Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

07.07.16

Weapons of Mass Distraction at the EPO Cost the EPO Millions of Euros

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Human rights abuses rely on complicit or apathetic media to carry on; independent inquiry well overdue

Benoît Battistelli in The Sun

Summary: Benoît Battistelli’s EPO continues to manipulate the media and waste millions of Euros (EPO budget) on Battistelli’s reputation laundering while his sheer abuses carry on uncovered (or barely covered)

THE past week has been relatively quiet not just because of US holidays but also because of the summer vacation. Having said that, there are new articles about the EPO in the German media and Battistelli’s expensive lobbying event helped interject him into news (“said EPO president Benoît Battistelli.”)

“The FTI Consulting contracts with the EPO sure give reasons for concern.”Want to help the EPO waste another 3,000,000-7,000,000 Euros on a similar lobbying event next year? The EPO asks: “Want to nominate an inventor for the European Inventor Award 2017? Find out here what patents they hold” (just forget about those who killed people and were honoured by the EPO). The FTI Consulting contracts with the EPO sure give reasons for concern. It is money down the drain and it enables Battistelli to get away with human rights abuses, so EPO budget is being used for Battistelli’s private vendetta (like smearing judges) rather than EPO interests. “The Tour de France is now under way,” the EPO wrote yesterday, “You may not know these bike-related patent facts” (another example of the EPO piggybacking events like the Tour de France for PR, and speaking of bikes, recall the recent Battistelli scandal). With puff pieces like these, no wonder many continue to ignore the EPO’s abuses and Team Battistelli disgracing France. Yesterday for example, MIP’s James Nurton, who spoke to Battistelli earlier this year, repeated the EPO’s lies which warp the reality of lost independence and make it seem like gain of independence. They try to make it seem like all problems are resolved when in fact the very opposite is true. To quote this one new comment about it:

Very disappointing that all the disciplinary issues have been swept under the carpet until October. But is that a cleverer move than it first appears? I recall a rumour that the judgment of the Dutch Supreme Court in the SUEPO/EPO case is due in September. If that is true, and if the judgment goes against the EPO, it should make for a very uncomfortable October AC meeting for Battistelli.

“I agree,” wrote another person. “Having the banned judge just wait for another four months in uncertainty is just irresponsible. And congratulations for the three oxymora in a single contribution: a clever move of the AC, a court judgement against the EPO, an uncomfortable AC meeting for Battistelli.”

Battistelli “gives the Staff Council less than 24 hours to review documents,” according to this person, so “presumably the BOAC can treat the President in the same way, meeting the letter of the law but giving him no real opportunity to interfere.”

The longest comment which we found yesterday spoke about Rule 12c:

The new Rule 12c says “On a proposal from the President of the Boards of Appeal and after the President of the European Patent Office has been given the opportunity to comment, the Committee set up under paragraph 1 (BOAC) shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal. “

To understand the significance of the changes you need to go to Article 23 (4)EPC:
(4)The Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and the Enlarged Board of Appeal shall be adopted in accordance with the Implementing Regulations. They shall be subject to the approval of the Administrative Council.
http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/2013/e/ar23.html

The relevant Implementing Regulations are Rules 12 and 13 EPC.

According to Rule 12 EPC, the Presidium shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal.
According to Rule 13 EPC, the members of the Enlarged Board of Appeal appointed under Article 11, paragraph 3, shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

In both cases, the rules of procedure “are subject to the approval of the Administrative Council” but they are adopted by “autonomous organs” of the Board of Appeal.

Under the new regulations, the rules of procedure are no longer adopted by “autonomous organs” of the Board of Appeal.
They are adopted by a subcommittee of the Administrative Council (the BOAC).
The organs of the Boards of Appeal have some input to this process but they are no longer responsible for adopting their own rules of procedure.

According to my analysis of the situation that amounts to a loss of autonomy.
I do not see how it enhances the independence of the Boards.

Another commenter jokes by pretending to be “JK and BB” (Battistelli and Kongstad) and says “that´s an unfortunate slip of the pen, due to the late hour. We of course meant: “On a proposal from the President of the Boards of Appeal … the Committee … (BOAC) shall adApt [not adopt] the Rules of Procedure …””

Battistelli, who keeps breaking his very own rules, is changing them to suit his personal agenda. Why isn’t the media covering these serious scandals? The Register is the only English-speaking publication doing so nowadays, risking the wrath of legal bullying by Battistelli and his flunkies. █

Links 7/7/2016: New Information About Ian Murdock, New Snap Desktop Launchers

Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Who needs a GUI? How to live in a Linux terminal.

      Ever consider the idea of living entirely in a Linux terminal? No graphical desktop. No modern GUI software. Just text—and nothing but text—inside a Linux shell. It may not be easy, but it’s absolutely doable. I recently tried living completely in a Linux shell for 30 days. What follows are my favorite shell applications for handling some of the most common bits of computer functionality (web browsing, word processing, etc.). With a few obvious holes. Because being text-only is hard.

    • Not Your Mother’s Linux

      As someone who’s primarily used Windows since the early ’90s (with some minor dabbling in OS X), I’ve found Ubuntu MATE Linux to be pretty intuitive during my month or so of casual experimentation. I would even go so far as to say it’s been easier to figure out than recent iterations of Windows — which I hope says more about how clunky that old operating system has become and less about how woefully incompetent I might be with computers.

      I have a confession to make — one that will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read this column in the past. I’m not really a computer person. My mother would disagree, but she’s never owned a computer — no matter how many times I’ve tried to get her on board for the admittedly selfish reason of being able to communicate with her in a fashion that avoids phone companies and post offices. She insists it’s because she “doesn’t like to type,” but I know her mistrust of technology goes far beyond computers (and if I got her a tablet, she’d be annoyed at the endless invasion of fingerprints — a complaint to which I can relate).

    • Full-screen Nagware: Microsoft’s Final Attempt To Push Windows 10 Is Its Worst Yet

      Microsoft has been able to convince millions of users to install Windows 10 on their PCs. To grab more user base, Microsoft is now showing full-screen upgrade pop-ups notifying the people to perform the upgrade before 29.

  • Kernel Space

    • Doing for User Space What We Did for Kernel Space

      I believe the best and worst thing about Linux is its hard distinction between kernel space and user space.

      Without that distinction, Linux never would have become the most leveraged operating system in the world. Today, Linux has the largest range of uses for the largest number of users—most of whom have no idea they are using Linux when they search for something on Google or poke at their Android phones. Even Apple stuff wouldn’t be what it is (for example, using BSD in its computers) were it not for Linux’s success.

      Read more

    • More Polaris & Tonga Fixes For Linux 4.7

      Another batch of AMDGPU DRM driver fixes has been sent in for landing in Linux 4.7.

      These latest AMDGPU fixes are for taking care of some PowerPlay issues for Radeon RX 480 “Polaris” and Tonga (e.g. Radeon R9 285) graphics cards. There are no other changes outside of these Polaris/Tonga PowerPlay fixes.

    • Stale Data, or How We (Mis-)manage Modern Caches by Mark Rutland
    • Taming the Chaos of Modern Caches

      “If you’re a bit tired, this is a presentation on cache maintenance, so there will be plenty of opportunity to sleep.” Despite this warning from ARM Ltd. kernel developer Mark Rutland at his recent Embedded Linux Conference presentation, Stale Data, or How We (Mis-)manage Modern Caches, it was actually kind of an eye opener — at least as far as cache management presentations go.

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD’s Linux Driver Will Likely See A Power Change For The Radeon RX 480 Too

        By now you may have heard that there is the potential for the Radeon RX 480 to draw more power from the PCI-E bus than it’s rated to provide. In rare situations, this could potentially cause problems for the system. AMD/RTG is preparing to release a Windows driver fix while I checked in with AMD about addressing this situation under Linux.

      • AMD improves its Linux drivers

        It looks like AMD has finally got the memo when it comes to Linux machines. Its new AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 driver offers day-one support for its new Radeon RX 480 from day one.

        The new driver is currently available for download from AMD’s website. It is officially supported on 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It’s very similar to the earlier beta release and AMD still calls it a beta, but apparently it is stable and there are installation instructions on the website.

      • Dirk Hohndel Is No Longer Intel’s Chief Linux/OSS Technologist

        Well this somehow slipped under our radar last week and comes as a big surprise… Dirk Hohndel has left Intel Corp after being their chief Linux and open-source technologist the past number of years.

        Dirk Hohndel had been working at Intel since 2001 where he had been leading the Linux/open-source charge. Dirk frequently spoke at Linux/FLOSS conferences about Intel’s involvement in these areas. Given his tenure at Intel and his frequent involvement in the Linux/open-source communities, it comes as a surprise to see him leave. Prior to Intel, he was CTO at SUSE.

      • OpenChrome 0.5 Has Working Support For Multiple Monitors

        For those still leveraging VIA x86 hardware on Linux, the DRM/KMS driver hasn’t been restored yet but there is a new xf86-video-openchrome DDX feature release now available.

        Kevin Brace has continued taking up the maintenance of the OpenChrome X.Org driver. Three months ago he released xf86-video-openchrome 0.4 while now available is OpenChrome 0.5.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME and Flatpak

      • GNOME Calendar supports alarms

        In another of my (appearently common) insomnia nights, I decided to add a cool new to my pet application – Calendar.

      • GNOME Calendar Will Support Alarms, GNOME Software to Better Handle Flatpaks

        The GNOME developers are hard at work this summer to bring you the latest innovations and technologies for the modern GNOME 3 desktop environment, as part of the GNOME 3.22 release.

        GNOME 3.22 is in heavy development until the end of September, when the final release will hit the streets, but it will take a while (~two or three weeks) for it to arrive in the main software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux operating systems, Arch Linux being among the first, but it will worth the wait.

      • Flatpak, Snap and AppImage

        Over the past few months we have been hearing a lot about two new package formats, Flatpak and Snap (aka Snappy, aka snaps). These two new methods of packaging software have been getting a lot of attention, especially in the Ubuntu and Fedora communities. Both package formats attempt to make packaging easier for developers as all of an application’s dependencies can be bundled in the one portable package. Both Flatpak and Snap also claim to be (in theory at least) universal. The idea here is that any distribution which provides the Snap framework will be able to run any Snap package. Likewise, any Linux distribution with the Flatpak software installed should be able to run any Flatpak package. This should make it possible for developers to make one package for their software which will run on any distribution.

  • Distributions

    • This Week in Solus – Install #30

    • Reviews

      • Running Linux on the Acer Switch Alpha 12

        The Acer Switch Alpha 12 is a 2-in-1 tablet with a high-resolution display, a detachable keyboard cover, an optional pressure-sensitive pen, and after having reviewed the tablet, I can say it offers the kind of performance you’d expect from a mid-range laptop… but in a 2 pound, fanless package.

        Best of all, the Switch Alpha 12 is reasonably priced: you can buy one for about $600 and up.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • New toolset makes it possible to build and ship Docker containers within Ansible

        A new project from the creators of the system automation framework Ansible, now owned by Red Hat, wants to make it possible to build Docker images and perform container orchestration within Ansible.

        Ansible Container, still in the early stages of development, allows developers to use an Ansible playbook (the language that describes Ansible jobs) to outline how containers should be built; it uses Ansible’s stack to deploy those applications as well.

      • Red Hat, Eurotech collaborate on IoT cloud platform
      • Red Hat expands cloud management solution

        Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution.

      • What You Missed at DevNation & Red Hat Summit 2016
      • Red Hat’s Ansible Container Aims to Streamline Container Workflows

        The system automation framework Ansible, which is under the wing of Red Hat, has given rise to a new way to build Docker images and perform container orchestration within Ansible. Ansible Container allows for the complete creation of Docker-formatted Linux containers within Ansible Playbooks, eliminating the need to use external tools like Dockerfile or docker-compose.

        The new toolset is now available on GitHub. Here is more on what it can do.

      • A brief guide to hiring with culture in mind

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Upgraded from F23

          It was my first upgrade from a previous release and all went fine and smooth.

        • Event report: Fedora Cloud FAD 2016

          Around a month back the Fedora Cloud Working Group met in Raleigh for two days for Cloud FAD. The goal of the meet was to agree about the future we want, to go through major action items for the coming releases. I reached Raleigh one day before, Adam Miller was my room for this trip. Managed to meet Tom after a long time, this was my first visit to mothership :) I also managed to meet my new teammate Randy Barlow.

        • Summer training 2016 is on

          The 9th edition of dgplug summer training started few weeks back. This year in the IRC channel (#dgplug on freenode) we saw around 186+ nicks participating in the sessions. Till now we have went through communication guidelines, IRC, mailing list how to, a text editor ( Vim in this case), blogging, basic bash commands, a few more bit advanced bash commands. We also learned about reStructured Text, and Sphinx. We also managed to live demos to all students from the mentor’s terminal.

    • Debian Family

      • The State Of Systemd In Debian (2016)

        Debian developer Michael Biebl has presented a status update on systemd in Debian at this week’s DebConf 16 event in Cape Town, South Africa.

        On Tuesday was a presentation by Biebl about systemd in Debian and the progress that’s been made with systemd as the default init system for the past year. The video presentation has yet to be uploaded, but there are PDF slides for those interested.

      • Mysterious death of software pioneer Ian Murdock ruled suicide

        Ian Murdock, the Linux programmer who died under mysterious circumstances after claiming he was beaten by police, hanged himself.

      • New Details Emerge About Debian Founder Ian Murdock’s Death
      • Murdock Death Ruled Suicide, Terrible Linux Regressions

        CNN’s Jose Pagliery today reported that Ian Murdock’s death was officially ruled a suicide. Murdock, who founded Debian GNU/Linux in 1993, became despondent after a run-in with San Francisco police. He took to social media to accused police of brutally beating him and threaten suicide. Murdock was found hours later face down with an electrical cord tied around his neck. The investigator said he found no obvious signs of trauma although the autopsy directly contradicts that statement. Pagliery reported that no announcement had been made publicly and that the details of his body being covered in bruises only came out in the autopsy report obtained by CNN. “The autopsy records also note his body was covered in bruises — on his chest, abdomen, back, arms and legs.”

      • twenty years of free software — part 9 small projects
      • Avoiding SMS vendor lock-in with SMPP

        There is increasing demand for SMS notifications about monitoring alerts, trading notifications, flight delays and other events. Various companies are offering SMS transmission services to meet this demand and many of them aggressively pushing their own proprietary interfaces to the SMS world rather than using the more open and widely supported SMPP.

      • Derivatives

        • Debian Edu / Skolelinux Jessie

          Then Debian Edu is for you. The teachers themselves or their technical support can roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.

          The Debian Edu developer team is happy to announce Debian Edu 8+edu0 “Jessie”, the latest Debian Edu / Skolelinux release, entirely based on Debian 8 “Jessie”, update 8.5. Upgrades from previous beta releases of Debian Edu Jessie to this release are possible and encouraged!

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Review: Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS shines

            Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) represents the first release from Canonical to deliver long-term support since 2011 (version 14). While the latest improvements may not be entirely revolutionary, Ubuntu 16.04 rounds up exciting features to fortify the server base and enhance the desktop experience. InfoWorld reviewed the new desktop release in April. In this review, I’ll focus on the server.

            One of the key updates in this release comes by way of the new Snap package archive. Canonical’s LTS repositories are notoriously outpaced by modern software release cycles. It’s the classic trade-off for stability: Canonical moves slowly to adopt new versions of packages in order to vet applications and ensure they don’t muck up your system. Unfortunately, that induces a lag time that leaves users waiting as the latest and greatest software passes them by.

          • Ubuntu Linux to be bundled as preferred OS with Pivotal Cloud Foundry app platform

            Canonical and Cloud Foundry developer Pivotal have agreed a partnership in which Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux will become the preferred operating system for running Cloud Foundry, with secure certified Ubuntu images included.

            Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular platform-as-a-service suites for developing and deploying cloud-native applications, and versions of it are integrated in a number of platforms such as IBM’s Bluemix developer cloud and HPE’s Helion Stackato.

          • Pivotal Adds Ubuntu to Cloud Foundry

            The steady shift to cloud native infrastructure continues with a partnership between enterprise software vendor Pivotal and Linux specialist Canonical that will provide secure images from Canonical’s Linux distribution Ubuntu on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

          • uNav GPS Navigation App for Ubuntu Phones Now Offers Offline Maps, Convergence

            Today, July 6, 2016, Marcos Costales has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability of a new update of his uNav GPS navigator app for Ubuntu Phone devices.

          • Nexus 6 Is Now an Unofficial Ubuntu Phone, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Support Coming Soon

            We told you the other day that Ubports’ Marius Gripsgård is on vacation, which means that he has a lot of time on his hands to improve the unofficial Ubuntu Touch port for various devices.

          • Linux Distributions Are Soon Dropping The Support For 32-bit Computers

            Today, few people are using the hardware that can’t run 64-bit CPUs. A recent proposal by Ubuntu’s Dimitri John Ledkov states that Canonical will be killing the 32-bit hardware support soon. This move is also inspired by the fact that 32-bit testing needs double effort and turns out to be costly for an open source project.

          • Canonical-Pivotal partnership makes Ubuntu preferred Linux distro for Cloud Foundry
          • Ubuntu Announces New Snap Desktop Launchers

            Canonical developers have been working on new Snap desktop launchers for improving integration of Snap GUI packages with the converged Ubuntu desktop.

            These new Snap desktop launchers provide a closer and more unified level of integration among packaged desktop applications. Didier Roche, Ubuntu Desktop Technical Leader at Canonical, explained, “The goal was to streamline the experience and ensuring that all following user visible features are working, independent of the toolkit or technology you are using.”

          • Announcing new snap desktop launchers

            Integrating desktop applications with snaps has been a little bit challenging in terms of getting them looking and behaving as part of the system. This means following general desktop theming, having global application menu integration, getting the icon caches, getting configuration keys and such. Also, the technologies and toolkits like GTK, Qt, demand a little bit of expertise on that front.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint 18 – Forgetting Sarah Linux

              Linux Mint. Version 18. Sarah. Cinnamon Edition. This was supposed to be the sweetest LTS yet. Only it’s very buggy, it’s worse than the previous edition and the three before, or maybe all of them. It’s even buggier than Ubuntu, and it’s been released a good two months after its parent. There are so many regressions in the system. And I know I’m trying every trick in the English language and scientific method to explain and convince you that this has nothing to do with my hardware, because with the same nuts and bolts in place, you can still baseline, calibrate, evaluate, and compare over time.

              With none of the other parameters changed – my box and me – Mint 18 Sarah is just not a very good release. The live session is awful. I don’t have any smartphone support, at all. Quite a few other aspects of the desktop experience are missing or lacking, and they are just not as refined as they used to be. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, yesterday you told me about the blue blue distro. This season is bad. There’s no other way of putting it. And my experience was so unrewarding, there are many other aspects of this system that I just did not evaluate in any depth, like the x applications and such. What’s the point?

              I wish I could tell a different story. But the simple reality is, I can’t. It defies logic that the previous releases of Mint or perhaps Xubuntu 15.04 or whatever give me everything I need, but this new LTS struggles in roughly 6 out of 10 critical areas. Read it any way you will, think what you want of me, seek flaws in my methods, seek affirmation in my words, there’s no escaping the awful and painful conclusion. One, I’m shattered. Two, this season is absolutely terrible. Three, Sarah Cinnamon deserves only about 3/10. Please stick with the R-releases, and do not upgrade.

            • Upgrading Linux Mint 17.3 to Mint 18 In Place

              Okay, I thought I could wait, but I couldn’t, so yesterday I decided to do an “in place” upgrade of my office desktop from Linux Mint 17.3 to Mint 18.

              It didn’t go smoothly.

              First, let me stress that the Linux Mint community strongly recommends a fresh install every time you upgrade from one release to another, and especially when it is from one major release, like Mint 17, to another, i.e. Mint 18. They ask you to backup your home directory and package lists, base the system and then restore. The problem is that I often make a lot of changes to my system which usually involves editing files in the system /etc directory, and this doesn’t capture that.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Florida Doctor Pleads Guilty to Fraud — Years After Complaints About His Prescribing

      Seven years after a U.S. senator cited him as a national example of aberrant practices, the onetime top prescriber of antipsychotic drugs in Florida’s Medicaid program is in federal custody awaiting sentencing on fraud charges.

      The second-highest prescriber is serving a four-year term in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud charges in 2012, but he only relinquished his license to practice medicine in Florida last fall.

      Taken together, the cases illustrate how long it can take regulators and law enforcement to take action against problem doctors — and how those physicians can continue prescribing drugs paid for by taxpayers in the meantime. In 2011, ProPublica wrote about the suspicious prescribing patterns of the two Miami-area psychiatrists, Fernando Mendez-Villamil and Huberto Merayo.

    • Ghostbusters, GMOs and the Feigned Expertise of Nobel Laureates

      The letter is a defense of “Golden Rice”, a GMO said to address vitamin deficiencies associated with blindness in the Global South and perhaps one of the worst of the frequent scientific frauds perpetrated by biotechnology interests. The Nobel Prize recipients fell for a zombie rice story that refuses to die and persists as a central legitimizing narrative in the pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric that regularly spews from the pro-GMO propaganda machine. I have written about this in the past to show how Monsanto and the other Gene Giants are spending hundreds of millions on a deceptive campaign to misinform the public about the fake scientific consensus they spin based on inadequately designed industry-led studies of risk, toxicology, and food safety (see the post of May 2, 2014).

    • Activists Expose Monsanto’s Senate Lackeys Minutes Before DARK Act Vote

      Just before a controversial genetically modified (GM or GMO) labeling bill came up for a cloture vote in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, food and consumer advocates dropped over $2,000 on the chamber floor in a symbolic protest against what they are calling the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” (DARK) Act.

    • What Percentage of Doctors at Your Hospital Take Drug, Device Payments?

      Where a hospital is located makes a big difference in how many of its doctors take payments from drug and medical device companies. See how your state compares and look up your hospital below.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Java Deserialization attacks on JBoss Middleware

      Recent research by Chris Frohoff and Gabriel Lawrence has exposed gadget chains in various libraries that allow code to be executed during object deserialization in Java. They’ve done some excellent research, including publishing some code that allows anyone to serialize a malicious payload that when deserialized runs the operating system command of their choice, as the user which started the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The vulnerabilities are not with the gadget chains themselves but with the code that deserializes them.

    • Linux Mint 18 improves security, but at a cost

      The default update settings of Linux Mint would not update the Linux kernel or notify the user when security updates and bug fixes were published upstream (from Ubuntu, which Mint is directly based on, or Debian, which is the basis of Ubuntu). This default behavior left users vulnerable to root exploits, and potential hardware issues for which patches were issued alongside security fixes. Other upstream updates were also blacklisted from Linux Mint for conflicting with the design of the Cinnamon desktop.

    • Safer automotive software through Open Source?

      Linux is about to conquer one of the last blank spots in the world of open source software: The car. EE Times Europe talked with Dan Cauchy, General Manager of Automotive at the Linux Foundation, about intentions and status of Automotive Grade Linux.

    • GnuTLS 3.5.2

      Released GnuTLS 3.3.24, GnuTLS 3.4.14, and GnuTLS 3.5.2 which are bug fix releases in the old, current and next stable branches.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama Makes It Official: Either Trump or Clinton Gets to Keep Longest War in US History Going

      Confirming that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will inherit the longest war in U.S. history, President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that over 8,000 troops will stay in Afghanistan after he leaves the White House.

      The figure is thousands more than the 5,500 soldiers he said in October 2015 would remain in the country.

    • Confessions of a War Propagandist

      Scheunemann was the public relations mastermind and one of the most influential behind the scenes operators in Washington during the winter of 2002-2003. Many of the talking points (“We will be greeted as liberators,” “Sadaam has used chemical weapons on his own people,” “Rogue state rollback”) came right out of our office. A former aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Majority Leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann proudly displayed a signed letter and framed photograph from President Clinton on his office wall, thanking him for his drafting of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, the stated goal of which was regime change. A frequent visitor to our office was Ahmad Chalabi, the American educated Iraqi dissident who provided much of the information that was passed directly to the Department of Defense and the White House through our office.

    • ‘Military action was not a last resort’: Chilcot finally releases Iraq War report

      Britain chose to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003 before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted, the Chilcot Inquiry has found. Sir John Chilcot’s seven-year inquiry concluded that military action “was not a last resort.”

      The massively delayed and hugely controversial Chilcot Inquiry, reporting back on Wednesday, was tasked with examining the first eight years of the war, starting with the run-up to hostilities and including the period of occupation.

    • U.K. Iraq Inquiry Criticizes Blair and Spies Over War Failures

      Britain’s involvement in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a failure, carried out before peaceful options had been exhausted and based on intelligence that was overstated, an official inquiry concluded.

      The investigation into the build-up to the war, its execution, and aftermath is highly critical of government ministers, the intelligence services and the military. But the biggest impact of the report, published Wednesday by former civil servant John Chilcot, will be on the reputation of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the man responsible for Britain’s involvement.

    • Chilcot report: 2003 Iraq war was ‘unnecessary’, war was not ‘last resort’ and Saddam Hussein was ‘no imminent threat’

      The long-awaited official report into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War has delivered a scathing verdict on Government ministers’ justification, planning and conduct of a military intervention which “went badly wrong, with consequences to this day”.

    • Jeremy Corbyn apologises on behalf of Labour for ‘disastrous decision’ to join Iraq War

      Jeremy Corbyn has apologised on behalf of the Labour Party for Tony Blair’s “disastrous decision” to go to war in Iraq.

      “The decision to go to war in Iraq has been a stain on our party and our country,” the Labour leader said after apologising at a private meeting with families of some of the 179 British servicemen and women killed in Iraq, veterans of the military operation and Iraqis who lost family members.

    • 5 takeaways from Chilcot Report on Tony Blair’s Iraq war

      Thirteen years on and the magnitude of the Iraq war continues to grow.

      The 2003 invasion and its devastating aftermath now infects every sinew of British politics. Trust in government is shot, the special relationship undermined, Britain diminished.

      Despite widespread public acceptance that the invasion has proved a disaster, Wednesday’s official judgement remained shocking for the sheer force of its condemnation.

      After seven years and £10 million of public money, Sir John Chilcot finally produced his findings and certainly pulled no punches. No element of the British establishment escaped unscathed, least of all former prime minister Tony Blair.

      The British army had been let down and humiliated, Chilcot found. Blair’s cabinet had been supine and the intelligence was just wrong.

    • The Tragedy of Tony Blair

      The scathing Chilcot verdict on Tony Blair’s contribution to the war on Iraq brings to mind a more awful tragedy: that more politicians – notably of the American variety – have not suffered the public, private and utter disgrace now falling on Perfidious Albion.

    • Tariq Ali on Chilcot Iraq Report: Tony Blair is a War Criminal for Pushing Us into Illegal War

      While Iraq is marking a third day of mourning, a long-awaited British inquiry into the Iraq War has just been released. The Chilcot report is 2.6 million words long—about three times the length of the Bible. Using excerpts from private correspondence between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush, the report details how Blair pushed Britain into the war despite a lack of concrete intelligence. For example, eight months before the invasion, Blair wrote to Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” Then, in June 2003, less than three months after the invasion began, Blair privately wrote to Bush that the task in Iraq is “absolutely awesome and I’m not at all sure we’re geared for it.” Blair added, “And if it falls apart, everything falls apart in the region.” For more, we speak with British-Pakistani writer, commentator and author Tariq Ali.

    • Tony Blair unrepentant as Chilcot gives crushing Iraq war verdict

      A defiant Tony Blair defended his decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 following the publication of a devastating report by Sir John Chilcot, which mauled the ex-prime minister’s reputation and said that at the time of the 2003 invasion Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat”.

    • Hacked Former NATO General Defends Plotting to Push Obama to Escalate Tensions With Russia

      Former NATO Commander Philip Breedlove defended himself on Saturday after The Intercept reported on leaked emails that showed him plotting to push President Obama to escalate tensions with Russia. “I think what you see is a commander doing what commanders ought to do,” Breedlove told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    • Merkel Urged to Temper NATO’s Belligerence

      U.S. intelligence veterans are calling on German Chancellor Merkel to bring a needed dose of realism and restraint to the upcoming NATO conference, which risks escalating the dangerous new Cold War with Russia.

    • General Breedlove and the Russophobes
    • Israel’s New Open-Fire Rule Authorizes ‘Extra-Judicial Execution’ of Palestinian Youths

      Israeli police are officially permitted to use deadly force against stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers, according to updated regulations made public on Tuesday by an Israel-based human rights organization.

      The new open-fire regulations, revealed by Adalah, a rights organization and legal center that defends Palestinians living in Israel as well as the occupied territories, state that “an officer is permitted to open fire [with live ammunition] directly on an individual who clearly appears to be throwing or is about to throw a firebomb, or who is shooting or is about to shoot fireworks, in order to prevent endangerment.”

    • Yemeni Drone Victim Responds to President Obama’s Civilian Casualty Figures
    • Happy Flag-Waving Drone Document Dump

      ODNI (update–and now I Con the Record) has released its report on the number of drone deaths. The overview is that the US intelligence community is reporting (more on that in a second) far, far fewer drone deaths than credible outside researchers do.

    • The Nonviolent History of American Independence

      Independence Day is commemorated with fireworks and flag-waving, gun salutes and military parades . . . however, one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, wrote, “A history of military operations . . . is not a history of the American Revolution.”

      Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a powerful role in achieving American Independence from British rule. Benjamin Naimark-Rowse wrote, “the lesson we learn of a democracy forged in the crucible of revolutionary war tends to ignore how a decade of nonviolent resistance before the shot-heard-round-the-world shaped the founding of the United States, strengthened our sense of political identity, and laid the foundation of our democracy.”

    • Chilcot Report: Tony Blair Told George W. Bush, “If We Win Quickly, Everyone Will Be Our Friend.”

      The Chilcot Report, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation.

      Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

    • From Paris to Istanbul, More ‘War on Terror’ Means More Terrorist Attacks

      At least 41 people were killed in the recent bombing of Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.

      The day before, suicide bombers killed five people in Qaa, a small village in Lebanon. And while the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed war in Yemen continues to rage, an ISIS affiliate claimed responsibility for attacks in the Yemeni port city of Mukalla that killed at least 12.

    • In Political Fights Over Chilcot Report, Iraqi Lives Don’t Matter

      The bitter political debate over the 2003 Iraq war resumed once again on Wednesday in the United Kingdom and the United States, thanks to the release of a report on the British role in the invasion and occupation.

      Parsing the report, prepared by a committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot, will take time since it runs to 2.6 million words, but the reaction online has already begun. Partisans for and against the war are sifting through the text for new details that might support their original positions, a reminder that Iraq has only ever mattered to most Americans and Britons as material for attacks on their political opponents.

      That becomes glaringly obvious when you compare the intensity and volume of commentary on the report to how relatively little was said about a suicide bombing in Baghdad on Sunday that killed 250 Iraqis.

    • Terrorism’s Murky Message

      Moreover, there are different scales on which to measure sophistication besides the number of people involved. Success in killing people other than oneself might be one of those ways of measuring. The recent attacks have presented a mixed picture in this regard. The triple suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia don’t look very sophisticated. One of the bombers managed to kill four security guards, but the other two blew up no one but themselves.

    • Bush, Blair and the Lies That Justified the Illegal Iraq War

      In front of the assembled 1,500 journalists, Bush showed a series of slides of himself looking under papers, behind drapes and out the window of the oval office. A smiling Bush narrated, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” followed by, “Nope, no weapons over there,” and “Maybe under here?” The transcript shows that this stand-up routine was greeted with “laughter and applause.”

    • Lost in the Military-Industrial Complex

      Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have ducked any serious discussion of America’s escalating military spending, suggesting that whoever wins will be captive of President Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex,” writes Chuck Spinney.

    • Where Are The Drone Casualty Figures the White House Promised Months Ago?

      Despite months of repeated promises, the White House has yet to release its estimate of civilian casualties from the administration’s drone program – a delayed disclosure the New York Times Editorial Board described as “too little, too late.”

      In March, Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama chief counterterrorism adviser, announced that the White House would “in the coming weeks” release an “assessment of combatant and non-combatant casualties” from U.S. drone strikes since 2009. Monaco doubled down on the commitment in a second speech a few weeks later.

      The figures are likely to show aggregate numbers of people killed by country in nations not recognized as battlefields – like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya – according to the Washington Post. Death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be included.

      The President is also expected to sign an executive order requiring the release of annual casualty figures going forward.

  • Classification

    • FBI: Clinton “Extremely Careless” Handling Classified Info, But No Charges Recommended

      The bureau also revealed it was likely that Clinton’s personal email server was compromised by foreign hackers.

    • The Department of Political Justice

      Is it worth impairing the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice to save Hillary Clinton…

    • FBI: Hillary Clinton Broke the Law, But Don’t Prosecute Her

      The latest in shocking but not surprising news came yesterday as FBI Director Jim Comey formally recommended not indicting Hillary Clinton for her alleged mishandling of classified information.

      Given America’s less-than-stellar track record of prosecuting the powerful, this outcome has been a virtual certainty for some time. Even so, the event is still important. It offers the clearest evidence to date that the rule of law does not exist. One set of rules applies to the politically connected, and an entirely different set applies to everyone else. Nothing could illustrate this fact better than the Clinton email scandal.

    • In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict

      The long-roiling question finally has been answered: Hillary Clinton will not be indicted for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. Period. Full stop. Pause a moment, and let it sink in.

      FBI Director James Comey delivered the word in a surprise news conference Tuesday morning, exactly three days after Clinton’s 3½-hour interview Saturday at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

      There was plenty of evidence that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and her staff had been “extremely careless” in their handling of classified and sensitive information, Comey said, but not enough to prove they had acted with the criminal intent or willfulness needed to secure a conviction. “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he concluded.

      While the FBI’s evaluation technically is not binding on the Justice Department, any indictment is now clearly off the table. Last week, following her embarrassing and ethically suspect encounter with Bill Clinton on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, Attorney General Loretta Lynch publicly pledged to follow the bureau’s lead. And the bureau, via Comey, has spoken.

    • Commentary: What the FBI didn’t say about Hillary Clinton’s email

      Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s recommendation that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for her use of an unclassified email server while secretary of state is significant, but what he did not address is equally important.

    • Why Hillary Clinton Should be Prosecuted for Reckless Abuses of National Security

      Yesterday FBI Director James Comey described Hillary Clinton’s email communications as Secretary of State as “extremely careless.” His statement undermined the defenses Clinton put forward, stating the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received; eight contained information classified at the highest level, “top secret,” at the time they were sent. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails.

      All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation, specifically of Title 18 Section 793(f) of the federal penal code, a law ensuring proper protection of highly classified information. Director Comey said that Clinton was “extremely careless” and “reckless” in handling such information. Contrary to the implications of the FBI statement, the law does not require showing that Clinton intended to harm the United States, but that she acted with gross negligence.

      The recent State Department Inspector General (IG) report was clear that Clinton blithely disregarded safeguards to protect the most highly classified national security information and that she included on her unprotected email server the names of covert CIA officers. The disclosure of such information is a felony under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Wanton Disregard for US Laws and National Security

      There is a new poster child for the U.S. government’s double standard in dealing with violations of public policy and public trust—former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who will receive no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security. Clinton merely received a blistering rebuke from FBI director James Comey, who charged her with “extremely careless” behavior in using multiple private email servers to send and received classified information as well as using her personal cellphone in dealing with sensitive materials while traveling outside the United States. Some of these communications referred to CIA operatives, which is a violation of a 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act to protect those individuals working overseas under cover.

    • Hillary Clinton as Damaged Goods

      FBI Director Comey’s judgment that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” but not criminal in her sloppy email practices leaves her limping to the Democratic nomination and stumbling toward the fall campaign, writes Robert Parry.

    • FBI Recommends ‘No Consequences’ for Clinton’s Reckless Email Handling
    • FBI Declares ‘No Charges Are Appropriate’ in Hillary Clinton Email Investigation

      Comey noted in his statement: “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.”

    • Judge Responds To Open Records Request By Having Requester Indicted, Arrested

      We’ve seen government officials do some pretty questionable things to avoid turning over documents to FOIA requesters. The most common method is just to stick requesters with a bill they can’t pay. Stonewalling is popular, too — so much so that the federal government sends out “Still interested?” notices to people whose requests have been backburnered for years.

      More rarely, officials will race requesters to the courthouse, hoping to secure a judgment in their favor stating that they’ve already fully complied with a FOIA request — even when they’ve done nothing but withhold and redact. Stripped of all the legal wrangling, this is basically the government suing individuals for asking for documents, forcing taxpayers to go out-of-pocket if they hope to counter the officials’ assertions.

    • WikiLeaks Releases Over 1,200 Clinton Emails on Iraq War

      WikiLeaks on Monday marked the yearly celebration of American independence by releasing over 1,200 private emails belonging to former secretary of state and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton pertaining to the Iraq War.

      The whistleblower platform announced the new archive in a tweet, noting that the emails would be made public just two days before the UK government is set to release its official inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, initiated by former U.S. President George W. Bush with substantial backing from then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

      Adding even more fuel to the speculation surrounding the Chilcot Inquiry, WikiLeaks on Monday also released a complete list of British MPs who voted to invade Iraq.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Change Deniers Can Rest Easy Knowing The Democratic Party Isn’t Out To Prosecute Them

      Last week, a couple right-leaning news publications published headlines suggesting that the Democratic Party wants to prosecute individual people who disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change.

      This is not true, and the stories themselves don’t suggest it. But the headlines are conspicuously misleading. “Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics,” screamed one headline from The Daily Caller. Townhall’s headline read nearly the same. The Washington Times went with “Democrats force Clinton’s hand on prosecution of climate skeptics.”

    • Big Coal Just Saw One Of Its Favorite Loopholes Closed

      The Obama Administration last week took a closely-watched first step in its effort to reform the federal coal program by issuing a rule that will make it harder for coal companies to dodge royalty payments when mining on taxpayer-owned public lands.

      The rule, issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), closes a loophole that enabled coal companies to sell coal to their own subsidiaries — and then pay royalties on that artificially depressed price. Through these self-dealing transactions, coal companies have been able to shortchange U.S. taxpayers and state governments millions of dollars in royalty payments that are owed on federal coal.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • Sterling falls to new low against the dollar in Asia trade

      The pound has hit a new low in Asian trading as concerns about the UK’s vote to leave the European Union continue to weigh on investor confidence.

      It touched 1.2798 against the dollar on Wednesday, a 31-year low, before recovering slightly to $1.2963.

      The pound has now fallen about 14% against the dollar since hitting $1.50 ahead of the referendum result.

    • How Brexit Will Affect U.S. Foreign Policy

      British voters’ decision to leave the European Union last week caused panic in world financial markets, with stocks dropping like a stone around the world. The British pound and the euro sank, and many “experts” lamented the beginning of the end of the EU. Maybe it’s true that Brexit will lead to a period of instability in stock markets, currencies and European politics. But there’s a bigger issue at play—European foreign policy in support of U.S. interventions around the world.

      As Chris Hedges eloquently noted in a recent Truthdig column, the U.K. is generally viewed as the closest ally of the United States. Washington uses that relationship to push its foreign policy under the guise of European and Western unity.

      Is Libya falling apart? The U.S. and EU intervene, and it’s all a show of unity.

    • Brexit: the cost of bad governance

      What has come to pass in the United Kingdom with the referendum on membership of the European Union would be called bad governance and patronage anywhere across the developing world. Short-sighted self-interest and political ambition have trumped long-term vision and the collective good. This is, by definition, the problem besetting all those countries that the UK and other international donors work with in efforts to help them become more effective – as well as fairer and more inclusive.

    • Lionel Messi handed jail term in Spain for tax fraud

      Argentina and Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for tax fraud, Spanish media say.

      His father, Jorge Messi, was also given a jail term for defrauding Spain of €4.1m (£3.5m; $4.5m) between 2007 and 2009.

      They also face millions of euros in fines for using tax havens in Belize and Uruguay used to conceal earnings from image rights.

      However, they are likely to avoid jail.

    • CETA will be voted on by EU member states after all, perhaps thanks to Brexit

      In an unexpected move, the European Commission has announced that national parliaments will be given the chance to vote on the CETA trade deal with Canada. As Ars reported last month, it was widely expected that the commission would try to claim that CETA was an “EU-only” agreement, meaning it would therefore be only need to be ratified by the three main EU institutions: the Commission itself, the Council of the European Union, and the European Parliament.

      In a press release announcing its formal proposal for the signature and conclusion of the EU-Canada trade deal, the European Commission explains its decision as follows: “To allow for a swift signature and provisional application, so that the expected benefits are reaped without unnecessary delay, the commission has decided to propose CETA as ‘mixed’ agreement”—that is, requiring all of the individual EU governments to ratify the deal as well.

    • TTIP impossible in 2016, French minister says

      It will be “impossible” for the European Union and the United States to conclude negotiations on a trade deal by the end of 2016, France’s junior minister for trade and commerce said on Tuesday (5 July).

      “I think a deal in 2016 is impossible and everyone knows it, including those who say otherwise,” said the minister, Matthias Fekl in a statement highly critical of the deal.

      Fekl’s position doesn’t seem to be a big surprise. France has already said that TTIP talks are likely to grind to a halt because of Washington’s reluctance to make concessions. But the real reason seems to be that France will hold presidential elections in April-May 2017 and the incumbent president François Hollande doesn’t want this issue to be part of the campaign.

    • The TTIP and the privitization of health

      The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty (TTIP) may present a genuine threat to health and to the outcomes we have reached in the healthcare systems today. With all its problems, the National Health Care System (SNS) that we know today, is internationally recognized as one of the best and most efficient in the world. In the State of Spain, Osakidetza holds recognized prestige in this field. Experts agree that “universal health systems with public property and management and based on Primary Care are those that offer the best results in health and are also the most efficient, the fairest and the most humane”.

    • SRSLY: BoJo, The #Brexit Bro

      BoJo is the tousle-haired towhead who went to the most haute of all British high schools for boys — it costs $13,000 just to drop out in the middle of a term, and that’s a bargain thanks to the falling value of the Great British pound — and yet, he managed to convince vast swaths of the plebeian old country (and I do mean old: “Leave” crushed among British seniors) that he should be their medium for social change. Johnson was previously the mayor of London, which voted heavily to stay, before he became the hair of the Leave Campaign.

      [...]

      He later lost a political appointment for lying to a superior about an affair he was having with a columnist at the magazine he was editing. He might’ve gotten away with that one if, according to the Daily Mail, the columnist hadn’t been a famous socialite whose mother revealed publicly an abortion stemming from the affair with Johnson. Johnson had previously dismissed the affair rumors as an “inverted pyramid of piffle.” Natch.

    • Despite Anti-Trade Rhetoric, Donald Trump’s Campaign Team Includes Pro-Trade Lobbyists

      Donald Trump denounced the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement on Tuesday and charged that Hillary Clinton, a long-time supporter of the deal, is deceiving voters when she says she now opposes it.

      Trump wasn’t wrong to charge that Clinton has surrounded herself with members of the global elite who promote and benefit from deals such as TPP. In fact, many members of Clinton’s inner circle have continued to advocate for the trade agreement.

    • Donald Trump’s Evil Twin Brother

      Just to clarify, Carl Icahn couldn’t actually be Trump’s biological “twin” because at age 80, he’s ten years older than his fellow billionaire. Still, in regard to swinish greed, naked ambition, and unvarnished contempt for working men and women, he surpasses Donald in almost every category, which is saying something, and which is why, even in hard-bitten business circles, Icahn has been described as “evil.”

      Carl Icahn gained fame in the 1980s with his “raider mentality” and highly publicized hostile takeovers of corporations. He would borrow enormous sums of money to purchase a company, then pay off the accrued debt by breaking it up and selling its components, basically destroying the company. One can’t help but recall Harold Wilson’s reference to Edward Heath: “He reminds me of a shiver looking for a spine to run down.”

    • New York Isn’t Telling Tenants They May Be Protected From Big Rent Hikes

      In February of 2015, Lilian Piedra received a letter with devastating news: Her landlord was jacking up the rent for her four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights from $2,100 a month to $3,500.

      The notice did not say she faced eviction, but Piedra immediately understood that’s what it meant. She and her husband were already struggling to raise three young children on her salary as a bank customer service representative and his as a parking garage manager.

    • Sports Direct reports worse-than-forecast 15 percent drop in profit

      British retailer Sports Direct (SPD.L) posted a worse-than-expected 15 percent drop in annual profit on Thursday, blaming tough conditions on the high street and negative publicity about its working practices.

      The company, which is not paying a dividend, said current political uncertainty after Britain voted to leave the European Union last month was likely to act as a continuing drag on consumer confidence.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Rebuffs Bernie’s Policy Demands

      Eager to hold the political “center,” Hillary Clinton has budged little on Bernie Sanders’s policy proposals beyond nice-sounding platitudes, a strategy that could lead to clashes at the Democratic convention, says Lawrence Davidson.

    • In the Bloodpot of Human Hearts: Standing Up Against Old Man Trump and His Creepy Racist Son Too

      The lyrics, scribbled by Guthrie over 60 years ago but just discovered earlier this year, describe the racist rental policies of Trump Sr.’s housing project Beach Haven. Notes Guthrie, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/Just how much/Racial Hate he stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line.” In honor of the release, Morello shot a video in which he proclaims, “I’m standing up against Old Man Trump.” He goes on vis a vis the son who followed in his father’s – and grandfather’s – bigoted footsteps, “When it comes to race relations, he’s like an old-school segregationist. When it comes to foreign policy, he’s like an old-school napalmist. When it comes to women’s issues, he’s like a frat-house rapist. So let’s not elect that guy.”

    • Clinton’s Pro-Charter School Comments Draw Boos from Teachers Union

      Hillary Clinton was booed at a National Education Association (NEA) event on Tuesday after suggesting that public schools have something to learn from their charter counterparts.

      “When schools get it right, whether they’re traditional public schools or public charter schools, let’s figure out what’s working and share it with schools across America,” she said to the labor union’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., provoking audible boos. “Rather than starting from ideology, let’s start from what’s best for our kids.”

    • The GOP’s Date from Hell

      For a half century, Republicans pandered to Americans angry about racial integration and other social change – even as GOP elites got rich off the “base” – leading to Donald Trump, the party’s date from hell, says Michael Winship.

    • Sanders Reportedly Booed by House Dems Who Just Want Clinton Endorsement Already

      Bernie Sanders spoke to Democratic members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday but was reportedly booed as he attempted to explain that his endorsement of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton might not fit into an easy timeline and that transforming the nation is about more than one election.

      While providing anonymity to all of its sources, Politico reported how “one person inside the room” said there were “boos from lawmakers” while Sanders was addressing questions about endorsing Clinton.

      One unnamed “senior Democrat” described being personally frustrated that Sanders used the meeting to talk about the central issues of his historic campaign while refusing to simply say when Clinton would receive his blessing publicly. “It was frustrating because he’s squandering the movement he built with a self-obsession that was totally on display,” the individual said.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Europol’s online censorship unit is haphazard and unaccountable says NGO

      Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (IRU) celebrated its first birthday at the weekend, but civil liberties organisations are worried that it goes too far in its efforts to keep the Web free from extremist propaganda.

      The IRU has been up and running since July 2015 as part of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) in the Hague. The unit is charged with monitoring the Internet for extremist propaganda and referring “relevant online content towards concerned Internet service providers” in particular social media. Much was made of how the IRU could “contact social network service provider Facebook directly to ask it to delete a Web page run by ISIS or request details of other pages that might be run by the same user.”

    • DA Demands Answers for SA’s UN Vote Against Internet Freedom

      South Africa’s vote against a United Nation (UN) resolution promoting Internet freedom is disturbing but unsurprising, given the ANC-government’s penchant for censorship.

      Last week, the South African government’s representatives at the UN voted against a resolution that sought to promote and protect human rights on online platforms. Part of the resolution sought to condemn the intentional disruption of Internet access to the public. In voting against this resolution, South Africa has joined the ranks of China, Russia and North Korea, countries that have poor human rights track records and are the biggest practitioners of censorship.

    • Selected-Information Age: The new face of censorship

      South Africa voted with China and Russia against a UN resolution on freedom of the internet. It is ironic that censorship is flourishing in the information age.

      Two beliefs exist about modern journalism. One is that the digital revolution is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the internet and the social media platforms it spawned, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, are shifting power from high authorities to civil society and to bloggers, or rather, “citizen journalists.”

    • Helen Suzman Foundation launches court case against SABC censorship

      On Monday 4 July, News24 reported that the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) has launched an urgent court bid to stop the SABC from implementing its decision to censor reporting of protests.

      The application is against the SABC, its board, COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng and Communications Minister Faith Muthambi, the HSF said in a statement on Monday.

    • Anti-censorship picketers to SABC: Cooperate or face more demonstrations

      An anti-censorship picket is underway outside the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) offices in Auckland Park, despite SABC management refusing to meet with protesting organisations.

      The picket is being led by the Save Our SABC (SOS) Coalition, together with the Gauteng South African Communist Party (SACP).

    • SABC protests to continue this week

      Protests will continue for the rest of the week in connection with SABC censorship and the dismissal of SABC journalists.

      The protest campaigns are being organised by civil societies such as Right2Know Campaign and SOS Coalition as well as Support Our SABC campaign.

    • Has Subaru’s SiriusXM ‘Censorship’ Crossed a Line?

      “Subaru has no business monitoring what I listen to and resetting my radio every time I turn off the car, when, in Subaru’s high and mighty opinion, I’m listening to something questionable,” remarked Patton.

    • UK High Court Upholds Blocking Of Infringing Websites In Trademark Cases

      Internet service providers can be ordered to block websites that offer counterfeit goods for sale despite the lack of an express law to that effect in trademark cases, the UK Court of Appeal for England and Wales said in a 6 July decision.

    • Professor breaks silence in University of Northern Colorado academic freedom case
    • University of Northern Colorado President Kay Norton’s letter to campus community
    • EXCLUSIVE: Transcript of Bias Response Team Conversation with Censored Professor
    • Colorado ‘Bias Response Team’ Threatened Prof To Change His Lessons
    • UNC prof shares tale of censorship by Bias Response Team
    • Campus opinion police

      The latest low point in higher education comes from the University of Northern Colorado, where the campus Bias Response Team came down on two professors for merely suggesting supposedly controversial viewpoints to students.

      The professors didn’t argue their opinions. And they didn’t compel students to do so, either. They simply suggested them. But that was enough for offended students to report them.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Shaping Traffic and Spying on Americans

      At the Intercept earlier this week, Peter Maass described an interview he had with a former NSA hacker he calls Lamb of God — this is the guy who did the presentation boasting “I hunt SysAdmins.” On the interview, I agree with Bruce Schneier that it would have been nice to hear more from Lamb of God’s side of things.

      But the Intercept posted a number of documents that should have been posted long, long ago, covering how the NSA “shapes” Internet traffic and how it identifies those using Tor and other anonymizers.

      I’m particularly interested in the presentations on shaping traffic — which is summarized in the hand-written document to the right and laid out in more detail in this presentation.

      Both describe how the NSA will force Internet traffic to cross switches where it has collection capabilities. We’ve known they do this. Beyond just the logic of it, some descriptions of NSA’s hacking include descriptions of tracking traffic to places where a particular account can be hacked.

      But the acknowledgement that they do this and discussions of how they do so is worth closer attention.

      That’s true, first of all, because of wider discussions of cable maps. In discussing the various ways to make Internet traffic cross switches to which the NSA has access, Lamb of God facetiously (as is his style) suggests you could bomb or cut all the cable lines that feed links to which the NSA doesn’t have access.

    • Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy for the FBI to Spy on Journalists

      Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures.

      The classified rules, obtained by The Intercept and dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of National Security Letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form.

      Media advocates said the documents show that the FBI imposes few constraints on itself when it bypasses the requirement to go to court and obtain subpoenas or search warrants before accessing journalists’ information.

    • FBI Must Not Sidestep Privacy Protections For Massive Collection of Biometric Data

      The FBI, which has created a massive database of biometric information on millions of Americans never involved in a crime, mustn’t be allowed to shield this trove of personal information from Privacy Act rules that let people learn what data the government has on them and restrict how it can be used.

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed comments today with the FBI, on behalf of itself and six civil liberties groups, objecting to the agency’s request to exempt the Next Generation Identification (NGI) database from key provisions of federal privacy regulations that protect personal data from misuse and abuse. The FBI has amassed this database with little congressional and public oversight, failed for years to provide basic information about NGI as required by law, and dragged its feet to disclose—again, as required by law—a detailed description of the records and its policies for maintaining them. Now it wants to be exempt from even the most basic notice and data correction requirements.

      NGI includes prints and face recognition data from millions of everyday people who’ve committed no crime but have had their biometric data collected when they needed a background check for a job, applied for welfare benefits, registered for immigration, or obtained state licenses to be a teacher, realtor, or dentist. For example, NGI holds millions of photographs searchable through facial recognition and accessible by 20,000 foreign, federal, state, and municipal-level law enforcement agencies.

    • EFF and ACLU-led Coalition Opposes Dangerous “Model” Employee and Student “Privacy” Legislation

      EFF, ACLU, and a coalition of nearly two-dozen civil liberties and advocacy organizations and a union representative are urging the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) to vote down dangerous model employee and student privacy legislation.

      The bill, the Employee and Student Online Privacy Protection Act (ESOPPA), is ostensibly aimed at protecting employee and student privacy. But its broad and vaguely worded exceptions and limitations overshadow any protections the bill attempts to provide. As our joint letter explains, ESOPPA will result in only further invasions of student and employee privacy.

      The ULC is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to researching, drafting, and promoting the enactment of uniform state laws, which it drafts and circulates as “models.” The ULC will vote on ESOPPA on July 11 at its annual meeting, and if it passes, the ULC will circulate the bill to legislators across the country in the hope of uniform adoption in all fifty states. But ESOPPA falls far short of its goal and does not live up to the prevailing standard for protecting social media privacy currently being enacted by the states and as required by the U.S. Constitution.

    • Go Big, Go Global: Subject the NSA’s Overseas Programs to Judicial Review

      The next round of surveillance reform is a time for the United States to go big – and to go global. We should get out of our defensive crouch and show the world how to balance robust intelligence capabilities with rules to protect privacy and civil liberties in the digital age.

      Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes collection of data inside the United States, so long as the direct targets are foreign citizens located outside the United States, with judicial review on a programmatic basis. Section 702 expires at the end of 2017. The debate over reauthorizing it pits supporters ­– who argue the law is vital and should be extended without change – against civil libertarians who urge its expiration or at least significant reforms. This paper is an effort to reframe that debate.

    • India’s High-Tech Billion-Person Aadhaar Identity System Can’t Cope With Real-Life Biometrics

      It sounds like getting India’s 1.29 billion population to use the Aadhaar system for routine daily transactions is going to be something of a challenge, to put it mildly.

    • Going Underground – the Snoopers’ Charter

      Here is a recent interview I did for the RT UK’s flagship news channel, “Going Underground” about the horrors of the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill – the so-called “snoopers charter” – that will legalise previously illegal mass surveillance, mass data retention, and mass hacking carried out by GCHQ in league with the NSA…

    • “Only Facts Matter:” Jim Comey Is Not the Master Bureaucrat of Integrity His PR Sells Him Has

      There’s an intimately related effort Comey gets some credit for which in fact led to fairly horrible conclusions: torture. Jack Goldsmith, with Comey’s backing, also withdrew the shoddy John Yoo memo authorizing waterboarding and other torture (Goldsmith also prevented Yoo from retroactively authorizing more techniques).

    • Federal Court Hears Long Overdue Arguments Over 2008 Surveillance Law

      More than seven years after President George W. Bush signed a law authorizing warrantless surveillance of international communications, a federal appellate court heard arguments challenging the 2008 law for the first time.

      Congressed passed the FISA Amendments Act in the wake of revelations that the Bush administration was wiretapping all Americans’ transnational communications. Rather than reigning in the program, Congress effectively legalized it – providing legal immunity to the phone companies involved, and allowing the government to conduct surveillance without a court order, as long as the “target” was a foreigner living overseas.

      In 2013, documents from by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the government cites the law as the legal authority for its PRISM and Upstream programs – which collect Americans’ emails and browsing histories with individuals and websites hosted overseas.

    • Author adds perspective to NSA’s covert activities

      The intelligence community hasn’t always escaped study. Long before Snowden became the patriot or goat, depending on perspective, the Church Committee in the U.S. Senate took a look into the government’s spy agencies after Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon put the CIA and NSA on personal projects.

    • The Secrets that Remain about Journalist NSLs

      Which brings me back to the other point about NSLs I keep harping on. The 2014 NSL IG report showed that the FBI was not reporting at least 6.8% of their NSLs, even to Congress, much less to the Inspector General. When asked about that, FBI said an accurate number was really not worth trying to do, even while it admitted that the uncounted NSLs were “sensitive” cases — a category that includes journalists (and politicians and faith leaders).

    • Facebook’s Flip-Flop: Is It a Law Enforcement Thing?

      It started when — as increasingly happens in her work — someone came to her with a scary problem. Facebook recommended he friend someone he had only just met for the first time at a meeting for parents of suicidal teens. In response, Facebook confirmed they do use co-location for such recommendations.

    • Massive Security Boost: TOR Privacy Features Are Coming To Mozilla Firefox

      In order to make your web browsing experience a lot better, Mozilla is integrating some key privacy features of TOR browser into its Firefox web browser. These features will go live with the final Firefox 50 release and make it a better Google Chrome alternative.

    • Court to Hear Case on NSA’s Warrantless Spying Program

      On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in U.S. v. Mohamud, where a man is fighting his conviction for Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction after undercover agents caught him attempting to remotely detonate a fake bomb that agents had provided. Mohamed Osman Mohamud is appealing, saying that federal agents illegally monitored his online activity during their investigation, getting data through an NSA surveillance program, Reuters reported. Through that program, the NSA collected information from online communications and international phone calls of Americans without a warrant.

    • Senate Funding Bill For State Dept. Asks It To Figure Out Ways To Stop Bad People From Using Tor

      It would appear that Congress is not so happy that the State Department is a major funding source for the Tor project. Tor, of course, is the internet anonymyzing system that was originally developed with support from the US government as a way to promote free and safe access to the internet for people around the globe (mostly focusing on those under threat in authoritarian countries). Of course, other parts of our government aren’t huge fans of Tor, because it doesn’t just help activists and dissidents in other countries avoid detection, but also, well, just about anyone (except on days when the FBI decides to hack their way in).

      There has, of course, always been some tension there. There are always the conspiracy theorists who believe that because Tor receives US government funding it is by default compromised. Those tend to be tinfoil hat wearing types, though. The folks who work on Tor are not exactly recognized for being particularly friendly to intrusive government surveillance. They tend to be the exact opposite of that. And, of course, part of the Snowden revelations revealed that Tor was one tool that still stymied the NSA in most cases.

    • 9th Circuit To Hear ‘Christmas Tree Bomber’ Appeal Wednesday
    • ‘Christmas tree bomber’ will appeal conviction
    • Mohamed Mohamud case and challenge to electronic surveillance go before appeals court
    • Oregon Lawyers Question American Surveillance Tactics
    • Appeals court hears warrantless spying case. Could it change surveillance law?
    • Warrantless surveillance in Portland holiday tree-lighting bomb plot challenged in court
    • US defends warrantless spying in Christmas tree bomber case
    • Man convicted of Portland tree-lighting bomb plot wants sentence overturned
    • Appeals court hears challenge to use of NSA data in criminal cases
    • Christmas bomber case appeal challenges NSA surveillance
    • Attorneys debate use of warrantless surveillance in Portland bomb appeal
    • Mohamed Mohamud back in court today to appeal conviction

      Mohamed Mohamud, the young Somalian American convicted in 2014 of trying to bomb Portland’s downtown square during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in November 2010, is back in court today where an appeal of his conviction will be heard.

      The appeal will be heard today by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit at 11 a.m. at the Pioneer Square Courthouse in Portland.
      Mohamud is serving a 30-year prison sentence. The appeal argues the sting operation was a setup. It also claims the FBI surveillance of Mohamud violated his constitutional right against unlawful search and seizure. Mohamud’s lawyers are seeking a reversal of his conviction or a new trial.

      Prosecutors are standing firm, saying Mohamud intended to commit an act of terrorism.

    • U.S. court to hear arguments in warrantless NSA spying case

      A U.S. appeals court will weigh a constitutional challenge on Wednesday to a warrantless government surveillance program brought by an Oregon man found guilty of attempting to detonate a bomb in 2010 during a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

      The case before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of its kind to consider whether a criminal defendant’s constitutional privacy rights are violated under a National Security Agency program that allows spying on Americans’ international phone calls and internet communications.

      Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-American, was convicted in 2013 of plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

    • VIDEO: Oh I do like to spy beside the seaside – GCHQ invites bids for learn-on-the-job cash [Ed: puff piece]
    • NSA Looks to IT Industry to Harden Vulnerable U.S. Nets [Ed: Another “NSA is the Good Guys” puff piece; they actively undermine networks’ security]
    • Protect your privacy: Resist mass cracking by US law enforcement

      In 2014, the Judicial Conference of the United States, which frames policy guidelines for courts in the US, proposed changes to Rule 41 of the FRCrmP that gives federal magistrate judges the authority to issue warrants for cracking and surveillance in cases where the targeted computer’s location is unknown. That means law enforcement could request warrants allowing mass cracking of thousands of computers at once. The Supreme Court, which oversees the Rules, submitted the changes to the US Congress in April. This is an unprecedented, broad government cracking authorization, and it is dangerous to the privacy and security of all Internet users.

    • The single reason I trust Google with my data
    • The Two Reasons I Don’t Trust Google With My Data
    • Should you trust Google with your data?

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Former Police Chief Pushes Through Legislation To Keep Body Cam Footage Out Of The Public’s Hands

      Whatever accountability and transparency could be achieved with the deployment of police body cameras often seems to be undercut by legislative activity. Minnesota legislators, prompted by law enforcement, tried to cut the public out of the process. So did a sheriff-turned-legislator in Michigan. The LAPD preemptively declared its body cam footage would not be considered “public records,” which means legislators will have to act to roll back the PD’s policy. And in Illinois, a law enforcement agency decided to stop using body cameras altogether because accountability is just too much work.

      Over in North Carolina, one legislator is sponsoring a bill that would exempt body cam footage from public records laws. His concern, of course, is the privacy of all involved.

    • Chelsea Manning ‘rushed to hospital after trying to take own life’

      Chelsea Manning, the military whistleblower serving a 35 year sentence, has been rushed to hospital after reportedly trying to take her own life.

      A US media report said that Manning, who is being held at in a cell at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was taken to hospital early on Tuesday morning. CNN said that it was believed that the 28-year-old had tried to take her life. There was no immediate independent confirmation of this.

    • Police Claim They Arrested Man Who Burnt American Flag Because Of Threats He Received

      Meet Bryton Mellott. Bryton’s just a guy from Urbana, IL. A guy with a Facebook page that he uses to share stuff with friends, post hilarious memes, and post a picture of himself burning the American flag on the 4th of July, the anniversary of when President Washington personally haymaker-punched the King of England right in the face (I think), thereby setting all some Americans free of our British overseers.

      As you can imagine, lots of people didn’t like Bryton’s picture. Some called the police about it for reasons we will get into in a moment. Others threatened him with violence and death. Still others threatened him with violence and death at his place of work. A few meager folks stuck up for him. You know, Facebook.

      And at the end of the day, Bryton was arrested by Urbana police.

    • Whitewashing Sharia councils in the UK?

      In an Open Letter to the UK Home Secretary, hundreds of women’s human rights organisations and campaigners warn against a further slide towards privatised justice and parallel legal systems.

    • From Captive to Captor: A Journalist’s Journey from Prisoner to Prison Guard

      Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer has spent much of his career reporting on criminal justice. For years he’d been frustrated by the secretive nature of the American private prison industry. Tired of old-fashioned document-hunting, he tried an unconventional approach. He went undercover, spending four months as a prison guard at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana.

      His 35,000-word story provides a rare, harrowing look at the closed world of private prisons — a system that holds 131,000 people nationwide. What he saw still haunts him: men stabbing each other with handmade knives as guards looked on; officers in tactical gear storming the prison’s dormitories; an assault victim writhing in panic as he pleaded for protection from a predatory inmate; a prisoner whose gangrene went untreated so long he had to have his legs amputated.

    • Tomgram: Nick Turse, Revolving Doors, Robust Rolodexes, and Runaway Generals

      Here’s an oddity: Americans recognize corruption as an endemic problem in much of the world, just not in our own. And that’s strange. After all, to take but one example, America’s twenty-first-century war zones have been notorious quagmires of corruption on a scale that should boggle the imagination. In 2011, a final report from the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars were lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan (which undoubtedly will, in the end, prove an underestimate). U.S. taxpayer dollars were spent to build roads to nowhere; a gas station in the middle of nowhere; teacher-training centers and other structures that were never finished (but made oodles of money for lucky contractors); a chicken-plucking factory that never plucked a chicken (but plucked American taxpayers); and a lavish $25 million headquarters that no one ever needed or bothered to use. Thanks to tens of billions of U.S. dollars, whole security forces were funded, trained, armed, and filled with “ghost” soldiers and police (while local commanders and other officials lined their pockets with completely unspectral “salaries”). And so it went.

    • Alaa Abd El Fattah Must Be Released, Says UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention

      Nearly two years ago, along with the Media Legal Defence Initiative and with consent and input from his family, we submitted a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) for the release of Egyptian coder, blogger, and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah. Abd El Fattah was arrested on November 28, 2013, two days after participating in a peaceful demonstration against a law allowing Egyptian civilians to be tried in military courts. His arrest was conducted without a warrant, he was beaten by police officers, and authorities raided his home while his wife and child were present. He was later sentenced to five years in prison.

    • Brazil’s Globo Attacks Protesting Cops to Protect Its Olympics Payday

      Police officers and firefighters in Rio de Janeiro protesting their lack of pay as the Olympics approach are engaged in “ethically reprehensible” actions “bordering on terrorism,” according to an editorial on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro’s largest newspaper, O Globo. The newspaper, a property of Grupo Globo, which is owned and controlled by the billionaire Marinho family, is Brazil’s dominant media conglomerate and a primary sponsor and beneficiary of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

      In attacking the police, the paper was not criticizing the epidemic of police killings of black and brown youth, nor the militarized occupation of many of Rio’s slums that has failed to improve public security, nor the criminal gangs of off-duty and former officers, known as milícias, that violently control and extort vast swaths of the city. Instead, Globo’s indignation was targeted at public servants nonviolently demonstrating for a basic worker’s right — being paid — as part of a protest that happens to threaten Globo’s own business interests worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a fact the paper neglected to disclose to its readers.

      “Welcome to Hell. Police and firefighters don’t get paid; Whoever comes to Rio de Janeiro will not be safe,” read a sign in English held by disgruntled police officers in Rio’s international airport on Monday, just weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics. The state of Rio, after wasting billions on lavish corporate tax breaks and delayed, over-budget Olympic construction contracts with notoriously corrupt firms, has declared a financial emergency, forcing it to cut benefits, postpone paying salaries and pensions to public workers, and slash operating budgets. Police and firefighters have for months been in conflict with the state over budget shortfalls. The state’s teachers union has been on strike for nearly four months.

    • ‘What Is a Journalist if Not an Advocate on Behalf of the Public?’

      Today’s US news watchers might not recognize that the pretense of objectivity in journalism, the view that reporters should strive to report the news as if from nowhere, is—besides not being possible—not a value that adheres to journalism the world around, or that has even always held sway in this country. Many of those thought of as the giants of the profession — Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens — were advocacy journalists before that term was considered not just a pejorative, but an oxymoron. Things seem to be changing again, though, with a growing awareness that if taking a side against poverty or racism or climate change means breaking some rule of straight journalism, then it’s the rules that ought to change.

    • Does More Security at Airports Make Us Safer or Just Move the Targets?

      At Ataturk airport, passengers pass through metal detectors and their bags are scanned as they enter the terminal.

      This differs from the procedures at most American airports, where anyone can enter the terminal without being screened.

      Turkish officials said the attackers initially tried to enter the building, but were turned away at the security screening.

      They returned with “long-range rifles” from their suitcases. Two of the attackers entered the terminal in the ensuing panic.

      One set off his explosives on the arrivals floor of the terminal; the other detonated his on the departures floor one level above. A third attacker blew himself up outside the terminal as people fled.

    • Falcon Heights shooting: Facebook video captures aftermath of fatal police encounter in Minnesota

      Ms Reynolds described the sequence of events repeatedly throughout the video, during which she said the officer asked the driver for his license and registration.

      “He told him that it was in his wallet, but he had a pistol on him because he’s licensed to carry. The officer said don’t move. As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times,” she said.

    • Senate Bill Would Force Red Cross to Open Books to Outside Oversight

      Legislation introduced in the Senate today would open the American Red Cross to outside oversight that it has long resisted.

      The bill was introduced by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, following a lengthy investigation by his staff that raised questions about the charity’s spending after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and documented how Red Cross leaders resisted an earlier congressional inquiry. Grassley launched his probe in response to reporting by ProPublica and NPR.

      Grassley’s American Red Cross Transparency Act, would amend the group’s congressional charter to allow unfettered access to its records and personnel by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The Red Cross operates as a private nonprofit but was created by Congress over 100 years ago and has a mandated role to work alongside the federal government after disasters.

    • Major New Brazil Events Expose the Fraud of Dilma’s Impeachment — and Temer’s Corruption

      From the start of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification was that she used a budget trick known as pedaladas (“peddling”: illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt. But this week, as the Senate conducts her impeachment trial, that accusation was obliterated: The Senate’s own expert report concluded there was “no indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any such budgetary maneuvers. As the Associated Press put it: “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” In other words, the Senate’s own objective experts gutted the primary claim as to why impeachment was something other than a coup.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Pressure Helps Bring Netflix To Comcast Cable Boxes

      We’ve long noted how Comcast is a bit of an anti-competitive jackass on both the TV and broadband fronts. When the nation’s biggest cable provider isn’t using usage caps to hinder streaming video competitors, it’s busy finding new and creative ways to prevent paying customers from wandering too far outside of Comcast’s well-cultivated walled garden. And while many global cable companies have joined the year 2016 by integrating Netflix functionality into their cable boxes for consumer benefit, Comcast has historically fought such a move, instead trying to drive consumers to its own Netflix knockoff.

    • Dish Sues Tribune Because It Called The Company ‘Dishgusting’

      For years now, consumers have been stuck in the middle of increasingly-ugly carriage fee disputes between broadcasters and cable companies. Usually they go something like this: a broadcaster demands a massive rate hike from cable companies to carry their channels. Cable TV providers balk, and the broadcaster pulls access to the channels in question until the cable provider pays up. Consumers not only lose access to content they’re paying for (refunds are never provided), but they’re also hammered by ads from both sides trying to get consumers to call and bitch at the other guy for being greedy.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The USPTO Moves to Clear “Trademark Deadwood”

        Is there a “trademark deadwood” problem? The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) thinks there is a “trademark deadwood” problem in its register. On June 22, 2016, the USPTO announced its intention to make new rules requiring additional documentation under section 8 and section 71 of the Trademark Act to ensure that a party is actually using the mark in commerce.

        It is axiomatic in the United States that use is a prerequisite for trademark rights. With respect to some limited exceptions, use is required to obtain rights at common law and to secure federal registration on the Principal Register. Fundamentally, if there is not use, there is ordinarily less opportunity for goodwill to develop or for a likelihood of confusion to arise.

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Hints at Second Coming of Megaupload

        Kim Dotcom has confirmed to TorrentFreak that he has a brand new cloud storage site under development. After an extended planning period, the entrepreneur says the platform will be his best creation yet. It could launch next January with a name that “will make people happy.”

      • UK Bill Introduces 10 Year Prison Sentence for Online Pirates

        The UK Government’s Digital Economy Bill, which is set to revamp current copyright legislation, has been introduced in Parliament. One of the most controversial changes is the increased maximum sentences for online copyright infringement. Despite public protest, the bill increased the maximum prison term five-fold, from two to ten years.

      • Porn sites will require age verification checks in the UK by 2017

        THE UK GOVERNMENT has unveiled the Digital Economy Bill that includes plans for age verification requirements on porn websites.

        The government has long been keen on this idea. We’re still none the wiser as to how such checks will be implemented, but the Digital Economy Bill explains that sites will be required to obtain age verification from visitors to stop children accessing such websites accidentally or purposefully.

        This is unlikely to go down well with privacy advocates, and the Open Rights Group has previously spoken out about the porn age check plans.

      • Mike Huckabee paying $25,000 for playing ‘Eye of the Tiger’

        Failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is paying $25,000 for playing “Eye of the Tiger” at a rally last year without the band’s permission, CNNMoney has discovered.

      • Mike Huckabee Settles For Five Figures With Survivor Over Copyright Infringement

        The claim that the rally was a religious gathering and not connected to the Huckabee campaign reportedly fell apart because he had listed the rally as a campaign expense on his records. Interestingly, despite Huckabee’s claim that it was not a campaign event, that it was so will allow him to use his campaign’s warchest to pay off the settlement.

      • American Copyright Trolls Continue To Abuse Canadian Courts In Search Of Easy Settlements

        In the United States, copyright trolls are finding it more difficult to save on filing fees by pursuing file sharers en masse. More than a few judges have shot down attempts to file infringement suits against “Does 1-30,” etc., ruling that these defendants are improperly joined.

        Meanwhile, in Canada, copyright trolls are trying a novel approach to suing alleged file sharers in big bunches: the reverse class action. Voltage Pictures is suing a nominative “class” of Does yet to be named for copyright infringement. This is its attempt to route around restrictions placed on it by another court, as well as the costs associated with complying with the demands.

        But in doing so, Voltage Pictures is making a mess of Canadian privacy laws. Rogers, the service provider standing between Voltage and the subscriber information it’s demanding, wants to know why the studio is abusing Canada’s “notice and notice” system to obtain information it’s not supposed to be able to acquire without a court order.

      • Why The Latest Supreme Court Ruling In Kirtsaeng May Have A Much Bigger Impact On Copyright & Fair Use

        Earlier this month, we wrote briefly about the Supreme Court’s second Kirtsaeng ruling, which focused on the issue of fee shifting in copyright cases. We didn’t spend that much time on it (and hadn’t covered the run up to the Supreme Court either). We had basically assumed that the first Kirtsaeng ruling from the Supreme Court, about whether or not the First Sale Doctrine applied to goods outside the US, was the real legacy of the Kirtsaeng fight, rather than a more mundane issue about fee shifting — especially when the more recent Kirtsaeng ruling was basically just “courts need to look at more than just if the original lawsuit was ‘objectively reasonable’” (but fails to give much guidance about what else should be looked at). Yes, we noted, this may ward off some bogus copyright lawsuits, depending on what standards the courts start to coalesce around, but there wasn’t much big news in the ruling.

      • UK Proposes To Tighten IP Protections Online

        The United Kingdom Digital Economy Bill, floated this week, aims to “enable access to fast digital communication services for citizens and businesses, to enable investment in digital communications infrastructure, to shape the emerging digital world to the benefit of children, consumers and businesses, and to support the digital transformation of government, enabling the delivery of better public services, world leading research and better statistics,” the UK government said in the document.

07.06.16

Microsoft and Its Lobbyist David Kappos (Former USPTO Director) Are Still Lobbying for Software Patents

Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Another reminder of revolving doors culture at the USPTO

Microsoft links to David Kappos

Summary: Just as things are beginning to improve in the US — where patent scope is tightened and software patents often get invalidated/rejected — the Microsoft-funded David Kappos (who came from inside the USPTO) rears his ugly head again

SOFTWARE patents are dying in the US and as we noted here yesterday, the “patent global warming” — as Benjamin Henrion habitually calls it — cools down a bit. The National Law Review (based in Chicago, i.e. US-centric) has a new series of articles the latest part of which discusses software patents (versus copyright on code) and correctly says that “the Alice Corp v CLS Bank Int’l decision at the US Supreme Court which made it much harder to patent software.” Asserting existing (old) software patents in a court of law has become even harder, as the USPTO has a build-in conflict of interests (so-called ‘production’ versus quality control — the same problem we now see at the EPO). So yes, Alice became a nightmare to big patent bullies like Microsoft and IBM (the previous employer of Kappos).

“Asserting existing (old) software patents in a court of law has become even harder, as the USPTO has a build-in conflict of interests (so-called ‘production’ versus quality control — the same problem we now see at the EPO).”Microsoft now links to David Kappos (its anti-Alice lobbyist) and his Web site which promotes software patents. “Patents Fuel the American Dream” is the title and Microsoft has just piggybacked US Independence Day for this lobbying push (opportunistic marketing stunts that strive to associate patent maximalism with patriotism). Benjamin Henrion responded by saying that “patents fuel the American nightmare.” It’s especially true for software developers, who are often hit by patent trolls that almost always use software patents.

Last week we wrote about the Sequenom decision (or lack thereof), which was good news for abolishers of software patents. Glyn Moody, who wrote a book on the subject on genome monopolies, said that “Diagnostic Patents Suffer Another Setback In US As Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Sequenom Appeal” (more about Mayo than about Alice). To quote Dr. Moody:

In recent years, there have been a couple of really important US Supreme Court decisions in the biotech field. One is the 2013 judgment striking down gene patents. The other is a ruling from 2012 that rejected the patenting of basic medical diagnostics, in a case involving Mayo Collaborative Services and Prometheus Labs. The resultant loss for biotech companies in terms of devalued patent portfolios, and their reduced ability to control the market using intellectual monopolies, has been so serious that it is no surprise that there are periodic attempts to get these decisions mitigated through subsequent court rulings.

[...]

Although the industry will doubtless whine about how there is no incentive to produce new diagnostic tests, there’s no evidence that research and development in this area has ground to a halt in the US since the Supreme Court ruling on Mayo. All that has happened is that obvious applications of natural biological phenomena have been removed from patentability. Given the inherent reasonableness of that, we can probably hope that further challenges to Mayo will also fail.

The above does not deal with the angle of software patenting (covered here a few days ago), but in essence and in brief the SCOTUS rejection means that there will be no potent challenges to Alice and Mayo and the foreseeable future. █

The ‘Administrative’ Council is to Benoît Battistelli What FISA is to the NSA

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Even illegal surveillance inside the EPO is passively accepted by the ‘Administrative’ Council of the European Patent Organisation (EPO)

FISA article
Reference: FISA Court Appears To Be Rubber Stamp For Government Requests (NPR, 2013)

Summary: The growing realisation that the so-called ‘Administrative’ Council is little more than rubberstampers of Benoît Battistelli, who controls their national budget

LATER this year we will have written over a thousand articles about the EPO. Not much has changed as not only Benoît Battistelli remains in power but also Željko Topić keeps his job (possibly to have the term extended, unless the ‘Administrative’ Council finally learns to say “no”).

The upside is that a greater proportion of EPO workers now knows the truth about the employer. The same goes for stakeholders like patent attorneys and European companies. “At the end,” one person wrote yesterday, “whatever Battistelli proposes will be approved – with cosmetic amendments to save the face of everybody in the AC.” (‘Administrative’ Council)

Here is the comment in full (CIPA represents clients):

as the CIPA already did before they were approved, and Merpel too, we can go on and dissect these rules after their approval and find further problems – look, without being an expert I can even do that:

On a proposal from the President of the Boards of Appeal and after the President of the European Patent Office has been given the opportunity to comment

First the president of EPO makes a comment and then the President of the Boards of Appeal makes the proposal … but what if the comment of the President of EPO is “I don’t like that”? What happens then? Does the resident of the Boards of Appeal still make the proposal?

We shall not forget that the President of the Boards of Appeal himself is dependent from Battistelli for his appointment or reappointment …

What I mean is: the fact that we are all here mentally masturbating [Merpel you can amend that] about possible scenarios deriving from the application of these rules means that they are not clear – there does not seem to be a definitive flow chart.

But the real truth is … neither the AC nor Battistelli seem to care about your comments and analysis – or the one of the CIPA, or the users, or Merpel, or AMBA.

You can scream from the top of your lungs “this is unclear!”, “this reduces the independence of the BoA!” – it seems to have quite the opposite effect: they adopt the rules even faster – overnight.

Stop it.

It’s wasted time. At the end, whatever Battistelli proposes will be approved – with cosmetic amendments to save the face of everybody in the AC.

Remember, it has been declared that “this is an historic achievement” – who are you to go against history?

The defeatism has not turned into humour. “Clearly,” wrote another person, “in this instance, they are only rubberstampers.” In other words, delegates became somewhat of a laughing stock like FISA authoritising surveillance in the US (never saying “no”, even if its job is oversight). To quote the comment:

The new Rule 12c says “On a proposal from the President of the Boards of Appeal and after the President of the European Patent Office has been given the opportunity to comment, the Committee set up under paragraph 1 (BOAC) shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal. “

“Shall adopt”?
No possibility to amend, or comment themselves, or not adopt unwanted RoP? What is the Committee then needed for? Clearly, in this instance, they are only rubberstampers.
A clear step towards dependency. But not necessarily towards dependency of the President of the EPOff[ice].
The PoBoA can impose any rules he wants, and since his renewal is dependent on the President,…. But he can also implement any rules he wants against the wishes of the PoEPOff. The PoEPOff can only comment, not amend.

Two years ago there were rumours suggesting that the ‘Administrative’ Council, and notably Mr. Kongstad, should be viewed as complicit (not apathetic) in relation to Battistelli. The latest ‘Administrative’ Council meeting left few doubts about that. The problem isn’t just the patent Office but the whole Organisation. It’s almost as though Battistelli elevated himself from Office President to Organisation President (having previously held Kongstad’s position). █

Links 6/7/2016: KDE Plasma 5.7, DigiKam 5.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux: An Evolving Trend That Is High On Demand

    When we discuss the advancement of Linux, well then several companies along with developers are playing their part in bringing up the technology, especially desktop, the area where Linux strived hard to excel. Stack Overflow conducted a survey of more than 50,000 developers that stated that nearly 21.7% choose Linux, in particular to develop on the LAMP stack. In spite of the fact that 50% of developers use the same, the rate is steadily depleting, making the competition effortless for Linux.

  • When Linux is the face of kindness

    My late father, Lou Shapiro, was an early leader of UNICEF, so relief work was baked into the genetics of my family. His work was centered on emergency relief for the survivors of earthquakes and other natural disasters. Whenever there was an earthquake in the world, I knew dad would be coming home late from work—and I was so proud that some family experiencing trauma would be sleeping in a dry tent, with warm blankets and clean water, because of my dad’s work. Following in my father’s footsteps, my own relief work has been centered on digital inclusion—and open source is the tool I turn to most often.

    Let me share two stories with you in that regard. In April, a young dad visited the public library where I work. He appeared interested in using the public computers our library offers. It turns out someone had stolen his family’s only computer, a Macbook, and his tax return was due that day. When I learned about his predicament, I asked, “Would you like to borrow a Linux laptop until your family buys another laptop?” He perked up and asked, “Does this library lend laptops?” I replied, “The library doesn’t, but I do. You can bring this back to me after you’re done with it.”

  • 4 open source tools I used to write a Linux book

    I spent the past year or so writing Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches, which is designed to introduce desktop Linux to non-technical users. This is a rundown of the tools I used to create the book, with the HUGE caveat that tools are just that—tools. They don’t actually do any work or planning for you. However, the right tools make the work much easier. These are the tools that were right for me.

  • Desktop

    • Can Desktop Linux Conquer its Challenges?

      Despite countless inroads made by today’s best and brightest Linux distributions, it’s still difficult for the Linux desktop to get ahead. In this article, I’ll talk about the biggest challenges I’ve seen and what can be done to overcome them.

    • Windows 10 to Linux

      There is a lot of noise at the moment about Microsoft’s new operating system called Windows 10. Without repeating all the details you can have a look, say here or here or here. The essence of the story is that Microsoft is making it very difficult to avoid the new operating system. The advice being given is to not install the upgrade – which is anything but easy, since Windows 7 is supported until 2020.

    • A Windows zealot trashes Linux

      Linux has always been a fantastic alternative to Windows for many users. But there are some people who are so attached to Windows that the very idea of Linux offends them. So it was with one woman who became outraged when a Linux user tried to help her mother with some computer problems related to Windows 10.

    • The New Fullscreen Windows 10 Upgrade Nagging Reminder
    • Microsoft’s final Windows 10 nagware gets up close and personal

  • Server

    • LzLabs launches product to move mainframe COBOL code to Linux cloud

      Somewhere in a world full of advanced technology that we write about regularly here on TechCrunch, there exists an ancient realm where mainframe computers are still running programs written in COBOL.

      This is a programming language, mind you, that was developed in the late 1950s, and used widely in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s, but it’s never really gone away. You might think it would have been mostly eradicated from modern business by now, but you would be wrong.

      As we march along, however, the pool of people who actually know how to maintain these COBOL programs grows ever smaller by the year, and companies looking to move the data (and even the archaic programs) to a more modern platform could be stuck without personnel to help guide them through the transition.

    • Java on the Mainframe – on z/OS rather than Linux – An opportunity well worth researching, if you run a Mainframe

      There is suddenly new interest in monitoring Java on mainframes – I’m not talking about running lots of Java VMs on Linux but about running Java against big mainframe systems on z/OS. This might be about modernising legacy COBOL applications (Java skills are easier to find than COBOL skills these days) or about extending the legacy with new business functionality. JAVA is very flexible, you can use it in DB2 stored procedures, or in CICs, or even in IMS programming (yes, IMS database is still in active use). According to BMC’s 2015 Mainframe Survey, 46% of those surveyed say that Java usage on their mainframe has increased by over 10% in the past two years; and 70% of respondees reporting growth indicated that writing new applications in Java was a key factor in this.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE neon Adds KDE Games

        Are you feeling too productive in your day? Then try the latest addition to KDE Neon! I’ve added the KDE Games applications to our repositories.

      • digiKam 5.0.0 is published…

        After two year of work, the digiKam team is proud to announce the final release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0. This main version introduces a new cycle of releases, which will be shortly released to quickly include all the fixes reported by end users.

        This release marks almost complete port of the application to Qt5. All Qt4/KDE4 code has been removed and many parts have been re-written, reviewed, and tested. Porting to Qt5 required a lot of work, as many important APIs had to be changed or replaced by new ones.

      • DigiKam 5.0 KDE Photography Software Released

        After two years of development, DigiKam 5.0 has been released as the digital photography management software from the KDE camp that’s now been ported to Qt5.

        The Qt5 port alone makes this a huge release and it does remove around 80% of the KDE-specific dependencies as in the future the developers are looking at making it Qt5-only. The dropping of many KDE dependencies is being used to make it easier to port and maintain this digital photography software on Windows, OS X, and other operating systems.

      • digiKam 5.0.0 Powerful Image Editor Officially Released, Ported to Qt5

        Today, July 5, 2016, the development team behind the digiKam open-source and cross-platform image editor software proudly announced the final release of digiKam 5.0.0.

        digiKam 5.0.0 comes two years after the release of digiKam 4.0.0. During these years, it received numerous snapshots that brought various nifty features and improvements, all of which are now present in this final build, which is available for download right now for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

      • KDE Neon 5.7 Lets You Taste the New KDE Plasma 5.7 Desktop Environment, Qt 5.7

        After informing us the other day about the availability of new ISO respins of the KDE Plasma Wayland images, ex-Kubuntu leader Jonathan Riddell has now announced the release of KDE Neon 5.7.

        For those behind on their KDE Neon reading, we’ll take this opportunity to inform them that the open-source initiative promises to offer ISO images as well as a repository that can be added on top of Kubuntu or any other Ubuntu flavor, with the most recent KDE Plasma, KDE Applications, and KDE Frameworks technologies.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 Officially Released with Great Wayland Improvements, Many Changes

        Today, July 5, 2016, KDE has had the enormous pleasure of announcing the availability of the final KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment release.

        Yes, that’s right, the Beta testing phase is now over, and the final release of the highly anticipated KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, which is used by default in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, including openSUSE Leap, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, and many others, has hit the streets.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 Officially Released
      • KDE Plasma 5.7
      • Animations on lock screen – Plasma Wallpaper support

        With Plasma 5.7 released I’m allowed to blog about new features in Plasma 5.8. One of the features missed by many users in the Plasma 5 series was the lack of animations in the lock screen architecture. With Plasma 5 we dropped support for the old XScreenSaver and went QtQuick only. Now technically it was always possible to have animations on the lock screen. Our lock screen architecture loads the QtQuick files through the lookandfeel package mechanism, which means that one could provide an animation in a lookandfeel package.

      • Synchronizing the X11 and Wayland clipboard
      • News from Randa, Café and next release
      • Interview with Matteo Pescarin

        It was a couple of years ago, I’ve grown disillusioned with the quality of the work I was able to get out of The GIMP from an artistic point of view until I started reading a couple of reviews of Krita online and decided to try it.

      • KDE Applications 16.08 Software Suite for KDE Plasma 5.7 to Land August 18, 2016

        Now that the release cycle of the KDE Applications 16.04 software suite is coming to an end, as the third and last maintenance update will arrive on July 12, it’s time for the KDE developers to concentrate their efforts on the next series.

        We’ve always wondered what will be the next version of the KDE Applications software suite for KDE Plasma 5.7, and now we know, as the release schedule of KDE Applications 16.08 has been published recently in the usual places.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Users Can Now Test KDE Plasma 5.7, Qt 5.7 & KDE Frameworks 5.24

        The developers of the Chakra GNU/Linux rolling operating system are informing the community today, July 5, 2016, about the availability of the just released KDE Plasma 5.7.0 and Qt 5.7.0 in the testing repositories.

        As we reported earlier today, the KDE project has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the final KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, which already landed in the testing repos of the Arch Linux operating system, as well as today’s KDE Neon 5.7 User Edition Live ISO images. Now Chakra GNU/Linux devs have uploaded the latest KDE Plasma 5.7 packages, along with Qt 5.7 on their testing repositories.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 released with more progress towards Wayland

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Shining design – available and yet as well to come!

        The current vibrant coloured bg/theme is not the final one we’re going to release in GA. It has been intended for celebrating the new (and great) Plasma5, the default OMLx3 desktop.

        As always, we do our best possible to provide the users with an overall nice and stylish look for our loved distro.

    • Slackware Family

      • Slackware 14.2

        Slackware was familiar. I could easily go back to using it. However, I have been spoiled by my experience with opensuse. With slackware, there are no configured repos. Any install of addition software takes additional effort, though perhaps just unpacking a tar file. And security updates require periodic checking for announcements and then manual installing.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Lenovo G50 & CentOS 7.2 KDE – Really nice and cool

        CentOS 7 is an excellent choice for home use, even on a laptop that’s not Linux friendly, and it does its work well despite the challenges, the likes of Realtek, UEFI and other buzz words. Now, if only different distros could blend the good elements from their peers. In this case, Ubuntu and friends are more media friendly, and you have better smartphone support. But CentOS does the basics much better, and this means stability, consistency, and weirdly, hardware support.

        It’s like being asked whether you want to lose an arm or a leg, and you can’t have both. In theory, Ubuntu is supposed to give you that LTS fun plus the latest and greatest software, but in reality, this is not happening with Xerus. Yes, Trusty is there, and it’s still the best overall candidate for desktops, in whatever guise. CentOS comes rather close. Yes, it does have its antiquities and enterprise idiosyncrasies, but the problems are solvable. That’s a really nice thing. You can actually fix issues, and there are no surprises waiting for you the next day.

        I did invest a significant amount of energy in making CentOS 7 work on the G50 machine. We can’t ignore that. But the yield is highly positive. The outcome is worth the effort. You need the right network support and some extra repos, but after that, you can add new software, codecs, bells and whistles, drivers for other filesystems and protocols, and anything else you fancy. Well, almost. All considered, this is far more than you’d ever expect. There’s still more work to be done. I will address all sorts of issues in follow up articles, including stuff like MTP, Flash performance, adblocking, volume control, and more. And I think you will be amazed how far you can take CentOS if you set your mind to it. Hint, Gnome edition perhaps?

        Which makes it a darn good candidate for your systems. For one reason only. It needs fixing only once. It does not regress. For me, this is a hugely important attribute for anything I may consider for my production setup. CentOS 7, the biggest and most pleasant surprise this awful spring testing season. Modern hardware, here you go. Off to you guys. Do it. Do it.

      • Red Hat Wants To Repeat The Magic of Linux With Containers

        At the recently held Red Hat Summit, Red Hat’s annual user conference, containers took the center stage. The keynotes emphasized the importance of containers, both for the company, and the broader open source ecosystem.

      • The State of Flatpak In GNOME Software

        Richard Hughes of Red Hat has written a post about Flatpak and GNOME Software. His new post covers the per-user and system-wide plugins for dealing with Flatpak packages, GNOME Software interoperates well with the Flatpak command-line utility, and various other details about the current state of Flatpak integration for GNOME Software.

      • Red Hat, Eurotech Team Up On IoT Platform

        Red Hat and Eurotech have announced a jointly sponsored Eclipse Foundation project: a multi-device IoT platform based on donated Eurotech code.

      • Flatpak and GNOME Software
      • Red Hat CEO: Avoiding bloody noses, hammering home open source participation, and why Microsoft is trying to stay relevant

        Whitehurst believes that virtually all of the newer innovations in technology are happening on Linux first.

        “If you look at Hadoop – Linux only, Microsoft paid Hortonworks to port it to Windows but I don’t know anybody who actually runs it on Windows, if you look at everything happening round SDN or containers, they are Linux containers,” said Whitehurst.

        Microsoft’s plays were described as a company that is effectively playing catch-up, chasing the pack and trying to re-ignite the domination of the 90s that came about because the Microsoft Developer Network started building on Windows, said the CEO.

        Whitehurst said: “I think they are recognising that all the developers, all the cool kids, are developing on Linux now, so there is a nexus of innovation happening there and they are trying to figure out how to work in that new system.”

        Microsoft has made a play to try and stay relevant with developers that are increasingly comfortable with open source tooling and Linux as the operating system.

      • A childhood’s dream

        I will be joining the Platform Operations Team at Red Hat as a System Administrator starting from mid-July! Being part of a great family which cares about Open Source and its values makes me proud and I would really like to thank Red Hat for this incredible opportunity.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 24 – It isn’t for everybody, but then, it doesn’t try to be

          On June 23, after installing Fedora for my first ever look at the distro for this review of Fedora 24, I pinged a friend who writes about Linux seeking help for a pesky configuration problem. I was trying to get GNOME to quit demanding a password every time I walked away from the computer for five minutes or so, which I thought should be easy, but wasn’t. After finding sort of a solution for the problem, I sent him another email.

          “I would expect Fedora to have an easy way to deal with this,” I wrote. “Actually, I find very few configuration tools in this installation of Fedora, which surprises me. This must be what you get when you have server people supervising the development of a desktop OS.”

          “Exactly,” he pinged back with record speed. “I’ve never cared much for it myself. Never really found it that compelling. Arch/etc I get; Ubuntu/Mint, I also see the appeal. But Fedora and SuSE always lost me. Nothing negative about them, rather, I fail to see the appeal unless you’re someone who uses these at work.”

        • Nvidia Drivers Install Fedora 24
        • Armadillo 7 and Nikola 7.7.9 now in Fedora 24

          A new update is available in Fedora 24 fedora-updates-testing repository. This is a major version change from version 6 to 7 and since this implies an .so (dynamic library) major number bump we had to rebuild all the packages that link with armadillo:

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Bullseye, More Obnoxious Windows 10, Slack 14.2 Notes

        Today in Linux news Debian announced version 10 codename at DebConf16 currently in session. In other news Microsoft was just kidding about that whole easier-to-decline thing and Li-f-e may be switching base from openSUSE to Ubuntu. Elsewhere, several reviews warrant a mention besides Neil Rickert’s and my own thoughts on Slackware 14.2.

      • twenty years of free software — part 8 github-backup

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • IBM SoftLayer Now Ubuntu Certified Cloud Partner

            IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure division has partnered with Ubuntu to offer users certified Ubuntu Linux images, giving access to all the latest Ubuntu features, compliance accreditations, and security updates to SoftLayer customers.

          • Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux Looks To Ditch 32-Bit

            Canonical is the latest software maker looking to end support for Intel’s once-great 32-bit platform

          • E-Shelter Offers Up Managed Ubuntu OpenStack Through Canonical

            Canonical and NTT Communications-owned data centre business e-shelter have launched a joint managed OpenStack private cloud service for e-shelter customers. Advertising.

          • Ubuntu 16.10 Unity 8 – Keyboard navigation
          • Fairphone 2 and OnePlus One Ubuntu Phones Receive Bluetooth, Voice Call Support

            Marius Gripsgård was happy to announce the biggest Ubports update ever for many of the unofficial Ubuntu Phone devices that he and other contributors to this project are maintaining.

          • Canonical Announces Snappy Sprint Event in Germany to Shape Up Universal Snaps

            Today, July 5, Canonical’s David Planella has informed Softpedia about an upcoming event that aims to gather together developers and contributors from various well-known projects to work on shaping up the universal Snaps.

            Last month, Canonical informed the media about Snaps becoming universal binary format for various GNU/Linux distributions that decide to adopt it in addition to various other similar formats, such as Flatpak or AppImage.

            Snaps are currently enabled by default in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, but Canonical made it possible for users of various other operating systems, including, but not limited to, Arch Linux, Debian, and elementary OS, to use it as well.

          • Linux distros look to drop 32-bit support
          • Linux distros to ditch 32-bit support

          • Flavours and Variants

            • First Thoughts on Linux Mint 18 “Sarah”

              I am a big fan of Linux Mint and I look forward to every release. This week Mint 18 “Sarah” was released. I decided to try it out on my Dell XPS 13 laptop since it is the easiest machine of mine to base and they really haven’t suggested an upgrade path. The one article I was able to find suggested a clean install, which is what I did.

              First, I backed up my home directory, which is where most of my stuff lives, and I backed up the system /etc directory since I’m always making a change there and forgetting that I need it (usually concerning setting up the network interface as a bridge).

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Goodwill is the source code at this open coder collective

    About a year ago, Gautam Rege decided that he wanted to do something to give back to the open source community.

    Rege, along with Sethupathi Asokan, is the cofounder of Josh Software, is among the top companies working on the Ruby on Rails framework in India.

    “With an experience of many years in the open source world, we realised that there is a need to build a platform for measuring the open source contributions, which coders make every day across the world,” Rege told ET.

  • Moving from a traditional product/release focused delivery model to a rolling model

    GDP was born as a “demo” project. The main goal was to provide a platform to show the software components for automotive that the different GENIVI Expert Groups were developing. This was done through a delivery model focused on publishing a stable and easy to consume version of the project every few months, a major release.

    Strictly speaking, GDP is a derivative. It is based on poky and uses Yocto tools to “create” the Linux based platform, adding the different components developed by the GENIVI Alliance together with upstream software. For the defined purpose, the release centric model works fine, especially if you concentrate your effort is very specific areas of the software stack with a small number of dependencies on the other areas, and a limited number of contributions and environments where the system should work.

    During this 2016, the GDP has grown significantly. We have more software, more contributors, more components and more target boards to take care of. Although the above model has not been not challenged yet, it was just a matter of time.

  • Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository

    This article outlines the scale of that codebase and details Google’s custom-built monolithic source repository and the reasons the model was chosen. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google’s developer workflows. Here, we provide background on the systems and workflows that make feasible managing and working productively with such a large repository. We explain Google’s “trunk-based development” strategy and the support systems that structure workflow and keep Google’s codebase healthy, including software for static analysis, code cleanup, and streamlined code review.

  • IoT Security: What IoT Can Learn From Open Source

    When personal computers were introduced, few manufacturers worried about security. Not until the early 1990s did the need for security become widely understood. Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is following the same pattern — except that the need for security is becoming obvious far more quickly, and manufacturers should have known better, especially given the overwhelming influence of open source.

    The figures speak for themselves. In 2014, a study by Hewlett-Packard found that seven out of ten IoT devices tested contained serious security vulnerabilities, an average of twenty-five per device. In particular, the vulnerabilities included a lack of encryption for local and Internet transfer of data, no enforcement of secure passwords, and security for downloaded updates. The devices test included some of the most common IoT devices currently in use, including TVs, thermostats, fire alarms and door locks.

  • Nextcloud 9 update brings security, open source enterprise capabilities and support subscription, iOS app
  • ​Nextcloud adds enterprise support and iOS appliance

    The ownCloud fork, Nextcloud is aggressively seeking private cloud business customers.

  • Nextcloud Improves Security, Adds Enterprise Support

    A month ago, Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, forked the code to create a new company called Nextcloud. Now in its first platform release the company’s technology is getting enterprise support.

    In keeping with ownCloud’s numbering, the new release is Nextcloud 9, though the release brings more than what is available in the ownCloud 9 release that debuted in March.

    “Nextcloud is building open-source replacements for the ownCloud closed-source enterprise-only features,” Karlitschek told eWEEK. “With this release, 80 percent is done and the rest will be coming soon.”

    Nextcloud isn’t simply replicating features that already exist in ownCloud. Karlitschek said Nextcloud is also developing its own set of new and innovative features.

  • Project aims to store publicly available software

    A French organisation dedicated to computational sciences has started a project to collect, organise, preserve, and make easily accessible the source code of all publicly available software.

    Inria has dubbed the project Software Heritage and says it will adopt distributed infrastructure in order to ensure long-term availability and reliability.

  • Events

    • How to write an excellent event recap
    • HaL deadline extended

      There is this long-running workshop series Haskell in Leipzig, which is a meeting of all kinds of Haskell-interested folks (beginners, experts, developers, scientists), and for year’s instance, HaL 2016, I have the honour of being the program committee chair.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Support Public Education and Web Literacy in California

        Web literacy — the ability to read, write, and participate online — is one of the most important skills of the 21st century. We believe it should be enshrined as the fourth “R,” alongside Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. From our open source learning tools to our free educational curriculum, we are dedicated to empowering individuals by teaching Web literacy.

        In 2015, 65% of California public schools offered no computer science courses at all. Public schools should do more to expose students to Web literacy: a paucity of funding and the elimination of digital skills classes and curriculum are a disservice to students and the state’s future.

        On June 30, we submitted an amicus letter to the California Supreme Court urging review of the case Campaign for Quality Education v. State of California. The issue in this case is whether the California Constitution requires California to provide its public school students with a quality education. We wrote this letter because we believe that California students risk being left behind in our increasingly digitized society without a quality education that includes Web literacy skills.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Formula E championship drives on Intellicore & Basho Riak TS

      Basho Technologies has announced Intellicore’s adoption of its Riak TS to power its Sports Data Management Platform, used by the FIA Formula E Championship to provide real time race analysis to its customers.

    • MongoDB Sets Up Real-Time Analytics Muscle with Apache Spark Connector

      The MongoDB World meetup took place last week, and there were a lot of interesting announcements made, including ones related to connecting open source database functionality to Apache Spark. From cloud developers working to incorporate databases with their deployments to enterprises that want more flexibility from their data repositories, open source databases are flourishing, and MongoDB is a leader in this area.

      At last week’s event, the MongoDB Connector for Apache Spark was announced. It is billed as “a powerful integration that enables developers and data scientists to create new insights and drive real-time action on live, operational, and streaming data.”

    • Why object storage is eating the world

      The traditional file system-and-database web backend is no longer adequate, and must make way for storage systems that manage unstructured data. In this article we will learn about the differences between structured and unstructured data, and why web storage backends must evolve to manage unstructured data.

      Traditionally, web applications use file systems and databases to store user data. This is simple to manage, as web applications generate structured data by accepting text input in forms, and saving the input to a database. However, times are changing; with the advent of social media, cloud storage, and data analytics platforms, increasing quantities of unstructured data are being pushed onto the Internet.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Japan Says Yes To Mirrorless Cars

      It’s clear that, at one point, glass mirrors will be a thing of the past, as companies will drop them in favor of video screens, but until then, they’ll have to wait for the legislation to change.

      Last month, however, the idea came closer to reality in Japan, which became one of the first countries to allow vehicles to use cameras instead of mirrors, as AutoNews reports.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Swedish politicians consider opening population’s medical-research DNA database for private insurance companies

      Since 1975, Sweden has taken a DNA sample from all newborns for medical research purposes, and asked parents’ consent to do so for this research purpose. This means that over time, Sweden has built the world’s most comprehensive DNA database over everybody under 43 years of age. But now, politicians are considering opening up this research-only DNA database to law enforcement and private insurance companies.

    • The Dutch & Pharma Policy: A Groundbreaking Presidency

      For the next steps, the European Commission seems rather hesitant to deliver on the tasks mandated by the Council. Drugmakers certainly feel uncomfortable with the debate around intellectual property and have even threatened to move their businesses out of Europe, should there be any changes to the IP regime. National governments, including the Netherlands, therefore will need to stand firm and prove that they are serious about what they signed off on June 17. They should guarantee that the European Commission delivers a bold and meaningful report and not another self-congratulatory inventory. And it remains to be seen how the political momentum will be maintained during the upcoming Slovak and Maltese Presidencies… In other words, June 17 was just the start rather than the end of the journey.

    • Celebrated eye hospital Moorfields lets Google eyeball 1 million scans

      Famous eye hospital Moorfields has agreed to give Google’s DeepMind access to one million anonymous eye scans as a part of a machine learning study intended to spot early signs of sight loss.

      Explicit patient consent is not required because the scans are historic, meaning the results won’t affect the care of current patients. Under the project, the hospital will also have access to related anonymous information about their eye conditions and disease management.

      DeepMind is a British AI company founded in London in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m. DeepMind Health was launched in February 2016 to work with clinicians in the NHS and other health services.

    • Google’s DeepMind AI to use 1 million NHS eye scans to spot common diseases earlier

      Google’s DeepMind division has announced a partnership with the NHS’s Moorfields Eye Hospital to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields’ patient database, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans.

      The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment.

    • VA Officials Pledge New Studies Into Effects of Agent Orange

      The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is expanding its efforts to determine how Vietnam veterans and their children have been affected by exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange.

      The VA will conduct its first nationwide survey of Vietnam veterans in more than three decades and request an outside panel of experts to continue its work studying the health effects of Agent Orange on veterans, their children and their grandchildren. Both initiatives were discussed Thursday in Washington at a forum hosted by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot on the possible multi-generational impacts of Agent Orange.

      Vietnam veterans have argued for years that their exposure to the toxic herbicide has damaged their health as well as their children’s. From 1965 to 1970, some 2.6 million U.S. service members were potentially exposed to Agent Orange, which contained a dangerous strand of the chemical dioxin. While the VA has linked Agent Orange exposure to a host of diseases in Vietnam vets, experts and veterans advocates have criticized the lack of research into the effects on future generations.

      “I believe that these individuals deserve an answer,” Linda Spoonster Schwartz, the VA’s assistant secretary for policy and planning, said in response to a question about the lack of research. “I believe that we need to at least ask the question. … This is the right thing to do.”

    • Fate of Vermont’s Historic GMO-Labeling Law in US Senate’s Hands

      As the nation’s first GMO labeling law takes effect, food policy experts are warning that its benefits could be “fleeting,” should the U.S. Senate pass a so-called “compromise” bill this week that would nullify Vermont’s historic law as well as other state efforts in the works.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • But I have work to do!

      There’s a news story going around that talks about how horrible computer security tends to be in hospitals. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone who works in the security industry, security is often something that gets in the way, it’s not something that helps get work done.

      There are two really important lessons we should take away from this. The first is that a doctor or nurse isn’t a security expert, doesn’t want to be a security expert, and shouldn’t be a security expert. Their job is helping sick people. We want them helping sick people, especially if we’re the people who are sick. The second is that when security gets in the way, security loses. Security should lose when it gets in the way, we’ve been winning far too often and it’s critically damaged the industry.

    • Lenovo ThinkPwn UEFI exploit also affects products from other vendors [Ed: Intel and Microsoft told us UEFI was about security but it wasn’t]

      A critical vulnerability that was recently found in the low-level firmware of Lenovo ThinkPad systems also reportedly exists in products from other vendors, including HP and Gigabyte Technology.

      An exploit for the vulnerability was published last week and can be used to execute rogue code in the CPU’s privileged SMM (System Management Mode).

      This level of access can then be used to install a stealthy rootkit inside the computer’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) — the modern BIOS — or to disable Windows security features such as Secure Boot, Virtual Secure Mode and Credential Guard that depend on the firmware being locked down.

      The exploit, dubbed ThinkPwn, was released by a security researcher named Dmytro Oleksiuk last week without sharing it with Lenovo in advance. However, since then Oleksiuk has found the same vulnerable code inside older open source firmware for some Intel motherboards.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Why the Sanders ‘Revolution’ Must Take on the Permanent War State

      The Sanders campaign never explicitly raised the issue of the permanent war state during the primary election contest, either. He did present a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton when they debated foreign policy, effectively demolishing her position urging a more militarily aggressive policy in Syria. He called for a policy that “destroys ISIS” but “does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East.”But he never talked about ending the unprecedented power that national security institutions have seized over the resources and security of the American people.

    • Is Coup Against Corbyn a Plot to Spare Blair from War Crimes Probe?

      In the tumultuous wake of Brexit, why has the Labour Party turned on leader Jeremy Corbyn for campaigning for the “Remain” camp, while the Conservatives have welcomed new leader Theresa Mays for doing exactly the same?

      Alex Salmond, former Scottish First Minister, has proposed one damning theory by suggesting that the Labour Party’s coup against Corbyn is an orchestrated attempt to stop him from “calling for Tony Blair’s head” when the Chilcot Report, the government’s official inquiry into the Iraq War, is published on Wednesday.

      In a blistering op-ed published Sunday in Scotland’s Herald, Salmond writes, “It would be a mistake to believe that Chilcot and current events are entirely unconnected. The link is through the Labour Party.”

    • Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”

      “According to Seidman’s account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies”, Cohen wrote, “Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions — suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism more fitting to Wiesel’s emerging role as an ambassador of culture and conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel altered several facts in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments that conflicted with the earlier version. (For example, in the French, the young Wiesel, having been liberated from Buchenwald, is recuperating in a hospital; he looks into a mirror and writes that he saw a corpse staring back at him. In the earlier Yiddish, Wiesel holds that upon seeing his reflection he smashed the mirror and then passed out, after which ‘my health began to improve.’)”

    • Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers, Too

      As Europe comes to terms with a Brexit vote fueled in large part by anti-immigrant hate-mongering, a new report exposes how war profiteers are influencing EU policy to make money from unending Middle East conflicts as well as the wave of refugees created by that same instability and violence.

    • Iraq Mourns After Weekend Bombing Deathtoll Rises Above 200 People

      The deathtoll from a massive truck bomb detonated in a Baghdad shopping district over the weekend has climbed to over 200 people, with hundreds more injured and scores still missing, making it one of the deadliest such attacks in the recent history of war-torn Iraq.

    • Iraqis want crackdown on ‘sleeper cells’ after huge Baghdad bomb

      By Monday evening, the toll in Karrada stood at 175 killed and 200 wounded, according to police and medical sources. Rescuers and families were still looking for 37 missing people.

    • Poll Disputes Claim of Obama’s Weakness

      Democrats’ hawkishness is fed by fear that Republicans will attack them as doves, a concern heightened by the charge that President Obama is disdained globally for not using more military force, a point disputed by ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Iraq Inquiry: Chilcot says ‘careful analysis needed before war’

      The chairman of the UK’s inquiry into the Iraq war says he hopes future military action on such a scale will only be possible with more careful analysis and political judgement.

      His 12-volume report on the Iraq War is due to be released later – more than seven years after the inquiry began.

      Sir John Chilcot told the BBC it would criticise individuals and institutions.

      He said he hoped it would help families of the 179 Britons who died between 2003 and 2009 answer some questions.

    • Grandfather fears Iraq War report will be a cover-up

      The grandfather of a Devon soldier killed in Iraq fears the long-awaited report into Britain’s role in the conflict will just be a cover-up.

      Sir John Chilcot is due to publish his long-awaited report into the war today, seven years after hearing evidence from his first witness.

      David Godfrey, who runs a fundraising shop in Cullompton, can’t believe it’s taken so long. For him, the UK should never have gone to war in the first place.

    • Families of Iraq War dead hope British inquiry will criticise ex-PM Blair

      A British inquiry into the Iraq War delivers its long-awaited report on Wednesday, with critics of the U.S.-led invasion hoping it will condemn former Prime Minister Tony Blair while some families of slain soldiers fear it may be a whitewash.

      To be published seven years after the inquiry was set up when the last British combat troops left Iraq, the report runs to 2.6 million words – about three times the length of the Bible – and will include details of exchanges Blair had with then U.S. President George W. Bush over the 2003 invasion.

    • WikiLeaks publishes more than 1,000 Hillary Clinton war emails

      WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website, has released more than 1,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server pertaining to the Iraq War.

      The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails on Monday that Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state. According to the release, the emails were obtained from the US State Department after they issued a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails stem from a State Department release back in February, The Hill reports.

    • Wikileaks publishes Clinton war emails

      WikiLeaks on Monday published more than 1,000 emails about the Iraq War from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time as secretary of State.

      The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, sent and received. They stem from a trove of emails released by the State Department in February.

      WikiLeaks combed through the emails to find all the messages that reference the Iraq War.

    • For Hillary Clinton’s Campaign, “Extremely Careless” Is a Soundbite to Celebrate

      When Hillary Clinton first acknowledged in March 2015 that she had indeed used a private email account — and her own server — to conduct official government business as secretary of state, it would have been hard to imagine that her campaign would 16 months later pronounce itself “pleased” that an FBI investigation concluded that she and her aides “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

    • Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations — until Hillary Clinton

      Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished in the harshest and most excessive manner – at least when they possess little political power or influence. As has been widely noted, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Secrecy in DC is so revered that even the most banal documents are reflexively marked classified, making their disclosure or mishandling a felony. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said back in 2000, “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a top secret NSA classification marking.”

      People who leak to media outlets for the selfless purpose of informing the public – Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden – face decades in prison. Those who leak for more ignoble and self-serving ends – such as enabling hagiography (Leon Panetta, David Petreaus) or ingratiating oneself to one’s mistress (Petraeus) – face career destruction, though they are usually spared if they are sufficiently Important-in-DC. For low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC, even the mere mishandling of classified information – without any intent to leak but merely to, say, work from home – has resulted in criminal prosecution, career destruction and the permanent loss of security clearance.

    • Misunderstanding Russia and Russians

      Western media has demonized Russia and President Putin with unrelenting propaganda that has dazed and confused many Russians, a condition that retired U.S. Col. Ann Wright encountered on a recent visit.

    • Chilcot Report: Parents of major killed in Iraq say Blair must now face legal action

      The parents of the 95th British serviceman to be killed in Iraq have said there would be “something terribly wrong with our political process” if the Chilcot Report did not produce grounds for the families of dead soldiers to take legal action over the Iraq war.

      Roger and Maureen Bacon lost their son Matthew, 34, a major in the Intelligence Corps, when his Snatch Land Rover was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Basra on 11 September 2005.

      Speaking to The Independent hours before the long-awaited publication of Sir John Chilcot’s report on the Iraq War, Mr and Mrs Bacon accused Tony Blair of betraying their son and misleading Britain into a war that was “a total and utter catastrophe”.

    • Blair Can Be Tried For War Crimes

      There is no requirement in international law for the appropriate jurisdiction of a tribunal – or even the tribunal itself – to be in place before a crime is committed, in order for it to try that crime. The most obvious evidence of this is the Nuremburg Tribunal, which did not even exist when the crimes which it tried were committed. But in fact international law has a long tradition of arbitration or judgement by bodies which were set up after the event, but judging by the law applicable at the time of the event. It is the crime itself which must be a crime at the time it is committed. The jurisdiction of the body which tries the criminal can be created after the crime itself.

      Total nonsense has been written widely that it would be retroactive law, and thus unacceptable, for Tony Blair to be tried at the Hague for the crime of waging aggressive war. But the crime itself was very plainly already in existence when Blair committed it.

    • The 179 British personnel who died during the Iraq war

      The invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of 179 British personnel between March 2003 and February 2009.

      Tony Blair told the Chilcot Inquiry into the conflict he had “deep and profound regret” about the loss of life suffered by British troops and the countless Iraqi civilians.

    • With Brexit, Israel Loses a Major Asset in the European Union

      Britain helped moderate and balance EU decisions about the peace process, blunt criticism and even harness the member states against anti-Israel moves at the UN; voices sympathetic to the Palestinian cause could now become more dominant.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Does Jim Comey Think Thomas Drake Exhibited Disloyalty to the United States?

      As you’ve no doubt heard, earlier today Jim Comey had a press conference where he said Hillary and her aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” but went on to say no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute any of them for storing over 100 emails with classified information on a server in Hillary’s basement. Comey actually claimed to have reviewed “investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information” and found no “case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.”

      [...]

      I can only imagine Comey came to his improper public prosecutorial opinion via one of two mental tricks. Either he — again, not the prosecutor — decided the only crime at issue was mishandling classified information (elsewhere in his statement he describes having no evidence that thousands of work emails were withheld from DOJ with ill intent, which dismisses another possible crime), and from there he decided either that it’d be a lot harder to prosecute Hillary Clinton (or David Petraeus) than it would be someone DOJ spent years maligning like Sterling or Drake. Or maybe he decided that there are no indications that Hillary is disloyal to the US.

      Understand, though: with Sterling and Drake, DOJ decided they were disloyal to the US, and then used their alleged mishandling of classified information as proof that they were disloyal to the US (Drake ultimately plead to Exceeding Authorized Use of a Computer).

      Ultimately, it involves arbitrary decisions about who is disloyal to the US, and from that a determination that the crime of mishandling classified information occurred.

    • FBI Director Comey Preempts Justice Department By Advising No Charges for Hillary Clinton

      FBI Director James Comey took the unprecedented step of publicly preempting a Justice Department prosecution when he declared at a press conference Tuesday that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server.

      The FBI’s job is to investigate crimes; it is Justice Department prosecutors who are supposed to decide whether or not to move forward. But in a case that had enormous political implications, Comey decided the FBI would act on its own.

      “Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case,” he said. Prosecutors could technically still file criminal charges, but it would require them to publicly disagree with their own investigators.

    • FBI Recommends “No Charges” Against Hillary Clinton

      In a surprising statement which concluded moments ago, FBI director James Comey announced that Federal officials have decided not to pursue federal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email setup, an announcement that will send a shockwave throughout national politics.

    • FBI: Clinton ‘Should Have Known’ Private Email Server ‘No Way To Handle Classified Info’, But No Charges Will Be Sought

      But at the end of it all, the FBI found Clinton’s use of private email server to be severelty stupid, rather than criminal. Comey says the FBI found no signs of “intentional misconduct” by lawyers during personal email deletions or routine purges. Likewise, there was “no clear evidence of intentional misconduct by staffers,” but Clinton’s emails were “clearly mishandled.”

      The FBI’s final conclusion is damning, but only in terms of harsh words, not actual punishment. Clinton and her staff “knew or should have known” a private email server was “no way to properly handle classified email” — especially when housed on private server with “no full-time staff” or anything approaching the level of service one would equate with email services like Gmail. Comey also noted that Clinton used her personal domain “extensively” outside of the US, needlessly exposing sensitive information in the “presence of hostile actors.”

      James Comey also took a little time to bash her agency, stating that the FBI found the “security culture” of the State Department to be “lacking.”

    • ‘No Charges Are Appropriate’: Statement by FBI Director Comey on Clinton Email Probe
    • ‘Most Transparent’ President Signs Into Law FOIA Reform Bill That Won’t Affect His Administration

      While this is cause for some celebration, let’s not overlook what’s actually happened here. Obama has signed a bill he can saddle his successors with. Neither leading candidate seems particularly amenable to openness and transparency — not Donald Trump with his big ideas on how to change laws to make things better for him rather than for the nation, and not Hillary Clinton, who set up her own email server to route around FOIA requests.

      While touting his administration as the Openest Place on Earth, FOIA responsiveness actually took several steps backward during his tenure. His administration also spent several years fighting FOIA reform, something that was ironically uncovered by documents obtained via a FOIA request.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • How the Great Lakes Observing System Supports Regional Health, Safety, Economy

      The Great Lakes are a vital shipping channel for the U.S., annually carrying billions of dollars of cargo to and from the Atlantic. They also contain 20 percent of the world’s freshwater, have 10,000 miles of coast, and—much like the ocean—the waters of the Great Lakes heavily influence the climate in the region. Knowing what’s happening and forecasting what’s to come in Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario keep us safer, healthier, and economically sound.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn’t About Free Trade — It’s About Protecting Corporate Profits

      The news media and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have repeatedly described opponents of the deal as “protectionist” or opposed to trade itself.

      For instance, after Donald Trump pressed Hillary Clinton to swear off passage of the deal, the New York Times reported that Trump was embracing “nationalistic anti-trade policies.” The Wall Street Journal said Trump expressed “protectionist views.” President Obama warned that you can’t withdraw “from trade deals” and focus “solely on your local market.”

      But opposition to the TPP is not accurately described as opposition to all trade, or even to free trade.

      In fact, the deal’s major impact would not come in the area of lowering tariffs, the most common trade barriers. The TPP is more focused on crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries.

      So the most consequential parts of the deal would actually undermine the free flow of goods and services by expanding some protectionist, anti-competitive policies sought by global corporations.

      “We already have trade agreements with six of the 11 countries. Canada and Mexico — our two biggest trading partners — are in there. The tariffs are almost zero [with those countries] anyhow,” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Intercept. “What’s in the deal? Higher patent and copyright protection! That’s protectionism.”

    • More in hope, less about immigration: why poor Britons really voted to leave the EU

      A popular Brexit narrative is that those left out of rising prosperity lashed out at the establishment because they could take no more punishment. They had suffered years of recession and austerity exacerbated by a Dutch auction – in which the asking price is lowered until there’s a buyer – driven by rising immigration.

      The latest NatCen British Social Attitudes Survey shows the true extent of concerns about immigration. Clear majorities thought migrants were having a net negative effect on British schools and the NHS. This was an area where there was substantial agreement between people with different levels of education. Another area in which the public was even more of one mind was in their awareness that the NHS has a funding problem.

      To find out where those left out of rising prosperity differed from the rest, however, we need to look at other survey questions. These introduce two important caveats to the popular narrative: that at least until the eve of the referendum campaign, poor Britons were not sure that leaving the EU would reduce immigration; and that it wasn’t just rising prosperity that they felt excluded from.

    • Like imperialists of old, Nigel Farage blundered ignorantly in and nicked our country from under our noses

      So farewell, for now and for a while, to the anti-Martin Luther King.

      With his charming poster of Syrians queuing forlornly in that distant corner of the UK that will forever be Slovenia, Nigel Farage reminded us that he too has a dream, albeit the reverse of Dr King’s.

      Nigel dreamed of a land where people are judged not by the content of their character, but by the colour of their skin. He also dreamed of taking this country back to the Fifties, and he has doubled out splendidly on that.

      We are transported back to the mid-1950s, of course, after the end of bread rationing but before large scale immigration from the former colonies. That mythical Elysium, sun-dappled age of innocence when Pop Larkin thought everything “perfick”, and boarding house owners had no need to express their absolute right as Her Britannic Majesty’s free born subjects to announce which potential guests they found undesirable.

    • How Nigel Farage pocketed a £7,500 pay rise after Brexit

      Shameless Nigel Farage has pocketed a whopping £7,500 pay rise by getting Britain to leave the EU.

      The outgoing UKIP chief has seen the value of his MEP wages soar since we voted for Brexit , because he is paid in euros by the Brussels Parliament.

      The shock result sent the pound plunging in value, and as of Tuesday it was down almost 9% against the Euro since the June 23 poll.

      As Mr Farage lives in leafy Kent it means his salary has effectively rocketed from £75,295 to £82,707 in just 11 days.

    • How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign

      On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss.

      Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled.

    • Canada, Europe trade deal at risk as EU gives 38 parliaments a binding say

      The European Union put its landmark free-trade accord with Canada on a slow track for approval, increasing the risk of a veto amid an anti-globalization backlash across Europe.

      The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, proposed that its first trade agreement with a fellow member of the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries face ratification by national parliaments in the 28-member bloc. A total of 38 different national parliamentary chambers, including in some cases regional assemblies, will have a binding say.

    • [Old] ‘France is totally bankrupt’: French jobs minister Michel Sapin embarrasses Francois Hollande with shocking statement on state of the country’s economy

      France’s employment minister Michel Sapin has admitted the country is “totally bankrupt”.

      The unexpected news came during a radio interview yesterday and is thought to have sent the country’s business leaders into a state of shock.

      “There is a state but it is a totally bankrupt state,” Mr Sapin said. “That is why we had to put a deficit reduction plan in place, and nothing should make us turn away from that objective.”

      Mr Sapin’s “totally bankrupt” statement is likely to cause huge embarrassment for President Francois Hollande, who will be left to undo the potential damage to his socialist government’s reputation.

    • About 100 BBC Monitoring jobs to be axed amid £4m cuts

      At least 98 jobs at the BBC Monitoring department are to be cut ahead of a £4m reduction in funding.

      The department, which has 320 staff, analyses local media from 150 countries in 100 different languages, but the operation is to be scaled down.

      The World Service said the Mazar-i-Sharif bureau in Afghanistan will be closed and new bases will open in Istanbul and Jerusalem.

      The team will relocate from Caversham Park in Reading, its base since 1942.

      The BBC said it would begin consultations with unions shortly.

      The loss of jobs will mean a reduction of nearly a third.

    • Aviva Investors says suspends UK property trust

      Aviva Investors, the fund arm of insurer Aviva (AV.L), has suspended its UK Property Trust with immediate effect, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

      “The extraordinary market circumstances, which are impacting the wider industry, have resulted in a lack of immediate liquidity in the Aviva Investors Property Trust. Consequently, we have acted to safeguard the interests of all our investors by suspending dealing in the fund with immediate effect,” a spokesman said.

      The suspension of the 1.8 billion pound fund comes a day after Standard Life Investments, the fund arm of insurer Standard Life (SL.L), suspended its 2.9 billion pound UK real estate fund.

    • EU rivals vie to wrest drug and banking agencies from London

      Milan’s new mayor Giuseppe Sala will fly into London on Wednesday, stepping up a battle between European cities competing to wrest two prestigious European Union agencies from London in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the bloc.

      The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) together employ more than 1,000 skilled staff from across the EU. Both are expected to relocate as a result of the so-called Brexit decision.

      The agencies are prized not only for jobs but also for their potential to act as hubs for finance and pharmaceuticals, two of Europe’s most important industries.

      That has set off a battle from Madrid to Stockholm to Warsaw as EU members seek to grab one or other organisation, in the knowledge that banks and drugmakers will want to maintain close ties with key regulators.

    • Universities take a knock post-Brexit

      European academic bodies are pulling back from research collaboration with UK academics, amid post-Brexit uncertainty about the future of UK higher education.

      While post-Brexit Britain might remain inside the European research funding system, academics in other countries are nervous about collaborating with UK institutions.

      UK-based academics are being asked to withdraw their applications for future funding by European partners.

      BBC Newsnight is aware of concerns raised by academics at Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter and Durham.

      Chris Husbands, the vice-chancellor at Sheffield Hallam, says that his researchers are already seeing significant effects.

    • Hillary’s National Security Alliance for Quivering Over Bank Prosecutions

      Again, I’m okay if Hillary wants to spend her time fearmongering about the dangers of Trump.

      But to do so credibly, she needs to be a lot more cognizant of the dangers her own team have created.

    • So long, Nigel Farage, the latest rat to jump from the sinking Brexit ship

      Hot on the heels of ‘Don’t Be A Quitter’ Dave and ‘Stabbed In The Back’ Boris, another politician leaves us to deal with the mess they created

    • ‘Brexit’ and the Democracy Myth

      There’s a theory going around that referenda are the ultimate in direct democracy. There’s something about masses of people voting for or against some major issue that causes would-be populists to go weak in the knees. But the theory is pure myth, as the Brexit debacle shows. Rather than raising democracy to a new level, referenda often drag it down.

      The classic example occurred in the early 1850s when Napoleon III, nephew of the more famous Napoleon I, engineered back-to-back plebiscites that allowed him to institute a dictatorship for nearly 20 years. Instead of democracy, France got the opposite – political prisoners by the thousands, foreign adventures, and a disastrous war with Germany.

    • Swimming Against the Loan Sharks

      Federal regulators have proposed new rules to rein in payday lenders, and those of us who’ve been fighting these legalized loan sharks for years are bracing for a major backlash from the industry while also pushing for tougher standards.

      Issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the proposal comes after years of grass roots pressure – in the face of nasty opposition by loan predators.

    • Britain needs to hire foreign experts to redo all the trade deals it voted to ditch

      Now that Britain has voted to leave the European Union, it faces the daunting task of renegotiating a long list of trade deals as a newly independent entity: all the deals the EU already has with other countries, the ones the EU is currently negotiating, and a deal with the EU itself after it leaves the bloc.

      This work will require millions of hours of work by seasoned negotiators with experience of the complex, high-stakes art of top-level government deal-making.

    • Brexit: Dual nationality on the table for Britons?

      It is more than a week since Britain voted to leave the European Union, and there is still little certainty regarding the future status of EU citizens currently living in the UK, or of British people living elsewhere in the EU.

      While many British citizens are happy to potentially wave goodbye to freedom of movement within the EU, some Britons would like to hold on to the opportunity to live and work in the other 27 countries that make up the union.

      At the weekend, German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the remaining members should not “pull up the drawbridge” for young Britons, who largely voted to remain, and so should consider offering dual nationality to young British citizens “who live in Germany, Italy or France, so that they can remain EU citizens in this country”.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Theresa May wins more than half of MPs’ votes as Stephen Crabb pulls out and Liam Fox is eliminated

      Theresa May has taken pole position in the race to succeed David Cameron, with a comfortable advantage after securing the backing of more than half of Conservative MPs in the first round of voting.

      If the Home Secretary can repeat her triumph by winning the support of Tory members, she will be installed in September as Britain’s second female Prime Minister, after Margaret Thatcher.

      Stephen Crabb, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pulled out of the race on Tuesday evening after finishing second last with 34 votes. He backed Mrs may for leader.

      Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox was eliminated from the contest after winning the support of just 16 MPs when the results were revealed at 6.30pm on Tuesday.

    • Theresa May is bad, but the other Tory candidates are worse

      Imagine Britain’s membership of the European Union as a cat. The cat is sealed in a box with an unstable radioactive element, “Article 50”. At some point the toxicity of A50 will kill the cat – an outcome that is confirmed on opening the box. But as long as the box is sealed, moggy is simultaneously dead and alive. This state is known as Schrödinger’s EU membership, after the Austrian physicist who described something similar in 1935 to elucidate the mysteries of quantum mechanics.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Censorship Crusade: Far-Right Politician, Parents Team Up To Ban Books In Va. Public Schools

      Some parents in a Virginia county are upset about a few books on public school summer reading lists – so much so that they’re calling for censorship.

      Chesterfield County, which is just south of Richmond, has been besieged for a second-straight year by a group that is clearly under the influence of the Religious Right.

      Last year, Shannon Easter and her allies protested the inclusion of multiple titles on the Chesterfield County summer reading lists for middle and high schoolers after Easter consulted materials she found online, which were produced by organizations affiliated with a prominent far-right group: Focus on the Family (FOF).

      In 2015, Easter and her allies made enough noise that four books were removed from the summer reading list, even though librarians in the county have noted that the books on the list are merely suggestions to encourage reading – no one is required to read any of them.

    • David Stratton on censorship, ‘Sandra’ and the Sydney Film Festival

      What I proposed to the Sydney Film Festival was that if any cuts were demanded in festival films they should be publicised. There should be a press release issued and interviews given and make as much noise about it as possible, because when something is done in secrecy you can get away with a lot more.

      The director of the festival at the time felt that he could not implement that motion, and there was a valid reason for it, actually. The festival had an agreement with the Customs Department, which allowed the festival to import films without paying customs duty.

    • How one filmmaker is battling censorship in Lebanon and encouraging others to do the same

      In making her short film I Say Dust, Darine Hotait wanted to explore Arab American identity from her perspective as a New York-based American Lebanese writer and director. It just so happened that her two lead characters would be women in their 20s who share a kiss. That kiss, however, has put I Say Dust at the centre of a long-standing discussion about censorship after it was recently banned from two film festivals in the Middle East.

    • SA sides with censorship countries, says DA

      The Democratic Alliance has expressed shock at South Africa’s move to vote against a UN resolution promoting Internet freedom.

      Last week, UN member states voted on the resolution which affirms political commitment to protecting human rights online.

      It also seeks to condemn the intentional disruption of Internet access to the public.

      South Africa voted against it, together with China and Russia amongst others.

    • South Africa’s ruling party condemns its own national broadcaster for censoring political violence

      South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has condemned its own public broadcaster for practicing censorship by not broadcasting images of violent anti-state protests.

      The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was initially accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias when it brought in a policy of self censorship when violence flared as local elections approached.

    • ANC condemns broadcaster for censorship

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said on Tuesday the public broadcaster, accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias as local elections approach, was exercising censorship by not broadcasting images of violent anti-state protests.

    • ANC does not condone SABC censorship – Mthembu
    • ‘ANC just as clueless as the public over SABC censorship’

      The African National Congress (ANC) says it believes the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) failure to consult it on policy changes being introduced is a sign of disregard.

      Speaking at Luthuli House, ANC Chief Whip Jackson Mthembu addressed developments at the public broadcaster and media freedom.

      The ANC says it believes it should have been notified about changes made at the broadcaster, because it’s the ruling party.

    • ANC Slams Censorship at South African Public Broadcaster

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said it hasn’t sought to influence news coverage at the national broadcaster, countering a claim by its former acting chief executive officer, and described its current leadership as “lacking.”

    • South Africa’s ruling ANC condemns public broadcaster for censorship

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said on Tuesday the public broadcaster, accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias ahead of local elections, was practicing censorship by not broadcasting violent anti-state protests.

      The comments by party chief whip Jackson Mthembu represent a U-turn and may point to schisms in the ANC, which in May welcomed the broadcast ban by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) as the “best decision.”

      “When property is burnt, people of South Africa need to be shown those images, that is the ANC view. Because when you don’t show those images, that amounts to censorship,” Mthembu said in a televised media briefing.

    • Media censorship is back in all its glory!

      Now since the SABC’s COO is above the law, and at the same time the person who single handedly decide what should and should not be shown on the local media, one can only assume the he is yet another deployed cadre not fit for the job!

      Now although education may not be the alpha and omega in Africa, most people in executive positions hold some sort of tertiary qualification!

      [...]

      Lest not forget, the SABC is there to serve all people of South Africa and not only the ANC leadership with their dysfunctional policies!

    • The reality of life under Turkey’s internet censorship machine

      Turkey, the world champion in Twitter censorship, presents a tough challenge for regular internet users thanks to its growing blacklist of 100,000 banned websites.

      But determined Turks are tough. After all, they are the ones who placed the #TurkeyBlockedTwitter hashtag on world’s top trends list—while Twitter was blocked nationwide.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • These Maps Show What the Dark Web Looks Like

      What does the dark web actually look like? Well, new research maps out the relationships between a load of Tor hidden services, and shows that many dark web sites, rather than being isolated entities, are perhaps more intimately intertwined than commonly thought.

      “The dark web is highly connected,” reads the latest OnionScan report published on Sunday. Made by security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis, OnionScan is a tool for probing Tor hidden services for vulnerabilities and issues that might reveal identifying information about the site.

    • Ron Wyden: Obtaining ECTRs without a Warrant Is Almost Like Spying on Someone’s Thoughts

      The other thing obtaining ECTRs with NSLs would do, though, is avoid a court First Amendment review, which should be of particular concern with web search history, since everything about web browsing involves First Amendment speech. Remember, a form of emergency provision (one limited to Section 215’s phone chaining application) was approved in February 2014. But in the September 2014 order, the FISC affirmatively required that such a review happen even with emergency orders. A 2015 IG Report on Section 215 (see page 176) explains why this is the case: because once FISC started approving seeds, NSA’s Office of General Counsel stopped doing First Amendment reviews, leaving that for FISC. It’s unclear whether it took FISC several cycles to figure that out, or whether they discovered an emergency approval that infringed on First Amendment issues. Under the expanded emergency provision under USAF, someone at FBI or DOJ’s National Security Division would do the review. But FBI’s interest in avoiding FISC’s First Amendment review is of particular concern given that FBI has, in the past, used an NSL to obtain data the FISC refused on First Amendment grounds, and at least one of the NSL challenges appears to have significant First Amendment concerns.

    • UK Police Accessed Civilian Data for Fun and Profit, New Report Says

      More than 800 UK police staff inappropriately accessed personal information between June 2011 and December 2015, according to a report from activist group Big Brother Watch.

      The report says some police staff used their access to a growing trove of police data, which includes personal information on civilians, for entertainment and personal and financial gain.

      The report, which is based on Freedom of Information requests sent to all UK police forces, raises questions about the police’s ability to protect civilian data. Specifically, privacy advocates are concerned about access to Internet Connection Records, which is the new type of data that would be collected under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill.

      In several notable incidents, one Metropolitan Police officer found the name of a victim so funny that he attempted to take a photo of the driving license and send it to his friend over Snapchat. A Greater Manchester Police officer tipped someone off that they would be arrested, and one from North Yorkshire Police conducted a check on a vehicle on his phone whilst off-duty.

    • Paris attacks: Call to overhaul French intelligence services

      French intelligence services should be overhauled following last year’s terror attacks in Paris, a parliamentary commission of inquiry has recommended.

      Commission president Georges Fenech said all the French attackers had been known to authorities, but these had not communicated with each other.

    • 2015 Wiretap Report Doesn’t Have Much To Say About Encryption, But Does Show Feds Run Into Zero Judicial Opposition

      Whatever the government is doing with these other options can’t easily be examined by the general public because there are no reporting requirements tied to these, unlike wiretap warrants. So, the number of times where encrypted communications (not contained in locked phones) are holding up law enforcement cannot be nailed down with any certainty. The DOJ could collect and disseminate this data, but it would certainly prefer to keep its reporting requirements to a minimum, even if this data would back up Comey’s encryption histrionics.

      What hasn’t changed, however, is what wiretaps are used for: drugs. 3,367 or 4,148 issued in 2015 were for narcotics investigations. And for those of you who have followed the explosion of possibly illegal wiretaps originating from a single county courthouse in California, it’s no surprise the state issuing the most federal wiretap orders is that particular coastal “drug corridor.”

    • Thomas Jefferson’s Ghost Visits the White House

      “And so we pretty much trashed the Fourth Amendment and now spy on all Americans 24/7. The First Amendment, especially the right to free speech part, that hasn’t held up well, either,” said Obama. “And you have to take your shoes off at the airport but none of us remember why that is anymore.”

      “But Barack, a well-informed citizenry, secure in their persons and papers, who can assemble to speak truth to their government is essential,” Jefferson said. “Actually, that’s kinda the whole thing.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • To Find Out Why Schools Are Sending In Cops To Bust Third Graders, Ask The Local Prosecutor

      Who’s leading the installation of police officers inside schools and the implementation of zero tolerance policies? In New Jersey, the answer is the local prosecutor’s office.

      A little background: police were called to a third-grade class party because a nine-year-old allegedly made a racist remark when discussing the brownies they were eating. NO. REALLY.

    • Triggering Article 50 will plunge the UK into turmoil – and the EU with it. It’s mutually assured destruction

      With the rise of so many far-right parties across Europe, we could be seeing the return of fascism to the continent

    • Former Donald Trump Adviser Calls Racial Profiling “Common Sense”

      A former adviser to Donald Trump on Wednesday endorsed racial profiling and warned that mainstream Muslim American organizations are waging a covert war of cultural subversion against the United States.

      Sebastian Gorka teaches at Marine Corps University and advises law enforcement and national security officials on terrorism and irregular warfare. Last fall, he was paid $8,000 for policy consulting with the Trump campaign. On Wednesday, he spoke at the Family Research Council, a social conservative advocacy group, touting his new book Defeating Jihad: A Winnable War.

    • The Revolt Against Globalism

      There was William Galston at the European Council on Foreign Relations, listening to his fellow elitists and foreign policy honchos caviling about the rise of Donald Trump and bemoaning the fate of the European Union (EU) at the hand’s of Britain’s Euro-skeptics. As the assembled luminaries had a collective sad in their five-star hotel, wondering how the proles could’ve gotten so far out of hand, Galtson – longtime Democratic party hack, former domestic advisor to Bill Clinton, and a senior fellow at the “centrist” Brookings Institution – heard a call to arms. It was almost as if Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and original founder and financier of the Council on Foreign Relations, had spoken to him from on high – or, rather, from below – and commanded him to spread the Word far and wide:

    • MPs From All Parties Tell Theresa May: EU Citizens In The UK Must Not Be Kicked Out

      London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron and Green MP Caroline Lucas are among those who have signed a statement urging protection for 3million EU citizens living in the UK.

      In a statement to HuffPost UK, representatives of Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems, SNP, Ukip and the Greens called on whoever takes over as Prime Minister to vow not to force EU nationals in the UK to leave the country.

      The future of EU migrants settled in the UK has been thrown into doubt after the front-runner for the Tory leadership, Theresa May, said their status could be part of any Brexit negotiation.

      Leadership rival Liam Fox has put forward the same view.

    • Theresa May under fire for threatening to deport EU migrants after Brexit

      The Government believes it would ‘unwise’ to guarantee EU migrants can stay in the UK

    • In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears

      Last week’s Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

      [...]

      In “How American Politics Went Insane,” Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

      He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

      “Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry,” he writes, before concluding:

      “Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”

      Rauch’s audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan’s clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine (“Democracies end when they are too democratic”), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

      It’s a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists.

    • TSA Scores Another PR Win With Assault Of Nineteen Year Old Brain Tumor Patient On Her Way To Treatment

      Rather than chalk this up to a big, bloody misunderstanding, the TSA and local authorities worked together to lock Hannah up overnight while her and her family’s baggage continued on to Chattanooga without them. Charges were dropped, but that’s not going to be the end of it. Cohen has filed a lawsuit against the TSA and Memphis law enforcement agencies.

      The TSA, meanwhile, took immediate steps to mitigate the damage by stating that Hannah’s parents should have called ahead if it didn’t want their child terrorized and tackled.

      [...]

      No apology. No admission that this might have been handled better. No recognition that the agents’ failure to listen to Hannah Cohen’s mother might have resulted in a brain tumor patient covered in less blood and fear. Just a bit of victim blaming where the TSA implies that agents may not have reacted so badly to a metal detector beep if only they’d been informed ahead of time that the alarm would go off and Hannah Cohen would react badly to swiftly escalating screening efforts.

      The most ridiculous thing about the spokesperson’s comment is that we’re supposed to believe the TSA will listen to parents of disabled travelers if they call ahead — when it’s plainly apparent they won’t listen to them when they’re STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THEM.

    • The Death Penalty Is Largely Driven by a Small Number of Overzealous Prosecutors

      “Cowboy” Bob Macy was a legendary — and infamous — prosecutor in Oklahoma City. Elected the top law enforcer in his county five times, Macy, who died in 2011, was known for his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, his classic western bowtie, and carrying his gun in court. He was also known for his passionate advocacy in support of the death penalty. During his 21 years in office, Macy was personally responsible for sending 54 individuals to death row, an accomplishment that earned him the dubious distinction of deadliest prosecutor in America.

      Also part of Macy’s legacy was the high rate of misconduct allegations levied against him — misconduct was alleged in 94 percent of the death cases he prosecuted and substantiated in one-third of them. Courts overturned nearly half of the death convictions Macy obtained; three of those defendants were ultimately exonerated.

      The numbers paint a grim portrait of a prosecutor who once told members of a jury it was their “patriotic duty” to sentence a defendant to death. But Macy isn’t alone. He belongs to a small club of five so-called deadliest prosecutors identified in a new report released today by Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project. Together, the five prosecutors, only one of whom is still in office, secured 440 capital convictions — the equivalent of 15 percent of the nation’s current death row population.

    • The Fire Sprinkler War, State by State

      From New York to Minnesota, how homebuilders headed off mandatory fire sprinklers with help from friendly legislators.

    • Turkey’s cautionary tale

      The case of Academics for Peace in Turkey shows us academics trapped between authoritarianism and precarity, and why international solidarity has become crucial.

    • Theresa May and the love police

      Our country has failed Ahmed and many like him. And in one of the most worrying developments of all, there is increasingly little we can do about it. In recent years in a Europe-wide trend known as the ‘criminalization of solidarity’, we as ordinary citizens have lost our right to care about and help other people like him. In a seismic shift that has barely made the morning papers, we have lost our right to love certain categories of migrants.

    • Donald Trump Doesn’t Seem to Understand What Rape Is

      Donald Trump likened backers of international trade agreements to rapists on Tuesday. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country,” he said. “That’s what it is, too. It’s a harsh word: It’s a rape of our country.”

      It wasn’t the first time he’d used the word that way. He accused China of rape last month: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said. “And that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

      But looking at how Trump uses the word rape, and whom he accuses of it, reveals a pattern. He uses it to demonize his political targets. At the same time, he seems to lack empathy or understanding of what rape actually is.

      “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said last year about Mexican immigrants. He defended the statement by citing a Fusion report that an estimated 80 percent of Central American women coming across the border are raped. “I use the word rape and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy,” he said last July.

    • Iceland’s Soccer Team Is Great, Its Treatment of Asylum Seekers Less So

      Some of the facts of the men’s case were in dispute, like whether the younger of the two was 16 or 19, but the legal grounds for their detention and expulsion from the country was clear. The men, identified in the local press by their first names, Ali and Majed, had arrived in Iceland seven months ago after first applying for asylum in Norway. So, despite asking for permission to stay in Reykjavik, where there is a small community of Iraqi refugees, they were deported in accordance with a European agreement known as the Dublin Regulation, which requires anyone fleeing persecution in another part of the world to stay in the first European country they reach. The terms of that agreement excuse Iceland from having to even investigate the claims of those who say they are fleeing persecution in their home countries.

      [...]

      Toshiki Toma, the Lutheran Church of Iceland’s pastor for immigrants, told The Intercept by phone that the two men, who had converted to Christianity last week, were jailed on their return to Norway, and now expect to be returned to southern Iraq, which is considered safe by Norwegian authorities.

      Toma, a native of Japan who has lived in Iceland for more than 20 years, said that he and Kristín Tómasdóttir, the parish priest at Laugarneskirkja church in Reykjavik, had received permission from the Bishop of Iceland to offer shelter the two men, in the hope that the police would respect the ancient tradition of treating houses of worship as places of sanctuary.

    • Swedish politician: Migrant rape isn’t as bad

      Swedish Left Party politician Barbro Sörman has suggested that it’s “worse” when Swedish men rape women, than when immigrants do so.

      “The Swedish men who rape do it despite the growing gender equality. They make an active choice. It’s worse imo [in my opinion],” Sörman tweeted.

      Sörman, a self-described socialist and a feminist, made the observation in response to what she claimed was excessive media focus on the fact that most of the rapes in Sweden are committed by immigrants.

    • Saudi Arabia arrests two for holding ‘dog beauty contest’ in Jeddah

      Two men have been arrested in Saudi Arabia for trying to organise a beauty contest for dogs.

      The pair had been planning a show which would find the most beautiful dog in Jeddah, a port city on the Red Sea coast.

      According to local media, three awards had already been dished out in the competition’s early stages.

    • Appeals Court: A Bunch Of Mostly-Irrelevant Information Is Not ‘Probable Cause’

      A drug conspiracy with no drugs. A house searched because a car carrying no drugs was registered to the address. It’s little things like these that add up to a successfully suppressed evidence, even if it took defendant Ricky Brown a trip to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to achieve it.

      The DEA, working with Michigan State Police, pulled over two vehicles that had left a house they had under surveillance, apparently on their way to a heroin buy set up by an informant. One vehicle, a Chevy Silverado driven by Steven Woods, was searched after a MSP traffic stop and approximately 565 grams of heroin were recovered. The other vehicle, a GMC Yukon in which Brown was a passenger was stopped as well. However, there were no drugs in this vehicle, just four cell phones.

    • Directive on Terrorism: The EU on a Securitarian and Post-Democratic Drift?

      Yesterday evening, the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) adopted the draft Directive on Combating Terrorism proposed by the European Commission by 41 votes to 4 with 10 abstentions. The EPP (conservative) Rapporteur Monika Hohlmeier had turned the directive into a text that will give credence to the worst anti-terrorism and surveillance laws from across the European Union. She clearly bowed under pressure from the French Government (FR), who is seeking to whitewash its own controversial laws regarding surveillance and websites censorship at the European level. La Quadrature du Net denounces this “europeanisation” of extrajudicial surveillance and censorship, all the more considering that the process surrounding the directive is in and of itself a staggering denial of democracy: Indeed, the draft Directive will be further discussed in secret “trilogue” negotiations, which will preclude any substantial amendment during the plenary debate of the European Parliament. Under the guise of security, the European Union is undermining its own fundamental values.

    • ‘They’re Making Racism and Xenophobia Into a Legitimate Voice’

      The story of masses of Britons googling “What’s the EU?” seems to be apocryphal, unsurprisingly. But it is fair to say many people were shocked by referendum results calling for Britain to leave the European Union.

      In the wake of the vote, some say many proponents of a so-called Brexit didn’t really expect it to happen. So how did it? And what is there to be learned from the echoes between the racism and nativism demonstrated and exploited by some Leave campaigners, and certain stokers of those same sentiments closer to home?

    • Voting Rights for 70,000 Louisiana Felons Sought in Constitutional Challenge

      Kenneth Johnston, 67, served in Vietnam and attended University of New Orleans before becoming addicted to heroin in part to address the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder he acquired in Vietnam. He spent 22 years in prison after a felony conviction and has been out for 23 years. Because he is on parole for life he will never be allowed to vote.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Frontier Backs AT&T’s Lawsuit To Keep Google Fiber Out Of Louisville

      Earlier this year, we noted how companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable were engaged in incessant whining about Google Fiber’s planned entry into Louisville, Kentucky. More specifically, the ISPs were upset that Louisville passed “one touch make ready” fiber rules that dramatically speed up fiber deployment times by letting licensed third-party contractors move other ISPs’ equipment when necessary. Such reforms generally help all ISPs by dramatically reducing the time it takes to deploy fiber infrastructure, often by as much as half a year.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ‘Just’ 5% of UK Internet Users are Hardcore Pirates

        A report published by the Intellectual Property Office has revealed that around a quarter of all UK media consumers pirated at least one item during a three-month period earlier this year. Infringement of movies and TV shows are both up in 2016, but music has shown a marked decrease.

      • Internet piracy falls to record lows amid rise of Spotify and Netflix

        Internet streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix have resulted in online piracy falling to its lowest rate in years, an official report claims.

        Research commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), which is tasked with fighting copyright infringement, found that 15pc of internet users illegally accessed films, music and other material between March and May.

        This is down from 18pc a year ago and was the lowest recorded rate in the five years the study has been carried out.

      • Documentary About Freeing Happy Birthday From Copyfraud Comes Out The Day After Happy Birthday Officially Declared Public Domain

        You may recall that last fall, a judge ruled that Warner/Chappell did not hold the copyright on the song “Happy Birthday,” as the company had alleged for decades (and which it used to take in approximately $2 million in licenses per year). Of course, while many in the press immediately claimed the song was in the public domain, we noted that was not what the court actually said, and the song had actually become something of an orphan work, and theoretically, someone else could claim the copyright. Indeed, the heirs of Mildred and Patty Hill (who are often cited as the creators of the song) stepped up to claim the copyright. In December, all the parties agreed to settle the case with Warner agreeing to pay $14 million to go to some of the people who had falsely licensed the song. But, part of the settlement agreement was a stipulation that the song, finally, officially be declared in the public domain.

07.05.16

Decline of Patent Quality at the EPO to Further Exacerbate With Latest Crackdown on Appeal Boards

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Highest quality is lowest cost
Reference: Highest quality is lowest cost

Summary: Rather than emphasise and maintain quality control at the European Patent Office, the Battistellites seek to maximise the number of granted patents and rely on false claims

THE PATENT quality (not so-called ‘production’) at the EPO used to be the pride of Europe. Growing up in Europe, many people learned about famous European patent examiners such as Albert Einstein (pre-EPO era). Some of the strongest companies worked hard and paid a lot of money in an effort to be granted European patents (EPs), which were quite reputable around the world. Some of the brightest scientists examined applications in tandem/parallel and determined whether or not an innovation or claimed invention was indeed novel and would have courts agree upon challenge (high certainty of eligibility, quality, and novelty). These are the “good ol’ days” of the EPO.

“Some of the strongest companies worked hard and paid a lot of money in an effort to be granted European patents (EPs), which were quite reputable around the world.”Based on this evening’s (GMT) press release, errors in examination continue to be found. An alternative headline for the “news release” [sic] would be: “EPO erroneously granted a patent again. Reinforcing claims of decline in examination quality.”

Not too long ago somebody sent us an insider’s account regarding patent “production”, ECfS (Early Certainty from Search), Priority 1 (in the queue), the so-called “Paris criteria” and more. It helps confirm what we have been writing here for months if not years, namely that there is a massive decline in patent quality the and this gets more irreversible the longer Battistelli stays. To quote:

Once upon a time, EPO examiners were largely free to organize their own work. It was clear that EPC and PCT time limits were to be observed and that replies should not be laying waiting for years, but otherwise things were left to the good judgment of the examiner. That has changed dramatically. Now each examiner has an electronic cupboard in which files are arranged following some obscure algorithm and deviation from the strict order foreseen is considered a crime to be punished with a bad note for quality. Last year the priorities were apparently mainly set according to the “Early Certainty from Search” program. Apparently this year reaching the “Paris criteria” has been added as a new objective. There are further constraints on the examiner and some of those may clash. There is e.g. the total number of “products” to be achieved in a year and the ratio of searches and examinations to be maintained – all this in a situation that is not necessarily under the examiner’s control. In technical areas with a low search backlog maintaining the “ideal” search / examination ratio may not be possible, and total production is equally likely to suffer.

Last night we showed that Team Battistelli (the HR wing) lies about recruitment. It is making up for lack of quality (of examination) by throwing more unqualified or inexperienced examiners at the task, paying them less and offering them fewer incentives to do a good job. “Workforce planning,” as an insider put it, seems to involve “lowering recruitment standards” and “5-year contracts for examiners have also been considered, to be renewed only once” (damaging to work security and experience).

According to the following, “face-to-face technical interviews done by DG1 have recently been replaced by Skype interviews” (here again EPO administration sucks up to Microsoft with spyware endorsement). To quote the broader version of this insider account:

In a recent DG1 internal message, PD11 has asked staff to help the Office recruit more examiners in order to create the over-capacity in DG1 needed to work off the backlog and to meet the Paris criteria for search and examination. The question arises as to how the capacity will be brought back to normal once the backlog has melted. We suspect that the preferred option will be through “incentivised” retirement of senior examiners considered too expensive – incentivised through pressure and threat. The other option will be dismissal for professional incompetence. To facilitate the process of firing unwanted staff, the Office has submitted a document to the GCC that would take dismissals for professional incompetence out of the hands of the disciplinary committee and make it a “managerial decision” by the President after receipt of a majority opinion delivered by a newly-created “Joint Committee”. That cuts two ways: the procedure will become easier and quicker, and the time needed to challenge the decision will double because decisions taken after a disciplinary procedure can be (almost) directly taken to ILO-AT whereas managerial decisions need to go through the Internal Appeals Committee first. Under the circumstances probably not many of our colleagues will be convinced to recruit their friends to the Office. The apparent solution: lowering recruitment standards. The face-to-face technical interviews done by DG1 have recently been replaced by Skype interviews. Only the “psychological” interviews, done by the HR department, are still held in the Office. Apparently DG4 (HR) and not DG1 ultimately decides who will be hired or who will not. This clearly shows the Office’s new priorities, and who is the boss here. 5-year contracts for examiners have also been considered, to be renewed only once. After protests from DG1, DG4 backed off from that plan, but the recent staff changes now list all entrant examiners since 1 May 2016 as “contract staff”. Furthermore, the question remains whether a recruitment process that pays more attention to the psychological – generalist – profile considered desirable by HR than to the technical skills required in DG1 will allow the EPO to maintain the high level of quality that made the Organisation a success.

The ENA mentality of Battistelli would ruin the Office and leave it in an irreparable state. Paying millions of Euros to PR agencies, media companies and silly lobbying events will get harder when applicants become unwilling to pay for low-quality patents. At the same time, Battistelli is biasing if not destroying the appeals process in the name of so-called ‘production’ (measured using a misguided and wrong yardstick which assumes more patents would mean “better”, linearly). Hours ago someone left the following comment about Battistelli’s plan to send appeal judges to ‘exile’ (the EPO lied about it under the banner of "news"). “In summary,” says this person, “I still think that this is bad reform that in many respects decreases the independence of the Boards.”

Here is the full comment:

I referred to the amendments made during the last AC meeting, which, as I understand are those highlighted CA/43/16 Rev.1.

You refer to two points: the drafting of the Rules of Procedure and the involvement of the users in the BOAC.

The first point is dealt with in the new Rule 12c EPC, which, contrary to what you say, does not seem to have been amended at all during the Council.

In respect of your view that the Rules of Procedure would be drafted within the Boards, as present, it seems to be based on a superficial reading of the text.

Old Rule 12(3) EPC said that “The Presidium shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Boards…”.
The new Rule 12c says “On a proposal from the President of the Boards of Appeal and after the President of the European Patent Office has been given the opportunity to comment, the Committee set up under paragraph 1 (BOAC) shall adopt the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal. “ Thus you see that the President of the Boards can only make a proposal but the adoption, i.e. the formulation of the final text, has been moved from the Boards to the BOAC after giving the President of the Office (which was previously not involved at all) the opportunity to comment. That is clearly a step in the direction of less independence.

In respect of the involvement of the users, it is true that the proposal has been amended to say that the BOAC “carry out, where necessary, user consultations on matters of direct concern to users, such as proposals to amend the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal and of the Enlarged Board of Appeal. “ But given how the opinions voiced by the users in the last consultation have not been into account, that is what I call a cosmetic amendment.

In summary I still think that this is bad reform that in many respects decreases the independence of the Boards. The fact that even worse reforms could and have been proposed is not a good reason for passing a bad reform. The members of the Council were right when they initially rejected it and I wonder on the basis of which deal struck behind closed doors they finally accepted it.

Patent offices live or die (or set their prices) based on demand and based on quality of examination. Unless ENA doctrine is elbowed out of the EPO, prices will have to drop (to maintain a level demand), just like recruitment standards fell, in a desperate effort to fill up the vacuum amid EPO brain drain.

Another fearsome outcome of all this — one which more directly impacts everyone in Europe — is that many low-quality patents would be granted, which would then pass all the costs to externalities like the European public, compelling small businesses which cannot afford going to court to just pay patent aggressors who fooled/tricked inexperienced EPO examiners (those recruited by the likes of Bergot) and faced no opposition from Battistelli-fearing (and understaffed) appeal boards whose cost virtually quadrupled so as to discourage appeals. █

SUEPO “Speechless” About Administrative Council Delegates for “Cavalier Attitude Towards Law-Making” and “Contempt for Consultative Processes”

Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli and Kongstad

Summary: The latest Administrative Council meeting served to reinforce the belief that delegates are little more than lapdogs of Benoît Battistelli, no matter what abuses he’s implicated and directly involved in (the subject is hardly even brought up anymore)

LAST week we wrote many articles about the EPO because it was a rather jaw-dropping week which further defended allegations that the Administrative Council is in the pocket of Battistelli rather than its overseer.

This morning someone (not SUEPO) leaked to us the following statement that SUEPO had issued several days ago:

News from the 148th Meeting of the Administrative Council

The decision-making process in the Council has reached a new, absurd, depth.

CA/15/16 (self-insurance for health-care costs) was accepted without discussion.

CA/52/16 (standards of conduct and investigations) and CA/53/16 (review of the disciplinary procedures) were removed from the agenda and postponed to the next meeting without any comments or discussion.

The Council then focused on CA/43/16 (reform of the Boards of Appeal) and CA/29/16 (post-service employment restrictions). On the first day a lengthy discussion took place, with interventions of twenty delegations mostly opposing the proposals and the fact that they were presented as a package. At the end of the day, the Chairman suggested that the Board 28 should prepare, together with the President and its team, a new version of both documents for the next day. New versions, CA/43/16 Rev.1 and CA/29/16 Add.1 Rev.1, were indeed adopted as a package almost without any discussion, with 35 votes in favour, only one vote against (NL) and two abstentions (HR, IT). We are speechless about the delegations’ complete change of mind overnight, their cavalier attitude towards law making (overnight haste work) and their contempt for consultative processes.

It is not clear to what extent the resolution adopted in the March Council and the recent Enlarged Board of Appeal decision were discussed in the confidential session. It appears that the Council delegates chose to ignore Mr Battistelli’s total disregard for their resolution, as well as his interference in the procedure before the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

SUEPO Central

Looking at IP Kat today (quiet day, possibly because it’s holiday in the US), there was only the following new comment about the abuse of justice by Battistelli — a long thread which over time developed into a discussion about BOAC (putting a Battistelli-appointed President in charge of the accused judge and his colleagues). To quote:

I said the amendments don’t do everything you might want, but they do address some of the concerns. They pick up some of CIPA’s suggestions, but not all of them. So they’re an improvement, but not perfect.

CIPA aside, AMBA was largely ignored. It’s probably AMBA’s input that should have carried more weight.

I took one of your concerns as an example: that the Rules of Procedure would be drafted by the BOAC. If that was ever proposed, then it is several months out of date.

Recall that last November BB [Battistelli] said that the Office (i.e. BB) would propose the RoP. Everyone said that was unacceptable. The AC told him to think again.

The AC (Administrative Council) has no bearing on Battistelli’s behaviour, as his action and inaction demonstrate (not obeying the Administrative Council’s demands and even extending the attack on staff representatives to The Hague, as noted above by SUEPO). There is hardly any separation between Battistelli and the Administrative Council anymore. There are also financial strings that ought not exist. Quoting further from the comment:

In February this year, BB made revised proposals. I don’t know exactly what they said about the RoP, but there was a big falling out between BB and the AC. The AC decided that Board B28 would tell BB what to say about the reform of the Boards of Appeal.

At the start of the latest AC meeting, therefore, CA/43/16 said that the new President of the Boards of Appeal would propose the RoP to the BOAC, and that he would be advised in this by the Presidium. Thus, the RoP would not be drafted by the BOAC, but within the Boards of Appeal, as at present.

CIPA requested that users should be consulted as well, preferably by having observer status on the BOAC. The amendment CA/43/16 Rev.1 made during the AC meeting doesn’t go that far, but it does say that the BOAC should consult users, particularly about the RoP.

Four months ago Board 28 (B28) lashed out at Battistelli and given that Battistelli has only gotten more abusive since (enhancing attacks on staff representatives and subverting the course of justice), it is not clear what has changed. Maybe the bully just made “Battistelli” the “B” in B28. Maybe the endless lies about “productivity” (in the future we shall demonstrate again that these were lies) helped silence them. Lying is very common in Team Battistelli, as we last illustrated last night. █

Signs of Progress: Overly Litigious US Patent System Calms Down a Bit, Reform Upsets Megacorporations

Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

US patent lawsuits
Based on data from Lex Machina

Summary: Tensions and disputes over patents in the US are on the decline, potentially as a direct result of heightened scrutiny of patents over their quality

THE USPTO is loved by patent aggressors and feared by everybody else. According to these new figures from Lex Machina (reported by IAM in this case), the USPTO just got a little less scary. To quote one of many analyses to come (after the US holiday): “New patent lawsuit in the US were down by close to 1,000 filings in the first half of 2016 compared with the first six months of 2015, providing a further indication that the marked drop off in cases since December may be part of a longer-term trend.

“As expected, given the IAM funding sources, IAM is not particularly happy about it, but what IAM wants is typically the very opposite of what society as a whole should want.”“According to Lex Machina’s running total, there were 2,238 cases brought in the first six months of this year compared with 3,232 in 2015 and 2,923 in 2014. That makes it the lowest first half total since 2011, the year that the America Invents Act was signed into law and its new joinder rules led to a spike in filings. Lex Machina has not officially announced their numbers for the first six months of 2016, but Lex Machina’s database keeps a running total and it’s safe to assume that the final total to the end of June will be close to 2,238. Unified Patents released its analysis earlier today which put the number of new cases at 2,187.”

This looks like great progress, possibly attributable to PTAB (part of America Invents Act*) and the message it sent out to patent aggressors after Alice had been handed down from SCOTUS.

As expected, given the IAM funding sources, IAM is not particularly happy about it, but what IAM wants is typically the very opposite of what society as a whole should want. IAM’s agenda is still promotion of the EPO, opposition to patent reform, UPC advocacy, and software patents (there’s no ambiguity about it). In the US, which still grants some software patents and thus helps patent trolls, voices can be found of large corporations that are upset. IAM gives them a platform this week. It is quite revealing.

Over at Patently-O, a blog based in the US (unlike IAM which is British), a MacDermid v. DuPont petition gets mentioned today and to quote the original: “Whether the Federal Circuit has erred in holding that there “must” be a proven “reasonable expectation of success” in a claimed combination invention in order for it to be held “obvious” under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a).”

“It was eventually the Supreme Court — not US Congress (in the pockets of megacorporations) — that brought necessary change.”Arguments about obviousness of patents have become commonplace not just because of Alice (which mostly relates to business methods and software). Another Patently-O article from today speaks of Rapid Litigation Management v CellzDirect and says that “[o]n appeal, the Federal Circuit held that the claimed hepatocyte prep-method was “not directed to a patent-ineligible concept.””

To quote the original: “The inventors certainly discovered the cells’ ability to survive multiple freeze-thaw cycles, but that is not where they stopped, nor is it what they patented. Rather, “as the first party with knowledge of” the cells’ ability, they were “in an excellent position to claim applications of that knowledge.” Myriad, 133 S. Ct. at 2120 (quoting Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, 689 F.3d 1303, 1349 (Fed. Cir. 2012) (Bryson, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part)). That is precisely what they did. They employed their natural discovery to create a new and improved way of preserving hepatocyte cells for later use.”

Here we have Myriad (the SCOTUS determination) being used to challenge another kind of patent. It was eventually the Supreme Court — not US Congress (in the pockets of megacorporations) — that brought necessary change. █
_____
* A science-led Patent Trial and Appeal Board which invalidates many software patents these days.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

Further Recent Posts

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts