09.11.16
Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New evidence suggests that software patents continue their plunge in the United States and those who make money from software patents cannot help shooting the messengers (in the media) and smearing those who simply do their job by applying the criteria agreed upon by the US Supreme Court
TECHRIGHTS has been watching very closely matters pertaining to software patents for about a decade (I’ve watched them much longer than that, predating this site’s existence). After so much activism we finally see tremendous progress; they’re dropping like flies and litigation involving software patents is so uncertain (for the plaintiff who takes a huge risk) that numbers indicate a sharp decline if not dampening. Only a fool would spend money pursuing new software patents; reckless patent holders would dare have them subjected to scrutiny by a court (the higher the court, the higher the risk, thus suing deep-pocketed players is riskiest).
“The number of some types of software patent lawsuits in the US has taken a nosedive since the 2014 decision in Alice v CLS Bank.”
–WIPRthe numbers are on our side. As WIPR put it the other day (note the use of the word nosedive): “The number of some types of software patent lawsuits in the US has taken a nosedive since the 2014 decision in Alice v CLS Bank.
“This is the finding of Patexia, an online patent research platform, which reported that software patent suits have declined heavily, although the fall was not equal across all software patent classification codes.
“Patexia identified 14 different US classes that describe some sort of software-related system or process.
“Patexia identified 14 different US classes that describe some sort of software-related system or process.”
–WIPR“These classes covered more than 14% of the 22,791 unique patents involved in patent suits from 2010 through to the first half of 2016.”
We are pleased to see that even insiders, such as Patexia, recognise the trend and write about it. Patent law firms prefer not to talk about it because it discourages their clients (or prospective/possible clients). Writing for “Canadian Lawyer Magazine”, one person gave 10 reasons you need a Canadian Lawyer (the real headline is “Ten reasons you need a Canadian patent”). This is an example of marketing/advertising in the form of an “article”. To quote from this — cough — article: “You may have heard that it’s not worthwhile to patent your company’s technology in Canada, with its smaller market, its conservative judicial remedies and its skepticism toward software-based patents.”
Well, recall i4i v Microsoft (Canadian company) and how things worked out [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. They pretty much risked going out of business after wasting years in court bickering over software patents. They still have a Web site which is active (last news item was a week ago), but we have not seen them in the media for literally more than half a decade. Recently, another Canadian company chose to turn into a patent troll down in Texas. This failing company, falling back on its patents, is Blackberry. How has it worked out so far? Any better than Nokia, which is still arming patent trolls in pursuit of cash? A lot of these patents are totally worthless, more so after Alice (Nokia — or Symbian at the time — had a famous software patent case in the UK nearly a decade ago).
“A lot of these patents are totally worthless, more so after Alice (Nokia — or Symbian at the time — had a famous software patent case in the UK nearly a decade ago).”Lexology, a site for lawyers, has just reposted (verbatim) an analysis from Fenwick & West LLP. It’s an analysis which we mentioned and also cited here the other day, showing a trend of invalidation of software patents in the US. It’s not looking good for software patents and it’s not getting any better, irrespective of what patent law firms are trying to tell us (by blatantly selective coverage of events or overt cherry-picking).
Dealing with a particular CAFC case, a pro-software patents propaganda site (for a long time) says it’s “keenly awaited” (by the vultures maybe) and that it relates to Alice. Expect it to change nothing at all, even if it somehow ends up in favour of a software patent (like in Enfish). CAFC rules against software patents around 90% of the time, so there’s probably no more of Enfish in the pipeline. Two years and about 3 months after Alice it’s effectively the end of software patents in the United States. Wait and watch how patent law firms (and their media mouthpieces) continue to deny this, hoping to convince the readers (or clients) that all is “business as usual…”
It’s not.
“It’s not looking good for software patents and it’s not getting any better, irrespective of what patent law firms are trying to tell us (by blatantly selective coverage of events or overt cherry-picking)”When pro-software patents propaganda Web sites want to undermine the importance/relevance of Alice they typically resort to insulting those who apply Alice (even judges are insulted!). To quote IAM: “In December last year the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments in McRO Inc., DBA Planet Blue v Bandai Namco Games America et al, a case that many, particularly in the software industry, hoped would bring some much needed clarity to the issue of subject matter eligibility.”
Nonsense. It has nothing to do with clarify, that’s just what lobbyists for software patents — people like David Kappos — like to say while they simply object to Alice and the Justices at the Supreme Court. Oh, the vanity!
To quote further from IAM: “As with any 101 case, in the McRO suit there’s not only the matter of the law but also of the Federal Circuit’s complicated relationship with the Supreme Court. A string of decisions from SCOTUS, which have reversed the lower court, has helped create much of the uncertainty around patent eligible subject matter. According to former CAFC Chief Judge, Paul Michel, the stark divisions that have clearly arisen between members of the judiciary, might be the reason for the delay in the McRO decision.”
“When pro-software patents propaganda Web sites want to undermine the importance/relevance of Alice they typically resort to insulting those who apply Alice (even judges are insulted!).”That’s another pattern of FUD we have come across. Proponents of software patents like to scandalise the status quo and pretend there is a fight — if not actually ignite one — between different divisions, courts, boards, etc. It’s typically a fictitious framing that seeks to discredit the system and shake/destablise Alice, making it seem too “controversial” a decision to refer to/cite as precedent.
These software patents proponents, usually patent law firms that never wrote any software, are actively trying to undermine the US Supreme Court. Shame on them for doing that. Watchtroll, with its big mouth, is attacking PTAB again (it won’t stop until they’re gone). They’re like a gang of hyenas. Writing about PTAB, MIP has two more articles on the latest trends. One is titled “Don’t Estop Me Now” and the latter is a subtle attempt to discredit PTAB by associating it with “patent trolls” (again, total fiction!). Making money by trashing patents granted in error by the USPTO (for quick monetary gains) does not make one a “patent troll” and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the definition of “patent troll”. Watch this headline, “Hedge funds and reverse patent trolls” (nothing to do with trolls).
“These software patents proponents, usually patent law firms that never wrote any software, are actively trying to undermine the US Supreme Court.”To quote MIP: “A big story last year was the emergence of hedge funds and other entities using the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. While Kyle Bass is seeing his IPRs through to final decision, other entities are acting as reverse patent trolls, a phenomenon that is predicted to gather pace” (again, nothing to do with trolls and probably a good thing that will compel the USPTO to do its job properly).
Patent lawyers and their mouthpieces reject the term "patent troll" (denying such a problem exists, a lot like those denying global warming), but suddenly, when someone kills bad patents, then they adopt the term and call the actors that. How pathetic and self-serving. Fish & Richardson P.C., which represents patent trolls, pretends patent trolling is all just a myth (published almost a decade ago, but revisited now via Patent Buddy, who is a pro-software patents attorney). To quote the author from Fish & Richardson: “A new breed of companies has emerged, and they are being called patent trolls. A patent troll is a person or entity who acquires ownership of a patent without the intention of actually using it to produce a product. Instead, it licenses the technology to an entity that will incorporate the patent into a product, or it sues an entity it believes has already incorporated the technology in a product without permission. The government, corporate America, and the media are fervently acting against these trolls. New proposed legislation, a blizzard of Supreme Court cases involving trolls, and endless newspaper and magazine articles are all trumpeting the same story line: Patent trolls are bad for society and must be stopped.”
Well, that is very different from those who use IPRs at PTAB to correct the USPTO’s errors (spurious granting of patents). But this kind of distortion of terminology certainly would not bother those with dishonest agenda.
“Put another way, they’re protesting against PTAB because to them — the patent microcosm — less litigation would be a corporate disaster (litigation is their most expensive product, whether as defendants or plaintiffs).”AIA (Leahy-Smith America Invents Act) gave us PTAB, which demolishes software patents by the thousands, so now it’s considered “trolling” to apply quality control to patents and prevent these from going to court? Here is a new Bloomberg piece (titled “Five Years In: The AIA’s Effects on Patent Litigation (Perspective)”) in which it’s stated upfront that “The authors are IP lawyers at a large law firm.” The article is by Daniel Zeilberger, Michael Stramiello, Joseph Palys, and Naveen Modi from Paul Hastings LLP. Their conclusion is as follows: “AIA-created post-grant proceedings are changing the landscape of patent litigation. Complaints and declaratory judgment actions are down. Potential cost savings for accused infringers are huge. And PTAB outcomes historically disfavor patent owners, who have appeared willing to settle a large percentage of disputes. It remains to be seen whether these trends will continue as PTAB practice evolves, guided by an expanding body of caselaw and potential legislative tweaks.”
Put another way, they’re protesting against PTAB because to them — the patent microcosm — less litigation would be a corporate disaster (litigation is their most expensive product, whether as defendants or plaintiffs). They might actually have to find another job — one in which they produce something other than paperwork for monopoly and litigation. One thing we have noticed is, the authors of pro-software patenting pieces are sometimes choosing to write anonymously. Apparently they’re too shamed of their self-serving lies that they want to hide behind pseudonyms or no name/s at all.
Expect more attacks on PTAB (which needs to be defended from them) and expect a lot more attacks on Alice. These attacks typically come from patent bullies, their lobbyists, and their law firms. “A decade of court decisions has shaken the basis of patent law,” says this new article, sending across the message that this is terrible news when fewer cases go to court. To quote:
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for patent holders to seek larger damage awards when their patents are infringed.
For patent watchers, however, the high court’s ruling was only just the latest in a particularly active decade of major patent litigation.
Beginning in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that holders who license their patents cannot win an injunction to stop third parties from infringing on their patent. That lawsuit, eBay v. MercExchange, L.L.C., changed the way patent lawsuits could be waged, altering incentives along the way.
“eBay substantially changed the world of patent litigation by limiting almost every verdict solely to monetary damages,” Robert W. Morris and Michael R. Jones, attorneys at Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott L.L.C., wrote in March.
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“The effect is harshest on individuals and smaller businesses that depend on the value of intellectual property for their livelihoods; these are the same inventors that have, for decades, produced many of our greatest technological advances,” MCM argues.
That last part promotes a myth, unless they speak of patent trolls. Those who benefit the most from the status quo are patent bullies like IBM and the only small entities to also benefit (as a side effect) are trolls, not startups that actually produce things.
“We hope that more people will recognise the problem with software patents and react accordingly.”In the area of militarism, arms manufacturers (or war contractors) have taken over the system and became a burden (or a parasite) inside it. The same goes for the area of patent, but the products are patents and lawsuits rather than weapons and wars. We hope that more people will recognise the problem with software patents and react accordingly. █
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Posted in America, Deception, Fraud, Patents at 7:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Distracting from the accusations
Summary: The USPTO is found to have been burning taxpayers’ money and the patent microcosm, which profits from this entire sort of ‘racket’, is trying to defend or belittle these findings
THE USPTO has been dealt a serious blow which we mentioned here very briefly the other day (billing fraud, similar to what's alleged to be happening at the EPO).
It is no surprise that examiner misconduct and fraud is defended by IAM ‘magazine’, but having followed their sources we are left worried. Here is what IAM wrote to excuse/dismiss it all (the headline is “accusations against USPTO staff may have less meat than reported”):
But according to Matt Levy, patent counsel with the Computer Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the numbers from the OIG’s report should be put in context. Earlier this week, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Levy claimed that the report exaggerated the scope of the problem. When broken down, he calculates that the waste amounts to an average of six minutes per examiner at the USPTO (he went into further detail in an IP Watchdog post here).
I reached out to Levy for a little more detail on his reasons for writing the letter. Here’s his response: “It seemed pretty clear that the OIG was making the problem look far worse than it was. I’ve written about the GAO’s report on quality, and I’ve been hopeful that it would garner some attention. Unfortunately, the scandal that the IG’s report created seemed likely to suck up all the oxygen. My goal was to bring a little perspective and, hopefully, help focus the conversation back on patent quality.”
Most patent owners would probably agree with Levy. That isn’t to denigrate the latest findings of the OIG but the more fundamental problem for the US patent system is the quality of the grants that it makes. That was certainly one of the main findings of IAM’s most recent benchmarking survey which was elaborated on by a more recent piece of research by Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University
Putting aside that last paragraph which is IAM's self-promotion (of propaganda), watch who they’re using to support their position. Remember which companies are behind CCIA, never mind Watchtroll (IP Watchdog) and other USPTO friends/buddies. It’s like a sort of coverup attempt because a lot of the above piggybacks Matt Levy from CCIA. It is a man whose wife works for the USPTO, i.e. his household receives a salary from the USPTO — something that should probably be mentioned (he personally asked me not to mention this again, but it’s hard given these circumstances and given that Levy gave away this potential conflict of interest himself, in his own blog). Watch what he wrote in response to the original piece (filed under “opinions”). His wife works for the USPTO, yet he does not disclose this in his letter to the editor (regarding the USPTO). How is one supposed to simply ignore this? The echo chamber in defense of fraud isn’t something that’s a minor detail that can be trivially overlooked. Found via this tweet are some vicious attacks on Florian Müller for bringing up the issue. A former IP Kat writer is slamming him for stating the obvious and he responds with: “Doesn’t matter due to fee diversion. Ultimately it is taxpayers’ money anyway.” Patent law firms too are against taxpayers now [1, 2, 3, 4]? Or implicitly in defense of billing fraud? How would that make them look? It is hard to explain to the patent microcosm its unwanted role (as it relates to practicing developers) [1, 2], but Müller did try and at the end he wrote a summary of his position as follows [1, 2, 3, 4]: “Some patent folks are being too emotional about USPTO fee diversion to think things through correctly. Let’s enlighten them now: Question was: if employees steal from USPTO, are taxpayers the ultimate victims? Yes. There are 2 independent ways to prove this. First, every $ less that the USPTO can send to Treasury (fee diversion) is a $ more that taxpayers have to contribute to pay for something. Second, fee diversion goes both ways: if theft contributed to a USPTO deficit, taxpayers would have to close the gap.”
“Slamming the watchdog isn’t easy (shooting the messenger which is independent) and if nefarious tactics are used to belittle the problem itself, what does that tell us about the accused (collectively) or their spouses?”I have exchanged quite a few E-mails about this subject since (Müller expressed some views) and it’s saddening to hear that patent law firms implicitly threaten alienation in retaliation for stating of the obvious. By doing so they probably risk only isolating themselves even further, turning software developers like myself and Müller into a foe.
For those who want to hear opinions from sites not run by software developers, consider reading “Patent office employees steal millions from American taxpayers”. To quote: “A new report from an independent watchdog found that employees of the Patent and Trademark office billed the government (AKA, the taxpayers) for 300,000 hours they never worked, costing the American people $18.2 million.
“Many employees work from home, and the report found numerous instances of time logged without any work being completed.
“The amount of wasted man-hours that could have been spent reducing the patent backlog is astounding, not to mention the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted paying employees for work they were not doing,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told the Washington Post.”
Working from home for the USPTO is something which Levy’s wife has been doing. It’s a shame that he did not disclose that in his letter of response to this piece from August 31st (“Patent office workers bilked the government of millions by playing hooky, watchdog finds”).
Slamming the watchdog isn’t easy (shooting the messenger which is independent) and if nefarious tactics are used to belittle the problem itself, what does that tell us about the accused (collectively) or their spouses? █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The only way is down
Summary: The British people have already been divorced from the EPO — a trend which is likely to continue amid Brexit negotiations and because the Battistelli-induced crisis deepens by the week
THE European Patent Office has lost its appeal here in Britain and it has nothing to do with Brexit (or a vote for Brexit). For quite a while now we have been hearing (privately) from disgruntled British applicants at the EPO (those who already have UK-IPO patents) — people whose stories will be published in the future when there’s no chance of it compromising ongoing disputes. Basically, we are left with the impression that British inventors don’t feel like they get their money’s worth at the EPO under Battistelli. One of them even considered suing the EPO before he realised it would not be possible (because of the immunity).
“Basically, we are left with the impression that British inventors don’t feel like they get their money’s worth at the EPO under Battistelli.”The EPO no longer hires people from the UK, based on recent figures that we published a couple of weeks ago. Earlier this year we learned that there was a 80% reduction in recruitment from the UK, but things appear to have gotten worse since (depending on which internal source of figures one relies on). As far as the EPO is concerned, Brexit appears to have already started and the only thing “English” about the EPO is the official language (for communication with clients, court/appeal/tribunal hearings etc.); as Battistelli started a vicious war against an Irish judge, there might soon be too little diplomatic affinity between Ireland (the other English-speaking country) and the EPO. I’m no proponent of Brexit but merely an observer of how the EPO’s abuses (top-level management like Battistelli) contributed to the negative image of the EU here, potentially convincing more people to have voted “Leave”.
Based on the following new article from Battistelli’s ‘protégé’ James Nurton (softball questions as ‘interviews’), individuals and businesses from the UK now file for trademarks (maybe also patents) at the UK-IPO rather than EUIPO (equivalent of EPO for trademarks) and there is a statistically-meaningful difference. To quote MIP: “UK trade mark and design filings jumped by 33% and 95% respectively in August 2016 compared to the same month last year, according to figures compiled by the UK IPO at the request of Managing IP” (MIP).
“Insiders at the EPO, as we shall show later this month, recognise the erosion of the EPO’s reputation (still ongoing and exacerbating).”We imagine that figures for the EPO would be similar, but due to long pendency of patents, the ‘Battistelli effect’ and the ‘Brexit effect’ might take some time for us to truly notice. Since MIP is now seemingly in bed with the EPO, we expect reluctance to produce reporting on that.
Insiders at the EPO, as we shall show later this month, recognise the erosion of the EPO’s reputation (still ongoing and exacerbating). We find it truly pathetic when all a company can say about itself to its shareholders is, “look we have got a patent at the EPO!” (latest such example). It’s not as though today’s patent quality at the EPO is what it used to be.
“Now that Battistelli is doing photo ops with Cambodia, which incidentally has zero European Patents (in the past 8 years or so), it’s not hard to sympathise with EPO staff for choosing to leave.”Patent quality at the EPO has gotten so bad under Battistelli (more on that later as well) that staff with dignity and good education often decides to leave. The EPO hardly wants and needs examiners now; it just wants people who can do a superficial search and stamp quickly (or “early certainty” as it euphemistically dubs it). Watch this very nonsense from the EPO regarding software patents, which are not legal in Europe. Just before the weekend it wrote: “Check out this course to see how computer-implemented inventions are examined for patentability under Article 52 EPC” (if they are computer-implemented inventions — a weasel word for software patents — they should be rejected outright).
Meanwhile, the EPO is still 'spamming' universities (latest examples in [1, 2) and if it deems this a recruitment tool/push, then it doesn’t seem to understand what academics who are experts in their field are looking for in an employer. Now that Battistelli is doing photo ops with Cambodia, which incidentally has zero European Patents (in the past 8 years or so), it’s not hard to sympathise with EPO staff for choosing to leave. I, personally, would never wish to work for Battistelli, whose office already threatened me in spite of me not working for him (and I'm not even in the same country!). The only way is down (unlike the song) as long as Battistelli stays. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Damn if the days aren’t already getting too short for this old soul who no longer feels comfortable driving after dark. This is made worse by the fact I live way out in the country — miles from nowhere, as they say — meaning I’m pretty much stuck in the house at night. The good news is, this means that these days I’m getting a lot of writing done.
Now on to this weeks FOSS news…
We’ll start with the good news. The Creative Commons has scored a victory in Austria. This started as one of those right versus left sort of stories, involving a left leaning film collective, Filmpiraten, and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, or FPO. It seems that Filmpiraten posted a video to YouTube documenting protests against Akedemikerball, an annual event hosted by the FPO each year in Vienna that brings right wing leaders to Austria. Also, each year it brings thousands of protesters.
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Server
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IBM on Thursday revealed a series of new servers designed to help propel cognitive workloads and to drive greater data centre efficiency.
Featuring a new chip, the Linux-based lineup incorporates innovations from the “OpenPOWER” community that deliver higher levels of performance and greater computing efficiency than available on any x86-based server.
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Kernel Space
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With this summer’s PulseAudio 9.0 release was support for Memfd-based transport. That support is now enabled by default in time for PulseAudio 10.
This feature is about using Memfd on modern versions of the Linux kernel as a transport / shared memory method in place of the existing POSIX SHM shared memory transport. Memfd has been around since Linux 3.17 and this transport method for PulseAudio should be more secure and modern — for allowing better sandboxing/container support, etc.
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Graphics Stack
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The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues to look promising and there’s been a lot more code being merged the past few days.
Since last weekend when writing about RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Continues Building Up Features Quickly, there have been 17 pages of commits landing in the code repository (Mesa semi-interesting branch) by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen.
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Applications
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Relatively quickly after version 0.4.5 of RProtoBuf was released, we have a new version 0.4.6 to announce which appeared on CRAN today.
RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“Protobuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects.
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Cool-retro-term is a free terminal emulator developed by Filippo Scognamiglio, it mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens. If you are tired of your current terminal than it comes in hand as eye-candy, it is customizable and reasonably lightweight terminal emulator. It uses the Konsole engine which is powerful and mature, it requires Qt 5.2 or higher to run terminal emulator.
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Proprietary
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Vivaldi, the web browser aimed at power users, was updated to version 1.4 (stable) today. There aren’t as many changes as in the previous release, but a few interesting improvements.
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Senji is an app that takes an interesting, innovative approach to security and privacy. Normally, when you upload information to the “cloud” (anyone else sick of the term yet?), you are trusting the encryption and practices, or lack thereof, of the provider of said cloud. You are trusting that they don’t snoop on your data (they do), or that they won’t turn over your information if the NSA so much as sneezes in their direction (they will). You’re also trusting that even if your information is encrypted, it’s not decrypted on certain servers once it arrives (it probably is). Now, there are some really good OTR (off the record) cloud storage providers out there where you can store your information with zero knowledge (SpiderOak comes to mind), but once again, you have to trust that they’re doing what they say they’re doing (personally, I do, but that’s mainly because the place isn’t run by my older brother).
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As far as GNU/Linux is concerned, it is a stretch goal of theirs—they’ll implement a G/L client if they get $70,000. I’ve decided to do a write-up of this even though G/L isn’t included out-of-the-box because they are working on an Android client which I think at least mostly fits the bill. Also, since the code is open sourced I’m sure if some enterprising G/L individuals wanted to, they could bang something out for us penguin folks in due time (with Senji’s permission of course, I don’t think the code is Free, as in Libre).
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The Adobe Air runtime enables developers to package the same code into native apps for desktop operating systems as well as for smartphone such as Android devices, iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and other devices, reaching the mobile app stores for over 500 million devices.
With Adobe Air you can build stunning, blazing-fast cinematic 2D and 3D games for the browser, iOS, and Android™. Use fully accelerated GPU rendering, which leverages the power of OpenGL and DirectX graphics. It give developers the ability to call into their native, platform-specific code using AIR native extensions. Free sets of native libraries are available through the Adobe Game Developer Tools to further empower developers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Do you want to build your own Linux distro? Don’t fancy the Linux distributions that are available? Do you think you can build a better distro? This is your lucky day. I’m gonna show you how to do that in 20 minutes.Yes, you heard me right, 20 MINUTES. Wanna find out how?
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Games
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I spoke to the developer of We Happy Few on twitter to get an update on the Linux version, it seems it has been pushed back.
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Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single GameCube game in the official library.
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A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to get some time with Cheese (based in Australia), who worked on the recent port of Day of the Tentactle Remastered by Double Fine. We actually ended talking for a very long time (Cheese is very talkative, but that’s great because most of what he talks about is really interesting and insightful) so his podcast is just a short, edited version of the bits we found the most relevant to share with you.
Since Day of the Tentacle Remastered was the first port of Cheese (while he was already involved in Linux game development for a long time), it was a great opportunity to learn more about how you should approach porting and games packaging for Linux. He had already provided some great amount of details in his blog post, and I wanted to go a little further with this podcast on some particular points.
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Rocket League is the sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (AKA SARP Battle-Cars) for the PlayStation 3. Seeing as the first game wasn’t a very good success, Psyonix, the developer and publisher behind both games, looked to address some of the issues that were presented, while still maintaining much of the core of Battle-Cars: you’re in control of a remote-controlled car in a soccer/football field, and the goal is simple: knock a ball into the goal, while preventing the opposing team from doing the same thing. It’s basically soccer (or, what most countries would call football) with RC cars. These cars can be customized to your liking, whether you like a monster truck with flaming red flames or a limousine with simple design and elegance. Much of the DLC actually has additional fancy-looking cars from which you can purchase (I’m probably going to wait until there’s a Game of the Year edition, as none of the DLC actually expands the gameplay itself). Your car has a boost gauge that will fill up as you collect orange patches on the ground and drain as you use it. These boosts give the game a little bit more complexity as cars can rush to their side to prevent a goal, add a little more knockout force when hitting the ball, or lifting yourself up into the air for an air hit. Or, if you’re like me, if your car goes fast enough you can run other cars over, forcing them to respawn to a random location. In addition, the cars can do frontflips, backflips, and sideflips to ensure a more accurate shot. Now Rocket League is currently among the top ten highest-player-count games on Steam. I’m honestly not much into the game myself but I certainly understand why it’s so popular. In fact, it’s considered to be an eSport, with tournaments every weekend.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today, September 10, 2016, the KDE project announced the release of the KDE Frameworks 5.26.0 collection of over 70 add-on libraries for the Qt5 GUI toolkit.
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KDE neon is an interesting project. If we ignore the world, it does bring some fresh new changes into the Plasma universe, with significant improvements but also a handful of bugs and glitches. If we expand our view to include all other distributions, the scintillating allure of neon begins to fade. It does not have any killer features that make it a worthy rival to other, well-established home players.
The visual distinction from Kubuntu is a small one, the smartphone support is lacking, the media support can be slightly polished, the package manager is awful, the app layer thin, and you can’t really pimp the distro because the beauty framework is utterly broken. I did like that more stuff works than before, but it’s like priding yourself on getting the highest fail grade in the classroom. Overall hardware support, network excluded and resource utilizations are probably the only redeeming features, but even then, by a tiny margin. Which gets quickly drowned in the sea of bugs, errors, problems, and glitches. Samba is another sore point.
At the end of the day, this distro is a cool test bed for what Plasma has in store, but it does not have the critical mass of goodies needed for any serious use. The recent wave of distros was pretty much awful, so you might be tempted to look at them, but no. Any old Ubuntu based on 14.04 is way better, and so is the new Fedora. CentOS 7, too. In the end, neon needs a lot more work before I can phrase the word recommended in association with its behavior. Overall, 5/10. But, compare it to the K-flavored Xerus, and there’s still hope. To be continued.
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In conclusion the project has paved the groundwork for future efforts on Sentinel-2 data integration, which will lead to Marble Virtual Globe being the first in it’s kind to possess this quality data, it being open for users all around the world to create and develop with.
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In the past, KTextEditor notified the user about externally modified files with a modal dialog. Many users were annoyed by this behavior.
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Dominik and me got the Akademy 2016 Award for our work on Kate and KTextEditor.
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I guess I should tell you all a little about myself. I learned C++ in high school computer science, but that was long ago. Since then, I have never stopped programming toys for myself and others. I have been a Linux user since around when I started in computer science and have used KDE as my main DE for just about the entire time. Around 2003, I switched to purely open source software. You see, I had always dabbled, but I just was not really ready to stop using the other proprietary operating systems. Then, in 2005, I started to become a fairly active member over at the Kubuntu forums. I started mostly doing it as a fun way to expand my knowledge base while helping others.
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We had an incredible time in Berlin. First the training day by KDAB and then three conference days packed full with topics ranging from how to set up an open source organisation to fine tuning Qt graphics.
Second. a shout out to the communities that we had the pleasure to work with to create QtCon, FSFE, KDE and VideoLAN, and of course to our partners KDAB, you guys rock!
Last but definitely not least, Thank You obviously to all the volunteers from the different communities!
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The other day I wrote about the Pager improvements awaiting in Plasma 5.8. In the comments user btin re-raised the issue of limiting the Pager’s display to the screen it’s currently on, instead of being all-exclusive.
At the time I wasn’t sure we could still sneak this in before feature freeze, but thanks to the screen-awareness of the new backend (which, to recap, is shared with the Task Manager and already needs to determine what screen a given window resides on), it turned out to be easy enough to do!
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We are happy to announce a new dot release with some improvements and various fixes. We also celebrate some code contribution from Harald Albrecht (TheDive0) hoping to see more devs joining our team.
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A tour through the moments that marked the 20 years of community history, starting with the technologies that made possible its existence.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In 2013, the GNOME Foundation ran a successful campaign that raised funds for enhancing privacy features in the GNOME desktop and application suite. Unfortunately, subsequent changes in the organization left GNOME without a clear plan for how best to use the earmarked funds, so they remain—untouched—in GNOME’s bank account. At GUADEC 2016 in Karlsruhe, Germany, the topic of how to utilize the money was revisited, and a plan has now begun to take shape.
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Gtef – the acronym for “GNOME Text Editor Framework” – is a new library that eases the development of GtkSourceView-based text editors and IDEs. It can serve as an incubator for some GtkSourceView features.
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Now that all interns have completed their work, I wanted to share a few final thoughts about this cycle of Outreachy. Hopefully, this post will also help us in future usability testing.
This was my third time mentoring for Outreachy, but my first time with more than one intern at a time. As in previous cycles, I worked with GNOME to do usability testing. Allan Day and Jakub Steiner from the GNOME Design Team also pitched in with comments and advice to the interns when they were working on their tests and analysis.
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We’re thrilled to announce the release of Budgie 10.2.7, the last release in our 10.2 series that aims to resolve a multitude of issues as well as land some user experience improvements.
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Today we are providing a minor update to Solus 1.2 in the form of Solus 1.2.0.5. This release enables us to address a multitude of issues that have since been resolved after the release of Solus 1.2…
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New Releases
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Just a few minutes ago, Softpedia was informed by Ikey Doherty from the Solus Project about the general availability of the Budgie 10.2.7 desktop environment for the Solus Linux-based operating system and other supported OSes.
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Sometimes the best way to get to know a platform is by “sitting down” with a developer and letting them do the talking about what they are passionate about. When I sent a selection of questions to the elementary OS development team, I had no idea that I’d get back such deep, and thoughtful answers. That’s exactly what UX Architect, Cassidy James Blaede brought to the table. And with the release of the next iteration of elementary OS (called Loki) due to hit September 9, 2016, I couldn’t think of a better time to have this chat.
Let’s jump right in and see what Blaede had to say about elementary, developing, open source, UX, and more.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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LinuxScreenshots.org is closed.
An archive of all screenshot tours from this site have been made freely available to the community, which consists of 2300 releases from 580 distributions.
You may download this archive for fun, or to start your own Linux screenshots website. Please help seed torrents.
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Arch Family
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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While distribution-hopping is common among newcomers to Linux, longtime users tend to settle into a distribution they like and stay put thereafter. In the end, Linux distributions are more alike than different, and one’s time is better spent getting real work done rather than looking for a shinier version of the operating system. Your editor, however, somehow never got that memo; that’s what comes from ignoring Twitter, perhaps. So there is a new distribution on the main desktop machine; this time around it’s openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Most rational users simply want a desktop system that works, is secure, and, hopefully, isn’t too badly out of date. Tumbleweed is not intended for those users; instead, it is good for people who like to be on the leading edge with current versions of everything and who are not afraid of occasional breakage. It’s for users who like an occasional surprise from their operating system. That sounds like just the sort of distribution your editor actively seeks out.
More to the point, Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution; rather than make regular releases that are months or years apart, the Tumbleweed developers update packages individually as new releases come out upstream. Unlike development distributions like Rawhide, Tumbleweed does not contain pre-release software. By waiting to ship a release until it has been declared stable upstream, Tumbleweed should be able to avoid the worst unpleasant surprises while keeping up with what the development community is doing.
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SUSE technologies are helping Daimler AG, the German automotive behemoth, to migrate a large proportion of its mission-critical servers from proprietary UNIX operating systems to ‘the open and flexible Linux platform’.
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Another week with 4 snapshots has passed, sadly some issues managed to sneak in but, as you are used to by Tumbleweed already, we managed to resolve the issues on the mailing list in no time and made sure that upcoming snapshots get the fixes asap. The snapshots published were 0901, 0905, 0907 and 0908.
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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DNF(Dandified YUM) is a relatively new package manager for Fedora , a community-supported Linux distribution. Referred to as the next generation YUM package manager, DNF was introduced in Fedora 18 and has ever since been the default package manager for this popular distribution.
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After PHP 5.4, and as announced, PHP version 5.5.38 was the last official release of PHP 5.5
Which means that since version 5.6.25 and version 7.0.10 have been released, some security vulnerabilities are not, and won’t be, fixed by the PHP project.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but targeting open source software is not something we see every day. Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular operating system Ubuntu. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.
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UbuCon Europe 2016 is the first conference dedicated to the European Ubuntu community. Look forward to two days full of talks, workshops, demos, exhibitions and (hopefully) great food! Social events in the evenings will give you the opportunity to meet fellow community members and visit some of Essen’s most beautiful sights!
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Today at the OCP Technology Day, Facebook announced the grand opening of its new hardware lab space in Menlo Park to validate and certify software solutions and Canonical was one of the first to test its solutions are OCP compliant.
At the new lab, enterprise and carrier-grade Big Software solutions were deployed including OpenStack Mitaka and Ubuntu Storage on OCP Leopard, Honey Badger, and Knox. These solutions were deployed to bare metal in time measured in minutes and hours instead of days or weeks due to the use of two key technologies: Juju and MAAS, both of which are tested and validated at Facebook’s new facilities.
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Flavours and Variants
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About a week ago, I decided to create a new team, dedicated to artwork, style and design for Linux Mint. The main goal of this team is to restyle our various websites, but also long term to work in coordination with the development team to make various aspects of our distribution more pleasing to the eye.
Artists who recently helped with web design were invited to join, and the team now has 8 members.
I’d like to thank Carlos Fernandez already for his involvement and Eran Gilo for the beautiful work he’s already produced.
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Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon Edition is the latest version of Linux Mint 18 featuring the latest Cinnamon 3.0 as default desktop environment.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The common problem most app developers face while making an app is the designing the UI. With screen sizes varying from smart wearables to smartphones and tablets, the process becomes more complicated. Neonto is one such company that provides an easy tool to design apps with a neat and well laid out UI. Neonto is now bringing their services to the Tizen based Samsung Gear S2, S3 and Gear fit 2.
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Android
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This is a pretty special release though. Nextbit provided devices to the PA team – showing just how committed they are to supporting the custom ROM community, at a time when Google seems to want to make it harder – and worked closely with two of PA’s developers to get the ROM ready. The update is focused primarily on performance and the overall experience on the Robin, which as you you know, is unlike any other Android phone.
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Recently the Sun published an article by Ryan Sabey (@ryansabey), “UNION HACK Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto ‘would let foreign spooks rob UK’”. The post included several criticisms from government officials and pundits challenging the quality and security of open source software, cautioning readers, “sensitive data could be at risk under Labour leader’s plans.”
Mr. Corbyn’s, “Digital Democracy Manifesto” calls for public bodies in the U.K. to, “encourage publicly funded software and hardware to be released under an Open Source license,” and “financially reward staff technicians who significantly contribute to Open Source projects”.
Neil Doyle, who the Sun simply identified as an expert, warned, “cyber-criminals and foreign intelligence agencies would have a field day” under such an approach while, “private firms or individuals would be reluctant to get involved in public sector projects.”
Adding further criticism was British MP Nigel Adams who said Mr. Corbyn’s initiative, “ignores the issue of Internet abuse” adding, “his shambolic policies could leave us open to malicious attack and put our national security at risk.”
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Exactly ten years ago, motion graphics artist Jonas Hummelstrand posted a message on a web forum. It read: “In 15 minutes the Swedish election TV-show airs, and we’ll be outputting a lot of real-time graphics directly from Flash!” Jonas was excited. He stood at the cradle of something new, but he probably had no clue how big his baby would turn out to be.
Jonas is the main person behind CasparCG, the open source professional graphics and video playout software developed by Swedish public broadcaster SVT. This year, a decade after its conception, CasparCG was used for the Eurovision Song Contest graphics, including all of the animated votes counting.
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According to Yahoo!, Pulsar is a low latency Pub/Sub messaging system that can be scaled horizontally across multiple hosts and datacenters. Yahoo! has been using Pulsar in production for Mail, Finance, Gemini Ads, Sherpa, and Sports since Q2/2015. By making it open source, they hope it will be widely used by being integrated with other open source products. Yahoo! has deployed Pulsar in over ten datacenters, reaching over 100B msgs/day spread over 1.4 million topics with an average publish latency of less than 5ms. Pulsar comes with guaranteed delivery of messages and two persisted copies, automatic cursor management for message readers and cross-datacenter replication.
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Individual cells within a tumor are not all the same. This may sound like a modern medical truism, but it wasn’t very long ago that oncologists assumed that taking a single biopsy from a patient’s tumor would be an accurate reflection of the physiological and genetic make-up of the entire mass.
Researchers have come to realize that cancer is a disease driven by the same “survival of the fitter” forces that Darwin proposed drove the evolution of life on Earth. In the case of tumors, however, individual cells are constantly evolving as a tumor’s stage advances. Mobile cancer cells causing metastasis are a deadly outcome of this process.
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Ladies, gentlemen, everyone else. Not that long ago, I reviewed Open365, a free, open-source, cloud-based productivity suite based on LibreOffice, with some nice spicy additions. I liked it. It’s a pretty decent product, with a lot of potential. But there’s still a lot more work to be done.
The one aspect of the five-app combo you get in Open365 that I missed in the earlier article is the mail functionality. You have the three power programs – LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Impress – plus GIMP, with the mail client as the fifth element. Get the joke? Oh my. Well, it is time to right all past wrongs and give the final piece of the cloud suite its due review. Rhyme. Word.
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Julia Reda ended the QtCon, a conference for the Free Software community, with a closing keynote on, among other things, Free Software in the European Public Sector.
Ms Reda, a member of the EU Parliament for the Pirate Party, explained how proprietary software, software that forbids users from studying and modifying it, has often left regulators in the dark, becoming a liability for and often a threat to the well-being and health of citizens.
An example of this, she said, is the recent Dieselgate scandal, in which auto-mobile manufacturers installed software that cheated instruments that measured fumes in test environments, only to spew illegal amounts of toxic exhaust into the atmosphere the moment they went on the road.
Ms Reda also explained how medical devices running proprietary software posed a health hazard for patients. She gave the example of a woman with a pacemaker who collapsed while climbing some stairs due to a bug in her device. Doctors and technicians had no way of diagnosing and correcting the problem as they did not have access to the code.
Also worrying is the threat software with restrictive licenses pose to democracy itself. The trend of substituting traditional voting ballots with voting machines is especially worrying, because, as these machines are not considered a threat to national security, their software also goes unaudited and is, in fact, unauditable in most cases.
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Events
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It was the third big open source desktop conference we’ve managed to get to Brno (after GUADEC 2013 and Akademy 2014). 3 days of talks, 150 attendees from all over the world, 4 social events.
The conference went pretty well from the organizational point of view. Feedback has been very positive so far. People liked the city, the venue (FIT BUT campus is really, really nice), the parties, and catering during the conference. TDF board even lifted Red Hat to the highest sponsorship level for the amount of work we did for the conference. The only major bummer we had was no online streaming. It’s quite easy to set it up with the university’s built-in video recording system, but the university didn’t allow it in the end. Nevertheless, we treated online streaming as nice-to-have. Video recordings are important to us and we’ll do our best to get them online as soon as possible.
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The Linux kernel community has been using Git for more than a decade, but it is still under active development, with more than 2,000 non-merge git commits from almost 200 contributor over the past year. Rather than review this extensive history, this Micro Git Together instead focuses on what the next few years might bring. In addtion, Junio will present on the state of the Git Union, Josh Triplett will present on the git-series project, and Steve Rostedt will present “A Maze Of Git Scripts All Alike”, in which Steve puts forward the radical notion that common function in various maintainers’ scripts could be pulled into git itself. This should help lead into a festive discussion about the future of git.
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LibreOffice spun out from OpenOffice in the aftermath of the Oracle/Sun acquisition. It was one of many projects including Hudson/Jenkins and MySQL/MariaDB that got forked. To the best my knowledge while all those forks have strong user bases and have become the default tools in their respective domains – the original projects persist.
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At LinuxCon North America 2016, Daniel German presented some research that he and others have done to extract more fine-grained authorship information from Git. Instead of the traditional line-based attribution for changes, they took things to the next level by looking at individual tokens in the source code and attributing changes to individuals. This kind of analysis may be helpful in establishing code provenance for copyright and other purposes.
German, who is from the University of Victoria, worked on the project with Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundation and Bram Adams of Polytechnique Montréal. It was a “combination of research plus hacking”, he said, and the results were fascinating.
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BSD
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For your viewing pleasure this weekend are benchmarks of TrueOS 20160831 (the rolling-release distribution formerly known as PC-BSD), DragonFlyBSD 4.6, GhostBSD 10.3, FreeBSD 11.0-RC2, and PacBSD 20160809 (formerly known as Arch BSD) all benchmarked from the same system! Plus for reference to the Linux numbers are Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and Clear Linux 10040 being compared to these BSDs on the same tests and hardware.
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Licensing/Legal
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In short I have put a time limit of 3 years to make money out of the product and if I am unable it is turned over to the world to use as they see fit. Even better, assuming searchcode server becomes a successful product I will be forced to continually improve it and upgrade if I want to keep a for sale version without there being an equivalent FOSS version around (which in theory could be maintained by the community). In short everyone wins from this arrangement, and I am not forced to rely on a support model to pay the bills which frankly only works when you have a large sales team.
Here’s hoping this sort of licencing catches on as there are so many products out there that could benefit from it. If they take off the creators have an incentive to maintain and not milk their creation and those that become abandoned even up available for public use which I feel is a really fair way of licencing software.
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Some of the most important discussions associated with the annual Kernel Summit do not happen at the event itself; instead, they unfold prior to the summit on the planning mailing list. There is value in learning what developers feel needs to be talked about and, often, important issues can be resolved before the summit itself takes place. That list has just hosted (indeed, is still hosting as of this writing) a voluminous discussion on license enforcement that was described by some participants as being “pointless” or worse. But that discussion has served a valuable purpose: it has brought to the light a debate that has long festered under the surface, and it has clarified where some of the real disagreements lie.
It all started when Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), proposed a session on “GPL defense issues.” Interest in these issues is growing, she said, and it would be a good time to get the kernel community together for the purposes of information sharing and determining what community consensus exists, if any, on enforcement issues. It quickly became clear that some real differences of opinion exist though, in truth, the differences of opinion within the community may not be as large as they seem. Rather than attempt to cover the entire thread, this article will try to extract some of the most significant points from it.
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Programming/Development
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I have decided to move to using GitHub pages and Pelican to create my person ‘hub’ on the Internet. I am still in the debate about moving some content over to the new hub, but have not made a decision yet.
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Health/Nutrition
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The cost of health insurance plans offered under the Affordable Care Act will jump 20 percent or more next year under rates to be announced Friday by Maryland regulators.
The CEO of Maryland’s largest insurer defended the hefty rate increases and said the federal law that expanded health insurance to most Americans needs to be changed if it is to remain sustainable.
“We regret that such rate increases are needed,” said Chet Burrell of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. “It is the last thing on earth we want. But no company can sustain the kinds of losses we have seen.”
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Despite local backlash against the use of a controversial insecticide, the first round of aerial spraying to curb the spread of Zika virus in South Beach took place early Friday. It lasted about 30 minutes.
A plane contracted by Miami-Dade County flew in the darkness just after 5 a.m. for the first of four spraying cycles that officials hope will quickly bring down the number of mosquitoes carrying Zika virus in Miami Beach.
The drone of the plane could be heard and lights could be spotted from Ocean Drive as it passed over the water three times. Few people were out. Some joggers hurried by in Lummus Park, where a few men slept along the rock wall. Restaurant staff were cleaning sidewalk tables.
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NHS leaders in England say they have reached a “tipping point” and cannot maintain standards for patients on the funding they are getting.
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said many hospital bosses wanted to “sound a warning bell” to political leaders.
It comes after latest figures showed record levels of delayed hospital discharges and patient waiting times.
The government has said it is giving NHS England the £10bn it asked for.
NHS Providers, the organisation that represents hospitals in England, says unless urgent funding is provided it will have to cut staff, bring in charges or introduce “draconian rationing” of treatment.
It highlights that 80% of England’s acute hospitals are in financial deficit, compared with 5% three years ago – while missed A&E waiting time targets have risen from 10% to 90%.
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A Chandler-based drug firm under investigation for its aggressive sales of a lethal painkiller claims that the large donation it made to a group that opposes marijuana legalization was an attempt to protect the public’s safety.
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It has been revealed that the maker of a powerful, addictive opioid drug is bankrolling the opposition to the effort to legalize and regulate marijuana for recreational use in Arizona.
The Phoenix New Times reported Thursday that Insys Therapeutics, the company behind the fentanyl-based medication Subsys, made a $500,000 donation to the group Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy (ARDP), which is leading the campaign against Proposition 205.
On the ballot in November, Prop. 205 would allow people 21 years of age or older to possess up to one ounce of marijuana and grow up to six plants in their homes as well as establish a department to regulate the drug’s cultivation and sale.
It appears that Insys is trying to “eliminate the competition,” according to the New Times, which noted that the company “expects to soon launch a pharmaceutical version of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.”
What’s more, Insys is currently facing numerous state investigations for deceptively marketing and selling Subsys, which is intended to treat cancer pain, and coercing doctors to promote it to patients for off-label uses. Fentanyl is estimated to be 80 times as potent as morphine and hundreds of times more potent than heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and may be fatal to users.
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Security
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Defence/Aggression
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Senator Bob Graham, former co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells Paul Jay that the Bush administration created a culture of “not wanting to know” about potential terrorist attacks among American intelligence agencies, who have rewritten history with “aggressive deception” since 9/11.
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The House on Friday passed legislation allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts, days before the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
The legislation passed unanimously by voice vote, to thunderous applause.
The bill, which passed the Senate unanimously in May, now heads to President Obama’s desk, where its future is uncertain.
The White House has hinted strongly it will veto the measure. Obama has lobbied fiercely against it, arguing it could both strain relations with Saudi Arabia and lead to retaliatory legislation overseas against U.S. citizens.
But lingering suspicion over Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks and pressure from victims’ families made the bill a popular bipartisan offering on Capitol Hill.
The bill’s popularity puts the president in a delicate position. Supporters are hoping Obama will be leery of expending political capital he desperately needs during the lame-duck session.
The president is hoping lawmakers will pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a criminal justice reform measure and confirm Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
If Obama does choose to veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, supporters believe that they have the two-thirds majority needed to override him — a first during his presidency.
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Behind the smokescreen of the broader Mideast chaos, Israel pursues a strategy of gobbling up Palestinian lands to establish de facto control of the West Bank while confining indigenous Arabs to isolated cantons, explains Alon Ben-Meir.
[...]
Netanyahu is not deterred by the criticism and condemnation from the international community. He takes the position that building new housing units is largely in settlements that will eventually be part of a final status deal in exchange for land swaps, as if he has the right to unilaterally decide which settlements will be incorporated to Israel proper without an agreement with the Palestinians.
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May 2017 will mark fifty years of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank characterized by institutionalized inequality and injustice toward Palestinians. At the bidding of the government, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) routinely and violently confronts Palestinians, but also Israeli and international dissidents who dare challenge the continued expansion and entrenchment of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and the blockade of the Gaza strip. Protesters run the risk of getting cursed, spat on, detained, beaten up, stoned, stabbed, shot, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured or any combination thereof. Moreover, in an unfortunate yet predictable move, the Israeli government has recently declared war on the nonviolent boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Like clockwork, every few years a cycle of violence disproportionately bathes Palestinian society in blood and tears and serves to further fortify the occupation (see Israeli Occupation for Dummies). According to renowned scholar Ilan Pappe, Israeli society needs a regular dose of war not only as a means to justify its excessive military budget and lucrative arms industry, but as a tool to reaffirm itself as a cohesive settler-colonialist entity faced with an existential threat.
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The laser-guided Hellfire missile is highly accurate. When one is fired from a Predator drone at an alleged enemy of the United States, whether in the deserts of Yemen, the mountains of Pakistan or elsewhere, it rarely misses. The remarkable innovation of pairing an unmanned aerial vehicle with a deadly precise missile emerged soon after Sept. 11, 2001. The United States has reportedly used this tool extensively against potentially thousands of terrorist targets around the world in the subsequent 15 years.
Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, former adviser at the Defense Department and influential voice in U.S. policy circles, is one of the many critics of America’s “direct action” program using these drones. In her new book, “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything,” she argues that drone strikes rely on problematic legal justifications and that their effectiveness and legitimacy cannot be independently evaluated because of the program’s secrecy. These strikes, along with government opacity about them, she believes, will ultimately undermine the international rule of law, further weaken America’s moral standing and set the stage for others to follow our law-bending lead.
For Brooks, drone strikes are but one illustration of the challenges we face in this new era of conflict. She contends that the distinction between war and peace has blurred and that the consequences for international law are enormous and underappreciated. Her core argument is that international law, as well as U.S. government organizations, have not kept pace with this smudging of the line. Her book is a cri de coeur that unless we build legal foundations that stand some chance of containing war and legitimating our actions, and restructure our agencies to accommodate new realities, we risk inviting further chaos, eroding the values upon which America was built and failing future generations. While ambitious and astute, the book is also diffuse and in some important ways misses its targets.
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Stars and Stripes is reporting that the number of US troops in Iraq has risen from 4,000 to 4,460 in preparation for the Iraqi government campaign against Mosul.
The WSJ reported that the government of Iraqi prime minister Haydar al-Abadi wants to begin the campaign in October.
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But we know that the entire Syrian fiasco was engineered by the CIA with cash, guns, and training, and unceasing support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at our behest. It is a long-standing neoconservative plan to break the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from Lebanon through Syria to Iran. These are, of course, the independent-minded states that have thus far refused to accept either Israeli colonization of Palestinian land or permit Western-backed energy projects to take shape on their territory. Hence the need to dismember them into tiny, feckless statelets that pose no challenge to either Tel Aviv or Washington.
But this is hidden behind the fog of war and a domestic haze of media nuance. This entire conflict could reasonably be said to hinge on a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” The words “moderate” and “rebel” make all the difference in the telling of this fable. The truth is that we have hijacked Arab Spring discontent and festooned it with brigades of terrorist mercenaries procured from around the Middle East and Asia, all with the singular mandate to take down the Assad government. Tens of thousands of jihadists have been injected by NATO into a multi-confessional state governed by an elected leader who won a larger percentage of the electorate than our liberal messiah Barack Obama.
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The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries in the world for human-rights abuses. What U.S. government officials and our media mostly ignore, however, is that American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov’s thirty-five years in power.
Torture has been endemic in Uzbekistan, where Karimov banned all opposition groups, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human-rights workers and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually took as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literallyboiled alive.
Karimov became leader of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989 while the country was still part of the Soviet Union. He backed the unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hardliners against reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and personally opposed Uzbek independence. But finding himself president of a sovereign state when the Soviet Union suddenly dissolved, he quickly modified his position, changing his first name to “Islam” and morphing into an Uzbek nationalist.
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Every year, America pays its vassal-state South Korea huge sums of U.S. taxpayer money to mount 300,000-man-strong military “games” that threaten North Korea. North Koreans view images that never seem to make it to U.S. kitchen tables: hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. armaments swarming in from the sea, hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops – their turrets and rifles pointed north – and nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes screaming overhead.
But when a young dictator straight out of central casting responds to U.S. threats with an underground test on North Korea’s founding day, it’s the number-one story on the front page of the New York Times.
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Donald Trump’s latest attempt to deflect criticism about a 2013 tweet in which he blamed the prevalence of sexual assault in the military on the presence of women has been to criticize the military court system for letting offenders go unprosecuted.
But a big reason the military court system is so ineffective at punishing sexual assault offenders is precisely because senior members of the chain of command are involved — and too many share Trump’s view that rape and sexual assault are inevitable given the circumstances.
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In the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when Congress voted to authorize military force against the people who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the hijackings, few Americans could have imagined the resulting manhunt would span from West Africa all the way to the Philippines, and would outlast two two-term presidents.
Today, U.S. military engagement in the Middle East looks increasingly permanent. Despite the White House having formally ended the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in both countries. The U.S. is dropping bombs on Iraq and Syria faster than it can make them, and according to the Pentagon, its bombing campaign in Libya has “no end point at this particular moment.” The U.S. is also helping Saudi Arabia wage war in Yemen, in addition to conducting occasional airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia.
Fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, it looks like the War on Terror is still in its opening act.
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Internationally, the greatest threat to America’s security is, of course, nuclear armed Russia which has enough intercontinental and sea-launched missiles to wipe the United States off the map. Accordingly, Washington’s most important foreign and national security priority is maintaining calm, well-mannered relations with Russia and its leadership.
Instead, we have Hillary Clinton and her frantic war party neocons trying to provoke Russia at every turn and giving Moscow the impression that she will start a war with Russia. It was precisely such war talk and sabre rattling that in 1983 during the Able Archer crisis brought the US and USSR to within minutes of a full-scale nuclear war.
For all Trump’s bluster and Islamophobia, he is absolutely right about seeking good relations with Moscow. The schoolyard demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin by the Clinton camp and its tame US media is childish, shameful and unworthy of a great power.
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On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force.
From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets. (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.) In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.
It was a barbaric, if daring, plan and an atrocity of the first order. Almost 15 years later, such suicidal acts with similar “precision” weaponry (though without the air power component) continue to be unleashed across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and sometimes elsewhere, taking a terrible toll — from a soccer game in Iraq to a Kurdish wedding party in southeastern Turkey (where the “weapon” may have been a boy).
The effect of the September 11th attacks was stunning. Though the phrase would have no resonance or meaning (other than in military circles) until the U.S. invasion of Iraq began a year and a half later, 9/11 qualifies as perhaps the most successful example of “shock and awe” imaginable. The attack was promptly encapsulated in screaming headlines as the “Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century” or a “New Day of Infamy,” and the images of those towers crumbling in New York at what was almost instantly called “Ground Zero” (as if the city had experienced a nuclear strike) were replayed again and again to a stunned world. It was an experience that no one who lived through it was likely to forget.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Chelsea Manning, the U.S. army private convicted in 2013 for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, has announced she has started a hunger strike to protest what she calls “constant and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”
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Given the fundamental role that whistleblowers play in highlighting fraud, waste and abuse, an administration’s record upon the incidence, manner and prosecution of whistleblowers (or policies that protect or expose them) is a critical part of its open government record. The way a White House takes legal or administrative action regarding leaks that demonstrate unconstitutional behavior in the executive branch matters.
On the one hand, the Obama administration added to congressional legislation with more protections for whistleblowers through an executive order, save for an exemption for those working in or contracting for the intelligence agencies. On the other, there have been a record number of cases filed against whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The double standard for “senior administration officials” quoted in stories favorable to the White House and whistleblowers who go to the press with embarrassing facts is one that no future administration should espouse.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Wilderness areas around the world have experienced catastrophic declines over the last two decades, with one-tenth of global wilderness lost since the 1990s, according to a new study.
Since 1993, researchers found that a cumulative wilderness area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon has been stripped and destroyed.
The shrinking wilderness is due, in part, to human activity such as mining, logging, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration. The researchers said theirfindings underscore the need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness and to protect wilderness areas from the threats they face. [In Images: One-of-a-Kind Places On Earth]
“Globally important wilderness areas — despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities — are completely ignored in environmental policy,” study lead author James Watson, an associate professor in the School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland, in Australia, said in a statement.
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All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure. The poisoning of our land, the theft of our children, the state violence committed against us — we are forced to not only live in opposition to these ills, but also to live in opposition to the fact that they are often erased from public view and public discourse, outside of Indian Country. The truth of our history and our struggle does not match the myth of American exceptionalism, and thus, we are frequently boxed out of the narrative.
The struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota, has been no exception, with Water Protectors fighting tooth and nail for visibility, ever since the Sacred Stone prayer encampment began on April 1.
For months, major news outlets have ignored what’s become the largest convergence of Native peoples in more than a century. But with growing social media amplification and independent news coverage, the corporate media had finally begun to take notice. National attention was paid. Solidarity protests were announced in cities around the country. The National Guard was activated in North Dakota.
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As members of more than 100 tribal nations continue their historic standoff against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, Texas tribes protested in solidarity at the headquarters of the Dallas-based company behind the project — Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) — and spotlighted the company’s conflicts of interest and corrupt practices in their own state.
Just before poorly trained private security officers sicced dogs on Indigenous water defenders protecting sacred burial grounds in North Dakota over the weekend, Indigenous activists with the American Indian Movement of Central Texas (AIMCTX) gathered more than 1,000 miles away at the corporate headquarters of ETP in Dallas on September 2 to decry CEO Kelcy Warren’s “Black Snake” pipeline projects and pray in rhythm to Native drumsongs.
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United Airlines Flight 880 was carrying more than 200 passengers from Houston, Texas, to London’s Heathrow airport two weeks ago when it was battered by turbulence that threw people on to the cabin ceiling. Twenty-three people were injured. “We were flying along as smooth as can be and then were just slapped massively from the top as if someone had torpedoed us,” one passenger told journalists.
The aircraft, a Boeing 767-300, made an emergency landing at Shannon airport and the injured were taken to University Hospital, Limerick. No one was seriously hurt but all went through a terrifying experience and one, say experts, which will increasingly affect flights.
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Finance
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Britain’s international trade secretary called the country “too lazy and fat” and described business leaders as more interested in playing golf on a Friday than seeking new trade opportunities.
“This country is not the free trading nation that it once was. We have become too lazy and too fat on our successes in previous generations,” Liam Fox said at an event on Thursday for the right-wing group Conservative Way Forward, BBC News reported.
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Tax officials in Denmark are reportedly paying an unknown source around £1 million (~$1.3M) for secret financial information on hundreds of Danish nationals.
Their names appear in the Panama Papers, leaked earlier this year, which consist of 11.5 million files from the database of Mossack Fonseca—the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm.
This is the first time, according to Danish newspaper Politiken, that Denmark has agreed to buy information on possible tax evaders in this way. Denmark also seems to be the first country to admit that it’s acquiring data from a source with access to the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents. [Update: apparently Iceland made an earlier deal—see comment below.]
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Why has the Fed created incentives for US corporations to loot their companies and drive them deeper into debt?
Despite four consecutive quarters of negative earnings, weak demand and anemic sales, US corporations continue to load up on debt, buy back their own shares and hand out cash to their shareholders that greatly exceeds the amount of profits they are currently taking in. According to the Wall Street Journal: “SandP 500 companies through the first two quarters of the year collectively returned 112% of their earnings through buybacks and dividends.”
You read that right, US corporations are presently giving back more than they are taking in, which is the moral equivalent of devouring one’s offspring.
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For many years, parents and education activists in Chicago have warned that the deliberate destruction of neighborhood public schools was causing a rise in violence. The city, first under Arne Duncan, now under Rahm Emanuel, ignored the critics, and made a virtue of closing public schools, opening charter schools, and sending kids long distances to new schools. Mayor Emanuel recognized that the critics’ complaints had some validity. He didn’t stop the school closings–in fact, he closed 50 public schools in a single day, an unprecedented action in American history. But to assuage the critics, he established “safe passages,” supposedly to assure students’ safety as they adapted to new and longer routes to their new schools. In 2013, a student was raped while walking to school on a “safe passage” route.
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The letter to Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal, states, “We are writing to urge you to extend PayPal’s services to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza thereby removing a major limitation on the Palestinian technology sector, one of the only bright spots in the overall economy. More importantly, extending PayPal services would resolve the current discriminatory situation whereby PayPal’s payment portal can be accessed freely by Israeli settlers living illegally (per international humanitarian law) in the West Bank while it remains unavailable to the occupied Palestinian population.”
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Project 100 is a special report on Olympic-related evictions in Rio de Janeiro, run by Brazil’s Agencia Publica – an independent, woman-led and non-profit investigative journalism agency committed to the facilitation of democratic debate and the promotion of human rights. The project investigates one of the untold stories of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro: what has happened to the lives of those affected by the city’s large-scale evictions programme?
Between 2009 and 2015, the Rio de Janeiro City Hall reported that 22,059 families – 77,206 individuals – had been subject to eviction. Authorities claim only one community removal, the highly publicised Vila Autódromo, was a consequence of Olympics development and a general lack of official data on Olympics-related removals provides a veil of secrecy as to the true social impact of the event.
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I am being laid off by my employer, IBM. Jobs in the Netherlands move to lower-wage countries like Poland and India, while IBM changes course towards a “cognitive” future in which there is less interest in the traditionally skilled technical IT jobs.
Unparalleled (because forced) job cuts in the Netherlands are the result of that change of focus. Almost 10% of the IBMNL work force is sent away in a “re-balancing” operation and I am out of a job per November 1st.
On an intellectual level I understand the reasons for this. It is nothing personal and it also has nothing to do with the appreciation of my performance. I have scored among the top 5% of IBM Netherlands employees during my performance reviews of the last couple of years, which is quite decent for someone aged 55 in a technical role. Nevertheless, I am affected personally and my close circle is affected too.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Amy Goodman, host and executive producer for Democracy Now, has been criminally charged for documenting attacks on indigenous protesters.
Last week, a Democracy Now film crew captured footage of private security contractors hired by the oil companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline attacking protesters with dogs and pepper spray. Video of the attacks went viral on social media, with Democracy Now’s story about the attacks garnering over 131,000 shares on Facebook as of this writing. WDAZ reported that Goodman, along with Cody Charles Hall, a media spokesman for the Red Warrior Camp, have both been charged with criminal trespassing.
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An arrest warrant has been issued in North Dakota for Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman. Goodman was charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor offense. A team from Democracy Now! was in North Dakota last week to cover the Native American-led protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.
On Sept. 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the Dakota Access pipeline company using dogs and pepper spray to attack protesters. Democracy Now!’s report went viral online and was rebroadcast on many outlets, including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and Huffington Post.
“This is an unacceptable violation of freedom of the press,” said Amy Goodman in a statement. “I was doing my job by covering pipeline guards unleashing dogs and pepper spray on Native American protesters.”
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We cannot look at the sun for long. When reality gets too painful and unbearably bright, we avert our eyes. But let’s hear it for the military, the same military that counseled caution before our mad, destabilizing plunge into Iraq and Afghanistan arranged by George W. Bush’s coterie of erstwhile draft-dodgers.
Military analysts are talking climate change as a prime “national security” issue. Small wonder; a lot of their island and coastal naval bases are on the brink of inundation. Also, the military appreciate “the chain of causation” from climate change disasters to the destabilization of nation states and the rise of new forms of terrorism.
The DOD’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review called climate change an “accelerant of instability” and a “threat multiplier.” The National Academy of Sciences in 2015 noted that climate change fueled the beginning of Syria’s civil war. Longer-lasting and more severe droughts, combined with government refusal to deal with crop failures and livestock deaths. set the stage for the current chaos.
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Labor Day has come and gone; the campaign season is now in high gear. Getting to this point was hard for anyone paying attention. It will soon be worse a hundred-fold.
The collective intelligence of the American people is about to be insulted even more shamelessly than it has already been — as the sales campaigns for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump rev up, seemingly without budget constraints.
Now would therefore be a good time to lay in a supply of anti-emetics, before the stores run out.
Ahead lies a barrage of news, impossible to avoid, of an electoral contest that makes a mockery of American “democracy.” That, unfortunately, is the least of it. The more portentous problem is what it is all leading to – a Clinton presidency.
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That brings us to the last factor, which I shall call the factor of the “importance of voting” at all. There are many eligible voters who are skeptical that voting makes any real difference in what happens after the election. This group may be subdivided into those who feel it is of no importance at all and those who waver on this question. The waverers may be persuaded not to vote for their only mildly preferred candidate if they feel they know the outcome but not if they feel uncertain about the outcome.
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Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton sparred separately on military matters with back-to-back appearances on NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum on Wednesday. Trump stuck with his usual empty bombast, assuring a meek Matt Lauer that he would fix things up just fine – while offering no concrete plans or budgets. Clinton had more substance, stating she would not put ground troops in Iraq or Syria, and stressing the steadiness and temperament needed for the job.
Lack of timely treatment of veterans in Veterans Affairs hospitals got a good deal of the attention from both candidates. But in all the discussion about PTSD and the need for mental health treatment, one group was all but ignored – female service members. They were barely mentioned, except when one questioner from the audience asked Donald Trump what he would do about sexual assault in the military.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The one line I remember from high school history is “clear and present danger.” Established in the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, this phrase outlines that speech creating a “clear and present danger” can be punished. So what speech constitutes a “clear and present danger” that someone’s First Amendment rights can be abridged?
This past April, Lindsey Riback, the news editor at the Albany Student Press, wrote an informative article detailing the resources available to report sexual assault in her article, “Sexual Assault Reports up 200 Percent at UAlbany.” Although this headline may seem shocking, the content explained that the increase in resources on campus to report sexual assault contributed to the sharp increase in reports. This headline came into question as the Accepted Student Open House rolled around. A University at Albany tour guide instructed other guides to remove any newspapers from the Lecture Center that displayed this headline so that prospective students and their families wouldn’t see it.
On Saturday, April 16, I attended this open house. At the time, I was a high school senior and had decided to major in English. I wanted to double major, but I was wrestling with which second major to pick. History? Linguistics? Journalism? These possible majors circulated in my mind; I couldn’t pick a definitive path. That is, until I heard Professor Rosemary Armao speak for the Journalism Department. The idea that I could talk to others and learn mounds of information—all through researching and reporting—appealed to me. Even more, the enthusiasm with which Professor Armao presented drew me to the right path: journalism.
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YouTube is the third-largest website on Earth, a behemoth viewed by millions each day. It’s also “over” — or on the brink of it — according to a group of outraged creators who claim the company has begun censoring them.
The controversy springs from confusion over YouTube’s long-standing policy of disabling ads on videos that could draw advertiser complaints. Those include videos that are violent, sexually suggestive, or that contain drug use or bad language.
But whereas YouTube has historically hidden demonetization notifications in its video analytics dashboard — meaning that some creators never saw them — the company recently began sending notices by email and alerting them directly on video pages.
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Kiwis who post videos online featuring “contentious issues” like sex, drugs and political speech could be hit in the pocket as YouTube clamps down on users profiting from them.
User Dolan Dark, who only wanted to be known as “Jay”, has 191,000 subscribers but said he was unable to make money from two of his videos which were not deemed “advertiser friendly” under new regulations.
Users who post videos to the site have the option to “monetise” their content whereby adverts are added to the start of the video.
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A Norwegian newspaper editor publicly censured Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after his social media platform took down a famous wartime photograph, citing concerns about child pornography.
Facebook’s decision to censor the famous photo of a naked child fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war has prompted questions about Facebook’s policies and its use of algorithms to control the content posted online.
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Once Rupert Murdoch performed this role, now increasingly Zuckerberg and Google do. To think they were ever likely to be more benevolent than the corporations of old is to subscribe to magical thinking.
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Facebook has backed down amidst outraged charges of censorship after deleting the iconic photo of a naked burned Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Demonstrating questionable journalistic standards now being increasingly challenged, the social network deleted the harrowing, Pulitzer Prize-winning image by AP photographer Nick Ut – which shows nine-year-old Kim Phuc running screaming from her village of Trang Bang after she was severely burned by napalm dropped by South Vietnamese planes on June 8, 1972 – in the name of “maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community.”
Phuc survived. Despite years of ongoing pain and surgeries related to her burns, she now lives in Canada, runs a foundation dedicated to help other child victims of war, and sometimes speaks about the powerful impact of one of the most famous war photographs of all time taken by the Vietnamese, then-21-year-old Ut. The recent uproar came after Norwegian author Tom Egeland included it in a Facebook post about photos that changed the history of wars, and in this case perhaps helped end one. Facebook removed the picture, Egeland protested, Facebook banned him and then proceeded to remove the image several more times when it was defiantly re-posted by other high-profile Norwegians – including Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who charged, “If you edit past events or people, you change history, and you change reality.”
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Facebook’s decision to temporarily censor the iconic Vietnam War photo of Kim Phúc has set off alarm bells for journalism watchdogs and reignited the debate over the social media company’s editorial responsibilities.
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Facebook’s decision Friday to reverse its ruling about an iconic photo from the Vietnam War that it initially said violated company policy is raising the issue about whether it is a social media platform or a news distributor.
The reversal followed online uproar after Facebook deleted the famous photo of Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack from a Norwegian author’s Facebook page.
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Tensions between Facebook and the news industry boiled over this week when the social media corporation censored a Pulitzer-winning Vietnam war photo, because it featured a naked child and violated site “community standards”.
The dispute over the “napalm girl” image, which a Norwegian writer published in a post about historic warfare photography, ended Friday when Facebook reversed its decision, acknowledging the “global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time”.
But the spat has exposed what journalists and ethicists say are fundamental flaws in the way Facebook controls and spreads news. Critics say the company’s decisions were driven by PR concerns and should serve as a wake-up call to free speech advocates about how powerful Facebook has become– and how ill-equipped the corporation is for its role, however unwilling, in journalism.
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In the space of a single day, Facebook has managed to: Draw condemnation from a Norwegian news organization for censoring a famous work of photojournalism from the Facebook News Feed.
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The demand that we remove the picture came in an e-mail from Facebook’s office in Hamburg this Wednesday morning. Less than 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, and before I had time to give my response, you intervened yourselves and deleted the article as well as the image from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.
To be honest, I have no illusions that you will read this letter. The reason why I will still make this attempt, is that I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Recently, we have updated our Frequently Asked Questions. “Who cares!” you might say. Well, here’s why I think it may be more important than you think. For the longest time we had five FAQ’s. Five. As a small company with little staff, FAQ’s and documentation were initially not as big of a priority as they perhaps should have been. Things that needed to be addressed have often been put on the back burner as we had larger issues to address. But, in recent weeks, we have begun to try and make changes in our approach, changes in our communication with you.
As we have begun this process, we are altering our previous method of outreach and communication to focus, quite simply, on these aspects: “more,” “better” and “engagement.” We have heard many of your calls for us to communicate more often and better. We consider important, especially for the free and open source community, to have engagement and a back and forth dialogue between you and us. From here on, this blog will be updated more often with all of us chipping in at times. Our FAQ’s have been updated to address many of the common questions that we get asked and it will continue to be updated as more questions come in to us. With our new communication team, we have also recently changed our approach on social media as well, aiming for more engaging conversations with you and moving away from the previous “privacy news fire hose” approach where we were sharing too many Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD) articles that overall impaired our credibility. All in all, we’d like to bring some fun back to our social media process and to talk WITH you instead of AT you.
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Brexit will not make “one bit of difference” to Britain’s intelligence relationship with the rest of Europe and the US, according to a former senior official with the National Security Agency.
William Binney, a technical director for the US intelligence agency turned whistleblower, said GCHQ will continue to share data and resources with organisations around the world following Britain’s retreat from the EU.
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Hollywood heartthrob Zachary Quinto, who plays Star Trek’s new Spock and Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s new film, has spoken out in defense of the NSA whistleblower, who is now in exile in Russia, calling the Espionage Act charges against him “absurd.”
The star was speaking at the premier of the latest film, Snowden, which tells the story of the young programmer’s interest in espionage work and eventual disillusionment with it, leading to one of the most significant revelations in recent history.
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Hollywood heartthrob Zachary Quinto has spoken out in defence of Edward Snowden, slamming the spying charges made against him as “absurd”.
Quinto, who plays Star Trek ‘s new Spock, said the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower should be returned to the US and called for authorities to drop charges against him.
Fugitive Snowden, who is seeking asylum in Russia granted by Vladimir Putin, is responsible for the biggest leak in modern US history.
He quit his £130,000-a-year job at the NSA after claiming he could not stand by and watch the civil liberties of millions of people be eroded.
Quinto, who stars in Oliver Stone’s new film Snowden, which tells the story of the young programmer’s early interest in espionage work, said at the Toronto premiere: “I do think he should be able to come back [to America].
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Oliver Stone’s docudrama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is the director’s most exciting — and relevant — movie in years.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev promoted a former deputy premier on Friday to succeed longtime ally prime minister Karim Massimov, who he has transferred to the role of security chief.
Massimov, who had led the cabinet since 2014 was dismissed and made the Central Asian country’s internal security chief Thursday, on the back of a summer that saw a spike in homegrown radical violence.
The appointment of Bykytzhan Sagintayev as premier temporarily ends speculation that Dariga Nazarbayeva -Nazarbayev’s 53-year-old daughter – might take up higher office.
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For six years, Daniel Jones was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee’s inquiry into CIA detentions and interrogations carried out in the post-9/11 Bush era. Jones and his team turned 6.3m pages of internal CIA documents into a scathing study which concluded that torture was ineffective and that the CIA had lied about it to two presidents, Congress and the US public.
But before Jones’s investigation was released in December 2014, the CIA searched through Senate files on a shared, firewalled network that had been set up by the agency for Jones and his team to securely receive classified documents.
The CIA accessed Jones’s work and even reconstructed his emails, sparking an unprecedented clash between the agency and its legislative overseers on Capitol Hill.
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Take Colin Kaepernick. By choosing not to stand for the national anthem, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has stood up for justice. He has raised awareness of police brutality and oppression against African-Americans in the United States. He has exposed the anti-Muslim origins of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and forced us to address the uncomfortable: institutional racism. Kaepernick’s act of rebellion was a risk from the start. The cost to him has been a stream of criticism and public blowback. But his courage has sparked a national conversation on free speech and what it means to be an American in the 21st century.
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Yet, there are so many programs — and not just in college — where fellowships, for example, are offered based on skin color. That’s not fair and its also insulting to black students from middle-class environments (or better) and from intact families who do well in school, but may be lumped in by skin color as having gotten special boosts.
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A prosecutor in California said on Friday that criminal charges would be filed against seven current or former police officers in the San Francisco Bay Area, capping a monthslong investigation into allegations of officers having sex with a teenage prostitute.
The allegations had roiled the Oakland Police Department, and five of those being charged were from that agency.
The charges include obstruction of justice, engaging in an act of prostitution and engaging in a lewd act in a public place, Nancy E. O’Malley, the district attorney for Alameda County, Calif., said in a statement.
A former deputy from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office and a former officer from the Livermore Police Department also face charges, the statement said.
A prostitute, the 19-year-old daughter of a police dispatcher, claimed that she had had sex with multiple officers from agencies around the Bay Area. At least one of the relationships began while she was a minor, Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland has said. The prostitute said the police had routinely tipped her off to raids.
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It was so successful in turning out ersatz privately educated pupils that I have been mistaken for one more or less since. And there is no doubt at all that this helped me get in to the fast stream of the FCO – in an intake in which I was one of only two state school educated entrants in the fast stream. There were two graduate entry streams – administrative (fast stream) and executive (slow stream). In 1984 there were just two state school entrants in the fast stream, and no private school entrants in the slow stream.
It is this plucking of hearty young yeomen and turning them into officers for which Theresa May nostalgically yearns. But I absolutely hated the school. I hated the discipline, I hated the militarism, I hated the narrow thought. I hated it so much I performed terribly – I got a B and two E’s at A Level and scraped into university on clearing. Yet once in University with much more personal freedom, I flourished and never in my entire University career came less than top in any exam I took, culminating in a first class degree. The grammar school system had almost destroyed my potential because of my reaction against its class divisiveness.
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These days, the question for me is: What are the politics of nonviolence? Nonviolence is a whole new way of life, but it is also a methodology of social change, a power at our disposal, a spiritual path, a way to relate to others, and a way of hope for the whole human race, despite the odds.
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I am a male human being.
And you’d better believe I’m a feminist.
I wear that label proudly.
The other day a friend of mine heard one of my articles was published in Everyday Feminism. And he said, “Kind of a backhanded compliment. Isn’t it?”
Hell no!
What does that mean? Would someone suppose that a man being considered a feminist somehow made him less of a man?
On the contrary. I think it makes him more of one. It makes him a decent freakin’ person.
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This week, Murray was denied entry into the United States via the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. The program is intended to enable “most citizens or nationals of participating countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without first obtaining a visa.” Murray is set to chair the presentation of this year’s Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence, which takes place Sept. 25, to CIA-torture whistleblower John Kiriakou.
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Fifty years ago this month (on September 9, 1966), President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety laws that launched a great life-saving program for the American People.
I was there that day at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson who gave me one of the signing pens. In 1966, traffic fatalities reached 50,894 or 5.50 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By 2014, the loss of life was 32,675 or 1.07 fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. A huge reduction!
This was an astounding success for a federal safety program that included mandatory vehicle-safety standards (seat belts, airbags, better brakes, tires and handling among other advances) and upgrading driver and highway-safety standards.
When the crashworthy standards were first proposed in 1967, Henry Ford II warned that they “would shut down the industry.” Ten years later on NBC’s Meet the Press he conceded, “We wouldn’t have the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.”
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Hundreds of people gathered in California on Friday to protest Urban Shield, the annual expo showcasing police and military weapons and offering SWAT training in the Bay Area.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In June, Senator Ted Cruz released a video declaring that President Obama is on the verge of “giving the internet away” to Iran, Russia and China. The video deploys an appropriately menacing soundtrack, some cyber-spooky glitch effects, and the threat of a “mini UN” taking over our beloved bastion of free speech and free enterprise—unless Congress acts before a deadline of September 30. Cruz upped the drama last week, in preparation for Congress returning from summer vacation, by launching a countdown clock on his website.
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DRM
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Digital products are weird: they are inert without software to animate them, and software is so technologically and legally weird that it can be very hard to know exactly what you’re buying.
But there just might be some clarity on the horizon, thanks to documents I recently filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), several publishers and public interest groups and 20 EFF supporters with important (and alarming!) stories to tell.
In 1998, the US Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 makes it a felony to bypass or tamper with “access controls” (today we call these “DRM” or “digital rights management”). Originally this was used to ensure that no one reconfigured their games console to play unofficial games (meaning that the console maker could extract fees from games companies without fear of competition) and that DVD players weren’t modified to play out-of-region discs. But software proliferated and the DMCA wasn’t far behind.
[...]
Apple repeatedly did this with iTunes, while Nintendo designed the 3DS game system to render itself permanently inoperable if an update detected evidence of tampering. This means that any solution the FTC comes up with will require extensive disclosures from the more baroque DRM schemes – which is as it should be. You can’t consent without being informed, and the entire basis for taking away our rights with DRM products is that we’re consenting when we “choose DRM”. All of this is just a sticking plaster, of course.
The real solution is to reform the laws that protect DRM – DMCA 1201 in the US, EUCD Article 6 in the EU, among others – to ensure that doing legal things with your own property remains legal. The fact that this principle needs legal protection tells you how bonkers the whole thing is. That’s why EFF has filed a lawsuit against the US government seeking to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Copyright trolls are known for their dubious tactics but a new report from Canada shows just how low they can sink. According to the University of Manitoba’s copyright office, among a flood of 8,000 piracy notices are some warning students that they could lose their scholarships or even be deported if they don’t pay a fine.
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Readers may remember that a few months ago I published a table that I had prepared for my students at the University of Southampton, attempting to summarise the position of the Court of Justice of the European Union as regards linking to protected content.
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Send this to a friend
09.10.16
Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Cub Linux 1.0 has much of the stability and maturity of a more established Linux distro.
It is a great alternative to Google’s semi-proprietary Chrome OS locked into the popular Chromebook hardware.
Cub Linux is a Chrome OS clone that runs on nearly any aging or newer computer with the user’s choice of the fully open-sourced Chromium Web browser or Google’s Chrome browser.
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Google’s first Chromebook was the kind of laptop you’d design if you didn’t give a damn about laptop design. It was thick, heavy, rubbery, boring, and black. Black keys, black body, black trackpad, black everything. Everything about the Cr-48 was designed to communicate that this device was still an experiment. Even the name, a reference to an unstable isotope of the element Chromium, was a hint at the chaos raging inside this black box. “The hardware exists,” Sundar Pichai told a crowd of reporters at the Cr-48’s launch event in December of 2010, “only to test the software.”
Moments later, Eric Schmidt took the stage and preached about how the “network computer” tech-heads had been predicting for decades was finally ready to change the world. “We finally have a product,” Schmidt said, “which is strong enough, technical enough, scalable enough, and fast enough that you can build actually powerful products on it.” Apparently already sensing the skeptical feedback Chrome OS would get, he gestured toward the audience and told them “it does, in fact, work.”
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Chromebook is a different thing from Netbooks with the fact that it does not have Windows being a huge difference. Chromebooks thus run on a fresh and different operating system that while it is not an old OS it isn’t a desktop kind of OS either but a mobile one.
Chromebooks have pretty hardware, especially if the Haswell processors they are running on, which are energy efficient, are anything to go by. Nonetheless, there are many reasons why buying Chromebooks make a lot of sense.
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Many organisations and businesses world wide are converting their core computer operating system to Linux as opposed to other operating systems for a number of reasons some of which we shall discuss here in after (why linux),this is mostly because of problems faced in daily computer usage both at home and at the work place.
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Server
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In this post, we discussed what application state is, the different types of application states you are likely to encounter. We also covered how each type of state can be managed in a containerized environment. In most cases, several options are available to choose from. So, although containers are ephemeral, the application state does not need to be!
My goal for this post was to show that stateful applications can be containerized. So, how did I do? We would love to hear your feedback and experiences, or if you have any questions I can help answer.
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Kernel Space
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A topic related to upstreaming patches on kernel forks related to embedded platforms is currently being discussed for Kernel Summit 2016. This is an age-old topic related to whether it is better to work upstream and backport or apply patches to a product-specific kernel and worry about forward-porting later. The points being raised have not changed over the years and still comes down to getting something out the door quickly versus long-term maintenance overhead. I’m not directly affected so had nothing new to add to the thread.
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If you had any doubt there is broad industry interest in blockchain, look no further than the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project. It has grown by 170 percent since its formal launch in February, now counting 80 members compared to the original 30 founding members.
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In the IT world of 1991, the desktop market was just blossoming, the personal computer was becoming more powerful, intel were breaking Moore’s law with reckless abandon, and Microsoft were starting to get their act together with a brand new exciting development that was to hit the streets a year later, called Windows. The server market was also expanding. An interminable list of organizations including IBM, HP, Sun, TI, Siemens, ICL, Sequent, DEC, SCO, SGI, Olivetti were building proprietary chips, machines and UNIX variants. UNIX had already by that stage enjoyed significant success since making the leap from academia to commerce, and everyone was trying to get a share of the spoils.
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After informing the community about the availability of Linux kernel 4.7.3 and Linux kernel 4.4.20 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS.
Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS is the seventy-eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series, which appears to approach its end of life soon, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, who states “The 3.14.y kernel series is coming to an end. There will be only one more release after this one, of this kernel series before it will be marked as end-of-life. You have been warned.”
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ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.8 was released on Friday as the newest version of this OpenZFS file-system implementation.
ZFSOnLinux 0.6.5.8 is an important release as it finally is the first stable version providing support for the past few Linux kernel versions: Linux 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 are now supported by ZOL. Meanwhile this code remains compatible with kernels going back to Linux 2.6.32.
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Graphics Stack
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Unfortunately, I don’t tend to notice when Linux drivers get released; it’s something I want to report more frequently on. Luckily, this time, I heard about NVIDIA’s 370.28 graphics drivers while they were still fresh. This one opens up overclocking (and underclocking) for GeForce 10-series GPUs, although NVIDIA (of course) mentions that this is “at the user’s own risk”. It also fixes a bunch of Vulkan bugs.
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A great new feature has been merged during this 1.19 X server development cycle: we’re now using threads for input [1]. Previously, there were two options for how an input driver would pass on events to the X server: polling or from within the signal handler. Polling simply adds all input devices’ file descriptors to a select(2) loop that is processed in the mainloop of the server. The downside here is that if the server is busy rendering something, your input is delayed until that rendering is complete. Historically, polling was primarily used by the keyboard driver because it just doesn’t matter much when key strokes are delayed. Both because you need the client to render them anyway (which it can’t when it’s busy) and possibly also because we’re just so bloody used to typing delays.
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Benchmarks
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Recently I purchased a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP processor as a $300 Xeon with eight physical cores but clocked at just 1.7GHz and without any Turbo Boost while the TDP is 85 Watts. Here are some benchmarks compared to other LGA-2011 v3 CPUs in my possession under Linux along with an AMD FX reference point too and followed by some Skylake Xeon benchmarks.
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Applications
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A new stable version of the open-source and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor has been released, namely version 2.0.6, which brings support for new digital cameras, as well as a bunch of improvements over the previous maintenance update.
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Ascensio System SIA boasts that its ONLYOFFICE office and productivity suite combines the best from the MS Office and Google Docs worlds. ONLYOFFICE is a free and open-source solution and is distributed under the AGPL v.3 license.
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AsciiDoc is a light-weight markup language that is being adopted at a fast-pace by projects. The Fedora Documentation Project, for example, has decided to migrate its books to AsciiDoc. AsciiDoc excels at being very easy to write with as it doesn’t have a lot of tagging or other extraneous keystrokes. It, like many light-weight markup languages, is known for having sensible defaults.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Thanks to robvv in our forum for pointing this out, ‘Rogue Stormers’ an action packed platformer with heavy action and RPG elements is now on Linux.
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I’m quite a fan of the indie colony building sim Maia, it has sweet retro sci-fi future graphics and it’s starting to come together little by little. It has taken a long time to get here, so Simon has a blog post explaining what’s going on.
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I was really excited when I saw the video for Little Invasion Tales, so I shot off a message to the developer who confirmed to me that Linux will be supported!
Seems like a really sweet and casual sim that will appeal to plenty of people. There’s very little info on it right now, but I will keep you posted as it looks fun.
It’s from the same developer who made ‘Redshirt’, which is strangely not available for Linux on Steam, but it is on other stores.
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My friends at GOG sent word that Death Road to Canada, a game about surviving the Zombie apocalypse during your road trip is now available DRM free for Linux on their store.
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Rocket League is finally finally available to install on Linux, albeit as a beta. If you don’t already own the game on Steam then now might be a good time to pounce as Rocket League is currently on sale, at 25% off.
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Rocket League did actually arrive on Linux while I was asleep last night and my lovely team popped the article out for me. I am awake, I have played it and here are some thoughts.
First thing, it is already better than a lot of ports due to one simple fact: It works fine with more than one monitor. Seriously, too many games screw that up, but Rocket League displays perfectly fine on what is set as my main monitor ‒ woohoo!
Steam Overlay works fine as expected, since they are only technically supporting SteamOS right now during the beta, it would be incredibly weird if it didn’t. I’ve seen a few ports recently that don’t work with the Steam Overlay so it’s worth mentioning.
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Epistory: Typing Chronicles is an interesting isometric adventure where you type words to kill your enemies, while the story unfolds as you progress in the map, just like Bastion. It was fully released on March 30th of this year, but since a few days ago you can now download a demo to judge it by yourself. The developers openly express their full confidence on the game, and they have their good reasons to do so, because although the game is very easy (even in Insane difficulty) it’s really fun and the artistic direction is excellent.
I don’t have the full game, but even if that’s your case, you may be still interested to check the demo, as they claim that it has some minor differences with the actual full game, though they don’t specify which ones.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The popular Krita painting program keeps getting even better. This new beta release of 3.01 includes features added from Google Summer of Code programmers. This screencast does a very good job explaining the new features, including new animation tools.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Well, that doesn’t go hand in hand, right? Things are awesome but they are not stable initially. GNOME Photos faced things no differently. While we had landed patches for Google Photos sharing earlier this summer,it took time to get stable and handling those shared images. It’s not only about the sharing but all the things around it.
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I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting “Usability testing in open source software” at the 35th Annual Government IT Symposium, in December 2016!
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GUADEC is the GNOME Foundation’s primary annual event, held every year in a different European city. The conference brings together contributors, enthusiasts, and partners from around the world for three days of talks, followed by three days of workshops (called “Birds of a Feather” sessions). This year, the event took place in Karlsruhe, Germany between the 12th and 17th of August. As always, the conference was a great opportunity for contributors from around the world to meet, make plans, and have fun.
Presentations covered significant developments in GNOME technologies such as Flatpak, GNOME Software, Builder, and new GTK+ features. There were also talks by GNOME’s partners, including Red Hat, SUSE, and Endless. In addition, the Foundation announced the debut of its newest conference, LAS GNOME, to be held this September in Portland, Oregon. In case you couldn’t make it, here’s a link to the 2016 GUADEC talks.
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New Releases
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Softpedia has been informed today by the creator and lead developer of the user-friendly Linux Lite operating system, Mr. Jerry Bezencon, about a few interesting facts regarding the upcoming major release of the GNU/Linux distribution.
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If you have been using Elementary OS Freya, you should be incredibly excited about the prospect of seeing your platform of choice gain even more polish. For those that have never given Elementary a chance, Loki will be a perfect introduction to one of the most elegant and user-friendly Linux desktops on the market.
I highly recommend that every Linux user at least kick the tires of Elementary OS Loki. Elementary was the first distribution to permanently sway me from Ubuntu and it shows no signs of releasing me any time soon. And since today, September 9, 2016 is the official release day of Loki, now is the perfect time to find out if Elementary OS Loki can sway you.
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Elementary OS 0.4 is powered by the Linux 4.4 kernel.
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Just a few minutes ago, the guys over elementary were extremely proud to announce the release and immediate availability of the elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” GNU/Linux operating system.
elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” has been in development for the past three or four months, during which it received two Beta milestones, and we have to admit that we were expecting to see the Release Candidate (RC) build as well, but it looks like the devs decided it’s time for the popular operating system to hit the stable channels.
And there you have it, elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” in all of its beauty is now ready to take over your personal computers, and the best part is that it’s based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which means that Loki is also an LTS (Long Term Support) OS, which will receive security and software updates until 2021.
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There are too many Linux distributions nowadays. While many people feel that there is no such thing as too much choice, I respectfully disagree. Quite frankly, the Linux developer community is spread too thin, leading to wasted resources and slow movement on projects. For end users, it can be hard to find the best operating system for them, as there are far too many from which to pick.
With all of that said, there is plenty of room for some distributions — when they make a substantial impact, that is. Elementary OS (stylized as elementary OS) isn’t the most popular Linux distro, and it certainly isn’t the best. However, this Ubuntu-based operating system is focusing on something that some competitors do not — user interface, which ultimately contributes to the overall user experience. It is because of this that Elementary is so important to the Linux community — it matters. Today, Elementary 0.4 (code-named ‘Loki’), achieves stable status.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Red Hat Family
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Finance
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Fedora
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…chomreabsuor, is what people in Cambodia say to each other when they meet. And it’s time for Fedorans to meet in Cambodia! Fedora’s FUDCon for the APAC region takes place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, held alongside the BarCamp ASEAN in November 2016.
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Let’s get right back into it with the Fedora 24 Beta release statistics regarding Bodhi updates, release-validation tests, and Bugzilla reports. The numbers don’t lie, keeping in favor with the idea that Fedora is growing!
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Outreachy ended last month. Given this was the first time the kernel team has tried to do this, I think it went well. I’ve been reflecting on what makes an internship successful based on this past summer and other experiences.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The development of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system continues at a fast pace, and we can see more and more software updates arriving every single day in its official software repositories.
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Softpedia was informed by Marius Quabeck from UbuntuFun.de that the registration for the upcoming UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu Linux users and developers is now open.
We informed our readers about UbuCon Europe, which is the very first European Ubuntu conference put together by a group of Ubuntu members, earlier this year, and told them that it would take place between November 18-20, at the Unperfekthaus in Essen, Germany.
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Flavours and Variants
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Today, September 9, 2016, Clement Lefebvre has proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the final version of the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE Edition operating system.
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Linux Mint 18 for KDE users is finally here more than two months after the MATE and Cinnamon versions. Clement Lefebvre announced the release today on the Linuxmint.com blog saying, “It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.” The day before Lefebvre introduced his new Artwork Design team and some of their early work. They’re to make Mint even more beautiful.
Linux Mint 18 KDE features Plasma 5.6 decorated with the same general Mint theme and images as found in the other spins. The KDE edition previously featured a more blue colored theme, but with version 18 it sports a very similar look as the others with green and gray the prominent colors. Man hours were a part of the reason for the change, but primarily it was probably to provide a more uniform look across the various desktops. However, if it was a matter of personnel and time, perhaps that is no longer a problem.
Yesterday Lefebvre announced the formation of a new artwork design team. This new team is to dress up the Cinnamon Spices Website, then perhaps others, and finally will collaborate with the development team on the distributions’ look and feel. According to Lefebvre’s post, the eight member team consists, at least partially, of artists who have helped Mint in the past and joined the new team by invitation. Lefebvre singled out two such artists in his post and shared Eran Gilo’s new Cinnamon logo as well as the site’s new look. The new updated Website theme is not live as of yet, but it will be a major improvement when it is. The Cinnamon Spices Website is a gallery and repository for Cinnamon desktop themes, applets/desklets, and extensions.
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Regardless of your feelings about the iPhone, you cannot deny that this week belongs to Apple. The company is certainly dominating much of the world’s attention. With that said, there is certainly more going on in the technology world than a new version of a popular smartphone. Some desktop Linux users for instance, would probably be more excited about a new version of a distribution, and today, a significant OS sees release.
What is the desktop OS of which I speak? Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’. True, that distribution is not really new, but this variation is — KDE. Yes, a new version of Mint — featuring the Plasma desktop environment and associated apps — is available today. Could the open source operating system be a good alternative to Windows 10?
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The much-awaited wattOS R10 has arrived in all its glory. This power efficient GNU/Linux distribution is based on the latest Ubuntu 16.04.1 long term release. The current release only provides LXDE desktop environment and Microwatt edition will be released later. The wattOS R10 release also brings broader support for older hardware.
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Drone and quadcopter manufacture Parrot has teamed up with Ubuntu producers Canonical to create a drone attachment called S.L.A.M. Dunk which focuses on creating autonomous machines that can avoid obstacles.
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F&S has launched a 50 x 40mm “PicoCOMA9X” COM with an NXP Cortex-A9 and -M4 based i.MX6 SoloX SoC, available with a Linux BSP and an optional starter kit.
The PicoCOMA9X computer-on-module uses F&S Elektronik Systeme’s 50 x 40mm PicoCOM form-factor, which features an 80-pin plug connector. It is pin-compatible with other F&S PicoCOM modules such as the NXP Vybrid-F based PicoCOMA5 module. Like the German firm’s larger, 62 x 47mm Efus A9X COM, it incorporates NXP’s i.MX6 SoloX system-on-chip.
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The USB-enabled 55 x 25mm “Explore M3” board is based on NXP’s LPC1768 Cortex-M3 MCU, and supports Arduino IDE, FreeRTOS, and bare metal development.
Bangalore India-based startup Explore Embedded has soared past its exceptionally modest $700 CrowdSupply funding goal for its Explore M3 development board. Early bird packages are gone, but you can still buy in for $19 through Oct. 13, with volume discounts. The Explore M3 is also available with a $20 Soda Debug Adapter and a $49 ARM Starter Kit. Shipments are due Nov. 15.
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Phones
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As a Sailfish OS user, you can now download and install the latest software update released for your Sailfish OS powered device.
The new update is called Aurajoki, which we released as an early access version a few months back.
Aurajoki is a river in the beautiful city of Turku in western Finland. As you may have noticed, we moved away from lake names to river names (‘joki’ means river in Finnish) for our new wave of updates as we wanted to add more motion to the release names.
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It’s been a while since last having a Sailfish OS update from Jolla to talk about, but that’s changed with the “Aurajoki” release finally hitting supported devices.
Sailfish OS Aurajoki is “one of our biggest releases in a long time,” which should be exciting for Jolla device owners but unfortunately doesn’t appear to add many compelling new features to tempt users of other platforms to switch over.
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Tizen
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Samsung Electronics has announced the certification of the entire range of its 2016 Smart TVs by renowned German testing and certification authority, TÜV Rheinland, for their usability. Aside certifying the TVs’ usability, TÜV Rheinland is also reported to have validated Samsung Smart TVs for their remote features. The certification and validation was awarded to Series 7 and higher Samsung Smart TVs, with specific reference made to the auto-detect feature that identifies external devices connected to the TV, and the Smart Remote that controls multiple devices.
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If you own a Tizen-powered Samsung smart TV or hope to buy one soon, then this news should get you elated. Samsung has teamed up with eLearning company Ascendia to bring eLearning games to the EduPedia app on Tizen TV right from its edutainment portal.
Ascendia announced the partnership and already the pilot program is now running in Romania. This isn’t going to be an elephant project, so you don’t have to worry, it’ll in the long run hit every house with Samsung Smart TV in it. The educational content of the Dacobots portal is available in English biut in coming months, many additional languages will be added. According to Ascendia, the relevant content can be found under the “Dinobots Kindergarten” and “Dacobots School” sections in the Tizen EduPedia application.
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Android
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For years, Samsung has been toying with its own mobile operating system, the Tizen OS that never quite gained enough support to be a real Android rival.
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I’ve now been using the LG V20 for about two days (two half days, one full day), and I’m ready to give you some thoughts and impressions on the newest high-end device from LG.
I didn’t review the V10 – Android Police editor emeritus Cameron Summerson had that job – so I’m using the V20 with a fresh set of eyes. What I do know about the V10 is that fans of that phone loved it. Not since the LG G2 and G3 had I seen quite such a positive reaction to an LG smartphone, and I think that had to do with the V10′s “no nonsense” approach to the large smartphone market. 64GB of standard storage, “high end” internal audio, a Quad HD display, removable battery, and rear-mounted fingerprint scanner made the V10 feel like the big phone with few compromises, apart from that questionable Snapdragon 808 chipset.
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Android is a powerful mobile operating system that provides a lot more customization options than its competitors (namely the iPhone). Although the ins and outs of a handset can vary between phone makers, these Android shortcuts should work no matter what model of phone you’re using. Here are 12 gestures you can use on Android that you might not know about.
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We know how a new iPhone gets existing iPhone owners flocking to the Apple Store to upgrade, but how do Android users react to a shiny, new Apple phone?
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I’ve spent a good bit of time explaining the ins and outs of open source products: what they are, how to make money with them, and what they are not. Namely, products are products, no matter the source code license they are published under. But there’s a journey that a software project must undergo before it can be accurately labeled with the moniker “product.” This journey includes, but is not limited to, the open source supply chain going from upstream bits to downstream product, as well as a bit of special sauce branding, complete with trademark, that applies only to the supported product. But, I can feel a bit of grousing bubbling just under the surface: Why does it have to be so complicated?
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Organizations use open source software to gain competitive advantage in many ways: to speed up software delivery, save money on development, to stay flexible, and to stay on the leading edge of technology.
But using open source software, and especially integrating and redistributing it in products and services, carries with it added complexity and risk. Code coming in from multiple sources, under different licenses and with varied quality and maturity levels, can expose organizations to issues with security, integration, support and management — not to mention legal action — if the code is not properly managed.
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Laura Abbott marks the end of the latest round of open-source internships at Outreachy with a blog post reflecting on “what makes an internship successful,” especially as seen in the kernel team’s internships.
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I wanted to share a recent interview with OpenSource.com about the FreeDOS Project, an open source software project that’s been close to me since 1994. Jason Baker from Red Hat interviewed me about FreeDOS, why we started it, and what to expect in FreeDOS 1.2 (out later this year).
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Despite new developments with the Open Compute Project and other groups, challenges remain when it comes to open source implementation in the data center. Explore them with these FAQs.
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Debian is one of the oldest Linux-based distributions that became the base of many distros. One of the most popular Debian forks is Ubuntu. Ubuntu takes Debian packages and builds its own packages. It has its own software repository, it’s own kernel. Though many would argue whether Ubuntu is a fork or not, even Mark Shuttleworth is not fully sure.
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Canopy is an open-source software so oncologists will be able to use it to identify potential biomarkers for different cancer cell populations within tumor specimens that are associated with drug resistance and invasive malignancy, among other characteristics.
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I have written in the past how the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC) has generated some great use case specifications on Real-Time Media and Software Defined Networking (RTM SDN) and how the Open Network Foundation (ONF) has realized these use cases with a new open source project for RTM SDN called Project Atrium Enterprise. However, what most don’t realize is how open source has changed the world in how we do Research and Development (R&D) as an industry.
I for one, having been in a closed source world for many years, didn’t realize how innovation is being incubated in a totally different model than the past. I always thought open source projects were what developers did in their spare time and that features were just punted over the wall with no rhyme or reason. Now, I knew that open source Linux was widely used as the operating system of choice for embedded systems; however, what I didn’t understand is how open source projects really worked and how they have been funded.
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Descendent Studios, makers of Descent: Underground, announced the open-source release of several Unreal Engine 4 plugins they developed for the game. The studio rolled out their GitHub repository on the heels of last week’s announcement that Descent: Underground won an Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Fund grant from Razer. Descent: Underground was the first high-end action title to natively support all of the major desktop VR headsets: OSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift.
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Events
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PostgresOpen is the longest running PostgreSQL conference in the United States. This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Stephen Frost, who is the program committee chair and a main organizer of PostgresOpen, which takes place this year in Dallas, TX from September 13-15. We talked about who goes, what sessions to look for, and their charity event which will be helping a cause near and dear to my heart: diversity in tech.
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In 2014 Bloomberg hosted its first “Open Source Day” event, which was an experiment to see if we could combine the company’s long history of volunteerism with open source collaboration. We brought one of the Git project’s core developers to New York City, got about 30 employees signed up, and they spent the day learning how to build, test, and improve Git. The event was such a success that we’ve held a half-dozen more, and they’ve grown into weekend events with attendees from our Engineering team, local universities and colleges, and of course the open source community.
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Databases
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InfluxData Inc. said its new open source InfluxDB time-series database — just moved to version 1.0 — was almost three years in the making.
Written in the Go programming language, InfluxDB 1.0 was designed to process time-series data with high availability and high performance requirements, the company said.
Although most popular in Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics development, time-series databases have many other use cases, according to InfluxData.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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After testing seven Linux distributions and eight BSDs on the new Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP + MSI X99A WORKSTATION system, I next decided to try getting some fresh Solaris-based results.
Unfortunately, using OpenIndiana nor Oracle Solaris was successful.
With the OpenIndiana tests I was using their newest “Hipster” ISOs bundled with the MATE desktop. I was able to get to the MATE desktop after selecting the VESA driver option from the boot-loader, then it looked like things may be going well for this Illumos-based operating system on this modern Broadwell-EP system where I’ve been testing all these Linux/BSD distributions as of late. However, after firing up the graphical installer, as soon as the actual installation process began the installer window immediately disappeared… Then a few seconds later the system was completely unresponsive. Rebooting again, same problem.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the integration of Internet technology into a wider range of home devices than previously envisaged by most users. Early adopters of IoT may now have homes with Internet-connected lightbulbs, alarm systems, baby monitors and even coffee machines. Internet integration allows owners to have greater flexibility over their devices, making it possible to turn on their air conditioning as they leave work to cool the house before they return, to have curtains that automatically close based on sunset time, or lights that automatically turn off after the owner has left the house. Each individual benefit may seem marginal, but overall they add significant benefit to the owners.
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Released GnuTLS 3.4.15, and GnuTLS 3.5.4 which are bug fix releases in the current and next stable branches.
Added the GnuTLS-SA-2016-3 security advisory.
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This week’s meeting had a special theme of looking at the categories and other user interface elements of the directory. The directory is one of the most frequently visited resources maintained by the Free Software Foundation, often by users who may not be familiar with free software. So we want to make sure the way that it presents itself is welcoming and useful. The first hour of the meeting was dedicated solely to discussing these issues.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Higher education is increasingly embracing different concepts of openness, from open access to open education resources (OER). But where does that other open concept—open source—fit into this model? Open source represents the best way to ensure these materials can be easily modified, without risk of material suddenly becoming unchangeable or inaccessible.
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Programming/Development
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Version 5.4 of the V8 JavaScript Engine has been released. This is another hefty update to V8 and it brings the favorite kind of work we like talking about: more performance improvements.
V8 Release 5.4 brings reductions in peak memory usage of on-heap memory up to 40% by tuning the garbage collector for low-memory systems. The off-heap peak memory usage has improved by up to 20% as well thanks to simplifying the V8 JavaScript parser.
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Standards/Consortia
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The march of HTML 5 dominance across the web has received an arousing boost with the news that popular porn site Pornhub is dumping flash in favor of the open web standard.
Whereas porn usually leads when it comes to embracing new technologies, the decision by Pornhub to abandon Flash was a case where instead it was following others, in particular Google The search giant announced in August that it would begin removing all support for Flash in its market-leading Google Chrome browser from version 53 that was due to be released in September.
Pornhub does, however, lead the porn industry, with competitors including YouPorn, xHamster, and RedTube still relying on Flash to serve their content.
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The Internet of Things has tremendous potential, but remains a mishmash of conflicting “standards” that don’t talk to each other. As various vendors erect data silos in the sky, what is actually needed is increased developer communication between disparate IoT projects.
I’ve argued before that this is one reason IoT needs to be open sourced, providing neutral territory for developers to focus on code, not business models. But there’s still an open question as to what kind of open source best facilitates developer-to-developer sharing. In Cessanta CTO and co-founder Sergey Lyubka’s view, the restrictive GNU General Public License (GPLv2) is the right way to license IoT, at least for now.
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Google is making some significant moves to bolster its presence in cloud computing. In its latest move, the company said it is acquiring cloud software company Apigee in a deal valued at about $625 million. Apigee offers API management solutions that help companies’ digital services interact with applications used by customers and partners. For example, Apigee Edge is an intelligent API management solution that helps businesses manage open source APIs “to securely share services and data across multiple channels and devices.”
Just this week, Google also partnered with Box to allow users of the popular Box enterprise cloud storage and content services platform edit documents with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, while keeping them stored on Box. Many enterprise users will applaud that move as it will give them more coud storage freedom. What is behind all these cloud moves from Google?
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Your phone uses the equivalent of two refrigerators’ worth of electricity every year.
No, charging your phone doesn’t suck up as much energy as your TV, Apple TV, your fridge, or your vacuum does. But if you add in all of the electricity required to store and move data across high-speed cable and wireless networks and climate-controlled server farms to deliver an hour of video to your phone each week, in the space of a year it adds up to more power than two new Energy Star refrigerators consume in the same time.
The estimate, from a 2013 report by the U.S. National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity—is a controversial one, but perhaps no estimate of the energy impact of our electronics use isn’t: measuring the aggregate impact of the supply chain and infrastructure behind your phone across its life cycle is a very difficult thing to do.
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If you’ve ever read anything on the internet, you know that the American education system isn’t doing so hot. Of course, poorly spelled rants against barely understood aspects of politics and culture aren’t the sole provenance of the United States, but global national education statistics do give some weight to the “Stupid American” stereotype. There are, however, several ready-made solutions to our many, many problems. All we have to do is swallow our pride and let other countries teach us how to become more better at schooling.
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I’m not sure which is more disturbing. The decision to embed version history in every email they send, or the inconsistent date formats, or the strange mix of HTML, C, and C++ style comments. Using — is a particularly poor choice of decoration within an HTML comment, by the by.
I’m also having a fun time imagining staying at a hotel 50 years ago, then receiving a follow up letter spattered with white out covering up various notes from the marketer to the secretary. “Insert reference to upcoming holiday here.”
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Congratulations. From this day forward, you will no longer squander your time trying to work out the perfect regex to validate email addresses. You will also never again run the risk of rejecting what is, in fact, a strange, valid email address.
The trick is to first define what we mean by ‘valid’.
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Science
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Internet Australia wants to see the country do more to achieve its potential as a world-leading “innovation nation” and has repeated its call for a Digital Future Forum of government and industry leaders, trade unions and academics to develop a roadmap for innovation.
IA chief executive Laurie Patton told the Digital Strategy Innovation Summit in Sydney on Wednesday there needs to be agreement between all political parties and industry on the direction Australia should take to achieve a national innovation agenda for the country.
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There’s nothing new or unusual about corporate and academic collaboration. IBM, for instance, has partnered with universities around the country since the 1940s to support computer science education. This relationship is mutually beneficial both for the tech giant and the institutions sponsored. IBM’s grant dollars provide welcome funding for research and equipment for students, all while fostering a new class of computer scientists and engineers.
University-business partnerships, however, require a careful balance. Take the tobacco industry. According to a 2012 study by Harvard professor Allan Brandt, cigarette makers all but invented the concept of industry-academic conflicts of interest. Since the 1950s, cigarette companies have sought to influence the debate about the dangers of smoking to sell more of their products. One tactic used was aligning with university-based science and underwriting millions of dollars for favorable research.
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Hardware
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APPLE’S NEW iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are being advertised as “water and dust resistant” but water sports enthusiasts should take note that they are not water and dust proof.
The difference is important if you are a scuba diver who always needs to be connected, because you’ll get nowhere with Cook & Co if you send your waterlogged phone back for replacement under warranty.
“iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are splash, water and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP67 under IEC standard 60529,” said Apple’s get-out clause.
“Splash, water and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.”
Interestingly, the blurb doesn’t mention dust damage so speedway riders may be OK.
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Health/Nutrition
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The bacteria on your skin is safer than these two chemicals the FDA just banned from your soap.
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Anyone who’s lived in a smoggy city would likely welcome the idea of using widely dispersed air filters to soak up all those toxic tidbits floating around—unless, of course, those filters were functioning human brains.
Our noggins naturally catch and collect the toxic, magnetic nanoparticles that we inadvertently inhale from polluted air, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those wee particles, made of the strongly magnetic iron oxide compound, magnetite, have been found in human brains before and were thought to be normal and harmless byproducts of biological processes. But according to the new study, a closer examination of minuscule metal balls in 37 human brains revealed that they’re actually from smog, formed during combustion or friction-derived heating, such as slamming on the brakes of a car.
Whether the particles are harmful is hazy, but the authors note that the nanomagnets have two troubling features: they can interact with misfolded proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease to produce reactive oxygen species, which can severely damage cells; and large amounts of them in the brain correlated with Alzheimer’s disease in earlier studies. Given these potential risks, the authors—a team of researchers from the UK and Mexico—suggest that exposure to them “might need to be examined as a possible hazard to human health.”
Lead author Barbara Maher, physicist and co-director of the Centre for Environmental Magnetism and Paleomagnetism at Lancaster University in the UK, got the idea to examine the brain-embedded particles knowing that magnetite nanoparticles are abundant in air pollution.
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There has been a massive increase in prescribing of anti-depressants to children over the last decade – but more than 40 per cent are drugs that have been shown not to work and which can have toxic side-effects, according to new research.
A study of almost 360,000 patients aged six to 18 in Wales found there had been a 28 per cent rise in anti-depressants given out by GPs, raising fears of the “medicalisation” of unhappiness and the ordinary emotional turmoil experienced by teenagers.
However the researchers said it could also be because children were now getting the help they needed due to a fall in the stigma attached to mental health problems.
Curiously while the number of prescriptions per child, per year went up, the number of diagnoses of depression fell, which the academics suggested was a sign that doctors were trying to avoid “labelling” young people as mentally ill.
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Sri Lanka has become malaria-free. On September 5, the World Health Organisation officially recognised this huge public health achievement. The WHO certifies a country so when the chain of local transmission is interrupted for at least three consecutive years; the last reported case was in October 2012. With no local transmission reported, Sri Lanka’s priority since October 2012 has been to prevent its return from outside, particularly from malaria-endemic countries such as India. There were 95, 49 and 36 cases reported in 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively, all contracted outside Sri Lanka. In a commendable initiative, Sri Lanka adopted a two-pronged strategy of targeting both vector and parasite, undertaking active detection of cases and residual parasite carriers by screening populations irrespective of whether malaria symptoms were present. Early detection and treatment of asymptomatic parasite carriers, who serve as reservoirs of infection, played a crucial role in interrupting the chain. While this was achieved by means of house visits and by starting mobile clinics in high-transmission areas, real-time monitoring through effective surveillance systems, community awareness and mobilisation also played their role. The public sector and the private sector were oriented to the common goal of eliminating malaria by enhancing case notification and achieving 100 per cent detection and confirmation through tests. Sri Lanka expanded the coverage of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to protect high-risk populations, and used multiple methods to reduce mosquito numbers.
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Security
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Net scum are still finding ways to take down users with a decade-old Windows Media Player attack.
The vector is a reborn social engineering hatchet job not seen in years in which attackers convince users to run executable content through Windows Media Player’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality.
Windows Media Player will throw a DRM warning whenever users do not have the rights to play content, opening a URL through which a licence can be acquired.
Now malware villains are packing popular movies with malicious links so that the DRM warning leads to sites where they’re fooled into downloading trojans masquerading as necessary video codecs.
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The IT security researchers at MalwareMustDie have discovered a malware that is capable of infecting Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices and web servers to launch DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
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IoT (Internet-of-Thing) devices have been used to make a botnet earlier also just like attackers recently compromised 8 different popular home-routers that are IoT brands to make a botnet out of them which executed a DDoS attack at the application-level against several servers of certain website. Discoverer of this application-level DDoS alternatively HTTPS flood assault of Layer 7 is Sucuri the security company.
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A new trojan coded in Rust is targeting Linux-based platforms and adding them to a botnet controlled through an IRC channel, according to a recent discovery by Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker.
Initial analysis of this trojan, detected as Linux.BackDoor.Irc.16, reveals this may be only a proof-of-concept or a testing version in advance to a fully weaponized version.
Currently, the trojan only infects victims, gathers information about the local system and sends it to its C&C server.
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A recent ping from a reader reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about the security limitations of using cell phone text messages for two-factor authentication online. The reader’s daughter had received a text message claiming to be from Google, warning that her Gmail account had been locked because someone in India had tried to access her account. The young woman was advised to expect a 6-digit verification code to be sent to her and to reply to the scammer’s message with that code.
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Depending on your age, you either might or might not have used Telnet to connect to remote computers in the past. But regardless of your age, you would probably not consider Telnet for anything you currently use. SSH has become the de facto standard when it comes to remote shell connection as it offers higher security, data encryption and much more besides.
When we created our first honeypots for the Turris project (see our older blog articles – 1, 2, 3), we started with SSH and Telnet, because both offer interactive console access and thus are very interesting for potential attackers. But SSH was our main goal, while Telnet was more of a complimentary feature. It came as a great surprise to discover that the traffic we drew to the Telnet honeypots is three orders of magnitude higher than in the case of SSH (note the logarithmic scale of the plot below). Though there is a small apples-to-oranges issue, as we compare the number of login attempts for Telnet with the number of issued commands for SSH, the huge difference is obvious and is also visible in other aspects, such as in the number of unique attacker IP addresses.
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vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.
The vDOS database, obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com at the end of July 2016, points to two young men in Israel as the principal owners and masterminds of the attack service, with support services coming from several young hackers in the United States.
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Game of War: Fire Age, your typical melange of swords and sorcery, has been one of the top-grossing mobile apps for three years, accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. So publisher Machine Zone was furious when the game’s servers, run by hosting company Peak Web, went dark for 10 hours last October. Two days later, Machine Zone fired Peak Web, citing multiple outages, and later sued.
Then came the countersuit. Peak Web argued in court filings that Machine Zone was voiding its contract illegally, because the software bug that caused the game outages resided in faulty network switches made by Cisco Systems, and according to Peak Web’s contract with Machine Zone, it wasn’t liable. In December, Cisco publicly acknowledged the bug’s existence—too late to help Peak Web, which filed for bankruptcy protection in June, citing the loss of Machine Zone’s business as the reason. The Machine Zone-Peak Web trial is slated for March 2017.
“Machine Zone wasn’t acting in good faith,” says Steve Morrissey, a partner at law firm Susman Godfrey, which is representing Peak Web. “They were trying to get out of the contract.” Machine Zone has disputed that assertion in court documents, but it declined to comment for this story. Cisco also declined to comment on the case, saying only that it tries to publish confirmed problems quickly.
There’s buggy code in virtually every electronic system. But few companies ever talk about the cost of dealing with bugs, for fear of being associated with error-prone products. The trial, along with Peak Web’s bankruptcy filings, promises a rare look at just how much or how little control a company may have over its own operations, depending on the software that undergirds it. Think of the corporate computers around the world rendered useless by a faulty update from McAfee in 2010, or of investment company Knight Capital, which lost $458 million in 30 minutes in 2012—and had to be sold months later—after new software made erratic, automated stock market trades.
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It is often the illusive “H Factor” – the human element – that ends up being the weakest link that makes cyber-attacks and data breaches possible.
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The White House announced Thursday that retired Brigadier General Gregory J. Touhill will serve as the first federal Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
“The CISO will play a central role in helping to ensure the right set of policies, strategies, and practices are adopted across agencies and keeping the Federal Government at the leading edge of 21st century cybersecurity,” read a blog post penned by Tony Scott, US Chief Information Officer, and J. Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator.
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The Xen Project has fixed four vulnerabilities in its widely used virtualization software, two of which could allow malicious virtual machine administrators to take over host servers.
Flaws that break the isolation layer between virtual machines are the most serious kind for a hypervisor like Xen, which allows users to run multiple VMs on the same underlying hardware in a secure manner.
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A Hong Kong-based technology manufacturer, USBKill.com, has taken data security to the “Mission Impossible” extreme by creating a USB stick that uses an electrical discharge to fry an unauthorized computer into which it’s plugged.
“When the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges — all in the matter of seconds,” the company said in a news release.
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WordPress is urging webmasters to update their CMS packages as quickly as possible to protect their domains from critical vulnerability exploits.
On Thursday, the content management system (CMS) provider released a security advisory alongside the latest version of WordPress, 4.6.1. Now available, the update patches two serious security problems, a cross-site scripting vulnerability and a path traversal security flaw.
The XSS flaw, discovered by SumOfPwn researcher Cengiz Han back in July at the Summer of Pwnage bug bounty project, allows attackers to use a crafted image file, upload to WordPress, and inject malicious JavaScript code into the software.
An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to perform a range of actions, including stealing session tokens and login credentials, as well as remotely execute malicious code.
The second critical issue, reported by Dominik Schilling from the WordPress security team, is a path traversal vulnerability discovered within the upgrade package uploader.
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Defence/Aggression
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Three U.S. veterans are supporting Faisal bin Ali Jaber, whose brother-in-law and nephew were killed in 2012 in a drone strike.
Three former drone operators backed a lawsuit against the U.S. drone program on Thursday to push for more accountability in deadly drone strikes.
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Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man’s legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike.
The veterans’ unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history.
The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation’s targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence.
The veterans say they “witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations.”
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Hillary Clinton is meeting on Friday with a new national security “working group” that is filled with an elite “who’s who” of the military-industrial complex and the security deep state.
The list of key advisers — which includes the general who executed the troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror profiteer — is a strong indicator that Clinton’s national security policy will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at home.
It’s a story we’ve seen before in President Obama’s early appointments. In retrospect, analysts have pointed to the continuity in national security and intelligence advisers as an early sign that despite his campaign rhetoric Obama would end up building on — rather than tearing down — the often-extralegal, Bush-Cheney counterterror regime. For instance, while Obama promised in 2008 to reform the NSA, its director was kept on and its reach continued to grow.
Obama’s most fateful decision may have been choosing former National Counterterrorism Center Director John Brennan to be national security adviser, despite Brennan’s support of Bush’s torture program. Brennan would go on to run the president’s drone program, lead the CIA, fight the Senate’s torture investigation, and then lie about searching Senate computers.
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Sen. Rand Paul’s expression of opposition to a $1.1 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia — which has been brutally bombing civilian targets in Yemen using U.S.-made weapons for more than a year now — alarmed CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday afternoon.
Blitzer’s concern: That stopping the sale could result in fewer jobs for arms manufacturers.
“So for you this is a moral issue,” he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. “Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?”
Paul stayed on message. “Well not only is it a moral question, its a constitutional question,” Paul said. “Our founding fathers very directly and specifically did not give the president the power to go to war. They gave it to Congress. So Congress needs to step up and this is what I’m doing.”
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Russia and the US have announced an agreement on Syria starting with a “cessation of hostilities” from sunset on Monday.
Under the plan, the Syrian government will end combat missions in specified areas held by the opposition.
Russia and the US will establish a joint centre to combat so-called Islamic State and al-Nusra fighters.
The announcement follows talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
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The U.S. and Russia led global condemnation of North Korea Friday, after the reclusive state said it had completed a fifth nuclear test.
Speaking in Geneva ahead of talks on Syria, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated the nuclear test carried out in the early hours of Friday would be referred to the Security Council.
Kerry said that the topic will be discussed within “the context of the United Nations,” according to Reuters.
Previous U.N. Security Council resolutions had banned North Korea from trialling new ballistic missiles, or carrying out nuclear testing. Lavrov said Friday that U.N. resolutions “must be followed.”
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In an interview with John Micklethwait of BloombergBusinessweek, Putin was asked about Russia’s desire to expand its influence geographically. Putin answered as follows:
“I think all sober-minded people who really are involved in politics understand that the idea of a Russian threat to, for example, the Baltics is complete madness. Are we really about to fight NATO? How many people live in NATO? About 600 million, correct? There are 146 million in Russia. Yes, we’re the biggest nuclear power. But do you really think that we’re about to conquer the Baltics using nuclear weapons? What is this madness? That’s the first point, but by no means the main point.
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The U.S. threat to launch a first-strike nuclear attack has little real strategic value – though it poses a real risk to human survival – but President Obama fears political criticism if he changes the policy, as Jonathan Marshall explains.
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In Saudi Arabia itself, the government seems unable to cope with the crisis. The ‘Arab News’ says that 31,000 Saudi and other foreign workers have lodged complaints with the government’s labour ministry over unpaid wages. On one occasion, the Indian consulate and expatriates brought food to the workers so that their people should not starve
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Fifteen years ago, the world watched as the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States played out before their eyes.
The images are unforgettable, and the stories of those who died and those who rushed to the scene dominated media coverage for months after the attacks.
But the way people mark the anniversary has in many ways changed from a collective experience that the masses were a part of, to a more personal experience, according to Brian A. Monahan, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at Marywood University in Scranton, Penn.
Monahan notes that fifteen-years-later there are two groups of people who experienced the attacks in very different ways — those who were around and watched the events unfold, and the second group of people who weren’t alive or were too young to remember.
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The American military’s extensive use of drones against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups has resulted in a shortage of Air Force pilots and other personnel to operate the aircraft, leading the Pentagon to rely more on private contractors for reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used contractors to perform many duties traditionally carried out by uniformed personnel, like protecting military bases and feeding service members. The contractors who are now serving as drone pilots are based in the regions where the drones are flown, and they are legally prohibited from being “trigger pullers” and firing weapons, Air Force officials said. But there is no limit on the type of reconnaissance they can perform, and they are providing live video feeds of battles and special operations.
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This week on CounterSpin: A federal prosecutor in Brazil determined that the bookkeeping maneuver with which twice-elected president Dilma Rousseff had been charged by her right-wing opposition did not constitute a crime. Rousseff’s congressional opponents include a number of people themselves facing charges, including bribery, electoral fraud, kidnapping and homicide. Then Rousseff was ousted. Many Brazilians are calling it a coup, but the official US position is, what now? We’ll hear about what’s happening in Brazil from Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Libertarian Gary Johnson’s blank gaze at the name “Aleppo” is shocking – about as shocking as yesterday’s chlorine gas attack constituting yet another war crime there, or the New York Times’ three corrections to get right just what Aleppo is and isn’t, or the way Twitter exploded about one guy’s unreal ignorance while generally ignoring almost an entire population’s annihilation, or the pitiable fact that another presidential candidate actually knows less than Trump, or the even more miserable fact that Johnson’s bewilderment pretty much sums up U.S. policy, press knowledge and levels of public awareness on Syria, which is, as Johnson so astutely noted, “a mess.” No, this wasn’t “a stumble” or “blunder” or “gaffe.” It’s the sorry state of our national political landscape. What’s not shocking here: Nobody in Aleppo has heard of Johnson either – they’re way too busy trying to stay alive.
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The fact that Johnson had apparently never heard of the strategically important city — and even failed to guess that it was the name of a city (he told Whoopi Goldberg later that he thought it might have been an acronym) — stunned Mike Barnicle, the columnist who asked him what he would do about the situation there if he was elected president.
When Johnson asked what Aleppo (or A.L.E.P.P.O. — or, a leppo) might be, Barnicle replied, with open contempt, “You’re kidding.”
But Johnson, it turns out, was not alone.
As remarkable as that moment was, it was quickly followed by reports on Johnson’s cluelessness that included basic errors about who was fighting in the city and why the tragedy there matters to the rest of the world.
Taken together, those error-strewn reports suggest that American journalists and pundits have become so completely focused on the horse-race aspect of electoral politics that they are paying almost no attention to the biggest foreign policy crisis that will face the next president.
The tone was set by Christopher Hill, a former United States ambassador to Iraq who is now the dean of international studies at the University of Denver.
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Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, when asked in an MSNBC interview (Morning Joe, 9/8/16) what he would do about the battle raging over the Syrian city of Aleppo, responded, “What is Aleppo?”
That’s troubling, that a presidential candidate would be unaware of one of the main battlefields in one of the world’s deadliest conflicts. But even more troubling is that the New York Times, the US paper of record, can’t seem to figure out what Aleppo is, either.
As FAIR contributor Ben Norton noted in a piece for Salon (9/8/16), the Times‘ Alan Rappeport (9/8/16) wrote a piece about Johnson’s gaffe that described Aleppo as “the de facto capital of the Islamic State,” or ISIS. That’s wrong; the de facto capital of ISIS is Raqqa, a city halfway across Syria from Aleppo.
This was then changed in an edit to describe Aleppo as “a stronghold of the Islamic State.” That’s also wrong; the main rebel faction in Aleppo is Jabhat al-Nusra, better known as the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria—a bitter rival of ISIS. ISIS itself has little presence in the city.
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I really don’t want to get bogged down in the Hillary email story. But given the ongoing discussions about whether claims she used the personal server to avoid oversight have merit, I did two more things. First, I did this timeline. Without going into too much detail, there are decisions made after requests for emails that suggest avoiding oversight was driving some of this. That’s especially true given the conflicting stories from Paul Combetta pertaining to his actions in late 2014 and March 2015; he ended up deleting Hillary’s emails after being informed of the House Oversight request for them. He may have only revealed that with an immunity deal.
The other detail I want to focus on is the number of devices Hillary had. Hillary defenders often point to her claim that she used the Blackberry for convenience to claim she surely wasn’t avoiding oversight. But I think the FBI report shows that she had three devices, not just one.
Most of the attention on the number of her devices focuses on the fact that she had 13 serial BBs, none of which were handed over to the FBI (instead of her actual BBs,, Williams & Connolly turned over two other BBs, though without SIM or SD cards).
It is true that her 13 BBs were used serially, not at once, which makes Hillary Clinton just like Tom Brady in her serial use of phones: she’s just a famous person who likes to swap out her phones all the time. The difference being that Tom Brady was told he didn’t need to keep his phone, whereas Hillary was under record-keeping obligations even before any investigation started. And Brady at least had had his comms reviewed by lawyers before he deleted his phone.
But it’s not the 13 BB detail that poses problems to Hillary’s single device claim. It’s this passage.
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The “Commander-in-Chief Forum” with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that NBC’s Matt Lauer moderated Wednesday night was billed as a way to interrogate the presidential candidates on substantive veterans’ and national security issues.
But from the questions chosen to the format, the event served as little more than a class on how not to hold the candidates accountable.
In the 25 minutes devoted to Clinton, nearly half was spent by Lauer grilling her about her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state (one veteran also asked about the issue). That left little room for questions on policies she presided over while in office.
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The United States is spending more money on more missions to send more elite U.S. forces to train alongside more foreign counterparts in more countries around the world, according to documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.
Under the Joint Combined Exchange Training program, which is designed to train America’s special operators in a variety of missions — from “foreign internal defense” to “unconventional warfare” — U.S. troops carried out approximately one mission every two days in 2014, the latest year covered by the recently released documents.
At a price tag of more than $56 million, the U.S. sent its most elite operators — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and others — on 176 individual JCETs, a 13 percent increase from 2013. The number of countries involved jumped even further, from 63 to 87, a 38 percent spike.
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When a major party cynically espouses a set of beliefs as a tactic for winning an election, those beliefs get entrenched in popular discourse and often endure well past the election, with very significant consequences. The most significant such rhetorical template in the 2016 election — other than the new Democratic claim that big-money donations do not corrupt the political process — is that Russia is a Grave Enemy of the U.S.; anyone who advocates better relations or less tension with Moscow is a likely sympathizer, stooge, or even agent of Putin; and any associations with the Kremlin render one’s loyalties suspect.
Literally every week ushers in a new round of witch hunts in search of domestic Kremlin agents and new evidence of excessive Putin sympathies. The latest outburst was last night’s discovery that Donald Trump allowed himself to be interviewed by well-known Kremlin propagandist and America-hater Larry King on his RT show. “Criticizing US on Russian TV is something no American, much less an aspiring prez, should do,” pronounced Fred Kaplan. Other guests appearing on that network include Soviet spy Bernard Sanders (who spoke this year to Putin crony and RT host Ed Schultz), Bill Maher (whose infiltrates American culture through his cover as a comedian hosting an HBO program), and Stephen Hawking (whom the FSB has groomed to masquerade as a “physicist” while he carries out un-American activities on behalf of Putin).
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The Ethiopian leadership remains in denial. The long meetings of its ruling bodies have culminated in a report on 15 years of national “rebirth”, in which it awards itself good marks, while acknowledging the existence of a few problems here and there.
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United Nations investigators encountered evidence that alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian military were staged by jihadist rebels and their supporters, but still decided to blame the government for two incidents in which chlorine was allegedly dispersed via improvised explosives dropped by helicopters.
In both cases, the Syrian government denied that it had any aircraft in the areas at the times of the purported attacks, but the U.N. team rejected that explanation with the curious argument that Syria failed to provide flight records to corroborate the absence of any flights. Yet, if there had been no flights, there would be no flight records.
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The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has come in for criticism due to its lack of attention to the detrimental effects of wars and military operations on nature. Considering the degree of harm to the environment coming from these human activities, one would think that the organization might have set aside some time at its World Conservation Congress this past week in Hawaii to specifically address these concerns.
Yet, of the more than 1,300 workshops crammed into the six-day marathon environmental meeting in Honolulu, followed by four days of discussion about internal resolutions, nothing specifically addressed the destruction of the environment by military operations and wars.
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The United States sent a senior official to the Arms Trade Treaty conference meeting in Geneva on 22-26 August to make the case for controls on exports of armed drones. The diplomat concerned, Brian Nilsson of the Bureau for Political Military Affairs, presented a draft document to establish principles for such exports, “with the express purpose of holding meetings with foreign delegations attending the conference and encouraging them to sign onto the declaration.”
In its way this appears to be a milestone in arms proliferation and international diplomacy, where Washington at last recognises a reality that has long been tracked in this series of columns and elsewhere: the proliferation of armed drones across the world, a process which the US itself – as a leading global producer and exporter – is deeply implicated. The Pentagon thinks it is reasonable to develop a technology that gives it an edge in the new era of ‘remote warfare’. But once many other people learn to do it, the edge disappears. It is time, then, to argue for arms control.
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Perhaps the most enduring question of Barack Obama’s presidency is a deceptively simple one: is the United States at war?
“America is at a crossroads,” Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in 2013. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” He then quoted James Madison, the fourth US president, who wrote, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
The speech was the closest Obama has come while in office to winding down — rhetorically, at least — what George W. Bush famously called the “Global War on Terror.” Yet, if Obama’s goal was to end, or even simply define, the war by the end of his eight years as president, he has failed. The country remains on a “perpetual wartime footing,” a phrase he used in the 2013 speech. That is due in part to the rise of ISIS (also known as Daesh), but the Obama administration’s militarism extends far beyond Iraq and Syria. And even the rise of ISIS’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, came as a direct response to the US occupation of Iraq.
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Hold on a second. Common sense got caught in my throat there for a minute. The crime dog on this case is…this guy? I mean, really, this guy? At least Trey Gowdy was a prosecutor once. This guy is a former reality show star who first got famous as a politician by whining about his congressional salary. This is that deep bench again.
But, since we are handed this lemon, let’s make some lemonade, shall we? Let’s go back to the golden days of early 1981, when the great sunshine of Amon-Ra Reagan had fallen upon the land, and some hostages came home—after which $12 billion in Iranian assets that Jimmy Carter had frozen suddenly were thawed. Six years later, he let them have $454 million more of their assets. There was a great unfreezing under the Reagan Administration.
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As President Obama toured an exhibition of prosthetics made for Laotians who lost limbs when bombs exploded years or even decades after the United States dropped them on Laos during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. announced it would provide $90 million over the next three years to help Laos clear the remaining explosives.
The unexploded bombs are 30 percent of the total that the United States dropped on the country—a total Obama described as “more bombs on Laos than [on] Germany and Japan during World War II.” So far, such ordnance has killed or injured more than 20,000 people.
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On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force.
From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets. (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.) In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.
It was a barbaric, if daring, plan and an atrocity of the first order. Almost 15 years later, such suicidal acts with similar “precision” weaponry (though without the air power component) continue to be unleashed across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and sometimes elsewhere, taking a terrible toll — from a soccer game in Iraq to a Kurdish wedding party in southeastern Turkey (where the “weapon” may have been a boy).
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“The Bush Administration initially said an inquiry was unnecessary, claiming that the perpetrators had been identified and their methods and motives were clear.”
Stein described the 9/11 Commission report as containing many “omissions and distortions.”
“The 9/11 Commission was not given enough money, time, or access to relevant classified information,” Stein said. “The Stein/Baraka campaign believes a new inquiry is necessary.”
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The NBC Candidates Forum continued the shameful corporate coverage of the Great American Meltdown that is our election season. That season has given us a Faux Cable News that runs clips of only one side and pays out hush money to cover up how its blonde anchors were not so much hired as trafficked; a CNN that has hired a paid employee of the candidate as a consultant and analyst; and networks that won’t mention climate change or carbon emissions the same way they won’t mention labor unions. They aren’t even trying to do journalism any more– cable “news” is mostly infotainment as a placeholder between ads for toilet paper. I can’t bear to watch it most of the time and just read the news on the Web. If I have to watch t.v. I turn on local news (often does a better job on national stories too) or Alarabiya and Aljazeera, which for all their faults do actually have real news (and their faults cancel out one another). I can always get the transcript for the cable news shows; reading it is faster and less painful than having to watch.
The NBC Forum didn’t really challenge either candidate on implausible statements, but on the whole engaged in a lot of badgering of Hillary Clinton while letting Donald Trump get away with outright misstatements of the facts and tossing him a lot of softballs.
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Sometimes the real news is in the details — or even in the discrepancies. Take, for instance, missions by America’s most elite troops in Africa.
It was September 2014. The sky was bright and clear and ice blue as the camouflage-clad men walked to the open door and tumbled out into nothing. One moment members of the U.S. 19th Special Forces Group and Moroccan paratroopers were flying high above North Africa in a rumbling C-130 aircraft; the next, they were silhouetted against the cloudless sky, translucent green parachutes filling with air, as they began to drift back to earth.
Those soldiers were taking part in a Joint Combined Exchange Training, or JCET mission, conducted under the auspices of Special Operations Command Forward-West Africa out of Camp Ram Ram, Morocco. It was the first time in several years that American and Moroccan troops had engaged in airborne training together, but just one of many JCET missions in 2014 that allowed America’s best-equipped, best-trained forces to hone their skills while forging ties with African allies.
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While Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump might have taken a victory lap after his meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, those south of the U.S. border are not.
Finance Minister Luis Videgaray resigned Wednesday, after backlash from the invitation to Trump to meet with Peña Nieto. Now, Mexican Senator Armando Rios Piter is proposing legislation that could put Mexico in conflict with the United States.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Attacks on WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, including accusations of collusion with foreign governments, are growing more commonplace in the media as Election Day approaches.
As the political establishment pushes back against WikiLeaks’ revelations of U.S. war crimes and corruption, political pundits have even threatened Assange’s life. Meanwhile, despite a total lack of evidence, the Clinton campaign continues to try to tie Assange to Russia, reviving a Cold War “red scare” narrative that the mainstream media seems all too eager to assist.
Mickey Huff, media literacy expert and director of Project Censored, told MintPress News that the media’s focus on Assange distracts from more important stories, including the actual content of the leaks released by WikiLeaks. A professor of social sciences at Diablo Valley College near San Francisco, Huff co-authors an annual report on censorship and propaganda in the media.
“I think we’re losing sight of the information these people are leaking,” he said. “It’s an ultimate distraction, a bait and switch.”
Criticism of Assange hasn’t been limited to attacks on his character, though. Political pundits, as well as some government officials and political candidates, have made serious threats against him. And treatment of Assange seems unlikely to improve under the next administration.
“He’s almost like a different version of an Osama bin Laden, a bogeyman du jour,” Huff said. “He’s someone that can be a whipping boy at almost any time if it’s necessary.”
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Swedish authorities have blamed the Ecuadorian embassy in London over delays in questioning its famous resident, Julian Assange, about sexual assault allegations.
“So far we heard nothing more from them,” Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny told reporters on Wednesday, after Ecuador said last month it would allow Assange to be interrogated inside the embassy.
“We are waiting to be told how and when this interview will take place, and if we will be able to be present while it’s been held,” said Ny, who added that Swedish investigators are ready to travel when needed.
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Few new details emerged at a press conference held by Ny and her colleague Ingrid Isberg in Stockholm on Wednesday to update Swedish and international media on the ongoing investigation.
Ny said she had been told that the Svea Court of Appeals would announce on Friday whether to uphold or throw out Stockholm District Court’s decision to keep Assange remanded in custody ‘in absentia’ over a 2010 rape allegation, an accusation which the 45-year-old Australian denies.
A major point of contention is that Assange has yet to be questioned in the case. After exhausting legal options in Britain, he fled to Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012. Ny said she had been trying to interrogate him since 2010 and defended a decision not to seek permission to meet him in London at an earlier stage.
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Let’s face it: the DOJ isn’t going to change until forced to — “presumption of disclosure” or not. This administration has done almost nothing to push for greater transparency and neither of the incoming presidential candidates — Hillary “Homebrew” Clinton or Donald “I Can Make My Own Laws, Right?” Trump — are likely to have a positive effect on government accountability going forward.
Certainly, there are still legislators who are pushing for better transparency, but they’re stymied by powerful agencies like the DOJ — and, often, the administration itself. The DOJ presides over agencies which have done everything but order a hit on prolific FOIA requesters like Jason Leopold. And, while the move towards a “release to one, release to all” policy on FOIA responses is better for the public in general, it’s also likely intended to discourage journalists from chasing down obscure government secrets by removing the possibility of “scooping” competitors.
The worst part is the DOJ likely doesn’t care whether the general public believes its inflated response numbers. Like far too many federal agencies, it has long since shrugged off any pretense of acting in the public’s interest. Its “91%” whitewash of its FOIA responsiveness covers up a 50-60% response rate — one that’s likely good enough for government work. Especially the sort of work few in the government show any interest in performing.
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The government also knows more today about the 16 hijackers who lived outside California than when the 28 pages were classified in 2003. Much of that information remains secret but should be made public. For example, the F.B.I. for a time claimed that it had found no ties between three of the hijackers, including their leader, Mohamed Atta, and a prominent Saudi family that lived in Sarasota, Fla., before Sept. 11. The family returned to the kingdom about two weeks before the attack. But in 2013, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by investigative reporters led to the release of about 30 pages from an F.B.I.-led investigation that included an agent’s report asserting “many connections” between the hijackers and this family. The F.B.I. said the agent’s claim was unfounded, and the family said it had no ties to the hijackers. Still, a federal judge in 2014 ordered the bureau to turn over an additional 80,000 pages from its investigation, and he is reviewing those for possible public release.
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Schindler’s analytical imagination then falters in attempting to link the dots. In releasing material that has a provenance to Russian hackers, “WikiLeaks is doing Moscow’s bidding and has placed itself in bed with Vladimir Putin.”
The language is a neat libel assuming that an organisation that releases material provided to it by an individual, or entity, is then doing that body’s bidding, all body and consciousness, as a subservient political instrument. WikiLeaks has, in fact, shown itself to be very much independent, much to the irritation of governments and in certain instances its supporters. The devil’s work is often trying.
At the New York Times, the strategy and outlook adopted by Schindler is replicated. The first is demonising Russia as a disinformation giant, weaponising information to weaken opponents. Neil MacFarquhar is certainly one captivated with the notion that Russia has that “powerful weapon” which he calls “the spread of false stories.” (How frightfully original.)
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
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Human-caused climate change likely doubled the chances of the torrential rains that caused deadly flooding in Louisiana and damaged 60,000 homes in the state, a new study has found.
Less than a month after the deluge that killed 13 people, a team of scientists have just published an analysis of rainfall records going back to the 1930s alongside computer model simulations.
Lead author of the study Dr. Karin van der Wiel, a research associate at both Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had now “changed the odds” for Louisiana being hit by torrential downpours.
Compared to the year 1900, the model analysis had clearly shown that the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had increased the chances of a torrential downpour in that Gulf Coast region.
Van der Wiel told DeSmog, “The odds for a comparable event have now changed by at least 40 per cent, and our best estimate is a doubling. That is because of the increases in greenhouse gases.”
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Fossil fuel giants Murray Energy and Southern Company paid for meetings with Republican attorneys general to discuss their opposition to the Clean Power Plan less than two weeks before the same GOP officials petitioned federal courts to block the Obama administration’s signature climate proposal, according to private emails (see below) from state attorneys general obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. The meetings took place at an August 2015 summit hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in West Virginia, where attendees were offered the opportunity to meet with GOP attorneys general in exchange for financial donations to help reelect the Republican state prosecutors.
Confidential documents also reveal that some of the GOP attorneys general again discussed “the future of the fight to stop the Clean Power Plan” at a meeting of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s 501(c)(4) organization, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, this past April.
The previously unknown meetings and financial donations – revealed in copies of conference materials, most stamped “confidential,” that were emailed to state attorneys general who attended the summit and obtained by CMD through public records requests – offer the first look at the behind-the-scenes coordination between GOP attorneys general and the fossil fuel industry to undermine the implementation of the Clean Power Plan.
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Over the past month, thousands of protesters, including Native Americans from more than 100 tribes across the country, have traveled to North Dakota to help the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe block the Dakota Access Pipeline from being built.
Last week, the Standing Rock Nation filed an emergency petition to overturn the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for the pipeline, which will be located a half-mile from the reservation through land taken from the tribe in 1958. The tribe says they were not consulted and a survey of the area found several sites of “significant cultural and historic value” in the pipeline path, including burial grounds.
But on Saturday, Dakota Access crews began bulldozing anyway, leading to a violent confrontation between protesters and security guards. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was at the construction site as security guards attacked protesters with pepper spray and dogs.
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Brazil’s new president, Michel Temer, will next week sign up to the Paris Agreement on climate change by committing Brazil to a reduction of 37% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and of 43% by 2030.
But critics say that the commitment glosses over the government’s failure to address the legal and illegal forest clearance that is adding to global warming.
Brazil’s emissions are the seventh highest in the world, and they come mostly from what is called land-use change − in other words, deforestation.
The government has promised that all illegal deforestation will be ended by 2030 – which, as critics point out, allows for it to continue for another 14 years − and sidesteps the thorny question of legally-permitted deforestation.
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Seventy-four years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War II. Last week, President Obama flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms, deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes.
Bombs may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind. What Mr. Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming planet. “And they’re terrifying,” he said in a recent interview in Honolulu.
“What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event,” he said. “It’s a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don’t experience and don’t see.”
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Verna Bailey stared into the silvery ripples of a man-made lake, looking for the spot where she had been born. “Out there,” she said, pointing to the water. “I lived down there with my grandmother and grandfather. We had a community there. Now it’s all gone.”
Fifty years ago, hers was one of hundreds of Native American families whose homes and land were inundated by rising waters after the Army Corps of Engineers built the Oahe Dam along the Missouri River, part of a huge midcentury public-works project approved by Congress to provide electricity and tame the river’s floods.
To Ms. Bailey, 76, and thousands of other tribal members who lived along the river’s length, the project was a cultural catastrophe, residents and historians say. It displaced families, uprooted cemeteries and swamped lands where tribes grazed cattle, drove wagons and gathered wild grapes and medicinal tea.
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The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s attempt to halt construction of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline near their North Dakota reservation, a cause that has drawn thousands to join a protest, was denied Friday by a federal judge.
The tribe had challenged the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to grant permits at more than 200 water crossings for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion pipeline, saying that the project violates several federal laws, including the National Historic Preservation Act, and will harm water supplies. The tribe also says ancient sacred sites have been disturbed during construction.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington denied the tribe’s request for a temporary injunction in a 58-page opinion. A status conference is scheduled for Sept. 16.
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The Obama administration said it would not authorize construction on a critical stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline, handing a significant victory to the Indian tribe fighting the project the same day the group lost a court battle.
The administration said construction would halt until it can do more environmental assessments.
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The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced it will be temporarily halting construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline effective immediately.
The ruling came down shortly after a federal judge cited with the pipeline companies in denying a motion filed by indigenous tribes to stop pipeline construction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had granted permits to Energy Transfer Partners’ family of companies to build a $3.8 billion, 1100-mile pipeline crossing four states that would carry as many as 578,000 barrels of oil per day across indigenous land and the Missouri River, which supplies drinking water to approximately 17 million people.
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California will become a petri dish for international efforts to slow global warming under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday, forcing one of the world’s largest economies to squeeze into a dramatically smaller carbon footprint.
“What we’re doing here is farsighted, as well as far-reaching,” Brown said at a signing ceremony at Vista Hermosa Natural Park in downtown Los Angeles. “California is doing something that no other state has done.”
The legislation, SB 32, requires the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, a much more ambitious target than the previous goal of hitting 1990 levels by 2020.
Cutting emissions will affect nearly all aspects of life in the state — where people live, how they get to work, how their food is produced and where their electricity comes from.
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In June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the billionaires Charles and David Koch, launched a new corporate public-relations campaign called “End the Divide,” to advance the notion that Koch Industries is deeply concerned by growing inequality in America. An ad for the campaign urges viewers to “look around,” as an image of an imposing white mansion is replaced by one of blighted urban streets. “America is divided,” an announcer intones, with “government and corporations picking winners and losers, rigging the system against people, creating a two-tiered society with policies that fail our most vulnerable.”
The message was surprising, coming from a company owned by two of the richest men in the world, who have spent millions of dollars pushing political candidates and programs that favor unfettered markets and oppose government intervention on behalf of the poor. But no trouble appeared to have been spared in the commercial’s creation. It features a cast of downtrodden Americans of all colors and creeds. To portray corporate greed, it includes a shot of a Wall Street sign, followed by a smug businessman looking down at the camera, dressed in a flashy suit and tie. But, according to Dickie Guice, who worked as a safety coördinator at a large Koch-owned paper plant in Arkansas, the company need not have gone to such lengths. Instead of scouting America for examples of social neglect, the Kochs could have turned the cameras on their own factory.
This summer, Guice decided to speak out about the paper mill in Crossett, a working-class town of some fifty-two hundred residents ten miles north of the Louisiana border.* The mill is run by the paper giant Georgia-Pacific, which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2005. According to E.P.A. records, it emits more than 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year, including numerous known carcinogens. Georgia-Pacific says that it has permits to operate the mill as it does, and disputes that it is harming local health and safety. But as far back as the nineteen-nineties, people living near the plant have described noxious odors and corrosive effluents that have forced them to stay indoors, as well as what seems to them unusually high rates of illness and death. Speaking by phone from his home, in Sterlington, Louisiana, Guice pointed the finger directly at the mill’s owners, and described a corporate coverup of air and water pollution that he says is “poisoning” the predominantly African-American community.
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In a Detroit District Court today, 62-year-old engineer James Robert Liang pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government, commit wire fraud, and violate the Clean Air Act. Liang, currently a California resident, worked for Volkswagen’s diesel development department in Wolfsburg, Germany from 1983 to 2008.
Volkswagen Group has been beset by scandal since last September, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made public that VW had been including illegal software in diesel Volkswagens and Audis. The software detected when the cars were being tested in a lab so that they could pass emissions tests, but once the cars hit real-world conditions, the software circumvented the emissions control system to spew large amounts of nitrogen oxide (NOx) into the atmosphere.
According to the plea agreement (PDF), in 2006 Liang and others began building the EA 189 diesel engine that has been the center of the controversy. When the engineers realized they couldn’t meet consumer expectations and US air quality standards at the same time, they began looking into using illegal software (often known in the auto industry as a “defeat device”). By 2008, Liang worked to “calibrate and refine the defeat device.” Later that year, he moved to the US to help with “certification, testing, and warranty issues” for the company’s new diesels.
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Finance
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This story is crazy. Late yesterday it was revealed that banking giant Wells Fargo had to fire 5,300 employees over a massive scam in which those employees created over 2 million fake accounts to stuff with fees in order to meet their quarterly numbers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also fined the company $185 million ($100 million to the CFPB, $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and another $50 million to Los Angeles).
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The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore.
The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years.
This layoff may have huge implications. That’s because the university’s IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus University of California system, which serves some 240,000 students and employs some 190,000 faculty and staff.
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A decision by the University of California to lay off IT employees and send their jobs overseas is under fire from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) and the IEEE-USA.
The university recently informed about 80 IT workers at its San Francisco campus, including contract employees and vendor contractors, that it hired India-based HCL, under a $50 million contract, to manage infrastructure and networking-related services.
The university employees will remain on the job until the end of February, but before then they are expecting to train their foreign replacements. The number of affected employees may expand. The university’s IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus system.
“How are they [the university] going to tell students to go into STEM fields when they are doing as much as they can to do a number on the engineers in their employment?” said Lofgren, in an interview.
Peter Eckstein, the president of the IEEE-USA, said what the university is doing “is just one more sad example of corporations, a major university system in this case, importing non-Americans to eliminate American IT jobs.” This engineering association has some 235,000 members.
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Apple is about to launch a new iPhone. I remember when, under Steve Jobs, the arrival of a new iPhone was a breathless and secretive affair, as though Willy Wonka himself was emerging from his factory and making impossible claims of his improbable technology. And if the iPhone didn’t quite live up – if it took years to get copying and pasting, or if Siri was basically a party trick – no one minded so much, because Jobs was the tech universe version of the late Gene Wilder, giving an idiosyncratic performance nobody can explain or match.
How far we’ve fallen. I’m writing this the night before the iPhone 7 unveiling, and I know nothing will surprise us. You heard it here first: the new iPhone will look and act almost exactly like the current iPhone to any normal person. It will probably be a little faster, come in a new color choice, and be absolutely boring. This time the big killer feature, apparently, is that there’s no headphone port.
How fantastic – I have been looking for an opportunity to throw away all my headphones and buy new ones directly from Apple. I can’t wait to watch Tim Cook ploddingly explain how much better everything will be in the new version. I love listening to Cook because when you look in his eyes you can tell he knows he’s a second-string community theater actor trying desperately to speak fancy words he learned by rote, following in the footsteps of the man who had the job before he did, Sir Laurence Goddamn Olivier.
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Ask Kweku Adoboli why bankers do not go to jail, and he would no doubt look surprised. A London-based trader at the Swiss bank UBS, Adoboli was jailed in November 2012 for what police described as the biggest fraud in UK history. He racked up £1.2bn of losses through secretive trades – and at one point those trades could have forced UBS to take a £7bn hit, enough to bring down the Swiss bank.
He is not the only banker to have been incarcerated. Nick Leeson – jailed in Singapore for bringing down Barings in 1995 – is now on the after-dinner speaking circuit. In August, he announced free trading programmes intended, he said, to “help people not make the same mistakes I did”.
Tom Hayes is behind bars, serving 11 years after being convicted for rigging Libor interest rates. Four former Barclays bankers have also been jailed for conspiring to fraudulently rig global benchmark interest rates.
But those who ask why bankers have not gone to jail are probably thinking of the 2008 banking crisis and, with the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers approaching (15 September 2008), the question may once again be at the front of people’s minds. After Lehmans collapsed, more than £65bn of taxpayer funds were pumped in to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Banking Group and a rescue package put in place for Bradford & Bingley. Northern Rock had been nationalised earlier in 2008.
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Uber won a courtroom victory on Wednesday when an appeals court ruled that drivers are subject to individual arbitration in a lawsuit over background checks, a ruling that might help the ride-hailing company fend off another costly class action lawsuit filed by its drivers.
While the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals found that agreements signed by two former drivers for the service over background checks “clearly and unmistakably” require legal disputes be settled by a private arbiter, the reasoning may be applied to another class action lawsuit filed by drivers over the company’s employment classifications. Uber agreed to settle that lawsuit earlier this year — an agreement that was rejected by a federal judge last month.
Arbitration is a method frequently used by companies for resolving legal conflicts outside of the court system. However, critics say that binding arbitration clauses give corporations an unfair advantage over employees and consumers who do not have the resources to challenge companies individually.
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“We must use the necessary measures to catch the tax evaders hiding fortunes in for example Panama with the aim to avoid paying tax in Denmark,” Minister for Taxation Karsten Lauritzen said in a statement.
“We cannot be sure of the end result, but everything suggests that it is useful information that the Danish tax authority will now pursue.”
The government would pay the source an amount in the “lower millions” of kroner (one million kroner is €134,000, $151,000) for the material, which it estimated could contain information on 320 cases involving between 500 and 600 Danish taxpayers.
The Danish tax authority had already received a “sample” of the data free of charge, the Ministry of Taxation said.
“Against this backdrop it is the tax authority’s assessment that the information is sufficiently relevant and valid to initiate tax investigations of a number of the companies and individuals appearing in the material,” it said.
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Tough. Like slavery. Difficult and ineffectual. A few of the sentiments expressed by 83 participants who responded to an Yle straw poll about the rigours of holding down multiple jobs. The views indicate that for the most part, moonlighting can easily become a physical drain and lead to exhaustion. For others, extra work gigs provide a pleasant change of routine and welcome extra income.
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In portraying herself as a virtual Barack Obama third term, Clinton ties herself not only to a foreign policy that continues to inflame the Middle East, but also to his domestic economic record. A key element is job creation, the cornerstone of any real growth.
For example, during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton praised Obama’s efforts to steer the nation’s recovery.
“Now, I don’t think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes,” she told the crowd in Philadelphia. “Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs… And an auto industry that just had its best year ever.”
Leaving aside some fuzzy math to get to that tally of 15 million new jobs, Clinton purposefully passes off quantity with what we’ll call quality.
A quality job is one that is sustainable, with full-time status and benefits, the kind of work that both rebuilds America’s soul while at the same time makes work more profitable than unemployment benefits and aid. Most importantly for the greater economy, a quality job is one that allows the worker to put money into society. Rising tide lifting all boats.
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Donald Trump with his tangled business dealings is a walking conflict of interest, but Hillary Clinton’s connections to the world of high finance and political pull creates its own problems with outstretched palms, writes Michael Winship.
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Fighting my way through this underground morass I emerged into the pergola-ed light of Victoria station. After getting my ticket—no credit cards accepted at the ticket machines, clearly another bit of Brexit wagon-circling—I stared for a long time up at the big board of departures and arrivals. I simply couldn’t find the name of my destination Pulborough in West Sussex. The announcement soon came: Industrial Action in the South of England. What with pensions halved by the referendum and worker’s rights under assault it’s no wonder that during this hot end of summer one can’t help but think of the Winter of Discontent. A recent study to be read in yesterday’s papers showed that many in Britain will have to postpone retirement till their mid-eighties if they hope to get by.
Eventually, I devised a way to get to my mother-in-law’s Sussex village. As the train exited the post-industrial, post-Brexit gloom of London and began to make its way through the countryside, the conductor came through the carriage. I asked him about the reasons for the strike. It seems that the station guards in this privatized patch of the former national rail system want to retain their duty of signaling to the driver that the train is safe to leave the station. The company—called Southern—claims that this old-fashioned practice is no longer necessary and its elimination will lead to cost-savings. Naturally, the union sees this “efficiency” as a prelude to laying-off more workers.
“It’s an odd strike,” I opined. “If there’s one thing the Brits are good at doing on their own these days, it’s shutting the door.”
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Pier 17 doesn’t even show up on most Honolulu maps. Cars whiz past it on their way to Waikiki’s famous white sand beaches. Yet few locals, let alone passing tourists, are aware that just behind a guarded gate, another world exists: foreign fishermen confined to American boats for years at a time.
Hundreds of undocumented men are employed in this unique U.S. fishing fleet, due to a federal loophole that allows them to work but exempts them from most basic labor protections. Many come from impoverished Southeast Asian and Pacific nations to take the dangerous jobs, which can pay as little as 70 cents an hour.
With no legal standing on U.S. soil, the men are at the mercy of their American captains on American-flagged, American-owned vessels, catching prized swordfish and ahi tuna. Since they don’t have visas, they are not allowed to set foot on shore. The entire system, which contradicts other state and federal laws, operates with the blessing of high-ranking U.S. lawmakers and officials, an Associated Press investigation found.
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The eternal promise of capitalist democracy is a future that somehow breaks from the past. In this alternate universe solutions to global warming, the threat of nuclear weapons, never-ending wars fought to control economic resources and the just distribution of political and economic power are always but one election away. Hillary Clinton is the agent of ‘effective’ change and Donald Trump is the agent of reactionary change. That the political and economic trajectories of the last half century have been uni-directional in favor of concentrated wealth and power are (1) the predicted outcomes of the theories by which they were sold and (2) antithetical to any notion of democratic representation as it is generally understood.
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More than 200 legal and economic scholars—including President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe—have penned a letter to Congress warning that the pro-corporate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic institutions.”
As ISDS “threatens to dilute constitutional protections, weaken the judicial branch, and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances,” the academics urge (pdf) lawmakers to reject the TPP, despite the Obama administration’s full-court press to pass the trade agreement during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.
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As President Obama prepares to make his big lame-duck push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he’s narrowed his sales pitch for the deal down to two basic arguments, and he made both of them during an interview this weekend with CNN.
The first argument the president is making in favor of the TPP is, of course, the idea that it’s going to be great for the American economy.
According to him, the TPP will help us write the rules of the Asia-Pacific marketplace for decades to come.
This is the standard argument for the TPP, and it’s the most obviously flawed.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The recipe could not be simpler. Mix cynicism with greed, quickly stir and voila! American politics and government served up on a platter to the highest bidder.
Call it low cuisine. And it doesn’t get any lower than what we’ve seen during this wretched campaign season — a presidential contest that, as one friend in Washington recently said, pits “the unethical versus the unhinged.”
Psychiatric evaluations notwithstanding, for sure each of the two candidates is the byproduct of crony capitalism run amok. Donald Trump started out boasting that his much-flaunted wealth meant that he could self-fund his campaign and that this made him incorruptible, a feckless notion that went flying out the window as soon as he became the presumptive, official party nominee and went running to fat cat funders with his diminutive hands out.
As The Washington Post’s Matea Gold reported Sept. 1, “The New York billionaire, who has cast himself as free from the influence of the party’s donor class, has spent this summer forging bonds with wealthy GOP financiers — seeking their input on how to run his campaign and recast his policies for the general election, according to more than a dozen people who have participated in the conversations.”
And let’s not get started on the wacky world of Trump’s actual finances, his bragging about using cash to buy political favors, his failure to release tax returns, his dodgy connections with overseas banks, Russian plutocrats and organized crime. “… It is safe to say,” The New York Times recently reported, “that no previous major party presidential nominee has had finances nearly as complicated…” Now there’s a classic Times understatement for you.
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Earlier this week, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, traveled to North Dakota to join the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s protests against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). At one point during the demonstrations, Stein spray-painted a bulldozer with the words “I approve this message.” Baraka spray-painted “decolonization” on other construction equipment. Each has since been charged with vandalism and trespassing.
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Watching a video of journalists running for their lives amid choking smoke in a building set ablaze in Kyiv is horrifying. It is even more chilling to realise that some of these people are colleagues and close friends you have known for years.
We would disagree on many political issues, but it is still shocking to see where the exercise of freedom of speech in post-revolutionary Ukraine can lead you. At the same time, the increasing violence against Ukraine’s journalists brings powerful voices at home and abroad together in the expanding uprising against Soviet mentality, which has plagued the country for the last 25 years.
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NBC then showed clips of 9/11 and of Obama announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden, but not a single image of a single body or bombed out house. After 15 years of immoral, illegal, catastrophic murder sprees, Clinton began by taking credit for her “experience” of having been part of making all those wars happen.
So, Lauer asked her, not about any of those wars, but about her emails. Eventually he turned to Iraq, and she claimed to have learned her lesson. Although she still wanted war in Libya and several other countries and still wants it badly in Syria (though Lauer didn’t get into that), so she’s clearly learned nothing. She did claim accurately that Trump backed war on Iraq and Libya too, while still claiming inaccurately that Gaddafi was planning a massacre. Lauer confirmed and corrected nothing.
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Clinton’s gender is not her biggest liability. Her refusal to even attempt to embrace bold progressive valued…
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Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, called the forum “an absolute disgrace” and just more proof that the entire presidential debate system needs an overhaul. “Matt Lauer treated this forum less as a chance to educate voters about the real differences in temperament and policy between the candidates and more as a chance to do clickbait trolling,” Green said. “Instead of asking about big ideas, he asked small-bore questions that voters aren’t asking at their dinner tables.”
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If ever there were a sign that the presidential race isn’t over yet, Democrats got one this week at eastern Ohio’s Canfield Fair.
On Labor Day, an iconic holiday for what used to be a reliable Democratic constituency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump got an enthusiastic welcome from thousands of Youngstown-area fans who waited hours in the blazing heat to see him.
This scene seemed all the more striking because it took place in a solidly blue-collar county that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. And because it was Trump’s second trip to the Democratic stronghold of Mahoning County in the past three weeks.
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The Green Party presidential candidate — who is eagerly courting former Bernie Sanders supporters — told an Omaha crowd on Wednesday that she had no choice but to spray-paint a bulldozer at an anti-pipeline protest in North Dakota after being asked to by Indian leaders.
Stein said she didn’t feel as if she could say “no” to such a simple request from people leading the fight against a crude-oil pipeline.
Stein was charged Wednesday with two misdemeanor counts of vandalism and trespassing in North Dakota for her impromptu graffiti.
“I felt like it was the least I could do in front of these Indian leaders, as they were putting their lives and their bodies on the line,” said Stein, who spoke at the Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha campus.
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Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president, met Thursday with the Tribune Editorial Board and shared a few ideas you might typically associate with a fringe, environment-focused candidate: She spoke of nuclear disarmament, abandoning fossil fuels, etc.
But darned if Stein, a physician who was raised in Highland Park, didn’t also articulate a frustration expressed this September by the majority of American voters, who seem restless over the country’s direction yet don’t like either major party candidate for president. Voters are “clamoring” for other choices, Stein tells us. They want “something else.”
Yes, for her it’s a self-serving observation, but it happens to be accurate. Polls show a majority of voters have an unfavorable view of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Americans also say they’d be interested in considering a third-party candidate, even without knowing much about Stein or Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.
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Third-party presidential candidates have participated in acts of civil disobedience, risked arrest, been arrested and been jailed with some frequency over the past 150 years. So the fact that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein faces misdemeanor criminal charges in North Dakota stemming from a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline is hardly unprecedented.
But it is politically significant.
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There was not much of a contest in Wednesday night’s forum with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Mrs. Clinton answered the questions of the moderator, Matt Lauer, in coherent sentences, often with specific details. Mr. Trump alternated between rambling statements and grandiose boasts when he wasn’t lying.
Mr. Lauer largely neglected to ask penetrating questions, call out falsehoods or insist on answers when it was obvious that Mr. Trump’s responses had drifted off.
If the moderators of the coming debates do not figure out a better way to get the candidates to speak accurately about their records and policies — especially Mr. Trump, who seems to feel he can skate by unchallenged with his own version of reality while Mrs. Clinton is grilled and entangled in the fine points of domestic and foreign policy — then they will have done the country a grave disservice.
Whether or not one agrees with her positions, Mrs. Clinton, formerly secretary of state and once a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, showed a firm understanding of the complex issues facing the country. Mr. Trump reveled in his ignorance about global affairs and his belief that leading the world’s most powerful nation is no harder than running his business empire, which has included at least four bankruptcies.
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Donald Trump’s interview with Larry King on the Russian-government-funded television network RT America is being widely seen in the mainstream U.S. media as evidence of unseemly coziness between Trump and authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The interview came after months of claims by Democratic Party officials and news media pundits that the Russian government is trying to get Trump elected.
RT America has a long history of coverage that benefits the Russian government and is critical of the United States, as many former employees have complained.
But there’s one problem with the theory that RT America and the Russian government are fond of Trump: RT America is sometimes more critical of Trump than U.S. media.
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In the end, it was actually America who lost last night at the MSNBC Commander-in-Chief forum, because one of these people will be our president in a few months, and the other two will no doubt live forever on our TVs.
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The most revealing moment in the presidential candidates’ first joint forum Wednesday night came when Donald Trump told the world how much he admires Vladimir Putin.
Never mind that the Russian strongman invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea. Never mind that he supports the butcher Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Never mind that so many of his political opponents end up murdered or imprisoned. Never mind that U.S. officials suspect his government of trying to disrupt our election with cyberattacks. In Trump’s star-struck eyes, all of this makes him “a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”
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Better than anyone, Donald Trump made the case for why our campaign money system is rotten. Unsurprisingly, the prime example he used was himself.
“I was a businessman,” Trump explained at a Republican debate in August 2015. “I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
Bravo. Sort of. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Republican primary voters seemed to reward Trump for saying that he bought off politicians right and left, as if admitting to soft bribery was a sign of what a great reformer he would be.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Firebrand filmmaker Oliver Stone said that every major Hollywood studio turned down “Snowden,” his new film about the NSA employee who leaked thousands of confidential documents and revealed mass government data gathering domestically and abroad.
The film, which screens on Friday evening at the Toronto Film Festival, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden, who now lives as a political exile in Russia.
“Joseph was my first choice for the role, I called him early,” Stone told TheWrap. But even with the actor attached he could not get studio financing. “He and Shailene [Woodley], the budget, the script — was still rejected by every major studio. It was a torturous process.”
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For years, we’ve pointed to examples of seemingly ridiculous and/or arbitrary examples of Facebook’s content moderation team blocking or banning perfectly reasonable content as offensive, often in a manner where it apparently can’t distinguish between nudity that is art or newsworthy, from that which is just titillating.
The latest example is getting a ton of attention as Facebook deleted an iconic Vietnam War photo of a young girl, Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack. It’s one of the most famous war photos ever, and the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten included it in a story of “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare.” The writer of the piece, Tom Egeland, posted it to Facebook as well, and Facebook not only took the post down, but suspended Egeland.
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Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phúc fleeing from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war is one of the most iconic pieces of photojournalism in existence.
The importance of Ut’s 1972 photograph cannot be underestimated. The image was instrumental in exposing to the rest of the world what was happening in Vietnam. Some argue, including Ut himself, that this photograph alone was a turning point in the conflict. The photograph galvanized opposition to the war.
But this week, Facebook decided that the image breached the social network’s terms of service. Facebook banned a user who published the photograph, and then subsequently ordered a newspaper to also remove the photograph from its Facebook page, sparking uproar over the social network’s control of media.
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Apart from the deletion of the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of a napalm attack in southern Vietnam, images of breastfeeding are frequently removed. In 2008, the company banned and removed any such images that showed nipples, causing a backlash and protests from tens of thousands of mothers.
The company’s image censorship guidelines were leaked to the press in 2012. They specifically called for reviewers to remove images of breastfeeding if the nipples were exposed but to allow “graphic images” of animals if shown in the “context of food processing or hunting as it occurs in nature”, resulting in further outcries. The company clarified its guidelines on nudity in 2015, but has not changed its policy.
Facebook says its policies are aimed at stopping pornography and abuse. The latter is a serious problem on some social media – in the UK earlier this week the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, said prosecutions relating to stalking and harassment were at record levels in England and Wales because so much was being conducted online.
Facebook says it uses both automated systems and human reviewers before taking action. Users of the social network are encouraged to actively report, via onsite tools, images they think could contravene Facebook’s “community standards”.
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The Cuban government is blocking text messages that contain words such as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “hunger strike,” according to an investigation from local dissidents. In a Spanish-language report published last week, prominent blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the government is filtering 30 keywords and blocking the transmission of any texts that contain them.
Reuters later confirmed that messages containing the Spanish words for “democracy” and “human rights” did not reach their destination, nor did those containing Sanchez’s name or “Somos Mas”: an opposition group that worked on the investigation. Texts that included the word “protest” were transmitted, the agency reported on Tuesday, and those that were blocked were marked as “sent” on the sender’s phone.
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The small West African nation of Gabon has replaced its country-wide internet blockage with an “internet curfew” that experts say is creating an “unprecedented level of communication suppression since the Arab Spring” and appears to have no end in sight. Gabon’s government rarely registers a blip on the radar of international news, but the blockage is the latest in a troubling trend of nations blocking the internet when they fear unrest.
The country held an election last week in which incumbent president Ali Bongo was narrowly re-elected amid widespread claims of fraud, which led to nationwide protests. Bongo ordered the internet cut off to the entire nation, which lasted for 104 hours between August 31 and September 5. Internet was only restored after a plea from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Bongo’s opponent, Jean Ping, says that between 50 and 100 people have been killed in the election’s aftermath.
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For years, we’ve pointed out the ridiculousness of “the view from nowhere” reporting (a phrase coined by journalism professor Jay Rosen). This is the ridiculous belief that being an “objective” journalist means never challenging what someone says to you, but rather just showing “both sides of the story” and not “taking” any side. But, that’s ridiculous. If someone claims that the earth is flat, and you do a story showing the person claiming that, alongside someone else saying it’s not, but never point out that the person saying the earth is flat is crazy, then you’re not doing your job as a journalist. A journalist should be focusing on getting to the truth, and that means calling bullshit when warranted.
This issue has come up again this week, thanks to NBC talking head Matt Lauer’s inability to challenge Donald Trump’s blatantly false statement that he was against the war in Iraq. Trump has been saying this throughout the campaign, and it’s simply not true. What’s more, plenty of journalists have pointed out that it’s not true, and any journalist interviewing the candidate, as Matt Lauer did, should have known that and should have pushed back. But Lauer did not, leading to widespread criticism.
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Perhaps one of the most dangerous ideas today is not being discussed. While artists decry external censorship, we are quick to self censor, avoiding any reference to race, gender or sexuality that might be viewed as offensive.
British choreographer, dancer and DV8 verbatim theatre producer Lloyd Newson believes that we are in peril of our ever heightening “PC” monitor getting in the way of freedom of speech.
He demonstrated the point at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) at the Sydney Opera House on the weekend by starting his talk What don’t we want to talk about in the Arts? with the question: ‘Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban? Hands up who does.’
A sheepish audience barely responded, wondering, “What has this got to do with the arts?” and “Is this a trick question?” We had immediately censored ourselves in the fear of not being seen as cultural accepting.
Newson posed that same question to audiences at his award-winning theatre work Can we talk about this? (2011-2012) which discussed Islam, censorship and freedom of speech.
‘I was interested in asking whether well intended multicultural policies in UK inadvertently ended up betraying the very minorities and freedoms they sought to be protecting.’
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It packs a quite the punch with its controversial title, but N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk (NWC) has made an indelible mark on the university landscape, playing to more than 150 venues in over 40 states, according to its creators and performers.
In fact, the show, a no-holds-barred autobiographical account of racism and an exploration of the impact of such derogatory terms, played just last year to a sold-out crowd at Cal State Long Beach’s (CSULB) Carpenter Center.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Cameras at intersections and in public parks have become commonplace, but are you aware that a plane flying overhead could be tracking your every move?
According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report in August, the city of Baltimore has been conducting surveillance over parts of the city with megapixel cameras attached to Cessna airplanes since at least January. This news comes after activists expressed concerns that mysterious Cessnas were seen flying above Black Lives Matter protests in 2015.
FBI spy planes, equipped not just with cameras but with cellphone surveillance devices as well, have become a new phenomenon in the United States. While the agency says the planes are not designed for mass surveillance, that claim is getting shakier by the day, especially in light of evidence of what’s happening in places like Baltimore.
The Stingray is a mobile cellphone surveillance device the size of a suitcase. Police departments across the country use the devices to collect cellphone data in specific areas of a town or city. The federal government has manned planes with these devices in the past, but to what extent they are in use federally and locally is unclear.
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Actor Zachary Quinto has called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be allowed to return to America without facing espionage charges.
The Star Trek actor said Mr Snowden had acted with “great courage” and it was “absurd” to brand him a “treasonist” while he remains in exile in Russia.
Quinto plays journalist Glenn Greenwald in Oliver Stone’s new film Snowden, which tells the story of how the former NSA analyst leaked details of mass government surveillance in 2013.
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The Obama administration’s top defense and intelligence officials are proposing a plan to separate the spying and war fighting arms of America’s vast hacking apparatus, an idea that was recommended but rejected after the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have gotten behind the proposal to separate the National Security Agency, the digital spying arm, from U.S. Cyber Command, which develops and deploys cyber weapons, three national security officials tell NBC News. Representatives for both men declined to comment for the record.
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WHY WE CARE: Let’s break down what ‘s happening in this tweet. The picture on the left looks to be a screencap of a post about Google’s new initiative to thwart ISIS recruitment. The image on the right is another screencap, this one implying that if Google users look up “How to join ISIS,” the search algorithm will instead lead them to “World’s smallest horse.” (The world’s smallest horse is apparently a 14-inch pinto stallion named Einstein, and he is beyond adorable.) The actual text of the tweet is a deceptively earnest “Amazing. Well done, Google.” My personal reaction to seeing this collection of images and words was slightly skeptical amazement. It seemed like something cool that might exist, and stranger things have indeed happened. (It feels weird to casually use that expression now.) Apple’s iPhone 7 unveiling was going on simultaneously, with news of questionable technology hanging in the air already. I stopped short of actually trying out this preventative measure, though, skepticism winning the day. It turned out to be the right move. A lot of other people did not suspect anything fishy in Heck’s ultra-dry trolling tweet. Enough of the 7000+ retweeters fell for it, in fact, that there was a substantial increase in Google searches for “How to join ISIS.”
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POLICE AND the security services frequently provide incorrect IP addresses in applications to intercept communications data with potentially “serious consequences” for the people targeted and the investigations that supposedly need the data.
The details were contained in the latest annual report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office (IOCCO).
The report does not provide a figure for the number of times that the security and law enforcement agencies have provided incorrect IP addresses, but the organisation said that it received reports of 1,199 known errors in 2015.
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U.S. authorities have arrested two suspects allegedly involved in dumping details on 29,000 officials with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Andrew Otto Boggs and Justin Gray Liverman have been charged with hacking into the internet accounts of senior U.S. government officials and breaking into government computer systems.
Both suspects were arrested on Thursday, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Boggs, age 22, and Liverman, 24, are from North Carolina and are allegedly part of a hacking group called Crackas With Attitude.
From October 2015 until February, they used hacking techniques, including “victim impersonation” to trick internet service providers and a government help desk into giving up access to the accounts, the DOJ alleged.
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Back in May we noted that the ridiculous and terrible anti-encryption bill from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein was dead in the water. The bill had all sorts of problems with incredibly broad and vague requirements, but the quick summary was that tech companies would have to figure out a way to backdoor all encryption, because if they received a warrant, they’d be required to decrypt any communication.
Rather than get the message that this was a really, really bad idea, it appears that Burr and Feinstein have just gone back to the drawing board, trying to recraft the bill. Julian Sanchez got his hands on one of a few prospective new drafts that are being floated around and has an analysis of the update. The draft that Sanchez has seen tries to fix some of the problems, but doesn’t really fix the main problems of the bill.
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When it was first released back in April, a “discussion draft” of the Compliance With Court Orders Act sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) met with near universal derision from privacy advocates and security experts. (Your humble author was among the critics.) In the wake of that chilly reception, press reports were declaring the bill effectively dead just weeks later, even as law enforcement and intelligence officials insisted they would continue pressing for a solution to the putative “going dark” problem that encryption creates for government eavesdroppers. Feinstein and Burr, however, appear not to have given up on their baby: Their offices have been circulating a revised draft, which I’ve recently gotten hold of.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Obama administration quietly hired 20 social and behavioral research experts to help expand the use of government programs at dozens of agencies by, among other things, simplifying federal forms, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch. The controversial group of experts is collectively known as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) and it functions under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
In 2015 Obama signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use behavioral science to sell their programs to the public, the records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal. By then the government had contracted “20 leading social and behavioral research experts” that at that point had already been involved in “more than 75 agency collaborations,” the records state. A memo sent from SBST chair Maya Shankar, a neuroscientist, to OSTP Director John Holdren offers agencies guidance and information about available government support for using behavioral insights to improve federal forms. Sent electronically, the memo is titled “Behavioral Science Insights and Federal Forms.”
The records, obtained from the OSTP under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), also include a delivery by Holdren in which he insists that the social and behavioral sciences “are real science, with immensely valuable practical applications—the views of a few members of Congress to the contrary notwithstanding—and that these sciences abundantly warrant continuing support in the Federal science and technology budget.” Holdren, a Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate is a peculiar character who worked as an environmental professor at Harvard and the University of California Berkeley before becoming Obama’s science advisor. In the late 70s he co-authored a book with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich advocating for mandatory sterilization of the American people and forced abortions in order to depopulate the country. A head of the OSTP Holdren technically oversees the SBST.
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U.S. Army Whistleblower Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike in military prison Friday, her attorneys confirmed.
“I need help. I am not getting any,” Manning wrote in a statement. “I was driven to suicide by the lack of care for my gender dysphoria that I have been desperate for. I didn’t get any. I still haven’t gotten any.”
Manning announced her identity as a transgender woman on August 22, 2013, a day after she was sentenced to 35 years in military prison.
After attempting to commit suicide in July, Manning was informed by military officials that she was being investigated for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.” She is facing indefinite solitary confinement, or a return to maximum-security detention.
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Today, after years of requesting the care she needs for gender dysphoria, Chelsea Manning has released a statement about the start of her hunger strike.
Chelsea is demanding written assurances from the Army she will receive all of the medically prescribed recommendations for her gender dysphoria and that the “high tech bullying” will stop. “High tech bullying,” is what Chelsea describes as “the constant, deliberate and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”
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Panama’s national police left approximately 20 indigenous Ngäbe protesters injured last week in what one medic described as an “absurd and irresponsible act.”
The protesters, all residents of Gualaquita, mobilized against the Barro Blanco hydro dam after the project’s owner and operator, Honduran-based Generadora del Istmo (GENISA) began flooding the Tabasará River basin with blessings from the government.
It didn’t take long for Ngäbe communities within the basin to suffer the consequences. In the community of Kiad, local road connections were washed away by the flood waters leaving entire families geographically isolated. Houses were also submerged by the rising waters, along with significant archaeological sites in the region.
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Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike today at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for the leaking of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
Manning is seeking written assurances from the Army that she will receive the medical treatments for her gender dysphoria beyond the hormone treatment she began in early 2015. Manning has sued the government to get such treatments and to lift the male grooming standards she is subject to that prevent her from growing her hair out.
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An influx of underage brides who have arrived in the country during the crisis has left it facing fresh problems.
In Denmark, a city which took a huge chunk of the nation’s 20,000 asylum seekers, is now considering banning child marriages.
In February the Danes announced plans to separate child brides from their husbands upon arrival in the country.
Oussama El-Saadi, a high-profile imam from a mosque in Aarhus, urged them to scrap the idea.
Despite protests, politicians are choosing whether to vote in favour of not recognising it.
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Tens of millions of unionized public sector workers walked off the job last Friday in a one-day strike against PM Modi’s plan to privatise public industries and increase foreign investment. It was one of the largest strikes in human history, if not the largest, and took place over Labour Day weekend.
With the exception of a short notice by a guest on a CNN show, not one of the US networks ran a single story on the strike.
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When tens of millions of workers go out on strike in the second-largest country in the world—and the third-largest economy in the world—resulting in what may be the biggest labor action in world history (AlterNet, 9/7/16), you’d think that would merit some kind of news coverage, right?
Not if you’re a decision-maker at a US corporate media outlet, apparently.
A coalition of trade unions in India representing some 180 million workers staged a one-day general strike on Friday, September 2, in protest of what they called the “anti-worker and anti-people” policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an advocate of neoliberal policies and increased foreign investment (Democracy Now!, 9/2/16). Assocham, India’s chamber of commerce, estimated that the economic impact of the strike was $2.4 billion–$2.7 billion (Hindustan Today, 9/3/16).
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Two teenagers have been jailed in southern France for their part in a brawl that saw three men violently attacked in front of their children after objecting to sexist comments directed at their wives.
The two couples, a friend and their children were cycling in the city of Toulon in July when the two women were abused for wearing shorts by around 12 youths.
Local prosecutor Bernard Machal said the teens hurled insults at the women, shouting “whore” and “go on, get naked”.
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Daniel Jones had always been friendly with the CIA personnel who stood outside his door.
When he needed to take something out of the secured room where he read mountains of their classified material, they typically obliged. An informal understanding had taken hold after years of working together, usually during off-peak hours, so closely that Jones had parking privileges at an agency satellite office not far from its McLean, Virginia, headquarters. They would ask Jones if anything he wanted to remove contained real names or cover names of any agency officials, assets or partners, or anything that could compromise an operation. He would say no. They would nod, he would wish them a good night, and they would go their separate ways.
[...]
But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.
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Which is one reason why Stone met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow, not once, or twice, but nine times. Stone will tell you: You can’t trust the United States government. You can’t trust the NSA, CIA, or FBI. You can’t trust the Hollywood studios, because those are corporations run by lawyers. And you certainly can’t trust the media.
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Police in Aurora, Colorado, got a call about a man pulling a gun on a kid. They had no description of the suspect. On their way to the scene, they stopped two Black men walking down the sidewalk.
Darsean Kelley, one of the men, followed the officers’ orders to hold his hands above his head and turn around. His repeated requests for an explanation as to why they had been detained went unanswered. Even though it was clear he had no weapons and he was no threat to the officers, Darsean was tased in the back just as he said, “I know my rights.” Darsean fell backwards and hit his head on the pavement.
The officers had no reason to detain them. They had done nothing wrong. When Darsean asked to talk to the officer’s boss, noting that there were witnesses to the tasing, the officer responded, “Hey, look right here. It’s all on video, sweetheart.”
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In a few hours, Senator Wyden will be going on the floor of the Senate to argue against updates to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
You may have already heard of Rule 41: EFF and allied digital rights groups have been raising the alarm about this extra-legislative rule change. In short, the pending updates would make it easier for the government to get a warrant to hack1 into computers. It would be easy for law enforcement agents to forum shop, finding the most sympathetic judges in the country to approve these vague and dangerous warrants.
What do we mean by “hack into computers”? In this case, the term refers to a wide range of poorly-defined techniques such as deploying malware to search, copy, and transmit private files from private computers, breaking into secure systems and accounts, exploiting vulnerabilities in widely-used software to turn our devices into surveillance tools, and much more.
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It’s hard to speak with your face pressed against concrete. Or when you can’t breathe. Or with a broken neck. And even when you manage to speak, people in power seek to silence you. Just ask the San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick.
The all-too-familiar voices of the status quo tried to quiet Kaepernick as soon as he began to protest. They want Americans of conscience to just sit down and shut up. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t say anything about kneeling. Kaepernick has been doing just that, and in doing so, has spoken volumes.
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The court in Washington, D.C., is hearing arguments in two cases against EFF client Public.Resource.Org, an open records advocacy website. In these suits, several industry groups claim they own copyrights on written standards for building safety and educational testing they helped develop, and can deny or limit public access to them even after the standards have become part of the law. Standards like these that are legal requirements—such as the National Electrical Code—are available only in paper form in Washington, D.C., in expensive printed books, or through a paywall. By posting these documents online, Public.Resource.Org seeks to make these legal requirements more available to the public that must abide by them. The industry groups allege the postings infringe their copyright, even though the standards have been incorporated into government regulations and, therefore, must be free for anyone to view, share, and discuss.
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The last Guantánamo detainee to make the case for his release before a panel of senior administration officials is also the youngest man left at the island prison.
In a hearing Thursday of Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board, Hassan Ali Bin Attash, a Yemeni who is believed to be about 31 years old, said through representatives that he was working toward a high school GED diploma and hoped to join relatives in Saudi Arabia and find a job as a translator.
Attash’s exact birthdate is uncertain, but he was certainly a young teen in 1997, when the U.S. military alleges that he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and began working for senior al Qaeda figures doing everything from bomb-making to logistics. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and spent the next two years being moved between CIA black-site prisons and interrogations in Afghanistan and Jordan before landing in Guantánamo in September 2004. While in U.S. custody, according to his own and other prisoners’ accounts, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from a bar by his wrists, and threatened with dogs and electric shocks, among other forms of torture. He was also severely tortured by the Jordanians.
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Late last month, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake ripped through central Italy, leaving 292 people dead and many more seriously injured. While it would not have been unheard of for tremors to cause that much destruction in a developing nation, the anti-seismic reinforcement technology available in a wealthy European country like Italy should have prevented many of the buildings that ultimately fell from collapsing.
The vast majority of those killed in the earthquake lived in the town of Amatrice, in northern Lazio, where the construction firm paid to carry out anti-seismic work had in fact links to organized crime, and utterly failed to conduct any sort of improvements.
If the work had been completed as directed, far fewer people would have lost their lives. One now-infamous elementary school that crumbled in Amatrice, was renovated to resist earthquakes as recently as 2012 and at a cost of $785,000 USD – money that apparently went into the pockets of local Mafiosi.
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Asked by reporters last week about the likelihood that Obama would raise criticisms of his human rights record, Duterte declared elliptically, “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You [Obama] must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. ‘Putang ina,’ I will swear at you in that [ASEAN] forum.”
The mainstream media was shocked at the insulting suggestion that the U.S. president would have to be respectful to the Filipino president or risk provoking some reactive rudeness. Asked in Beijing if he would meet as planned with Duterte, Obama affected mild amusement at the “colorful” Filipino leader, saying his staff was deciding when and if a meeting will happen. Its cancellation was announced son afterwards. Obama would meet with the South Korean leader instead.
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Washington, on the other hand, views the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the New People’s Army, as “terrorists.” Just as the U.S. views all left-wing armed movements as terrorists (unless and until they can be used for common purposes, as in the case of the Iranian MEK in Iraq). In 2002 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took the unprecedented step of blacklisting the estimable Sison personally as a “terrorist” and the U.S. (spurred by then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) was surely behind the Dutch authorities’ raid on his house and his brief detention in 2007 on suspicion of ordering two murders in the Philippines the year before. (He was cleared of the charges and released.)
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How would a President Hillary Clinton react, should the CPP acquire an established role in Philippines politics, Manila withdraw from recent military and “security” agreements, and the country draw closer to the PRC? Be assured her crooked cabal is already discussing coup plans. Because that’s what they do, thinking that as the “exceptional” nation they need not (as Hillary confidant Henry Kissinger once said in relation to Chile) “stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
But that was 1970, when the U.S. had twice the share in global GDP than it has today and the world was divided by the Cold War. Ruling classes of nations forced to take sides at that time have seen been obliged by market and geopolitical forces to align, re-align, and hold out options for the future. Obama cannot snap his fingers and demand that Duterte cooperate with an anti-China, pro-U.S. balikitan program. Nor will his successor be able to do so.
The next U.S. president might face an independent country whose people are attempting to resolve their own contradictions in their own way, rejecting interference from the putang ina in Washington. What could be more hopeful than that?
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A scathing report from Human Rights Watch reveals the degrading and inhumane conditions under which hundreds of refugee children in Greece are being forced to sleep in dirty, vermin-infested police station cells, detention centers, and coast guard facilities for months at a time—in violation of Greek and international law.
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Prisoners across the United States are launching a massive strike on Friday, on the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, to protest what they call modern-day slavery.
Organizers say the strike will take place in at least 24 states to protest inhumane living and working conditions, forced labor, and the cycle of the criminal justice system itself. In California alone, 800 people are expected to take part in the work stoppage. It is slated to be one of the largest strikes in history.
In the era of Black Lives Matter, the issues of racist policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, and other factors that contribute to the mass incarceration crisis are coming to the forefront of civil and human rights movements.
“Slavery is alive and well in the prison system, but by the end of this year, it won’t be anymore,” reads the call to action from groups including Support Prisoner Resistance, the Free Alabama Movement, and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). “This is a call to end slavery in America.”
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A man who was rendered to Gaddafi’s Libya in a joint MI6-CIA operation has written to Sir Mark Allen, the former MI6 official who was responsible for his ordeal, following a rare public comment by Sir Mark.
In a recent article for the Catholic Herald, Sir Mark Allen – formerly head of counter-terrorism at MI6 – argued for a faith-based “answer to terrorism.”
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The Missouri River, the longest river in North America, has for thousands of years provided the water necessary for life to the region’s original inhabitants. To this day, millions of people rely on the Missouri for clean drinking water. Now, a petroleum pipeline, called the Dakota Access pipeline, is being built, threatening the river. A movement has grown to block the pipeline, led by Native American tribes that have lived along the banks of the Missouri from time immemorial. Members of the Dakota and Lakota nations from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation established a camp at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers, about 50 miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. They declare themselves “protectors, not protesters.” Last Saturday, as they attempted to face down massive bulldozers on their ancient burial sites, the pipeline security guards attacked the mostly Native American protectors with dogs and pepper spray as they resisted the $3.8 billion pipeline’s construction, fighting for clean water, protection of sacred ground and an end to our fossil-fuel economy.
Standing Rock Sioux set up the first resistance encampment in April, calling it Sacred Stone. Now there are four camps with more than 1,000 people, mostly from Native American tribes in the U.S. and Canada. “Water is Life” is the mantra of this nonviolent struggle against the pipeline that is being built to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois.
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Every once in a while, the curtains part and we get a glimpse of the ugliest, most shameful spectacle in American politics: the Republican Party’s systematic attempt to disenfranchise African-Americans and other minorities with voter ID laws and other restrictions at the polls.
If you thought this kind of discrimination died with Jim Crow, think again. Fortunately, federal courts have blocked implementation of some of the worst new laws, at least for now. But the most effective response would be for black and brown voters to send the GOP a message by turning out in record numbers, no matter what barriers Republicans try to put in our way.
The ostensible reason for these laws is to solve a problem that doesn’t exist—voter fraud by impersonation. Four years ago, you may recall, a Republican Pennsylvania legislator let slip the real reason for his state’s new voter ID law: to “allow” Mitt Romney to win the state. In the end, he didn’t. But Republicans tried mightily to discourage minorities, most of whom vote Democratic, from going to the polls.
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Anyone who wants to understand mass incarceration needs to understand Attica. And anyone who wants to understand Attica must read Heather Thompson’s new book, Blood in the Water, the first scholarly history of the Attica prison uprising. It is a riveting tale, but a difficult one to read. Several reviewers have noted that they had to stop reading at several points, to breathe and to wipe the tears from their eyes. I join that group. As difficult as it is, this is a story that must be told.
Forty-five years ago today, on September 9, 1971, almost 1,300 prisoners took over an exercise yard at Attica prison. For months, they had filed petitions, written grievances and tried everything they could to ease the horrid conditions at Attica. They often were hungry, as prison officials only budgeted 65 cents a day per prisoner for food. There were few jobs and no opportunities for education. Racial and ethnic discrimination was rampant: Black prisoners were assigned the dirtiest, hardest manual labor jobs. While all mail was censored, any letters in Spanish were simply thrown away, hitting the Puerto Rican prisoners who received mail from their Spanish-speaking parents the hardest. Medical care was grossly inadequate, with one doctor for the entire prison. Guard brutality was unchecked.
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The United States is indeed exceptional. It is the only country that ushers in a new Presidency by displacing thousands of the highest Executive Branch officials. That leaves in place those who are indentured to public service but, with the exception of the uniformed military and Intelligence services, almost never make policy, direct its implementation or review it. ‘Change’ you can believe in because it is dictated by law and rooted tradition.
It is one of the age’s secular mysteries how institutional integrity and coherent programs survive this upheaval. Foreigners in particular fret over how they are going to handle fresh personalities and new ideas. After all, all this motion could jeopardize their own plans and commitments. Anxiety is abated somewhat when they look back at other transitions to find that continuity eclipses innovation by a wide margin. There is more change of style than of substance. That holds for both persons and policies.
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Building public support for human rights reform is crucial. Without a broad and deep public constituency, legislators will not pass the necessary laws, supervisors will not enforce new rules, and citizens will not demand real accountability and change.
For a long time now, we have known that non-governmental rights groups play a key role in these reform efforts. They lobby lawmakers and government, report abuses, and mobilize public attention, and these efforts are sometimes successful. All too often, however, human rights groups do this work without collecting much in the way of systematic evidence. As a result, they do not have an accurate sense of who are their strongest supporters, and which population sub-groups need more attention and persuasion.
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The ground upon which greed rests is hard and fast while the ground upon which our moral discriminations rest is soft and fuzzy, mostly so because moral fronts serve the interests of greed. Greed works both sides of our party duopoly, both Democrat and Republican. They join in ignoring the anxieties and fears of both the working-class and the middle class, thus becoming, either openly or by silent concession, supporters of neoliberalism and über-globalization.
Nevertheless, the disillusionment of the Many has found its leaders, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who though far different in their diagnosis and treatment equally ride the powerful wave of anger and discontent. That wave is now breaking against not only neoliberalism and über-globalization but against the Third Way/New Democrat collaboration advocated by Bill Clinton and one assumes to be continued by Hillary Clinton.
A mixture of greed and hypocrisy, of Uriah Heep fronted by Seth Pecksniff, of real intent and alibi cover up surround all matters attending a bedrock force that has had much to do with the U.S.’s transformation from democracy to plutarchy, namely globalization and its many camouflages.
Revolt against this now remains with Trump and his supporters, its manifesto being what I call über-xenophobia, xenophobia being the mildest preamble to the ugliness of the whole. Sanders’ own manifesto of revolt remained, like moral discriminations, soft and fuzzy, cerebral and un-visceral, while Trump’s continues to drum a message that like all percussion is felt not cogitated. Trump’s own distortions of sentences, of argument and exposition, of language and meaning testify to the fact that his appeal does not lie in conceptual understanding but elsewhere, lower, deeper, darker.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Just a few months ago, we wrote up a decently long post explaining why the upcoming “transition” of a piece of internet governance away from the US government was both a good thing and not a big deal. You can read those two posts on it, but the really short version is twofold: (1) the Commerce Department’s “control” over ICANN’s IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) was always pretty much non-existent in the first place; and (2) even having that little connection to the US government, though, only provided tremendous fodder for foreign governments (mainly: Russia & China) to push to take control of the internet themselves. That’s what that whole disastrous UN/ITU/WCIT mess was a few years back. Relinquishing the (non-existent) control, with clear parameters that internet governance wouldn’t then be allowed to jump into the ITU’s lap, helps on basically every point. It takes away a key reason that other countries have used to claim they need more control, and it makes it clear that internet governance needs to remain out of any particular government’s control.
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In other words, as we’ve explained before, Ted Cruz’s concerns over the internet here are completely backwards. Up is down, black is white, night is day kind of stuff. Keeping the IANA connection to the US government is the kind of thing that opens up the possibility for Russia/China to exert more control over internet governance by routing around ICANN and its flawed, but better than the alternative, “multistakeholder” setup. Moving ICANN away from the US government, with strict rules in place that basically keep it operating as is, takes away one of the key arguments that foreign countries have been using to try to seize control over key governance aspects of the internet.
If Cruz fears foreign governments taking control of internet governance, he should do the exact opposite of what he’s doing now. Let the Commerce Dept. sever the almost entirely imaginary leash it has on ICANN. Otherwise, other countries’ frustration with the US’s roles is a much bigger actual threat to how the internet is managed.
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Everybody hates ‘em, but more and more Americans find themselves living under the confines of broadband data caps. Each month, millions of households wrestle with balancing their internet use against staying under their usage limits.
As the number of users affected by data caps grows, so do the number of complaints. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency has been looking at data caps: “It’s not a new topic to us, that’s for damn sure,” he said. But regulators and legislators have yet to do anything about them — and they should. Here’s why.
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DRM
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In June 2016, I wrote about the MQA proprietary closed-source music encoding system and shared my thoughts on why I felt the system is not a good thing. Since then, I’ve been reading more about MQA so this month I’ll share additional thoughts.
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With the recent iPhone 7 announcement, Apple confirmed what had already been widely speculated: that the new smartphone won’t have a traditional, analog headphone jack. Instead, the only ways to connect the phone to an external headset or speaker will be via Bluetooth, through the phone’s AirPlay feature, or through Apple’s proprietary Lightning port.
Apple’s motivations for abandoning the analog jack are opaque, but likely benign. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone’s body. The decision may also have been a part of the move to a water-resistant iPhone. And certainly, many people choose a wireless listening experience.
But removing the port will change how a substantial portion of iPhone owners listen to audio content—namely, by simply plugging in a set of headphones. By switching from an analog signal to a digital one, Apple has potentially given itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. We hope that Apple isn’t unwittingly opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.
When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The UK IPO will now be providing advance notice of grant to applicants. They will be issuing a communication informing an applicant that his/her application meets all requirements and will therefore proceed to grant. This will typically be 1 month’s notice, but 2 months’ if issued as the first examination report (as currently is the case).
This will bring the UK procedure closer in line with the familiar Rule 71(3) EPC procedure at the EPO. Importantly, the change will give applicants a guaranteed period to decide whether to file a divisional application before the “allowed” application grants, and so stop divisional “foreshadowing” i.e. raising the possibility to the examiner that a divisional application might be of interest in a response to an examination report, and asking for time to decide before they grant the case.
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Fines of nearly €150 million imposed on pharmaceutical company Lundbeck and a number of generic rivals by the European Commission have been upheld by the EU General Court. The Court’s decisions are the first to find that pay-for-delay agreements breach EU antitrust rules
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Copyrights
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After having covered many YouTube copyright and Content-ID horrors stories, we can now share a personal experience. A few days ago we uploaded the archive of old TorrentFreak TV episodes to YouTube and within hours we received our very first copyright claim. Ironically, it’s from a friend of the site and one of the last people we expected.
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Last month, we wrote about a blog post by Public Knowledge questioning why the Copyright Office kept acting like a lobbying firm for Hollywood, often stepping into issues where it has no business and almost always pushing the Hollywood viewpoint. It turns out that was just a sneak peak of a much larger report that PK has now released on The Consequences of Regulatory Capture at the Copyright Office. The full 50-page report is worth a thorough read.
It details the obvious bits concerning the revolving door between copyright maximalists and the Copyright Office, with much of top management coming from jobs in the entertainment industries, and then many former top Copyright Office folks going right back into that industry upon leaving. But the more interesting part of the report is looking at how frequently the Copyright Office appears to blatantly misinterpret copyright law in an attempt to expand what the law actually covers.
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If you do cable TV, you’re a renter. You need that set-top-box that connects the cable to your television, and chances are, your cable company won’t let you buy the thing. You’re forced to rent it, paying that monthly fee for years on end, shelling out far more than that box is really worth. But that might change.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a proposal that would force pay-TV providers to offer apps that let you bypass set-top-boxes altogether. Instead of plugging a set-top-box into your TV, you could just use cable through a device of your choice, like a Roku, an Xbox, or a Google Chromecast stick. Plus, you could watch on all sorts of other devices, like phones and tablets. If the new proposal passes, you say goodbye to that monthly fee forever.
It may seem a little late to do something about this particular problem, given that analysts say more people are now cutting the pay TV cord. But there are still tens of millions of people paying for the tube, and the average subscriber pays $231 a year for the things, according to the Federal Communications Commission, and cost the country about $20 billion annually.
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The Federal Communications Commission unveiled its long-awaited proposal to increase competition in the video “set-top box” market on Thursday, but the agency’s “compromise” plan faces no guarantee of final approval after months of furious pushback from the cable and entertainment industries.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made it a priority to break the cable industry’s dominance of the cable set-top box market, which forces most consumers to pay an average of $231 per year to rent these old-school devices, pouring nearly $20 billion annually into the coffers of Comcast, Charter and other industry giants, according to a 2015 Senate report.
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We’ve noted how the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box fell apart over the last few months, thanks to a massive disinformation effort by the cable industry involving a flood of hugely misleading editorials and some help from the US Copyright Office. In short the cable industry used a sound wall of hired voices to claim that cable box competition would hurt consumer privacy, violate copyright, result in a huge spike in piracy, and was even racist. Despite these claims being nonsense, the unprecedented PR campaign managed to sway several FCC Commissioners that had originally voted yes on the proposal.
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Except, of course, there’s nothing in there that’s a copyright issue at all (just as there was nothing in the original proposal). The new proposal doesn’t impact copyright licensing at all. Just read it. It only requires that TV providers offer apps that are fully controlled by the provider, enabling subscribers to then access licensed content. There is no infringement here. There is no compulsory license. The TV providers still have the same license they’ve always had with the content providers. The end users still have the same contract they’ve always had with the TV providers. The only difference is that end users might not have to rent expensive boxes any more, and now the TV providers will make apps available to those subscribers, which can work on various boxes to access the same licensed content.
The complaint here is really about the loss of control for the cable providers and the ability to shake down the public in renting boxes. The MPAA’s ridiculous complaint seems to be that it doesn’t like the content being made available on new devices without some sort of additional payment. But that’s not the law, and it’s certainly not copyright law. For years, we’ve known that it’s legal to use other devices to access content — the VCR and DVRs have both been declared legal. The MPAA’s complaint here is basically that it doesn’t like the fact that those court cases have gone against it, and it’s trying to pretend they did not.
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With the Icelandic Pirates crushing it in the polls and set to form the next government of a sovereign, carbon-neutral, strategically located nation, it’s worth asking how a party whose two issues — internet freedom and copyright reform — are wonky, minority interests rose to prominence.
The answer is a combination of the contemptuous, naked corruption of the Icelandic establishment — the people who helped destroy the world’s economy — and the Pirates’ flexibility, frankness and basic decency.
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Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof continues to fight against copyright holders that target alleged file-sharers. The company explains that it has setup its logging policies in such as way that it can refuse requests for IP-address information from so-called copyright trolls, suggesting that other ISPs should follow suit.
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Today, the European Court of Justice significantly curtailed the freedom to hyperlink – one of the basic building blocks of the web. Together with the new special copyright protection for news articles the European Commission is planning to propose next week, the ability of Europeans to point to things online without having to fear breaking a law is in peril.
Could the following message soon be commonplace on the European internet? Read on for details.
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Copyright owners may be emboldened to take action against sites that provide links to infringing content following the CJEU’s ruling in the GS Media case. The dispute involved hyperlinks to sites hosting photos of a Playboy model
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A ruling from the European Court of Justice has clarified when the posting of hyperlinks to infringing works is to be considered a ‘communication to the public’. Those who post links to content they do not know is infringing in a non-commercial environment can relax, but for those doing so during the course of business the rules are much tighter.
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The European Court of Justice published today an important decision on the legal status of hypertext links, a key element of the Web. Sadly, it has chosen to discard the conclusion of the General Attorney, by ruling that posting a link to content illegally published online is a copyright infraction. This jurisprudence has contributed to weaken hyperlinks and how the Web works, at a moment were the European Commission is also questioning the liberty to link.
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In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably have known that the material was infringing. Worse, they will be presumed to know of this if the links are provided for “the pursuit of financial gain”.
The case, GS Media BV v. Sanoma, concerned a Dutch news website, GeenStijl, that linked to leaked pre-publication photos from Playboy magazine, as well as publishing a thumbnail of one of them. The photos were hosted not by GeenStijl itself but at first by an Australian image hosting website, then later by Imageshack, and subsequently still other web hosts, with GeenStijl updating the links as the copyright owner had the photos taken down from one image host after another.
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09.09.16
Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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By that I mean every corporate cathedral you can shake a mouse at is full of Linux, yet Linux has not yet enabled a free and open marketplace for every business and every customer. Instead, every human being on the commercial net remains trapped in corporate cathedrals, many of which are ravenous for the blood of personal data, most of which is acquired by surveillance. In fact, nearly our entire existence in the commercial world is inside cathedrals where we have near-zero autonomy and great exposure to whatever those running the cathedrals wish to know about us.
The wide-open bazaar—the open public marketplace—where we can roam free, as anonymous or selectively know-able as we please, still doesn’t exist online. And it should, because the internet protocol was built to support it. Just because it isn’t there yet doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build it. Hell, commercial activity has existed on the internet only for 21 years so far. (Starting on April 30, 1995—that’s when the NSFnet, the last of the internet backbones that forbade commercial traffic, stood down.)
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Desktop
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What is it with courts to accept the status quo instead of recognizing fundamental principles of law and justice? Are they on the payroll of monopolists? What’s wrong with giving consumers choice? Nothing. This court has blundered like so many others.
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Server
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IBM is mounting its strongest challenge yet to x86 hegemony with the unveiling of its spanking new Linux based S822LC system. What makes this system different is that it’s based on a new processor/motherboard configuration, complete with a sporty NVIDIA NVLink connector.
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IBM on Thursday rolled out its latest Power8 processor, which is designed to move data faster, and new servers with OpenPower features.
For IBM, the OpenPower Foundation community is critical for its Power8 processor. A bevy of companies are in OpenPower, a group that aims to be a counterweight to x86-based servers.
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IBM is adding new capabilities to its Power8 silicon and introducing new Linux-based servers in a bid to grow its share of the Big Data analytics market.
IBM first launched its Power8 family of servers in April 2014 and has been steadily growing the portfolio ever since.
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Containers and cloud native are great technologies, but what is the larger business context? Why should the pointy-haired bosses care? Joe Beda of Accel Partners described the tremendous business value of DevOps done right in his keynote presentation at LinuxCon North America in August.
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For more than a year now, we’ve covered the Google’s move to release Kubernetes under an open source license, and the steady pace at which the technology nearly has become as high profile as Docker and other tools in the container space. Contributors to the Kubernetes project include IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and others.
Now, Skippbox has announced that it will debut Cabin, the first mobile app for the Kubernetes container orchestration system. As Kubernetes becomes a popular standard, this mobile management app has a lot of promise.
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Kernel Space
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After announcing the release of the Linux 4.7.3 kernel, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of the twentieth maintenance update to the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel series.
Linux 4.4 is currently the most advanced long-term supported kernel branch, until Linux kernel 4.9 takes over later in the year, and it is being used in very popular GNU/Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Therefore, it is imperative to it to receive security updates that patch various bugs and flaws discovered by various researchers and hackers.
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Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, has gone on another rant at a contributor over a piece of code with which he disagrees. It’s not the first time he has got involved with the community in this way.
Torvalds has repeatedly told the community that he is not willing to consider tying firmware and driver modules together in a single unit.
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The Hyperledger Project, a collaborative cross-industry effort to advance blockchain technology led by The Linux Foundation, announced that 17 new organizations have joined to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications. The project now has more than 80 members, which represents a growth of 170 percent in the last six months.
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25 years of linux and yes, I know Linux is popular. Still it was unexpected when I was asked in public transport if I know about Linux. Man wanted me to help with X restarting due to bad graphics drivers… I asked how he realized… and he told me about my T-shirt. I realized I have UnitedLinux T-shirt on… Given SCO’s involvement in that one… should I burn the shirt?
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA’s Unix team today released the 370.28 driver as their newest Linux/BSD/Solaris driver in their short-lived branch.
The NVIDIA 370.28 driver most notably adds over/under-clocking support for GeForce GTX 1000 “Pascal” graphics cards. This Pascal clock adjustments via CoolBits was previously added to the NVIDIA 370 beta Linux driver from last month.
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Today, September 8, 2016, Nvidia released a new short-lived graphics driver for Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, including FreeBSD and Solaris, the Nvidia 370.28.
Looking at the release notes, we can notice that Nvidia 370.28 is here to add many fixes for bugs that have been reported by users since the last stable release, and it also looks like it contains that changes implemented during the Beta stages of development of the Nvidia 370.x graphics driver series.
Yes, that’s right, Nvidia 370.x was in Beta until today, and now Nvidia promoted it to the stable channel, but it’s a short-lived branch, which means that it won’t be supported for long until a new version will see the light of day, so our recommendation is to always stay on the long-live branch of the Nvidia video driver.
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X.ORG –
Playing legacy/X11 games on Wayland via XWayland may soon be in better shape with the latest slew of X Server patches.
Jonas Ådahl today published a set of 12 patches for implementing pointer confinement and warping within XWayland.
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Applications
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A new stable release of Wireshark, the nifty network sniffing tool, is now available for download. You may recall the app from the Ubuntu “Spyware” saga. Wireshark was among the tools used to inspect packets/searches travelling from the Unity Dash and back.
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Before looking at a more detailed test I wanted to try each compression tool against a single file type so that we could see how each tool handles the file in question.
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TigerVNC 1.7 was released today as the newest version of this open-source, high-performance, cross-platform VNC implementation.
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On September 8, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal announced the release of a new maintenance update for his popular, free, open-source and cross-platform ebook library management software.
Calibre 2.67 is now the most stable and advanced version of the application, and among the new features it includes we can mention an updated Kobo driver that supports Kobo Aura One e-book reader’s firmware version 4, support for reading more image formats as covers, and support for displaying book counts on the Tag Browser’s right edge.
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Proprietary
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A new version of the official Spotify desktop app rolled out last week. The update, which bumps the version number to v1.0.37, features just one notable Linux-specific fix: support for opening/playing albums, artists and tracks using Spotify URLs. Revolutionary, man.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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On September 8, 2016, game studio Psyonix was proud to announce the availability of a Beta version of the popular Rocket League game for SteamOS/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.
Rocket League is a futuristic, physics-based sports/action game that lets players play European football while driving booster-rigged vehicles. It is the successor of the popular and classic Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars game released in 2008 only for Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console, also developed and published by the Psyonix game studio.
The game officially hit the Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 platforms in July 2015, and a few months later, in February 2016, it arrived for Microsoft’s Xbox One gaming console as well. Due to popular demand, Rocket League is now also officially available for the Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems, but only in a Beta form at the moment of writing this article.
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Rocket League is now officially available for SteamOS, due to the time of the release I will be unable to give any actual impressions as I am likely asleep while this gets published.
I will be able to get impressions up rather early tomorrow morning (UTC time), as it will be my first priority. It will likely be the main game on our Friday livestream too.
It’s been a bit of a wild ride, but it’s here ‒ finally.
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With many Linux gamers having looked forward to the Linux release of Rocket League, I tested out the Linux port of the game when using Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D as well as the AMDGPU-PRO blob.
Considering Rocket League on Linux lists system requirements even lower than the Windows specifications and do mention AMD, I was expecting the process to go well. Additionally, Rocket League is powered by Unreal Engine 3 — yes, UE3, not UE4. Considering that, it went well.
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Pan-Pan was sent over by my friends at GOG to take a look at. I had never heard of it before, but the visuals are so interesting it was begging to be played.
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My GOG contacts sent over Fear Equation, a game I have been really wanting to play as the sound of managing a train in a horror setting filled with fog and deadly creatures sounded fun.
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Stellaris 1.3 patch ‘Heinlein’ is starting to sound more and more exciting! They really are putting in a lot of effort to make the overall game feel more alive and rewarding. This latest post on their new patch sounds fantastic.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Do you own an old PC, like the ones that came with windows XP? Well, you don’t have to dump them just yet as they can be brought back to life with these lightweight Linux desktop environments. These desktop environments are characterised as lightweight because they consume lesser resources than other popular desktop environments with feature-rich experiences. Here are all of these lightweight Linux desktop environments.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Just a few moments ago, the development team behind the open-source Kdenlive video editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems proudly announced the release of Kdenlive 16.08.1.
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Today, September 8, 2016, the KDE developers published the first point release of the KDE Applications 16.08 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
KDE Applications 16.08.1 is here right on time for the last maintenance update to the KDE Plasma 5.7 series, version 5.7.5, which should be out on September 13, 2016, according to the official release schedule, and it brings, as expected, multiple improvements to many of the included KDE apps and components, along with the Long Term Support (LTS) version of KDE Development Platform 4.14.20.
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If people need a version of Linux that looks like XP then they could easily go for Q4OS and for people looking for an Apple style interface there is Elementary.
I really liked Zorin when it first came out but I am struggling to see its place in the world now that time has moved on. Many Windows users have become accustomed to Windows 10, Linux users are happy with their desktops of choice and Zorin just doesn’t offer as much as Mint and Ubuntu
The fact that Zorin will always lag behind Ubuntu is definitely a downside and Mint is just a better distribution, with better stability, more consistent release cycles and better support.
Read more
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New Releases
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A year ago, Kali Linux moved to a rolling release cycle in an effort to provide a continuous stream of application updates. Kali Linux is a popular open-source Linux distribution for security professionals, loaded with a growing list of tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, web application analysis, database assessment, password attacks, wireless attacks and reverse engineering. Despite Kali Linux’s rolling release cycle, it still puts out milestone releases as a roll-up omnibus of changes made over a period of time. The Kali 2016.2 milestone was released Aug. 31. In addition to application updates, it also provides users with a choice of different desktop environments. By default, Kali Linux in the past has provided users with a GNOME desktop although they have long had the choice to load their favorite desktop on their own. With the Kali 2016.2 update, users can now just simply download a version of Kali that already boots with the MATE, LXDE or Enlightenment desktops. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features of the Kali Linux 2016.2 release.
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Black Lab Software’s CEO Robert J. Dohnert informs Softpedia today about the availability of the second Beta development milestone of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” operating systems.
Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Beta 2 is here approximately three weeks after the launch of the first Beta build and it adds a few local applications, among which we can mention the Abiword word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet editor, Rhythmbox music player, Totem video player, GIMP image editor, Chromium web browser, and Thunderbird e-mail and news client. OpenJDK 8 (Java support) is available as well.
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Arch Family
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Believe it or not, we completely forgot to write our usual story about the updated installation medium (a.k.a. ISO image) for the month of September 2016 of the famous Arch Linux operating system.
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OpenSUSE/SUSE
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Seems like the top story today was the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SUSE parent company Micro Focus. Links to the press release arrived yesterday emphasizing that SUSE is now HPE’s preferred Linux partner. In other news, the Everyday Linux User pondered the “strange” developments over at the Zorin OS camp and OMG!Ubuntu! discussed Ubuntu’s new default wallpaper. Michael Larabel took TrueOS Beta for a spin and Doc Searls said today, “Linux has been used at least as much to build corporate (and government) cathedrals as to liberate the geeks who write it.”
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Before HPE spun out its software assets in a deal with Micro Focus, the UK-based business was best known for its soup-to-nuts support of COBOL. What most people missed is the deal also made HPE the first major, old-school technology company to give preference to Linux distributor SUSE.
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Red Hat Family
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Just 51% of Australian and New Zealand organisations have the right skills in-house to develop and support their mobile enterprise strategy, according to research by open source software giant, Red Hat.
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Finance
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Red Hat (RHT) has an average broker rating of 1.31, which is interpreted as a Strong Buy, as rated by 16 equity analysts. Nonetheless, 13 analysts are positive on the stocks future and they recommend a Strong Buy on the stock. 1 other analysts advise a Buy. Nevertheless, the majority of 2 analysts consider that the stock is a Hold with neither a large upside nor a downside. Ranking by Zacks Investment Research for Coach Inc is 3, which is also a Hold.
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Fedora
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While it may just feel like recently when DNF 1.0 was released and Fedora switched from Yum to DNF by default, DNF 2.0 is already in development and hitting Fedora Rawhide systems.
Honza Silhan confirmed at the end of last week that DNF 1.1.10 is the last version of DNF-1 with the 1.x version already being unmaintained. DNF-2 is now in development and is landing in the Fedora Rawhide development repository. DNF-2 will bring new features and bug-fixes. One of the big underlying changes is making use of libdnf rather than Hawkey/libhif.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Leostream Corporation, a leading developer of hosted desktop connection management software, and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for container, cloud, scale-out and hyperscale computing, today announced that Leostream has joined the Charm Partner Programme to facilitate the deployment of virtual desktops on Ubuntu OpenStack. The partner program helps solution providers make best use of Canonical’s model driven operations system, Juju; enabling instant workload deployment, integration, and scaling on any public or private cloud, as well as bare metal with just a click of a button. The Juju Charm Store has a rapidly growing number of charms available to DevOps teams, with hundreds of cloud-based applications available.
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Monitoring battery life of your Ubuntu laptop just got a touch easier. The Atareao team has added a new battery usage and information section to its fork of the CPU-G hardware information tool (think CPU-Z on Windows). You’re probably familiar with seeing a timeline power usage graph on your mobile device, be it Android, Ubuntu or iOS.
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As you’re no doubt aware, a new desktop background accompanies each new stable release of Ubuntu.
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The Orange Pi series of machines lets you run a small Linux machine dedicated to a specific task for a very attractive price — less than $20 for setup. Some ideas for using an Orange Pi include adding network connectivity to an older printer, transcoding a USB webcam and sending it over the network, or just connecting some hardware to the 40 pins and being able to interface to chips faster than a microcontroller could.
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In the hope that this joke never sees the light of day again, Linux distro maker Canonical and drone maker Parrot have joined forces to create S.L.A.M.dunk, a development kit to help design autonomous vehicles that avoid obstacles even in the most innest of indoors.
The system uses a combination of Ubuntu and ROS (Robot Operating System) to provide an environment for prototyping self-driving, 3D mapping or data gathering. Attaching it to a drone turns it into an “intelligent robot”, according to Ubuntu.
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Today, September 8, 2016, Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton was extremely proud to announce that a total of ten million Raspberry Pi single-board computers have been sold to date.
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I think most of us expected it would be a success, but this big a success? I’m talking about the Raspberry PI of course, the single-board computer that has now sold over 10 million units since launching back in 2011.
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Advantech’s 3.5-inch form-factor “MIO-6300” board-set aims the company’s Celeron N2930-based Pico-ITX SBC at robotics and other real-time control apps.
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Phones
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Tizen
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I am a software engineer at Samsung Poland R&D Center and I have started my adventure with application development in Tizen and for Tizen based devices about 2 years ago. In that time I had the opportunity to create applications and games both for Tizen smart phones, like Z1 and Z3. The meeting with the Tizen Platform was also my first step to programming wearables. That made my Tizen experience even more interesting. I had the opportunity to create applications for Samsung Gear S, Gear S2 and Gear Fit 2 devices.
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Android
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Apple and Samsung have always dominated the smartphone market by offering flagship phones with a potent combination of powerful hardware, functional software, and unique features. The recent announcement of the iPhone 7 takes things to the next level by adding a beefed-up processor, major improvements to the camera, and waterproofing. Let’s take a look at how Apple’s new flagship compares with the Samsung Galaxy S7, one of the best Android phones available.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google has been granted a second extension by the European Union to respond to accusations that it has abused its market dominance with its Android mobile operating system.
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I’m a huge fan of Amazon’s cheap tablet computers. Amazon’s Android-based tablet OS is breeze to set up for my 9 year-old, but their proprietary paywalls blocked me from getting everything I wanted installed on mine. Luckily, rooting most Android devices is pretty easy.
I was so happy with my daughter’s Fire HD 7 that I almost bought one for myself. Reading about Amazon’s hardware, I realized I could get the earlier 7″ model, the HDX, for about the same price but with oodles more horsepower, resolution and RAM. I decided it was a worthy $60 experiment, to see if I could convert. A 64GB WiFi-only unit was soon in my hands.
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What is this witchcraft? DeskDock, now available on the Play Store, allows you to share your computer’s keyboard and mouse with your Android device. If you’ve ever used Synergy, it’s very close to that.
What’s the point of something like this, you may ask? The primary use the developer provided was to make Android development much easier. With this tool, you could work on an application on your computer, push it to your device, and test it without your hands ever leaving your keyboard. But there’s plenty of other potential uses as well – you could use your Android tablet as another monitor to watch media on, for example.
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The latest development in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 recall saga: Three Australian airlines have banned the use of Note 7 handsets onboard their aircraft, citing safety concerns after at least 35 devices suffered battery fires or explosions. Meanwhile the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority says it’s considering its options.
According to Reuters, the airlines weren’t ordered to ban use of the phone by the authorities, but pro-actively put these measures in place following Samsung’s global Note 7 recall.
The Note 7′s battery issues recently made the news in Australia after one local model caught fire in a hotel room, causing a reported $1,870 worth of damage.
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Usually, after Apple releases a new iPhone, it puts out a breathless press release about how many people preordered it on the first weekend.
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Engineer Marc Merlin has been working at Google since 2001 but has been involved with Linux since 1993, in its very early days. Since then, open source adoption has dramatically increased, but a new challenge is emerging: Not many companies care about the license side of open source, Merlin stated in his talk “How Google Uses and Contributes to Open Source” at LinuxCon and ContainerCon North America.
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According to the U.S. Census, online retailers in the United States sold $97.3 billion worth of goods in the second quarter this year. That represents roughly 8 percent of all retail sales in the country during that time period.
If you’re a small business owner, getting a piece of that market can seem like a very attractive opportunity. But setting up an online shop may be a daunting prospect if you aren’t very technical.
In this article, we feature 10 ecommerce software solutions that can make setting up an online store easier. These are all open source solutions, which means that they are completely free if you run the software on your own server. If you don’t want to host your own website, many of them are also available through hosting providers for a small fee.
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Such open source is a signal to developers that an employer is developer-friendly, and it also allows companies to collaborate on code even as they compete for box office market share, automobile customers, etc. Whatever your organization, in short, you need more developers, which means you also need more open source. A lot more.
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Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University say they have developed an open source algorithm that can help spot social media frauds trying to sway valuable community influence.
“Given the rise in popularity of social networks and other web services in recent years, fraudsters have strong incentives to manipulate these services. On several shady websites, anyone can buy fake Facebook page-likes or Twitter followers by the thousands. Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor fake reviews are also available for sale, misleading consumers about restaurants, hotels, and other services and products. Detecting and neutralizing these actions is important for companies and consumers alike,” the researchers wrote in a paper outlining their algorithm known as FRAUDAR.
According to Carnegie Mellon researchers the new algorithm makes it possible to see through camouflage fraudsters use to make themselves look legitimate.
According to Christos Faloutsos, professor of machine learning and computer at Carnegie Mellon the state-of-the-art for detecting fraudsters, with tools such as NetProbe, is to find a pattern known as a “bipartite core.” These are groups of users who have many transactions with members of a second group, but no transactions with each other. This suggests a group of fraudsters, whose only purpose is to inflate the reputations of others by following them, by having fake interactions with them, or by posting flattering or unflattering reviews of products and businesses, he said in a statement.
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While VMworld 2016 is now in the rearview mirror, some major partnership announcements emerged from within the conference halls. One such announcement partnered cloud and object storage company Scality, Inc. with hosting and Internet infrastructure provider OVH. This new go-to-market team-up will provide enterprises large and small a solution to handle large-scale storage needs.
This partnership is just latest in a string of pioneering ventures at Scality since it opened its doors in 2008. To explore the company’s impressive growth and market strategies, SiliconANGLE recently spoke to Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality.
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Open source software and security will be fundamental elements of 5G, according to top executives at the 2016 CTIA Super Mobility conference here.
During yesterday’s opening keynote session, CTIA chairman and AT&T mobility president and CEO Glenn Lurie highlighted the role of open source software in the 5G roadmap. “We have to embrace open source, software-centric solutions. We know this drives flexibility and scalability with the growth of the network. It makes everything faster, better, and cheaper,” Lurie said.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Italian military have switched the first 8000 PC workstations to Libreoffice, an open source office productivity suite, reports Sonia Montegiove, a software analyst working for the Italian province of Perugia who is helping the military with the switch to LibreOffice.
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Anyway, the Italians have figured out that they don’t have to stick with a single source of supply from USA for all their IT. Good for them. They wouldn’t do that for anything else. Why IT? So, they are gaining freedom from M$, saving money and getting better IT. It’s the right way to do IT. I hope they get around to using a FLOSS OS too someday. That will compound their savings and increase security.
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On the heels of announcing new versions 5.2 and 5.1.5 of the free, LibreOffice suite of productivity applications, The Document Foundation has provided statistics indicating that LibreOffice is gaining traction with Linux users, developers, administrators, and enterprises. In fact, the new version 5.1.5 of the suite is specifically tuned for enterprise users.
The Document Foundation’s Annual Report notes that the LibreOffice project now has more than 1,000 contributors with 300 making commits in 2015. Moreover, new releases of the suite include enhanced focus on compatibility and standards. The suite’s import/export filters have improved exponentially, and — in a move that will appeal to many admins and cloud-minded users — the suite has been steadily adding direct integration with platforms and services including Google Drive, SharePoint, and Alfresco. You can now open files directly from — and save files to — these services via menu choices under the File menu in LibreOffice applications.
Integration with these platforms and services, of course, means that LibreOffice is now much more competitive with Google Docs. Additionally, as security concerns remain on everyone’s radar, The Document Foundation is working closely with the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP), a public-private partnership formed to secure electronic communication for organizations including defense contractors and government entities. The TSCP has specifications and frameworks that preserve more secure shared documents online. LibreOffice 5.2 complies with these document classification specifications.
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Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Following the seven-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison published earlier this week, on the same system I set out to test a variety of BSD distributions on the same system and ultimately benchmark their out-of-the-box performance too. Those performance benchmark results will be published later this week while today were a few remarks I wanted to share when trying out TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD, GhostBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, and PacBSD (Arch BSD) on this modern Intel Xeon system.
All of my testing was done on an Intel Xeon E5-2509 v4 Broadwell-EP system with MSI X99A WORKSTATION motherboard, NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and an OCZ TRION 150 120GB SATA 3.0 SSD. With the seven Linux distributions tested in recent days they all worked fine on the system: Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Antergos, and Sabayon Linux.
Below are my various brief remarks when testing the different BSDs on this Intel Xeon system. These are my thoughts with admittedly being a Linux enthusiast while just touching BSD, Solaris, and others only on a semi-frequent basis. I am by no means a diehard “Linux fan boy” and have no fundamental objections to BSD, I simply prefer the operating system that best fits my needs and for benchmarking where I can get my tests done in a reliable, reproducible, and timely manner. I at least prefer my operating systems have a clean and quick install process with sane defaults; working generally ~100 hour weeks, I don’t have time in 2016 if an OS cannot easily install and boot properly on a modern PC. I enjoy testing out the various BSDs and have no strong bias to any of them. This is the largest BSD testing comparison I’ve done in the past 12 years on Phoronix at the same time and on the same hardware.
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Licensing/Legal
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Michael Weinberg (who has written seminal stories on 3D printing and copyright) writes, “We are seeing widespread adoption of copyright-based open licenses in 3D printing and open source hardware. This is great in that it shows that the culture of openness has really permeated the culture. It is not so great because a significant number of the things nominally licensed in these communities aren’t actually protected by copyright.”
“This could create problems by 1) undermining long term confidence in open licenses when people find out that they are not enforceable when a copyright isn’t involved and/or 2) creating a constituency of people who want to expand the scope of copyright protection in order to make their open licenses enforceable.”
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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A report related to a state pilot program has declared that college and university students from Vernon and across the state can save thousands with the use of “digital, open-source textbooks.”
The results of the pilot program were published last month.
See the report here.
The pilot program was created through Special Act No. 15-18, “An Act Concerning the Use of Digital Open Source Textbooks in Higher Education.”
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Science
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The China government will prohibit imports and sale of 15W to below 60W incandescent light bulb from October 1, 2016, leading to a complete end to use of such lighting product, according to industry sources.
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Hardware
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I bought a laptop with only SSD drives a while ago and based on a limited amount of reading, added the “discard” option to my /etc/fstab file for all partitions and happily went on my way expecting to avoid the performance degradation problems that happen on SSD cards without this setting).
Yesterday, after a several month ordeal, I finally installed SSD drives in one of May First/People Link’s servers and started doing more research to find the best way to set things up.
I was quite surprised to learn that my change in /etc/fstab accomplished nothing. Well, not entirely true, my /boot partition was still getting empty sectors reported to the SSD card.
Since my filesystem is on top of LVM and LVM is on top of an encrypted disk, those messages from the files system to the disk were not getting through. I learned that when I tried to run the fstrim command on one of the partitions and received the message that the disk didn’t support it. Since my /boot partition is not in LVM or encrypted, it worked on /boot.
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Health/Nutrition
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From a press release issued today: “House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin (D-MI) and Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) today sent a letter to World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Roberto Azevêdo, criticizing the WTO Secretariat’s stance on measures it views as protectionist, and urging the office to better support the rules-based global trading system.”
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Security
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DragonFlyBSD is now the latest operating system that has decided to switch from OpenSSL to LibreSSL by default.
LibreSSL is now used by default in base while the ports packages may still depend upon OpenSSL until they have been shifted over to using LibreSSL.
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WordPress 4.6.1 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
WordPress versions 4.6 and earlier are affected by two security issues: a cross-site scripting vulnerability via image filename, reported by SumOfPwn researcher Cengiz Han Sahin; and a path traversal vulnerability in the upgrade package uploader, reported by Dominik Schilling from the WordPress security team.
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Cache attacks: this is not good. Ok, so we have a rowhammer: basically very common, hard-to-work-around, hardware problem. Bits in your memory may flip. Deal with it.
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The federal agency that stored, and lost, millions of current and former government employees’ sensitive files, fingerprints, and security clearances spent only a small fraction of what other federal agencies allocated for cybersecurity, according to a new report published by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday.
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Two North Carolina men were arrested Thursday on charges that they were part of the hacking group “Crackas With Attitude’’ that pulled off a series of embarrassing data breaches against the head of the CIA, a senior FBI official, and the Justice Department’s case management system.
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Defence/Aggression
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The United States government spent over $42,000 per Afghan to create 500 jobs over there.
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The Libertarian candidate for president has apparently not been keeping close tabs on the Syrian civil war that has decimated the country and created hundreds of thousands of refugees.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Of course the FBI never really addresses how Hillary violated the Federal Records Act. Of course the FBI never really addresses how Hillary tried to avoid FOIA. (Note too that Drum ignores that some of those “personal” emails have been found to be subject to FOIA and FRA and Congressional requests; they weren’t actually personal.)
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This argument might make some sense if Yglesias had ever advocated for the alteration of federal statutes like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Third Party Doctrine that have been abused for years by government agencies with complete disregard for wholesale changes in personal communication preferences. (Under the Yglesias theory, phone calls = emails, so the government should need a wiretap warrant to access the contents of these communications, rather than just regular search warrants.)
Furthermore, he’s simply wrong about the FOIA’s treatment of phone calls and emails. If a public record is generated by a phone call, it too can be accessed with a FOIA request. One example would be 911 calls, which are always recorded and are considered public records.
This was pointed out to Yglesias by USA Today journalist Steve Reilly. Yglesias responded once, indicating he was making a point, rather than aiming for accuracy.
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Finance
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The Rock Against the TPP concert tour continues to gather steam as it makes its way around the country, giving voice to users whose concerns about the Trans-Pacific Partnership are being ignored. This Friday, the event will hit San Francisco, and there’s still time for you to claim your free tickets. Hip hop stars Dead Prez and punk legend Jello Biafra are headlining the event, joined by nine other acts in an event that will rock long into the night. EFF will also be there, as well as at a teach-in on the following day, to explain how the secretive deal will impact your digital rights.
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Every fall the internet and its resident tech mumblers congregate for The Apple Event, a quasi-pagan streaming-video rite in which Tim Cook boasts of just how much money his company is making (a lot) and just how much good it’s introducing to the world (this typically involves a new iPhone). This is merely annoying most years; but in 2016, when Apple is loudly, publicly denying its tax obligations around the world, it’s just gross.
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A provision that would let foreign corporations challenge new American laws and regulations has become the latest flashpoint in the battle over the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, even as President Obama on Tuesday said he will renew his push for its passage in the lame-duck session of Congress.
“We’re in a political season now and it’s always difficult to get things done,” Obama said at a town hall meeting in Laos. “So after the election, I think people can refocus attention on why this is so important.” He sounded confident: “I believe that we’ll get it done.”
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One of America’s largest banks has told its high-ranking employees they cannot donate to Donald Trump – but has left open the way for them to contribute to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
According to a memo that was circulated to staff at Goldman Sachs, the bank said it had expanded its political restrictions to partners at the firm and listed those persons it now considered “restricted”.
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Last year, we did an episode of the Techdirt podcast discussing whether or not Airbnb was good or bad for cities, and afterwards I heard from a few people insisting that we were too quick to dismiss the concerns of the anti-Airbnb crowd. It seemed to us that the problem, if there was one, was in the overall housing stock of cities, rather than Airbnb having a legitimate impact. Yes, certainly there are some people who just use some homes/apartments/condos for doing short-term rentals, but it was difficult to see how (even at Airbnb’s scale) it was enough to significantly impact housing prices.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Green Party leaders reaffirmed the party’s support for presidential nominee Jill Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka as they face charges for civil disobedience during the ongoing protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“The Green Party stands in solidarity with Native Americans and others gathering at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The oil pipeline poses a serious danger to local drinking water — it was moved away from Bismarck for this very reason. It desecrates Lakota burial ground on land seized from the tribe. It shows that the Obama Administration, deferring to Energy Transfer Partners and the Army Corps of Engineers, still refuses to take the climate crisis and fossil-fuel consumption seriously,” said Chris Blankenhorn, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.
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Last night’s MSNBC Commander-in-Chief Forum featured two candidates who couldn’t be more in love — with “The Troops.”
The troops were spoken of as if they were a they, maybe that group huddled outside smoking or something. Both Trump and Clinton made it clear they are ready to do anything to support the troops. Good, we owe the troops a lot for having to take the big hits for some dumb foreign policy decisions.
But it is only Hillary who cites her “experience,” so let’s take a look at that. Specifically, during the years she was secretary of state, how did her organization implement veterans preferences in hiring new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs; America’s diplomats)?
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Putting aside the shortcomings of both major candidates, for many critical observers the biggest loser during Wednesday night’s presidential “Commander-in-Chief” forum on NBC News was the platform itself.
Moderated by NBC’s host of The Today Show Matt Lauer, the town hall-style event was staged inside the belly of the U.S.S. Intrepid, a retired World War II aircraft carrier that now serves as a military museum in New York City, and was promoted by the news outlet as a chance to extract specific positions from both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on veterans affairs and foreign policy.
But instead of informing viewers on these key subject matters or holding the candidates to account for past actions or statements, a widespread reaction among progressive viewers and critical journalists from across the political spectrum was that Lauer failed to ask the necessary tough questions or followups, with many suggesting the forum was a lesson in how not to inform voters or put a check on those seeking high office.
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Clinton wobbled on style. Trump stumbled on substance.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Those 48 words are a one-sided retelling of an NPR report (“Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in North Dakota Turn Violent,” 9/4/16), which in turn gets most of its information, as well as its anti-protester spin, from an AP story, “Oil Pipeline Protest Turns Violent in North Dakota” (9/4/16).
But the report on NPR‘s website also contains video footage from Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (9/4/16), who—apparently unlike any of her colleagues from network TV—thought the largest mobilization of indigenous activists against environmental degradation was worth reporting on. Goodman’s footage shows the construction project’s security guards wielding pepper spray and deploying attack dogs to provoke and injure demonstrators—violence on the part of the pipeline authorities that got left out of CBS‘s rip-and-read on the protests.
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A Google-incubated program that has been targeting potential ISIS members with deradicalizing content will soon be used to target violent right-wing extremists in North America, a designer of the program said at an event at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.
Using research and targeted advertising, the initiative by London-based startup Moonshot CVE and Google’s Jigsaw technology incubator targets potentially violent Jihadis and directs them to a YouTube channel with videos that refute ISIS propaganda.
In the pilot program countering ISIS, the so-called Redirect Method collected the metadata of 320,000 individuals over the course of eight weeks, using 1,700 keywords, and served them advertisements that led them to the videos. Collectively, the targets watched more than half a million minutes of videos.
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North Korea has forbidden people from making sarcastic comments about Kim Jong-un or his totalitarian regime in their everyday conversations.
Even indirect criticism of the authoritarian government has been banned, Asian media reported.
Residents were warned against criticising the state in a series of mass meetings held by functionaries across the country.
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In the past few days, vloggers (video bloggers) have been upset with YouTube because it has a new policy about which videos can host advertisements and make money and which cannot. YouTube is essentially more strictly enforcing where ads go, bypassing videos that have controversial content. The complaints range from the company depriving creators of their rightful ad revenue to, my personal favorite, the enforcement being a form of censorship. Please allow me to clear a few things up.
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For years now, CNN has been dubbed the Clinton News Network and even the Communist News Network, with a disturbing amount of truth for the former and a much more hyperbole for the latter.
But last week, CNN emerged as the Censoring News Network. Is anyone surprised?
There are certainly some fine reporters at CNN who strive to be balanced and fair in their work, and when compared to Fox and MSNBC, there have been times when CNN appears to be less biased then their cable competitors.
But as the presidential campaigns wear on, CNN’s pro-Hillary, anti-Trump reporting is becoming even more glaring to the point of blatant censorship. Shades of the old Communist Party playbook!
As an early endorser of Ted Cruz, I noticed CNN’s fairly obvious disdain for him during the Republican primaries, as a Trump or Hillary victory in one state would be described as very important or highly significant, while an even bigger Cruz victory in an equally important state would be reported flatly and without adjectives, as in, “Senator Cruz wins in Utah.”
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Does America realize that the racist, bigot and warmonger slurs and the desperate attempts to shut down an American and his free speech is something to be gravely concerned about? Take a hard look at what is happening in this country and just who it is stifling your right to speak and be heard.
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Global Voices Advocacy’s Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.
The government of Gabon blocked access to the Internet shortly after protesters began contesting results of recent presidential elections in which incumbent President Ali Bongo appears to have won by a narrow margin. Hundreds of people were also detained during demonstrations over the election results, following allegations of election fraud by the opposition party. The shutdown followed reports of throttled bandwidth and limited access over the weekend, and persisted for five days.
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Has Facebook sorted out the difference between the nudity of Michelangelo’s full frontal David and the naked nine-year-old Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack?
How risqué in Facebook-world is an eyeful of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, complete with “fully nude female breast”, buttocks and partially covered genitalia or a thousand Renaissance works featuring nude children, aka cherubs?
This is a pressing issue now that Facebook has censored a post by a Norwegian writer Tom Egeland in which he showed the famous war-time photo of Kim Phúc running from a toxic cloud.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The ACLU would like to take a closer look at the government’s activities regarding its seizure of Freedom Hosting back in 2013. To date, the docket remains sealed — as is the case in far too many DOJ prosecutions. In this case, the FBI basically took over Freedom Hosting to serve up its Network Investigative Tool to unmask anonymous Tor users.
The difference between this and its more recent NIT deployment in the Playpen child porn case is that many of those exposed by the malware weren’t suspected of any wrongdoing. While letting the exploit run its course, the FBI also helped itself to TorMail’s email database, later acquiring a warrant to access the contents of the seized communications.
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The FBI is suffering from an image problem. Its boss has spent a great deal of time arguing against protecting phone owners from thieves and malicious hackers. Its anti-terrorism program seems to be focused on pushing vulnerable people into doing things they’d never do on their own. And it has, along with the NSA, seen whatever street cred it might have had stripped away by leaked documents, litigation, and the realization that all Americans and their rights are subject to the agency’s chants of “national security.”
In order for an agency to keep up with the hacking Joneses, it needs periodic injections of new blood. The problem is, the only decently-skilled hackers the FBI can apparently press into service are those it’s arrested. It’s having a difficult time attracting new hires that honestly want to use their skills in the ways the FBI would like to deploy them.
So, the FBI is trying to alter its stance on hiring, as well as the public’s perception of the agency. And, of course, it’s failing to do so because it’s allowing Jim “Nerd Harder” Comey to act as spokesperson for the FBI’s youth movement. After being informed by his daughter that the FBI = “The Man,” Comey is using this dad anecdote to lead into a series of dad jokes that seem better suited for attracting people like him, rather than the people his agency actually needs.
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Moreover, since such consent must be freely given by the data subject, special attention must be paid to those situations in which the data subject is in effect left with no choice but to give consent. Consent will be deemed not to have been properly given where, for example, there is a clear imbalance of power between the data subject and the controller seeking consent, or where the processing of personal data is not necessary for the performance of the contract, even if it is included in the contract.
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For a long time now, Google has been gaining traction with Google Docs, which remains one of the key ways that many people work in the cloud. However, Google–a company known for its dedication to open standards–has dragged its feet on preventing various kinds of lock-in for Docs users. In particular, to use Google Docs and keep documents stored in the cloud, you’ve traditionally been required to keep them under Google’s umbrella, storing documents on Google’s platform.
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The Stingray, a controversial cellphone tracking device used by the U.S. government and law enforcement, will be the subject of a forthcoming investigation from the House Oversight Committee, according to Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
“You will be shocked at what the federal government is doing to collect your personal information,” Chaffetz said on Wednesday morning. “And they can’t keep it secure, that’s the point.”
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Last March 2016, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) fell victim to what is now known as one of the biggest government-related breaches in history. This hack on the COMELEC database leaked the personal information of approximately 55 million registered Filipino voters. The incident soon caused widespread concern and public outrage, prompting FMA to call the attention of the then-newly established National Privacy Commission (NPC). Shortly after FMA’s call, the NPC started an independent investigation on the breach, which is now the subject of the young Commission’s first case. Over the past few months, the NPC conducted several investigatory hearings on the case, at least two of which were attended by FMA.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Firstly, if either Nicola Sturgeon or Jeremy Corbyn had done this they would be under simply colossal pressure from the mainstream media. Tarring by association has been the backbone of the mainstream media campaigns against both Corbyn and the SNP, and pages after page and headline after headline have been concocted around the slightest association of Corbyn, Sturgeon or Salmond with people a great deal less vile than Collins, over just single intemperate social media entries.
Will anybody attempt to deny it is true that if Corbyn or Sturgeon quoted a twitter account as offensive as this one it would be massive front page headlines?
Secondly, it is important because May’s tactic at Prime Minister’s Questions is to ignore the question asked, but reply with a pre-arranged jibe about Jeremy Corbyn. That is precisely what happened here. The “joke” quoting Lewis Collins by name was written by one of May’s political advisers – paid by the taxpayer – and then read out by her. May claimed that “Lewis’s” comment had been selected from replies to a Corbyn social media tweet canvassing public opinion. It seems to me massively improbable that this is true. Tory advisers are not sifting through tens of thousands of public social media replies to Jeremy Corbyn, and then happening to hit on this Tory commenter.
The truth is rather that Collins’ gross Tory laddism appeals to Tory professionals, and that May’s adviser who wrote the question is almost certainly a follower or fan of Lewis Collins’ output. And that seems to me to tell us something very significant indeed about this Tory government.
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Former British Ambassador Craig Murray, a truth-teller, has been banned from entering the United States of America.
Washington is so afraid of truth that the most honorable man in Great Britain cannot be allowed into the USA.
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A Dutch politician from an anti-racist party declined to shake hands with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, before a meeting at the Dutch parliament in The Hague on Wednesday.
Tunahan Kuzu, a member of Parliament who was born in Turkey and co-founded the new multi-ethnic party, Denk, or Think, in 2014 to represent immigrants to the Netherlands, explained later that he intended the gesture as a sign that many in the Netherlands object to the abuse of Palestinian civilians living under Israeli military rule in the occupied territories.
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There is no more essential act in a democracy than voting. But making sure that the balloting is open to all and efficiently administered has been, at best, a low priority for many state legislatures, a victim of misplaced priorities and, at times, political gamesmanship.
Historically, newsrooms have focused on covering the outcome of Election Day, relegating voting snafus to be followed up later, if at all. Today we’re announcing Electionland, a project to cover voting access and other problems in real time. The issue is particularly urgent this election year, as states have passed laws that could affect citizens’ access to the ballot box.
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Lauri is the subject of extradition requests from three separate US court districts for his alleged participation in #OpLastResort, the series of online protests that followed the death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz tragically took his own life in January 2013 while facing prosecution under America’s draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and extraordinary pressure to agree to a plea deal.
Over the course of a three-day hearing earlier this summer, Judge Tempia heard evidence on the inadequacy of US prison conditions, coercive plea bargaining, disproportionate sentencing and the discriminatory treatment meted out to hackers in the US justice system.
Changes in the law were made in 2013, in the wake of the Gary McKinnon case to address public concerns about extradition and the severity of conditions for vulnerable British citizens in the United States penal system. It is now up to Judge Tempia to decide whether Lauri should benefit from those protections.
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The centre, near Strathaven, is set to close towards the end of 2017.
The Home Office said it would look to build a new short-term holding facility near Glasgow Airport.
Dungavel opened in 2001 and can hold up to 249 detainees. It is the only such centre in Scotland and has been the subject of numerous protests, which branded the site “racist and inhumane”.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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If you’ve followed the telecom sector for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that the merger conditions affixed to its rotating crop of mega-mergers are usually hot garbage. Frequently the ankle-height goals are proposed by the companies themselves, and are usually something the companies planned on doing anyway. Telecom companies also know full well that regulators historically can’t be bothered to check their math on such promises, letting them essentially trot out a rotating crop of feel good, but totally hollow “obligations” before they get to work laying off redundant employees and raising rates.
It’s a win-win relationship of dysfunction, where giant companies get to grow ever larger, and regulators score cheap political points for “toughness” thanks to a media that can’t be bothered to actually read the fine print of such deals, lest readership get bored.
When Comcast was pushing for its 2011 acquisition of NBC Universal it crafted a new wrinkle in this old story. It proposed offering $10, 5 Mbps broadband to low-income homes if regulators signed off on the deal. And while regulators were happy to promote this as yeoman’s work in bridging the digital divide, it didn’t take long before low-income families began protesting in the streets, pointing out the plan was hard to find, hard to qualify for, and difficult to sign up for. Still, Comcast’s “Internet Essentials” plan has been a PR bonanza, with the cable giant holding an endless barrage of PR junkets advertising its selfless altruism.
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Back in February, the FCC approved a new plan to bring some much-needed competition to the old cable box, resulting in better, cheaper, and more open hardware. But fearing a loss of control (and $21 billion in annual cable box rental fees) the cable industry launched an unprecedented lobbying campaign featuring an endless barrage of editorials attacking the plan for encouraging piracy and even being racist. The cable industry even managed to get the Copyright Office to fight on its behalf, spreading false claims that the plan would “harm copyright” despite having really nothing to do with the subject.
[...]
But like so much said about the FCC’s plan over the last seven months, that’s simply not true. The FCC would primarily act to ensure the cable industry didn’t just supplement one bad idea (the locked down cable box) with another (apps saddled with onerous restrictions and fees), which is a pretty far cry from an entirely new copyright apparatus being forged in the belly of the FCC. And again, contrary to the Copyright Office’s claim, this debate has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, and everything to do with control.
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Senator Ted Cruz just gave a speech in the Senate proposing adding an appropriations rider to the upcoming continuing resolution in an effort to halt the IANA transition.
He repeated many of the same false claims he has already made regarding the transition.
Cruz claims ICANN is an international body akin to the United Nations. He claims that the transition empowers China, Russia and Iran to censor the internet.
“Imagine searching the internet…and seeing a disclaimer that the information you’re looking for is censored,” he said. “It [the content] is not consistent with the standards of this new international body. It does not meet their approval.”
Um, ICANN isn’t a new international body. And it doesn’t control content.
Amusingly, he later points out that some internet giants have agreed to censorship requests by certain countries. Cruz suggests that the powers that be are determined to censor the internet. Yet this also shows what we already know: governments and other entities can already apply censorship to some degree inside their own borders. But no one country controls the internet.
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Can the GOP stop Obama’s internet giveaway? [Ed: Anti-Obama sites bash Obama even when he does the right thing regarding the Internet]
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Intellectual Monopolies
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AbbVie also argued that in this event, the Arrow declaration against AbbVie UK should be struck out as the Bermuda entity was the applicant for European Patent Application No 1 737 491 and, thus only it had committed the acts in the EPO that Fujifilm (and now the judge) relied upon as evidencing a “real prospect” in relation to the Arrow declaration. AbbVie UK had no interest in the subject matter of the application. Fujifilm also argued that it was probable that the Bermuda entity would grant an exclusive licence to the UK entity at some point in the future in order to later seek lost profits. Further, the UK entity, even if it is not granted an exclusive licensee, would have a significant financial interest in the inventions in the patent family because it will be the one who exploits the inventions in the UK. An Arrow declaration binding on the UK entity thus served a purpose so as to “forestall the possibility of AbbVie making threats to its customers or making statements that its product infringed”.
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The enforcement of intellectual property rights – how they are enforced and by whom – is left to countries’ discretion. Members of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on enforcement shared experiences this week on how they raise awareness about IP, their IP enforcement policies and regimes, and capacity-building in relation to WIPO training activities. And at the end of the session, delegates decided to pursue those topics of discussion again in 2017.
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In the world of video games, it’s always useful to remember one thing: Nintendo hates you. More specifically, Nintendo hates its fans that go about expressing their fandom in ways that Nintendo does not specifically approve of. And Nintendo doesn’t approve of much it seems, whether its fan-remakes of games made 25 years previously, fan videos of fan-created Mario Bros. levels, or fan-made movies featuring Nintendo game characters. Nintendo is not on board when it comes to its customers’ desire to be creative and express their love for the games the company makes or the characters within them.
That stance continues to present, with Nintendo shutting down all kinds of fan-made creations. Those creators typically walk away from their projects in defeat. But when Nintendo decided to send a DMCA complaint to the creators of No Mario’s Sky, those creators didn’t just walk away. The game itself came out of a coding competition.
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Copyrights
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US Copyright Office Charged With Industry Bias [Ed: In an Empire of Corporations, where Corporations fund politicians to do their bidding, almost every Federal office is a pawn of Corporations]
“The Copyright Office is one of the starkest examples of a captured agency operating within the government today,” Meredith Rose, policy advocate at Public Knowledge said in the announcement of the report release. “With limited accountability a pattern of favoritism toward industry and rightsholder groups, it is unsurprising that they have staked out tenuous positions and advocate for expansive copyright monopolies. It is clear from its positions–both implicit and stated–that the Copyright Office often acts more as an advocate for profit-maximizing entertainment industries, rather than as an impartial organ of government.”
The 50-page report from Public Knowledge is here.
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The CJEU press release on the decision is available here [pdf]. The decision itself is available here.
“The posting of a hyperlink on a website to works protected by copyright and published without the author’s consent on another website does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ when the person who posts that link does not seek financial gain and acts without knowledge that those works have been published illegally,” the CJEU release summarises. “In contrast, if those hyperlinks are provided for profit, knowledge of the illegality of the publication on the other website must be presumed.”
The case involved a company called GS Media in 2011 linking to copyrighted Playboy photographs of a woman named Britt Dekker that had been posted to an Australian website without permission. After the Australian site took the photos down, GS Media linked to another site that posted them until that one also took them down. Then visitors to the GS Media site posted links to other sites where the photos could be found. GS Media was sued for copyright infringement by the editor of Playboy.
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Terrible Ruling: EU Decides That Mere Links Can Be Direct Infringement [Ed: So merely throwing a link – maybe in error – in one’s Twitter or other social [control] media account can give you massive fine or even jail]
Last year, we talked about an important copyright case in the EU regarding whether or not linking to infringing material was, in itself, infringing. The case involved a blogger in the Netherlands, Geen Stijl News (“GS Media”) linking to some pre-publication Playboy photos. There had been an earlier case, the Svensson case where the European Court of Justice got things right with regards to whether or not hyperlinks could be infringing, but there were some questions left open in that ruling. The court in the Svensson case found that linking to authorized content wasn’t infringing. But what about unauthorized content?
And now we have the ruling and it’s not very good. Some are trying to spin it as a good ruling, because it basically says that if the link is not for profit, then it’s not infringing, but the worrisome part is that if the link is considered “for profit” then it can be direct infringement. Basically, the court tries to split the baby here. It notes concerns that many people had about how posting a mere link to content could be infringement, in that many times those posting the link will have no idea if the original content is authorized. But rather than actually deal with that specific issue, it just basically said “well, if it’s a for profit effort, then they can afford to figure out if the content is authorized.”
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As reported in this morning’s (super-)breaking news post, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has finally issued its decision in GS Media, C-160/15.
The Court held that Article 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive “must be interpreted as meaning that, in order to establish whether the fact of posting, on a website, hyperlinks to protected works, which are freely available on another website without the consent of the copyright holder, constitutes a ‘communication to the public’ within the meaning of that provision, it is to be determined whether those links are provided without the pursuit of financial gain by a person who did not know or could not reasonably have known the illegal nature of the publication of those works on that other website or whether, on the contrary, those links are provided for such a purpose, a situation in which that knowledge must be presumed.”
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09.08.16
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Media as cheerleaders, not journalists
Summary: Managing IP (MIP), in addition to IAM, is pushing the EPO’s agenda, including the antidemocratic UPC, which MIP dedicated an entire event (even a couple) to
THE EPO is not a friend of Europe. Heck, it’s not even a friend of its own staff! See staff surveys about it.
Two days ago we wrote about MIP-EPO intersections (we refer to Managing IP as MIP for abbreviation) and earlier this week, just after Labor Day in the US (a long weekend), the EPO kicked off a series of propaganda (a seemingly new campaign). This means we’ll cover the subject more often and issue rebuttals more frequently than last month. We have a lot of material that we are eager to publish.
Battistelli is trying to grease up delegates/participants of the Administrative Council and pave the way to the UPC even if by truly nefarious tricks like entryism and lobbying. We won’t let him have his way. The guy is a liar. That’s an understatement actually. He’s thuggish, he’s manipulative and one might even say “corrupt” based on some of the recent appointments at the EPO’s management. The reason he has managed to keep his job (thus far, maybe until the term’s end) is a serious set of flaws in the EPC (which Battistelli ignores anyway) and the EPO’s detachment from national laws (Eponia makes up its own laws with no external review or discretion, then changes the laws as it goes along while management is allowed to break these laws).
Margot Fröhlinger (mentioned here for her UPC lobbying before) came from the EPO to MIP’s UPC advocacy event (there are actually two such events this week, for maximal impact). According to this MIP account (they have several), “Margot Fröhlinger believes UPC will go ahead with or without the UK. UK’s participation post-Brexit not a problem.”
Really? Will the EPO be lobbying with wishful thinking and self-fulfilling prophecy attempts? Again? Another tweet said: “Fröhlinger says there is a risk, no guarantees, but hopes CJEU will agree to UK participation in UPC.”
There’s also a photo in there. The EPO is a rogue organisation, so we are expecting it to game this debate and do whatever it takes to push forth such an antidemocratic UPC deal. It would push TTIP/TISA/CETA/TPP as well if it had to. ISDS would be very much in ‘the spirit’ of Battistelli.
Watch how MIP emphasises EPO views, which MIP entertains by setting up those two events. “That’s certainly one view,” it said. Well, good, so where are the opposing views? Oh, wait… that’s not part of the programme. They have essentially created a platform for EPO and UPC lobbying, trying to steer policy in the presence of people whom they try to influence. We saw that before in the US. We’ll get to that in a moment (IAM was responsible for that).
MIP then notes that “Winfried Tilmann of @HoganLovellsIP thinks if UK doesn’t ratify UPCA before Brexit, then door will be closed.”
Nice alarmism there from Winfried Tilmann, who is a Battistellite that mentioned earlier this year and at the start of the year. The truly ‘balanced’ panel of MIP sure begins to smell rather fishy. Is this a debate or an echo chamber? Maybe it’s more like a church where UPC is the undisputable religion.
“Lots of ‘different’ [sic] views on UPC,” claims MIP, but it just happens to be the case that all of them are in favour of the UPC, even though in reality the UPC would probably harm more than 99% of Europeans. No public interest groups are present (or speaking) at this event. When Managing IP says “Lots of different views on #UPC” it means it in the same way that Presidential Debates in the US, controlled and funded only by the two major parties, call the debates “different views” (it’s controlled, scripted, no hard questions and no absolutely public representation/intervention).
Going back to notable tweets, “George Moore of Sandoz: UPC without UK isn’t fatal.System beneficial. Cordula Schumacher: UK’s experience in early stages ideal” (assuming that passing the UPC would be “ideal”, which is in itself overly loaded and presumptuous a statement).
As expected, anti-FOSS and pro-software patents promotion creeps into this EPO-leaning event, in the form of FRAND. “According to Joachim Feldges, there is difference in opinion between German courts on Huawei v ZTE SEP FRAND guidance,” one tweet said. Another said: “Matthias Schneider of Audi: Needs to be clarity on what good value is re security & FRAND isn’t all about royalty rate.”
They are talking about SEPs, i.e. patents you are not allowed (or unable) to work around. We already mentioned how FRAND was on the agenda as well (before the event) and why it’s about software patents a lot of the time. “There is a view here that @EPOorg & @The_IPO are predictable on computer-related inventions. But be careful with drafting,” said another tweet. Just renaming software patents “computer-related inventions” won’t magically make them patentable, as software patents are clearly NOT legal in Europe. Here is what the FFII’s Benjamin Henrion said about it: “yet another quote to show that UPC is about swpats [software patents] after all.”
Mind the fact that the EPO is now promoting next week’s event about software patents (in part). The EPO is going to America! Yesterday it said: “Why is it important for US industry to protect its inventions in Europe? Find out at this event”
Today it said: “Join this event to find out about the differences between US & European practice for ICT patent applications” (“ICT” is just the latest weasel word/phrase).
Going back to the MIP event, this tweet said: “Here is what Graham Burnett-Hall of @marksandclerk thinks of BREXIT. He remains optimistic on UPC” (picture/photo included in there).
Wow, what a ‘diversity’ of views. Everyone is in favour of UPC (as intended), even if they know it’s unlikely to ever happen. Someone left the following comment in Techrights regarding this event, possibly conflating IAM with MIP, but here is what it said:
{i}[IAM]“We’re not in the business of promoting #UPC or #Unitarypatent – just providing a platform for discussion!”{/i}
Well, they’re right. They get paid for,prviding a meeting space for discussions among IP professionals.
The issue is extremely few want to discuss the advantages of “status quo”, which is incidentally also the current status “post-brexit-vote”. There is not more money for those advocating this position, but there may be more money in it for those who hope to profit from a change. So one side sees a chance to “invest”, the other sees no improvement in their position, so no need to invest, as any investment into defending “status quo” can never earn that money back.
So only one side will come in large numbers…
So of course the discussions will go towards one topic, and within that one topic be very one sided…
The IAM panels will include the “UPC will not happen” opinions, but those will usually be brushed aside for being “opposed to changes”…
Also, too me it felt like they do not want to have a look at real politics. The current brexit situation does not allow politics to do much in this regard right now, but this seemed to be out of grasp for their minds.
They want a change to happen, and find it difficult that politics sometimes cannot and will not listen to “expert”.
And the VolksWagen diesel scandal showed us where it goes when politicians listened too long to the opinions of “experts”…
Whoops, I am mixing topics again….
Yes, it wll be one-sided, but there will be a few who are of the opinion to stop UPC for the time being,and continue discussions once Britain has finally filed their article fifty notification or officially decided to stop the whole brexit discussion. But no discussion=no money for panel organisers. So IAM will continue holding panels. And advertise them. I just wishes they would try to attract a discussion starting from the other side.
E.g. “UPC is dead, what now?”
The discussion in situ may still go the old ways, but they would appear less biased.
Here we have Maarten Mooij of Nokia lying. It’s well established that the UPC would help patent trolls (they too know it!), yet this tweet said: “Maarten Mooij of Nokia doesn’t see a major change re NPE activity in Europe if UPC comes into force. Depends on case law though” (NPE is a euphemism for troll; Nokia itself helps patent trolls right now, as we last covered earlier in the week).
Jumping the gun again (as there's no UPC_, here is another UPC ‘genius’. “David Barron @GowlingWLG_UK: panel on SEP litigation in Europe, incl how it might play out in UPC (if)” (photograph in the tweet).
Nice propaganda event MIP has got going on for Battistelli in both France (his home country) and Germany (home of the EPO). Does all this lobbying pay well in attendance fees? Maybe favours in the long run? We don’t know for sure, but they’re now running a series of puff pieces with Battistelli. From the “litigation panel,” says this morning’s tweet, we have “Joachim Feldges @AllenOvery estimates there are about 100 SEP cases pending in Germany” (see what we wrote about SEP above).
That’s good for the patent litigation industry (patent law firms), no doubt about it. It’s also good for the patent mafia, firms like Sisvel that raid expos/events and confiscate (or steal) products “because patents!”
Is this the vision of Europe that we want? Where is the public in all this? What we have MIP presenting to us are very large corporations, their patent lawyers, and the EPO. Where are the rest of the European stakeholders? Maybe they cannot afford to pay over 1,000 Euros to attend a one-day event in which they cannot even speak (just listen). We wrote and complained about this a month ago.
Wise men and women are in the audience after all, but they’re paid to lie and promote the UPC. They can’t quite admit in public that the UPC is a sham. According to this: “In Munich for #EUPATENT16: no one in audience thinks that UK will ratify #UPC agreement”
Right…
Meanwhile in IP Kat Annsley Merelle Ward from Bristows (major UPC boosters) tries to create some more false hopes that UPC will happen, piggypacking David Davis and manufacturing a misleading headline (“Does David Davis want to ratify the UPC Agreement?”). Read the sole comment there from Ellie Wilson. It says: “I noticed that at the Managing IP European Patent Forum this week Margot Frohlinger of the EPO has suggested that UK could either join UPC via a separate agreement or under Article 142 of the EPC.
“This is not really news – in terms of the massive uncertainty, or the need for external agreement if the UK is to participate at all – as much as it is perhaps interesting because of the source.
“Maybe, maybe it justifies having a bit of optimism, but, like Amerikat, I’m not holding my breath.”
“No one except [the EPO's] Fröhlinger,” Henrion joked about (almost religious) belief in the likelihood of UPC. Fröhlinger is bossed by Battistelli who does not tolerate dissent (he has already proven this with extreme actions).
So what’s all this charade about and why are they not just going on stage (not audience) to acknowledge this pessimism? EPO and Team UPC (mostly self-serving litigators) will likely rename and redo UPC, then try to implement it without the UK. Nym-shifting or eternal morphisms isn’t new for for UPC. It has had many names and identities over the years, dodging criticism all the time. Battistelli has been promoting this since well before it was known as “UPC”.
Speaking of Battistelli, do rumours of a UPC based in Paris with Battistelli as its head not far-fetched after all? The above event is in France too and this tweet says: “Caroline Casalonga of Casalonga leading session on getting evidence in patent litigation in France/UPC” (photograph therein).
Here is why we think a lot of this charade is very closely connected to the EPO, and MIP isn’t just commissioning or organising such an event for spontaneous desires. The EPO retweeted its Managing IP puff piece (interview with Battistelli) a very short time after it had been published (maybe minutes). It’s like they had the whole thing timed and coordinated all along. Did it work as planned, Battistelli et al? An intersection between the event and this puff piece? They are going to cover the ‘social’ [sic] nonsense of Battistelli in future part/s. More lies, more money and power for Battistelli. Will some of this money ‘trickle down’ to MIP? The EPO certainly launched a well-executed (if not so shallow) propaganda campaign so we shall do a reactionary anti-propaganda series of posts.
Regarding claims that AMBA’s views were ignored by MIP (while Battistelli continued to lie about the boards), MIP responded (via) to one who asked: “I heard also you interviewed amba. Will you be soon publishing it?”
“We haven’t interviewed AMBA yet,” MIP replied, “but have written to request an interview – watch this space.”
Well, perhaps they need to ask the EPO for permission. After all, reality check with AMBA might interfere with Battistelli’s interview (the already-published part 1 in particular).
For those who think that the EPO’s latest wave of propaganda involves only MIP, think again. A self-selecting survey (just ~600 people who are already inside the IAM cult) is being used to spread EPO propaganda about patent quality. They are relying on a very small and biased sample set (population), as any scientist with the faintest clue about statistics should be able to immediately tell. The editor in chief of IAM published this piece, not disclosing the very close if not incestuous relationship with the EPO. “In order to get a better idea of why the EPO does so well and the USPTO lags behind,” he wrote, “earlier this year we worked with Professor Colleen Chien of the Santa Clara University School of Law, and a former White House senior IP adviser, to develop a follow-up survey designed to drill deeper into our readership’s opinions of both offices. During June readers were emailed and invited to take part. We got approximately 650 responses. Below Colleen Chien summarises some of the main findings.”
With “approximately 650 responses” from people who are self-selecting, how legitimate is this bound to be? Also, they are not even sure how many people exactly have participated (notice the word “approximately”)? What kind of survey is uncertain about th size of the data? it’s just very easy to rig such things, e.g. to select who to E-mail and how often, in order to get the desired outcome, never mind loaded questions or push-polling. Remember that IAM has EPO money on its table, so will it risk delivering an output that’s not desirable to the Battistellites? We very much doubt that. By spreading a lot of money through PR agencies, the EPO has polluted a lot of news sites and metaphorically poisoned the well. IAM is not a legitimate source of information about the EPO and we are going to show that behind the scenes Battistelli uses this propaganda from IAM, and occasionally drops citations into letters to “media partners” (i.e. paid-for coverage) of the EPO in support of his ludicrous claims, just like the most dishonest politicians out there.
Going back to MIP, they don’t take our criticism too well. They offer so much “balance” that their STARS account blocked me in Twitter. They don’t like opposing views, do they? They blocked me in Twitter not because I abused them (I didn’t even talk to them!) but because I highlighted their bias by linking to things they said. They want invisibility. They just don’t want me to see what goes on in their UPC events. As I put it yesterday, “Managing IP is going to learn, just like IAM, that blocking someone from visibility is 1) ineffective 2) increases criticism 3) futile” (someone then added: “4) a mark for very poor journalistic performance”).
With advocacy of the antidemocratic UPC and a human rights violator, Battistelli of the EPO, we cannot assume that information from MIP can be taken without a grain of salt. Earlier today we showed how it published a “Sponsored Post”. That was last night! MIP is rapidly going down the bin, along with IAM (it too does sponsored posts)…
The timing of EPO propaganda is perfect because they try to push several objectives/talking points ahead of October’s meeting of the Council. They not only dump Battistelli lobbying on all Twitter followers but they are also still 'spamming' universities. Here are the latest 5 examples [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. They don’t quite realise how foolish it makes them look. They are wasting millions of Euros on this nonsense.
Regarding Battistelli’s “Social Conference”, one EPO insider sent us the following (to illustrate the attitude of staff towards Battistelli these days):
Dear Roy,
The mere thought of it makes me feel sick…
This is no joke: the EPO will organise in October a “Social Conference”. They dare! After having disciplined dozens of staff, fired staff representatives and union officials, downgraded others, put thousands under huge pressure, deny sickness to many, refuse promotion to pregnant women and soon (according to well placed insiders) stop granting social leave which are in the Codex with all sorts of “friendly advise” such as “think of your career….”.
The official EPO propaganda has it (quote verbatim):
“The conference will focus on all social-related aspects and will be based on the outcomes of the Financial Study, Social Study and OHSRA currently under finalisation. Themes to be discussed will be Social Dialogue, Financial sustainability and social package,
Well-being at the workplace, and Change management and readiness to change.
All interested stakeholders will be invited to participate: representatives from the Office’s management and staff, as well as members of the Staff Committees and recognized trade union, and delegates of the Administrative Council. To facilitate the discussions and interactions, general presentations by the consultants in charge of the studies will be followed by 8 to 12 thematic workshops.
The Social Conference will take place in Munich, Isar building, over the course of a full day on Tuesday 11 October. It is a unique opportunity for a wide range of participants to assess and discuss the challenges faced by our Organisation. If you wish to participate in the conference, please contact your line management by 14 September at the latest as places in the meeting rooms are limited.”
HERE THE RESULTS OF THE 2016 TECHNNOLOGIA OFFICE WIDE SURVEY (AFTER 2010, 2013 WITH THE SAME QUESTIONNAIRE)
https://suepo.org/documents/43311/54961.pdf
https://suepo.org/documents/43311/54951.pdf
So not only does the EPO ignore the Technologia survey (from a renowned French consulting which worked among many others on France Telecom’s debacle, the Renault Technopole one) but when they are about to sack Laurent Prunier, Central Staff Representative and SUEPO Official in TH (and perhaps others who too are in the death row, in particular in TH), they dare to write about “well-being at the workplace”.
Wicked!
Furthermore, to illustrate the attitude of staff towards Battistelli, one person has just come up with the following ode that spells out EULOGY:
E UREKA was the former in-house publication
U ncensored, informative and short of fabrication
L atest Gazette, lots of pictures of our Batters
O nce again Pravda style, credibility in tatters
G lorified half-truths, with a hand of sleight
Y es, only the obituaries seemed to be dead right
The “usual problem,” one person explained, is that “the EPO is not part of the EU…” (“…but a part of Hell!” added this remark about it). Here is a new comment from Tuesday. It too speaks about the structural deficiencies:
The AC has a clear conflict of interest, which under a different situation would be considered intolerable. But who cares about the EPO? It is a bit like putting the CEOs of Samsung, LG, Nokia etc. in the governing board of Apple. It is clear that this would not work to improve Apples success, and it is the same at the EPO.
The ILO does not respect the right to be heard, because she does not hold hearings even when they are requested, but this is apparently legally acceptable. Who cares?
I believe the drafters of the EPC were honest and upright men who could not envision that a generation would come after them who had a different moral standard.
The ILO is the only independent review employees of the EPO have when in dispute (the first two instances are internal and cannot be considered independent).
But hey, if you get paid a lot you should just accept being robbed of your rights…. so stop complaining, you are still not doing so bad. “We consulted you (according to the management of the EPO), even though the representatives did not agree to the changes requested, “so we can change your work contract, rules an regulations. WE only need to consult you, it is nowhere written that you have to agree for us to introduce changes which are detrimental to you”. In a national setting this would be unacceptable, and an employer would be taken to court. But not so with the EPO because the EPO has immunity.
But no immunity is absolute, and should never be, because absolute immunity corrupts.
We invite feedback and information regarding the EPO even through we already have plenty which we intend to publish soon. September is going to be a very busy month. █
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Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 9:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Look! Dead dolphins!” (how the patent microcosm tries to frame the demise of bad patents)
Summary: With the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB, part of AIA), the International Trade Commission (ITC), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) and even the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) showing disdain for software patents time is running out for patent examiners and lower courts that still pretend such patents sometimes have merit
THE USPTO‘s examiners now face the challenge of PTAB. It’s professionally embarrassing to be proven to have granted patents in error, so the examiners cannot simply ignore Alice, not any longer. “On USPTO Oversight,” Patently-O wrote yesterday: “I am generally in favor of additional Congressional oversight of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office – this is especially true because members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees tend to be smart, well informed, and act with intention to improve the patent system.* Although partisan politics do come into play, much of the focus tends to be on real issues and real solutions. The oversight process forces additional USPTO transparency and is the standard mechanism for getting information from Executive Agencies. On this point, I will note that the information exchange is often done in the background lead-up to the actual hearing — thus, although a hearing might not be too exciting or informative, the associated deadlines force the new communications.”
We are overwhelmingly in favour of having oversight affecting examiners at every patent office, as otherwise the profit motive takes over and quality control is virtually abolished (until the late and expensive stage which is a lawsuit in the court/s). Management of every patent office too needs to be subjected to scrutiny. The USPTO’s former Director, for example, has become somewhat of a lobbying giant, disgracing not only the Office but the entire system (he is now lobbying on behalf of large corporations in favour of software patents and against Alice, i.e. against a Supreme Court‘s ruling).
“Management of every patent office too needs to be subjected to scrutiny.”According to Mr. Loney from New York, “143 PTAB petitions [were] filed in August, down from 157 in July and 2016 high of 176 in June. Monthly average for year now 140.8 petitions.” Here is his full analysis (partly behind paywall), showing that PTAB activity has been increasing over the years, throwing out a lot of software patents (which courts would throw out anyway). As time goes on it ought to become apparent also to holders of such patents (not just their rivals) that these patents are worthless piles of paper and not even PTAB will be needed to prove it, let alone the courts. “The number of Patent Trial and Appeal Board petitions filed in August was slightly above 2016 average,” Loney wrote. “The month also saw notable Federal Circuit decisions on common sense, motions to amend and claim construction [...] The 143 Patent Trial and Appeal Board petitions (PTAB) filed in August was down from 157 in July and the 2016 high of 176 in June. The monthly average for the year is now 140.8 petitions.”
Up-to-date statistics regarding software patent invalidations in the courts of the United States (mostly lower ones, i.e. friendlier to plaintiffs than CAFC) got published last night. “June, July and August showed an uptick in the number Section 101 decisions from April and May, the majority of these being motions to dismiss and judgments on the pleadings,” the expert notes (he has been tracking this closely for years). “The rates of invalidity holdings continue to be steady: 70% overall, and 66.3% in the district courts. Success on motions on the pleadings is up to 68.1%. We’ve recently started tracking ITC proceedings as well, as shown above in the last row. Three of the five holdings of invalidity recorded above involved direct competitors and counterparties, Fitbit and Jawbone. In March 2016, Fitbit invalidated Jawbone’s fitness tracking patents in an ITC proceeding brought by Jawbone (ITC 337-TA-963). In July, Jawbone returned the favor and successfully invalidated Fitbit’s patents (ITC 337-TA-973); the ITC judge in the latter decision even relied upon Fitbit’s arguments that it made in its own motion against Jawbone.”
“That seems like wonderful news, but sites of patent law firms portray that as terrible news (to them it is).”We previously covered these rulings from the ITC, which certainly seems to be software patents-hostile. According to this new article, “above 90 percent” of patents on payment technologies (such patents are a subset of software patents) are dead/dying. Thanks to Alice! “Since Alice,” says the article, “the reject rate for patents for payment technologies is above 90 percent. This is a development that many contend has been crippling the innovation in this space. However, one company CardinalCommerce has secured one, and according to many lawyers, if someone can manage to get an e-commerce patent in this environment, it is worth a lot.”
That seems like wonderful news, but sites of patent law firms portray that as terrible news (to them it is).
Here is a new paid-for article, published in MIP by the patent industry last night. Having seen MIP becoming somewhat of a Battistelli/EPO platform, we worry they’re going to do more of those “Sponsored posts” (at least this time there’s disclosure). This one particular article speaks of telematics patents post-Alice and says “the patentability of such inventions could be impacted by the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice Corp Pty v CLS Bank Int’l, because inventions that arguably can be performed by humans are not patent-eligible subject matter under 35 USC § 101 (134 S Ct 2347, 2354-55 (2014)).”
Well, so be it. These patents should never have been granted in the first place. If patents (applications) never get granted, then they cannot be used for litigation or even for shakedowns, where the accused fears having to go to court not because of the outcome but because of the legal fees, obviously prohibitive unless one works for a large company. █
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