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08.14.13

Links 14/8/2013: Debian Turns 20, New Derivatives

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • things i would want to know about erlang

    Earlier this year I spent a few weeks playing with Erlang. I wanted to make something out of it, but despite an encouraging start I found it too frustrating to use.

    I got excited about Erlang because a lot of interesting things have been done in Erlang. Like CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Riak and so forth. Besides that, Erlang is a dynamic language and I generally find those quite nice to use.

  • Open-Source Apache Web Server Hits Ignominious Milestone

    Since the dawn of the Web era, one technology has steadfastly dominated as the world’s most popular Web server. That technology is the open-source Apache Web Server, commonly referred to simply as “Apache.”

    Internet research and security services firm Netcraft is now reporting that across the nearly 717 million Websites it has surveyed this month, Apache serves 46.96 percent of them. That is the first time that Apache’s share has fallen below 50 percent since December of 2009. At its height—in November of 2005—Apache held a 71 percent market share.

  • “IBM Will Continue To Invest In Open Source Technology Projects”

    IBM is one of those companies that banks big on open source technology. Those at the helm know this is where the future of technology lies. Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Dipankar Sarma, distinguished engineer, Systems & Technology Labs, IBM India, to discuss the increasing demand for open source professionals and the opportunities that IBM offers them. Excerpts…

  • Second Round of Our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition

    The good news is, we found plenty of great new blogs and we’ve now reached the second round in our vote. We’ve ended up with ten additional blogs to consider, in addition to the nine that were already on our list. That means voters now have a field of 19 blogs from which to choose. As with the first qualifying round, you can vote for one or two blogs. Because this is an elimination round and not a qualifying round, however, there is no longer any way to add a new blog for consideration. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine used to say, “What you see is what you get.”

  • Xen Project User Summit 2013 Sessions Announced
  • Open Source Options Reduce VMware Cloud Market Share: Analyst

    While open source platforms CloudStack and OpenStack have gained in popularity, VMware’s traditional position atop the market has been trending downwards

  • List of Open Source Site Management Software Published by Boffin Today

  • Events

    • Latest Cloud and Open Source Talks

      Last month I was fortunate enough to give a couple of talks at OSCON. I was particularly pleased with the reception my keynote received on Creating Communities of Inclusion, which touched on some topics beyond the typical licensing and community around open source software. I was was also asked to expand on these topics at OpenSource.com. Here are the abstracts and links to the presentations and article.

    • Migrating from UNIX to Linux Webinar Sept 5th

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Firefox To Remain Default Browser in Ubuntu 13.10

        Chromium, the open-source frills-free version of Google Chrome, was put forward as a Firefox replacement for the 13.10 release back in May. The debate on which was better suited continued into June. At that time developers said they were ‘leaning towards Chromium as default’.

      • Google Dramatically Raises Bounties for Finding Chrome Bugs

        Bug bounties–cash prizes offered by developers to anyone who finds key software bugs–have been steadily on the rise for several years now, with Google and Mozilla increasing their bug bounty programs. In fact, Google has been setting new records with the bounties it offers for meaningful bugs and confirmed earlier this year that it paid out more than $31,000 to a single security researcher who identified three Gooble Chrome bugs.

        Now, in a new post, Google has confirmed that bugs previously rewarded at the $1,000 level will now be considered for rewards of up to $5,000.

      • Ubuntu Will Stick With Firefox Over Chromium For Now

        While Canonical engineers keep raising discussions about swapping Mozilla Firefox for Google’s Chromium as the default web-browser for Ubuntu Linux, the 13.10 release will continue using Firefox by default.

    • Mozilla

      • Unlocked $80 Firefox OS phone to hit eBay soon

        ZTE says it will soon begin sales of an unlocked version of its Firefox OS-based ZTE Open handset on eBay US and UK for $80, following its launch in Spain, Venezuela, and Colombia. In related news, Samsung is once again rumored to be slowing Tizen OS development, and Mozilla released a new version of the Firefox for Android Beta with WebRTC real-time communications support.

      • ZTE Firefox OS smartphone available globally for $80

        In an attempted preemptive strike on other would be number three smartphone OS makers, Firefox and ZTE has partnered up to bring an $80 Firefox OS, unlocked smartphone to all users everywhere via eBay.

      • ZTE Will Soon Start Sales of Firefox OS Phones on eBay
      • Firefox phone available on eBay for $80

        The smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS with the rest struggling for the distant 3rd spot. Canonical, the parent company of the most popular GNULinux based operating system Ubuntu, is also trying their hands at the mobile phones.

      • Internet Advertising Bureau Turns to Full-Page Ads in Mozilla Kerfuffle

        The Internet Advertising Bureau is not letting up as it fires off screed after screed against Mozilla for its plans to block advertising cookies in the Firefox browser. If you’re like most of us, you get annoyed by how advertising cookies in your browser seem to know what your interests are and serve up creepy ads that hit a little too close to home. That’s why Mozilla has worked with Stanford’s Center for Internet Society which has a new Cookie Clearinghouse that will oversee easy-to-use “allow lists” and “block lists” to help Internet users protect their privacy. Mozilla has worked on its own on methods for suppressing cookies, too.

      • Did You Know that Mozilla is Hijacking the Internet?

        A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla on the grounds that the latter had “lost its values” because it insisted on defending the users’ rights to control how cookies were used on their systems.

      • Firefox 24 Set to Update Browser Console, Android Features

        Mozilla’s open-source browser will receive new developer-friendly capabilities on the desktop and user-facing features on Android.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Coraid’s Suda Srinivasan: Public Cloud vs. Private vs. Having It All

      “If a customer wants a particular performance set with unique parameters, most public cloud providers do not provide that kind of service. They only have one or two flavors. So the big question is, how do you take that ease of use and that simplicity from Amazon or another public cloud, and marry that with customizability and the ability to specify different parameters for your storage?”

  • Databases

    • Oracle Gives MySQL Workbench a New Look

      IDG News Service (New York Bureau) — Oracle has revamped the user interface for its MySQL Workbench administration software, streamlining a number of routine operations and adding some new time-saving features as well.

    • Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL Partners Must Master NoSQL

      Traditional relational databases like Microsoft (MSFT) SQL Server, Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL continue to gain popularity. But channel partners would be wise to check out NoSQL (Not only SQL) alternatives, which are catching on for big data, analytics and real-time cloud computing applications.

  • CMS

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Wikihouse: open source, citizen-led urban development model

      In his TED Talk architect Alstair Parvin shared a fascinating view of how open source thinking can transform architecture and multiply its benefits to society at large.

    • Africa: Open-Source Opens Up Architecture for the Poor

      Architects and community leaders are combining forces to lead the way in creating many types of innovative housing in developing nations as part of an open-source collaboration.

    • Open source amphibious tsunami-resistant houses

      There aren’t many times when we confuse the building and construction of physical buildings with the building and construction of software applications.

      Thanks in part to a high energy keynote rant from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, even non-techies seem to have an idea that developers, developers, developers means software application developers — and not the guys in the yellow hard hats.

      When we talk about open source architecture we are once again, mostly talking about the “architecting” of software applications and their modelling, construction and later development, debugging and refinement.

    • NREL releases free, open-source energy analysis tool

      The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed Energy DataBus, an open-source application for monitoring, storing and analyzing energy-related data for optimizing energy use and detecting energy “leaks.”

    • GreenQloud Announces QloudSync: A New Clean Powered Open Source Cloud Storage Syncing Client at GROW 2013

    • Open Access/Content

      • First 100 Pages of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File Released

        “On 1/11/13, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment in Brooklyn, as a result of an apparent suicide,” reads a January 17, 2013 Secret Service memo. “A suppression hearing in this had been scheduled for 1/25/13 with a trial date of 4/1/13, in U.S. District Court of the District of Massachusetts.”

        In January 2011, Swartz was caught using MIT’s public network to bulk-download 4 million academic articles from the JSTOR archive. MIT had a subscription to the archive that made it free to use from MIT’s campus. The Secret Service was brought into the case early on, and federal prosecutors ultimately charged Swartz with wire fraud and computer hacking.

      • First 104 pages of Aaron Swartz Secret Service File Released – Who is the female on page 97? ~pj

        Kevin Poulsen at Wired reports that the first 104 pages of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service files are available now, with a lot more to come, as a result of court ordered release. There are apparently 14,500 more pages to come.

        Look at page 97. It’s redacted so the identity of the woman is kept confidential, but it appears from the notation that a woman was in contact with authorities and informing them of conversations between her and Swartz.

  • Programming

    • Announcing SDL 2.0.0

      After many years in development, SDL 2.0.0 has finally been released!

    • SDL 2.0 WIll Finally Be Released This Week!
    • Post open source software, licensing and GitHub

      Few would deny that the rise of GitHub as a popular hosting service for software projects is one of the most significant developments to affect open source during the past five years. GitHub’s extraordinary success is necessary context for understanding the criticism leveled at it during the past year from some within or close to the open source world. This criticism has focused on licensing, or rather the lack of it: it is claimed that GitHub hosts an enormous amount of code with no explicit software license. Some critics have suggested that this situation results from a combination of the ignorance of younger developers about legal matters and willful inaction by GitHub’s management. In a followup article I will discuss the measures recently taken by GitHub to address these concerns; this article explores aspects of the complaint itself.

    • Twitter buys tech boot camp firm to whip engineers into shape

      With the buy of Marakana, the social network’s engineers will get crash courses in open-source technologies like Python and Android.

    • Twitter acquires open source educator Marakana for internal ‘university’

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Google, Nvidia Sign Onto IBM OpenPOWER Consortium

      IBM has recruited several top tech firms, including Google and Nvidia, to join its newly founded OpenPOWER Consortium, an industry alliance formed to promote IBM’s flagging Power microprocessor architecture for back-end systems in an effort to better compete with Intel and ARM.

      As part of the effort, IBM is following ARM’s lead and opening up its proprietary Power-based hardware and software technologies to outside developers for the first time and will offer licenses for parties wishing to use Power IP in their own products, the company said this week.

Leftovers

  • Powerful Beijing doctor’s illegal structure tops them all

    When it comes to illegal structures, a rooftop villa built by an eccentric Beijing resident on top of a 26-storey residential building puts Henry Tang’s wine cellar to shame.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • U.S. and Monsanto Dominate Global Market for GM Seeds

      For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto page and our Genetic Engineering page.

      One glance at the statistics and it’s clear: The U.S. and Monsanto dominate the global market for genetically engineered crops. Forty percent of the world’s genetically modified (GM) crops are grown in the U.S., where Monsanto controls 80 percent of the GM corn market, and 93 percent of the GM soy market.

    • Taking pills for unhappiness reinforces the idea that being sad is not human

      If you have a terrible job or home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. Pathologising it can only make everything worse

    • “Pandora’s Lunchbox” — Ingredients in Processed Food Products May Surprise You

      “The vitamin D in your milk . . . is almost surely a derivative — after many chemical stages — from lanolin from Australian sheep wool, concocted in a factory in China. . . . Vitamin A, is often synthesized from acetone, a principal ingredient in nail polish remover,” notes George Kenney based on his interview with Melanie Warner, a former writer for the New York Times.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Vietnam: A War on Civilians

      Many humanitarian-minded lawyers will bristle at this, but why not admit that the law is on the side of the B-52s, not that of the civilians below? Who do you think wrote the law in the first place? We urgently need to see how the laws of war work in practice, given that so many hawks of both left and right insist that law and lawyers are a viable means of fashioning military force into a precise, therapeutic instrument. But as this book suggests throughout, the primary function of the Rules of Engagement and military law in general is not to restrain lethal force but to authorize it. In Vietnam, the overriding principle of International Humanitarian Law, the current preferred euphemism for the laws of war, turned out to be the Mere Gook Rule.

    • Who Dies in Yemen Drone Strikes?

      …White House policy “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

    • Defining Drone Deaths in Yemen

      Given that the administration had previously defined militants as military-age males in the vicinity of a target (Salon, 5/29/12), one would hope reporters would take official claims–from U.S. or Yemeni officials–with a grain of salt.

    • Yemenis call U.S. drone strikes an overreaction to al Qaida threat

      While Western news reports have cast casualties of the next strike, on Aug. 1, as militants, locals in the area of Hadramawt where it took place have claimed that the dead had no links to the al Qaida group and included a child.

    • CIA Claims Syria Is Top ‘Threat,’ And US Policy Is Making It Worse

      Outgoing CIA Deputy Leader Michael Morrell raised more than a few eyebrows this weekend when in an interview he declared Syria to be the “top current threat to US national security,” a spot usually reserved for someplace the US is directly militarily involved in.

    • CIA tries to fool the world

      Last week, the CIA’s second-in-command, Michael Morell told WSJ that toppling the Syrian regime could pose a threat to the national security of the US. Morell’s admission came as a shock and the American media did its best to ignore it.

      [...]

      We’ve asked Peter Koenig, a former World Bank economist and a proficient analyst of the tactics used by the media manipulators, to comment on the “stunning admissions” made by the CIA official:

      “Putting this ‘admission’ into context reveals the falsehood of the statement. The CIA is secretly controlling and managing the world’s largest gun-running operation out of Benghazi, Libya, supplying the “Syrian opposition” with state of the art weapons via Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf States. This includes weapons from countries other than the US, so as to disguise the source of supply and funding”, he told the Voice of Russia.

    • CIA admits it has drone documents, but refuses to publish them

      The US Central Intelligence Agency has finally come forward and admitted it does have documents about US drone strikes, but says it can’t share them with the public because doing so would pose a massive security risk to the country. As the CIA stated in a document filed in federal district court in Washington, DC last week (and made public today): “The details of those records, including the number and nature of responsive documents, remain currently and properly classified facts exempt from disclosure.”

    • CIA refuses to release drone documents

      Despite ruling that agency can’t ignore FOIAs on drone program, CIA files brief to keep documents secret

    • Drones In Yemen: Does the U.S. Pay Families When Strikes Kill Innocent Yemenis?

      There have been nine drone strikes reported in Yemen in the past two weeks – an uptick apparently connected to the Al Qaeda threat that shut down U.S. embassies across the Middle East and Africa. As many as six civilian deaths have also been reported.

    • Drone strikes: Does U.S. pay families when drones kill innocent Yemenis?
    • Who Are US Drones Killing in Yemen — and Why?

      President Obama at his pre-vacation press conference Friday promised more “transparency” on U.S. government surveillance programs. But he made no mention of the need for more information about who our government is secretly killing abroad. And while U.S. government officials have happily reported intercepting an alleged phone conversationamong al Qaeda leaders (the details of which keep changing) that prompted the embassy closures and evacuations, they’ve provided no information on who the United States has killed in retaliation with its latest drone strikes, or why.

      That’s no small omission.

    • CIA Refuses to Acknowledge Drone Targeted Killings

      Months after a federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit seeking Central Intelligence Agency documents outlining the government’s drone targeted killing program, the President Barack Obama administration is again claiming that acknowledging if it has such paperwork could disclose classified secrets concerning whether it even carries out targeted killings.

    • UN chief urges legal drone use in Pakistan visit

      UN chief Ban Ki-moon waded into the controversy surrounding US drone strikes during a visit to Pakistan Tuesday, insisting they must operate within international law.

    • It’s Looking More and More Like the Benghazi Conspiracy Theories Were Actually the Truth

      New information about circumstances surrounding the attack on the U.S. consulate on Sept. 11, 2012 raises concern about the U.S.’s involvement in Libya and Syria. According to Joe DiGenova, an attorney for whistleblower Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator of operations, 400 U.S. missiles were sent to Libya covertly and have since been stolen by an unidentified group. The night this fatal assault occurred, 35 CIA operatives were said to have been working in an “annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian rebels.” Since then, the CIA has undergone incredible lengths to suppress information about the incident from leaking out. This suppression of information indicates that the CIA has something to hide. It is crucial that an open investigation be conducted to figure out the missile’s whereabouts, as leaving this mystery unresolved could result in the weapons landing in the wrong hands.

    • Ex-CIA analyst: US pays lip service to Mideast ‘peace talks’

      A former CIA analyst has accused the US government of saying much and doing less about illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

    • How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

      “They’re in a scary business,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien. ACLU analyst Jay Stanley has written that Palantir’s software could enable a “true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.”

    • Meet The Venture Arm Of The CIA

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination backed by 100k petition-signing supporters

      The Nobel Prize committee has received a petition that endorses awarding the peace prize to US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is convicted of espionage and facing up to 90 years behind bars for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

    • The courage of Bradley Manning will inspire others to seize their moment of truth

      The critical moment in the political trial of the century was on 28 February when Bradley Manning stood and explained why he had risked his life to leak tens of thousands of official files. It was a statement of morality, conscience and truth: the very qualities that distinguish human beings. This was not deemed mainstream news in America; and were it not for Alexa O’Brien, an independent freelance journalist, Manning’s voice would have been silenced. Working through the night, she transcribed and released his every word. It is a rare, revealing document.

      Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007, Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded… For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” He hoped “the public would be as alarmed as me” about a crime which, as his subsequent leaks revealed, was not an aberration.

    • Sentencing Phase in Bradley Manning’s Trial, Day 10 (Live Updates)

      Yesterday’s witnesses were called to the stand to testify on whether the Army had been under pressure to deploy Manning to Iraq. It came out that his unit was at least a third “under strength” when it came to intelligence analysts. This raises the question of how much officers ignored any mental health or behavioral problems Manning may have had prior to deployment.

      Defense attorney, David Coombs, also focused on the lack of leadership in Manning’s unit from superior officers and whether officers had taken proper disciplinary action when Manning had outbursts while stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Baghdad.

      And, before proceedings were over yesterday, the judge issued a ruling granting a government motion for the court to force the defense to turn over a sanity board report minus Pfc. Bradley Manning’s statements, which had been put together when reviewing whether Manning was mentally fit to stand trial.

      Coombs argued prosecutors were not entitled to the report because Manning’s mental condition had not been raised in court prior to the judge’s verdict. But the judge agreed with the government that, since the defense is going to call a witness who is a psychology expert to testify on Manning, the government was entitled to the report.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Photographer Captures Waves of Trash in Indonesia

      Waves for days. Trash for eternity. That’s what photographer Zak Noyle discovered on a recent trip to Java, Indonesia. The waves of Java, always known for being pristine and barreling, were now rolling swells of disgusting trash and debris.

      Noyle was shooting Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya in a remote bay when he and Surinaya discovered the water to be covered in garbage, according to GrindTV. The bay was miles from any town, yet strong currents had carried the trash of the world’s most populated island, Java, to its once pure waters.

    • Why the World Bank Is Taking On Climate Change

      The organization believes that increased drought, extreme storms, and rising sea levels are significant threats to economies worldwide.

    • A Texan tragedy: Plenty of oil, but no water

      Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • USA vs. NSA: Legislative Efforts to Curtail Spying
    • Communication in the Post-PRISM World

      Linux users didn’t need the recent NSA eavesdropping scandal to convince them that securing communication was a good idea. For years, free software developers have been creating secure tools that offer similar functionalities to all of those popular but very leaky services with ridiculous names.

    • Obama appoints intelligence boss to run ‘independent’ review of NSA

      President Obama has appointed James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence who was recently caught misleading Congress about the extent of NSA surveillance, as the head of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies that will investigate the agency.

    • Obama’s NSA Reforms Off to a Bad Start

      On Monday, one devilish detail emerged when the White House instructed James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to form the “high-level group of outside experts,” that President Obama had promised to Americans on Friday.

    • The absurd honesty of Clapper’s NSA review group

      James “least untruthful” Clapper will review his own agency to promote “trust” not shift policy

    • Confessed Liar To Congress, James Clapper, Gets To Set Up The ‘Independent’ Review Over NSA Surveillance
    • Would You Vote for Someone Who Kept Quiet About NSA Spying?

      Whether he passes reforms or not, President Obama’s mass surveillance program has made him the closest thing we have to Big Brother. Will his top lieutenants, Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, take that funk with them into the next election?

    • How NSA surveillance endangers the Fourth Amendment
    • Obama Plan to Revamp NSA Faces Obstacles
    • Guess Who Obama Put in Charge of Investigating the NSA?
    • Obama’s white paper on NSA spying

      The Obama administration released a “white paper” on Friday that purports to provide a legal justification for one of its telephone surveillance programs. Under conditions of growing public concern over revelations by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, the document was clearly prepared for public relations purposes. Its release was timed to coincide with Friday’s press conference, at which Obama attempted to put a friendly face on police state spying.

    • White House Says Intelligence Director Will Not Lead NSA Review Group
    • NSA review led by intel chief who lied about NSA domestic surveillance
    • The Man ‘Who Lied to Congress About NSA Spying’ Will Be In Charge of Independent Review Board
    • Op-Ed: Clapper to head Obama blue ribbon whitewash review of NSA

      In his press conference on Friday President Obama offered several measures meant to reassure people about NSA surveillance programs. His fourth measure involved setting up an outside and independent board to review the programs.

    • White House: Clapper’s Involvement in NSA Investigation ‘Limited’
    • White House says intelligence chief James Clapper won’t lead NSA review

      James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, will not be involved in selecting or leading members of a group reviewing the NSA’s surveillance methods. On August 12th, President Barack Obama issued a memo telling Clapper to “establish a review group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies,” responsible for determining whether the US surveillance system was both advancing American interests and behaving in a way that would “maintain the public trust.” Now, though, a White House spokesperson tells both us and The Hill that Clapper won’t be a part of the process.

    • Larry Ellison: Google is ABSOLUTELY EVIL, but NSA is ESSENTIAL

      If there was one topic about which Ellison was unflinchingly enthusiastic, however, it was NSA surveillance, some details of which were revealed by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, now a fugitive enjoying asylum in Russia.

      “It’s great,” Ellison said of the domestic spying. “It’s great, it’s essential. President Obama thinks it’s essential. It’s essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It’s absolutely essential.”

    • Kerry visit to Brazil overshadowed by NSA spying controversy

      The United States pledged on Tuesday that Brazil and other allies will get answers about American communications surveillance aimed at thwarting terrorism, but gave no indication it would change the way it gathers such information.

    • Delivery of US jets: NSA scandal threatened Armor deal with Brazil / Latin America News
    • Brazil May Be Losing Faith in the U.S. Due to NSA Leaks

      The South American country was planning to spend $4 billion on 36 fighter jets for its air force in a contract promised to the U.S. Now that Edward Snowden has revealed that the National Security Agency had been mining information on Brazil’s commercial, military and energy intelligence, President Dilma Rousseff seems to be having second thoughts. A source told Reuters that the Brazilian government “cannot talk about the fighters now. … You cannot give such a contract to a country that you do not trust.”

    • Kerry, on visit to Brazil, gets earful over NSA spying
    • NSA-proof email encryption? Cobblers, sniff German hackers

      German hackers have poured scorn on Deutsche Telekom’s plan to offer “secure email”, describing it as little more than a marketing gimmick.

      Deutsche Telekom and partner United Internet are rolling out SSL-encrypted connections between users’ computers and the companies’ mail servers as part of the “Email made in Germany” offer.

    • NSA backlash undermines ‘Star Wars’ US web defence

      Plan to screen internet traffic against cyber attacks unlikely to progress, officials say

    • Laura Poitras, the NSA, Snowden and a Rubik’s Cube

      The filmmaker who helped Snowden publish NSA revelations shares her story with the New York Times

    • NSA & MI5 – hand in glove. Are you really surprised?

      The level of surveillance across the US and the UK should not come as a shock to their citizens. To what extent is the nature of these actions rooted in history? Would even the most benevolent of governments be able to stop the constant monitoring of its citizens?

    • Despite NSA and giant ‘golf balls,’ mystery of Menwith Hill doesn’t trouble locals

      Lately, installations such as Menwith Hill have come under scrutiny and criticism, following disclosures made by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. was using NSA surveillance programs to secretly gather information about phone calls and Internet communications worldwide.

    • Congress denied access to classified document prior to NSA vote

      In May 2011, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) took the floor of the Senate to warn his colleagues that Americans would one day be outraged to learn that the U.S. Government was actively engaged in surveillance activities that most citizens would consider outright criminal.

    • How Congress Overlooked NSA Spying

      Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs might have been avoided if more members of Congress had done their duty to stay informed about these classified activities, rather than get distracted by the fluff of politics, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • ‘Lawful Interception Recovery Fee,’ The NSA’S Bill To Spy On Us? [Video]

      The “Lawful Interception Recovery Fee” many phone users are reportedly spotting on AT&T bills is giving rise to a bit of frustrating and just-like-those-government-bozos speculation… that the controversial NSA spying program has resulted in a charge tacked on to our cell phone bills. Have you ever in your life?

    • Investigating the investigators at the NSA

      The short answer to whether the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) programs for reviewing emails and telephone calls as well as metadata (pieces of information about communications like when and from where an email was sent) arising from them is legal would appear to be: yes.

      Unlike some past controversies about the balance between protecting the nation’s security and privacy rights, no one is saying that the executive branch went out completely secretly on its own (though the scope of the program has shocked many even in Congress) with the new far-reaching checks into people’s personal lives.

    • Edward Snowden: It’s Not Just The NSA Reading Your Email

      Again, this isn’t really a surprise, per se. Like we said, as bad as America is in some respects, other countries are worse. And it’s safe to assume that 99% of what you’re doing goes unread because there’s little if anything that, say, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service cares about.

    • How the Government Created Someone Paranoid Enough to Report the NSA Leaks

      The New York Times Magazine cover story by Peter Maass detailing how Edward Snowden reached out to the two reporters that broke the NSA surveillance story isn’t about that surveillance. It’s only sort of about journalism. Instead, it’s largely a story about how close to the boundaries of civilization you must get — literally and figuratively — to be assured that you can protect your privacy. And it’s about how the United States government pushes people there.

    • NSA secrets leaked to ‘fearless’ journos

      US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said in an interview released on Tuesday he chose to divulge details of a vast US surveillance effort to journalists who reported “fearlessly” on controversial subjects.

      Snowden, in the interview released by The New York Times, said he chose documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald because they were not cowed by the US government.

    • Snowden: NSA targeted journalists critical of government after 9/11

      Leaker Edward Snowden accused the National Security Agency of targeting reporters who wrote critically about the government after the 9/11 attacks and warned it was “unforgivably reckless” for journalists to use unencrypted email messages when discussing sensitive matters.

    • Voters mad about NSA spying face uphill battle

      Charlotte Scot isn’t one to take things lying down — like the time President George W. Bush was re-elected and she moved to Canada in protest.

    • Snowden, NSA Leaks Introduce New Viewers To Old YouTube Video

      Back in 2010, social media had finally grown out of colleges and into mainstream awareness. Twitter rolled out a new design that allowed pictures within feeds, and Facebook crossed the 500 million user threshold shortly before the release of “The Social Network,” the David Fincher film about Facebook’s founding. A newcomer, Foursquare, allowed users to “check-in” to physical locations with their smartphones and was quickly growing in popularity.

      [...]

      …images taken with a smartphone could be used to track the physical location of the person in the photo.

    • NSA Might Be Behind Tor Malware Attack as per Experts

      Malware lodged on the web-servers of Freedom Hosting — the renowned “hidden service” web hoster on the ‘Tor’ anonymized network shut down during the first week of August 2013- might have de-anonymized visitors to the websites on that server. This could send information regarding identity of visitors to an IP address which was coded into a malware script and injected into browsers. Apparently, the IP addresses under discussion belong to the NSA or National Security Agency, note security researchers, reported arstechnica.com on August 5, 2013.

    • Fix NSA mess — or else

      They should do so, and they should do so immediately, dramatically and very publicly. Because the real danger of these covert surveillance programs is that once they are no longer completely covert, their existence undermines everyone’s trust in the government.

    • NSA Strategy and Core Values
    • Spain demands ‘clarification and information’ on NSA surveillance

      On Monday, Spain’s Foreign Ministry demanded “clarification and information” concerning a report published in Der Spiegel which said Spain was a target of secret surveillance by the NSA.

      The report published in Der Spiegel explains how German intelligence services cooperate closely with the NSA, but also states that Germany for its own part is a target of US surveillance. But there is more to this story within the European Union.

    • Mailpile: crowdfunding a secure, private email client/cloud service

      Mailpile is an Iceland-based free/open source email service that’s privacy oriented, integrating easy-to-use encryption and scalable searching. The idea is to produce something that’ll run well as a cloud-based service or on your own desktop. They want to ship their first milestone in January 2014, and are looking to raise $100K on Indi-egogo to pay for the developer hours to see the project through. With the Mozilla foundation abandoning support for my beloved (but creaky) Thunderbird, I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with, and I’ve put my money where my mouth is, with a $128 donation. I’m especially impressed by their determination to integrate easy-to-use mail crypto — the holy grail of email for decades now.

    • Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document

      Critics demands answers from chairman Mike Rogers after claims that committee failed to share document before key vote

    • The NSA Is Hiring! And Following A Pittsburgh Car Dealership On Its Twitter Account?

      The hiring team for the NSA doesn’t have it easy these days. Their advance scouts got absolutely slammed by some college students during a meet-and-greet at a Wisconsin university. And just recently, the agency cut a ton of potential Snowdens loose by unceremoniously announcing plans to fire 90% of its systems administrators. With the agency swiftly being voted “least popular” by many Americans (and around the world), the HR division has its hands full keeping the agency staffed.

    • NSA’s New Surveillance Plan and Other News You Need to Know

      he NSA has plans for a new online surveillance system…

    • Language makes Obama’s NSA stance problematic

      …contradicted by two revelations at the end of last week.

    • 14/08/2013Is Germany a victim of the NSA, or an accomplice?

      Discussions aimed at banning espionage between the two countries in the future are scheduled at the end of August between Gerhard Schindler, the head of the German Foreign Intelligence Service (BND), and his US counterparts.

    • NSA FISA Surveillance: Experts Poke Holes In Administration’s Legal Justification For Phone Records Program

      No sooner had the Obama administration released a white paper laying out the legal justification for its mass phone data collection program than legal experts began to poke holes in it.

    • Yes, The NSA Is Tracking You. Get Over It

      A German writer is fed up with the hypocrisy of an exhibitionist society outraged by the limits of privacy. Yes, you are being monitored. Now get back to your celebrity Twitter feed.

    • Stackfield – the data encryption site that’s profiting from the NSA revelations

      Thanks to Edward Snowden, the question of internet security is one currently raised across the globe. While US-based online platforms are facing a significant amount of users leaving their services, the NSA scandal has also been a godsend for some providers, who have seen a rush of new customers.

    • NSA Snooping? What About the FBI Bugging My Bedroom?

      In one haunting piece, Stew recalled meeting the great folk singer Victor Jara during an early-‘70s visit to Chile with Phil Ochs and Jerry Rubin. Not long after that, Jara, only 27, had been tortured—his fingers cut off–and killed by Pinochet’s thugs following the coup that deposed of democratically elected Salvador Allende. (Phil Ochs, in probably the final major act of his tortured life, later organized a tribute to Jara in New York that I attended, featuring a surprise guest appearance by Bob Dylan.)

    • Gwynne Dyer: NSA surveillance and changes to the Internet

      Edward Snowden is safe from American “justice” for the moment, and he will certainly go down as the most effective whistle-blower in history. His revelations are going to cause a wholesale restructuring of the world’s most important communications system, the Internet. And that, rather than his whereabouts and fate, is now the real story.

    • NSA Spying in the Courts

      The National Security Agency’s collection of every American’s telephone dialing information is hotly contested in the court of public opinion and in Congress. It is now seeing its first test in the courts since its existence was revealed.

    • A window to a more secure Web

      Email has come a long way in the last decade. Much of this has to do with the rise of centralised services offered by the likes of Google,

      Microsoft and Yahoo. But, the fact that user data rests physically on their servers, located mostly within the legal jurisdiction of the U.S.

      State, raises serious questions about how user data is vulnerable to the snooping eyes of the State. The abrupt shutdown of Lavabit and Silent Mail, two services that offered robust encryption at the server-end to protect user privacy, has highlighted the need to explore alternative services and approaches to mail storage.

    • You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

      Previously we covered how to protect your privacy by preventing people from tagging your photos in both Facebook and Picasa. Consider this a follow-up as it looks like Facebook is a bit more involved in privacy intrusions than anyone had previously thought.

    • The Surveillance Speech: A Low Point in Barack Obama’s Presidency

      Jon Stewart once reacted to a Barack Obama speech by marveling that “at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.”

    • US National Security Agency ‘is surveillance leviathan’

      But Mr Bowden said the figures were “utterly meaningless” since the memorandum is vague about where the data is taken from.

      He adds: “After subtracting video media and spam, which accounts for most data by volume, 1.6% is an admission the NSA has become a surveillance leviathan.”

      Mr Bowden also said there was “no privacy restraint or restriction” in the way that the NSA can access the communications of foreigners.

    • Intelligence committee withheld key file before critical NSA vote, Amash claims

      Republican who led Congress revolt against surveillance insists members did not see document before 2011 Patriot Act vote

    • Germany denies phone data sent to NSA used in drone attacks

      German intelligence agency criticised for sending large quantities of mobile phone metadata to the NSA and GCHQ

    • Deutsche Telekom launches ‘NSA-busting’ encrypted email service

      Deutsche Telekom and United Internet have launched a super-secure German email service that they claim defeats the data-sniffing shenanigans of the likes of the NSA.

    • The NSA Turned Spying into a Video Game for Analysts

      Spying must get boring sometimes. Identifying targets. Wiretapping unsuspecting citizens. Sifting through all that private data. It must get old. Maybe that’s why the NSA introduced gamification elements into its software to encourage a little bit of healthy competition between analysts.

    • NSA analysts earned ‘skilz’ points by training for XKeyscore surveillance, says new report

      In Europe, Germany has been a nexus of debate over American surveillance: it’s allegedly both one of the most-watched countries in western Europe and a close partner of the NSA. It’s said to be central to the XKeyscore information-gathering program — and, according to new documents reviewed by Der Spiegel, its analysts have the maddest skilz in the business.

    • To learn spying software, NSA analysts “unlock achievements” to win “skilz”
    • Kerry: NSA Spying a ‘Very Small’ Part of Talks in Colombia

      U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program was a “very small” part of his talks in Colombia.

    • Kerry Travels to Brazil as NSA Spying Controversy Lingers
    • N.S.A Scandal and High-Tech Espionage on Brazil

      Is the U.S. ready to embrace the notion that Brazil has finally arrived on the world stage? Judging from the recent National Security Agency (N.S.A.) scandal, Washington is very skittish about the up and coming South American player. According to journalist Glen Greenwald, N.S.A. intercepts of Brazilian transmissions, including phone calls and internet communications, have been massive. Indeed, within the wider Americas region, N.S.A. snooping on the South American nation is second only to the U.S. in terms of overall scope. Writing in O Globo newspaper, Greenwald adds that the N.S.A. spied on the Brazilian Embassy in Washington and the South American nation’s mission at the United Nations in New York.

    • NSA Domestic Spying Enabled By Legal Loophole
    • Bob Schieffer Roasted For Unbalanced NSA Panel

      “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer drew fire Monday for hosting what critics said was a deeply unbalanced forum on the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities.

      Schieffer, who has been vocally critical of leaker Edward Snowden, brought together three people who supported the NSA: its former director, Michael Hayden, Peter King, a Republican congressman, and Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat.

    • Why “stop and frisk” is worse than NSA surveillance

      My black friends in New York, particularly those who don’t live in the fancier precincts of Manhattan, have been harassed by the NYPD in a way that I, as a white guy, will never experience.

      They’ve been stopped and frisked, for reasons known only to the officers. Almost every young black male I know has a story to tell.

    • Bob Schieffer’s NSA Farce

      His performance was an embarrassment to journalism.

    • NSA scandal splits government and opposition

      The opposition Social Democrats have slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government over its handling of the NSA spying affair. Meanwhile, Chancellery Minister Ronald Pofalla is testifying again in parliament.

    • The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

      It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.

    • Robinson: What NSA reforms?

      The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our emails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done — but not whether.

    • Bin snooping? We’ve been here before

      Longstanding BBW supporters may remember that I was once Director of this parish. For the past two years, I’ve been a Common Councilman in the City of London, aka the Square Mile. These two things crossed over significantly this week, with the news (broken by Quartz) that a company named Renew, which had installed bins in the Square Mile, was using a data collection capacity installed in those bins to collect information about mobile telephone usage amongst passers-by.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay’s 10th birthday is a milestone for internet freedom

        An internet milestone has just been reached: Pirate Bay has passed its 10th anniversary. The iconic/notorious site (pick your adjective) celebrated with a party just outside Stockholm. Who knows, perhaps entertainment bosses were simultaneously weeping into their champagne and plotting new action against their favourite enemy. The filesharing hub is arguably the most famous of all sites providing access to torrent files and magnet links to allow peer-to-peer sharing. If that means nothing to you, it’s like being able to swap those tapes you made of Radio 1 chart shows with anyone in the world.

08.13.13

Behind Samsung’s Latest Gross Violation of the GPL and Samsung’s Continued Support for Microsoft’s Patent Racket Against Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Kernel, Samsung at 11:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Quick Guide of license compatibility with GPL
Quick Guide of license compatibility with GPL

Summary: A call for advice on how to handle another Samsung violation of the GPL and betrayal of the community

As a quick reminder, over 6 years ago we called for a boycott of Samsung, which proved that it didn’t care about freedom and actively worked against it. In 2 posts [1, 2] from the past few weeks we covered yet another violation of the GPL by Samsung. This one required a leak to be shown and we spoke to the leaker, who prefers to remain anonymous. We consulted internally to see how this can be dealt with.

“Not enough data to do more than guess,” iophk wrote, “I do recall that the SFLC disapproved of the ‘robin hood’ approach to freeing code that had been ripped off.

“This one required a leak to be shown and we spoke to the leaker, who prefers to remain anonymous.”“I guess it depends on the provenance of the code. If it is ripped off from the kernel then it comes under GPLv2 or later (IIRC). Then it comes down to v2 or v3. I like what v3 accomplishes, but I do not. like mixing copyright with patents in the same license. Can v3 provide any protection if Microsoft starts to claim to have patents on *FAT?”

This is an interesting possibility that we are exploring. Samsung’s GPL violations are in an implementation of exFAT, a very common extortion tool against Linux distributors. “Here is the latest info from the most recent kernel,” writes iophk. “It is v2 only.”

It is v3 which deals with patent provisions. iophk continues: “Linus likes v2 very much but seems to have removed the “or later” clause that I vaguely recollect being there. Can rxrz [the leaker] say which version of the kernel exfat-nofuse came from? If it is a later one, then maybe v2 is the only option. If it is an earlier one, there might be a choice between v2 and v3.”

He later, upon further investigation, adds: “Here’s the oldest commit in Git, which has the same preamble. So I’m not sure under which circumstances v3 could be used. It is certainly a safe bet with v2.”

“We could like to relay the leaker’s question to the wider community.”We spoke with the leaker of this code, who wrote: “I just wanted to do a good thing.

“But now I have decided to put the LICENSE file there, containing GPLv2, since Samsung has stolen that code initially from the Linux kernel tree. (I believe it fits this code the best, v3 may be better though, I don’t know)”

We could like to relay the leaker’s question to the wider community. To quote her, the leaker: “Could you please help the project and make up a LICENSE file content for it? It happens that I’m not too good with legal things myself…”

I promised to work with our community at Techrights or anyone else who reads this to address this issue. Any suggestions of ways forward from here? Or licensing? █

Microsoft Hardly Changes Its Smear Campaign Against Google After Microsoft’s Collusion With the NSA Got Exposed

Posted in FUD, Google, Microsoft at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

National Security Operations Center
National Security Operations Center

Summary: The biggest source of SPAM (Windows) and privacy violations (Windows and Microsoft services) throws accusations of spam and privacy violations by Google

Thanks to Edward Snowden we now know a lot more about the NSA’s liaisons with Microsoft. Microsoft can no longer accuse Google of privacy violations with a straight face, can it? So what happens to the Scroogled PR campaign, which reportedly made another comeback? The Inquirer reports:

MARKETING GENIUSES in Redmond must be spinning in their chairs and high-fiving, having launched Microsoft’s latest anti-Google “scroogled” campaign.

This time around the Google Scroogle relates to emails and spam. “Google spams your inbox with ads that look like real emails,” it hollers.

“Google violates your privacy by reading every single word of every single email sent to and from Gmail accounts so they can better target you with ads. Now, they’re going one step further over the line by using that same personal information to spam your inbox with ads that look like real emails,” said the accompanying marketing information.

First of all, Microsoft lets the NSA hijack entire systems of over a billion people. So don’t tell us about privacy, Microsoft. It also lets the NSA eavesdrop on Skype and much of its server-based business (Azure, E-mail, and so on).

Secondly, Microsoft is the number one cause of SPAM (last pointed out a couple of days ago), so who the heck at Microsoft has the nerve to accuse Google of ‘spam’? Google is mostly a victim of this Windows-spewed SPAM.

Microsoft’s main product these days is surveillance/dossiers on people and of course a slew of abominable lies, such as the above. Shun Microsoft like you would shun an oppressive regime, which is what Microsoft is secretly advancing (while publicly pretending to pursue the opposite). Recall what Microsoft did in Russia. █

Obama Administration Offers Weak or Detrimental Intervention in the Patent System

Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 10:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Swearing to protect corporations like Apple

Obama

Summary: Obama is expected to supersede another patent-induced ban — this time against a Korean company — and whether he does so or not, the patent system in the US (USPTO) loses its credibility

The patent system in the US is not working based on the state of the economy. Maybe it helps make the rich even richer, or maybe it helps drive innovation to China, the world’s rising superpower. American.com has this new article which deals with Obama’s focus on patent trolls [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] — a subject that motivates some new blogs. This is essentially going after the small guys and leaving the rest, who occasionally suffer from those small guys, in tact. Towards the end the article mentions software patents too:

In conclusion, the Obama administration’s executive actions do not require Congressional approval, and will likely result in some modest improvement in transparency and increased PTO level of scrutiny of software patent applications. But serious Congressional policy debate likely will begin in this fall’s session, reflecting a significant opportunity to develop a common legislative agenda on Capitol Hill for much needed, focused bipartisan patent law reform addressing PAE litigation abuse.

PAE means patent trolls. It is a more polite term. Obama could be given the benefit of the doubt if he hadn’t helped Apple embargo Korean rivals (in reverse, removing ITC deterrence against Apple by Samsung). He intervened in the sanctions war by acting to unban the Apple products which a suitable authority decided to ban. Now that Samsung gets banned will Obama intervene again? Or dos hen only come to Apple’s rescue?

Samsung has suffered a big blow in the US over the weekend with a court issuing an import ban on some Samsung devices on grounds they violate two of Apple’s patents.

[...]

The Obama administration now has 60 days to decide whether to let the Samsung ban take effect, and may stoke accusations of favouritism if it decides to back the American Apple over South Korea’s Samsung.

If Obama’s staff can’t veto this decision, then it will show that the legal system in the US is just a farce with nationalist agenda. Either way, the fact that Obama’s staff members can intervene in lawsuits they know nothing about is itself proof of a broken, rogue, and arbitrary legal framework. This whole legal ‘anarchy’ serves to show that perhaps this whole system needs abolishing; slight reforms that change public perceptions won’t be enough. Reforming the patent system is like ‘reforming’ the massive surveillance apparatus. █

How EFI/UEFI is Harming Digital Freedom and Technology Rights Like Privacy and Anonymity

Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Jacob Appelbaum
Image by Alexandre Dulaunoy

Summary: Tor is stifled by complications associated with UEFI lock-in, which limits what can run on computers and lets companies/governments control computers remotely

Now that privacy is a hot subject, with a lot of people’s ‘paranoia’ confirmed to have been justified, there are many vigilant citizens or businesspeople who turn to privacy-respecting services, some of which, like secure E-mail companies in the US, shut down due to bullying from their government (Mega has a new services like that in New Zealand). We have just found out that EFI is impeding Tails development. For the uninitiated, Tails is a distribution of Debian GNU/Linux with Tor in it. Unlike Windows bundles [1, 2], this one is secure.

According to this new video, Jacob Appelbaum, a prominent Tor developer, confirms that EFI (and by extension UEFI) weakens user control. Towards the end of this new talk he speaks “garbage EFI stuff that’s force down our throats.”

How do tweakers of Linux who facilitate UEFI with their hacks feel about it? For most users, UEFI has almost nothing to offer. Boycott UEFI. █

IRC Proceedings: August 4th-August 10th, 2013

Posted in IRC Logs at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: August 4th, 2013

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

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IRC Proceedings: August 5th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: August 6th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: August 7th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: August 8th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: August 9th, 2013

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IRC Proceedings: August 10th, 2013

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Enter the IRC channels now

08.12.13

Links 12/8/2013: Netrunner 13.06, New Sabayon

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Finland’s Upper Secondary School Exams Going All-Linux

    “The Matriculation Examination Board of Finland has just opened an international hacking contest to find flaws and exploits in Digabi Live — the Live Debian based operating system to be used in the all-digital final exams by the year 2016. The contest ends on 1st of September, and the winners are about to scoop hefty hardware prizes, also available as cash.”

  • The state of the Linux community

    What prompted me to write this article were two things. One, the recent donation drive on Tuxmachines. Two, the announcement about the closing of The H, which you may also have known as The H: Open Source, Security and Development. What is common for both these announcement is the obvious difficulty in having a sustainable financial model when running sites dealing in Linux.

  • TLWIR: Developing a GNU/Linux-Based Quality Assurance System

    I write about GNU/Linux for a living. It always frustrates me when I make a mistake that makes it through my review process to the actual published article. Most often, it is a spelling error that I missed during my proofreading process. I recently decided that I had to find a systematic method of identifying errors BEFORE publishing my articles.

    Quality assurance is the most important aspect of any endeavor, whether its is building safety systems into a state-of-the-art hybrid vehicle at Toyota, or writing articles that present accurate information about the GNU/Linux operating system.

  • I quit using Linux because…

    Once in a while, a prominent or not so prominent member of the Linux community makes a switch – for one reason or the other – to another operating system, usually to Mac OS X. The latest is Denis Koryavov, the former GUI Development lead for ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software solutions provider based in Russia and the publisher of ROSA Linux.

  • Desktop

    • GNU/Linux and That Other OS Head-to-Head In Uruguay

      The battle for Freedom continues in Uruguay, a country of more than 3 million in South America. You can see in this chart that every up-tick in adoption corresponds to a down-tick in M$’s OS. This is the only game in town on legacy PCs. GNU/Linux is slowly but surely winning share.

  • Kernel Space

    • Those unexpected regressions…

      A while ago, I read Ken Stark’s delicious rant because of a kernel regression.

      [...]

      Fortunately, my brother had won a set of CDs with a collection of programs that included some free software and demos. In one of them, there was StarOffice, which allowed me to create my presentation. When finished, I saved it both as an .sdd file and a converted .ppt file.

      That was a long time ago. I thought I had lost the presentation forever, but I found an old CD containing only the original .sdd thesis presentation. Logically, I wanted to see it.

      I had seen LibreOffice deal with .sdd files before, so, when I got the dialog asking me for a program to open the ancient presentation, I knew that something was wrong.

      There was simply no way to open it.

    • Linux 3.11-rc5 Celebrates 20 Years Since Windows 3.11

      Twenty years ago today Microsoft released Windows 3.11 while today Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.11-rc5 kernel. He wished he could have released Linux 3.11 kernel final today, but that didn’t happen.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Nouveau Receives Video Improvements

        A set of patches were published this weekend to improve the Nouveau NVIDIA Gallium3D graphics driver’s handling of video playback acceleration for certain scenarios.

      • Linux’s Common Display Framework Is Still Going

        The Common Display Framework (CDF) proposal for the Linux kernel that started last year is still being worked on. The CDF code is now up to its third revision, but this isn’t likely to be the final revision before pushing it for mainline inclusion.

      • X.Org 7.8 Isn’t Actively Being Pursued

        While there’s an X.Org 7.8 Wiki page that mentions planned features like XWayland integration and video driver hot-plugging, there isn’t active work towards putting out the X.Org 7.8 katamari nor specifically on delivering these mentioned features.

      • Precise vBlank Timing Comes For Nouveau NV50

        Precise vBlank timing support has been patched for the Nouveau DRM driver to support the NV50 through NVC0 NVIDIA GPUs (up to and through Fermi but not yet any NVD0 or Kepler hardware).

      • NVIDIA VP3/VP4 Engines Exposed On Nouveau For MPEG-2/VC-1

        The open-source and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver is now able to tap the more recent “VP3″ and “VP4″ video encode/decode engines on recent NVIDIA GPUs that make up NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD technology. With utilizing these VP3/VP4 engines, there can be MPEG-2 and VC-1 acceleration using this hardware.

    • Benchmarks

      • The Top Features Of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8

        The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 (codenamed “Sokndal”) is expected in the next week. With the imminent release of our industry-leading open-source automated benchmarking platform for Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris, here’s a look at some of the top features coming. Aside from just those carrying out the benchmarks, many of the features also benefit those viewing the results — such as Phoronix.com readers.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma Media Center 1.1 RC Release
      • Krita Lime (2.8prealpha). New features overview

        Some time have passed since I was talking about new features of the current development version of Krita. But there are lots of them actually! Let me show them to you :)

      • Recalling the days from Akademy 2013 in Bilbao, Spain

        It has been almost 3 weeks since I’ve been back from Akademy 2013 which was held in the splendid city of Bilbao this year, and it would be foolish to not write about my experiences there, since memories however bright they might be, can easily fade away with time.

      • KDE Plasma Media Center 1.1 Up To RC Stage

        The first release candidate for KDE’s Plasma Media Center 1.1 release is now available. Plasma Media Center supports viewing photographs, watching movies, and listening to music from one central KDE component.

      • KDE Lock Screen vs. Touch Input

        With respect to touch input, most parts of KDE can be handled very easily. However, one, imho, very important aspect, simply lacks all touch UI support: the lock screen (and also the login screen), right now, do not support touch UIs at all.

      • Release Party in Stuttgart this Friday

        This Friday (16th) there will be a release party in Wirtshaus Troll in Stuttgart starting at 19:00 to celebrate the awesome 4.11 release of the KDE SC. For more information (also about other release parties) check the Wiki

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 3 – Gone in 60 seconds

        I have never reviewed Mageia before and there is a reason for that. Mageia has always been my “Eleanor”.

        The “Eleanor” reference comes from the film “Gone in 60 seconds” and refers to the one car that Nicolas Cage cannot steal because something happens when he tries to do so.

        Mageia has always given me that sort of a problem. I tried Mageia 1 and 2 without success and rather than write a bad review I decided to write nothing at all.

        Mageia though appears to be one of the more popular distributions and I can’t just go on in this fashion. Therefore I have installed it, tried it and now I am going to tell you about my experience.

      • A proper alpha..

        Some of it is at least, we’ve released the live isos today which you should find on your nearest mirror.

      • Mageia 4 In Alpha, Lots Of Features Planned

    • Gentoo Family

      • Press Release: Sabayon 13.08

        Sabayon 13.08 is a modern and easy to use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model. This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by our build servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories. The ChangeLog files related to this release are available on our mirrors. Linux Kernel 3.10.4 with BFQ iosched, updated external ZFS filesystem support, GNOME 3.8.4, KDE 4.10.5, MATE 1.6.2, Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.1, UEFI SecureBoot for 64 bit images (with bundled UEFI shell), systemd as default init system, Plymouth as default splash system and new high-dpi artwork are just some of the things you will find inside the box. Please read on to know where to find the images and their torrent files on our mirrors.

      • Sabayon 13.08 Brings Systemd By Default, UEFI Fixes

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Virtualization: LXC Application Containers

        Linux containers (LXC) is a lightweight virtualization technology build into Linux kernel. Unlike other virtualization technologies, the virtual machines (VM) are driven without any overhead by the kernel already running on the computer. In VM you run only the processes you need, most of the time without even going trough the regular SysV or Linux init. This means that memory is used very conservatively. These lightweight containers are sometimes called application containers, as opposed to distribution containers where you run a full distro starting with SysV/Linux init.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Lowers Ubuntu One Price to Boost Kickstarter

            Electronista reports that Canonical has adjusted its Kickstarter campaign for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone again to generate more high-dollar pledges. The company is now offering the smartphone for $695 instead of its full $830 price as originally set when the Ubuntu Edge Kickstarter project launched on July 22. Currently, there are 12 days left, and Canonical has only managed to generate just under $9.3 million out of the project’s $32 million goal.

          • Canonical will win even if Ubuntu Edge doesn’t make its $32 million

            It looks less and less likely that Canonical will raise the $32-million it needs for the Ubuntu Edge. So what! It won’t matter in the long run.

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Enables Phased Updates – But What Are They?

            Earlier this week ‘Phased Updates’ were enabled for Ubuntu 13.04 – but what are they?

            Worry ye not: we’re here with a quick overview of what this sci-fi-sounding change is and what it will mean to you going forward.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Deepin 12.12.1 Review: Amazingly beautiful and soothing Ubuntu GNOME spin from China!

              I have used Deepin Linux earlier but never got time to actually pen down a review. It is based on Ubuntu but uses the GNOME shell rather than Unity and comes with great support for Chinese language. I am no expert in Chinese and hence, downloaded the 32-bit English version of Linux Deepin for this test.

            • Taking a look at gNewSense

              You might have noticed that posting in this space has been rather non existent for a while. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in FLOSS, nor is it because of a lack of ideas or desire to post. It’s just that things have gotten in the way.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Remotely control your Raspberry Pi

      Take control of your Raspberry Pi from your smartphone, tablet or PC, from anywhere in the world

    • Phones

      • Android

        • What Does “App” Mean?

          I think I’m going to start using the term “app” to mean “all the pieces you need to build to have a deliverable piece of software.” Because three-letter words are good, and anyhow that’s what the actual people out there who use what we build are starting to say.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Forrester: Tablets and 2017

        There it is. The world can and does accept tablets as legitimate PCs capable of doing almost everything and being portable besides.

      • Tablet PC, Tablet PC, Tablet PC

        That’s all gone now. When a retailer like Wal-mart has the temerity to use a term like “Tablet PC”, they are going off-script.

      • Acer to downplay Windows in favor of Android, Chrome OS

        Acer has told investors that it will reduce its emphasis on Windows PCs and laptops over the next few quarters in favor of devices based on operating systems from Microsoft’s archrival Google.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google open-sources 2 cool Chrome Web Lab experiments as its year-long London exhibition ends

    Google has turned to GitHub to take two of its most popular Chrome experiments to the Open Source development community.

    If you recall last July, London’s Science Museum entered into a year-long collaboration with Google called Web Lab, a collaborative project featuring a range of interactive Chrome experiments designed to bring the inner workings of the Web to life.

    Visitors to the free exhibition, which will close this Sunday, were given five separate experiments to get involved with.

  • Boffin Makes List of Open Source Youtube Downloader Software Available On Its Website
  • Open source has won, let’s look to the future

    My nearly 11 minute keynote at OSCON 2013 this year, felt long enough when I gave it, but in terms of what I have to say about the future of open source, it wasn’t even close.

    Here I expand on the lessons I’ve learned from other people working in open source, new technologies emerging in open source that haven’t come of age yet, my passion for open source not being a Zero Sum game, and bringing open source to other parts of society and industry.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • ZTE to sell ZTE Open Firefox OS phone on eBay US and UK
      • ZTE Open Firefox OS Phone to Sell in U.S. and U.K. on eBay

        In another important milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile phone platform, the ZTE Open Firefox OS phone is set to start selling soon via eBay’s stores in the U.S. and U.K. ZTE and Mozilla officials confirmed the news on Monday, noting that unlocked phones will sell for $79.99. Thus far, phones based on Mozilla’s open mobile OS have been targeted at emerging markets, including several Latin American, countries. The phones will be orange, as seen here, and users in the U.S. and U.K. will be able to pick their carrier networks.

  • Education

    • How open source took root in one Pennsylvania school district

      I’ve been working in educational technology for more than 17 years and have spent much of my career advocating for open source in schools. For years, open source in education has gotten a bad rap. Superintendents, school boards and teachers frequently misunderstood open source software to be synonymous with dubious code birthed by mad, degenerate “hackers” who spend dark nights scheming to unleash complex and nefarious plots for social disruption.

    • Yet Another School System Thrives on FLOSS

      People still doubt my claims that GNU/Linux and FLOSS thrives in education but my experience in the bush in northern Canada is not unique.

  • Healthcare

  • Project Releases

    • OpenIndiana 151a Finally Sees An Update

      OpenIndiana, the operating system seeking to let Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris project live on within the open-source community, is finally out with an update. This isn’t a stable OpenIndiana release but rather is still a pre-release to 151a.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Google Reader Replacements

    The Google Reader service was launched in 2005 and built up a faithful user base of millions over the years. This aggregator of content served by web feeds offered an undeniably intuitive way for users to access a stream of updates from selected websites, enabling them to easily keep tabs on their favourite websites. Following the announcement in March 2013 that Google was to close the doors to this service – it closed July 2013 – millions of users have had to seek an alternative feed-reading service. How many made the right choice?

  • Science

    • How to: make a microscope from a webcam

      Mark Miodownik, presenter from Dara O Briain’s Science Club on BBC Two, reveals how you can perform simple science experiments at home. Try some DIY science and see the microscopic world up close by turning a webcam inside out…

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Farmers in Bicol uproot golden rice

      “We are very concerned as there are news that feed testing will start this year and that the harvest will be used in these feed experiments. In China, the people have protested against the feed trials on children, prompting proponents to compensate the affected families. We do not want our people, especially our children to be used in these experiments.” – Sikwal GMO

    • Filipino farmers destroy genetically modified ‘Golden Rice’ crops

      A group of activist farmers in the Philippines stormed a government research facility and destroyed an area of genetically modified rice crops the size of 10 football fields. According to New Scientist, the farmers say that genetically modified organism (GMO) foods have not been established to be safe for consumption and that the real solution to world hunger isn’t biologically engineered plants, but a reduction in worldwide rates of poverty.

      “The Golden Rice is a poison,” said Willy Marbella to New Scientist. Marbella is a farmer and deputy secretary general of a group of activists known as KMP — Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas or Peasant Movement of the Philippines.

    • The Tiniest New Technology Poses Unanswered Safety Questions

      You might use nanotechnology in the sunscreens you squirt or lather on your kids. You might like your lips and taste it in your favorite lip-gloss. You might even eat it in your Jell-O pudding. But is it safe?

      Well, that’s a tricky question.

      “Before you can do a risk assessment, you have to be able to do an exposure assessment and a toxicity assessment,” says Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen. “And they really can’t be done yet with nanoparticles. So it makes doing a risk assessment really hard. And there is increasing evidence that particles at the nanoscale can have more of a toxic effect. And that shouldn’t be surprising.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • West turned blind eye to Israel’s involvement in Sabra and Shatila ‘slaughter’

      Between 800 and 3,500 people were killed – mostly older men, women and children – by Israeli-backed, far-right Christian Phalangist militias between September 16 and 18, 1982.

      The Israeli army had invaded Lebanon in June of that year in an attempt to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and its leader, Yasser Arafat, and had succeeded in forcing their departure a week earlier.

      Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/west-turned-blind-eye-to-israels-involvement-in-sabra-and-shatila-slaughter#ixzz2bhbGe8SR
      Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook

    • The innocents caught under the drones: For fearful Yemenis the US and al-Qa’ida look very similar

      I have encountered two separate Yemens this past week: the one portrayed in Western media outlets and the other reality of living in Sana’a. One was rife with conflict and insecurity, the other associated with the navigation of the capital’s gridlocked traffic. Yet the two Yemens collided in a visceral way for most people.

      The al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot, described vaguely by President Obama as a “threat stream”, and the subsequent US embassy closure in Sana’a were far from the minds of most Yemenis. Most were more preoccupied with the approaching conclusion of Ramadan, the Eid al-Fitr celebrations and the political direction of the nation, most notably the United Nations-backed National Dialogue Conference, which aims at drafting a new constitution before elections in February.

    • Activists groups can be considered terrorists

      To better understand the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and who is considered a threat we must first ask ourselves “What is a terrorist?” By definition, a terrorist is a person or group of people that cause fear and panic in others by their words or actions. The US government would have us believe that “covered persons” refers to “terrorists” such as al-Qaida or the Taliban.

      However, that is not clearly written in the NDAA. The NDAA only mentions “covered persons.” The government, therefore, could effectively use the NDAA with its indefinite detention and lack of due process against anyone it considers a terrorist. This includes peaceful groups such as the Free State Project and the Occupy movement.

    • Q&A: Chilean author on the CIA’s role in the 1973 military coup

      The Santiago Times speaks to Carlos Busso, an investigative journalist, about his new book on the CIA in Chile, why Allende was a threat and the unofficial story of the coup.

    • How drones shatter Yemeni hopes

      Some years ago, a Western journalist described Yemen as “history’s last departure lounge.” But nobody even in their wildest imagination would have thought this Arab country would one day become the latest theater of America’s drone war and bizarre killings.

      Yes, US missile strikes and civilian casualties coupled with a near total absence of government services and deepening poverty is making Yemen the magnet of the very groups US wants to destroy as part of the war on terror.

    • Putting brakes on use of drones in N.C. right move

      The guidelines for use of drone aircraft by governmental agencies are simple and clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

      [...]

      The people who wrote the Fourth Amendment could not foresee drones, but they were wise enough to outlaw warrantless searches without specifying how the search would be carried out.

    • Citizens for Legitimate Government: 11 August 2013

      U.S. buying even more hardware for Yemen’s military 09 Aug 2013 U.S. drones have been battering Yemen, killing at least 28 people, and American spy planes watch from overhead. And now, Yemen’s skies are looking to get even more crowded. The U.S. Navy is helping the Yemeni air force buy 12 light spy planes, adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military aid the U.S. has given to the Sana’a regime. The Navy’s Light Observation Aircraft for Yemen program aims to buy 12 small planes — or maybe choppers — equipped with infrared and night vision cameras and the ability to beam the images collected by those cameras back to a ground station.[Gee, looks like arming the murderous regime in Yemen is sequester-proof. Ditto the Syrian rebels aka cannibals. This is *insane.* Start reading.]

      Yemeni Al Qaeda expert casts doubt on terror threat claims 11 Aug 2013 Yemen’s foremost Al Qaeda researcher says recent U.S. drone strikes have failed to kill senior leaders of the organization, and he dismisses claims that a plot to bomb a Canadian-owned oil facility was foiled by Yemeni authorities. Abdulrazzaq al-Jamal, a journalist and researcher who has been given exclusive access to the terrorist group’s Yemen branch, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said the series of drone strikes in the past 12 days have killed 32 people, including low-level foot soldiers and civilians.

      Yemenis call U.S. drone strikes an overreaction to al Qaida threat 09 Aug 2013 The United States launching of eight drone strikes in Yemen in the span of 13 days has ignited widespread outrage in the country. The anger over the strikes, which came as an al Qaida-related threat shuttered U.S. embassies and consulates in Yemen and 15 other countries, has overwhelmed attention to the threat itself, which many here view skeptically anyway.

    • Imprisoned CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Totality of Punishment Is Not Limited to a Prison Sentence

      Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who has served five months of a thirty-month sentence in the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written a fourth letter from the prison.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Kaufman: Why has no banker gone to jail?

      Last week, for the first time, the Securities and Exchange Commission won a case against an individual banker for fraudulent behavior leading to the financial meltdown of 2008-09.

      Hold the applause. The banker was a mid-level executive. It was a civil case; he will face other penalties but will not be going to jail. The U.S. government’s record remains intact. It has sent no one from Wall Street to jail for playing a role in the financial crisis.

    • Americans abroad rejecting US citizenship as tax hikes loom

      The number of Americans who decided to renounce their citizenship in the second quarter of 2013 increased sixfold the same period in 2012, a number the federal government attributes to strict impending financial disclosure rules.

      The United States is the only country out of 34 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that continues to tax citizens regardless of where they live around the world.

    • Thank You, TSA, NSA, FBI and CIA!

      The secret is that the Federal Reserve can’t really control the economy at all. It can influence it. And the influence it has is all negative; that’s the joke. Setting interest rates at any level other than that chosen by willing borrowers and lenders, the Fed distorts the price of credit. And distorting prices always leads to problems…either shortages or surpluses.

      Also, by fixing rates at ultra-low levels, the Federal Reserve is actually stealing from one group and giving to another. The middle class, savers, and working people lose wealth. Hedge fund managers, bankers, zombies…and, of course, those loveable feds themselves…gain.

    • Donald Trump On ABC’s This Week: “I Don’t Know, Nobody Knows” If Obama Was Born In The U.S.
    • WSJ’s Stephen Moore: Devastating Sequestration Cuts Are A “Success” Free Of “Negative Consequences”

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s Stephen Moore falsely claimed that the drastic budget cuts known as sequestration have had “none of the anticipated negative consequences,” when in reality economists have explained that the cuts have had devastating effects on economic growth, jobs, and programs for low-income Americans.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • LEAKED: Intelligence Agencies Running Mass Number of Propaganda Accounts on Social Media

      If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent months it is, in the words of the New York Times, that “the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.”

      “Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next ‘Matrix’ movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare,” the paper reported.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Op-Ed: Obama on NSA reform — Not giving credit where credit is due

      Without this publicity and consequent public awareness about the program, the president would probably just have let sleeping dogs lie and let the program continue without change. Snowden’s revelations and their consequent effects have forced Obama at least to go through the motions of reform to get ahead of the game. This has been combined with a huge increase in warnings of a global terror threat that can be used to convince the public that the surveillance programs are essential to their security. As a recent article put it, Snowden, Greenwald and whistle blowers were winning. A poll showed that most Americans thought of Snowden as a whistle blower rather than a traitor.

    • Indiana University law prof: NSA surveillance violates privacy

      Fred Cate penned a brief with other law professors asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s order authorizing the government to collect the data. He argues the intelligence court’s 2006 order violates the Patriot Act and “and presents a significant risk to the personal privacy of millions.”

    • Matt Welch Criticizes NSA Spying, Liberty-for-Security Swaps on Fox News

      On Thursday, Aug. 1, I appeared on Fox News’s Your World With Neil Cavuto to talk about the ongoing NSA revelations triggered by Edward Snowden, and where Americans should “draw the line” between liberty and security:

    • Impeach the President, Dismantle the NSA, and Fire the top Echelon of our Military

      Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden and others understand their obligation as honorable citizens to protect and defend the honor of those who once had the courage to dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to making truth and integrity a way of life for all peoples starting right here at home. Many lost their fortunes and their lives doing so. We are no longer being led by such people although there are many people living in the United States today who do have the courage, the honor, and the ability to do what our Founders did.

    • Robocalls: A job for NSA

      The state and federal Do-Not-Call programs are a joke.

    • Matt Damon Slams President Obama: WATCH ‘Elysium’ Actor Discuss NSA, ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law [VIDEO] Weekend Box Office Results

      Elysium actor Matt Damon has been known as a big supporter of President Obama, especially during his presidential campaign in 2008. However, it seems Damon has soured on the president, judging by a recent interview. During an interview with BET, Damon suggested that it feels like he and the President of the United States have separated. Damon told BET, “He (President Obama) broke up with me.”

    • Former adviser Van Jones calls Obama’s denial of NSA spying ‘ridiculous’ (Video)

      Van Jones, a former special adviser to President Barack Obama for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, and co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” has described the statement the president made Tuesday on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” that the government does not having a spying program as “ridiculous.”

    • Zimmermann’s Law: PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder Phil Zimmermann on the surveillance society

      Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, in a wide-ranging interview talks about the corrupting nature of big data, the end of privacy and the rise of the surveillance society. He also shared his thoughts on Moore’s Law and its marriage to public policy, and why Silent Circle shutdown its email-service.

      [...]

      Given the frenetic nature of the news, I didn’t think I would get a chance to have a measured discussion with Zimmermann. Much to my surprise, he got on the phone and we ended up discussing everything from the rise of the surveillance state; big data and its devastating impact on society; data totalitarianism; the somewhat dubious role of Google and Facebook in our lives; and why as a society we can’t fall victim to the cynicism that is starting to permeate our lives. He also talked at length about the important role of our legislators in pushing back against the unstoppable tide of the “surveillance society.”

    • Loophole Shows That, Yes, NSA Has ‘Authority’ To Spy On Americans — Directly In Contrast With Public Statements
    • NSA’s Rules Allowing Warrantless Searches On Americans Came THE SAME DAY It Was Told Searches Violated 4th Amendment

      We already wrote about the bombshell revelation from the Guardian that the NSA changed the rules in October of 2011, so that it had permission to do warrantless searches on US persons (contrary to public claims). However, Marcy Wheeler recognized the date of that update is the very same date that the FISA court supposedly smacked down the NSA for violating the 4th Amendment with some searches.

    • FBI suspected of cyber-attack on anonymous web-hosting and email services

      On August 5 malicious software (malware) in the form of a Java Script (JS) attack code was discovered embedded in multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting (FH), the largest hosting company on the anonymous Tor network. Initial research into the malware by experts suggests that it originated from and returned private data back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or other US government agencies.

    • Not only do they spy on us…

      ….but Big Brother also charges us to spy on us.

    • NSA to chop sysadmin numbers by 90 percent – or is it?

      Most likely, these people would be put on other work rather than fired.

    • Obama’s NSA ‘reforms’ won’t change anything

      W
      While I attended President Obama’s Friday news conference, which largely dealt with surveillance and security, I couldn’t help but wonder whether one man, eight time zones away, was watching: Edward Snowden.

      Having lived in Moscow for many years, I know the Russian capital has many Friday night diversions — but what could been more interesting for Snowden than to watch the president of the United States continue to react to his bombshell revelations? Snowden probably gets a kick out of hearing the president mention his name, too — the ultimate validation of his own importance. Indeed, the president even devalued himself by taunting Snowden. If Snowden is so sure of himself and his views, Obama said, why not return home, get a lawyer, and make his case in court?

    • Don’t Insult Our Intelligence, Mr. President: This Debate Wouldn’t Be Happening Without Ed Snowden

      One of the more ridiculous claim’s during President Obama’s press conference on NSA surveillance today was the claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it’s likely we would end up in the same place. While he admitted that Snowden may have “accelerated” the process, he’s also claiming that the leaks put our national security at risk.

    • Obama’s Response To NSA Was To Appease The Public, Not Reduce The Spying

      Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn’t trust the government. That’s because he keeps insisting that the program isn’t being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that’s not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place.

    • Obama says phone spying not abused, will continue

      President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered “appropriate reforms,” he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.

    • DOJ: There’s No Expectation Of Privacy In Your Phone Records Because People Don’t Like Terrorists

      Following our post on the NSA’s document defending its surveillance programs, let’s look more closely at the Justice Department’s “white paper” explaining the legal rationale for scooping up all of the metadata on every phone call under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, also known as the “business records” or “tangible things” section. This document just focuses on that one program, rather than the many other programs, and within its 23 pages there are so many ridiculous things. I’m sure we’ll come back to many of them in future posts. After going through it a few times, it seems abundantly clear that this was a rush job by the administration to defend this particular program, without realizing just how ridiculous many of its claims are. As Julian Sanchez has noted, the arguments made in this document appear to contradict the DOJ’s actions in dozens of ways, and basically invalidates a ton of previous arguments concerning other surveillance programs. And, worse, it more or less opens the door for massive surveillance on a variety of other things. Again from Sanchez, the argument in this paper could easily apply to having a local prosecutor subpoena all city phone records looking for drug dealing. Because safety!

    • Obama’s Simply Wrong: Whistleblower Protections Would Not Have Applied To Snowden

      During the Q&A portion of today’s President Obama press conference, reporter Chuck Todd asked Obama about Ed Snowden and whether he was a “patriot,” after Obama announced some reforms and even directly made clear that those who support civil liberties and greater transparency “love their country” and are “patriots.” Except, Obama said that he does not think Snowden is a patriot, in part because he had signed the Whistleblower Protection Act and extended the protections to the intelligence community. This is laughable on a variety of levels, including the Obama administration’s actions against other whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and William Binney, who did go through official channels, and then were subject to ridiculous investigations and (with Drake) totally trumped up charges on a bogus unrelated issue.

    • Obama’s Response To NSA Surveillance: Some Minor Reforms & Transparency; Still Lacking Justification
    • London’s bins are tracking your smartphone

      Smartbins use devices’ Wi-Fi connections to log their MAC address and track customer habits

    • Rep. Justin Amash: House Intelligence Committee Withheld NSA Documents From Incoming Congressmen

      Defenders of the NSA’s program always point to two things: it’s all legal and it’s all subject to oversight. Part of the “oversight” is the FISA “thumbs up” system that has approved every request for two years in a row. The other part of the “oversight” is Congress itself.

      Unfortunately, members of Congress have been lied to directly about the extent of the collections occurring under Section 215 (and 702), so that’s one strike against the “oversight.” Now, it appears that members of Congress are being selectively provided with information about the programs.

    • Assange: Obama ‘validates’ Snowden

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says President Obama’s plans to make changes in National Security Agency surveillance programs stem from a single source: Edward Snowden.

      Obama “validated Edward Snowden’s role as a whistle-blower” with his proposals to revamp NSA programs, Assange said in a written statement Saturday.

      “But rather than thank Edward Snowden, the president laughably attempted to criticize him while claiming that there was a plan all along, ‘before Edward Snowden,’” Assange said. “The simple fact is that without Snowden’s disclosures, no one would know about the programs and no reforms could take place.”

    • Michael Hayden, Former NSA Chief: After A Major Attack, U.S. Likely To Seize More Surveillance Powers
    • Julian Assange: Obama ‘validates’ Snowden by proposing NSA changes
    • Required reading: The surveillance state

      President Barack Obama says he will work with Congress to review US surveillance programmes and the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), following the whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations of a programme of mass surveillance of electronic communications, including emails and Skype calls.

    • Snowden’s father decries ‘political theater’ over son’s leaks

      The father of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, complained Sunday about the “political theater” surrounding his son’s disclosures of secret surveillance programs and dismissed President Obama’s proposed reforms as “superficial.”

    • Surveillance debate or immigration reform?

      For President Barack Obama, August was supposed to be the time when a major immigration bill landed on his desk.

    • Obama’s NSA review vindicates Snowden, Assange says
    • EU a Key NSA Target
    • Stickonspy: sticker-reminder that the NSA likes to fool around with your webcam

      Stickonspy sells die-cut stickers that go around your laptop’s webcam to remind yourself — and others — that spooks from western governments have made a practice of using spyware that allows them to covertly switch on laptop and mobile phone cameras and microphones to spy on their owners. $3 for one, $10 for 6.

    • Crypto-currency for NSA leaker: Snowden fund accepts Bitcoin

      US fugitive Edward Snowden’s defense fund, launched recently by WikiLeaks to raise money for the legal protection of the NSA leaker, has announced it now accepts donations in virtual currency Bitcoin.

      The Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund (JSPD) was set up on August 9 with the goal to provide legal as well as campaign aid to journalistic sources. Snowden, who is behind the biggest intelligence leak in the history of the US National Security Agency (NSA), has been selected the first such source.

    • The NSA Isn’t the Only One Spying On You — Your Phone Company is Helping

      A recent federal court ruling that sanctioned the warrantless tracking of American cellular users was deeply troubling. It revealed a disturbing expansion in the scope of power of U.S. executive bodies and has sparked a great distrust among the American people of federal and state authorities.

      In what has become, as the New York Times describes, “a routine tool” for state and federal agents, cell-phone tracking remains a topic many law enforcement officials shy away from discussing. The popularity of the practice has led to its adoption by many local police departments and has become the most prevalent invasive way government officials invade personal privacy.

    • Former NSA chief predicts surveillance programs will expand

      The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.

    • Want to shoot some guns during recess? Spy agencies court Congress while deceiving it
    • Why won’t they tell us the truth about the NSA?

      But we soon discovered that also was not true either. We learned in another Guardian newspaper article last week that the top secret “X-Keyscore” program allows even low-level analysts to “search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

    • Obama Spurns NSA Spying Reform

      Huey Long once said fascism will arrive “wrapped in an American flag.” In “Friendly Fascism,” Bertram Gross (1912 – 1997) called Ronald Reagan its prototype ruler. Gross didn’t know Obama.

      He represents the worst of rogue governance. He advances America’s imperium. He heads its police state apparatus. He’s waging war on humanity. He’s doing it abroad and at home.

      He puts a smiling face on repression. He’s hardline. He’s ruthless. He’s done what supporters thought impossible. He exceeds the worst of George Bush. He says one thing. He does another. He demands it.

      His promises ring hollow. He broke every major one made. He’s a serial liar. He’s a moral coward. On August 9, he defended the indefensible. He did so disingenuously.

    • The Art of Deception: A Necessary Skill for Intelligence Officials

      As more and more becomes known about blanket spying by the National Security Agency, one thing is becoming increasingly apparent. Government officials are deliberately and repeatedly misleading Congress and the US public in a concerted effort to conceal as much as possible about what the NSA is actually doing.

    • NSA server in Ukraine as part of electronic surveillance program, Snowden revelations suggest

      Details of a top secret U.S. National Security Agency program for culling intelligence from the internet indicate that at least one computer server was or is located in Ukraine, the Guardian wrote on July 31, citing documents provided by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.

    • In light of NSA revelations, two German companies to automatically encrypt emails

      Two of Germany’s biggest Internet service providers said Friday they will start encrypting customers’ emails by default in response to user concerns about online snooping after reports that the U.S. National Security Agency monitors international electronic communications.

    • Germany ‘mid-level’ interest to NSA: Report

      Germany is considered to be of ‘mid-level’ interest to the US National Security Agency with the European Union a key priority of spying targets, reports weekly Der Spiegel, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

    • US Snooping Programme Had One Server Located In India: Report

      A controversial US surveillance programme that sweeps Internet usage data had 700 snooping servers installed at 150 locations around the world, including one in India, according to a report.

      The XKeyscore programme, run by the National Security Agency (NSA), allowed analysts to search through vast databases containing e-mails, online chats and browsing histories of millions of individuals, the Guardian reported, citing documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • NSA Likely Houses Servers in American Embassy, Report Says

      A source in the Russian special services said with “practically 100 percent certainty” that a server supporting the NSA surveillance system XKeyscore is located in the American embassy in Moscow.

    • One of NSA servers used for XKeyscore located in US embassy in Moscow – media
    • National Security Agency Spies on Us and Pays Others to Spy

      Several stories concerning the National Security Agency spying on U.S. citizens surfaced recently.

      British newspaper The Guardian reported on a computer program called XKeyScore. This program allows civilian hackers working for the NSA to fill out a form which gives them access to our email and phone call contents. It can give them recorded files, or real-time email, chat, text or phone-call communications.

    • EU ranked as ‘key priority’ for NSA monitoring

      The European Union is ranked as a key priority by the NSA for monitoring a German newspaper reported Saturday, citing a document leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Edward Snowden’s father gets visa to visit NSA leaker in Russia

      National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s father has secured documents to visit his son in Russia and plans to discuss how he could fight espionage charges, Lon Snowden and his attorney said Sunday.

    • Snowden’s father gets visa to visit NSA leaker son in Russia
    • NSA snooping casts pall over Kerry trip

      Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Colombia and Brazil this week builds on efforts to deepen relations with Latin America, but he can expect a curt reception from the two U.S. allies after reports that an American spy program widely targeted data in emails and telephone calls across the region.

    • NSA’s Spy History Poses Daunting Challenge for President Obama

      For decades, the NSA has routinely monitored the phone calls, and before emails, the telegrams of thousands of Americans. The rationale has always been the same, and Obama has repeatedly said it in defense of the spy program, and that’s that the surveillance has done much to protect Americans from foreign threats and attacks. The NSA recently tossed out the figure of 42 terrorist acts that it supposedly nipped in the bud because of the spy program. The problem with that is the agency’s history. Its named targets in the past have not been solely alleged Muslim extremists, but Communists, peace activists, black radicals, civil rights leaders, and even drug peddlers.

    • Assange says Obama’s NSA reform vindicates Snowden
    • New search engine protects you from NSA

      The website is called Zeekly.com and founder Jeffrey Sisk explains it doesn’t retain search history, and also runs on 2048-bit SSL encryption to keep private what Internet users don’t want public.

    • Forget Transparency: Now Is The Time to End the NSA’s Surveillance

      On Friday, President Obama delivered a speech meant to answer Americans’ concerns about NSA surveillance. Like most 50-minute speeches by major politicians, it amounts to 50 minutes of life we’ll never get back, and little substance.

      The take-away from the speech is that President Obama is “comfortable” with the surveillance program exactly as it already exists, and the “reforms,” to the extent of which they will happen at all, center on his quote “how do I make the American people more comfortable.”

      In effect, this means a PR campaign to convince the public that what the NSA is doing is okay, and it is noteworthy that one of the major “reforms” announced was having the intelligence agencies make a website to sell the programs to the public.

    • King: Obama needs to speak out more in support of NSA

      Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said Obama could have used his “bully pulpit” to allay fears among the public that the National Security Agency was snooping on their private telephone and Internet communications.

      “What I’m very critical of him for is basically he’s been silent for the last two months,” said King, an outspoken proponent of anti-terrorism intelligence efforts. “He has allowed the Edward Snowdens and the others of the world to dominate the media, and now we have so many people who actually think the NSA is spying on people.”

    • GOP lawmakers balk at privacy advocate in FISA Court
    • Clyburn: Obama can’t have ‘blank check’ on NSA surveillance
    • Peter King: Obama ‘silent’ on NSA
    • Republicans Warn Against NSA Changes

      Some senior Republicans in Congress on Sunday threw cold water on a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s plan to revamp the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs–his proposal to provide a new advocate for privacy concerns.

    • Edward Snowden dodges NSA traps in endless runner iOS and Android game
    • Ways To Reduce The Chances Of Being Spied On By The NSA Or Anyone Else

      One tool is Tor, a free service that is described as “virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet” by providing “the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.”

      Tor makes it possible to avoid being tracked by web sites use and to use email, chat and other services anonymously. It also allows users to access services that may be blocked by their Internet service provider (in some countries by government order).

      A new iPhonem, Android, Windows and Blackberry app called Seecrypt“allows you to make and receive unlimited, secure voice calls and text messages between Seecrypt Mobile-enabled devices, anywhere in the world.”

    • Former CIA, NSA Chief: Obama Wants Americans to Accept Surveillance

      Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden addressed President Obama’s promises of more “transparency” for the surveillance programs, saying that his goal is just to make Americans comfortable enough to accept the program.

    • Lon Snowden, NSA Leaker’s Father, Claims Russia Has Issued Him A Visa

      National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s father has secured documents to visit his son in Russia and plans to discuss how he could fight espionage charges, Lon Snowden and his attorney said Sunday.

    • Mega to run ‘cutting-edge’ encrypted email after Lavabit’s ‘privacy seppuku’

      Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is working on a highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server. It comes as the US squeezes email providers that offer encryption and Mega’s CEO calls Lavabit’s shutdown an “honorable act of Privacy Seppuku.”

      Mega’s Chief Executive Vikram Kumar, who is heading the development of the company’s own end-to-end encryption technology to protect the privacy of the future email’s users, has reacted to the Lavabit founder’s decision to suspend his service’s operations – an act, which was shortly followed by voluntary closing down of another secure email service, Silent Circle.

    • New Rule: Congressmen Who Thought Iraq Had WMDs Can’t Talk About NSA Effectiveness

      Senator Saxby Chambliss is either a blind war hawk or is deliberately misleading the public. Last week, after the National Security Agency had intercepted an al-Qaida conference call plotting attacks against U.S. embassies, Chambliss claimed it was proof that mass surveillance programs were effective. But the AP reports that the NSA’s controversial phone and Internet monitoring programs “played no part in detecting the initial tip.”

      The press should have known — and reported on — the fact that Chambliss had a history of hawkish interpretations of intelligence reports after he voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Indeed, the most ardent defenders of the NSA are exactly those members of Congress who wrongly believed we needed to invade Iraq after believing that there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

    • The NSA is turning the internet into a total surveillance system

      Now we know all Americans’ international email is searched and saved, we can see how far the ‘collect it all’ mission has gone

    • Lawmakers tasked with overseeing NSA surveillance programs feel “inadequate”

      In the wake of the Obama Administration’s nod towards greater transparency for its surveillance programs, some members of Congressional intelligence and judiciary committees now say that they have not had the proper opportunity to understand, much less challenge these programs.

      “In terms of the oversight function, I feel inadequate most of the time,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. She spoke with The Washington Post on Saturday evening, admitting that while the programs were “approved” by Congress—”Was it approved by a fully knowing Congress? That is not the case.”

    • Russia among countries atop NSA surveillance priority list

      Russia, alongside the EU, China and Iran, are on top of the NSA’s spying priority list, according to a document leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel weekly.

      In the classified document, dated April 2013, countries are assigned levels of interest for NSA surveillance from 1 (the highest) to 5 (the lowest).

      Among the top surveillance targets are China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and Afghanistan. The EU, as a whole is also ranking high, though individually its 28 member-states are of lesser importance to the US intelligence, with Germany and France representing mid-level interest, while countries like Finland, Croatia and Denmark are denoted as almost irrelevant in data gathering.

    • Peter King Defends NSA Against ‘Slanders’: ‘Drives Me Crazy’ To Hear ‘Snooping And Spying’

      On this Sunday’s Face the Nation, New York Congressman Peter King denounced the beating the NSA’s reputation has taken as a result of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the organization’s surveillance programs, arguing that “loose words” like “spying” and “snooping” unfairly diminished the patriotism of NSA staff and officials.

    • Snowden details how NSA can search e-mails, calls without warrant
    • Iran, Russia, China, EU atop NSA Piority List

      Russia, alongside the EU, China and Iran, are on top of the NSA’s spying priority list, according to a document leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel weekly.

    • Obama’s assurances miss core concerns over NSA surveillance programme

      The US president, Barack Obama, sought to reassure his country, as well as his allies, with a public review and additional oversight of US national security surveillance programmes, but observers said the steps do little to address the core issues at the heart of public concern over the practices.

    • US Govt. Employee Bravely Calls for the Total Abolition of NSA

      These programs have only one objective, and they cannot be reformed or “controlled” or otherwise fixed. Their objective is to reduce the people of the whole Earth under absolute tyranny.

    • On NSA Surveillance, Congressional Oversight Fell Short

      Much of President Obama’s defense of the NSA surveillance program yesterday came down to it being under the oversight of all three branches of the federal government, himself, the Congress, and the secret judges that signed off on the warrants.

    • Lavabit’s Ladar Levison: ‘If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It’

      Ladar Levison, 32, has spent ten years building encrypted email service Lavabit, attracting over 410,000 users. When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was revealed to be one of those users in July, Dallas-based Lavabit got a surge of new customers: $12,000 worth of paid subscribers, triple his usual monthly sign-up. On Thursday, though, Levison pulled the plug on his company, posting a cryptic message about a government investigation that would force him to “become complicit in crimes against the American people” were he to stay in business. Many people have speculated that the investigation concerned the government trying to get access to the email of Edward Snowden, who has been charged with espionage. There are legal restrictions which prevent Levison from being more specific about a protest of government methods that has forced him to shutter his company, an unprecedented move.

  • Civil Rights

    • New CCTV Code of Practice comes into force

      The code is a step in the right direction towards bringing proper oversight to the millions of cameras that capture our movements every day. However, with only a small fraction of cameras covered and without any penalties for breaking the code, we hope that this is only the beginning of the process and that further steps will be taken in the future to protect people’s privacy from unjustified or excessive surveillance.

    • TSA, change the airport security mindset

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright owners group tears apart law review process

        Australia’s home entertainment industry lobby has slammed the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) over its handling of a review of the country’s copyright regime.

      • Australian Copyright Industry Says Proposal To Bring In Fair Use Is ‘Solution For Problem That Doesn’t Exist’

        A couple of months back, Techdirt wrote about Australia’s proposals to shift from the current fair dealing approach to fair use as part of wide-ranging reform of copyright there. When something similar was mooted in the UK as part of what became the Hargreaves Review, it was shouted down by the copyright maximalists on the grounds that it would lead to widespread litigation. As Mike pointed out at the time, that’s nonsense: the existence of a large body of US case law dealing with this area makes it much easier to bring in fair use without the need for its contours to be defined in the courts.

Groklaw Slams the US Legal Framework for (Mis)Handling of Patents

Posted in Patents at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“I am a US citizen, and I’m ashamed of what has just happened.” –Pamela Jones

Groklaw team

Summary: Even the popular Web site headed by a law professor and a paralegal is growing angry at what it is increasingly viewing as protectionism that facilitates corruption, not justice

PATENT maximalists have long used the nice-sounding word “innovation” in order to market to the public corporate protectionism, which does not sound as widely beneficial as “innovation”. Public perceptions are evolving on all sorts of issues, one of which is patents.

Ever since Google took part of Motorola it has been involved in battles where patent stacking by Apple and Microsoft challenged the zero cost of Android, the world’s leading operating system (as measured in terms of number of new installations). Geoffrey Manne writes:

It remains to be seen if the costs to consumers from firms curtailing their investments in R&D or withholding their patents from the standard-setting process will outweigh the costs (yes, some costs do exist; the patent system is not frictionless and it is far from perfect, of course) from the “over”-enforcement of SEPs lamented by critics. But what is clear is that these costs can’t be ignored. Reverse hold-up can’t be wished away, and there is a serious risk that the harm likely to be caused by further eroding the enforceability of SEPs by means of injunctions will significantly outweigh whatever benefits it may also confer.

SEPs are standard-essential patents, as we covered recently. The one with her eyes on the FRAND ball is the headmistress of Groklaw. Citing a 2006 paper, Jones shows that “royalty stacking” has long been seen as a form of “exploitative abuse”. Jones also cites an analysis showing the relevance of this to the Samsung-Apple battle. Noting Microsoft’s contribution to this battle, she writes:

Motorola Presses Its Case v. Microsoft’s FRAND Attack in Seattle and in Germany

[...]

As for the judge, he’s maybe starting to realize that some of his assumptions about FRAND requirements conflict with what the experts are now telling him. He expresses a measure of confusion about it in an order [PDF] on what the experts for both sides can tell the jury. Here’s what he won’t allow Motorola’s experts to tell them: that being willing to negotiate is sufficient to meet a FRAND obligation. That contradicts what this judge has already ruled in this crazy case, so he doesn’t like that, I suppose. The “reason” they can’t say that to the jury is, he says, because he gets to decide what is or isn’t a fulfillment of a RAND obligation, in that he’s Da Law on Microsoft’s obligations under Washington state law which he believes the world must go along with, Germany included. Experts can’t opine on legal conclusions. However, Motorola has now informed him via this route that he’s been getting some things seriously wrong on what FRAND obligations are and what good faith requires. Perhaps it will influence him. He says that the Motorola experts can input how the jury instructions read. I wouldn’t put much faith in that if I were Motorola, and I gather they don’t. This German prong is getting interesting, I must say.

As FOSS Force put it the other day:

Microsoft continues to collect patents [payments] from nearly everyone using Android, without proving a thing.

Meanwhile, notes Jones, the Microsoft-led Nokia is threatening Android with FRAND as well. Quoting a slightly old article, she picks her words as follows: “This is an article from June, I know, but it speaks to the problem the ITC was trying to address, before the White House just emasculated the ITC. It’s for subscribers only, but I wanted you to know about it, because Nokia’s counsel said that in the past, companies were “far more likely” to respect IP because they participated in the standardisation process and had the incentive to make sure it worked. But today would-be licensees “apply the totally opposite strategy” and “established and respected companies” wilfully infringe IP. That is exactly what Apple and Microsoft have been doing, as I see it. They claim they respect IP, and they demand that theirs be respected, but they have yet to pay Samsung or Motorola for their FRAND patents, instead forcing them to incur the expense of litigation while they enjoy a long, free ride. Lukander said that the problem of free-riding is much greater than any problem of hold up by FRAND patent owners, and that as a result, Nokia has decided to step back from the standardisation process, electing either not to join certain standard-setting organisations or not to contribute certain technologies to these organisations. The FRAND system used to work fine, Nokia said, because negotiations usually worked, but they only worked because the threat of an injunction inspired cooperative negotiations. But now, it’s working against innovation and against users, because it’s no longer balanced. Timothy Lucie-Smith, head of IP licensing at Ericsson, is also quoted in the article, saying that companies that accused others of hold-ups “just want to get a good deal [after] coming late to the development process”. And that’s exactly what I’ve been telling you this is about, since day one.”

“The ITC’s political bias and harm to innovation is so controversial that even lawyers’ blogs call for its dismissal.”Remember when Groklaw protected Apple’s side in a lawsuit for a long time? That all seems to be undone now. “Apple drops to 32% tablet market share in Q2 amidst strong YoY Android growth,” said one headline. Jones commented on it by saying it “will continue, because no one admires a bully.”

So Jones is definitely not sympathising with Apple or buying Apple products anymore. That’s good. While unprepared to criticise the USPTO as much as we have, she is definitely slamming the ITC and some of this peripheral legal bureaucracy right now. The ITC’s political bias and harm to innovation is so controversial that even lawyers’ blogs call for its dismissal. Our wiki page about the ITC shows that none of this should be seen as new. Pamela Jones said something which we said years ago about this corruption of the system. To quote: “By that definition of the ITC, they certainly did their job, protect a US company from a “foreigner” even though Apple was found by the ITC to be guilty of reverse holdup.”

Yes, exactly. Not news.

“It’s not even a small step to patent reform to make the system even less fair,” she added. “As long as they are Apple’s and not Samsung’s property rights” the ITC will do its thing, she believes.

“Apple is already moving to ban Samsung again.”On another day she wrote: “It’s so obviously protectionism, it’s hardly a surprise that it’s upset people. Samsung was found by the ITC to have behaved in good faith, but Apple was ruled to have been guilty of “reverse hold up”, meaning it didn’t present itself as a willing licensee. If *that* isn’t enough to justify an injunction, when everyone — courts and regulators — say it should be enough, what would be? And the reason given — that they were worried about FRAND hold up — is clearly not the real reason, since in this fact pattern, it was actually the opposite. So, it’s a black mark on the US in Korea. If courts and regulators play favorites, based on a company’s nation of origin, why wouldn’t other countries do the same? And if you can’t get a fair shake in the US, why would companies located elsewhere ever donate anything to a standard, knowing that they have no way to enforce their rights? Nokia has already said it won’t be donating as it has in the past. Telling such companies that they are still free to enforce their rights in court is silly. It costs millions for a patent infringement lawsuit, for starters, while unwilling licensees like Apple free ride, and as we saw in the Apple v. Samsung litigation, fairness isn’t at all what a foreign company can expect to receive in US courtrooms either. Apple is the biggest US taxpayer, and it paid off. That’s about it. And it smells funny. Yes. I said it. This is about lobbying by Microsoft and Apple, here and in Europe and Australia and wherever they can. It has nothing to do with FRAND holdup. It’s not even pretending to be about fairness. It’s about money. Apple and Microsoft don’t have a lot of FRAND patents. So they want to block competitors in the smartphone market from distribution with regular patents and design patents — just wait to see what ITC does to Samsung next week, with the excuse that the patents are utility patents, not FRAND — and then Samsung and others who developed this field are blocked from doing the same. Sound fair to you? I am a US citizen, and I’m ashamed of what has just happened.”

For those who believe there is no harm, Jones cites this report:

The decision will probably handicap Samsung’s ability to obtain higher technology licensing fees from Apple in any negotiations, said Susan Kohn Ross, a trade lawyer with Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp in Los Angeles.

And guess what? Apple is already moving to ban Samsung again. From the same corporate news site:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is trying to force Samsung Electronics Co.’s mobile devices off U.S. store shelves a week after dodging an iPhone 4 ban by a rare White House veto.

As Jones put it in relation to this separate article: “The US can waive Apple’s reverse holdup regarding Samsung’s FRAND patent, because the US economy needs and wants iPhones. But if India looks at its own national needs with respect to IP, that’s not allowed.”

The problem here is systemic. So we need to hammer the system, which a corporate coup distorted if not created. Here is Jones’ longer analysis of this case:

The ITC, according to the Wall St. Journal, decided today to order an injunction against certain Samsung products, thanks to Apple, who was just shown mercy by the President when the shoe was on the other foot. Of course, you know this isn’t necessarily the end. The President gets to do for Samsung what it did for Apple, should he so desire:

As part of its findings, the ITC overturned an administrative judge’s earlier finding that Samsung infringed a potentially important Apple patent on phone design.

The ITC said Samsung can continue to import and sell its infringing devices during a two-month period in which the Obama administration can review Friday’s order.

Samsung had warned the ITC that a product ban potentially could have a significant impact on the South Korean company’s U.S. devices and create “an immediate and long-lasting shortfall” of smartphones in the U.S. market.

Remember that patent aggression that Microsoft had engaged in and the lawsuit filed against a government department which stood in Microsoft's way? Google is trying to do the right thing here. As one report put it, “Google Asks Judge to Toss Microsoft Suit Over Phone Ban”.

“This whole system is undergoing a rapid collapse, so US citizens should reform or overthrow parts of it.”Well, that was a great reminder that the same government which fights privacy, truth/whistleblowing, and even journalism while firmly standing for torture, assassination and indefinite detainment without charges is no exception when it comes to patents. This whole system is undergoing a rapid collapse, so US citizens should reform or overthrow parts of it. The end of the patent regime, for instance, is long overdue. █

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