemed suspicious by the filters.
It’s been mostly talk, though. Anecdotal evidence passed on by journalists, security researchers and others whose interests might clash with what the US government has deemed acceptable. Now, there’s data. A study by Jonathon W. Penney shows searches for certain subject matter have declined in response to the NSA leaks. Penney cites earlier studies of Google traffic that showed a statistically significant decline of 5% in searches involving terms people might believe would be flagged as suspicious by mass surveillance software. He also notes that the dip was short-lived, corresponding roughly to the initial Snowden leaks before resuming at their normal pace after a few months.
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Cho was shocked. The 54-year-old Korean immigrant said he had operated his shop for six years without a problem. He says he had even helped cops solve neighborhood crimes, giving them video footage of the sidewalk outside his store.
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Sarah Ryley at ProPublica has a fascinating, depressing, and exhaustive report on the NYPD’s apparent ongoing civil rights abuses. Under the guise of policing “nuisance businesses,” certain precincts are targeting minority-owned businesses — usually small bodegas, laundromats, etc. — with abatement actions that force owners to either lose their source of income or capitulate to the NYPD’s overreaching demands.
One business owner was hit with a “nuisance abatement” action — one which could lead to his laundromat being closed for at least 30 days — after undercover officers twice sold stolen goods to store customers. Sung Cho’s laundromat had nothing to do with either sale, other than being open for business when the sales were made. Despite Cho’s lack of culpability in the selling of stolen goods, the NYPD portrayed his business as a “facilitator” of illegal activity and hit his store with a restraining order.
As Ryley reports, the nuisance abatement program is prone to abuse, what with its one-sided court process (NYPD files complaint and asks for restraining orders without notifying the business owner or allowing them to challenge the orders) and very loose definition of “facilitation.” While the statute does provide that business owners must be given a chance to challenge an order within three business days of being presented with it, the NYPD routinely serves orders on Thursday or Friday, forcing businesses to close over the weekend, normally their busiest sales days.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A top law enforcement official in Los Angeles County resigned Sunday after reporters discovered a cache of racist emails he circulated.
Tom Angel stepped down as Chief of Staff to L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell just days after a series of racist and anti-Muslim emails he’d sent and forwarded in 2012 and 2013 were published by the Los Angeles Times.
“I took my Biology exam last Friday. I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently, ‘Blacks’ and ‘Mexicans’ were NOT the correct answers,” one of the emails Angel forwarded reads.
Angel sent the emails while serving as Chief of Police in nearby Burbank, a community that is nearly one-quarter Latino and less than 3 percent black.
In another message, Angel passed along a list of reasons “why Muslim Terrorists are so quick to commit suicide” that includes bullet points for “Constant wailing from some idiot in a tower,” “You can’t wash off the smell of donkey,” and “More than one mother in law.”
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Bernie Sanders will campaign all the way up to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to seek the nomination—and to continue building the “political revolution.”
What is that political revolution, beyond his call to get the billionaires and corporations out and the people in?
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to discuss even the broad strokes of some of its secret investigative methods, such as implanting malware and tracking cellphones with Stingrays, is backfiring – if the goal is to actually enforce the law.
In the most recent example, the FBI may be forced to drop its case against a Washington State school administrator charged with possessing child porn because it doesn’t want to tell the court or the defense how it got its evidence – even in the judge’s chambers.
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There are plenty of other U.S. heroes of political renown and aggressive poor judgment, such as Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the U.S., who, while founding U.S. national parks and wildlife preserves, managed to find time to help engineer the Spanish-American War and the imperial seizure of Cuba and the Philippines.
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The Seattle Police Department said violence rose out of a peaceful march for workers’ rights and immigration that took place earlier in the day. At least five officers were injured, including one who was hit with a Molotov cocktail, another who was struck in the face with a rock, and a third who was bitten by a protestor.
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When asked about his post-primary plans, if Hillary Clinton clinches the Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders was quick to tell ABC News in Rome last week that he would go back to his day job as a U.S. senator from Vermont.
But several of the advocacy groups backing his campaign have begun strategizing about the next phase of what many of them view as Sanders’ “political revolution.”
“Many are wondering, ‘What’s next?’ We want to get together and talk about it,” said Charles Lenchner, co-founder of People for Bernie, a grassroots organization that has been unofficially working alongside the senator’s presidential campaign from the beginning.
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Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R), who is currently seeking her party’s nomination for an open U.S. House seat, said last week that she believes the right to self defense includes the right to aim your gun anyone who aims a gun at you, even if they are a law enforcement officer.
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Another male teenager’s future is in jeopardy after police charged him with possession of child pornography and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—all because he swapped sexy photos and videos with a girl.
Levar Allen, a 17-year-old athlete at his Louisiana public school, is black. The girl, a 16-year-old, is white. Local news stories note that she initiated the sexting, and he reciprocated.
His mother—a single mother of three—has spent thousands of dollars getting her son out of jail and fighting the charges. She thinks her son’s race may have played a role in the police department’s decision to vigorously punish him.
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A 21-year-old woman named Hadon (who is also referred to as Hadan in media reports) suffered critical injuries from the self-immolation. She is currently being treated at a Nauruan hospital by four emergency doctors, including two anesthetists, the Nauruan government said in a statement released on Monday.
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In the US the rise of the anti-Enlightenment right wing and its sponsors forces us to question whether the scientific mind continues to be a form of self-governance and of shared cultural values. And, of course, Natural Law lives on in the jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas, at least according to an astonishing article in the Regent University Law Review which I couldn’t make myself read because the sections I did read were appalling, google it if you have to know.
Locke’s ideas generally are associated with the Founding Fathers. No doubt his positions on slavery and expropriating the lands of Native Americans, and his idea that ownership of private property free of governmental interference is a crucial element of freedom, were congenial to their personal desires and philosophical positions. We may need to think about property more closely, as we have done with the other two.
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As we recently covered here, a few Aiken, South Carolina, police officers engaged in a steady procession of Constitutional violations during a traffic stop predicated on nothing more than a (fully legal) temporary plate. Shirts were lifted and breasts exposed. At least one cop spent a considerable amount of time probing the passenger’s anus. For all intents and purposes, it was a roadside raping, performed under the color of law.
The horrific traffic stop is the focus of a federal lawsuit… and a whole lot of belated scrambling by law enforcement and city officials. Radley Balko of the Washington Post, who broke the story, found himself on the receiving end of a sneering, condescending editorial by the Aiken Standard — the local paper which had no interest in covering the lawsuit until after national internet hellfire began raining down on the town it serves.
The editorial is worth reading all the way through, if only to experience the surreality of being talked down to by an editor who wouldn’t know unbiased journalism if it showed up at his desk wearing a blue uniform and told him to kill an unflattering story.
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On the morning of April 27, in concert with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the BATF, the NYPD conducted what authorities described as a “gang raid” on the Eastchester Gardens and Edenwald House housing projects in the Bronx, arresting roughly 100 people on a series of charges. The New York media, apparently tipped off ahead of time and present with cameras ready for the wholly-pointless-except-for-police-PR perp walk, jumped into action—trying and convicting the suspects as gang members solely on the say-so of the NYPD and federal officials.
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Shortly after arriving at a makeshift military jail, at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in May 2010, I was placed into the black hole of solitary confinement for the first time. Within two weeks, I was contemplating suicide.
After a month on suicide watch, I was transferred back to US, to a tiny 6 x 8ft (roughly 2 x 2.5 meter) cell in a place that will haunt me for the rest of my life: the US Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. I was held there for roughly nine months as a “prevention of injury” prisoner, a designation the Marine Corps and the Navy used to place me in highly restrictive solitary conditions without a psychiatrist’s approval.
For 17 hours a day, I sat directly in front of at least two Marine Corps guards seated behind a one-way mirror. I was not allowed to lay down. I was not allowed to lean my back against the cell wall. I was not allowed to exercise. Sometimes, to keep from going crazy, I would stand up, walk around, or dance, as “dancing” was not considered exercise by the Marine Corps.
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Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun was, as was to be expected, the most colourful. The editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, made it his personal mission to smear and condemn the supporters, claiming that hooligan Liverpudlians had urinated in glee on brave police, pilfered from the dead and obstructed those keen to resuscitate the dying.
With the bodies still warm, he juggled two options of headline: “You Scum” or “The Truth.” Eventually, he went for the latter, despite warnings within the paper about the potential inaccuracy of the message. “Drunken Liverpool fans,” went the story, “viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims of the Hillsborough soccer disaster, it was revealed last night.” To this day, some shops boycott that intemperate rag.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In a joint letter, 73 organisations from 31 countries call on the European Telecom Regulators to uphold net neutrality in their current negotiations about the future of the Internet in Europe.
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DRM
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Today community groups, activist organizations, and businesses are taking part in the International Day Against DRM, celebrating ten years since the first global day of action in 2006. The groups are united in envisioning a world without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), technology that polices what people can do with digital media by spying on them and compromising their computer security. As the largest anti-DRM event in the world, the International Day Against DRM is intended as a counterpoint to the pro-DRM message broadcast by powerful media and software companies. The Day is coordinated by Defective by Design, a campaign of the Free Software Foundation.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The substantive discussion of policy options include greater transparency on R&D costs; changing the incentives; setting priorities, coordinating efforts and ensuring sustainable financing; and government action. The report includes an analysis of how much it really costs to develop a drug, looking into recently asserted claims of massive expenditure to come up with a single product.
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To fix this, they have a few suggestions — all of which seem worthwhile. First, they say the bar is way too low for granting patents, so Australia should raise the bar for what’s considered “inventive.” They suggest the standard should be changed to if the invention or solution “would have been obvious for a person skilled in the art to try with a reasonable expectation of success.” They even consider going beyond that, but recognize that some patent holders outside of Australia may freak out at such a suggestion and avoid the Australian market.
The second suggestion is giving an “overarching objective” to patent law, which examiners can use as a sort of guiding light or touchstone. Basically, allow Australia to reject patents by arguing that granting such patents would go against the public interest.
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Trademarks
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Institutions for higher education are no strangers to abusing trademark law, I suppose, what with Harvard one time looking to lock up all kinds of language, or the University of North Dakota bullying artists over a parody version of its defunct and abandoned sports team logo. But it sure seems to feel more egregious for a learning institution to blatantly bullshit one of its own students through trademark threats, which is exactly what Dixie State University did when it claimed a student’s parody of its sports logo was trademark infringement.
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Copyrights
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Science magazine just published a great piece on the utility of Sci-Hub. Unfortunately, its defense of its own business model is flawed.
[...]
First, a bit of background. The Sci-Hub archives contain nearly 50 million documents, with more being added every day; these archives have been built primarily without the explicit permission of the publishers that hold the copyright to this material. By maintaining tight control over those copyrights, academic publishers can charge often-exorbitant fees for annual subscriptions and one-time access to articles; yearly subscriptions to some specialized science, technology, engineering, and math journals can cost upward of $10,000. In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier earned about $1.58 billion in profit on about $9.36 billion in revenue. Knowledge is power!
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A draft report by the Australian Productivity Commission (APC) concludes that the current copyright law fails to properly balance the interests of copyright holders and users. It warns that “Australia’s copyright arrangements are weighed too heavily in favour of copyright owners, to the detriment of the long-term interests of both consumers and intermediate users.” The APC makes recommends changes to the law to address the imbalance, including “the introduction of a broad, principles-based fair use exception.” This follows the 2013 Australian Law Reform Commission report on Copyright in the Digital Economy, which also recommended that Australia amend its copyright law to include fair use.
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Three years ago, down in Australia, the Australian Law Reform Commission started examining various copyright reform proposals, and eventually made a rather mild suggestion: bring fair use to Australia. Frankly, we felt that the Commission could have gone much further, but it basically said to copy the American approach to fair use. Not surprisingly, Hollywood flipped out, claiming that it would “lead to an increase in piracy.” And, soon after that, the new government, led by Attorney General George Brandis flat out ignored the report and pushed for expanding copyright against the public interest, and very much towards exactly what Hollywood wanted. This wasn’t all that surprising, given that it was revealed that Hollywood representatives spent a lot of time with Brandis, while he deliberately avoided meeting with representatives of the public.
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05.02.16
Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 1:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another ‘Alice’ on the way?
![The bronze doors of the US Supreme Court](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/bronze-doors-u-s-supreme-court-1224330.jpg)
The bronze doors of the US Supreme Court
Summary: A quick review of some of the latest developments regarding SCOTUS (the US Supreme Court) as far as patents go
There will soon be an interesting design patent case at the Supreme Court of the United States, alongside other cases that are not about patents and some that are (some are about copyrights too). A new article by Dennis Crouch, covering a “patent-copyright parallel” (not exactly the same as in Oracle v. Google), says about one such case: “In both patent and copyright cases the issue of laches arises more often than you might think because of the legal treatment of “ongoing” infringement. Each infringing act is seen as a new act of infringement. Thus, the six-year limits period starts anew each time a new copy of the infringing product is made, sold, or used. If someone has been making an infringing product for the past 10 years, the statute would let the patentee them reach back 6 years for damages. Courts often see that result as as problematic when the patentee sits on its rights for so long (and since most civil claims have a shorter period of limitations) and thus apply the laches doctrine to limit collection of back damages even when within the six-year period.”
“Müller essentially changed sides and he is against Apple’s unreasonable patent demands these days.”“This is, incidentally,” said this one person, “the second time this term that SCOTUS has granted one copyright and one patent case in a day” (SCOTUS typically rules in favour of reformists these days, so whichever such case the Justices take under their wing would likely end well).
As Florian Müller put it in this morning’s article about design patents: “In about five weeks from now, we’ll see how successful Samsung’s mobilization efforts have been, and two months after that we’ll see the fruits of Apple’s campaigning.” The focus of Müller, however, is stated upfront in his title: “Where will the ‘friends of the Supreme Court’ come down on design patent damages in Apple v. Samsung?” Müller and I do not agree on the Oracle v. Google case (we had a long exchange about it today), but we do agree on the Samsung case. Müller essentially changed sides and he is against Apple’s unreasonable patent demands these days. If SCOTUS rules against Apple (in any of the ongoing cases), it will be good news for Google, for Android, for Free software, and for Linux. Apple has placed itself on the wrong side of history. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: There is still political work being done — albeit rather discreetly — against Battistelli and his goons at the European Patent Office’s top-level management
WE sometimes get the impression of defeatism among EPO staff. Some find it hard to believe that Battistelli will step down and dismissed staff representatives reintegrated into the workforce, even though work is still being done (usually more discreetly than before) towards that.
“As for the EPO situation,” one person told us about an insider, “s/he doesn’t expect much to change for the better, given the Administrative Council’s unwillingness to do anything other than, more or less, backing the president. S/He, too, appears to be very frustrated with the lack of action on the part of national governments, including our minister of (in)justice in Germany, who’s a sad joke in my opinion.”
“The Netherlands is increasingly concerned and so is France.”Germany, for reasons we have explained here several times before, feels comfortable turning a blind eye because it benefits financially from the EPO. But that doesn’t mean other countries too choose inaction. The Netherlands is increasingly concerned and so is France. The predominantly French management around Battistelli (his cronies and their family members) are becoming a national embarrassment that promotes perception of systemic corruption.
“The French MP Philip Cordery,” SUEPO wrote earlier today, “reported in a blog post dated 25 April 2016 about a joint letter (written with other French MPs: Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’, Richard Yung, Claudine Lepage, Jean-Yves Leconte and Hélène Conway-Mouret), dated 21 April 2016, to the French Minister of Economic Affairs Emmanuel Macron. The letter was sent “in order to demand once again that France take action towards a reform of the management of this international organization”.”
The PDF link/original in French [PDF]
suggests ongoing work ‘behind the scenes’, so to speak, not for the first time from Mr. Cordery [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Cordery et al ought to know that Battistelli has become a source of great shame to France.
A translation of the blog post [PDF]
(original) and a translation of the letter [PDF]
in English was posted by SUEPO and here it is in English:
EPO: Keep up the pressure for management reform
Following the last meeting of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Office, I, together with a number of my colleagues representing French citizens established outside France, called upon the Minister of the Economy, Emmanuel Macron, in order to demand once again that France take action towards a reform of the management of this international organization.
And the accompanying letter:
Paris, 21 April 2016
Ref.: PC/AF/169
Minister,
We wish to draw your attention to the importance of the decisions taken at the last meeting of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Office.
We are pleased to note that a resolution was voted through, resulting from a compromise in order to obtain a majority. It has therefore been possible to focus on the social conflict and the imposition of sanctions and disciplinary procedures against EPO staff members. We welcome the role played by France, which, by your mediation, has accepted its responsibilities and mobilised its partners with regard to these issues.
We are now calling for the greatest vigilance on your part with regard to the effective implementation of the measures arising from this resolution. In our view it is essential that the persons concerned are given the opportunity to make recourse rapidly to an outside authority to re-examine the issues and act in arbitration with regard to the sanctions which may have been imposed on them, and that this be put into effect without any further delay.
The present immunity of the management of the EPO with regard to management of the staff and the choice of strategic attitudes adopted by the Office is a matter of great concern. It is arousing concern with regard to the future of this organization, and the development of innovation in Europe. The nationality and the status as a French executive of the President impose a particular responsibility on our country in the present situation. It is for this reason that in our view it is imperative that France, by way of its official representative on the Administrative Council, takes action such that a major change in the management of the Office can come into effect rapidly.
At the present time, the two staff union representatives who were dismissed in Munich have not been reinstated, and the degrading abuses of the statutes of the Office continue. Some
staff members at the Hague are still under investigation. One of them in particular has been deprived of any treatment as a result of failure to take account of his stopping work due to illness, giving rise to fear of possible dismissal. We therefore believe it to be essential that our own citizens, who are victims equally with the other staff members of the repressive managerial policy adopted by the President of the Office, be fully and continuously supported during this ordeal.
We are at your disposal to discuss these matters with you. More than ever, we are convinced that a major reform of the management of the EPO is essential, and we are eager that our
country should commit itself to this end, without any shortcomings.
We remain, Minister, yours faithfully
Philip Cordery
Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’
Richard Yung
Claudine Lepage
Jean-Yves Leconte
Hélène Conway-Mouret
Emmanuel MACRON
Minister of the Economy, Industry, and the Digital Sector
139, rue de Bercy
75572 Paris Cedex 12
Copy to Yves LAPIERRE
Director General
National Institute of Industrial Property
Assemblée Nationale – 126 rue de l’Université 75007 PARIS
pcordery@assemblee-nationale.fr – 01 40 63 06 58
There is action in additional EU member states against the EPO, but revealing details at this stage would potentially compromise actions. The EPO saga is far from over, in spite of the relative calm. Don’t be misled. Battistelli was advised to keep a low profile for a reason. It’s a massive reputation laundering operation. █
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Posted in Europe, Marketing, Patents at 9:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This is all from the past hour, in succession (EPO’s Twitter feed in a period of just 15 minutes, 3pm-3:15pm GMT)
Summary: EPO budget at ‘work’, days after doing copy-paste jobs and also working overtime in the weekend for an extravagant and needless/purposeless event (except for Battistelli's own pride)
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A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)